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Contents |
Fiction |
Column |
Interviews |
Sponsors & Links |
Editorial |
Guidelines |
Reviews |
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ReviewsForever ShoresOrbital BurnMockymenCuster's Last Jump, and Other CollaborationsThe Resurection Man's LegacyNothing Human
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Forever Shores : ed. Peter McNamara & Margaret Winch
This anthology is beautifully crafted, chunky at seventeen stories and 376 pages, and worth over and above the $29.95 price tag. The cover includes an eye-catching illustration by Conny Valentina, of a drapery-clad young woman staring into the misty unknown (and into the book). Wakefield Press certainly live up to their reputation of producing beautiful books. The collection starts with Isobelle Carmody's 'The Phoenix'. The story is a gripping tale of a pair of misfit children immersed in their romantic fantasy world until a newcomer forces them into tragic reality. It is impossible to stop reading this meticulously crafted tale, even as the reader tries to avert horrified eyes. Leanne Frahm's 'Rain Season' shows the degeneration of businesslike Brisbane of the present to a dystopian vision of savagery, as floodwaters of almost biblical proportions are dumped unceremoniously onto the city. One ambitious man (in advertising no less!) struggles against the forces of nature as he tries to continue working while civilisation falls apart around him. People say that cats are only one meal away from being feral, but how far away are humans? Frahm has used careful detail to create the image of the decaying city in all its savage wonder. The anthology finishes on a lighter note, with the entertaining 'Waste' by Michael Pryor. This comic tale of almost Pratchett-style humour, follows Tilden Lambholder, a young farmer whose lifelong dream was to pursue his father's footsteps into the Magical Waste Brigade. Pryor's background in writing for young adults is clear here - his story is extremely engaging. The reader is carried along with the action, accompanied by the naïve protagonist, sound effects and pure fun. Forever Shores is a varied and well-rounded collection of fantastic fiction, that has earned a place in any bookshelf. Each story is compelling and entertaining reading, but those leaning more towards horror and SF have the most impact, leaving the reader with much food for thought. Forever Shores can be purchased from the Wakefield Press website at http://www.wakefieldpress.com.au, Amazon.com or ask for it at your favourite bookshop.
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Orbital Burn : K.A. Bedford
For Louise Meagher, heroine of Orbital Burn, being dead is a drag. Infected by a malicious nanovirus at a party in her teens, she was reanimated after her death by more nanotechnology. Now she is literally falling apart as she saves her few credits to refresh the nanos giving her a semblance of life. To make matters worse, her harried existence takes place on Kestrel, a planet doomed to apocalypse within the week at the hands of the Big Bastard, an unstoppable planetoid-sized rock hurtling directly towards Kestrel. Ms Meagher is an unlicensed occasional private detective - she sometimes helps people find things. Her latest - and last - client is Dog, a brain-augmented canine who wants to find Kid, his previous owner, who happens to be a flawed organic android. Unfortunately there are other groups after the same thing with far more political and social clout, and seemingly endless supplies of firepower. The novel is structured in three distinct sections, utilising conventions of different genres. The first and most compelling section is detective/noir style, introducing a private investigator with all the ennui of a 1940s hardboiled detective. The tone then segues into almost unadulterated science fiction, then takes a more introspective bent towards the resolution of the story. Some may find this disconcerting, but there is enough background and solid characterisation to support the combination of genres. Kestrel and the other settings are plausible and convincing, and Lou is a compelling and sympathetic heroine with a stubborn streak of humanity, for all that she's dead. Add a sprinkling of power-happy cops, a suicidal artificial intelligence suffering from existential angst, a neo-Mafia family, Bloody Tom (the ex-husband) and lashings of thrills and blood and Orbital Burn enters the echelons of 'a bloody good read'. This is Bedford's first published science fiction novel, and is expected to be followed soon by Eclipse and Hydrogen Steel. Bedford keeps a very low profile living in Western Australia, where he concentrates on writing. Watch out for another review of Orbital Burn and an interview with author K.A. Bedford next issue!
Orbital Burn is published by EDGE Publishing. EDGE is a Canadian publishing house that includes Tesseract Books. They focus on science fiction and fantasy novels.
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Mockymen : Ian Watson
Ian Watson's latest offering presents us with a two part, fast paced novel centred around these four disparate themes. The novel opens in the mid-nineties with an elderly Norwegian SS officer, Knut Alver, and a young English couple, Steve and Chrissy, who travel to Norway at the gentlemen's request. They take pictures of themselves at a park of sculptures and make these photographs into jigsaws for the elderly man. Once they have completed this task it becomes apparent that his request was not as innocent as it seemed. Nightmares of ritual sacrifice and Nazis torment Chrissy and Steve. The couple confront Alver and he is forced at gunpoint to reveal he is seeking direct reincarnation. The former SS officer is soon discovered dead by his own hand and Chrissy pregnant to his Norwegian nephew. Two decades later aliens have helped humanity through 'the hardship years' by providing food factories, medical advancements and a recreational drug called Bliss. Bliss enables the user to experience greatly enhanced emotional states, with one small side effect, it can leave the user mindless. Waste not want not — the aliens can use these mindless dummies as hosts for their minds in their search for immortality: these are the Mockymen. Jamie Taylor is a victim of Bliss with a difference; he has reawakened from the dummy state, arousing the interest of both the aliens and M department: the government agency concerned with monitoring Mockymen and their activities. The appearance of a rogue Mockyman and the unauthorised acquisition of alien technology reveals Jamie's clouded past as well as the Mockymen's dark desires and intentions for mankind. Mockymen is a well written work which provides a good depth of character. His research is evident on the occult side of the Nazi party, including Hitler's fascination with the Spear of Destiny, the monks which were brought back to Germany after the exploration in Tibet, the exploits of the holy relics division and other occult connections. Mockymen is an imaginative novel in two parts. The first part incorporates a story previously published. For the second part he has taken the story twenty years into the future, presenting the reader with a fast-paced complex tale of first contact speculation. This novel is a great read if only for the black magic, aliens, Nazis and the drugs. Mockymen can be found at http://www.goldengryphon.com/ or Amazon.com
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Custer's Last Jump, and Other Collaborations : Howard Waldrop & others
I believe that there are three kinds of books. The first type are the books you hold in your hands, hardbound or paperback, that you open and close, read, browse, borrow and, if you like sadistically tormenting bibliophiles, bend spines and fold over the corners to mark your place. The second kind are the books of the mind: these are the books possessed by publishers, writers, editors and serious fans and bibliophiles, the books you imagine such as Charles Dickens' The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Steven Utley's Silurian Tales as well as the unwritten or unpublished books of your own work. These books sometimes find themselves being converted to books to hold, but rarely are they as good as imagined. The third and final kind are the books of dreams, imaginary tomes conjured in your sleep that remain just out of reach when you wake. These books, if by chance are published, almost never live up to expectations. Custer's Last Jump is all three of these kinds of books. Golden Gryphon have done a near-miraculous thing in bringing to life a work of modern legend, and have produced an impressively packaged collection. We're talking about quality small press publishing here: a three-thousand copy run (just the right amount: as Waldrop himself says in an interview in Locus, November 2003, “I can sell 3,000 copies of anything I write, but print 4,000 and you'll have to eat some...”), fantastic cover art by Frank Kelly Freas, elegant typesetting and a paper stock that simply smells and feels like the paper in a good book should. The bulk of Waldrop's collaborations were written in the early 1970's, including four in one night in 1973, when Texas was teaming with shit-hot young SF writers full of piss and beans: Joe Pumilia, Lisa Tuttle, Tom Reamy, Bruce Sterling, Joe Lansdale, George Proctor, Steven Utley and Buddy Saunders, just to name some. At the time there was a fair amount of collaborating to be done among these auspicious folk, who were also producing fantastic work in their own right. Howard Waldrop has written on various occasions as to the hows and whys of collaboration, and Custer's Last Jump includes three “essaylets” on the art of collaboration. Waldrop likes to talk about the “third head” that grows in a good collaboration, where 1+1 = 2.147, where “the 0.147 is smarter than both of you put together”, which goes along way to explaining the marvel that is the title story. But I'm getting a little ahead of myself. The collection kicks off with “One Horse Town”, a collaboration with Leigh Kennedy and one of the more recent stories in the book, having been first published in 2001. Only a Howard Waldrop story about the Trojan War could get away with this title (his novella about the twelve labours of Hercules was called “A Dozen Tough Jobs”, afterall). Beyond the title, “One Horse Town” is really a gritty, bloody tale of the sacking of Troy wonderfully juxtaposed with the archaeological expeditions of Schliemann and Homer's childhood being haunted by the ghosts of the city. Next up is the title story and Nebula-nominated “Custer's Last Jump” (it lost through the sheer misfortune of being up against Asimov's first robot story in 19 years). As Waldrop tells it, this story was written in four days over the telephone in 1972 with Steven Utley, and then took four years to get published in a “complex and uninteresting” tale. The story itself is far from uninteresting — dealing with the victory of Crazy Horse and other Oglala Sioux Indians flying Krupp monoplanes over the dirigible-mounted paratroops and armoured men of the 7th Cavalry at the Battle of Little Big Horn. It is an incredible re-telling of the great battle via the Annals of the Smithsonian, Colliers Magazine, Mark Twain's Journals and Colonel E.R. Burrough's history of the 7th Cavalry, and complete with its own bibliography. Waldrop's collaboration with Buddy Saunders, “A Voice & Bitter Weeping”, was later expanded into the collaborative novel The Texas-Israeli War: 1999. The story follows the movements of Charlie Bagel Squadron, a tank squadron of Israeli mercenaries in an assault on Dallas in a post-apocalyptic Texas. Waldrop and Saunders give the reader more than a regular tale by getting into the mind and under the skin of Sol Inglestein, the mercenary commander. Back in the days before he was a gazillion-selling fantasy writer, George R.R. Martin wrote a swag of mind-blowing short stories, including “Men of Greywater Station” with Waldrop. This story has all the trappings of a lonely outpost psycho-thriller: everything is against the few brave scientists left in a laboratory outpost — a sentient fungus has just taken possession of a platoon of heavily armed soldiers and is sending them their way. The tension is thick enough to cut with a knife. “Willow Beeman” was Waldrop and Utley's richly crafted attempt at an R.A. Lafferty shaggy dog tale, and came at the end of that night in 1973. Willow Beeman is the last man on earth, whose only friend is Patrox, a being who looks remarkably like a Galapagos tortoise. Patrox is old and wise, and must explain to Willow all the things he has forgotten and no longer understands. Things like sex, for there comes a time when Willow's loins stir. Willow then goes off in search of something to copulate with, which has disastrous consequences on a global scale. It's a truly amazing story which takes the reader through a series of twists to its rather magical conclusion. For almost 28 years, “The Latter Days of the Law”, co-written with Bruce Sterling, was unpublished. How this was allowed to happen astounds me, as the story, an 11th century Japanese detective story, is a bit of a find. Written in 1976, it would have been at the end of the time when Waldrop and Sterling were on a technological par: both writers were at the time using manual typewriters. For the record, Howard still is. “The Latter Days of the Law” is a wonderfully scenic piece, where the writers manage to create an intricate picture of the world without distracting from the action. The story also serves to demonstrate how “alien” other cultures are in comparison to our own. Barring the yet-to-be finished novel The Moon World, Waldrop has rarely written spaceship stories: though he has collaborated on several. “Sun's Up!”, written with A. A. Jackson IV is one such collaboration, dealing with the fate of a robot exploration ship sent to monitor a dying star. Give a dozen writers this plot and I'd imagine you'd have close to twelve similar stories, but give it to two Texans and you'd get a gem like this, with its marvellous conclusion that comes straight out of left field. It'd make a great short movie. The final story is another collaboration with Steven Utley, “Black as the Pit, from Pole to Pole”. Utley and Waldrop produced this epic tale of Frankenstein's monster and hollow Earth theory in response to a Robert Silverberg request to do a story like “Custer's Last Jump”. There is room to debate whether this incredible pastiche, a tribute to the likes of Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.P. Lovecraft, Philip Jose Farmer and Edgar Allen Poe among others, qualifies as a story like “Custer's”, but Silverberg apparently didn't feel cheated. To the very last word, this story demonstrates how amazing the “third head” can be. I've got a theory that something was put into Texan tap water in the early 1970s that led to the emergence of a bunch of some of the most amazing writers the planet has ever seen. Writers who have given the planet some of the most amazing SF it has ever seen. And from this comes, at last, the Waldrop collaborations collection, one of the most amazing books you'll ever see. Custer's Last Jump, and Other Collaborations is a must have, belonging on every bookshelf. There is no other way to describe a collection that has so much to offer: where the strongest stories are simply among the best in the genre and the weaker stories still have more to offer than a lot of work being published today. Any one of the title story, “The Latter Days of the Law” and “Black as the Pit, from Pole to Pole” (in its first reprint for 25 years) alone make the collection well worth the price; that you get all three, and five more stories, and three “essaylets”, and introductions and afterwords to each story; and all this in an attractively packaged hardcover book made the way books were meant to be made, means there is no excuse for not getting a copy. Custer's Last Jump, and Other Collaborations can be found at http://www.goldengryphon.com/ or Amazon.com
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The Resurrection Man's Legacy : Dale Bailey
I've got a lot of praise for Golden Gryphon, they're doing things right. Not only are they publishing some fantastic books but, when Ticonderoga Online sent out requests to a lot of publishers for review copies, they sent us a bag load of books while a stack of other publishers didn't even bother to reply. Gary Turner at Golden Gryphon has, in the last couple of years after taking on the reins left by his late brother Jim, published a box of books that belong on every bookshelf by the likes of Howard Waldrop, Lucius Shepard, Neal Barrett Jr and Nancy Kress. A quick note to the Australians reading this: there is no better time than the present to buy from this quality overseas publisher. With the exchange rate the best it has been in seven years, how can you resist it? Back to the review. Dale Bailey snuck under my radar while I was off doing other things, so when this collection fell into my hands I will admit to being a little hesitant to open it. There's something about the unknown that makes people uncomfortable, unlike those old favourite books that can be re-read time and again. Though even those old favourites must have been new, unknown books at some stage, right? Dear reader, life is short, so don't hesitate. Just pick up the damn book and read it. The Resurrection Man's Legacy opens with the title story. It is the tale of Jake Lamont: coming to grips with the death of his father and getting used to living with his somewhat stricter, elderly aunt. It's also about baseball and robots, but don't let that put you off. Bailey immerses the reader into Jake's world, showing us his feelings and allowing the reader to share the experiences of his childhood. This is SF at its best, where the speculative component is perfectly integrated into the story and yet is neither overpowering nor tokenistic. In “Death and Suffrage” we are confronted by the dead returning to the world. And they'd like to vote for their choice of Presidential candidate. Rash words in a televised debate by a Presidential candidate advisor in a debate on gun control have woken the dead, and neither party really wants to touch the issue while the advisor finds he his now dealing with a ghost from his own past. In this story Bailey shows he is not afraid to take on two rather contentious issues: the alleged constitutional right to bear arms and the notion that politicians should speak from the heart. I'm guessing this great story hasn't done so well in Texas. “Touched” is one of the bravest stories I have ever read. Here Bailey tells the tale of a 1920s mining town through the eyes and mind of a child with Down Syndrome. Jorey has a love/hate relationship with his brother Cade, a fifteen year-old youth who mocks Jorey in company yet is surprisingly compassionate then the pair are alone. Jorey's grandmother says that Jorey is special, and he is. Set this relationship against a United Mine Workers vs bosses' lackeys power struggle and you have a very special story. There are a breed of writers populating the United States that can create the most amazing tales of isolated communities and their inhabitants. Manly Wade Wellman was one, Jack Cady was another. In “Touched” and “The Census Taker” Dale Bailey shows the reader that he too can create a community that may not be thriving, but at least seems to get by without too much help from out of town. I think that part of the secret is in the supporting cast, the folk who may not even utter a word but whose descriptive presence is enough to breathe vitality into the tale. There are eleven stories in The Resurrection Man's Legacy, eleven fascinating worlds all slightly different from our own, each incredibly real. Barry N. Maltzberg, in his introduction, makes reference to Raymond Chandler when he talks about, “...fiction lived through its background...” and this is exactly what Dale Bailey gives the reader. There is that extra depth in each tale, creating an enriched reading experience. The Resurrection Man's Legacy can be found at http://www.goldengryphon.com/ or Amazon.com
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Nothing Human : Nancy Kress
Which is just as well, because if the pribir are right, humans may need to change just about everything else to survive in such an unstable world. In 2013, some 13 year-olds on the east coast of the United States awake from comas to pronounce, “The pribir are coming!” When the pribir do come, they communicate through smells that only these children can detect. They begin telling humanity to do everything environmental groups have been saying for years: destroy nuclear and biological weapons, reduce greenhouse emissions and shut down nuclear reactors. But is this for the good of the planet or are the pribir paving the way for an easy invasion? Nothing Human follows the lives of the "pribir children", as they become known, from first contact through several generations to a world ravaged by the worst nightmares imaginable. If anything, this is the novel's only flaw as it does at times become difficult to keep track of all the characters as we are introduced to the new generations, mostly due to the tendency of the pribir children to produce triplets. Kress does help the reader with strong character development, filling the world with believeable people the reader can empathise with; people who the reader is sad to see die as time passes. Nothing Human is a well crafted and complex novel, populated with ideas and wonderful characters. It questions what it is that makes a human, is it DNA, behaviour or a combination of the two? Nothing Human can be found at http://www.goldengryphon.com/ or Amazon.com
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376 pages Wakefield Press 2003
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