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OtherRealms Issue 20 Part 06
Electronic OtherRealms #20
Spring, 1988
Part 6
Northshore
The Awakeners, Volume 1
Sheri S. Tepper
St. Martin's Press, March, 1987
Reviewed by
Barbara Jernigan
Copyright 1988 by Barbara Jernigan
A favorite Russian toy is a palm-sized, brightly painted, babushka (old
woman). The better examples have intricate detailing, almost concealing
the seam around the waist. What? She comes apart! The toy opens to
reveal another babushka, as brightly-painted as the first. She, too,
has a seam; she, too, conceals another babushka, who conceals another
babushka, who conceals....
Sheri Tepper's Northshore is like that Russian toy. Each chapter is
carefully wrought, full of detail describing the land, then the
peoples, then the cultures, then the reasons behind the cultures, then
the reasons behind the reasons... of a place called Northshore. But
more, each chapter opens another layer, revealing a new complexity
underneath. Like the Russian toy, the reader thinks, "Ha. This must be
the innermost layer, there can't possibly be more." Yet each succeeding
chapter shows that there is more. And more. And more. Until -- But that
would be cheating.
For me, however, there aren't many books that I would recommend without
hesitation that you purchase in hardbound. This is one of those few --
though I should admit one minor drawback: this is Volume I of a
duology. If you can't stand lengthy suspense -- though Northshore
ends, while leaving a sense of impending action, is not a cliffhanger --
wait for Volume II (Southshore: The Awakeners), which the coverslip
of Northshore promises is "soon to be released."
Northshore is a complex read. Nearly every word, and certainly every
image and concept, seems to matter, every brushstroke counts. It is a
well thought out book, from the landscape to the food chain, to the
inhabitants' cultures and beyond, and all fascinating. The world turns
under three moons, which are physical manefestations of the three
reigning gods. It is equatorially split by "the World River," almost a
deity in its own right, an ocean-wide tidal current that follows the
moons. The events of Northshore, unsurprisingly, take place on the
northern shore of the River; "Southshore" is a mythical place, none in
memory have attempted to traverse the River.
Two known sentient species dwell on Northshore (there is much to
Northshore that does not meet the eye): humans, and the birdlike
Thraish. Each species' culture is highly stratified, particularly the
humans', which ranges from the Rivermen, tradesmen whose tide propelled
boats ply the seven-year world circuit, to the Noor, darkskinned clans
that inhabit the steppes to the north. And then there is Northshore
itself, with its Awakeners and frag powder merchants, its oracular Jarb
Mendicants and blue-faced priests of Potipur, glittering with sacred
mirrors. Northshore, with its processions of black Melancholics,
flailing away at the citizens with their fishskin whips and given good
metal coin to do it. Northshore, with its puncon orchards and frag
groves and wide fields of white-podded pamet and blue-tasseled grain.
And Northshore's River edge, where lean forms of stalking Laughers,
tight-helmed in black, announce their approach with cries of scornful
laughter, ha-ha, ha-ha, making the heretics run for cover. Echoing the
Laughers, stilt-lizards hoot through their horny lips, scattering the
song-fish from around their reedlike legs only to snatch them up one by
one to gulp them down headfirst. Ha-ha ha-ha. Northshore is a mood
piece, and the mood is a dark one. The land-dwellers live in enforced
ignorance, praying to be "Sorted Out" at their deaths. Those not sorted
become workers, zombies who slave under the piercing gazes and mirrored
staves of the Awakeners, until their bodies no longer hold together,
and they become meals for the Thraish. This you discover within the
first chapter.
The rest of the book progresses from this, moving deeper into the
reasons that make Northshore what it is -- and into the currents of
change that are building, even as the tides surge at the Conjunction of
the three moons. Although there is quite a lot of action, Northshore,
in retrospect, has the feel of a setting-up for the events of the next
book, much akin to the first third of a Masters' chess game. Like the
the nested babushkas, Northshore is an intriguing puzzle of uncovering.
Tepper's images are so evocative and so carefully crafted, it matters
little that it is only a first piece. Only! This is a book that may
well aspire to the literary heights of this and any genre. Northshore
is a book to be savored; to quote the Independent Press blurb on the
slipcover, "Step into Tepper's world...then try stepping out of it."
What lies at the center of Tepper's babushka puzzle may be the ultimate
emptiness, or it may be a wondrous revelation yet unguessed. It will be
an impatient wait for the second and concluding volume.
Behind the Scenes
Ivory: A Legend of Past and Future
African Genesis
by
Mike Resnick
Copyright 1988 by Mike Resnick
Chuq has sent out a call for some Where-Do-You-Get-Those-Crazy-Ideas
articles, and since the genesis of my forthcoming novel, Ivory: A
Legend of Past and Future, is still fresh and clear in my mind, I
thought I would take him up on it.
Back in 1983 or 1984, while I was researching something quite different
about Africa, I came across a mention of an animal known only as the
Kilimanjaro Elephant. It was an evocative name that seemed to have a
mythic quality to it, so I began finding out what I could about this
elephant -- and what I found fascinated me.
In the Roland Ward Book of Big Game Records, the top 200 trophy animals
of every African species are listed. Usually the difference between the
Number One and Number Twenty animal is half an inch, or a quarter of a
pound. Not so with the Kilimanjaro Elephant: his tusks weighed 237 and
225 pounds, and no other tusk in history ever went over 190 pounds. He
was a monster among his own kind.
There was more, too -- or, rather, curiously less. With almost every
other animal in the book, they know the date it was killed, who shot
it, what kind of bullet was used, where it was shot, who the guide or
white hunter was, what the animal's measurements were. Not so the
Kilimanjaro Elephant: they think, but do not know, that he was killed
on the northern slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro; they suspect, but do not
know, that he was killed in 1898; they surmise, but do not know, that
he was killed by an escaped slave. And that constitutes everything that
is known about him.
Well, everything prior to his death, anyway. His ivory turned up for
auction at Zanzinbar in 1898. One tusk, the larger one, was bought by
an American, who was to pick it up at Cairo. It was shipped north with
a slave caravan, but the caravan was raided, and the tusk disappeared
for 12 years, finally turning up in Brussels. The other tusk went to
Belgium, then India, and ultimately England. Finally the British Museum
of Natural History bought the pair of them in 1932, and after an
attempt was made to steal them in 1937, they were taken off exhibit and
stored away in a vault beneath the museum, where they still reside. I
wrote to the curator for permission to examine them, and finally got to
see them in May of 1985. They are magnificent, each going more than
ten feet long and two feet in circumference at the base.
I began tracing every reference I could find in my voluminous African
collection, and finally plotted out a mainstream novel, which would
follow the Kilimanjaro Elephant for the last month of his life, and
then follow the ivory on an entirely fictitious journey until it wound
up in the British Museum.
I called Eleanor Wood, my agent, bubbling with enthusiasm about the
story. She listened politely, then told me that if I did a bang-up job
on it, she might be able to get me as much as I could get for a short
story from Omni. Whereas, she continued, if I would remember that I am
supposed to be a science fiction writer and that that's where my audience
is, and if I would follow the ivory not just to England but into space,
and not just for a period of 34 years but of five or six millennia, she
could get me 30 or 40 times as much as a short story for Omni.
A word to the wise was sufficient, and I began expanding the scope of
the book -- and suddenly realized that I could tell a much more
powerful tale with this approach. I created two framing devices, a
future researcher for the 65th-Century equivalent of Rowland Ward, and
the spirit of the Kilimanjaro Elephant himself, and each told
alternating sections of the book. The main novel, about 60,000 words,
was a straight-line narrative by the researcher. But as he keeps
searching for the ivory, the story segues into about a dozen incidents,
perhaps 90,000 words total, in which the tusks appear at various times
and places -- as stakes in a poker game, as objects of alien religious
rites, as pawns in a scholarly battle between paleontologists, and so
forth. I told these tales of the ivory non-sequentially for reasons
that I hope are clear to the reader.
This approach allowed me to write about the foibles and nobilities of
Man, which is the business of every writer, rather than some silly
hide-and-seek adventure about a pair of elephant tusks, and the main
continuing story allowed me to enlist the metaphysical as well as the
factual in assessing the human condition.
Since a couple of the stories occurred during the elephant's lifetime,
all that remained was to take a safari to Kenya in 1986 and retrace his
steps on his last journey from the Tana River to the slopes of Kilimanjaro,
which I did -- and which I also wrote up and sold as a factual article
for Swara, the journal of the East African Wildlife Society.
Then it was just a matter of sitting down and writing Ivory: A Legend
of Past and Future, which took about 5 months. I think the hardest part
was creating differing technologies and backgrounds -- none of them
important to the plot, but all important to the versimillitude of the
story -- for a dozen different future eras. The two pre-publication
reviews it has received thus far claim that it is my best novel to
date, and I have no argument with that assessment. When it is published
by Tor this summer, it will not only have a jacket by Michael Whelan,
but will also feature the only known photograph of the Kilimanjaro
Elephant's tusks -- quite possibly the first time in history that a
fiction book featured a frontspiece displaying its non-fictional
source.
Voice of the Whirlwind
Walter Jon Williams
Tor Books, $16.95
[***]
Reviewed by
Danny Low
Copyright 1988 by Danny Low
The story begins after the death of the hero, Etienne Njagi Stewart.
Fifteen years ago, Stewart bought clone insurance, so when he died, he
was resurrected. The problem is that Stewart never updated his memory
wire during the intervening 15 years and the new Stewart has no idea
what he did during those 15 years. What little he discovers about his
old self all indicated that the old Stewart was engaged in questionable
activities and died under suspicious circumstances. The old Stewart was
also clearly rather psychotic. The 15 year lapse gives Stewart a chance
to start anew but certain events makes him believe that what he does
not know about those missing years could result in his death again and
it could permanent this time.
What follows next cannot be told. The book is a well enough crafted
mystery that it is very difficult to tell much about what happens
without giving away clues. Williams has written a proper mystery. There
are clues throughout the book at the appropriate places so the reader
can figure out the mystery. The only flaw in the mystery is that an
experienced mystery reader can figure out exactly what is going on
about 2/3 of the way into the story if not sooner. There is no real
attempt to disguise the fact that the plot is a rather old and well
used one.
The book could be best described as cyberpunk as it might have been
written by Keith Laumer. Williams style is very similar to that of
Roger Zelazny but Williams' heros, while they appear to be typical
Zelazny style heros, have a heroic quality about them that is reminiscent
of a Keith Laumer super hero. Both Laumer and Zelazny create very
similar super heros. Laumer's heros are basically pure (often to the
point of being rather stupid) and are heroic as a consequence whereas
Zelazny's heros have a veneer of fake cynicism that make them unheroic.
Laumer's heros do right because that's what a man gotta do whereas
Zelazny's heros do right because of sentiment. Williams blends the two
styles creating heros that have a fake layer of cynicism but do right
both because they are sentimental and because they are heroic. It is an
interesting blend that Williams has been developing in his previous
books and has perfected in this book. It is a sufficiently different
style that it can now be called the Williams style.
The whole book is very derivative. This is not necessarily bad.
Originality sometimes mean you have found something new that you do not
like. The book is well crafted and is good basic entertainment. It is a
very well done example of action escapist SF.
Songmaster
Orson Scott Card
Dell books, 1980, 338pp, $2.875
[Also re-issued by Tor books]
Reviewed by
Kevin Anderson
kanders@lll-ncis.ARPA
Copyright 1988 by Kevin Anderson
This review was written seven years ago when Songmaster first came out
in paperback. As you will be able to tell, I loved the book, and was
annoyed at the publishing vagaries that have kept it out of print for
so long. Now the novel is once again available and worth looking for.
How can anyone describe the feeling a reader gets the first time he
reads Dune, or The Lord of the Rings, or The Chronicles of Thomas
Covenant -- and knows, with certainty, that this is one of the best
books he has ever read. And then you read countless other books,
searching for the same feeling. And then, finally, you stumble upon
Songmaster by Orson Scott Card.
This novel grew from Card's novelette "Mikal's Songbird," which was the
runner-up for both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and winner of the Analog
Reader's Poll for "Best Novelette of the Year." The novel has terrifying
potential (which is fully realized) and a fascinating idea -- the
author has a damn good story to tell, and he knows it, and so does the
reader as soon as he starts to read. Ansset is a singer, a special
singer with a phenomenal power in his voice that can make people
helpless before the naked emotion in his songs.
But then he changed his song. Still without words, he began telling
them of the sweating cooks in the kitchen, of the loaders, of the
dentist, of the shabbiness behind the buildings. He made them
understand the ache of weariness, the pain of serving the ungrateful.
And at last he sang of the old woman, sang her laugh, sang her
loneliness and her trust, and sang her death, the cold embalming on the
shining table. It was agony, and the audience wept and screamed and
fled the hall, those who could control themselves enough to stand.
And then Ansset becomes the special Songbird to Mikal, the Emperor of
the Galaxy; and they learn to love each other.
It was a soft song, and it was short, but at the end of it
Mikal was lying on his back looking at the ceiling. Tears
streamed out from his eyes.
"I didn't mean the song to be sad. I was rejoicing," Ansset said.
"So am I." But an Emperor has many enemies, and Ansset loses
almost all of the people he loves...before he learns to use his
voice as a weapon.
This is a book you'll want to read slowly, merely to enjoy. Words don't
make up this novel -- they are quanta of sheer joy, pure horror,
rending sorrow, absolute ecstasy in reading with an intensity I have
felt only one or two times before. I could quote paragraphs and pages
of writing brilliance, hoping to convince others to rejoice as I have
done. Songmaster is the best I've yet seen from the best new author
I've yet seen. Card should win every award in every field of literature
for this masterpiece. Orson Scott Card is a Wordmaster.
I still recall this book as one of the best I've ever read. Without
having reread it, I cannot say whether it is better than the
magnificent Speaker for the Dead, but it is certainly something that
should be on your Must Read list. I believe poor distribution and poor
publicity was, in part, at fault for Songmaster not winning any awards
in 1980. But the book deserves your attention now.
Soldiers of Paradise
Paul Park
Arbor House, 1987, 280pp, $17.95
0-87795-861-0
Reviewed by
Neal Wilgus
Copyright 1988 by Neal Wilgus
If War and Peace had been written by Aldous Huxley, Frank Herbert and
Conan the Barbarian the result might have been Soldiers of Paradise.
Paul Park's new novel of the far future resembles Tolstoy's masterpiece
in that it paints a broad picture of human behavior during times of
drastic change, and in the use of maverick aristocrats as main characters.
But Park's ironic satire is closer to Huxley than Tolstoy, while his
bizarre landscapes and weird cults are comparable to Herbert -- and
only Conan could truly comprehend Park's unique creatures called
Antinomials.
The times that are a-changin' in Paradise are seasonal -- for on this
much changed future Earth the months are thousands of days long and a
full turn of the seasons will cover a generation or more. The story
opens in the last phases of winter and progresses, slowly, into early
spring -- a time of upheaval, fire and flood, and the dreaded but
life-giving sugar rain. The war that has been raging for the past year
(i.e., generation) is not going well and the strange religion of the
land -- worship of a phallic dog-like god name Angkhdt -- is also
caught in revolution.
The aristocrats of Paradise are the Starbridges -- a family of the
rich, the royal and the righteous which has dominated the rest of the
population for so long that even when the Starbridges fight each other
the masses only shrug and go along. (Sound familiar?) But it's the
maverick Starbridges -- Abu and Thanakar -- who are the most
interesting and who are the main characters in this complex social
comedy and haunting fantasy. Both of these Starbridges are misfits who
have escaped the responsibilities that accompany their names -- Abu
because he's a fool and a drunk and a poet, Thanakar because of his
crippled leg which disqualifies him for any of the serious roles the
Starbridges must perform.
And then there are the Antinomials -- a bizarre subset of the human
race (maybe) that has grown so disgusted with civilization that they
have abandoned all thought and "normal" communication, living only from
moment to moment, substituting their music for speech, moving further
and further from Starbridge culture with each generation. Justifiably,
perhaps, since that culture is our own unjust and straightjacketed culture
taken to even more ridiculous lengths -- with super rich and super
poor, each restricted and distorted by cruel and unusual behavior codes
carried to illogical extremes. And it is with the super poor and the
Antinomials that Abu and Thanakar hobnob from time to time, adding spice
and dimension to a story already rich in invention, insights and madness.
Paul Park is described on the dustjacket as a resident of Manhattan who
cast off his corporate chains and took a trip around the world -- ad
who still has no fixed address. Be warned that Soldiers of Paradise is
the first volume of the Starbridge Chronicles and that the sequel,
Sugar Rain, has already been completed. For that reason Paradise ends
with many loose ends dangling, but in this case I didn't mind at all.
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
Delphi: CHUQ
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