Locus, June 2014 Read online

  Viewed in the context of Patterson’s resolutely historical approach, the Sanders/Clareson volume illustrates the value of critical reading. For example, while Patterson does a more complete job of placing Heinlein’s early Cold War novel The Puppet Masters in its historical context, he simply describes the novel’s achievement as ‘‘putting solidly liberal American values before his readers,’’ while Sanders acknowledges the novel’s ambiguities: ‘‘The Puppet Masters shows deep tension between reverence for the free individual’s potential and disappointment at how most people actually behave. The novel has almost as much trouble deciding how to treat free humans as those who are slug-ridden.’’ By the time he gets to The Number of the Beast, a novel sometimes viewed as ‘‘gratuitous self-indulgence,’’ he suggests a more measured, even postmodern reading: ‘‘It is Heinlein’s longest burst of playfulness, whose subject eventually turns out to be the self-aware writing of fiction.’’ There are, of course, readings I would take issue with, the index is not quite reliable, and like many of the McFarland volumes (this is #42 in its ongoing ‘‘Critical Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy’’) it’s overpriced (though a more reasonably priced e-book is available). However, it also features a bluntly honest foreword-cum-memoir by Frederik Pohl, and offers readers the finest concise overview of Heinlein’s work we’ve seen in quite a while.

  –Gary K. Wolfe

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: FAREN MILLER

  Queen of the Dark Things, C. Robert Cargill (Harper Voyager 978-0-06-219045-1, $26.99, 432pp, hc) May 2014.

  The Quick, Lauren Owen (Random House 978-0-8129-9327-1, $27.00, 529pp, hc) June 2014.

  Valour and Vanity, Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor 978-0-7653-3416-9, $25.99, 398pp, hc) April 2014.

  Butcher’s Road, Lee Thomas (Lethe 978-1-59021-470-1, $20.00, 308pp, hc) May 2014. [Order from Lethe Press, 118 Heritage Ave., Maple Shade NJ 08052; .]

  When the click of a mouse or a finger-swipe can take us anywhere in the digital universe, from gossip to debate to scholarly evaluation (interspersed with weather forecasts and breaking news), it spawns new modes of thinking, not just a bunch of shallow trends. Applied to genre fiction, this eclectic spirit can transform familiar tropes and modes of storytelling in many ways. Looking back at my April column, I see in it the nonchalant mix of mundane near-contemporary life with the dark enigmas and bureaucratic ironies of VanderMeer’s Authority, as well as the genuine historic elements that help shape Lloyd Shepard’s dark fantasy The Poisoned Island. This month’s lead reviews feature novels by two relative newcomers who use the noise and dangers of great cities – modern Austin TX in C. Robert Cargill’s second novel and sequel Queen of the Dark Things, mid-to late-19th-century London in Lauren Owen’s debut The Quick – as the home base for roving minds, alert to multiple worlds. Each flirts with epic length but approaches narrative and tone very differently from the dark fantasies I covered in my early years at Locus, more than a quarter-century ago.

  Cargill’s title reminded me of a book from the late ’80s: Anne Rice’s The Queen of the Damned (third in the Chronicles of the Vampire Lestat), and the page counts are almost identical. His series began with Dreams and Shadows, where Ewan – something like a changeling prince with ties to Faerie – becomes a rock music ‘‘god,’’ much as Lestat did before him. No vampires participate in this book’s climactic supernatural street war (with overtones of Armageddon, like some wild hybrid of West Side Story and Wagner’s Ring Cycle), but they dominate The Quick, so each book invites comparison and contrast with Rice.

  Where The Queen of the Damned had Lestat looking back to his mortal life in pre-revolutionary France and the changes that soon followed, Queen of the Dark Things shifts focus from Cargill’s own glamorous yet troubled rock star to a friend who survived the chaos that ended Book One: gifted mortal wizard Colby Stevens. Although another throng of demons and damned souls populates this sequel, the changeling left no ghost, so only memories haunt Colby now. The rise of a new menace won’t leave him much time to mourn, since it forces him to look further back into memories from childhood, exploring this queen’s tangled mortal roots to learn what motivates her to attack him and his city with such hatred.

  Much of the book’s emotional power derives from flashbacks in which the young wizard’s education in indigenous lore and magic, from a Clever Man in the Australian Outback, is both interrupted and illuminated by his growing friendship with a ‘‘pretty little girl in purple pajamas’’ (the girl’s dream-walking spirit). Yet Chapter One leaps a great deal further back, to 1629, for its grisly account of seven mutineers from the ship Batavia: captured, mutilated and slain, only to be transformed, their shadows turning into crows and flying off to Java.

  These creatures (and their demonic masters) prove to be as crucial to the present menace as its dark queen. When Cargill pauses the two main plotlines for scholarly footnotes – new excerpts from the works of his grand master of the occult, Dr. Thaddeus Ray, PhD – we begin to see potential connections between the Batavia episode and Australia’s indigenous forms of dream and shadow. Yet the journey toward full understanding is a slow one. More than half of the novel must pass until we reach the crisis where the bitter discord of shadows resolves into a coherent whole.

  The mad confusion beforehand does offer fascinating insights into a multitude of forces, places, and ideas: the inner workings of faith and disbelief; the power of relics (some with deep personal meaning); spirit figures on an escalating scale, from the most fleeting manifestations of genius locii to a Texan goddess – the foxy, sassy, eternally young female avatar of Austin. Readers more accustomed to a smooth and steady narrative that flows toward a grand conclusion may gripe at the long wait for the full picture to emerge, but patience reaps genuine rewards. When Colby finally adopts methods advocated by his past tutors (mage and trickster), and outwits ancient schemers at their own game, the action races towards a climax where surprise mingles with sheer delight.

  •

  Early in Queen of the Dark Things, and even sooner in Lauren Owen’s first novel The Quick, library scenes help establish quite different narrative tones. Cargill links an interesting dump called Puckett’s Stacks to Austin’s artistic underground, as a rock critic prominent in Dreams and Shadows tracks Colby there and Colby offers him ‘‘a tattered, dog-eared copy of Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels,’’ stunning because it’s signed. More evidently splendid tomes, ‘‘delicious-smelling volumes,’’ line the shelves of Owen’s library, but by the last years of the 19th century it stands largely forgotten in a decaying Yorkshire estate with neglected grounds and ‘‘owls in the nursery,’’ until a pair of curious children – James and Charlotte – make the place their dusty treasure trove and proving ground.

  After a brief excerpt from an 1890 document informs us the Aegolius ‘‘bears the dubious distinction of being the most mysterious club in London,’’ The Quick leaves the mystery hanging through most of Part One’s five chapters (nearly 100 pages) to focus on James’ story: youth in the wilds of Yorkshire, some years of education at Oxford, flight to bohemian circles in London where he tries to make himself into a poet and meets slumming aristocrats. The library where his younger self once reveled has some gothic touches, like a ‘‘priest hole’’ (not a true relic but a replica harking back to dangerous times where clergymen escaped murderous Puritans by hiding in such places), and the great city where our hero hopes to lose his innocence seems decadent enough (with denizens like Oscar Wilde), but the plot doesn’t veer into the genuinely eerie until he gets kidnapped near the end of Chapter Five. Until then, Part One reads more like Henry James describing a young American on tour in Britain. No obviously uncanny creatures, wizards, crones or fallen angels cross the traveler’s path.

  With extensive excerpts from the damaged Notebooks of Augustus Mould, beginning in 1868, Part Two plunges into a dark fantastic back story where the novel finally unleashes
its monsters – most, but not all, of them vampires. Along with the history of the Aegolius, we learn about antagonistic enclaves of the undead in various London neighborhoods, and the efforts of a scattering of offbeat mortals who oppose them. Though the club and its members seem to have remained almost dormant for centuries, surviving on the blood of reprobates while settling even further into their old ways, true change is now afoot. A relatively new recruit thrusts his way to the top, driven by unusual ambitions that combine a thirst for scientific knowledge with some surprisingly utopian dreams. When he recruits a tutor from his mortal childhood, human doctor and scholar Augustus Mould, to aid him in this quest, many longstanding assumptions about the differences between the Quick (obnoxious mayfly mortals) and the Dead collapse, amidst entangled subplots.

  Three more Parts introduce a remarkable new cast of characters: schemers, idealists, and others (both human and nonhuman) who get swept into the escalating action against their will. When Charlotte comes to London, trying to track down her missing brother, she joins forces with this book’s rich young American tourist, perhaps the only man ever to escape the Club alive (with help from James). Figures and tropes suitable for tales of Jack the Ripper or Dracula clash with the revolutionary spirit of the times. Feral child-thieves like a gang straight out of Dickens (though one girl’s brash attitude seems closer to Shaw’s Eliza Doolittle, in her days as Cockney brat) cavort through an urban Twilight Zone.

  Cargill’s Queen may be more broadly eclectic as it leaps back and forth between Texas, the Australian Outback, and the depths of Hell, but in The Quick Laurel Owen – a brand-new author with an M.A. in Victorian Literature – has produced her own mind-bending tour de force.

  •

  Kids tend to pick up foreign languages more quickly than their elders, and young writers can become adept literary ventriloquists (as shown in the novels discussed above). The next two books put mimicry to different uses, narrowing their scopes as they work fantastic elements into genres from bygone eras: Austenesque regency romance for Valour and Vanity, the gangster novel and film noir for Butcher’s Road. Where Cargill and Owen revel in wild variety, Kowal and Thomas prefer to look deep into one hybrid creation.

  Valour and Vanity (fourth in Mary Robinette Kowal’s Glamourist Histories) extends the chronicle of a man and woman – adepts at the magical art of Glamour who recently tied the knot – but pays new heed to a real artistic product of the era, Romantic poetry (which puts a very different spin on notions of ‘‘romance’’). A quote from Lord Byron serves as its epigraph, and the poet himself shows up after Jane and Vincent reach Venice, as part of an ongoing investigation of potential links between magic and the physical world.

  Near journey’s end, they run into trouble. Self-proclaimed pirates attack the ship just off the coast of Italy and steal all their possessions, including items crucial for a tour of Venetian glassworks. Even when prospects seem to brighten with their rescue, dark forces work behind the scenes. Some players in the tragicomedy of errors that follows hope to exploit glamour for their own sinister purposes. Where Book 3 (Without a Summer) made glamourists the object of widespread popular paranoia, this sequel shows just how deadly they could be.

  •

  Like dreams and shadows, or the forces that give vampires their monstrous afterlives, the weirdly insubstantial substance that empowers glamour – Kowal calls it ‘‘ether’’ – reveals new properties under close scientific observation. So does an unearthly form of metal whose theft sets off (metaphoric) fireworks in Butcher’s Road, a hybrid in which Lee Thomas links the foul deeds of gangster stories to supernatural horror – changing our notions of both forms in the process.

  This column is devoted to tales of the dark side where losers play more central roles than outright villains. Thomas provides a corker of an antihero in Butch Cardinal, a washed-up, foul-mouthed ex-wrestler whose glory days are just a fading memory. Reduced to working as a mobster’s ‘‘hired muscle’’ amid the many danger zones of Depression-Era Chicago, Butch may still cling to old dreams of retirement far from the city lights, but it seems far more likely that his current profession will grind him down and spit him out, dead or alive.

  In November 1932 a job that started normally enough goes wrong in ways he cannot understand, leaving him accused of a murder he didn’t commit, and unable to deliver the package he was sent to get. Though a colleague helps him stave off doom a little longer by finding him a refuge in New Orleans, that burg is such a hotbed for supernatural forces that Butch faces worse danger there.

  He needs to find out what’s so goddamned important about the contents of this package, a necklace he describes as ‘‘Just some ugly piece of jewelry. No diamonds or rubies in it. Looks like lead – ugly, rusted lead.’’ A secretive group of alchemist-mages views the bauble with the pendant ‘‘rose’’ quite differently, as a powerful tool for magic, but Thomas offers scraps of their arcane knowledge to the reader long before his desperate fugitive can learn much about the uncanny, otherworldly nature of the mess he’s fallen into.

  Like old mobster tales (including 1930s film noir), Butcher’s Road flaunts its elaborate strings of metaphors and similes. Early in Chapter One, Butch talks with Lonnie Musante, ‘‘a short and slender man with big ears, skin as white as milk and a single lopsided tooth that rose and fell like a guillotine behind the mushy curtains of his lips.’’ When the book ends back on Chicago’s busy streets, the crowds appear to move ‘‘as if in unison, a single herd,’’ and some poor souls wear outer clothes so ragged, ‘‘they seemed more like the garments of the long dead.’’

  By mixing fancy language with tough talk, even tougher behavior with weirdness drawn from many types of occult horror (all of it interwoven with a subplot of gay romance that’s genuine, not just a bid for dirty laughs), Lee Thomas serves as my final example of a modern literary ventriloquist whose erudition, and wide-ranging curiosity, can drive the novel to bold new flights of fancy.

  –Faren Miller

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: RUSSELL LETSON

  The Greatship, Robert Reed (Argo-Navis 978-0-7867-5366-6, $31.99, 636pp, tp) November 2013.

  Consider this a continuation of last month’s column, which covered Robert Reed’s three-in-one volume, The Memory of Sky. That triptych is part of the Great Ship sequence, an enterprise that has occupied Reed on and off for most of two decades: a sprawling set of stories centered on the discovery, occupation, and operation of the ancient, enigmatic, planet-sized starship that enters our galactic neighborhood sometime in the quite distant future, at which point humans decide to take it on a grand tour of the Milky Way, accepting whole populations of humans and aliens as passengers. (If I had organized my reading better, the order of these reviews would have been reversed. In fact, for those not familiar with this segment of Reed’s work, I recommend starting with these stories before taking on the Great Ship novels, Marrow (2000), The Well of Stars (2004), and The Memory of Sky.)

  The Greatship is another big book: a dozen stories, all but one of novelette or novella length, originally published between 1997 and 2010. (Five more series stories have appeared since then.) To these Reed has added a Prologue and eleven new ‘‘Bridge’’ sections of varying length, and his Introduction reports that the stories ‘‘have been reworked, sometimes lightly massaged and occasionally mutilated with a hyperfiber knife. I have set them in some kind of chronological order, with overlaps and long gaps, and I won’t explain my logic.’’

  The emphasis in last month’s review of The Memory of Sky was on strangeness and puzzlement. This time, the themes of my sermon are Scale and Scope. Not that these stories lack the exotic or odd or mysterious, but even those strong flavors are so overwhelmed by immensities, both temporal and spatial, that they might as well be thematic. These themes are sounded right at the book’s opening, in a Prologue that looks back at the earliest days of the universe and moves from the nucleus of the hydrogen atom out to an
expanding Creation that ‘‘refuses to stop, trying to gather up the scattered pieces of an event that long ago ceased to have any visible margin, any meaningful brink or lip.’’ Nearly every story offers some contemplation or manipulation of scale – not only of time and space, but of possibility: How many ways might life arise and adapt and expand and find a way onto the Ship? How might nearly eternal beings use their (vastly extended but almost certainly eventually finite) period of consciousness?

  The stories and the Bridges also offer various bits of history, background, and fill-in: how the stars came to humankind; glimpses of the species’ expansion across the galaxy; how humans sighted and boarded the Ship and became its masters; what became of the polypond (see The Well of Stars) after the war that the Ship almost lost. Then there are the important or in-passing stories of various species: the 3-31s, whose nearly unchanging world led them to not believe in time; the Tilas, who see a multiverse of possibilities; the J’Jal, who have suffered an interstellar diaspora and invented a pan-species sex cult; the Dawsheen, whose original planet undergoes periodic, extinction-level winters; the Scyphas, whose ‘‘lineages’’ are not even really species but constant reinventions of their information-dense genetics.

  The initial story, ‘‘Alone,’’ starts with a small, shy, ancient shapeshifting entity very, very slowly walking across the enormous surface of the Great Ship as it approaches the Milky Way:

  With just the eye of his mind, he was gazing back across tens of thousands of years, remembering every step taken and each step avoided, and he could only marvel at how small his long life appeared when set against the light of far suns and the deep abyss of Time.