INTERZONE 254 SEPT-OCT 2014 (17 page)

THE VERY BEST OF FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION VOLUME 2

edited by Gordon Van Gelder

Tachyon Publications pb, 419pp, $15.95

Duncan Lunan

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
has been going since 1949 and has always aspired to print the “very best”, putting its emphasis on literary and artistic values. The first “best of” anthology appeared in 1952 and they continued yearly for the next twenty years, with a long succession of retrospectives and themed anthologies thereafter. Selecting the “very best” from all that, as Gordon Van Gelder did for the magazine’s sixtieth
anniversary in 2009, had to be a tall order, and perhaps it was inevitable that he would be dissatisfied with it. After five more years, evidently the impulse to continue was irresistible.

The book needs little more justification for its existence – sixty-five years’ worth of top quality fiction could hardly be mined out in a single volume – but Michael Dirda goes further in his introduction, arguing the need for it to counter “presentism” in the new generation of readers for whom the genre is characterised by film and TV productions. To someone of my age it might seem incredible that there are science fiction fans who’ve never heard of Alfred Bester’s
The Stars My Destination
(for example), much less read it, but it seems there’s a need to take their education in hand.

For old hands some of the stories here will be familiar, and some will be favourites. The former would almost certainly include ‘The Prize of Peril’ by Robert Sheckley, Heinlein’s ‘All You Zombies’, ‘The Anything Box’ by Zenna Henderson, ‘The Country of the Kind’ by Damon Knight and Harlan Ellison’s ‘Jeffty is Five’.

For me the latter include ‘The Narrow Valley’ by R.A. Lafferty, ‘The Third Level’ by Jack Finney, George Alec Effinger’s ‘The Aliens Who Knew, I Mean,
Everything
’, and ‘Maneki Neko’ by Bruce Sterling.

I read most if not all of them first in books, which illustrates how hard the magazines were to get back in those days, in Scotland. (The major distributor then was John Menzies, who seemed to believe that no-one wanted to read them outside the cities, and that nobody would buy them outside the main line railway stations.) But it also illustrates the extent to which the magazines were at the cutting edge of the field, with
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
always near the top of the range.

The stories here by C.M. Kornbluth, Brian Aldiss, Jack Vance, Kit Reed and Jane Yolen aren’t personal favourites of mine, but that’s explained by personal tastes and the names guarantee good writing.

What’s harder to explain is that almost all the stories in the second half of the book seem unfamiliar, although they date from 1984 onwards and I was reading the magazine regularly for most of the time.

Again the writers form a distinguished list, including Lucius Shepard, James Patrick Kelly, Gene Wolfe, Charles de Lint, Robert Reed, M. John Harrison, Geoff Ryman and Elizabeth Hand. It’s not just a Golden Age thing because the Effinger and Sterling stories which I like are from 1984 and 1998, and one of the best is Stephen King’s ‘
The New York Times
at Special Bargain Rates’, which dates from 2008. Nor (before anyone suggests it) is it because the Effinger story is the only one involving space travel, as witness the others above which I do like. Neither Van Gelder’s foreword nor Dirda’s introduction mention the fact and presumably it’s a coincidence, because one of Van Gelder’s earlier themed anthologies was of
Fantasy & Science Fiction
stories about Mars.

Nor can I put it down to a bias for science fiction rather than fantasy, because two of my four favourites above are fantasy – five counting the Stephen King, and personal taste definitely counts there because I’ve always preferred King’s short fiction to his novels. Seemingly he was editing
The Best American Short Stories
and decided to write one “just to see if he still had it. Sure seems that he does, no?”, which gets a “yes” as far as I’m concerned.

I suppose the unfamiliarity is just because I can’t remember every story in the six hundred or so issues of
Fantasy &Science Fiction
which I have read, and because I don’t share Van Gelder’s personal tastes all that closely. But it does have the advantage that I’ve been able to read many of these stories as if they were new to me, and to those for whom they really are new, they will serve as a good introduction the magazine itself.

BARRICADE

Jon Wallace

Gollancz pb, 256pp, £14.99

Barbara Melville

In
Barricade
, our fleshy yet entirely artificial narrator Kenstibec shares a story of a road trip gone awry. He travels across a post-apocalyptic Britain, observing the disturbing aftermath of the war between the humans and the human made. The “Ficials” – genetically engineered life forms – are super strong and unfeeling, barricading themselves in cities and unleashing violence on their former human masters. Humans – or “Reals” – do their best to survive outside, indulging in tribalistic behaviours, and destroying Ficials wherever possible. With the help of an armoured car, Kenstibec’s mission is to transport fellow Ficial and journalist Starvie from Edinburgh to London, a journey threatened by all manner of unfathomable chaos.

So, at its heart, what is this book about? Perhaps it’s asking if one can still be human without emotions? Or perhaps it is exploring the line between mimicry and mastery? For me, these questions resonated the first few times authors asked them, but not now.
Barricade
shares themes with
Super-Toys Last All Summer Long
by Brian Aldiss,
I, Robot
by Isaac Asimov and just about any recent action film involving AI and transhumanism. Of course, old ideas are fine to revisit but they need to be expertly spun. This doesn’t happen in
Barricade
, leaving me wondering if this book needed to be written. It has that unfortunate debut author quality of finding a new way of saying nothing new. Overall this book is poorly executed, amateurish and misanthropic.

There are the usual suspects: poor exposition and naff dialogue. Reams of clumsy over-description makes it read like a novella that’s been padded to fit an ambitious word count. Much of this padding is gross and pointless violence, including the sexual abuse of Starvie, a female “Pleasure Ficial” designed to be desirable. This brings me to my biggest complaint: her characterisation is hateful. She is vapid and irritatingly cinematic, like some Hollywood goddess who fights and fucks with ne’er a hair out of place. Several male characters – who I feel are also being massively short-changed – treat Starvie like a sex doll. Now one could argue that surely she
is
an object – she is a Ficial after all – and that this is a deliberate exploration of a devastating misogynistic world, rather than a symptom of a misogynistic book. However, this doesn’t sit right with me. Even if this was the intention, it’s still sickening to read, and there are no male Pleasure Ficials at all. Furthermore there are several descriptions like this one:

“She lowered her head, then tossed it back in a cascade of curls, brushing at it with her fingertips, her face vacant, her lips pouting.”

This is Kenstibec’s narration – the narration of an entirely asexual, emotionless being who makes several points of saying he just doesn’t
get
sexual attraction. So why-oh-why would he observe and then report on her cascading curls and pouting lips? This is one of many sexually charged comments on Starvie’s looks, in particular her hair, which by the end of the novel I wanted to incinerate. There is no indication he has mimicked or learned this language from somewhere else. In fact, the rest of his narration, while occasionally reflective, tends to bland and functional. So if it’s not coming from the narrator, it has to be authorial or editorial intrusion. That, for me, is a very scary thought.

This book is immature in both its ideas and execution. I kept being pulled out of the story to ask: what on earth is going on here? Why do I feel so slimy? I also feel rather sad, because in spite of my objections, I do believe Wallace can put one word in front of the other, and that Kenstibec had the makings of an interesting narrator. With a good rewrite and an edit, this book could have been so much more – at the very least a story well told, if not a masterly thought experiment. But alas, I can’t change what has already happened. So while I’m not sure I look forward to Wallace’s next book, I am certainly very curious. I suppose, in all likelihood, it couldn’t really get any worse.

THE HOUSE OF THE FOUR WINDS

Mercedes Lackey & James Mallory

Tor hb, 304pp, $24.99

Ian Hunter

Not to be confused with the John Buchan book of the same name that featured – I kid you not – a retired grocer as its hero, this
The House of the Four Winds
is by Mercedes Lackey and James Mallory and is ‘Book One of One Dozen Daughters’. Expect another eleven titles to follow, and maybe even the dreaded book thirteen, which wraps everything up. The prolific Lackey is possibly better known as the creator of The Valdemar Universe and its many trilogies, odd quintet and sometimes stand-alone novel that comprise it. There is also her SERRAted Edge series. She’s better known to me for the Diane Tregarde trilogy of the early 1990s that chronicled the occult adventures of witch Tregarde and was probably slightly before its time and suffered accordingly in terms of sales compared to the recent and current market which is saturated with all sorts of heroines (alive and dead and sometimes in between) who walk the dark side. As mentioned, Lackey is very prolific, which is an understatement, as, apart from short story collections and contributions to anthologies, my reckoning is that she has written (so far) 120 novels – although several series have been in partnership with other writers, most notably her husband Larry Dixon, as well as many leading female writers including Holly Lisle, Ellen Guon, C.J.Cherryh, Anne McCaffrey, Andre Norton and Marion Zimmer Bradley. Not surprisingly, she has some previous with Mallory, writing the Obsidian trilogy, the Enduring Flame trilogy, and the first two novels of The Dragon Prophecy trilogy with him.

Which brings us to
The House of the Four Winds
, a twelve-chapter novel that starts with a three-page scene-setting prologue entitled ‘The Parliament of Cats’, which is direct, straightforward and almost fairytale-like in its delivery. It tells us of the circumstances surrounding the Royal Family of the Duchy of Swansgaarde, which lies in a valley in the Borogny and borders on Turkey, Poland and the mighty Russian Empire, as well as the possibly even mightier Cisleithanian Empire; a precarious place to be for such a tiny state. Matters are not helped by the fact that Duke Rupert and Duchess Yetive have produced twelve daughters and then, unexpectedly, one son who, according to the laws of inheritance, will take the throne. It’s all very well for number one son, but what to do about all these princesses, and do you really want twelve daughters stomping around the castle or hidden in their chambers with the court musicians turned up to eleven? Fortunately the Duke and Duchess have had the foresight to allow their daughters, since the age of ten, to choose whatever “trade” they wanted to study. Princess Clarice Eugenie Victoria Amalthea Meulsine, the eldest of the daughters, and soon to turn eighteen, picked the sword as her trade. Now, after a family gathering, it has been decided that each princess, when they reach the age of eighteen, will go forth into the world and seek their fortune and Clarice, as the eldest, gets to go first on this grand adventure to make a new life for herself.

It’s a shame then that, with such a conceit and series set-up, this first book doesn’t exactly set the heather on fire. It reads like a Shakespearian cross-dressing romance meets
Pirates of the Caribbean
. Thanks to a special corset, Clarice disguises herself as a man – Clarence Swann – with the intention of working her passage on the
Asesino
which is sailing for the New World. Things are complicated by her burgeoning bromance with ship’s navigator Dominick, and further complicated when he leads a mutiny against the cruel Captain Sprunt. After Sprunt’s death, the crew are now branded as outlaws and pirates and have no choice but to head for the secret pirate haven known as the House of the Four Winds. Then the fun starts in a tale that involves ghosts ships, sea monsters and magic, with Clarice quickly going from a wide-eyed innocent to someone who views everything and everyone through narrowed eyes in a fast-moving, light-hearted romp – apart from the odd flogging, that is.

Given that the Duchy has another eleven daughters still to seek their fame and fortune, it will be interesting to see what other occupations and adventures they embrace. Unlike the young ladies who populate Jane Austen novels with accomplishments such as singing, playing the piano, embroidery and going for long walks, I imagine greater things await these princesses depending on the trades they have adopted. However, I suspect the only way I will find out about them in future is by reading the announcements posted on the castle gates.