Birthday Review: Five Capsules on C. S. Lewis

Five Capsule Reviews of C. S. Lewis.

Today is the 120th anniversary of the birth of Clive Staples Lewis (who, famously, died on the same day in 1963 as another British writer known for SF/F work -- Aldous Huxley -- and, of course, as an American President.) In Lewis' memory I'm posting this set of five rather informal (and somewhat short) "reviews" (blog posts, really) from some time ago. The four Narnia posts are all from a reread I did back in 2001 or so. (I couldn't find the others.) I purposely chose art from a variety of different editions of the Narnia books. As a kid when I first read them, from the library, several times over, the editions were the mass market paperbacks much like image shown for Prince Caspian below.

C. S. Lewis' The Great Divorce is a "novel" which serves really as a piece of Christian apologia.  It's very well done, fascinating reading, well-argued though I think attacking straw men in many cases. I don't see that it can persuade an atheist, but the advice herein seems very good for a Christian. In it Lewis has a dream in which he is waiting for a bus in a grey, rainy, city.  The bus takes him and a number of other passengers into the sky, then up a cliff onto a beautiful plateau, leading to a range of mountains.  He and the passengers seem insubstantial, but a number of beautiful, substantial, people come to try to help the passengers make their way to the mountains. This is Heaven, you see, and they have come from Hell. Lewis overhears a number of conversations between the souls in Heaven and the unsaved souls: in every case, the unsaved souls find excuses for not accepting joy and staying in heaven. Eventually Lewis meets George MacDonald, Lewis' great predecessor as a combination Christian apologist/writer of children's fantasies, and MacDonald becomes the mouthpiece for much Lewis' burden of teaching. For instance, the famous quote from this book, "there are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, in the end, 'Thy will be done'" is attributed to the MacDonald character, though as far as I know it's not really a quote from MacDonald.

One of my rereading projects for this year is the Chronicles of Narnia. The second book (by order of publication, which is obviously the right order in which to read the books -- hmmmph!) is Prince Caspian.  The four Pevensie children return to Narnia a year after The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.  Soon they realize that hundreds of years have passed in Narnia while only a year has passed on Earth.  The reign of the four children is legendary.  Narnia has been ruled for some time by humans called Telmarines, who came from another country.  They have oppressed the talking animals and dwarfs and so on, especially recently, under the rule of the evil King Miraz.

Peter, Edmund, Susan, and Lucy manage to save a dwarf from execution, and he tells the story of King Miraz' nephew Caspian (who is actually not a prince but the rightful King of Narnia).  Caspian was raised by a kindly nurse and a half-dwarf/half-human tutor, who told him stories of the glorious time of the High King Peter and the other Pevensie children, when the animals could talk, etc.  Caspian becomes a partisan for returning Narnia to a juster rule, and he also learns that he is the true King: that his uncle killed his father and exiled any loyal knights while Caspian was an infant.  When Miraz' wife finally gives him an heir, Caspian escapes and begins a resistance effort, with the help of a number of dwarfs and talking animals.  It is he who has called the four children back to Narnia (by blowing the magic horn introduced in the first book), and so the children make a journey to the site of the desperate battle Caspian is fighting with the much superior forces of the usurper.  And, of course, Peter and the others, particularly Lucy who seems closest to Aslan, help vanquish Miraz (who is doomed also by his natural suspicion and the dissension in his ranks).

This is an enjoyable book to read, but I didn't like it as much now as I liked it when a teen.  Not because of the Christian symbolism, which I didn't notice back then but which is clear as a bell now: I actually think that stuff is well done.  The main reservations I have are, first, the worldbuilding: which is really quite thin.  For example, as far as I can tell from travel times, Narnia must be no more than say 50 miles on a side.  By the same token the plot is simple, with a somewhat contrived ending.  And finally, Lewis is very anti-industry, anti-modernism of any sort, and at times that is expressed in a grating fashion, such as when he intimates that bridges are bad things.

I jumped right back into my reread of the Narnia books.  I'd say that rereading the first two books they seemed diminished by time, but The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, not a favorite of mine when I was a teen, seemed better on rereading.  Edmund and Lucy, the younger Pevensie children, are staying with their nasty cousin Eustace.  Eustace has made fun of them for their belief in Narnia, but one day as the three children are looking at a picture of a ship, they find themselves once again in Narnia ... indeed, in the water next to the ship. They are rescued, and the ship turns out to be the Dawn Treader, on which King Caspian is sailing to the Eastern Ocean, trying to retrace the steps of the seven nobleman who had been loyal to his father, and who were exiled by the usurper King Miraz.  Also, Reepicheep the Talking Mouse wishes to travel all the way to the very end of the world (Narnia being flat), and to see what lies beyond.  The neat part of this book is the imaginative details of the various islands the travelers visit on the way.  In addition, the ending is beautifully handled, though it's got some of the same sadness as some of the other Narnia books, as Edmund and Lucy are told that this is their last visit.  Eustace has undergone some salutary learning experiences on the trip, but there are hints that he may return.  Caspian is paired off with a wife, and as a result I now see that Neil Gaiman's Stardust has a slight echo of Narnia in it.  (Though as I've said before, Stardust reminds me much more of Lud-in-the-Mist.)  The only drawback is Lewis' usual anti-modernity, but that rather comes with the territory.

Continued galomping through Narnia with The Silver Chair.  Eustace, from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and his schoolmate Jill Pole, fleeing bullies at their school, escape through a gate into Narnia.  Aslan sends them to Caer Paravel, telling Jill a series of things she must do to help find the Prince, Rilian, the son of Caspian.  Rilian was searching for the serpent who killed his mother, and for ten years has been lost.  Eustace and Jill, with the help of a marsh-wiggle, Puddleglum, set out to the North to find clues about Rilian.  Braving some evil Giants, they learn that  he is underground, and they end up in a realm of "Earthmen", or gnomes, ruled by a beautiful Queen, and her Prince.  They learn, as you have guessed, that the Prince is Rilian and the Queen an evil sorceress, and through cleverness and bravery they fight free and back to the surface.  This book holds up pretty well.  The underground kingdom is pretty cool, and well described, as is the city of the Giants.  And Puddleglum is a delightful character, one of Lewis' best.

I continued my Narnia rereading project with The Horse and His Boy.  This is sort of a pendant to the rest of the books, being set during the reign of the four children from the first book.  It is set in Calormene, a corruptly ruled country, of an Arabian flavor, someways south of Narnia.  A young boy, Shasta, cruelly treated by his adoptive father, escapes with a horse who turns out to be a talking horse (Bree) from Narnia.  The two soon fall in with a noble girl (Aravis), running from a forced marriage to the evil Grand Vizier, who also is accompanied by a talking horse (Hwin).  When trying to sneak through the capitol city of Calormene, Shasta is mistaken by King Edmund of Narnia (who is visiting with Susan, as the Crown Prince of Calormene wishes to marry her) for the prince of Archenland, a country on the border of Narnia and Calormene.  Taken to the palace, Shasta escapes after finding the real prince, while Aravis meets one of her friends by luck overhears a plot by the Crown Prince to invade Archenland and Narnia to attempt to force Susan to marry him.  Follows a desperate ride across the desert to try to warn the Archenlanders, complete with encounter with Aslan, and revealment of Shasta's true identity (not much of a surprise).

This was my favorite Narnia book when I was a kid, but in some ways it doesn't hold up as well as some others.  For one thing, the meme "White men good, Arabs bad" seems to be tacitly understood.  Granted that in Narnian terms this can be explained by the degree of worship of Aslan -- it still comes off as frankly racist.  Also, I think the plot is easier to see coming at this age -- I think I was more surprised when a kid by the twists.  But there is much that is good, as well, perhaps especially the characters of the talking horses.

Birthday Review: Short Fiction of Sarah Monette

Today is Sarah Monette's birthday, and in her honor here is a compilation of my Locus reviews of her short fiction (with a blog extract included).

Locus, January 2004

The longest story in Alchemy #1, Sarah Monette's "The Wall of Clouds", is also fine, about a strange set of patients at a convalescent home, perhaps sometime in the late nineteenth century, some unexpected deaths, and a perhaps haunted elevator.

Locus, September 2004

In Sarah Monette's "The Venebretti Necklace", Mr. Booth discovers a walled-in skeleton in one of the Museum's mysterious basements. He and archaeologist Miss Coburn learn that the skeleton is of Mrs. Stanhope, who disappeared at the same time as the cursed Venebretti Necklace more than a half-century before. The question is "Who buried her and why?". In a way this is a somewhat ordinary ghost story, but the characters, especially the pathologically shy Mr. Booth, and Monette's voice, make for a very entertaining read. I look forward to more stories of Mr. Booth.

Blog Post, early 2005

My favorite story in All Hallows #35 was "Bringing Helena Back", by Sarah Monette, one of her Kyle Murchison Booth stories. This time Booth agrees to help an old college friend bring his wife back from the dead (despite the fact that she died of a cocaine overdose in the company of another man).


Locus, August 2006

Lone Star Stories has three good stories: “A Night in Electric Squidland” by Sarah Monette may be the best, about a psychic investigator looking at disappearances from a shady nightclub.

Locus, February 2007

Sarah Monette is one of the most consistently enjoyable newer writers we have. “Amante Dorée”, at the Winter Paradox, is another delightful piece. Annabel St. Clair is a prostitute in New Orleans in an alternate history in which the French rule North America. She is also a spy for the French emperor, investigating people such as young Louis Vazquez, who claims to be a descendant of the last Bourbon king. Yet she is vulnerable – when she lets real emotion affect her, as with her flirtation with a British spy. And she, of course, has secrets … This short story has intrigue, romance, sexual ambiguity, death … lovely work.

Review of Fast Ships, Black Sails (Locus, December 2008)

The other highlight, for me, is Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette’s “Boojum”, which is SF – speculative pirate collections seem usually to manage to sneak in a couple of SF stories. And I admit I am a sucker for them. Here, a boojum is a living spaceship, bred in the atmosphere of a gas giant, and Black Alice Bradley is a crewmember forced to make a dangerous choice when aliens attack. The ending reaches for good old SFnal wonder, and makes it.

Locus, August 2008

There is also, in the Spring Postscripts, a decidedly weird story of wandering in dream world from Sarah Monette, “The World Without Sleep”, which struck me oddly only in that it seemed not quite right for a Kyle Murchison Booth story – other than that it’s quite good.

Locus, October 2009

And there’s more horror – of a sort, again, that appeals to me – at Clarkesworld. “White Charlie” is another of Sarah Monette’s Kyle Murchison Booth stories (though Booth’s name is not given here). In this one Booth must deal with the unwanted gift to his museum of some mostly worthless old books from a dotty benefactor. Unfortunately, the previous owner had tried to use the books to gain power – and in so doing had summoned a rather scary creature, that comes along with the gift. What I really liked here – besides the secondary characters – was the way Booth is forced to think twice about his response to the dangerous creature unwittingly loosed on the museum.

Locus, December 2009

One story in particular in Lovecraft Unbound is outstanding: “Mongoose”, by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear. This is set in the same future as their 2008 story “Boojum”. So we already know there’s Lewis Carroll lurking in the background, and the title of the new story points at Kipling. But Lovecraft is here too, as one Israel Irizzary is summoned to Kadath Station (other stations also have Lovecraftian names: Providence, Leng, Dunwich, etc.), to deal with an infestation of toves and raths. Carroll again – but if the creatures are named out of Carroll, they come from a Lovecraftian source – they are horrors out of space and time, that is. Monette and Bear nicely suggest that horror, and also suggest that bureaucratic screwups are a horror too, as they let Irizzary, with an unexpected ally, and with his partner Mongoose, deal with the infestation while learning some surprising facts about their universe.

Locus, May 2011

In May at Fantasy Magazine, Sarah Monette’s “The Devil in Gaylord’s Creek” is an involving story about a dead girl who has a job killing devils. It’s more complicated than that, of course, but Morgan, the narrator, is dead, and about 16, and with her rather prissy boss, or minder, or mentor, a man named Francis, she uses a magical sword to kill the Devil when he shows up. We learn something about these Devils – the one in Gaylord’s Creek was conjured from tragedy, and perhaps that’s always true – and we learn something about Morgan, and her life and death and afterlife, and her oddly affecting relationship with Francis. Good and original work.

Locus, March 2012

Sarah Monette's “Blue Lace Agate” (Lightspeed, January) is a buddy cop story – with the “cops” in question being instead members of the Bureau of Paranormal Investigation – worried about things like shoggoth larva smugglers. There's a decent murder mystery here, but as expected for this subgenre, the heart of the story is the developing relationship between two mismatched partners – and that is well-executed as well. I don't know if Monette plans more stories involving Jamie Keller and Mick Sharpton, but they would be welcome.

Birthday Review: Metaplanetary, by Tony Daniel

Metaplanetary, by Tony Daniel

a review by Rich Horton

Tony Daniel turns 55 today. He received a lot of well-deserved notice in the 1990s for his first couple of novels, and for stories like "Life on the Moon" and "The Robot's Twilight Companion". The novel in question, Metaplanetary, the first of a planned trilogy, appeared in 2001, and its successor, Superluminal, in 2004, but he couldn't sell the third book, and nothing else came out until an enjoyable novel from Baen in 2012, Guardians of Night. He has continued to write and edit for Baen since them. For his birthday, I am posting a review I wrote first for my blog back in 2001, of Metaplanetary.

The best reading I have done recently, however, was of Tony Daniel's new novel Metaplanetary. So far, this is the best SF book I've read from 2001. Metaplanetary is a grand, involving, novel set in 3013 C. E., in a fully colonized solar system which is about to burst into a vicious civil war. It is chock full of neat, if perhaps not always fully plausible, SFnal ideas. It managed to excite my somewhat jaded sense of wonder, and it made me care deeply about quite a few characters, and it advances some interesting and worthwhile moral themes. Its main flaw is that it doesn't end so much as stop -- it's part of a trilogy (the sequel was called Superluminal, and the third book never appeared), and it really does not stand alone. Another, lesser, flaw, perhaps, is that the villain is really evil -- no moral ambiguity there. But that said he is well-portrayed and interesting.

The solar system in 3000 or so is divided into basically two sections. The inner system, called the Met, consists of the inner four planets, and a gloriously weird system of tubes connecting them, which makes the whole thing look like a spider web, sort of. Many people seem to live in the tubes, or in nodes of the system, called bolsas. Mercury, with all that energy available, is the dominant planet. Earth has been largely returned to nature.

The outer planetary systems have all been colonized, with varying degrees of success. Triton, Neptune's big moon, is one of the most successful colonies. In addition, a number of artificially intelligent ships live permanently in space, particularly the Oort clouds, and they have traveled as far as Alpha Centauri. (These are called cloudships.) The Met doesn't reach to the outer system because the asteroid belt is impractical to cross with the tubes.

Besides the Met, the other key SFnal notion of the book is "grist". Basically, grist is very "smart" nanotech. Most if not all humans have an integrated bunch of grist attached, called a pellicle, which hosts a version of the their personality in AI form, called a convert. There are also "free converts", AI's based on scans of human brains but which don't have a biological body.Humans can interact with both free converts and with the "attached" converts of other humans in Virtual space, and all of the system, pretty much, is instantaneously connected by a grist network called the merci. And some humans are what are called LAP's -- LAP stands for Large Array of Personas: they are in essence a network of clones and converts that can be physically and virtually in many places at once.

For the most part, the solar system is in something of a Golden Age. The physical needs of people seem to be well supplied. A critical political issue is the rights of "free converts". Some do not consider them "Human" -- they are just computer programs, in this view, without real free will, without, if you will, "souls". But others, especially in the outer system, regard them as clearly human.

The novel is told from a variety of points of view: a couple of cloudships; a free convert named Danis Graytor; Danis' human husband Kelly; their daughter Aubry (who has a human body but is considered a "half free convert"); an artificial woman named Jill with a body made of grist and a braine based on a ferret's; Colonel Roger Sherman, the military leader of Triton's forces; Sherman's son Lee; Director Ames, the leader of the Met government; General San Filieu, an aging Catalan woman under Ames influence who leads the Met attack on Triton; and more. This gives us a good look at the variety of ways people live in this future, and at what it is like to be a free convert, or a cloudship, or a human with a pellicle and convert attachment, or a LAP. This also helps keep the action moving, important in a fairly long book.

The action of the novel is exciting and fascinating. We see atrocities, such as some clever means of torturing AIs, and a brutal attack on Triton with some scary uses of space tech; and we see heroism in the resistance to these atrocities. We see convincing depictions of sex between humans and AIs, and of alternate means of travel in a physically linked solar system, and of AI entertainment. We get useful glimpses of the history of this future: the young life of Director Ames, the development of the cloudships, the invention of grist and the merci. It's a fairly long book, but never boring.

The characters are fully rounded, even the villains. (If they are evil, and many are, they are evil in interesting ways.) Daniel gives his different characters and narrators different voices. His prose is generally sound, occasionally lapsing into cliche, but at other times very nice. His scope is vast, and his theme is one of the great SF themes: "What is a human?" He illustrates this nicely with his array of characters of vastly different "shape" or composition; and he metaphorically illustrates even more nicely the associated conflict of viewpoints between individualists and collectivists: hinting by the end at a truly scary collectivist vision. The scary parts of the book are convincing and often quite original, and very scary: and the heroism is moving and believable. I really liked this book.

Ace Double Reviews, 75: The Planet Killers, by Robert Silverberg/We Claim These Stars!, by Poul Anderson

Ace Double Reviews, 75: The Planet Killers, by Robert Silverberg/We Claim These Stars!, by Poul Anderson (#D-407, 1959, $0.35)

A review by Rich Horton

On the occasion of the 92nd anniversary of Poul Anderson's birth, here's a repost of a briefish review I did of one of his Ace Doubles, backed with one by Robert Silverberg.

Silverberg again! And Poul Anderson. Two of the most prolific writers in SF history, and also two of the more regular Ace Double contributors. And also two SFWA Grand Masters: two of the best SF writers ever. As of 1959, though, I doubt anyone was predicting future Grand Master status for Silverberg: certainly this novel provides no support for such speculation! Anderson, to be sure, is another matter.

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The Planet Killers is about 43,000 words long. It is an expansion of "This World Must Die!", published under the name Ivar Jorgenson in the August 1957 Science Fiction Adventures. It's a very simple story -- too simple, really. I expected -- hoped -- to see a twist along the way but none really happened. The story opens with Roy Gardner, an agent of Earth, being ordered to the planet Lurion. It seems that a computer has decided that Lurion will turn warlike in 67 years, make a sneak attack on Earth, and completely destroy it. The only alternative for Earth is to destroy Lurion now, by sending 5 agents to Lurion to set off sonic generators to, I guess, shake the planet apart.

The objections to this are obvious. Most clearly, in 67 years there is no way to divert Lurion from this path? More simply, how can there be a "sneak" attack if Earth has predicted it? And how contrived is this idea of sending 5 and only 5 agents to plant the sonic generators?

At any rate, Gardner goes to Lurion. He finds the one remaining agent of the 5 previously sent, who is near collapse. Gardner soon learns that Lurion is indeed an awful place, evidenced by such  things as entertainments in which two people (one usually, it seems, a woman) fight with knives until one is killed. But Gardner also meets a Lurionese group which hopes to reform the planet from within. And he meets an Earth woman, an anthropologist, with whom he falls in love. She too will be doomed if Lurion is destroyed, for any attempt to evacuate Earth people from the planet would give away the game.

Can Gardner's resolve hold? Or will he make the obvious morally correct decision? And how will his agency treat his defection, if he defects? All the most obvious and straightforward answers occur. It's really a paint-by-numbers book -- Silverberg at this stage of his career was not terribly good, but he was often at least decent -- competent and entertaining, and occasionally attacking interesting themes. But not here -- this is Silverberg at close to his worst.

(Cover by Ed Valigursky)

Poul Anderson's We Claim These Stars! is a fairly early Flandry story. It was originally published as "A Handful of Stars", in the June 1959 Amazing, then expanded and reprinted in this Ace Double as We Claim These Stars! The Ace Double version is about 41,000 words long. Ace later reprinted it as a single book. It was also reprinted, under the superior title "Hunters of the Sky Cave", in Anderson's collection Agent of the Terran Empire (1965). Alone among the stories in that book, it was not revised for the 1979 Gregg Press edition.

As with all Flandry, the story is good fun. And this is one of the earliest Flandry stories to show hints of the darkness that pervaded the later full-length Flandry novels. Right from the beginning, to be sure, Flandry was lamenting the coming "Long Night" -- that was the central them of the series from the get go. But by We Claim These Stars! little hints of Flandry's personal emptiness begin to show up. Briefly, in this novel he accompanies a young woman who has escaped from a planet overrun by Merseian supported invaders back to her planet, where he sets up a resistance operation. There is plenty of derring-do, and of course some romance (resolved as ever in a bittersweet way), and even a direct physical encounter with Flandry's rival Aycharaych. The Terrans win this round, but we already know, of course, that they won't win them all -- that the Long Night will claim the Terran Empire.

This is certainly one of the best early Flandry stories, probably the best.

Birthday Review: Stories of John Grant

On the occasion of Paul Barnett's 69th birthday, here's a compilation of my Locus reviews of a number of his short stories, all of which were published under his "John Grant" pseudonym.

Locus, January 2003

The Autumn 2002 issue of The Third Alternative is also pretty strong throughout. The highlights are a good morally scary piece from Brian Hodge, a solid novel excerpt concerning the Blitz from Graham Joyce, and perhaps most interesting, John Grant's novelette "Wooden Horse". A young man derails his doctoral studies by becoming obsessed with some old British WWII films shown at a seedy local cinema. The recitation of the films involved, and the reason they are so interesting, along with subtle details of the narrator's life, slowly spring the surprise, which is not precisely novel, but well-presented and queasy-making.

Locus, July 2003

John Grant's "No Solace for the Soul in Digitopia" (Live Without a Net), is a fine erotic fantasia of multiple universes, in which a visit to what seems to be our universe reveals the limitations of a computing-based life.

Locus, September 2004

The Third Alternative leads off with a lovely, erotically-charged, novelette from John Grant, "Has Anyone Here Seen Kristie?" The protagonist, devastated by his wife's death, has been pushed by a co-worker to take a vacation in Edinburgh, during the Festival. There he meets by chance a young woman named Kristie, and they spend the week chastely exploring the Festival, getting much more out of it together than the man could have by himself. The culmination is in a sense predictable, but nicely handled with a slightly wistful conclusion.

Locus, November 2004

John Grant's "Q" (Sci Fiction, October) involves a government figure investigating research at a mysterious laboratory. They have learned to scan people's minds, but only usefully to read dreams. Somehow (unconvincingly to me) this leads to a disturbing revelation about the nature of the universe, which is given a cynical political twist. Interesting stuff, but I couldn't quite believe.

Locus, January 2009

John Grant’s “Will the Real Veronica LeBarr Please Stand Down?” is the lead story and the best in the Autumn Postscripts. It’s told from the point of view of a famous actress – perhaps – or is she a simulation of that actress? She works in a whorehouse where the gimmick is that the johns get a liaison with a famous person. And her latest john turns out – scarily – to be only too familiar to her.

Locus, April 2014

I made a point last month about the number of horror stories I liked, and I'll open this month by mentioning another: “His Artist Wife”, by John Grant, from the January-February Black Static. The narrator is a writer of of low-budget paperback entertainments, and his late wife Lucy was a brilliant and popular artist. He's mourning her death while trying to write a much more ambitious novel, based on another real-life couple: a composer and his mysterious wife, who died on their wedding night. Soon enough we realize that Lucy was murdered, apparently by the narrator, apparently because of her affair with the author of some books she illustrated. The story develops gradually, as drawings in Lucy's style begin to appear, depicting versions of her murder; while the new novel goes slowly, while we learn details of the relationship of the composer and his wife; and while Lucy's lover remains the narrator's only human contact. Lots of ambiguity, lots of atmosphere, lots of disquietude. I really liked it.

Locus, June 2014

The March-April Interzone is an excellent outing for the magazine. John Grant contributes another very fine piece: “Ghost Story”, in which Nick, a happily married man, gets a phone call from a girl he was infatuated with at the age of about 8. It seems she's pregnant, and he's the father. But the childhood connection had not continued, and they haven't even met in years – how can this be. An uneasy visit explains nothing really, but Nick is pushed to wonder about what the girl is convinced they did together, and what history she came from. Really fine work, and very well resolved.

Also, here's  a link to my review of his collection Take No Prisoners. (This review first appeared in the June 2004 Locus)

Birthday Review: Take No Prisoners, by John Grant

Take No Prisoners, by John Grant (Willowgate Press, 1-930008-09-0-4, $13.95, 260pp, tpb) 2004.

reviewed by Rich Horton

On the occasion of Paul Barnett's 69th birthday, I'm taking the opportunity to post this review (that first appeared in Locus for June 2004) of his collection (under his usual pseudonym, John Grant) Take No Prisoners.

John Grant (who also writes under his real name, Paul Barnett) is not exactly unfamiliar to me – I've read a number of his stories, such as last year's fine "No Solace for the Soul in Digitopia". And of course his compilations of authorial indiscretions in "Thog's Masterclass" (a regular feature of David Langford's fanzine Ansible) are rightly celebrated. But I have not read any of his many novels – and so this book works very well as an introduction. Grant displays considerable range.  Included are a couple of humorous mysteries, several contemporary horror stories, an alternate history novelette, some SF and some fantasy and some very striking combinations of SF and fantasy.

Intriguing were a number of stories, mainstream, straight fantasy or a heady combination of fantasy and SF, which signal a tenuous link to each other by occasional references to The World and by the repetition of character names like Qinefer, Lo Chi, and Qinmeartha; as well as place names like Starveling.  Otherwise these stories show little connection, but I suspect that a greater familiarity with Grant's oeuvre, perhaps particularly his novel The World, would clarify matters somewhat. Not to worry, though: the stories work perfectly taken by themselves.  For example, there is "Mouse", at first reading straightforward SF about the exploration of an anomalous world and its alien-built structure, but which turns out to also concern the World and the Incarnate Gods who create much of it.  At its center is an affecting story of two people trapped in an alien room, one of them the title character (real name Qinefer), a woman who has rejected contact with other people, the other a man still recovering from his wife's departure.  Much different is "I Could have a General Be/ in the Bright King's Arr-umm-ee", about Qinmeartha, who betrayed his evil rulers to the Bright King, partly by seducing the evil Queen, Lo Chi. But he finds that Lo Chi's love exacts a price. "All the Best Curses Last for a Lifetime" tells of a created being who becomes the Soul of Evil. "Sheep" again seems straight fantasy, with this time Qinmeartha a brutal husband to the fair Lo Chi, until she sees a chance for revenge. "Coma" is set in our world, with Lo Chi a young woman in a coma, but it suggests links with a larger universe as Lo Chi's comatose mind explores a certain "chord". Finally, "How I Slept with the Queen of China" is purely mainstream, about a somewhat inarticulate young man trying to protect the title character (real name, again, Qinefer) from an abusive boyfriend.

The longest story in the book is "Snare", which tells of a briefly successful rock band through the eyes of the drummer.  He's in love with the lead singer, and agonizes through her other affairs, dreaming that she really feels something special for him. Much later the band is long gone, and he has married and has a mundane job, but once yearly he makes a pilgrimage and listens to the few songs they recorded. Song by song we learn the sad and ultimately disquieting story behind the group.

The two mystery stories are "A Lean and Hungry Look" and "A Case of Four Fingers".  Both are comic stories about the rather fumbling Inspector Romford. In the first he is dragged by his wife to a bit of "culture": an amateur production of Julius Caesar that gets a bit too realistic.  The second and better of the pair sets the story explicitly in the village of Cadaver-in-the Offing, which serves as the setting for all cozy detective stories. This requires someone to recycle the characters – and who better than the narrator (but let the story reveal that). This particular time a cadaver goes missing before it can be recycled. It seems that the murdered man, a great magician, has performed another feat and disappeared after death.  Can Romford solve the case?

"The Glad Who Sang a Mermaid in from the Probability Sea" is another dizzying SF/Fantasy combination, as the "Finefolk" find a way to flee Earth and the domination of the "Ironfolk" by learning FTL travel. But the Ironfolk inevitably follow ... In "Wooden Horse" a young man derails his doctoral studies by becoming obsessed with some old British WWII films shown at a seedy local cinema. The recitation of the films involved, and the reason they are so interesting, along with subtle details of the narrator's life, slowly spring the surprise, which is not precisely novel, but well-presented and queasy-making.

I am struck here not only by the variety of these stories, and the impressive imagination, but by the control of voice. His first-person narrators all tell their stories in characteristic and different ways: from the exuberant, arch, tones of the Finefolk narrator of "The Glad Who Sang a Mermaid in from the Probability Sea", to the archaic and mannered style of Qinmeartha in "I Could have a General Be/ in the Bright King's Arr-umm-ee", to the simple, even naive, words of the young man in "How I Slept with the Queen of China" – each a different voice, each perfectly matched to the story being told.  This is a book of first-rate work, by a writer worthy of more of our attention.

Two Short Novels by Don DeLillo: The Body Artist and Cosmopolis

Two Short Novels by Don DeLillo: The Body Artist and Cosmopolis

a review by Rich Horton

These reviews are taken from blog posts I did at the time of reading, and I'm posting them today on Don DeLillo's 82nd birthday. They are the only books I've read by DeLillo. Both are fairly short, and both have slight elements of the fantastic or SFnal.

The Body Artist (2001)

Don DeLillo's new novel (or novella, it's a bit over 25,000 words) is The Body Artist.  I haven't read DeLillo before, though I have a copy of White Noise buried in the "Ought to Read" pile.  This book, by all accounts, is not typical of DeLillo.  It certainly doesn't seem like the other books based on descriptions of them I've read.

Lauren Hartke is the "Body Artist" of the title (basically, a performance artist).  Her husband, a 64 year old Spanish film director, commits suicide one day, and she stays in their remote rural rented house for a few months, alone.  But soon she realizes she is not alone: a very strange, apparently brain-damaged, man is in the house -- possibly has been in the house since before she and her husband rented it.  Hartke can't bring herself to report this man to the authorities, and she spends some weeks trying to talk to him.  The man can hardly speak, and when he does, it's in incomplete sentences -- sentences which sometimes, eerily, sound like something her husband or she herself said in previous months.  Or even like something she will say in the future.  Was the man spying on them for months, and does his damaged brain recall fragments of conversations?  Is he somehow possessed by the spirit of her husband?  Is he a creature from a different dimension?  Is she making too much of this -- could these utterances just be random words to which her faulty memory assigns shape?

The book is more interested (as we might expect) in asking those questions than answering them.  Though clearly it's about identity -- certainly the questions about the suicided husband's identity are important -- and Hartke's "art" involves trying to reshape her body -- to remove all traces of her "self" and use her body as a template to take on other "identities" -- and of course the question of what "identity" the mysterious stranger has is important, too.  (I found myself, also, thinking of Sarah Canary.)

It's really very well-written.  I wasn't wholly excited by it -- I guess I wanted DeLillo to come closer to answers.  But the book is spooky and memorable, and the prose is excellent. It has been made into a 2016 film by Benoit Jacquot, called À jamais.

Cosmopolis (2003)

Don DeLillo is the author of such novels as White Noise and Underworld, a huge literary star, certainly one of a few names usually mentioned as possibly our leading American novelist. I've only read his two most recent novels, both very short: The Body Artist (2001), and now Cosmopolis, new this year. Cosmopolis is about 50,000 words long, about twice the length of The Body Artist, but still pretty short in comparison to DeLillo's more famous novels. So, if you are thinking I am lazy and/or intimidated by the other stuff, you're probably right. At any rate, I had read a few reviews of Cosmopolis, mostly quite dismissive, and I was going to skip it until I saw a positive mention of rec.arts.sf.written and almost the same time saw it at the library. What the heck, I figured, it's short.

The "hero" (quotes definitely necessary) of this book is Eric Packer, an obscenely rich New Yorker who makes his money in the currency markets. He wakes up one morning in 2000 and decides to drive across town in his limousine and get a haircut. The novel follows his long trip, as the president is in town, and other complications ensue, making it a very slow progress indeed.

Packer does considerable work in his limousine, which is fully net-connected. Most of his work (that we are shown) involves tracking the value of the yen, which is inexplicably rising even though all indicators say it is grossly overvalued. Packer has bet that the yen will fall, and as it rises he loses more and more money, a process exacerbated by what seems his hubris, his refusal to cut his losses. He is also worried, or his security chief is worried, by what is called a "credible threat" to his life. Even so, Packer stops the limousine several times and gets out. He eats three different meals with his old-money wife of about a month, Swiss-born poet Elise Shifrin, each time trying to convince her to finally consummate their marriage. The sincerity of his feelings for her is undercut by his additional stops for a variety of sexual encounters -- with an old mistress, with an employee, with one of his security detail who catches his eye. But though she complains about his evident infidelity, their relationship seems more complicated than that.

Packer also has different encounters -- the funeral of a rap star he had admired, a pickup basketball game, a trip to a rave. And he meditates rather fatuously (to my mind) on the state of the world, of technology, the meaning of money and poetry, and the deaths of some of his rivals. Alternate sections present the "confession" of a former employee of Packer's, who, we soon gather, will murder him by the end of the book. And Packer keeps losing money, and slowly sheds his security detail, sometimes in shocking fashion, as the seedier part of the city is reached.

Obviously DeLillo is interested in, oh, the relationship between technology-mad "new money" America and the "old-money", perhaps more artistic, Europe (represented by his poet wife). But that seems only a side issue. Packer himself is a strange creation, wholly unbelievable really, as indeed his whole entourage and his obsessions seem huge exaggerations to me. In a way that makes the novel very cold, and Packer's fate not terribly affecting. He's a) not a nice guy, and b) not a real person. Still, I was rather absorbed by the book, and I found it interesting if not exactly gripping. It is perhaps best read as satire, and Packer best seen as nearly a comic grotesque -- an exaggeration.

(There are, incidentally, very minor SFnal aspects -- mainly a camera that seems to see the near future. And the general feel of the book is at least very slipstreamish -- I am sure Bruce Sterling would happily have included it in his list of candidate slipstream novels if it had appeared before Sterling's 1989 article that introduced the term.)

Cosmopolis was made into a film by David Cronenberg that was released in 2012.