Review of Twelve Kings of Sharakhai by Bradley Beaulieu

The following is less a review and more a response to Bradley Beaulieu’s 2015 Twelve Kings in Sharakhai.

I recall encountering the term ‘churnalism’ in John Clute’s review of Paolo Bacigalupi’s novella “The Alchemist”on Strange Horizons.  I’ve not investigated the term further, but Clute’s typically abstract phrasing left me with an impression of its meaning: product pumped out of a manufacturing facility to keep the conveyor belt of mainstream fiction turning.  Within two chapters of Beaulieu’s Twelve Kings in Sharakhai my mind immediately snapped to ‘churnalism.’

The novels opens with a bloody gladiator fight between a warrior woman and hulking male fighter (aka “feminism” in modern genre), and within a few paragraphs transitions to a graphic sex scene featuring said warrioress (including the words “spilled seed,” “manhood,” “gasp,” and other such refined expressions).  Pure advertizing, such an opening ‘hook’ screams: “If you want more of this, keep reading!!”  Obviously trying to capture a piece of the success of George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones tv series and its similar dependence on unending sex and violence, Beaulieu’s novel, at least what I read beyond this point, is rife with sensationalism but little if nothing of deeper substance. 

Review of The Book of Skulls by Robert Silverberg

David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet opens with a shot of an ultra-typical, American suburban home.  Slowly zooming in on the lawn, the view descends through blades of grass to the swarm of insects in the earth beneath.  While Lynch used the symbolism to represent his opinion of what was happening behind the white-picket fence, 1.5 children veneer of suburban America, it’s also possible to transpose the symbolism into other areas, the human mind among them.  The veneer the late 60s and early 70s free love and groovy times, Robert Silverberg uses his 1971 The Book of Skulls to dig beneath its surface, particularly the era’s male youth to find what swarms beneath.  It isn’t pretty.

But the novel starts in thriller land.  Four will enter: one will commit suicide and another be murdered, and the last two will exit immortal.  Thankfully, The Book of Skulls is more than this cheesy idea would promise.  Hovering uncertainly between realist fiction and satire, the premise is engaged and resolved via character rather than plot or melodrama.  Rendered in smooth and subtly affective prose, Silverberg presents the machinations of four human minds in all their dirty detail while taking to task aspects of the (post?) flower-power mindset.

Awards Like Stars in the Sky: The Canopus

The past year has seen a Pluto flyby, a Mars landing, and an asteroid landing—all major, major successes for space exploration and events whose images are utterly fascinating for their reality and the mind boggling amount of calculation and preparation that went into getting each.  These missions remind us that, despite the immense technological deficiencies remaining, some small progress is being made toward humans beyond the moon.  These three successes apparently so poignant, a new science fiction award was created.  Just what the genre needed… 

Intending to spotlight works that have interstellar exploration and travel as their prime motif, The Canopus Award was inaugurated just this past week.  Such is the world we live in today.  Don’t like something?  Change it yourself!  With a little bit of money and a few people to help coordinate the necessities (locating pertinent texts, writing policies and procedures, creating online presence, etc.) one can, in this example, attempt to overcome the wrenches in the works (known as Barry Malzberg, cyberpunk, and space fantasy—sorry, Singularity texts) and get back to the good ol’ fashion idea of massive metal objects transporting humans through the great void at great speed by creating an award that brings awareness to such texts.

Review of Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind by Anne Charnock

From one (admittedly simple) perspective, art can be divided into two parts: the internalized (what is created or enjoyed for individual satisfaction) and the externalized (what is bought/sold, exhibited, studied, discussed, and passed on through time by society).  Both are highly dependent on the fact a means is available.  Without materials or access, an individual cannot create or partake in art, just as without sponsorship, research, knowledgeable persons, public venues, etc. art is not integrated into society at large.  Inject gender into these two halves of a whole and you’ve got the delicate, intelligent workings of Anne Charnock’s wonderful second novel, Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind (2015, 47North).

On the surface, Sleeping Embers is the story of three iterations of young women.  Real-life daughter to the fifteenth century Italian master painter Paolo Uccello, young Antonia looks ahead to her adult life with trepidation.  Despite showing promising talent, painting is a limited option to females of the era.  A life in the cloisters of a nunnery or as a dowried wife to a nobleman are her only options.  Living in contemporary UK, Toni is a thirteen-year old girl on a trip with her father, a skilled copyist, to China for a proposed commission.  Her mother having died in a car accident a few months back, she and her father are trying to get their lives back together with just the two of them.  And in the early twenty-second century, Toniah is starting post-graduate work in art history at a university in London.  Middle daughter in a parthenogenetic (all-female) family, she attempts to apply her knowledge of quattrocento art in women’s restitution studies, but meets some resistance.  The discovery of a never before seen painting by one Antonia Uccello, however, changes her luck.

Review of The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson

Kingsley Amis’s The Alteration is one of alternate history’s most notable texts.  As with many British books, its concerns are largely centered on Old Albion, particularly what the Isles would have been like were the Reformation never to have occurred. A wonderfully-imagined possible intersection of religion, politics, and culture, one can’t help but wonder the degree of its influence on Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2002 alternate history The Years of Rice and Salt.  A book that likewise pivots religious concerns on a single point in history, Robinson removes Christianity and Judaism from the scene to focus on the two major religions that remain, Islam and Buddhism.  Published in the wake of 9-11, Robinson forgoes finger-pointing to build something of his re-aligned, Asiatic world.

The first two major iterations of monotheism eliminated, The Years of Rice and Salt posits a Jonbar point wherein Black Death wipes out 99% of Christendom and Judaism in Europe.  In essence laying out the red carpet for Islam to expand westwards and China eastwards, Robinson revisions the world to be dominated by these two major powers.  Not wholly a dichotomy, Hindustani India retains a toehold, and without invading Europeans, so too does the Native American population.  (Given extra years without European invasion to disrupt the relative cultural and technological homogeneity, Robinson envisions the tribes forming a loose but stable coalition that evolves to a point it becomes a global player politically and commercially—an interesting aspect, indeed.) 

Review of "The Builders" by Daniel Polansky

There is no doubt we are living in a second Golden Age of speculative fiction.  The number of titles produced so high and spread across such a variety of sub-genres, in fact, it’s impossible for anyone to read all that comes available in science fiction and fantasy each month, let alone year.  Quantity not often equaling quality, the bulk of new material is, unfortunately, superfluous.  Where the majority of pulp from the 30s and 40s was lost to time, e-pulp of the current Golden Age is thus likely to go the same direction.

This is a long way of saying Daniel Polansky’s 2015 “The Builders” (Tor) is e-pulp.  It has color and punch, but so quickly dissolves into nothing.  Polanksy himself calling the novella a “one-note joke” derived from “adolescent sensibilities,” his story of gun-slinging animals who get revenge on a depraved city leader is as lite as speculative fiction gets. 

Kung Fu Panda meets Mean Streets, “The Builders” features Bonsoir the wisecracking French stoat, Boudica the doe-eyed sniper possum, Cinnabar the quick-draw salamander, Barley the heavy-gunner badger, Gertrude mole, and Elf the lame owl who team up under the cool, calm guidance of the Captain (a disfigured mouse) to get their final revenge on evil Mephetic skunk.  Bullets flying fast and furious against hordes of rats and lackeys, the Garden will never be the same.

Review of The Darkness that Comes Before by R. Scott Bakker

Take the philosophical concept of the original Dune trilogy, sprinkle in some basic plot devices from The Lord of the Rings, and mix with a coherent system of magic, a handful of strong lead characters shaded in gray, wholly original races, cultures, and settings, and voila, you will have R. Scott Bakker’s Prince of Nothing series in a nutshell.  A lucid concoction, the trilogy holds no punches, leaving the reader wide-eyed for its brutal adherence to the realities of pre-industrial life and probing of the darker crevasses of the human psyche.  No fuzzy hobbits picking flowers and discussing what variety of pipe tobacco they prefer, instead, Machiavellian scheming, deep-seated fear, ever-inflating egos, and pushes, risks, and clashes to obtain power are unveiled as ugly truths in humanity.  Underrated, the Prince of Nothing is one of the best epic fantasy series available today, The Darkness that Comes Before (2003) its first volume. 

The Darkness that Comes Before is a strong trilogy opener. Patiently revealing bits and pieces of Earwa, giving the reader strong, distinct characters to wrestle with, creating tension from the social and political setup, developing a layer of intellectual depth to the underlying motivations of the story, and most importantly, giving purpose to the overarching narrative, there are few opening volumes in epic fantasy as successful.  A critique of human fear and ego the series’ roots, Bakker’s narrative is appropriately character and dialogue based, but should not be mistaken as a hero’s journey.  It’s dark. In fact, the novel holds much more in common with Peter Watts’ hardline views toward the human psyche in Blindsight than Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings silven elves and magisterial forests and mountains.  Another way of saying this is, it’s epic fantasy minus the good guys. 

Review of The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack by Mark Hodder

Pouncing on the steampunk zeitgeist, Mark Hodder’s 2010 The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack takes the clockwork aesthetic and runs with it—as fast and hard as it can.  Victorian England, steam horses, top hats and walking sticks, brass hovercrafts, Richard Burton (a la a Sherlock Holmes), the paranormal, biological tinkering, cursing parrots, and a mystery involving a spring-loaded, blue fire-breathing man on the foggy streets of London—it may be as overtly steampunk as steampunk gets.

A clear mix of Tim Power’s The Anubis Gates and James Blaylock’s Langdon St. Ives books with a lingering essence of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde, Hodder places Richard Burton, the famous African explorer, front and center in an alternate history adventure of late 19th century British proportion.  With secret societies, late night escapades, eugenics, Dickensian street urchins, spontaneously exploding werewolves, roto chairs, and time travel conundrums peppering the mix, the devices and tropes leave no doubt as to its predecessors. 

Review of "Hawksbill Station" by Robert Silverberg

Note: this review is for the novella “Hawksbill Station” not the novel expansion.  If you are interested in the novel, I recommend Joachim Boaz’s review, here.

Soviet forced labor camps, located in the remotest depths of Siberia, define the word ‘exile’.  As the titles (let alone content) of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago and Gustav Herling’s A World Apart imply, life in the work camps was more than one degree separate from civilization.  Not just murderers and thieves worked to the death in extreme conditions, the camps were likewise home to political dissidents and subversives, which in conjunction with the remote isolation, created a unqiue environment consisting of a much wider variety of personalities than the average penitentiary in the West.  Far from Siberia (quite literally) yet similar in demographic, Robert Silverberg’s superb 1967 novella “Hawksbill Station” takes a look at one such prison camp.

Time travel the main plot device (though thankfully not one whose technicalities are delved into in the least), a totalitarianist government uses a time machine to ship its convicts millions of years into Earth’s past into the Cambrian era.  A one way trip, the men (and it’s only men) are provided the basics of life—shelter, rudimentary technology, etc.—and are left to fend for themselves, no hope of returning to the present day.  Mostly radical intellectuals and political subversives, they resist the urge to resort to primitivism, maintaining as relatively a civilized society as their meager means allow.  Battling inner demons, Jim Barrett is the informal leader of the misfit group that has slowly assembled over the years. With his embracing view, his social glue is a big part of why their time-lost colony still functions.  But with the arrival of a new prisoner, a young man calling himself Law Hahn, the relative stability of Hawksbill Station threatens to crumble.

Review of West of Eden by Harry Harrison

(For a better genre view of West of Eden, see MPorcius’ quality take here.)

Extreme alternate history, West of Eden (1984) is a version of Earth wherein the dinosaurs never went extinct and evolved in parallel to humanity. I normally do not point to wikipedia, but in the case of this novel it does a great job summarizing the setting and how it’s different from what we know. 

Featuring sentient dinosaurs (called yilane) evolved to a bio/steampunk-ish level of technology, they are set against a version of humanity not yet graduated from the stone age.  Having evolved on separate continents, the opening of West of Eden features the first meeting of the two species.  Not going well to say the least, a cycle of violence takes hold in the aftermath that threatens to make one side or the other extinct.  Caught in the middle is Kerrick.  A child at the outset, his hunting party is slaughtered by the yilane and he is taken captive.  Treated like a dog, he nevertheless learns their language and becomes a part of their society as he grows up.  But he never fully accepts his situation. Harboring dreams of escape and vengeance, Kerrick gets what he wants, but whether or not he’s satisfied is another question.

Superficially genre, the imaginings of West of Eden will either turn the reader on or off.  Sentient dinosaur anthropoids the litmus test, if the idea causes no eyelashes to bat, the text can be appreciated, as below the surface Harrison has imbued his alternate history Earth with many pervasive and interesting ideas.  From primitive survival to xenophobia, the effects of technology on a species and inter-species relations to paganism, discrimination, and imperialism, it’s clear Harrison is telling a story more concerned with the interplay of ideas than the wars and battles and other trappings of mainstream science fiction that are so easily, and often appealingly available to the eye.