Voices in the Wilderness

I subscribe to the very wittily-named Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, a generally high-end market for short speculative fiction. Over the years, I've read many an entertaining short story and been inspired to look up other works by some of the authors.

However, there is a dark side to F&SF -- an aspect that simultaneously repels and draws
me in with its strange wordplay and unique artwork. Horrifying and amusing (often at the same time), I have found myself looking through back issues just to find more of these bizarre nuggets of entertainment, as they are elusive and rare.

I speak, of course, of the ads for self-published novels from independent publishers. Here shining examples:

To Live Without Warning [by Timothy LaBadie] is a story set in a future San Francisco, where public transportation is the only way to travel, and people with colds are required by machines called breathe-eraters[sic] to wear masks. ... There are aliens who disguise themselves as homeless people, and there are twins from an alien abduction, one human, one not, plus a virtual couple who live in a bungalow on the beach in a virtual Costa Rica who mix up their computer code to have a virtual child, and then there is a cat woman who can do all sorts of erotica with her tail, and a drummer who leads more than a band called Death, Ax and Grind.

Man, that sounds totally rad!

Honestly, though "To Live without Warning" sounds kind of like a cautionary tale about a world with no pregnancy tests.

But what if I was in the mood for something a little more magical?

Paraworld Zero, by Matthew Peterson: Earthling, Simon Kent, stumbles upon a secret that thrusts him into a bizarre adventure filled with magic, technology and deadly out-of-this-world creatures. He discovers a true friend, confronts his inner demons and becomes the savior to a peculiar race of people, when all he truly wants is to find his way back home.

George Lucas, eat your heart out!

According to one of the endorsements, this book features, "The exciting action of Star Wars with the humor of Napoleon Dynamite." So says Diana Pharaoh Francis, author of the Path and Crosspoint series.

I'm honestly surprised no one mentioned Harry Potter, since the crappy Poser art in the ad is pretty clearly supposed to (and utterly fails to) evoke the cartoony covers of Rowling's books.

Reiteration Space

Revelation Space
by Alastair Reynolds

My tradition of "reviewing" things that are several years old continues with Revelation Space, the debut novel of Welsh writer Alastair Reynolds. It's a science fiction novel set in 2543-2567 AD, which rather disconcertingly skips back and forth between two stories that, eventually, manage to come together.

Dan Sylveste is the stubborn, egotistical leader of a scientific mission to the planet Resurgam. The mission has become more of a colony, actually, since a large portion of the original expedition pulled up stakes and left years before, feeling that there was nothing left to learn about the Amarantin, an intelligent race nearly a million years extinct thanks to a suspicious solar flare.

Sylvestre is adamant that there is something vital to be learned from the Amarantin -- something important for humanity, though he's not sure exactly what that might be. His fanaticism has blinded him to a new and growing opposition in the colony and he soon finds himself a prisoner after a coup removes him from power.

Meanwhile, ten years before that, a ship called Nostalgia for Infinity is searching for ... Dan Sylvestre. But thanks to that pesky speed of light, they are just arriving at Yellowstone -- a planet Sylvestre left nearly 30 years before that. Ilia Volyova, one of the ship's "triumvirs" (three officers of supposedly equal rank below the captain), is having trouble getting her new gunnery officer acclimated to the job.

"Trouble," here, means that the mental link to the gunnery drove him completely psychotic, raving about something ominously called the "Sun Stealer" and trying to kill Volyova, forcing her to kill him instead and cover it up.

Nostalgia for Infinity definitely needs to find Dan Sylvestre, for reasons that eventually become clear, and they pick up a new gunnery officer in the form of Khouri, a former soldier turned professional assassin who has her own secret agenda: Kill Dan Sylvestre.

This storyline then follows the increasingly disturbing trek of the Infinity to Resurgam, in search of Sylvestre, while the former storyline picks up with Sylvestre, after several years under house arrest, and, through the miracle of time dilation caused by traveling at a speed approaching that of light, the stories more or less seem to have a similar timeframe, despite years of actual difference.

Confusing? Yeah, but you get the hang of it around a third of the way through. It doesn't help, though, that sections from different characters' points of view are often separated by nothing more than a blank line.

Of course there is more to the Amarantin than everyone believes, and Dan is eventually vindicated in his obsession with the extinct race. But there are sinister forces at work, and no one character really gets all the pieces laid out for them until things have gotten rather out of hand.

Despite having a fairly intriguing concept, Reynolds definitely needed some editing here. While nearly 600 pages in paperback, the book could easily lose 100 of those pages by removing segments where characters basically explain to other characters things that the reader already knows. This happens with irritating frequency in the last third of the novel, as the disparate story lines finally converge.

Conversely, Reynolds practically skims over some intriguing points, particularly the identity (and nature) of Khouri's mysterious employer and the discovery of a wrecked starship. This is somewhat frustrating, given the number of pages dedicated to decidedly less interesting bits.

While Ilia Volyova, Khouri, and the rest of the crew of Infinity are pretty interesting characters, Sylvestre, despite ostensibly being the novel's "main" character, is less so. He is inconsistent in his attitudes and other characters treat him in vastly different ways. He's supposed to be an arrogant genius, but the genius part is mainly displayed by people referring to him as such, rather by anything he actually does.

Likewise, Sajaki, an enigmatic and threatening member of Infinity's crew, seems to scare everyone he comes in contact with, but when push comes to shove, there is nothing there. His character is apparently 95% public relations.

Published in 2000, Revelation Space received pretty good reviews, particularly for a first novel, and, despite my criticism, it did have a lot going for it. I looked up Reynolds on Wikipedia and was pretty impressed to see that he's published seven novels so far. That's one a year from 2000 on. I'll probably look up some of his other works, since even halfway decent "hard" science fiction is pretty scarce.

If this is a "lesser work..."

Wild Seed, by Octavia E. Butler

Apparently, this is considered one of the late Ms. Butler's "lesser works." It doesn't merit its own Wikipedia entry, it didn't win any major awards, and I haven't seen it on any must-read lists of science fiction/fantasy.

Frankly, I'm surprised, because, after my third reading, I am still overwhelmed by how incredibly rich Wild Seed is.

Published in 1980, the novel spans about 150 years of time in the lives of two immortals. The first, and oldest is Doro, whose existence is sustained by his ability to steal the body of the person closest to him, either when his current body naturally dies, or, much more disturbingly, whenever he wants to make a point. Doro is a menacing figure, both alien and human, who has lived millennia before the novel's opening, attempting to breed a race of superhuman descendants via a eugenics program whose scope and methodology would make Josef Mengele look like a slacker.

In all his existence, Doro has never met another person with even the potential for immortality. This changes in 1690 when, after finding one of his "seed villages" in Africa destroyed by marauding slavers, he feels the pull of a powerful presence.

He seeks out and finds the source of his attraction in the person of Anyanwu, a healer and shape changer who can control her body almost absolutely and has lived many lives of her own by appearing to grow old and then relocating for a time before returning as a young woman to the people who do not recognize her as their grandmother or great grandmother.

These two characters meet on page four. The following 275 pages are an epic account of their unique and disturbing relationship and the book as a whole is one of only a small handful that have ever inspired me to read them more than twice. Race and culture, love and bitter hatred, and the struggles of virtually immortal beings to retain their humanity all combine to make Wild Seed a gripping tale.

Though it is categorized as "fantasy," those of you who are geeky enough to distinguish between flavors of fantasy might notice that it is effectively a "supers" tale, albeit in a very unusual setting. Doro's children, his experiments both successful and failed, are reminiscent of the mutants of the X-Men series -- terrifying to the general population and often tortured by the very powers that make them different.

The book is also very reminiscent of the better parts of Anne Rice's Interview With the Vampire. Like Interview, much of it occurs in the antebellum south and the timeless natures of Doro and Anyanwu and their tenuous and tragic attachments to the mortal world have many parallels with the descent of Louis into Lestat's world.

Butler was probably the most prominent African-American science fiction/fantasy writer of her time, and certainly the most prominent African-American woman in the field. If Wild Seed isn't her best, then there are some amazing books out there I still haven't read.

His Dark Material Girl

The Golden Compass, by Phillip Pullman

This is the first novel in the fantasy series with the ominous-sounding name, "His Dark Materials." The series is fairly well thought-of and this volume is "soon to be a Major Motion Picture" with the star power of Daniel Craig, Nicole Kidman, and Sam Elliot (who is breaking out of his typecast mold and playing a gruff but heroic Texan).

Before discussing this volume, I should point out that this series has already broken the Three-Book Barrier. The TBB, in case you're wondering, is something that I just made up to fill space. But that doesn't make it any less important!

The TBB refers to the number of volumes beyond which a fantasy series begins to falter under its own weight. This is, of course, due to The Lord of the Rings. (Yes, I know that LotR is more like six books crammed into three volumes, but did you know that Tolkien originally wanted the whole thing sold as a single volume? Liar.)

Any fantasy series that exceeds three volumes asserts by its very length that it has more to say than LotR, which is a pretty bold statement in the world of fantasy. While a trilogy is able to stand on its own merits without necessarily being compared to LotR, the comparison is inevitable after that point. Almost invariably, when a series has gone beyond three books, it is on a downhill path:

• Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea series was a fantastic trilogy ... until she added a fourth book.
• Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's series was ... well, the first two books were pretty good. Maybe this isn't a great example.
• Most readers will tell you that Robert Jordan should have kept the Wheel of Time series to a few volumes and that later books seemed bloated. (Now, of course, they'll have to suffer for the fact that he passed away before he could wrap up all the plot threads he'd spun out in the 11-volume series unless they want to head down the perilous road of posthumous publication).
• The jury is still out on George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series. I personally think that book four was the weakest in the series (though still pretty good), and his rather slow progress on book five makes me wonder if we'll ever see the whole seven-volume series.

Of course, there are exceptions. Frank Herbert's Dune series is well-regarded (though the posthumous efforts of his son and other authors are decidedly less-so), for example.

Anyway. Where was I?

Oh, yeah. The Golden Compass.

Originally titled Northern Lights, this book was renamed by the publisher of the North American edition solely based on the compass-like device depicted on the cover art. This goes down as possibly the only fantasy novel renaming stupider than that inflicted on Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (though somewhat less insulting to Americans).

The book follows the adventures of Lyra Belacqua, an orphan girl who lives at Jordan College in Oxford. Her parent's fate is initially something of an enigma, though moreso to Lyra than to the adults who seem to know an awful lot about her.

An epidemic of disappearing children touches 11-year-old Lyra's life when it claims two boys -- a friend and a rival. Lyra is taken away from Jordan before she can find out much about the disappearances, however, and placed in the care of the sinister and mysterious Mrs. Coulter.

Note: Since the novel was written in 1995, years before her rise to infamy, we can be reasonably confident that there is nothing in this book implying that conservative hate-monger Anne Coulter is a malevolent bitch queen who would stop at nothing to further her own agenda. The fact that she is exactly that is entirely beside the point.

Lyra soon discovers that Mrs. Coulter is not a very nice person and she runs away, carrying with her the eponymous golden compass, given to her by the head of Jordan college just before she left for Mrs. Coulter's care, which is actually a neat device called an "aleithiometer," the purpose of which is initially somewhat mysterious.

What follows is a fairly epic journey into the far north in search of the missing children. Lyra is joined by several colorful characters, including a Texan aeronaut, several "gyptians" of noble character, and a badass polar bear who, like Lyra, has a somewhat mysterious past (though in his case, he knows his own past very well, and any reader paying even the slightest attention can figure it out and predict a good portion of the rest of the book from the moment he's introduced.)

I read this book because the trailers for the upcoming movie looked interesting and, really, it's a decent fantasy novel, if a bit "young adult" in tone. I'd say it's somewhat above the Harry Potter level of drama, but it lacks a bit of the grab power of that series (despite a considerably more original and complex story). Still, despite the fact that it ends on what is basically a cliffhanger, and that the other books are available in my local book store, I'm not really rushing out to buy and read them.

The cliffhanger ending might just sink the movie, as well, particularly since they don't seem to be marketing it as "first in a series." That's asking for trouble, in my opinion, because there are few things more irritating than a movie that ends in an unexpected cliffhanger with no solid promise of a follow-up.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

It's hard to imagine the kind of pressure J.K. Rowling must have been feeling when putting together the final book in the best selling fantasy series of all time. With a fan base much broader than the young adult audience the books were marketed for and a worldwide community that had been poring over the previous six volumes and speculating endlessly about the finale, it's safe to say that she had to tread very, very carefully.

Luckily for that audience (which I am obviously a member of), she has mostly succeeded.

While every Potter reader will likely have some quibble with the fates of their beloved characters, Rowling has definitely pulled out all the stops, here. There is tragedy, not only in the deaths of a few beloved characters, but also in the circumstances of those deaths. There is triumph, and, for once, Harry is not the only character to make a heroic stand (though, of course, Harry gets the big showdown that everyone knows he can't avoid).

Snape's backstory is finally revealed, and though it is a bit exposition-heavy, it is possibly the best part of the book. The other major character whose early life is explored is, most surprisingly, Dumbledore. Easily the most unexpected element of the book, the humanizing of the late, previously saintly headmaster of Hogwarts will probably raise some eyebrows among the faithful.

Though it features virtually every major and minor character from the series in some form, the book focuses mainly on Harry, Ron, and Hermione, as they are on the run from the bulk of the wizarding world. Largely on their own for a surprisingly long time, and plagued by setbacks and frustration, the trio's friendship is pushed to the breaking point. During their journey, they encounter a few characters who are either entirely new to this volume, or have had only minor roles thus far, including Luna Lovegood's father, Xenophilius Lovegood, Griphook the goblin, and Olivander the master wandmaker.

Through an interesting "shared consciousness" lens, Rowling is also able to show us the vile deeds of Voldemort and his minions. Harry periodically "becomes" Voldemort, and witnesses his frustration at his continuing failure to destroy him. This actually serves to lend a lot of tension to the story. At times, Harry will be in the midst of some difficulty only to learn, suddenly, that Voldemort knows where he is and is coming with terrible speed. This is particularly effective toward the end of the book, when Harry & Co. are racing to find something before the Dark Lord realizes what they are up to.

This volume is a very suitable addition to the Potter series, and a fine conclusion. While it does leave a few minor questions unanswered, it brings a definite climax and close to the story.

And now, some spoilers.



DO NOT READ PAST THIS POINT




I warned you. Don't say I didn't.




Still reading?


Okay. Random thoughts.

First, the good:

If I had been less manly, I might have teared up a little when Dudley finally treated Harry with a little kindness. Or when Hedwig died. Or when Harry saw the bodies of Lupin and Tonks lying next to each other. Or when Fred died. Or when Snape revealed the form of his Patronus. Or when Percy came back. (Hang on a minute, I have something in my eye...)

Really, the book had too many nifty bits to list. So here's a list: Percy's return to the fold, Neville's moment of triumph, Trelawney kicking ass, Kreacher's transformation, Snape's history revealed, the whole damn Battle of Hogwarts, Mrs. Weasley getting medieval on Bellatrix Lestrange's ass, the side trip to the Chamber of Secrets, Ron's book on how to be a ladies man, "Harry, if we die saving them, I'm going to KILL you!" ...

Dumbledore's explanation of why he had to make things so hard to figure out actually worked for me: "So you wouldn't be able to charge in like an idiot without having people help you."


Now, the not-so-great:

Snape's death is a bit weak. His backstory is very well done, but I still wished he'd had some kind of meaningful interaction with Harry before he died. His secret was pretty much what I'd expected, but it was handled very well.

I really wish there had been a bit more with Draco Malfoy. I had hoped to see him change a bit, but any changing he did was pretty much off-screen, indicated only by the fact that he acknowledges Harry on the platform at the end. In fact, Rowling misses a fantastic opportunity to justify Slytherin's existence even a little by having somebody, anybody from Slytherin fight the good fight. But, no. They're all toerags, after all.

How did Fred even die? There was an explosion and, boom, he's dead. No indication of what really happened.

Harry's dead. No, he's not, because he's a Horcrux! Surprise! Yeah, not really that surprising.

Why did Voldemort's curse reflect back on him? It didn't make a lot of sense.

No info on what Harry, Ginny, Ron, and Hermione are doing with themselves, "19 Years Later"? Apart from pumping out the kids, that is. The only person whose career we learn anything about is Neville, who has apparently (and unsurprisingly), become the professor of magical plants at Hogwarts. No mention at all of Luna, Hagrid, or George. No mention of who became headmaster of Hogwarts. No mention of the fates of Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy. No mention of what has happened to the Ministry. No mention of Umbridge being sent to Azkaban. No mention of a LOT of things, all of which I'd really like to know.

Oh well. It was still a good book.

"Books! And cleverness!"

My oldest daughter, at the ripe old age of six, has recently finished reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (apologies to purists who know it should be "Philosopher's Stone").

Six.

My memory is a bit fuzzy, but I'm pretty sure I didn't read anything of novel length until I was nine or ten.

She wanted to watch the (godawful) movie of Sorcerer's Stone, but not until she'd finished the book. Once she sat down and watched it, she was able to talk about differences between the movie and the book.

At six, I would have had a hard time distinguishing between cinematic and comic book versions of Star Wars.

Okay, fine. The kid is smarter than me. It's not like I haven't already admitted that. And she loves to read, which is great. She sometimes sneaks extra reading in during schooltime, and after she's supposed to be sleeping at night.

Now, I did the same thing, but not until I was considerably older. I'm not sure about her mom. She is a bookworm too, though, so she was probably reading Jane Austen when I was reading The Mouse and the Motorcycle.

So we have a little Hermione in the family (though not an insufferable know-it-all, thank god). Now if we can manage to keep the younger one from going all Slytherin on us, we'll be set.