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OtherRealms Issue 20 Part 10
Electronic OtherRealms #20
Spring, 1988
Part 10
Much Rejoicing
Reviews by
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes
Copyright 1988 by Dan'l Danehy-Oakes
Reviewed in this Issue
Vale of the Vole
by Piers Anthony
Avon, 1987, $3.95, 0-380-75287-5
Life During Wartime
by Lucius Shepard
Bantam New Fiction, 1987, $7.95, 0-553-3481-5
The Bridge of Lost Desires
by Samuel R. Delany
Arbor House, 1987, $17.95, 0-87795-931-5
Metrophage
by Richard Kadrey
Ace Books, 1988, $2.95, 0-441-52813-9
Vengeance of Orion
by Ben Bova
TOR Books, 1988, $17.95, 0-312-93049-6
Alien Island
by T.L. Sherred
Ballantine Books, 1970, $0.75, 345-01815-075.
Installment Five: The Problem
Debbie Notkin once explained Xanth to me from a bookseller's point of
view. People would come in to the store, she explained, see Xanth on
the "New Releases" rack, and groan. "Oh, no...not another one."
And then they'd buy it.
It's like that. Xanth is an addiction, almost a guilty secret.
Actually, I think that the best explanation of Xanth from the reader's
point of view is this: Xanth is Oz for grown-ups.
The parallels are there, and very clear. An ever-growing but basically
familiar cast of characters lives in a fairyland of limited but
indeterminate size, and in each book, they face some new (magical)
threat, meet new (magical) friends and see new (magical) sights. There
is never any doubt in the reader's mind that all will work out well in
the end, if only because all is watched over by a powerful Good
Magician, much like Baum's Glinda. And along the way, no effort is
spared by the writer to introduce the most wretched and groansome puns
known to mankind.
All of which is by way of beginning to review Piers Anthony's new Xanth
book, Vale of the Vole.
Vale, like all its predecessors, delivers fair entertainment value for
the reader's money. It claims to be the "first volume of a new Xanth
trilogy," which I take to be a polite way of informing the reader that
Anthony has moved to a new publisher. Something in the way of a real
trilogy may be intended this time, though, for unlike all its
predecessors, Vale leaves significant plot threads unresolved --
particularly the disappearance of the aforementioned Good Magician.
The central "gimmick" of the book in hand is the search of a motley
(and ever-growing) crew of Xanthics to rescue the titular Vale from an
invasion of demons, evil but normally insignificant, who have made the
place uninhabitable for its resident Voles. Each of the three central
characters (Volney, a vole; Chex, a centaur-hippogriff cross, and Esk,
a human-ogre-nymph cross) is further burdened with a significant
personal problem.
Anthony, whatever else might be said about him, is a superb plotter. He
manages to spend most of the novel raising the stakes on all these
problems, general and personal, and resolve them all with a single,
unexpected stroke in the last few pages.
As I said above, an honest entertainment value. I wouldn't suggest
beginning Xanth with Vale -- I wouldn't, honestly, suggest beginning it
at all: it is, as I said, an addiction -- but if you're already
addicted, don't pass it up.
Lucius Shepard's Life During Wartime is a terrifyingly honest book. I
almost feel guilty mentioning it in the same column as Xanth, but, in fact,
I read them at about the same time, and the contrast between my reactions
to them brought home to me one of the central problems of SF today.
Life is, to be blunt, a killer novel. It kicks ass. I'd recommend it to
anyone and everyone except for the Problem -- and that, as Paul Harvey
says every day at six thirty, is The Rest Of The Story.
Life During Wartime is the tale of David Mingolla, an American soldier
in a nasty little brushwar in Central America sometime early next
century. The war and all its details are astonishingly well-realized
through Mingolla, who, as a result, becomes one of the most complete
and believably human characters in recent SF.
Mingolla meets and falls in love with Debora Cifuentes, a Guatemalan
who has one significant feature in common with him: They both have
momentary flashes of prescience; they both can touch other minds. They
are like cat and dog.
Mingolla is transferred to the Army's "Psicorps," trained to use his
psychic talents in battle. He finds himself pitted against Debora.
Ultimately, they both defect from their Sides to fight a stranger and
darker battle.
As the novel proceeds, Mingolla discovers more and more of "what's
really going on." The US and other governments are only part of the
answer; the truth appears to lie in a conspiracy of psychics dating
back centuries. It isn't that simple, and I'm not spoiling much by
telling you that.
Mingolla's psychic powers (and Debora's) grow tremendously,
continuously. In the end, he has become that fixture of SF, the Mental
Superman. But Shepard doesn't let the pulp figure sit undisturbed; the
same things that make Mingolla superhuman make him inhuman, a monster.
By novel's end, he is drenched with blood, and still a believable,
sympathetic character; though he is a monster, there is nowhere he
could have done other than he does. The monstrosity is not so much his
as the power's, and the greatest horror is in the inevitability of his
dehumanization.
It's difficult to tell you how good this really is. The reviewer,
surrounded by the superlatives which appear on every book on the market
these days, is reduced to invidious comparisons.
The whole book reflects and refracts itself, in a manner that reminds
one of Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. The constant revelation of
deeper and deeper mysteries reminds one of Phil Dick, or the
"Illuminatus!" books without all their attendant silliness. The gritty
revelation of war and the horrors underlying the war make Joe
Haldeman's Forever War seem optimistic. And the whole is overlaid with
a mystical feel that leaves one thinking that Shepard, perhaps, has
actually had the experiences that Carlos Castenada fakes up for his
long-running "Don Juan" series.
It is, in short, an incredible book. A book that looks seriously at
serious moral problems; a books that accepts and offers no easy
answers; a book that challenges the reader at every turn.
Which brings me, at last, to The Problem.
To make one last invidious comparison, Life During Wartime is a better
book -- a tremendously better book -- in many, many senses than Vale of
the Vole.
But I read Vale of the Vole practically in a single sitting; I found
myself putting Life During Wartime down again and again, preferring to
watch television (or read Vale of the Vole) to continuing with it.
Why?
I could say that Life was hard to take in large doses, and that would
be partly true, but it isn't the main truth.
An easy and inaccurate way to state the main truth is this: somewhere
in all his meaning, truth, and beauty, Shepard forgot to be entertaining.
But that is inaccurate. Life During Wartime is entertaining: more, it
is recreational; you emerge from it, at the end, refreshed, renewed.
But -- and this is the accurate statement -- Life During Wartime is a damned
hard book to read. Vale of the Vole is almost insipidly easy to read.
I read a lot of SF. I read a hell of a lot of SF; what I review in this
column is maybe a third of it. But most SF, and most of what I read,
is, finally, cheap and easy entertainment.
There's nothing wrong with cheap and easy entertainment. Anthony is, as
I said above, an honest craftsman. So is Jack Chalker, and so is Isaac
Asimov, and so on.
We are pleased to see SF "finally" on the best seller lists. The reason
is not that the mainstream has finally accepted SF; the intelligent and
unprejudiced general reader always included some small amount of SF in
his reading diet.
The reason writers like Anthony and Asimov consistently make the best
seller lists is just the opposite: they have accepted the standards of
the mainstream, or, more precisely, of the mass audience that buys best
sellers. They have made SF easy for the reader: they do not challenge.
A steady diet of porridge makes the digestion lazy; one finds a good
steak and asparagus nearly indigestible.
So too with the mind. A steady diet of Piers Anthony and Jack Chalker
leaves the mind lazy, wanting a book that can be read almost as fast as
the hand can turn pages. A book like Life During Wartime demands much
more of the reader, and many readers are unwilling to give that these
days.
Only a steady infusion of the hard stuff into the mental diet can
toughen those muscles back up, and to that end I recommend Life During
Wartime to almost anyone.
If you don't want to work, stay away from it.
Another book that may help to strengthen the mental muscles is Samuel
R. Delany's The Bridge of Lost Desire. This is the latest in another
series with devoted readers, the "Neveryon" books.
Bridge contains two new long stories and a significantly expanded
version of the very first story in the series, "The Tale of Gorgik."
The three are (perversely? Certainly purposefully) placed in reversed
chronological order in the book, which ends with a Foreword to the
entire series.
Neveryon, for those who don't know, is an imaginary country on the
borderland between prehistory and history, between barbarism and
civilization. The tales are almost metafictional, commenting as they do
on the nature of fiction and storytelling; but these comments are
really only a legitimate part of Delany's larger concern, the nature
of signs, symbols, and desire, and how they affect and are affected by
minds and cultures.
The first tale in Bridge "The Tale of Time and Pain," is the last in
the series, dealing with Gorgik as quite an old man, having finally won
all his battles. In a deserted castle he meets a boy, and relates his
life in very different terms than we have seen before. It is a
recapitulation of all Delany's themes and concerns, and something of a
coda, a summation of the series.
The second, "The Tale of Rumor and Desire," tells of an aging bandit in
a small village. He has nearly outstayed his welcome there, and, in a
peculiar set of circumstances, meets another traveller, his "ideal"
woman in terms of desire, and one who also finds him tremendously
desirable. Their meeting and parting is a strange reflection and
refraction (through the prism/mirror/lens of Neveryon) of Delany's most
recent science-fictional novel, Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand.
There is a strange dullness to the first half of the tale, but it is
redeemed by the clarity of the final scenes. Still, it comes off as the
weakest tale of the entire series.
Finally, "The Tale of Gorgik" (repeated and amplified from Tales of
Neveryon) serves as a da capo to the whole series. Some of the
expansions seem too explicitly designed to tie "The Tale of Rumor and
Desire" to Gorgik in some small way; others expand on the tale's
original theme, bringing Delany's ten years of improvement as a writer
to bear on it.
The Bridge of Lost Desire is as good a place as any to enter Neveryon
for the first time. I would recommend such a reader go through the
tales in reverse order, however (as does Delany himself).
And, as mentioned above, the reader must be prepared to work at it.
From the (latest) (ostensible) ending of the "Neveryon" series, we move
on to a rather more definite ending, and a very sad one: the end of
Terry Carr's "Ace Science Fiction Specials." I've been waiting for this
with mixed emotions, looking forward to it, but not wanting it to come
because there wouldn't never be no more. It's Terry's very last and
final gift to us.
And, sadly, it could be better.
Richard Kadrey's Metrophage is not a bad book by any means. It's a new
and very different version of the canonical cyberpunq world: we see it
through the eyes of a man with no jacks, no artificial parts. His name
is Jonny Qabbala, and he's a dope dealer who used to work for the
Committee for Public Safety, a governmental organization that has
pretty much shoved the police to one side in its efforts to bully the
public into being safe.
A strange disease is loose on the streets of Los Angeles: it's kind of
like leprosy, but when you're not looking it turns into something a lot
more like meningitis. In this phase is reduces you to an idiot, then an
animal, then a vegetable, and finally a stiff in a few weeks.
Jonny's connection has been hit.
Jonny wants to find the man who hit his connection.
The Committee wants Jonny.
In fact, suddenly everyone seems to want Jonny, and they're willing to
hurt anyone he cares about to get him.
And what does this have to do with the aliens on the moon?
It's not a pleasant story, but it's a very exciting one.
"But wait! There's more!"
Kadrey's language is occasionally stunning. He's as good a stylist as
Gibson was in Neuromancer, with some differences which indicate that he
may ultimately become a better writer than Gibson is now: particularly,
he has a sense of humor, something lacking even in Gibson's best
passages. Also, his imagery is manic. In the introduction, Rudy Rucker
calls Metrophage a surrealist science fiction novel. I don't agree
with that, but the imagery shows definite surrealist inclinations.
"Now how much would you pay?"
"Don't answer yet!"
Kadrey has one other "feature" lacking in Gibson's "sprawl": national
governments. It's hard to tell in the standard cyberfuture whether
national governments have "withered away," or if the characters simply
don't pay much attention to them.
Not so in Kadrey's future. The governments are clearly there, and their
influence is terrifyingly logical given the nature of the world. In
addition, they allow Kadrey to make some very succinct points about
government -- and especially the U.S. government -- in our world today.
"Operators are standing by for your call!"
It isn't steak, but is sure ain't porridge. You can't launch into
Metrophage the way you can into this week's Star Trek novel: but you
can read it on the bus without going insane. Call it a gourmet hamburger.
Somehow, I seem to have become the Official Ben Bova Reviewer for OtherRealms.
I don't mind; actually, I'm rather glad, because it's opened me up to a
writer I'd had some poor experiences with in the past. Last issue, for
example, I reviewed in this space the exceptional The Kinsman Saga; now
before me I have his new book, Vengeance of Orion.
Reviewing a sequel to a book you haven't read is a strange business.
Bova manages, mostly in the first few pages, to give the reader enough
information about Orion that the rest of Vengeance is not utterly
confusing. He manages to do this without (as far as I can tell) giving
away the basic plot of the first book, which is something of an
accomplishment in my eyes.
Orion himself is a created human being, a Hunter created by the "gods"
(and one god in particular) to perform a series of tasks in their
ongoing shaping of human history.
At novel's opening, he is enjoying a well-earned respite from his tasks
of Hunting with the woman he loves.
A page later, he finds himself unexpectedly on the shores of Troy, a
paid laborer digging the defensive ramparts of the Achaian army. We
learn that Achilles has just performed his infamous sulking withdrawal,
and the Achaians are in a bad way.
Orion saves the day. In doing so, he shows himself to be yet another
science-fictional superman: the novel's weakest point. Bova accepts the
classic trope of the superman (though he is at pains to deny it) and in
many ways, Vengeance is just another adolescent power fantasy.
What redeems it is its philosophical content. Spider Robinson is quoted
on the cover, describing the first Orion book as "speculative
theology." This is actually quite an accurate description of the
situation; Bova has created a reality where all gods are real, all
religions essentially true, and there is no conflict between them. He
does this in a science-fictional, not a fantastic, manner: which makes
the "gods", finally, not gods at all. I won't spoil the joy of
discovery by explaining what all that means.
Bova has researched Vengeance extensively. He moves Orion from the
walls of Troy to the walls of Jericho (did you know that both cities
fell at roughly the same historical moment? Or that the Hittite empire
also collapsed at the same time? I didn't), and from there to Egypt.
Along the way, he participates in both famous sacks, which allows Bova
to give rationalistic explanations for the Horse and the collapse of
Jericho's walls. I don't like this kind of revisionism; I prefer my
mythology straight up. But I'll grant that they're both damn good
explanations, well within the cultural and technological possibilities
of the day.
As I said, it's well-researched. Bova introduces the details of the
cultures and technology Orion encounters naturally, and if the
environment does not live and breathe the way, say, Shepard's Guatemala
does, well, very few fictional environments do. Vengeance is a
well-crafted, well thought-out book, and I can recommend it as a good
evening's read.
Closet Classic: Does anyone out there remember when Ballantine Books
was run by people named Ballantine?
Ian and Betty Ballantine. They were two of the best publishing minds in
the history of paperbacks, and produced an absolutely dynamite line of
science fiction originals.
Part of this was because they knew how to take a chance with a strange
book. And, friends, I've got a gonzo strange book for you here.
T.L. Sherred's Alien Island is a tale of first contact in the classic
mode. The aliens have landed in Michigan. They open their gangplank,
and a lone, brave man enters. A lone brave drunk. See, they landed in
the parking lot of a bar, and their landing craft looks like a giant
beer keg.
They aren't invading. They aren't interested in slaves, or human
flesh. They don't even want to invite Earth to lay down its nuclear
arms and join the interstellar comity of worlds.
They just want to trade. Which, all these years later, makes their name
seem prophetic: they call themselves the Regan Group.
So guess who they pick as their representative on Earth?
Yep. The drunk. His name is Ken Jordan, by the way.
They supply him with billions of dollars in hard cash (gold and other
heavy metals) and a list of what they want: Irish whiskey, Burmese tea,
and numerous other consumables and luxury goods. And cultural
artifacts. Especially cultural artifacts.
The governments of Earth are puzzled and annoyed. They all want alien
technology; they each want a bigger share of the trade; they want to
know what the hell is going on. So does the reader.
So does Dana Iverson, the tale's narrator. She's a CIA operative. We
see the first part of the story from a distance, as she isn't directly
involved; but she soon manages to become Jordan's personal secretary,
and, eventually, the manager of his entire operation.
With her assistance, Jordan buys an island and surrounds it with the
ever-popular Impenetrable Force Shield. Attempts to raid the island for
its gold result in puddles of goo where the would-be raiders used to
be. There's a rather grisly image of Jordan cleaning out the entry
with a firehose...
In the meantime, Jordan's been gathering the best and the brightest
young people -- recent high school graduates from the Detroit/Windsor
area, hiring them and letting them live rent-free on the island. Their
parents protest, particularly when one of them gets another pregnant
and Jordan won't turn them over to the authorities.
It's all part of the Regan master plan. They've done this on dozens of
worlds. The Regans are not merely capitalists. They've got a damn good,
if not exactly altruistic, reason to buy all this stuff and take it off
Earth. To say more would be a major spoiler.
Suffice it to say, Alien Island is a damn silly book, but one with
painful (if not particularly original) points to make about the ways
and the directions of human governments in the twentieth century. Some
of its details seem a little dated (particularly the benevolence of the
CIA), but the whole stands up well after eighteen years.
Hey, kids! Nominate your own favorite long-out-of-print books as
Closet Classics. You'll be sharing a wonderful secret with OtherRealms'
thousands of readers, and accumulating good karma to see you through
your next incarnation.
Alien Island was pointed out to me several years ago by Debbie Notkin...which
brings us full circle.
See you next issue.
OtherRealms #20
Spring, 1988
Copyright 1988 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 not be reproduced in any form without written
permission of Chuq Von Rospach.
The electronic edition may be distributed or reproduced in its entirety
as long as all copyrights, author and publication information remain
intact. No individual article may be reprinted, reproduced or
republished in any way without the express permission of the author.
OtherRealms is published quarterly (March, June, September and December) by:
Chuq Von Rospach
35111-F Newark Blvd.
Suite 255
Newark, CA 94560.
Usenet: chuq@sun.COM
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