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OtherRealms Issue 17 Part 02
Electronic OtherRealms #17
July, 1987
Part 2
Much Rejoicing
Reviews by
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes
Copyright 1987 by Dan'l Danehy-Oakes
ptsfa!djo
Count Zero, William Gibson, [****-]
Hardwired, Walter Jon Williams, [****]
Vacuum Flowers, Michael Swanwick, [**]
The Rapture Effect, Jeffrey Carver, [***]
War Day, Whitley Streiber and James Kunnetka, [***+]
The John W. Campbell Letters Volume 1,
Perry A. Chapdelaine, Sr. et al, [****]
Cat's Pawn, Leslie Gahdallah, [***+]
The Atrocity Exhibition, J.G. Ballard
Off-hand, I would say that books are best insured against
oblivion through practice of the auctorial virtues of
distinction and clarity, of beauty and symmetry, of tenderness
and truth and urbanity.
--James Branch Cabell
Beyond Life
Episode Two: Encores
Poor William Gibson.
I mean: when your first novel wins the Hugo, the Nebula, and damn near
every other award for which it is conceivably eligible, and is taken up
as a manifesto for a Movement within your field, you've got a real
problem with your second. What do you do for an encore?
Gibson wrote a book called Count Zero [Arbor House, 1986] and it's one
hell of an encore. It is, in fact, a better book than Neuromancer,
though it probably won't win any awards at all. (For one thing, it came
out in paperback too late.)
A better book? Yes. Count Zero has characters you can care about, an
element sorely lacking in Neuromancer. I mean, you can understand Case,
and maybe even Molly, but in the end, nobody cares what happens to
them. Not so here. Count Zero has three separate and distinct
protagonists, and each of them is more human than Case and Molly put
together. Especially I'd like to call your attention to the Count
himself, an ignorant street-kid playing cowboy -- if we'd seen Case
like this, Case would make a lot more sense.
Then, too, the plotting in Count Zero is more complex; Neuromancer was
basically a non-stop forward motion toward a single goal. Here three
characters pursue separate goals through the same world, on a collision
course. There are hints along the way of how the three sub-plots
connect, but the climax retains the shock and inevitability of a
mid-air crash. Finally, Gibson's use of the language has taken a
quantum leap. In Neuromancer, he used English language rather clumsily;
here, it's like the scalpel in the hands of a skilled surgeon. It
produces blood, but the blood is controlled, purposeful.
You'll note that I haven't told you much about what actually happens.
This is deliberate. Anything I could tell you would be inadequate or
too much; I can only say read this book.
Chuq has said, "there ain't no such thing as cyberpunk, only Gibson and
a lot of pretenders to the throne." At any rate, if it's true, the
best-known pretenders have to be Walter Jon Williams and Michael Swanwick.
The former's Hardwired [TOR books 1986; pb. 1986 $3.50] is a good
example. There are two kinds of people here -- those who live in space
colonies, and those who wish they did, because the Orbitals, due to
some creative bombing some time back, own everything.
Sarah is one of those who wishes she lived in a colony. She's an
assassin- for-hire, with a built-in gadget that sounds like something
out of H.R. ("Alien") Giger. Very protective of her little brother (a
prostitute), and very disturbed when he gets blown up by someone out to
silence her. Cowboy (no relation to Gibson's "cowboys") is a
panzerboy, a smuggler who plugs into a high-speed tank to make his
"runs." More: he's the best, but he's getting old -- after 28, your
reaction time starts to slip.
The inhabitants of Earth, "mudboys" and "dirtgirls," seem ripe for a
revolt; Cowboy and Sarah play their parts. The story moves at a
breakneck pace through a set of twists and twirls that I frankly lost
track of more than once.
But the real wonderfulness of Hardwired is the language. If Gibson is a
surgeon, Williams is a psychotic with an axe. He plays with your mind,
makes you work with him to create his world as he spews the mindscape
with argot, slang, and advert slogans with no explanation in sight. But
even without the slang, the language pulls the reader willing or not
into Williams' vision. For example, try this:
It is the girl in the next stall who is weeping, pausing only to
draw massive shuddering breaths before bringing the air out again
through the tortured muscles of the throat. It hurts to cry that
hard, Sarah knows. The ribs feel as if they were breaking. The
stall shudders to the impact as the girl drives her head against
the wall, and Sarah knows that it is pain the girl is seeking,
perhaps to drive out pain of another kind.
Sarah tries not to get between people and what they need. If this
doesn't conjure up a powerful image, call the mortician; you're
already dead.
Swanwick, on the other hand, has adopted all the piece-parts without
seeming to absorb the gestalt. In Vacuum Flowers, [Arbor House, SF Book
Club, 1987] he's taken concepts more-or-less equally from Varley and
Gibson and sprinkled them liberally with Heinlein, comes up with a goulash.
The protagonist is a large part of the problem. She's a wetware
construct, a programmed personality placed into someone else's brain,
and she knows it before the book is far along; this makes it difficult
for me, at least, to care very much about her -- I'm more interested in
what happens (happened?) to Eucrasia, the person whose flesh she inhabits.
Her name, incidentally, is Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark. Deep into the book,
we discover that she was a person with a body of her one, once, but by
that time it's too late; the degree to which I don't care about her has
reached terminal levels.
The story begins as a chase (Rebel escapes from the hospital and the
Company that wants to copy her wetware), and works quite well on that
level. Sadly, it doesn't remain on that level; Rebel becomes involved
in interplanetary intrigues involving the People's Republic of Mars (no
shit -- Mars is the Red planet) and a corporate man/machine mind that
has taken over Earth, and my dontgivadamn index passed the breaking
point. Swanwich tries to put too many chickens in one basket, and they
laid an egg. Those waiting for a worthy encore to In The Drift will
have to wait a little longer...
On to stranger and sillier things. A fellow named Jeffrey Carver has
been writing to respectable critical attention for some time now, but
until his fifth book, The Rapture Effect [TOR, 1987], I had managed to
avoid reading anything by him -- a policy I now wish I had continued.
Really, it's not a bad book; it's just not a good book. It has some
major things going for it -- a pointless, mistaken war over a valueless
planet; first contact (I'm a sucker for first contact novels,
especially if the aliens are alien); an entertaining and engaging AI;
competent, unassuming writing. But it doesn't do anything. The
background borrows many of the trappings of the cyberpunks but none of
the aesthetic, and it just doesn't work. The humans and the aliens make
their peace, the AI gets what it wants, and everybody's happy except
the evil creatures -- Oh, I didn't mention them, did I? The novel is
divided into Parts, each of them prefaced with a short passage in
italics about some delightfully malevolent creatures who live in the
darkness beneath the surface of the valueless planet mentioned above.
Nothing seems to come of this, and the fact that they're still waiting
in that darkness at novel's end practically shrieks, "SEQUEL!!"
To which I say, pfui. There is so much good and so much bad about The
Rapture Effect that I have trouble grading it. I want to give it high
marks, I want to give it low marks -- it comes out average.
Onward, ever onward. Whitley Strieber and James Kunnetka wrote an
astonishing book called War Day [Warner paperback 1987, $4.95], the
best and most humane projection of the effects of a "limited" nuclear
war on the United States I have ever read. Now their encore: Nature's
End, which takes a similar look at the probable outcome of Man's
continued disregard for the physical health of the planet he inhabits.
They provide a reasonable, not a panicky, look at the combined effects
of air and water pollution, deforestation, overfarming, overpopulation,
etc., without neglecting the technological gains likely in the same
period (some 40 years hence) and come up with a chilling projection.
The story in which all this information is given is the story of a
family, two couples, who set out to destroy a demagogue. Gupta Singh is
the demagogue in question, and he is arguably the novel's real main
character. Singh is successfully promoting a movement called the Depop
-- short for depopulation. Singh's program: kill one third of the human
beings on Earth. His motivation: He says, to save the world. In fact,
to destroy humanity.
Four people set out to expose him (through a computer technique called
the "conviction") and find his considerable resources bent on their
destruction. Fleeing from Singh, they fall through the "cracks" in
their society to find an entire society underneath -- and one more, one
very special secret beyond that.
Those of us learning to write science fiction today are laboring under
a severe handicap -- there is no John W. Campbell, or, as far as I can
tell, any other editor who does what Campbell did: he worked with the
writers and writers- in-training, teaching them to be more than they
were, more than they perhaps would ever have become without him.
The best substitute, poor as it is, that I have found is The John W.
Campbell Letters Volume I. [AC Projects paperback, 1985, $5.95], edited
by Perry A Chapdelaine, Sr., Tony Chapdelaine, and George Hay. Even if
you aren't trying to become a writer, there is much to delight,
entertain, infuriate, and puzzle you here. For example:
% Those who claim that Dune Messiah and Children of Dune suffer
"sequelitis" will have to find some other reason for not liking
them; JWC discusses Herbert's planned trilogy with him before the
publication of the first book.
% Campbell claimed to have suggested to Hubbard that he turn
Dianetics into a religion. Of course, he added, Hubbard went about
it in the wrong way...
Here is a chance to see Campbell's mind at work, tossing ideas around
like there was no future, and it all had to be thought of now. Here is
his brilliance, his quirkiness, his humanity, and, I fear, his
conservative racism. Here, in short, is Campbell the man.
I do love first novels. You never know when you're going to turn up a
Neuromancer or Wild Shore, and even if it's no good, you aren't very
disappointed.
So I went into Leslie Gadallah's Cat's Pawn [Del Rey paperback, 1987,
$2.95] with a Good Attitude. A very Good Attitude, in fact, which
improved as the novel wore on.
Plot: Protagonist is cast away among the Oriani, catlike pacifistic
aliens. He gets involved in the underworld of their spaceport, and
from there in interstellar politics; he has to stop the Evil
War-mongering Empire, and succeeds in his little bit. Also, he
discovers the Oriani's Deep Dark Secret, and is never permitted to
leave Orion again.
Big deal, right? Well, actually, it is. Bill Anderson is a fine
protagonist, knowing enough to get along, naif enough to get into
serious trouble. The Evil War-Mongering Empire is actually a believable
and chilling menace. And the Deep Dark Secret, though a bit of a
cliche, is quite satisfyingly Dark.
Oh. One more thing. Cat's Pawn does not end on a happy note; it ends on
a most disturbing note, which implies a very deep lack of hope for the
future. Like The Rapture Effect , it leaves much room for a sequel --
however, unlike The Rapture Effect, this room grows organically out of
the novel, and is wide enough that the sequel need not be a direct
continuation of Cat's Pawn to satisfy.
A damned good first novel.
Closet Classic: Before I go on with this, let's get one issue straight.
I want recommendations for this feature. This was recommended to me by
Steve Farnum of Oakland, California, for which I thank him greatly. I
suggest that the feature is best utilized for works whose authors are
still alive, but anything which has been printed only once (or never)
in the US, and has been out-of-print here for a long time, is fair game.
So.
Here we have a book that Doubleday bought, printed, and then pulped the
entire run. A second American publisher bought it and dropped it
unprinted. It was finally released by Grove Press, for a single print
run, and has not been heard from on this side of the Atlantic since.
The book is The Atrocity Exhibition by J.G.Ballard (Grove's edition was
called Love And Napalm: Export U.S.A.), and it is not hard to see why
it has had problems in America. It contains stories called "Why I Want
to Fuck Ronald Reagan," "Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline
Kennedy," and the classic "The Assassination of JFK Considered as a
Downhill Motor Race."
Is this Science Fiction? It is indeed. Where most writers have used
physics, astronomy, and engineering; where more recent writers have
used anthropology, cybernetics, and bioengineering; Ballard has written
the only SF I know whose speculative content is based in the field of
abnormal psychology.
The stories which make up The Atrocity Exhibition are disturbing
"condensed novels" about the alternative mental breakdowns of a
character who may be named Tallis or Trabert, Traven or Talbert, or
some other variation thereon. In his psyche, the modern equation of sex
and violence has reached its nadir, and films of Vietnam atrocities and
the Kennedy assassination are his pornography.
A number of characters are sucked repeatedly into the whirlpool of his
disintegrating mind, and some of them are killed. A young lady named
Karen Novotny, in particular, seems to be killed in several versions of
T's breakdown.
The Atrocity Exhibition is not for the squeamish, and not to be read
quickly. It is dense. If you have a stomach for grisly, twisted
fiction, it doesn't come better than this.
OtherRealms #17
July, 1987
Copyright 1987 by Chuq Von Rospach.
All Rights Reserved.
One time rights have been acquired from the contributors.
All rights are hereby assigned to the contributors.
OtherRealms may be reproduced in its entirety only for
non-commercial purposes. No article may be reprinted without
the express permission of the author.
