Planetary Adventure

My review of the new anthology The Jack Vance Reader is up at sfsite. I think some people may have taken it as too dismissive of Vance's early work -- more of a subjective response than an objective evaluation. I recognize that The Languages of Pao was groundbreaking in its use of pioneering linguistic theory and that Emphyrio has a special place in the hearts of many readers. That's why I wrote that Vance afficianados might enjoy the anthology but general readers dipping into sci-fi for the first time might not. I recommended Dying Earth and Lyonesse as alternative entry points for just that reason.

The tales collected in the anthology are not, however, classics in the sense that they will be reread by general fiction readers in fifty years or emerge as sci-fi exemplars in the canon of general fiction, such as Dying Earth, Book of the New Sun, etc. The read was laborious in comparison to the other works I mentioned -- mostly because of poor plotting and characterization. That doesn't mean that the works are without value. Vance's exposition is always thoughtful and baroque. And his dialogue can be engaging when his characters are debating philosophical or political topics. But I didn't feel any forward momentum pulling me into the stories. They never achieved takeoff velocity. As a fan of Vance and the genre, I could appreciate the mechanics of his stories and their contribution to sci-fi, but to recommend them to a new reader seemed not the best way of convincing them to pursue either sci-fi or Vance in the future.

Of course, there's an element of subjectivity and personal taste to any book review. Reader-response theory dictates no less. Everybody approaches a novel with different life experiences, backgrounds, etc. That's why I try to give reasons why a book succeeds or fails. These can be more objectively debated. Thus, there's a tension between criticism that holds a work up to an objective, impersonal ideal of art and the immediate, visceral response of a reader to a work. It's like trying to convince someone that a particular movie isn't funny when they're laughing off their seat. I'm not one to complain if this anthology gives more people pleasure than I thought it would. I just don't want them to miss the best Vance has to offer -- which is really the whole point of a book review: helping people prioritize their reading selections in a world where there is never enough time to read everything one should or would want to.

The Jack Vance Reader

Edited by Terry Dowling and Jonathan Strahan

Subterranean Press (July 2008)

482 pp.

3 books. 3 introductions. 1 author. Jack Vance. Normally, that should be enough to make any collector happy. So perhaps that's what editors Terry Dowling and Jonathan Strahan were counting on when they collected three of Vance's shorter novels (or longer novellas) into a compact trade cover, slapped on a preface about the "planetary adventure" subgenre, and apportioned a separate introduction for each book by Robert Silverberg, Ursula LeGuin, and Mike Resnick -- Jack Vance admirers and masters in their own right one and all. And as a compendium of Vance's older works, The Jack Vance Reader pulls together three workmanlike tales of the Grand Master into a solid, respectful anthology. But as an introduction to a new generation of readers, the volume fails to entice. If any sci-fi author's oeuvre is worth exploring, it is Jack Vance's. His Dying Earth saga is a seminal classic of the eponymous sub-genre, a triumphal pairing of baroque fantasy to far-future speculation. His fairy-tale Lyonesse trilogy outclasses and outsmarts, outsparkles and outdelights nearly all the competition. Vance invites you inside the story, and his words are not so much printed on the page as whispered in your ear.

But the tales collected herein -- Emphyrio, The Languages of Pao, and The Domains of Koryphon -- are not so accessible. Involute, slow, at times laboriously factitious, they are interesting explorations of "ideas in action," but paper-thin characters, stilted dialogue, and flat plots deprive the stories of much emotional resonance. They are not failures, but neither are they classics destined to be read and re-read in another 50 years. Accordingly, while the studied aficionado can appreciate them, the general reader may not even finish the anthology. More disturbing, she may not bother returning to any of Vance's worlds.

Emphyrio, the first selection, is a study in the power of myth and individualism in a dystopian society. One part "Harrison Bergeron," one part Anthem, the story traces the life of Ghyl Tarvoke, the son of a woodworker living in a feudalistic society where stasis is considered progress, conformity excellence. That society is divided into three classes: an aristocracy of rentiers who live in eyries above the city, their only interaction with commoners the tax they take for public infrastructure built centuries ago; a mass of semi-professionals and artisans working within a highly regulated guild system and receiving fixed municipal welfare allowances; and "noncuperatives: non-recipients of welfare benefits, reputedly all Chaoticists, anarchists, thieves, swindlers, whore-mongers." As he should in such a story, Ghyl chafes at this procrustean culture. He discovers the legend of Emphyrio, a mythical hero with liberational tendencies. In a fit of capricious enthusiasm, he submits Emphyrio's name for the mayoral ballot, in the hope of inspiring the populace to reassert its privileges under the forgotten Charter. Amiante, his father, is supportive: "Freedom, privileges, options, must constantly be exercised, even at the risk of inconvenience. Otherwise they fall into desuetude and become unfashionable, unorthodox -- finally irregulationary."

Political discussions of this sort punctuate the narrative and are not uninteresting. In the middle of a piratical adventure, Ghyl and a group of friends take the time to debate the parameters of their original compact with the sobriety of political philosophers theorizing over the state of nature, a scene Vance plays well, however self-consciously. But, as Silverberg writes in his introduction, the tale is a fable. And the most engaging fables are those with peripatetic plots that move from one idea to the next at a fairly rapid pace. Without the emotional pull of realism developed with three-dimensional characters, evolving relationships, and textured and alert dialogue, fables need some sort of constant self-awareness and theatricality to keep the reader's interest.

The Languages of Pao gets closer to achieving this sustained narrative canter. If Emphyrio is an examination of how static societies are undermined from within, Pao is a study in how external pressures galvanize social change. On the world of Pao, it is the metastructure of language rather than the political superstructure which internalizes submission. When, unable to overcome its innate apathy, a population of billions is overrun by a few thousand off-world mercenaries, the Paonese regent seeks, like the Meiji government of Japan, to modernize. For advice, he turns to the Breakness wizards, technocratic leaders of a patriarchal society of hypercompetitive social engineers. The polar opposite of the Paonese, Breakness dominie Lord Palafox devises a plan to spur competition and individualism in the Pao population by spawning specialized subcultures with new languages. His model, though, is the chain of being not the cooperative or public commonwealth. "Trust," sneers Lord Palafox, "What is that? The interdependence of the hive; a mutual parasitism of the weak and incomplete . . . . The Paonese concepts of 'trust,' 'loyalty,' 'good faith' are not a part of my mental equipment. We dominie of Breakness Institute are individuals, each his own personal citadel. We expect no sentimental services derived from clan loyalty or group dependence; nor do we render any. You would do well to remember this."

The plot traces this transformation through the eyes of an exiled Paonese prince, Beran, living in Breakness and, due to his linguistic fluidity, neither of one world nor the other. If Emphyrio is a send up of the sclerotic social democratic polities of Western Europe, Pao certainly doesn't pull any punches for American-style cutthroat capitalism. Once again, though, there aren't really any human relationships for the reader to hold onto, just a succession of events of varying interest.

The final novel, The Domains of Koryphon, is in some ways the weirdest and (perhaps for that reason) the most enjoyable of the three. A frontier Western with murder mystery elements and political overtones, Koryphon begins with Schaine Madduc's return home after 5 years of self-impose exile to her father's landed estate, Morningswake. The estate controls vast tracks of land ceded to Madduc's anscestors by nomadic natives ("Uldras") overrun by offworld freebooters ("Outkers"). This crowded planet also includes the erjin, a semi-intelligent race trained for urban slavery, and the morphotes, obscure creatures reduced to a zoological attraction -- "CAUTION! Morphotes are dangerous and cunning! Consider none of their proffers; accept none of their gifts! Morphotes come to the fence with a single purpose in mind: to mutilate, insult, or frighten those Gaeans who come to view them. TAKE WARNING! Morphotes have injured many persons; they may kill YOU. NEVERTHELESS, WANTON MOLESTATION OF THE MORPHOTES IS ABSOLUTELY FORBIDDEN."

Schaine's father's vehicle is found ambushed in the desert, his lifeless body within. Schaine, her brother Kelse, their guard Gerd Jemasze, and assorted political activists including a quondam childhood friend now a "Redemptionist" demanding the return of tribal lands and a potential love interest/advocate of the Society for Emancipation of Erjins ("SEE") collectively navigate the wildernesses of Vance's narrative, investigating the elder Madduc's demise at one point, resolving political grievances at another. Apparently, even fantasy worlds have their Red State/Blue State culture wars: "Urban folk," declares Kelse, "dealing as they do in ideas and abstractions, become conditioned to unreality. Then, wherever the fabric of civilization breaks, these people are as helpless as fish out of water." To which a Redemptionist replies, "Imagine yourself an Uldra: disenfranchised and subject to alien law. What would you do?" Vance keeps a brisk pace and interweaves the two plots well. More importantly, the resolution is surprisingly thoughtful while comically arch.

Indeed, the three novels are well selected vis-a-vis each other. Each dramatizes a socio-political problem, envisions a solution, and works out their contradictions and limitations. Emphyrio's revolution mirrors the capitalists' strike of Atlas Shrugged, with alien oppressors substituted for government parasites. John C. Wright offers an homage to Emphyrio in his The Golden Transcendence Trilogy, but his must be counted the superior philosophical fable. Pao attempts to strike a balance between the yin and yang of stability and change, community and individualism. And Koryphon wrestles with modern post-colonial issues of dispossession and group rights, firmly settling on the side of pragmatism. These are all places worth visiting someday. Just don't make them the first stop on your Jack Vance itinerary.

Review-Review Review

David Anthony Durham spares some gracious words for my review of Acacia on his blog: http://www.davidanthonydurham.com/blog/

I actually thought my review wasn't the best I'd ever written: it wanders at the beginning with a didactic survey of the history of the genre, closes inartfully, and just has an unsteady rhythm throughout, probably because the prose is a bit choppy and the macro-organization poorly planned. So I think it's definitely kind of Durham to give it a shout out on his blog. And while Durham describes my review as "very kind," I have to respectfully disagree. "Grateful" might be a better adjective. Books like Acacia are the reason I continue to read fantasy. Like an addict chasing an elusive high, I spend an inordinate chunk of my limited free time wading through mass-market rubbish for a prize discovery like Acacia. In genre fiction the old Greek prescription "Know Thyself" really is essential. If you only study best-seller lists, you're sure to waste your time with stacks of books that could be put to better use as kindling while missing a horde of treasures, such as Jeffrey Ford's The Physiognomist or Jeffrey Vandermere's City of Saints and Madmen or K.J. Bishop's The Etched City. And because of the variety of tastes nurtured by genre subfields, even mainstream newspaper and blog reviews are no guarantee. You have to develop a finely honed intuition or find a clear, unmistakable consensus to distinguish the brass from the gold--and even then, you'll waste time with a dozen false leads for every good tip.

It could be argued that conventional literary fiction (Roth, Updike, DeLillo, Powers -- all of whom I do immensely enjoy but more as a connoisseur) exhibits a higher consistency in quality, but, for me, the source of much of the emotional exaltation and wonder to be found in reading is in genre fiction: whether it's the brushed-steel blue melancholy of Chandler's The Long Goodbye; the mordant wit and fey imagination of Vance's Lyonesse Trilogy; or the archetypal far-future reveries of Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun, finding a great book is a lot like falling in love -- worth the wait.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I reviewed Acacia favorably not out of generosity but because it's one of the best genre books I've read in the past several years. Durham's craftsmanship as a historical fiction writer really shines through and offers something new, similar to Martin's early Fire and Ice books' debt to Sharon Kay Penman's novels on early Britain's interminable civil discord. And Acacia's studied pacing, fluent characterization, and careful plotting reminded me of Pullman's His Dark Materials and Stroud's Bartimaeus Trilogy. If you read only one fantasy book every year, make it Acacia for 2007 -- and Dragons of Babel for 2008.

As a side note, for book afficianados looking for their next fix or an update on his sequel, Durham maintains a very reader-friendly and informative blog. Other writers with interesting websites or blogs that I've noticed: Jeff Vandermeer; George R.R. Martin; Michael Swanwick; Brandon Sanderson. Writers who could do (much) better: Robin Hobb, Jeffrey Ford, Guy Gavriel Kay.

The Dominican Tolkien

My review of Junot Diaz's The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is running on The Agony Column. It won more awards than the last five Updike and Roth novels combined. It's not as good as all that, but it's consistently entertaining and probably the best first novel I've read since Eggers's debut.

The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
by Junot Diaz
Penguin Books (2007)
335 pp.
ISBN: 978-1-59448-329-5

You've heard the phrase "larger than life." No one would use that term to describe Oscar Wao, or even the justly lauded novel bearing his name. Here is a man -- an overgrown boy more precisely -- whose very absence of ambition, bravado, adventure, and (yes) life defines him, like the negative space in the center of a doughnut. He is fat. He is nerdly. He is demure. He is a dreamer. He is who nobody wants to be, but who everyone fears they could become. He is also, at the end of his brief, wondrous life as vividly told by his best friend Yunior, a brave, gentle soul, whose actions reveal the humanity in the quietly steadfast. And that is almost enough to turn this book, a virtuoso first novel from Junot Diaz, into an instant classic. If (like its eponymous hero) it falls short of greatness, it nevertheless reminds us how small the rest of the world is.

The book begins, like Kill Bill (another genre smashup), auspiciously enough with a laughably serious sci-fi quote: "Of what import are brief, nameless lives . . . to Galactus??" Diaz follows with a high-brow excerpt from poet Derek Walcott: "Christ have mercy on all sleeping things! From that dog rotting down Wrightson Road to when I was a dog on these streets . . . I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation." And that, more or less, previews the novel's tone: a teetering balance of high and low, comic book and Shakespeare, nerd-dom and Third-World politics. The theme of alienated adolescents fantasizing about mutant powers shares the same pages as that of immiserated, impotent minorities trapped in sub-tropical tyrannies. Diaz focuses on the Dominican Republic, the home of the Leons, expatriates whose ancestors were decimated by the brutal dictator Rafael Trujillo and who now live in (where else?) New Jersey, where the last male scion spends his days watching anime, reading fantasy, orchestrating role playing games, and writing an endless sci-fi epic.

Oscar, appellated Wao after his abiding love for Doctor Who, takes after another comic novel hero, Ignatius J. Reilly of A Confederacy of Dunces. He is a man of girth and stunted sexuality sublimated into baroquely stilted verbiage, uttering salutations such as "Hail and well met," intoning gravely after a jog "I shall run no more," and wondering whether orcs "at a racial level" imagine themselves to look like elves. The narrative, voiced by a room mate from college, places him at the center of the story, but the novel circles through time, sketching a family history reaching into the post-war past of the Dominican Republic and the origins of the Leons' terrible fall. Thus, the viewpoint switches to Oscar's sister, then his mother, grandfather, then back again to "the Dominican Tolkien."

The family member's destinies purportedly trace a "fuku" or curse, stretching across time and space. The reader can observe Diaz striving for a flavor of magical realism: Isabel Allende meets Gabriel Garcia Marquez. But, it is one ingredient too many in this heady Caribbean brew. He supplies a couple coincidences and visions that lend themselves to an otherworldly interpretation, but the story's heart simply isn't in it. This is a character study; almost a short story collection of interrelated life vignettes. In its attention to detail and the sympathy afforded each character, the novel merits comparison with the intimate short work of Alice Munro. At the same time, Diaz can muster a prose so bleak as to be drawn from a Cormac McCarthy novel:

At one point they passed through one of those godforsaken blisters of a community that frequently afflict the arteries between the major cities, sad assemblages of shacks that seem to have been deposited in situ by a hurricane or other such calamity. The only visible commerce was a single goat carcass hanging unfetchingly from a rope, peeled down to its corded orange musculature, except for the skin of its face, which was still attached, like a funeral mask. He'd been skinned very recently, the flesh was still shivering under the shag of flies.

Unfortunately, the stories are so individually strong that they exert a centrifugal force on the central narrative, resulting in a less-than-dynamic pace and plot. While the realism and lack of sustained ambiguity keep the atmosphere natural, the real wonder here is the narrator, a consummate verbal showman who recombines Dominican Spanish and American English into a stream of vibrant sound and sense, rhythm and rhyme. Like Arundhati Roy or early Salman Rushdie, Diaz explores the fringes of natural sound and language, delighting in a childlike play with the skin of thought. The conversational discourse employs copious use of footnotes, strewn at times in short bursts of thought confetti and at others in long, winding discourses on minor character backgrounds and Dominican history. Diaz demonstrates a technical mastery here that was rightly commended; his youthful, player-narrator could, without just the right balance, very easily have sounded like a puff-chested caricature of Caribbean machismo. In its studied effortlessness, the novel recalls A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, the work of an author who also received a Toronto sermon of adulation with his debut, only later to be reprimanded for indulging in style at the expense of substance, and then even later redeemed by a "straight" story about an African child refugee.

This is a book that tugs at you, wears down your defenses. At once supremely silly and profoundly serious, it is a book running on fumes and adolescent adrenaline that keeps going because it never condescends to the reader and consistently sustains an aura of authenticity. In its preoccupation with the effluvia of marvelous pop fiction, it is also a love letter to the past 30 years of American culture before the Internet revolution and the i-pod generation, when our entertainments were a little less hi-tech and yet (by virtue of raw imagination) more fully realized than ever since.

Real Tropical Thunder

My review of Ian McDonald's trippy, terrific Brasyl is up at the agony column. One of the best sci-fi novels of recent years. Short, punchy, stylized, self-contained -- very few complaints.


Brasyl
By Ian McDonald
Pyr/Prometheus Books 2007
United States, First Edition
ISBN: 978-1-59102-543-6
357 pp.; $25.00

Brasyl, the excellent new time and genre-splicing novel from Ian McDonald, bills itself as “BladeRunner in the tropics.” The comparison is disingenuous (and clichéd): where BladeRunner married a noir sensibility with dystopian manga visuals, McDonald’s novel exults in a bigger-brighter-faster cyberpunk ethos. It is also unnecessary. Brasyl presents a world (in fact a world of worlds) completely of its author’s own messy, fractal imagining – a rainforest society poised between fecundity and rot where Indios shamans let slip the veils of reality, Portuguese priests establish their own earthly Cidade de Deos, reality TV producers rake the slums to slake the public thirst for exhibitionist depravity, and the cyber angels of perpetual surveillance stream the skies, watchful, recording all. There are many sights to see in Brasyl.

The novel consists of three distinct stories in which connections increasingly appear. The first occurs in present-day Sao Paulo, Brazil, where Marcelina Hoffman, an ambitious reality TV producer looking for her next great show after such hits as Filthy Pigs, Kitsch and Bitch, and The Real Sex in the City, decides to track down a soccer goalkeeper blamed for Brazil’s loss of the 1950 World Cup. Her boss, a pretentious technophile who spews faux-hip IM-speak such as IPTRB (It Presses the Right Buttons) and IRTAMD (I’m Ready to Announce My Decision), gives her the green light. She begins to trace the former goalie’s whereabouts but is interrupted when a doppelganger emerges bent on sabotaging her career.

Twenty-five years in the future, Edson Jesus Oliveira de Freitas is also encountering doppelgangers. He falls in love and goes on the run with one of a woman named Fia Kishida, “just a plain quantum-computing postgrad specializing in multiversal economic modeling,” who is murdered. It is difficult to hide, they find, when nanobot surveillance drones swarm the sky and coordinate with ubiquitous RFID chips on the ground. Fia II explains that her world is “less paranoid. We don’t watch each other all the time. But it’s more . . . broken . . . . . We leave bits of ourselves all over the place: memories, diaries, names, experiences, knowledge, friends, personalities even.”

The third story takes place in the 18th century and follows Father Luis Quinn, a Jesuit with a violent past and a facility with languages, on his mission to find a renegade priest who is building his own church in the rainforest’s heart of darkness. Quinn has requested a difficult task and his prayer is answered. He meets a French scientist who shows him the science-ruled future: a primitive Governing Engine. “A universe ruled by number, running like punched cards through the loom of God.” Earlier, he witnesses the conquistadores, after a plague exterminates all beasts of burden, reduce the natives to human mules – a repudiation of the Enlightenment creed that nature had not contrived to have some men born with saddles on their backs and others “booted and spurred” to ride them. Father Diego, Father Luis’s prey, is no more forgiving: “Citizens of heaven, subjects of Christ the King . . . . They come to me as animals, deceptions in the shape of men. I offer them the choice Christ offers all: Accept his standard and . . . become men, become souls. Or choose the . . . inevitable lot of the animal, to be yoked and bound to a wheel.”

While there is enough material here for a quite longer book, McDonald knows that not every meal need be a banquet. Brasyl is, thus, a repast meant to delight and surprise not to sate the senses. Those appreciative of the author’s flair but harboring larger appetites may enjoy McDonald’s River of Gods – twice as long but just as deep.

As the novel progresses, the different characters with their stories, their lives, their settings, and their worlds swirl together across space and time. This is a tricky task, but McDonald succeeds because of his ability to ground the reality of his foreign locales with evocative descriptions. “Rio had always been a city of shifting realities, hill and sea, the apartment buildings that grew out of the sheer rock of the morros, the jarring abutments of million-real houses with favela newlywed blocks, piled one on top of another. And where the realities overlap, violence spills through.” Nor is life easier for those exiled to the jungles of “green and mold, water and heat and broken light, mists and vapors, and the flat, gray meanders of endless rivers. Canoes and bows and creatures heard but seen only in glimpses, a world without vistas, its horizon as distant as the next tree, the next vine, the next bend in the river. A vegetable world, vast and slow.”

Like the characters, the reader comes to realize that “the flimsiest of girder works over the deepest of abysses, that this world, these streets, the skirt of rooftops spread out beneath like a first Communion frock, the blue sea and the blue sky and the green forest of the hills, even the soccer ball . . . carried with the clumsiness of a geek-boy, were a weave of words and numbers . . . . An improvised found-source favela solution.” With his shimmering visions and sprawling prose, McDonald is both a creator and destroyer of worlds. It is a pleasure to watch him at work.

Queen of Hearts

My review of Greg Keyes's The Born Queen, the conclusion to his Thorn and Bone series, is posted at sfsite.com. A solid, traditional fantasy that may get a little wobbly at the end, but still stands heads and shoulder above your run-of-the-mill epic fantasy.

The Born Queen: Book Four of The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone
By Greg Keyes
Del Rey (March 25, 2008)
464 pp.

Perfection isn’t always good enough. With The Born Queen, Greg Keyes delivers a stellar conclusion to his quartet The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone that nevertheless leaves the reader earthbound in an ultimately conventional, if unconventionally well written, epic fantasy. Keyes executes each of the key elements of the genre as masterfully as his dessrata (fencing) champion Cazio dispatches enemies. He properly reconstructs rather than simply incorporates uncanny linguistic and anthropological sources from this world to breathe verisimilitude into his own. He deals, at a lethally brisk pace, hands of fate to his characters that no card-counting reader could anticipate. His prose hustles the reader forward into the story rather than the other way around. On a technical level, it is difficult to dispute that Keyes has accomplished everything he set out to on the terms of the story he intended to tell. But by playing the genre so traditionally, however impeccably, he has revealed its limits, even if they are not coterminous with his own.

Keyes’s saga began with the publication in 2004 of The Briar King, in which is recounted the assassination of the greater part of the royal household of Dare of the kingdom of Crotheny; the defense of its fled princess, Anne, and her maid, Austra, by a dashing, sunkissed fencer, Cazio; and the intersecting journeys of a young nobleman scholar, Stephen Darige, with a holter (guardian) of the King’s Wood, Aspar White. In 2005, readers returned to his world with The Charnel Prince, in which was witnessed the usurpation of the throne by the resurrected Robert Dare, paternal uncle to Anne. Then, in 2007, Keyes released The Blood Knight, a penultimate volume revealing the murder of the forest-guardian Briar King, the rise and fall of a poisonous Dune-esque worm, Anne’s awakening to her supernatural birthright, and the identity of the eponymous sanguineous chevalier.

The Born Queen resumes the story in the thick of things without leave to catch your breath – readers are encouraged to review the previous books or at least freshen up via wikipedia. If in the prior volumes the story simmered, here it blasts on full boil. Keyes weaves the novel from five separate points-of-view: short, staccato-sharp chapters that, by the last 100 pages, accelerate and collide in a heady stampede. The stakes of the previous novels (whether certain characters live or die, who occupies a temporal throne) alternate with a grander scheme in The Born Queen that concerns the fate of the world. Surprises are, if not liberally, precisely sprinkled. Keyes otherwise avoids complacency by a careful attention to the mechanics of prose: diction, syntax, micro-level organization. His paragraphs are as measured and dynamic as his chapters. Careful word choice (e.g., glister, bedimmed, churr) in both dialogue and descriptive passages infuses the prose with the breeze of another living world, much like Gene Wolfe’s use of archaic neologisms did for The Book of the New Sun.

The conclusion, brilliant but flawed, is frustrating. Two major revelations occur, both of which are unexpected. In the earlier of the two, a legendarily insane historical figure is reincarnated. The first disappointment is that little distinguishes this character’s voice from the voice of Robert Dare, his contemporary foil. The second is that these too baroquely evil madmen never meet. By contrast, the second revelation is a gem perfectly hidden in plain sight and not revealed until the very end. As an additional pleasure, in a codex, Keyes honors another character with a poignant Atonement-style valediction.

So what’s wrong with Keyes’s endgame? Primarily, the fact that everything (plot, characters, destinies, stakes) gets too big too fast and then hinges on one individual’s sentimentality. In the first place, the background for the struggle (a heap of exposition concerning three magical thrones) is conveyed almost entirely through dialogue rather than drama. Keyes does his best with the constraints (4 books, 400-plus pages, 5 years --amazing) he’s imposed on himself, but the reader is rushed to comprehension, which falters in places: I’m still not sure what the purpose of the Blood Knight was, who he worked for, and why he collaborated with the Sarnwood Witch. Additionally, there’s too little recognition of the role of historical chance or the tragedian’s feel for misunderstanding and disaster. The fate of the world hinges on the outcome of the struggle between the corrupting taint of absolute power and the moral accountability of friendship. I should have been harrowed but instead was reminded of Season Six of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

And herein lies the heart of the problem. While Keyes was planning and composing his series, the genre evolved. Today, television shows such as Battlestar Galactica and movies such as The Dark Knight succeed not because of their spectacular settings but because they adapt genre conventions to contemporary issues such as terrorism, emergency ethics, group psychology, and the unstable definition of heroism. In fiction, fantasy such as David Anthony Durham’s Acacia tackles the issue of pragmatism versus idealism in a multi-ethnic, multi-polar world confronting the quandary of global governance. Even George R.R. Martin’s continuing (and continually delayed) series has evolved. What began as a historical-fiction approach to the fantasy epic substantially indebted to the style of Sharon Kay Penman has grown into a unique meditation on the imperatives of realpolitic and the end of the (post Cold War) bipolarity of good and evil.
Keyes’s series, in distinction, most resembles Lost, a story that irresistibly commands the subject’s attention but cannot definitively rebut the accusation that its virtuosity is a shell game hiding a Rube Goldberg.

But these quibbles pale in comparison to the virtues of Keyes’s sequence. Simply put, The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone is one of the finest traditional fantasy series of the past two decades. It’s too bad that’s not the same anymore as calling it a classic.

Here be Dragons

My review of Michael Swanwick's The Dragons of Babel, one of the best fantasy novels I've ever read, is up at sfsite.com. It's even better than the original, The Iron Dragon's Daughter.

The Dragons of Babel
By Michael Swanwick
Jan. 8, 2008 (Tor)
320 pp.

“I desired dragons,” Tolkein reflected, “with a profound desire.” Fantasy has desired dragons too -- if not always as profoundly as one would like, then at least profusely. Eddison invoked the beast as a symbol of eternal return in The Worm Ouroboros. Gardner, delving into similar mythological mines in Grendel, unearthed a creature existing outside of time, an intelligence spearing the past, present, and future on the tip of its claw, an impressive, impassive Nietzschean herald of the heat-death of the universe. Most other authors, however, fashion serpents only scale deep, imagining them as gigantic sand worms (Herbert), fire lizards (McCaffrey), or leonine raptors (Dragonheart). Among contemporary writers, Hobb is one of the few to express a deeper interest in the metaphysical properties of dragons -- using sea-spawned serpents that metamorphose (or face extinction) through an intricate environmental process as a metaphor for the precariousness of modern ecologies.

Swanwick’s dragons, however, are one of a kind. Modern monstrosities, they are part jet and part artificial intelligence, baleful spirits of power and malice bent on destruction. And, like Gravity’s Rainbow’s rockets, they come screaming across the sky in the first line of The Dragons of Babel, “their jets so thunderous they shook the ground like the great throbbing heartbeat of the world.” Will la Fey, an orphan of uncertain parentage, runs outside to watch them pass overhead and witnesses one fall in combat to a basilisk, in a scene (like many others) rendered with the vividness, poignancy and precision of a prose poem. Two days later, “a crippled dragon crawled out of the Old Forest and into the village. Slowly he pulled himself into the center square. Then he collapsed. He was wingless and there were gaping holes in his fuselage, but still the stench of power clung to him, and a miasma of hatred . . . . [I]t was built of cold, black iron . . . with jagged stumps of metal where its wings had been and ruptured plates here and there along its flanks. But even half-destroyed, the dragon was a beautiful creature.”

This awful power and irresistible beauty is what seduces Will into becoming the dragon’s lieutenant. Swanwick conveys Will’s initial excitement with dark humor. It “gifted everything with an impossible vividness. The green moss on the skulls stuck in the crotches of forked sticks . . . the salamanders languidly copulating in the coals of the smithy forge, even the stillness of the carnivorous plants in his auntie’s garden as they waited for an unwary toad to hop within striking distance -- such homely sights were transformed.” But this “sleek being with the beauty of an animal and the perfection of a machine” will not consent to a mere partnership; it wants total control. In the maw of its cockpit, Will is drugged and raped as “[s]omething cold and wet and slippery slid into [his] mind. A coppery foulness filled his mouth. A repulsive stench rose up in his nostrils . . . . Coil upon coil, it thrust its way inside him.”

Will spends the remainder of the novel trying to live with the dragon inside him, even after its physical body is reduced to ash. His village exiles him for crimes committed during his enthrallment. His initial adventures are aimless excursions, peripatetic scenes of arch didacticism that recall Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland. He rescues a child older than she seems, an eternal Alice as it were. Fleeing the escalation of war between the East and the West, he enters a refugee camp and encounters the apogee of suffering alongside the nadir of goodness, from which he finds a purpose: to bring the war to Babel, the dragons’ home.

Swanwick’s unique setting -- a contemporary faerie world in which post-industrial technology and ancient magic blend seamlessly -- has garnered many labels: elf punk, cyber-steampunk, slipstream, the original New Weird. In fact, Swanwick’s world is a meticulously researched compendium of mythological figures, a lovingly compiled faerie grimoire of the globe. He paints his characters – generic elves and dwarves but also wodewose, fossegrim, tokoloshe, haint, tylwyth teg, russalka, albino giants “translucent-skinned and weak as tapioca pudding” and a host of other Otherworldly ethnics – with Pre-Raphaelite attention to historical detail and moral seriousness. Harkening back to the macabre plotting and grim tone of Hans Christian Anderson and Christina Rosetti, his book is distinctly fantasy for adults. His mellifluous prose style echoes Lord Dunsany, while his story structuring resembles the bildungsromans of James Cabell and David Lindsay more than the epic quests of Tolkien. Immersed in a pop-saturated culture of designer brands straight out of a Bret Easton Ellis novel (Givenchy, Zippo, Marlboro, McDonalds and other epiphenomena of late-consumer capitalism all make an appearance), his world is sui generis and cannot truly be categorized, only comprehended.

Nominally a sequel to the early-90s’ classic The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, the book revisits the same world with new characters and updated themes. Where its predecessor tackled issues of child labor and feminism, The Dragons of Babel meditates on the causes and costs of terrorism, unlimited executive power, and globalization as seen in the microcosm of the multi-cultured metropolis. Swanwick’s Babel, a congeries of ethnic fay from across the continents teeming in close quarters in a darkly dreaming analogue of New York City, is a consummate triumph. Exemplary touches are his haints, oppressed spirits of Southern U.S. heritage, who inhabit his Harlem, a nod to Ellison’s The Invisible Man, and his stone lion, who patiently guards the city’s library (reading over the shoulder of any nearby bibliophile) while waiting for his mates’ labors to shake the Tower of Babel to ruins. The tour is brief (a mere 320 pages) but packed – the sights and sounds of Babel and the novel recursively folding in on themselves, as rich and dense and intricate as the parapets of Gormenghast.

In its capacious incorporation of other great works, its assured and dexterous prose, its evocative images, its timely thematic concerns, and its satisfying and original conclusion, The Dragons of Babel is an unqualified masterpiece representing the pinnacle of modern fantasy. Simply put, it is great fantasy as great literature. Future writers would do well to heed closely to Swanwick’s considered inversions of the tropes of the genre, which remind us that “Magic in the imagination is a wondrous thing, but magic in practice is terrible beyond imagining.”

Out with the Old, In with the New Fantasy

Acacia Book One: The War with the Mein
By David Anthony Durham
576 pp.
Doubleday 2007

Like Hannibal’s horde crashing its way to Rome, David Anthony Durham’s fantasy debut, Acacia Book One: The War with the Mein, continues (a year after its release and on the eve of paperback publication) to crest the waves of critical acclaim. Enthusiastic reviews and exposure in a number of establishment publications, including The Times, The Washington Post and Entertainment Weekly. Selection for both Publisher’s Weekly’s and Kirkus’s roundup of best fiction from 2007. A John W. Campbell Award nomination for best new fantasy writer. Even a Hollywood movie deal. It took three books and at least four times as many pages for George R.R. Martin to get this kind of attention.

Which prompts the question: Has the fantasy genre matured or has the mainstream media mellowed? The demonstrated profitability over the past decade of the fantasy franchise (the proverbial cave-dweller more likely recognizes the names Potter and Frodo than Obama and McCain) supports the latter proposition. But with non-traditional fare such as Acacia stacking the bookshelves, a measure of satisfaction in the new direction of the genre is not uncalled for.

The epic (usually serialized) quest story has been and remains, for better or worse, the public face of modern fantasy. As with Plato and philosophy, a deep, thoughtful, independent tradition preceded J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis but was largely eclipsed by their popular success. With Tolkien, we have fantasy as the English pastoral, the anti-Industrial Romance yearning with an almost Pre-Raphaelite naïveté for the community and simplicity of the medieval era. Lewis’s Narnia sequence deployed similar conventions but substituted a layer of Christian allegory for Tolkien’s literary paganism. The Post-War period lay fallow for a couple decades – Fritz Leiber and Michael Moorcock experimented successfully with pulp and anti-heroic forms of the genre but remained essentially esoteric authors. Likewise, LeGuin’s and McKillip’s respective Earthsea and Riddle-Master sequences were too literary and deceptively, elegantly simple to break into the mainstream, leaving the field open for such authors as Raymond Feist, David Brooks and David Eddings, practitioners of a sometimes imaginative if ultimately limited style of adventure-oriented, teenager-focused escapism. Then, Stephen Donaldson flipped the genre on its head with his Thomas Covenant series, exploring the linkages between sickness and heroism, fantasy and sanity.

But the real transformation begins with Robert Jordan and his inexhaustible Wheel of Time series. Here we have the sense of a world as wide with a history as deep as our own – with kingdoms existing beyond the page. The action is, initially, grand if at times inscrutable. To explore his variegated world, Jordan assembles an ensemble cast of characters, each of whom is uniquely individuated. The weaknesses appear once the reader is well into the story: a plodding prose, a meandering plot, and conventional dualist themes. But the groundwork is laid for future innovation. The whimsical variety of imaginary beings in J.K. Rowling’s universe, as well as its voluminous length, owes not a little to Jordan’s. And if Jordan worked within a bipolar paradigm, Martin updates the genre for the post-Cold War era of hyper-realist global politics.

Acacia incorporates all these disparate strands and directs them to a contemporary purpose. Durham comes to the genre with the toolkit of a historical fiction writer who has written on topics as varied as emancipated slaves settling the American West and Numidian raiders threatening the Roman republic. Refreshingly, he eschews the traditional European white bread setting for a Mediterranean focaccia of cultures. Acacians, olive-skinned empire-builders, rule The Known World, a sea-hugged landmass of diverse peoples. Like that of the imperial Romans, their civilization includes light-skinned clannish northerners, from which a Vercingetorix-like assassin emerges to depose the emperor, Leodan Akaran. The assassin’s brother, Hanish Mein, finishes the job, sweeping the Acacians’ army from the field with foreign allies and primitive biological weaponry. But, like the historic Theodoric whose conquests and reign resemble his own, Hanish has come not to bury Caesar but to praise him; i.e., take the crown for himself.

Leodan’s four children scatter to the four winds, and the remainder of the novel is spent catching up with them then following their individual and collective destinies, which intersect and collide in surprising ways. Some of them have undergone considerable character changes, which Durham presents abruptly and with little background. At first, the elision is discomfiting, but later it seems of a piece with his larger macro-historical style. Many events are distilled to seminal scenes rather than allowed to unfold with realistic verisimilitude. Durham is presenting us his own Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and if the story must skip over the quiet moments of life to capture the grand sweep of history, then that is a trade-off the author is entitled make – especially as it spares the reader from enduring the usual slew of banal escape scenes.

And he certainly does cram a wealth of ideas and detail into a 576-page book. In a subplot involving the exchange of a drug called the mist for a levy of child slaves, he explores the connections between imperial decline, mass narcotic dependence, and human trafficking. With the very title of the Akarans’ dominion, The Known World, Durham comments on their provincial arrogance. Hanish gets a taste of this when he thinks to double cross the independent trading company, the League of Vessels, balancing the world’s powers by managing the drug-slave trade. As one emissary warns:

Scowl at me all you like, Hanish. Threaten me. Fume at me. Reach across the space between us and throttle my neck if you want to . . . . Just know that if you do so you’re like the ant that bites a man’s little toe. You bite one moment, the next you’re squashed.

And then there are the mines of Kidnaban, the first sight of which shakes the worldview of one of Leodan’s children like an earthquake:

The sight of them struck her with a type of horror that she had forgotten existed, the same fear she had felt when a silly maid had told her tales of a demon race of people who lived inside a steaming mountain, feeding the fires within it with naughty children snatched from their beds . . . . By the light . . . she [] made out the confusion of crisscrossing diagonal lines . . . . blurred by a barely perceptible form of movement . . . . The objects in motion were not tricks of the light. They were people. . . . So small that they could not be perceived as individuals but took form only because of their collective movement, as a line of ants from a distance is one being . . . . She realized the most ghastly thing was not the staggering numbers of them nor their defected facades nor their smallness compared to the project that bound them. There was another reason the line looked so irregular to her eyes. There were children among the laborers.

If epic fantasy is traditionally about heroes, Acacia is about forces beyond any individual’s control. It acknowledges the tension between idealism and pragmatism, which creates a space in which heroism cannot operate. Durham’s demonstration of the unintended consequences of the exercise of power echoes LeGuin’s classic Taoist text The Lathe of Heaven, but the brutal clash of civilizations he depicts capturing the ruthless capriciousness of history when juxtaposed against human desire is indebted to no predecessor. The novel’s eponymous tree, then, is a not inapt symbol: covered with thorns, difficult to uproot, the acacia is revered by some as a symbol of purity and immortality. But it is also known to harbor colonies of ants which swarm out in the thousands to kill its host’s rivals – as indiscriminate and ineluctable a force of nature as one could imagine.

The epic quest genre is old – as old today as the Soviet Union was when it collapsed. It competes not just against literary fiction but against more pioneering forces in the wider genre of speculative fiction such as the new weird, steam punk, cyber punk, and fabulism. It was once enough to be merely competent, to achieve technical mastery of the conventions, to be good. Success today demands that an author bring something more to the reader: a novel framing device, an unexplored perspective, a new direction, and most importantly contemporary relevance. The question is no longer whether a particular epic fantasy is good or even great but whether it is different and fresh. Otherwise, it is just as dead as the wood pulp it’s written on.