Review of Sailing to Sarantium by Guy Gavriel Kay

Save the detour of Ysabel, since publishing the three-book Fionavar Tapestry Guy Gavriel Kay has been pumping out historical fantasy as consistently as a machine. Covering the globe one romantifi-able culture after another, he has moved from Europe (Tigana, A Song for Arbonne, and The Lions of Al-Rassan) to Asia (Under Heaven and River of Stars).  Stuck in the middle of this oeuvre—literally on the Bosphorous between the two continents—is The Sarantine Mosaic.  Detailing the life and times of what we knew as Byzantium, and which later became Istanbul, Sailing to Sarantium is the first book of the two-volume series.  Style and methodology products of the same machine, the book is everything one expects from Kay.

Sailing to Sarantium is the story of Caius Crispin, a mosaicist living in the kingdom of Bataria.  Wife and daughters taken by a plague two years prior, he devotes his life to the only thing remaining important to him: his craft.  Alongside his once mentor, now partner Martinius, the two are decorating a local church at the story’s outset.  Their work interrupted, an Imperial courier arrives from the distant capital Sarantium to deliver a request: come to the holy city and have the honors of creating a moasic on the dome of the largest cathedral ever constructed.  Not feeling up to the task, Martinius appoints Crispin, who, still suffering from the heartbreak of losing his family, feels a trip to Sarantium would put some life back in his soul.  But before hitting the road for the long journey, Crispin is stopped by the Batarian queen and given a private commission—one that could get easily him killed should the secret be revealed.  The weight of the task not enough, a local alchemist, the mysterious Zoticus, also has work for Crispin to do in the holy city, and provides him a strange bird made of metal and leather.  But no matter how prepared the melancholy artisan may be for the challenges ahead, nothing can possibly ready him for the Sarantine court.  Every word possessing two edges, opening one’s mouth in front of the Emperor can be more dangerous than drawing sword.  Art may just have to come second.

Review of Time:X by Wilson Tucker

"Science fiction is chock full of alien adventures, of brave ordeals and struggles against terrible odds on some lost and remote planet.  It is also full of brawny men who pilot the space ships and lovely ladies who ride in them.  Ten times out of ten when marooned on an unfriendly planet, the brawny, brainy pilot repairs the damaged ship, beats down with an uncanny skill the murderous native attack, and skips into the wild blue yonder with one hand on the controls and the other around the lady’s waist.

    It all gets rather boring.

    Every once in a while there should be some punk unable to distinguish between holes in animal and mineral matter."

Such is Wilson Tucker’s introduction to the short story ”Home Is Where the Wreck Is” in his 1954 collection Time:X.  The pulp era on its way out (it’s still on its “way out” half a century later), the stories collected look to advance science fiction beyond mere escapism.  And Tucker succeeds.  Like his contemporary Ray Bradbury, Tucker’s m.o. is more humanist and cynical than the sensationalist ‘squids in space’ of Gernsback’s magazines and those they spawned.

Time:X contains ten short stories, none of which resemble the other, save two.  It opens with the bizarre “The Street Walker”.  The story about one of the few people licensed to be outside their apartment complex, Tucker, tongue subtly in cheek, ladles out criticism of the direction of existence he perceived humans living in the urban environment to be headed, namely willful isolation at home.  Likewise cynical, “The Wayfaring Strangers” and “The Mountaineer” are short vignettes on two different men’s first encounters with extra-terrestrials.  The welcome mat rolled up and stuck in their back pockets, Tucker’s view of fundamental human nature comes streaming through.  (Those who enjoy Jack Vance will appreciate “The Mountaineer”.) “Exit” contains just as much black humor: men on death row attempt to escape using the knowledge of particle physics.

Review of Identity Theft by Robert J. Sawyer

Futuristic detective noir.  Sound like it’s been done before? From Heinlein to Clarke, Asimov to Richard Morgan, Alastair Reynolds to PKD, Ian Macleod to Ken Macleod, Adam Roberts to Lavie Tidhar- it has been done, and in fact is a dead horse unless something fresh is done with the motif.  Looking to remain stale, ahem, looking to go retro, Robert J. Sawyer read Altered Carbon and decided to put it into the form of a 1950’s vintage pulp story, the 2005 novella Identity Theft the result.  Unoriginal and simplistic—to say the least, the cat is out of the bag from the title onwards.

Identity Theft, in classic noir style, is the first-person story of Alexander Lomax, private eye for hire.  A ‘transferred’ woman (a woman whose sentience has been lifted from her biological body and placed in a prosthetic body) named Cassandra Wilkins comes to his office on the first page, needing help finding her lost husband.  As New Klondike, the Martian colony where the story takes place, is only “three kilometers in diameter, all of it locked under the dome”, Lomax expects to have an easy time finding Wilkin’s transferred husband.  But finding the body is only the beginning of the story.  Trickery and identity ruses popping up thereafter, Lomax has his work cut out for him to get to the bottom of the mystery.

Review of Marrow by Robert Reed

Please note this review is for Robert Reed’s 1997 novella Marrow, not the novel of the same name published in 2000.

The BDO (Big Dumb Object for the genre uninitiated) is an idea unique to science fiction.  Robert Reed’s novella Marrow not only utilizes it, but encapsulates one BDO within an even larger BDO.  The conceptualization receiving a flogging from the point of view of premise, the brief seventy pages do little to escape mere presentation.  Interesting for world-building junkies, there is a minimum of characterization and plot to bear its weight, leading to the idea that Reed’s later novel-length expansion may be better served.  But to the story:

Marrow is the story of the Ship.  The size of Jupiter, it had been abandoned for billions of years by a species dubbed the Builders before being discovered and taken over by humans.  Populating the living compartments with hundreds of billions of humans and aliens, the Ship heads around the Milky Way on a tour of the galaxy.  Many of the technical details of the massive, hyperfiber-coated vessel a mystery, in the early going a still bigger enigma reveals itself in the form of a planet hidden in the Ship’s core.  Kept a secret by the Ship’s captain, a select crew is sent to investigate, dubbing the nestled sphere Marrow.  Things peaceful in the initial exploration of Marrow’s surface, hell breaks loose when a freak electrical storm destroys the group’s technology, leaving them to survive with nothing but their intelligence and gene-spliced immortality.  Whether the group makes it off the encapsulated planet’s surface and back into the Ship is for the reader to discover.

Review of Bones by Pat Murphy

The time and place for scientific investigation and the time and place for letting nature run its course is an ethical intersection becoming increasingly prominent in modern society.  Stem cell research: beneficial to humanity, or a violation of human rights?  Cloning: a way to the future, or a mega-problem waiting to burst?  Animal testing: necessary, or cruelty?  Two hundred years ago the questions were more basic but no less profound.  Pat Murphy’s 1990 novella Bones explores one of these questions: should a corpse be put to use by medical science, or laid to rest peacefully?

Bones is the semi-biographical account of two men, Charlie Bryne and John Hunter, both real personages from history, and opens with the story of Bryne’s conception.  The size of an adult by age 10 and more than eight feet tall by the time he’s twenty, his father is a man of Irish legend—a heritage that Bryne’ mother instills in him as the massive youth grows older.  Ever increasing numbers of Irish leaving for London, Bryne, after meeting an English cardsharp, heads to the big city to join them, his mission to bring the Irish back to their homeland.  Living in London at the same time is the renowned surgeon and anatomist John Hunter.  Grave robber by night and scholar by day, Hunter spends his days investigating cadavers with an eye to the bizarre. It is thus running into Bryne’s eight foot frame on the street one day that his interest is piqued, and the two form a tentative friendship.  Each man with different aims, the resolution of their situation is softly intense.

Review of Fireflood and Other Stories by Vonda N. McIntyre

Vonda McIntyre is not a prolific writer of short fiction, and indeed has only one collection to her name.  Drawing together short stories, novelettes, and novellas published between 1971 and 1979, Fireflood and Other Stories nevertheless is a quality selection.  Zoning in on McIntyre’s penchant for intense, dark stories with human pain and transcendence at their core, it is a shame the collection is out of print. 

Fireflood opens with the title story, and brings to light the strongest theme of the collection: oppression and freedom from it.  It tells the story of Dark, a human modified with scales and claws to be able to tunnel and dig.  Fleeing her captors at the outset, she attempts to use her talents, as well as cooperate with other modified humans, to not only flee, but escape permanently.  The conclusion is as implicating as is possible in storytelling.  (A commonly used methodology in the stories to come, McIntyre often truncates the climax, implying the denouement rather than presenting it.) “The End’s Beginning”, though set in an ocean and ostensibly featuring a sentient dolphin, nevertheless finds humanity oppressing a species which likewise desires permanent escape.

Review of The Empress of Mars by Kage Baker

Please note this review is for the 2003 novella The Empress of Mars, not the 2008 novel of the same name.

Edgar Rice Burroughs is most famous for his A Princess of Mars books (or perhaps Tarzan, there is the mainstream after all...).  These stories, for all intensive purposes, are wild west adventures that visit the red planet.  Numerous parallels existing between the Mars and western America of the 19th century, classic story lines utilizing damsels in distress, wild natives, shoot outs, and wily heroes fill the books.  Revisiting the pulp era, Kage Baker’s 2003 novella The Empress of Mars is a light feminist revisioning of Burrough’s conception to positive effect.

Mary Griffith is owner/proprietor/overseer/supervisor/manager/outright boss of the Empress of Mars, a bar-restaurant for weary colonists in Mars’ first domed habitation.  An eclectic group of employees at her side, a half-crazy heretic mans the kitchens, a redundant engineer cleans floors and repairs machinery, and a brood of daughters serve drinks, wait tables, and bring joy and life to the watering hole Mary lords over amongst the blowing red sands.  Soft when she needs to be, and hard at all others, the woman faces an uphill battle every day.  If her meager landholdings are not enough to grow the barley necessary to brew the Empress’s lagers, an English consortium threatens her every other move with restrictions and taxes, keeping her just financial afloat.  But one day Mary experiences a huge stroke of luck, and the Empress’s fate shifts in a new direction.

Review of Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury

Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) is the story of Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade, neighbors born two minutes apart.  Will a minute before midnight on Halloween and Jim and minute after, the two boys rollick and cavort about their town, creating mischief as twelve year old boys do.  Playing in outside one autumn day, they are approached by a lightning rod salesman.  A storm on the horizon, Jim panics and purchases one of the metal devices, running to his roof to install it.  That night as clouds gather, the two boys hear a train approach their sleepy town, the smoke from its engine a haze in the night.  Escaping through their windows, the boys go to Moon Meadow, where, for reasons neither can explain, the train has stopped and slowly taking shape around it is a carnival.  A cloud of malice hanging in the air, the two stand transfixed as they witness a moment of the macabre on the carnival’s merry-go-round.  Scared witless, Will and Jim tear off into the night, their little town all the more scary.

Bradbury a superb stylist, Something Wicked This Way Comes palpably oozes mood.  The arrival of the carnival, the coming storm, the people which emerge from the seemingly self-erecting tents, and the bizarre side shows have a dynamic sensuality most fantasy books lack.  Borderline magic realist, the text possesses all the color and mettle of Bradbury’s talents, the imagery and story ripe as a result.

Review of Toast by Charles Stross

For as prolific as Charles Stross has been since the turn of the millennium (literally almost two novels per year and roughly fifty pieces of short fiction in the fourteen years since), there are only two collections in his oeuvre: Toast (2002) and Wireless (2009).  Collecting ten short stories and novelettes published between 1990 and 2000, Toast captures the best of his pre-millennium short fiction.  Though possessing inchoate style (due to dependence on forebears), the flow of ideas is everything Stross would erupt to become.

Singularity in play since the beginning of his career, Stross openly discusses the topic in the collection’s introduction.  However, there is no selection (speaking specifically about the initial publication of Toast and not that which added “Lobsters”) which captures the acceleration of intelligence and technology like Stross’ later works, e.g. Accelerando, Saturn’s Children, Palimpsest, etc.  That being said, almost all of the stories do, in some way, utilize, survey, or hint at the rudiments of singularity.  “Antibodies”, for example, while rooted in dark math, features settings and action sequences that employ devices and motifs readers commonly associate with the movement, up to and including parallel realities.

Review of New Model Army by Adam Roberts

The world wars of the 20th century featured a mighty clash of giants on the battle field.  Their massive bodies nearly equal, it took years and countless thousands of lives to decide who was bigger and badder.  The Vietnamese War saw a new kind of battle: the giant was met with flitting guerilla tactics—little Davids, much to the chagrin of the giant.  9-11 saw an even different set of tactics employed against the giant; while it roamed field and forest poking its snout where it did and did not belong, a new breed of animal snuck behind its back and destroyed the sanctity of its home.  The giant’s reaction was as predictable as can be: it charged headlong into where it thought the animal lived and began wrecking as much havoc as it could like a bull in a china shop.  To this day, the Middle East still ripples with the effects of bombs, tanks, and thousands of troops.  But might is apparently not enough: that divisive animal lives on and is still able to score effective hits.  Tackling the David vs. Goliath military paradox in democratic terms, as well as the underlying reasons for aggression, Adam Roberts’ 2010 New Model Army is brilliant commentary on the state of war today, and, more importantly, the personal and social motivations underpinning the continual presence of war and fighting in society.

In the early stages of the novel, the following quote is laid down:

“…one of the shaping ideological forces of the second half of the twentieth century is that democracy is not just ethically better than dictatorship, it is practically superior. Hey, people said: look at the number of wars fought between the two regimes and always won by the former. This era was ushered in, and ideologically validated, by the fact that armies from democratic nations fought armies from authoritarian nations and won. But although that was the case, nobody suggested that the armies themselves should be run on democratic lines.”