Return-Path: Date: Fri, 22 Feb 91 06:38:00 -0800 From: chuq Reply-To: chuq@apple.com Precedence: bulk Subject: OtherRealms #29 (Winter, 1991) [3 of 10] Apparently-To: bzs@world.std.com Electronic OtherRealms #29 Winter, 1991 Part 3 of 10 Copyright 1991 by Chuq Von Rospach All Rights Reserved. OtherRealms may be distributed electronically only in the original form and with copyrights, credits and return addresses intact. OtherRealms may be reproduced in printed form only for your personal use. No part of OtherRealms may be reprinted or used in any other publication without permission of the author. All rights to material published in OtherRealms hereby revert to the author. Scattered Gold Charles de Lint Copyright 1991 by Charles de Lint A Graveyard for Lunatics Ray Bradbury Knopf, July 1990; 285pp; $18.95 Unlike many authors who have been writing for as long as he has, Ray Bradbury has only published twenty-five books. But also unlike many other authors, those twenty-five books are true jewels. Whether he turns his keyboard to science fiction such as his The Martian Chronicles or Fahrenheit 451, fantasy like The October Country or Something Wicked This Way Comes, or mysteries such as the recent Death Is a Lonely Business or the book in hand, what stands out in Bradbury's work is both the sheer quality of his prose and his affection for his characters. The latest book takes the narrator of Death Is a Lonely Business and places him on a 1950's movie studio lot as the scriptwriter for a horror film. Together with a boyhood friend, he sets out to create the perfect movie monster, only to find that the lot itself and the graveyard that lies beside it, are already haunted by a monstrous Beast. But this isn't a horror novel. Rather, it's a love letter to the movie business as it existed in the 50s, encompassing both the positive and negative aspects of it. With Bradbury as the author, though, it's all viewed through a soft-focus lens. There are the genuine aspects of a whodunit, as well as the elements of a thriller, yet in the end one leaves the book with a strong sense of the times and the warm memory of the very real characters with whom Bradbury peoples his fiction. Make Way for Dragons! Thoraninn Gunnarsson Ace, August 1990; 215pp; $3.95; 0-441-51527-1 >From another world to ours, come two battling dragons -- one huge and evil, the kind one associates with Wagner's Ring Cycle; the other small and good. The battle ends in a draw and both creatures go off to recuperate for the next round. The evil dragon heads off into the wilderness; the good one -- whose name is Dalvenjah -- makes her way to the nearest city where she hopes to hook up with a local sorcerer. What she ends up with is a cello-player named Allan Breivik who, while he has a certain amount of inborn magical talent, has no training. What follows is an enjoyable romp as Dalvenjah and her dragonet Vajerral (who snuck in through the rift between the worlds behind her) adjust to living in California and prepare for the next battle with the evil dragon. Gunnarsson has a nice light touch with his prose and he's mostly on target with his story. Where it falls apart is when he brings in the FBI. They're fairly innocuous at the beginning of the story but when they reappear towards the end, they don't act like real police officers at all and deliver lines along the lines of "Even so, I would not have her sacrifice herself." Still, if you can ignore that aspect and you aren't looking for anything beyond a light entertainment, I don't doubt that you'll have some fun with this novel. Alien Sex Edited by Ellen Datlow Dutton, May 1990; 251pp; $18.95; 0-525-24863-3 This anthology, following on the heels of Datlow's extremely successful Blood Is Not Enough, repeats the set-up of the earlier book. Once again it's a mix of reprints and original stories; once again she presents a series of highly innovative glimpses into all the varied possibilities inherent, but so often not found, in a theme anthology. It's to her credit that both books can be read straight through without a sense of sameness. Yes, each story relates to the theme, but from that point on, all bets are off. Alien Sex runs the gamut from Larry Niven's hilarious essay on Superman's sexual limitations, "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" to the seriousness sf speculation of "Husbands" by Lisa Tuttle. Along the way we catch glimpses of bestiality (handled very tastefully) in Leigh Kennedy's "Her Furry Face", a dark poem by Michaela Roessner, Philip Jose Farmer offering a William Burroughs-esque version of the Tarzan myth, Pat Murphy's fascinating exploration of evolution in "Love and Sex Among the Invertebrates", and a handful of other wonderful stories. One of my favorites was Lewis Shiner's updating of the Lilith myth in "Scales" -- not so much for the story itself, which is good, but for the deceptively simple and moving prose in which he tells it. I liked his narrative style so much that I pulled his recent novel Slam from the middle of the "to be read" stack and started in on it as soon as I finished the last story of the book in hand. I don't know what subject Datlow will turn her sly attention to for her next anthology, but you can bet I'll be lined up at the bookstore waiting to get my copy of it as soon as it's available. The one short story that she edits for OMNI every month just isn't enough. Slam Lewis Shiner Doubleday, July 1990; $18.95; 0-385-26683-9 As mentioned above, Lewis Shiner has a deceptively simple prose style -- trust me on this, it's not easy to write this clearly and concisely and still keep a sense of heart in one's work. Slam is a mainstream novel with prose just as invigoratingly spare as that of "Scales". It's told from the viewpoint of a thirty-nine-year-old man who's just served six months in a federal penitentiary for tax evasion and is now out on parole. He gets a job as caretaker in an old oceanside house, looking after some twenty-plus cats, and soon is involved with as eccentric a cast of characters as one could hope for: his lawyer friend Fred, who's always telling lawyer jokes; his fundamentalist parole officer, Mrs. Cook; the pastor of a local UFO church; a pair of deaf and blind treasure hunters (one's blind, the other's deaf); Terrell, an escaped convict with whom he shared a cell; the local widow, Mary Nixon; and a group of anarchistic skateboarders. Over the passage of his first week of relative freedom, Dave runs the gamut of emotions, from falling in love with one of the skateboarders who's young enough to be his daughter, to his convict buddy Terrell running dope out of the house Dave's looking after. Complicating matters is the fact that Dave just can't deal with authority and his parole officer is putting the pressure on him. How Dave deals with it all makes for an entertaining, at times humorous, and always thoughtful story. The final resolution's a bit idealistically pat, perhaps, but within the context of a piece of fiction, it does work. Slam, for all its realism, isn't realistic fiction. Many of the characters say or do things one wouldn't normally associate with the sort of person they are. But what underlies the surface story is an exploration of anarchy -- how to be truly free in a world that has no patience for those who stray from the norm -- and whether it's the skateboarders, Terrell or Dave himself discussing it, the resulting thoughts on the subject give depth to a story that's not only entertaining, but provocative. The Real Story Stephen R. Donaldson Bantam Spectra, January 1991; 210pp; $19.95; 0-553-07173-4 After nine highly successful fantasy books, and three mysteries under the pen name "Reed Stephens", the best-selling living fantasy author Stephen R. Donaldson has made a career change with his new novel, The Real Story. It's not simply that its subject matter is pure science fiction, nor even that it's a particularly short book from an author whose novels usually sprawl out some five-hundred pages per book. The writing itself has changed to suit the tone Donaldson wished to set with this breakaway from the past. The Real Story is part of a five-volume series, the opening salvo in The Gap into Conflict, but introductory to a longer work as it is, it still stands admirably on its own. The time is the far future. Humanity is out among the stars, mining asteroids for the ore that humanity has always needed to fuel its expansions and progresses. On the edge of known space, among the asteroids of Delta Sector, Donaldson explores a Byzantine relationship between a woman named Morn Hyland and two ore pirates, Angus Thermopyle, as despicable a character as one is likely to meet in fiction, and his rival Nick Succorso, who remains somewhat of a cipher even when the book is done. Central to the story is the captor/victim relationship between Thermopyle and Hyland. Thermopyle is a social misfit, amoral, a misogynist when he thinks of women at all. When he captures Hyland after her ship has gone down on an asteroid, he becomes determined to break down her will; to make her his, body and soul. Her body becomes his through a futuristic device known as a zone implant which allows him to control her every movement, but her spirit remains unbroken until hope for succor arises in the presence of Succorso. Thermopyle is such an unsettling character, and his degradation of Hyland so disturbing, that Donaldson has been forced to change his prose style to tell their story -- not just because science fiction requires a different style than fantasy, but because normal methods of narrative are simply too immediate for this intense a storyline. Gone is the rich tapestry of Donaldson's fantasy prose. In its place he employs a style that is almost that of an essay or a biography -- a spare, journalistic approach that effectively removes his readers one step further from the action at hand, without noticeably lessening the intensity of what they are being shown. What remains, however, is Donaldson's sensitivity towards the imperiled and his insight into the workings of a disturbed mind. There is a world of difference between Angus Thermopyle and Thomas Covenant, the principle character from Donaldson's most famous fantasy series, but there are similarities as well. Both characters are difficult to like and to understand, and both must have been difficult for the author to use. But then, as has been so capably shown in his previous works, Donaldson's trademark is his ability to step beyond the ordinary, to create not only new worlds that are fully-realized within the pages of his novels, but characters that few other writers would even consider making protagonists. The Real Story is certainly a change of pace: short and to the point, yet for those who have followed its author's career, it might well seem inevitable that he would move on to the complexities that are also found at the heart of this most recent work. Black Cocktail Jonathan Carroll Century/Legend, 1990; 76pp; L4.50; 0-7126-2164-4 Weird Tales edited by John Betancourt, George H. Scithers & Darrell Schweitzer Terminus Publishing, Winter 1990-91; 146pp; $4.95 Magazine; no ISSN Jonathan Carroll is a long-time favorite author of mine, but he also continually frustrates me. In his novels, short stories and this novella, he reveals a prose style that literally sings with clarity, odd turns of phrase, resonance, insight -- in other words, all the Good Stuff. Unfortunately, his last few novels and this piece in hand, often leave me disappointed at the end. Not because his prose loses its strength, but rather that his stories seem to run out of steam about three quarters of the way through. Novels such A Child Across the Sky merely left me somewhat confused at the end. But this one.... It's starts, as most of Carroll's work does, with such promise: Ingram York, trying to recover from his lover's death, meets Michael Billa who seems to be the prefect friend: witty, a great conversationalist, the kind of person who just makes you feel good. Imagine York's dismay when, sometime later, he meets Clinton Deix, who claims that all of Billa's stories are lies and can prove that he and Billa were schoolmates, even though Billa is in his late thirties, while Deix is only fifteen. This is the sort of thing at which Carroll excels: tantalizing puzzles, characters that come alive as soon as they step on the page, mystery. But unlike some of those novels that left me confused at the end, this time around I understood all too well. The puzzle would have been better left unexplained. I won't tell you why, since I don;t want to spoil things for you in case you feel differently; I'll just tell you that it all seemed rather hokey. Still, there's lots of nice touches such as York being Maris' brother -- remember her from Bones of the Moon? -- sweet asides, snippets of pearly wisdom, a sense of wonder. I used to have the same trouble with the endings to Clifford Simak's later books, but I still read them because the ideas, everything I like about Simak's prose and characters were too good to miss. So I guess I'll keep reading Carroll, marveling and being frustrated, for as long as he writes. Much better than Black Cocktail is the latest issue of Weird Tales which features four stories -- a form in which Carroll excels -- and a kind of interview. I say "kind of", since Carroll's responses to obvious questions are all present; the magazine just didn't print the questions. Still, it's easy to figure out what's going on. The stories aren't exactly all new, either. "The Panic Hand" appeared in a recent Interzone and "Tired Angel" showed up in Fear. There's no mention of their previous appearances, but since both of those are UK newsstand magazines, you'll likely not have seen either of them, which would be a shame if Weird Tales hadn't reprinted them here, because they're among Carroll's best work. The other two pieces, "My Zoondel" and "Postgraduate", while not as strong, are still fine, weird stories, and of course, Weird Tales publishes features, columns and a number of stories by other authors as well. The Dean Koontz interview is interesting, taking a different line of attack than most recent ones have, Nina Kiriki Hoffman is in fine form with her "Exact Change", and the whole package sports a wonderful cover by Thomas Kidd. Much Rejoicing Dan'l Danehy-Oakes Copyright 1991 by Dan'l Danehy-Oakes Episode 14: The Return of the Invidious Comparison. But Without Piers Anthony. I don't know what, if anything, they thought of it as song. But that, as Santine Once said to me, is what you can never know and I can never tell you. -- Samuel R. Delany, Stars in my Pockets Like Grains of Sand. Sometimes books leap out and demand to be compared with one another. Or, at least, lumped together. I present for your delectation two pair of such, a book that needs no companionship, and a couple of quickies. The Night Mayor Kim Newman Caroll and Graf, $17.95; 0-88184-642-2 Sparrowhawk Thomas A. Easton Ace, $3.95; 0-441-77778-3 The Night Mayor is by turns scary, funny, silly, and gripping. Kim Newman gives us the entertainment medium of the future, Dreaming, a sort of movie set in cyberspace so that you can enter and experience the characters' full range of senses. A Dream is also the perfect escape haven for a convicted criminal, Truro Daine, a supernasty who gives new meaning to the name "mass murderer." Daine has escaped into a Dream of his own making, a cine-noir Night City from which he can't be pulled by force because of namby-pamby rules about the death penalty. Instead, a pair of professional Dreamers must enter his Dream and eject him from within. As the novel opens, one of the Dreamers, a schlockmeister named Tunney, is already in Daine's Dream. His personality has been subsumed into his best-known creation, a Bogartesque private dick named Richie Quick. We follow him through a series of cliched hard-boiled movie scenes (including an uproarious visit to Chinatown), with guest stars galore, while, in alternating scenes, the other Dreamer, artiste Susan Bishopric, is brought to his aid. After Bishopric enters Daine's dream, the plot begins to permute and mutate in delightfully unexpected ways, including a brief interlude >from a Japanese monster movie, before justice is done and Daine faces a worse punishment than he has escaped. Newman's future is marvelously detailed, but not very convincing. It's the sort you go along with for the romp, like one of Douglas Adams' confections. Also, the Dream gets sufficiently weird at times that it's not entirely clear what is going on or why. And Daine never shows himself to be as evil as his carefully-detailed reputation. These are not mere quibbles, quite, but the ambition of The Night Mayor is such that these flaws are easily forgiven. Sparrowhawk, by comparison, is less daring plot-wise; it's essentially a near-future police procedural. Tom Easton's daring is in his milieu, a future in which biotechnology has advanced immensely: people drive immense Tortoises and Roachsters (made from lobsters and, yes, cockroaches) to work in the morning and live in giant, hollowed-out gourds. We who have seen his "biofuture" stories in F&SF, not to mention Gardner Dozois' Best of the Year anthology, have waited for his first novel with some anticipation. Emily Gilman is a gengineer developing the Bioblimp, a huge hydrogen-self-inflating jellyfish with marsupial pouches, and tentacles toughened to serve as cargo handlers: a moving van. Her future is bright. But someone's out to kill Emily, and doesn't much care who else gets killed along the way. Detective Bernie Fischer comes in on the case. He follows clues and leads in impeccable police-procedural tradition. The case is solved and wrapped up neatly. It's a good mystery novel. Unfortunately, it's a lousy SF novel. The plot is insanely pedestrian for such a wild milieu; as far as Easton shows us, people and culture are essentially unchanged by 100 years of advances in biotechnology. The first scene in the novel is an airline terrorist attack, which is immediately blamed on -- you guessed it -- Palestinians. Emily is the mother in a nuclear family, faithful to her husband; she has a brief fling with Bernie that only serves to strengthen that devotion, and to convince Bernie to marry the fellow cop he's been dallying with since before the novel opened. We -- at least those of us who read mystery novels -- have seen this bit in too many police procedural novels to see it carried forward into the next century with anything but boredom and frustration. To sum up, Sparrowhawk is an almost completely successful novel, but successful only because it attempts very little. The Night Mayor is less successful than Sparrowhawk, but because it attempts so much, its failures are more interesting than the other's success. Oddly enough, there is a related comparison to be made between the next pair of books... Winterlong Elizabeth Hand Bantam Spectra, $4.95; 0-553-28772-9 Mad Roy's Light Paula King Baen Books, $3.50; 0-671-72015-5 The common theme here: transcendence. Elizabeth Hand's Winterlong is damned difficult to describe. It's set after I don't know how many "Ascendences," which are fought with "Rains of Roses" (tailored viruses) and may or may not be a new name for world wars. The viewpoint characters are definitely underclass and not really clear on world politics. Which is fine; we learn enough to understand what happens to the characters as the novel progresses. Our viewpoints are a boy and girl who eventually turn out to be twins separated, not at birth, but very young. They were the property of a house of religious prostitution, the Miramar, one of several such in the City of Trees. These houses worship a goddess, the Magdalene, and a god, the Gaping One, the latter being a death-god who they'd rather worship from a distance. He is supposed to bring the Final Ascension when he returns. The girl, Wendy Wanders, was sold by the Miramar because she was autistic and so useless as a prostitute. The upperclass used her in experiments, which partially cured her and gave her an artificially augmented empathy. She enters the dreams of others, a talent which her owners use as a therapeutic tool. But Wendy's clients have developed a nasty habit of committing suicide. The boy, Raphael, remained with Miramar and grew up a pampered prostitute. He leaves the house to live with his current client, a museum curator with sadistic tastes, in the hope of gaining knowledge; he is not entirely successful. Raphael accidentally kills a curator and has to flee for his life. On the way, he contacts a group of corpse-eaters called the lazars. Wendy is driven from her home outside the City of Trees in a Rain of Roses; Raphael, the same night, is captured in a raid on one of the Houses. They begin a complex dance which leads to their coming together and the transcendent return of the Gaping One and the Magdalene. The path is very bloody. That is not merely an oversimplification of what happens in Winterlong: it is a terrible distortion. To be frank, the book is too dense to be tractable to summary. Looking over what I've written, I see I've failed entirely to mention Dr. Silverthorn (who becomes a walking skeleton before dying), Miss Scarlet (a talking chimp and the greatest actor of the age, who is obsessed with the Disney film Pinocchio), and a host of wonderful things. I have also failed to mention that Winterlong, because it's so dense, is very rough going in spots; in particular, in the first two chapters (the point of view alternates chapter-wise between Wendy and Raphael) it's difficult as hell to get your bearings. And the only reason this is so is because of an apparent reluctance on Hand's part to compromise with point-of-view or to introduce explanations of what her point-of-view characters already know, descriptions of what they're already intimately familiar with. This is laudable artistically, and disastrous commercially. I don't see Winterlong attracting a mass audience, which is a shame, because it's one of the most ambitious novels since The Book of the New Sun (which it resembles in several ways) or Neuromancer (which it also resembles in others). Now, Mad Roy's Light doesn't seem like the sort of book that will end up with a transcendent vision. At first glance, and even at second, Paula King has produced a plot from Andre Norton and A.E. Van Vogt born out of a milieu of C.J. Cherryh: which are, in fact, not at all bad antecedents, as antecedents go. Jennan Bartlett is a Cherryhish character, one of the first humans inducted into a trading Guild led by the alien Daruma, isolated from her own kind and loving the alien. Another group of humans steals a McGuffin -- a widget, a religious statuette called a Madringal -- from a planet named Shann, whose natives are all schizophrenics. Bartlett gets involved in some trade and political machinations which endanger her life roughly once on each planet she visits, confronts her own need for human (sexual) companionship, faces off mysterious, powerful aliens from outside Guild space. A nice, neat, generic SF adventure novel sort of plot, all in all... ...except that the McGuffin holds the key to why the Shenda are all crazy. We are privy to this knowledge from a brief prologue, set fifteen thousand years earlier, in which a godlike being called Madringa appears from a Shenda warp drive, cries "I AM THE LIGHT," and destroys Shann's moon. The Mandringal McGuffin is, of course, the very warp drive part which can resummon Mandringa, and does to various extents as the novel progresses. The ending shows us some of Mandringa's activities, but in fact still damn little of what it is; King attempts to portray transcendence through silence, and fails. In fact, neither Hand nor King succeeds brilliantly in portraying the transcendent. As Wittgenstein observed, "What we cannot speak of, we must pass over in silence." But because Hand's characters, her world, her very language are so rich, while King's are ultimately so familiar, her failure is the more interesting. Which brings us, at last, to the only completely successful first novel I've read lately. Imagining Argentina Lawrence Thornton Bantam, $8.95; 0-553-34579-6 Rarely does a book make me weep. Almost never does a book make me weep in public. But on the bus going home one recent evening, reading the climax of Imagining Argentina, I could not restrain myself. It's the story of Carlos Rueda and his family, told by his friend Martin Benn. Benn is a journalist who works with Rueda's wife, Cecelia, in Buenos Aires during the '70s. Cecelia writes a series of articles about the "disappeareds" that culminates in her own disappearance. Rueda, and his daughter Teresa, are shattered. He tries in a number of ways to cope, to compensate, to convince himself she'll be back; his grieving is very real to the reader. And then, one day, he starts telling stories about the disappeared. He tells a mother that her child will be returned to her under such-and-such circumstances: the child is. He tells of the death of another, the continuing imprisonment of a third; and it becomes clear that he is telling the truth, that somehow his stories tell what has happened, and what will happen, to his listeners' loved ones. Even the news of their deaths, even the news of their rapes and tortures and deaths, comforts, because it ends the uncertainty. Too, Rueda gains strength from those he helps. And we see, not only the evil of the junta -- something we have all seen so many times we no longer need to be convinced -- but, more importantly, the sheer unimaginative banality of their evil. Rueda grows strong enough that he can confront the man behind the disappearances, General Guzman: and does so, and comes out of the office unhurt. But he can not tell the one story he needs to hear, the story of Cecelia. His life goes from bad to worse; his daughter is taken, and when her story is told, it's one of torture and rape and death. Rueda carries on. He knows that he must, that they took his daughter because they dared not take him. His is a private war, but a war in which he holds the only weapons that matter -- spirit and imagination. Eventually, as the history books say, the Generals fall. I won't reveal what part Rueda plays in this, or how he finds the end of Cecelia's story, but I will tell you to go out and read Imagining Argentina if you have to knock over a bank to get the money for it. It's about love, about fear, about the survival of the human spirit, and about the reason we all started reading this stuff anyway: imagination and the power of stories. Quick Takes -- all good reads: Expecting Someone Taller by Tom Holt (Ace, $3.95; 0-441-22332-X). A pleasant but dull Englishman accidentally gets hold of the Nibelung's Ring and Tarnhelm. Silly and literate. Stars in my Pockets like Grains of Sane by Samuel R. Delany; Emergence by David R. Palmer; Little, Big by John Crowley (Bantam Spectra Signature Special Editions, $4.95 each). Three of the most important works in the SF/F field in the last ten years, all reissued with nice covers and new introductions or afterwords by the author. If there's any of these you don't have, you're in for a treat. Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett (Workman, $18.95, 0-89480-8530-2) A grumpy angel and a pleasant demon try to stave off the Apocalypse. Problem is, they've misplaced the Anti-Christ. Sort of like Douglas Adams, only intelligent. ------ End ------