Today is Alex Irvine's birthday. He's a very fine writer who deserves a bit more notice, I think. Here's a selection of my reviews of his short fiction:
Locus, May 2002
The two real standouts in Sci Fiction are a pair of stories set in the late 21st Century, but in very different milieus. Alex Irvine's "Jimmie Guang's House of Gladmech" is a moving story about a stateless man, Jimmie Guang Hamid, who ends up in Kyrgyzstan, trying to make money in the chaos of a war between the Islamist Federation and Russia. He sponsors a series of battles between war surplus robots, partly in the hope that his entertainments represent a temporary chance for rapprochement between the occupying Russians and the IF fighters. But when he falls in love with a local girl, a victim of rape by one of the Russians, he wonders if he needs to take sides, or if that would just be giving into to the spirit of war. This is a thoughtful and affecting story.
Locus, September 2003
I was very pleased with the September F&SF -- a strong issue indeed, top to bottom. The cover story is Alex Irvine's "Pictures of an Expedition", which tells of a Gates-sponsored trip to Mars in 2009, looking for water and evidence of life. They find both, but that's not what the story is about. Instead, it's about the reaction of the multi-ethnic crew, three men and three women, to the intense media pressure on them (things like betting on which of them might be murdered by a crewmate). Most seriously affected is the designated "babe" of the mission, Jami Salter, and it is her severe reaction that provides the fulcrum to the story. I found it well-done, but oddly muted -- I think in the end it is about a rather small subject, and somehow it doesn't seem to punch at novella weight.
Locus, August 2004
Best at Sci Fiction this month is Alex Irvine's "Volunteers". This is a rather darkly moving, quite odd tale of interstellar colonization. Wiley Brennan has grown up on a colony at 47 Ursae Majoris A (the new "hot" SF setting – see Allen Steele's Coyote and Robert Charles Wilson's Blind Lake). The colony is in trouble, as most of the residents are psychotically trying to somehow replicate the 1950s, to the point of having plastic surgery to look like Marilyn Monroe. His problem is exacerbated by his father's status as a "Volunteer" – who stayed awake during the entire journey from Earth, and by his mother's having died en route, possibly as a result of a mistake his father made. The story is layer upon layer of oddness (especially the nature of the starship's AI): not always convincing, but always interesting. The narration imbues events with a sense of impending tragedy – a three-way tragedy: in the past of the main action, at the time of the main action, and possibly in the future as well. It's emotionally fraught, a powerful story – far from flawless, but still one of the better stories of the year.
Locus, October 2008
Not quite 40 year old Alex Irvine’s “Shad’s Mess” (Postcripts, Summer) very nicely portrays an ordinary working guy facing corporate pressure in an interesting science fictional setting – he’s an operator of a teleportation booth, and he’s who the shit falls on when things go wrong. Amusing and honest and oddly sweet.
Locus, December 2009
Alex Irvine returns to the world of his fine 2007 story “Wizard’s Six” in “Dragon’s Teeth” (F&SF, December). This is another strong dark high fantasy story. Paulus is a guard captain whose service to his King and Queen ends up sending him on a quest to kill a dragon. But he understands that he has little power before the political maneuvering behind the tasks he’s given – but perhaps the quest itself will grant him some variety of power. The story does not seem over, and certainly I am eager to read more.
Review of Is Anybody Out There? (Locus, June 2010)
The first two stories use the idea of the alien to explore human character, a time-honored SF strategy. Alex Irvine’s opening story, “The Word He Was Looking For Was Hello”, does a beautiful job of briefly presenting numerous traditional SF answers to the alien question while exploring a lonely man’s yearning for his daughter, given up for adoption.
Locus, January 2003
Alex Irvine's "Vandoise and the Bone Monster" (F&SF, January) is a complexly framed story that settles down to concern an old man in Colorado trying to kill himself – and the thing that's chasing him. The story interleaves American Indian magic and history, with paleontological history, and it's always entertaining.
Locus, March 2004
The March F&SF closes with a strong caper story (with a slight but unmistakable fantastic element) from Alex Irvine, "A Peaceable Man", reprinted from his collection Unintended Consequences. The title character is an antique dealer on the shady side of the law, who ends up spending a few years in prison when a robbery goes bad. When he comes out he finds that his beloved dog is dead … or is it? What's more, a gangster is after him for the money from the robbery – but he has no idea where it might be. Irvine continues to demonstrate impressive range, and this story, which reminded me just a bit of Donald Westlake, opens up another subgenre to his talents.
Locus, January 2005
Another fine story about art is Alex Irvine's "The Lorelei" (F&SF, January), set in early 20th Century New York, where a callow young painter meets the famously romantic American painter Albert Pinkham Ryder. A strange sort of encounter with Ryder's muse – the Lorelei – has great effects on both Ryder's life and work, and that of the younger man.
Locus, July 2003
I found the second issue of the overtly slipstream anthology Polyphony (edited by Deborah Layne with Jay Lake) even better than the first. The standout for me was Alex Irvine's "The Uterus Garden", which is of all things straight science fiction. Some sort of plague has rendered most women infertile, so fertile women are in particular demand. Sometimes for high-status marriages, but more scarily they are at risk of being kidnapped, sedated, and used as broodmares. An infertile couple, awaiting adoption, encounter an escapee from one such "uterus garden" – she is pregnant, and the couple are presented with a tricky moral dilemma. All very nicely handled.
Locus, January 2008
Alex Irvine’s “Mystery Hill” (F&SF, January) concerns Ken Kassarjian, a late middle-aged man who owns the title tourist attraction in rural southern Michigan. It’s one of those places where gravity seems askew – water flows upward, things like that. Ken is plagued by both skeptics and wacko true believers, so he is suspicious when a physicist, Fara Oussemitski, shows up. On the one and, she’s doing the kind of measurements intended to debunk his site. On the other hand, she seems to believe that something really is strange about the gravity at Mystery Hill. On the third hand, she’s awfully pretty. Ken has other problems, including a neighbor who keeps gathering the very strange roadkill near the site and, it turns out, makes a strange homebrew from the remains. Plus there is a persistent wacko who thinks she is a “Reptilian” alien, and a group of local teenagers who dance on the seventeenth hole of his putt putt golf course. Fun stuff throughout, neatly resolved.
Locus, March 2016
The best of three Martian-set stories in the first 2016 issue of F&SF comes from Alex Irvine. “Number Nine Moon” is a gritty sort of story (literally, in a sense) about a few space veterans who decide to loot a deserted Martian settlement as the planet is being abandoned by Earth. Disaster strikes, and the survivors have to make a desperate attempt to escape to orbit before the last human leaves them. It’s duct tape adventure resembling The Martian, with an intriguing crusty old narrator and his cynical foil. Fun stuff.
No comments:
Post a Comment