The Gambler

Here’s a good story to read. It almost (almost) makes me sorry that Ted Chiang has a story in Eclipse 2 that is easily up to his usual standards, because I think Paolo Bacigalupi deserves a Hugo, and “The Gambler” could otherwise have won him one. It is a very fine piece of work, which manages to find a new angle on — and, not insignificantly when considering award chances, a new tone with which to explore — Bacigalupi’s trademark environmental and globalisation concerns.

In the very near future (itself not actually a venue Bacigalupi has really used; his best stories have tended to be set after some ecological deadline has passed), Ong is a refugee from Laos who has found a new home and a job in Los Angeles. A couple of flashbacks involving Ong’s father flesh out this backstory, but most of the tale revolves around Ong’s work as an online journalist for a large media conglomerate. The depiction of a data-dense newsphere — referred to as “the malestrom” — is good, vivid and chilling; stories “bloom” into existence, as explosions might over a battlefield, and reporters are spoken of as raising and caring for and sustaining their biggest stories as they might a child.

Unfortunately, the stories Ong writes — exposes about the loss of the genetic archive of an extinct butterfly, or mismanagement of water recycling — don’t bring in the clicks, certainly not compared to his colleague’s latest celebrity paedophilia scoop. Ong is threatened with redundancy unless the hit-rate on his stories improves, and out of generosity a colleague sets up an interview with a pop princess called Kulaap, another Laos exile; she ends up trying to save Ong from himself, when his instincts tell him to try to use the interview as a platform for calling attention to the plight of his home country.

There’s an unavoidable element of meta about “The Gambler”, never more prominent than when Kulaap tells Ong, with a sigh, that “No one reads a depressing story, at least, not more than once”, and Ong responds by insisting (quite rightly) that his stories are real news. Thus (the suspicion is unavoidable) does Bacigalupi deal with his reputation for miserablism. But the reader is never nudged into noticing this parallel — you need information external to the story to see it — and the story instead wisely spends its time deepening Ong’s quiet but firm sincerity. The end of the “The Gambler” is probably the most touching thing Bacigalupi has yet written: what Ong gambles on is human nature, and Bacigalupi makes us want him to win.

In other news: not dead yet, just busy. I’ll be at the BSFA 50th party tomorrow evening, though. And one issue of Vector went to the printers last week (meaning it could start hitting doormats as early as the end of next week), with another hot on its heels.

Story Notes 1

I’ve not been reading that much short fiction this year but, with an eye to being a half-way informed voted by the time Hugo nominations roll around, I’ve started to play catch-up. I’m going to try to post brief notes on what I’ve been reading every other week or so; and I’m going to dot around as the mood takes me, so don’t expect reviews of complete issues or anthologies.

“Fellow Traveller” by Hari Kunzru
“Collecting” by Zhu Wen
“A Matter of Timing” by Bernadine Evaristo
(The Guardian, August-October)

The three entries so far in the Guardian’s “China Reflected” relay of stories, which alternates contributions by Western and Chinese writers, riffing off each others’ ideas and themes. Kunzru’s “Fellow Traveller”, probably the best of the three, is a gently comic piece in which a Western traveller finds himself a guest at a hotel on the summit of “Queer Stone Mountain” without quite remembering how or why he got there. By day he goes for aimless walks along misty paths, takes photographs of what he sees, and finds himself harassed by talking pandas who object to his choice of subjects:

“Many things to take pictures in China. Bridge over Yellow River. New Beijing Stadium. Development in autonomous regions. Three Gorges Damn.”

“It’s just a house.”

“House never just house, when photo taken by imperialist lackey.”

The hotel bartender is contemptuous: they’re throwbacks, she says, wishing it was the Cultural Revolution all over again. Gradually the narrator acclimates to his situation, without ever full understanding it. Zhu Wen’s short essay picks up on the idea of pandas as a Chinese national treasure (“Serve Chinese people by harness power of childlike feature, soft two-colour fur and pretending we about to have sex,” they say in Kunzru’s story. “We play major role in cold war”), and describes differing attitudes to collecting and cultural preservation in Britain and China, among other things reframing the tale of the communist party’s use of last emperor of China, Aisin Gioro Puyi, as a form of collecting.

Bernadine Evaristo’s story in turn picks up on the idea of individuals as cultural treasures, and satirically imagines a museum in a near-ish future China which presents, among other things, an “Exhibition of Britain”. Features include his former Royal Highness, King Charles III (“forced to wear, at all times, a heavy ermine cape and a rather tacky papier-mache-crown”), an ex-Beefeater held up as a “typical, everyday Englishman”, as well as more traditional treasures such as the Domesday Book, the statue of Eros from Piccadilly Circus, and a reconstructed Stonehenge. So the targets never really move beyond the obvious, but the story doesn’t outstay its welcome, and the pointed final image offers a welcome counterbalancing seriousness.

“[a ghost samba]” by Ian McDonald (Postscripts 15).
Not, so far as I noticed, directly connected to Brasyl, but set in the same country and making use of the same basic sfnal concept, this is as story narrated by a 40-something music obsessive who tracks down the only copy of a young prodigy’s second album (said prodigy having died in a fire) and then obsesses about completing it. At times it reminded me of both Stephen Baxter’s “The Twelfth Album” and Alastair Reynolds’ “Everlasting”. It’s probably a better story than either of them; arguably less sfnally ambitious, but as you’d expect, McDonald writes extremely well about the sound and sensation of music, and that’s what gives this tale its force.

“Glass” by Daryl Gregory (Technology Review, November/December)
The problem with “Glass” is that it’s too short – not that much longer than one of Nature’s Futures – although whether that problem originates with constraints of the venue or with Gregory I couldn’t tell you. The story is constructed as another neurobiological thought experiment, a la “Second Person, Present Tense” or “Dead Horse Point”, except that this time there’s a literal experiment involved: a trial of a new drug that stimulates mirror neruons. Dr Alycia Liddell is administering the drug to a small group of convicted criminals — sociopaths — with the hypothesis that it will provoke empathy. That she finds herself having to talk one patient out of a violent confrontation turns out to be evidence of a not entirely anticipated kind of success; and although that confrontation is tense and focused, and the story has a vicious final turn, there’s an an inescapable sense that it ends just when it should be getting started.

“An Honest Day’s Work” by Margo Lanagan (The Starry Rift)
I enjoyed this a lot; although there’s a serious story at its heart, I think this is one of Lanagan’s more playful stories (at least compared to the likes of “The Goosle”). It also happens to be the third story I’ve read this year – after Adam Roberts’ Swiftly and Benjamin Rosenbaum’s “Sense and Sensibility” – that riffs on the idea of humaniform life on a different scale. The narrator, a disabled boy, lives in a coastal village whose economy is built around capturing and carving up giant human-like creatures. The story deals with one such event and, even without the obvious resonance of the central image, provides plenty of opportunity for Lanagan to showcase her imaginative reach with characteristic vividness.

“Arkfall” by Carolyn Ives Gilman (F&SF, September)
This is a story with a very interesting background – indeed, the story seems to exist in large part to allow the ecology and culture of the setting, a waterworld with the rather unconvincing name of Ben, which in the process of being terraformed, to be described. But the story itself is flat and predictable. After an accident, three characters – Okaji, one of the waterworld’s inhabitants, her mother, and an uber-obnocious Heinleinian go-getter with the unironic and stunningly hackneyed nickname of “Scrappin’ Jack” – are trapped together in one of the living vessels that contribute to the terraforming process. Okaji, and the culture from which she comes, are everything that Jack is not – in his terms, passive and introverted; though they seem actually to function perfectly well on their own terms, even if their habit of referring to each other in the third person grates after a while – and so, unsurprisingly, the two come into conflict. The simplistic nature of their interactions is intensely frustrating, as is the fact that one of the key events in their journey – they discover an undersea alien city, which admittedly is quite spectacular – apparently requires us to believe that the terraforming project was initiated before a thorough survey of the planet was carried out; and the conclusion is, as I said, is predictable. To nobody’s surprise, Okaji and Jack gradually iron out their differences and bond, their plight being resolved when Jack has a “Bennish” idea and Okaji admits her urge to explore for exploration’s sake. I’ve rather enjoyed other stories by Gilman, particularly her earlier novella “Candle in a Bottle”, so this was a real disappointment.

The Steel Remains

The Steel Remains cover Here I am back at the start, in a sense: it was Morgan’s acknowledgement of Elric and The Broken Sword as influences on The Steel Remains that made me seek them out. So the review that follows has a slightly tortured history, having been first composed back in June (or thereabouts), then revised both in light of having read the other books I’ve discussed this week, and having read Graham Sleight’s review, my reaction to which helped me to pin down how I wanted to say some of the things I wanted to say. And then, earlier this week, an interview with Richard Morgan was posted at io9, in which (among much, much else) apropos of some of the reactions to The Steel Remains he says:

In genre — and this seems to be the case more in science fiction — we cursed with a template-based form of appreciation. They always read in the context of what they’re already read. A book will be assessed on how much it seems to be like something else in the same … which seems to be a really old way to read to me. I don’t think it happens in mainstream fiction. […] an awful lot of reviews of The Steel Remains were measuring it against a fantasy novel by George R.R. Martin, a fantasy novel by Steven Erickson. I find that really strange. I am not George R.R. Martin and I am not Steven Erickson, and who’s to say that the book I’ve written is anything like those? There’s a constant blind impulse to find similarity and contrast.

I can understand his frustration; the tendency of some sf fans to dismiss new book X because author Y did the same thing in his book Z, twenty years ago drives me up the wall. (For a recent example, substitute “Paul McAuley’s Cowboy Angels” for X, “Michael Kube-McDowell” for Y and “Alternities” for Z.) It’s irritating because it’s usually a way of shutting down discussion – and even if it’s true, the fact that it’s true is not interesting, how and why it might be true is what’s interesting – and because it’s often a form of avoidance, a route to cheap, deceptive understanding. That said, I think Morgan is also being more than a little disingenuous. No two books are identical, but no book exists in a vacuum, either. How X is like (and unlike, of course) Z might well be useful information for someone reading a review: and done well, such comparison is another tool with which a reviewer can illuminate the specifics of X.

So I don’t feel any guilt about saying that, now that I’ve read some Anderson and Moorcock, their influence on The Steel Remains seems obvious. (There’s no danger of me making a similar claim for either George RR Martin or Steven Erickson, largely because I haven’t read the relevant books by either of them, but also because – from what I know about their work – such comparisons do seem to fall more towards the deceptive than the illuminating end of the spectrum.) From Anderson, I see a deliberate and forthright refusal of anything resembling a rose-tinted view of pre-industrial life; from Moorcock, a healthy dose of emo. The combination manifests as a worldview steeped in weary frustration: there are three main characters, all of them heroes who have outlived their war, and one of the strongest emotions afflicting each of them is a sense of waste, a sense that it could have been different. It’s not surprising that when the time finally comes to draw a line in the sand, one character does so because “I watched men like you piss it away again, the civilisation we’d saved […] And I will not watch it happen again” (370).

When the Scaled Folk invaded, Egar (called Dragonbane for a reason, now a clanmaster on the Northern plains), Archeth (dark-skinned half-breed, engineer, now advisor to the Yhelteth emperor), and Ringil (scion of a well-to-do family, leader of a last stand, now living in largely self-imposed exile) were in the front lines, but afterwards either they lost their way, or the world did. They all chafe at the situations they now find themselves in. Either there is no place for them (Archeth’s people have left the world; Ringil’s sexuality is illegal), or the place they’ve found is not enough (Ringil gets by as a hero-mascot for a tavern in small settlement, but resents it; Egar finds nomadic, tribal life unfulfilling after the intensity of urban civilization). All of them want to get back, into the world and what they do best, and on one level The Steel Remains is, straightforwardly, the story of them doing just that. Each of them needs a different shove to get going — Archeth is given a chance to put her expertise to use when she’s sent to examine the aftermath an attack on a Yhelteth port; Egar becomes a pawn in a godgame; Ringil is recruited by his (formidable) mother to track down his cousin, who has been (legally) sold into slavery by her husband — but thereafter their momentum carries them through their various investigations.

That plot structure is one important difference to the other books I’ve been discussing — Our Heroes don’t form a Quest Party, although of course eventually the threads do collide, and events reach a climax – but there are others. Apart from anything else, The Steel Remains is a modern novel, constructed as a novel from the ground up; there is none of the compression that marks out the Elric stories, for example. Other differences are obvious because I know some of Morgan’s previous work, in a way that’s not true with most of the other writers I’ve been talking about; for instance, where The Broken Sword is fairly relentless in its intensity, like Morgan’s other books The Steel Remains adopts what Adam Roberts aptly described as a sort of post-rock aesthetic, interspersing moments of quiet with moments of thundering loud.

The most familiar loudness in Morgan’s work is, of course, anger, which sometimes leads to the argument that there is a contradiction at the heart of his novels between style and subject that undermines their coherence. But it strikes me that such an argument is based on a slight misreading. There’s no doubt that Morgan’s books frame their physical, verbal, and moral engagements in high-stakes, high-contrast terms, but they shout with a purpose. Violence, for example, is as costly and terrible as it can be useful, or even necessary; above all, it is (rightly) seen as part of being human, or at the very least part of being human for the people Morgan is interested in writing about. Ultimately Morgan’s characters, for all their individual vigour, tend to be victims of a system. Black Man was venemously explicit about this towards its end – as one character sardonically put it, “Don’t ask, don’t ever ask who’s really making all this happen” – and while there’s no single comparable crystallizing moment in The Steel Remains, the anger at misplaced prejudice, the architects of injustice, and the mechanisms that encourage both frequently rings through.

The angriest character in The Steel Remains, and the axis around which the rest of the book is organised, is Ringil. (With three protagonists, and three books planned in the series, it will be interesting to see whether Egar and Archeth get their turn in the spotlight.) In a number of ways, Ringil resembles Black Man‘s Carl Marsalis: both are soldiers who appear to have lived longer than they were needed; both have an ironic sense of humour; both have a high sex drive; and of course, both attract hate and fear simply by being who they are. In other ways, they’re different. For all that Ringil is a veteran, he is younger than Marsalis, with less sense of himself, and all the hot-headedness and arrogance that condition brings; he thrills in battle in a way that would probably cause Marsalis to snort and shake his head. (It has that effect on the reader a couple of times, at least.) But ultimately the two of them complement each other as points on a spectrum of what men are allowed to be. Marsalis, allegedly a genetic throwback to the sort of Real Men who existed before wussy stuff like agriculture came along, was seen as too much man; Ringil, whose homosexuality marks him as a deviant, is seen as not manly enough. Which of course is nonsense; he’s in a Richard Morgan novel, so even while straining (and shouting) against the boxes his cultures put him in, Ringil is possessed of the sort of earth-shattering maleness that usually indicates a Lucius Shepard protagonist (although I can’t, offhand, recall any gay Shepard protagonists, or indeed any who are quite as nifty with edged weapons).

Because of his sexuality, from a distance Ringil looks like the same sort of intervention into the expectations of heroic fantasy as Alyx. In fact Morgan accepts more of the terms of engagement than Russ, in that Ringil’s personality is closer to that of Scafloc and Elric; but certainly Morgan is no less frank about Ringil’s fucking than he is about Ringil’s fighting (or indeed than he is about his straight characters fucking, both here and in earlier novels). Put another way, passion is another source of loudness in the book; and when it gets mixed up with anger, as it often does because of the way Ringil’s society treats his sexuality, you get passages like this:

[H]e couldn’t cloak it any longer, the leaking sense of loss, more fucking loss, soaking through into the same old general, swirling sense of betrayal, years upon pissed away years of it, made bitter and particular on his tongue now, as if Grace-of-Heaven [a lover] had come wormwood into his mouth in those final clenched, pulsing seconds. Pleasure into loss, lust into regret and there, suddenly, the same sick spiral of fucked up guilt they sold down at the temples and all through the po-faced schooling and lineage values and Gingren’s lectures and the new-recruit rituals of bullying and sterile manhood at the academy and every fucking thing ever lied and pontificated about by men in robes or uniform and– (59)

It’s the sort of anger that would in other hands be mere bluster: the sort rooted in frustration, that grabs you and becomes all-eclipsing while it lasts; the sort that often leads to violence, in this world and in Morgan’s, and then ebbs as quickly as it rose. (Or doesn’t: the rage at the execution of one particular gay youth remains undimmed throughout the book.) There’s a lot for Ringil to be angry at; his world is medieval in all the worst ways, thinned with no sign of recognition or recovery. In addition to the condemnation of homosexuality (it is punishable by execution), the post-war economy is in the toilet, and as a part-consequence slavery has been legalized; and religious fundamentalism is on the rise. In fact, about the only thing Ringil has going for him is that he’s not a woman. Reviewing Scott Lynch’s most recent novel — a writer whose mix of formal and informal language bears some comparison to Morgan — for Strange Horizons, Martin Lewis objected to the way in which (as he saw it) gender and other inequalities had been largely airbrushed away. Lewis was subsequently taken to task by some commenters for a lack of imagination, but if such it is then a similar lack attends The Steel Remains, in which prejudice and discrimination are endemic; Ringil’s only advantage is that he can hide his assumed inferiority (and in some cases, his fighting prowess might persuade people to look the other way). I’d say it’s something that elevates Morgan’s book above Lynch’s: better, to my mind, to engage with something than to sidestep it.

Part of that engagement is that, as much as any of the Elric stories, The Steel Remains is about the difficulty of claiming a new identity when the old one is taken from you by force or time. With a sense of waste, inevitably comes a sense of what was lost, and how loss leaves you adrift. It’s probably Archeth – for all that she gets relatively little action until late in the book, and spends relatively more time infodumping or being infodumped at for our benefit – who anchors this theme. She has the advantage of being close to the seat of power; she can see all too clearly how badly the empire she serves matches up to her dreams for society after the war. She has lost her heritage, and we eventually learn that her dark-skinned people left because they felt diminished by contact with human society. And, as an engineer with some access to technologies far beyond those of the people she lives among, she is the only one of the three protagonists equipped to argue with the world by any means other than force (though she is no slouch with her knives): to most people, science and sorcery are one and the same. But Ringil, too, is troubled by loss, or not so much troubled by it as assaulted by his memories — they sneak up on him, and once even literally stop him in his tracks. Nor is memory the only way the past breaks loudly into the present; there’s unfinished business of various kinds, returning enemies, several corpses that appear to have risen from the dead and one that actually does.

Such eruptions of the creepy and wonderful and strange are handled as confidently as good fantasy requires. They’re a different kind of loud for Morgan (as Graham noted in his review) but one that seems to me to sit comfortably, perhaps surprisingly so, with the more familiar elements of his aesthetic. Indeed, the final third of The Steel Remains is exhilaratingly full of discovery, without ever sacrificing either emotional intensity or the plot’s forward motion, and highlight another interesting link to Moorcock, Anderson and Russ, if not Leiber: there are several heavy hints dropped that Ringil’s world is in some way connected to our own. (Which brings me back to a question I raised in the comments earlier this week and didn’t get an answer to: when did full, separate secondary worlds become de rigeur in genre fantasy? I’ve heard it attributed to Patricia McKillip’s Riddle-Master trilogy (1976-9), but I really have no idea.) There are characters in The Steel Remains – Archeth is one – who know, for instance, that their world is part of a solar system that’s part of a galaxy; that the “band” that illuminates the night sky was probably once a moon; that their world has probably been visited by more than one near-human species. And Morgan’s fairies are to all intents and purposes worldwalkers, beings who can see and navigate through “a malestrom of alternatives” (and thus see the possibilities that are not; more loss, more weariness).

As in The Broken Sword and Stormbringer, in The Steel Remains, there is no guarantee in any of this that Ringil’s world can be saved, or that its future will be better than its past. But there is perhaps a little more optimism. If, you think, if Morgan’s heroes could see through their loss, if they could use their anger — if they could shout loud enough — then maybe they’d actually have a shot at healing some wounds. But it seems a pretty slim if. More likely they’ll keep fighting, because that’s what they do, because that’s what there is, because the system can’t be beat; and when they cry out, it will be with Egar’s battle-cry, in an “awful, no-way-back call for death, and company in the dying” (22). There are two more books to come, and I reckon that’s the way it will go; but if so, it’ll be a story worth telling, anyway. And reading.

The Adventures of Alyx

Adventures of Alyx cover If, like me before I read it, the only things you know about The Adventures of Alyx are that it’s Joanna Russ’s response to heroic fantasy, and one of the canonical examples (along with CL Moore’s Jirel of Joiry) of introducing a female character into a role perceived (or at least assumed to be perceived) as basically male, what do you expect? I think I expected Xena, or Kitiara; what I found is conspicuously different, and rather elegantly set up. Although the world in which Alyx operates is still, in many ways, hostile to women, the world’s creation myth, in which women were created before men, and men were created from an extraneous body part, creates a space for a hero like Alyx to exist. But more than that, it seems to me that thinking about Alyx as a woman is a red herring. What really differentiates Alyx from the other protagonists I’ve been talking about — at least when reading these stories in 2008 — is not her sex, but her character. Unlike Fafhrd, Alyx is not callow; unlike Elric, there is no doubt Alyx is a hero: tough, smart, practical, competent, brave. (And, notably, explicitly not conventionally beautiful, unlike most contemporary tough, smart, etc, female leads.) And unlike Scafloc, her heroism is not doomed; she wins, convincingly, every time. Nor does she suffer much internal anguish in these tales. In short, unlike her male counterparts, Alyx is not only someone you can root for, but someone you might actually be able to stand being.

The Adventures of Alyx collects four short stories and one short novel, all but one of which revolve around Alyx in the way that the Elric stories revolve around Elric — though it’s worth noting that they are tidily-structured short stories, rather than the overstuffed mini-epics of the thin white duke – and none of which are as memorable as the character they showcase. The first tale (published in 1967; originally “The Adventuress”, and here “Bluestocking”), establishes Alyx as a “pick-lock” and general adventurer-for-hire, although — again, a difference to the men — not an heir to a kingdom, or a noble line. The descriptions of her are in many ways simply descriptions of an average 30-year-old working woman. She is short, with gray eyes, black hair, and freckles. She has an intellectual bent, but has found that her chosen profession “gratified her sense of subtlety” (9). Not that she’s unambitious; she has visions of becoming a Destiny, although what that means is never completely clear. The plot that Russ constructs for her seems inadequate. Ostensibly, it involves Alyx recruited to escort a young lady (never referred to as a girl, though she is only 17 and acts, at least to start with, like a spoiled brat) who wishes to run away from an arranged marriage to a rich boor whose previous wives, the narrator heavily insinuates, died in dubious circumstances; in practice, it’s a story that exists primarily to provide a series of trials which Alyx can overcome, demonstrating her toughness, smarts, practicality, competence and bravery in the process. It is not, in other words, a particularly high-stakes story — a distinguishing factor that persists throughout the book; the fate of the world is never in the balance — and nor is it particularly spectacular. An encounter with a sea-monster is typical:

Then she saw the sea monster.

Opinion concerning sea monsters varies in Ourdh and the surrounding hills, the citizens holding monsters to be the souls of the wicked dead forever ranging the pastureless waves of the ocean to waylay the living and force them into watery graves, and the hill people scouting this blasphemous view and maintaining that sea monsters are legitimate creations of the great god Yp, sent to murder travelers as an illustration of the majesty, the might, and the unpredictability of that most inexplicable of deities. But the end result is the same. Alyx had seen the bulbous face and coarse whiskers of the creature in a drawing hanging in the Silver Eel on the waterfront of Ourdh (the original — stuffed — had been stolen in some prehistoric time, according to the proprietor), and she had shuddered. She had thought, Perhaps it is just an animal, but even so it was not pleasant. Now in the moonlight that turned the ocean to a ball of silver waters in the midst of which bobbed the tiny ship, very very far from anyone or anything, she saw the surface part in a rain of sparkling drops and the huge, wicked, twisted face of the creature, so like and unlike a man’s, rise like a shadowy demon from the dark, bright water. It held its baby to its breast, a nauseating parody of human-kind. (16-7)

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think this is bad, even if some of the tricks used (an extremely long sentence followed directly by a short, abrupt one, for instance) crop up a bit too frequently throughout the book. But it’s not exciting. First, the forward action of the scene is paused to tell us some stuff about what is believed about sea monsters; and most of the description is vague generalities — “huge, wicked, twisted”. Although we’re told that final image, of a distorted tableau of motherhood, is “nauseating”, the emotion isn’t evoked in us, particularly, and it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the image is more important for its symbolic qualities, particularly when Alyx goes on to kill it in short order.

This is not to say that Anderson and Moorcock’s stories were lacking in symbolism — hardly — but that I think Russ’s goals are somewhat different than theirs. What The Adventures of Alyx has going for it, largely, is voice. I’ve already mentioned the alternate mythology, and the narrator of “Bluestocking” clearly takes some fun in poking at conventional roles, such as the (I presume) heavily ironic comments that Alyx is “among the wisest of a sex that is surpassingly wise”, and that women’s “natural weapons” are “deceit, surprise and speed” (19). But there is also a laconic, even mocking element to the voice — and the story construction; although lip service is paid to the idea of Alyx’s charge, Edarra, growing up during their journey together, in fact what happens is that the major part of the journey is elided, and Edarra is suddenly and magically grown up, almost between paragraphs — and a sense that the tone has been chosen not to create a world out of whole cloth, but to subvert one (ours). It’s at odds with the innocent expectation of belief that marks The Broken Sword and the Elric stories, and makes for businesslike, even brusque storytelling.

Russ is also far more impatient even than Moorcock with the boundaries of the type of story she is telling. “Bluestocking”, with its nod to Fritz Leiber and all, is actually the only story in the book that could be called straightforward heroic fantasy. Tale two, “I Thought She Was Afeard Till She Stroked My Beard” (also 1967, original title “I Gave Her Sack and Sherry”), is an origin story for Alyx that doesn’t mention her by name until the final page — or looked at another way, until Alyx chooses to claim her name. Before then, she is an oppressed wife who escapes from (and, not incidentally, kills) her abusive husband before going out to make her way in the world and train as a fighter. Although she travels for a while with a captain called Blackbeard, and learns some things from him, the narrative is careful to insist that at no time does she need him. “The Barbarian” (1968) looks at first like a return to the format of “Bluestocking”. Alyx is approached by a fat man who patronisingly claims to know a lot about her — “‘And now,’ (he pronounced the ‘now’ with peculiar relish) ‘you are getting old […] You’re thinking of settling down'” (50) — and who wishes to recruit her to assist him with a series of break-ins. We can tell he’s a bad guy because he’s stupid (the defects of those Russ wishes us to dislike are usually framed as a kind of stupidity, and in this case we are explicitly told his stupidity offends Alyx) and sure enough, on one break-in he tells Alyx to kill a baby, on the grounds that he claims to know she will grow up to be a cruel queen. Alyx refuses — although as much on the grounds that the man should do his own dirty work as anything else; her first reaction is not “no!” but “What on earth for?” — and subsequently tracks the man to his lair, where it is revealed, for anyone who doubted it, that he is a time-traveller, given to tinkering with history. “My hobby is world-making” (63), he says to Alyx, who kills him, and then smashes his machines.

And Picnic on Paradise, originally published in 1968 as Russ’s first novel, appears to be even more straightforwardly science-fictional. It picks up on the time-travel theme, revealing that Alyx has been brought forward 4,000 years in a sort of temporal archaeology accident, and recruited as an Agent. As the novel opens she’s been dispatched to the planet Paradise, a popular tourist destination caught in a “commercial war”. In an echo of the plot of “Bluestocking”, she’s recruited to escort a group of civilians, of varying degrees of uselessness, from A to B — quite literally, from station A to station B, in an example of Russ’s dry humour. Of course, B turns out to have been destroyed when they get there, necessitating a longer and increasingly dangerous journey through cold, mountainous, treacherous terrain to the next-nearest station, at the planet’s pole. In other words, it’s the sort of story that could comfortably be told in a fantasy setting (indeed, the level of sfnal invention on display, with humans having interbred sufficiently so that everyone is a pleasing shade of light brown, and treatments such as “Re-Juve” on offer, is in all honesty not far above what you’ll get in a middling episode of Doctor Who), which perhaps is intended as a comment on the separability (or not) of the two genres. You could even argue that the imposition of the mission on Alyx from higher up the chain of command is The Adventure of Alyx‘s equivalent of the sort of godgames that make Scafloc and Elric’s lives so miserable.

In some ways, Picnic on Paradise is not actually very good. For an adventure story it’s baggy, featuring a crowded party of sketchily-differentiated characters, and perhaps a little too much commitment to conveying the mind-numbing tedium that polar expeditions probably come with in real life. Predictably, members of Alyx’s group start falling by the wayside one by one, and equally predictably Alyx grows from being more than a little frustrated with her charges, thinking of herself as a teacher saddled with a class of small children, to considering them to be “her people”. Somewhat to my surprise, I found the most interesting element of the novel to be the relationship that develops between Alyx and one of the male civilians, known as “Machine” and initially introduced as “an idiotic adolescent rebel” (74) – and not just for the contrast it presents to the relationships in the other books. “Bluestocking” (very weirdly) ends with Alyx and Edarra finding some men, and the one that Alyx pairs off with may be the new husband we get a glimpse of at the end of “The Barbarian”; but of the nuts and bolts of Alyx in a relationship, this is our only sight. Like Scafloc and Elric, she is older than her partner; unlike them, thankfully, there is no suggestion that her attraction to Machine stems from his youth per se, although they do start calling each other “dear” and “darling” with alarming speed, and it’s not actually entirely clear what the attraction does stem from, other than, perhaps, the fact that he’s the only not-entirely-obnoxious, vaguely competent man within several hundred miles. But the scenes of them together are largely thorny and convincing. This is particularly true when Russ is dealing with the collision between Machine’s serious attitude to sex — who has what can only be described as a mechanical dedication to making sure his partner enjoys herself — and Alyx’s rather more passion-led approach. Interestingly, in this Russ positions Alyx as the child: “When you do something, you do it right, don’t you?” asks Machine, trying to explain his approach, to which Alyx promptly says “No,” before explaining that the only reason to do it is “because you want to”, as “any five-year-old child” should know. It’s an interesting exchange, because Alyx’s temper frequently gets the best of her elsewhere in these stories — not always, in fact rarely, for the worst, but not entirely admirably, either.

The collection’s final story, “The Second Inquisition” (1970) changes setting, tone and style yet again — in the process making clear exactly how much control Russ has over those elements of her writing — relocating to 1925, and the narrative of a young woman still living with her parents. She describes an unusually confident visitor who is staying with them, who seems fairly clearly to be one of the tall, indefinably mixed-race people of Picnic on Paradise‘s time, and who sure enough turns out to be a time traveller, one of a number of agents trained by Alyx and engaged in a temporal conflict. It’s a story that picks up on one of the most moving exchanges in Picnic in Paradise, when Alyx is trying to convey to one of the civilians what the world she comes from is like, and what time travel feels like to her:

“Think of that, you thirty-three-year-old adolescent! Twenty-six and dead at fifty. Dead! There’s a whole world of people who live like that. We don’t eat the way you do, we don’t have whatever it is the doctors give you, we work like hell, we get sick, we lose arms or legs or eyes and nobody gives us new ones, we die in the plague, one-third of our babies die before they’re a year old and one time out of five the mother dies, too, in giving them birth.”

“But it’s so long ago!” wailed little Iris.

“Oh not it’s not,” said Alyx. “It’s right now. It’s going on right now. I lived in it and I came here. It’s in the next room. I was in that room and now I’m in this one. There are people still in that other room. They are living now. They are suffering now. And they always live and always suffer because everything keeps on happening. (127-8)

This works on several levels: it conveys the shock of transition which Alyx experienced, moving between times; it is metafictionally true, in that just before and just after this exchange we are indeed reading about the people in those other rooms; and of course it’s a reminder that geographical inequality in the real world, today, is as significant as the temporal inequality Alyx is describing. This last is, I think, reinforced by the collection’s overall trajectory from stories about a world that is remote and separate from ours, to stories about a world that is directly and intimately linked to us.

The first four Alyx stories all end with the same line, or a variation on it: “But that’s another story.” “The Second Inquisition” ends with the narrator isolated, having witnessed extraordinary events and a glimpse of a world from which she is excluded, in favour of having to live in reality. “No more stories,” she says, echoing the finality of Stormbringer rather than the ongoing tapestry of The Broken Sword. The sadness of it contrasts with the upbeat expansiveness of all the other endings, but it works better. And there is a sense, too, that the stories say all that Russ wanted them to say. Others — Mary Gentle, Samuel Delany – may have found other routes into the same seams of ore, but I think Russ got the gold she wanted from this mine, and was ready to move on to others.

Elric

Elric US cover At the start of “The Dreaming City” (1961), the first Elric story, a group of armoured men, soon revealed to be soldiers, are sitting around discussing an upcoming battle. We should attack now, says one; no, cautions another, we must wait for Elric, for it is his knowledge that will ensure our success. It’s a classic, if obvious, ploy to build anticipation for the main character’s entrance, and when Elric finally appears, Moorcock does not stint on the description:

Elric was tall, broad-shouldered and slim-hipped. He wore his long hair bunched and pinned at the nape of his neck and, for an obscure reason, affected the dress of a southern barbarian. He had long, knee-length boots of soft doe-leather, a breastplate of strangely wrought silver, a jerkin of chequered blue and white linen, britches of scarlet wool and a cloak of rustling green velvet. At his hip rested his runesword of black iron — the feared Stormbringer, forged by ancient and alien sorcery.

His bizarre dress was tasteless and gaudy, and did not match his sensitive face and long-fingered, almost delicate hands, yet he flaunted it since it emphasized the fact that he did not belong in any company — that he was an outsider and an outcast. But, in reality, he had little need to wear such outlandish gear — for his eyes and skin were enough to mark him.

Elric, Last Lord of Melnibone, was a pure albino who drew his power from a secret and terrible source. (14-15)

As character introductions go, they don’t come much more heavy-handed than this: detailed and desperately self-conscious about the outlandish proto-goth-ness of the person it’s describing. (And, indeed, slightly too pleased with itself as a reaction to older works, as the mighty god-king’s re-titling suggests.) But it serves its purpose, and at least makes clear that these are not stories where we need to be worrying about nuance.

The next thirty pages are a condensed epic in which Elric leads the sealords against Imrryr, his home city and the last remnant of a great empire, in order to settle a personal score. Moorcock whips through the various confrontations leading up to the climax with little poetry but — for anyone used to the pace of modern genre fantasy novels — astonishing speed and vigour, and fills the story with wild and scary and shrieking magic, obscene agonies and evil laughs. (“Yyrkoon laughed then — laughed like a gibbering demon from the foulest depths of hell”, 34). It is all more flamboyant and fantastic than anything in Swords Against Deviltry or The Broken Sword, but perhaps the most notable thing about “The Dreaming City”, beyond its historical significance, is the committed bitterness of its ending: Elric betrays just about everyone, usually in such a way as to lead to their death, and swims off into the sunset. The only relationship that endures beyond the final page is that between Elric and Stormbringer. At one point in “Ill Met in Lankhmar”, Fafhrd insists that “all weapons are in a fashion alive, civilized and nameworthy”; Stormbringer may be alive and nameworthy, but it is anything but civilized. It is the “secret and terrible source” mentioned above, a demonic soul-drinking blade not without its own will. “We must be bound to one another then,” Elric states, “two of a kind — produced by an age which has deserted us. Let us give this age cause to hate us!” (42)

Elric UK cover The currently available UK and US editions of the early Elric stories differ somewhat; as the cover picture at the top of this post indicates, I read the Del Rey edition of these stories, which is the first in a series of books that present the Elric tales in the order they were written, rather than (as Lankhmar does) the order of their internal chronology. This edition has one big advantage, for my purposes, over the current UK edition, which, though prettier (left) and also presented in publication order, contains only the stories, whereas the Del Rey edition includes a generous supply of ancillary materials, including cover art, introductions, and letters from old fanzines, which help to fill in (a version of?) the historical context. Moorcock’s introduction, for example, tells us that on these stories’ first appearance, “some readers seemed to be uncomfortable” with the “ironic tone” of the Elric stories, which were “probably the first ‘intervention’ into the fantasy canon, such as it was” (xxi), noting Stephen Donaldson and Scott Bakker as later examples. Later, he confides that “It is a little strange for me to accept that Elric has become part of the pantheon of epic fantasy” (xxxiii). Reading these stories for the first time in 2008 it’s a little strange to imagine a time when Elric wasn’t canonical – Steph Swainston’s Jant is but one prominent descendent of Elric. It’s not just that it’s odd to read about a world in which this sort of fantasy isn’t a huge market segment (“These days,” Moorcock notes in one fanzine letter dated to 1963, “people seem to want information of some kind with their escapism — and sword and sorcery doesn’t strictly supply information of the type required”, going on to contrast it with the success of James Bond. How the pendulum swings …). It’s also odd to read Moorcock’s comments about canonicity and irony because, over forty years after their initial publication, the irony in some of the stories is, for me at least, barely discernible. This is not so much because the scenery of these books has become familiar through over-use, as it has for books like The Lord of the Rings or Neuromancer, although there is some of that — I first encountered the idea of Chaos as a bad guy playing Warhammer Fantasy Battle as a teenager, and although I knew academically that the Warhammer world was intensely derivative, I had no idea how specific some of the borrowing was, down to (it turns out) the multi-headed arrow as the chaos symbol. No, it’s more in attitude and story-shape that I think Moorcock’s influence feels pervasive: the spin he puts on the idea of the magic sword, and the lost empire, and the tortured hero, and the ultimate conflict.

The idea of balance between the forces of Chaos and Law is in fact introduced in the second, equally direct, story, “While the Gods Laugh” (1961), in which Elric is recruited to seek the Dead God’s Book, in which is recorded “a holy and mighty wisdom” (47). The ending might be a surprise if you’ve never read a quest for ultimate knowledge before — hint: the bitterness of the end of “The Dreaming City” isn’t a one-off, although it is slightly tempered this time — but the journey provides an excuse for Moorcock to let Elric discourse on cosmology and on his philosophy of life with Shaarilla, the woman who enlists him. (And who is the only female character in this book with significant amounts of independence and agency; but more about that later.) “My only comfort is to accept anarchy,” he tells her. This way, I can revel in chaos and know, without fear, that we are all doomed from the start — that our brief existence is both meaningless and damned” (51). The book is guarded by a giant in the service of the Lords of Chaos, who admits to Elric that he is disturbed by the idea that the Book could give either side in the eternal struggle the upper hand; as he puts it, “We exist only to fight — not to win, but to preserve the eternal struggle” (78). It sets the terms for the stories to follow.

And those stories are, in purely pyrotechnic terms, a blast. In his introduction, Moorcock freely admits that the stories are entertainments, not works of art (though he argues that they contain the seeds of much of what followed) but it doesn’t really prepare you for the density of imagination which follows. In part that’s because the length of each tale is also a shock, though a welcome one: the best of these stories are distilled essence of epic. On the downside, the remaining stories that were originally published in book form as The Stealer of Souls — which make up the first half of the present volume — are filled with transparently convenient plotting, a moderately bad case of Fan’t’asy N’a’ming D’sease, some atrocious dialogue (“I had hoped never to have to make use of that hell-forged blade again. She’s a treacherous sword at best” / “Aye — but I think you’ll need her in this business”, 166; although some of the dialogue demonstrates more self-awareness, such as when Elric responds to a speech about the awesome power of a warlord’s fully operational army with an offhand “thanks”), and mysterious and beautiful women. As I hinted yesterday, there is a parallel with The Broken Sword here in that the most childlike of the women, disturbingly, is handwaved into a marriage with Elric that seems to be largely based on his love of her innocence. (In one of the fanzine letters appended to the body of this edition, Moorcock acknowledges the problems with the representation of women, and implies it stems from personal circumstances at the time.) But on the upside, these are tales filled with battles and emotional torment and exotic landscapes and marvels: elementals fighting above a city, drugs, an undead-king (“His heart did not beat, for he had none; he drew no breath, for his lungs had been eaten by the creatures which feasted on such things. But, horribly, he lived …” 156, and it’s the ellipsis that makes it), cat-people from another dimension and, at the end, a dragon-riding set-piece. It also ends with Elric insisting that he is “tired of swords and sorcery” (194) — although significantly, when he tries, he is unable to properly throw Stormbringer away.

Which brings me to the second half of Elric: Stormbringer, your classic fix-up, published as stories in 1963 and 64, and in book form in 1965. As a novel-length inevitably had to do, Stormbringer raises the stakes. To this point, Elric has mostly been wandering around one continent; now he becomes aware of a great army massing across the ocean, that may pose a threat to the safety of the Young Kingdoms. (Intriguingly, the first map of Elric’s world, reproduced along with a number of magazine covers, is dated 1967, suggesting it was retrofitted to the stories. That would at least explain why the forces of darkness seem to insist on travelling East across the ocean, rather than making what one assumes would be a land voyage Westwards …) The army in question hails from the island of Pan Tang (Moorcock’s sensitivity to racial issues in these stories is on a par with his sensitivity to gender issues), and has allied itself with Chaos: which makes them more despicable than Elric’s people, for all that the Melnibonians are nominally chaotic themselves, because, says Elric, “These newcomers, more human than we, have peverted their humanity whereas we never possessed it in the same degree” (232). By the end of the first story — Stormbringer is climax on climax — we have learned that (no surprise) Elric’s sword, and he with it, have a greater destiny than he previously realised; and in a conversation with a Dead God, Moorcock confirms what has been implied since the beginning of the series, that Elric is living in our remote past. “The Earth’s history has not even begun,” a Dead God tells Elric. “You, your ancestors, these men of the new races even, you are nothing but a prelude to history. You will all be forgotten if the real history of the world begins” (264).

It’s the original magazine versions of the four stories that make up Stormbringer which appear here, which leads to some redundancy in the text, but increases the book’s value as a historical resource. Something those repetitions also help to make clear is that the evolution of Elric and the cosmology of his world was not a natural and inevitable progression; rather it was one of improvisation. Even as the forces of chaos advance — “iron and fire beat across nations like an unholy storm”, 247; one of the things Stormbringer does very well is develop an atmosphere of gathering darkness — Moorcock is building his world as fast as he’s tearing it down. We learn more about the past of Elric, and of Melnibone, and more about the geography of the world, than we ever needed in the earlier stories. And yet Moorcock picks up pieces of continuity from the earlier stories — a character here, a magic item there — and weaves them into his tapestry.

The extravagant visions of Chaos seem to bring out the best in Moorcock, too. Our first sight of the Dukes of Chaos is all abstractions, “suddenly ragged colour, shrill sound, and disordered matter” (308). And here’s a portrait of the Camp of Chaos, set in a landscape that is itself becoming unstable and messy:

No mortal nightmare could encompass such a terrible vision. The towering Ships of Hell dominated the place as they observed it from a distance, utterly horrified by the sight. Shooting flames of all colours seemed to flicker everywhere over the camp, fiends of all kinds mingled with the men, hell’s evilly beautiful nobles conferred with the gaunt-faced kings who had allied themselves to Jagreen Lern and perhaps now regretted it. Every so often the ground heaved and erupted and any human beings unfortunate enough to be in the area were either engulfed and totally transformed, or else had their bodies warped in indescribable ways. The noise was a dreadful blending of human voices and roaring Chaos sounds, devils’ wailing laughter and, quite often, the tortured shout of a human soul who had perhaps regretted his choice of loyalty and now suffered madness. The stench was disgusting, of corruption, of blood and of evil. The Ships of Hell moved slowly about through the horde which stretched for miles, dotted with great pavilions of kings, their silk banners fluttering; hollow pride compared to the might of Chaos. (377)

There’s plenty that’s bad about this paragraph — the imprecision about who’s doing the observing in the second sentence; the proximity of “perhaps now regretted” and “perhaps regretted”; the fairly pedestrian way it proceeds through the senses and describes each in turn. Nevertheless, for me at least, it has enough energy and cumulative power to overcome such flaws. Moorcock notes that “the landscapes of my stories are metaphysical, not physical” (438), something that becomes unavoidable towards the end of Stormbringer and, by all accounts, the later-written stories.

The structure of Stormbringer presents the relationship between Elric and his sword with a series of tests: Stormbringer weighed against the life of Elric’s wife, Stormbringer weighed against Elric’s devotion to his patron demon, Stormbringer weighed against Elric’s friend. Moorcock is explicit about the nature of the relationship: Elric calls for Stormbringer “as a lover calls for his betrothed” (318). That Moorcock takes this relationship as far as it can possibly go is to his credit, undeniably ironic, and perhaps the one aspect of the stories in this book that still seems truly transgressive. After all, you can’t get much more contrary in fantasy than to give your series an ultimate, unbreakable, unsequelable ending. (Even if you go on to find other ways to write about the character…)

The Broken Sword

The Broken Sword cover In an introduction to D’Aulaires’ Book of Norse Myths [pdf link], reprinted in his essay collection Maps and Legends earlier this year, Michael Chabon describes the appeal of Norse mythology: “it begins in darkness, and ends in darkness, and is veined like a fire with darkness that forks and branches.” This is presumably the sense in which the back-cover blurb of the “ultimate fantasy” edition of The Broken Sword — “a superb dark fantasy of the highest, and most Norse, order” — should be read. While Poul Anderson’s novel borrows most heavily from the details of Norse mythology to construct its plot, there are also significant elements drawn from Christian and English lore, not to mention references to traditions existing elsewhere in the world, and in an afterword Anderson goes to some lengths to argue that his depiction of the historical (as opposed to fantastical) parts of his setting are true to our understanding of them. (Although the non-Norse mythological elements are apparently downplayed in the 1971 reissue, relative to the original 1954 text which I read.) But the manner of the story’s expression, throughout, is pure Norse. The Broken Sword is, to borrow Chabon’s phrases again, structured by “veins of calamity and violence … like the forking of a fire or of the plot of a story”. As with Swords Against Deviltry, the ground state of the world is harsh and cruel, but Anderson provides no gloss; his tale is relentless. In the opening chapter, a Jutlander called Orm leaves home to seek his fortune in the world. He sails to England, where he claims land by burning down its inhabitants’ house in the middle of the night – with them in it — and claims a woman by threatening her father with a similar fate. And he is, relatively speaking, on the side of the angels.

In The Broken Sword, that doesn’t mean he’s a good guy so much as it means he’s a valuable piece to those gods who aren’t actively working towards the dissolution of all creation, or the corruption of men’s souls. More than in any of the other books I’m discussing this week, The Broken Sword justifies Moorcock’s attempt to label the category as epic; although there is less at stake than there is in, say, Stormbringer, the manner in which the stakes are treated gives them something approaching equal weight. There is a much powerful sense that the world is a canvas, or chessboard on which grand dramas are played out.

And they play out, predominantly, around Orm’s son, who exists as an agent of prophecy. A witch, whose family is killed by Orm, places a curse on the Jutlander that his firstborn will be raised beyond the world of men, while Orm will in turn foster “a wolf that [will] one day rend him” (2). The Broken Sword is in part the story of these things coming to pass. An elf-earl abducts Orm’s son, names him Scafloc, and replaces him with a changeling (who is, rather horribly, created via the earl’s rape of a captive troll). At a feast in Elfhiem, in honour of Scafloc’s naming, a new prophecy is offered: a messenger for the gods turns up with what appears to be the titular weapon, saying that it is a gift for a time when Scafloc will need “a good blade” (15). (Although it is reforged in the course of the book, The Broken Sword does not tell the sword’s story; it might be better to take the title as a reference to Scafloc and his changeling counterpart, Valgard, who are in many respects two halves of one whole.) And there are yet more markers of destiny, albeit not directly acknowledged as such: when Scafloc boasts that the three things he has never known are “fear, and defeat, and love-sickness” (28) it’s fairly obvious where the story is heading.

Or perhaps that should be stories, plural, because The Broken Sword is also epic in the sense that it subsumes just about every category of narrative you can think of. There is some abbreviated coming of age; there is a revenge tragedy, in which Valgard is manipulated by the witch into killing most of Orm’s family; there is a war, between the elves of England and the trolls of Finland, in which both Scafloc and Valgard are caught up, on opposing sides; there is a romance; and there is a quest to re-forge the sword into a weapon capable of turning the tide in the war. The style throughout is formal without being ornate; economic and serious, unafraid to elide periods of no relevance to the main narrative, or to usher in huge changes, or changes in fortune, without warning. (Something about the flow of narrative time within the book put me in mind of Geoff Ryman’s first novel, The Warrior Who Carried Life, which could also be fairly described as epic, despite focusing on a very few individuals.) It is the sort of story in which a king can speak “quietly” to his foe in the midst of a raging battle (187).

The characters are broad enough to match the great deeds they must undertake. Scafloc is the best of elf and human, carefree and mischevious, honorable, fast enough to chase down a stag on foot, but able to handle metals — and therefore weapons — that would burn his adoptive father. Valgard is his mirror, or shadow, growing up “strange, aloof, silent” (33) and before long painfully aware of what he is and is not. He oscillates between terrifying beserker rages and ragged fits of melancholy: “Night closes on me, the sorry game of my life is played out … I was but a shadow cast by the mighty Powers who now blow out the candle” (47). Around Scafloc and Valgard constellate a variety of other characters, mostly related to them in some way; for all that it ostensibly tells of great, world-changing events, The Broken Sword is a deeply personal book, in the sense that a blood feud is personal: the heroes and villains all know each other. Female characters in general get a raw deal (witch; weepy queen; kidnapped trophy), but probably the single most interesting character beyond the central duo is Scafloc’s nature-sister, Valgard’s nurture-sister, Freda. She is kidnapped by Valgard, to be delivered to the troll king as proof of his renunciation of his human heritage, but rescued by a raiding Scafloc. Subsequently the two fall into a relationship, even fighting alongside each other at one point, which necessitates some rather desperate attempts on Anderson’s part to justify why Scafloc never thinks too deeply about the fact that Valgard’s brother looks exactly like him (“Imric, to break his fosterling’s human ties, had brought him up not to be curious about his parentage”, 74), or why Freda never notices (“Eyes and lips and play of features, manner and touch and thought, were so different in them that she scarce noticed the sameness of height and bone structure and cast of face”, 74). To be honest I found the incest less disturbing than the near-fetishization of Freda’s youth (“His troubled mien vanished at sight of her — young, slim, lithe and long-legged, still more girl than woman”, 84-5), though this can perhaps be attributed to historical fidelity, and is certainly more nuanced than a comparable relationship in the Elric stories.

The reason the characters cannot notice the truth of their situation, of course, is that the story remains all; it’s also the reason I didn’t mind the contrivance. It strikes me that fantasy in the style Anderson chose here assumes a distance from the human not unlike that found in scientific romance. Both seek to portray a broad sweep of events, over and above the nuances of strictly believable human response. When a young Scafloc encounters an exiled faun, driven from his land by missionaries of the Christian god, it tells him, “I fled north … but I wonder if those of my ancient comrades who stayed and fought and were slain with exorcisms were not wiser … The nymphs and the fauns and the very gods are dead, dust blowing on desolate winds. The temples stand empty, white under the sky, and slowly they topple to ruin” (17) – giving us a glimpse of a changing land, and of a depth to time, that would not be out of place in a scientific romance. The not-infrequent and entirely unironic quothing — and the early passing note that Scafloc “learned the skaldic arts so well that he spoke in verses as easily as in ordinary speech” (20-1), which in a fantasy novel is the sort of thing that strikes fear into a reader’s heart — serve a similar end, even though it is hard to imagine an actual human behind it.

If you like, these strategies create a space in which heroics of the sort in which Scafloc and Valgard engage can plausibly happen; but to put it this way might downplay the importance of The Broken Sword’s landscapes, which achieve the same task literally, rather than metaphorically. The world in The Broken Sword is primal, empty, often stark, and often seen at night:

A moon newly risen cast silver and shadow on the crag and scaurs of the elf-hills, on the beach from which they rose, on the clouds racing eastward on a great gale which seemed to fill the sky with its clamor. The moonlight ran in shards and ripples over the waves, which tumbled and roared, white-maned and angry, on the rocks. (61)

I have nothing more in-depth to say about this quote; I just like it.

Michael Moorcock, in a review for The Guardian, suggested that The Broken Sword spoiled him for The Lord of the Rings, which was published contemporaneously with Anderson’s book. “I couldn’t take Tolkien seriously. Aside from his nursery-room tone, I was unhappy with his infidelities of time, place and character, unconvinced by his female characters and quasi-juvenile protagonists,” Moorcock wrote. “Anderson’s human characters belonged to the 11th century and were often brutal, fearful and superstitious. Their lives were short. Their understanding of the future was a little bleak, with the prospect of Ragnarok just around the corner.” Once again, that valorization of darkness; and while I don’t agree that said darkness is an a priori good in fantasy, there’s no denying that in The Broken Sword it works. As the manner of Valgard’s creation suggests, although the novel contains noble actions and moments of joy, the joy is always fleeting and there are few noble people — which perhaps explains the freshness that attends many elements of the book which are now cliché, and indeed which have been reacted against by later work: everything is pared down. Elves may be beautiful, but it is a severe beauty — “White and ageless, of thin-carved, high-boned features, with beast ears and eyes of blind mystery, they were a sight of terror to mortal gaze” (61) — they are as guilty of using Scafloc as the gods (changelings are useful to elves), and their society is built, as surely as any of the others in the novel, on a slavery which is never questioned. But it seems to me that the two writers, Anderson and Tolkien, have a similarity that outweighs their differences: a confidence to go back to the root essence of fantasy, and use it as the grist for their tales. Both works have a compelling coherence, a sense that all their different elements fit together; and both feel as though they have always been told, and will always be told.

Two Reviews

The Quiet War cover There is a sense in which the true subject of Paul McAuley’s latest novel is revealed by passages like this:

Working in the vacuum-organism fields, Macy learned to trust her pressure suit’s bubble of warmth and air and to appreciate the still silence of Ganymede’s naked and unforgiving icescapes stretched cold and still under the infinite black sky, and there were blessed moments when her consciousness sank into her muscles and time melted into an eternal now and everything around her, the awkward casing of her pressure suit and its whines and hisses and whirrs, the fields of vacuum organisms and the stark plain beyond, flowed into a single pure experience. (185-6)

This example is particularly striking, because most of the time one of Macy Minnot’s greatest virtues is her alert, pragmatic engineer’s mind, but each of the novel’s main characters experiences at least one comparable moment. For clone soldier Dave #8 it comes the first time he experiences a universe beyond his barracks: at first “everything was new and exciting and charged with significance and the high resolution of reality”, and then “the connection between what he had learned and what he saw struck a bright snap of pleasure” (148-9). For space pilot Cash Baker (no, naming is not McAuley’s strong suit), it comes in the middle of a mission that involves diving into Saturn’s atmosphere: “The sky was deep indigo and seemingly infinite, the sun a tiny flattened disc that glowered at the hazy horizon, the centre of concentric shells of bloody light that rose towards zenith … He felt like the king of this whole wide world, an emperor of air, and told Vera that this place was definitely made for flying” (222). And for Sri Hong-Owen, scientist and (I would argue, against her protestations to the contrary) politician, it comes at home, in the part of Antarctica she has remade after the environmental upheavals of Earth’s recent past: “Facing into the cold, clean wind and thin flurries of snow, she could survey the entirety of her little kingdom”. Tellingly, however, Sri is the only one of the four characters to look beyond the immediate moment. She sees impermanence, “a mirage” maintained in the teeth of the second law of thermodynamics. “The world,” she muses, “must be free to find its own point of equilibrium” (168). Aside from often being vivid, clear writing, what I think all these moments do well is to give a flavour of what it is like to be human in this future: to be a fragile member of a fragile species, maintained by technology in the face of ancient, often empty, fundamentally inhospitable landscapes, and yet to find something resembling a moment of peace. An equilibrium between the noise of being human and the quiet of the universe.

Unfortunately, most of the time The Quiet War struggles to maintain this balance. Set in the relatively near future, it combines a semi-Grand Tour — that is, a plot which systematically navigates between half a dozen of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, plus a couple of other locations — with an attempt to depict two societies sliding towards war. Almost all of it is notionally told from the perspectives of the four characters mentioned above, all of whom are subjects of one of Earth’s feudal mega-nations (Greater Brazil), and caught up in some way with the plot to initiate war with the democratic Outer colonies. I say “notionally” because although most of the narration sticks relatively close to its subject (close enough, as Abigail Nussbaum notes in her review at Strange Horizons, for the narrator to be able to explicate exactly what a character is thinking or feeling at any given time), there are big wodges of context inelegantly but liberally sprinkled through the text. Sometimes these are history lessons; sometimes they are technical explanations, as one or other of the characters goes about some particularly high-tech part of their job; often they read like background information from a sourcebook:

East of Eden, Ganymede, occupied a narrow crevasse at the southeastern edge of the dark and cratered terrain of Galileo Regio. The floor and sides of the crevasse were insulated and pressure-sealed with layers of fullerene composite and aerogel, and it was roofed with the same material … The settlement had been founded some fifty years ago by a group who believed that the other inhabitants of Jupiter’s moons had grown too soft, too bourgeois. Although there home was pleasantly bucolic, East of Eden’s citizens were austere and close-minded, keen on conformity, custom and civic duty, and they prized the acquisition of scientific and philosophical knowledge about all else. … Their government, a form of direct democracy similar to that of the city-states of Classical Greece or the early years of the Roman Republic, involved endless discussions (156-7).

I think it’s clear that these sections are intended to be as important to the overall aesthetic of the novel as the character-focused moments I described above, in that one of The Quiet War‘s central goals is undoubtedly to build up a picture of a future solar system, one that eschews romanticization for verisimilitude. And in that goal, it is largely successful. The Quiet War is from that tradition of sf which is unabashedly didactic, devoted to political, technical and geographical detail, and while there are inevitable familiar elements (Dave #8’s tale, in particular, reminded me variously of the future-war parts of Stephen Baxter’s Xeelee sequence, and the clone workers in David Marusek’s Counting Heads), the range and coherence of imagination on display is impressive. The societies on Earth, which have turned environmentalism into a form of religion, and in the Outer colonies, which have started to embrace the more radical possibilities of fully participatory democracy and genetic modification, are convincing (although we see much more of Outer cities like East of Eden than we do of Earth). The technical innovations woven into the plot, from self-sustaining biomes to the “vacuum organisms” that support the colonists, are fascinating; and the stubborn insistence on portraying the various moons and planets as they really are (as we currently understand them) gives the whole enterprise a solid foundation. There are moments and passages when the sense that it really could be like this can make The Quiet War utterly absorbing.

But I’m not sure the sourcebook stuff is necessary. Admittedly, I haven’t read many of the original “quiet war” stories which preceded the novel, and of those I have read most, such as “Second Skin” (1997) and “Making History” (2000), are set after the war; but I don’t remember them requiring such encyclopedism to make their point, and while a novel obviously has more space to play with, I don’t know that this was the best use for it. I’m not even arguing that the information needs to be woven into the narrative more elegantly; the problem is that most of the time, it already is. There’s nothing in that description of East of Eden, for instance, which Macy Minnot does not subsequently experience first-hand. She sees the colony’s buildings with her own eyes; gradually learns about its history and the temperament and interests of its citizens; and gains first-hand experience of living in a democracy – albeit negative experience, as the system is manipulated against her.

You could perhaps construct an argument in favour of the lectures that has to do with pacing and tone: they help to maintain the measured pace and sober tone that drain the sensationalism out of the novel’s more action-adventure elements. Adam Roberts’ review acknowledges the limitations of the novel’s style but finds, ultimately, that its “quietness” is its great strength. There’s something to that: the implied narrator is native to this future and thus takes moments such as, for example, the scene in which Macy is subjected to casual torture as unremarkable, enabling them to be presented with powerful understatement in precisely the way Roberts describes. A less utilitarian perspective, or one that sought greater historical distance, would lessen this effect. No matter how carefully, how impressively the knowledge that went into The Quiet War was orchestrated, however, I found myself missing the wit and irony that distinguished the other Paul McAuley novels I’ve read recently (the Arthur C Clarke Award-winner Fairyland, and last year’s Cowboy Angels). Things do improve in the novel’s punchy closing stages, which bring the question of how humans can live in the solar system to a pivot point, and slingshot most of the characters onto interesting new trajectories; a subplot that sees Dave #8 infiltrating an Outer colony is a particular highlight, as is a climactic encounter between Sri and an Outer “gene wizard” she’s been seeking for much of the novel. But too much of the quietness of The Quiet War is a lifeless quiet, which could have done with a bit more human noise.

The same can’t be said of Ian R MacLeod’s new novel. Indeed, as Faren Miller notes in her review for Locus (August 2008), Song of Time is a book that could be accused of melodrama, and accordingly it adopts a rich, storybookish tone that would seem alien in The Quiet War. Roushana Maitland, the aging classical violinist who narrates the tale early in the twenty-second century, is a classically MacLeodian protagonist: a third-generation Indian immigrant on her mother’s side, of Irish extraction on her father’s side, but, at least to start with, reservedly English in her demeanour. As the novel starts, two significant things happen. One, she finds a strange, amnesiac young man washed up on the beach outside her Cornwall house and gives him shelter, and two, having recently been implanted with a crystal that will gradually record her personality (shades of Greg Egan’s 1990 tale “Learning to be Me” here, although again the tone is radically different) for later upload into a digital afterlife, she begins to relive various memories. The earliest are of her brother, Leo, of learning to play the violin, and of growing up in the suburbs of Birmingham:

Forgotten, tired, sticky, I drifted out into the back garden. In those days, in that lost summer of that lost century, scarcely any stars hung above Birmingham, there was so much light and smog. The French windows still hung open, and it seemed for a moment that Leo and Blythe and I could still be playing inside. Not struggling in fits and starts through the Brahms, but making music which shaped itself like the cool flow of a midnight river. I could almost hear that lovely, inexpressable sound over the boom of next door’s television and the drone of evening traffic on the Alcester Road. (16-17)

Roushana’s voice, here and elsewhere, is typical MacLeod, cool purposefulness pitched somewhere between the lushness of The Light Ages (2003) and the stuffiness of The Summer Isles (2005). But whereas the voices of those novels dovetailed exactly with their periods (both are historical fictions, of one kind or another), in Song of Time there is a mismatch between a near-future backdrop that is as dense with technological and cultural change as we demand from modern sf, and the foregrounded voice. Ultimately, I think it works to the novel’s advantage; indeed, control of tone is one of its great strengths, with, for example, the dissonance between the intensity of nostalgia that Roushana displays – “lost summer of that lost century”! – and how we expect the near future to be written about used to powerful effect. Similarly, when Roushana lets the mysterious stranger (whom she calls Adam) watch the news it unleashes a sudden torrent of images, familiar as an extrapolation of our own increasingly media-saturated lives, that is all the more viscerally powerful for its incongruity. Moreover, Song of Time is as much about what the future means to us as what it might actually be; and MacLeod is unarguably good at investing this sort of style with a cumulative power. Slightly earlier in the same reminiscence, a stoned Leo talks about the future:

How Mars would cease to hang red in the sky and turn verdant green, and Venus would shift from white to oceanic blue. Soon, long steel ships will dart from existence to existence, probability to probability, world to wondrous world. It’s there for us, Sis, waiting ahead in this century in which we’re so lucky to have been born. Leo certainly knew that such visions were already outdated, but that didn’t matter: what mattered on that afternoon was the dream, and the way he said You and I, Sis. What mattered was lying beside my brother on that frayed rug, and I think that Leo, for all his drawling know-it-allness, really did imagine then that the world was a place of endless possibility, a ripe fruit which he would soon reach out to possess. (13-14)

For all its datedness, there surely can’t be many sf readers for whom this first sf longing, the sense of easy destiny implied when the final image of “ripe fruit” recalls those planets hanging in the sky, will not strike a chord. But a couple of hours later, Leo has already changed his mind, adopting a more contemporary attitude — “The future isn’t something waiting ahead of us any longer. We’re living with it. It’s with us. It’s everything. It’s here” (17). Anyone who’s read MacLeod’s superb novella “New Light on the Drake Equation” (2001), which portrayed an old man living in a future science fiction hadn’t prepared him for, could at this point be forgiven for thinking they know where Song of Time is heading, but though there are similarities, the novel goes further than the story. The future in Song of Time is a shifty, uncertain thing, sometimes promising, sometimes malign, always bound up with the characters’ sense of themselves. When Leo becomes sick, for instance, infected by a modern plague – an engineered virus that causes increasingly severe food intolerance in people with caucasian heritage — he becomes increasingly bitter about the dream he shared with his sister. A planned trip to a Venice afflicted by subsidence and rising sea levels becomes totemic; “What do you think the future holds for me?” (41), he demands. Later, after a family tragedy, Roushana’s mother insists to her that “The past’s gone, darling. The hopes and the theories mean nothing. All we’ve got left is the future” (77). In Roushana’s present, an avatar evangelising about the benefits of a digital afterlife claims that “The future isn’t the Earth” (159), but belongs to a form of life that can become “the breath of the sun”, and travel to the stars. But perhaps most definitive is Roushana’s assertion, when worn out by the process of remembering, that “The past is gone. So is the future. All that remains is me” (275).

Earlier, the doctor who explains to Roushana how her memory-crystal implant should work puts it even more plainly, in the course of reassuring her that not to worry if some memories are biased, or painful to recall: “This isn’t supposed to be some impersonal history — it’s the reflection of your true nature which counts” (153). And MacLeod holds true to that credo throughout the novel. This is not to say that Song of Time is a story in which the sf elements are window-dressing — although on the surface it seems less essentially sfnal than something like The Quiet War, it ultimately turns on a choice that only the sfnal elements could enable. But the narrative is grounded in a different way, in emotion rather than fact. And it’s quiet in a different way, too. Inevitably, Roushana and her family are caught up in some of the century’s notable events, but just as many happen off-screen, and there are tantalizing references to “the sink cities of Southern Europe” (5), or “machines which mine the distant planets” (45), or other such details. Together with the ways in which the technological advances in medicine, computing and other fields are unobtrusively worked into the background, this teasing gives MacLeod’s future history a sense of depth and solidity; yet the closest we get to a lecture or a panorama is the occasional paragraph in which Roushana describes a place and time in the course of describing how it felt to be there, then.

Initially, it has to be said, that the flashbacks are by far the more compelling aspect of the novel, describing with precision and force everything from the suburbs of Birmingham to a devastated India to a baroque Paris in the throes of artistic and political ferment. (This last is a tour-de-force.) The present-tense episodes which punctuate these reminiscences keep the novel moving, but for a while seem as though they will not move beyond mere functionality. But perhaps I was more resistant to them than I should have been, given that I was utterly convinced I knew what was going on with Adam, and utterly wrong. Certainly, as we get to know Roushana better — in her determination, her sometimes coldness, and her passions — and as she comes to know, and increasingly to confess to, Adam, the present-tense sections come into their own. The final fifty pages or so bear down on the relationship between Roushana and her exuberant, performative husband Claude, to unearth how Claude’s death still shapes Roushana’s present. In spite of their melodramatic qualities (a great raging storm underlines the emotional intensity of the climactic scenes), they build to a piercing, haunting conclusion.

And through it all, inescapably, there is music. Although we don’t get much detail about Roushana’s career – on the grounds that it’s a matter of public record, and that she thus needs to spend less time remembering it – what we do get renders the emotional stresses and rewards of a musical life as viscerally as anything I’ve read since Michel Faber’s The Courage Consort (2002). Moreover, the novel as a whole is marvellously inclusive, even inspirational, in its appreciation of “high” culture, although when it comes to describing music directly, MacLeod perhaps falters; describing a mid-21st-century genius’ work “as if Beethoven had written trance”, for instance, seems to be trying a bit too hard. But in the same way that Song of Time is less about the reality of the future than the idea of it, it’s less about the specific character of music than the feelings it inspires and the atmosphere it evokes. The “song of time” within the narrative takes advantage of various technological innovations to constantly evolve: any copy of the score which is ever opened will be subtly different to any other, according to rules laid down by the original composer, growing and changing (as memories grow and change). It’s a grounded sfnal speculation – the music of a culture in which access to recordings is ubiquitous – but also serves as a hymn to the power of the present moment, and a reminder that nostalgia, whether for the past or the future, can be a trap. It’s a truism to say the same of the best novels, that they change not just from one reader to the next, but from one reading to the next, demanding to be revisited, so perhaps the most generous praise I can offer of Song of Time is to say that the act of reading it feels just as ephemeral, and essential, as the music to which Roushana Maitland devotes her life.

Anathem

Anathem cover My review of Anathem has been published in this month’s IROSF:

One repeated theme, for instance, is how much can be figured out from very limited knowledge by the systematic application of logic and reason: how accurate a picture is possible from a limited number of facts. But at this point, I run into a problem not dissimilar to that facing reviewers of Ian McDonald’s Brasyl last year, which is to say that the specific nature of the story being told is a withheld revelation that it would be unfair to spoil. Suffice it to say that it’s a familiar kind of sf narrative, and that although from one perspective it’s a version of that narrative that takes an extraordinarily long time to get to the point, from another it’s the most detailed working-out of the theory underlying that narrative for many years. This is, of course, what many people said of The Baroque Cycle. I am not one of them: in fact, my reaction to Quicksilver is handily summed up by Raz in this book, who is at one point sentenced to the standard punishment of his Order, to copy out a number of chapters from a tome whose contents are said to have “been crafted and refined over many centuries to be nonsensical, maddening, and pointless … The punishment lay in knowing that you were putting all of that effort into letting a kind of intellectual poison infiltrate your brain” (157). But while on one level I’m ready to acknowledge that Anathem simply engages with a cluster of ideas that are more interesting to me, I think it is also a better book.

See also Liz’s review; and elsewhere in that issue of IROSF, Nick Mamatas on “Why Horror is the Odd Man Out in Genre Fiction“, and Ruth Nestvold and Jay Lake asking “Is it the Age of Fantasy?“, among others.

Kairos

Kairos cover Kairos is a novel that spends a lot of time refusing to look you in the eye. Very nearly half of its pages (which number 260 in the revised 1995 edition, i.e. not the one pictured; I don’t know if the original 1988 edition is substantially shorter or longer, although Jones’ afterword suggests not) have passed before it actually admits that it’s going to be something more than one of the most grimly hypnotic visions of a real-year-88 near future committed to paper, but the pattern is there from the start. The first person we encounter is Sandy Brize who, on a cold August day, is deciding to leave the lover with whom she has spent her whole adult life. We never see the leave-taking itself: what we get is Sandy’s thought that, “around her failing love affair the failing world had gathered: started and spoiled, tried and failed, until Sandy could scarcely tell the two apart” (3), and other cheerfully entropic observations. Similarly, chapter two, a flashback to ten years earlier, doesn’t show us the couple in happier times; rather, it begins with Sandy having visited Otto Murray, who has just given birth, in hospital. Chapter three then opens with Otto Murray alone in a protesting crowd, Sandy having stormed off after an argument. And so on. In each case, the imagined scenes are more powerful than anything Jones could have written, of course; when Otto does visit Sandy, post-breakup, in the story’s present day, it’s something of an anticlimax, although one in which what is not said, what is absent, remains a looming presence — which, for marginalized inhabitants of a United Kingdom falling to pieces, whose inhabitants are only too well aware that the future is being decided elsewhere, even if by war, is only fitting.

The urban gloom that pervades most of Kairos is a peculiarly British drabness, but — another way in which the novel is evasive — conjured predominantly in the corner of the eye, through observations such as Sandy’s that relate a character and their environment. It’s an approach you could describe as street-level, if that didn’t conjure images of the lurid angsts of cyberpunk. Things that would be the meat of a more typical science fiction novel are passed over in brief, or excluded altogether. We are told that the Tories are in power — after one term of a “moderate” Labour government — but the Prime Minister is never named. The first decade of the twenty-first century has apparently seen “the oil crisis, the dollar crisis, the Japanese Rearmament”, and there’s mention of “the Islamic Bomb” and “the Israeli Bomb”, plus various brushfire wars, but Kairos cares about these events only to the extent that they shape the people who have to live with them in the back of their mind. Most characters are introduced in terms of the niches they cling to, of class, race, gender, sexuality, and how those niches constrain and define them. Sandy and Otto are unambiguously poor, but even the better-off characters seem excluded from wherever it is that the decisions are being made. For Sandy, increasingly as the novel proceeds, the only way to live in such a world is to seek a kind of psychic oblivion. Otto, on the other hand, raised in a relatively more liberal time, feels “betrayed […] she had no choice but to consider certain conditions normal and struggle for their recovery” (39). At times, it’s almost a cliché of how the eighties in Britain are meant to have felt, but its power remains. For all that Otto, Sandy and their friends try to find a way to deal with the world they find themselves in, Kairos can be as corrosive to the soul, if not the senses, as its inspiration.

The sf plot is, to start with, a conjuring trick. There is an organization, with the slightly cringe-inducing name of BREAKTHRU, which probably started life as a pharmaceutical company, apparently became a millennial cult, and has hung around for reasons not fully apparent to any of the characters. Sandy goes to one of their meetings, and is partly baffled, partly repulsed by their ideology. At the same time, Otto’s young son, Candide — a cruel affliction of a name if ever there was one – reports occasional sightings of things that may or may not be angels. Otto herself ends up in possession of a package, containing something taken from BREAKTHRU, which is barely mentioned until one of Candide’s angels turns up, explains the plot (ta-da!), and then anatomizes Otto and her friends:

“Okay, so we’ll rerun the story so far. The container that has gone astray holds an enormous quantity, relatively speaking, of a very new and potentially very dangerous drug.
[…]
“With the concentration that is packed in that little tube, there is no need to ingest it. It affects any contacts like a kind of radiation. Touch isn’t necessary, even: intention is enough.
[…]
“It gets right back to the, um, sub-particulate interface between mind and matter. It is operating under Planck’s constant, down where everything turns into everything else. It’s like, you can really play around with things.
[…]
“[You] probably think of yourselves as outsiders, dissenters. That isn’t true at all. In fact you epitomise the present state of the world, especially in this country and the others like it; white consumerism. […] You’re very comfortable in your separate ways but deep down it’s all based on denial.” (113-5)

It’s difficult to convey how incongruous the twin intrusions this passage represents — the appearance of an angel, kilt and golden breastplate and all, and the sudden, brazen clarity he brings to the story — seem after a hundred densely gnarled pages of Kairos. Whether or not the angel came from heaven, or is simply a kairos-user, he certainly appears to have come from another story, though as the last part of the quote may suggest, he doesn’t herald a dramatic shift in the novel’s trajectory. With kairos loose in the world, what the second half of the book sets out to demonstrate is that denial does you no good if intention is enough.

So the characters set out on journeys that take them deeper into landscapes that they are probably creating. These chapters are, at times, almost unbearably tense; they are also largely superb. Otto finds herself wandering dazed through the ultimate betrayal, a postapocalyptic Brighton — the aftermath of World War, for her, is marked by silence everywhere, the absence of people — then incarcerated in a prison that may be as much mental as it is real, before temporarily losing her identity entirely: one chapter begins, starkly, “The prisoner had escaped. It could not remember how” (220). Meanwhile, Sandy journeys with Candide to the headquarters of BREAKTHRU; she was not actually present during the angel’s visitation, but is increasingly conscious that the separation between her mind and the world is breaking down. She may be trapped in a version of the story that Otto has created, refracted through her own psyche. In one of the book’s most striking images, while trapped in a motorway traffic jam Sandy looks up to see ” the pale November sun burst into an arc. A multiple arc of white suns spanned the sky. Everyone in all the cars shouted in terror and amazement” (150). Whether this is a literal change in the nature of reality, or simply how Sandy interprets the sunbursts of nuclear war, is unclear; as is, for a long time, whether the war itself is real, or caused by the protagonists thinking it so, or simply happens to coincide with the Kairos event. It seems to be the revolution the characters have been yearning for. It is terrifying. It even succeeds, briefly.

Or perhaps more than briefly. John Clute described the end of the book this way:

But Candide joins forces with Sandy, Otto’s working-class lesbian lover who has suffered both the snubs of her circle and most of the wounds an uncaring state can inflict. Sandy’s apocalyptic bitterness now combines with Candide’s natural abandon to impose a convulsive transmutation upon the shattered land. But kairos, which literally means fullness of time, has also a specifically Christian meaning: the moment of Christ’s appearance. Though Jones wisely refrains from attempting to limn an actual Second Coming, the vision that closes Kairos, of an unpatriarchal world in which it is inconceivable that dogs (and humans) might be tortured, rings backwards through her text like a blessing, and justifies it. (Look at the Evidence, 135; TLS, 6 January 1989).

I’m with him for the first couple of sentences, but although the vision he mentions is in the book I read, it doesn’t close it. This may be what changed between the two editions, because in mine the final chapter of Kairos takes place after the event has ended — after, in fact, it has been made safe to think about, by parcelling it away as some kind of cosmic phenomenon, not a human action at all — in a world which in many ways appears to be going on much as it ever has. Not all: there are echoes of the power that kairos lent its users, and Otto in particular seems to have retained some ability to shape the reality she sees, and in fact worries that “I have to keep imagining things now” (259), lest they end. And some characters who had been dead are restored to life. But although there may be more, as Otto puts it, to the kairos event than “a changing of the guard” (231), there is also less. Sandy’s new job working on road repairs is purely mundane. Torture remains conceivable, although perhaps it might be more effectively resisted; an absence of dialogue has been replaced by “the ever present murmur of the human ocean”.

If it’s a blessing, it’s a fundamentally pragmatic one. I can’t think of many other novels in which the political and science fictional arguments complement each other quite so carefully; nor many from which the science fiction ultimately evaporates so devastatingly. What is left are people. Essays could be written about the way this novel plays with identity, but they would have to note, as Otto ultimately does, the potential for self-defeat in such considerations. “We would rather be slave owners and slaves,” she declares, “than try to live in the real world” (220). And so it seems to me that Kairos ends where it must. More people may have realised that opportune moment — the time of changes – is always right now, but crappy jobs and politics remain. The world remains; and we remain.

Legolas Does The Dishes

Postscripts 15 cover Although “Legolas Does The Dishes” (in Postscripts 15) is the least sfnal thing I’ve read by Justina Robson, it’s not a radical departure from the themes she’s been working with at novel length – identity, consciousness, relationships. In fact, it’s arguably her most careful expression of those themes to date, drawing out the inherent science-fictionality of the first two, and laying bare the tensions they inflict on the third. According to the header notes, the story was written between the completion of Living Next-Door to the God of Love (a book I admire greatly) and the start of Quantum Gravity (a series I wish I could admire more), and it does function as a kind of pivot between them. Both of the longer works have at their core relationships between (more or less) human women and otherworldly men, and what you get in “Legolas Does The Dishes” is a similar relationship, but reframed in terms of uncertainty.

Elizabeth is a patient in an unnamed North American asylum. She claims to have a curse of sight, to be able to see “other planes”, and to be uniquely aware that “the world is the product of the mind”. As the story begins, she describes her introduction to a new member of staff – a dishwasher – whom she becomes increasingly certain is, in fact, Legolas. She knows full well that The Lord of the Rings is fiction, but —

… the meme of Legolasness and all it implies must have been spreading around the general population like a plague and so, even though I cannot really be looking at an Elf of Middle Earth, but surely am only looking at someone through a voluntary delusion I am prepared to entertain as True, nonetheless, here he is. Legolas is washing our dishes. Because reality is of the mind. And my mind says this is the real thing. And so he is. Unless he thinks he isn’t. And then of course, he won’t be.

Elizabeth is like this: open, a little breathless — you always feel she could stand to take a deep breath — and well aware that we might consider her crazy. (And aware of the ways in which popular culture can be used to help us understand her craziness. When introduced to Legolas, she describes herself as moved towards him by an “unstoppable force”, until the “immovable object” of a kitchen counter stops her.) She was committed for poisoning her mother for “poisoning me with ideas” or, more specifically, with a story: “She brought me up believing that I was living in a fairytale.” For Elizabeth, ideative poisoning is no less severe a crime than the more traditional kind, and her actions were a kind of self-defence, but we’re left wondering. The intensity of her fascination with Legolas (he never acquires another name), and the strength of her confidence that he really is the reincarnation of a fictional character, are a disconcerting couple of degrees beyond normal. And when he doesn’t deny her initial questions (“What are you doing here? Why aren’t you in Valinor?” … He muttered hesitantly, “I forgot about that, I guess”) we may see it as a man humouring a woman he thinks is less than entirely sane, but she takes it as a license to believe the story in her head: as license, if her understanding of the nature of reality is accurate, to make the story true.

The pair are introduced by one Nurse Driver, who is aware of Elizabeth’s claims about what she can perceive, and seems to take a perverse pleasure from placing her with unsuspecting folks and seeing what happens. Nurse and patient are locked in an odd duel of wills and wits, in which neither party is ever quite sure of the other’s position. Elizabeth notes that, “[Driver] and I always had this thing going on where I could never tell if she were serious or simply playing me for the sake of being entertained”. Driver’s introduction of Elizabeth to Legolas certainly seems frivolous, until Elizabeth starts taking it seriously, at which point Driver gets more restrictive (possibly jealous) and Elizabeth is forced to employ both bribes and blackmail in order to achieve her self-imposed goal of waking Legolas up to his true heritage. (She notes that at first he is distinguished by “farm-animal calm”, perhaps in contrast to her awareness of her own supposed position as Nurse Driver’s “domesticated animal”. By the end of the story, both are certainly more alive.) Yet for all that Driver seems a less than honourable employee, we can never be completely sure that Elizabeth should get her way, because we are constantly reminded of her instability. Although Elizabeth’s first conversation with Legolas ends when Driver inaccurately blames her for breaking one of the dishes being washed, Elizabeth is alarmingly fascinated by the shiny shards that result, and apparently has a history of stabbing people.

Legolas’ motivations remain as tantalisingly vague as Driver’s, and the question of whether or not Elizabeth is correct about him is never fully resolved. For every bit of seeming corroboration — watching his eye movements for tell-tale signs when she’s quizzing him, for instance: “He glanced up and left. I knew it. People look that way for Visual Recall” – there is an excuse. The evidence available is either on the edge of extraordinariness, not clearly over the line — throwing something into a bin, “a throw of about eight metres and he did it with a gesture no more studied or powerful than simple pointing” — or its flaws are recognised by Elizabeth herself, such as her observation of pointed ears, usually covered by hair, in a very grainy photograph. Over the course of the story, during which Elizabeth sets in motion various legal moves that will end with her release, and aims to persuade Legolas to travel with her to her family home when that happens, Legolas either decides to use Elizabeth to his own advantage (she gives him access to her money), or is dumb enough that he starts to believe what she’s telling him about a past life (Driver characterizes him as a “born idiot”), or is genuinely changed by her mind, and awoken to some awareness of his true nature. Like Driver, Legolas’ actions – or what Elizabeth tells us of his actions – somehow don’t add up to a complete whole.

We do gradually get a better picture of what Elizabeth means when she says that reality is of the mind, and a sense that she might be on to something – even if she isn’t quite sane. It’s equipoised science fiction: Elizabeth has a complete, coherent, explanatory view of the world, but it differs from the consensus. When she says that the existence of Middle Earth can be defined by “a place in spacetime and a position in someone’s mind”, we have no way of judging whether she’s perceived the nature of reality or just making up things to fit the pattern her broken mind observes. We can at least be confident, probably, that Elizabeth isn’t consciously lying. At one point, she notes that “One could never trust to theories of mind alone to bring plans as important as these into fruition”: it could be simple pragmatism, or it could be a subconscious acknowledgement that she’s delusional, but it’s unlikely to be the sort of thing that a deliberate fantasist would say. She also tells us that her therapist, Dr Lucy, has confirmed that the fact Elizabeth’s scrupulous honesty, to the point of not understanding why one would lie, is part of her pathology; although Elizabeth thinks she’s spotted holes in Dr Lucy’s theories, and in a way that chimes with the portraits of Driver and Legolas that she offers:

Most of Dr Lucy’s beliefs about minds relies on a heavy emphasis to their regularity, stability and cohesion – the entire theory under which she’s trying to make a name for herself is in fact called Cohesive Behaviourism: the Integrity Glue That Holds Us Together. Because of this she missed the significance of my self-determination (excusing herself by saying that abstract elements of mathematics were unsuitable tools for dealing with psychological analysis) so I never got to the part where I could whisk the cloth off my big revelation and tell her that some probability distributions have no mean, or average value. And neither do objects, or atoms, or people.

Whether or not Dr Lucy’s theory is accurate in this story’s world, it certainly seems to be the case that the Quantum Gravity series, in particular, is intended to test something very like Cohesive Behaviourism to destruction. The premise of those books is that a “quantum bomb” has fractured reality into a number of different realms; one corresponds to the popular conception of fairyland, one to hell, and so on. Like “Legolas Does The Dishes”, it never fully commits to one genre, although Quantum Gravity is at least unambiguously fantastic; a collision of fantasy and sf, which to date has been pacy but uneven. (Depending on your perspective, the level of inventiveness on display is either exhilarating or suffocating; I tend towards the latter view.) At the tale’s centre is a cyborg heroine, Lila Black, who ends up with several personalities cohabiting in her head, challenging her sense of self; in another story, she’d be as crazy as Elizabeth. Lila also finds herself in a relationship with an actual elf – a rock star elf, in fact – in which the intensity of sudden attraction is in part explained by an interaction of energy fields. Similar fields apparently surround humans in “Legolas Does The Dishes”, although a closer match for Elizabeth and Legolas’ relationship can be found in Living Next-Door to the God of Love. In that novel, teenage runaway Francine winds up in a “high-interaction sidebar universe” in which something very like Elizabeth’s theories about the nature of reality is provably true, and meets a man who turns out to be literally defined by, among other things, her love.

What “Legolas Does The Dishes” adds to this stew of ideas, though, is an answer to the implicit question: if mind shapes reality, what shapes mind? The answer, almost inevitably, is recursive, and goes back to why Elizabeth killed her mother:

In retrospect I think the mathematics could all go in my sessions with Dr Lucy and I should stick to aphorisms and cilches, affirmations and the like, with their dripfeed of empty hope into the consciousness.

This is also how poisons and drugs work, but they are for the body. The mind requires stories. Dosage is very important. The right measure at the right moment.

Another way of phrasing the story’s central question is to say that it’s not clear whether the arrival of Legolas represents the right dose of story for Elizabeth, or the wrong dose. Certainly it seems that it was a wrong dose of story — her mother lying to her — that provoked Elizabeth into committing murder. And Legolas provokes Elizabeth into getting out of the asylum, after twenty years of incarceration, through a combination of legal and more practical scheming. (Elizabeth also wonders whether confronting Driver with incriminating evidence of an inappropriate liaison will be too much story for the nurse.) But it could simply be that Legolas drives Elizabeth deeper into her delusion, since another way of describing Elizabeth is to say that she believes in a different story to us.

“Legolas Does The Dishes” feels, to me at least, more controlled than Robson’s recent novels. There is the electric sense that Elizabeth, even if she is right, is a fundamentally unstable individual; the casualness with which she hides a shard of Pyrex under her nail (because glass is much less dangerous than steel to a body’s energy field) is squirm-inducing. But there’s an equally powerful sense of what a wonder it might be if Elizabeth is right, such as her description of spray from Niagra falls as “world’s tears” that give sight like no other. There’s a good amount of humour undercutting the seriousness of Elizabeth’s pronouncements; having asserted that story is medicine for the mind, she reveals that her preferred tonic is Oprah Winfrey. There are deft inverting observations, such as Elizabeth’s reaction to a Porsche in terms that we would more commonly associate with, well, encountering an elf — its “ineffable strangeness”. And holding it all together is an expertly managed tension between reality and delusion. The care with which each element of the story is shaped and positioned with relation to the whole, in fact, reminds me of the last story of Robson’s that I read — “Little Bear”, in Pete Crowther’s anthology Constellations a couple of years ago. That was good enough that I’ve been keeping my eye out for more; and “Legolas Does The Dishes” fulfils its promise.