Jessica Raven, a thirteen-year-old on holiday in France with her family, follows her younger brother Paddy into a strange treasure hunt - only to find herself trapped, with Paddy, in an ancient oubliette. Fortunately help is at hand; but even after the family's return to England, Jessica is haunted by dreams and visions of Jean-Luc, the boy she met on the treasure hunt - who, in turn, is pursued by the vengeful ghosts of children. Jessica's own life is not without problems; her older brother, Adam, is dying of a rare genetic disorder. Is she simply shutting out unpleasant reality and retreating into an elaborate game of make-belief? Or are her visions of Jean-Luc, and the lost Chaplet of Rochers, somehow linked to her brother's fate?
'Ann Halam' is better known as Gwyneth Jones, who has received considerable acclaim for novels such as Northwind and White Queen. The Haunting of Jessica Raven is pitched at a younger market, but the writing is still elegant, and the author doesn't 'talk down' to her intended audience. Jessica is a thoughtful and sympathetic character, with thoughts and emotions that ring true. A short novel - some scenes are, perhaps, over-terse - but not a slight one.
Friday, September 01, 1995
Lethe -- Tricia Sullivan
Lethe is set in 2166, eighty years after genetic warfare has changed the world forever. The cleanup operation is still in progress; purple algae process the toxins from the seabed, and a variety of new species have arisen to fill drastically-changed ecological niches. Meanwhile, the majority of Earth's remaining human population live in reservations, shielded from the poisonous elements and the merciless sun. Outside the rezzes, One-Eyes - mutated human stock - perform the menial tasks that keep the pure humans alive. And in the high tower of the League of New Alchemists - so-called because they transmute matter, in this case their own flesh - live the Brains, who administer this grim new world. The Brains (or Pickled Heads, as they're known 'behind their backs') are bodiless arrays of tissue, connected to the world through a permanent interface - the appalling results of biological experimentation from the days before the Gene Wars. The work of the League - ranging from terraforming the Moon to developing 'only slightly radioactive' crops - is carried out largely by altermoders, products of genetic manipulation who can switch from their human state to an aquatic form in which they communicate with dolphin pods. The dolphin-altermode symbiosis provides massive 'computing' power, which can be applied to almost any problem.
The latest 'problem' is a real teaser. Jenae and her dolphins are asked to interpret a mysterious transmission picked up from Underkohling, an artifact of unknown origin on the outskirts of the solar system. Underkohling's mysteries have already been probed, to no effect. It holds four 'gates'; two lead to uncharted areas of space, one to somewhere that no probe has ever returned from - and the fourth gate appears at unpredictable intervals. Its latest appearance coincided with the presence of software expert Daire Morales, who was searching for the source of the transmission. It's swallowed him whole. Whether he found the source is a matter for debate.
The transmission which Jenae attempts to decode refers to the ship 'Morpheus', which crashed on Underkohling at the height of the Gene Wars, carrying the Board of Ingenix - one of the three companies who, between them, tried to remake the world. Could 'Morpheus' have passed through the fourth gate? Could the gate lead to a new, unsullied world?
Daire, of course, knows the answers; getting them back to Earth, however, poses problems. And the answers pose more questions that he cannot answer. What are the ghosts? Is he a ghost himself? Where is he?
Jenae's discoveries put her in an equally untenable position - one that is even more dangerous. Her obsessive quest for justice leads her from the desert wastes of New Zealand to the uncomfortable cosiness of 22nd-century Oxford - and through the oceans between.
Lethe shows us a future that's distinctly dystopic. Nature is now inimical to human life, and human life knows it only too well. 'Humanity, that once sought to control the world, has succeeded only in changing it, and now ... evolution has taken off like a house on fire ... The world's not (our) playhouse any longer. It's a great big ravenous entropic thing.' That's the ivory tower perspective of an Oxford don. Keila, the One-Eye, might say the same thing; but, on the other hand, she has mutated and survived. This is a world where, more than ever, your DNA dictates your chances of survival. The fight to regain a small part of the earth for humans is a grim one, and the human tragedies which result cannot be allowed to interfere with that reclamation. Jenae's twin sister Yi Ling carries the gene for altermode, but is not an altermode herself; Daire also carries the latent gene. Both will come to regret their genotype, for very different reasons.
Lethe deals uncompromisingly - and unpedantically - with one of the recurring themes of science fiction - what it means to be human. Is it in the genes? The brain? The 'soul'? Lethe doesn't offer us any real answers; but the questions are posed in new and intriguing ways, inviting us to consider all the implications of genetic manipulation. Sullivan's rigorously constructed future contains little that is fanciful - and much that is poetic. As Daire says at one point, 'anything is possible ... you just have to suspend your belief in reality.' The reality offered in this novel is disturbingly plausible, as convoluted as a naked brain, and brilliantly described. An astonishing debut.
The latest 'problem' is a real teaser. Jenae and her dolphins are asked to interpret a mysterious transmission picked up from Underkohling, an artifact of unknown origin on the outskirts of the solar system. Underkohling's mysteries have already been probed, to no effect. It holds four 'gates'; two lead to uncharted areas of space, one to somewhere that no probe has ever returned from - and the fourth gate appears at unpredictable intervals. Its latest appearance coincided with the presence of software expert Daire Morales, who was searching for the source of the transmission. It's swallowed him whole. Whether he found the source is a matter for debate.
The transmission which Jenae attempts to decode refers to the ship 'Morpheus', which crashed on Underkohling at the height of the Gene Wars, carrying the Board of Ingenix - one of the three companies who, between them, tried to remake the world. Could 'Morpheus' have passed through the fourth gate? Could the gate lead to a new, unsullied world?
Daire, of course, knows the answers; getting them back to Earth, however, poses problems. And the answers pose more questions that he cannot answer. What are the ghosts? Is he a ghost himself? Where is he?
Jenae's discoveries put her in an equally untenable position - one that is even more dangerous. Her obsessive quest for justice leads her from the desert wastes of New Zealand to the uncomfortable cosiness of 22nd-century Oxford - and through the oceans between.
Lethe shows us a future that's distinctly dystopic. Nature is now inimical to human life, and human life knows it only too well. 'Humanity, that once sought to control the world, has succeeded only in changing it, and now ... evolution has taken off like a house on fire ... The world's not (our) playhouse any longer. It's a great big ravenous entropic thing.' That's the ivory tower perspective of an Oxford don. Keila, the One-Eye, might say the same thing; but, on the other hand, she has mutated and survived. This is a world where, more than ever, your DNA dictates your chances of survival. The fight to regain a small part of the earth for humans is a grim one, and the human tragedies which result cannot be allowed to interfere with that reclamation. Jenae's twin sister Yi Ling carries the gene for altermode, but is not an altermode herself; Daire also carries the latent gene. Both will come to regret their genotype, for very different reasons.
Lethe deals uncompromisingly - and unpedantically - with one of the recurring themes of science fiction - what it means to be human. Is it in the genes? The brain? The 'soul'? Lethe doesn't offer us any real answers; but the questions are posed in new and intriguing ways, inviting us to consider all the implications of genetic manipulation. Sullivan's rigorously constructed future contains little that is fanciful - and much that is poetic. As Daire says at one point, 'anything is possible ... you just have to suspend your belief in reality.' The reality offered in this novel is disturbingly plausible, as convoluted as a naked brain, and brilliantly described. An astonishing debut.
Tuesday, August 01, 1995
This Immortal: An Obituary for Roger Zelazny, 1937-1995
This was originally published in Vector #184 (Summer 1995) , the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association. At the time I included an incomplete bibliography: there are far better ones available now on the Web, for example here and here.
Roger Zelazny's death, on the 14th June 1995, prompted mixed reactions. Someone on the Net posted a message to the effect 'at least he won't be writing any more bad books'. The author of the message was promptly flamed, both by dedicated Zelazny fans and by those who thought (rightly) that it was a tactless thing to say.
In general, the obituary writers have hung fire on the merit of his recent work, preferring to laud the Hugo-winning Lord of Light (1967) and the long-running 'Amber' series (1970 - 1991). He won (they recite) three Nebulas and six Hugos. He published nearly thirty solo novels and at least four collections of short stories. He was a Grand Master of science fiction.
In recent years, it's true, Zelazny's best work has been his short stories - which have appeared at increasingly long intervals, no doubt because of the illness that he hid from the SF community. There have been a number of collaborative novels, most notably Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming (1991, with Robert Sheckley). Zelazny's last solo novel, 1994's A Night in the Lonesome October - a cheery (if occasionally whimsical) fantasy with Lovecraftian overtones, narrated by Jack the Ripper's watchdog Snuff - received enthusiastic reviews. The wit, and the elegance, which had characterised his earlier work were still evident from time to time. As his career progressed, though, Zelazny seemed to be moving towards fantasy, and away from science fiction; and, while his fantasy novels were entertaining enough, they didn't have the originality of his science-fictional work. Dilvish the Damned (1982) even featured elves ... Over the last two decades it became increasingly apparent that Zelazny was no longer the force majeure he had been in the late Sixties and early Seventies.
Back then, when the New Wave was in its infancy, Zelazny's themes were epic; men as gods, life and death, the nature of the mind, parallel worlds ... Zelazny had quite a reputation as a reworker of myth. Creatures of Light and Darkness (1969) shuffled the Egyptian pantheon; Lord of Light (1967) features a colony ruled by men and women who have taken on the attributes of the Hindu gods. There are elements of Greek legend in This Immortal (1966); and, more recently, Eye of Cat (1982) featured Navajo myth. While Zelazny never ignored the psychological aspects of religion and belief systems, he was at pains to assign a hard scientific provenance to his 'gods'. Thus, for example, Osiris and Anubis have animal heads as the result of cosmetic surgery, while the Hindu pantheon of Lord of Light switch from body to body and wait for each new brain to adjust to their individual mutated minds. In This Immortal, a variety of myths and monsters infest post-holocaust Greece, snapping eagerly at the heels of the narrator, who resolutely denies his own mythic qualities.
In his short stories, he sometimes played the trick the other way around. Mythical beings were uprooted from their natural habitat and deposited in mundane times. In Zelazny's Hemingway pastiche, 'The Naked Matador' (1981), a criminal on the run is assisted by a strange woman who wears a headscarf and dark glasses. She turns his pursuers to stone. In a neat, low-key touch, the villains' car is a blue Fury. Elsewhere we find Morgan le Fay working as a Tarot reader, Jack the Ripper (again) relishing a snuff movie in Los Angeles, and a chess-playing unicorn, Tlingel, with a taste for lager. Whatever else Zelazny lost in later years, his sense of humour was as strong as ever.
Many of Zelazny's heroes are more god than man, whatever their origins. The 'Amber' series (starting with Nine Princes in Amber, 1970) features a family of superhuman near-immortals, who walk through infinite parallel worlds, competing for the crown of Amber - the Immortal City, the reality of which all other worlds (including our own) are mere shadows. The princes and princesses of Amber communicate with one another by what could be called, unkindly, a fantasy mobile phone - Tarot trumps bearing likenesses of each member of the family. Conveniently, these can also be used for teleportation. Amber's royal family behave, at times, like the cast of a Jacobean revenge tragedy (Zelazny was a professor of Renaissance and Jacobean literature for some years). There's a curious blend, which for a time typified Zelazny's style, of hard-bitten prose and poetic imagery. Consider a ride through Shadow, with Corwin - the narrator, and Man Who Would Be King - shifting reality around him as he moves:
"We race a great meteor, we touch upon its bulk ... speeding across its pitted surface, down, around then up again - it stretches into a great plain, it lightens, it yellows ... it is sand, now, beneath my horse's hooves ... thudding along the beach beneath a lemon sky, blue clouds scudding - the salt, the wrack, the shells, the smooth anatomy of driftwood ... white spray off the lime-coloured sea ..." (The Hand of Oberon, 1976).Zelazny plays with archetypes throughout the 'Amber' series - Amber, after all, is the archetypal city. There are magical messenger birds (which have a habit of shitting on one's cloak), mazes, surreal landscapes strewn with iconic images .. since everything exists somewhere in Shadow, it's simply a case of getting to the right - or wrong - place to encounter Lancelot, visit an underwater city or be interrogated by the Sphinx (which doesn't know the answer to 'What's green and turns red at the touch of a button?')
The 'Amber' books encompass an epic tale, but perhaps - even in the first five books - at too great a length. The second part of the series - while featuring computerised shadow-shifting and even more Machiavellian intrigues - doesn't have the same spark as the earlier books, perhaps because its narrator, Merlin, has less godlike arrogance - and considerably less common sense - than Corwin. The 'Amber' books, however, are perhaps the most popular of Zelazny's work; they've spawned interactive novels, a Tarot set and even a role-playing game on the Net.
Zelazny first explored the 'Amber' theme of Order versus Chaos, with all possible worlds existing in between, in Creatures of Light and Darkness. The earlier book is perhaps the more effective. The thirty thousand 'midworlds' lie between the houses of Life and Death, ranging from medieval societies to worlds which foreshadow some familiar cyberpunk images. (Zelazny was writing about mechanised prostitution, where a human being is wired into a machine, before Gibson had his first typewriter). It's a far more poetic, almost experimental novel, which blends poetry, play scripts and strong imagery - and, among the poetic prose and the vivid characterisations, there's some pretty solid scientific grounding. Black holes and population dynamics mingle with dead cities and shapechangers, and a teleportationist who - like the Amberites - can project himself to anywhere he can imagine. There is also a remarkably funny passage concerning the use of human entrails for prophecy.
The mingling of science fiction and fantasy, which typified his earlier novels, is most blatant in Jack of Shadows (1971). The world has stopped turning; one side, eternally facing the sun, is devoted to science, while the other is governed by magic. The eponymous hero, a creature of twilight, reincarnates again and again, seeking to destroy the machine at the heart of the world - a task which can only be performed with both science and magic - and a generous dose of cynicism. There are some neat metaphysical conceits, not least the World Machine - a Darkside image, which the Daysiders claim is really a fire demon. Both views, of course, are correct. "Each of you colours reality in keeping with your means of controlling it," says Morgenstern, the fallen angel who is waiting for the sun to rise.
Zelazny's gift for evocative philosophical metaphor is also present in Roadmarks (1979). Any point in history - including alternate histories - can be reached from the Road: "Time is a super-highway with many exits ... the sideroads have a habit of reverting to wilderness when there are none to travel them". Like his earlier Doorways in the Sand (1975) this is an entertaining adventure novel with an exotic setting, rather than a serious exploration of a theme. Nevertheless, Zelazny's prose is literary and sprinkled with wit and vivid imagery.
Another theme which Zelazny returned to time and again was that of the mind. His first novel, published in 1966, was The Dream Master (expanded from the novella 'He Who Shapes'). This posited a future branch of psychiatry in which dreams - and nightmares - are lived out under the control of the Shaper. Like any good novel, the setting is only half the story. The Dream Master is a powerful description of a great man with a flaw - too strong a liking for playing God.
I've already mentioned that the characters in the Amber novels use their minds to shape the world around them, adding and taking away elements until they reach the Shadow world they seek; Zelazny has some profound (and also, on occasion, facile) things to say about the attitudes that this power evokes:
"Solipsism is where we have to begin - the notion that nothing exists but the self ... I can find, somewhere off in Shadow, anything I can visualise. This, in good faith, does not transcend the limits of the ego. It may be argued ... that we create the shadows we visit out of the stuff of our own psyches, that we alone truly exist, that the shadows we traverse are but projections of our own desires. Whatever the merits of this argument, it does go far towards explaining much of the family's attitude towards people, places and things outside Amber. Namely, we are toymakers and they, our playthings - sometimes dangerously animated, to be sure; but this, too, is part of the game. We are impresarios by temperament, and we treat one another accordingly. While solipsism does tend to leave one slightly embarrassed on questions of etiology, one can easily avoid the embarrassment by refusing to admit the validity of the questions." (Sign of the Unicorn, 1975)Zelazny was fascinated with immortality; indeed, if he could be said to have had a major theme, particularly in his earlier works, the concept of living forever - or almost forever - would have been it. He offers a variety of ways in which immortality can be achieved; for instance, in this lecture from Creatures of Light and Darkness:
"By one means or another, certain individuals have achieved a kind of immortality. Perhaps they follow the currents of life and draw upon their force, and they flee from the waves of death. Perhaps they have adjusted their biochemistry, or they keep their bodies in constant repair, or they have many bodies and exchange them, or steal new ones. Perhaps they wear metal bodies, or no bodies at all ... they cheat on life, on death, as you can see, and their very existence upsets the balance, inspires others to strive to emulate their legends, causes others to think them gods."Elsewhere he has body transfer via computer (Lord of Light); rejuvenation drugs (Isle of the Dead, 1969); and sheer good luck (or, perhaps, mutation) as in the case of Conrad Nomikos, the narrator of This Immortal (1966). Conrad has been alive for at least two hundred years, although this is not generally known. On the other hand, it's difficult to hide in a computerised society ... Conrad never thinks of himself as a god, but eventually godhood is thrust upon him by the Vegans, who bequeath him the Earth: "I feel I have made a good choice in naming you as heir to the property commonly referred to as Earth. Your affection for it cannot be gainsaid ... you appear to be the closest thing to an immortal overseer available."
The flipside of immortality is death. Perhaps Zelazny's most powerful short story is 'A Rose for Ecclesiastes' (1967), in which the poet Gallagher is sent to Mars to translate the holy books of a dying race. His love affair with a Martian girl, Braxa, leads him to fight the doom-laden pronouncements of the Mothers, who have decided that their infertile people should, effectively, give up the will to life. "The dance was good. Now let it end." He preaches to them from the Book of Ecclesiastes, and from his own work, trying to persuade them to accept help from Earth. Gallagher convinces them to choose life; then, finding that Braxa was only doing her duty, he attempts suicide. That's a glib summary of an immaculately crafted story; deservedly, it won a Hugo.
Zelazny's own enthusiasm for life showed in much of his work. His was an eclectic range of interests; fencing and wrestling (most of his books contain exquisitely-choreographed fight scenes); philosophy and psychology; computer science; astronomy; literature .... He quoted many poets in his work, from Chaucer to Whitman, and was a poet in his own right - although his poetry is not easily obtainable. The influence of Jacobean tragedy has already been noted; reading the 'Amber' books is much more fun if you've a Dictionary of Quotations to hand! He had an eye for detail - both emotional and physical - that, at its best, was reminiscent of Theodore Sturgeon; and a tendency to philosophise:
"Sipping beer in a mountain lodge on the planet Divbah ... I once looked out through a wide window and up at the highest mountain in the known universe. It is called Kasla, and it has never been climbed. ... It is one of those crazy things you think about and promise yourself that someday you're going to try, and then you wake up one morning and realise that it is probably exactly too late; you'll never do it." (This Immortal)In his time Zelazny was one of the great; he co-authored a novel with Philip K. Dick (Deus Irae, 1973), and even appeared as a character in Delany's story 'We Who In Some Strange Power's Employ'. (Zelazny was not averse to basing characters on his friends and colleagues; Fred Cassidy, the hero of Doorways in the Sand, is based on Joe Haldeman.) While little of his recent work had the brilliance of earlier years, one can't help feeling that there were still some ideas coming to fruition.
Best, then, to let his own words, again from This Immortal, serve as an elegy:
"Had you died young, your passing would have been mourned as the destruction of a great talent before its fulfillment. But you lived and they cannot say that now. Some choose a short and supernal life before the walls of their Troy., others a long and less troubled one. And who is to say which is the better? The gods did keep their promise of immortal fame to Achilles, by inspiring the poet to sing him an immortal paean. But is he the happier for it, being now as dead as yourself? I cannot judge, old friend ... May the lords Phoebus and Dionysius, who do love and kill their poets, commend thee to their dark brother Hades."
Saturday, July 01, 1995
Blood Ritual -- Frances Gordon
Frances Gordon is best-known for her work under another name. Fantasy fans will recognise the cheery gruesomeness that distinguishes Bridget Wood’s Celtic novels, beginning with Wolfking. Blood Ritual demonstrates that she can write contemporary horror at least as well as dark fantasy.
Michael Devlin is a journalist returning to Eastern Europe, where he lost his sight while investigating the fate of Bosnian refugees. With him travel Sister Hilary and Sister Catherine from St. Luke’s, the convent where he has been nursed as far back to health as is feasible; Hilary is accompanying him to the Viennese clinic where he hopes his sight will be restores, while Catherine is returning to her family home to visit her beloved brother, who is dying. Or so she believes.
Michael and Hilary travel to the Romanian borders in search of the organisation Tranz, which offers sanctuary to the dispossessed. Michael interviews a local innkeeper, and learns of Nazi atrocities committed within CrnPrag, the Tranz stronghold. He begins to formulate his own theories about the missing refugees - until Hilary visits CrnPrag and escapes with tales of something much older, much darker and with a great thirst for blood.
And Catherine? She’s been lured back to the familial bosom in order to accept the heritage she has been attempting to exorcise - that of her famous ancestress, Elizabeth Bathory, who had a taste for the blood of young girls. It’s a taste that lingers in her descendants, although without the sexual element which Elizabeth enjoyed so much. Back in London, the nuns of St. Luke’s are beginning to discover some unpalatable truths about Tranz, and about Sister Catherine - truths the family cannot allow to be rediscovered.
Gordon concentrates on the perverse sensuality of blood, rather than simply exploring the sexuality of vampires - or humans. Elizabeth’s descendants aren’t strictly vampires; they have a complex relationship with blood, rather than the simple physical addiction of the more traditional vampire. A complex and mature novel; it’s closer to the timbre of Anne Rice’s work than are many of the new crop of vampire novels, but with a style and tone which are refreshingly original.
Michael Devlin is a journalist returning to Eastern Europe, where he lost his sight while investigating the fate of Bosnian refugees. With him travel Sister Hilary and Sister Catherine from St. Luke’s, the convent where he has been nursed as far back to health as is feasible; Hilary is accompanying him to the Viennese clinic where he hopes his sight will be restores, while Catherine is returning to her family home to visit her beloved brother, who is dying. Or so she believes.
Michael and Hilary travel to the Romanian borders in search of the organisation Tranz, which offers sanctuary to the dispossessed. Michael interviews a local innkeeper, and learns of Nazi atrocities committed within CrnPrag, the Tranz stronghold. He begins to formulate his own theories about the missing refugees - until Hilary visits CrnPrag and escapes with tales of something much older, much darker and with a great thirst for blood.
And Catherine? She’s been lured back to the familial bosom in order to accept the heritage she has been attempting to exorcise - that of her famous ancestress, Elizabeth Bathory, who had a taste for the blood of young girls. It’s a taste that lingers in her descendants, although without the sexual element which Elizabeth enjoyed so much. Back in London, the nuns of St. Luke’s are beginning to discover some unpalatable truths about Tranz, and about Sister Catherine - truths the family cannot allow to be rediscovered.
Gordon concentrates on the perverse sensuality of blood, rather than simply exploring the sexuality of vampires - or humans. Elizabeth’s descendants aren’t strictly vampires; they have a complex relationship with blood, rather than the simple physical addiction of the more traditional vampire. A complex and mature novel; it’s closer to the timbre of Anne Rice’s work than are many of the new crop of vampire novels, but with a style and tone which are refreshingly original.
Covenant with the Vampire -- Jeanne Kalogridis
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.
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.
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?
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