Lord Demon -- Roger Zelazny and Jane Lindskold

Lord Demon is the second of two novels, unfinished by Zelazny at his death in 1995, to have been completed by Jane Lindskold. As with Donnerjack (1997), Lindskold's influence is easily detected: it's unfair to judge Lord Demon as simply another book by Zelazny, or to assume that this is the novel Zelazny would have completed, alone, if he’d lived.

The background is vintage Zelazny, with a cast and setting borrowed wholesale from mythology and given an SFnal interpretation. The characters in Lord Demon are demons and gods from Chinese myth. Except, of course, they’re not really demons and gods: they’re beings from another dimension. After a war between chaotic and lawful factions some millennia ago, the losing side broke through into ancient China and fitted themselves seamlessly into the local belief system.

The narrator, ‘Lord Demon’ himself, is Kai Wren, a master craftsman who specialises in magical bottles containing pocket universes for the magically-aware to call home. Kai Wren is also known as Godslayer: in the war, he was the only demon to have single-handedly slain a god. Now he’s peace-loving and solitary, avoiding the company of other demons and confiding only in his human servant, Oliver O’Keefe.

One night, Ollie is killed, and the quest to find his murderer opens up a series of mysteries. Kai Wren acquires a human apprentice, Li Paio, and ventures back into demon society, embroiling himself in a series of feuds and alliances. Unfortunately, he learns the identity of one enemy just too late to avoid being transformed into a mere human …

If parts of that plot summary are reminiscent of Zelazny’s classic Amber series, maybe it’s no accident. There’s a number of Amberesque plot elements, and one very obvious reference to Nine Princes in Amber that’s almost enough to make one suspect the author - which author? - of archness.

Kai Wren, however, isn’t a typical Zelazny hero. He makes mistakes, and is forced to rely on others: he has romantic, rather than merely lustful, inclinations: and he’s much less egocentric and arrogant. In short, he’s more human than most of Zelazny’s protagonists.

Maybe it’s an indication that Zelazny himself was moving into a different, more mature phase as a writer: it seems more likely, though, to be Lindskold’s influence, overlaying Zelazny’s plot and characters with themes and motifs of her own. There are elements of this novel which aren’t classic Zelazny: animated coathangers, the land of lost socks, and a cute puppy called Fluffinella. But reading Lord Demon as classic Zelazny is rather missing the point: it’s a joint work, and perhaps the saddest thing about it is that it’s not a true collaboration.

The Stars Compel -- Michaela Roessner

This is a novel imbued with the scents and tastes of its setting – an alternate Renaissance Italy, where the precociously Machiavellian Caterina de'Medici (aged eleven) is threading her way through a maze of political and magical intrigues.

The viewpoint character is not Caterina herself, but Tommasso Arista, her cook. Tommasso isn't a mere kitchen boy, but an artist in his own right: apprenticed to Cellini, he is Michelangelo's lover and Caterina's confidante. His family tree includes not only prestigious cooks, but his grandmother Angelina – whose amazing recovery from a debilitating illness is popularly ascribed to her occult powers – and his dead sister Ginevra, whose spirit apparently lives on in a ruby pendant around Caterina's slender neck.

Tommasso's everyday life is drawn as a fascinating and frustrating melange of famous names, kitchen feuds, mouthwatering recipes and occult visions. His recipes are described in tantalising detail (this is most definitely not a book to read while you're dieting) and, while some of the epicurean details may seem anachronistic – were turkey and coffee well-known New World imports as early as 1530? – Roessner's research is sound enough in other areas to give verisimilitude to the more obscure details.

Tommasso understands only a little of the cosmic events unfolding around him - and so, perforce, the reader is similarly confused. It seems that Caterina is just one incarnation of a being who inhabits many planes, and who has chosen to be born into the nobility of 16th-century Florence in order to combat the forces of darkness. Caterina regains awareness of her greater self only in dreams, and during her waking hours has no knowledge of the choice she's made.

There's plenty to distract her, though. Her magical powers are gaining strength as she nears adolescence, and she is uneasily aware that a battle between good and evil is being fought through the streets of Florence and Rome. Caterina herself, Tommasso and her beloved cousin Ippolito are game pieces on the side (of course) of Good. Ranged against them are the villains of the piece – Alessandro de'Medici, ostensibly her half-brother but probably the Pope's bastard son; Lorenzaccio de'Medici, another cousin: and an array of necromancers, demons, assassins and politicians. Their aim is not clear, but indications are that it is Evil.

Those who haven't read the first in the series, The Stars Dispose, may find the plot convoluted and obscure. There is no summary of the events recounted in the previous novel: this, perhaps, is why the forces of evil seem no more than mildly unpleasant.

City of Diamond -- Jane Emerson

Proper space opera, and a nice thick book to boot. Not that I'd dream of booting it: this is one of the paperbacks which is doomed to eventual disintegration, since it's hooked me comprehensively.

The premise - which put me off when I first read the blurb - is that aliens have donated a set of three 'city-ships' (generation ships built of a strange rock-like substance) to a group of humans bound by a common religion, Redemptionism, founded by one Adrian Sawyer centuries before the beginning of this novel. Now the Cities - Diamond, Opal and Pearl - are in an uneasy state of truce as they roam the galaxy looking for (a) trade opportunities and (b) a couple of handy religious relics - which, given the futuristic setting, are likely to be far more than just trinkets.

What makes this anything other than just a run-of-the-mill space opera? Appealing characters, for one: if not a cast of thousands, there are certainly at least ten viewpoint characters, ranging from the Irish Zen-assassin Keylinn to the high-born, sheltered Iolanthe Pelagia, the Protector's new bride; from the sociopathic 'demon' (the technical term for those of a particular half-human, half-alien genetic background) Tal to this employee, the pragmatic petty criminal and social outcast Spider.

The society itself is compelling, and incredibly detailed, without the novel consisting largely of infodumps. Resources are strictly limited on a generation ship: Emerson does no more than hint at the Lottery which Spider has escaped. The Redemptionist religion is not explored in detail, but there is a hint of unpleasantly literal Catholicism: communion confers a mystical experience upon the faithful, and involves a fluid which turns out to contain real - alien - blood.

And the plot ... well, it is a space opera, and - even worse - it's the first in a series which looks unlikely ever to be finished. (Boo hiss!) Though it does stand alone - albeit with an rather unfinished aftertaste). There are enough plot strands - romantic, adventurous, political, religious and so on - to keep the action moving, and to make it difficult, at times, to discern either the key characters or the key plot strand - is it the alien relics, or the whole 'demon' thing, or the Graykey assassins?

But the entire novel is a delight. The whole 'Three Cities' setting, with its mixture of archaic practice (the Royal Hunt sounds positively prehistoric) and alien, incomprehensible technology, is in some ways more Renaissance than Regency. I can see why this was described as 'the bastard offspring of Heinlein and Heyer', though: it's a very mannered society (which is precisely why Tal is such an interesting character, an amoral individual viewed against the backdrop of an extremely structured society) - and there's a real sense of a somewhat claustrophobic space-dwelling society.

The Magician's Assistant -- Ann Patchett

I wish to recommend this novel to everyone. Please go and buy it. It is out in small-format paperback now: definitely not SF or fantasy, though it may be magic realism - of an odd kind, since it is set in North rather than South America, and most of the magic is the 'mundane' sort with cards and rabbits.

The novel begins with a death: the death of Parsifal, stage name of Guy Fetters. Sabine, his stage assistant and his wife (a relationship based more on mutual affection than anything else: they shared a house with Parsifal's male lover, the Vietnamese Phan, who predeceased him) is left to pick up the pieces of his life - and to encounter his family for the first time. Needless to say, the clash of Sabine's Jewish / Californian life with that of Parsifal's mother and sisters, who live an unexceptionally comfortable life in Nebraska, churns up some old secrets and creates a few new ones.

Patchett's writing is wonderfully evocative: a couple of weekends ago I was discussing the emptiness of America (compared to Britain), and by coincidence had just been reading this:

Dorothy, Albertine and Kitty, quite alive in Nebraska, eluded her entirely. In fact, the entire state of Nebraska defied imagination. Who actually lived there? … Sabine got the Rand McNally road atlas out of the trunk of her car and thumbed through to Nebraska, a page kept perfectly clean and uncreased from lack of use. Other pages showed green for hills, darker green for mountains, blue for rivers and the deep thumbprints of lakes, but Nebraska was white, a page as still as fallen snow. It was not crosshatched with roads, overrun with the hard lines of interstate systems. It was a state on which you could make lists, jot down phone numbers, draw pictures. And there, in the beating heart of nowhere, Sabine found Alliance. Alliance, Nebraska. How could he not have mentioned that? It didn't look like something you would simply forget.

That's another big part of the book: the elements of a person that you discover only when they're gone. This would, I think, be a very cathartic book to read if you had recently suffered a bereavement: either that, or it would be impossible to read as being uncomfortably accurate.

Sabine isn't really left alone, though: she dreams, and to the reader the dreams seem to be true dreams. Even better: unlike the typical fantasy-novel dreamer, she doesn't recall every detail of the dreams. Often it's only a recollection of a blue swimming pool, or a particular phrase, that stays with her on waking: but the dreams are presented as something real. She doesn't dream about Parsifal, either: she dreams long and coherent conversations with Phan, who explains that Parsifal's 'embarrassed' or 'afraid' to enter her dreams this soon. Phan, although never 'alive' in the novel, is as real - and, literally, haunting - a character as any of the others.

When Parsifal's mother visits her in LA, new perspectives open on Sabine's quiet, well-ordered life. She decides to return the visit, and finds herself in snowbound Nebraska, playing witness to the marital upheavals of his sisters. In another touch of realism, she finds out why he left by accident: everyone thinks that someone else must have told her.

The novel concludes with two very different and significant events. One of them was vaguely predictable, but isn't taken far enough to feel like a fix: the intrusion of romance, of a sort, into Sabine's emotional desert. (All sorts of interesting aspects to this one, too: but I won't give it away.) The other event is one that I think might make this magic realism: I won't be giving much away if I divulge that Sabine, always the assistant, ends up doing something that simply isn't possible in terms of stage magic, but looks very like real magic. (She learns it in a dream).

I'm looking forward to reading this novel again, although for a change this isn't because there are parts that don't make sense until the finale. Very highly recommended indeed.

The Vintner's Luck -- Elizabeth Knox

A week after midsummer, when the festival fires were cold, and decent people were in bed an hour after sunset, not lying dry-mouthed in dark rooms at midday, a young man named Sobran Jodeau stole two of the freshly-bottled wines to baptize the first real sorrow of his life."

If I hadn't known better, I'd have suspected Neil Gaiman of writing this novel about wine, love and angels. It's set in Burgundy, France, beginning in 1808: Sobran, sampling the new vintage and bemoaning his luck in love, encounters an angel, Xas, whose wings smell of snow. Xas promises Sobran that he'll return in exactly a year, to toast Sobran's marriage: and so a relationship is born that spans 55 years. Initially the two meet annually on the anniversary of Xas's [not altogether unsymbolic] fall into the Jodeau orchard. Xas is a worldly sort of being for an angel: he's interested in gardening, wine and - above all - humanity. At first he's unwilling to speak of his angelic life: later, as the relationship between the two changes, their conversations move from simple, rustic pleasures to theology, war and the vast distances between heaven and hell.

If the novel focussed only on Xas and Sobran, on the nature of the angel and the man and the parallel sins, or moral crimes, which they commit, it would still fascinate. Sobran's friends, relations and employers - notably the Baroness Aurora, a local landowner and Sobran's confidante - are never merely supporting characters. As well as the tale of Xas's falls - definitely plural, and not for the usual reasons - and Sobran's moral dilemma when he discovers his friend's true nature, the novel includes several murders, several romances, and the tale of a woman's descent into madness.

The Vintner's Luck is a family saga as much as it's a theological fantasy - and, as an historical novel, it's firmly rooted in its setting. Sobran goes to war for Napoleon: Aurora has a breast removed (without anaesthetic - I detected echoes of Lady Mary Wortley Montague's account of a similar operation here); new techniques are used in the vineyard: and, meanwhile, science advances ...

Antarctic Navigation -- Elizabeth Arthur

Antarctic Navigation is the first-person narrative of Morgan Lamont, an American woman born on the 60th anniversary of Scott’s last journal entry, who became obsessed with Scott as a child. She makes a variety of odd friends during her teenage years – a boy who attends special school (though it is not evident whether this is simply due to learning difficulties or to some psychiatric condition): the daughter of Swedish immigrants, who is obsessed with storage: an eco-terrorist who works as a forest ranger: a man whose sense of balance and location is so highly developed that he is constantly travel-sick, and severely disoriented by small magnetic anomalies … All of these characters come in very useful later in her life. After her mother’s death in a snowstorm (also due to a psychiatric condition), Morgan’s grandfather – the wealthy founder of a paint company – contacts her for the first time in her life, and after some stormy overtures gives her what she’s always wanted.

This is one of those novels which, rather irritatingly, begins with the protagonist looking back on the events which led her to where she is now, so you know where she ends up. (This authorial omniscience detracts, inevitably, from some of the crises through which Morgan drags herself and her allies). I also think that Elizabeth Arthur could have written a book about half the length of this one without omitting much of import. She’s keen on extended metaphors – albeit often fascinating ones – and will blithely devote an entire chapter to a discussion of a physics experiment, setting us up for a single image which works, and sticks. Arthur also spends a lot of time talking about ideas in classical Greek philosophy, most notably the concept of arete, or a ‘quality of excellence’. Morgan’s father died while writing a book on architecture, so there’s plenty of architecture. Naturally, too, she has done her research on Antarctic history: Wilson, Oates, Bowers and the whole crew of them are here, as well as some people, and events, that I haven’t yet come across elsewhere. That wealth of discursive detail is an aspect of this book that I find very appealing, but it does add to the wordage and tonnage: this is, quite literally, a weighty tome, almost Victorian in its scope and digression. (It’s a very good read, too, though sometimes one can’t help wishing she would just get on with it.)

Arthur – or shall we say ‘Morgan’, so as not to fall into the Fatal Trap of confusing author and character, as some might – is keen on Scott. Morgan reads the Huntford book [The Last Place on Earth - very pro-Scott] (it’s not named, but the internal chronology and a couple of remarks indicate that this is the book) and immediately begins to argue Scott’s case. She also reads Scott’s wife’s autobiography, and finds herself strangely repelled by Kathleen Scott and her agenda. Indeed, she is rather jealous of the woman.

What Morgan wants to do is to prove that Scott could have succeeded: that it was bad luck, rather than poor planning: that it wasn’t just because Scott refused to kill his dogs (and this is a theme she keeps returning to: that Amundsen was some sort of sadist for using and killing dogs, and that Scott was sane and kind. I have a feeling that, while Shackleton was a cat person, Morgan Lamont is a dog person. Does this explain anything? Almost certainly not.). Morgan describes Scott as "a person of great intellectual curiosity, who had to overcome a natural inclination to laziness, and who found himself pulling a sledge across 1800 miles of ice, because he had not wanted to kill other intelligent animals." Because of this less-than-pragmatic approach to the use of animals, Morgan is also relieved that recreating Scott’s expedition won’t involve using fur ‘except for the mittens, boots and sleeping bags’ – though she remains silently on why it should matter what you use the fur for, once you’ve killed its original owner to get it. In fact, the expedition end up using fake fur for mittens etc, which is not exactly historically accurate.

Some of her historical asides simply don’t add up, too, and I’m unsure who to believe. Huntford asserts that Scott bought his butter in Denmark: Arthur has "we bought New Zealand butter, just as they had"

Another new concept, to me, was that of Antarctica as the Counterweight continent – the idea, dating from Classical Greece, that there must be a southern landmass, to balance the weight of all that known land.

Arthur, trying to describe the first sight on Antarctica, resorts to ‘the language of a chemist’, and remarks that Dr Wilson, on Scott’s expedition, did the same. I hadn’t known that: but I do know where I’ve seen the trick before, which is in Kim Stanley Robinson's Blue Mars, when Sax is trying to describe the many shades of purple through which the sky passes at sunset. Nothing new under the sun… and, of course, Robinson would have read Wilson’s journals, assuming that he was at all interested in matters Antarctic before getting over there on the Writers’ and Artists’ Programme. [see my review of Kim Stanley Robinson's Antarctica, published a year after Antarctic Navigation]

I also learnt a lot about the United States Antarctic Program: for example, the list of medical conditions that disqualify someone (even a Proper Scientist) from being employed in Antarctica. I can understand AIDS, hepatitis, pregnancy … but epilepsy? Thyroid problems? Asthma? Grrr. Guess I won’t be going as a US employee, then. All these conditions are, as Arthur points out, treatable: I’m allowed to drive (not that I can) despite being classified as epileptic, because I have not had an ‘episode’ for over two years (actually nearer four – and nothing to do with the lousy medication, either). I can certainly treat my asthma: the Antarctic Program, incidentally, doesn’t differentiate between allergy-type asthma and other types, so even someone with hayfever can be excluded on that ground, despite the remarkable lack of pollen on the Ice.

The Americans aren’t, or weren’t, kind to their Antarctic workers: while those of other nationalities could expect to see something of the continent (and were allotted helicopter time as a matter of course), the Americans were forbidden even to venture onto the sea ice. (Morgan gets deported from Antarctica for an illicit excursion to Scott’s hut). One of the characters explains this with what I found a very interesting theory: that Americans, far from being pioneers, are terrified of the wilderness, and hate the idea of being a loser or a failure. Scott was a loser, ergo not a hero. And why are Americans scared of failure? According to this character, because they are all descended from dismal failures:

Wherever they came from – Scotland or Ireland, Germany or Poland – they had failed and they had nothing left to lose. They had the clothes on their backs, one potato, and a pocket handkerchief. In another minute, if they stayed where they were, they were going to die. So … they climbed aboard some ship .. once they got there they found a huge bloody wilderness, worse than anything they could have imagined.

Arthur, among her other strengths, has an eye for travel writing: there are episodes that remind me of Jan Morris, and others that remind me of Bill Bryson. For example, the much-delayed flight from Christchurch to McMurdo Base:

… the drug-sniffing Labrador was brought out from somewhere to inspect us again. he took his job just as seriously this time as he had the last, because he was a Navy dog, and he understood that his masters were absolutely convinced that someone on this flight had managed to pick up some drugs while on a secured quarterdeck, completely surrounded by military policemen.

Morgan doesn’t come across as a woman, even when in love. Imagining conversations with the not-quite-ghost members of Scott’s expedition, she observes that Cherry-Garrard didn’t particularly like women.

But I wasn’t a woman when I was there. I wasn’t a man, either. I was a human being as they were, every one of them. The advantage of an all-male company in that age which had brought them to the Antarctic was that it had allowed men to act like whole human beings.

Seems a drastic remedy …

Morgan Lamont does become more fallible – and perhaps more likeable – after an encounter with an Argentinean male feminist. (She also becomes more womanly). And she certainly ends up following in Scott's footsteps: the expedition is evidence of a fallibility, stubbornness, and even stupidity, that's reminiscent of Scott as portrayed by Huntford. Morgan makes mistakes – big ones – and suffers for them: unfortunately, so do some of her companions.

She's so in love with the idea of Scott as martyr that it takes an apparent visitation from the ghost of Scott to persuade her to save her own life. She sees Scott as almost a Christ-figure, dying for others and suffering without complaint, "pulling behind them on their sledges the weight of Empire". This ties in neatly with her personal feelings of guilt, as news of the Gulf War reaches Antarctica and she realises that her expedition is funded by Lamont Paints, who made their money by supplying the US Navy with paint. "I knew now what I was dragging behind me." This crisis of conscience, coupled with the knowledge that she has endangered her companions by insisting on authenticity (an insistence that goes by the board on the first day of the expedition, but it's too late to change very much by then), drives Morgan into a severe depression – sheer self-indulgence, when one is part of a team crossing one of the most inhospitable landscapes on Earth. She is saved by the ghost, or spirit, or hallucination of Scott – the only one of his expedition whom she had never felt was somehow present in the hut – who appears from the blizzard to tell her, basically, to get a grip and obey him.

I have mixed feelings about Morgan Lamont. In some ways she's a strong woman looking for someone (probably male) to lead her. She enthuses about the other female member of the expedition – Gronya, the storage fanatic – but doesn't actually say very much about her, or report much of her speech. When another member of the expedition develops a, potentially disruptive, crush on Gronya, we hear a lot about his feelings, but nothing of hers. Morgan is also a cheat, and guilty – as charged, above – of Scott-like stupidity. She seems to treat the whole thing as a game, or a dramatic presentation, although all their lives depend on her actions.

In some ways Arthur is rewriting and recasting Scott's expedition (I had fun trying to decide which of her characters matched up with the Last Five from Scott's polar trip), and exploring how it might have been different, and what motivated Scott. Reading Antarctic Navigation as a simple travel narrative would be a big mistake: reading it as an exploration of the whole Scott myth is far more interesting. The spiritual and supernatural elements reminded me of that bit in The Waste Land about 'Who is the third who walks always beside you?'.

There are some beautiful images in this novel, and some profound philosophy. I don't like Morgan Lamont, but I am prepared to accept that without her this novel would not work. I am still not convinced, though, that "the planet spins faster as the two Poles than it spins anywhere else on Earth", or that "someday the South Pole would be the place where the Earth stopped spinning". I'll grant some poetic truth … but I'm not sure that 'truth = beauty \ beauty = truth' is a valid argument when it comes to science.

Ship Fever -- Andrea Barrett

A collection of short stories which share the love of science - and vice versa - as their theme. It would have been easy for this to be a pretentious sort of book: lots of strained metaphors and parables, a few famous scientists behaving in uneasily human fashion, etc. Instead, each story contains, in miniature, the sort of human interest, intelligence and passion which appeal to me in novels such as The Vintner's Luck (Elizabeth Knox, 1999).

Barrett doesn't focus on the moments of discovery, or the great scientists of the past: she is more concerned with those who fail, or those who never try, or - in one story - those who have effectively completed their life's work and are waiting to die.

The stories ... well, this sentence began 'especially worthy of mention' until I found myself listing the entire contents of the collection. I'll stick to describing and discussing those that made most impact on me.

'Birds without Feet' is the story of Alec, a nineteenth-century naturalist who follows in the footsteps of Alfred Wallace, hunting and killing and stuffing birds and animals, mourning each death but telling himself it is in the name of science. Gradually he can no longer deny that the deaths are for nothing; that he will never experience the flash of insight, the new discovery, which could justify the slaughter. Approaching nature passionately rather than intellectually, he's too caught up with detail to be a theorist, 'caught like a fly in the richness around him, drowning in detail'. Unlike his role models, he is not serving a 'greater good', but a misplaced and unrealistic ambition, to be like them: to be them.

In 'The English Pupil', Linnaeus, victim of several strokes and senility, instructs his coachman to take him out of the city to his old house. Night and snow are falling: somewhere, vaguely, he thinks that someone might be wondering where he is. The man who developed a system of nomenclature that was widely used even within his lifetime cannot remember the fates or names of his dead friends, or of the young man - the English pupil - who comes with Linnaeus' daughter to take him home. Poignant and thoughtful: an encapsulated 'life of Linnaeus' in fragments, as recalled by an old, sick man on a snowy night.

I was also rather taken with 'Rare Bird', in which spinster Sarah Anne writes, with increasing frustration, to Linnaeus, contradicting his theory that swallows winter underwater, in frozen ponds and rivers. The advent of a widow, also interested in natural philosophy, encourages her to experiment by forcing a swallow to 'hibernate' (and Barrett could have forced the parallel with witches, 'if it dies it was innocent'). Upon fishing out the drowned bird, she realises that something must change - and flees with her friend the widow. Once her brother realises that she's gone, he believes that she's 'flown to other climes': in fact, her fate is never made clear, although her brother behaves as though his theory is a fact. A remarkably understated and evocative story: a clear and intelligent perspective on what it meant to be an eighteenth-century woman, even a wealthy one, with scientific ambitions.

'The Behaviour of the Hawkweeds' brings together several tales. Antonia has inherited a letter drafted by Mendel, dealing with genetics: Mendel had been misled by a fellow scientist into investigating heredity in the hawkweeds, which don't display the same straightforward lines of inheritance as do peas. The letter, passed to her by her grandfather, becomes a kind of dowry in her marriage to Richard, a present-day - rather mediocre - geneticist. What he never thinks to ask her is how she came to possess the letter. A young man to whom she is attracted asks that question: Antonia tells the story her way rather than her husband's, just for once, and thus betrays her husband's pride.

I can't do that story justice by simply describing it: there are so many facets to the tale. The rivalry between the Czech immigrants (Antonia's family) and the Germans (a man killed by Antonia's grandfather, leading to her possession of the letter): the laws of genetics, embodied in Antonia's sixth toe which her children don't show, but which appears once more in her grandchild: the pettiness of scientific research, both in Mendel's time and in the mild departmental politics between Richard and the younger scientist ...

All life is here.