Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 (27 page)

48

Jack Vance

Maihac brought out his froghorn, perhaps the most bizarre item in his collection, since it comprised three dissimilar instruments in one. The horn started with a rectangular brass mouthpiece, fitted to a plench-box sprouting four valves. The valves controlled four tubes which first wound around, then entered, the central brass globe: the so-called “mixing pot.” From the side opposite the mouthpiece came a tube which flared out into a flat rectangular sound bell.... Above the mouthpiece, a second tube clipped to the nostrils became a screedle flute....

For weeks volunteers and professionals had decorated the Surcy Pavilion to represent a street in the mythical town Poowaddle. False fronts simulated buildings of unlikely architecture; balconies held lumpy pneumatic buffoons, caparisoned in the traditional Poowaddle costume: tall crooked hats with wide brims supporting burbling baluk birds and brass-footed squeakers; loose pantaloons, enormous shoes with up-curling toes....

The Swamps along the fringes of the desert and beside the river seethed with life. Balls of tangled white worms, prancing web-footed andromorphs with green gills and eyes at the end of long-jointed arms, starfish-like pentapods tip-toeing on limbs twenty feet long; creatures all maw and tail; wallowing hulks of cartilage with pink ribbed undersides.

Linguistically and visually, Vance recalls a mature version of another genius in his own domain, the children’s author Dr. Seuss. Both men delight in the garishly oddball. If Vance accentuates the darker aspects of his vision, that’s only because he’s writing novels for adults.

Two of the most favored character types in the Vance Repertory Troupe occupy center stage in
Night Lamp
. (The title, by the way, naming a sun on whose lone habitable planet certain crises occur, is not explicated until well past the halfway point of the novel, consistent with Vance’s gradual unveiling of his plot’s mysteries.) The first figure is that of the boy who survives against all odds—bearing a strange destiny involving revenge—and matures into a highly competent young man. The best previous example of this theme in Vance was
Emphyrio
; the most extensive, Kirth Gersen, is the vengeful hero of the Demon Princes quintet. Here the lad is named Jaro Fath, orphan with missing memory and odd voices ringing in his head.

The second figure is that of the fey, willful, enticing girl-woman. Frequently she is evil, just as frequently good. There’s one of each in
Night Lamp
: Lyssell Bynnoc and Skirlet Hutsenreiter. The former is not a full-fledged villainess, such as we saw in Vance’s Cadwal Chronicles sequence beginning with
Araminta Station
, more a self-centered amoralist. But the latter is as charming a love-interest as any Vance has yet conjured, a figure with affinities to Nabokov’s beloved nymphets.

With these two youngsters bearing the major weight of events, Vance spins out an elaborate tale of treachery, decadence, social climbing and the satisfaction of obtaining justice long delayed. Echoing his classic
The Dragon Masters
at one point, the story jumps between two major locales: the planets Thanet and Fader, the latter Night Lamp’s satellite. The action spans two decades, giving the tale—whose twists and turns it would be unfair to divulge—a rich sense of history.

Another of Vance’s prime concerns shines thorough in this book: the notion of delusional systems. In the largest sense of the label, any kind of society represents for Vance a consensual folly. But he makes a crucial distinction between those delusions that work, that are sustainable and generally beneficial, and those that are inherently primed for failure: predatory, destructive of their holders and those around them. The society on Thanet, with its stultification into “ledges of comporture,” is a working system that generally promotes harmony and order (although Jaro the rebel runs afoul of it right from childhood). However, such malignant societies as that of Ushant (where “tamsour” rules) and Fader (where “rashudo” is the ideal) prove the danger of attempting to force life into artificial molds. In the concluding chapters of the book, Vance concentrates this warning down into the portrait of a single man with a unique, prison-bred philosophy and code of conduct, who is totally unable to adjust to freedom.

Always contrasting mankind’s petty lusts and ultimately insignificant actions, our short lifespans and limited mentalities, against the vaster background of an infinite, infinitely rich universe, Jack Vance simultaneously upholds the sanctity of human life, proposing that our best impulses and emotions are the only reliable measures and guides in a treacherous cosmos.

49

Kage Baker

Baker’s clever, plausible twist on the time travel notion is that history (at any given moment) is invariant, so what is known to have happened cannot be changed by visitors from the future. However, much history is unrecorded or open to interpretation, allowing time travelers to intervene covertly. “If history states that John Jones won a million dollars in the lottery on a certain day in the past, you can’t go back there and win the lottery instead. But you can make sure that John Jones is an agent of yours, who will purchase the winning ticket on that day and dutifully invest the proceeds for you.” Centuries later, wisely husbanded by financial dealers throughout the past, your winnings will arrive in the form of funds, land, recovered lost paintings by famous artists. Even extinct creatures and plants can be preserved for the benefit of future ages, so long as you have reliable agents seeded across the ages. This scheme allows the Company access to the treasures of time even though nobody can travel forward beyond their own point of origin. (Or so it seems, until Mendoza’s puzzling “Crome radiation” starts messing with spacetime.)

Cyborged immortality, meanwhile, proves workable only when its necessary massive changes are made as early as possible. Adult bodies and brains are too set in their ways. Doomed, forgotten children of the past are located by Company agents and press-ganged into eternity. Feisty, ignorant little Mendoza is one such, even her name borrowed, condemned to death as a Jew by equally ignorant but far more culpable Inquisitors. Snatched away by 20 millennia-old Joseph, she begins her transformation and accelerated training as a specialist in rare plants for her saviors from nearly a thousand years in her future. This furtive organization, by the mid 24th century, is effectively rulers of the world. But mysteries attend Dr. Zeus, Inc., plenty of indications that its future is not the utopia its immortalized delegates might have hoped to find at the end of their long, weary journey. Indeed, no messages have been received from beyond the Silence in July 8, 2355, leading to wild speculations. Is the world doomed to end on that day, perhaps in a global conflict brought on by the Company itself?

Baker was a master of story: now emotionally moving and even heartbreaking, now zany and laugh-out-loud black-humored. Mendoza’s fate, eerily, is to fall desperately in love three times with the same man, who is different each time and always inappropriate, but compulsively desirable. It is the kind of tangled gothic romance only possible in a time travel sequence, and Baker works it for all it’s worth, to our enjoyment and benefit. In this opening volume, he is a 16th century English puritan, the former libertine and radical Nicholas Harpole, racked with guilt over his sexual infatuation with the lovely, mysterious Mendoza, who is only just starting to get the smallest notion of what being a cyborg implies.

In England for the marriage of Queen Mary Tudor to Prince Philip of Spain, Mendoza visits the botanical garden of Sir Walter Iden and finds there a rare medicinal treasure, Julius Caesar’s Holly. Thus, the novel’s title, with its inevitable undertones of exile from the Garden of Eden and its secret trees of both life and the knowledge of good and evil. Under Joseph’s cynical tutelage, Mendoza seduces Nicholas, but when he uncovers her inhuman nature he flees to Rochester and preaches fire and brimstone, attracting the wrath of the reinstated Catholic church. Like the famous Oxford Martyrs, he is sentenced to burning at the stake. Can white-skinned, red-haired, black-eyed Mendoza, with her enhanced powers and knowledge of futuristic technology, save her lover?

In the Garden of Iden
is very much the best place to start the series, but it really comes into its own with
Sky Coyote
. Mendoza arrives on the west coast of America in 1699, before the ruinous arrival of the Spanish. The local people, the Chumash tribe, are taken in by Joseph’s manic impersonation of the trickster god, but less persuaded by his efforts to recruit their guilds into service of the Company. Accomplished in dialect, Baker avoids the usual stilted translations, presenting the Native Americans in charming and sometimes hilarious colloquialisms crossed with Chamber of Commerce wheeler-dealer from three centuries later. Introducing Joseph, visiting Humashup township, chief Sepawit stands in “nothing but a belt and some shell-bead money”: