Review of Homunculus by James P. Blaylock

The best works of a sub-genre are most often those which come to light in hindsight.  Unaware they were/are part of a groundswell, there is no overt implementation of particular tropes or themes in order to be part of a specific literary or cultural movement.  Steampunk stories, for example, while billowing in popularity after 2009-2010, have not since seen as many truly unique works as the decades prior.  The best novels and stories produced before it became a cultural phenomenon, James Blaylock’s Homunculus (1986) is one such novel, and indeed one of the sub-genre’s charming, capering, and unwitting cornerstones.

A strange dirigible circling the rainy gray skies of England, the inventor Langdon St. Ives works oblivious on his space rocket at the outset of Homunculus.  But a late night burglary attempt on a perpetual motion device brings St. Ives closer to the gyres of the dirigible’s haunting significance.  Snagging him and dragging him into the proverbial machine, however, is his possession of the memoirs of Sebastien Owlesby and its account of a magical little man trapped in a box.  With the dirigible’s orbit decaying toward London, it isn’t long before it’s up to St. Ives and his Royal Society fellows to attempt to bring down a scheme that no one seem to have a firm handle on, right down to the very men perpetuating the scheme.

Review of Learning the World by Ken Macleod

After opening his career in science fiction with the original Fall Revolution series, Ken Macleod has since been going through the genre’s major tropes and conceptions to find inspiration.  The Engines of Light trilogy hard sf meets space opera and Newton’s Wake full blown space opera, for his next novel Learning the World (2005) Macleod decided to go the first contact route. 

A dual-perspective novel, the actual contact between humanity and a bat-like alien species comes very late in the novel.  Humanity interestingly the species technically advanced enough to do the contacting, Learning the World oscillates back and forth between characters in a generation starship approaching a new system and the aliens who inhabit one of the planets in the system as the two notice signs of the other before actual contact.  The aliens having a WWII level of technology, first contact technically (ha!) occurs when the aliens notice a new “star” moving through their night sky.  Other strange, unnatural things popping up in their atmosphere and environment, they quickly figure out they are not alone.  Meanwhile on the ship, factions appear once humanity observes likfe on the planet and likewise figures out it is not alone.  The main draw of Learning the World is thus the manner in which each side learns about the other and the relative effect it has on their societies.

Review of Fevre Dream by George R.R. Martin

Good ol' clichés.  In fiction they can be A) beaten like a dead horse, B) expanded upon to transcend origin, C) deconstructed for critical value, or D) given enough depth to stand on their own—legs tottering from the years of accumulated weight, but standing nonetheless.  Another way of putting this, B, C, and/or D are needed to avoid A.  George R.R. Martin’s Fevre Dream (1982) goes with tactic D, but it remains up to the reader whether its legs collapse.

The offer seeming too good to be true, at the outset of Fevre Dream Captain Abner Marsh approaches his midnight dinner with the mysterious Joshua York with strong reserve.  Marsh’s fleet of steamboats having recently been destroyed in winter’s ice, he has little of value, and is wary of the massive sum he is offered to captain a steamboat, no questions to be asked.  When Marsh learns the full incentive of the offer, however, he jumps on it—a dream truly come true.  A time later, Marsh finds himself happily plying the waters of the Mississippi once again.  But more questions remain.  York confines himself to his stateroom during the day, has a bizarre obsession with unsolved murders along the river, and his companions are a little long in the tooth—literally.  Little does Marsh know just how much stranger his life on the river is about to become.

Speculiction grows legs...

Ahh science fiction book lists, the guilty pleasure of any bibliophile.  Agree, disagree, learn, laugh...  But with so many available, what to do when somebody requests one of you?  I recently found myself in this situation after a request from Sciencebookaday.com.  I decided to go random, or at least semi-random.  See here for the result. (One may even find a picture and short bio of the yeti.) Interestingly, after perusing the site, I noticed that esteemed colleague and friend of Speculiction From Couch to Moon also has lists featured on Sciencebookaday.com (here and here).  Even more interestingly, it would seem our friend also decided to go random.  And just even more interestingly, Nnedi Okorafor's Lagoon appears on both our lists, which must mean it's a good book.  Go read it if you haven't.

*Note - Image heedlessly pilfered through google. Contact me if it needs to be removed.  Viewer statistics can easily prove I am in no way profiting from it... 

Review of The Beyond by Jeffrey Ford

David Lindsay’s 1920 Voyage to Arcturus is a quiet classic of fantasy.  The story of a man who is transported to the eponymous planet, he finds himself walking a kaleidoscope land where the sky can be purple, mountains rise and fall like the wind, and the people he meets have such esoteric thoughts he can only take stabs in reply as to their ultimate coherency.  Saving his best for last, the concluding volume of Jeffrey Ford’s Well-Built City trilogy, The Beyond (2001), spins Lindsay’s story darker and weirder, tying itself back into the main ideas of the preceding two volumes, The Physiognomist and Memoranda, to create a strange, kaleidoscope voyage of its own.  The Beyond as imaginative and conceptually deep as contemporary fantasy series gets these days, it confirming the trilogy’s status as among the contemporary best.

Memoranda a ninety-degree turn from The Physiognomist, looking ahead to The Beyond the reader has no hope of guessing what comes next—despite the lead-on in the final paragraphs of Memoranda.  Abandoning the second dimension for the third, Cley and Misrix’s adventures in the wilds beyond the Well-Built city are mythic in mode but 100% Weird in style.  With the trusty hound Wood by his side, Cley carries on his hunt for Arla, the woman fixed in his mind, while Misrix, gleaning through the rubble of the Well-Built City, attempts to reconcile the demon and human inside himself and civilization.

Review of The Big Sheep by Robert Kroese

Along with having one of the most unique titles in science fiction’s history, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is one of the genre’s significant novels.  Though written in Dick’s quirky hand, it nevertheless digs at the meaning of existence and sentience in a world where AI is so similar to human intelligence as to seemingly render the difference moot.  The subject material potentially deep, it’s no surprise subsequent writers have picked up on the premise, developing it in new directions.  One such novel is 2016’s The Big Sheep by Robert Kroese (St. Martin’s Press).  Just not sure whether the development is a progression or regression… 

Private investigator Blake Fowler and his eccentric partner Erasmus Keane have just been called to the research firm Esper for assistance with a most bizarre case.  A sheep, one of a very large breed and of special biological significance, has been stolen.  Uncertain where to kick off the investigation, the pair start by interviewing employees who had access to the animal.  In the process of questioning the people, they are interrupted by one of the world’s most famous soap opera stars, Priya, who claims her teddy bear is trying to kill her.  It being post-collapse Los Angeles, Fowler and Keane blink, but agree to take on her case as well.  Developments quick in coming in the sheep case, the pair soon realize they are working on one and the same problem; indeed something is lurking beneath the leary gaze of sheep.

Review of Night's Master by Tanith Lee

There are a lot of reasons myth continues to fascinate humanity—the characters, the lingering moral and cultural value, the occurrence of the supernatural, the nostalgia, and others.  It’s fair to say the core humanity inherent to the tales is another strong reason why.  Myths simple stories when viewed from the outside, once penetrated they reveal many central characteristics that make us human.  Written in 1978, Tanith Lee’s Night’s Master possesses precisely these elements—despite not being set in a world not of this Earth.

Technically a set of interwoven stories, Night’s Master nevertheless has aspects common throughout.  Aspects that slowly aggregate into a whole, chief among them is Azhrarn, Prince of Demons, and ruler of the underworld.  Humanity his toy, he wrecks destruction and heartache on a whim, but is likewise fascinated by mortals.  The opening story telling of his thieving of a mortal boy from the green, sunny overworld, their fate unfurls in classic, mythopoeic fashion.

Review of Last Call by Tim Powers

A deck of playing cards is a mainstay of modern society.   For as ubiquitous as board games have become, playing cards are still the standby.  But we take them for granted—because it’s easy.  The numbers 2 through 10 are a universal aspect of existence with an obvious relationship.  King and queen also have an easily recognized relationship, and few question their place at the top.  The joker is, well, the joker—as crazy-wild as can be, and the ace is the ace: a lowly one or number one—trumping them all.  But the jack?  Who is he, and how did he get mixed in?  Why not a knight or vizier?  Seem more relevant.  And the one-eyed jack...  This is the legacy explored in Tim Power’s fantastical Last Call (1992).

Last Call is the story of Scott Crane (aka Scarecrow Smith), the one-eyed adoptee of one of the greatest poker players ever to drift through the US’s casinos and poker tournaments in the early 20 th century, a man named Ozzie Smith.  Ozzie a superstitious guy, he warns Scott against playing in a wide variety of strange situations, one of which is over water.  But a son doesn’t always listen to his father, especially aged sixteen, and Crane, intrigued by the stakes being offered on a house boat on Lake Mead, heads out for an evening of gambling.  Feeling he walked away a winner, it takes some time to discover just how, in fact, he was a loser.  Crane’s world slowly cracking at the edges, his life gains only greater and greater subjectivity as larger forces at play are revealed.  It seems one can hazard more than money in poker.

Review of This Census-Taker by China Mieville

After a three year break, genre favorite China Mieville returned to the scene in late 2015 with a collection of largely unreleased stories, Three Moments of an Explosion.  A step forward for Mieville, the collection shifted away from the (relatively) conventional arenas of horror and dark fantasy seen in his popular Bas-Lag and Kraken novels toward a more focused and mature side of his fiction.  With the release of This Census-Taker in 2016, the direction is confirmed.  A novella to be experienced as much as read, the darkness haunts without any ghosts or monsters.

The three-year break giving Mieville the chance to really bring to bear his talents, This Census-Taker shows a writer fully in control of his craft, something that could not always be said of his earlier verbosity—ahem, fiction; This Census-Taker simmers in deceivingly simple pain and beauty, on the page and in the mind, sucking the reader in.  About a boy living with an abusive father in the hills outside a town that barely survived the collapse of civilization, the shadows of Mieville’s forest loom without anything apparent blocking the light. 

Culture Corner: Thailand, Bangkok

Let me get the soon-to-be-obvious out of the way first.  This collection of photos in no way comes close to representing the city of Bangkok.  More a look at the most popular cultural/tourist attractions, the reader will not catch any glimpses of everyday street life in Thailand's capital.  And this is my fault, mostly due to the circumstances of travel.  Where I normally have the hands free to snap away, walking the streets at my leisure.  This holiday I brought with me my eighteen month old son, which meant my hands were rarely free, and when they were, we had already arrived at our destination, i.e. temples, palaces, and other beautiful places, just not places that would give the reader a glimpse of quotidian urban life in Bangkok.  But enough humming and hawing, it is what it is:

The Buddha at Wat Arun...