Title: Look at the Evidence: Essays and Reviews
Author: John Clute
Publisher: Serconia Press
ISBN: 0-934933-06-5 (TP)/0-934933-05-7 (HB)
Price: $15.00 (TP)/$30 (HB)
Reviewed By: Howard Waldrop
A damn thick square book, the most demolishing and revelatory book about SF since Barry Malzberg's Engines of the Night, or, well, Clute's last book. It's his reviews, and some introductions and re-evaluations; it's especially those terrifying year-end wrap-ups, put here at the first of every year's reviews, so you know as you read it's not going to get any better in November and December, of those years 1987-1992, plus scattered stuff up to 1994.
He still has the glee of surprise when he comes across something good, and is grateful. Dead bad stuff he deals with pretty summarily; i.e. this is what most fanboys and fangirls secretly want and deserve; it's the yeasty, unboring, vital bad stuff that causes him (and the field) the most grief, care, and concern.
This book is so swell all my synapses are firing (for the first time in years) as I read it; I was so excited I stopped and wrote "Heart of Whitenesse," which will be out in the new, new, new, New Worlds next year, and I dedicated the story to him.
His careful, cheerful and nihilistically devastating review of the Panshin's The World Beyond the Hill is the kind of review you hope never ever ever to get (or to write something that deserves it). And this, after right off the bat telling you what's good in it. For about a long paragraph. The one word Clute never uses, which Knight and Blish would have gone for immediately (being fanboys themselves once) is Fuggheaded. Clute shows you Fuggheaded, but at a much higher level of diction.
Words. You'll need an unabridged dictionary handy while you read this. Pleroma isn't used much by steelheaders here in Oso. "Yowee, Harve! There's a positive pleroma of 20"-24" cutthroats in the river today!" [Clute's the only person I ever heard use the word misprision, and he did it correctly, in a sentence, too.]
This book gave me an overview of the last nine years of SF (when I haven't been reading it) and saved me a hell of a lot of trouble and time (I haven't missed much).
It's an inspiring book; if nothing else, somebody should try to write a book that staggers Clute; I dare you. If you do, he'll celebrate it and thank you personally. He wants SF and fantasy to be as great as they can be, after so many years and ever so many disappointments. Just before the end of the book, he thinks something's happening that gets away from the concerns of what he calls First SF (all of it, up to just before now, including cyberpunk). Everybody tells me the examples he uses are flawed books-I'm not the guy to ask-I think he feels that a few writers are on to something not like the stuff before, and not only that, not like the stuff before in a way they, and we, don't understand yet... Sigh. Like everything else, he'll probably be right about that, too.
Cover by Judith Clute. Swell book design by John D. Berry, who I know for a fact proofread this nine separate times, all 464 pages of it (and there's still a couple of typos).
But mostly there's Clute. We don't deserve this guy.
Title: Bloodchild and other stories
Author: Octavia Butler
Publisher: Four Wall Eight Windows
ISBN: 1-56858-055-X
Price: $18.00
Reviewed By: Lawrence Person
"Tough-minded." That's the word that most often comes to mind when discussing Octavia Butler's fiction. No easy answers. No simplistic plot formulas. No cheap happy endings. Just some of the sharpest, most skilled prose in science fiction engaging tough issues head on. Some may balk at the collection's tiny size (135 trim-sized pages containing Butler's entire short fiction output, plus two essays on writing), but it packs more punch per page than any book you'll read this year.
The title novelette is one of the genre's undisputed classics. It tells the story of a world where humans are ideal hosts for their alien overseers, the Tlic, to lay eggs in. If caught in time, their larval forms an be extracted painlessly. But when Gan witnesses a hatching caught too late, he has a hard decision to make: to let one of his family be implanted, or to undergo the procedure himself. (I provide this summary on the slight chance that a few of you out there might have missed "Bloodchild" in its dozen previous appearances). Symbiosis or parasitism? As usual, Butler is far more interested in raising difficult questions than providing easy answers. Designed to linger in your mind and under your skin for the rest of your life. Dark, disturbing, and utterly brilliant.
Just a step behind are "Speech Sounds" and "The Evening and the Morning and the Night," either of which would mark the high point of many another writer's career. In "Speech Sounds," a mysterious illness has left the vast majority of humanity without verbal and written communication skills. Rye, one of the "less-impaired" (capable of speaking and understanding speech, but without literacy) sets out on a dangerous cross-city journey only to meet up with Obsidian, a still-literate man acting as policeman. It's a harrowing, poignant tale, one made all the more powerful by Butler's skilled depiction of the intricacies and nuances of interpersonal communication.
Disease is also the driving force behind "The Evening and the Morning and the Night." Lynn is a genetic carrier of DGD, a nasty hereditary disease that causes its victims to rip their own bodies apart. She and her DGD fiancée have few prospects but shortened life and a violent end until they visit a new type of DGD ward that promises hope for both of them-but only at a price...
The last two stories here, "Crossover" and "Near of Kin," are sharp but slight mainstream character tales. Well executed, but far less impressive than her SF. As for essays, "Positive Obsession" and "Furor Scribendi," a beginning writer could do far worse for advice. (Adding a third, Gardner Dozois' "Living the Future: You Are What You Eat" and Joe R. Lansdale's dictum on writing ("Apply butt to chair") could put them ahead of 90% of writing aspirants.) And even if you've read every story in this collection, you'll still want to read the "Afterwards."
Butler's short stories are rare, wondrous beasts. Better pick up Bloodchild and other stories now, since it's likely to be a decade or more before you find another handful in captivity.
Title: Brittle Innings
Author: Michael Bishop
Publisher: Bantam
ISBN: 0-553-08136-5 (HB)/0-553-56943-0 (PB)
Price: $21.95 (HB)/$5.99 (PB)
Reviewed By: Caroline Spector
Michael Bishop has established a body of work marked by unique vision and continuity of theme. In 1983, No Enemy But Time won the Nebula for best novel, but Brittle Innings, his latest, is even better.
It's 1943 and seventeen-year-old Danny Boles is called up to play shortstop for a Georgia Class C team, the Highbridge Hellbenders. For Danny, it's the first step toward his dream of playing ball in the Majors. But on the train to Highbridge, Danny is raped by a soldier-and the trauma of the event strangles his already stuttering voice, leaving him mute. Upon arrival he's roommated with Hank "Jumbo" Clerval, the team's freakish first baseman. Though dismayed by this turn of events, Danny and the Hellbenders are soon swept up in the fever of a tight pennant race that could give Danny and Hank their chance at The Show.
We are quickly introduced to the whole Hellbender family-Mister JayMac, team manager and owner; Miss Giselle, his wife; Kizzy, the cook; Darius, the team trainer; and the Hellbenders themselves. Each is unique and memorable, and each plays an important role on the team-and in the novel. What makes Brittle Innings so powerful is the interweaving of these disparate lives and their consequences on each other. No one escapes unscathed, or unchanged.
It soon becomes apparent that Hank Clerval is none other than the monster from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Using that as his model, Bishop has structured Brittle Innings as a narrative within a narrative within a narrative. The reader starts in the gentle hands of Gabe Stewart, a sports reporter hoping for the book of a lifetime, but soon the narrative is turned over to Danny Boles-and within Danny's story is Hank's. Therein lies Brittle Innings' power. For like Shelley's Frankenstein and Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the story we come away with is far more than the sum of the stories told.
Ostensibly, Danny's story is how he ended up as the best baseball scout in the country rather than the best shortstop in history; but what Danny really tells us is how he became the man he is, who is not necessarily the man he wanted to be. Hank's story, too, is about becoming a man. This theme, the search for self and identity, runs throughout the book. Both of the main male characters (and some of the secondary ones) are searching for their fathers, men they are trying to be like-or run away from. Hank literally carries his father with him, trundling the frozen, mummified corpse of Victor Frankenstein across the ocean to Canada and parts north. Danny's father has abandoned his family; and Danny, though he doesn't realize it, misses him desperately. Part of the reason Danny loves baseball so much is that his father taught him the game.
Darius, the black pitcher and illegitimate son of Mr. JayMac, is similarly searching-for the love of a father unable to acknowledge him. And because of segregation, Darius can't even play for Mr. JayMac's team (with the exception of one particularly bitter moment when his father betrays him). Thus Darius, though a secondary character, is vitally important in revealing the casual bigotry of the book's main characters (Southern segregation, and the changes in it wrought by the war, are among the novel's more prominent subtexts). As the book progresses, Darius's situation, like Hank and Danny's, becomes more and more dire until he is forced to choose what path he will take-and what man he will become. Brittle Innings' flaws are more nit-picky than significant. Hank's story, relayed in diary form in the center of the book (an echo of the monster's story in Frankenstein), is a bit longer than it might have been, draining away much of the narrative's early momentum. But his story is so fascinating, and so integral to Bishop's subtext, that, though some may find it distracting, most readers will understand its purpose by novel's end.
Brittle Innings is quintessentially American. Bishop's voice has a freshness and cadence reminiscent of Twain, and he's one of the few writers who can use dialect effortlessly. The book succeeds because Bishop convinces us that the most improbable events are facts. It's a helluva novel (one of the best I've read in the last ten years), a brilliant period study, and combines baseball and Frankenstein. What more could you want?
Title: Door Number Three
Author: Patrick O'Leary
Publisher: Tor
ISBN: 0-312-85872-8
Price: $23.95
Reviewed By: Lawrence Person
At last year's Armadillocon, editor David Hartwell said he had been working with O'Leary for nearly a decade to get this novel into shape. It shows. Door Number Three is one of the most strikingly original and well written first novels in recent memory.
It starts with psychiatrist John Donelly accepting a new patient, a woman who claims to have been left on Earth by the alien Holock, with the proviso that she must convince one person she's telling the truth in order to remain here. According to her, the Holock take great interest in earthly affairs because entering human dreams is their primary form of entertainment. Donelly starts out believing her story to be an elaborate delusion hiding a wrenching trauma, until strange events (and stranger dreams) start to invade his mundane existence. Soon he realizes that not only his own life hangs in the balance, but possibly the entire human race. O'Leary slowly and skillfully invests the Holock with a sense of menace far scarier than anything Whitley Strieber ever dreamed up. As for what they finally turn out to be, I'll only note that it's no accident that Holock sounds like Morlock...
Door Number Three's cliché-free, first person narrative manages to juggle time travelers, alien abductions, government conspiracies, and dream eating monsters, all without sounding like rejected X-Files scripts or descending to Tabloidland farce. O'Leary pulls rabbit after rabbit from his hat of wonders, until you start to realize it's rabbits all the way down. It's a deft, seamless performance, and perhaps the most structurally and conceptually ambitious SF novel since Geoff Ryman's The Child Garden (which, I should hasten to add, it resembles not at all).
There are almost no beginner errors in evidence here. The prose is smooth and polished, the characters vivid and memorable, and the plot gripping. What flaws do exist are more a matter of tone than actual missteps. The personal revelations about Donelly's relationships to his brother and mother are a bit too reminiscent of the clinical psychological descriptions so fashionable in the 1970s. And the Jungian, Deadhead-loving protagonist's sensitivity level is cranked a couple of notches higher than I care for. But these are quibbles compared to the novel's overall achievement.
Clever, well-written, and boldly original, O'Leary's Door Number Three elicits one of the rarest (and highest) pieces of praise that can be bestowed on a science fiction novel in the 1990s: It's unlike anything you've ever read before.
Title: Holy Fire
Author: Bruce Sterling
Publisher: Bantam Spectra
ISBN: 0-553-09958-2
Price: $22.95
Reviewed By: Glen Engel-Cox
94-year-old Mia Ziemann has lived a impeccable existence, avoiding the myriad vices available throughout the 21st century. But even her pure lifestyle cannot prevent the ravages of time, and she suffers from health problems only radical medical procedures can cure. Because she can afford it, and because she has lived such a virtuous life, she is eligible for any number of experimental medical treatments to prolong it. The first risk she has to take, to join the post-human condition, makes Mia realize she never really lived.
While the theme of a life without risk not being worth living is foremost in Bruce Sterling's Holy Fire, he also tackles such concerns as health care and control, the ethics of prolonging life in a democratic society, and what all this has to do with art. This seems like a lot to take on in 300 pages, but Sterling is nothing if not ambitious. This ambition often overpowered both story and character in the past (e.g. Schismatrix, where the Prigoginian treatise towered above a simple plot of warring factions). But Mia is fully realized, with truly interesting flaws (her fanatical obsession about protecting herself), and a desire, one that had lain hidden until renewed life brings it into the open. It is this desire, this flame that burns within us all, that Sterling showcases in Holy Fire: a desire to live, not just survive.
For long-time Sterling readers, Holy Fire continues to explore how humanity interacts with new technology. Sterling's Shaper/Mechanist stories followed the evolution of humans into two separate camps-the Shapers who modified themselves biologically, and the Mechanists who married themselves with technology. In these stories, Sterling assumed future humans would all be modified-all post-human. In Holy Fire, he again explores posthumanity, but instead of being set against each other, they are set apart from humanity. The struggle thus depicted is merely an exaggerated extension of current trends (the aged vs. the young).
Holy Fire is dense with ideas, but smooth in execution. Sterling has crafted a rich world that no other author, past or present, could have created, filled with the insights only Sterling can provide.
Title: Zod Wallop
Author: William Browning Spencer
Publisher: St. Martins
ISBN: 0-312-13629-3
Price: $21.95
Reviewed by: Lawrence Person
Any "fantastic children's book intrudes into real life" novel is going to be measured against Jonathon's Carroll's debut, so let's get the comparison out of the way early: Zod Wallop kicks Land of Laughs' butt.
After one small press mainstream novel (Maybe I'll Call Anna), Spencer first came to SF's attention when Gardner Dozois plucked "A Child's Christmas in Florida" from The Return of Count Electric (that rarest of animals, a collection of entirely new short fiction by a unknown writer that wasn't vanity published) for one of his Year's Best SF collections. Since then Spencer has proven a nimble stylist. In Résumé, With Monsters, he conflated soul-destroying jobs with soul-destroying Cthuloid horrors to hilarious effect. With Zod Wallop, he's turned out a slipstream novel that ranks among the funniest of the year.
The book starts out with a band of lunatic asylum escapees (and a monkey-the monkey's important) showing up at a wedding for two of their own, and gets much funnier, and stranger, from there. The lunatics in question were in group therapy with Harry Gainsborough, a children's author who never recovered from his daughter's drowning death, after which he wrote Zod Wallop. Inmate/groom Raymond Story believes everything in Zod Wallop is true, and has convinced several of his fellow inmates as well. The problem is, the book itself starts intruding on Harry's own reality, and suddenly the race is on to prevent the coming apocalypse...
In addition to Land of Laughs, Zod Wallop also recalls echoes of Peter Straub's Floating Dragon (Gainsborough's group was administered an experimental drug named Ecknazine, whose side effects may include changing reality) and Straub and Stephen King's The Talisman, while remaining markedly superior to all three. It moves along at a breakneck pace, accomplishing more in lean, hilarious sentences than Carroll did in detailed, descriptive paragraphs. Likewise, Zod Wallop never sinks to the levels of incredulous absurdity Floating Dragon did during its climax. And as for The Talisman, a book worse than either author could have produced on their own, let's just say that Zod Wallop's villains (two pharmaceutical magnets transformed into Gainsborough's "Vile Contenders") are a far more interesting lot.
Zod Wallop is lean, wacky roller-coaster of a novel, and everyone who loves novels that are funny and intelligent should line up to buy a ticket for Mr. Spencer's Wild Ride.
Title: A User's Guide to the Millenium
Author: J. G. Ballard
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 0-312-14440-7
Price: $23.00
Reviewed By: Dwight Brown
At last. At long last. Finally, we are graced with a collection of cultural criticism from one of the pre-eminent critics of the later half of the 20th century.
Why do I think Ballard is that important? First of all, Ballard is one of the few (if not the only) critics to gaze upon popular culture with the telescope of surrealism and the microscope of psychoanalysis: his criticism is a dangerous high-octane mix of Jung and Dali. (I find it significant that Ballard has more to say in this collection about surrealism and its successors than about science, science fiction, or even his own life.) Make no mistake about it, we live in a surrealist age. (Think of the white Bronco. Watch COPS. Or the Clinton administration.) And Ballard brings to it the scalpel to strip away the skin.
Second, and more important, Ballard is one of the most gifted writers of his generation. That Jungian/Daliesque filter wouldn't be worth a damn if the guy couldn't get it up, and boy, can he. I could write this entire review based mostly on pungent Ballard quotes, if I didn't think it would be a cheat. On the other hand...
If there is a flaw with A User's Guide to the Millennium, it lies with the selection of pieces. While Ballard (and, apparently, David Pringle) have gone out of the way to provide a diverse selection, I found myself wishing for more. I would have loved to read Ballard's take on Jurassic Park and Toy Story, or his thoughts on the creeping Disneyfication of popular culture. And, given that much of Ballard's work deals with the decay of ordered social systems and their replacement with new orders spontaneously arising from the ashes of the old, what of the former Soviet Union? This ghost is curiously absent from Ballard's pages. (And, while the autobiographical material is interesting, I'd gladly trade it for more cultural criticism. For that matter, why doesn't Picador do a second volume of Ballardian autobiography?)
But perhaps Ballard has our best interests at heart. Too much of the man at one sitting, much like white chocolate, probably isn't good for you. Take small bites of A User's Guide to the Millennium, and you won't be left unsatisfied.
Title: Resurrection Man
Author: Sean Stewart
Publisher: Ace
ISBN: 0-441-00207-2
Price: $22.95
Reviewed By: Lawrence Person
If you triangulated between Patricia Geary's Strange Toys, Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory, and James P. Blaylock's "Paper Dragons," the result might be Sean Stewart's Resurrection Man.
A slipstream fantasy [riding that particular hobby-horse pretty hard this issue, aren't you Lawrence? - YM], Resurrection Man is set in an alternate contemporary America where those born with "angel" powers are capable of working highly personal forms of magic. Dante (the name's no accident) is an angel who's family holds dark secrets. Jet, his darker, angel-marked younger brother, seems an interloper to family, tolerated but never accepted, and each secretly longs for the approval of their distant physician father. But soon Dante feels the stirring of his long suppressed powers, powers that will draw his family's secrets kicking and screaming into the light.
Like The Wasp Factory, Resurrection Man is filled with family secrets and personal rituals, and like "Paper Dragons" it postulates a system of magic whose mysteries seem tantalizing beyond the reader's grasp. But Resurrection Man is more domestic drama than anything else. Some my find this tightness of focus claustrophobic when such a radically changed world lies just beyond the doorstep, but its cast of characters are all sharply drawn and rendered to considerable emotional depth. And when Dante does finally unleash his powers, the resulting climax is well worth the wait. Stewart had published two novels, Passion Play and Nobody's Son, previous to this one, and a fourth, Clouds End, was published just before we went to press. The consummate skill Stewart displays in his third will send alert readers scurrying to find his other books, since the author of Resurrection Man is a man to watch.
Title: The Unnatural
Author: David Prill
Publisher: St. Martin's
ISBN: 0-312-11910-0
Price: $21.00
Reviewed By: Lawrence Person
Jessica Mitford, author of the quintessential funeral industry expose, The American Way of Death, died recently (she was cremated, as per her instructions). One wonders what the old muckraker would have made of David Prill's slipstream debut novel The Unnatural. I suspect she would have been pleasantly shocked to find that Prill had successfully parodied a subject she thought beyond parody.
The Unnatural tells the story of Andy Archway, the young phenom destined to break Janus P. Mordecai's single-season embalming record. Think about the accumulated tropes of every inspiring baseball movie ever made applied to the world of funeral homes, and you'll have an idea what The Unnatural is like. With the skill of a born parodist, Prill keeps the prose straight-faced throughout, employing his transmogrified sports clichés with unflinching earnestness. The overall effect is wickedly funny. The strangest thing about this novel is its eerie plausibility. So many aspects of professional sports have become so patently absurd that The Unnatural's depiction of them is a parody only by virtue of its funerary setting. And history is littered with cultures whose death rituals are far more obsessive and bizarre than the ones depicted here. It's all too easy to imagine a world where magazines like Respectful Casket Tales show up on newsstands next to Reader's Digest.
For its first two-thirds, this book is one of the funniest novels I've read this decade. Alas, then there's the rest of the book, which is not so much bad as disappointing. The novel founders on the rocks of inadvisable authorial choices, the humor sinking slowly beneath the waves of a muddled plot. There are other missteps here, such as too much time spent on the villainous Drabford brothers compared to their overall role.
Still, these are forgivable flaws for an author's first novel, especially one so funny. The Unnatural is the This is Spinal Tap of funerals.