Contents

Strange Sentences – Hal Duncan explains the joys of style

Day of the Dead – Barth Anderson’s The Patron Saint of Plagues, reviewed by Cheryl Morgan

Subscriber Draw – Win a copy of The Patron Saint of Plagues

More Thrilling Adventures – Chris Roberson’s Paragaea, reviewed by Cheryl Morgan

The Tournament Tour – David Keck’s In the Eye of Heaven, reviewed by Cheryl Morgan

Temeraire in China – Naomi Novik’s Throne of Jade, reviewed by Cheryl Morgan

Haunted London – Mike Carey’s The Devil You Know, reviewed by Cheryl Morgan

Who Was That Masked Man? - Pádraig Ó Méalóid compares versions of V for Vendetta

Journey’s End – Kate Elliott’s Crown of Stars, reviewed by Juliet E. McKenna

Disposable Living - Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, reviewed by Victoria Hoyle

More Alien Than Space Ships – Judith Berman’s Bear Daughter, reviewed by Karina Meerman

Horrible Favorites – Mark Morris’ Cinema Macabre, reviewed by Stuart Carter

City of Freaks and Aliens – Jeffrey and Scott Thomas’ Punktown: Shades of Grey, reviewed by Mario Guslandi

Short Fiction – Nic Clarke looks at this month’s offerings from Interzone, Strange Horizons and Sybil’s Garage

I Wish I Wasn’t in Dixie - Kevin Willmott’s film, CSA, reviewed by Peter Wong

A History of Judgment – The Complete Judge Dredd, Volumes I and II, reviewed by Joe Gordon

A Long, Slow Dance – Steve Cash’s Time Dancers, reviewed by Cheryl Morgan

A Place of Learning – Farah Mendlesohn’s Polder, reviewed by Cheryl Morgan

Model J. Ford – Jeffrey Ford’s The Empire of Ice Cream, reviewed by Cheryl Morgan

Collected Collections – Zoran Živković’s Impossible Stories, reviewed by Cheryl Morgan

Book on the Wall – John Picacio’s Cover Story, reviewed by Cheryl Morgan

Fear of the Future – Daniel Dinello’s Technophobia!, reviewed by Cheryl Morgan

Meaning and Mr. Wolfe – Robert Borski’s The Long and the Short of It, reviewed by Cheryl Morgan

A Reader’s Guide to Australians – Donna Maree Hanson’s Australian Speculative Fiction: A Genre Overview, reviewed by Cheryl Morgan

Out of Synch – Previously reviewed books get a new lease of life

Miscellany – News round up

Editorial Matters – What’s new in the Emerald City.

Strange Sentences

By Hal Duncan

Style, so often seen in opposition to story, is a much-maligned, misunderstood creature within the field of genre fiction, it sometimes seems. Story is — so many would say — content, the immersive and intriguing illusion of characters, plots and themes. Style is only — they continue — a superficial (and therefore secondary) sheen of tricksiness and technique overlaid upon this story. When we criticize a novel as being overwritten, overwrought... self-indulgent, what we are saying generally is that, well, the tricksiness is excessive. There’s too much style here. The prose is too ornate, too baroque, too gothic (or inversely too pared-down, too modernist, too minimalist — which is simply to say that the technique is overdone; the deficiency of detail is still a surfeit of style).

No, there’s a simple story to be told, with clear characters, a straightforward plot, apparent themes... and the author has only gone and messed it all up with this thick layer of impenetrable style smeared over the surface of the structure, prettily patterned but a camouflaging confusion of the underlying composition. Or worse still, he hasn’t bothered with story at all, just daubed that gauche and lurid style stuff all over a blank canvass, with no attempt at ordered composition whatsoever. That’s the argument against style.

Is this a straw man, this antipathy to style as something that "gets in the way" of story, or "disguises" a lack of it? I don't think so. It seems to me rather a common complaint within the field.

Now I want to establish from the start that this is not about Art versus Entertainment. This antipathy to style can come from either philistine or philosopher; both see style as execution, execution as a (potential) barrier to immersion in the composition, that composition as a means to an end, the end being vicarious thrills on the one hand, intellectual insights on the other. Plot and theme. Reading-for-theme tends to have more status than reading-for-plot, but whether you want beard strokes or eyeball kicks, it’s all treating the work itself as a means to an end — if that’s all you’re looking for, that is.

Both philistine and philosopher, these hypothetical extremes of reading only for plot or only for theme, will tend to blame the writer’s execution if the composition is not immediately obvious. Aware of obvious tricks and techniques in the text but unable to discern any meaningful patterning of character and plot, they scapegoat style: if there is a story there, they say, it is obscured by the style; in the absence of plot or theme, they say, this is just playing with words. It is pointless. It is pretentious. It has no substance.

But there’s a threefold danger here, I think, of misreading the text in terms of import, intent and, most importantly, substance. To focus only on action or theme is to miss much of the potential import of a novel, to deny that others might actually, you know, read for other reasons. And to assume a shallow purpose in the face of a profusion of literary techniques is to rule out many plausible aesthetic intents, to deny that the author could actually have had any valid reason at all... really, I mean, honestly, they’re just playing with the pretty words, aren’t they? But these are blinkered views. Worst of all though, to assume that either plot or theme are "covered" in style rather than revealed by it, unraveled, presented to the reader through it, is to ignore the very substance of the novel and focus on an element that really is a superficial effect. This is not just blinkered; it’s misguided.

Style is substance. The substance of a novel is the words upon the page, the clauses they construct, the sentences they make, the paragraphs, the scenes and chapters. Characters, plots and themes — these are only glosses we put on the text, overarching generalities of who these fictional creations are, of what they do, and of why. The questions of personality, action and meaning are integral to the act of composition, but they are no more the underlying composition than the title of the novel is; like that title they are simply abstracted encapsulations of the subject. They answer the question "What is it about?" rather than "What is it?"

Ask me what Vellum is about and I can give you one of two answers. The first is simple, a complete encapsulation of character, plot and theme in a sentence of only two words:

I mean, you can’t get clearer than that, can you — a basic noun-verb predicate? That sentence tells you who it’s about — people — what they do — die — and the thematic focus is, I think, pretty implicit in the combination of those two. It’s not exactly detailed, I’ll grant you, but then sketches never are. A more detailed sketch of a draft-dodging Irish angel, a War in Heaven and the liberating power of nihilism would remain a cursory summation at best. I could draw some more sketches, go into more detail; still it would only be a caricature. So usually, when asked the dreaded question, I go for the second answer. It’s a glib answer, a joke, but in a way it’s more accurate. What’s the book about?

It’s about 180,000 words.

That’s the substance of the book, the meat of it. But what about the bones, you might ask, the architecture, the underlying composition? Don’t we have to talk about this in terms of character, plot, theme? Isn’t that just the way it is, because that is what the story is made up of?

No, the story is made up of words. The skeleton of the book, what gives the sinews and muscles of sentences an overall shape, is simply larger units of prose, the book as a whole breaking down into volumes, chapters, scenes, paragraphs, sentences, the building-blocks of that larger structure. How the sentences are put together into paragraphs is as much a stylistic choice as the choice of how the words are put together into sentences. How the paragraphs are put together into scenes is as much a stylistic choice again, as is how those scenes are put together into chapters, and so on, all the way up. All choices of substance, of what goes into a book, are stylistic choices, style being only the characteristic choices that distinguish one writer from another (or one book from another, to be more accurate; one writer can have many styles).

To give you a comparison, if we look at painting, the styles of Romanticism and Neo-Classicism (in, say, Delacroix and David respectively) are not just a matter of coloring-in some paint-by-numbers line drawing, using brushstrokes of different types, wild and thick on the one hand, restrained and smooth on the other in order to achieve different styles. The Romantic and Neo-Classical styles are not simply surface effects; it’s as much a matter of structure as anything else, of subject and environment, foreground and background, the character and plot of painting. It’s dynamic diagonals and ellipses versus stable verticals and horizontals. It’s order versus chaos. One cannot take Delacroix’s "The Raft of the Medusa", clean up the wild paintwork and suddenly have a Neo-Classical painting. Nor can one take David’s "The Death of Marat", paint over it with rough brushstrokes and suddenly have a Romantic painting.

More to the point, take Cubism or Abstract Art, where the style is defined at least as much by choices of composition as by choices of surface execution: could we take a jpg of Picasso's "Guernica", run it through some filters in a graphics program (right-click, select Effects >> Soften) and suddenly have a work of the Impressionist school? Would browning, ageing, darkening turn one of Mondrian’s geometric canvasses into a painting in the "style" of an Old Master?

What it’s really about, I think, is the expectation of straightforward representation. In the work of Mondrian or Picasso there’s a break from direct representation that can leave the viewer unmoored, unsure of the subject and therefore unconvinced that there actually is one. And without a subject, it follows on, surely there is no substance. It’s just style. The term "cubism" was first applied as a term of abuse by a French critic, Louis Voxelles, who dismissed the work of Braques as composed of nothing more than "bizarre cubiques". It’s just playing with shapes, he seems to be saying. It’s just playing with words, is the equivalent literary criticism. Style without substance. Strange sentences. But the substance of a Cubist work is those "bizarre cubiques", just as the substance of a novel is those "strange sentences".

In Vellum, I certainly have some strange sentences. Here’s one from the first panel of the fourth section of the twelve section "eclogue" that sits between volume one and two (each of which are composed of seven chapters of twelve sections of four panels each, with a prologue before one and an epilogue after the other (also in twelve sections of four panels)):

Now that is, without a doubt, a flouncy sentence. My God, the alliteration alone should be enough to get it kicked out of the book and sent sulking home, its hand nailed firmly to its forehead in poetic posture. But it’s there exactly because it is so ornate, so artificial. In that eclogue, three different narrative voices are used section by section by section, three different registers, three different syntaxes; one drops away, while the other two gradually merge, because this, as much as the characters, their actions and the meanings of those actions, is the story at that point in the book. Reality is breaking down, a living language is blending mundane reality with fantastic myth, so two different narrative voices, one prosaic and one poetic, have to mingle and merge. That structuring technique is far more of an identifying feature of my style in Vellum than any single narrative voice, naturalistic or artificial, painted with Romantic passion or Neo-Classical restraint.

Compare that sentence above with the first sentence of the next panel:

What I’m trying to say is that there is no more style, no less style, in one sentence than in the other. They have different registers, one highly poetic, the other spartanly prosaic. They have different syntax, one elaborate, the other simple. They have different voices, and one is more artificial than the other. But note that the first sentence has no adverbs and only one adjective in all its pompous grandiosity — the word "vast" as a modifier for "void". As a precise description of an act — the act of singing and the subject of the song — the only excess words in there, other than that "void" are "of" and "and", articulating a list which would otherwise be a formless, incoherent trudge from A to B to C to D to E to F, God help us:

Strip down the sentence to the functional and the sense of it is less clearly articulated; add a few stylistic flourishes, an "of" here, an "and" there, and it becomes easier to read because it breaks the sentence into clauses, gives it more structure. The substance is revealed through, not concealed by, the styling of the sentence.

Of course, we could lose some of that detail. I could have just written "He sings about stuff."

People die. End of story. Not much point in writing the novel then, eh?

But this isn’t about justifying a particular syntactic choice on my part. It’s not about justifying the voice of that sentence. It’s about the idea that we should — or even could — take that sentence (or that sort of a sentence) and somehow strip away the "style", make the prose more "transparent", to reveal the story "underneath". That we could and should communicate the same descriptive detail more effectively in a simpler form. Are there more basic synonyms for "earth", "air", "sea" and "fire"? Are the words "shattering", "scattering" or "gathering" not clear and precise? Is it wildly unconventional to twist the verbs into nouns, too choose a more ergonomic "shatterings" over "acts of shattering" and so on? Are the words "flickerings" or "flecks" or "flash" confusing as descriptors of fire? Style is not something that’s been superimposed upon that sentence; it’s just a matter of the structural choices made in putting it together. I made similar structural, stylistic choices putting that sentence together with others, some strange, some not so strange, to make the story as a whole.

Some people will, of course, simply prefer the register of one sentence to that of the other. That first sentence is, without a doubt, flouncy as fuck. That’s the technical term, by the way. So, yes: the high-flown rhetorical tone can be grating in its artifice. The pared-down prosaic narrative can be lustreless in its functional simplicity. And to this extent, the narrative voice — not style but voice — the presence or absence of a combination of rhythm and vocabulary which has in its own right a certain character, which gives a sub-audible texture to the "surface" of the work, can be a barrier to perception of the "underlying" composition. But if style is, as I am arguing, as much structure as syntax and lexicon, we should not blame our incomprehension on a surfeit of style over substance. It’s like saying there's too much Cubism smeared all over Picasso’s "Guernica". Stripping away the Cubism from "Guernica" would not reveal the underlying composition. Strip away the Cubism and there is no "Guernica".

So why is it style that gets the blame when the large-scale structuring of a novel is not obvious, when we look at a work and see only these "strange sentences"? I think there are actually two distinct complaints here.

On the one hand there’s the power of voice — not style, but voice — to alienate the reader, to irritate with its artifice. I remember when I first started reading Peake’s Gormenghast, trudging slowly through the first fifty pages, hating the book, despising it, because the prose was so thick, the tone so contrived, the pace so ponderous. Fifty pages in though, suddenly it clicked. I accepted this weird, unnatural narrative voice, understood how intrinsic it was to the novel, to the import, intent and substance of this grand, archaic and eccentric structure. Remove that voice from Gormenghast, strip away the style of Peake’s strange sentences, and you’d have only a shell without substance. Nevertheless, there are many, I’m sure, for whom that voice never clicked and never will, who can’t "get past" the style, who can’t "see through" it.

On the other hand there’s the rejection of straightforward representation that you get in Modernist art, painting and fiction, where the structure of the work does not map directly to the subject but instead works on more abstract relationships. Fragmenting and recombining, cutting-up and folding-in, this kind of work can render the subject in such an unfamiliar state it seems there is no subject at all. I remember when I first read Burroughs’s The Naked Lunch, flying through page after page of centipedes and junkies, orgies and hangings, loving the sheer drive of this drug-fuelled homo-pornographic and fantastic chaos, but having no idea what was going on or what it all meant, no idea of plot or theme. Being a collage, a mosaic, the fact that the reader has to fit its shards of shattered subject back together in their mind, doesn’t mean it has no subject at all. Still, there are those, I’m sure, who’ll always find Burroughs baffling, for whom there’s nothing there "beneath" all the experimentation, all the style.

If it sounds like I’m blaming all incomprehension on the inadequacies of the reader, that’s not the point I’m trying to make. The reader is perfectly entitled to read for whatever reason they want, to reject a book because the voice is too affected or the prose too dislocated. I simply think it’s a mistake to set up a dichotomy between style and substance, to blame those strange sentences for seducing the callow author with their sensual drift, their sonorous shifts, distracting the writer from their role as purveyor of plot or theme. That’s not style without substance. It might be voice saying nothing that we want to hear, or incoherent reconstruction of the subject, or both; but if there’s voice at all, if there are words on the page, then there is substance, and even if the subject is entirely unfathomable there’s still substance, just as a Mondrian has meaning — import, intent and abstract significance — even in its complete refusal to represent.

And who knows? Maybe those strange sentences you find infuriating at first will win you over with their wiles; maybe they’re saying something that’s worth hearing. And maybe there is a coherent structure to be grasped, if you just step back a little from the novel and, instead of focusing on this bit here and that bit there — instead of focusing on all those strange sentences which — the substance just as much as they’re the style, the basic components of the underlying composition — look at it as a whole.

Maybe it’s not all just "bizarre cubiques".

Maybe it’s not all just strange sentences.

Day of the Dead

By Cheryl Morgan

People writing book reviews today all grew up in the 20^th Century. When I was a kid the 21^st Century was a far-off future inhabited by the characters from Gerry Anderson TV shows. And yet now here we are. In some ways the lives we lead are very science-fictional compared to what we knew back then. But people are still writing science fiction, and I occasionally see reviewers using the phrase, "21^st Century science fiction". What does it mean?

Well, who knows? But let us, for the moment, play the Movements game and try to think how SF written now might be different from what was written then. Here’s a very simple classification.

19^th Century SF was centered on Europe and came out of the old empires that collapsed after World War I. Classic writers were Verne and Wells, and the prevailing technology was mechanical.

20^th Century SF was centered on the US and began with the idea of space as an extension of the Frontier (Heinlein). From there it evolved into the Galactic Pax Americana of Star Trek, and finally to a future ruled by sinister American corporations (cyberpunk). The prevailing technology was electronic and, latterly, digital.

21^st Century SF, in contrast, will concentrate on the future after the fall of the American economic empire. It will often be set in former Communist countries, and in countries now regarded as "Third World" such as India and Brazil. The prevailing technology will be biological. Early examples of the sub-genre might be M. John Harrison’s Signs of Life, Geoff Ryman’s Air, and Ian McDonald’s River of Gods (not to mention the eagerly awaited Brasyl).

Where does all this lead us? Why, to a book review of course. Indeed, to a review of a book that fits squarely in the definition above. The Patron Saint of Plagues by Barth Anderson is set in a resurgent Mexico, led by President for Life, Emil Obregón. The Mexicans have their own Pope, have renamed their capital Ascensión in recognition of their rise to the status of a world power, and they are busily reconquering Tejas.

The US federal government pretty much collapsed along with their economy, but some still cleave to the old ways. David Henry Stark is a crack virus hunter with the Center for Disease Control. Whenever a dangerous plague breaks out, Stark and his fellow experts jet in to isolate the virus and devise countermeasures. Of course Stark doesn’t expect to be called in to combat an outbreak of dengue fever in Ascensión. It doesn’t sound serious enough, and in any case he is American and therefore technically at war with Mexico. Then he gets a mysterious email supposedly from a Mexican doctor who claims that the plague is not dengue at all, and that the true nature of the outbreak is being covered up. Not long after, the official invitation from the Mexican government arrives.

Because of the war, Mexico cannot enlist Stark’s aid openly. And because of the war it is not easy for him to get there. Consequently a certain amount of techno-thriller rushing around and waving of guns is required. But the seriousness of Obregón’s summons is borne out by the agent that he sends to ensure that Stark gets to Mexico.

Her ratty black hair was pushed back from her brow, revealing a hairline that had been shaved back several inches from her face. Unnatural wrinkles distorted her exposed scalp and temples, as if thick twine coiled just below the skin. She looked briefly at Stark, then away, and Stark realized who, what, she was. Her eyes shone in the dark but the gleam wasn’t happiness. It was an augmented optic nerve and silicon lens, which turned that organ into another brain, or rather, a computer. Or so Joaquin had once told Stark. She was a sabihonda as the Mexicans called them. A cyborg.

Of course while Obregón might have been very serious about wanting Stark in Mexico, there’s no guarantee that he wanted him there to cure the plague. If the virus did turn out to be artificially created, and its virulence and specificity certainly suggested that, then who better to be able to blame it on than a famous American virus expert?

And then there is another issue. Mexico is a deeply Catholic country. Nothing happens there without it having religious significance. And one major mystery to be solved is how Sister Domenica, a radical nun, was able to predict the arrival of the plague and warn Mexico’s poor against it. Not that that necessarily did much good. Those poor people tended to react to the plague in much the same way as other poor Catholics reacted to the Black Death hundreds of years ago.

In susurrant, sliding steps, nearly fifty flagellants in black-leather masks entered the wide zócalo. Haunting in their masks, with zippers up the front of their blank, black faces, they raised their elbows high to deliver blows upon their own backs, sweaty chests thrust forward. A man in a tattered priest’s cowl of Holy Renaissance red and black stepped to the front of the procession, holding a cross like a torch. Vampirically pale and wild-eyed, he stood among the snapping whips and pointed into the smoking cathedral, screaming a mad mix of Spanish and Latin. "Virus y veneno! Virus y veneno!"

There are several aspects of The Patron Saint of Plagues that are very impressive. To begin with Anderson clearly knows enough about how viruses and immune systems work to sound extremely authoritative. Doubtless readers with medical degrees will be able to point out where he has taken short-cuts or simplified explanations, but for most of us the science will look very impressive.

In addition Anderson has a clear affection for Mexico. Books like River of Gods and Air, while seriously researched, are clearly not books by people who live in India or Mongolia. The Patron Saint of Plagues, on the other hand, reads like a book by someone who knows Mexico and its people well. Having a smattering of Spanish will help in reading the book as Anderson has no qualms about letting his characters speak in their native language from time to time.

Add to that a well-constructed, politically aware techno-thriller with an intriguing plot and you have a book that should do very well indeed. The Patron Saint of Plagues is Anderson’s first novel, and there are some rough edges to the prose that I’m sure will fall away as he writes further books. Also I was wholly unconvinced by the relationship between Stark and the entertainingly foul-mouthed Pakistani doctor, Isabel Kushub. But I’m sure that when "best first novel" lists get discussed next January this book will be one of the first suggested.

By the way, when you get to read the book you will note that I’ve spelled President Obregón’s name as Anderson’s manuscript has it, not how it was mis-typed by someone at Bantam. I understand that the Bantam editorial team is considering introducing certain management techniques pioneered by a gentleman called Torquemada. Hopefully subsequent editions will allow for it to be corrected.

Subscriber Draw

By Cheryl Morgan

Emerald City is a non-profit venture supported by the kind donations of our subscribers. For information on supporting the magazine please see here.

This month, courtesy of Bantam, we have three copies of Barth Anderson’s The Patron Saint of Plagues available to be won. You may think you don’t have much of a chance, but if more people don’t subscribe soon those kind people who did send us money are going to start winning a second book.

The draw will take place on May 16th. Rules for the draw are available on the Emerald City web site here.

More Thrilling Adventures

By Cheryl Morgan

As people are probably getting to know by now, Chris Roberson is a big fan of the pulp ethic, of thrilling adventure stories simply told. His latest foray into pulp revivalism is Paragaea: A Planetary Romance, a new novel from Pyr. It tells the story of Akilina "Leena" Chirikov, the pilot of the ill-fated Vostok 7. History tells us that Russian engineers cancelled the launch of that space craft, but actually it did reach orbit, whereupon it vanished into one of those inconvenient space-time discontinuities. Chirikov found herself orbiting a strange planet, at which point her adventures were only just beginning.

The planet of Paragaea is a version of Earth in a parallel universe, or something similar. It is populated by strange races of man-animal hybrids: jaguar men, snake men and so on. The book is dedicated to, amongst others, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and to Alex Raymond, the creator of Flash Gordon, which should give you some idea of what to expect. Along with her companions, Lt. Hieronymous Bonaventure ("Hiero"), a former Napoleonic-period British naval officer, and Balam, the exiled prince of the jaguar men, she travels through this new world having, well, adventures.

The particular adventure in question, of course, is to try to find another trans-dimensional portal whereby Leena, a devoted servant of the Soviet system, can return to our Earth and report to her superior officers. However, this is primarily an excuse to allow our heroes to wander back and fore across the landscape, meet various strange beings, and get into hair-raising scrapes. Paragaea is one of those books in which the heroes find themselves in mortal danger at the end of every other chapter, only to spring free with a single bound in the beginning of the next.

I’m not a great expert on pulp-era fiction, but I think it quite likely that one of the attractions of Burroughs’ and Raymond’s fiction was that they never wrote a book that was 400 pages long. Roberson, on the other hand, has done this. It isn’t long before the reader wonders why. Clearly some of the encounters are necessary to the furtherance of the plot. In particular their teaming up with the android, Benu, is necessary to show that Paragaea, far from being the primitive society it seems, is in fact a post-scientific society filled with wonders of nanotechnology and genetic engineering that Roberson doesn’t need to explain because they are so far advanced that they are indistinguishable from magic.

Some of the encounters are also necessary because Roberson, commendably, does try to do some character development and address the issue of how Leena’s Communist ideals are affected by being thrown into a pseudo-mediaeval world where no one has heard of Karl Marx. However, I have a sneaking suspicion that many of the encounters exist only because Roberson’s imagination is a little too endless for his own good. Burroughs or Raymond would, I suspect, have made two or three books out of Roberson’s one, and I suspect they might have been more exciting because of that.

On the other hand, Roberson has to work within the modern industry where a novel is expected to be in the region of 300-500 pages (or 800 if it is a UK-published fantasy). And his book does do pretty much what it is advertised to do. I’m tempted to say that it would work pretty well as a YA book, except that I think youngsters today are way more cynical than they were when I was a kid. Paragaea is probably a book for adults who yearn for simpler times, rather than for kids who want to escape the world they know. But it is a competent piece of escapism, and it does manage to sneak in some serious stuff now and then when the reader isn’t looking. In particular, while it is occasionally critical of Communism, it reserves most of its venom for religious fundamentalists. It isn’t my sort of book, but I’m sure it will find a good market.

I note also that Roberson claims to have included a number of "Easter Eggs" that fellow pulp fans will notice. I’m completely clueless on this subject, but I know that Roberson is very well read in his chosen field and this may provide lots of entertainment for his fellow enthusiasts.

The Tournament Tour

By Cheryl Morgan

You have to be a little careful with the publicity for fantasy novels these days. The word from Tor about David Keck’s In the Eye of Heaven is likely to be that the book features a young man who fights his way up from obscurity to save the world from evil. And yes, that is a plausible summary of the book. But it also makes it sound just like so many other fantasy novels. From the point of view of selling the book to a mass audience it is probably wise to make it sound familiar and predictable. But I know it won’t sell it to you guys, and indeed it would not have sold it to me. The question here has to be, is there anything different and interesting about this book?

Try this for starters. The book is edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who edited three of this year’s Hugo nominees for Best Novel. And while this is, I believe, David Keck’s first novel, he’s no stranger to the business. His wife, Anne Groell, is a senior editor at Bantam. All of which tends to suggest that Keck is not going to produce something formulaic and dull.

Time for some plot, I think. Our hero, Durand, is the second son of a minor nobleman. He ought perhaps have been sent to the church, but that didn’t appeal to him, and in any case his father had hopes. A knight beholden to him looked like he would die without issue. There had been a son, but he had gone off to war and nothing had been heard of him for years. It looked like there would soon be a small village needing a lord. So Durand was sent to train as a knight in expectation of getting land of his own.

Unfortunately for Durand, the missing son turned up. His dreams of lordship were dashed, and there was nothing for it but to become a knight errant. In many ways that is a posh term for "sell sword", but there is the tournament circuit. Young men without money or land can earn fame and fortune on the field of combat. Thus Durand falls in with Lamorick, a duke’s son who is in disgrace and is trying to restore his reputation by fighting anonymously as The Red Knight.

If this sounds a little Arthurian, well indeed it is. Or, more to the point, it is in the tradition of heroic knightly tales from which our modern Arthurian legends are descended. But Keck’s tale has a gritty realism to it. Indeed, at times it sounds rather like a story about a sports club on tour: a bunch of young bravos wandering around the country playing a rather dangerous sport for kicks and glory.

Being a fantasy novel, In the Eye of Heaven does have a small amount of magic in it. There are actual bad guys. Lamorick and his crew do end up saving the kingdom from some devious sorcerers. There is also a section of the book set in an enchanted forest, which is a fine Arthurian theme. But victory is obtained primarily through bravery on the tournament field, and by having the good sense to spot what is going on and do something about it while everyone else is obsessed with petty personal political objectives. Only when all seems hopeless (after the bad guys have triumphed through superior knowledge of parliamentary procedure, no less) is magic rather cleverly invoked.

If you are looking for a "more like this" recommendation, In the Eye of Heaven reminded me most of a trilogy of books by Richard Monaco, based around the Parsifal legend, that were published about 30 years back. They brought the same sort of mud and blood-soaked realism to knightly combat. But I guess few of you will have read those books, so all I can say here is that Keck takes a bunch of themes from Arthurian legend (including the love triangle with Lancelot and Guinevere) and uses them to make a story that is entirely his own and a refreshing change from the dull and predictable fantasy of which we see so much these days.

Temeraire in China

By Cheryl Morgan

One of the problems with writing a sequel to a very successful genre novel is that you have probably used up most of your surprises. A well-designed trilogy can be crafted so as to allow the mysteries to be leaked out slowly over the full length of the work. But if instead you are writing the first book of what might become a lengthy series you pretty much have to set the scene fairly thoroughly in book one, and that means nothing new to put in book two.

This may be why Naomi Novik decided use book two of her Temeraire series to resolve the Chinese problem immediately, rather than have it hanging over Temeraire and Laurence until Napoleon had been dealt with. It takes the characters well away from the hurly burly of Napoleonic warfare and introduces a whole new "alien" landscape in the form of Imperial China. Consequently Throne of Jade is a very different book to Temeraire, and reader interest is maintained.

Just as a quick reminder, we learned in the first book that Temeraire is a Chinese dragon of the Celestial breed normally reserved for the personal use of the Imperial Family. He had been intended as a gift for the Emperor Napoleon, but having been egg-napped on the high seas by a British frigate he ended up being impressed by Captain William Laurence. The two quickly prove their worth in battle, but no one expects the Chinese to be happy about this turn of events, and so it proves.

At the beginning of Throne of Jade we learn that a deputation has arrived in London from China. Led by the Emperor’s brother, no less, they are demanding the immediate return of Temeraire to his homeland. Concerned that the Chinese might ally themselves more closely with Napoleon, and possibly even launch an attack on Russia, Mr. Pitt and the Admiralty decide to accede to the Chinese demands. Temeraire, of course, refuses to go anywhere without Laurence, so the two of them end up on a transport ship taking the long journey by sea to the Far East.

Once again Novik shows a deft touch in her handling of the alternate world. She brings in salient contemporary detail, such as noting the existence of the slave trade as they pass West Africa. We learn that Laurence’s father, Lord Allendale, is a political ally of Wilberforce — something of a surprise given his crusty attitudes towards dragonriders. Then there is the whole matter of Darkest Africa. In a world where dragons exist, what strange creatures might menace Temeraire and his human friends on their journey?

Traveling with them are Prince Yongxing and the Chinese delegation, plus Mr. Hammond, a diplomat assigned to the mission by the British Government. Laurence is very clearly completely out of his depth in political matters, and he and Hammond are very quickly at loggerheads. The Chinese, meanwhile, seek to find ways to come between Temeraire and his rider so as to persuade the dragon to leave the unworthy Englishman behind. But some cross-cultural fertilization does take place and by the time the party reaches China a certain amount of mutual respect has been established. Also a certain amount of amusement is caused along the way by highly spiced food.

If I have a criticism of the book it is that I think Novik was too hands off with famous people in the early stages. I liked the way she kept Temeraire and Nelson apart in the first book, but the arrival of the Chinese delegation seems to be a little too high-powered to be left to Admiralty flunkies as Novik portrays it. Pitt may have had other things on his mind, but I would have expected Lord Castlereagh, the Secretary of War, to have taken an interest, or at least to have been mentioned.

However, as we all know, these books are not really about humans. The narrative only really comes to life when the four-legged star of the show is on stage. Temeraire is as cute and lovable as ever. He gets a girlfriend, and the Chinese fill his head full of all sorts of interesting ideas about dragon rights that have some of the humans muttering about Jacobin dragons. It is all great entertainment, and the good news is that book three is only a month away. I have it sitting by me as I type. Which means I need to stop writing and get reading.

Haunted London

By Cheryl Morgan

Mike Carey has featured in these pages before only as the scriptwriter for the comic version of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere. He’s doing a fine job with it too. But he also writes his own stuff. He has worked on comics such as Hellblazer and Lucifer, and now he has a novel. As you might expect from the title, not to mention from his comics work, The Devil You Know is a horror-related book, but it is pretty squarely in the "supernatural detective" sub-genre rather than anything splatter-worthy. The hero, Felix Castor, is a ghost hunter of sorts. That is, he happens to be one of those people who can see ghosts, and sometimes persuade them to go away. Sometimes people pay him to make them go away. This is not always a good thing, especially for Castor, so he tries not to get involved. But sometimes, like all of the best private eyes, he needs the money.

Of course the clients are often the problem. Take Jeffrey Peele for example. The Director of the Bonnington Archive doesn’t have much time for ghosts or ghost hunters, and he thinks that getting rid of a ghost should be simply a matter of laying down some anti-ghost powder in the areas it frequents, whereupon it will go away. Like mice, you know. Except that ghosts are not mice, they are people. And one of the things you need to do in order to get rid of a ghost is find out who they are and why they are haunting the place. Thankfully the archive is full of musty old documents. The chances are that the ghost came in with a recent acquisition, and that it is centuries dead. But if that is so, why is Castor’s demon-possessed friend, Rafi, advising him not to take the case? And why has an unpleasant East End brothel owner suddenly taken an interest in Castor?

Carey is in that fine tradition of British comics writers who have made it big in American comics. His knowledge of London is clear for all to see. Indeed, there are things in the book that may be completely opaque to US readers. I don’t suppose many of them will know who Kenneth Wolstenholme was, or why he said, "They think it is all over," but almost everyone in Britain knows. I can explain if you really need to know. And indeed I can explain to Carey why Australians have a fondness for putting raptors on wine bottle labels, something he seems rather confused about.

Enough with the detail, however, you want impressions. The Devil You Know is a well-written, entertaining supernatural noir detective story. It has a lot of the usual silly boy stuff about punching each other out, but that’s only to be expected. And Castor isn’t exactly your traditional thriller hero. Quite the opposite, in fact. He’s really very human, as are most of the other characters in the book. A good horror story can be as much about human failings as about the supernatural, and many of the "bad guys" in Carey’s book are simply people who are failing at life, not people who are bad through and though (though it has a few of them too).

Then there is Juliet. Nothing wrong with having a succubus as a character in a horror novel, says I. The girl has a Nature. It isn’t her fault she gets up to bad things. Besides, she has a certain amount of class. It would appear that there are to be more books about Mr. Castor, and that Juliet will be in them too. I suspect I may read them just to see what she gets up to.

Who Was That Masked Man?

By Pádraig Ó Méalóid

Put simply, V for Vendetta is one of the best films I’ve ever seen. Its impact on me when I first saw it was such that I found myself in tears almost continually from beginning to end. On the other hand, I can give you a very good argument as to why the film should never have been made in the first place. More on that later, after a quick synopsis of the film.

The setting for V for Vendetta is Britain in the near future, with a far-right, fascist regime in charge. After a brief piece about Guy Fawkes, presumably for the US audiences, who may not have heard of him, the film starts with Evey Hammond, a young PA for British Television Network, going out to keep an assignation with Gordon Dietrich, one of her superiors at work. Evey knows she will be out after the 11:00 pm curfew, but decides to take a chance anyway. She is soon in trouble with the Fingermen, this government’s version of the secret police, and is about to be raped and probably killed, when a mysterious figure, wearing a cloak, hat, and Fawkesian mask, appears, kills her attackers in spectacular fashion, and introduces himself with a long monologue largely consisting of words beginning with the letter V. This is worth repeating here, not only because it more or less sets out his basic motivations, and because I’ll want to refer to it later, but because is also quite a decent piece of writing:

"In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished; a vital voice once venerated, now vilified. However, this valorous visitation of a bygone vexation now stands vivified, and has vowed to vanquish those venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violent, vicious, and voracious violation of volition. The only verdict is vengeance. A vendetta, held as votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and virtuous. Yet verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose, so let me simply add that it is my very great honour to meet you, and you may call me V."

V then brings Evey up to the rooftops of London, just in time for him to conduct an imaginary orchestra in Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, which starts playing over the city’s ever-present loudspeaker system, and which climaxes with the explosive destruction of the Old Bailey, complete with fireworks, just as Big Ben strikes midnight. The date is the fifth of November.

Within hours, the government’s various agencies are trying to get to grips with the situation. The Finger, in charge of security services; The Eye, in charge of visual surveillance; and The Ear, in charge of audio surveillance, are all trying to find out what they can. Two further agencies, The Mouth and The Nose, in charge of propaganda and criminal detection respectively, attempt to deal with the situation in their own ways. The Mouth releases a statement about a scheduled nighttime demolition of what was a dangerous old building, with the fireworks put down to high spirits by one of the workers. In the meantime, Eric Finch, once a policeman but now reluctantly in charge of The Nose, is trying to find the culprit using good old-fashioned police work. From this point, the film goes into high gear, and simply never stops until the very last shot. To say more than that would simply be giving away too much. Along the way it has time to be a political thriller, a detective story, a conspiracy theory, and a love story, of sorts. It’s possibly even a SF story, if the fact that it’s set in the near future is enough to allow it to qualify. It seems to be influenced by all sorts of things: obviously the original graphic novel by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, but also by things like 1984, Beauty and the Beast, The Count of Monte Cristo, and of course the story of Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot. It’s also, of course, a product of the times in which it was made, in the same way the original story was a product of its own times. And it’s really, truly, absolutely, one of the finest things I’ve ever seen on a cinema screen.

V for Vendetta is the story of a year in the lives of three characters — V, Evey, and Finch — and the world in which they live. All three will be transformed by the end of it, and the world they live in will be transformed also. V starts by seeking only revenge for his hideous treatment twenty years before, and finds compassion through love. Evey wishes not to live in fear any more, and finds strength through revelation. Finch wants to find the truth, and is illuminated by the truth he finds. All three characters are well realized, and very well acted indeed. Natalie Portman, in spite of her slightly wobbly accent at times, is harrowingly good as Evey and Stephen Rea gives a very solid performance as policeman Eric Finch. Hugo Weaving does astonishing things with his role as V, given that he spends the entire film wearing a mask and dressed in black. Subtle movements of the head and slight changes of body posture, along with clever lighting and direction, serve to give what is a fixed and seemingly immutable Guy Fawkes mask a whole range of emotions.

V is probably the most intriguing character to grace the big screen for many years. He’s part action hero, part political activist. He’s a dangerous anarchist and a champion of democracy. He is, undoubtedly, a demented lunatic, but also a dashing and mysterious romantic male lead. This last aspect — that of an attractive and romantic figure — is certainly one that I would never have imagined, but I have been assured by several ladies of my acquaintance that this is definitely the case. On top of this V’s home, the Shadow Gallery, is simply magnificent. It is full to the brim with books and paintings and various cultural artifacts of all sorts, whether high art or popular culture. Jan van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Marriage shares wall space with a framed copy of The Beezer, and native carvings from all over the world are scattered on tables and desks. Evey’s bedroom is simply stuffed with precariously stacked mountains of books. It’s the kind of place any sane person would want to live, and makes a very attractive and intriguing backdrop for certain scenes in the film.

Lots of other actors give great performances. John Hurt as High Chancellor Adam Sutler is suitably angry throughout, only addressing his underlings through a huge television screen, much like Big Brother in 1984. It makes an interesting contrast to Hurt’s own role in the film version of that book. He played Winston Smith, whose torture and transformation finds an echo in Evey’s own transformation. Tim Piggott-Smith is superbly menacing as Creedy, the head of The Finger and a thoroughly nasty piece of work. Stephen Fry, essentially playing himself, gives a very touching and very moving performance as Gordon Deitrich, a performance that would make the film worth seeing all on its own.

On the other hand. . .

Much has been made of the fact that Alan Moore is not a supporter of the movie of V for Vendetta. There are good and strong reasons for this, as I hope I can show. To do this, I’ll have to delve a little into the history of Moore’s work.

I read the first installment of V for Vendetta in the first issue of Warrior in 1982, where it shared space with another of Moore’s finest works, Marvelman. I have a long interest in all the works of Alan Moore, more or less stemming from the time I read that first issue of Warrior. Moore is undoubtedly the finest and most important comics writer in the world now, and possibly ever. Despite this, he has suffered from very shabby treatment at the hands of most of the comics companies he worked for. The back-story of V, particularly, needs to be understood.

The UK comics magazine Warrior, in which V first appeared, lasted for twenty six issues, ending in 1984, by which point the story was a little over halfway through. At the time there was a lot of interest in comics in the media. The idea that comics were actually a legitimate form of literary expression, and that they could actually be read by adults, was starting to be felt. The way the comics companies were dealing with the creative people behind comics was also changing. That process would eventually lead to big companies — such as DC and Marvel — publishing comics that were still copyrighted to the original creators, rather than automatically becoming the property of the company as had always been the case in the past. Moore was at the very spearhead of this, along with Frank Miller and others. However, at the time that Moore went to negotiate a deal with DC, along with co-creator and V artist David Lloyd, and Warrior editor Dez Skinn, those kinds of contracts were still a while away.

The contract that Moore and co ended up with was this: DC would publish V as a ten-issue mini-series, beginning in 1988, and subsequently as a graphic novel, which appeared in 1990, and would own the right to the series, and the character, and in general could do as they wished with it, as long as they kept it in print. However, if the graphic novel went out of print, the rights would then revert to Moore and Lloyd. This all seemed fair enough, except that no-one could have foreseen that the graphic novel would be continuously in print from then until now, therefore, by it’s very success, forever keeping his creation out of Moore’s reach. When DC sold the movie rights for V to parent company Warner Bros, they didn’t need Moore’s permission to do so, and went ahead regardless of his opinions on the subject. Certainly movies had been made of DC properties before, but these were generally of characters that were part of the DC pantheon, and had been written by numerous people over many years, and could certainly not be seen as being the product of a single creative team.

Even at that point, Moore was prepared to allow things to simply proceed as they were. True, two previous movie versions of his works, From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (LoEG), were less than wonderful, but at least he more or less knew that was going to be the case and, having sold the rights, was content to leave the moviemakers to it, as long as they left him alone. Unfortunately, two things happened that finally finished Moore’s desire to have any involvement with Hollywood, the second of which specifically caused him to take an adversarial position on the movie of V.

First of all he was drawn into a court case involving LoEG, claiming that that movie was substantially stolen from a screenplay called A Cast of Characters. There was, apparently, quite an amount of similarity between the two screenplays, but these similarities only came about in that version, and were entirely absent from Moore’s original work. None the less, he found himself giving a ten-hour deposition for the case. It was at this point that he decided that he wanted his name taken off all movies based on his works, and that, if he owned the rights to something, he simply wouldn’t sell those rights to Hollywood in the first place.

The final straw for Moore began in 2005 with a phone call from Larry Wachowski, V’s writer/producer. Moore politely told him that he didn’t want anything to do with films and simply wished to get on with his writing. And that should have been that. But it wasn’t… Moore was soon made aware of a press release about a press conference given by Joel Silver, the film’s producer, and its cast. In this, Silver said that Moore was, "very excited about what Larry [Wachowski] had to say and Larry sent the script . . ." Moore felt, quite rightly, that his name was being used to endorse the film against his explicit instructions. Indeed that they’d managed to quote pretty much the exact opposite of his actual feelings about the project, and about the film industry in general. He requested, through his Wildstorm editor, Scott Dunbier, that DC/Warner Brothers should issue a retraction of what he described as "blatant lies — that’s the phrase I’m groping for." What he wanted, he said, was a retraction, a clarification, and a modest apology, released in a similar manner to the original press release. Silver’s words were removed from the movie’s website, but there was no retraction, although DC’s president, Paul Levitz tried to get Silver to make one. When Moore’s two-week deadline passed, and there was no apology forthcoming, Moore was true to his word. He finished his contracted work for ABC/Wildstorm/DC, which consists of finishing a hardback LoEG book, and a story for Tom Strong, and will now never work for DC again.

And that’s why Alan Moore wants to have nothing to do with the movie version of V for Vendetta.

It is for that reason that I’m so personally torn about the fact that I like the film so much. I absolutely agree that Moore and David Lloyd deserve to have their intellectual property returned to them. On the same line of reasoning, I can see that Moore wouldn’t have wanted the film made, and have no choice but to agree. However, the film did get made, and we can only judge it on what it is, and not what it might have been, or indeed might not have been.

One person who occasionally gets forgotten in all this is David Lloyd, who was the artist and co-creator on V for Vendetta. Unlike Alan Moore, Lloyd was fully in favor of the film, and the point could be argued that the film more closely resembles the story drawn by Lloyd that it does the story written by Moore. Lloyd’s role in creating V was not just following art direction given by Moore either. The character of V was largely designed by him and the ways in which the story was told, like foregoing thought bubbles and sound effects, were at his suggestion. These ideas had far-reaching consequences as Moore and Lloyd were, unknown to themselves, rewriting the grammar of comics as they went along. I sometimes have difficulties with the story of V, which is not without flaws. Even Moore himself acknowledges this in the introduction he wrote for the series. But it is undeniably one of the milestones in the development of comics for a more mature audience, and one of the books on which the current popularity of graphic novels is based.

There are any number of differences between the film and the original graphic novel. If you are going to go see it hoping that it is a direct translation onto the screen of the original then you are bound to be disappointed. The book was originally written in the Britain of the 1980’s, and reflects it’s time. The film was made in the US in the early years of the twenty-first century, and obviously reflects its time, too. Characters are changed, and whole chunks of the book are missing, but none the less the filmmakers obviously had a lot of love for the original work, and manage to drop references to it throughout the film. V’s soliloquy, which I quoted earlier, references many of the titles of the installments of V from the comics, all of which began with the letter V. There were titles like Vaudeville, Vox Populi, Verdict, and so on. Lewis Prothero, although he’s not identified as a doll collector in the film, as he is in the book, still has a few shelves of dolls in his bathroom. The little girl who says ‘Bollocks’ to the cameras still gets to say it, just in a different context. And much else.

On the other hand, the film is riddled with inaccuracies and plot holes. For instance the Jan Van Eyck painting in the Shadow Gallery, The Arnolfini Marriage, is much larger than it should be. We are told at one point that Bishop Lillian, in his earlier days, was paid some ridiculously large sum of money while working at Larkhill, without ever being told why this is the case. Considering that they’re meant to be living in an oppressive fascist regime, the people we see in their homes seem to be in no way actually oppressed. Although a lot is made of the fact that Evey hasn’t had butter in years, wide-screen TVs, tobacco, and beer seem to be in plentiful supply. Numerous other instances could be pointed out, and no doubt will be. However, as far as I’m concerned, they don’t really matter. I loved the film the first time I saw it, and the second time, when I was considerably less emotionally affected and could simply enjoy it for what it was. It’s a well-made film, and an important film, especially for the times we live in. It is even a reasonably good adaptation of the original work, at least in some respects. Certainly the film seems to gather oddness and controversy to itself as it goes along. One of the people working on the film during the destruction of Westminster, as part of a work placement scheme, was Ewan Blair, son of the British prime minister. I even managed to walk into my local comic shop just in time to hear a discussion on whether or not Larry Wachowski’s alleged forthcoming gender realignment surgery would adversely affect the film.

There is one last aspect of the film that I found fascinating. There is a novelization of the movie, which has been written by Steve Moore. Steve Moore is a very old friend of Alan Moore, and is said to be the person who first taught Alan to write comics. He’s also Alan’s magical partner, and in general the pair have worked together in various ways for quite a number of years. I got the opportunity to get a few words from Steve Moore about the writing of the novelization, which are fascinating in themselves:

Certainly Steve Moore’s novelization makes an intriguing third version of the story of V, and I urge you to read it, just as soon as you’ve been to the cinema to see the film a few times. It goes without saying that you should already own a copy of the graphic novel. I’ll leave you with perhaps the most succinct comment I heard on the film, as a crowd of us gathered in the foyer of the cinema after the preview screening here in Dublin. A friend of mine came up to me with a shine in his eyes and said, "let’s go blow shit up!"

Journey's End

By Juliet E. McKenna

The seventh volume of a vast and detailed fantasy series has a lot riding on it. Everything must be wrapped up with a satisfying sense of conclusion, no matter how intricate the story may have become. Yet a straightforward and indeed necessary survey of all the various characters’ fates risks undermining the whole series with a fatal sense of anticlimax. There must be surprises and final, unexpected twists, but these absolutely cannot outrage the logical progression of events established thus far. That presents the author with considerable challenges, as the burden of continuity inexorably steers the narrative in directions that are as clearly indicated for the reader as they are for the writer.

Kate Elliott charts a course through these potential hazards with as sure a touch as she’s demonstrated throughout the Crown of Stars series. The final volume is also called Crown of Stars, and we begin by picking up Alain’s story. His narrative has been one of those threaded through these books and thus tying the series into a coherent whole. Alain is initially a witness to the chaos following on from the cataclysm in the fifth volume that returned the Ashioi to this world. As a solitary traveler, he’s actually having an easier time of it that many of the nobles trying to find a way home through all the destruction with their retinues trailing after them.

It’s entirely logical that everyone would be trying to get home after all the upheavals they’ve faced and, as a result, the encounters between characters who’ve been long separated feel entirely unforced. Naturally, they share tales of what they have done and where they have been, enabling Elliott to recap events for the reader with admirable subtlety. I do like writers who appreciate that even the keenest readers may simply not have the time to go back and re-read previous volumes. And as has always been the case from the first volume, these personal stories anchor this series to a human scale. Great events are not merely being played out as intellectual abstraction. Real people, whom we can sympathize with or loathe with a passion, are living through these momentous times.

Nobles whom we’ve seen plot and counter-plot through the series are now showing their essential character. Some, like Constance and Theophanu, do their best to keep faith with their religion, and with the feudal relationships that oblige them to protect the poor and humble in return for the rewards of their status. Others, such as Conrad the Black and Sabella, are heedless of the suffering around them. They’re still fixated on satisfying their own lusts and ambitions and taking revenge, renewing or discarding old alliances as they see fit. As a consequence they’re heedless of the dangers that threaten their position. If lords and princes are not fulfilling their feudal obligations, how long can they expect the allegiance of the peasantry? The series has consistently been underpinned by an unobtrusive exploration of such wider issues of power and responsibility, personal and political. While this never interferes with the wholly engrossing adventure, it gives it an intellectual depth for those readers that like to consider such debates.

With all this turmoil around him, Sanglant is striving to hold onto the kingship his dying father bequeathed him. Yet he lacks so many of the advantages that Henry enjoyed. The Eagles have lost their magical Sight now that the Ashioi’s return has changed the whole balance of enchantment in this world. His right to the throne remains disputed, thanks to his illegitimacy, his Ashioi blood and his devotion to Liath with her even more perilous dual heritage. There’s also the question of his heir. Their daughter Blessing remains unaccounted for.

Sanglant’s enemies, by contrast, have somehow retained their malevolent magic. Thanks to the undying enmity of the vile Antonia, the ghastly galla are still pursuing Sanglant and his beloved, sorcerous Liath. The couple’s defenses against these shades are finite, and diminishing. The Ashioi too continue their pursuit of Liath and her daughter. If humankind don’t want them, the Ashioi most certainly do. They continue to pursue their own war while the ancient horse-people and their Kerayit allies still contrive against them. And we must not forget Hugh of Austra, a man with magical skills whose heart is as vile as his face is fair.

Nor should we overlook Alain, for so long our useful witness. There’s considerably more to him than this role, and his strange link to the rock-born Eika remains as strong as ever. Their self-proclaimed Emperor Stronghand is determined not to see all his valorous achievements undone even when the consequences of the cataclysm undo the magic of the wise-mothers that his people have so long relied on, rousing a sleeping marvel in the process.

The pace of this final phase of the story is swift, fluent and exciting. This is definitely not one of those final volumes that rely on the reader’s dogged determination to find out what happens to keep them turning the pages. There’s no bogging down in minutiae due to failing inspiration at the end of such a long and complex work. Twist by turn, Elliott deftly satisfies and then confounds expectation, with the narrative as fresh and immediate as when it first began.

The sweeping events of the previous books come full circle and spiral towards a climactic final battle. Just as Sanglant must win through force of arms, Liath must wield the knowledge that is her birthright. All the key players are brought to crucial meetings, some unexpected, some anticipated but with wholly unforeseen consequences. Shock follows on from surprise, right through to the multifaceted negotiations necessary once the battle has been both lost and won. The splendidly creative final resolution is a fitting conclusion to what has been a truly inventive series drawing on all the classic strengths of high heroic fantasy.

Disposable Living

By Victoria Hoyle

Only rarely does an ordinarily mainstream author make a foray into Speculative territory that is well received by both "literary" and genre critics. Oftentimes this is a simple matter of ‘and never the twain shall meet’. At other times they do meet but in head-on collision, forceful enough to send whole communities of reviewers into apoplexy (think: Atwood’s Oryx and Crake). Still, it does happen, every so often, that a novel breaches genre boundaries successfully and proves mutually acceptable. Such a one is Kazuo Ishiguro’s Man Booker nominated, Arthur C. Clarke Award nominated Never Let Me Go.

Set in an alternate England in the late 1990s, it is the sixth novel from an author who has won universal critical acclaim for his real-world fiction but who, wonder of wonders, has still proven amenable to having his latest work associated with SF. It seems possible that he is even flattered: he recently confirmed that he will attend the presentation of the Arthur C. Clarke award at Sci-Fi-London at the end of this month. Amen to that, say I.

Kathy H., aged 31 and first person narrator of Never Let Me Go, has been a "carer" for nearly 12 years and, she admits in her opening words, a rather good one:

This chatty, easy voice is typical of her and breeds an immediate familiarity. She speaks matter-of-factly and gives herself no context; she asks us to collude with her, addressing the reader with a "you-know-how-it-is" intimacy. She even posits, slyly, that whatever and wherever she is, we are in a similar position: "I know carers, working now, who’re just as good and don’t get half the credit. If you’re one of them, I can understand how you might get resentful…" Of course, we have no idea what Kathy is alluding to but that has its own comfort for genre readers. We thrive on just this kind of obliquity.

Her subject, however, is not to be her (or, by implication, our) present but her past; her mode is retrospective and it is memory, often digressive and uncertain, that she plunders for significance. She begins to narrate her privileged childhood spent at Hailsham, an apparently idyllic boarding school. Like all boarding schools it has its own set of bizarre customs: an enormous emphasis placed on creativity, "Exchanges" in which students buy and sell each other’s artwork, "Sales" of bits and pieces of twentieth century paraphernalia, visits from the mysterious "Madame" and "guardians" who look after the children’s every need. In describing her friendships with fellow students and the minutiae of their daily lives Kathy H. paints a picture of a childhood and adolescence spent without parents, without holidays (religious or otherwise) and without contact from the outside world.

Her childhood self seems to know and not know that there is something strange about this upbringing. As she says herself:

"…it feels like I always knew…in some vague way, even as early as six or seven. And it’s curious, when we were older and the guardians were giving us those talks, nothing came as a complete surprise. It was like we’d heard everything somewhere before."

We, the reader, are kin to Kathy H.’s younger self in this respect. From the beginning we have known and yet not known the truth. Kathy’s language has been preparing us, peppered as it is with common words - like "carer", "donor", "recovery centre" and "donation" — used in disquieting ways. When one of the guardians, Miss Lucy, reveals what we’ve suspected all along — that Kathy H. and all the others are cloned humans, bred for the sole purpose of organ donation — it hardly come as a surprise. Still, it’s a striking reality: Kathy H. and her closest friends, Tommy and Ruth, have been born in order that they might die, in order that some anonymous others might live. This is their biological destiny.

When they leave Hailsham at sixteen they move to The Cottages, a sort of half-way house where they stay until their "carer" training begins. They might be carers looking after older donors for up to a dozen years before they’re called to donate themselves, however once the donation process is initiated it continues until they "complete". Death is never mentioned, but there is a terrible, desperate inevitability to it. In this sense at least, Never Let Me Go is a typical Ishiguran novel of human tragedy.

Perhaps we should begin, however, with what it is not. Certainly it is not a novel predicated on vigorously credible cloning technologies. In truth cloning is the narrative’s ur-beast, a fabulous construct upon which Ishiguro builds character and comment rather than story. The word "clone" isn’t part of Kathy’s vocabulary and is used only once, in anger, by another character. It is, if you like, the proverbial elephant in the room. Ishiguro chooses not to reveal the development of the technology, the sequence in which donations are given or the mechanisms by which "donors" survive the removal of up to three vital organs. So if you’re after the actual "science" in the science fiction you may well be disappointed. I’d recommend something like Michael Marshall Smith’s Spares (1997) instead. His take on organ donor clones is vicious in its scientific veracity.

Nor does Never Let Me Go have much in the way of traditional "plot". Even Ishiguro’s denouement is characteristically quiet. Of course, there are questions to be answered — Who is Madame? What is her "gallery"? What sets Hailsham students apart from their fellow clones? — but it is a novel to make your heart ache rather than pound.

Character, however, is key. Ishiguro has always had a penchant for the restrained and the civilized, for deference and repression even, which is well reflected in Kathy H.’s ragged innocence and acceptance of her fate. Although her narration is informal, her brand of disclosure is thoroughly limited: her sheltered life, defined by Hailsham, then by the Cottages and finally by her role as a carer has engendered a circumscribed expression. These basic stages, or rather her memories of them, are all she has to offer us by way of revelation. She isn’t one for diatribes or hot displays of emotion. She doesn’t rail against the scientists who made her or the agencies that have controlled her life. She never admits her ultimate physical destiny. She cannot. She hardly comprehends an alternative existence.

Her contact with the world outside and with non-clones has been wholly fragmentary. The Sales at Hailsham exposed her to a heritage of twentieth century popular culture — videos, music tapes and personal walkmans — but in a piecemeal fashion that loaded each object with peculiar significance. Thus a pencil case or a cassette tape might come to symbolize parental care and specialness in a world with neither. Kathy experiences a mini culture in which material ownership is a signal of received and given love. She turns to her Judy Bridgewater tape for comfort, playing the song "Never Let Me Go" to herself, and, in a strange way, feels that the tape loves her back. The giving of Sale gifts, the buying of each other’s art at Exchanges is the highest act of affection and honoring between the friends. It is an emotional economy laden with pathos.

Sign and action are similarly weirded. Once the Hailsham students move to the Cottages they begin to "collect" gestures from the wider world, enacting them on each other. At one point Kathy describes a way of saying goodbye in exacting detail, even though it is no more than a brief tender touch to the arm. All the things we take for granted — the finer points of human interaction —have never been socialized into Ishiguro’s clones. They are appallingly innocent and he does an excellent job of illuminating the truth of it. Kathy H. never considers a life beyond what she is because she is incapable of doing so. She is not physically constrained — she is free to drive about the country, she lives in a bed-sit alone, she chooses her own "donors" — but there is no escape for her.

Yet always beneath the rather flat calm with which Kathy relates events is a typically Ishiguran fury, a pure volcanic turmoil of grief and horror and helplessness that is without real direction. Here is a woman whose interpersonal relationships are hopelessly curtailed, whose selfhood is entirely disregarded, whose humanity is conveniently denied but who absorbs injustice all the same. How does she manage it? Why does she choose to stay? What invisible force keeps her and her fellow donors in orbit of a system that refines them down to just kidneys and livers and lungs and hearts? Whatever it is, Ishiguro implies, these same forces are the ones that keep us all locked in a state of properness. They stop us flailing out at unfairness, stop us killing each other, stop us killing ourselves. The irony of this properness is that it is at once essential — without it we would go insane — but also impossibly restrictive. In the end though it allows us to live and persist, it allows us to function. Perhaps Never Let Me Go is the most potent novel I’ve ever read about the power of this social contract and the function of the human within it.

The novel also imagines a dreadfully possible reality, facilitated by science but born and nurtured by all too familiar forms of ideological reticence. The kinds that lead us to prioritize some lives over others or allow us to dehumanize individuals over distance. It is the kind that supposes ideas can be controlled, that controversial science can be purely academic. It says categorically that this is not so:

Because Ishiguro’s favored approach to atrocity is indirect what we get is a slow revelation, a gradual build up of tension to this terrible understanding. And there is a certain cathartic joy in being crushed by the weight of a possibility so well evoked. As always with Ishiguro the consolation is in the humanizing reality of our reader’s response. We are horrified and that is only how it should be.

Thoughtful, provocative and emotionally rich Never Let Me Go should have won last year’s Booker Prize. The fact that it didn’t may or may not be a reflection of the entrenched anti-SF prejudices of the judges. What is true, however, is that the novel is now up against tough competition for this year’s Clarke Award with stronger-than-strong showings from Geoff Ryman, Charles Stross and Liz Williams. Nevertheless, it could well prove a worthy winner.

More Alien Than Space Ships

By Karina Meerman

Bear Daughter by Judith Berman has been lying on my desk for the longest time. I finished reading it weeks ago, but writing the review was daunting. Not because Bear Daughter is a bad book, but because I couldn’t organise my thoughts to form a proper opinion. The deadline has come and gone and has come again, so I will attempt to unravel my ambivalence.

Bear Daughter is the story of Cloud, a young girl who wakes up one morning in the village of Sandpit to discover she has become fully human. Overnight she lost her bear part. She is very confused about this (as was I when I read it), but the people in the village seem to accept the fact that bears sometimes are people too. Cloud’s father is Lord Stink, an immortal bear spirit. Her mother is the lovely Thrush, married to the human King Rumble, who is mightily displeased with Cloud’s existence.

The story goes that King Rumble, in his hunger for power, has bound up the ghosts of Cloud’s bear brothers and bear father, creating a hole in the mortal world that only Cloud can close. But Cloud wants to be a human girl and forget about her bear self. She flees Sandpit to escape the cruelty of Rumble and the threat of his wizard, Bone. Her flight becomes a journey that will take her to some very magical places, from "the watery home of the orcas to the celestial seat of the prince of heaven." She travels across what must be Northern America and encounters talking animals, spirit beings and some actual people. During her journey, the ghosts of her brothers cry out to her, asking her to save them.

The story has many recognisable elements in it: bear, girl, soul, family, spirit, mountain, water and dog. But Berman has a peculiar way of combining them. Being almost totally ignorant of Native and/or North American culture, I didn’t know what to do with the gods and spirits in the story. To me, the characters were more alien than space ships and I just couldn’t relate. I had the feeling I was missing some important information and that I’m from the wrong cultural background to fully appreciate the book.

I really wanted to like it, because Bear Daughter is a different book, with a magical quality that a lot of mainstream fantasy doesn’t have. It was a joy to read a book without white skinned, blond haired fairy kings and queens, helpless women, heroic men, magic rings and wizard trainees. I love the way Berman writes: it is alive and clean and to the point. But it all felt too alien and I just couldn’t handle Cloud.

It infuriated me that she acted so powerless while she had so much power within reach. Why didn’t she use her anger? Why reject her power just to be a human girl, when her personal path was obvious? Maybe it is a Book With a Message. After all, many women wait too long before they use their real power, and some never discover it. And maybe that annoyed me in Cloud. Maybe that part of the story was a wee bit too recognisable.

Horrible Favorites

By Stuart Carter

If you like horror movies — not any horror movie in particular, just horror movies in general — then this book is especially for you. If you have ever enjoyed a horror movie — any horror movie — then this book is for you, but you’re probably better off borrowing it from someone. Are you an academic, studying the genre from the dim, dusty confines of your ivory tower? This book is probably kind of useful to you. Have you simply got too much time on your hands and are doggedly working your way through the entire horror movie section at your local DVD rental emporium? Yeah, you definitely need this book — if only to save yourself some cash and wasted hours of your life that you will never get back.

What’s particularly nice about Mark Morris’ Cinema Macabre is that it is unmistakably an enthusiast’s book. Each contributor, all of them SF/F/H luminaries, has turned in an essay that isn’t necessarily about The Best Horror Film Ever Made In The History Of The World So Shut Up And Listen There, Especially You At The Back, Fool. No. Instead we have 50 pieces of writing by a quite disparate group of individuals about their favorite horror movie. Possibly it is the one that featured the best cinematography, but equally likely, the one that first scared the pants off them as a wide-eyed ten-year-old; or which once struck a chord with them; or the one they recall that disturbed them for the longest time. A film that, for whatever reason, they wanted to write about.

And it’s a fine idea, especially given the inherently visceral nature of the horror movie genre. I’ve read quite enough dry ‘textual analysis’ of Alien, thank you very much, and I’m altogether too familiar with the kinetic cinematography of The Shining (perhaps I should get out more). And whilst the essays on both those films contained herein are as readable and thought-provoking as you could hope for, what it was nicest to find in this unpretentious, but not unintelligent, collection is some of the stupid celluloid; the rough diamonds, the films that fall short of what their makers may have hoped for, and yet which, for all their faults, still managed to wring gasps from, to give pause to, and even inspire their audiences. Personally I recall watching Lamberto Bava’s Demons as an impressionable 14-year-old and absolutely loving it, so much so that, in order not to spoil that memory, I’ve never watched it since. Now, having read Marcelle Perks’ essay on that film, I feel far more confident about doing so.

John Carpenter’s Halloween and The Thing both scared the living daylights out of me when I first saw them, and I still rate them very highly today, so it’s a joy to find that there are others who do, too. Muriel Gray’s four pages on The Thing is an informative delight, as is Terry Lamsley’s essay about The Return Of The Living Dead. Each rekindled the exhilaration of seeing those films for the first time, and yet also added an extra dimension of understanding to them.

But Cinema Macabre isn’t simply the literary equivalent of one of those TV nostalgia shows that seem to dominate so much of the schedules here in the UK just now (all of them titled something like 100 Best TV Genocides or TV’s Greatest Enemas!). Although an element of that kind of nostalgia does inevitably (and far from unpleasantly) creep in, there are plenty of films that I’d barely heard of here: some new, some old, and more than a couple of classics I’ve accidentally managed to miss time and time again. (My wife never tires of reminding me each time I roll my eyes in horror that she’s never seen, say, Return Of The Living Dead, that I have somehow managed to avoid watching The Wicker Man all these years). There are at least half a dozen films mentioned in Cinema Macabre that I want to see for the first time, and well over a dozen more that I simply want to see again — The Night Of The Demon, The Old Dark House, Let’s Scare Jessica To Death, King Kong and, of course, Demons, to mention just a handful.

Sadly, even Ramsey Campbell’s essay on David Lynch’s Lost Highway couldn’t persuade me to bother seeing that film again; however, this is yet another entertaining aspect of this thoroughly recommended, thought-provoking, yet easy to read book: the debate over what is included versus what isn’t. I mean, for goodness’ sake, where’s Nightmare On Elm Street? Where’s The Incredible Melting Man?? And surely the mystery of Julia Roberts’ entire career comes under the heading of Cinema Macabre, doesn’t it…?

City of Freaks and Aliens

By Mario Guslandi

The city of Paxton, more popularly known as Punktown, is an Earth colony located on the planet Oasis. There different races and species, both indigenous and foreign, cohabit and collide. The brainchild of the American writer Jeffrey Thomas — author of the notable horror collections Aaaiiiieee! and Honey Is Sweeter Than Blood — Punktown , with its varied urban setting, has already been the location for a previous short story collection published by Ministry of Whimsy Press in 2000. Now joined by his brother Scott (author of Westermead), Jeffrey comes back to the dangerous streets of this alien city to observe and dissect the events taking place in there. The stories feature monsters, mutants, clones, robots and other weird creatures.

An unusual mix of SF and horror (but definitely unbalanced towards SF), this volume collects eight new stories by Jeffrey and seven by Scott. The themes vary from mutant "children" born from an unhappy whore ("Sweaty Betty") to an alien menagerie at loose in a dilapidated building ("Perfectly Beastly"), to the difficult relationship between a man and a bunch of his own clones ("Hydra"), and so on.

Jeffrey manages to really hit the target with several pieces. In "The Unbearable Being of Light" a huge, bizarre creature dominates the scene in a zone inhabited by enigmatic people and repellent parasites. The alien atmosphere makes the tale dark, fascinating and not so subtly unsettling. "The Hate Machines" relies upon a very original idea. Life sucks in Punktown, and special puppets are made available to get rid of anger and hate, and to allow people to let off steam.

"Adrift On The Sea Of Milk" is an excellent story about a carnival ride and a peculiar doll given out as a prize. The ambiguous nature of the doll (mechanical? animal?) is depicted in a delicate, disquieting manner, revealing an undercurrent of sadness and despair. The beautifully written "Willow Tree" is an offbeat tale of murders taking place around an old tree at a traffic intersection.

Among Scott’s contributions I particularly liked "Pulse", the intriguing report of the strange adventures of a necrophiliac bus driver forced to face murder and violence, and "The Merciful Universe". The latter is a gentle, compelling piece of fiction describing the lives of a young girl and a lonely woman, and the unlucky fate of their pets. The remaining stories I found a bit too "alien" for my own taste, but that is Punktown’s nature, I guess.

A mix of strong colours and delicate shades, this collection will disturb more than one reader, delight some, disgust a few, but it won’t bore any, which I think is no small merit. Isn’t entertainment the first objective of fiction?

Short Fiction

By Nic Clarke

The future is, as usual, bleak. The April issue of Interzone (# 203) contains no less than three stories that fall under the broad heading of "future dystopia". Karen Fishler’s "Among the Living" has a neatly disquieting premise — experienced but aged soldiers are given new bodies so they can continue to serve their country, and kill foreigners. But the emotional impact of the story is somewhat undermined by its length, and by the unnecessary extra moral sting in the tail, which overplays an already stark scenario. "Ten With a Flag", by Joseph Paul Haines, meanwhile, is a succinct but ultimately predictable exploration of prenatal predestination.

Easily the most effective and original of the bunch — and my own pick of the month — is "The American Dead", by Jay Lake. From its opening lines it is the issue’s stylistic standout, the present-tense immediacy of the narrative offsetting the languid heat of the environment:

"Americans are all rich, even their dead. Pobrecito knows this because he spends the hottest parts of the day in the old Cementerio Americano down by the river. The water is fat and lazy while the pipes in the colonia drip only rust brown as the eyes of Santa Marguerite. […] He sits within a drooping tree which fights with life and watches the flies make dark, wriggling rafts out on the water."

The colonia’s inhabitants live under the repressive rule of a cadre of priests and their enforcers. The American graves represent young Pobrecito’s dreams of escape — of prosperity, and the beauty and ease that he believes will accompany it — which he shares with others by selling pictures torn from a hidden cache of pornographic magazines. But there are hints that America, fallen victim to some unspecified apocalypse, is now unobtainable to outsiders for reasons other than just geography and economic opportunity.

Lake resists the temptation to spell out the details of his world too directly, choosing instead to filter it through colloquialisms and imagery drawn from Pobrecito’s experience and surroundings. The result is a tantalizingly spare picture wrapped up in Biblical metaphor and the affecting tragedy of the characters. How did this state of affairs come about? Does the ending suggest that change is imminent? Questions about sex, society, and the sexualization of society — in particular, how women are continually made into Eves — are raised without hectoring, and without any attempt to provide programmatic answers.

Another strong offering, markedly different in tone and style, is Elizabeth Bear’s "Wane". This is a detective story in an alternate history setting: an early twentieth-century world where the US never gained independence, the Aztec Empire still exists, and the moon is the color of copper. It has an engaging lead character in Lady Abigail Irene Garrett, and a flavor of both steampunk (there’s a dirigible) and court-politicking high fantasy. The prose is ornate, with an emphasis on intricate description, but not overly so.

Also notable is Paul Di Filippo’s "The Furthest Schorr: 32 Fugues Based on the Paintings of Todd Schorr", a collection of vignettes inspired by the titular artist’s work that appear spread throughout the magazine. They showcase a wide range of settings and subgenres, from the exploration of alien planets to a greedy child who summons up spirits in quest of an endless supply of chocolate milk. All share the same fundamental structure, however. Each one ends with an ironic, humorously-nasty twist. My personal favorite was "The Torment of Sammy Squashbrains", a splendidly creepy snippet about a group of children invited to a Halloween party thrown by the author of their favorite books.

By way of contrast, the two stories I most enjoyed this past month at Strange Horizons were a pair of modernist contemporary fantasies. "The Flying Woman" by Meghan McCarron (20 March) is sad, lovely fairytale about a love that dare not speak its name. The narrative is sparse and fractured, structured as a series of snapshot episodes — some retelling events, some simply reflective:

"The Flying Woman in Profile. […] If the image were a daguerreotype, she would seem mysterious. If it were a bust, she would seem noble. If it were a holy card, she would be a saint. But the image is a photograph on my wall, and when people see it, they all say, Who is that? She looks so far away."

Nia Stephens’ "Every Angel is Terrifying" (10 April) is an evocative piece about a dying artist in New York. Like "The Flying Woman", the style is impressionistic and the structure thematic rather than linear. It uses the images of angels to personify abstracts — Death, Beauty, Home — and thereby link together the narrator’s recollections of the dead man.

Sybil’s Garage #3 (March 2006) (sensesfive.com) is a small-press ‘zine of speculative fiction and poetry. Most of its stories wear their genre elements lightly — if at all — and the trend is towards the brief and intriguing mood piece, rather than the intricately plotted epic. My favorite was Cat Rambo’s "Lonesome Trail", a succinct, magical transmutation of poetry-writing into a night journey through a luminous desert valley. "So That Her High-Born Kinsmen Came" by Yoon Ha Lee is a haunting glance into the mind of a nursing mother. Eric Gregory’s "The Redaction of Flight 5766" begins as the mundane story of a disillusioned airport security worker, but soon becomes something else entirely — and has a fascinating, ambiguous ending.

Two other unusual and funny pieces stand out. "Indentured Advertisements" by Gary J. Beharry is one half of a dialogue between an advert and its target, in which the ad claims to be an indentured servant, pressed into service by "them" and forced to sell liquor against its will. Brian Conn’s "Six Questions about the Sun" is a gloriously inventive alternate cosmology in which the sun is an ambivalent presence in the sky, fuelled by human beings’ blood, sweat and tears (fed to it by flocks of tiny white birds), and longs to lay down "the burden of sustaining life":

I Wish I Wasn't in Dixie

By Peter Wong

"What if the South had won the Civil War?" This alternate history query has provided grist for novels by such folks as Ward Moore and Harry Turtledove. To my knowledge, charting the ramifications of a Confederate victory has never before been the subject of a film. Enter Kevin Willmott with his film C.S.A.: The Confederate States Of Americ