It is 1845, and Arkady Tepesh has been called home to bucolic Eastern Europe after the death of his father. He is the last of his line, and management of the family estate must pass to him. His sweet, heavily pregnant English wife Mary travels with him to meet the in-laws for the first time. Like any new wife, she is healthily suspicious of them, and soon begins to realise that something is very rotten in Uncle Vlad’s sprawling castle, set in acres of gloomy forest in the heart of beautiful unspoilt Transylvania ...
Covenant with the Vampire is composed of extracts from the journals of pragmatic Arkady, sensible Mary and Arkady’s sister Zsuzsanna, who is mad. It’s the first in a prjected trilogy by Jeanne Kalogridis, a ‘bestselling American author whose work, published under a pseudonym, has been translated into seventeen languages’. Any guesses? Here’s a clue: I don’t think it’s Anne Rice. Despite a blurb which promises an ‘erotic, stylish and page-turningly terrifying’ novel, Covenant is less bloody and sensual by far than Rice’s novels. (Granted there’s a certain amount of biting and sucking, as has come to be de rigeur in vampire novels, but it takes more than that to make an erotic novel). Kalogridis’ style is (deliberately) more reminiscent of Bram Stoker’s as she charts the gradual descent of Arkady Tepesh from man of reason to supernatural creature.
At first Arkady’s journal entries are a triumph of Victorian rationalism over ignorant peasant beliefs. After a long journey through a dark and stormy night (of course) to his uncle‘s castle, the first person he sees is his brother - who died horribly as a child - pointing ominously into the forest. A lesser man would run screaming: Arkady sensibly attributes the hallucinations to ‘the stress of travel’, adding, ‘I am a modern man who puts his hope in science rather than in God or the Devil’.
As the novel progresses, however, his naivety begins to seem like blind stupidity - especially when contrasted to Mary’s growing fears, confided only to her diary. Arkady’s fears are still those of a rationalist: that the police won’t believe him when he reports a servant’s disappareance, that the peasants are abusing Vlad’s good nature, that a guest has accidentally fallen from a high window. Only when he begins to recall some of his repressed childhood memories does he realise the horror of his situation.
Never one to place his faith in the supernatural, Arkady devises a cunning stratagem which may save his immortal soul, but will estrange him from everything he knows and loves. Once aware of his doom, he becomes an altogether more interesting character - as does Mary, never a weak woman but hitherto constrained by the mores of her time.
As this is the first in a trilogy (which will end where Dracula started) a cliffhanger ending is to be expected, and Kalogridis doesn’t disappoint.
Saturday, July 01, 1995
The Detached Retina -- Brian Aldiss
"Science fiction seems to offer an elusive something ... a sense of looking at things and finding the familiar strange ... for this it needs the SF writer's gift, a detached viewpoint, a detached retina. Perhaps ordinary readers are not comfortable with detached retinas. As Delany pointed out, you have to train yourself or be trained to appreciate the tropes of SF."
The Detached Retina is a collection of essays drawn from Aldiss' critical work over the last fifteen years. Their provenance ranges from book introduction to obituary; their degree of detachment is similarly varied. There's an open letter to Salvador Dali, and essays on futurology and psychology. There is a great deal of incisive criticism, and a recurring defence of his own works - both fiction and non-fiction - which, whether intrusive or not, is seldom bland.
"The past is rich in life ... it's the future that's dead, stuffed with our own mortality" writes Aldiss. His view of current trends in science fiction is not particularly optimistic. He bemoans the trend towards the impersonal and the massive - "towards humans as machines" - and ties this into the social context of much science fiction - "our SF culture springs from nations with most power, so power is naturally a prevailing theme". Cyberpunk offers a renaissance of human individuality, which 'seems to extend to infinity - but within the limits of the machine". In his introduction to Decade: The Sixties (written in 1977), he posits that the Sixties was the decade when science fiction "began to stand outside itself and look at itself". The relentless forward march of technological progress was shoved out of the way to make space for experimentation and hedonism. There's a distinct sense that this was a Good Thing, and that things have been in decline ever since. Considering that this essay was written from a vantage point of only eight years, one can't help wondering what changes Aldiss would have made, had he not considered that it should "stand as it was when first published".
There are several indications that, on occasion, he despairs of much modern SF. "The nutritive content has been fixed to suit mass taste," he writes. "Nowadays, the world ... has to be saved by a group of four or five people which include a Peter Pan figure, a girl of noble birth, and a moron ... the prescription thus incorporates an effigy for everyone to identify with. In the old days, we used to destroy the world, and it only took one mad scientist. SF was an act of defiance, a literature of subversion, not whimsy." (Old days? Does he mean Good Old Days?) On occasion, one can't help feeling that Aldiss is comparing the worst of the new with the best of the old - a comparison which does no favours to either side of the balance.
At one point he writes, "(SF) should be about the future. And of course about human beings. When it gets involved with telepathic dragons, I'm lost." This is an example of Aldiss at his most irritatingly dismissive. Quite aside from the slur on McCaffrey (who, at least in her earlier works, was playing the good old SF game of 'what if?', and examining human-alien relationships) it's a horribly anthropocentric viewpoint. Human beings? What about 'people'? Where does this leave the work of writers like Stephen Baxter and Gwyneth Jones, who write intelligent SF with alien protagonists? Aldiss is often scathing about 'formula fantasy' (and, indeed, formulaic SF) and its practitioners. The Detached Retina deals mainly with science fiction, and with non-genre fiction that shares some SFnal tropes. However, In 'One Hump or Two' (the text of a lecture given at the IAFA Conference of the Fantastic) he makes some salient points about the differences between US and UK fantasy: "(the) spiritual aspect is largely absent in American fantasy and at least flickeringly present in the English stuff ... Did the 1980s yield in the US anything so ... full of ancient power as Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood?" In part, according to Aldiss, this may be attributable to our 'buried past': "we have Stonehenge, you have Scientology". But, in the end, the two have largely merged. Aldiss manages to dismiss fantasy, post-Tolkien, as "a giant step forward for womankind to the Age of Le Guin and Earthsea and Anne McCaffrey and her dragons". With this aggravating summation, Aldiss dismisses recent fantasy and female writers in one fell swoop. Female writers? I'm sorry; there's half a page on feminist utopias. And an essay on Anna Kavan; not a familiar name, but at least a female name.
And, of course, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley - 'Science Fiction's Mother Figure'. This essay is perhaps the weakest in the book. It starts out as a defence of Aldiss' view - first aired in Billion Year Spree (BYS), his 1973 critical overview of science fiction - that Frankenstein was the first science fiction novel. And, on the subject of Shelley and her monstrous 'child', Aldiss is informative and entertaining. "She captured the Irrational," he writes, "dressing it in rational garb and letting it stalk the land." He explains the social and political context of Shelley's writing lucidly, drawing comparisons between Shelley and earlier utopian writers, and discussing her little-known novel The Last Man. But where the essay falls over is in its second half - "a more personal view". This concerns itself less with Aldiss' personal view of Shelley, and more with his reaction to the critical slamming of BYS. We already know (from several iterations of the same phrase) that he regards the work as "an asset to scholars ... carte blanche not to have to study texts a million miles from the real thing". (The 'real thing', of course, as defined by Aldiss.) While his defence of the book's tenets is scholarly - if occasionally repetitive - Aldiss tends to react personally to mention (and non-mention) of his work. Describing del Rey's omission of his fictional works in The World of Science Fiction, Aldiss magnanimously remarks that "this particular instance can perhaps be ascribed to jealousy". And he is "grateful" to be mentioned in the Clute-Nicholls Encyclopedia of SF. He defends BYS on both the critical and the personal fronts; the first is certainly justifiable, the second perhaps less so. One of the few flaws in this collection is Aldiss' tendency to self-reference: discussing Amis' Something Strange, he writes (apropos of nothing) that "it bears a family resemblance to my story 'Outside'". P.D. James' The Children of Men "bears an astonishing accidental resemblance to my 'Greybeard'". While few would deny that Aldiss is one of the seminal figures of SF, it hardly becomes him to remind us of the fact.
There are proper places for self-reference, and in that respect Aldiss doesn't let us down. His obituaries of James Blish and Theodore Sturgeon are affectionate and revealing. In his discussion of SFnal style, it's only fitting that he writes of what he knows; his own. The autobiographical pieces - 'A Personal Parabola' and 'The Adjectives of Erich Zann' (a painful, and extremely funny, piece on Lovecraft) - have a fascinating intimacy, reminiscent of his fiction.
And there is creativity along with the criticism - the 'Rough Guide to Utopia', for example. The Detached Retina is often amusing and, just as often, contentious. Aldiss covers an immense ground, only occasionally stopping to mark out a piece of his own territory. Scholarly, witty and perverse at times; a book which deserves the adjective 'thought-provoking'.
The Detached Retina is a collection of essays drawn from Aldiss' critical work over the last fifteen years. Their provenance ranges from book introduction to obituary; their degree of detachment is similarly varied. There's an open letter to Salvador Dali, and essays on futurology and psychology. There is a great deal of incisive criticism, and a recurring defence of his own works - both fiction and non-fiction - which, whether intrusive or not, is seldom bland.
"The past is rich in life ... it's the future that's dead, stuffed with our own mortality" writes Aldiss. His view of current trends in science fiction is not particularly optimistic. He bemoans the trend towards the impersonal and the massive - "towards humans as machines" - and ties this into the social context of much science fiction - "our SF culture springs from nations with most power, so power is naturally a prevailing theme". Cyberpunk offers a renaissance of human individuality, which 'seems to extend to infinity - but within the limits of the machine". In his introduction to Decade: The Sixties (written in 1977), he posits that the Sixties was the decade when science fiction "began to stand outside itself and look at itself". The relentless forward march of technological progress was shoved out of the way to make space for experimentation and hedonism. There's a distinct sense that this was a Good Thing, and that things have been in decline ever since. Considering that this essay was written from a vantage point of only eight years, one can't help wondering what changes Aldiss would have made, had he not considered that it should "stand as it was when first published".
There are several indications that, on occasion, he despairs of much modern SF. "The nutritive content has been fixed to suit mass taste," he writes. "Nowadays, the world ... has to be saved by a group of four or five people which include a Peter Pan figure, a girl of noble birth, and a moron ... the prescription thus incorporates an effigy for everyone to identify with. In the old days, we used to destroy the world, and it only took one mad scientist. SF was an act of defiance, a literature of subversion, not whimsy." (Old days? Does he mean Good Old Days?) On occasion, one can't help feeling that Aldiss is comparing the worst of the new with the best of the old - a comparison which does no favours to either side of the balance.
At one point he writes, "(SF) should be about the future. And of course about human beings. When it gets involved with telepathic dragons, I'm lost." This is an example of Aldiss at his most irritatingly dismissive. Quite aside from the slur on McCaffrey (who, at least in her earlier works, was playing the good old SF game of 'what if?', and examining human-alien relationships) it's a horribly anthropocentric viewpoint. Human beings? What about 'people'? Where does this leave the work of writers like Stephen Baxter and Gwyneth Jones, who write intelligent SF with alien protagonists? Aldiss is often scathing about 'formula fantasy' (and, indeed, formulaic SF) and its practitioners. The Detached Retina deals mainly with science fiction, and with non-genre fiction that shares some SFnal tropes. However, In 'One Hump or Two' (the text of a lecture given at the IAFA Conference of the Fantastic) he makes some salient points about the differences between US and UK fantasy: "(the) spiritual aspect is largely absent in American fantasy and at least flickeringly present in the English stuff ... Did the 1980s yield in the US anything so ... full of ancient power as Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood?" In part, according to Aldiss, this may be attributable to our 'buried past': "we have Stonehenge, you have Scientology". But, in the end, the two have largely merged. Aldiss manages to dismiss fantasy, post-Tolkien, as "a giant step forward for womankind to the Age of Le Guin and Earthsea and Anne McCaffrey and her dragons". With this aggravating summation, Aldiss dismisses recent fantasy and female writers in one fell swoop. Female writers? I'm sorry; there's half a page on feminist utopias. And an essay on Anna Kavan; not a familiar name, but at least a female name.
And, of course, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley - 'Science Fiction's Mother Figure'. This essay is perhaps the weakest in the book. It starts out as a defence of Aldiss' view - first aired in Billion Year Spree (BYS), his 1973 critical overview of science fiction - that Frankenstein was the first science fiction novel. And, on the subject of Shelley and her monstrous 'child', Aldiss is informative and entertaining. "She captured the Irrational," he writes, "dressing it in rational garb and letting it stalk the land." He explains the social and political context of Shelley's writing lucidly, drawing comparisons between Shelley and earlier utopian writers, and discussing her little-known novel The Last Man. But where the essay falls over is in its second half - "a more personal view". This concerns itself less with Aldiss' personal view of Shelley, and more with his reaction to the critical slamming of BYS. We already know (from several iterations of the same phrase) that he regards the work as "an asset to scholars ... carte blanche not to have to study texts a million miles from the real thing". (The 'real thing', of course, as defined by Aldiss.) While his defence of the book's tenets is scholarly - if occasionally repetitive - Aldiss tends to react personally to mention (and non-mention) of his work. Describing del Rey's omission of his fictional works in The World of Science Fiction, Aldiss magnanimously remarks that "this particular instance can perhaps be ascribed to jealousy". And he is "grateful" to be mentioned in the Clute-Nicholls Encyclopedia of SF. He defends BYS on both the critical and the personal fronts; the first is certainly justifiable, the second perhaps less so. One of the few flaws in this collection is Aldiss' tendency to self-reference: discussing Amis' Something Strange, he writes (apropos of nothing) that "it bears a family resemblance to my story 'Outside'". P.D. James' The Children of Men "bears an astonishing accidental resemblance to my 'Greybeard'". While few would deny that Aldiss is one of the seminal figures of SF, it hardly becomes him to remind us of the fact.
There are proper places for self-reference, and in that respect Aldiss doesn't let us down. His obituaries of James Blish and Theodore Sturgeon are affectionate and revealing. In his discussion of SFnal style, it's only fitting that he writes of what he knows; his own. The autobiographical pieces - 'A Personal Parabola' and 'The Adjectives of Erich Zann' (a painful, and extremely funny, piece on Lovecraft) - have a fascinating intimacy, reminiscent of his fiction.
And there is creativity along with the criticism - the 'Rough Guide to Utopia', for example. The Detached Retina is often amusing and, just as often, contentious. Aldiss covers an immense ground, only occasionally stopping to mark out a piece of his own territory. Scholarly, witty and perverse at times; a book which deserves the adjective 'thought-provoking'.
Friday, June 23, 1995
Paint it Black -- Nancy A. Collins
Paint it Black is the third novel to feature Sonja Blue, schizoid punk vampire extraordinaire. Sonja hasn’t given up hope of destroying Morgan, the aristocratic vampire who made her what she is. The hunt, however, doesn’t stop her amusing herself by hunting down other vampires who prey on unsuspecting humans - and by seducing her own prey. But the Other, the violent and bloodthirsty creature that lurks in her back-brain, keeps getting out. And the Other isn’t nearly as well-mannered as Sonja; the survivors could tell of that, although there aren’t many of them.
In a secluded house in Yucatan, the vampire-child Lethe is growing up fast. Palmer, looking after her and waiting patiently for Sonja’s return, doesn’t know what Lethe will become; it’s evident, though, that soon she’ll be ready to go out into the world, and fulfill her mysterious destiny. Meanwhile, through the sultry nights of New Orleans and the sleazy private sex clubs of New York, Sonja walks among the Pretending Races - werewolves, vampires, demns and seraphim - seeking Morgan, and a solution to her own divided nature.
Collins’ nocturnal world is richly detailed, contemporary and all too credible. There’s a depth to the characterisation - both human and Pretender - that fascinates and seduces the reader. The climax of the novel reveals Pretender plotting on an almost Biblical scale - and the key to Sonja’s own nature. There’s one problem, though; how can Collins follow this?
In a secluded house in Yucatan, the vampire-child Lethe is growing up fast. Palmer, looking after her and waiting patiently for Sonja’s return, doesn’t know what Lethe will become; it’s evident, though, that soon she’ll be ready to go out into the world, and fulfill her mysterious destiny. Meanwhile, through the sultry nights of New Orleans and the sleazy private sex clubs of New York, Sonja walks among the Pretending Races - werewolves, vampires, demns and seraphim - seeking Morgan, and a solution to her own divided nature.
Collins’ nocturnal world is richly detailed, contemporary and all too credible. There’s a depth to the characterisation - both human and Pretender - that fascinates and seduces the reader. The climax of the novel reveals Pretender plotting on an almost Biblical scale - and the key to Sonja’s own nature. There’s one problem, though; how can Collins follow this?
Thursday, June 01, 1995
The Night Inside -- Nancy Baker
Ardeth Alexander, a research student in Toronto, has measured out her life in careful plans and predictable behaviour. It’s a guarded life, with no one allowed to become too important to her - except her younger sister Sara, singer with the rock band Black Sun, for whom Ardeth is a refuge in an uncertain world. But Ardeth’s researches, unknown to her, have uncovered truths that some would rather not have revealed. She is abducted and imprisoned in an abandoned asylum - where, each night, she is required to give her blood to the monster in the next cell. Helplessly, she submits, planning her escape; but gradually it becomes clear that there is only one, ghastly, way out. How else can she avenge what has been done to her? And Ardeth is not the only victim; there are all the dead girls, the actresses, out in the gully with stakes through their hearts ...
The sacrifices Ardeth must make are sympathetically described; there’s a real sense of the anguish she feels at giving up everything normal and safe. Only then can she learn the lessons that her old, orderly existence denied. In the city, a killer is stalking. Sara is hunting, relentlessly, for her lost sister. A wealthy recluse sits and pores over her grandfather’s diaries, searching for clues. And Ardeth is seeking out the real monsters; whatever they may be, they are more dreadful than the man who shared her imprisonment.
‘The Night Inside’ combines elements of thriller, romance and gory horror; despite the occasionally clumsy style, it’s a good read.
The sacrifices Ardeth must make are sympathetically described; there’s a real sense of the anguish she feels at giving up everything normal and safe. Only then can she learn the lessons that her old, orderly existence denied. In the city, a killer is stalking. Sara is hunting, relentlessly, for her lost sister. A wealthy recluse sits and pores over her grandfather’s diaries, searching for clues. And Ardeth is seeking out the real monsters; whatever they may be, they are more dreadful than the man who shared her imprisonment.
‘The Night Inside’ combines elements of thriller, romance and gory horror; despite the occasionally clumsy style, it’s a good read.
Monday, May 15, 1995
Fate -- Mary Corran
Asher's childhood is spent in a small world, like most children; her parents are farmers, her playmates are the other children from the village and the manor house. Then the Grey Men invade the country, and everything changes. The Oracle says that Vallis, Prince Lykon's infant daughter, will save the realm - but Vallis has disappeared, and Asher grows to adulthood in a land crippled by heavy tributes and the presence of the hated invaders who now rule half of the known lands of Tenebran.
Fourteen years after the invasion, Asher has fled a repressive marriage and is living in the city of Venture and working as a senior clerk at the Treasury. Only recently have women been employed in such important positions, but it's good political sense; women don't have to be paid as much or treated as well as men, and anyway many of the men have been sent to internment camps. Asher appreciates her position. It gives her the chance to embezzle money for the women's underground - which helps women escape the city, and their male oppressors, and head north to freedom in the lands of the alien Saff.
Asher has another advantage; she believes she is immune to destiny. The people of Tenebran are deeply fatalistic; there is no religion, only a strong belief in destiny and in the cryptic rhymes of the Oracle. The death of Asher's twin brother when they were born seems to have cancelled out her own fate; she is free to act as she will. If she needed proof, it is supplied by her immunity to the magical wards and hexes which guard warehouses and strongboxes.
Then the Oracle summons Asher. She is horrified to find that it has a prediction for her - and more horrified to meet her childhood friend Mallory, now a wealthy merchant, in front of the statue of Lady Fortune. Clearly their fates are linked - but Asher has spent too long running from her past, and from destiny, to accept the Oracle's message graciously. She sets out to tempt fate ...
Fate describes a world with real people engaged in real moral dilemmas, asking - and finding answers to - age-old questions. Is gender destiny? Can an individual have free will and yet be destined to perform a particular act? Can men and women be friends in a society which oppresses women?
Mary Corran's City background is evident in the detailed structure of her society; the politics and economy of a country under the thumb of the invader are clearly and comprehensively described without lessening the roles of magic and fate in the lives of the inhabitants. More unusually, Corran manages to write a novel with feminist leanings which neither damns or apologises for the behaviour of men and women in a strictly patriarchal society. While some of her male characters seem at times to be little more than ciphers, it's made clear that this is simply Asher's perception of them. She slowly becomes aware of her bias: 'Because he's a man, I acted as if he had no feelings, or no right to have feelings. As if he were first a man and only second a friend.' Perhaps Asher's major insight is when she realises that much can go unnoticed unless one has eyes to see; this realisation is the crux of her quest, but it changes her in smaller, more personal ways as well.
Asher has a quest to fulfill, courtesy of the Oracle; but Fate is as much the story of her philosophical quest for meaning and understanding as it is the tale of the Oracle's prediction and how it is finally fulfilled. 'All I ever wanted was to have control over my own life', she muses at one point. By the end of the novel she is left with more questions than answers; but she, and others, have a freedom that is new and wonderful.
Fourteen years after the invasion, Asher has fled a repressive marriage and is living in the city of Venture and working as a senior clerk at the Treasury. Only recently have women been employed in such important positions, but it's good political sense; women don't have to be paid as much or treated as well as men, and anyway many of the men have been sent to internment camps. Asher appreciates her position. It gives her the chance to embezzle money for the women's underground - which helps women escape the city, and their male oppressors, and head north to freedom in the lands of the alien Saff.
Asher has another advantage; she believes she is immune to destiny. The people of Tenebran are deeply fatalistic; there is no religion, only a strong belief in destiny and in the cryptic rhymes of the Oracle. The death of Asher's twin brother when they were born seems to have cancelled out her own fate; she is free to act as she will. If she needed proof, it is supplied by her immunity to the magical wards and hexes which guard warehouses and strongboxes.
Then the Oracle summons Asher. She is horrified to find that it has a prediction for her - and more horrified to meet her childhood friend Mallory, now a wealthy merchant, in front of the statue of Lady Fortune. Clearly their fates are linked - but Asher has spent too long running from her past, and from destiny, to accept the Oracle's message graciously. She sets out to tempt fate ...
Fate describes a world with real people engaged in real moral dilemmas, asking - and finding answers to - age-old questions. Is gender destiny? Can an individual have free will and yet be destined to perform a particular act? Can men and women be friends in a society which oppresses women?
Mary Corran's City background is evident in the detailed structure of her society; the politics and economy of a country under the thumb of the invader are clearly and comprehensively described without lessening the roles of magic and fate in the lives of the inhabitants. More unusually, Corran manages to write a novel with feminist leanings which neither damns or apologises for the behaviour of men and women in a strictly patriarchal society. While some of her male characters seem at times to be little more than ciphers, it's made clear that this is simply Asher's perception of them. She slowly becomes aware of her bias: 'Because he's a man, I acted as if he had no feelings, or no right to have feelings. As if he were first a man and only second a friend.' Perhaps Asher's major insight is when she realises that much can go unnoticed unless one has eyes to see; this realisation is the crux of her quest, but it changes her in smaller, more personal ways as well.
Asher has a quest to fulfill, courtesy of the Oracle; but Fate is as much the story of her philosophical quest for meaning and understanding as it is the tale of the Oracle's prediction and how it is finally fulfilled. 'All I ever wanted was to have control over my own life', she muses at one point. By the end of the novel she is left with more questions than answers; but she, and others, have a freedom that is new and wonderful.
Thursday, March 02, 1995
MagicNet -- John DeChancie
Like many an American fantasy before it, MagicNet begins in the enchanted groves of academe. Schuyler King, professor of English at a New England college, has just settled down for the evening with a volume of Keats when he receives a disturbing phone call from an old friend. Grant turns out to have been torn apart by a demon - but not before he’s mailed King a set of computer disks. The disks contain a program which is, effectively, Grant’s ghost. Apparently he’s been messing about on the Net and upset a few people too many - but this isn’t your normal everyday infobahn. This is MagicNet, based on rationalised magic, where demons roam dataspace and the response time is instantaneous. "It’s not like any other computer network you’ve experienced".
Now a hacker called Merlin is going for world domination through the Net, and he must (of course) be stopped. King, armed only with a new laptop and accompanied by a lesbian witch, sets off for San Francisco where the bad guys hang out. King swiftly realises that a virtual San Francisco is even weirder than the real thing. Fortunately Jill has a non-Net friend with whom they’ll be safe - one Harlan Ellison ...
MagicNet is an extremely entertaining book, although there are enough loose ends to weave a very tangled web. Elements of assorted Eastern mythology creep in, and together with DeChancie’s witty, fast-paced prose style, create an ambience not a million miles from Zelazny’s later works. Fantasy’s answer to Neuromancer? The lighter side of Snow Crash? Decide for yourself.
Now a hacker called Merlin is going for world domination through the Net, and he must (of course) be stopped. King, armed only with a new laptop and accompanied by a lesbian witch, sets off for San Francisco where the bad guys hang out. King swiftly realises that a virtual San Francisco is even weirder than the real thing. Fortunately Jill has a non-Net friend with whom they’ll be safe - one Harlan Ellison ...
MagicNet is an extremely entertaining book, although there are enough loose ends to weave a very tangled web. Elements of assorted Eastern mythology creep in, and together with DeChancie’s witty, fast-paced prose style, create an ambience not a million miles from Zelazny’s later works. Fantasy’s answer to Neuromancer? The lighter side of Snow Crash? Decide for yourself.
Wednesday, March 01, 1995
Raiders of the Lost Car Park -- Robert Rankin
Robert Rankin’s previous novels didn’t make that much of an impression on me; competently written, ingeniously plotted and occasionally very funny, but something didn’t quite click. Despite this I tried to keep an open mind about Raiders of the Lost Car Park, and was pleasantly surprised. My knowledge has been broadened no end. I now know what really turns Prince Charles on (and the current royal revelations do little to disprove Mr. Rankin’s allegations); I’ve also discovered where travellers really come from, and the names of the people who are responsible for corn circles. And that’s not the half of it ...Rankin has a gift for describing people and places: from the opening scene in Minn’s Music Mine, where the ashtrays are overflowing with ancient stubs, to the grand finale in the King of the World’s throne room (located, unsurprisingly, somewhere under West London) there is an attention to detail which demonstrates a keen eye and a keener imagination. Cornelius Murphy (the Stuff of Epics) and his minuscule friend Tuppe make endearing heroes, matched with an equally appealing set of blacker-than-black villains and assorted helpers and hinderers. Throw in a suitable mixture of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, and a few traditions and old charters, and you have a hugely enjoyable book - much shorter than ‘Illuminatus!’, and even funnier. The humour isn’t as heavy-handed as Pratchett’s can be, and the self-referential mockery of Rankin’s style makes the text itself part of the joke, which should keep the post-modernists among us happy as well.
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