Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews (27 page)

Fury

by Henry Kuttner

Gollancz, 208 pages, paperback, 2000; reissue of a book originally published in magazine form 1947 as by Lawrence O'Donnell

When I was in my teens and still at school, I was an addict of the paperback-remainder bins that were in every Woolworths, for there one could find countless sf and fantasy books at a trivial cost, mainly US remainders dumped in the UK. It was thanks to those bins that I built the nucleus of an excellent sf/fantasy library. (It was also thanks to them that I became an avid fan of Richard Powers's cover art, but that's another story.) There I discovered many US authors I'd never before heard of, one of the most notable being Henry Kuttner, whose
Bypass to Otherness
(1961) I still regard as one of the best story collections ever published, in any genre; I re-read my copy several times, and pressed friends and relatives to read it, until finally it dropped to bits.

Among the other authors who impressed me at the time were two, Lewis Padgett and Lawrence O'Donnell, who seemed to have something of the Kuttner flair, although in my youthful critical opinion they weren't as good. It came as a considerable shock, years later, to discover that Kuttner, Padgett and O'Donnell were one and the same person.

Or, rather,
two
and the same person. For all three names (and others besides) were used largely for collaborations between Kuttner himself and his wife, Catherine L. Moore.
Fury
was one such collaboration, and is perhaps their most famous effort. To the teenager that I once was, however, it was actually a disappointment: I expected from the title some magisterial tale, as hot or as cold as fire, and instead found a novel that was really more about political machination than anything else. Coming back to it decades later has been an interesting experience.

The tale is this: Mankind has destroyed Earth in an atomic blaze. Centuries later, the survivors live in great domed colonies (Keeps) at the bottom of the oceans of Venus, confined there because wild animals and plants make the planet's land surface unremittingly hostile. Human society is stagnant through lack of the need to struggle, and it is clear to a few that the species is on its slow way out. Matters are not helped by the presence of a ruling caste of Immortals (not in fact immortal but rendered exceptionally long-lived as a heritable consequence of the atomic wars on Earth), who, with a perspective of centuries, have a habit of perpetual procrastination.

To one of these Immortals, Blaze Harker, is born a son, Sam. The mother dies in the birthing, and in grief Blaze has the baby hideously mutilated and cast adrift among the (mortal) plebs, where he grows up unknowing of his heritage. He becomes a petty and then a major criminal, with a strong psychopathic bent. He also, purely for commercial reasons, becomes fired with the idea that humanity should claim and colonize the land surface. This project Sam powers by large-scale deception and subterfuge, until finally it is brought to fruition as the first stepping stone towards humanity's destiny among the stars.

Fury
is, essentially, the biography of Sam Harker.

The most striking thing about this half-century-old novel is how modern it seems: shift the scene to a hostile planet other than Venus, remove one or two incongruous gender asides (Sam realizes he is repelled by one woman because she displays the aggressive self-confidence that really ought to be the province of men alone), and add a heap of cusswords plus a couple of detailed gratuitous sex scenes, and this could easily be a novel written in the 1980s or any time afterwards, right up until the present day. The politics are simplified, but that's true in (almost) all political novels. The human relationships are depicted in a generally adult fashion that contrasts starkly with the adolescence permeating most pulp novels of the 1940s and indeed for some decades afterwards. And the Kuttner/Moore combo succeeds in a trick that is remarkably sophisticated in both intention and attainment for fiction of that era: although the murderous, wholly self-interested Sam is as dislikable a figure as many a fictional villain, we somehow end up identifying with him, rooting for him.

The teenage me was wrong in his disappointment. This is a fine novel.

There are carps to be carped about this edition, however. First, it seems odd in a self-styled collectors' edition to maintain the lie that this was a solo effort by Kuttner; why not bill the authorship properly, and give Moore her share of the credit? The information that it was a collaborative work is tucked away on the back flap, but really it should be on the front cover. Second, the frequent typographical errors retained from the original Gollancz printing are a profound irritation, as are some crazily positioned line-spaces.

Some of them practically mid-sentence. If this is to be a collectors' edition, then such blemishes should have been erased. There is no cosy glow of nostalgia on encountering yet another blasted typo; instead there is the profound feeling that one's being short-changed – which of course is exactly the case, because the reason the corrections weren't made can only be because it would have cost money. Not very much money, to be sure; so it's kind of contemptuous to the readership that nothing has been done.

Still, the cover price is relatively modest, and if you've never read
Fury
it represents an excellent investment. If you merely need a copy for your shelves, you might perhaps be better searching the dealers for a second-hand copy of a different edition.

—Infinity Plus

Impact Parameter, and Other Quantum Realities

by Geoffrey A. Landis

Golden Gryphon, 340 pages, hardback, 2001

Geoffrey Landis is a working physicist (with NASA) and, according to the back flap of this book (I confess I haven't gone a-counting), the author of "over sixty published short stories and novelettes" plus one novel,
Mars Crossing
. Since his stories have been appearing since at least the mid-1980s and the novel was published as recently as 2000, it is evident that he's a member of one of that rare (although not excessively so) breed of sf writers distinguished in the short form but for some reason unwilling to do much with the long form. A collection of his short stories is therefore of particular interest, its publication an event worthy of some excitement.

Golden Gryphon have done him proud with
Impact Parameter
. This is an exceptionally nicely produced book, with a good, albeit somewhat atypical, Bob Eggleton cover, with attractive typography (that is unfortunately not quite matched by the standard of proofreading). It is a very handsome piece of publishing.

And what of the stories themselves?

Although he is reasonably versatile, Landis has the reputation of being primarily a hard sf writer, and the sixteen stories in this volume reflect that. In fact, it's probably a good idea to list the stories, since some are quite well known:

"A Walk in the Sun" (1991)

"Impact Parameter" (1992)

"Elemental" (1984)

"Ecopoiesis" (1997)

"Across the Darkness" (1995)

"Ouroboros" (1997)

"Into the Blue Abyss" (1999)

"Snow" (1998)

"Rorvik's War" (1995)

"Approaching Perimelasma" (1998)

"What We Really Do Here at NASA" (1994)

"Dark Lady" (1995)

"Outsider's Chance" (1998)

"Beneath the Stars of Winter" (1993)

"The Singular Habits of Wasps" (1994)

"Winter Fire" (1997)

(There are also a Foreword by Joe Haldeman, who is as always entertaining, generous and informative, and a very enjoyable Afterword by Landis himself giving some background info on the genesis of each story.)

That might seem like a uniformly impressive line-up of stories, kicking off proceedings with a Hugo-winning short to boot. But in fact the standard varies quite widely, not just conceptually but also in terms of credibility and of the stylistic ease of telling. "Elemental", for example, is a piece of (relative) juvenilia that might better have been excluded from this volume, and the same could be said of "What We Really Do Here at NASA", which is less a story than a squib that probably seems immensely funny to the author. That leaves us with fourteen stories that are worthy of serious consideration.

Almost all of the fourteen would normally be classified as hard sf. This is a subgenre that traditionally (rightly or wrongly) concerns itself less with character and subjectivity than with the scientific and/or technological ideas that drive the plot. That statement should not be misinterpreted: many hard sf stories include excellent character work and are deeply enriched by philosophical and/or emotional subtexts, or whatever, while many soft sf stories lack such graces. The point is that a hard sf story can
get by
without them.

And on occasion Landis is satisfied with this situation. In the hands of, say, Christopher Priest a story like "Rorvik's War" – in which technological illusion persuades a man he is fighting in a horrific mechanized war – would be a deeply moody, reflective and affecting piece. In Landis's hands there is no real characterization at all: he is much more concerned with the pyrotechnics of the tale. It still stands up as a good tale: as just noted, hard sf can get by without the refinements.

In other pieces Landis is obviously much
dis
satisfied with the notion that hard sf must abjure the responsibilities of most other forms of fiction, and one can see him struggling to
do
something about it. Here he has greater and lesser success, depending on the story. In "A Walk in the Sun" (a woman is stranded on the Moon for a few weeks; reliant on her solar cells to survive, she walks right around the Moon so as to keep constantly in sunlight) the protagonist is heckled onward by visions of her dead sister; one applauds the effort to give the character depth, while at the same time shiftily feeling that this is somewhat Creative Writing 101.

A much more interesting emotional/psychological setup is presented in "Into the Blue Abyss". In this story, which is somewhat reminiscent of Arthur C. Clarke's "A Meeting with Medusa" but arguably a lot better, two astronauts are sent plunging into the "seas" of Uranus. When they discover primordial life, it becomes in the strong political interest of one of the venturers to kill the other, the narrator, so that this finding will never be reported. The narrator's constant awareness of this is well handled. In fact all that happens is that the other explorer decides not to kill her and probably never had any intention of doing so, so that all the emotional build-up leads to no crisis: there is no onstage struggle of conscience on the part of the politically motivated explorer, no resolution of the interesting emotional situation but instead just a dissipation. Or was the threat entirely in the narrators' mind? The rejection of melodrama in favour of realism seems fine by me.

Another emotional/psychological setup that has great potential for interest comes in "Approaching Perimelasma". Here a miniaturized (to minimize tidal effects) human clone is sent into a black hole to observe all the wacky consequences of the laws of physics. The contents of the clone's mind are a necessarily simplified version – to save space in the miniature brain – of the mind of a full-size human principal, downloaded into it. The clone bears considerable resentment towards the full-size version of himself, who possesses memories and mental/emotional capabilities which he himself does not. The problem here is that the reader never quite believes in that resentment, or at least that it would be experienced by this particular protagonist.

It would be unkind and unjust to describe Landis's handling of the psychological situations in any of these three stories as clumsy – although it most certainly is in tales like "Elemental", which is a bit of an embarrassment despite having been nominated for a Hugo (Landis himself notes: "I have mixed feelings about it [the story] now"), and the title story, "Impact Parameter". Rather, it is somewhat rudimentary, as if Landis were making a very creditable stab at working out the art of characterization from first principles.

Yet this is not the case. Although "A Walk in the Sun" dates from 1991, "Into the Blue Abyss" is a 1999 story and "Approaching Perimelasma" a 1998 story – in other words, both are relatively recent. Of the two finest stories in the collection one, "Snow" dates from 1998 and is thus again quite recent in Landis's career, but the other, "Across the Darkness", is from 1995 – and both, especially the former, derive their impetus almost entirely from their exquisite handling of characterization, emotion, atmosphere and, in the latter case, the dynamics of human relationships. Another fine piece of character work, "Dark Lady", comes from, again, 1995. So it is very evident Landis does indeed know how to do it, and can do it superbly; where for some reason he has difficulty is in matching this depth to hard sf – because none of these three is essentially a hard sf story.

(A special mention should be made of "Snow". Less than five pages long, it is one of the finest sf stories this reviewer has read in a while. Why this brilliantly beautiful miniature hasn't been showered with every award imaginable is a matter beyond understanding.)

To say it once again, hard sf can get by without many of the elements demanded of other genres and subgenres of fiction: the ideas are the thing, and assuming they take wing then the rest becomes merely ancillary. In that context,
Impact Parameter
is an excellent collection, and certainly it makes highly enjoyable reading. Landis is currently a very good writer; the impetus for much of the criticism expressed above is that the stories in this book show how exceptionally, how spectacularly good he very nearly is, how very close he comes to transcending the self-imposed limitations of hard sf.

—Infinity Plus

Dead Man Riding: A Nell Bray Mystery

by Gillian Linscott

St Martin's Minotaur, 320 pages, hardback, 2002

In the opening year of the 20th century, six free-thinking Oxford University students and a tutor go on a reading holiday on the Cumberland farm of the great-uncle of one of them. On arrival, they discover that their host, a cantankerous eccentric who's a disturbing step or two more free-thinking than themselves, is under suspicion of murdering the son of a local worthy. Soon this seems almost trivial in light of the shifting relationships among the visitors themselves, and the discovery by at least some of them that the free love they've long theoretically advocated is in practice both more and less than they'd thought.

Then, one early morning, our narrator, Nell Bray, encounters Great-Uncle James's prized stallion running through the dawn mists with Great-Uncle James tied into its saddle, dead. However hard the visitors try to persuade themselves that the Old Man (as they call him) might have chosen to commit suicide in the manner of his favorite Byron poem, it is obvious to Nell there must have been foul play ...

There is a very great deal to recommend about this book. The principals – the students, the tutor, the Old Man, the Old Man's mistress, the Old Man's taciturn gypsy horseman – are all fully created, and the relationships between them are engrossing. The solution to the mystery – or, rather, to a little cluster of mysteries – is made more difficult for Nell and her friends because it depends on knowledge that well raised English people in the late-Victorian age deliberately concealed from themselves; in theory this ought to make it easier for us to spot what's going on than for Nell, and in many ways it does, yet at the same time Linscott very skillfully plays with our supposedly more sophisticated awareness to render the solution still tantalizingly obscure. A further piece of auctorial skill is that we come away from the book liking different characters than the ones we'd expected at the outset to find ourselves liking. And Nell herself is a delightful companion through it all, with her sharp perceptions and her able way of capturing personalities, atmospheres and scenes.

And yet ... and yet the book is actually quite remarkably hard to read.

Why?

The answer's almost ludicrous. If ever I'm asked again by a tyro writer why I stress the importance of the humble comma, I shall hold up
Dead Man Riding
as a ghastly demonstration of my point (pardon the pun). Linscott's attitude towards commas appears to be that a writer should, well, stick one in every now and then. As a consequence, several hundred times while reading this not very long novel I had to pause, frustratedly, to parse a sentence or phrase in order to work out what the heck Nell was trying to tell me before I could move on. If you can be bothered with such an exercise, then you'll find this text well rewards your labors. But for many I suspect the obstacle will prove too great.

—Crescent Blues