Review of The Dragon Griaule by Lucius Shepard

    “…the dragon Griaule, a vast mile-long beast who had been struck immobile yet not lifeless by a wizard’s spell, and who ruled over the Carbonales Valley, controlling in every detail the lives of the inhabitants, making known his will by the ineffable radiations emanating from the cold tonnage of his brain. From shoulder to tail, the greater part of Griaule was covered with earth and trees and grass, from some perspectives appearing to be an element of the landscape, another hill among those that ringed the valley; except for sections cleared by the scalehunters, only a portion of his right side to the haunch, and his massive neck and head remained visible, and the head had sunk to the ground, its massive jaws halfway open, itself nearly as high as the crests of the surrounding hills.” (The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter)

A quiet evil, the Dragon Griaule exudes malevolence in subtle ways.  Shepard examining several of them, six in fact, the eponymous collection brings together the stories published as of 2012, and is, in most ways, the author’s magnum opus.  Appearing irregularly over a period of almost thirty years, the five novellas and one novelette are pleasingly unconventional, spellbinding, humanist, haunting, and smoothly well-written—each story highly unique within the context.  The following is a brief summary of each.

In dialogue with the metaphors of life, “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule” (1984) is literary fantasy at its peak, and is the story of Meric Cattanay.  Griaule a powerful evil, the men of the nearby village have hired wizards and mages for ages to try to kill it once and for all, but with no success.  It is Cattanay who suggets trying to kill Griaule by painting him—literally, not on canvas.  Painting a dragon of such size a lifelong process, the story is told in windows of time in Cattanay’s life as he deals with the exigencies of handling the task he has taken on. Utilizing one of fantasy’s most recognized, if not the most recognizable trope for literary purposes, the novelette is a beautiful tale of one man “conquering a dragon”.

Review of Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

The meat industry is one of those background entities of civilization that few people question—but would if they knew more of the details that go into turning a live animal into gleaming pink wads on white styrofoam pads in your local supermarket.  For example, the meat we buy is almost always pumped full of water (and other chemicals).  After removing a hunk of cow or pig from the carcass, it is placed between two needled plates, injected with a fluid mix, and shaken—like a mixed drink.  While keeping the meat fresh longer, weight is also boosted in order to, of course, make more money on the sale.  Why sell one piece of meat when you can pump it full of slurry and sell it for two?  After reading Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice (2013), I’m starting to get the same feeling about another industry: the current incarnation of speculative fiction.

A quality novella hidden in a blasé 400 page novel, Ancillary Justice is the story of Breq, a former ship captain.  Once occupying the minds of hundreds of avatars, she hunts for a secret weapon on an ice planet, bent on revenge against the empire that reduced her to a single body.  Encountering a colleague of old dying in the snow, Breq revives him, and for as much trouble as his drug withdrawal brings, drags him across a frozen planet on her quest for the weapon.  Told in alternating chapters, a second thread, nineteen years in the past, describes how the empire reduced Breq to a single existence with nothing except vengeance on her mind.  But whether she is able to find and kill the multiple existences of Anaander Mianaai is up to the reader to discover.

Review of Ship of Shadows by Fritz Leiber

Please note this review is for the novella Ship of Shadows, not the later collection which took this as its title.  A review of the collection can be read here.

Reading the comments regarding a review of Fritz Leiber’s The Big Time today, I was made aware of a facet of the novel I hadn’t been aware of: its hints and stabs at Weird (yes, capital W).  Things never quite mirroring the reality of our world, at no time does Leiber pause to break it all down in the novel, instead letting the reader sink or swim.  Inspired, I decided to pick up a collection of Leiber’s I’ve had for some time.  The first story knocked me down.  A Weird text if ever there were, Ship of Shadows is a delightful dip in an ether of horror to which few know the recipe.  Looking for, or needing anchors to reality in your fiction? Look elsewhere.

Ship of Shadows is the bizarre story of Spar.  Half-blind, half-deaf barman at the Bat Rack, a watering hole is perhaps not the best place to work for an addict.  Sick and hungover on the opening page, a talking cat makes his acquaintance, and after some initial social troubles, the two become friends.  The owner of the Bat Rack barely tolerant of Spar’s lifestyle, it’s the customers who keep Spar afloat.  Doc, though having his own issues, has an eye out for the crippled and elderly Spar—and the eye is needed if the likes of Crown and his Hellhound are to be kept at bay.  Events oscillating between the mundane and feverishly horrorific, Spar discovers a cat may be a better friend than humans.

Review of Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett

Citizen Kane is considered by many connoisseurs to be the greatest film of all time.  Channeling the idea of empire through the life of a mysterious magnate, it is a drama telling the bittersweet story of the glory days of wealth, the inevitable fall, and how its biggest dreams are left unfulfilled.  Half a century later, with numerous new forms of media having been adopted into mainstream culture, comes Terry Pratchett.  Practically creating a new form of media of his own, he decided to overlay Hollywood onto the template of Citizen Kane.  The weight of elephants behind him, 1990’s Moving Pictures is the same bittersweet result.

Capturing the magic and innocence of the burgeoning film industry in Ankh-Morpork, at the outset of Moving Pictures the Guild of Alchemists discover the secret to capturing pictures on film.  Studios, back lot sets, haberdasheries, production companies and all other business associated with the film industry springing up practically overnight in an empty patch of desert a few miles outside of the great city, it isn’t long before trolls, dwarves, and humans (and dogs) are lining up to catch their bit of fame on the silver screen in Holy Wood.  Victor Tugelbend is one of the many caught up in the madness.  But with a little luck, he soon has a new last name and is starring opposite the lovely Delayne de Syn (originally Theda Withel, otherwise known as Ginger).  Stars literally in her eyes, it’s Ginger’s sleepwalking to a mysterious temple rising from a nearby beach that concerns Victor most.  Strange things in the air, Holy Wood and Ankh-Morpork are eventually swept to the verge of destruction by the powers of cinema.

Review of Illyria by Elizabeth Hand

Incest is currently thought of as having sex with someone close in your bloodline, and is one of the strongest social faux-pas possible in Western society today.  (Interestingly, Merriam-Websters defines 'incest' according to law, i.e. sex with someone you are not legally allowed to marry.)  The term subconsciously turning the stomach for most, kissing cousins are currently on the outside looking in when once they were an accepted part, and even in some cases, a preferred reality of society.  Tackling the issue head-on in the contemporary era, Elizabeth Hand’s novella Illyria (2007) presents living, breathing people dealing with the issue, all manner of reader reaction - conscious and subconscious - the result.

Illyria is the story of Madeline Tierney, the youngest of six girls, and Rogan Tierney, her cousin, the youngest of six boys.  Their fathers’ identical twins, the two even grow up on the same street, their houses opposite one another.  The innocence of kissing cousins becoming more serious as the pair go through puberty, and their secret becoming ever more precarious as their two families evolve, the finding of a treasure in the attic of Rogan’s home one day turns everything upside down.  But the repercussions are not immediately apparent.  Life goes smoothly in the build up to their high school’s production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. But whether the show goes on remains to be seen.

Review of Bronte's Egg by Richard Chwedyk

In the early 90s, Jim Henson got together with Disney and produced a television show called simply Dinosaurs.  The puppets and dolls anthropomorphized to the point of being human save surface features, the show featured a typical family—of dinosaurs.  Though utilizing many of the common motifs of American situation comedies, the show also tackled a large number of social issues thanks to Henson.  It is thus coming to Richard Chwedyk’s 2002 novella Bronte’s Egg, one can’t help but think the show was a major inspiration.

Bronte’s Egg is the story of Axel, an excitable, sentient mini-dinosaur (“with the scary parts removed”) living in a shelter cum laboratory where other dino pets that have been abandoned by their owners reside.  Waking early one morning, he sets off to the computer Reggie to send a message into space.  After the others wake, they do their part to protect an egg another dinosaur named Bronte has laid that the caretakers are not supposed to know of.  After breakfast, Axel puts the second part of his plan for the day into action: buy a Rotomotoman.  But when Axel’s message to the universe is unexpectedly picked up by a scientific watch group, the young dinosaur and his friends find themselves scrambling to make appearances, Rotomotoman included.

Review of Reach for Infinity ed. by Jonathan Strahan

With the success of two ‘infinity’ themed anthologies under his belt (Engineering Infinity and Edge of Infinity), editor Jonathan Strahan pushes his science fiction agenda forward with a third.  Presenting the third transitive point, Reach for Infinity (Rebellion Publishing, 2014) regards humanity’s future in the solar system and beyond.  Familiar names return and new are added, making the fourteen stories in the third anthology as creative and enjoyable as the first two.

In the intro Strahan asserts that “hard sci fi has always sat at the heart of the science fiction field”.  While the statement is contentious (see Shelley, Verne and Wells, Burroughs and E.E. Smith, Gernsback, et al), there’s no doubt it occupies a major slice of the genre pie.  Opening the collection is perhaps the most extreme hard sci-fi writer the world has yet seen: Greg Egan.  “Break My Fall” is the story of a group travelling in a hollowed out asteroid through the solar system’s transportation network.  Being slingshot (slungshot?) along, they use the gravity of particularly spaced orbiting hubs to move outwards, that is, until a rescue is needed at one of the hubs.  Further pushing the realities of science, albeit in situations closer to home, Ken Macleod’s “‘The Entire Immense Superstructure’: An Installation” and Karl Schroeder’s “Kheldyu” each create plausible superstructures that work with Earth’s environment in positive, practical fashion.  Peter Watts’ “Hotshot”, while certainly not what one thinks of when the term ‘hard sf’ comes into the discussion, nevertheless tells a tale rooted in modern neuroscience.  Replete with Watts trademark determinism, there is a light at the end of the tunnel—a big, bright, burning one.

Review of The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks

Perusing bookshops in Poland one finds fiction is categorized along the same genre lines as America or Britain.  They have horror, fantastyka, science fiction, kryminalny—all of which are readily recognizable to the English speaker.  There is one additional category, however, that I’d never seen before: sensacyjny.  Neither ‘sensual’ or ‘sensation’, the word, in this context, translates to ‘sensational’.  Not in the ‘amazing’ or ‘magnificent’ sense of the word, rather ‘sensationalist’ or ‘suddenness’, and it’s in that section one finds books that have certainly taken readers by storm, but less certainly are in possession of layers beyond outright popularity.  It’s here one finds Dan Brown, Stephanie Meyer, Stephen King, and, Iain Banks’ 1984 The Wasp Factory. (Though to be fair, Banks at least attempts an agenda.)

The novel is the story of Frank Cauldhame, a sixteen year old who is open to the reader about having killed three times in his youth.  Baldly psychotic, he goes into detail describing the fetishes and rituals of his life—the bones, skulls, candles, and totems that protect the small island in Scotland where he and his eccentric father call home.  If his own problems aren’t bad enough, Frank’s brother Eric is certified crazy, and at the outset of the story escapes the mental hospital.   Phone calls to Frank occurring sporadically thereafter, each one draws Eric closer and closer to home.  Little know to Frank, the ultimate conflict has been lying under his nose the whole time

Review of Devices and Desires by K.J. Parker

Carving out a niche in the epic fantasy market these days is an ever-challenging task.  Some authors producing original ideas and others the most blasé, most have only a moderate degree of success making their creations singular.  George R.R. Martin, through strong characters and worldbuilding, has conquered the market, while writers like Terry Brooks, David Eddings, Michael Sullivan, and the creators of Dragonlance continue to churn out easily digesteable material derivative of tradition.  Occupying the middle territory are writers like Richard Morgan, Brian Ruckley, R. Scott Bakker, Joe Abercrombie, David Gemmell, etc., etc.; certain facets are unique, but by and large a very familiar sense of epic fantasy imbues their work.  K.J. Parker is another such author, and the first in the Engineer trilogy, Devices and Desires (2005), is a representative example why.

Devices and Desires is the story of Ziani Vaatzes.  Engineer among the industrially dominant Mezentine, he breaks Guild law (literally by fractions of an inch) and, in the opening pages, is sentenced to death.  Making a narrow escape, he soon finds himself a prisoner of neighboring Eremia, a duchy at war with Mezentine.  Duke Orsea, leader of Mezentine, grasps Ziani’s potential and puts his knowledge of metalworking, machining, and engineering to use.  Ziani more than willing to impart his knowledge, vengeance on Mezentine and seeing his beloved wife and daughter once again cloud every decision he makes.  But whether Mezentine is able to reclaim what was lost to them is certainly at odds.

Review of End of the World Blues by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

Roger Zelazny, on top of writing a number of immensely popular books and stories, was one of the genre’s great stylists, noir minimalism utilized in nearly all his works.  He was likewise predictable for his main characters; a world weary man with personal issues finds himself in situations he would rather avoid but faces despite, the common premise.  Basing his fiction on these two same elements, I have come to think of Jon Courtenay Grimwood as a successor to Zelazny, but significantly upgraded for the (post-) modern world.  An exemplary text, his End of the World Blues (2006) possesses a sophisticated sense of noir that does not lack for eye-kicks (to borrow a phrase from Bruce Sterling), and features a troubled man whose choices get him in deeper and deeper trouble. The teenage girl manga fantasy, well, that's just the icing on the cake.

Where Zelazny sought to implement history, myth, and legend into genre storylines, Grimwood brings his foundational content closer to the contemporary era.  Events do occur in and outside of time, but always the rays of story emanate from 20 and 21st century concerns; identity, existentialism, and an overall loss of faith in society inform the subtext.  Never over-stating these elements, Grimwood keeps his personal comments veiled, allowing the characters their voices, and in turn gives his stories more socio-cultural relevancy than Zelazny’s.  Embodying nearly everything the author has created to date, End of the World Blues is a well-written, engaging story worthy of greater recognition than it received.