The detective novel is about order. In the best examples, like Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett, the detective's central quest is to maintain order. Sometimes this requires destroying the existing order and rebuilding from scratch, as in Hammett's Red Harvest. Sometimes, the order that the detective is trying to maintain isn't particularly pleasant, like George Alec Effinger's Marid Audran novels, or requires him to do unpleasant things, as in the ending of Robert Parker's Ceremony. But the best detective novels have someone (besides Rush Limbaugh), who's dedicated to preserving their vision of The Way Things Ought To Be.Title: Gun, With Occasional Music
Author: Jonathan Lethem
Publisher: Harcourt Brace & Company
ISBN: 0-15-136458-3
Price: $19.95
Reviewed By: Dwight Brown
However, we have to be convinced by that vision. World-building skills are just as important in detective fiction as they are in science fiction. If we can't believe in the detective's universe, why should we believe in his vision? If we don't care about his universe, why should we care about his struggle for order? Let the damn thing blow itself to shit. Contemporary writers, like Parker or Lawrence Block, may gain some advantage by setting their stories in places that actually exist, but they understand there's more to world-building than saying, "New York, 1975" or "Boston, 1987". Today's SF detective novel in question, Jonathan Lethem's Gun, With Occasional Music, does a lot of things right. As imitation Chandler, the writing works reasonably well--much better, for example, than Parker's imitation Chandler. This is more impressive still given that Lethem chose to tie one hand behind his back in writing dialog, since the asking of questions is strongly discouraged in this particular future (even if you are a "Private Inquisitor" like Lethem's gumshoe Conrad Metcalf), but what dialog there is in Gun is pretty snappy. The plot, though, is straight out of The Big Pop-Up Book Of P.I. Plots and Yummy Fajita Recipies, entry #947: P.I. is hired by man framed for murder to clear his name, even though the case looks hopeless, and spends the rest of the book in conflict with people who have a vested interest in keeping his client in the frame. Yawn.
However, Gun really falls apart in the world building. Accelerated evolution of animals and babies? Okay. Snorting of personal designer blends of pharmaceuticals? Okay. Karma carried around on cards? Okay. Neat science fiction geek elements, to be sure, but there doesn't seem to be any underlying vision of just how these things affect society. Just one of these elements could provide enough extrapolation for a single novel, but Lethem throws them all into the book without rhyme or reason. I suspect this is a first novelist's mistake: Lethem didn't have enough faith in his own (not inconsiderable) ability to write convincing interactions between characters, so he threw in a lot of neat flash and glitter in hopes of distracting his readers.
There's too much glitter and not enough substance. Gun lacks any sense that anything's at stake. Things just happen, seemingly for arbitrary reasons. The only official representatives of order are the staff of the Inquisitor's Office, who appear only as enforcers, not policy makers. There's no sense of any guiding hand, no one to finally appeal to, or even to defeat. Even the "bad" guys in Gun are cyphers, and the ending is confusing and unconvincing.
I wanted to like Gun, With Occasional Music: it was one of the few novels this year I looked forward to reading. But it suffers from a writer who was unsure of himself, and tried to cover for it with SF pyrotechnics. When the smoke cleared, I couldn't recommend Gun: but there's enough good work in it that I still look forward to Lethem's next novel.
Now here's proof positive that any art form can be done right. In this case, it's the Action/Adventure school of science fiction, of which Christopher Hinz's Paratwa Trilogy (consisting of Liege-Killer, Ash-Ock, and The Paratwa) is a particularly skillful example. Though conforming fully to the form's conventions (there are chases and intrigues aplenty throughout, and each book ends with a climatic battle), Hinz has crafted a fictional universe far more intricate and convincing than many a Hugo or Nebula winner I could name.Title: The Paratwa Trilogy (Liege-Killer, Ash-Ock, and The Paratwa)
Author: Christopher Hinz
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 0-312-00065-0/0-312-03291-9/0-312-05489-0
Price: $19.95/$18.95/$19.95
Reviewed By: Lawrence Person
The setting is some 200 years after a late 21st century nuclear holocaust, a leading cause of that which was the Paratwa, a race of genetically engineered assassins consisting of a single telepathically linked entity inhabiting two bodies. Now the Irryan Colonies live in peace above Earth's battered remains, the last Paratwa thought extinguished. That is, until someone ventures to the Earth's surface to retrieve and revive Reemul, the hyper-deadly Paratwa once known as the Liege-Killer, then sets him loose. To counter the threat, two Paratwa hunters are revived from their stasis capsule and the chase is on. That is, until they learn the situation is far more deadly than it first appeared, that the Ash-Ock, the Royal Caste of the Paratwa, not only survived the holocaust, but have designs for conquest. . .
Telling more than that would spoil most of the fun. There's enough twists and turns in each to keep a roller-coaster junkie happy and the action moving along at high speed. Great plot, good characters, convincing setting, skillful, seamless writing. Indeed, save for a couple of minor elements in the last book, Hinz's makes nary a misstep throughout the entire series.
Liege-Killer (Hinz's first novel) stands well on its own, whereas Ash-Ock and The Paratwa together make up one work set 56 years after the first book's events . Though the phrase "SF Action/Adventure" conjures up images of lowest-common-denominator high tech war-porn rack-fillers, The Paratwa Trilogy is far closer to such recent classics as Hyperion and A Fire Upon the Deep than Star Destroyer #17. Alas, these books received very little publicity when they were first published. It's high time that oversight was corrected.
"Darn peculiar" is the phrase that most often comes to mind when discussing Don Webb's work, and an apt description it is. Webb's fiction tends to straddle that "almost-too-strange-to-be-published" line, where he has such luminaries as R. A. Lafferty and the late Avram Davidson for company--fine neighbors, to be sure, but it's not the sort of place you hang out in looking for wealth and fame. Thankfully, none of the aforementioned gentlemen have let that deter them from writing their weird, wonderful tales.Titles: The Seventh Day and After and The Bestseller and Other Tales
Author: Don Webb
Publisher: Wordcraft of Oregon/Chris Drumm
ISBN: 1-877655-05-8/0-936055-61-8
Price: $7.95/ $3.00 ($5 signed)
Reviewed By: Lawrence Person
Still, those listed above are a diverse lot, sharing little more than reputations for being prolific writers of extremely strange short stories and small but devoted followings among speciality publishers. Which brings us to two of Webb's small press offerings: The Seventh Day and After and The Bestseller and Other Tales. Both are short (78 and 44 pages, respectively) collections of stories, and both betray their small press origins in the quality of their illustrations. Roman Scott's for The Seventh Day are poor, while that of Webb himself for the cover of The Bestseller goes far to prove that, as an artist, Don Webb is a fine writer. But needless to say, the important things here are the stories, and in both cases they're a mixed bag. Many stories in The Seventh Day (the title story, "Beach Scene") seem more like exercises in surrealism than fully fleshed out tales, while "The Protocols of Captain Whizzo" reads like notes toward a paranoid fantasy rather than the real thing. One recurring problem with Webb's work is that his imagination is so fecund he often fails to develop one story fully before rushing on to write the next.
"An American Hero" and "Baggage" are both short, witty vignettes that hold together just well enough for the few pages expended on them. "Paradise Lost" is a clever, convoluted deal-with-the-devil story that, despite a few rough edges, is as close to standard genre fiction as Webb comes here (i.e., not very). "Gladsome Yule" is perhaps the world's first SplatterSanta story, and has enough sex and viscera to do a Splatterpunk proud. The collection finishes strongly with "In Praise of Satan," a poem which, while quite different than what title alone might indicate, is still not designed to win Don friends in the Moral Majority. I found it to be an effective work despite being completely unaware of the real-life person to which it obviously alludes.
The Bestseller starts out weakly as well, with "Suppose" being a rather weak loss of reality vignette, and "Second Honeymoon" and "Brother B____ His Story" both evoking a feeling of "so what?" However, after that things get better, as Webb infuses his surrealist stew with both more plot-and-character meat and a tasty specificity.
"My Hometown" features a man driven from his home when huge skulls begin to rise from the ground, destroying his and his neighbor's houses. His neighbors promptly move into the skulls and start redecorating. The title story is an entertaining "fictional character comes to life" tale with a strange twist; at four pages, it's just the right length. "Voodoo Economics" displays some of Webb's better talents at evoking an underlying system of magical reality, though it too would benefit from being fleshed out a greater length. But the best tale herein is "Instruments of Precision," in which a high school math professor's Lolita-like obsession for one of his student leads him to a vast and awesome glimpse at higher levels of reality. While even here Webb could have given us a little more, this is enough of the True Stuff that it's mere quibbling to ask for perfection.
Should you buy either of these collections? Well, if I asked you "What do you think of stuff that's really weird?" and you answered "Yeah, buddy, give me some!", then rush out and pick up both. If you are a little more selective in your weird delights, and haven't already caught some of Webb's better stories in Asimov's ("Sabbath of the Zeppelins" and "A Half-Dime Adventure" are particularly fine), The Bestseller and Other Tales is a good introduction to his work. Besides, for three bucks, how could you go wrong? The Seventh Day and After will appeal mainly to those who are already Webb fans-and they've probably got both of these already.
Note: Chris Drumm's address is Chris Drumm Books, P.O. Box 445, Polk City, IA 50226. (515) 984-6749. Copies might also be found at Adventures in Crime and Space, P.O. Box 684608, Austin, TX 78768. (512) 4SF-BOOK, acs@eden.com.
Blackburn, Bradley Denton's third novel, is the a moral fable of highly selective serial killer, one who only kills those who deserve killing. Dishonest auto mechanics, crooked salesmen and cheating spouses are the fodder for his oddly moral retribution.Title: Blackburn
Author: Bradley Denton
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 0-312-00065-0/0-312-03291-9/0-312-05489-0
Price: $19.95/$18.95/$19.95
Reviewed By: Lawrence Person
Denton follows his eponymous protagonist in a non-linear, two-track narrative, one showing Blackburn's efforts to make his way in the world, the other showing his rough upbringing at the hands of an overbearing father. Jimmy Blackburn's childhood is not a happy one. He seems to have particularly bad luck with pets.
In addition to being a finely crafted work, Blackburn bristles with wry black humor. We see how each of his victims earn their fate, and see that, yes indeed, all of them deserved their grisly end. Well, most of them, anyway. Well . . .
Ah, therein lies the rub. At one point, Blackburn talks admiringly to the cynical author of another serial killer novel, noting that all his fictional victims deserved their fate because "they were horrible."
"We're all horrible!" the author rages back. And indeed, Blackburn is about the potential for violence, for evil, in all of us. This question takes on particular urgency when he runs into a far nastier serial killer by the name of Roy-Boy. One of the central questions Blackburn raises is when one takes on the right of divine retribution for earthly sins, how do you avoid becoming either jaded or intoxicated by the power? Just where you draw the line when playing God?
Ultimately, Blackburn is more about questions than answers, especially easy answers. Intelligent, witty, occasionally midnight black, and at times oddly touching, Blackburn is a deft and wonderful novel that puts another feather in Denton's cap.
Oh yeah. Despite this being a Stoker Award nominee, there's not a single fantastic element in the whole book. But you're not going to let that stop you, are you?
McDonald's new novel manages to display, in the course of an evening, the same scale and sweep his first novel, Desolation Road, took a century to achieve. The premise driving Necroville is that nanotechnology allows the resurrection of the dead. The courts have held that the resurrected are not people, resulting in three classes of social stratification: those who can afford the lump-sum payment to the Death House; those who cannot and are therefore reborn indentured to the corporation paying for their reconstruction; and, the ultimate dispossessed, the living who have been priced out of the labor market by masses of the dead.Title: Necroville (U.K.)/Terminal Cafe (U.S.)
Author: Ian McDonald
Publisher: Gollancz SF/Bantam Spectra
ISBN: 0 575 05493 X/0-553-37416-8
Price: £15.99/$12.95
Reviewed by: Bill Humphries
The narrative follows drug and VR designer Santiago Columbar and his friends as they gather at a bar in the Los Angles Necropolis on November 1st, the day of the dead. At the same time, the Freedead--revivified souls who revolted against the corporate owners who had sent them out to mine the asteroids--are returning to Earth in order to liberate their fellows.
As in his previous novels, McDonald merges the personal with the political, filling Necroville with gorgeous ideas and extrapolations. Once again, McDonald shows a keen acknowledgement of demographic reality, as all but one of his California viewpoint characters are non-white. He takes the notion of nanotechnology and has fun with it, including vivid scenes of sportscars deliquescing into the asphalt for parking convenience, then being pulled out by the owner. The adaptations of the Freedead to life in deep space are disquieting, but logical and awesome.
The book's only flaw lies in reducing the Freedead's war of liberation to a confrontation with a single corporation head. In reality, questions about exploitation are not reducible to a single villain, or even evil intent. That aside, Necroville is a splendid book.
Why isn't this novel twice as long?Title: Heavy Weather
Author: Bruce Sterling
Publisher: Bantam Spectra
ISBN: 0-553-09393-2
Price: $21.95
Reviewed by: Dwight Brown
There's just too much in Heavy Weather: too many neat ideas, too much social extrapolation. Sterling seems to have thought a lot about the effects of things like unbreakable encryption, wireless networks, digicash, and all that other tech that's coming real soon now and will either save us or (as Sterling seems to think) damn us. There's ideas and new technology and really neat stuff springing off practically every page of this book. Sterling is a gifted observer as well. I love his constant distinction between "people who write code" and "people who write interfaces." Moreover, I love the sections where people actually gripe about the stupid interfaces on their <fill in the blank>. He's also a frustrating observer: his two page lecture on how "unbreakable encryption, digital authentication, anonymous remailing and network untraceability" ruined the world is wonderfully pessimistic, and difficult for me to refute in the space I have here. But why is Sterling convinced this is the way it has to be? I don't know.
This is the major problem with Heavy Weather: there's not enough depth. I want more. I want to see how everyday people live. I want to see not just the uses for technology that the people on the street find, but the original intended uses. I want to know more about the Storm Troupe, this bunch of weirdos that's chasing the Mother Of All Tornados. Except for the Ungers, Jane and Alex, and a couple of other Troupers, we never find out much about the members. Even Jane and Alex's motives aren't clearly explained. (Yeah, Jane's in love, and Alex is playing the "Feel Like I'm Fixing To Die Rag", but that doesn't go far enough. Why does Alex continue to hang around with the Troupe long after being kidnapped from an illegal Mexican clinic by his sister? I don't know, and I'm not sure Sterling does.)
The star of Heavy Weather is the weather: more specifically, the monster killer tornado from Hell, the F-6. No surprise, eh? Well, Sterling doesn't seem to have thought this was enough of a climax: instead, much of the action during the tornado is focused on a bunch of "truly eleet network doods", (Private to Sterling: B1FF! is a parody, okay? Nobody talks like that except AOLweenies. And "eleet" is spelled "3133T") an unconvincingly evil bunch of political types who intend to use the storm to cover their tracks as they escape from bondage. Bondage to what? Why is this here? Has Sterling lost faith in his audience to that extent: that he has to trump up a traditional confrontation and resolution, instead of letting the climax ride on the tornado? I can't say I blame him if this is the case, but damn! He should have tried!
One of these days (I hope very soon), Sterling will write his Carrion Comfort: a huge, sprawling, balls-to-the-wall book where he can give his mind full play and explain why he thinks X is the inevitable result of Y and Z. Heavy Weather isn't that book: it doesn't even come close. But it isn't a failure: Sterling's ambition can't be bound between 310 pages, but what is caught on paper is worth having around.