Locus, March 2013 Read online

  This makes Bendith ‘‘the ideal child thieves of any fairy court.’’ Now we begin to understand what happened back in Chapter One, when a hideous Bendith Y Mamau (named Dithers) snuck up to snatch baby Ewan from his cradle, leaving behind a changeling.

  Though stolen babes and changelings traditionally stay in their switched lives, hardly anyone in Cargill’s wild tangle of plotlines manages to stay put. Ewan’s new friend Colby was a mortal boy lured out of Texas at the age of eight, coming to Fae with a djinn in tow. (Arch-Trickster Coyote identifies that creature as Yashar, the Cursed One, but finds him oddly blasé about his burden.)

  A group of nixies, who haunt Texas Hill Country in search of mortal prey, briefly adopt the wayward changeling Knocks. This unattractive creature thrived in his brief spell of city life with humans, and misses the place far more than his slipshod ‘‘family.’’ Here in the hills,

  There were no shootings, no stabbings, no drunken date rapes. No homeless lay suffering on the corner, no despondent teens slit their wrists over self-centered teenage crushes. No children were beaten, abused, or humiliated in any way.

  Without ‘‘a drop of delicious dread anywhere to be found,’’ Knocks longs for the urban jungle. When the nixies dump him in Faerie with the Forest Bogies, the changeling struggles till he can find new inspiration.

  Cassidy Crane, ‘‘slender, raven-haired, punk-rock goddess’’ of the Austin club scene, blew into the Limestone Kingdom of the Fae, became ‘‘something of a legend,’’ and left a daughter there ‘‘before vanishing back into the ether of the rock scene.’’ This girl, Mallaidh (‘‘pronounced Molly’’), has charmed the fairy court by the age of eight, and Knocks comes to adore her.

  At the end of Book One (in a two-part novel), these growing youngsters have experienced plenty of adventure in the realms of magic, but now they’re ready for something different: the great world of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll centered in Austin. The males take off for Texas, and Mallaidh sneaks in after them under another guise. Though traces of their earlier lives still cling – the new Ewan is part-fae, Colby has mastered wizardly skills, Mallaidh shapeshifts, and Knocks never was entirely human – these don’t offer much (if any) advantages in Austin.

  Like some exotic port of call, the city welcomes exiles, variously come from Fae, Heaven, and Hell. When our travelers arrive, old enemies have resumed scheming after a long detente, and weird eclectic armies stand at the brink of war. Dreams and Shadows ends with a great battle on the streets of Austin. Among so many deaths, there’s carnage in the group we know, yet some survive, and Faerie gains new legends, which shift the truth and breed monsters. Unearthly children, safe in their own woods, still shake with fear when someone tells of things that go bump in the night.

  •

  Mark Chadbourn has been writing fantasy for years, and The Devil’s Looking Glass is Book Three in his series Swords of Albion. These Swords consist of fictional Elizabethan ‘‘adventurer and rake’’ Will Smythe and a small band of fellow agents in the service of their Queen (not all of them entirely human). Genuine historic figures show up in roles adapted to a world where history is deeply entwined with magic. As this book begins, Elizabeth’s counterpart, the Faerie Queen, remains imprisoned in the Tower of London. The Swords’ frequent employer, alchemist and scholar Dr. John Dee, could be a wizard as Chadbourn sees him, with fingers in many occult pies.

  But now Dee is missing, and so is the ‘‘looking glass,’’ another title power-object linking worlds and dimensions. For The Silver Skull, it was a metal mask from the New World. Here it’s a mirror of obsidian, a stone associated with New World cultures, but not just with the natives – like Cargill, Chadbourn has brought Faerie farther west in changing times.

  For readers, things change too. These days we may view enchanted mirrors as something more like smart-phones. When the one in question finally shows up, it transfers voice and image among all the kingdoms and colonies of Fae and men. These include a London threatened by gathering supernatural forces, while the Swords are off trying to retrieve Elizabeth’s magus and what might be one of his most potent tools.

  When the voyagers (including one female stowaway) reach a Caribbean haunted by pirates both undead and alive, you may think of those Johnny Depp films, but The Devil’s Looking Glass never descends to mindless nonstop action. There’s room enough for philosophical debate in unexpected places, even as characters squabble and scheme against one another. Smythe has a fierce enemy among his own men, a spitfire who thinks the boss just a cad. We’ve seen another side of Will, in private moments where he pines for a lost love – who might survive among the western Fae.

  Many chapters begin with images – something like Old Masters come to life. This could almost be Chadbourn’s take on a Constable seascape:

  The poop deck heaved on the heavy swell and a good wind filled the sails. Under blue skies, the Tempest scudded toward the New World, bearing down hard on the darkness and the mystery. Yet Will and Captain Courtenay stood at the rail and looked out across the choppy water at their backs. They watched a wall of grey cloud rolling across the white-topped waves on the eastern horizon, keeping apace with the galleon. Both men felt uneasy.

  Their unease raises the emotional ante. Where some Elizabethans might boldly face the future and its brave new worlds, these characters tend to peer out from tangles of painfully twisted emotions.

  The plot can seem just as gnarled, with many turnings, terrors, betrayals, and revelations about its mingling, shifting worlds. If my advance copy’s small print is any indication, the publisher has crammed a lot into not much over 300 pages. Though Will survives The Devil’s Looking Glass, it leaves him somewhere between triumph and disaster. And so he looks ahead, in the last lines: ‘‘There would be blood, he knew, and strife, and there would be an ending. But not this day.’’

  SHORT TAKES

  Chadbourn’s closing words could apply to almost any ongoing fantasy series. Robin Hobb has certainly produced her share of them, notably the Farseer books, yet even here she isn’t limited to trundling out massive sagas about medievalesque kingdoms, ruling families, and Witted magics (not quite shape-changing as we usually know it). The Willful Princess and the Piebald Prince explores the origins of an old Farseer legend of a Witted heir at novella length.

  Though trained by a minstrel/truthsinger, Felicity the narrator doesn’t attempt to shape things into song, only to tell the truth. She’s well-equipped to do that, since she isn’t delving into musty archives. Felicity personally knew both title characters. She served the Princess – who thoroughly belies her given name of Caution – and undergoes a similar ordeal of unmarried pregnancy. Both women gave birth to sons, though only one was princely and piebald.

  This is a tale of intrigues, resentments and magics in a court small enough for matters to boil over into anger, then tragedy. Some of the language would suit official accounts of elder times (‘‘Thus matters stood’’; ‘‘It must be told here….’’). More often, it resembles a dark ballad or a rowdier song (‘‘Gouts of his blood … leaped across her dress, wetting her to the very skin’’; ‘‘There were three midwives in the room, all wearing white aprons and with their sleeves rolled back’’). But many scenes could have come straight from Felicity’s private diaries. She admits to moments of befuddlement, tells of troubled visits to her mother, and summons just a little more dignity for a passage that opens, ‘‘And I will speak bluntly of the gossip that was noised about later and is still repeated even now.’’

  She’s less direct about disclosing secrets that might blast apart the legend as it came to be known. (This account is more convoluted than it first seems.) But even the most intimate details emerge at last, in a tale/memoir of people and events from the dawn of Farseer history.

  Gail Carriger’s Parasol Protectorate series, starting in 2009 with Soulless, brings the supernatural to something like late-Victorian ‘‘ladies novels’’: comedies of manners notable for their droll wit. For
these fantastic versions, human and nonhuman worlds grew close during a long shared history, until Britain’s aristocracy includes vampires and werewolves tame enough to take their place in high society. When villains want to interfere with this system, a special Bureau works to stop the bad guys in their tracks.

  Etiquette and Espionage begins a new series for younger readers, Finishing School. This is an academy outwardly devoted to teaching girls how to become Young Ladies of Quality: everything from the art of curtsying to the skills required to snare a rich earl as one’s husband. Behind the scenes, its tutors aim to combine such standard instruction with the darker arts of espionage and even murder – creating well-bred, nicely dressed counterparts of 007 with his ‘‘license to kill.’’ There’s also a deliberate wackiness to things, like the balloons which keep this school permanently aloft, and its Rube-Goldbergish library. Creatures such as the heroine’s robotic pet, Bumbershoot, bring steampunk to the mix: ‘‘The mechanimal sat back on his haunches and set a puff of smoke at her, tail waggling back and forth hopefully.’’

  Tomboyish Sophronia arrives reluctantly, and has trouble fitting in till she manages to make friends and discover useful skill sets. Adults may have more trouble dealing with Carriger’s wayward prose, where genuinely witty observations mingle with non-period gaffes. (‘‘Hopefully’’ can show up in its slangy modern sense, and my long years under the thumb of the grammar police brought shudders every time ‘‘comprised of’’ appears.)

  Teenage readers may not even notice such things. Etiquette amd Espionage does offer lots of fun for anyone thoroughly willing to suspend disbelief.

  –Faren Miller

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: RUSSELL LETSON

  Empty Space: A Haunting, M. John Harrison (Gollancz 978-0-575-09631-8, £12.99, 304pp. tp) July 2012. (Night Shade 978-1597804615, $14.99, 280pp, tp) March 2013. [Order from Night Shade Books, 1661 Tennessee Street, #3H, San Francisco CA 94107; .]

  Edge of Infinity, Jonathan Strahan, ed. (Solaris, 978-1781080566, $8.99, 384 pp, pb) November 2012. Cover by Adam Tredowski.

  If ‘‘empty space’’ came up on a word-association test, my response might well be ‘‘atoms and – ’’, signaling both a long-ago undergraduate encounter with Democritus and a general materialist orientation, philosophy-wise. But in M. John Harrison’s Empty Space (the completion of a trio of novels that includes Light and Nova Swing), the cosmos is not at all adequately summed up by that chilly but somehow comforting metaphysic. Instead, as one of the book’s epigraphs indicates, nothingness is home to all manner of somethings, and the subtitle, A Haunting, suggests that encounters with them might be less than pleasant.

  Three very gradually converging story lines and their obscure connections supply narrative pull. Two threads are set in the 25th century, far from Earth, out in the region of space dominated by the supremely alien Kefahuchi Tract, an outbreak of irreality, or strange physics, or cosmic craziness that has drawn humans (and, throughout galactic history, all manner of beings) like flies to carrion or rag-pickers to a trash-heap. Here are owner Fat Antoyne (who is no longer fat), pilot Liv Hula, and supercargo Irene the Mona of the tramp starship Nova Swing, contracted to transport an enigmatic, probably illegal, and increasingly disturbing load of ‘‘mortsafes.’’ (Nobody is familiar with the term, but they prove to be ‘‘old, alien, not good to be around.’’) At the same time in Saudade City, near where a chunk of the Tract has come to ground, a nameless (or many-named) policewoman called ‘‘the assistant’’ is looking into a series of grotesque murders in which the victims’ contorted bodies are left slowly turning in midair. These two threads are cross-connected by various other characters (military-intel fixer Rig Gaines, the probably-not-human MP Renoko, Epstein the thin cop), and both run various gritty future-noir and space-adventure conventions through an intensive symbol-and motif-transforming machine to produce a kind of anti-SF narrative collage.

  The third thread – which is actually the first, since it opens and closes the novel – seems to arrive on a different literary vector altogether. Sixtyish widow Anna Waterman lives in a minimally near-future version of the kind of tatty suburban landscape that UK writers do so well. Anna’s chapters feel like one of those mainstream depictions of the opaquely unsatisfactory lives of should-be-comfortable bourgeois citizens: emotionally bleak or blank stories I generally cannot bring myself to finish. Anna is not at all psychologically fit. She has recurring enigmatic dreams and is prone to wandering around looking into empty houses or to taking aimless rail journeys or midnight floats down the Thames without benefit of boat or clothing. But she is experiencing more than ordinary neurosis and breakdown. Her cat, James, brings in ‘‘gelid bits and pieces’’ that are not parts from his usual prey, and her back garden is being visited by all manner of enigmatic phenomena – strange lights, silver eels, eruptions of unnatural flowers, a garden house that bursts into flames that do not burn anything.

  Clearly something is reaching through time and space, spooking the crew of Nova Swing, depositing floating corpses, adding to Anna’s baseline distress. There is a spectral woman who tells Anna, ‘‘I am Pearlant and I come from the future’’ – and who also seems to manifest to the assistant and to others up the line in the 25th century. Anna wanders and dreams and thinks about her long-dead first husband (central to Light); and the assistant examines floating corpses and receives visits from Rig Gaines; and the Nova Swing crew picks up its cargo of mortsafes, whatever they are; and the secondary characters carry out obscure missions and inquiries of their own; and there is a war; and eventually the parts do click together.

  Which is not to say that the click allows the reader to walk away completely satisfied. The book contains mazes and riddles and seemings and is itself all of those things – it is a puzzle to be solved, a folded-up network of events to be re-articulated in ways that make some kind of sequential, causal sense. And by the end, some of that is possible. But there are other kinds of puzzles – meta-puzzles, if you will. Why select these events, why run them through this transformational machinery, why surround them with these particular images and motifs and sensory cues? The text is an environment of allusions, referents, symbols, metaphors, nods, winks, and homages. It is, to steal one of its own phrases, a ‘‘semiotic boutique’’ dedicated to the perhaps paradoxical (for a shaped text) notions that ‘‘[n]othing here was made for us,’’ that the universe ‘‘isn’t what we think,’’ that it is ‘‘a useless analogy for an unrepresentable state.’’

  And indeed, large chunks of this fictional world do not make sense to anyone in it, and the events that penetrate its slices of history, even though we witness them, emanate from and vanish into places that we will not – cannot – understand, like the war that erupts in the final chapters, doing enormous real damage, unexplained and unintelligible even to those conducting it.

  Empty Space would seem to be part of an argument Harrison is having with certain kinds of fiction and, finally, with certain ways of viewing the world and the self. In a 2003 Strange Horizons interview, he told Cheryl Morgan, ‘‘I think it’s undignified to read for the purposes of escape…. If you read for escape you will never try to change your life, or anyone else’s. It’s a politically barren act, if nothing else. The overuse of imaginative fiction enables people to avoid the knowledge that they are actually alive.’’ But if the utile of fiction is to, say, encourage a grown-up engagement with the universe-as-it-is, what is the point of so much dulce? If stories must carry the burden of political and psychological responsible maturity – if they must wear a serious expression in the middle of July – why should the surface of the prose get away with being beautiful? Is it lovely in order to draw the unblinking eye to the unloveliness of an inhuman and all-but-unintelligible world?

  And the writing here is lovely, or at least verbally and imagistically complex, arresting, and seductive. Planetary names are part astronomical, part-bran
d-name marketingese, part nose-thumbing: Panamax IV, Alpha Five Flexitone, World X, Perkins Rent IV, Cassiotone 9. It’s Cordwainer Smith on acid. There are similar naming games for the various businesses (mostly bars and diners) along the grotty spaceport streets: the Faint Dime, The East Ural Nature Preserve, Tango du Chat, the Starlight Room. And catalogues, as in this view of things pouring out of the fallen chunk of the Tract near Saudade City:

  scaled in incongruous ways – unfamiliar objects being tossed up in the air by a silent but convulsive force…. giant crockery, huge shoes, ornaments and jewellery [sic], bluebirds and rainbows, tiny bridges, tiny ships, and tiny buildings…. They rose, floated, toppled, thrown up as if by the hands of gigantic, bad-tempered, invisible child.

  In fact, the whole N-dimensional space-time tangle is studded with repeating motifs (a transformation of the catalogue figure): cats, vomit, dice, diners, giant-baby mirages, sex organs, song titles and musicians’ names, and everywhere and for just about every character, fashion notes: the second murder victim wears ‘‘a dark blue Sadie Barnham work jacket,’’ while of MP Renoko we learn that

  his look successfully teamed used raincoats with grey worsted trousers five inches too short…. His clothes came spattered with outmoded foods such as tapioca and ‘‘soup.’’ On his feet he wore cracked tan wingtips without socks, and it was a feature of this careful image that his ankles went unwashed.

  (Renoko also enjoys arguing about kitsch as ‘‘a product of ‘the post modern ironisation’’’ with a friend whose ‘‘commitment to body-art and collectible tambourines’’ leads her to disagree strongly.)

  Getting through the novel’s sideways-connected story lines required some patience – I found it difficult to maintain reading momentum. I would put the book down for a day or two and read something else. But I kept returning to it, curious about where it was heading and drawn as well by the smooth, strange, sly, often funny writing – amusements on the way to whatever nightmarish grown-up enlightenment might eventually arrive or condense or precipitate or manifest, like a giant infant emerging from a solid wall.