Table of Contents

- Introduction

- The Touch

- A Step Beyond

- Hopscotch

- The Verificationist

- It's Been a Good Life

- The Lost

- Atom

- Black Projects, White Knights

- Coldheart Canyon

- The Fifth Victim

- A Matter of Profit

- Thief of Souls

- Lazy Bones

- Sarah's Landing 1

- Pretty Dead

- From the Dust Returned

- Let's All Kill Constance

- Boost

- Expatria

- Keepers of the Peace

- Collecting Candace

- The Curse of Chalion

- Saturday Morning Fever

- Voice of the Violin

- The Wooden Sea

- Nemesis

- Tempter

- Into the Web

- Peril

- Fault Lines

- The Feminists

- Kunma

- Terror Tales of the City: Prince of the Perverse

- Fountain Society

- Prey

- Nalda Said

- The Compleat Enchanter: Fantasy Masterworks 10

- Singularity

- The Mind Box

- The Dead Wives Society

- Regina's Song

- The Shroud of the Thwacker

- Children of the Star

- Enchantress from the Stars

- Time Traveling with Science and the Saints

- Artifacts

- Fever 42

- Through the Wormhole

- Pigtopia

- Galactic Rapture

- The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque

- Daughters of a Coral Dawn

- Reunion

- Last Harbor

- Fitcher's Brides

- Alone

- The Killing Hour

- The Survivors' Club

- Science Good, Bad and Bogus

- Death in Dublin

- Vaporetto 13

- Motion to Kill

- The Tarzan Chronicles

- The Anniversary

- Lost Stories: 21 Long-Lost Stories from the Bestselling Creator of Sam Spade, The Maltese Falcon, and The Thin Man

- A Caress of Twilight

- A Time Gone By

- Empty Cities of the Full Moon

- A Season for the Dead

- Lucifer's Shadow

- Supping with Panthers

- Sense of Evil

- The Program

- Timeshift

- The Murder Room

- Deadly Visions

- Speak Now

- Dark Terrors 4

- The Tooth Fairy

- The Anatomy Lesson

- Edward Maret

- Surgical Risk

- Right to Life: A Novella and Two Stories

- Bag of Bones

- The Knotted Cord

- The Moth Diaries

- The Buzzing

- From the Corner of His Eye

- Fury

- Impact Parameter, and Other Quantum Realities

- Dead Man Riding: A Nell Bray Mystery

- i-o

- Fantastic Tales

- Silence and Shadows

- Fat Ollie's Book

- Rules of the Hunt

- Deepsix

- Guilty Until Proven Guilty

- Northern Gothic

- Windhaven

- Come Fygures, Come Shadowes

- Noir: Three Novels of Suspense

- Picoverse

- Bronwyn Book One: Palaces & Prisons

- Remnant Population

- The Speed of Dark

- The Dreamthief's Daughter

- Shockingly Close to the Truth: Confessions of a Grave-Robbing Ufologist

- Suicide Casanova

- The Integral Trees

- Flying Cups & Saucers: Gender Explorations in Science Fiction & Fantasy

- Phoenix Fire

- The Burden of Indigo

- Decadence

- Thief of Time

- Song of the Bones

- The Extremes

- The Prestige

- Dirty Boots

- Resurrection Men

- Hell on Earth

- Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies

- Scorched Earth

- Any Time At All

- Salt

- The Years of Rice and Salt

- The First Cut

- The Vampire's Violin

- Home Front

- Next of Kin

- Ship of Fools

- Drive

- Quietus

- Louisiana Breakdown

- The Grail Conspiracy

- The Longest Way Home

- Way Station

- Worlds Enough & Time: Five Tales of Speculative Fiction

- Cavalcade

- What Rough Beast

- Heart of Ice, Blood of Fire

- Has Science Found God?

- Return to Isis

- The Legend of Rah and the Muggles

- Blade of Tyshalle

- Selected Stories

- The Companions

- Singer from the Sea

- Terror Firma

- Games Dead People Play, and Other Stories

- The Book of Revelation

- The Assassins of Tamurin

- Big Planet

- Bloodlines

- Golem

- The Reunion

- Journeys into Limbo

- The Psychotronic Video Guide

- The Mechanics of Wonder: The Creation of the Idea of Science Fiction

- God Save the Mark

- Love Spell

- The Rift

- Passage

- The Haunted Air: A Repairman Jack Novel

- Hosts: A Repairman Jack Novel

- The World and Other Places

- Going, Going, Gone

- The Otherhood

- Magic Time

- TWO GROUP REVIEWS

- Cruci-Fiction

- Across the Sea of Genre

Warm Words & Otherwise

A Blizzard of Book Reviews

John Grant

Cover art by Ron Tiner

Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews

A bumper collection – over 150,000 words! – of book reviews, many of full essay length, by the two-time Hugo winning and World Fantasy Award-winning co-editor of The Encyclopedia of Fantasyand author, among much fiction, of such recent nonfiction works as Corrupted Science and Denying Science.

Scholarly, iconoclastic, witty, passionate, opinionated, hilarious, scathing and downright irritating by turn, these critical pieces are sure to appeal to anyone who loves fantasy, science fiction, mystery fiction, crime fiction and many points in between ... and who also enjoys a rousing argument.

Published by infinity plus at Smashwords

www.infinityplus.co.uk/books

Follow @ipebooks on Twitter

© John Grant 2011

Cover © Ron Tiner

ISBN: 9781465982278

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

The moral right of John Grant to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

Electronic Version by Baen Books

Introduction

Why would anyone want to read a collection of book reviews?

It's a very good question, and one to which I'm not certain I have any coherent answer. The fact of the matter, though, is that book reviews have a power to fascinate us. Some friends in London have a bathroom shelved with old copies of Foundation and other literary magazines, and I'm far from the only guest of theirs to find myself spending far longer closeted than I'd originally intended. And one of the great joys of browsing through old magazines like the Edinburgh Review is discovering reviews of books you never knew existed by authors who've often been long ignored.

All right, then: an ancillary question. Why would anyone want to read a collection of my book reviews?

Let me get back to you on this.

~

The vast majority of the reviews in this book were produced in the early and middle years of the 21st century's first decade for two online venues, the website infinity plus, edited by Keith Brooke, and the genre-fiction webzine Crescent Blues, edited by Jean Marie Ward. Reviews for the former could be of any length I chose, and so some of the ones you'll find here are fairly long – up to several thousand words. Reviews for Crescent Blues, by contrast, were limited to 500 words (although I did, as you'll see, occasionally succeed in persuading Jean Marie to relax the rules a little). In the case of some of the other reviews here the wordcounts imposed by editors were even tighter and the dicta even stricter.

I discovered there were different skill sets (to use that ghastly but useful modern term) involved in writing essay-style reviews than in producing the shorter style; in the former I could bring in lots more information from outwith the scope of the book under consideration, and also I could opt far more for analysis and, to back up my contentions, citations of specific pieces of text or summaries of various plot points. Yet I soon found, too, that I could, as it were, sneak bits of analysis into the shorter-style reviews as well. My technique became to write the Crescent Blues (and similarly constrained) reviews to a length somewhat greater than would ever see print, then cut the text down savagely. Of course, I now wish I'd kept my original drafts ...

A few other magazines are represented here by a small number of reviews, sometimes just one: SFX, Foundation, Extrapolation and most especially the horror magazine Samhain, edited by John Gullidge. There are also a handful of reviews where, embarrassingly, I can no longer remember who they were written for. Google helped me in a couple of instances, but not for that final hard core. I can only assume they appeared in print magazines, and that my file copies of the relevant issues have long vanished into the quicksand of time. One culprit in this latter context may be my tumultuous move from one continent to another in 1999, during which a lot of stuff was discarded.

In pulling together this collection I obviously did a fair amount of basic copyediting and proofreading. (I was chagrined to find how many typos and general screw-ups there were in what I'd assumed to be pristine text! My apologies to all my original editors for the work I made for them.) I've excised some of my more irritating outbursts of adolescent snottiness and – although you may find this hard to believe as you read – plenty of incidences of ghastly, self-important pomposity. I've tidied up various instances of repetitive ideas and phraseology; for example, when reviews appeared separately it didn't much matter if I quite often said a book was "well worth your while", but when reading the text all together I found the repeated phrase rebarbative. I've added a few footnotes, clearly labelled, where it has seemed to me that an extra comment from the perspective of 2011 is called for. And I've on occasion found myself trying my damnedest to remember the first thing about books that in my reviews I described as "unforgettable".

Most of the books discussed are fiction, split about half and half (although I haven't counted) between fantasy/science fiction and mystery/crime. There are also a few nonfiction books represented here, many of them from the publisher Prometheus. At the moment I'm going through the copyeditor's corrections for my own first book for Prometheus, Denying Science. It's a small world, or something. What worries me is that I see I've quite often been a bit scathing about the standards of proofreading and so forth in the Prometheus books I've reviewed. Fingers crossed none of their staffers ever ventures here ...

During the surprisingly long editorial process involved in preparing this text it was borne in on me more and more what a huge debt of gratitude I owe to the authors of all the books reviewed here, even the ones where my comments have been less than complimentary. Writing about those books has shaped the person I am today, and the way that I look at the world.

—John Grant, Hewitt, June 20 2011

The Touch

created by Steven-Elliot Altman, edited by Patrick Merla

ibooks, 347 pages, paperback, 2000

A Write Aid project to benefit the charities HEAL and F.A.C.T.

Imagine the problem facing the potential reviewer of a charity anthology – the authors have contributed for free, and so it must have been especially difficult for the editor to turn any offering down. Of course, one wants the venture to succeed: the charity, and the people dependent upon it, need as much support as they can get. At the same time, the reader – the person who may go out and spend $14.00 on the book – must not be misled as to its quality. The dilemma can best be expressed in the following terms: "What the hell do I do if the book's no good?"

Luckily, this is not a worry that affects The Touch. Of the 23 stories here, only two are weak (and those by two of the most famous authors to contribute); perhaps two more are so-so, but all the rest vary between good and excellent, with the average probably being somewhere around the "extremely good" mark and one story in particular being a gem.

So, the mechanics:

This is a theme anthology, the theme being that, sometime in the near future or even the near past, a new epidemic has inflicted humanity. The form this epidemic takes is that those infected by the disease, should they touch a non-infected human being, will deprive that human of one or more senses. In most of these stories the sense concerned is a fairly obvious one: sight, hearing, sexual desire, speech. In some it is more subtle than that. A few of the most effective stories concern such subtleties: in one the sense involved is the ability to order one's experiences, in another it is the ability to hear music in one's head, and in a third it is the ability to recognize faces. At the same time there are a couple of exceptional stories that use the more obvious senses as their underpinnings. What all of these outstanding tales share is a focus on the human aspects of either (a) being deprived of a sense or (b) being one of the witting or unwitting infecters, a "Depriver".

The arrangement of the stories accords approximately to a chronology of the spread of the Depriver disease, with the earliest stories happening a little before 2001 and the later ones being set well into the future. The stories do not actually pull together to form a coherent pseudo-history, but this does not matter. What is important is that the idea itself has sparked off such a plethora of good stories. A measure of the general quality is that, after reading a bunch of these stories, you have to remind yourself to remember that touching another human being in real life is actually (probably) safe enough.

What, then, are the best stories of a very good bunch?

Karl Schroeder's "After the War", set in the former Yugoslavia during the civil war there that the West largely just watched, is a study of victims, both those who have suffered directly from the massacres and those who have been sufficiently brutalized by the political and racist climate to perpetrate those massacres. It is a moving tale, reminding us that we condemn others at our own peril.

In a way Harry Turtledove's "The Lieutenant" does the same, although here the viewpoint is different. Whereas Schroeder's story looks from the inside at the very human tendency to condemn – seeing it as rooted in the predilection to victimize – Turtledove's story regards these twin motivations from the outside, seeing both as based in self-interest. "The Lieutenant" loses power as a result, but is nevertheless a fine tale; in other company it might be outstanding.

Diane Dekelb-Rittenhouse's "Gifted" truly is outstanding. It centres on a precociously young musician who falls for an older (not much) patroness of the arts who is a Depriver. The touch of her hands is enough to induce deafness in others. The musician himself has already been deprived of his talent in a more mundane fashion: a child prodigy not just as a player but as a composer, he has been robbed of his ability to compose through the insensitivity of his overweening father, who through relentlessly pressing him to attain ever more has succeeded in making him attain less. The result of all this is a superbly human story which will bring close to tears anyone who loves music.

Bob Mahnken's "Shared Losses" is another fine story. Its focus is bigotry, personified by the elderly narrator, who, although female, exemplifies the male backwoods American (alas, still extant) whose solution to anything untoward is to shoot it. The story harks back to an earlier era of sf – it could well have been written by Clifford Simak had Simak's times been a bit more liberated – but loses nothing thereby. What Mahnken impressively succeeds in doing, even as one weeps for the victims of the bigotry, is make one sympathetic towards the bigot herself; no mean feat. And yet, of course, until bigotry is understood it will never disappear – a point that is perhaps one of the main subtexts of this book.

Then there's Sean Stewart's "Don't Touch Me". Like Mahnken's, this tale eschews any consideration of the more obscure senses the Deprivers might inadvertently steal; here the focus is on love stolen by the conditions the disease imposes. Several of the stories in this anthology concern the insuperable obstacle that the inability to touch places upon the course of love (generally on the obstacle it presents to sex), but this one triumphs through its attention to character: its narrator is a recently dumped adolescent male; the object of his rebound attraction is a girl who would be fascinating at any other time but is doubly so right now. The integrity of the telling makes this another powerful tale.

But the gem of the entire anthology is Dean Whitlock's ambitious and unbelievably well achieved "Waiting for the Girl from California". This is a story so good, and so beautifully written, that it sings from the pages. It is so poignant in both its concept and its telling that it makes one ache ... and if I told you a single thing more about it I'd spoil it for you. If this tale goes unrecognized by some award or another then the whole awards system must come under scrutiny. If you bother to read not one other story in the anthology, your fourteen bucks will have been well spent. This is what fiction – and most especially speculative fiction – is all about. It is a long time since this reviewer has been so affected by a story, all the more remarkable since this one is a mere sixteen pages long.

It would be a credit to Steve Altman and Patrick Merla that they had put together an anthology for the worthy cause of the charities noted above. That they have put together such a fine anthology says more for them.

—Infinity Plus

A Step Beyond

by C.K. Anderson

iPublish, 346 pages, paperback, 2001

The Russian manned expedition to Mars that set off in 2017 was about a year into its voyage when the craft was struck by a small meteoroid and all aboard died. Four years later, in 2022, a new expedition sets off – two expeditions, really, one Russian and the other American, the two craft travelling together and their crews cooperating. The outward trip will take some two years, involving a slingshot around Venus and the deployment there of a robot surface probe.

Not everything goes precisely according to plan. Tensions mount in the Russian craft as its captain develops a major case of the hots for the sole female astronaut involved, who happens to be the wife of the pilot. One of the American team develops acute appendicitis; an emergency operation is performed by his colleagues, but soon after there is a solar flare and he succumbs to a combination of post-operative infection and radiation sickness.

And so on.

The distinction is rarely made between science fiction and fiction written about science for the entertainment of scientists. The reason the distinction is little made is obvious: there's such a huge overlap between the two only marginally different forms that there's hardly ever any point in making it. In such works as Gregory Benford's Timescape (1980), Paul Preuss's Broken Symmetries (1983) and Robert A. Metzger's Picoverse (2002), scientists can find scads of highly entertaining workings-out of ideas from the farther reaches of physical theory; but these novels are also rambunctiously enjoyable as sf.

A Step Beyond, by contrast, is determinedly realistic; paradoxical though it might seem to make this remark about a tale concerning a space expedition, it keeps its feet firmly on the ground. This realism is its great weakness as an sf novel, even at the same time as it is the book's great strength as a work of fiction for those interested in the technology of space exploration. Here you can see worked out very plausibly how things might go for humankind's first manned expedition to Mars, an event that will be exhilaratingly exciting when it happens. The trouble is that, as with virtually any groundbreaking human endeavour, the exciting bits will be possible only because of the 99% of it all that will be, um, well, sort of boring. As example, the first lunar landing was monumentally exciting to watch and vicariously be a part of; but only a few space-exploration junkies (of which I was one) could be bothered to sit through all the banal exchanges between the astronauts and Mission Control on the flights there and back.

In an sf novel we'd be given only the high points of the mission to Mars. In A Step Beyond we're given the whole lot. Paragraphs like this are everywhere:

"Temperature is seven hundred and thirty-seven Kelvin." Satomura was running the fingers of his left hand across the screen and tapping at the keyboard with his right as he read the information out loud. "Surface pressure is ninety-four atmospheres. Wind velocity is one-point-two meters per second."

Satomura is reporting results from the robot probe sent down to Venus, This is actually all pretty exciting stuff for a planetary scientist ... but it's not so thrilling for an sf reader.

There are some identifiable flaws in A Step Beyond. In the first fifty pages or so there's a marked tendency for characters to tell each other at length things they already know:

"Yes," Nelson confirmed. "I've heard that the backroom politics at the Kremlin got quite ugly. Kerimov was threatening to fire the entire Russian Space Agency. At first, he wouldn't even consider a joint mission. He still wanted to demonstrate the greatness of the New Republic by reaching Mars first. But he had lost a lot of credibility with the Volnost disaster. Then there was the tape of the late Commander Titov telling his wife that a joint mission was the safest way to proceed."

Of course, all of the astronauts listening to Nelson know this – there's absolutely no reason for him to tell it to them, and so all that's really going on is a clumsy infodump.

Despite such quibbles, this is an admirable piece of work – but, as I say, for space scientists rather than for sf readers. There's none of that Sense of Wonder sf readers have come to expect. Like reality, A Step Beyond is a bit dull.

—Infinity Plus

Hopscotch

by Kevin J. Anderson

Bantam, 354 pages, hardback, 2002

My own personal Golden Age of Science Fiction came when I was about 15-17, which happened to coincide with the time when the remainder bin of the Woolworths just round the corner was replenished every few days with copious heaps of American sf paperbacks. At that price I could afford to buy almost as many as I wanted, which I duly did; and I read them at the rate of one a day or, often, two a day. Every now and then I'd discover a gem – Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land was one, Brian Aldiss's Hothouse another, the two Robert Randall books, Henry Kuttner's Bypass to Otherness, Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano, most of the Pohl/Kornbluth collaborations ... Many prizes there were, far too many for my memory to encompass.

But at least 95% of these books were far from treasurable: they were good, honest, uninspired journeyman efforts churned out by all the countless minor sf authors of the day. Devoid of much originality and certainly not illuminated by any stylistic flair, these texts filled their allotted number of pages with plodding competence. I can't remember any of them in particular because, to be honest, there wasn't much to be remembered; if I'd been quizzed on any one of them the day after I'd read it I might well have had trouble remembering its plot. Don't misunderstand: I didn't feel in any way cheated or short-changed by them. They had little aspiration beyond (aside from earning their authors the next rent-cheque) filling a few hours of the reader's time relatively pleasantly, and this they fulfilled with – to repeat the word – competence.

I was strongly reminded of this era of my life while reading Kevin J. Anderson's Hopscotch. Although it is two or three times longer than any of those nameless old pulp paperbacks would ever have been permitted to be, it has exactly the same atmosphere of dutiful journeyman sf. The pages get turned OK, but without any great deal of enthusiasm because there's no real narrative drive and, quite rightly, we anticipate no ideative surprises. This is a long book based on a premise drawn from sf's common stockpot.

Sometime in the future the technology has been developed whereby human beings can swap ("hopscotch") bodies with each other at will. The opportunities for crime are obvious: a murderer could borrow a body to perform the slaying, then swap back or swap onward, so that evidence like fingerprints and securicam images would be valueless. Thus the establishment of the Bureau of Tracing and Locations, or BTL (which, through no fault of the author's, I read as BLT throughout), whose task is to keep track of individuals no matter how many bodies they might flit through.

Our four central characters have just emerged from the orphanage; it is a nice insight that, with it being all too easy for unwanted conceptions to occur in the "wrong" body, this future world would contain lots of unwanted children. The four are Garth (wannabe artist), Daragon (one of the rare individuals unable to hopscotch, but with the compensatory ability to see who people really are no matter what body they're currently wearing), Eduard (who makes a living by getting paid to hopscotch into people's bodies while they undergo things like dental surgery) and Teresa (token warm-hearted female, submissive, because of warm-heartedness gets laid a lot whichever body she's in).

Daragon, because of his rare talent, is recruited from the orphanage straight into the BTL and there groomed for stardom by its charismatic leader Mordecai Ob. Garth, aided by a grant from Ob, becomes a monumentally rich and famous artist, gaining his experience of life by hopscotching around to get the ultimate in vox pop input. Eduard is hired by Ob to be his caretaker, responsible for exercising Ob's real body while Ob himself is doing his administrative stuff in Eduard's body. Teresa joins a cult called the Sharetakers whose philosophy is (stop me if you've heard this one) based on the exploitative and abusive leader getting everything he wants and – surprise, surprise – screwing all the cult's women, but particularly Teresa, at every, well, turn.

That's about the first half of the book, and a very long half it seems. The blurb writer, obviously at a loss as to how to make all this seem rivetingly original, has ignored it, and in despair gone for the plot that commences with the second half. Unknown to all, Ob has been taking some new mind-rotting and body-rotting drug using Eduard's body, then swapping back into his own Charles Atlas-style flesh at the end of the day; indeed, several of Ob's caretakers prior to Eduard's appointment to the post have been effectively disappeared, presumably because their bodies have died as a result of Ob's addiction. Almost too late, Eduard – who's been a bit puzzled by how lousy he's been feeling – discovers what's going on. His revenge on the vile Ob is, however, drastically more effective than he'd anticipated, and Ob dies.

So Eduard's on the run as a murderer. Old friends Garth and Teresa believe in his innocence and help him, but he's dogged by the implacable Daragon, who refuses to believe that his idol Mordecai Ob could ever have been guilty of anything.

And so you have it. There's lots of attempts by the good-guy trio to die in place of each other as they hopscotch between their own and others' bodies, to the extent that a couple of times Anderson is moved to notch up the hellish pathos of it all by starting to quote Sidney Carton from Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities: "It is a far, far better thing ..." At this stage this reviewer entered a state of paralysis, unable to decide whether to throw the book at the wall or just to fold up in giggles.

In the main this is all, so far as it goes, competently related (aside from the occasional line like "Jennika flinched as if she had swallowed a thistle whole"), although, with its lack of pacing and narrative drive, there's no excitement at all in the telling. The "so far as it goes" parenthesis is not idly employed, because there are a heck of a lot of places where Hopscotch does not go.

For a book of this fairly considerable length, part of whose agenda must have been to explore all the ramifications of its premise, there seem some curious omissions. It is possible that there are offhand references that I've forgotten to some of these, in which case please forgive this addled brain, but I was surprised to find nothing about:

(a) The uses to which physicians could put hopscotching for diagnosis. If a patient's saying "Doc, I gotta pain here but I can't really describe it", what a godsend it'd be if the doctor could briefly swap into the sufferer's body to pinpoint the exact location of the pain and be able to experience directly what it felt like – whether a chest-pain was angina or just indigestion, for example.

(b) In the book the rich and villainous exploit the hopscotching process however they can, with utter ruthlessness and disregard for the welfare of other people's bodies. Wouldn't the illicit practice emerge among the thrillseekers of discovering what it was like to be murdered, forcibly hopscotching into a victim and then hopscotching back just before death? It'd be the ultimate jolly for the repulsive snuff-movie market, or for those who like getting half-strangled during sex.

(c) There's quite a lot in the book about hopscotching for sexual purposes – for example, couples making love twice in a row, swapping bodies for the second encounter, or making love with each other while garbed in other people's bodies – but nothing that I can recall about what would surely be the predominantly appealing attraction of hopscotching hijinks. Each of a couple who swapped bodies with each other would know exactly what gave the most delight to the partner, and by administering it would in due course have it administered back. The enormous educative and self-educative possibilities for enhancing their mutual sex life to a degree otherwise impossible would surely be explored by every couple, probably endlessly, in an orgy of giving; yet all we seem to find here is a sort of short-sighted philosophy of taking, with the partners seeking only the thrill they can get from the particular act of sex in which they are currently engaged.

Also omitted is any real discussion of the technology of hopscotching. Somewhere early on Anderson has realized he really ought to do something about this deficiency in what is, after all, ostentatiously a work of sf rather than a fantasy. (A fantasist might be able to do a whole lot more with the premise, come to think of it – but that's just an aside.) So he gives us the nearest we get to an explanation using the clumsy technique of an overheard bar conversation:

"And you want to know the biophysics? Does it matter?" The first man sucked delicately on his cigarette. "When you use a COM terminal, do you care about the network electronics? No. You simply tap in, extract the information you need, engage the communication link you want, access your accounts. You don't need a degree in organic matrix management to use the thing. You don't need to understand the dirty details about hopscotching, either."

That's it! If you, dear reader, want to know more about the principles underlying the technology of hopscotching, you're just being extremely stupid to keep asking silly questions about something you have no need to know.

This is an enormous copout. Of course, no one expects sf writers to come up with genuine explanations of their impossible technologies – otherwise we'd be awash with workable real-life time machines, matter transmitters and the rest built according to verbal blueprints first published in story form in old issues of Shocking Science Wonder Stories – but not only does the reader have a right to expect the author to have worked up at least a dose or two of vaguely convincing flimflam, the very integrity of a science-fiction novel depends upon it. Yet Anderson blithely tells us that "you don't need to understand the dirty details about hopscotching" ... and his editor let him get away with it!

Coincidences run rampant in the book. The worst offender comes when some of Daragon's overenthusiastic BTL sidekicks gun down a man they believe to be Eduard; in fact, as Daragon learns during a two-Kleenex moment while cradling the dying man in his arms, this individual is none other than ... Daragon's own long-lost father. Elsewhere the major players are constantly encountering each other by chance, a fact that leads one to believe that the whole tale is being told within a very small geographical scope indeed.

Following the geographical train of thought leads us to the book's most glaring deficiency of all: there is no sense of place anywhere throughout the telling. We know that we're somewhere on Earth, because, in the only instance of there being any reference to somewhere outside the city where the rest of the action is staged, Garth goes on vacation to Hawaii. But that's our sole clue. The city otherwise floats in a vacuum: if the advent of the ability to hopscotch has had consequences nationally or internationally, we're told nothing of them. Is there commerce between this city and the others that must surely exist? Well, search me. Daragon's dad is supposed to have been on the run for hundreds of years, but has never thought to put as much distance as possible between himself and his pursuers by going to another part of the country or even abroad. Mordecai Ob is the top gun of the Bureau of Tracing and Locations, but is he its national head or just its head within the city? Presumably the latter, because to go by the evidence in this book the organization has no dimension outwith the city; indeed, the search for Eduard – one single person – depletes the BTL's manpower resources to such an extent that it starts having to offer skeleton service only for some of its other functions, a situation that is permitted to subsist for a period of months. Is this supposedly massive organization really just little more than a couple of football teams in numbers?

This lack of feeling for place goes right down to the details. The single venue most frequently haunted in the text is a joint called the Masquerade Bar where folk go to hook up with potential hopscotching and sex partners. Yet by the end of the book the reader has no sense whatever of having been there. Yes, there's the occasional flat description of some feature or other of this watering hole, but one never catches the remotest whiff (literal or metaphorical) of its atmosphere, never an appreciation of its size, or its lighting, or its sound, or ... In all, a reader of this book could be taken into the Masquerade Bar tomorrow and not recognize it. Similarly, most of the other venues – Ob's office, Ob's gardens, skyscrapers, factories, Garth's mansion – all seem to have been hired for the occasion from Central Casting, rather in the same way that the Sharetakers group is just Rentacult. Where all these places are in relation to each other is anyone's guess, except that BTL HQ is on a small islet that is nevertheless large enough for Eduard to be able to run for miles exercising Ob's body; no, wait a minute, that can't be right ... Does the city bustle, or is it fairly quiet? What does it feel like to be there? What are the shops like? Does it have ghettoes or posh areas or red light districts? Is the air polluted or clean? What forms of public transportation are most used, if any? Are the people generally bloody-minded or rude or amiable or socially aware or cold or ...?

One gets the very strong feeling that the reason one has no sense of the city, or of anything within it, is that Anderson, likewise, hasn't "been there". Rather than having any visualization of the city, he has just tacked on standard bits of city whenever the occasion demands them. Teresa's old body is currently being used by someone who works in a factory? Right, then, wheel on A Factory. You know it's A Factory because that's what you've been told it is. But there's no impression given that this is a particular factory that Anderson has ever been in, either physically or in imagination. And so on.

Which leads us back to those old journeyman sf paperbacks of yore. They too were often marked by a lack of originality in their premise and working out, by poor pacing, by wooden, stereotyped characterization and setting, by clumsy plotting, and by their lack of narrative drive. I stress that there was nothing wrong with that: as one paid over one's pennies (literally!) one was fully aware that this was the rudimentary form of entertainment one was buying, and if one's purchase proved to be otherwise, why, that was a delightful surprise. But it would be nice to think sf had moved on a little since those days – that the standard of base-level competence might have improved a bit. At the very least, one would expect such stuff to be confined to cheap series mass-market paperbacks designed as journey-fodder to be sold on station bookstalls, not as expensively produced glossy hardbacks claiming to be other than consumables.

No such luck.

I am of course utterly misguided in every single criticism of Hopscotch I have dared to whisper in this review, and I can present you with the proof. On the back of the book's dust jacket a number of sf's brightest luminaries flatly contradict me. In the interests of fair play I would like to cite their cover-quotes so that you may compare them with the points I have made above and see where I have gone astray in my reasoning.

"Cracking good – swift, sure storytelling, with more plot twists than a snake and twice the bite." – Gregory Benford

"A rousing tale that charges hard into territory where nobody has gone before, this one may be the most original book of the year." – Jack McDevitt

"Colorful, inventive, and intriguing, it's idea-driven sf at its best, and a pleasure to read." – Allen Steele

"Kevin J. Anderson has done it again! Great setting, intriguing characters, and a fascinating idea make Hopscotch his best book yet." – Kristine Kathryn Rusch

—Infinity Plus

The Verificationist

by Donald Antrim

Vintage, 179 pages, paperback, 2000

In what is really more a long short story than a novel, psychoanalyst Tom leads a group of his colleagues to a Pancake House for a social evening. During a fairly grim evening of "enjoyment", Tom, who is more in need of treatment than any of his clients could be, misbehaves childishly just once too often, and to stop his activities a colleague lifts him up in a bear hug. Squeezed thus, Tom undergoes an out-of-the-body experience (OOBE) that persists for the rest of the book. It is left moot as to whether the OOBE has any objective reality; it may perhaps be only a hallucination – but, if so, it's a hallucination that apparently comes to be shared by some other members of the cast, who eventually join him in his flights both in and outside the Pancake House.

As Tom swirls about the prose does likewise, treating us to a portrait of various aspects of his existence, all of which seem to be not just on the point of disintegration but perpetually so.

The state of his marriage is fragile, due as much to his juvenility as to his frequent infidelities. He is never quite able to acknowledge that the support of his wife Jane – who comes across as a complete saint (and martyr?) – is all that is keeping him as much on the tracks as he is. He believes he loves her, but seems incapable of comprehending what love actually is, certainly the full love that Jane offers him.

His sanity is likewise frail: his mind is full of impressive-seeming psychoanalytic theories that crumble apart into meaninglessness on a moment's examination. (It is one of the other characters who solemnly pronounces, "Maybe sexual hunger should be described as the terror in love at the beginning of death", but it could as well have been Tom.) The same goes for the program that is his pride and joy, the Young Women of Strength; it seems to have no real purpose except his own motives, which remain shrouded but, in light of his omnidirectional and almost infantile lusts, must be suspect.

By the end of the book, then, we are fully persuaded that Tom's existence lacks all meaning, that it is sustained only by an intellectual artifice that is itself in imminent danger of collapse. Whether this is particularly enlightening is another matter altogether; it is very tempting to suggest The Verificationist shares the same unnecessariness that is its primary subject matter.

Nevertheless, there are some bright turns of wit along the way – I more than once laughed out loud ("... for Rebecca must have known it was not likely that I would appreciate competition for her attention, especially from a charming drunk like Sherwin, who, regardless of his stated inclination to dodge the pains and sorrows of love, would waste no time getting his hands all over her tits") – and there is a sort of cumulative growth of the true feeling of fantasy while Tom's OOBE, initially a solo effort, progressively complexifies as further people join in.

There is also a great amount of sex in the book – real, imagined and sought – as befits a tale set largely within the mind of a psychoanalyst. Tom's fellow analysts seem (unless he's misperceiving them) to be possessed of the urges of rabbits, with the same lack of selectivity. Much more interesting are his own relationships – with his wife, where the intensity of feeling is too great for him to comprehend, and, although unconsummated, with the pretty young waitress of the Pancake House, Rebecca, who is the first to join him in the quasi-liberation of the OOBE. Tom's feelings towards Rebecca become a quagmire as he struggles between lust and responsibility.

Although it has several points of interest, in the end The Verificationist must be deemed a slight work – but one that passes the time entertainingly enough.

—Infinity Plus

It's Been a Good Life

by Isaac Asimov

Edited by Janet Jeppson Asimov

Prometheus, 309 pages + 8 pages b/w photographs, hardback, 2002

Culled largely from Asimov's three volumes of autobiography but with the addition of such items as extracts from letters to his wife Janet (who compiled and annotated this volume), It's Been a Good Life is a sort of Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman! portrait, delivered in bite-sized chunks, of the major Golden Age science-fiction writer, proselytizing rationalist, prolific popularizer of science, and author of lay introductions to a whole host of subjects from the Bible to the works of Shakespeare. It offers a thoroughly entertaining fast read, complete with a complement of good jokes and revealingly funny anecdotes. More importantly, it introduces us to the company of a thoroughly engaging man; by its end one wishes one could have had Asimov as a friend, even if the friendship might on occasion have been an argumentative one. That is, really, more than one can expect from a straightforwardly biographical or autobiographical work – just as Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman! achieved a more intimate introduction to Feynman the human being than did James Gleick's eminently worthwhile, highly readable, very comprehensive Feynman biography Genius.

Asimov, as we discover, never lost his fannishness. In part this may have been loyalty: decades later, he still expresses a fannish love for John W. Campbell Jr and his meetings with the man, even though at the time he abhorred much that Campbell stood for and the abhorrence increased as time went on. And, well towards the end of his life, Asimov still displays a fannish awe in his accounts of his encounters with the famous – fairly frequent encounters, because by this time he was a living legend in his own right. This is no fault in a person, of course – fannishness is, after all, nothing if not an expression of an overall enthusiasm for life, experience and discovery that we would all wish to cultivate in ourselves – but it came as a great surprise (to this reviewer at least) quite how much it seems to have influenced Asimov.

And there was a downside to it. It is quite manifest that he was a genius – even without the inarguable evidence of his extremely high IQ, no one could have produced such an astonishing number of books on such a wide diversity of subjects without being a polymath of such a high order as to be indistinguishable from genius. Yet, while reading It's Been a Good Life, more and more one gets the creeping feeling that somehow all this genius was wasted. His early science fiction was brilliantly entertaining and of course did a tremendous amount to mould the modern form of the genre, yet at no time can one put a hand on one's heart and say that it was challenging; it made no attempt to alter the reader's worldview. Again, his countless works of nonfiction, while astonishingly impressive in toto are far less so when examined individually; perhaps most useful of all of them was Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology, yet even this, as anyone who has ever made much use of it will attest, has to be cross-checked against other and more reliable sources before its data can be accepted and its occasionally oversimplified interpretations trusted.

Perhaps what's really the case is that the price anyone pays for being a generalist is a superficiality of comprehension of at least some of the subjects within one's designated scope. The scope of Asimov's generalism was truly astonishing, so perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that he tended to be a bit sloppy on the detail, whether factual or conceptual.

There is, however, I think a little more to it in Asimov's instance than that. His otherwise admirable anti-elitism affected his writing as well. Take this comment:

Of course, it helps if you don't try to be too literary in your writing. If you try to turn out a prose poem, that takes time ... I have therefore deliberately cultivated a very plain style, even a colloquial one, which can be turned out rapidly and with which very little can go wrong. Of course, some critics, with crania that are more bone than mind, interpret this as my having "no style." If anyone thinks, however, that it is easy to write with absolute clarity and no frills, I recommend that he try it.

This simplified style became more pronounced in his fiction as the years went by; reading his later novels, from Foundation's Edge (1982) onwards, time and again one desperately wishes he would put a little more of that unnecessary floridity into his style, because by then what had once been a laudable transparency had descended to pedestrianism. But, more significantly, his urge towards written clarity seemed to affect not just his prose style but also the content of what he wrote. The truth of the matter is that in some areas of knowledge, notably but not exclusively the sciences, a full understanding cannot be presented to the lay reader in terms that he or she will comprehend. Scientists such as Stephen Hawking and Paul Davies have made an excellent fist of conveying at least a partial understanding of very abstruse ideas to the lay reader who's prepared to work at it; but many potential readers give up by about page 3 because unwilling to put in the necessary cerebral effort. Very few would have the same difficulty with an Asimov popularization – which is to his credit – but at the same time you don't get nuttin for free: you may come away from an Asimov popularization thinking you've gained a good understanding of the subject, but the chances are that the "clarity" you've so much appreciated will in fact have misled you entirely. Just as crystal-clear writing can obscure the reader's vision of the scene, so can crystal-clear explanation obscure understanding of ... well, of what in fact is not being explained, even though writer and reader may think it is.

All of that said, this is as charming a book as Asimov obviously was so charming a man. And it is very much an Isaac Asimov book rather than a Janet Jeppson Asimov book; his widow is to be commended for having made that so. In other aspects, however, her editorial hand is less assured; the editorial apparatus tends to be rather sloppily written, and she should not have been satisfied with such shoddy proofreading and indexing. For example, in the Bibliography we are told on page 190 alone not only that Asimov published a 1950 story collection called I, Robert but that the collaborations with Robert Silverberg (Nightfall, The Ugly Little Boy, Forward the Foundation and The Positronic Man) were solo efforts. That sort of error, presumably perpetrated throughout, is appalling in what purports to be a definitive bibliography of the author.

But it's the anecdotes, often deliciously self-deprecating, that remain in the mind. Some of these concern Asimov's loudly trumpeted rationalism, which brought him little popularity in the Bible-blinded USA of the late 20th century (he was named Humanist of the Year in 1984 by the American Humanist Association, and by the time of his death was still serving as President of that organization); others concern sf, and writing, and science, and publishing. All are of course personal tales, but the truly personal ones – those involving family and close friends – are perhaps the most affecting. Let me summarize the feel of this excellent book by quoting one:

After my parents sold the candy story [sic: "store" is meant], my mother decided to go to night school and learn how to write. She knew, of course, how to write Yiddish perfectly and Russian just as perfectly, but neither used the Latin script. She had to learn that to write English.

She learned quickly and in a very short time was able to send me short letters in painstakingly formed English writing. One of the teachers at the night school finally nerved himself to ask The Question (as the Asimov family referred to it).

"Pardon me, Mrs. Asimov," he said, stopping her in the hall. "Are you by any chance a relation of Isaac Asimov?"

My mother, who was four feet, ten inches tall, drew herself up to her full height and said, proudly, "Yes. He is my dear son."

"Aha," said the teacher, "no wonder you are such a good writer."

"I beg your pardon," said my mother, freezingly. "No wonder he is such a good writer."

—Infinity Plus

The Lost

by Jonathan Aycliffe

HarperCollins, 176 pages, hardback, 1996

Aycliffe is better known as Daniel Easterman, who might be regarded as an author of the thinking person's fat airport bestseller. (Neither name is the author's real one.) The Lost is the fifth in the series of shorter novels he has released under the Aycliffe pseudonym. In earlier books – like Naomi's Room, Whispers in the Dark and The Vanishment – he seemed intent on recreating the atmosphere of M.R. James for the 1990s; these were exceptionally spooky ghost stories, and their aficionados generally read them in a single terrified sitting ... which probably ended at three in the morning.

The Lost is a bit different, since it relates less to M.R. James than to Bram Stoker. The style is epistolary, very much as was Stoker's Dracula, although much more readably so. It is revealed to us that none of the characters is quite (or at all) whom the others thinks s/he is.

Young Michael Feraru, a Briton of Romanian descent, believes that, after the anti-Communist revolution in Romania, he can reclaim the property his family abandoned as they fled the country in the wake of WWII. Sure enough, he discovers on going there that he is really Count Mihai Vlahuta and that he owns the remote and vast Castel Vlaicu (Vlaicu Castle). En route to the castle he falls in love with his Romanian lawyer, Liliana Popescu, little realizing that she has not fallen in love with him but just enjoys having sex. When they arrive at the castle they discover it to be tenanted by two people, mother and son, whom they assume to be caretakers, still there after all these years. But the "caretakers" prove likewise to be of Vlahuta stock, and the mother knows the terrible secret of the castle and of the Vlahuta family – that their dead never truly die, but continue to exist as soul-eaters (strigoï) ...

The most fascinating part of this sometimes confused book (there are occult events back in England which go unexplained) is the way in which Aycliffe studies the changing personality of his central character, who evolves from a simple prep-school master to become a quite ruthless Romanian aristocrat. There are many scarinesses but also a sense of pathos as we watch him head towards his spiritual doom. Unusually, this is a book which might have benefited from being a little bit longer: its pared-downness makes it exceptionally readable, but there is a certain lack of the depth of feeling present in the earlier Aycliffe novels. Nevertheless, The Lost is recommended.

—Samhain

Atom

by Steve Aylett

Phoenix House, 137 pages, hardback, 2000

Set in the city of Beerlight, this short novel (almost a novella) represents an attempted hybridization of surrealism with the Hammett/Chandler hardboiled detective tale. Whether there is actually any point in trying to marry two such antithetical modes – surrealism deconstructs Story, the detective tale relies on Story – is a question for another arena; the book, which is replete with conscious references to the Fathers of Surrealism (notably Magritte), must be taken on its own terms or not at all.

There's an explosion at the Brain Facility, and the preserved brain of Tony Curtis is stolen. Various characters are eager to get it or get it back, for reasons that are not much clarified when it proves the brain is not that of Tony Curtis at all, but that of Franz Kafka. Stirred into the mix is the eponymous private defective (not a typo) Taffy Atom, seemingly possessed of transnormal powers (although this may be illusion), along with his sidekicks Madison (a sexy spitfire) and Jed (a giant talking goldfish). That is about as much of the plot as it's sensible to recount, because in many ways, like any good surrealist tale, this book doesn't actually have a plot, just the appearance of one, an appearance fostered by the use of the motifs of the hardboiled PI story. The effect is rather like that of some of Jerome Charyn's wilder Secret Isaac novels (of which I was constantly reminded while reading Atom), only divorced yet one further step, or indeed several, from reality – and from Story.

Well, if the quest in search of a plot is designedly futile, what of that quest itself, regardless of its lack of destination? In other words, while this novel may be a ride to nowhere, what's the ride like?

One of the motifs of the hardboiled PI story is the deployment of firecracker one-liners, and here Aylett scores reasonably highly, with only a few of his squibs being damp. The opening phrase of the book gives a brilliant (and just about the only required) description of Beerlight, "The city sprawled like roadkill", although this is unfortunately burdened by the rest of the sentence: "spreading more with each new pressure." Other one-liners that leap from the page: "Smoking a cigar which seemed to have been carved from an expensive chair ..."; "Modesty's kinda useless if everyone agrees with you ..." There are plenty more, but their incandescence tends to be dimmed by the admixture of the occasional misfire: "Well you're a regular suppository o' wisdom ...", "Maddy was so deep he needed a U-boat to visit her" and so forth. Still, even Raymond Chandler produced plenty of dud one-liners among the jewels, so we can't be too critical.

But there was another extremely important component of the old PI story: characterization. No matter how much even the best of these writers and the venues in which they published may have been despised by most of the lit crew of their time, and to a great extent by some of that crew's successors, they displayed a mastery of characterization that has been rarely if at all matched in any other field of written storytelling – indeed, that's what many of the one-liners were for. By the nature of surrealism, in contrast, characterization is not really possible – indeed, it could bring the whole surrealistic edifice tumbling down – and this fact severely restricts Atom's function as an entertainment. While one or two of the individuals peopling his pages have singular speech patterns, which is characterization of a primitive sort, most are fairly indistinguishable from each other, to the extent that not only did I constantly have to remind myself who they were when their names appeared but also, on occasion, I even had to think twice about whether they were male or female! This again is an interesting surrealistic effect – especially since, paradoxically, about the only character who's instantly identifiable on reappearance is Kitty Stickler, a nightclub singer of such extreme standardized beauty that she becomes effectively invisible – but it sure as hell truncated Atom's ability to entertain me except on the most superficial level.

One of the book's two cover-quotes from Michael Moorcock states: "This is toon-noir ... as on the button as tomorrow's news." "Toon-noir" is a very apt description, especially with reference to Gary Wolf's Who Censored Roger Rabbit? (1981), but the remainder of Moorcock's comment serves, presumably unintentionally, as a pointer to Atom's problem as a novel: tomorrow's news hasn't happened yet, although much of it is beginning to coalesce. Similarly, Atom offers us, presumably not unintentionally, what can be interpreted as a cameo view of the coalescing process – a soup of motifs swirling towards an integration that has not yet been and may never be, for inherent reasons, attained. To both extend and mix the metaphor, it is consequently hard to establish whether what's being served up is a hearty nutritious broth or a thin consommé.

—Infinity Plus

Black Projects, White Knights

by Kage Baker

Golden Gryphon, 297 pages, hardback, 2002

Before I talk about the book, a few words about the publisher. If I had to vote for which is the best publisher currently operating within the genres, I'd almost certainly opt for Golden Gryphon. Their books are produced with such care and love – not just for the subject matter but for production standards – that it gives a genuine thrill just to hold a Golden Gryphon book in one's hands. And, almost always, the contents live up to the rest, so I had high hopes of this collection by Kage Baker, an author with whose work I am (to my shame) otherwise unfamiliar.

Most of the stories are in her series about Dr Zeus Inc., otherwise known as The Company – a shadowy super-technology organization that could be thought of as lying at the heart of most of the relevant conspiracy theories. There are also some stories in another, slightly linked series, concerning a prodigy known as Alec Checkerfield.

The newly penned opener to this volume, introducing Dr Zeus Inc. to the unacquainted reader, is a firecracker piece of writing; surely no appetite could be left unwhetted by this piece. But thereafter, while each of the stories is a highly competent piece of magazine fiction, none of them seems outstanding; always I was left with that exasperated "nicely done, but so what?" feeling.

But it's a lovely, lovely book, from its splendid J.K. Potter cover all the way on through.

—Crescent Blues

Coldheart Canyon

by Clive Barker

HarperCollins, 676 pages, hardback, 2001

Since the industry of Hollywood is dreams, it's hard to understand why there have been so very few good stories of the fantastic centred on, or based in, the movie business. Even Thomas Tryon, the ex-movie star turned fantasy novelist, stayed strictly within the bounds of the real in his one movie novel/fixup, Crowned Heads (1976). The single novel that this reviewer has come across that mixes the movies with fantasy with any real measure of success is Theodore Roszak's exquisite 1991 novel Flicker, and even it is likely to offend genre fans in the delicious subtlety, rather than the wham-bam foregrounding, of its fantasticated underpinning. Within the movies themselves there have been a few successful attempts at this marriage, the most notable probably being Last Action Hero (1993), much maligned on release but now generally well regarded, and Woody Allen's 1984 excursion The Purple Rose of Cairo. One could add Maurizio Nichetti's delirious 1989 piece The Icicle Thief, although there the movie-within-a-movie is being screened on television, and it is the fantasies created by tv that are the real subject.

So the strapline on the cover of Coldheart Canyon is enough to set the pulse a-tingling and the jaws a-salivating: "A Hollywood Ghost Story." Barker is one of the most elegant writers and exciting imaginers in the horror business: almost as good a writer as Peter Straub, almost as good an imaginer as Ramsey Campbell "A pity he should waste that writing ability and those powers of imagination on such garbage" is a common enough reaction, and perhaps an unfair one, although it does tend to be the ugly schlock moments rather than the wonderful flights of fancy that stick in one's mind after reading a Barker novel. But give him a ghost story and the results should be pretty stupendous – after all, remember what a fine novel Stephen King crafted from the form of the traditional ghost story with his Bag of Bones (1998).

And for the first couple of hundred pages or so it seems that Barker has pulled it off. There is a beautiful sense of claustrophobia about the tale and its telling, not to mention that same delightful feeling as in Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood (1984) that strange and spectral archetypal figures are just on the limits of tangibility – although here of course the archetypes are born of the movie industry rather than of legend. One settles down for what looks to be another five hundred or so pages of sheer bliss, to wallowing euphorically in a new addition to that rarest of beasts, the truly successful fantastication about the movies. There's ozone in the nostrils, the eyes are flared, the real world is forgotten ...

But then ...

But then Barker the horror writer takes over. After another couple of hundred pages occupied largely by increasingly kinky sex between mortals and bits of ectoplasm, described with all the erotic passion of a coroner's post mortem report (although much more nicely written, of course), the rest of the book is a fairly straightforward horror novel. Quite a good horror novel, as horror novels go, but not exceptional even in that arena.

It's a crushing disappointment. What a complete waste of those first two hundred pages! "A pity he should waste that writing ability and those powers of imagination on such garbage," in short.

The story starts back in the 1920s. Hollywood star Katya Lupi – lovely, ruthless, promiscuous, worried about the advent of sound to the movies – returns to her native Romania with her manager, worshipper and would-be spouse Zeffer to visit her folks. Zeffer has a blanket instruction to buy anything he thinks might amuse her for the new home she is building in one of the canyons near Hollywood. Visiting a rundown monastery, he buys from the monks the four walls of a room completely covered in hand-painted tiles depicting scenes from a Wild Hunt of sorts – often in bestially cruel and/or pornographically explicit detail. The tiles are exported to Hollywood, where a room is constructed to hold them and the mural is painstakingly reassembled.

There is a legend behind those tiles. They were created at the behest of Lilith, Adam's first wife and also the Devil's wife – and, too, the wife for a short while of ex-Crusader Duke Goga, after he and his huntsmen had accidentally killed Lilith's goatboy son, who was fathered by the Devil. The child does not die; instead, the Duke and his party are condemned forever to hunt the territory, the Devil's Country, that is both depicted in and is the tiles, in an attempt to recapture him.

Once the room has been reconstructed in LA, Lupi discovers that entering it can gain a person one entrance also to the real Devil's Country, a seemingly endless tract of landscape through which Goga and his gang still ride in search of the goatboy. Time spent there has a curiously rejuvenating effect – the place is, in effect, a fountain of youth.

Flip forward to the present day. Heart-throb movie star Todd Pickett's career has started to slide. In desperation he opts for a face-lift. It's a disaster. To keep him out of the limelight, his agent Maxine stows him away in a long-deserted mansion in one of the canyons near LA ... which proves, of course, to be still secretly inhabited by a youthful and sex-crazy Katya Lupi. And in the grounds Zeffer still lives, although he's not as youthful and not noticeably sex-crazy at all because decades ago Katya got mean about rationing visits to the Devil's Country when it occurred to her its supply of rejuvenation might be finite. Also lurking in the grounds, almost always unseen, are the ghosts of hundreds and possibly thousands of old movie stars who were Katya's friends before she cut them off from their regular visits to the Devil's Country; these spectres, barred from the house by wards Katya has nailed into the doorsteps, can take on physical form when they want to, and they're all sex-crazy too.

Todd, who was pretty sex-crazy to begin with but has been looking forward to a lean time of it because his face is such a mess, becomes a sort of walking sex-craze on encountering Katya. He plays with her the games sex-crazy people play (or, at least, the games sex-crazy adolescents wish like hell they could play), then joins in one of the ectoplasmic orgies, then he boffs Katya in the Devil's Country – an ecstasy enhanced by the fact that they get caught mid-boff by Goga and his pals – and then he ... well, actually, I sort of lost count around here.

Goga isn't sex-crazy. Presumably having been married to Lilith for the few years during which she entered this world to commission the tiles cured him of any sex-craziness he may once have had, or maybe it's just that he's spent several centuries on horseback. Not sex-crazy either is Tammy, the president of Todd's fan club, either because she's fat (the novel displays a certain amount of stereotyping in the characterization) or because she sublimates it all in her obsessive collecting of knick-knacks relating to her idol. Either way, she gets concerned when Todd drops out of public view and heads to LA to investigate, following the trail to a certain old mansion in a canyon ...

And that's when the viscera begin to erupt.

To use the movie terminology, there are some curious continuity errors in the text, as if the book went through a lot of rewrites. On page 77, for example, Todd has to cancel his facelift appointment because his dog is ill; but it's not until page 101, after the dog has died, that he makes the appointment in the first place. On page 249 it's mentioned that it's twilight, yet a little beforehand Todd and Katya have been viewing their surrounding by moonlight and starlight. On page 408 Tammy says to Todd that "We're going to do this together" (not sex, I hasten to add), yet on pages 411-12 it becomes evident that they didn't. There may be some other examples I didn't spot.

Because Barker is such a fine prose artist, Coldheart Canyon is in general very readable – aside from the two hundred or so sex-crazy pages, which become very tedious after a while – but this quality doesn't make it a good novel, or even a particularly good entertainment. It's certainly not one of Barker's own better efforts. Yet that first couple of hundred pages, when he seems to be setting up for a top-notch ghost story, are a remarkable achievement. Why he didn't just keep going, why he apparently suffered a crisis of nerve and reverted to the bizness-as-usual – there's a mystery for you.

—Infinity Plus

The Fifth Victim

by Beverly Barton

Zebra, 352 pages, paperback, 2008

Oh dear.

A small Tennessee town: Cherokee Pointe. A killer starts sacrificially murdering young women. Maverick FBI agent Dallas Sloan (rippling thews, unruly shock of blond hair, never found a woman who could tame him; get the idea?) recognizes the m.o. and arrives seeking vengeance for the killing of his niece by this same murderer the previous year in a different state. He's the only person in the FBI who's noticed there's a killer on the loose whose m.o. is to sacrificially murder four women in a row and then do the same to a fifth but with the extra feature of ripping her heart out for later cannibalistic consumption.

Here in Cherokee Pointe, though, the local law forces have what would seem to be, were it not that the local Chief of Police is a sinecured halfwit, a considerable advantage: local psychic Genny Madoc (petite, pert breasts, never found a man worth letting inside her pants; get the idea again?) can intermittently tap into the killer's mind and witness his vile deeds. Now, if only she could get a street address ...

Although Dallas thinks "psychics" are all phonies or crazies, from the moment they first clap eyes on each other the electricity sparks between him and Genny with such intensity Van de Graaff would have trashed his own generator in jealous disgust. It's obvious that, unless one or other actually bursts into flames first, they're going to have a monumental sex scene about three-quarters of the way through the book, and, golly gosh, so they do.

Alas, just about everything else is equally predictable except quite how much direr, at any particular point, the book can get from here on.

The Fifth Victim is by intention a serial-killer chiller, a mystery and a semi-erotic romance novel – all three. To take these aspects in turn: The serial-killer aspect is so hokey (oh, lumme: satanist cults) it'd have seemed a trifle passé in, say, 1953. The mystery's flaccid: the murderer's the guy you thought, then thought might be the Red Herring because he's so bloody obvious.

And the erotica? Oh, geez. The Genny/Dallas megaromp is surprisingly OK, but elsewhere the liberal sexual references, plus the fairly frequent lesser sex scenes, are so clumsy and dumb it's hard to know whether to burst out laughing or into tears. And the main characters have astonishingly high Allure Quotients. Perhaps people have stronger sex urges in Tennessee: not one but several of the characters possess such a powerful aura of sexuality that they leave members of the opposite gender in a state of high arousal merely by walking by or speaking on the phone.

This is a book that leaves you begging for less.

Oh dear.

—Crescent Blues

A Matter of Profit

by Hilari Bell

HarperCollins Children's Books, 281 pages, hardback, 2001

Usually, by the end of reading a book, one has a fairly clear idea – possibly a misguided one, but still an idea – of whether the book is good, bad or somewhere in between, but in the instance of Hilari Bell's young-adult sf novel A Matter of Profit this particular reader has found it infernally, and bizarrely, hard to decide.

The protagonist is a young man, Ahvren, of the human species known as the Vivitare. Generations ago, the Vivitare were conquered on their home world by militaristic alien invaders, the Karg. They fought a protracted rebellion, eventually driving out and exterminating the invaders. Now they in turn, using Karg technology, conquer other worlds. Latest on the list is the 40-world, 40-species alliance known as the T'Chin. But the diverse T'Chin species (many of which have names tiresomely full of apostrophes and triple esses) have confused the Vivitare Empire by offering up no resistance to the invasion: they have let the Vivitare simply walk in and take over, a reaction interpreted by the Vivitare as being just a matter of cowardice.

The Vivitare have a pretty savage code. In place of a religion they have what can most swiftly be described as a faith in the survival of the fittest. At the top of their social order, therefore, are the most skilled fighters – the soldiers, who are exclusively male. Other men are, through sterilization, eliminated from contributing to the gene pool. Women, who are generally regarded as incompetent at just about everything, do not suffer such a triage; it's assumed the most survival-equipped men will wish to mate with only the most beautiful and survival-equipped women.

Young Ahvren, although a fully qualified member of the soldier caste, has been sickened by the ruthless Vivitare suppression of a recent rebellion on the planet Mirmanidan. He wants to get out of the war game, something very difficult for a member of his caste. When he expresses this to his father, who is a high member of the aristocracy, his father makes a wager with him: he can quit soldiery if he can use his wits to run to earth the widely rumoured plot to assassinate the Emperor.

So Ahvren goes out and about among the diverse species of the planet T'Chin, main centre of the T'Chin alliance and the original home of the T'chin species. Note that lower-case "c"; it's not a typo. Although there is no hierarchy among the 40 species of the T'Chin alliance, the species that started it all was the insectile T'chin, the differentiation being marked by the upper-case/lower-case "c".

And it is with this sort of thing that Bell starts getting into all sorts of difficulties, because an alien language wouldn't have a letter "c" in it in the first place – and doubly so since the T'chin communicate via smells (pheromonal exudations) rather than sounds. Indeed, Bell has gone to great and highly creditable effort to create a whole gamut of alien species that are not just different from us but different from each other, yet at the same time she seems to keep forgetting the very aspects of their alienness that she has been at such pains to establish. As example, we often discover members of physiologically quite distinct, non-humanoid species grinning at each other. Item A: What does an alien grin look like? Item B: Would a truly alien species experience the emotion that would produce a grin?

It may seem unkind to keep harping on this point but, precisely because Bell has done such a good job otherwise of creating the aliens, it keeps slapping at the reader. We are completely convinced by Wurrul, a member of a somewhat catlike species, and then we're hit by "the astonishment on his face rapidly giving way to careful control. Only the flicking tip of his tail revealed tension." (This book was read as an uncorrected proof, so the particular passage may, like others below, have been amended.) How could Ahvren read those emotions on Wurrul's face? And, although Wurrul looks a bit like a giant cat, why should he reveal tension by tail-twitching in the manner of a terrestrial moggie?

At the same time, there is so much to praise about this book as a work of the imagination. The multicultural mix of alien species is ambitious, and Bell has done really well here. The Vivitare culture is well painted. Ahvren and some of the other characters, notably his foster-sister Sabri, leap off the page as real people. It is also highly praiseworthy that some pretty tough issues are tackled head-on in a way not normally associated with novels for this age-group. The main plot is less invigorating, for the most part, and involves frequent interjections – from a T'chin – that even George Lucas might have thought twice about putting into the mouth of Yoda: "A turtle encountering a rock thinks it a very slow creature." (And again, how would an alien know about turtles?) Yet often there are glowingly vivid pieces of prose: "She must have been pretty once, and she was hanging on to the voluptuous remains of her charms."

This is certainly not an inconsiderable novel: it is of serious intent, and it decidedly merits reading. But it's also a bit of a curate's egg. Good, bad or indifferent? Bad it isn't – it has too many virtues for that – but, as noted at the start, this reader at least can't make up his mind about the other two.

—Infinity Plus

Thief of Souls

by Ann Benson

Dell, 496 pages, paperback, 2002

This long book (623 pages) is really two novels in one. In the first, set in 15th-century France, the widow, now abbess, Guillemette correlates the many rumors circulating the countryside that one of France's great heroes, Gilles de Rais, who fought alongside Joan of Arc, is a serial sex killer of young boys. Guillemette's quest to find the truth is both spurred and complicated by the fact that, in the long ago, she was Gilles's wet nurse; he was the playmate of her younger son, Michel, who disappeared one day, supposedly gored and dragged off by a wild boar, with Gilles as the only witness. Now Gilles relies on his power and status to protect him from the consequences – even the suspicion – of his crimes. However, with the support of prelate-politician Jean de Malestroit, Guillemette uncovers the revolting truth about the man whom, in a way, she still loves, and vindictively, because of her long-dead son, pursues him through trial and punishment.

The second novel, told in alternate chapters, has parallels. In modern Los Angeles, cop Lany Dunbar uses good detective work to ascertain fairly swiftly that renowned movie special-effects man Wilbur Durand is the psychopathic killer of a series of adolescent boys. Like the Gilles of Benson's story, Durand was grossly sexually abused as a child by older relatives; the origins of his psychopathy are not hard to understand. Pinning Durand down and bringing him to justice are, however, not such simple tasks for Lany as one might expect, for he is to a large extent protected by the shields of our modern US hierarchy, notably money and prestige. And soon Lany's own son is threatened, so the matter becomes even more personal ...

Of the two slightly related novels, the historical one is the more successful. Medieval France was a barbaric place to be, and Benson captures the ambience with a somewhat plodding skill, drawing us into the mores of that society. In particular, she manages well the matter of cultural relativism; for example, we can recognize Jean de Malestroit as an intelligent and sensitive man even though he is, in accordance with his era, quite ready to call in the torturers of the Inquisition to facilitate the gathering of evidence. Likewise, Guillemette's bloodthirsty desire for vengeance – she is near-grief stricken when the court decrees Gilles will be hanged before burning, rather than suffer the agonies of being burned alive – seems well in keeping with her time.

The mechanical alternation of chapters between the two tales – if it's an odd-numbered chapter we must be in medieval France – does little to help the modern-day story, but its real problem is that, unlike the historical one, it is nowhere near strong enough that it could stand up on its own as a solo novel. The detection element of its plot is clever, but over fairly quickly; the rest is somewhat formulaic. Perhaps in an attempt to underscore the loose parallels between the two tales, or perhaps just to emphasize the notion that defensive mothers have a spitefulness that transcends the passage of centuries, Benson has Lany, with apparent auctorial approval, coldly arrange for the torture murder of Durand in prison – this despite Lany's acceptance that Durand was a killer solely because mentally ill. Torture murder as a fitting response to the sick? We're left with not resolution but revulsion.

—Crescent Blues

Lazy Bones

by Mark Billingham

Morrow, 384 pages, hardback, 2003

I read and was much impressed by Mark Billingham's previous Inspector Tom Thorne thriller, Scaredy Cat, although I had reservations about the clumsiness of the writing. This time around, that clumsiness has disappeared, as if by magic – or by editor – and we're left with a marvellously slick piece of police-procedural noir. My only reservations concern the plotting.

Thorne and his crew at Scotland Yard's Serious Crimes Group perhaps shouldn't have been called in for something so banal as the torture murder of recently released rapist Douglas Remfry, but it's lucky they are because the killing proves to be the first in a series. Someone is cultivating pen-friendships with convicted rapists and then, on their release, luring them with pornographic photos and promises of S&M sex to their painful dooms. As with other serial cases, the likelihood is that the source of the murderer's rage lies somewhere in history, but at first the SCG doesn't know where in history to look. A search of past murders reveals a couple of unsolved cases that are tantalizingly similar, but the similarities aren't quite strong enough and anyway there's no obvious connection.

But then at last one of the employees of the recently formed Area Major Review Unit – which brings elderly police officers out of retirement to analyze cold cases – starts probing the long-ago murder of an accused but acquitted rapist, and this leads her to a ghastly 25-year-old murder-suicide that may hold the key to Tom Thorne's latest problem.

Meanwhile the body count continues to rise, and through it all the flinty hearted Thorne is trying to cope with the blossoming of the first romance to come his way in years ...

The mortar in Billingham's thrillers is the joyous facility with which he creates vivid, interesting, complex secondary characters. Outstanding in Lazy Bones are Phil Hendricks (from previous cases), the gay, punk forensics expert who just happens to be the seemingly ultra-conservative copper Tom Thorne's best friend; and especially Carol Chamberlain, the police retiree who looks like someone's not-necessarily-very-nice, overweight granny but who brings unbridled enthusiasm and a mind like a laser to her duties at the Area Major Review Unit. Even if the main plot itself were not so powerfully gripping, we'd be kept reading compulsively by the urge to follow the fates of these and the other characters.

In the case of Lazy Bones, it's good that this is so, because the plotting makes it a bit thunderingly obvious to us, from about two-thirds of the way in, who it is who's committing the murders. Since Thorne has almost the full gamut of the same evidence in front of him as we do, it's somewhat implausible that his masterful detective mind doesn't at least share the same suspicions. In fact, the book otherwise has such a strength to it that the pages keep relentlessly turning anyway, but it means that one finishes Lazy Bones with a sense of slight disappointment that the denouement's anticipated reversal of expectations never happened.

If you've not encountered Tom Thorne yet, you most certainly should. He's a worthy counterpart to Ian Rankin's Edinburgh cop, John Rebus. And that's high praise.

—Crescent Blues

Sarah's Landing 1

by Elena Dorothy Bowman

iUniverse, 310 pages, paperback, 2002

As I've remarked in these pages before [Yawn – Ed.], the recent boom in vanity publishing through the technology of print-on-demand (PoD) has had both advantages and disadvantages.

The advantages centre on the fact that self-publishing writers don't have to consider the commercial preconceptions of editors and publishers. It matters not one whit to them if their novel fits snugly into any predefined marketing niche. This opens the door not just for a flood of the direst writing but also for a steady and sometimes quite strong flow of the very best, most exciting and most adventurous writing – certainly within the imaginative genres. To be sure, you might have to put up with some interesting spelling; but among these books you can find new ideas, new experiments ... and a lack of the formulaic approach that is killing stone dead so much of the supposedly speculative fiction being issued by the major commercial houses.*

[* 2011 note: Matters have improved a little in the years since this review was written ... or maybe they haven't altogether: a few months ago I looked idly at the YA section of the local big-box store and discovered the selection of books there consisted entirely of Twilight wannabes.]

The disadvantages centre on almost exactly the same fact.

Time after time, reading the output from such vanity presses as iUniverse and xLibris it is extremely obvious why no commercial house would touch one or other book with a bargepole. But let's leave such cases to the side. Instead let's think of the books where the primary disadvantage of self-publishing is most evident: those where, as you read them, you have the maddening sense that there's a pretty good book struggling to be set free, and that what it needed to set it free were the attentions of an editor and copy-editor.

Sarah's Landing 1 is such a book.

At the copy-editing level it contains untold examples of spelling errors, typographical errors, repetition and downright clumsiness, while the punctuation appears to have been applied with a clogged salt cellar – stingily in most places, with a sudden rush in a few others, but never with very much semblance of intention.

But it's at the editing level that it suffers most, as we shall see ...

In the year 2055 Joshua Morgan is the astronaut who was left behind – because of a sudden unexplained ear infection – when, a few years before, the starship Earth Star-1 set off on its maiden voyage. Powered by a brand-new and little understood hyperdrive, Earth Star-1 vanished in a burst of light just after entering hyperspace. No one at home can now remember the details of the hyperdrive's workings, and all the plans for its construction have disappeared. Occasionally people wonder if Allen – the inventor of the hyperdrive, who vanished with Earth Star-1 and whose credentials no one at SICOM (read NASA) thought to check when they employed him because he was such a genius an' all – might have had something to do with the mystery.

Well, of course he did. He was a member of an alien species, the Theonians, who're so astonishingly humanoid that they can even breed with us. The Theonians have long been in a state of cultural and psychological moribundity. For ages they've been purloining humans – including many of the crew of the Eldridge, the ship that had all that trouble as the subject of the Philadelphia Experiment – and carting them off to the planet Theon for intermarriage and interbreeding: the Theonians may have incredible mental powers, teletransporting themselves here and there at will, but Earthmen, you see, bonk better. "The women are certainly happier these days than before the arrival of our first visitors," pronounces alien leader Heron.

Joshua, investigating mysterious disappearances, is drawn to the coastal New Jersey small town of Sarah's Landing, from where a disproportionate number of people have gone missing. In fact, as the locals say, the vanishings all seem to happen from one particular building, in which Joshua promptly rents himself an office – but not before he and rangy redhead telepath Alexandra have become lovers.

When Alexandra hops off to New York for a few days, Joshua discovers where all those missing persons have gone: to Theon. In Theon he discovers he can do things like fly before being dragooned into Theonian society and told to forget Alexandra, whom he already knows is his true love: after all, Heron's daughter, Adrianne, is now of age to become his new lover. Since she's if anything even more heart-wrenchingly sensational than Alexandra, Joshua dutifully acquiesces ... although able to maintain sporadic telepathic contact with Alexandra, even managing on one occasion to teleport himself home for a quick night of passion.

The net result is that both women become pregnant by him roughly simultaneously. Moreover, their fetuses are capable of telepathic communication as well ...

Oh, did I forget to mention that all this while Earth has been in radio-type contact with another alien species, the Crlllions, of planet Crlllion? That's because the author does as well, until page 243, where the fact is introduced almost as an aside. Indeed, although we aren't told this until even later in the book, it was to Crlllion that Earth Star-1 was sent, at the suggestion of the Crlllions. Obviously (by now) the starship vanished from human ken because the Theonians nabbed it – indeed, they were responsible for it in the first place, because Allen's commission was to deliver home a nice big consignment of Earthlings all in one fell swoop. But that wasn't the only reason the Theonians seized the vessel: late, late in the book they tell Joshua that they were saving humanity from itself, because all the Crlllions really want to do with the other species they contact is lure them to Crlllion and eat them, to make up for the food shortages there.

(As an aside, think of the name "Crlllion". Since it must be a phonetic rendition of the name the aliens call themselves – unless, miraculously, they use the Roman alphabet – where the hell did that triple-"l" come from? Wouldn't the name, in English, be spelled "Krillian", or something like that? Perhaps the author thinks giving the aliens a real weirdo unpronounceable name will make them seem somehow more alien.)

So you see the disadvantages of not having an editor? The genetics, economics and logistics of all this plot – not to mention the astronomy – are completely haywire. The technology of the year 2055 is a bizarre mixture of incredibly futuristic (viz the ftl starship) and 20th-century: videophones have only just recently been introduced to the world of 2055. When the starship is somewhere at the edge of the solar system preparing for the transition to hyperspace, there's no time lag in the radio messages to and from Ground Control in Houston. The Crlllions are described as cannibals because they'll eat humans; of course, they're not – they'd be cannibals if they ate other Crlllions. And anyway the Crlllions must be crazy to think importing a few hundred Earthlings, even as breeding stock, will solve a planet-wide food shortage; and wouldn't it be a whole lot cheaper and easier to grow more cows? The beautiful and sensuous Alexandra, aged 24, is a virgin when Joshua meets her. Humans and Theonians have identical anatomies, physiologies and even DNA. And so on, and on, and on.

Perhaps the epitome of the torrent of scientific illiteracy comes when Joshua first sets eyes on the Theonians' big central power-generating unit. Not long arrived from an Earth whose technology is little different from today's, he takes one glance and thinks:

This must be the ultimate in fluid mechanics and matter anti-matter power generation ever conceived. The Theonians must be tapping the core of the planet Theon.

Well, if you can recognize a matter-antimatter power generator at a glance you're a whole lot cleverer than I am. If you can conceive a generating system that combines fluid mechanics and matter-antimatter reactions you're a whole lot cleverer than I am. If you can work out how to mine antimatter from the core of your planet you're a whole lot cleve ... oh, actually you're not, because either your planet doesn't have any antimatter in its core or it's a rapidly expanding cloud of incandescent gas.

The ending of the book is entirely arbitrary. It just stops, more or less in mid-sequence, with none of the plot-threads resolved. There are, apparently, three further volumes in the saga to come; even so, this abrupt closure is unforgivable. To be sure, it's fair play to end one volume of a series such that the reader is left gasping for more; to leave the novel effectively unfinished is not.

With a plot that holds together with about as much conviction as the hypothetical antimatter-cored planet, with an enormous amount of clumsy writing, and with much more besides, by all the rules Sarah's Landing 1 should be an out-and-out bad novel, and I wouldn't be wasting my time reviewing it.

But the curious thing is that it's not. Fairly frequently, while wading through all the rest, one realizes that bits of it are working quite well. Joshua's discovery of the massive alien complex seemingly under the building in Sarah's Landing is really quite absorbing, as are the early stages of his training in Theonian-style mental powers. Alexandra emerges as a real person, and so to a lesser extent does Adrianne; one begins to care about both of them. It's quite fun that the Philadelphia Experiment is thrown into the soup. Just every now and then there's a nice coup of the imagination, or a sweetly perceptive turn of phrase. In short, the very fact that I got to the end of the book says something for it – more than that, it would actually make the basis for a pretty good skiffy movie. (And low-budget, too, since you'd not need to spend anything on rubber suits for the aliens!) Given the attentions – the very diligent and extensive attentions – of a competent editor to paper over all those plot inconceivabilities, Sarah's Landing 1 could perhaps be better than just rescuable: it might actually turn out very well.

As for the lack of a copy-editor (and proofreader)? Well, although one can blame vanity publishing for much of this, Bowman herself must not go completely without criticism. This text seems not to have been checked by anyone – not even given a read-through by its author.

I could hardly recommend that you rush out and buy Sarah's Landing 1, but the possibility remains that Bowman may, one day, either find a good editor or learn to edit herself – and preferably both. In that event, she may be one to watch.

—Infinity Plus

Pretty Dead

by Gerry Boyle

Berkley Prime Crime, 336 pages, hardback, 2003

Jack McMorrow is the Maine stringer for the New York Times, having deliberately moved himself away from the pressures of cutting-edge journalism. However, his semi-retirement from the fray hasn't isolated him from high-profile crime cases; this is the latest addition to Gerry Boyle's series about him and his permanent other, Roxanne Masterson, a social worker.

It's through Roxanne that Jack is brought into this latest case. The daughter of powerful, wealthy (think Kennedys) David and Maddie Connelly has been reported as suffering bruises that might indicate child abuse, and Jack tags along when Roxanne goes to interview the family. They get drawn into the Connellys' social circle, meeting various of the staff of the Connellys' own foundation. A few days later, Jack goes to a crime scene and finds that the victim is Angel Moretti, a sexbomb temptress and, seemingly, manipulating cocktease whom he met during a Connelly gathering. As he tries, with Roxanne's assistance, to track down the killer he is both threatened by hoodlums and cooperated with by the Connellys.

But are the Connellys all that they seem? Are they genuinely cooperating? For all that they blame a sacked and now conveniently disappeared nanny, could it be that they were indeed responsible for those bruises? Is it possible for Jack to do his job as a reporter while at the same time doing his job as (now) a friend to make sure the Connellys are subjected to as little unjustified public attention as possible? Is there a Mob involvement? And why is Maddie Connelly – the woman who seems to have everything – seemingly so scared of her own shadow?

There are plenty of questions to be asked, and Jack sets about finding the answers – aware all the time that the killer may be closer to Roxanne and himself than he thinks.

The combination of mystery and thriller is not always easy to achieve – ratiocination and action thrills offer two different forms of excitement – but Boyle makes a very good fist of it in this novel; the final fifty pages or so are as compulsive as anything you'll find in any edge-of-your-chair thriller. There's one major "cheat" in the ratiocination aspect of the tale: I can't detail it for fear of giving away too much, but essentially Jack is seriously misinformed about something for no apparent purpose other than to mislead the reader. Aside from that, this is a good detective novel as well as well as an effective thriller.

The characterization is nicely done as well; for the most part one gets the impression one has come to know these people. (The portrayal of the victim is especially vivid.) The writing's nice without being prissy, and there are some good one-liners. Yet my enthusiasm was tempered, partly because of the "cheat" mentioned above and partly because what the novel doesn't quite succeed in capturing is atmosphere. The two principal settings are rural Maine and Boston, and certainly this reader didn't get the feel of either. That, of course, doesn't matter too much if everything else is working well; but it does render Pretty Dead less lingering than it might have been.

—Crescent Blues

From the Dust Returned

by Ray Bradbury

Morrow, 204 pages, hardback, 2001

This book has an extremely interesting Afterword about its genesis. It began with the publication, in the October 1946 issue of Mademoiselle, of Bradbury's famous story "Homecoming", which had earlier been rejected outright by Weird Tales, the pulp to which Bradbury had been a somewhat uneasy but regular contributor for several years. The story's appearance in Mademoiselle was illustrated – with a full double-page spread, no less – by Charles Addams, and the two men soon after decided that, over the next few years, they would create a book together: Bradbury would write further stories concerning the Family, the assemblage of supernatural quasi-humans introduced in "Homecoming", and Addams would illustrate them. Other commitments got in the way of good intentions, and the proposed book never came to fruition ... until now, long after Addams's death. All that survives of Addams's intended contribution is the book's cover illustration, which is that old double-page spread from Mademoiselle.

This book is billed as a novel. It isn't. And neither is it really a collection of short stories. Rather, it is a book of prose that contains six previously published short stories, three new ones, and a goodly number of short (often extremely short and inconsequential) interpolated prose passages that sometimes verge on short-storyhood but are mainly just included for the sake of atmospherics. The book itself is short: many of those 204 smallish pages are blank, and the leading of the type is very generous. On occasion the jury-rigging together of its components becomes over-evident, as at the start of the story "West of October", well into the book (page 69): here we find half a page telling us all sorts of stuff about the Family that we already know, but it's been left in there because it was, necessarily, in the original publication of the story.

The book is also billed as "A landmark event more than fifty years in the making – and a new occasion for rejoicing". I'm not too sure it's that, either.

Somewhere at the top of a hill, somewhere in probably the Midwest, somewhen in probably the middle of the 20th century or thereabouts, there stands a House whose occupants are members of a Family whose other members are scattered all over the globe. Some of the Family seem vampirish, but to describe them as vampires would be to oversimplify: instead they are the dead who are not dead, or some such.

The principal family members with whom we are concerned are A Thousand Times Great Grandmère, who is the mummified mother of Nefertiti; Cecy, who forever sleeps in the attic but whose thoughts can wander far and wide and possess the bodies of others; the bat-winged Uncle Einar, who is a joyously playful friend to children; and Timothy, a mortal foundling, now a ten-year-old and the Family's determined historian (and presumably a surrogate character for Bradbury himself, upon whose own childhood the scenario is – extremely loosely! – based). Also somewhat near centre stage are Father and Mother (that is, Timothy's adoptive father and mother), who are strange in themselves but never really coalesce in the mind's eye.

The previously published stories are "The Traveler" (Weird Tales, 1945), in which the Family must cope with the arrival of rogue relative John the Unjust, a Vlad Drakul figure who might destroy their integrity; "Homecoming", in which, during a gathering at the House of all the far-flung Family, Timothy learns to accept and revel in his mortality; "Uncle Einar" (Dark Carnival, 1947), in which the eponymous character loses his battish sonar and thus can no longer fly at night, and so must find a way of flying by day without being recognized as a "monster" and shot down by humans; "The Wandering Witch" (Saturday Evening Post, 1952, as "The April Witch"), in which Cecy, a-quest for the experience of love, enters the body of a young woman and forces her to be polite, for just one evening, to a young man whom she dislikes; "On the Orient North" (The Toynbee Convector, 1988), a slightly twee but nevertheless effective ghost story spoiled by a predictable ending and somewhat bolted onto the rest of such structure as there is; and "West of October" (The Toynbee Convector, 1988), in which the excorporated spirits of four young men are drafted into the mind of A Thousand Times Great Grandmère's spouse, where they discover a world of romance and sex that they decline to leave.

Most of these are good stories, but the first four are extremely familiar from widespread publication in other books while the latter two will be well known to Bradbury devotees.

What then of the three new stories? In "Make Haste to Live" a buried Family member is disinterred and over succeeding weeks become rapidly younger until she vanishes in a sexual encounter. In "Return to the Dust", not quite a free-standing story, the attention of mortals has been drawn to the House, thanks to the malevolence of John the Unjust (op cit.), and so the Family must flee their separate ways. Finally, "The Gift", again not quite a free-standing story, sees Timothy present A Thousand Times Great Grandmère to an Egyptian museum of antiquities.

So much for characters and content. As it's not really profitable to discuss the plot of a non-novel, what about the writing style?

Bradbury has never made any secret of the fact that the major stylistic influence on his writing is that of Thomas Wolfe. (A note for the youthful: This is the Thomas Wolfe of You Can't Go Home Again, not the Tom Wolfe of Bonfire of the Vanities.) If anything, Bradbury for a couple of decades wrote Thomas Wolfe better than Thomas Wolfe did: ignoring the subject matter, the stories in, say, The Martian Chronicles/The Silver Locusts (1950) – another non-novel, but oh what a magnificent one – had all Wolfe's richness of imagery and language but also a greater stylistic discipline. Where Wolfe was always in danger of lurching into purpleness, Bradbury, with less rambling sentences and particularly with shorter paragraphs, always kept just this side of the narrow dividing line between floweriness and flaccidity. All through the 1940s and 1950s he maintained his grip on this precarious position with astonishing skill.

Around the time of his story collection The Machineries of Joy (1964), however, the grip seemed to be starting to slip. It was as if Bradbury had, well, run out of things to say and stories to tell, and was trying to compensate for this lack by an ever-increasing linguistic grandiosity that often veered into something approaching self-parody, as if Gerard Manley Hopkins had become possessed by the spirit of William McGonagall and the two personalities were fighting it out. It is no coincidence that I cite the names of two poets here, because Bradbury's great strength as a stylist hitherto had been the robust poetic zeal of his language; now too many of the metaphors were misfiring, and what had once been a rich swirl was becoming too often a gush.

His subject matter was changing, too: many and then most of the stories were well clear of the realms of fantasy. Of course, there's no objection at all – certainly from this quarter – to such a switch of focus; but the loss of the fantastic from Bradbury's writing did make even more obvious the flagging of his style. I can remember reading, in the early 1970s, a Bradbury collection and a collection by the Irish writer Frank O'Connor. The subject matter of the two sets of stories was not at all dissimilar, and I sadly had to admit that O'Connor's beautifully taut yet richly written fictions made Bradbury's read like a self-indulgent and amateurish attempt at emulation. (For all I know Bradbury has never even heard of O'Connor, of course; but that's the way the stories read.) Yes, O'Connor's language was fully as poetic as Bradbury's; yet it did not obviate his tales possessing a powerful narrative drive.

And it seems to me that Bradbury has never recaptured the joyous exuberance, both stylistic and narrative, of his early fictions – which were tales that any writer would have been proud to have written. From the Dust Returned would seem to be just a further evidence in favour of my contention. By contrast with the early tales, there are countless examples here among the new material of flaccid, self-indulgent overwriting, some of which are near comic:

• ... sucking vile liquors toward a surface abandoned because of the possible upchuck of nightmares ...

• Planes fly like pterodactyls on huge wings.

Oh yes? So the planes are flapping their flexible wings up and down in a complexly articulated fashion?

• ... you looked down to see your pale light painting lost towns the color of tombstones and spectral ghosts.

As opposed to the non-spectral type of ghosts.

• She leaned forward suddenly and gave him such a kiss on his mouth that his eardrums fractured and the soft spot

• With one last crushing gesture he crammed his fist to his ears and dropped dead.

• A rabbit thumped and ran in Timothy's chest.

• "Like ghosts?" // "Which use people's ears to look out their eyes!"

Actually, I suppose if you've managed to cram a single fist in both ears simultaneously this last one shouldn't be too difficult as an encore.

Let it not be thought that there are no nuggets of gold to be found in From the Dust Returned. Some of the reprinted stories have, for obvious reasons, all the exquisite fantastication of language and imagery that led in the first place to Bradbury's eminence; and elsewhere, in the more recent work, every now and then it is as if the same Muse had called back briefly to blow a breath of inspiration into his face. When this happens, the prose and imagery suddenly lift exhilaratingly off the ground, and one is left gasping. But then, all too soon, we're back to rabbits thumping and running in Timothy's chest. The overall impression with which I came away from this book was thus, sadly, that it's a very slight piece of work ... and that it's about time I dug out that dusty copy of Bradbury's splendid non-novel Dandelion Wine (1957) to read it yet again.

—Infinity Plus

Let's All Kill Constance

by Ray Bradbury

Morrow, 210 pages, hardback, 2003

The nameless narrator of this book, a Hollywood screenwriter – clearly identified by the circumstantial information given on page 68 as Bradbury himself – is beachfront neighbour to fading movie queen Constance. One dark and stormy night she comes to him telling him that she is in threat of her life; when she shortly afterwards disappears he goes off on a quest – sometimes on his own, sometimes accompanied by one or more friends including cynic-with-heart-of-gold private eye Crumley – in an attempt initially to save her but soon just to work out what the hell is going on. As we follow them we gain a portrait of the Hollywood of yesteryear, its idiosyncrasies and its fundamental glamorous tawdriness.

This is Bradbury's third attempt at a roman-a-clef noir detection – earlier were Death is a Lonely Business (1985) and A Graveyard for Lunatics (1990) – and it's enjoyable enough in a superficial sort of a way: vaguely entertaining, but completely uninvolving. It is this latter quality, or lack thereof, which is the novel's downfall as a noir, for noirs depend above all on an atmosphere that requires the total involvement of the reader. Bradbury's natural style, with its flightiness and exaggerated poeticism, works against him in this genre – ironic to find oneself saying this, because of course it was precisely that style which made particularly his early works of fantasy so comprehensively engrossing. There it was perhaps that the style left open so much space for ambiguity; here the ambiguity irks. (Chandler's language, for example, was often richly poetic, but at the same time its meaning was always crystal clear.) Here's a sample:

All the doors still stood wide, bright lights burned inside while Gershwin punched holes in a player piano roll in 1928 to be played again and again, triple time, with no one listening except me and Crumley walking through lots of music, but no Constance.

Even after one's worked out the meaning of this sentence there are still, as it were, bits of scattershot phrasing left flying adrift. That "triple time", for example. Did Gershwin, working in 1928, record the pianola roll at one-third speed? Perhaps pianola rolls were always recorded at one-third speed, for technological reasons – the punches could work only so fast, or something? If so, this is a bit of knowledge beyond your humble reviewer's ken. Or maybe Constance set her pianola to play at three times normal speed. Come to think of it, it must have been an electric pianola, because otherwise she'd still be sitting there pumping the pedals. When was the electric pianola invented? And so on.

A reasonable practitioner of noir fiction would have had the mesmerized reader two-thirds of the way through the chapter after next by now, not still stuck on page 20 grappling with this sentence.

There are some memorable moments, though, most notably the narrator's encounter with Constance's first, forgotten-nonentity husband, now dwelling eremitically in a hilltop shack surrounded by tottering megaliths of piled old and rotting newspapers. There is a skewed richness in such caricatural scenes, reminiscent of Mervyn Peake. But they are oases of vividness amid much that is desert.

There are annoying technical blemishes. On pages 44-5 there's an extended exchange of dialogue in the midst of which Bradbury loses track of which of the two characters is speaking. On page 72 there's reference to the British beer Old Peculier, but spelt "Old Peculiar". And so on.

But what's most irritating of all about this book is its lack of ambition. Yes, even the greatest of writers – and Bradbury's career speaks for itself – may obviously want to relax with a romp every now and then rather than attempting a masterpiece with each and every new book, but Bradbury of all people is surely capable of producing an excellent romp rather than just a piece of lazy froth like this.

To put this another way: Bradbury has the prized capacity to create works that (and this is irrespective of whether the reader necessarily likes all of them) give the impression of having been greatly loved – loved with an enormous passion, with a fullness of the heart – by the writer. It's a magical ability, and every writer in the world wishes s/he had it.

This book doesn't have that quality.

—Infinity Plus

Boost

by Steve Brewer

Speck Press, 252 pages, hardback, 2004

Sam Hill is a professional car thief. Boosting cars is his main source of emotional stimulus ... with the possible exception of his romantic yearnings toward his fence, Robin Mitchell, daughter of the fence and car thief who mentored Sam way back in the days before he'd found anything worthwhile to do with his life. In turn Sam is mentoring the youth Billy Suggs, teaching him not just how to be a car thief but the artistry of the profession – for Sam's specialty is not common-or-garden theft but the stealing, under commissions channeled through Robin, of rare and collectible items.

It's a good life until the day Sam discovers the Thunderbird he's just stolen has a dead body in the trunk. His first task is of course to get rid of the corpse before the cops come sniffing (perhaps literally) around. But the problem's bigger than that. The whole situation smacks of a setup: someone's trying to land him not just in trouble but in serious trouble, including a possible murder rap. That someone has to be stopped before they try something, well, worse.

Aided by Billy, Robin and Sam's man-mountain friend Way-Way, Sam soon traces the line back to seedy car fence Ernesto Morales and beyond him to drugs kingpin Phil Ortiz, who, it proves, is seeking revenge for the time Sam boosted one of his prized collection of vintage cars. The makeshift team of buddies find themselves taking on Ortiz and Ortiz's equally murderous army of thugs in a tit-for-tat war of thrust and counterthrust, all the while keeping out of the clutches of both local and federal cops. This is not a war Sam intends to lose, even though just capitulating and getting out of town could well be his wiser course. But to win it he's going to have to be very inventive indeed ...

This is modern, straightforward, fast-moving, no-nonsense caper fiction at something close to its finest. The characters are beautifully and economically drawn, in the best noir tradition – not just the major players but also the supporting cast, including notably the cops Stanton and Delgado and their fed counterparts Brock and Jones (Jones is an especially delightful creation). At times the text is as laugh-out-loud funny as anything by Donald E. Westlake; at other times it's as grim as anything by Westlake's auctorial alter ego Richard Stark. Always it's possessed of a lively wit and intelligence ... and it would make a marvellous movie.

This little gem of a novel is thoroughly recommended.

—Crescent Blues

Expatria

by Keith Brooke

Cosmos, 177 pages, paperback, 2001; reissue of a book originally published in 1991

It used to be difficult, most of the time, to tell British sf apart from its American counterpart: in cargo-cultish fashion, British sf writers did their best to imitate the strand of the genre originated by the fixed notions of John W. Campbell Jr, which notions shaped American sf for better or worse. However, there has always existed alongside this a distinctly British version of mainstream sf, which looks back less to Campbell than, arguably, H.G. Wells. Whereas Campbellian sf relies for its effect on the use of twinned floods, if not torrents, of event and ideas, this distinct British strain sets the ideas – which may be every bit as radical – to play second fiddle to two other elements: first, the actual craft of writing, which includes the grace of the prose and the concentration on character; and, second, a subtext ... what the book is about, as apart from what the tale tells.

There have been many distinguished contributors to this strain of sf aside from Wells: some that come to mind are Keith Roberts, Christopher Priest, Michael Coney (despite his departure from the UK as long ago as 1973), John Wyndham, Edmund Cooper (when on song), J.G. Ballard (in his earlier days, before he struck out to carve a niche all his wonderful own), Eric Brown, John Christopher ... There have even been a few US writers who have worked along the same lines: George R. Stewart and Walter M. Miller are two.

Keith Brooke's novel Expatria, now deservedly reissued, belongs to this tradition. While some of its events are startling, even approaching the melodramatic, its carefully measured, consciously understated prose eschews any of the customary cheap stunts used by genre authors in their attempts to keep the reader whizzing through the pages. This is a novel that happens to be sciencefictional rather than the escapist whirlwind that is normally implied by use of the term "sf novel". To describe it as gripping would be accurate but would at the same time mislead: it grips because of the reader's absorption in the characters and the significance of the events rather than through any nonstop pulse-racing action. It introduces you to a world which, without your perhaps consciously realizing it, comes to permeate your mind, so that you have to shake your head to return yourself to 21st-century Earth.

Mathias Hanrahan, who believes people should embrace technological ways and exploit all the artefacts still surviving from the earliest days of colonization, is heir to the Primacy of Newest Delhi, capital of one of the two major nations on the planet Expatria, colonized generations ago by the occupants of Space Arks sent out from Earth. The people and governments of Expatria have largely rejected the science and technology their ancestors brought with them, and now live in a sort of progressive-medieval culture. Mathias's father – the Prime of Newest Delhi – is murdered, and Mathias is framed for the crime. He flees first to the anarchic city of Orlyons and then to Alabama City, capital of the marginally more enlightened other major Expatrian nation. There he is encouraged in his pro-technology zeal, joining a loose-knit organization called the Project, headed by formalistic but eventually good-hearted bureaucrat Sukui and dedicated to rediscovering the technology of yore for the good of the people.

Fiddling with a radio set, members of the Project intercept radio signals sent optimistically down to the surface by the descendants of those original colonists who elected to stay aboard the Space Arks in orbit around Expatria; just as the surface population of Expatria has never realized such people existed, so the idea that the planet could have a surviving population has become quasi-mythological to the inhabitants of the Arks. The reason for the attempted – and consummated – contact is that the Arks have discovered another generation starship is on its way from Earth intent on converting all Expatrians, surface and orbital, to a fresh religion.

The sequel, Expatria Incorporated (1992), to this 1991 novel is amply heralded.

Where Brooke scores highly in his world creation is in his handling of religions and religious sects. The organized beliefs depicted here – though not in detail – are logical descendants, exogamously combined and then distorted and perverted, of the mishmash sects we see around us today; there are, for example, the Conventists, worshippers of the portmanteau divinity Mary/Deus, and the Death Krishnas. Later a pimp actually invents a new and successful religion – the Caravan of the Holy Charities ("Now [...] which of the Charities was it you wanted to fuck?") – which is almost immediately subtly adapted by secular interests to spread the word, in the teeth of the authorities' reluctance to admit this publicly, that the Arks exist and are populated.

A much less successful element of the world creation concerns music. A nice touch is that in straitlaced Alabama City music-as-entertainment is officially frowned upon, so that entertainment establishments are officially classified as workplaces; audiences come to them not to enjoy themselves, you understand, but simply to facilitate the work's being carried out. But that's an aside. More to the point is that the same understanding of the cultural-evolutionary process as applied by Brooke to organized religion is not carried on in the instance of music. The music played by several characters in Expatria, sometimes to great popular approbation, is bluesy rock, much as in the late 20th century and early 21st. It is of course feasible – just – that bluesy rock will still be being played hundreds if not thousands of years in the future on isolated and regressed colony planets, and it's likewise feasible that the guitar, drums, saxophone and harmonica will still be instruments of prime choice. But everything we've learnt from history insists that such a mode of music would have become a specialist interest, with the vast mass of the people being devoted instead to some new (and not necessarily better) form. Giving the Expatrian populace the blues is much like feeding an MTV audience Mozart; and surely, by the time of Expatria, today's instruments of popular-music choice are likely to have gone the way of the crumhorn.

The foremost musician in this tale is Mono, and she is also the most beautifully realized of its characters. Her day job, as it were, is as a high-class prostitute; but this career she evidently regards as only a means to an end – the way of financing what she actually wants to do, which is front a rock'n'roll band. It is a nice touch that Mathias, who loves her as a friend rather than something to screw, is able to use his rudimentary knowledge of the old technology to cobble together for her an electric guitar. The relationship between Mono and Mathias is very sweetly handled.

Throughout, Brooke's tale-telling is superb; only in the last few pages does it fall down, when too much is revealed too quickly – a fault compounded by the fact that some of the revelations have already made themselves evident to the attentive reader. Until this point there is a lovely steady pacing of the narrative; the final few pages are as disruptive in their effect as if a smoothly, inexorably flowing river had, in its last stages before reaching the sea, suddenly turned into a babbling stream.

All in all, however, this is a completely absorbing novel ... albeit a minor one. The publisher of this edition of Expatria, Cosmos, is not only reissuing two others by Brooke but has a new Brooke novel imminent; I drool.

—Infinity Plus

Keepers of the Peace

by Keith Brooke

Cosmos, 179 pages, paperback, 2002; reissue of a book originally published in 1990

Set in 2083/4, this novel envisages a future in which a fair percentage of humanity lives in Lagrangian-orbit space colonies which have not long before successfully fought their war of independence to rid themselves of direct governance from Earth. Indeed, now the boot is more on the other foot, since the colonies have a strong political and military presence on the home planet, where they dominate the waging of a not-quite-war between its dictatorship ally Grand Union and neighbouring CalTex – two of the states into which the former USA has split.

Jed Brindle is an average lad from a small, largely agricultural space colony. When called up for the draft he does not, like many of his peers, opt for one of the seemingly relatively easy excuses to deny the call; he is eager enough to leave the stifling confines of home and find adventure in the military. Once there and fitted with implants to control mood, communicate with his fellows and all the other things cyber-implants might be expected to do, he proves to be a frighteningly effective soldier – possessed not just of the requisite fighting skills but also of a ruthlessness that scares his superiors. This book is his story.

Before we look at that story, a note on the book's structure. The main narrative runs linearly through the odd-numbered chapters. The even-numbered chapters consist of flashbacks that take the form of diary entries (some by Jed), interview quasi-transcripts, etc. The result of this structuring is a very interesting one: at the same time that we are being pulled along by the events of the "now" we are being given an ever more rounded, and sometimes subtly shifting, depiction of Jed himself and of his times. There's something of the same feel, because of this, as when reading the John Dos Passos-influenced novels of John Brunner such as The Sheep Look Up (1972) and Stand on Zanzibar (1968). Brooke handles the dual strands of his narrative adroitly.

In the "now", Jed and a group of colleagues are conducting a plane hijack in order to kidnap a prominent CalTex figure, Cohen. Things go wrong, and the plane crashes in the middle of the desert with massive loss of life. Jed sets out to lead a small party comprising his injured military colleagues Amagat and Jacobi as well as the uninjured Cohen across the hostile terrain to the nearest Grand Union outpost, which is separated by a matter of just a few miles from the nearest CalTex outpost.

Along the way, as they survive the desert rigours and occasional aerial attack, Jed goes through a rite of passage – not the stereotyped transition from adolescence to adulthood but something far more interesting than that: the transition from killing machine to human being.

The cover quotes for Keepers of the Peace cite Heinlein and Haldeman as obvious precursors. In novels like Starship Troopers (1959) and The Forever War (1974) these two authors did indeed tell the tale of futuristic war from the worm's-eye view of the common soldier, showing how the brutalities of active military life can turn a normal, sensitive human being into something quite other. Yes, but ... In Keepers of the Peace there's nothing of the triumphalism of Starship Troopers or of the omnipresent large-scale-combat blood and guts and Vietnam allegory of The Forever War; Brooke keeps his focus far tighter, far more intimate than that, holding scenes of actual fighting to a minimum and tending to depict them with the same flat, sparse starkness that characterizes Jed's own thinking about them. A better comparison, in terms of the feel of the novel, might be with the opening chapter (based on a short story) of David Langford's 1982 novel The Space Eater. Jed's entirely cyborged father at one point spells out this destruction of the personality in the grinding machines of military exigency:

My son is dead. I guess he started to die back in March when they sent his draft notice, but now it's all over. There's a new person in that body of his.

And:

When Jed was called up, Toni was worried about what they would do to his body. I guess she doesn't want him ending up like me. But she was focused on the wrong thing: it's what they do to your mind that matters.

The military is like one big computing system. The generals do the programming, and there's one awful lot of equipment to be coordinated. The soldier is the place where hardware and software come together and do their work.

In this view, the individual soldier cannot be a human being: in order for everything to function properly, she or he, whether regarded as stalwart hero or murderous war criminal, must be reduced to the status of not even a silicon chip but of one of its electronic switches. It's a grimly powerful metaphor, and one that is, even more grimly, hard to challenge on its own terms.

As noted, there's no Vietnam allegory here. In this book's scenario it's rather as if, instead, the triumphant Vietcong had rather rapidly transformed themselves into the US Army. While preaching freedom and democracy – and while doubtless practising exactly those ideals outside the confines of this story – the colonies are in reality, in an echo of US foreign policy, propping up a seedy dictatorship against what appears on the scant evidence presented to be a reasonably liberal democracy, the fundamental spur being, despite the idealistic demagoguery, plain self-interest. Although we can hope it will not, we can anticipate that what is in 2084 merely the making of unpleasant friends will develop into a tyranny of economic dominance, reinforced as necessary by military means, by the colonies over the Earth.

Despite all the drama of its events and the sternness of its political message, this is an oddly quiet book – something that Brooke effects through a studious restraint of writing style. Those who seek the measured provocation of thought when considering our military future – and indeed our military present – can be heartily recommended to read Keepers of the Peace. Those who seek out militaristic sf for the thrills, the gore, the glory and the melodrama should be prescribed this novel as therapy.

—Infinity Plus

Collecting Candace

by Susan M. Brooks

Small Dogs Press, 200 pages, paperback, 2005

The nameless protagonist of this neo-noir piece first encounters Candace in a Florida bar, and is instantly captivated by her. Long legs, skimpy clothing, cute face, suggestive tattoo, beaucoup de bosomry – what sensitive, reconstructed male ascetic could resist her? He picks her up – or is it the other way round? – but not for sex: not only is she seemingly oblivious to the notion that sex might be anticipated, but his desire for her is entirely psychological, you understand, rather than physical, so that an act of sex with her would destroy the iconic Candace he has so swiftly created for himself. He wants to discover her mentally rather than carnally ... with the carnal option perhaps left open for later.

What he discovers about her is that all the previous males in her life – notably her three husbands – done her wrong in one way or another, perhaps most particularly through their quite inexplicable eventual dumping of her. It soon becomes plain to the reader why all this inexplicable dumping went on: Candace is a vapid moron of the most tedious imaginable kind. The protagonist, however, effectively conceals this patent fact from himself, finding her a constant maze of fascination and desirability. He casts himself into the role of her Knight in Shining Armor, and sets off, with her in tow, to exact revenge upon those males in her past who have so grievously ill treated her. In merry road-movie-psycho fashion, the pair of them cheerfully and gruesomely slaughter Candace's exes, the inspiration for their crimes being almost as much the searingly hot Florida summer as the protagonist's obsessed quixotry.

This is a novel with a great deal going for it, and its central premise has a sort of brutal effectiveness. However, the fact that the central femme fatale is seemingly such a complete bimbo, complete with a love for the Bible coupled with a total inability to understand the first word of the New Testament's message, means that soon the reader is filled with the same urgent compulsion to escape her company as her exes undoubtedly experienced. The protagonist is little better: the novel's conceit, initially intriguing, that he can be capable of such profound self-deception over Candace, eventually plummets to become exasperation and even incredulity that he could be such a halfwit. If she were banging his brains out one could at least understand his addiction to her: is there a male who cannot look back on protracted periods of gonads-driven idiocy? But that's not the case, and can't be: he's made her into a figure of chastity.

Collecting Candace could get around these problems if it were exquisitely written. Unfortunately, the writing is rather clumsy. Were the two central characters possessed of one single scintilla of appeal, this roughness could add to the novel's overall noir ambience. As it is, the roughness soon begins instead to grate.

Oddly enough, Collecting Candace is worth reading despite all these adverse comments ... if you can stomach the unremitting bleakness of its vision of the most Neanderthal aspects of, and indeed members of, modern American society. It is from such ground that there springs the culture-of-ignorance whose current dominance has done so much to topple our country so swiftly from the position of world leader to world laughing stock. Brooks is to be heartily and very sincerely congratulated on having managed, in such a brief work, to do so much to explain this phenomenon.

—Crescent Blues

The Curse of Chalion

by Lois McMaster Bujold

Eos, 442 pages, hardback, 2001

Bujold is of course extremely well known for her science fiction: her mantelpiece must groan under the weight of all those Hugos. Yet this particular reader – and it's perhaps an embarrassing confession – has always had deep reservations about her sf novels. They have seemed to be no more than enjoyable light entertainment: books to be picked up and read quickly, mildly enjoyed, then forgotten about just as quickly. If some of them have a deeper-rooted agenda, then they have been among the ones I've not encountered. Nevertheless, the decision of a writer of such prominence in the sf genre to shift to the high-fantasy genre is an event of some significance; moreover, the very softness of the themes that characterize to their (debatable) detriment the sf novels might be a positive advantage when deployed within genre fantasy.

Well, yes ... and no.

As the book opens we encounter its central character, Cazaril, making his way on foot from the distant land of Ibra back to his homeland of Chalion. A soldier by profession, he is now a disfigured, frail remnant of his former self, having spent a while in the brutal environment of the Roknari galleys, into which he was betrayed by the vile Jironal brothers. When he gets back to Chalion he discovers that the elder of those brothers is now Chancellor and virtual proxy for the ailing king, Orico. In short order Cazaril finds himself detailed to escort Orico's half-siblings Iselle (girl) and Teidez (boy) to Cardegoss, Chalion's capital city, for Orico has fathered no children and so Teidez is the heir presumptive. Cazaril and his charges are immediately pitched into all kinds of derring-do, for the Jironals plan to take over the kingdom ...

I've been using words like "king" pretty freely here. I shouldn't have indulged in this sloppiness. Because this is a fantasy, Orico is called not a king but a "roya". His queen – oops, another taboo word – is a "royita", while Iselle and Teidez are, respectively, a "royesse" and a "royse" rather than the princess and prince you might take them for. Such silly tricks of vocabulary, presumably utilized solely in order to persuade us that the story is occurring in an imagined, fantasticated otherworld rather than the real one, are actually profoundly irritating: they reach their nadir in the universal use of the word "nuncheon" to describe a meal that takes place around the middle of the day ...

The reader does, in fact, need rather a lot of persuading to believe this is a fantasticated otherworld, because great stretches of the novel seem rather to be set in the sort of haphazardly remembered history still lingering in the mind of someone who's read superficially about the Middle Ages a long time ago – a very long time ago, and perhaps only in the pages of Reader's Digest. There is much for the likes of Sarah Palin to recognize here.

One could of course make similar snide remarks about 99% of other generic fantasy novels, some of which are excellent fantasies for all that; but here it is particularly obviously the case because there's not a great deal of fantasy to divert the attention. Indeed, with an exception that could be explained as a matter of the characters' belief rather than as a manifestation of the supernatural, the fantasy part of the novel doesn't really get started until about page 175, over one-third of the way through this long novel. Bujold's focus up until that time has been on the burgeoning romance between Cazaril and the scrummy Lady Betriz – a high-born virgin half his age – and on setting up the various intrigues and character-clashes that will drive the rest of her tale.

The romance aspect should be stressed. This humble reviewer has long maintained that most of the high fantasy published today should be considered not as part of the fantasy genre at all, but as a subgenre of the romantic novel. The Curse of Chalion fits this classification to a tee: it is stuffed to the gills with Harlequinesque tropes. There's another significant romance in the tale, but, sticking with that between Cazaril and Betriz for now, we have the classic older-and-somewhat-disabled-man/younger-woman scenario in which neither, for several hundred pages, dares come out into the open and Speak Their Love. Anyone for Jane Eyre ...?

The fantasy elements, when they do finally shuffle to centre-stage, are actually quite a lot of fun. The younger and viler Jironal brother, Dondo, is foisted onto Princess (dammit, I mean Royesse) Iselle as a husband, as part of the Jironals' plans for domination. The thought of wedding and bedding him makes Iselle puke. Loyal Cazaril decides to stop the marriage by use of "death magic": this involves persuading one of the five gods, the Bastard (I'm not being pejorative: that's the god's name, and it's one of the brighter features of the book that this be so), to send a demon to scoop up the soul of the enemy and cart it off to hell, the only trouble being that the demon always takes the soul of the magic-worker at the same time and to the same destination. Cazaril, however, survives the experience, thanks to the unwitting prayers of Iselle, but Dondo's soul ends up quasi-tumorously in Cazaril's belly, as does the demon, where both make their resentful presences felt. Thereafter Cazaril has a form of second sight that enables him to see not only ghosts but the auras of others who have been, like himself, god-touched ... including the dark, malevolent auras that shroud all members of Chalion's ruling family, who inherited the curse of the book's title when one of their ancestors used the death magic to save the kingdom.

Of course – I'm giving away no secrets here, for this is a romantic novel – Cazaril foils the surviving Jironal brother's ambitions, lifts the curse, and gets the gal.

If the destination of the tale is predictable, what of the journey to get there – its telling?

In keeping with the vocabularistic tricks referred to earlier, Bujold also often makes use of ye olde antiquated vocabulary and grammatical constructs, plus dialogistic forsoothery in order to keep reminding us that we're in fantasyland. Aside from that, however, the telling is delightfully slick (no criticism intended): The Curse of Chalion is a genuine page-turner, primarily perhaps because the character of Cazaril, unlike most of the others (there are some nicely portrayed minor characters, though), is so well delineated – in fact, one could almost say that it is concern for Cazaril's fate that keeps the pages turning rather than his adventures themselves.

Viewed as a light entertainment, then, The Curse of Chalion is a definite success: it does everything a romantic adventure novel should do, and does it well. Yet is it really a fantasy?

Obviously the answer is "yes" in terms of the shelf in the bookstore where you'll find it placed. But otherwise? That's a lot less certain. Throughout my reading of The Curse of Chalion I was constantly reminded of Judith Merkle Riley's excellent novel In Pursuit of the Green Dragon (1991). The point is that Riley's novel is a historical fiction; essentially it is a yarn rooted in genuine history. It does, though, have fantasticated elements (the "green dragon" of the title is an alchemical reference, for example), but these fit well alongside the more straightforward elements. What made my mind revert so frequently to In Pursuit of the Green Dragon was that Riley's historical novel has as much fantasy in it as has The Curse of Chalion. The only real difference is that Bujold's tale is set not in a real history but in a cobbled-together one where kings are called royas. In effect, she has written a historical novel without all the pain of doing the necessary but boring research.

So you pays yer money and you takes yer choice. As a jolly way of whiling away a long train journey, The Curse of Chalion will amply, and expertly, satisfy you – it could even keep you reading in bed long past official lights-out, as it did me – but if it's fantasy you're after you'd be better off looking elsewhere; and the same, obviously, is true if your taste is for historical fiction.

—Infinity Plus

Saturday Morning Fever

by Timothy Burke and Kevin Burke

St Martin's Griffin, 247 pages, paperback, 1999

In his book The Mechanics of Wonder (Liverpool University Press, 1998) and elsewhere Gary Westfahl puts forward an alternative explanation to the usual one for the dramatic improvement in the quality of sf published during the early years of John W. Campbell's tenure as editor of Astounding. It is Westfahl's suggestion (and he acknowledges that it is not entirely original to him) that the credit should be accorded not to Campbell but to Hugo Gernsback. For, Westfahl argues, it was Gernsback who published the sf magazines that the authors of the "Campbell stable" read during the formative years of their early adolescence; Campbell was just the editor who was lucky enough to be there when those writers hit maturity.

You don't need to agree entirely with Westfahl's argument (although in this instance I probably do) to recognize that he is pointing to something that is largely overlooked in critical studies of science fiction and fantasy: critics may talk of the influence of the works of Writer A on Writer B but in fact the most important influences on the latter are much more likely to have been Kemlo, or sf children's stories by Captain W.E. Johns and Patrick Moore, or the Dr Who novels, or ...

Or children's tv series. If Writer B is an American, the chances are high that her/his sciencefictional perceptions will have been early moulded by exposure to the programmes screened during those hours on Saturday mornings when kidvid took over the schedules. Secure in a world where no adult dared to tread – and, indeed, of whose nature few adults can have been aware, to judge by the inanities enunciated by those who made a profession of denouncing the Saturday morning output – the imaginations of the watching kids were stimulated and shaped. The fact that many of the series involved were junk is irrelevant to their importance (who would in adulthood defend Captain Johns's The Death Rays of Ardilla as a work of literature, or even as a competent piece of storytelling?), in particular because most of the watching kids were perfectly well able to discriminate between the gems and the crude ore: even the junk was liked as junk, and most of it served its imagination-stimulating purpose far better than the occasional self-consciously "educational" programme that the networks were bullied by the lobbyists into broadcasting.

I was talking recently to a 21-year-old who reads very little fantasy or sf, but what little she does read, she was telling me, is as a result of watching series like Bagpuss and Willo the Wisp – not to mention Disney animations – in childhood. So it's not just writers who owe something to children's television but readers as well.

The Burkes' Saturday Morning Fever is thus a far more important book than it might on the surface appear; if we are to understand modern fantasy and sf aright then it, or something like it, should be required reading. It is also among the most entertaining books I have read recently, and certainly far more entertaining than any "significant" book has any right to be. Here, for example, is the Burkes' initial statement of its thesis:

Saturday morning cartoons are regarded by most American adults over the age of forty as having marginally more redeeming social value than hard-core pornography ... but perhaps not quite as much value as an episode of a television talk show dealing with incestuous anorexic biker Rotarians. "Saturday morning" has long served as a shorthand epithet for culture judged to be juvenile, low-quality, moronic, mind-numbing, or cut-rate.

We have two words to the folks who think this way: Piss off.

Elsewhere, in their synopsis of the sf series Land of the Lost – in which a family falls through a time portal into an alternate world populated by strange creatures including the monstrous Sleestaks – the Burkes note that there was more than one flaw in the series' visualization:

The family should have looked like refugees from Lord of the Flies by their third year, given that they were running around in a swampy, humid climate being chased by dinosaurs and lizard people. However, everything stayed neat and clean, including the characters' psyches. You'd think by year three that the main human characters would be going a bit bugshit, particularly given that the son was right smack-dab in the middle of adolescence and was probably giving some thought to putting the moves on a female Sleestak once he could figure out which ones were female.

The majority of the fantasy and sf series discussed in the book were animations, with Hanna-Barbera the major producers in terms of bulk if not of either general or genre-specific interest. To the fantasist the most important single stable was Sid and Marty Krofft Productions, which generated series that must technically be described as live-action, although the frequent surrealistic use of bizarrely costumed characters makes the term seem somehow inapposite. Prime among such productions was H.R. Pufnstuf, whose title character was a mutant yellow dragon, H.R. Pufnstuf himself, mayor of Living Island, the alternate world into which youthful hero Jimmy plus his pal Freddie the Talking Flute were cast by the machinations of a sorceress called Witchiepoo, who desired the talking flute for herself (useful things, talking flutes?) and one of whose sidekicks was named, wonderfully, Stupid Bat. Is it any wonder H.R. Pufnstuf devotees still roam the land (the UK too) as adults? And is it any wonder there's a quasi-rumour that the eponym's enigmatic initials stood for "hand-rolled"?

It was on Saturday mornings that many more widely recognized fantasy and sciencefictional characters made their screen debuts or knew their finest hours. Hours, anyway; maybe not finest. Among them were Superman, Batman, the Addams Family, GI Joe, Godzilla, Dr Dolittle, Casper, Spider-Man, Captain Marvel and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, to name just a few. The company in which they mixed included lesser and since largely forgotten shows like Goober and the Ghost Chasers, The Groovie Goolies and a series whose title character baffles comprehension, Rubik the Amazing Cube; but Star Trek and Planet of the Apes (in both cases the animated series), The Flintstones, The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show, Ralph Bakshi's Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures, Sabrina, the Teenage Witch and Jonny Quest were in there as well.

The Burkes' book does not serve well as a reference guide to these and many other shows that have, as noted, indirectly played such a significant role in forming today's fantasy and sf: here you will find little by way of rigorous data on running times, seasons aired, production credits, etc. But that is not the Burkes' purpose. Instead they seek to convey the sensation of being a Saturday morning kid during the Golden Age of the 1970s and 1980s, and in this they triumph superbly. Consider: I was reared in Scotland rather than the United States, and in fact my home did not possess a tv set until I was anyway a little too old to appreciate what I would by then undoubtedly have dismissed as "kids' stuff", yet, thanks to the Burkes, I now have a fairly clear impression of (and here I wish to choose my words carefully) what I would now remember it felt like had I spent my formative years as an American Saturday morning tv kid. That is no mean achievement. And the experience has opened my eyes to the why of some of the sf and fantasy (art as well as the written word) of the 1990s.

There are minor cavils. The index is not 100% reliable and the copy-editor might wisely have read through the text one extra time. But otherwise this gloriously irreverent, gloriously partisan, gloriously affectionate text offers a splendid insight into one of the foundation stones of the modern fantasy/sf edifice.

—Samhain

Voice of the Violin

by Andrea Camilleri

Translated by Stephen Sartarelli

Viking, 256 pages, hardback, 2003

Every time I came to the end of a session of reading Voice of the Violin, my introduction to the writing of Andrea Camilleri and his character Salvo Montalbano, I found myself grinning all over from sheer pleasure.

Which is odd, because it's a full-blooded detective story whose subject matter is not always especially pleasant. A minor traffic accident draws Sicilian cop Montalbano into discovering the naked, murdered body of a beautiful young woman, Michela Licalzi; immediately before death she has had both vaginal and anal intercourse, but there are no secretions within her body for forensics to work with, and all her clothes and personal belongings have been removed from the scene. Some of those personal belongings were valuable – notably her jewelry, in the handbag she kept with her – but where was the sense in her murderer removing all the rest? Unless, of course, the other items might in some way offer a clue to his identity ...

Montalbano has to work through not only the mystery but also Sicilian police politics, the complexities of Michela Licalzi's romantic and other liaisons, and a pair of linked crises in his own emotional life – these latter two problems exacerbated by the immediate attraction between himself and the dead woman's best friend, Anna Tropeano.

This might sound as if it all makes for Voice of the Violin being a weighty, somewhat worthy, somewhat gruelling novel, a reader preconception that is perhaps not helped by public comparisons between Camilleri's Montalbano and Georges Simenon's Maigret. Such comparisons are actually well justified – if you like Maigret (or Mark Hebden's Pel series, or Janwillem van de Wetering's Amsterdam Cops series, or Sjowall & Wahloo) you'll love this – but they obscure the astonishing lightness of touch that Camilleri achieves. He's a master of creating character or conjuring up a scene with just a few deft brush-strokes, while Montalbano's rather quirky morality and passion for good food, both very lightly and often humorously depicted, manage to become almost additional characters in their own right.

This is really quite a short novel – the publisher has released it in a small format to bump up the page-count a bit – but it's an immensely satisfying one. It's also a very complete one. It's customary to say of good novels that one was disappointed to come to the last page, but in the case of Voice of the Violin the telling is so well crafted that in fact this wasn't – at least for this reviewer – true: as with one of those meals Montalbano so much enjoys, the last mouthful perfectly satiates, and even a morsel more would be a surfeit.

—Crescent Blues

The Wooden Sea

by Jonathan Carroll

Tor, 302 pages, hardback, 2001

Jonathan Carroll is one of the best and most intelligent novelists at work today, and yet, although they sell healthily, his books have never achieved the sales figures his manifold virtues so richly deserve. This has puzzled many – the jacket of this new novel is covered in quotes from the famous expressing exactly this bewilderment – yet the reason Carroll's work has never really conquered the commercial market seems obvious enough, a conclusion reinforced by reading The Wooden Sea: his novels cannot easily be summarized in a sentence or two.

This is precisely the reason they're so very rewarding, of course, but not helpful when you're trying to recommend them to friends. If you were wanting to recommend a Stephen King or a John Grisham novel, for example, you could say "it's about vampires in a small American town" or "it's about this guy on the jury of a cigarette-company lawsuit who's secretly an anti-smoking campaigner" and you'd have adequately conveyed the gist of the book. Each novel of Carroll's, by contrast, is "about" a whole lot of things, so you're reduced to saying: "Just read it. You'll love it." (This is almost verbatim the way UK editor Peter Lavery introduced me to Carroll's work, way back when.) To repeat, this is why people who do read them do love them, but of course it makes it hard to induce people to do the reading bit in the first place.

So my apologies in advance – and to Carroll as well – if the following resumé seems a bit vaguer and more chaotic than it could be.

Frannie McCabe is Chief of Police in the small town of Crane's View, somewhere in the sleepier reaches of New York State. One day a dying three-legged dog is brought into his office, and takes over his heart. A few days later it dies, and he buries it. At about the same time a couple of the rowdier townsfolk disappear, seemingly into thin air. The dog refuses to stay buried, reappearing in his car boot accompanied by a beautiful perfume – not the stench of decay that one might expect. Other enigmatic symbols associated with the dead dog recur in McCabe's life, notably a coloured feather which only later will he realize is actually artificial. A teenager dies, and it is discovered that the drawings in her schoolbook relate to the dog, the feather and McCabe himself. An old artbook reveals an 18th-century painting of what appears to be the three-legged dog – and called by the same name, Old Vertue.

These and other strange occurrences could almost lie within the province of the real, and for a while McCabe desperately tries to rationalize them as such. However, his attempts soon founder as his life lurches into the outrageously surreal. Aided by allies that include himself as a teenager (his junior self promptly gets the hots for McCabe's own stepdaughter), he struggles to make sense of all the weirdness, before realizing the counterproductiveness of trying to make sense of something that has no straightforward sense, no rationality.

An individual called Astopel, whom for some time both McCabe and the reader assume to be a demon of a sort, tells McCabe that he has only seven days of life to solve the enigma of what is going on if he is to save the world. However, those days need not all be spent in the same part of his life; cast into the future, for example, he spends some hours as an old man and learns the dreadful truth as to how his wife has died/will die young – an event which he obviously yearns to avert once back in an earlier portion of his life ...

Where this novel succeeds most brilliantly is in its portrayal of constantly shifting realities. Let me enlarge upon this. The fantasy concept of alternate realities is similar to but distinct from the sf idea of alternate universes or parallel worlds; the two concepts can be overlapped, of course, and often are, but they need not be. Good alternate-realities stories are extremely difficult to write, which is why there are so few of them: many writers either do not take up the challenge or (which is really much the same thing) lapse into the easier-to-handle sciencefictional mode of the alternate-universes story. The Wooden Sea – although it is in part actually an sf novel – is a paradigmatic example of what the fantasy alternate-realities story can be made to do, while also, though it is eminently easy to read, demonstrating the difficulty of handling the mode. McCabe's (and hence the reader's) realities are in a constant state of flux, always likely to be temporary and never to be trusted, but somehow our perception of those realities remains fixed: because of this, although the sequence of events, if related baldly as a list, might seem to be random, there is at no point any sense while sharing McCabe's adventures that they have just been arbitrarily thrown together – it is always in our mind that they do have a purpose and an order, although that purpose and that order may transcend our understanding.

Even when finally an explanation is forthcoming, there is the delightful feeling that this explanation itself may be as transient as the realities through which McCabe has, and we have, journeyed. In that sense, the plot's explanation almost doesn't matter.

All this is infernally difficult to achieve, as I've said: as readers we usually want to have a book's rationale (or rationales) firmly foregrounded, and become impatient otherwise. It requires great skill for an author to shake us loose from this dependence on the rational, this desire to duck the challenge that full-blooded fantasy should be issuing to its readers. Michael Moorcock does it sometimes. More specifically, Gene Wolfe succeeded brilliantly in There Are Doors (1988) and, in a rather different way, Mark Helprin managed it in the later parts of Winter's Tale (1983) – while, of course, Lewis Carroll managed it in his proto-surrealist Alice novels. There are other examples, but they're few and far between. It was in particular the Wolfe book that kept coming to mind while I was reading The Wooden Sea. Although the two novels are very different, both succeed in letting us – or making us – cut ourselves free from the logic of the everyday world.

It would be perfectly possible to read The Wooden Sea with great pleasure as just an entertainment, and doubtless many people will, perhaps pondering from time to time about its seeming quirkiness. But it would be a waste to do so when the book offers us so many other rewards.

—Infinity Plus

Nemesis

by Vincent Cobb

M-Y Books, 304 pages, paperback, 2007

Several years ago in the English Midlands, trainee police recruit Angela Crossley, still not quite out of her teens, was in on the culmination of a pedophile case. Some unknown had been abducting, raping and savagely murdering young girls. The killing might have gone on indefinitely had it not been that the mother of a pre-adolescent girl called Connie came to the police with the astonishing claim that her daughter was psychic and could help them. Angela, deputed to go through the motions with this obvious nutcase, was convinced despite herself, and sure enough Connie was able to guide the cops to the derelict site where the murderer had been dumping all the pathetic little corpses. Although the murderer was not apprehended, the discovery had the effect of getting him – at least so everyone hoped – to clear off into another part of the country. However, police insensitivity to Connie at the time of the gruesome discovery drove the girl into mental collapse ... and ever since she has been under psychiatric care. Her psychic abilities seem to have been scoured out of her by the experience.

Because of guilt or perhaps something more than that, Angela has been a regular visitor to Connie in the psychiatric hospital, and the two young women have become friends. Now it seems that Connie, her exploitative mother dead, may soon be well enough to attempt a return to the outside world, and of course Angela is keen to help her. Yet what neither of them could have predicted is that the pedophile psychopath has chosen this moment to return to the Midlands, here to renew his campaign of rape and slaughter ...

The writing style of Nemesis could hardly be more out of tune with the 21st-century American mode. This is not simply because it's a (first) novel by a British writer, set in Britain. Even in that country the style is an anachronism: ponderous, somewhat wandering, definitely amateurish. I was reminded of nothing more than the many hardback mystery novels issued by the leading British mystery publisher Gollancz in uniform yellow covers during the 1960s and 1970s. (Gollancz's books were also habitually packed with typos and questionable grammar, not to mention even misspellings. Presumably inadvertently, Cobb and his publisher have managed this further level of verisimilitude.) Many of the Gollancz mysteries were as slickly written as anything you'd find elsewhere, but a good many were not. That's not to say they were in any way bad: they simply harked back to a yet earlier age, the 1940s or so.

The amateurishness of the telling of Nemesis thus works for me in a way it may not work for others. First, the clumsiness of the writing reinforces the impression that we're reading not a novelist's artifice but the genuine record written by Angela, a bright but not especially bookish cop. And second, of course, the whole time I was reading Nemesis I was, as a Brit of A Certain Age, bathing in a warm pool of nostalgia.

In short, Nemesis has a very good tale to tell, but you may be significantly offput by the telling. It's very much a case of caveat lector. Me, I think you'd find this book worth the gamble.

—Crescent Blues

Tempter

by Nancy A. Collins

Gauntlet, 222 pages, hardback, 2001; reissue of a book originally published in 1990

Nancy Collins made her name – and added a phrase to dark fantasy's vocabulary – with her first novel, Sunglasses After Dark (1989), a tale of chic, urbanized vampires. Her second novel followed in short order: Tempter (1990). This book received much less attention, being generally regarded as more of the same, but with voodoo added somewhat discordantly to the vampiric mix. What was unknown to readers back in 1990 was that the vampires in the tale had been added only at the behest of Collins's publishers, who were eager to groom their newly discovered author as "the next Anne Rice". For this new edition Collins has not only taken the vampires back out again but also rewritten almost every sentence in the novel in some way, great or small.

Although it was not rated very highly at the time, Tempter was in its initial form a pretty fair novel. (I know this, because it's among the small percentage of novels I chose to bring with me when I emigrated from the UK to the US.) It is now better than that. A mark of how much better is that this reviewer read it in the form of an ARC (Advance Reading Copy) so littered with typographical errors that in the ordinary way he would have found it impossible to continue for more than a couple of dozen pages because of the constant distraction, yet he not only finished the book but found it gripping.*

[* 2011 note: The text was apparently very thoroughly proofread preparatory to final publication.]

The tale is set in New Orleans. Alex Rossiter is a has-been rock star making efforts to restart his career, although hampered in this by the urgings of his testosterone. He experiments with voodoo (or, as we're told, more correctly "voudou") in the hope that the voudou gods will aid his career. Penis-guided as always, he ends up in bed with the beautiful mambo, Ti, who danced at his initiation ceremony. From her he borrows and then purloins a grimoire called The Aegrosomnia, a collection of blood-sacrifice-requiring spells which, we later discover, were those used by a vicious plantation-owner, Donatien Legendre, in a bid to bring himself physical immortality. Luckily Legendre was thwarted by a slave-girl/voudou mamalewe whom he'd raped, Jazrel, but his evil soul, now known as Il-Qui-Tente ("Tempter"), lingers on in the remains of his mansion, Seraphine, aching for a route back into the world of mortals ...

Which route it discovers through Alex Rossiter.

Other characters involved in what becomes a fairly complex plot include Charlie, a beautiful yuppie with a propensity for falling in love with ghastly men; Jere, the not-very-successful artist who for years has loved Charlie but whom she regards only platonically; Arsine, a member of Rossiter's new band; and Mad Aggie, an ancient who peddles voudou paraphernalia that everyone believes, wrongly, to be just tourist-fleecers. The strongest and best depicted of all these characters are quite noticeably the black ones – Ti, Arsine and Aggie.

A further complication of the plot arises – indeed, several, interrelated further complications – because none of these characters can be guaranteed to be the normal human beings they seem to be; they may instead be the physical incarnations of immortal souls that can emerge on occasion to dominate the temporal spirit of the individual concerned. On occasion this causes Collins some difficulties in presenting her material; most of the time she copes very well with the challenge, but there are scenes involving two separate entities, one called Alex and the other Rossiter, where one has to pay close attention to be absolutely certain of who is whom.

The pace of the telling in general rarely flags, the only real exception being during a central section when we are treated to extensive extracts from the 19th-century journals of Donatien Legendre's lawyer and then of the wife whom Legendre grievously abused. Collins makes these extracts, which are vital to any understanding of the rest of the action, as interesting as she can – and it is to her credit that she succeeds so well – but even so they do stand out in stark contrast to the breakneck pace of the rest.

Such minor carps aside, it is excellent news that at last a definitive version of Tempter has been released. Whether or not you've read the previous version, this is a publication that merits your attention.

—Infinity Plus

Into the Web

by Thomas H. Cook

Bantam, 272 pages, paperback, 2004

One of the great pleasures of opening each new Thomas H. Cook novel is that he eschews the standard rentathriller style employed by most of the other writers on the relevant shelves. Further, Cook is quite prepared to tailor his writing style to the mood of the subject matter, so that, in effect, if you follow Cook's novels you get several thriller writers for the price of one. (That is, if his books are even thrillers. They tend to transcend the category's guidelines.) Thus the last Cook novel I reviewed for Crescent Blues, Peril (see below), had a wonderfully spare dispassionate style that perfectly offset its in actuality very romantic tale of love trying to flower and of people trying to be people in brutally adverse circumstances. Into the Web again has brutality at its heart, but here the brutality is of the kind that communities accept almost as if not realizing it's there, the brutality perpetrated by their authority figures; the central brute is the ex-sheriff of a small, remote West Virginia town, Kingdom City. The style is almost that of the bucolic novel, which matches the way Kingdom City would like to see itself and us to see it; the events depict the true corruption and violence at Kingdom City's heart.

Roy Slater left Kingdom City for college in California weeks after his simple-minded brother Archie, in custody for viciously murdering the hostile parents of his girlfriend, hanged himself in his cell. Now, two or three decades later (the text is a little unclear on this), Roy is back to be at the side of his dying father. Old Sheriff Porterfield has retired, but his son Lonnie, a chip off a pretty revolting block, is running things in his place. Roy, escaping for a while from the curmudgeonly company of his father, stumbles into conversation with Lonnie, and hence almost immediately into the investigation of a suspicious death.

That death proves to be no mystery at all – in a delightful tease of our preconceptions, Cook soon lets us know this was merely a matter of a poor elderly man dying of chronic illness. But the death occurred on property owned by Roy's youthful sweetheart, Lila Cutler, whom he planned to return from college to marry and take away from Kingdom County, but who wrote and told him not to bother – she would never, after all, be his.

The reopening of this old wound draws Roy into prodding at another: he has always been convinced, despite Archie's confession, that his gentle-souled brother could not have been guilty of the decades-ago double homicide. If it wasn't Archie, who was it? Digging into the old crime, Roy discovers atrocities hidden for decades by Kingdom City's acceptance of central evils, and must constantly reappraise the people around him (notably his own father) and his interpretations of their motives for their past acts. What appears to be profound vileness can prove to be philanthropy, but the philanthropy in turn may conceal an even worse vileness. What seems mystery may be no mystery at all; the mystery may lie within what appears to be clear-cut ...

The dissection of the present to reveal the truth that gave rise to it is engrossing, and Cook succeeds also in making his tale extremely moving. Old Sheriff Porterfield emerges as one of the more terrifying brutes of modern fiction, even though his sense of duty can lead him to perform on occasion the kindest of deeds. But what really stirs the emotions, as Roy unearths the truth about not only the old homicides but also Lila Cutler, his father, and ultimately himself, is the sheer quantity of human happiness that has, over the decades, been obviated – the waste of human lives – through the failure of a community to face up to the monster it has placed in the position of master.

There is an obvious political allegory here, but Cook skilfully declines to take it too far, leaving it to the reader to connect the relevant dots. Besides, this is only one aspect of a novel whose shortness conceals the multiplicity of its layers. It's quite astonishing, in fact, that Bantam should have chosen to release this little masterpiece, reminiscent of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, as a mass-market paperback original, since Into the Web is a novel you'll want to keep on your shelves for repeated reading. Hopefully there'll be a hardcover of it in due course.

—Crescent Blues

Peril

by Thomas H. Cook

Bantam Dell, 320 pages, hardback, 2004

Sara Labriola is, in a rather small way, married to the Mob: her husband Tony runs a legitimate enough business, but her father-in-law Leo is a vicious operator in the lower Mob echelons. Although Tony hasn't inherited Dad's vileness, he has been indoctrinated into believing some of Dad's rather more reprehensible attitudes concerning the roles of husbands and wives. Constrained from pursuing any activity that might interest her, condemned to spend her time picking up dirty underwear after Tony, realizing that she's hit middle-age and the future is going to be only endlessly more of the same, she yearns even for the somewhat grim days before she met Tony. Then she was a torch singer of occasionally purchasable morals, but at least she wasn't stifled.

Being fortunately childless – for shame! – one day she ups and flees her comfortable Long Island home for the anonymity of New York, taking neither car nor credit cards. She's untraceable. Or is she? Tony, slowly realizing the error of his ways, is eager to find her, not necessarily to bring her back but at least to talk to her so that he may have some sense of closure. Leo wants to track her too, ostensibly to bring back his son's wife but in fact to destroy her.

A small-time semi-crook called Mortimer is in serious hock to Leo. Mortimer has just been told he has only three months to live, so were all other things equal he'd be unmoved by Leo's death threats. However, he understands these would extend to his widow. He therefore complies when told to bring into the game the services of Stark, an enigmatic figure whose expertise is finding lost people – whether or not they wish to stay lost. (Stark? Donald E. Westlake fans, see below.)

Other involved characters include the barman Abe, the sole person whom Mortimer entrusts with the secret of his impending demise and also – by very stretched coincidence – the guy whom Sara approaches in Manhattan seeking a job as a singer; and Caruso, a hood forever seeking to turn hitman. Caruso has a fanatical loyalty to Leo, to whom he believes he owes everything.

Peril is made up the interlocking tales of these various people, constructed rather in the way of a typical Ed McBain 87th Precinct novel, although there the resemblance ends. (The style is more reminiscent of Donald E. Westlake in his "Richard Stark" mode.) As we are given the pieces of the plot to jigsaw together, a sort of inexorable momentum builds up; the tension is very real. Everyone wants to locate Sara except Sara herself, who wants to lose Sara and rediscover the woman she once was. Who will find her first? Her life depends on it.

A couple of the main characters are quite brilliantly depicted: Mortimer and especially Tony, who goes through a gradual attitudinal sea-change that's masterfully handled. But Leo's vileness seems sketched rather than painted in, and Sara's vapidity, although wonderfully captured in a lovely, lovely piece of characterization, makes it hard to care as much about her fate as you perhaps should.

You'll certainly enjoy Peril, and almost certainly you'll become snared in the working out of its various converging strands, but even just a few days after you've finished it you may find you have difficulty remembering its resolution. This is a top-quality piece of journeyman craftsmanship – nothing at all wrong with that, but it's not Cook at his best. Cook at his best, though, is equalled by few, so who's complaining?

—Crescent Blues

Fault Lines

by Natasha Cooper

Simon & Schuster, 346 pages, hardback, 1999

A few years ago, Kingsford – somewhere in the Home Counties – was terrorized by the so-called Kingsford Rapist, whose assaults culminated in murder and who thereafter desisted. Now there has been another grisly sex murder, clearly a copycat crime, and the cops, under plodding family-man cliché Chief Inspector William Femur (a name for which, one can't help feeling, he must have often had his leg pulled), set off in lumbering pursuit of the perpetrator. Also in pursuit is pluckily-beautiful-but-intelligent-with-it cliché feminist barrister Trish Maguire, who, unlike most series amateur detectives, here does little more than some rather aimless snooping around.

There are other feminist stereotypes here as well: the males are almost without exception caricatured as malign, inadequate, sexist or just plain stupid – or all of these – whereas the women are almost equally universally intelligent, industrious, civilized and in all ways superior to mere masculine scum, right down to their dress sense and not forgetting the fine cut of their faces and figures. The sole exception is the deceased, who is permitted to have been dowdy; indeed, she is by far the most interesting character in the book, and it's a pity Cooper was unable to develop her, through flashback or other means, to the extent she merits.

Despite the nature of the crime and the serial-killer aspects, frissons of horror are not so much few and far between as nonexistent. To be sure, we have lengthy descriptions of the initial murder and of (no cigars for guessing this one) the attempt by the psychopath on Trish herself – a scene that seems to be the sole justification for the designated heroine's inclusion in the book, just as if she were the bimbo romantic appeal in a B-movie who's been told not to wander off but does. Neither of these scenes, however, generates the remotest tingle: cardboard characterization and a lack of atmosphere doom them. Matters are not helped by the plotting, which takes the form of a whodunnit. It is a convention of the whodunnit that, early on, there's presented a thunderingly obvious solution which the reader knows is not the correct one. In this book, to our escalating disbelief, we are tediously led through knots of false deduction so stupid that it cannot be credited real people would ever think this way to reach, not some surprise denouement, but ... that thunderingly obvious solution!

A mystery that doesn't mystify, a thriller that doesn't thrill, and packed with the kind of stereotyped, dumbed-down feminism that makes any real feminist see red – as if all the other failings are somehow okay just because the author's heart is in the right place ... Added irritations are a type-size so large as seemingly to be designed for the visually impaired and the proliferation of blank pages at chapter heads, presumably both measures to make the text look more substantial than it is.

—Samhain

The Feminists

by Parley J. Cooper

Pinnacle, 188 pages, paperback, 1971

I should stress right at the outset that this paperback original was published in 1971. Why a review in 2003 of a relic from sf's hoary past? Well, I think the reason is to be found in the front-cover blurbage:

1992: TO BE A MAN IS A SIN

TO TAKE A WOMAN IS A CRIME

The Feminists

... They rule the world, and top dog is a bitch! A small band of men and their women go underground to fight the final battle of the sexes!

Yes: The Feminists is clearly what sf publishers are constantly telling us is "a forgotten classic" – a cutting-edge dystopian work to rank alongside Nineteen Eighty-four, a dire-warning if-this-goes-on tale about a horrific future in which the weaker sex have usurped the laws of Nature and taken over the reins of political power.

Tremble in your locker-rooms, oh heedless males.

The future is distant 1992, and everything's gone to hell in a handbasket since the female coup (often for reasons that are not immediately apparent: for example, I cannot understand why a drop in industrial production to virtually zero should have caused devastating global pollution). Men are a subjugate species; they have their uses, but not many of them, and are expected to be self-effacing and subservient at all times. Jackbooted butch dyke security troops are everywhere. Heterosexual sex is prohibited except by special permit.

Husky hetero Keith Montalvo has sex with a like-minded colleague, and their crime is discovered. She's in hot water, but he's in serious trouble. He goes on the run, hides in the New York subway, encounters and joins the underground (literally) resistance (which is composed of both men and women seeking not a return to male dominance but the establishment of equality of the sexes) is recruited, engages in guerrilla warfare, is captured, tortured and sentenced to execution, and is unofficially reprieved at the last moment when the Mayor of New York realizes he is her long-abandoned son and goes to the guillotine in his place.

Oops, I forgot the obligatory bit: he falls in love with a sultry rebel temptress.

One can imagine how this book came into existence. The scene is a smoke-filled editorial office at Pinnacle. Shirtsleeved males of varying degrees of obesity and baldness sweat amid the white-hot heat of creativity. They've had the USA conquered by bugs, commies, aliens, prehistoric monsters, werewolves ... you name it. What the hell is there left? And then it slowly dawns: even more terrifying than Godzilla is ... women!*

[* 2011 note: Cooper got in touch with me after this review appeared and told me that the book's genesis was nothing like the one I'd imagined. He wrote it off his own bat ... and in a weekend! Under these circumstances, it's quite an achievement.]

I did wonder for a while if Cooper's purpose was satirical – if he might be using his female-dominated USA to make caustic comment about our own male-dominated USA (and of course it was far, far more so in 1971). But I don't think, on reflection, his aspirations went that high: there are too many stupid jibes about the supposed failings of womanhood, such as:

... he doubted that any woman, even a Feminist soldier, would brave following them into the sewage system. Their [women's] inherited fear of rats was evident even in Angela, who was, he thought, braver than most.

Of course, with the more recent mapping of the human genome we can identify exactly the chromosome responsible.

A thought that kept hammering at me as I read was this: Whatever we might say, and indeed whatever we might think, we have in our culture elevated the terrorist to the status of folk hero – for terrorists is what the heroes of The Feminists are, merrily planting bombs that blow up the innocent alongside the guilty. Although the official stance of Western civilization is staunch opposition to terrorism, in fact popular culture has glorified the terrorist, who in consequence has always had firm public support – so long as s/he is our terrorist, the underdog fighting back pluckily against oppression using whatever means are to hand, most notably their own courage and ingenuity. We admire their quickwittedness, their tricksterism. In other words, terrorists are evil murderous bastards unless they're on our side, in which case they're heroic freedom fighters, and the civilians they kill with their bombs and their bullets are just collateral damage. This is an enormous example of double standards, and of course it's not confined to Western cultures. The dichotomy is perfectly understandable, of course; what is destructive is the pretence that it doesn't exist.

Hardly an original thought – I've even had it myself several times before – but it was reinforced by my reading of this book.

But what of The Feminists as a novel? I must confess that when I handed over my 5¢ for it at a yard sale I hoped it'd be so astonishingly bad I'd be rocking with mirth as I read it – that there'd be a flood of juicy morsels for Thog's Masterclass. Alas, the novel is not a "classic" for that reason; the writing is somewhat drab and uninspiring, and the adventures lack any verve or originality. Yet it's an intriguing curio nonetheless, and will remain on my shelves: there may well be writers somewhere in the West today who're self-publishing equally doom-laden futuristic novels about the dreaded ascendancy of women, but I can't imagine any front-line commercial publisher wishing to take such a thing on. So The Feminists is a "classic" of sorts in that it is a literary item whose like we shall not see again, at least in the immediately envisageable future.

Fortunately.

—Infinity Plus

Kunma

by Frank Corsaro

Forge, 336 pages, hardback, 2003

Unorthodox psychotherapist David Sussman has a new client, Laurel Hunt. From the descriptions, you might be forgiven if you occasionally leafed back to check that David is indeed a psychotherapist, not a Black Mask-style P.I., because this babe has the legs, the curves and the wherewithal. She also has a problem: her semi-estranged husband's in hospital with an undiagnosed condition; his business partner (and her recent amorous partner) has been discovered murdered in London with his tongue ripped out; and she thinks everything's the fault of a malevolent supernatural entity.

David thinks she's disturbed.

He also thinks she's hot.

She thinks he's hot, too.

It doesn't take long before P.I. (sorry, psychotherapist) and client are clapping more than lustful eyes on each other. However, as David soon has to admit, Laurel has a point, because David's charlatan-psychic pal Ara, to whom David sent her for a consultation, turns up with his tongue ripped out. Guided by his other pal Peter – all three of David, Ara and Peter went off a while back to study at an Indian ashram – David soon discovers that the root of Laurel's problems is himself.

In a previous incarnation he was a Tibetan abbot who schemed to instal a protege in place of the Dalai Lama. The scheme was exposed and the abbot horribly executed. The protege was sexually abused and had his tongue ripped out. He promised to avenge the abbot's death, but was unsuccessful during that lifetime. Taunted as "Kunma" – soul-stealer – the protege has come back in this new reincarnatory cycle as a supernatural monster, capable of possessing people (Laurel's husband) and still intent on exacting vengeance against the reincarnated versions of the punishers.

Oh, and Laurel's young son Chris is the new Dalai Lama but nobody knows it yet.

There's quite a lot more like this, all culminating in an incredibly confusing face-off with a pack (it says here) of vultures at the top of a mesa in New Mexico. I say it's incredibly confusing, because at least one of the characters, if I was following things aright, is in two places at once. The vultures certainly find it all zoologically confusing; we're told that "the abbot watched dazedly as they rushed like lemurs toward destruction."

Frank Corsaro is Artistic Director of the Juilliard Opera Center, and is in general a pretty prestigious sort of a fellow – possibly famous, although, er, I'm not the best judge of that. The writing is atrocious, which makes for occasional giggles but is more often just outright tedious – I would have given up had I not been reading this book for review. The editorial standards emulate those of iUniverse or xLibris. The research manages to be both superficial and heavy-handed. The plotting is risible.

This is shoddy publishing. Of course, plenty of bad books are published for commercial reasons. But, when they hand over their $24.95, readers have a certain right to expect the publisher has made at least some effort with the "product" they're paying for. Otherwise the $24.95 is being taken under false pretenses.

—Crescent Blues

Terror Tales of the City: Prince of the Perverse

by Joseph Covino Jr

New Humanity Press, 319 pages, paperback, 2002

In San Francisco, around now, mad hypnotist Dr Valdemar is obsessed with the tidal wave of "Abnormals" (i.e., homosexuals) that seems to be engulfing and irremediably corrupting the city and, indeed, Civilization As We Know It. He hits on the cunning plan of ensnaring drifting wannabe writer Peter Lyon and conditioning him into being a sadistic serial slayer of overtly homosexual men. However, Peter's plucky girlfriend Jonna Park, allied with scholarly gay liberationist Kerwin Usher, does the appropriate thwarting.

Those names – "Usher", "Valdemar" – may stir some recognition, and this is no coincidence. For Prince of the Perverse, the first in a series of like novels, is an extended homage to and pastiche of the prose writings of Edgar Allan Poe. As such, it serves its purpose well.

Unfortunately, precisely because it is so lovingly and faithfully done, it has problems in terms of actual readability. Poe himself was of course a pioneer of both the macabre mystery and the horror tale, but he succeeded best at short – really quite short – length. Further, he was no great plotter and certainly no great stylist; he compensated for both by his brilliance at the sudden effect, at intense, almost visual imagery, and at what is in terms of the modern horror story called the gross-out. Prince of the Perverse reproduces all those virtues but, alas, all of Poe's shortcomings – and it does so at novel length.

A longish novel, at that.

Thus we're treated to acres of overwriting and to unbelievably long didactic passages, many rendered in the form of Platonic dialogues. One of the philosophical extravaganzas is really quite interesting – it compares the hypnotic state with romantic love – but most are expositions on the theme of hypnosis that seem to go round and round in circles without ever showing much sign of getting anywhere. Two are dialogues between Peter and Jonna debating whether or not he is right to be terminally peeved that she still enjoys the company (and no more than that) of her ex-lover; after about two paragraphs of Peter's spoilt-brat whinings on the subject one's incredulous that Jonna hasn't long ago hurled him off the Golden Gate Bridge ... indeed, one's eager to volunteer to do it for her.

All of this extra Poe-esque material means there's not very much room left for plot, and indeed the summary in the first paragraph above just about covers it, less a couple of not-so-startling twists. Covino enjoys his Grand Guignol effects, again reminiscent of Poe, but these fall late in the book; for many readers perhaps too late, because by then they'll have picked up a different book.

Prince of the Perverse is, then, by no means a literary exercise without merit; Covino is to be admired for having sustained his homage so well and for so long. The most dedicated of Poe devotees will surely wallow happily in this book; to the rest of us, however, it must remain as little more than that: a worthy exercise to be respected rather than actually read.

—Infinity Plus

Fountain Society

by Wes Craven

Simon & Schuster, 350 pages, hardback, 1999

Despite the pseudo-holographic jacket – it's always a warning when vast extra sums have been spent on the covers of "celebrity" novels – the notion of a first novel by movie director Wes Craven holds a certain appeal to the curiosity.

As always with "celebrity" novels, the first question in the reader's mind is: "Who actually wrote this?" Well, there are just enough examples of writing amateurishness – nothing too offensive in this regard (you'll find more in a David Baldacci thriller) – to persuade us that, unusually in such cases, Craven did indeed write this book himself.

The next question is: "OK, so he wrote it himself. What sort of fist will a movie director make of writing a novel?" This is an especially germane question in the instance of Craven, who over the years has produced a string of the most imaginative horror movies around. You might not like a movie such as Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), but it – as well as, most especially, the last in that series, Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994) – is packed with extremely interesting and imaginative fantastications, so that the obligatory gore and mayhem are reduced to little more than irritating distractions.

That fertile imagination, alas, is not particularly evident in Fountain Society.

The plot is yet another rehash of fellow movie-director Curt Siodmak's Donovan's Brain (1943). Peter is a weapons scientist and Beatrice, his wife, is a neurobiologist; both are engaged in hush-hush work for the US Government. Beatrice is one of a team, headed by evil genius Freddy (oh yes?), that is questing for the secret of immortality. Years ago, Freddy experimented with human cloning, inserting the DNA of his volunteer colleagues into the ova of women who came to him for fertility treatments. Peter and Beatrice were among those volunteers.

Peter is dying of cancer. Freddy, in league with stereotyped brute-headed fascist military officer Henderson, sends agents halfway round the globe to snatch Peter's clone, professional shit Hans. Peter's brain is loaded into Hans's body, and the operation seems to be a complete success.

However, Hans had a much younger mistress, gorgeous model Elizabeth. She begins to be plagued by quasi-memories of Vieques, the Caribbean island/naval base where all this hush-hush stuff has been going on; a pseudonymous e-mail lures her there. Peter, meanwhile, has been having wet dreams about a woman he has no conscious memory of ever having known. Elizabeth and Peter/Hans meet on a deserted Vieques beach and, predictably, make the earth move a few times. Elizabeth is baffled as to how formerly selfish lover Hans has become an exquisitely considerate master of the sensual arts.

What has happened, of course, is that the two bodies involved – Elizabeth's and Hans's – are experiencing our old pal cellular memory. It's spoiling no surprises to tell you that Elizabeth proves to be Beatrice's clone: no wonder she and Hans were mysteriously attracted to each other on first sight, as if they'd known each other forever ...! And it's not really a surprise that evil Freddy and murderous Henderson will do anything, killing included, to stop our trio from revealing all to the world. But they do not reckon with the fact that the cellular memory inherent in Hans's body means Peter can function as an expert pilot, a boxer with lightning-fast reflexes, and all that stuff.

As a chase thriller, Fountain Society is quite fun; it's certainly a far more enjoyable read than Siodmak's original(s) – we must not forget the latter's own rehash Hauser's Memory (1968). As an sf or fantasy novel it has, obviously, nothing new to add; and it's certainly, perhaps unexpectedly, not a horror novel. There are some oddities of science:

• Peter had proved that atoms were not merely protons and electrons whirling around a nucleus ...

• With the body temperatures of each men [sic] at 23 degrees Centigrade, 7 degrees below normal ...

(To save US readers time with their pocket calculators, 23 deg C = 73.4 deg F, 7 C deg = 12.6 F deg, so "normal" body temperature would work out at 86 deg F. Eh?)

• We're two billion years of evolution, you sap! It's the Entropic Principle, Peter – the laws of nature exist because our brains can imagine them.

And then there are oddities of expression, such as the afternoon sunshine making everything "gilded with gold".

All in all, while there are plenty of far worse novels not just published but attaining the bestseller lists, your best idea to satisfy your curiosity about this one is by means of a trip to the library rather than, your hard-earned $25 in hand, a trip to the bookstore.

—Infinity Plus

Prey

by Michael Crichton

HarperCollins, 367 pages, hardback, 2002

It is almost impossible to doubt that the bestselling sf novel of 2002 will be Michael Crichton's Prey; it is only marginally less certain that, when lists are compiled by the book trade of bestsellers published in that year in various categories, and of the relative financial performances of one category against another, that Prey will be conspicuous by its absence from most if not all of the sf rolls.

Why? Because, despite the fact that it is a fiction set in the near future whose plot depends on an extrapolation from current science, it's not really, you see, a science-fiction novel at all. It's in a different category altogether.

That category is called "Bestsellers".

Now, just before you dismiss this as a trivial point, be aware that the name of the category is somewhat misleading. "Bestsellers" is a marketing term, and by no means all of the books in this category actually sell well. Rather, they are works which the book trade decides in advance of publication have the potential to bestsell, and to which the trade therefore devotes a hugely disproportionate amount of money to be expended upon a marketing campaign designed to persuade readers that this book is among the very best current products of the publishing industry. Such a judgement is based not on any bookseller actually reading the damn' thing – perish the thought! – but simply on a combination of publisher's hype, author's sales track record, cover design, blurb (although even this may not be read), a certain amount of (legal) corruption, and so forth.

Which is not to say that all bestsellers do not deserve their status; simply to explain what the marketing category "Bestsellers" is.

After that preliminary digression, what of this specific example?

In this reviewer's experience, Michael Crichton's novels have a bad habit of reading as if they were movie novelizations written before the fact. Almost all of them have indeed been filmed, and some of those movies have been among the cinema industry's great blockbusters of the past few decades: The Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park (and its sequels) are the most notable examples, but others like Rising Sun and Sphere should not be forgotten ... although some, like The Terminal Man and The Great Train Robbery (vt The First Great Train Robbery), have advisedly been.

Part of this criticism is true of Prey; or, to be more accurate, this criticism is true of parts of Prey, but they're the least interesting parts – as you might expect – and in a curious way don't affect in any substantive way one's opinion of the novel as a whole.

Jack is a high-flying, cutting-edge computer programmer out of work because, in his last job, he attempted to whistle-blow concerning the corrupt dealings of his boss; as a result, he was fired and a whispering campaign was started within the industry to besmirch his name. His wife Julia more than compensates for the drop in family income, however, being herself a high-flyer in the nanotechnology company Xymos; so financially it's no great problem that Jack stays at home as a house-husband and father while searching for a job. However, and even though he in many ways hugely enjoys this role, it does bring about psychological insecurities; and at first it is to these that he attributes his growing conviction that Julia is having an affair.

His youngest child falls ill with a mysterious skin inflammation – an inflammation that abruptly disappears when the toddler is placed in the MRI chamber for a magnetic scan. Julia accidentally drives her car off the road and, although pretty badly injured, in hospital vociferously refuses to allow herself to be subjected to an MRI scan.

Jack is suddenly phoned by his old company. One of the programs he created for them is being used by Xymos, and is causing problems – not because of any fault in the program's writing but because Xymos have been a tad overambitious in its application. Could Jack step in as a consultant to sort things out? He sees this as an opportunity to get to the truth about Julia's supposed affair, accepts the job, and is immediately on the way – even as she lies in her hospital bed – to Xymos's nanotechnology manufacturing plant somewhere in the middle of the Nevada desert.

The particular sphere of programming that is Jack's speciality is that whereby AI is approached not through trying to design an artificial intelligence from above, as it were – through the design of a comprehensive program that will, hopefully, cover every problem the AI might encounter – but through the creation of large numbers of basic units which are given relatively few rudimentary rules; these units, interacting, will evolve new behaviour patterns of their own, and this evolution may generate a compound entity that, if not a sophisticated artificial intelligence, will be something that looks pretty goddam like it. The parallel here is with the so-called "group mind" of ants and termites: an individual termite has so little intelligence it's probably wrong even to use the word, but has just enough to grasp a couple of simple rules or imperatives, and it is through the application of these rules or imperatives that colonies of thousands and millions of termites display behaviour patterns that include architectural feats so sophisticated even we ourselves would have difficulty countenancing them.

Xymos has applied such principles to swarms of nanobots, and has released several swarms into the desert in order to accelerate their evolution – their development of exploitable quasi-intelligence. This stratagem has worked far more effectively than Xymos anticipated; unfortunately, the swarms have evolved out of control. Worse still, their imperatives have driven them, so that they may build more nanobots, to seek fresh organic material – in other words, to become killers of living creatures, humans included should humans be available.

That's the first and by far the most interesting part of the book, and it's made even more interesting not just by the author's uncharacteristically sure handling of Jack's situation and introspections but by his copious infodumping: the flashing to and fro between a genuine narrative zeal and fascinating tidbits related to programming, nanotechnology and animal behaviour creates a fine tension.

Then, inexorably, the "Film me! Film me!" side of Crichton takes over as Jack and a steadily attritioned band of Xymos workers endeavour to destroy the swarms through penetrating their hive, blowing things up, enacting cunning plans, and so on. They are countered not just by the swarms but by those humans, including Julia and her supposed lover, who have been taken over by swarms of nanobots and thereby made fitter, stronger and a whole lot nastier. There are things out there, Jim, with which man was never meant to meddle ...

The cracking-adventure part of the book is competently enough handled that one is never positively bored, and certainly it contains more than a sufficiency of filmic set pieces, some designed to take advantage of the very latest CGI special effects. Faces dissolving? – we gottem! Near-invisible swarms of nanobots coalescing into human simulacra? – right on! Fisticuffs in a Frankensteinian laboratory? – you betcha! A daring venture into a creepily atmospheric subterranean hive with spooooooky lighting and lotsa explosions? – Crichton's your man! Even so, its melodrama does seem a heck of a let-down after all the careful work of the first part of the book; the pages may turn faster, but that's merely because there's far less on each of them to engage the interest.

Crichton's denouement is effective within these limitations, and perfectly satisfying in context even although by this time I didn't believe a word of it ... which creates a slight dichotomy of the intellect, because the very last thing in the book is a three-page bibliography of perfectly sober books and articles, and I found myself looking at this, too, with a sort of tolerant, amused incredulity. Were they genuinely useful, or was this just an Ann Coulteresque exercise in citation-gallop?

Overall, however, this is a pretty good sf novel, and it's also pretty good as "Bestsellers" go – indeed, the first 140 pages or so are sufficiently fine that you won't have wasted your money even if you don't bother reading the rest of the book. So in a way one begrudges the novel its bestsellerdom very little alongside some of the genuine drek, the truly witless pabulum, that's hyped to the top of the sales charts.

This said, is it not slightly galling that, purely because of the arbitrary classification of this book (like all of Crichton's novels) by the book trade, it is likely to sell several hundred times as many hardback copies in the USA as other sf novels of a similar type that are at least as good and quite often better. The best 2002 novel I've read so far is likewise a near-future sf tale, is likewise extremely accessible to a mainstream readership, gripped far more absorbingly than even Crichton's first 140 pages, and kept this up for the entire book ... yet Elizabeth Moon's The Speed of Dark was classified by the trade (and indeed its publisher) not as a "Bestseller" but as "that sci-fi stuff", so 99% of the readers dodging the fortress walls built out of copies of Prey at the entrance to every Barnes & Noble in the land will never even have heard of Moon's book, let alone think to buy it.

—Infinity Plus

Nalda Said

by Stuart David

Turtle Point Press, 152 pages, paperback, 2003; US reissue of a book originally published in the UK in 1999

A young man who keeps his name secret lives in constant fear his identity will be discovered by those intent on cutting him open to steal the jewel he bears inside him. Never daring to stay in any one place long, he flits from anonymous job to anonymous job, finding casual labour most often as a gardener, and staying constantly clear of society's record-keepers. This novel, told in his own disjointed, not-quite-literate words, is a part of his story.

We slowly discover that he lost his parents in infancy, being taken in by an aunt, the Nalda of the book's title. Nalda was his sole source of knowledge as he grew, telling him tales he believed implicitly, because he had no authority other than her to draw upon. One of the tales she told him was that his father was a jewel thief who, on the run from bilked and consequently murderous fellow-thieves, not long before his death fed the most valuable gem he'd stolen to his infant son to hide it. That stone, Nalda claimed, was still there inside him, but one day it would emerge and his life would be transformed.

Unfortunately, Nalda was crazy.

Cast adrift after she has been taken away into care, the narrator entered his current ever-transient mode of existence. Each time he fears his secret to be on the brink of discovery by someone he has allowed to grow too close to him, he flees once more.

But now at last he seems to have found relative security, as gardener to a nursing home whose administrators take a friendly interest in him. The prettiest of all the nurses there, Marie, recognizes the goodness dwelling within this odd man, and becomes first fascinated by and then in love with him. Much of Nalda Said is taken up by an account of the faltering, fumbling, unconventional blossoming of love between these two very different dreamers.

This is a curious and affecting work. From the narrator's semi-literacy, Stuart David manages to weave a largely hypnotic web, much in the same way that Daniel Keyes did in his short story "Flowers for Algernon" (1959) and Elizabeth Moon even more so – although deploying more literate devices – in her superb novel The Speed of Dark (2003). David doesn't quite have the same control as those two authors, with one of his tricks (the substitution of "although" for "though" throughout) being both irritating and, in the end, implausible.

But to compensate for this he offers us the wild recalled fantasies of the narrator's one-time sole mentor, Nalda; these come to form, together, a sort of cosmogony of the microcosm that is the narrator's small world. Where his Nalda-derived precepts conflict with the facts, he tends to alter his perception of the facts to make them fit the precepts; there is thus a direct analogy with the moulding of children's minds by the religious fallacies drummed into them by the adults of their local culture.

Nalda Said is a thought-provoking novel and, despite the constant disruption of the reader's concentration caused by the silly although/though tic, an absorbing one. Its subtextual weight is impressive for such a slim piece. I much look forward to seeing more from this writer.

—Blue Ear

The Compleat Enchanter: Fantasy Masterworks 10

by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt

Millennium, 532 pages, paperback, 2000; reissue of a book originally published in 1988 as The Intrepid Enchanter (vt The Complete Compleat Enchanter)

The four long novellas and one shortish novel that comprise this volume have a fairly complicated publishing history, into the full bibliographical abysses of which it is probably wisest not to venture. The first three – "The Roaring Trumpet", "The Mathematics of Magic" and the novel The Castle of Iron – were first published in Unknown in 1940-41; of these the first two were loosely fixed up as a single "novel" called The Compleat Enchanter (1975). The other two of the five – "The Wall of Serpents" and "The Green Magician" – originated over a decade later, in 1953 and 1954 respectively, and were likewise released in book form as a fixup, The Wall of Serpents (1960; vt The Enchanter Completed). Later came another couple of tales by de Camp alone: "Sir Harold and the Gnome King" (1990) and "Sir Harold of Zodanga" (1995), but these are not included in the current volume. The canon has been further added to by other authors, notably Christopher Stasheff.

And that's the simplified version ...

The series hero is Harold Shea, a psychologist one of whose colleagues, Reed Chalmers, has been working on a theory whereby people could hypothetically transport themselves into alternate realities through thoroughly imbibing the Boolean equations that express the logical underpinning of the relevant reality. In "The Roaring Trumpet" Shea tries this out at home and suddenly finds himself in Asgard, where he allies himself with the Aesir as Ragnarok approaches. In "The Mathematics of Magic" Shea more confidently tries the trick again, this time taking Chalmers with him, and the pair have adventures in the reality of Spenser's The Faerie Queene; most significantly, Shea hooks up with the spritish forest girl Belphebe, whom at the end of the story he brings back with him to our reality and who is subsequently a series character alongside him. He has married her by the start of the novel The Castle of Iron, which is set in the milieu of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso. "The Wall of Serpents" takes place in the realm of the Kalevala, and "The Green Magician" in the Ireland of Cuchulainn.

The Compleat Enchanter tales are seen as the ancestors of that strain of comic fantasy which has reached its current peak in the works of Terry Pratchett. Novels by expert practitioners in this subgenre – a category which unfortunately excludes almost all of Pratchett's imitators – and inexpert ones alike generally follow the pattern established by de Camp and Pratt: all or a good part of the action takes place in a fantasyland whose skewed logic both fascinates and provides a constant undercurrent of humour.

It was the skewed-logic aspect that appealed to John W. Campbell Jr, the editor of Unknown who published the first three tales. Campbell was a man with a highly structured mind (a pretty odd bloody structure, some might maintain, but that's beside the point), and he was eager to see fantasy codified, so that it would have rules in the same way that the laws of science supposedly governed the genre he preferred, science fiction. De Camp's and Pratt's pretence that they were applying just such a set (or series of sets) of rules to magic – the underpinning of almost all genre fantasy – was therefore right up the Campbellian street.

The trouble is that it was, as stated, quite simply a pretence. We are given a few fragments of the Boolean equations that Shea must recite in order to effect his transition from one reality to the next, and really their relevance is no greater than if he'd been saying "Abracadabra!" or "Hocus! Pocus!" Other "rules" are introduced, such as that any gadgetry Shea brings with him into a fantasy reality won't work; but there's no more coherent explanation of why this should be so than there is in the average traditional story about a mortal incursion into Fairyland, where very much the same effect occurs.

This might seem to be irrelevant – after all, you might say, what's important is that the tales work as entertainment – but that would be to ignore the major role that skewed logic plays in works of humorous fantasy (and indeed in almost all humorous fiction). Most of the best jokes rely on a final shock logical leap from a premise that is convincingly quasi-rational and has generally been built up in a quasi-logical progression. Remove that premise and there is no basis for the punchline; almost always, the joke is not funny but just sort of silly and trivial.

And this is an ongoing problem with the Compleat Enchanter tales as entertainment. Events tend just to happen. Those events are enjoyable enough to read about, but, as there's no particular reason why one should follow the other, similarly there's no particular reason to keep turning the pages. It's clear de Camp and Pratt were aware of this, because all five of the tales here don't so much end – in some kind of climax or resolution – as just peter out. At the conclusion of the first tale, for example, we have no idea of how this version of Ragnarok will turn out or even if Shea has really affected it at all; it's just time for him to get the hell out (perhaps, Fanthorpe-fashion, the two authors realized they were fast approaching the permitted word-count), so he does. Story's over; on with the next one.

Which leads to a further difficulty. There's not much new to say in each fresh story, aside from the change of venue. "Formulaic" is a cruel word, but it's hard not to apply it here. Certainly this reader's heart did not soar at the prospect of each new story's beginning. Rather there was the sense that, for a full understanding of the tale, all that had to be established was the new setting; from there the rest of the story could be more or less taken as read.

But one after the other may not be the ideal way to approach the five tales in this volume. Singly, with long intervals between the reading, the four novellas are entertaining, and there are a few good jokes lurking in the midst of these 532 pages. The Castle of Iron, the novel, is less successful, primarily just because it is longer, so that the conceit is wearing a bit thin by its end. The characterization of Belphebe is a delight; it's a pity that none of the other protagonists, Shea included, are much more than names on the page. In sum, then, it can't be denied that these tales justify their recognized status as seminal in the story of comic fantasy; in that sense they are required – and important – reading. There should be a copy of this book on the shelf of every serious student of fantasy.

Presumably to enhance the reader's sense of the historical significance of these stories, Millennium/Gollancz have preserved all the many typographical errors of the previous printing.

—Infinity Plus

Singularity

by Bill DeSmedt

Per Aspera, 502 pages, hardback, 2004

The first book from a new Seattle publisher that aims to compete head-on with the established "big boys", Per Aspera Press, Singularity is an effective technothriller that stamps DeSmedt's name on the field in no uncertain manner.

Marianna Bonaventure is an inexperienced agent for CROM, a US covert agency charged with keeping track of the nuclear materials and knowhow left lying around after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and – more to the point – with attempting to make sure none of it falls into the hands of terrorists or rogue nations. (Yes, there's an irony in the "rogue nations" part of this.) She finds there is something suspicious going on around the enigmatic Russian industrialist Arkady Grishin, who makes his base of operations on a vast ocean liner, the Rusalka. In order to help her probe this mystery, she ropes in Jonathan Knox, a high-priced civilian business analyst who has a great knack for solving problems through near-instinctive pattern-recognition. At first reluctant about everything to do with the caper except the charms of Ms Bonaventure, Knox soon finds himself an enthusiastic participant in the investigation, as it becomes clearer and clearer that the nature of Grishin's ambitions is world-affectingly grim.

Meanwhile, on the far side of the globe, Texan physicist Jack Adler is bemused by the extent to which his Russian colleagues on an expedition into the wilds of Siberia to examine the region of the Tunguska Event of 1907 are resistant to his theory of its cause. That theory posits that the earth was hit by a mini black hole, a remnant from the Big Bang. It's a perfectly valid real-world hypothesis; Adler's extension of it is that the black hole may very well have taken up a complex spiralling orbit within the body of our planet. He finds what appears to be proof of this, but then all of his records and equipment are destroyed in a murderous attack.

Through many complicated routes, Bonaventure and Knox, placed as spies aboard the Rusalka, come close to hitting on Adler's theory independently, and in due course their suspicions are confirmed through a direct electronic contact with Adler himself. Grishin and his scientists have developed a way of capturing the black hole, stripping it temporarily of its event horizon, and using the naked singularity as a time machine whereby they can alter history to their own gain and human civilization's enormous disbenefit.

As in any technothriller, there are two elements to this novel, the techno part – the scientific/technological underpinning – and the thriller part.

It's in the techno part that DeSmedt really shines. He has an astonishing gift for explaining really quite abstruse physical and technological concepts with clarity and immediacy, and in making such explanations both fascinating and – let's be forthright here – enormous fun. Even if you're perfectly au fait with current ideas about black holes and their physics, the novel is worth reading just for the flamboyant joy of these expository passages. DeSmedt is clearly passionately in love with these areas of physics, and he succeeds completely in conveying that passion to the reader.

Similarly, his extrapolations from present into near-future technology are entirely convincing – at least to this reader. I finished this book with my mind in a total jumble as to which of the communication/surveillance technologies depicted are current in the real world and which are merely products of DeSmedt's controlled imagination; all seemed equally plausible. As for the technologies involved in black-hole capture, they too seemed highly feasible. It's a while since my disbelief has been so convincingly suspended by a technothriller.

DeSmedt is less accomplished in the thriller element of the novel, but luckily he's saved by another of his great skills: the creation of excellently sympathetic characters. Marianna Bonaventure is a wonderful creation; she stands out in a genre where the smart, kickass, yummy female has come to be regarded as little more than a standard part of the toolkit. This is because all of her many strengths as a person are in part a product of the weaknesses she also possesses. At first she completely flummoxes Knox, who simply cannot find a way to relate to her complexities, his reactions to her beauty and her personality all clashing with each other. The reader's reactions are likely to be similar, until at last, probably more than halfway through this long book, it becomes possible to understand, at all levels, this thoroughly three-dimensional – and certainly very engaging – individual.

Knox himself is no mean fictional creation. He's somewhat reminiscent of an Ellery Queen for the twenty-first century in his powers of ratiocination and his veneer of general geekiness, but he's a far more real person than Ellery Queen could ever be. DeSmedt's semi-major characters, too, leap from the page: Sasha, the old friend of Knox's who has compromised his idealism in the pursuit of entrancing technology; Galina, another old acquaintance of Knox, a tragic figure whose love for children is brutally matched by her inability to have a child of her own, and who, unknowing of Grishin's fell motives, is the primary technological brain behind his endeavours; and Mycroft, a.k.a. Dr Finley Laurence, the super-analyst and cybernetics genius to whom Knox turns when even his own analytical powers prove insufficient. Even Bonaventure's boss, the shoot-first-think-later bureaucratic numbskull Pete Aristos, has a delightful sense of realness to him. Only the character intended as our heroes' ultimate focus of dread, Yuri, Grishin's murderous sidekick, is a bit of a cypher; in essence, he's Jaws from the James Bond movies but without any of the redeeming characteristics. Grishin likewise seems to have been drawn from Central Casting.

Perhaps Yuri in particular epitomizes the novel's weakness as a thriller. The thug-dodging and general hijinks are all perfectly competently done, but they lack the marvellous originality of the rest of the novel: you find yourself aching for each "exciting bit" to be over so you can get back to the really exciting stories being told – the next link in the scientific chain, or what's happening in the faux pas-strewn mutual circling going on between Bonaventure and Knox. As implied above, it's because of the enormous strength of these aspects – the scientific and the emotional – that the novel swings grippingly along at the high pace that it does; the relative weakness of the adventure aspects, their resorting-to-the-default aura, becomes more or less irrelevant.

The back of the book bears a stack of cover quotes from noteworthies: Kevin J. Anderson, David Brin, Kip Thorne, Greg Bear and Anthony Olcott. Unusually, I found that I agreed with just about everything they said; for once the blurbers' enthusiasm isn't hype. With one exception. Anderson says: "Singularity juggles Clancy, Crichton, and The Da Vinci Code." The comparison with Crichton is justified, although DeSmedt is by far the better novelist of the two. The comparison with Clancy may be justified: I've never been able to get beyond about twenty pages into any of Clancy's writings, so rely for my knowledge of them on the rather jolly movies. But Singularity has no connection whatsoever with The Da Vinci Code; the comment is quite simply absurd – a thoroughly egregious example of the base art of rentaquote. In the ordinary way I'd not bother mentioning this piece of folly, but Singularity is something, well, a bit special. Shame on Per Aspera for so cheapening the treasure they've published.

Throughout this review I've been describing Singularity as a technothriller. As will be evident, though, it can also be approached as hard sf. In that context, too, it's eminently successful – in fact, it's the most readable piece of hard sf, by a quite significant margin, that I've come across in quite a long while, and, enlivened as it is by its glorious characterization (or, to be waspish, by characters at all), should be recommended reading for most of the authors currently working in the subgenre.

However, matters of categorization are best left to the Dryasdusts and Panglosses: technothriller or hard sf, who really cares? It's purely as a work of imaginative fiction, classification be damned, that Singularity should be assessed. Well, put it this way: this is a book you'll want to own in hardback. DeSmedt is a wonderful newcomer to the field, and his debut must surely be of great significance to it. I cannot believe otherwise than that his voice will be given the attention it so emphatically deserves in the years to come.

—Infinity Plus

The Mind Box

by A.J. Diehl

Midnight Ink, 472 pages, paperback, 2005

Hollywood detective Lane (Helena) Daily is called in to lead the investigation into the horrific murder of movie and music producer Eddie Ealing, whose corpse has been found grotesquely mutilated in the style of his screen gorefest Sense of Life. Could this be the first killing by a serial murderer with a bizarre sense of humor and a chip on his shoulder about cleaning up the entertainment industry? That's Hollywood's first assumption, an assumption shared by many of Daily's colleagues, but she's not so sure – especially when there's evidence that her investigation is being quietly hobbled by powerful movers and shakers.

Not long before the murder, Ealing received by e-mail a sadistic display showing a human heart and a young woman's blood-smeared face. The sender was Mike's Gifts, a shadowy organization – or individual – whom Daily discovers has a long history of, for a fee, exacting physically harmless but psychologically sadistic revenge upon the bullying and corrupt. Could this "gift" be linked to the murder? Does she need to solve the mystery of Mike's Gifts before she can solve the mystery of Ealing's death?

Or is the answer to be found in the too-squeaky-clean memory-research establishment, the Temperel Institute, run by the Ealing family and centred on the dead man's eccentric-genius brother? And where does the Ealing paterfamilias, a hyper-rich professional moralist, fit in?

All of the above, while an accurate summation of the scenario, makes A.J. Diehl's first novel, The Mind Box, sound like just another template mystery.

It's not.

To amplify that statement would probably be to give away too many of the surprises to be found during the course of reading this long, richly textured and very rewarding book. Suffice it to say that it's one of those wonderful novels where you end up a very long way from where you expected to find yourself.

The Mind Box is not a perfect novel. The first sixty or eighty of its 470+ pages have a certain aura of uncertainty about them; I was reminded of one of those small-press authors who have all the talent in the world but desperately need a good editor. In particular, the author seems keen to cram in as much as possible of her research on police procedure, forensics and the like. But thereafter, almost between one page and the next, the narrative picks itself up and starts zipping along compellingly. Daily, who in the initial pages seems set to be a by-the-numbers modern-mystery-novel female cop sleuth, becomes instead a fully rounded and very simpatico personality, as does her friend and shrink, television psychiatrist Paulette Sohl. Minor characters become fully fleshed out, including Daily's cop ex-husband and especially one of the other characters, whose identity I'd better not reveal here but whose importance becomes increasingly evident as the tale progresses.

A.J. Diehl is definitely a writer to watch. The Mind Box is a complex and highly satisfying novel, and an impressive debut to the genre.

—Crescent Blues

The Dead Wives Society

by Sharon Duncan

Signet Mystery, 288 pages, paperback, 2003

An attractive, independent young-middle-aged female PI with something of a past? Sounds a bit like Sue Grafton's Kinsey Milhone, and the comparisons are sure to be made between Milhone and Sharon Duncan's Scotia MacKinnon, protagonist of The Dead Wives Society. The similarities don't stop with the setup: just as Milhone's adventures are (increasingly) undertaken against a sort of soap opera background woven from the relationships between her supporting characters and indeed from that between Milhone and her estranged family, so are MacKinnon's. Perhaps such comparisons are odious, but there are enough echoes of Grafton's work here that I kept expecting to be brought up short by one of Milhone's electric one-liners. No such luck.

Ex-cop Mackinnon, three husbands down and a rich boyfriend on call, lives on a boat in the San Juan Islands, Washington State. Surrounding her are folk like the guy on the next boat, Henry; ditzy Zelda, her part-time assistant downstairs; Abbie, ever looking for a good cause to demonstrate about; and local newspaper editor Jared. These and others are having their interpersonal ups and downs, into which MacKinnon is sometimes dragged. To add to the mix, MacKinnon's mother, elderly hippie Jewel Moon, arrives for a stay to have a heart-to-heart about the way she abandoned MacKinnon in infancy, so MacKinnon can realize she's been maybe a bit tough on Mom all these years.

MacKinnon's new client is sizzlingly glamorous French-Moroccan medic Chantal Rousseau, freshly arrived in town with her aged full-Moroccan mother. Rousseau has been swindled bigtime by one Forbes Cameron, who briefly married her, and wants at least her mother's jewelry back; placing Cameron's own family jewels in a blender is an eagerly sought optional bonus. As MacKinnon digs, she discovers Cameron, under various aliases, has perpetrated similar swindles on a whole string of women, some of whom have been – and are still being – bumped off.

But that's not all. It soon emerges Cameron is a rogue MI6 agent who a couple of years ago turned murderously traitor and is now on the run from ex-colleague Michael Farraday, despatched to terminate him. Even so, Cameron has a new rich female victim in his sights ... but who?

Implausibilities leap forth. Cameron knows his most recent ex is here but nonetheless plans a high-profile celebrity marriage in the locality. All his aliases have the same initials, FWC, a habit an MI6 agent might perhaps have grown out of. As MacKinnon puzzles over a pair of cufflinks, monogrammed with those initials, that Cameron forgot when ditching Rousseau, she on impulse shows them to Zelda, who just happens to recognize them instantly because she once shared a house with the jeweler who made them. And so on.

This is all told amiably enough, but it's hardly white-knuckle stuff. Further, the solution to the mystery element – who's the next unlucky bride? – is glaringly obvious to the reader about 100 pages before it is to MacKinnon. In sum, this is a book that seems to have no aspirations higher than to be a time-passer. One feels Duncan could try harder.

—Crescent Blues

Regina's Song

by David and Leigh Eddings

Del Rey, 424 pages, hardback, 2002

The Eddingses normally write the kind of fantasy I run a mile from – epic high fantasies that it's a surprise to find are merely multi-volume rather than, as they seem, endless. This novel, however, promises something very different: a contemporary urban fantasy based on the incredible psychological bonding between identical twins. In fact, it proves to be a serial-killer thriller of sorts; the faint smidgen of fantasy present could as easily be omitted because it has no real relevance to the plot and is confined to perhaps half a dozen scattered paragraphs.

A few years ago the twins Renata and Regina were going home from a teen party when one of them was raped and murdered; the other, when found, was gibbering incoherently in the twins' own private cryptolalia. The two girls were so identical and so inseparable that even their parents had difficulty telling them apart, so it's difficult for anyone to know which is the one now confined to an asylum; the footprints taken just after their birth, the checking of which might have revealed the survivor's identity, have been lost by the hospital concerned. (No, there is no sinister reason for the loss: it's just plotting-friendly happenstance.) However, it's assumed from observing the girl that it was the marginally more dominant of the pair, Regina, who died.

What jolts the presumed Renata out of her craziness is a visit from the quasi-cousin, quasi-elder brother Mark, son of the twins' parents' best friends. Indeed, she blossoms so much in Mark's presence that soon she is deemed well enough to have a trial period outside the asylum living with her aunt in Seattle and auditing classes at the university where Mark is both part-time teacher and student. Things seem to go pretty well, except that she has occasional "bad days" when apparently nightmares jerk her back temporarily into madness.

Meanwhile, Seattle is being plagued by the activities of a serial killer called the Seattle Slasher, who gruesomely eviscerates small-time criminals and suspected rapists, sadistically keeping them alive as long as possible during the proceedings. It takes Mark about two hundred pages longer than it takes the reader to realize that, wowee zowee, there's a correlation between Renata's "bad days" and the murders – i.e., Renata has a "bad day" immediately following the night of one of the murders. Mark takes to following her at nights, and finally catches her not quite in the act but just slightly too late.

However, DNA testing shows that her final victim was the guy who raped and murdered her sister, so that's all right then.

With the connivance of a middle-ranking police officer and a "sensible" judge, not to mention the assistant DA and the injection of large amounts of Daddy's cash, it is ensured that Renata suffers none of that nasty embarrassing media coverage poor folks can expect, avoids the too-ghastly-dahling fate of psychiatric institutionalization, and has a happy ending of sorts in a secret nunnery the Catholic Church has established precisely to cater for such eventualities.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention that another of the characters is our old pal The Incredibly Stupid Senior Police Detective.

There's the feeling throughout this book that the Eddingses have read a lot of Charles De Lint. I would recommend this to any aspiring writer of urban fantasies, but De Lint does have his minor flaws. One of these, almost eradicated from his more recent books, is a too-frequent lapse into tweeness. In De Lint à la Eddingses, there may an occasional lapse out of cutesy tweeness, but it's pretty hard to find. The good-guy and -gal characters are just so goddam lovable, especially in their cutesy banter, that any sane reader very soon has the frantic urge to do a Seattle Slasher job on them. Take this:

"Hugging doesn't have anything to do with that [sex]," Twink replied. "Every house should have an official hugger – no questions, no comments, just hugs. A few good hugs can take away acres of lonesome. The people with the notepads don't understand that. They talk and talk and talk, and it doesn't do any good at all. What we really need is hugs." She sighed then. "Nobody in the world of normies is ever going to understand the world of buggies, but you don't have to understand. A hug lets us know that it's not really important to you that we're crazy, and that you like us all the same... ."

One can almost forgive Renata – universally called "Twink" or "Twinkie" – for this, because after all she's a recovering mental patient, and it's understandable for people during this stage of recuperation to be sometimes pretty nauseating in their efforts to re-establish their identity in the world and their social relationships. But in this book everybody's at it! As you'll imagine, after 424 pages of this sort of stuff you may find your home's supply of brown paper bags substantially depleted. Worst offender of all is Mark ("Markie", as Twinkie calls him, when not referring to her psychiatrist as "Docky-poo"); as he's the book's narrator, the reader has no real escape.

What also becomes evident from fairly early on is that the Eddingses deploy a fairly limited vocabulary. Someone once devised the game of Clench Racing, whose simple rules were that each contestant took a Stephen Donaldson book at random, and the winner was the first person to find the word "clench"; games of Clench Racing, according to the lore, typically lasted just a few seconds. With this book one could play Grumpy Racing, Shifting Your Load Racing, Hitting the Bricks Racing, Low Crimes And Misdemeanours Racing, Barn Burner Racing and many others. The point of mentioning some of these is that they're jocular terms used by all the characters, whatever their station in life; no one says "losing her marbles" when they could say "shifting her load". It's as if the Eddingses cannot think of replacement equivalents for any of these slang expressions, even though, of course, in real life people use a wide diversity of phrasings for (in this instance) having a mental relapse. Perhaps what is being pointed to here is really a more deep-seated problem: that all of the characters, being drawn on paper tissue-thin, are effectively interchangeable.

Such limitations of writing become especially apparent in the case of Twinkie's class paper. She has been auditing Mark's writing class, and he's assigned the students the task of writing a 500-word essay on "What I Did On My Holidays". Twinkie doesn't have to write this essay but she does, and it's reproduced in full (pages 111-12). One might be reasonably pleased with it had it been produced by one's ten-year-old, but Mark's reaction on reading this short piece by a university student is something other:

"Jesus!" I said, gently putting the paper down. Damn! This girl could really write!

This reader rubbed his eyes in incredulity. It's a mug's game, of course, for any writer to present a piece of writing purportedly done by one of her/his characters and then describe it as a work of genius, but if one has to do it then it's an elementary precaution to do one's best to make sure that the piece in question is at least not too terribly lame. One has to conclude the Eddingses believe Twinkie's essay really does exemplify fine writing. Well ... roll over, Molesworth.

One more lesson in vocabulary from the Eddingses is revealing. We are told that the "delly" in the expression "delly-belly" is a corruption of "delicate". Oops. It says on the back flap here that David Eddings was once "a college English teacher" but this is hard to credit – not so much because of his ignorance of the UK-English expression "Delhi belly" but because of the lack of rigour in checking it out before pontificating about it.

So much for the writing: what of the plot? I must confess I'd hoped for something of the nature of Thomas Tryon's fine novel The Other (1971), in which the identity confusion between twins leaves room for the reader to make a whole passel of misinterpretations, so that the result is a fantasticated text describing events that are not in themselves especially fantasticated. As you'll have guessed, what I read fell far short of that. But let's leave that aside, and let's leave aside also the plot's seeming justification of torture-murder as a perfectly reasonable means of punishment. Let's just accept the somewhat plodding, predictable plot for what it is.

Doing so doesn't help much, because the plot even on its own terms is terminally rickety. Two examples must suffice. Renata's psychiatrist decides this seriously ill patient may have at least a trial period out of the sanitarium living with her aunt – fair enough. But what reputable psychiatrist would agree to this trial being not in a family home but in the home of a single woman who works nights as a cop and sleeps much of the day, so the patient is left on her own much of the time?

Second, towards the end of the book a bunch of Mark's chums (who're not mentioned above, but they're there all through the book providing lashings of cutesy badinage to test the strongest stomach) decide to use an elaborate ploy to make it impossible for the flocks of media vultures camping outside the sanitarium to follow as Renata is transferred to the secret nunnery. You really don't want to know all the details of the byzantine machinations involved, but an important element is that the local cops will be bribed to cut off the vehicles of the pursuing journos and impose upon their drivers a mandatory "random" breath test. Yup, that's sure to stop 'em in their tracks – and we're told that indeed it does. A wonderfully brilliant idea, that one! Unfortunately, it's beforehand been mentioned in the text that some of the media companies concerned have helicopters ... something presumably forgotten by the Eddingses (and by their editor) in the eagerness to show how clever are these bright young banter-swapping things.

Poor characterization, bad writing, plot holes, a highly rebarbative narrative and dialogue style ... one hunts desperately for something charitable to say about this book. I quite honestly wish that I could.

—Infinity Plus

The Shroud of the Thwacker

by Chris Elliott

Miramax, 368 pages, hardback, 2005

Struggling 20th-century writer Chris Elliott (a sort of alter ego of the author) is drawn by the prospect of making lots of money to write a book about the unsolved series of grotesque 19th-century Manhattan killings attributed to a mysterious Jack the Thwacker. After all, the case has everything a potboiling writer could want: an anonymous stalker who felled his killers with a back of Mackintosh apples and then turned their mutilated bodies into bizarre tableaux; a detective team comprising NYPD detective Caleb Spencer and his on-again-off-again lover, the spunky yummy-dame journalist Liz Smith, plus Teddy Roosevelt; and above all the suspicion that the murderer might have been someone in a position of high social authority. (Initially Elliott had thought the perpetrator might be Goya, for no particular reason other than that Goya was a famous artist, but had to withdraw that suggestion when Goya's surviving descendants threatened to sue.)

As his "researches" continue, we spend most of our time in the 19th century among the filthy, violent, gaslit alleys of New York City – which the author actually does quite a good job of evoking, even as he triumphantly mangles most of the historical facts – and part of it in the present day, where Elliott, living in the famous Dakota building, must cope with the fact that neighbor Yoko Ono wants to have him evicted, by fair means or foul, so she can convert his apartment into another studio. But will Elliott be drawn not just figuratively but literally into the 19th-century murder plot?

For the first one-third or so of The Shroud of the Thwacker the manic inventiveness of the plot, the joyful bawdy broadness of its portrayal of the main characters (I have the feeling the fart-happy buffoon Roosevelt depicted here is far closer to historical reality than the noble-idealist version we customarily meet), the constant barrage of excellently bad jokes and the satirical sideswipes at authors like Caleb Carr, Patricia Cornwell and Dan Brown more than compensate for the frequent examples of clumsy or even downright bad writing. The mixture makes for a merry melange that had me laughing out loud on more pages than not.

But then things begin to flag. The inventiveness is still there, but it seems to have become self-conscious, almost desperate ("Oh, jeez, I've not had a wacky idea for a chapter or two, better think up something really outrageous quick!") while the jokes tail off in both number and hilarity. By the book's end the pages are still turning fairly readily, but without great interest, and smiles – let alone laughs – have become increasingly rare. Matters aren't improved by the exceedingly ho-hum illustrations, which seem intended to charm by their amateurishness but succeed only in seeming amateur.

Terry Pratchett need not look to his laurels, but The Shroud of the Thwacker has a first hundred pages to die for and is at least moderately entertaining thereafter.

—Crescent Blues

Children of the Star

by Sylvia Engdahl

Meisha Merlin, 721 pages, paperback, 2000; omnibus reissue of books originally published in 1972, 1973 and 1981

This volume contains the three novels This Star Shall Abide (1972), Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains (1973) and The Doors of the Universe (1981).

Many generations ago, the home star of the human species that had evolved on the Six Worlds went nova, vaporizing the six inhabited planets of that solar system and almost completely extinguishing that human species. (Excuse the cumbersome language. Engdahl makes plain that this human culture is not ours – it has evolved separately.) Largely because of antiscientism, the species was unprepared for this disaster. A small colony had been established on a planet of another solar system, but only vulnerably so: there are elements within the ecosystem that are antipathetic to human life, while in the far past the world was stripped of its few metals by an alien species. Shortly before the nova a scientific party was sent to bolster this colony and to preserve the human species however they could, despite the hostility of the colonized planet.

En route, the leader of the scientific party concluded that the sole way of ensuring the species survived was to preserve the technology the party was bringing with it by whatever means were necessary: otherwise, within a few decades the means of survival would be squandered. In order to do this he decided to set up something abhorrent to him and to his fellows: a caste system, with the designated Scholars at the top of the tree, under them being the Technicians (who have enough knowledge to maintain the technology) and then the Villagers, who must lead a primitive existence, surviving solely through the technological assistance of the Scholars and Technicians. Sometime later the First Scholar and his followers established a fake religion in order to keep this artificial structure in place – specifically, to give the Villagers what Karl Marx called the Opium of the People in order to dissuade them from rebelling.

As noted, the scientific party found the caste system abhorrent: the Six Worlds culture had believed for centuries that knowledge should be freely available to all, and that no one was the born superior of anyone else. To get around this problem, the First Scholar decreed that the ranks of the Scholars should be replenished not through heredity but by recruiting new members from among those Villagers and Technicians who not only rebelled against the system and the religion, but had the courage to court torture and death in publicly doing so. In other words, the only people who can become Scholars are those who detest the notion of a privileged class, and desire not privilege but truth. With that as their guidance, they are fit to become part of the scientific research programme of the Scholars, which is to discover some way of synthesizing metals so they can build starships in order to search out a more viable homeworld.

That this dream of synthesizing metals is a false one becomes clear in the time of Noren, a village lad who cannot tolerate the foundations upon which this society is based. Convicted of being a heretic, he is passed to the City where the Scholars dwell; he anticipates he will suffer torture and worse, yet feels this is a small price to pay for the retention of his honesty. To his astonishment, he discovers the words of the Prophecy of the Star, the keystone of the religious underpinning of it all, are literally true – albeit misleading – and, more important, are seemingly essential if this human species is to survive. He thus goes through the ordeal of a public recantation of his heresy, thereby graduating to become a Scholar.

And he is regarded as the most promising new scientist for many a long year: if anyone can solve the problem of synthesizing metals, he will be the one. Except that he soon proves to his own satisfaction that the task is impossible, and so must investigate other possibilities ...

The first few pages of this omnibus contain review quotes from the time of the three novels' original publication. This is fairly standard practice; what is less standard is that not all of the reviews are entirely favourable. The Association of Children's Librarians, for example, had this to say about The Doors of the Universe:

This is a very sophisticated and technical book ... The subject is definitely popular, but the average child in eighth or ninth grade will not be able to comprehend the theme. This book will do better as an adult novel.

Of the trilogy as a whole Children's Book Review said:

They will not, unfortunately, be popular [with young people] because the intellectual level and reading difficulty will restrict their circulation to the more intelligent high school students.

The two reviewers were right and they were wrong. Where they were wrong was in grossly underestimating the ability and willingness of young readers to tackle "difficult" themes in their fiction reading: most of them are absolutely bursting for such stuff. Where the reviewers were right is that these three novels are indeed in many ways tough reading, whatever the age of the reader. Engdahl's concern here is to present us with a succession of primarily moral but also philosophical problems, none of which have easy answers. The action of the novels is therefore secondary to the ethical wranglings through which Noren, his devoutly religious lover Talyra and the Scholars' Chief Inquisitor Stefred must pick their way. As in Isaac Asimov's original Foundation trilogy – to which this trilogy, in an odd way, earns comparison, for both good and ill – much of the "adventure" comes through the play of intellectual ideas rather than through physical thrills and spills. To say the books are very talky would be accurate, although not necessarily a criticism.

But it's an important factor nevertheless in one's enjoyment of the omnibus. For quite a long time while reading it I was thinking how superb it was to have the three novels available back to back, so we could experience the full impact of Engdahl's vision rather than absorbing it in diluted form through reading the novels separately and perhaps years apart. After a while, however, this view changed: I now wish I had indeed read the books separately, because there are so many moral dilemmas being raised here that eventually my brain began to suffer overload. A very good thing of course! And yet ...

So I end up both heartily recommending this book and at the same time doing so with reservations. You will almost certainly come away enriched from Children of the Star, but you'll probably find the experience in some ways a gruelling one – this is not an easy read, in any sense of that term. Which is perhaps another way of saying it's an extremely good book.

—Infinity Plus

Enchantress from the Stars

by Sylvia Louise Engdahl, foreword by Lois Lowry, illustrated by Leo & Diane Dillon

Walker, 288 pages, hardback, 2001; illustrated reissue of a book originally published in 1970

Right at the outset this reviewer should confess to having had a long-term love affair with this novel.

At one stage during the 1970s I was sent from the UK on a six-week business trip to the USA, going to various cities. As one does, I picked up fistfuls of disposable paperbacks along the way, most of which got left in anonymous hotel rooms after serving as forgettable mind-fodder. One of them that I picked up, assuming it would be just a way of passing a lonely evening and probably better than American television, was the Atheneum paperback of Enchantress from the Stars. I can still vividly remember my astonishment on discovering – I think the view outside the hotel window was downtown Boston – that this was much more than the standard crud. Rather, it was a beautifully written and beautifully conceived book, one of the best sf novels I'd ever read – all the more remarkable, perhaps, in that it was obviously intended for older children rather than adults. It was one of the few books that travelled home with me to the UK, where I naively expected my peer group to be buzzing about it, on the everybody-else-already-knows-about-this-marvel-except-me principle.

Not at all. I was alone in my enthusiasm: no one else around me knew the book at all. Over the years and eventually decades I reread it a few times, and was richly rewarded when my daughter grew to be of an age that she could enjoy it as much as I repeatedly did. Obviously I looked around in UK bookshops for other Engdahl titles, but – although I gather some others were indeed published in the UK – I was never lucky.

It's been perhaps a decade since last I read Enchantress from the Stars, so the news that it was being reissued in a redesigned, re-illustrated and re-edited edition was received here at Snarl Towers with great delight. The delight intensified when the book itself arrived: this is an exquisitely lovely piece of design and production, a book made to be treasured forever, with extra copies bought to be given to special friends. The cover by the Dillons should be up for every relevant art award (their illustrations inside are fine, but not so exceptional); in addition, an award should be invented for the book's designer, Ellen Cipriano, whose work here is beyond even the Dillons'. This is one of those books you want to kiss from time to time when no one's looking, it's so beautifully made.

But what of the novel itself? I was naturally a bit nervous about actually reading it. What if nostalgia had coloured the text beyond its real worth?

I needn't have worried. This book is if anything even better than it was the last time I read it.

Young (perhaps aged 20) Elana belongs to a galactic culture called the Federation whose technology and psychology are so far advanced beyond our own that they obey the Clarke law that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". On an early page Engdahl spells out rather more explicitly her own, presumably independently derived, variant of this:

It is by now a well known fact that the human people of the universe have similar histories – not that the specific details are similar, but the same patterns emerge on every home world. Each must pass through three stages: first childhood, when all is full of wonder, when man admits that much is unknown to him, calling it "supernatural", yet believing. Then adolescence, when man discards superstition and reveres science, feeling that he has charted its realms and has only to conquer them – never dreaming that certain "supernatural" wonders should not be set aside, but understood. And at last maturity, when the discovery is made that what was termed "supernatural" has been perfectly natural all along, and is in reality a part of the very science that sought to reject it.

The folk of the Federation, in short, are completely familiar with their own technology – Elana doesn't regard any of the marvels she can perform using it as in any way remarkable – while at the same time they're empowered by various abilities that we, still in "adolescence", would regard as belonging to the credulous fringe, notably telepathy and psychokinesis. Yet the Federation people are not superhumans: as human beings they are as vulnerable as the rest of us ... and vulnerable not just physically but emotionally.

One of the duties the Federation has taken upon itself is the succouring of Youngling civilizations – those still in the stages of "childhood" and "adolescence". This task it must perform completely unknown to the Youngling civilizations concerned, for it has been established that overt intervention – and anything on a major scale – is likely, however well intentioned, to deleteriously affect a civilization's continuing evolution towards the level the Federation enjoys.

Elana is the daughter of a Federation field agent whose responsibility it is to silently assist selected Youngling cultures. With him and her assigned fiancé Evrek she is on her way to a family gathering when their starship is diverted to the planet Andrecia. The feudalist ("childhood") culture there is not yet aware that its world has been invaded by the advance party sent by a technological ("adolescence") culture, the Empire, which is intent on establishing a beachhead on Andrecia preparatory to colonizing the planet, with its aboriginals to be herded off into reservations. Elana's father is instructed to send down a team onto Andrecia in the hope of subtly and secretly tweaking affairs so that the Empire is induced to withdraw from the planet and leave the aboriginals to follow their own cultural-evolutionary course. By hook and crook Elana becomes part of that team.

The Empire's military crew has come down in a remote forested area, where they are using a massive mechanism called the rockchewer to clear some terrain for the establishment of the first colony. Because of the rockchewer's long "neck", loud roars and habit of devouring everything in its path, the aboriginals believe it is a dragon. The local king, who emerges as being as brutal as anything you could expect from a feudal society – barbaric executions a speciality – accepts the offers of self-styled heroes to go slay the Dragon of the Enchanted Forest and rid his kingdom of it; their rewards should they succeed (and so far none has ever come back) will be the traditional ones, ranging from half the kingdom through to his daughter's hand in marriage ... or even all the king's wisdom, which is the reward sought by Georyn, the youngest of four sons of a woodcutter who resolve to kill the dragon and acquire glory.

The Federation team of which Elana is part realizes that the weakness in the Empire's armour is its antipathy to "superstition"; if the Empire can be made to believe that at least some of the natives of Andrecia are capable of wielding magical forces then it will withdraw and hereafter regard the planet as fearful and taboo. Elana is therefore set to intercept Georyn and his brothers as they journey towards the king's court, and to find out if any of them have the aptitude to be given a rush course in the "supernatural" powers of the mind.

Georyn and one of his brothers prove to have it, but the brother is soon killed by an Empire psychopath, and so all hopes rest on Georyn's fortitude if the dragon is to be slain and the Empire driven off ...

What no one has reckoned on is that Elana and Georyn might fall in love, which they do despite the presence of Evrek as part of the Federation team. Their love, however, can never be allowed to reach fulfilment, for it would be as impossible for Elana to stay on Andrecia as it would be for Georyn to be plucked out of his own culture and introduced into the Federation: the cultural gap is simply too large.

The tale of this inevitably frustrated romance is a large part of the appeal of Enchantress from the Stars (Elana is an enchantress in more than one sense), and of course the story of how Georyn in the end, through his own courage, eventually defeats the dragon is another.

But the book is very much more than this. Ringing through its pages is an extraordinarily appealing faith in humanity – not in leaders or prophets, to be sure, but in common or garden human beings, whatever the level of the culture in which they happen to be fixed. Elana comes to learn that Georyn is in every way her moral and intellectual equal, despite the fact that he sees – can only see – his world in terms of enchantments and "supernatural" forces; and she learns that the same is true also of Jarel, a medic sent along as part of the Empire's expeditionary force: although his leaders believe in such retrogressive notions as conquest, he (and hence presumably countless other subjects of the Empire, who in a simplistic Star Wars-type scenario might be regarded as mere mindless clones, and thereby legitimate laser-fodder) believes the act the Empire is preparing to commit to be a deeply criminal one, and that the Empire's designation of the Andrecian aboriginals as "subhuman" is merely a trick of thinking designed to obscure the stark immorality of the Empire's plans. These (and much else there is no room to describe here) are deeper philosophical points than, alas, one is accustomed to encountering in children's sf.

Another matter of significant interest about Enchantress from the Stars is the way its story is told. Most of the narrative is related in the first person by Elana, but large parts are told in the form of the much later legend the Andrecians have derived concerning the actions of the quasi-historic hero Georyn, who with the aid of an otherworldly Enchantress once slew a Dragon. As a result of this dual mode of telling (triple, really, because there are a few sections told in the third person) the novel has sometimes been described as a science fantasy or just as a fantasy. The fact of the matter is that it is neither of these: one of its many great achievements is that it is without a doubt a science-fiction novel, yet one which has a massive amount to say about the emergence and evolution of fantasy and legend. Metafiction is, thus, a primary component of this book; and yet there's no sense that anything so pompous-seeming is being thrust upon the reader, for Enchantress from the Stars never stops being a riveting tale, and can be fully enjoyed on that level alone.

Enchantress from the Stars was originally published as a children's book, and thereby failed to gain the more widespread recognition it so manifestly deserved; it received a Newbery Honor in 1971 and the Phoenix Award in 1990, but has generally been ignored in sf/fantasy circles. The new and lovingly created reissue is likewise aimed at the children's market. This is a sensible decision from the commercial viewpoint, because it's likely to sell ten times as many copies that way; but this time round, hopefully, it will be recognized also as not just a novel for young adults but also as one of sf's great classics. The only possible complaint one can make is that, after finishing it, you will likely find yourself disinclined for a while to pick up anything else in the genre for fear it will, as it were, taste of ashes.

In sum, it is almost impossible to convey how good this book is. Please just read it.

—Infinity Plus

Time Traveling with Science and the Saints

by George A. Erickson

Prometheus, 177 pages, hardback, 2003

The thesis of this short book is stated succinctly in its Afterword: "History reveals that religion in general and Christianity in particular [have] retarded social and scientific progress and been the source of immeasurable woe." The book is thus a staunch rebuttal, reinforced by copious historical examples, of the commonly held fallacy that, despite all the multitudinous evils committed in its name, Christianity has overall been a civilizing factor.

Erickson begins his historical analysis by discussing the fate of Giordano Bruno, the 16th-century freethinking cleric who was tortured and burnt at the stake as a heretic for espousing and promoting the Copernican hypothesis. And it is upon the Church's still continuing and often horrendously bloody struggle to suppress scientific endeavour that Erickson, quite rightly, chooses almost exclusively to concentrate; for science, despite the frequently flawed behaviour of its establishment (as witness the derision heaped upon Wegener for advocating the notion of continental drift), is almost by definition ever in the vanguard of free thought, and, without the technology that science brings in its wake, freedom of thought must often be subjugated to the simple struggle to survive.

It is certainly the case that, as Erickson amply demonstrates, when science ushered in the Enlightenment, the thinkers of that era were merely picking up where the ancient Greeks had left off fifteen hundred years earlier. And it is also certainly the case, as he again demonstrates, that this 1500-year diaspora of indescribable misery and appalling brutality was largely imposed upon the West by the doctrines of the Christian churches and their imposition, often through the agency of secular tyrants, by supposedly Christian establishments whose primary goal was worldly gain and who had no interests in the teachings of Christ except insofar as they could be perverted in order to facilitate that goal.

During that 1500-year-long nightmare there were of course the obvious Christianity-inspired slaughters of the innocents: the Crusades, the Inquisition, the witch-hunts, the Thirty Years' War. What go less generally recognized are the other casualties caused by the repression of scientific advance. The violence-enforced bans not just on medical experimentation and research but also even on medical speculation killed countless millions. The prohibitions on work in the physical sciences – of which Copernicus's seemingly pure-theory deductions were a part – crippled engineering and other life-saving technologies, thereby causing countless more millions of unnecessary deaths. Deaths aside, the sheer human misery engendered by the theistic tyranny is incalculable.

Erickson retains the full force of his rhetoric for the modern proponents of religion-based ignorance and stupidity in the West. The final two sections of his final chapter offer a devastatingly effective piece of polemic directed against the modern forces of intellectual repression, from Pope John Paul II and President George W. Bush on downwards, and in defence of those who, often shamefully beleaguered, pursue freedom of thought. He mercilessly exposes the nonsense of those who describe Creationism as a "science"; of those who ban birth control yet take no responsibility for the inevitably ensuing bastards, poverty, suffering and starvation; of those who use the words of the Prince of Peace as a justification for war and genocide; of those who make the laughable claim that in order to preserve freedom of thought we must suppress it. Here is Erickson on Ronald Reagan:

Ronald Reagan, perhaps the least intelligent man to ever be elected president until George W. Bush, felt comfortable appointing fundamentalist James Watt to be the Secretary of the Interior despite Watt's apocalyptic belief that led him to advise Congress not to worry over environmental issues because, "I don't know how many future generations we can count on until the Lord returns."

It is shameful that we elect men like Reagan, who once inquired, "Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity?"

The "intellectual curiosity", one need hardly add, that led to the development of the camera and motion pictures.

Though compulsively readable, the book is not without its flaws. Because of its brevity it must naturally miss some highlights during its brief trip through scientific and religious history – although it does, to its credit, cover all the major bases. On one or two occasions the text seems slightly jumbled, as if Erickson had been interrupted a few times while making his final revisions, so that a sentence seems to be in the wrong place on its page. There's a bizarre tendency to use the spelling "eigthteenth", and Sir Humphry Davy is described repeatedly as "Sir Davy". Erickson says that Priestley, on discovering oxygen, called it "phlogiston"; of course, Priestley called his new-discovered gas "dephlogisticated air", believing that it had been deprived of the theoretical (in fact, imaginary) substance phlogiston posited by Stahl a few decades earlier to explain weight-change during combustion – it was Lavoisier who, being told by Priestley of the behaviour of "dephlogisticated air", leapt to the correct conclusion that air is made up of more than one gas.

And there's one real chronological howler:

In the end, the aging Copernicus entrusted his manuscript to a liberal Nuremberg cleric named Andreas Osiander, who knew that the Vatican theologian Cardinal Bellarmine had condoned, if not arranged, the murder of Giordano Bruno for holding similar views.

Unfortunately for this statement, Bruno was burnt in 1600 while Copernicus died over half a century earlier, in 1543.

It is to be hoped such matters will be corrected when the book reprints.

Erickson nowhere explains the title of his book, but I choose to interpret it in the sense that we're being encouraged to participate in countless mental voyages of time travel in order to ask the question, not so much "what if?", as "what if not?" What if the Roman Catholic Church, later enthusiastically joined in the persecution of free thought by the Protestant churches, had not come to power – even, had not existed? It is almost incontestable that our civilization, for good or evil, would currently be at a level well ahead of where we are now. In this, of course, Erickson more than sufficiently makes his intended rebuttal; as a side-effect, he has also given us a book that serves as a possible source – almost a blueprint – for countless alternate history stories. It would even be reasonable to assert, although Erickson does not, that this book, through its depiction of the negative, itself depicts an alternative history-that-never-was. That alas never was.

Time Traveling with Science and the Saints can be recommended not just for your own reading but as a book you might like to give to any young adolescent of your acquaintance; it is easily readable enough and short enough even for younger children, but some of them might be seriously disturbed by the accounts of the antics of the Inquisitors and others. Whether we like it or not, our young people are bombarded at every turn by the seductions and indoctrinations of the religious, whatever their sect; I can think of no better gift to ensure that a youngster will at least be able to make up her or his own mind.

—Infinity Plus

Artifacts

by Mary Anna Evans

Poisoned Pen Press, 267 pages, hardback, 2003

Any author whose name so closely resembles the real name of George Eliot clearly has a lot to live up to ...

Faye Longchamp lives on the fringes of the law, or a little beyond them. She is a pothunter – which is to say, she digs illicitly for archaeological specimens in order to sell them on the black market. Her purpose is to keep body and soul together while, somehow, retaining possession of her ancestral home, Joyeuse, on Florida's Gulf of Mexico coast. Unlike many pothunters, she has in fact trained as an archaeologist, although circumstances forced her to drop out of her training before its end; still, Professor Magda Stockard is more than eager to hire her services for the occasional bona fide archaeological dig. At the moment Magda's team, Faye included, is engaged on a dig on a little archipelago called the Last Isles, offshore from Joyeuse; Faye is also pothunting on the side.

One night, two of the college students employed on the dig are murdered. Faye discovers, during her extramural activities, a skeleton dating from a few decades ago, and concludes the remains are those of Abigail Williford, whose disappearance, still unsolved, was a cause célèbre of its day. Unable for obvious reasons to report the matter directly to the law, she begins to research the case, while simultaneously, thanks to the chance discovery of an old journal, researching her own origins amid liaisons between slavers and slaves.

Soon it becomes evident to her that various local notables were more closely involved in Abigail's disappearance than they have ever publicly admitted. More old burials of murder victims are discovered by the members of the dig; it was in an attempt to prevent discovery of these that the two student archaeologists were shot. The murderer of Abigail and the others will clearly stop at nothing to avoid detection, yet Faye is driven to try to identify him before her own life becomes forfeit.

Artifacts is an extremely charming novel, and its central character – the mixed-ancestry Faye pluckily striving to survive despite the leviathan of the state and the schemings of a murderer – is enormously appealing. So too are some of the minor characters, notably her faithful friend Joe Wolf Mantooth, a simple-minded child-of-nature Native American. The journal extracts that pepper the text are engrossing in their depiction of the barbaric society that existed in Florida not so very long ago, when human beings depended for their very lives upon "owners" who could be either sadistic or benevolent. The depiction of Faye's emergent pride in her own ancestry, and hence in herself, is genuinely inspiring. The writing is smooth and the tale grips from beginning to end.

The only element of Artifacts that doesn't work so well is – oddly for a mystery novel! – the mystery itself, whose solution becomes reasonably obvious from about the halfway mark. Yet such is the charm of all the rest that this barely matters.

Read this book. You'll enjoy it.

—Crescent Blues

Fever 42

by Christopher Fahy

Overlook Connection Press, 332 pages, hardback, 2002

Every once in a while a novel comes along which jolts the senses so radically that it can be difficult for the reader to withdraw from the logic of the tale and return to the logic of the real world. Classic examples are Joseph Heller's Catch-22 and, perhaps paramount, Luke Rinehart's The Dice Man. And now there is Christopher Fahy's Fever 42.

Comparisons with The Dice Man are not out of order. Although there are extravagant differences between the two books, the feel of their narratives has some similarity and, more particularly, there is the same sense that the protagonist has a self-destructive bent the reader is only too willing to share. The Dice Man is the more mind-twisting of the two; Fever 42 gains its strength from being the more plausible and the more human. Where The Dice Man focused on the lunacy of permitting one's life to be governed entirely by chance, Fever 42 focuses on the lunacy born of understandable human failings.

42-year-old teacher Ted Wharton is stuck in a so-so job and marriage. He loves his wife, of course he does, even if she's exasperating and their sex life tedious. He loves his kids, of course he does, even if they're high-octane brats. And so on.

He's wrenched out of this by one of his students, class sex bomb Joy Dollinger; she aggressively seduces him, initiating a reckless affair. Though little more than a third of his age, she is far more sexually experienced than he is, and delights in educating him in the wilder and more inventive practices she knows – delights he's never even dreamed existed. They couple in seedy motels but more often in places where their exhilaration is intensified by the possibility of discovery, notably on school premises. His life becomes a maelstrom of porn videos and magazines, bizarre gadgetry ... and excitement, the excitement that's been missing from his life for too long. Wharton's is a midlife crisis par excellence.

Obviously, it's also a recipe for disaster. The liaison cannot forever go undiscovered; neither can the graphic polaroids and videos they've made of each other in flagrante delicto more flagrant than the most flagrant delictos many of us have attempted in the privacy of our own homes. Worse: Joy declares she loves Ted forever and persuades herself he's going to ditch his family and marry her, and when he declines to do so starts manipulating him by threatening to reveal the truth to all – particularly, of course, that she was legally underage when the boffing began. Before that, at least a hundred pages before Ted, we know his life is going to be destroyed; we want him to stop his frantic career toward catastrophe, and yet at the same time we know even more so that stop is the last thing we want him to do.

Sure enough, the inevitable calamity comes to pass. But Fahy manages very beautifully – without the slightest trace of cloy – to give Ted a redemption of sorts.

Ribald, erotic, hilarious, deeply serious and tragic, often all at the same time, Fever 42 is one of those rare books that restores our faith in the mainstream novel – and, strangely, in humanity.

—Crescent Blues

Through the Wormhole

by Robert J. Favole

Flywheel, 182 pages, hardback, 2001

Young Michael Banks and his best pal Kate are visited by the apparent ghost of an old horse-riding mentor of Michael's and given what purport to be virtual-reality kits yet which are in fact time-travel devices, made and supplied by a group called CyberTimeSurfers Inc. These have not been delivered for use as toys: it is important that Michael and Kate travel back to the time of the American Revolutionary War to save the life of Michael's ancestor John Banks, a soldier under Lafayette, as otherwise John's whole lineage, Michael included, will disappear from history. After various adventures, the kids succeed in their assigned task and within the allotted timespan.

Elements of the tale are of course pretty arbitrary. Most importantly, there is no real rationale presented as to why the task has suddenly become necessary – since Michael is already alive and kicking it's evident this particular timeline ain't bust, so why does it need fixing? Similarly, there's no reason given as to why CyberTimeSurfers should care at all whether Michael and all his ancestors back to John should survive rather than any other lineage; perhaps Michael or one of his descendants is going to do something important for the human race in the future – who knows?

There is a rationale for the book, though. This is a novel aimed at young adults – youngish young adults. Michael is a (male) Black American, Kate is a female (white) American. Michael is getting flak at school from his peer group because he is crazy keen on the honky sport of equestrian eventing. Kate, whose key sport is swimming, is on the verge of capitulating to the societal myth that there are theoretical – as opposed to artificial – limits to what women can achieve, as symbolized by her habit of funking out just before important school swimming races. Both, through their adventure in the past, learn to buck the imposed stereotypes and be – and be proud to be – what they most importantly are, irrespective of colour or gender: human beings. They discover their genuine identities.

This is a very attractively published book, complete with neat little maps to keep one in touch with events on the ground during the War of Independence adventures. The copy-editing is not quite what it should have been – "But the force of the blow had knocked John to the floor with such force that Michael had been yanked off his feet and pulled down on his back on top of John" – and the writing, which occasionally veers into didacticism, is as a whole rather flat: we are told about the musket fire but do not smell it; we are told about horseback chases but do not hear the thud of hooves or share the fear of the pursued. Nevertheless, this is a jolly enough tale to while away a few hours, and of course its subtexts, its messages, are important for its designated readership.

There is a further message. John Banks was a genuine historical personage, one of the relatively few Black freemen to fight for Independence during the Revolutionary War. In this book – as presumably was the case in reality – he does so because he believes that the best hope of all Americans, Black and White, lies in self-rule for the colonies. Of course, Blacks were to discover such beliefs were illusory; a long and bloody history of the oppression of Black Americans was to follow, and it is still the dismal case that, despite all legislative measures, they do not enjoy full equality – for one among many stark evidences of this we need look no further than at the comparative rates of capital convictions and executions between the different skin-colours. Of course, there's no reason at all to believe matters would have been any better, and they might well have been even worse in the shorter term, had the revolution failed and the British remained in power. Yet the ghost of John Banks, looking back from today, would surely be wondering bitterly exactly what it was he fought for.

Any reader of this novel will wonder the same – and it is good that they should do so. For this reason alone Through the Wormhole would be recommended reading.

—Infinity Plus

Pigtopia

by Kitty Fitzgerald

Hyperion, 247 pages, hardback, 2005

Jack Plum is a man of indeterminate age who has grown up under many burdens: his father disappeared many years ago; his mother is bedridden and viciously abusive; their poverty is worsened by his mother's alcoholism; and, most of all, he is hideously disfigured, so that other people try to have as little to do with him as possible and generally regard him as a moron. Denied human companionship, he has turned instead to friendships with pigs, whose language he believes he can understand. In the cellar of his home he has secretly constructed Pigtopia, a place where his adoptive family of pigs can live and where he can go whenever his mother is asleep to play with his friends and tell them stories.

Most of the kids in the neighborhood regard Jack as nothing more than the natural target for malicious taunting and sometimes worse, but one of them seems different. Jack falls in love from a distance with young Holly Lock. His is a pure love – he has no sexual designs upon her. During chance encounters with her, she reacts with fear and revulsion at first, but slowly she begins to realize that Jack's outward ugliness does not indicate any monstrosity of soul and eventually the two become the dearest of friends. Of course, they must keep their meetings in Pigtopia and their wild midnight forest rides on pig-back completely secret, for everyone is ready to think the worst of the neighborhood freak and they're bound to assume his relationship with Holly is pedophilic.

Yet the intrusions of the world cannot be kept at bay forever ...

Pigtopia is a love story, and in its way a very beautiful one. The characters of Jack and Holly are wonderfully created, and it's impossible not to be drawn into their world: one cares. The cover blurb ostentatiously drops the name of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, but that does Pigtopia something of an injustice: this is a different and overall a better book. If there's a comparison to be made, it might be with Iain Banks's The Wasp Factory, although this again could be misleading: there's Grand Guignol in Pigtopia all right, but it's less prevalent and it's presented in a far gentler context than in Banks's novel – almost as if Banks had tried his hand at writing To Kill a Mockingbird.

That weird juxtaposition of comparisons points toward what is, at least for this reader, Pigtopia's only real demerit: even the diluted Grand Guignol seems irritatingly out of place. The love story, and its inevitable disastrous conclusion, would be more powerful and more moving without it. Quasi-paradoxically, the episodes of gruesome drama actually slow the narrative down – quite the reverse of what Fitzgerald presumably intended.

That's a relatively small quibble, though. The love story of Jack and Holly offers a gateway through which we can better understand the nature of our own humanity, and it engrosses in so doing.

—Crescent Blues

Galactic Rapture

by Tom Flynn

Prometheus, 500 pages, paperback, 2000

The reason why there are so many technological civilizations in the Galaxy, and why they're all human, is this:

Long, long ago an enigmatic supercivilization called the Harvesters went through the Galaxy. They came across the planet Earth, which happened to have proto-human beings at the top of the evolutionary chain. For purposes of their own the Harvesters took a sampling of proto-humans, food animals, plants, etc., from the Earth and used them to seed every other plausibly inhabitable planet in the Galaxy. The Harvesters then disappeared, presumably travelling on to repeat a similar act in the next galaxy along the line; however, a relic of their quondam presence might be the occasional, unpredictable appearance out of some alternate dimension of one of the Tuezi, vast and invulnerable death machines which, upon their popping into our reality, immediately proceed to devastate the nearest planetary system.

On all of the planets they seeded the Harvesters, for inscrutable reasons, programmed a minor sensory deficit into the population – the inability to see certain tricks of the light, for example. All except one: Earth. The humans from Earth have the complete range of senses. Another point of oddity about Earth humans is that some of them are white; the standard colour of the members of the Galactic Confetory is black.

Earth has been only recently discovered by the Confetory, and in the normal way, despite its unique status as the homeworld for all humanity, would have been placed under Enclave – that is, quarantined off from any outside interference because as yet far too socially backward. However, the complete sensory complement of the savages from Earth makes them ideally qualified to be Spectators – undercover operators who, loaded with bio-implants and transmitters galore, can move incognito among the barbarians of Enclave planets, broadcasting the full range of their experiences of sex, blood, torment, misery and mayhem for the titillation of the trillions of subscribers, Galaxy-wide, to the entertainment medium known as the senso.

Interdependent with the senso is Earth's other major export: religion. None of the other cultures in the Galaxy has been so foolish or illogical as to invent gods and god-worship, and the novelty of the notion has spread like a sort of senso-driven wildfire throughout the Confetory.

Top dog today – this is the middle of the 24th century – among the organized Earth religions is the Universal Catholic Church, with its headquarters on the planet appropriately named Vatican. Various revisions have been made to dogma over the years. At the trivial level, pederasty has been proclaimed not to be a breach of celibacy, and priests are encouraged to practice it. (Interestingly, this book was written through the decade of the 1990s, according to the author's note, and thus before the current cluster of pederasty scandals that's rocking the Catholic Church globally.) Even more significant is the doctrine of Serial Incarnation, which has it that Christ was not incarnated by God on just a unique occasion but has been or will be made incarnate once on each populated world in the Galaxy.

Mathematician Fram Galbior is a Galaxy-wide hero because some while ago he was able to calculate the exact time and position of each new appearance of a Tuezi; these otherwise indestructible death machines have a fleetingly short moment of vulnerability just as they first appear, so their threat can be nullified by having armed warships waiting in space for them when they arrive and blasting them as soon as they do. Now Galbior has performed a new set of calculations which apparently predict the next planet upon which Christ will incarnate and the approximate time (within a few decades) of that incarnation: the next emergence of Christ will be on Jaremi Four, and may in fact have already happened.

This is somewhat horrifying news for all concerned. Jaremi Four was a backward planet to begin with – even more primitive than Earth – but a Tuezi attack some decades ago has shot it back a good distance towards the Stone Age. Life is nasty, brutal and short there as countless local chieftains war upon each other, perpetrating the most revolting barbarities upon all around them. Even before the Tuezi attack, Jaremi Four had been one of the quarantined Enclave worlds; since the devastation there can be no question of the Enclave status being lifted – not for many generations yet.

However, although Confetory members may not interfere with the social evolution of Enclave worlds, this does not mean they may not land on and move around covertly on such worlds, just so long as the locals are never aware of the Galactic civilization or indeed the existence of life outside their own planet. So Jaremi Four has long been infiltrated by Spectators, busily broadcasting all the thrills and spills of barbarism to their senso audience.

One such Spectator, Ruth Griszam, has been observing events of no particular note. One day, however, she meets Arn Parek, a native Jaremi Four conman superabundantly charged with charisma. He has discovered – more accurately, has independently invented – religion, and the way in which the mentally or emotionally inadequate (which on Jaremi Four means just about everybody, oppressors and oppressed alike) find that it fills a gaping hole in their psyche. With the aid of a few basic mentalist (conjuring) tricks, Parek is making a good living as a sort of peripatetic avatar of the sky gods, enjoying worship, viands and wenches in one community until they grow weary of his easy-going parasitism, at which point he swiftly moves on to the next. And so on.

By chance, Griszam records Parek in action, "converting" the two murderous barbarians, Ulf and Chagrin, who have been her companions this past little while. She assumes her broadcast of his tricksterism will be regarded as mere fun by the audience, but to her astonishment the trillions of senso addicts instantly become devoted Parek fans, being converted by him as easily – albeit at a remove – as the primitives Ulf and Chagrin. Even when Parek connives at the murder of his old friend Dultav, who has become her lover, Griszam realizes that there is potentially a big journalistic story here.

She's not the only one. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has been fairly dormant for a long while, but entrepreneurial evangelist Alrue Latier recognizes in Parekism a chance to revitalize Mormonism with himself at the helm – and, more pertinently, how this situation can be manipulated such as to increase yet further the torrent of monetary "offerings" sent in to his own near-perpetual senso show by the credulous. Using the latest technology, Latier secretly violates Enclave in order to present himself to Parek as one of the sky-gods, to enable Parek to perform miracles and so on (according to Arthur C. Clarke's famous principle that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic). The savages didn't need much convincing before, but, now that Parek can do some really spectacular miracles and can predict future events, they're falling over themselves to follow him.

But Latier is not alone among the Galactics in recognizing the potential of the situation and violating Enclave. Orgena Greder, owner and tyrant of the planet Khoren Four, wants a spectacular and public end to the ministry of Parek so that she may promote the claims of her own psychopathic protege to be the newly incarnated Christ; the presence on a planet of a godhead does wonders for interstellar trade, and Khoren Four could sorely use the revenue. Accordingly, Greder presents herself to Ulf, Parek's bloodthirstily military sidekick, as another and better sky-god, so that Ulf, while outwardly the loyalest of disciples, is in fact secretly plotting Parek's downfall and his own triumph as conqueror of all Jaremi Four in a series of ever-increasingly bloody, massacre-strewn campaigns.

The Catholic Church, in two minds as to whether or not it would be to its own advantage if Parek were the Christ, cannot leave this alone, and so breaches Enclave even more comprehensively than anyone else ...

Believe it or not, all of the above is really little more than the starting premise for the plot! For we have in Galactic Rapture not only an extremely long book (large pages, narrow margins and eye-strainingly small type mean you could at least double the page-count given at the head of this review for an estimate of the novel's length) but an extremely complex one – and, for that matter, an extremely good one.

There is obviously plenty of material here from which to construct a fairly standard space opera trilogy. (I am convinced Galactic Rapture was intended as a trilogy but that the publisher decided to cram its three parts all into a single volume. This would explain the minuscule type, which makes this most engrossingly readable of books in practice very hard to read.) But space opera is not Flynn's purpose. Instead, he offers a very, very, very deep and biting dark satire of not just the imbecilities of organized religion but also human frailties and vices in general. Quite frequently the bracingly refreshing bleakness of his satiric vision is illuminated by extremely funny jokes, so that on one page you can be nauseated by the fastidiously detailed scenes of carnage and torment yet on the next find yourself laughing out loud. The overall sense, though, is that there is very little to laugh about in the human condition, and that the blame for this being so cannot be laid at the feet of some creator god. We ourselves have quite deliberately, through action or inaction, created such misery, using our religions as only one of several tools in the construction of it. Furthermore, unless we change our ways, if unrestricted we are capable of spreading the same folly and affliction far beyond the confines of our own home world.

Agree with it or not, Flynn is presenting us with, through his satire, some extremely fundamental questions about ourselves and the axioms of our social structures, questions which we normally do our best to evade. To take just a single example, it is generally assumed by atheists that the beliefs of others are sacrosanct: that it is a fundamental right of every human being to believe in the religion of his or her choice; that religion is a personal matter, not to be tampered with by others.* By the end

[* 2011 note: Attitudes have changed quite a lot among many atheists in the few years since I wrote this review. Plus ça change, plus c'est une autre chose.]

of reading the thought experiment that is Galactic Rapture, having seen plausibly exemplified the damage that religion can do – and on a massively widespread scale – one has to face what has become an inescapable question: Is that tolerant principle in fact a viable one? Will toleration of religious nonsense – and the question is unaffected by the actual existence or otherwise of a deity or deities – spell the doom of the human species?

Such a question is represented symbolically in Flynn's satire. To continue with our current example, if we regard Jaremi Four as analogous to an individual (or to that individual's worldview), then its decreed status as an Enclave world – whose inhabitants must not be tampered with by outsiders – can be seen as analogous to the "accommodationist" principle of toleration expressed above. Whatever widespread brutalities and unbelievable human sufferings are perpetrated on Jaremi Four, the Galactics will not intervene; whatever garbage true believers cram into the minds of their children, we will not intervene to save those children from the destruction of their own and others' lives through the indoctrinated hatreds, fallacies and bigotries. Those who choose to turn their backs on the fruits of human knowledge are all, in effect, Enclave worlds; while the rest of us, without really questioning why we do so, observe the principle of Enclave as if it were itself some kind of ineffable religious statute.

Leaving considerations of satire aside for a moment, on a purely sciencefictional basis the principle of Enclave – obviously under a huge diversity of names – is a notion very frequently encountered throughout the genre. It's a very plausible idea, that advanced civilizations will hide themselves from less advanced ones until the latter reach a certain level of sophistication for fear of causing the destruction of a culture; each civilization must follow its own natural course of evolution independently until it is ready to do otherwise in case it is culturally or even physically – as in the case of the now extinct indigenous Tasmanians here on Earth – annihilated by contact with more advanced ones.

I must confess I've always accepted this premise in sf without really thinking about it: one has only to glance at the sorry history of the Native Americans after the arrival of the Europeans to realize that such quarantining is A Good Thing. Yet Flynn actually presents a very strong argument for the opposite: it is in the nature of life itself, and hence human cultures, to encounter the different – whether that be a volcanic eruption or another civilization. Contact between two cultures is destructive of the less advanced one only if the more advanced one lets it or makes it be so – in effect, only if the approach of the more advanced culture is one of military or social conquest: physical or cultural imperialism.

There are far too many riches within Galactic Rapture for me to even begin to list them here – for that you must go and fight with the small print to enjoy them for yourself. (The small print obviously often defeated the Prometheus proofreader as well;*

[* 2011 note: Flynn's follow-up, Nothing Sacred, arrived in 2004 and shared the same typography. I'm still waiting for the moment when I feel brave enough to face another bout with that tiny print.]

and nobody involved has worked out that "aurora" is a singular, not a plural, noun.) The struggle is eminently well worth it. Equip yourself with a magnifying glass if need be. Whether or not you agree with all of Flynn's answers or with his general theme, he presents questions that we as a single-planet culture really need to face rather than forever dodge. And he does so within the context of a satire that, for all its bitter darkness, is also riotously entertaining.

Endlessly thought-provoking. Tremendous fun. Conceptually challenging. Moving. Impassioned. Richly written. Deliciously imaginative. Willing to speak the unspeakable. Unafraid to accept and explore new ideas. Say, remember when we all thought this was what speculative fiction was all about? Galactic Rapture is all of that and more. Viewed from any perspective, it's an extremely important book; science fiction is lucky to have it.

—Infinity Plus

The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque

by Jeffrey Ford

Morrow, 307 pages, hardback, 2002

In Victorian-era Manhattan, fashionable portraitist Piero Piambo receives a most unusual commission. His client, Mrs. Charbuque, demands that he paint her portrait without ever once setting eyes upon her or upon any other likeness of her; instead, she will sit for him only behind a screen, telling him tales about herself from which he must attempt to deduce her appearance. Piambo would of course normally reject such a nonsensical commission out of hand – he has plenty of rich potential clients drooling to give him their business – but the fee Mrs. Charbuque offers is an enormous one and, perhaps even more important, the challenge is so unique that it inspires a jaded Piambo, although at first he is not fully conscious of this, to revert to the ideals of art he embraced so passionately in his youth, before cynicism and commerce turned him into the darling of the well heeled chic set he is today.

The tales Mrs. Charbuque relates over and through the screen are almost beyond – sometimes completely beyond – belief, and yet Piambo, while knowing at one level they are not to be accepted at face value (as it were), is driven to try to research what he can of the facts behind them, and uncomfortably often his researches seem to show the tales may, after all, be true. It is as if the tales' fantastication itself is giving him the gift of art in place of the slick picture-manufacture at which he has become so adroit – or, rather, that they are forcing him to regain what he once had but discarded. And real life intrudes all too bluntly on occasion upon his dreamlike obsession with these strands of fantasy that have come to dominate his perceptions: there seems to be a Mr. Charbuque, who is none too keen on Piambo's assignations with his, Mr. Charbuque's, wife. Piambo's mistress is not especially pleased, either. It is of no use for Piambo to protest that, far from engaging in amorous congress with his sitter, far from even touching her, he has yet to clap so much as a fleeting glimpse upon her; partially false, too, for him to protest too much, because the truth is there's a decidedly erotic element in his fascination with the voice that tells him these wild stories.

Not all of the tales have equal charm. The tale of the seer who bases his divinations upon the morphologies of snowflakes, and who one day is confounded to discover two of them impossibly identical, is exceedingly beautiful. That of his copromantic counterpart ("turdologist", to use Ford's term), who is thrown into consternation by discovering two identical turds, comes across not so much as a delightful flight of fancy as profoundly unfunny schoolboy scatological humour masquerading as arch wit behind a gauze of elegant articulacy.

But that elegance is truly remarkable. Consider this:

"How did you know it was me?" I called after him.

Before he disappeared into the night, I heard him say, "The smell of self-satisfaction; a pervasive aroma of nutmeg and mold."

Or this, concerning a numerological system:

An abracadabra of addition, division, and multiplication would follow, capped off by the subtraction of the digit one hundred forty-four, the numerical constant for human error.

Or this, describing a professional lockpicker:

"There is no ring of keys," said Wolfe. "I'm the ring of keys." He held up his open hand, knuckle side out, before my face. It was a rather squat, round mitt, the fingers like sausages, but from their tips grew exceedingly long nails that had been precisely trimmed to the thinnest width. At their very ends, those of the pinky and ring bearer were cut in a serrated pattern, the thumb bore a three-inch hat pin, and the remaining index and middle sported eruptions of nail that evidently would fit a lock's baffle.

(There's also the occasional instance where the conscious stylistic elegance trips up over its own two feet, as in this: "Upon voicing my question, the door opened and Watkin announced that my time was up.")

I'm quite certain the term "magic realism" will be bandied about quite widely concerning this book, and indeed it does have a strong magic realist feel – which is in no way diminished by the serial-killer aspects of its real-world plot. However, its concerns seem to be somewhere else entirely; one should look for similarities not among the magic realist writers but instead to a writer like John Barth, obsessed with the power of Story in such novels as The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1992). For really the real-world elements of The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque – dramatic as they become, personally threatening to Piambo as they are – fade almost into insignificance in our minds as well as his beside the Story-empowered alternative truth that Mrs. Charbuque creates. The real world becomes just a jostle of trivial stories; hers is Story, and therefore truer – even though, as with its creator, for it to be perceived (which it can be) one must strain to perceive the invisible.

Which is, of course, something at the very core of human fantasy.

Despite any minor criticisms, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque must be one of the best novels of 2002. The fact that Ford has chosen to use fantasy as a means of investigating fantasy is of course its appeal to die-hard fantasy readers; but really this is a novel of interest to all, whatever their normal literary palate. This novel is a deftly constructed creation every bit as lovely as any of the invisible sitter's flights of fancy. The sense of it – its air – lingers long in the mind, and is welcome there.

—Infinity Plus

Daughters of a Coral Dawn

by Katherine V. Forrest

Naiad Press, 226 pages, paperback, 1984

Although outwardly completely human, Mother is an alien from the planet Verna III, brought home to Earth by Father, with whom she has a passel of seemingly human daughters. But, as they grow older (which they do much more slowly than humans do), it becomes evident the daughters are far more intelligent than the Earth-humans around them. This might be tolerable were it not for the fact that this near-future Earth has reverted to a complete male domination, with testosterone being the currency of the day. Might is right, and it's the men who've seized the might.

The daughters go out and marry Earth men, by whom they in turn have daughters who seem fully human but are in fact as talented as their mothers. And the daughters have daughters ...

By the time there are thousands of this all-female clan, the world situation has deteriorated yet further, the male tyranny having become yet more oppressive; a means of artificial fertilization has become available, but has been outlawed because it would diminish the male grip upon the female thralls. The women of the clan decide that they should leave to find another world to claim as their own – a habitable planet of which Earth has not yet become aware, of course, because otherwise the males will hunt them down and either try to exterminate them or, perhaps even worse, try to bring them back. The logistics of locating such a world and getting there are not so daunting as they might seem, because, despite their femaleness, many of the clan members have, through their hyperintelligence, risen to fairly high-ranking positions within the scientific/technological hierarchy.

The first half of this book – which very much falls into two halves – concerns all of the above and the journey, aboard a seized super-starship, to the planet, which they christen Maternas in honour of the still-jaunty Mother, the only heterosexual among the thousands-strong party of settlers. At Mother's insistence, the women appoint a new leader, perhaps the most intellectually talented of them all: the synthesist Megan.

In the second half, Maternas is accidentally discovered by a ship from Earth containing three hyper-chauvinist males and a young female lieutenant, Laurel. After an attempted rape by one of the males, and after Laurel has described how she has been harassed and bullied throughout the flight, it is clear the males cannot be allowed to stay. On the other hand, neither can they be allowed to go back to Earth and report their discovery. There are some difficult decisions ahead for Megan.

And some equally difficult decisions ahead for Laurel, too. Should she return to Earth, her home and, despite everything, the world to which she has at least some emotional allegiance; or should she stay in the semi-idyll of Maternas? Previously a practising heterosexual, can she adapt to the homosexual ways of the women of Maternas?

To a large extent, her mind is made up for her, because she falls headlong in love with Megan. For her part Megan, who has hitherto preserved her virginity in the interests of maintaining distance from and impartiality towards her people, finds to her intense annoyance that she's fallen completely for Laurel ...

Unabashedly a work of lesbian evangelism, Daughters of a Coral Dawn is a work of very considerable charm, a quasi-allegory (genetic considerations alone make it a dubious candidate for straightforward science fiction, and the astrophysics is bizarre) that manages to make its profoundly anti-male sentiments, despite their irrationality (all blanket descriptions of millions of individuals are by definition irrational), quite unexceptionable, quite inoffensive. Where perhaps one really ought to take offence, because this sort of sexism is the cousin of racism, instead one grins and understands.

In part this is because of the sensitivity and sympathy with which Forrest draws a few of her central characters. One grows genuinely to like Megan, Laurel and Minerva, the latter being the historian who carries the main burden of the story in, particularly, the first half of the book. Outside this central circle, Forrest's hand is less sure; many of the women are just blurs distinguished only by their names, the three men are of course merely crude stereotypes, and Mother becomes fairly swiftly a rather annoying caricature. But that doesn't really matter because one becomes so involved in the tales and emotions of those three main protagonists.

For the lascivious, there are a few fairly graphic sex scenes, the last of which seems to go on forever for no reason other than attempted titillation. These scenes, although written with an extremely appealing wry yet loving lyricism, seem to have been grafted onto the main body of the book in order to establish its credentials – political or commercial – within its perceived market ghetto. It's as if Forrest had been told that there was no real market for sf with a lesbian theme, so she should aim primarily for the lesbian erotica reader and hope readers would tolerate the rest. This is actually a very great pity, because Daughters of a Coral Dawn is far too interesting and pleasing a book to be confined to any ghetto.

Copies of Daughters of a Coral Dawn were until very recently rather hard to find, because the book had been out of print for quite a while. However, in September 2002 Alyson Publications released a new edition (not seen by this reviewer; paperback, $13.95). Unfortunately, Alyson is a press whose main focus seems to be gay porn (oops, I meant "erotica"); back to the ghetto with a vengeance for this very charming, certainly non-pornographic work – but at least it's readily available once more. Whatever your sexual orientation, Daughters of a Coral Dawn is a book that's worth your time.

—Infinity Plus

Reunion

by Alan Dean Foster

Del Rey, 328 pages, hardback, 2001

Because of his prolific production of movie novelizations – some pretty good, some, to be honest, pretty dire – it is often almost overlooked that Alan Dean Foster has created a significant body of other fictions. These are often very enjoyable entertainments, and at their best can be something more than that.

Among the most popular of these independent novels have been those in his Pip and Flinx series, set in the far future when the Galaxy is divided up between the Humanx Commonwealth and a fairly limited number of alien cultures. Flinx is Philip Lynx, an empath who owes his erratic talent to his genetically engineered origins as an experiment by a now outlawed eugenicist cult, the Meliorare Society. Pip is his lifelong pet and ally, an alien creature that resembles a miniature dragon, spits corrosive venom and is capable, like Flinx himself, of a high level of empathy. Because of his abilities, Flinx feels – and in fact is – an anomaly in humanx society, and thus devotes his life to a quest for an understanding of his origins and hence of himself.

This episode of that quest starts on Earth, where he discovers that a computer file containing details of his origins has been stolen from a central databank, with the sole copy being expropriated to the remote desert world of Pyrassis, which lies within the region of the Galaxy governed by the AAnn, a hostile reptilian species. During a lengthy sojourn on Pyrassis, Flinx discovers a mountainous ridge there is in fact a vast alien transmitter, half a million years old. Sparked into activity during a gunfight between himself and a couple of AAnn xenarchaeologists, this device transmits a signal, its content unknown, to the gaseous moon of the Pyrassis system's outermost planet (which seems to be the sixth world if you go by page 86 or the tenth world to judge by pages 201 onwards). Still pursuing the stolen file, Flinx heads for this moon and discovers that all is not what it seems there. As he engages in a three-way struggle between himself, a vengeful AAnn military mission and a humanx party led by his infinitely evil yet also infinitely beautiful alter ego, he gets answers of a sort.

During the course of this entertainment there are flashes of early Harry Harrison and of Eric Frank Russell, yet Foster's telling lacks certainly the slickness, verve and humour and arguably the wit of either of these authors. In place of these attributes he deploys – or, more accurately, invites us to wallow in – an excess of vocabulary. (Okay, okay, so I'm calling the kettle black here.) Occasionally his logophilia runs rampant to deliberately amusing effect, but more often it leads him into linguistic booby-traps or to produce tracts of hugely over-adjectived narrative that feel consciously padded and are, not to put too fine a point upon it, a bit dull.

As an example of over-adjectiving, we find on page 181 that Flinx "followed his excited former reptiloid captors", which has at least one adjective too many because of course the beings concerned were not former reptiloids. Again, on page 243 we discover that a membranous construct "looked like a razed segment of electrified soap bubble", a description markedly difficult to construe. Similarly hard to understand is this, from page 281: "Warm particles trickled from her tail where it emerged from the soothing sand, as it did from those of her staff." Or, on page 300, "Mahnahmi had moved so rapidly that the ... escort she had coldly and efficiently liquidated still lay where they had fallen in the corridor" – the corpses hadn't had long enough to crawl deadly off, one assumes. (The word replaced by an ellipsis in that sentence is actually "stunned". No, Mahnahmi didn't stun her escort: she killed them. Foster's meaning is that they had been stunned by the fact that she should suddenly turn on them and kill them.)

There is really rather too much of this sort of stuff.

The whole central section of the book, in which Flinx wanders about the desert surface of Pyrassis to no particular purpose except to have brushes with death – thirst, hunger, cunningly camouflaged alien predators, pursuing AAnn, etc. – seems uncommonly overextended. All that happens of any real importance during the course of 120 pages or so is that Flinx learns of the existence of the alien supertransmitter, alerts the AAnn to the presence of a human intruder in their territory (so that they can start chasing him), and in conjunction with a couple of AAnn inadvertently triggers the supertransmitter into activity. This portion of the book ends somewhat perfunctorily: suddenly, inspired by quasi-intelligent plants aboard, his ship's AI decides to send down a shuttle to rescue Flinx – and, whoosh, away he goes.

This anticlimax could be more disappointing to the reader were it not for the fact that, during those preceding 120 pages, the pulse has largely failed to pound. The great disadvantage of throwing vocabulary into a text by the bucketful is that all possibility of dramatic tension is smothered under the verbal scree. Here is just an abridged part of the description (pages 110-11) of those quasi-intelligent plants coming to the conclusion that Flinx needs rescuing from the Pyrassian surface:

His emboldened convictions were not matched by certain growths he had left behind on board the Teacher [his ship]. In ways that could not be explained by contemporary biology, physics, or any other branch of the familiar sciences, they sensed that something had gone seriously wrong with the warm-blooded vertebrate in whose charge they had been placed. When his absence persisted, they grew quietly frantic. Leaves twitched imperceptibly in the windless confines of the Teacher's lounge. Petals dipped under the influence of forces far more subtle and less obvious than falling water. Unseen roots curled in response to wave patterns that had nothing to do with the subtle movements of soil and grit.

The situation was analyzed in the absence of anything Flinx or any other chordate would recognize as a brain. It involved a manifold process of cogitation far more alien than any propounded by AAnn or thranx, Otoid or Quillp. Among the known sentients, only the cetacea of Cachalot or the Sumacrea of Longtunnel might, upon exerting a supreme effort, have glimpsed an intimation of the process, but no more than that. It was not possible for compartmentalized organic brains deliberating by means of sequential electric impulses to fathom what was taking place among the plants of Midworld. [...]

In silence broken only by the whisper of air being recycled through the hull, envisionings sprang lucent and undiminished among the alien flora. What inhered among them inhered among every other growing thing on the world from which they had come. It was not a discussion in the sense that subjects were put forth for disputation and debate. Did clouds moot before resolving to rain? Did atmosphere argue prior to sending a breeze northward, or to the east? When a whirling magnetar blew off overwhelming quantities of gamma rays, was the direction and moment of eruption a consequence of cognizant confutation?

And so on. A later piece of description (page 154) seems curiously apropos in this context: "Like black pudding, the maze threatened to congeal around him ..." Maybe it's all intended to be a parody of E.E. "Doc" Smith. Or Lionel Fanthorpe. Or Michael Innes ...

The net effect of such overwriting is to turn what should have been a fast-moving romp – as per Harry Harrison's Deathworld (1960), shall we say – into something rather sluggish and tedious. Although the abrupt removal of Flinx from his Pyrassian hazards is, as noted, anticlimactic, certainly this reader greeted it with a heartfelt sigh of relief in that it signalled the end of an extended section in which it seemed the author had lost his way – as if his schema insisted that 40% or so of the book should consist of Flinx's adventures on Pyrassis but that, once Foster had got his protagonist there, he discovered there was a paucity of adventures to be had.

And the telling does indeed improve a bit thereafter, as we head towards the final confrontation between Flinx and his alter ego, although still there is never any great suspense because of the continuing plethora of unnecessary vocabulary. (The first section of the book, set on Earth, is much more plainly told and hence much more enjoyable and effective.) The ancient artefacts display their wonders, as ancient artefacts do; the greatest wonder of all is that Flinx has, at some stage in the past, encountered something just like one of them, and so knows what to do with it even if unclear as to its actual function. No real surprise for the reader here: what it does is zap the AAnn who have been malevolently hunting him down.

The conclusion of the book, alas, leaves much unresolved, thereby allowing for the inevitable sequel.

Foster is a very much better writer than this book portrays him – novels like Icerigger (1974) and Midworld (1975), while hardly heavyweight classics, are memorably enjoyable, even if the latter is perhaps a bit too redolent of Brian Aldiss's Hothouse/The Long Afternoon of Earth (1962). Reunion, by contrast, comes across as a romp that doesn't romp or a space-operatic Sense of Wonder tale that lacks the Sense of Wonder. It is reasonably entertaining in parts, but lacks either the vivacity or the central driving idea to pull the reader delightedly forward. Its blurb describes it as "a roller-coaster ride into the unknown", but the car – although occasionally trying to hiccup itself into motion – stays fixed in its place at the start of the rails, while the ideas and imaginings of the book seem to stick only too resolutely to the known.

Yet Foster can never be discounted, as far too many people do on the basis of all those novelizations. In the past he has often enough followed an unsatisfying novel with one that is tremendous fun. Dedicated followers of the adventures of Pip and Flinx will doubtless enjoy Reunion as a minor entrant in a series that began as long ago as 1983. Other readers might wish to wait until the next volume.

—Infinity Plus

Last Harbor

by George Foy

Bantam Spectra, 357 pages, paperback, 2002 reissue of a book originally published in 2001

Somewhere in New England there's a decaying harbour, and living there on a decaying sloop is the equally decaying Slocum, once the technical brains behind X-Corp Multimedia but now a recluse nursing himself through the miseries of his shattered marriage and rejection by his daughter. He wants nothing to do with the world, and the world is adamant that it wants nothing to do with him.

That future world is both recognizable and unrecognizable to us. The milieux within which Slocum moves are little different from their counterparts today; the poor and relatively poor have seen little change in their lives except possibly for the worse. The elite rich, by contrast, have grown inexorably richer, and the technological future is really theirs alone. The sad paradox is that they seem to be doing very little with it except find new ways of entertaining themselves, of filling up the hours with pleasurable idleness, of keeping their lives empty. The vitality of the human race seems to be almost exclusively the province of the poor and dispossessed.

The business of X-Corp Multimedia is interactive virtual-reality entertainment – the Flash. In effect, X-Corp Multimedia are the new drug lords, and they have come to rule the world; because the Flash is as mind-destroyingly addictive as any pharmaceutical yet of course perfectly legal.

One night, as Slocum contemplates either death or his dreams of sailing off to find freedom in the as yet untrammelled parts of the world that must surely exist – the two subjects of his contemplation are really one and the same – there moors in the harbour an almost impossibly huge luxury ocean liner. Aboard it, aside from the crew and security goons, there is only one person: an enigmatic and secretive young woman, Melisande, a recluse like himself by whom Slocum is at first idly attracted, then obsessed. As his obsession unfolds, it draws him back into the land of the living while at the same time progressively revealing the hideous truth not only of Melisande's existence but also of the way the world is run.

The Last Harbor is a singularly beautifully written book, one that transcends all genre boundaries; it is a serious and major piece of fiction. At the same time it is also a crusader for fiction, for the written and printed word, encroached upon as it increasingly is by other media forms. Consider this:

In that same cool blue light he looked at the book and saw what she [Slocum's estranged daughter] would see – an incomprehensible attempt to approximate, in black-and-white and painful script, a story that four years ago she could have watched in color and sound so perfect that she might as well have been living it. Worst of all, the gap between what he had put into it as both creation and gift, and what she saw it as, would substantify, more than her mother's words ever could, how the separation between them had grown. If he could not understand how she felt about the stories that had once shaped her life, what could he know of who she was now, or how she felt? And what right did he have to insist that he know the forces she reacted to daily?

In other words, the printed book grants the reader freedom – a freedom that is all too readily denied to the population of The Last Harbor's VR-dominated world. It is the same freedom that Slocum evisages when he fantasizes about sailing his sloop away to somewhere new, somewhere better, somewhere so bright and shining that it could only exist in those dreams of his – the freedom of exercising one's own imagination rather than simply participating vicariously in the enactment of someone else's imagination.

Foy is a master of atmospherics, and mood. This is one of those books where, once immersed, one has to make an effort to jolt oneself back into the everyday world, to recognize it as the true reality and the book's as a fictional one. Although there is in fact quite a lot of physical action in The Last Harbor, the real story is one of mental action – and it's an absolutely engrossing one.

Foy's characterization is spot-on as well. He is an expert in that rare art of perceiving other human beings. Here is just one of the many little character vignettes that appear all through the novel:

[Vera's] gaze seemed the product of great internal pressure. Slocum remembered Vera from X-Corp Christmas parties ... She had always seemed poised and charming and without foundation; one of those people who talked a great deal and the more they talked the less, you realized, they were actually able to do.

Or this, spoken by one of the characters:

All dat man's got is, leaving his wife. Madre de diosh, what's he gonna have left if he really does it?

And then there is the somewhat longer description of Melisande when Slocum first meets her:

She had thin shoulders covered by a scarlet dressing gown that fell to the floor in columns so that for a microsecond he had the impression the ship had been designed to suit her. Or maybe it was the other way around and, because the whole ship was designed like that, she had dressed to match.

A white silk scarf was wrapped around her neck, which seemed to bend as it rose to support the oval of her face. Her nose was very straight until the end, where it turned up. Her chin and cheekbones were not weak but they did not quite work together – though they looked as if they might, in a plane projected forward from her face, closer to where she was going. Her hair was caught up in back and draped around her features in frondlike whirls and curves. Thin, a little crooked in how she held herself against the door; those were all part of his collection of first impressions of Melisande Yonge. But the ones that hit him hardest, and stayed with him longest, were: She was pale, so pale her skin looked like rice paper lit from within; and the combination of that pallor and her sudden appearance out of nowhere and the particular presence of her convinced him, for another microsecond, that he knew her; more specifically, that he had invented her... .

The Last Harbor is in its way a very quiet book, but it is also a very powerful one. And a wonderful one.

—Infinity Plus

Fitcher's Brides

by Gregory Frost

Tor, 398 pages, hardback, 2002; foreword by Terri Windling

This superb novel is one of the Terri Windling-edited Fairy Tale series in which writers recast traditional tales. In this instance, Frost combines Bluebeard and Fitcher's Birds to produce a fantasy that's very much more entrancing than either.

It's 1843, and charismatic preacher Elias Fitcher claims the world is about to end; all except those who come to dwell in his utopian community in the Finger Lakes region of New York State will be forever damned by a vengeful Lord. Among the families suckered by this nonsense are the Charters: mom, dad and their three lovely daughters, Vernelia, Amy and Kate. Fitcher's eye first falls on the eldest sister, and she becomes his bride ... but soon disappears. Then it's the turn of Amy, and finally, of course, Kate is "favored." Kate, who's spunky and intelligent, succeeds in outwitting and defeating the vile sexual predator Fitcher where the over-sensible Vernelia and the flighty Amy have failed.

This is exactly as you'd expect from a fairy tale. What you wouldn't have expected, though, is that Frost succeeds in turning his fable into a very full fantasy, in two principal respects. One of these is the long denouement, about which I ought not to say too much (for fear of spoiling) except that Fitcher proves to be very much more than the mere charlatanistic mortal he seems. And the other is Frost's creation of the bizarre, near-macabre supposedly utopian society itself. Jekyll's Glen seems, as you read, to be simply a rather strange community – well, what else might one expect from nineteenth-century religious nuts? Very subtly Frost reveals its further strangenesses, so that it's only after some considerable amount of acceptance of the plausible reality of Jekyll's Glen that you suddenly bring yourself up short at the realization that things are actually very odd. It's then that you look back and discover quite how much you've taken at face value that you shouldn't have.

Frost's artistry is exemplary, and his tale-telling likewise. This is a dark and broody novel that'll hold you from beginning to end.

—Crescent Blues

Alone

by Lisa Gardner

Bantam, 336 pages, hardback, 2005

Lisa Gardner at the top of her form has become one of the best of our current genre-thriller writers, and even when she achieves less than that she's still head and shoulders above many of her competitors. In Alone she doesn't attain the heights of The Survivors Club or even The Killing Hour (both discussed below), but she has nonetheless written a thriller of some considerable interest in that it's a sort of crossover between the genre thriller and the noir novel, coming complete with a femme fatale figure.

This femme fatale is beautiful, sexy Catherine Rose Gagnon. A couple of decades ago, as an adolescent, she was imprisoned underground and repeatedly raped by the psychopathic Richard Umbrio; that she survived is the reason Umbrio was finally caught and put behind bars. More recently she has married the playboy Jimmy Gagnon, son of a prominent judge, and borne him their son Nathan. But Jimmy is a serial adulterer and drunkard, and abuses her.

One night the Boston SWAT team is called to the Gagnon home; yet again the neighbors have reported the sounds of violence – gunshots, even. Massachusetts State Trooper Bobby Dodge is deployed across the street as a sniper, should the need for one arise. And arise it does: he sees Jimmy Gagnon apparently about to shoot Catherine, and fires first. But Jimmy's father, Judge Gagnon, does not take his son's death easily, and commences to use his very considerable power to hound Bobby on murder charges. And the judge also persecutes Catherine, trying obsessively to seize custody of Nathan from her.

Meanwhile, Umbrio has been unexpectedly released from prison, and has begun a murder rampage. Yet these are not random killings: he has been hired to follow someone else's agenda. His ultimate target is the girl who escaped from his clutches 25 years ago, Catherine Gagnon.

Both Bobby and Catherine are in their different ways alone against the world, and so naturally they gravitate toward each other. The only way they can hope to get themselves out of the legal quagmire the judge has cast them into is to delve into the complex of motivations driving the man's increasingly strident attempts to ruin their lives. For Bobby this means walking an emotional tightrope so far as his feelings for Catherine are concerned: on the one hand he is engaged in a torrid affair with her, and adores her; on the other he suspects her of merely using him as her puppet, and perhaps even of engineering the death of her husband.

A welter of fine supporting characters help this story bubble along merrily. I particularly enjoyed Elizabeth Lane, the psychotherapist to whom Bobby is referred for counselling after the shooting; she too has her reasons for feeling alone. Susan, the girlfriend whom Bobby dumps in his infatuation for femme fatale Catherine, is likewise well drawn, as are Bobby's one-time lover and fellow cop D.D. and even the murderous Umbrio. What marks Alone as a lesser Gardner work is that there are a few plot twists so improbable that the necessary suspension of disbelief becomes hard to maintain; one of these in particular is completely gratuitous (the twist is irrelevant to the plot), artificial (it's only a twist because the author hasn't been playing fair with the reader), and consequently irritating.

But, as noted at the outset, even lesser Gardner is better than much other genre-thriller fare, so Alone can certainly be recommended as a thoroughly enjoyable means of whiling away a few winter's evenings.

—Crescent Blues

The Killing Hour

by Lisa Gardner

Bantam, 324 pages, hardback, 2003

There's a serial killer at work, but a serial killer with a difference!

Yes, I know: you've heard that opening line before. But please bear with me. This one has an m.o. whereby he abducts two young women at once; one he kills immediately, but then he doctors the corpse so that (for anyone who can first realize his intentions and then interpret his cryptic clues) it acts as a pointer to the location where he has dumped the second abductee – alive, but in fiercely hostile territory and with an inadequacy of survival essentials. The woman who is "first victim" is thus the lucky one; so far all but one of his "second victims" have endured torturous deaths.

The killer's stamping ground has hitherto been Georgia, but Georgia agent Mac McCormack has had an anonymous tip that brings him to FBI Headquarters at Quantico. Sure enough, the next "first victim" is dumped in right inside the Quantico grounds, where it is discovered by trainee agent Kimberly Quincy. Assisted by Kimberly's ex-FBI father and his lover, now running an investigations agency together, Mac and Kimberly have to do battle with inordinate amounts of FBI red tape and pecking-order politics as they try to identify the whereabouts of the "second victim" in time to save her life. What they discover is that this time the Eco-Killer – so-dubbed by the press because his motives appear to include a twisted attempt to draw public attention to endangered wilderness areas – has devised a riddle far more devious and far more ambitious in its scope than any he has set before ...

So far so good – and the fact that this tale is told in Gardner's characteristically smooth and readable style helps proceedings along. With its notion of murdered bodies being adulterated to offer elaborate clues, The Killing Hour is almost reminiscent of those fascinating Golden Age detective novels by the likes of Ellery Queen and John Dickson Carr where the murderer is engaging in a complicated intellectual game with the detective; in such terms, Gardner's novel is every bit as engrossing as those precursors.

But don't get the idea you're in for an old-fashioned entertainment of the Queen or Carr type. This is very much a 21st-century detection, with an engagingly feisty heroine to match. (That she should be attracted to McCormack, who seems to have more hands than brains when women are around, grates.) And the sufferings of the victims are not intellectualized into irrelevance, as would be the case in the traditional entertainment.

Unfortunately, that pinpoints the eventual problem with The Killing Hour. Its literary precursors did not strive for realism – indeed, deliberately shunned it so the focus would be on the puzzle, on the game, with the plot being all the more delightful for its stark implausibility. Gardner's plotting in the later stages of this novel proves to be every bit as implausible; but because the telling relies on realism – her intent is to thrill, not just to puzzle – her denouement thereby comes as a profound letdown. A shame, because there has been so much before those final fifty pages that enthralled.

An oddity. Internal evidence would suggest that Gardner's intention was to call this novel Heat Kills. Instead it bears the rather hackneyed, uninspiring title The Killing Hour. One wonders what went on there.

—Crescent Blues

The Survivors' Club

by Lisa Gardner

Bantam, 368 pages, hardback, 2002

Jillian, Carol and Meg, although all beautiful, are three very different women – the first is forceful and dominant, the second is a bit of an emotional wreck, and the third is young and seemingly naive – but all share one thing in common: they have all survived an attack by the murderous College Hill Rapist. Together they formed the Survivors' Club and bullied the Rhode Island cops into intensifying the hunt for the rapist, with the result that Eddie Como has been arrested and charged with the crimes on the basis of a DNA match. As he arrives for the first day of his trial, however, Como is assassinated by a professional hit man who is himself promptly killed by a car bomb.

Onto this turbulent scene comes state cop Roan Griffin, who is recovering from traumas of his own: he had a breakdown after, in quick succession, his wife died of cancer and a serial child-rapist and -killer he'd been hunting, David Price, proved to be the seemingly friendly guy next door. As he probes the two new killings Griffin becomes emotionally involved with the three members of the Survivors' Club, each in different ways, and with their families. Matters become rapidly more complex when the College Hill Rapist strikes again, once more leaving sperm traces whose DNA matches that of the dead Como. As Griffin delves he discovers that nothing – about the crimes or about the Survivors – is as it has hitherto seemed ...

This is an extremely impressive mystery-thriller, enhanced by generally excellent characterization and sense of mood. Some aspects are of course predictable through the nature of the genre: Como was innocent, Griffin and Jillian are destined for each other, and so on. But these conventions serve to satisfy our expectations – which they do admirably – and are anyway more than compensated for by countless delightfully unexpected twists and turns of the plot. What's additionally pleasing is that Gardner isn't afraid to be pretty tough with the reader at times, unflinchingly presenting the sheer nastiness of violent rape; there's also a somewhat muted subtext about capital punishment.

A couple of cavils, though. First, the mechanism whereby those DNA matches have been forged by the perpetrators seems very improbable. It may well be theoretically possible, but it seems so byzantine as to create a plausibility gap that even as good a writer as Gardner cannot bridge. Second, toward the end events enter a phase of Silence of the Lambs-like melodrama; that this should happen is inevitable as a consequence of the preceding plot – it's not gratuitous stuff – but again it makes the reader's happy suspension of disbelief difficult to maintain.

These are, though, surprisingly minor criticisms when you're actually reading the book; it's only afterwards that they surface as discontents. All the rest of the tale-telling is so very good that you're prepared to forgive Gardner just about any lapse as you feverishly turn the pages ...

—Crescent Blues

Science Good, Bad and Bogus

by Martin Gardner

Prometheus, 412 pages, paperback, 1989

Martin Gardner's book Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (1957; an expanded version of his 1952 book Fads and Fallacies) is one of those rare books that I would recommend should be in the library of every intelligent human being. Dated much of it might be, but as an example of how pseudoscience withers under the spotlight of rational thought it is almost incomparable: it serves as a source of great entertainment but also as a warning to each and every one of us that we should examine closely our received ideas as well as some of our own dottier notions.

Science Good, Bad and Bogus is, in a way, Gardner's very much later companion volume to that seminal work, and like it is drawn from essays written over the years. It's a much fatter book, and one's tempted to say that this is largely because of the amount of repetition in it; whereas in Fads he went to a certain amount of trouble to ensure the book was indeed an integral book rather than merely a retrospective, here he ... well, basically, he didn't bother.

This actually does the compilation a great disservice. One can forgive anyone for harping on about their bêtes noires – Gardner's prime ones are Immanuel Velikovsky and Uri Geller – but constant repetition of that harping-on becomes at first merely tedious and then as maddening as being asked to watch a dead horse being flogged and required to applaud each and every time.

His subject matter is of course a mixture of pseudoscience and the supernatural/psychic; in effect the supernatural/psychic becomes here a subgenre of pseudoscience, in that he approaches psychic claims from the viewpoint of experimental science. Thus, for example, while it is patent that he regards Geller as a charlatan-conjurer, he is more concerned with the deeply flawed investigations of Geller's claims by pseudoscientists and established scientists alike than with the full details of the trickery. This is actually a much more rewarding approach than the obvious one – attacking Geller's claims directly – and profoundly more educational. A recurring theme, and one that could well be carried over into our evaluations of more orthodox science, is that expertise and indeed genius in one sphere of human understanding should not be taken as any qualification at all for pronouncements in another. To continue with Geller as our example, we have much here on how a fine mathematician, John Taylor, was hopelessly deluded when he came to examine the supposed phenomenon of spoon-bending – not just by Geller but by a horde of gleefully cheating kids.

About half the essays in Science Good, Bad and Bogus are extended book reviews, and in many ways these are even more revealing than the others. While a good number of the books he eviscerates have vanished into obscurity, all are, of course, still floating around in libraries and second-hand bookshops, and are thus continuing to delude the unwary. After each review, as per the other essays, Gardner includes a postscript, updating his comments as necessary and often citing the outraged letters received in the wake of the item's original publication. Again, these postscripts are especially rewarding in the case of the book reviews, for many of the authors have chosen to defend their work in extenso ... and sometimes they make a reasonably good fist of it, reminding us that we should be just as sceptical about sceptics like Gardner as about anyone else.

This note leads to another mild criticism of the book. While my knowledge of the field is far less extensive than Gardner's, every now and then I had the feeling that perhaps an occasional baby was being flushed away with the bathwater. This sense was brought into sharp focus when I came across Gardner's assault on a famous joke of John Gribbin's. In Gribbin's clearly labelled exercise in wild speculation, White Holes (1977), he discusses tachyons, hypothetical faster-than-light particles which the mathematics insist would have to "travel backwards in time" (i.e., go the "wrong way" along time's arrow). In a spirit of self-mockery concerning all the quite serious (if, to repeat, wild) speculation that fills the book, Gribbin advanced the deliberately spurious theory that Gellerite spoon-bending might be caused by the audience's astonishment on sight of a spoon being bent releasing a burst of tachyons; said tachyons would then "travel backwards in time" to bend the spoon. It's not one of the world's greatest jokes, but it's pretty obviously a joke.

Gardner obviously didn't spot that, instead taking it as an example of the kind of speculation that he disliked in the rest of Gribbin's book (and in Gribbin's and Stephen Plagemann's earlier, definitely attackable book The Jupiter Effect). In the postscript to the review he cites Gribbin's remarkably friendly follow-up letter pointing out gently that Gardner had, well, missed the joke. Gardner's response to this letter is astonishing, and does not burnish his reputation much; it's very much a huffy "well, he would say that, wouldn't he?" diatribe. Gardner then goes on to attack a different Gribbin book, Timewarps (1979), as if its many flaws somehow bolstered Gardner's floundering argument that he hadn't, for once, been hoist by his own hyper-sceptical petard.

I've gone on at length about this single example not because it's desperately important in itself but because it symptomatizes the suspicion that Gardner can become just as obsessively tunnel-visioned in the zeal to prove his case as any pseudoscientist blinded by conviction to any contrary evidence.

Elsewhere among the many outraged letters quoted in these postscripts we see frequent examples of his correspondents' inability to understand the nature of science. For example, in the case of one telepathy experiment Gardner points out that it would have been possible for a confederate to have seen how the Zener cards were turning by standing on a chair in a corridor outside the experimenter's room and watching through a fanlight. Now, Gardner's point was not that this did happen but that it could have – and the very fact that it could have, or that something like it could have, destroys the validity of the supposedly scientific experiment. That is, it is not proof that there was no telepathy involved; it merely shows that the experiment, likewise, has not proved that there was, despite the experimenters' claims. This sort of refinement is clearly over the heads of many of those who wrote to complain about Gardner's various conclusions.

All of this said, Science Good, Bad and Bogus is, overall, an extremely valuable, interesting and entertaining compilation, and can be thoroughly recommended to anyone interested in the stranger workings of the human mind and in the effectiveness of rational, analytic thought as a tool for understanding the grab-bag of marvels that is the universe around us.

—Infinity Plus

Death in Dublin

by Bartholomew Gill

Morrow, 304 pages, hardback, 2002

Bartholomew Gill (real name Mark McGarrity) died in summer 2002 and so this posthumous novel is presumably the last in his popular sequence about Dublin cop Peter McGarr – unless, perhaps, McGarrity left further unpublished manuscripts, or unless the publisher commissions another author to continue the series.

The Book of Kells and a couple others are stolen from Trinity College, Dublin, the thieves leaving behind a gruesomely murdered security chief. Initially responsibility is laid at the feet of an obscure pro-Celtic-Golden-Age-That-Never-Was secret society, the New Druids, a suspicion reinforced by receipt of video tapes, seemingly from the society, demanding ransom.

But is it all really so simple? McGarr, recovering from two years of widowerhood, doubts it even while falling for the sensual lures of one of the key witnesses, Kara. He doubts it even more as Chicago-gangster-style violence erupts on the Dublin streets, as the body count of gorily murdered tangential characters mounts, as he goes back for a further bout of uninhibited passion with the sophisticated Kara, whom he can hardly credit would be interested in a gnarly old street cop like himself, as ...

This last novel in the series was in fact my first – alas, most probably my last, too. It's entertaining, but in a rather superficial way; if there are hidden depths to the tale and its recounting then I missed them. And, by about a quarter of the way through, credulity begins to be stretched beyond breaking point. No. I can't believe either that Kara would throw herself wantonly at McGarr; even less can I believe that her behaviour wouldn't make him smell a very large rat. I can't believe Dubliners would be so blasé about the sudden epidemic of shoot-ups in their city, or about the grandiosely staged serial murders; to be true, the people are shown to be glued to the TV news, but there's no sense that, say, they're taking such precautions as staying indoors a lot. I didn't much believe in any of the characters, from the Irish taoiseach and McGarr's dimwit publicity-seeking rival superintendent on down – with the exception of McGarr himself, his immediately family and a muckraking journalist, who are well handled. And, while it's many a year since last I was in that city, I didn't even find myself believing in the Dublin setting.

A further annoyance: the publisher presumably felt so reverential toward its deceased author's sacrosanct words that numerous hasty first-draft clumsinesses are evident: "The others were staring at him, one man even having rose from his seat to get a better look"; "McGarr knew other people who had suffered losses as great as he is but whose hobbies had given them succour and solace"; and so on

I suspect Gill fans will enjoy this novel as the completion of the saga. For the rest of us, this is a book to be borrowed from the library as a way of passing a no more than moderately enjoyable evening.

—Crescent Blues

Vaporetto 13

by Robert Girardi

Sceptre, 197 pages, paperback, 1998

There are too many supernatural novels about Venice, and almost all of them conform to the same template. An American or a Brit who works in one of the professions – teaching and finance are particularly popular – has recently suffered either a bereavement or the bustup of an amatory relationship, and they go to Venice, either for a therapeutic holiday or for professional reasons. There they discover the mystical magic of the damp and squalid city, get lost a few times while walking insomniac among its bridges and back alleys, and encounter the supernatural. If they are female, they are likely (although this is far from inevitable) to meet a staunch and reliable male who helps them through the various assaults mounted by the spirit world, and at the end either sail off into the sunset with them or say a wistful and moist-eyed farewell along the lines of: "I love you forever and the sex was grrreat, but It Was Not To Be." If they're male, it's more likely the fascinating but highly enigmatic woman whom they meet while walking insomniac among those bridges and back alleys and with whom they have that grrreat sex doesn't support them against the spirits but actually is a ghost made flesh.

Robert Girardi's Venice novel falls into the latter category. It's short – little more than a longish novella – and it's generally very nicely written, but it has absolutely nothing new to say. The ghost woman is encountered about ten pages after you've started impatiently wondering when she's going to appear, and the only surprise about the denouement is the fact that Girardi believes the revelation that the woman is a ghost is going to surprise you. After that, in an epilogue, his hero (Jack Squire, touchingly called Jack Spire in the blurb, presumably by the same person who in the prelims describes good reviews of Girardi's previous novels as "paise") seeks pastoral advice from his priest, who guides him as follows:

And before you can come to mass, you'll need to come to confession ... Because if, as you say, you pursued sexual relations with that Venetian woman outside the sanctity of marriage, it's still adultery plain and simple, even if she was dead when you did it.

There are too many supernatural novels about Venice, and almost all of them conform to the same template. This is one of them.

—Samhain

Motion to Kill

by Joel Goldman

Pinnacle, 400 pages, paperback, 2002

If you don't get further than the first twenty pages or so of this legal thriller ...

Well, the trouble is it's difficult to get through those first couple of dozen pages, but thereafter you find yourself reading a moderately enjoyable romp.

Lou Mason is a painfully smart smartass and the most recently arrived partner of law firm Sullivan & Christenson. The firm survives largely on the business brought to it by senior partner Richard Sullivan, so it's bad news all round when he's found drowned – a death soon determined to be murder. Fab babe cop Kelly Holt investigates, and Mason insinuates himself into her investigation partly for self-protection (not only is he a possible suspect but the murderer seems to have lethal intentions towards him, too) and partly in the hopes of insinuating himself into something quite different. He'd been on the point of resigning because he'd realized that much of Sullivan's business was crooked; now it becomes increasingly evident that the corruption extended far further through the firm than he could ever have envisaged. He's teamed up with fab babe lawyer Sandra Connelly – who has never shown much interest before but now seems to be throwing herself at him – to try to salvage as much of the firm as possible, while around them the body-count inexorably rises.

The double dose of fab-babery is a bit hard to credit, especially given Lou's exceptionally rebarbative incessant line of smartasshood – his chat-up lines might have impressed the girls at high school, but a grown-up woman like Kelly would surely have the sense just to smack him one – and elsewhere there are plot elements that strain plausibility more than a trifle, but otherwise Motion to Kill is largely fun stuff, and the pages keep turning at a satisfactory pace. In purely technical terms the writing is often somewhat amateurish, with in particular a plethora of unheralded changes in point-of-view making some passages hard to follow. Overall, indeed, what the novel desperately needs is the attention of a good editor; even a good copy-editor would have been useful. Any diligent editor would have done something about those opening pages: the opening chapter or two would serve well in a creative writing class as an example of What Not To Do.

If you're looking for another Scott Turow, John Grisham or Marianne Wesson, then you're going to have to look a bit further than Motion to Kill. If you're a fan of David Baldacci, though, then you're going to find this – which is, let us remember, Goldman's first novel – at least comparable and probably a step up. Certainly he's a writer who seems worth some investment of a reader's persistence for future, hopefully more polished works: I definitely plan to read his succeeding novels, The Last Witness and the forthcoming (February 2004) The Cold Truth.

Let's keep our fingers crossed that Pinnacle have given him an editor for those; it is, after all, what publishers are for.

—Crescent Blues

The Tarzan Chronicles

Text by Howard E. Green

Foreword by Phil Collins

Hyperion, 192 pages including two 8-page gatefolds, hardback, 1999

For some while now Hyperion have been producing a The Art of ... book for each new Disney animated feature, and with their large format, lavish illustrations and generally useful texts these books have become items to be treasured – in some instances, as with Mulan, perhaps more than the movie itself.

In this instance it was a foregone conclusion the book would be a delight: the backgrounds in Disney's Tarzan are so magnificent that a book devoted to those alone would be an object to adore in its own right. As it is, we have here in addition hundreds of roughs, conceptuals and finished artworks showing all the main characters, either solo or played off against the sumptuous backdrop of the African jungle (or, quite properly, Disney's vision of it – just as Burroughs's Africa wasn't the real Africa).

Perhaps surprisingly for an art book, the text, albeit journalistic in style and treatment, is not just adequate but good – not merely a carelessly thrown-together adjunct to the pictures. Green has clearly had extensive access to the main players in the game, most notably Glen Keane, Supervising Animator on the character Tarzan. Naturally this character is the one treated by Green in greatest depth, but for my money the most interesting section of the book is in fact that on the bringing to the screen of the other characters in the movie, most particularly Jane.

Jane is anyway a fascinatingly realized character: on the one hand plain and on the other attractive; on the one hand resembling Minnie Driver, who voiced the part, and on the other – at least according to Driver herself – "a character that doesn't really look like [me]". These two linked dichotomies make for a screen persona to which one's emotional response is satisfyingly complex. Green is clearly aware of this, and there is the sense in his text that he would have liked to devote rather more attention to Jane than the dictates of space permitted.

And then there are those backgrounds. Produced using a computer technique called Deep Canvas, whereby fully convincing 3D images can be generated – a sort of turn-of-the-century equivalent of the multiplane camera, and potentially every bit as important – these artworks are nevertheless best viewed as just that: artworks, and exquisite ones. For, although computers have been used in the backgrounds' final manifestation, we mustn't forget that it was human hands and human minds that created the originals, without which the computers would have been useless. The teams led by David McCamley (Supervising Digital Background Painter) and Dale Drummond (Supervisor of "Look Development") should be credited with a very genuine artistry – several fine artists whom I know have rushed out to buy this book purely on the strength of the backgrounds – rather than be regarded as mere keyboard slaves.

The only area in which this book could be said to fall short is in its discussion of the Deep Canvas process itself. Apparently there was more here, but at the last moment Disney became concerned over the dissemination of trade secrets and so text was excised. This presumably accounts for one or two odd design decisions, such as a massive double-page spread showing only a close-up of the upper part of Tarzan's face. But that is a very minor criticism.

The production and design values are first-rate and, just to top it all off, the cover price, although $50 may seem a lot, represents a bargain by comparison with other art books. This is a splendid and extremely beautiful book.

—unknown venue

The Anniversary

by Amy Gutman

Little, Brown, 352 pages, hardback, 2003

Exactly five years ago notorious serial killer Steven Gage was executed. Now three women closely involved in his final days – his ex-girlfriend, the lawyer who tried to get his death sentence commuted, the bestselling writer who built a career on her book about him – receive anonymous notes wishing them a "Happy Anniversary". Soon after, the writer, Diane, is murdered in a fashion somewhat resembling the dead killer's modus operandi.

The crime brings together the other two women, lawyer Melanie and ex-girlfriend Laura, now living as Callie and hoping the world has forgotten her past. They recall how Gage, while on Death Row, tutored other prisoners in law, so that some gained retrials – among them notorious serial rapist-murderer Lester Crain, who, shortly before escaping detention, vowed he'd show Gage his gratitude ...

Yet Diane's killing has none of the hallmarks of Crain's handiwork. Even so, there are signs that he is, as it were, in the vicinity of all the goings on, and Callie's suspicions centre on him – even after Melanie has been viciously attacked but, significantly, not killed, and even after Melanie's old friend Mike Jamison, an ex-FBI profiler, points out that the attack on Melanie, with its attempt at a quick kill, could not have been more unlike anything done by Crain.

The notion of the crimes of one serial killer being perpetuated by another after his incarceration or death is not a new one, but then most serial-killer-chiller-thriller plots aren't especially original, and that doesn't necessarily stop the resultant novels from doing their essential job of thrilling and chilling. It's what the writer does by way of original development of the well worn premise that can engross us; and, even if that development is itself not particularly original, the writer can carry the whole thing off by creating an appropriately chilling atmosphere or through the manipulation of secondary-level plotting surprises.

Gutman succeeds with the third strategy: several times I was startled by minor twists. Unfortunately, she fails with the first two. For the most part the tale is predictable – e.g., the eventually revealed murderer was my #1 suspect from very early on. But the greater problem is the lack of atmosphere, allied to a failure of her central characters to jump off the page: they should be interesting, because she's praiseworthily striven to give them all sorts of characteristics and foibles that ought to make them real people rather than fictional protagonists, but they stubbornly remain two-dimensional. And so I didn't care what happened to any of them; several times I had to remind myself that, since I was reading this book for review, I couldn't simply put it aside.

It's a pity, because elements of Gutman's subtext are interesting. She raises important questions – without polemic – concerning capital punishment, and she has some significant things to say on the subject of guilt and self-accusation.

In sum, this isn't a bad book. It's just dull where it shouldn't be.

—Crescent Blues

Lost Stories: 21 Long-Lost Stories from the Bestselling Creator of Sam Spade, The Maltese Falcon, and The Thin Man

Edited by Vince Emery, introduction by Joe Gores

Vince Emery Productions, 352 pages, hardback, 2005

A good claim can be made – and it is certainly made by both Joe Gores and Vince Emery in this book – that Samuel Dashiell Hammett was one of the formative influences on 20th-century (and hence 21st-century) US literature, bringing to American fiction a new clarity and terseness of style, not to mention a whole new range of subject matter. Academic critics might point first to Ernest Hemingway in this role but, as Gores and Emery rightly maintain, it seems clear that it was Hemingway who was influenced by Hammett, not vice versa.

The 21 tales assembled here are, as is usually the case with collections of this sort, something of a mixed bag. Some are no more than squibs – one is little over 100 words long – and in some other instances it is easy to see why the stories have slipped through the nets of previous anthologists. But some – like "Laughing Masks" (1923) and "Ber-Bulu" (1925) – are of far more substantial interest. The former is a hardboiled tale of the type for which Hammett is best known; the latter is equally hardboiled but set not in grimy streets but on a remote Philippine island. Future anthologists will have good cause to be grateful to Emery's detective work in unearthing these two – as, of course, do readers today.

However, only about half of this book is occupied by the 21 tales. The remainder, aside from Gores's longish and interesting introduction, comprises Emery's contextualizing text. I soon found that this, constituting as it does a biography of Hammett the writer – with plenty also about Hammett the man – was even more interesting than the stories ... which is saying something. Probably because Hammett's later communist activities have encouraged US literary historians to downplay the extent of his influence, we tend to underappreciate how highly Hammett was regarded at the time; further, we're likely to undervalue Hammett's contributions to the Hammett–Hellman literary partnership because Lillian Hellman, in the eyes of today's literary elites, had the "respectability" of being a playwright whereas Hammett was, after all, "merely a thriller writer". Emery quite radically sets us right on both misconceptions, while at the same time being quite unflinching about Hammett's many flaws as a human being.

As if the content weren't enough on its own to make this book a necessary addition to your shelves, it's also quite beautifully produced, with excellent paper, carefully chosen typography, substantial boards covered in what seems to be real cloth, an old-fashioned square backing, and so on. For the first time in my life, I was impelled to go out and buy one of those stretchy cloth book protectors to keep my review copy pristine.

Lost Stories is essential reading for anyone interested in the development of the crime-fiction genre; as Emery points out, Hammett practically singlehandedly invented the literary style that we now call noir. But even that is to underestimate the importance of this book: it offers a substantial insight into the development of American literature as a whole. Thank you, Mr Emery.

—Crescent Blues

A Caress of Twilight

by Laurell K. Hamilton

Ballantine, 326 pages, hardback, 2002

I have to confess that, the last time I tried to read one of Ms Hamilton's many novels, I got about halfway through and then threw it across the room. The book in question was called Narcissus in Chains, and was the umpteenth volume featuring Ms Hamilton's series heroine Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter. I had fought my way through about two hundred pages of badly written soft porn (I have no aversion at all to well written soft porn) and had come to a section where various of the loathsome characters were discussing adoringly the genital endowment of a particular historical vampire. This vampire, we were told salivatingly, had been the possessor of a penis so doughty that his erection was a full six inches thick.

That's right: thick. Not six inches long. Not even six inches in circumference. But thick.

This reviewer did not, as might have so many other men, rush straight to the nearest mirror to gaze at and weep over his own deficiencies. He did not even accidentally turn the ruler to the centimetre side while frantically checking. Instead he threw the book across the room and then, remembering the principles of academic rigour, asked a couple of congenital experts on matters penile if such a weapon might be of any practicable use other than being waved around proudly to impress the rest of the guys in the locker room.

Gentle reader, they laughed so hard I wondered if I should call an ambulance. And the book stayed thrown.

A Caress of Twilight is not about Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter. It is the second in a series of novels about Meredith Gentry, a princess of Fairyland who is also a private detective in our own world, it being the rather charming conceit of this series that the USA has offered a home to refugees from the Realm of Faerie. Meredith – "Merry" – is somewhat of a fugitive from the politics of the royal courts of Fairyland, some of whom wish to murder her and with others of whom she maintains at best a relationship of mutual distrust, powerbroking chessplay and hostile alliance. She is guarded by a bunch of other elementals, all male and all of them possessed of six-inch ...

Well, no, not quite. At the start of the book, Merry has just finished a threesome with two of the guards, and as the tale – such as it is – progresses she samples the rest of them, in each instance for several drooling pages. Two of them prove to be endowed with members of such enormity that, while not six inches thick (oddly, Ms Hamilton gives no precise dimensions concerning such important attributes, neither in US Customary units nor in metric), our heroine has, to use technical phraseology, some considerable difficulty cramming the damn' things in.

Now, I wouldn't want to give the impression that this book is nothing but nonstop writhing. There's a plot as well. It's rather problematic to remember what the plot actually is, because it appears only intermittently among the couplings, among lengthy and tedious character descriptions, and among interminable scried conversations with various royals that seem to have little point except to show what complete bastards they all are except our Merry – who might well be just as much a bastard if she could ever stay upright long enough, but that's only a wild speculation on this reviewer's part, you understand.

Lemme think, now. The plot has to do with a criminal investigation that Merry and her studs are attempting to carry out. There's this ex-goddess of Fairyland who decided years ago to come to Hollywood and be a screen goddess in the human world instead. Someone's out to get her. Someone's also mass-murdering people in all directions, and the police – one of whom, the lieutenant in charge of the case, is really, really stupid and doesn't think Merry and her pals will be at all helpful, whereas we wise readers know of course that she's the only hope – the police, as I say, are getting nowhere. The screen goddess wants to have a baby by her mortal husband, but he's at death's door so Merry and one of her gang have to do some detailed proxy banging for the luckless couple. Someone in Fairyland has let loose an ancient terror which is responsible for all the bad things that are going on.

Case solved, out with the measuring tape and back to the fun.

Merry is not the only fun- and dimension-lovin' female in the book's cast, although she's the only one whose fun is described in gratuitous detail. Here's a sample of one of the others being unusually subtle:

"I also never thought you'd be so blessed down below." [The Queen] sounded wistful now, like a child who hadn't gotten what she wanted for her birthday. "I mean, you are descended from dogs and phoukas, and they are not much in that way."

"Most phoukas have more than one shape, my Queen."

"Dog and horse, sometimes eagle, yes, I know all about that. What does that have to do ..." She stopped in mid-sentence, and a smile crooked at the edges of her lipsticked mouth. "Are you saying that your grandfather could turn into a horse as well as a dog?"

He spoke softly. "Yes, my Queen."

That's in fact one of the better-written parts of the book; elsewhere we find such delights as "He had managed to keep just enough cover over his groin so that he was covered", to isolate just one. Late in the book we encounter the minor character Bucca, who is supposedly Cornish; in order to prove that he's Cornish his speech is rendered in dialect that veers excitingly between Irish, Scottish, Yorkshire/Lancashire and who knows what else. And so on.

There are also, unless this reader is being even stupider than usual, some puzzling inconsistencies. To select a single example, on page 25 we're clearly told that the penalty for a Raven (a member of the Queen's personal guards) who touches – I assume this is a euphemism – any woman other than the Queen is death by torture, yet this is clearly forgotten later on when there is no thought of making it secret from the Queen that our Merry discriminates not one whit against the Raven seconded to her personal entourage.

As stated at the outset, this reviewer has no particular prejudice against reading soft porn (so long as it's well or at least competently written). There is a point of unease, however, when one begins to sense – probably completely incorrectly – that a text has teetered from consciously created erotica (or attempted erotica) into the writer's personal masturbatory fantasies. Within fantasy, one strikes that point frequently when reading some of Anne Rice's early, pseudonymous, overtly erotic novels, such as her Sleeping Beauty sadomasochistic cycle; one runs smack into it as into a brick wall in the works of John Norman; and one encounters it again here. It is almost certainly, as noted, a misleading sense, but that doesn't make the reading experience any more pleasurable: one squirms not with lasciviousness nor even a delectable feeling of minor guilt, but with sheer embarrassment, as if a stranger had just asked you to fumble through their used underwear.

What, leaving such considerations aside, of the status of A Caress of Shadows as a straightforward fantasy? Well, of course, there's not much room for yer actual non-erotic fantasy in among all the rest, and most of what there is is pretty mundane stuff: you've read these imaginings many times before, drawn as they are from the genre-fantasy writers' common stockpot. That initial conceit, however – that the denizens of Faerie are the new refugees in an alternate-reality USA – is genuinely a pleasing one. It's a great pity the rest of the book can't live up to it.

But then that is perhaps not the purpose of Ms Hamilton or her publishers.

—Infinity Plus

A Time Gone By

by William Heffernan

Akashic, 290 pages, paperback, 2005

Back in 1945, Jake Downing was a rookie NYPD cop – fast-tracked as a homicide detective because of a leg injury received at Pearl Harbor that saw him discharged from the army – when Judge Wallace Reed was murdered. A prominent Democrat marked for future glory by his party, a highly respected judicial figure, married to an astonishingly beautiful and much younger wife, Judge Reed seemed to have everything to live for. As Downing and his vastly more experienced partner, Jimmy Finn, started digging, pressure was built upon them by the city's political boss, Manny Troy, to opt for the easy solution – that Reed was murdered by a small-time gangster, Louie Grosso, who was intent on stopping the judge from bringing Grosso to richly deserved justice.

The truth, of course, was much more complicated than that – this is, after all, neo-noir. Behind the benign, reputable mask of the dead man, the two cops soon discovered, lurked a corrupt sadist who was involved in all sorts of sleazy manipulations and who brutalized his young wife. They quickly found, also, that the cut-and-dried evidence against Grosso had been manufactured, and clumsily manufactured at that. Matters were complicated by the unmourning widow, Cynthia – Cyn – Reed, the femme fatale of the piece, who swiftly enmeshed the young Jake Downing in her wiles and bedsheets. At last, and after many intricacies, the two cops yielded to the pressure and permitted Grosso to go to the electric chair for the crime he didn't commit, consoling themselves with the knowledge that he was certainly guilty of a half-dozen other, Mob-related murders.

But twenty years later Jake, now Chief of Detectives Downing – a position he owes in part to his acquiescence to political "reality" two decades before – decides to reopen the case. Fighting against new pressures to let the dead past simply stay buried, he enlists the retired Jimmy Finn and Jake's own lover, an assistant coroner, to revisit old territory, painfully reliving his torrid affair with the ambiguous Cyn Reed.

This book triumphs on many different levels. One is its evocation of the genuine noir spirit. Fittingly, even the good guys are not exactly spotless, as Jimmy Finn engaged in habitual police brutality (along with most of the rest of the 1940s NYPD) and Jake's affair with Cyn was not only adulterous but conducted while Jake's wife was in the final stages of pregnancy with their first child. The out-and-out bad guys are of course sleazebags of the scummiest kind; a second of Heffernan's skills is in the brilliant creation of ghastly characters like Manny Troy, union leader and mobster Owney Ryan, and Cyn's petty-hoodlum brother Oliver. After an extended encounter with any of them one finds oneself desperately yearning for a shower. Cyn herself, as befits a femme fatale figure, has a murky past that her public veneer of respectability insufficiently covers. A third success of the author's is in the creation of genuine ethical problems Jake must face during his later investigation that go far beyond the crime itself and his part in the cover-up.

Deliciously convoluted and neatly written (I especially liked the use of first- and third-person narratives to distinguish the 1940s and 1970s Jake Downings), A Time Gone By is a top-notch piece of work.

—Crescent Blues

Empty Cities of the Full Moon

by Howard V. Hendrix

Ace, 441 pages, hardback, 2001

Not too many years in our future, scientists researching into immortality – or at least extreme life-prolongation – investigate the possibilities of prionoids. ("I think of a prion as a protein whose altered shape is contagious to other proteins," explains one of the characters early on. "Sort of like a cross between the games of Go and dominoes. Each protein, once altered, can now alter the shape of those other protein molecules it was itself originally shaped like. A cascade effect.") Because treatment with prionoids can have beneficial effects on certain mental illnesses, it is not difficult to find "volunteers" among the clients of charitable institutions dealing with the poverty-stricken of the streets.

However, at around the same time, though at first seemingly unconnected, there is a sudden, disturbing but apparently harmless craze for rhythmic drumming and dancing. This craze spreads like wildfire, and it slowly dawns on all concerned that it is less a fashion than some sort of psychological infection. More, some of those infected begin to display other symptoms, such as "somnia" – the converse of insomnia – whereby people fall asleep for very protracted periods of frenziedly REM-rich sleep, the while displaying religiously rooted (not necessarily Christian) stigmata. Most dramatic of the symptoms, however, is a temporary transition into animal form – into various were-creatures.

The end result of all this is a pandemic that kills about 98% of the Earth's human population, many of the scant remainder being shapeshifters/were-creatures.

That's the beginning of one main strand of this book.

The other main strand, intertwined with the first, is set some thirty years later, when Christopher Spires – an industrialist who played a large part in the prionoid-based research into promoting longevity – has gathered a goodly percentage of the non-were population into a colony in the Bahamas, conferring upon his adherents the longevity treatment. The people of this colony seem to have an arcadian existence, troubled only occasionally by attacks from without by the envious shapeshifters, whose life expectancy is short. Another problem is that the best and the brightest of the colonists tend to become defectors ("abjurers"), rejecting the rule of Spires and the longevity treatments alike and willingly accepting exile in order to continue their own researches into the exact cause of the pandemic.

Naturally, our focus of interest is on various of the abjurers as they travel around the devastated American South in search of each other and the answers to their many questions.

Playing a part in both strands, and complicating them yet further, is Johnny Drisan, a space pilot suddenly snatched from an alternate universe into this one.

This is not a novel that is easy to synopsize – indeed, it's extremely difficult to do so, or even to follow exactly what is going on while one's reading it. One of the reasons will already be evident: it is jam-packed full of ideas and plot elements – normally something creditworthy in an sf novel but here done at the expense of readability and character development. Of the 30+ chapters, most begin with extended infodumps or back-stories that on occasion occupy 50% or more of the chapter's length; on one occasion only the final page or so of the chapter concerned actually contains any action that advances the plot. This can be intellectually exciting – and on occasion it is – but it does make Empty Cities of the Full Moon somewhat less than involving: once you've put the book down at the end of a session, there's no great emotional incentive to pick it up again, no pressing need to find out what happens next. In short, for all its fine intellectual qualities, Empty Cities of the Full Moon suffers from an emotional aridity that very nearly defeats its whole purpose as a novel.

Yet some of the intellectual excitements should not be underestimated. Here, for example, is a very lovely quasi-scientific model, as described by one of the more enigmatic characters, of psi:

If you analyze the waves of even the ordinary ocean of water, you'll find that they're information-rich. As long as a wave pattern persists, it can tell you about the passage of ships, wind direction, shoreline effects, lots of things. Boats, for instance, don't just make waves as they pass through the water – they're also rocked by the waves they themselves pass through, which includes the wakes of other vessels. The ocean interconnects the motion[s] of all vessels on its surface... . [S]o too the quantum ocean interconnects the motion[s] of events that occur in space and time. The quantum ocean functions as a holographic field, encoding the particulars of the motion[s] of events and transmitting those particulars to "inform" the motion[s] of other events... . The information in the quantum ocean is holographic – distributed and simultaneously available at multiple locations. Propagation of the holographic wave patterns is essentially instantaneous because they are scalar waves: longitudinally propagating waves of information rather than force. Fluctuations below the energy threshold of particle-pair creation... . Look at the branches above us [of the trees among which the characters are strolling] and think of the whole canopy as a "green brain". Think of the branches as dendrites. In the brain there are an awful lot of branching dendrites – far more than the leaves of this tree. Those dendrites release ions, and each of those ions is a tiny electric field vector. There are ten billion neurons in the brain, each with an average of twenty thousand connections. Action potentials within the neural nets are significantly affected by the scalar topology of the quantum ocean – much the way the gentlest of breezes from the ocean of air affects the leaves of this tree. Our cerebral hemispheres act as specialized scalar interferometers, responding to the presence of scalar waves much the way the leaves of this tree respond to that gentle breeze ...

A friend once said, deliberately self-deprecatingly, of a story that likewise suffered the coagulative effect of a surfeit of complicated ideas: "I have a very small mind, and this story is simply too big to fit into it." Reading Empty Cities of the Full Moon I felt exactly the same way. I am certain this is an exceptionally good book; but I believe it fails at what it set out to do, which was to be a good novel. To repeat, it offers intellectual stimulation galore – but the same could be said of something like Hawking's A Brief History of Time, which no one in their right minds would describe as a good novel, or any kind of novel at all. Where Empty Cities of the Full Moon falls down, or indeed apart, is in the matter of story: the plethora of ideas and expositions effectively kills the storytelling and all its usual appurtenances, like (as noted) emotional drive and involvement with the characters. Three-quarters of the way through the book I was still getting mixed up between the two major female characters, Trillia and Tomoko, despite the fact that they are described as different in every conceivable way (aside from gender) and serve entirely different functions in the convoluted plot.

If you seek a science-fiction novel that presents a fearsome intellectual challenge – a chess match against a Grand Master – then Empty Cities of the Full Moon may very well be the book for you. However, if it's a novel you're after, then you'd probably be better to look elsewhere.

—Infinity Plus

A Season for the Dead

by David Hewson

Delacorte, 400 pages, hardback, 2004

and

Lucifer's Shadow

by David Hewson

Delacorte, 384 pages, hardback, 2004

There are plenty of good reasons not to read The Da Vinci Code, and here are two of them. The similarities with Dan Brown's international bestseller are not in fact too great, but both of these books by Hewson concern ancient and modern conspiracies, one of them is centred on shenanigans within the Catholic Church, and so on. Both are in strict point of fact mystery novels, but both so far transcend any genre considerations – and are so beautifully, lovingly written – that they demand serious attention as mainstream literary novels. Arriving in quick succession here for review, they together offered this reviewer what was probably his most rewarding reading experience of 2004.

A Season for the Dead opens with a spectacular scene in the Vatican Reading Room. Professor Sara Farnese is trying to work there when a gun-brandishing fellow professor, Stefano Rinaldi, appears and proceeds to unfold in front of her a recently flayed human skin. Before he can explain too much to her, he is shot dead as a dangerous madman by an over-zealous Swiss Guard. Soon afterward, the discovery is made in a nearby church of a pair of mutilated corpses.

The Vatican does its best to divert the investigation mounted by the Roman police, but reckons without the cop called in to straddle the sensitive line between the two jurisdictions. That cop is young Nic Costa, a delightful mixture of aesthetic connoisseur and unreconstructed macho Italian male who probably gets his doggedness from his gritty father, a major figure in the old-time Italian Communist setup. While the bodies pile up and senior Vatican figures do everything in their power to alter accepted reality in the hope that Nic will either run down the blind alleys they temptingly open for him or allow his palm to be greased, his probing slowly zeroes in on the activities of a privately disgraced American cardinal, Michael Denney.

A far greater distraction to Nic's investigation is offered by Sara Farnese, who likewise seems central to the conspiracy in that many of the dead have been her lovers. Much of the emotional dynamic of the novel's plot concerns Nic's attempts to reconcile his strong attraction – both physical and, more important, personal – to the professor with the progressive revelation of the full extent of her astonishingly prolific sex life. He must learn to accept that the woman with whom he has fallen in love is the person she is, not the person he might have wanted the love of his life to be.

There is much of the feel of John Fowles's The Magus to Hewson's A Season for the Dead, as various eminences grises attempt to bamboozle him with smoke and mirrors, and the sense of thwarted eroticism, which Hewson handles with exquisite delicacy, has an echo not just of that novel but also the same author's The French Lieutenant's Woman. Hewson, like Fowles, is concerned not just with the overt mystery, the mystery of the plot's events, but also with deeper, less tangible mysteries that his hero – and perhaps the reader – will perhaps never fully solve. How, for example, does Caravaggio, the 16th-/17th-century murderer-painter with whose life and works Nic is near-obsessed, fit into the tapestry of present-day murders and conspiracies?

The second of these two novels, Lucifer's Shadow, again has some similarities with The Magus. Young Daniel Forster is hired from England to Venice to catalogue the library of a private collector ... or, at least, that's why he thinks he has been employed. It soon becomes clear to him that there are undercurrents of motivation at play among his employer's intimate circle, but it will be a long time before Daniel – and ourselves – can discover what is truly going on. The term "god game" has been used to describe fictions whose protagonists are in effect being manipulated, unknown to them, by the invisible strings of covert puppeteers around them. In Lucifer's Shadow Daniel is the innocent victim of a god game.

But are the puppeteers benign or malicious? This cannot be known without the telling of a parallel story. In 1733 young Lorenzo Scacchi, ancestor of Daniel's enigmatic employer, comes to Venice to find himself likewise ensnared in a god game ... and also in love, love with a beautiful composer whose work can never be publicly recognized because of her double disqualification in being both a woman and a Jew. Yet there is at least the possibility that Rebecca's masterpiece might be performed, so that it can receive the public acclaim it deserves, even if she cannot be acknowledged as its composer; and a conspiracy to that end is mounted involving not just Lorenzo and Rebecca but also the great showman-conductor-composer Vivaldi. But one of the conspiracy's architects has, unknown to anyone else, a quite different agenda – a murderous one.

The two tales of murder and conspiracy, separated by the best part of three centuries, are complexly – and masterfully – intertwined, and both are populated by quite exquisitely realized characters. Both stories are complicated in themselves, presenting mysteries whose development becomes only gradually apparent; but the true, overarching mystery can be understood only by the solution of both tales.

A Season for the Dead and Lucifer's Shadow are each a mightily impressive achievement. Reading either one alone offers a delicious feast at both emotional and intellectual levels. Reading the two novels one soon after the other might almost create a sensory overload ... Ah, but what a delicious overload it is.

—Crescent Blues

Supping with Panthers

by Tom Holland

Little, Brown, 432 pages, hardback, 1996

Recursive fantasy-horror is a dangerous game to play: it can either be lots of fun – as in Mark Frost's The List of 7, which mixes Arthur Conan Doyle, Helena Blavatsky, Adolf Hitler and the model for Sherlock Holmes with a hideous occult conspiracy – or it can seem like a routine exercise, an act of literary cleverness. Supping with Panthers, which inhabits very much the same territory as Frost's book, is exceptionally well written and contains passages of stunningly vivid imagery, but eventually the confection of Byron, Oscar Wilde, Jack the Ripper, Bram Stoker and others with bloodthirsty vampirism begins to – it is hard to resist the word – coagulate. There are Holmesian echoes here as well – the central character studied at Edinburgh under the same tutor as did Doyle. In fact, after reading about two-thirds of this long book I felt I was eating a stew into which too many ingredients had been put.

To summarize the plot in its most basic form, Dr John Eliot, a specialist in haematology, discovers the truth about vampirism while serving with the British Army in a remote province of India. Once he is back in London, his acquaintances become the victims of vampiristic killings, and he is persuaded to investigate the case. This he does, and in the course of doing so discovers the ghastly truth about himself.

Holland is an extremely good writer, and his depiction of some of the characters – especially Stoker – is fine, but his revelling in the joys of recursiveness stops his tale from being properly told. In the end, I tired of the book even while continuing to admire its many good qualities.

—Samhain

Sense of Evil

by Kay Hooper

Bantam, 352 pages, hardback, 2003

This is the latest offering in Kay Hooper's Bishop series based on the premise that the FBI has an underpublicized division of psychic crimefighters, headed by the eponymous psychic and his wife Miranda. The early entries in the series more directly involved these two, and were in their way very engaging; this most recent volume, the sixth, focuses instead on the exploits of more junior agents of the division.

In the small South Carolina town of Hastings there is a serial killer on the loose, taking as his victims beautiful blonde women who are successful in their chosen professions. Hunky Police Chief Rafe Sullivan is at a loss as to how to stop the murders, and is grateful when the FBI sends in one of its top profilers, Isabel Adams. The only trouble is that of course she's beautiful, blonde and successful in her own profession. The pair being almost instantly smitten by each other's charms, Rafe's instincts are to protect the woman he is swiftly coming to love, but all the indications are that she is better able to protect herself than he is. Further, she's not the only member of the FBI's psychic team in town.

Their investigation reveals that not all of the victims have been as pure as the driven snow. They unearth a sordid pattern of sadomasochistic prostitution and probable blackmail – looking at tranquil Hastings, whodathunkit? It soon becomes evident that the killer, who in exhibitionist fashion seems to delight in committing further murders despite the spotlights having been switched on, is fully aware of the danger Isabel represents, and has added her to the list of future targets. But she is of stern stuff, and will not relinquish the pursuit ...

It's obvious from the first pages that Hooper knows her craft – but knows it too well. There's a Prologue that could have come from just about any psychic-serial-killer thriller, and most of the rest of the novel follows much the same pattern: we keep reading because there's no good reason to stop rather than because of any surprises, fresh ideas or thrills. The resolution of the mystery – the revelation of the serial killer's identity – involves such prime hokum that one doesn't know whether to giggle or throw the book at the wall. It's no wonder Hooper embellished the main plot with all the subplotting about kinkiness beneath the town's innocuous surface; these embellishments she handles pretty well, thereby lifting the book from the rut in which it might otherwise have gotten itself irremediably stuck.

Sense of Evil is not by any means an out-and-out bad book, and in many ways it succeeds in its intention to pass the reader's time. But it seems to be a book entirely without ambition, the literary analog of a completed paint-by-numbers picture hanging on a friend's wall: you can compliment the friend on the skill, patience and care used to apply the colours, but as to the artwork's originality ...

—Crescent Blues

The Program

by Greg Hurwitz

Morrow, 368 pages, hardback, 2004

Your local bookstore is piled high with novels that, however sleekly and professionally they may serve their purpose as nail-bitingly suspenseful thrillers, are essentially no more than empty-headed entertainment. This is no criticism of them: they achieve superbly what it is they set out to do, which is to make you read far later into the night than you should. Thereafter, of course, you forget all about them ... with the eventual result, after you've read a bunch of such entertainments in a row, that you have the embarrassment of picking one of them up and being unable to remember whether or not you've read it.

Nothing could be further from the case with the suspense novels of Greg Hurwitz. What truly distinguishes them from the herd is that not only are they first-rate thrillers, brilliantly eliciting all the requisite pulse-pounding, but that they have subtexts – agendas, even – in which the profounder implications of an ethical or other premise are rigorously thought through. In Hurwitz's previous novel, The Kill Clause, protagonist Tim Rackley, unjustly ousted from the US Marshals Service, falls into the hands of a clique dedicated to inflicting capital punishment upon perceived scum who have escaped justice through the exploitation of a flawed and/or corrupt judicial system, which the clique regards as over-liberal. So, too, does an embittered Rackley, and he carries out a few "executions" on the clique's behalf. But then doubts set in, especially when he becomes convinced of one of the targets' innocence; and he discovers he has been manipulated into murder by clique members with a reprehensible secret scheme of their own. The novel's net effect is to offer a critique of popular attitudes toward capital punishment: Rackley is educated into the realization that the death penalty is as vile as the crimes it purports to avenge.

In The Program the focus of the subtext seems to be on our preconception that people's religious or quasi-religious beliefs, however asinine, should be respected – should be sacrosanct as a personal matter, and thus immune from criticism. The flaw in such apparently laudable tolerance is that those beliefs may in themselves be damaging or indeed dangerous to others. In course of exploring this territory through the medium of Rackley's penetration of a viciously grasping cult, The Program, in order to try to rescue from it the daughter of a wealthy Hollywood producer, Hurwitz provides us with an astonishing amount of fascinating information on the techniques used by such cults first to snare and indoctrinate their victims, then – psychologically, physically, or both – to ensure that it's virtually impossible for said victims ever to escape.

Rackley is lured back into the Marshals Service at the behest of fantastically rich movie producer Will Henning, whose daughter Leah has vanished into The Program. At first Rackley resists, resenting (as he should) the fact that Henning's wealth alone gives the man extra-legal influence; but soon he is caught up in the attempt to counter the devastation the cult is causing to numerous human lives as it uses indoctrinative techniques to separate the gullible from their worldly goods. At the heart of The Program is its leader, the carefully self-recreated Messiah figure T.D. Betters who, surrounded by "handmaidens" and thuggish, vicious bodyguards, is seemingly unassailable by US law; those who lose everything they own to the cult, including most of all their souls, are, after all, supposedly adults of sound mind acting of their own free will. Leah, the initial reason for Rackley's infiltration of the cult, becomes instead – even while he becomes emotionally bonded with the young woman – the tool he might be able to use to bring about the cult's downfall.

Perhaps the most chilling and memorable sections of this always absorbing novel – it constantly runs through one's mind that The Program is as effective at snaring people as is the eponymous cult! – are those in which Rackley subjects himself to the cult's induction sessions, secure in the knowledge that he will be able to come through mentally unaffected because of the strength of his own will and the tuition given to him by a broken man who has succeeded in making his escape, albeit at the cost of nearly destroying himself. Rackley's confidence in his own resilience, he finds, may well have been misplaced ...

Of course, the cult turns out to have far more lethal methods at its disposal to keep its adherents in line than merely indoctrination, as Rackley eventually discovers. Even then, because of the inhibiting nature of the laws pertaining to claimed religions, however phony, morally obscene and exploitative these may be, it is difficult to find a way of pinning the murders to the actual perpetrators, the cult's leaders.

As with The Kill Clause before it, The Program delivers the full-scale edge-of-the-seat-emotional-rollercoaster experience one demands from the very best suspense thrillers, but it's the gritty fibre of its ethico-philosophical underpinning that makes it an unforgettable novel, one that merits rereading. This is la crème de la crème indeed.

—Crescent Blues

Timeshift

by Phillip Ellis Jackson

AmErica House, 211 pages, paperback, 2001

"The year is 2416. Mankind is slowly coming to terms with the terrifying reality that, as a race, it is moving toward extinction. Three hundred and fifty years earlier the country divided into two cooperative, but separate nations – the East and West United States. A brief nuclear exchange involving remnants of the old Soviet empire gave rise to a deadly new lifeform – a toxic, self-replicating, indestructible ash."

In the grand tradition of R. Lionel Fanthorpe comes Phillip Ellis Jackson's first novel, heralding what is promised to be a trilogy.

Our descendants live underground, hoping to reclaim their world (which is coextensive with today's USA) through eliminating the ash, a task they hope to accomplish by exploiting the properties of Beta Light. "Beta Light?" you ask with a quizzical crossing of the eyes. Well:

Scientists discovered that after leaving the sun, Alpha Light – the spectrum ranging from infrared to ultraviolet – split off and continued on into space while a new, hitherto unknown companion particle, Beta Light, was trapped in a sediment-like swirl by the earth's magnetic field. Because of its unique properties, Beta Light acted like a recording film capturing the images of the past exactly as they happened – sights, sounds, everything just as it was. Man could view the past, but not interact with it. Still, it was enough to replay the 3-D holographic images they retrieved, allowing the people of the present to share in a life that once was, and might never again be.

As a wacky-physics sf premise, this is only about one order of magnitude wackier than Bob Shaw's "slow glass", a concept with which, in terms of potential for story development, it can be directly compared. Thanks to advanced technology, people can be sent on "jumps" into the layers of Beta Light that surround the earth rather like the rings of a tree; there they can record the past. The hope is that, by dint of detailed historical research, they can pinpoint the moment in time when either the precursor of that ash was invented as an item in the biological-warfare arsenal or the "cure" for it was invented by the long-dead scientist Audrey York. Or something like that: this is a novel in which it is easy to lose track.

There's not a lot of crime in the 25th century for the obvious reason that "jumps" can be made back to the moment of perpetration and the criminals thereby readily identified.

Paul Thorndyke is the up-and-comer in B.E.T.A., one of the three all-American corporations that control access to Beta Light. A member of the company for only a couple of weeks, he is visibly such a leader and genius that he is asked to stand in for B.E.T.A. boss Scott Hollock as witness of the most important "jump" yet, back to the moment when past US President Peter Haley authorized the development of York's work; if the establishment where that further research was done can only be pinpointed, the reasoning goes, then future "jumpers" can be sent to spy on what went on and thereby discover how to neutralize the killer ash.

Oh, yes, B.E.T.A. stands for Betalight Electromagnetic Technology Applications. The other two companies are P.A.S.T. – "Particle Accelerator Shuttle Transmission" – and T.I.M.E. – "Transitional Insertion Management Enterprise". Each of these three handles a different aspect of the effort to exploit Beta Light. Clearly it'd be a good idea if the three corporations could be unified; and this is the aim of various criminals in high places who realize that the person at the helm of the unified corporation could also be (cackle, cackle, cackle, Mr Bond) the ruler of the world. The high-echelon nasties are assisted in their wheeze by the fact that the brilliant mathematician Harman Bright, who has devised a way of altering Beta Light images (so folk can be framed for crimes they didn't commit, and thus be got out of the way), is not only a brilliant mathematician but a cheery little psychopath: anyone looks as if they're cottoning on to the nefariousness all around and Harman Bright can either snuff them or/and fake up the scene of a snuffing so that the threatening individual is instantly convicted of murder, on Beta Light evidence, and condemned to death.

Here's an odd thing. Throughout the civilized world at the start of the 21st century the US fascination with the death penalty is widely regarded as a noxious practice, a barbaric hangover from earlier ages; and there's much debate even within the country as to its effectiveness and morality. Yet in Jackson's future, a full five hundred years hence, not only is capital punishment still practised, it's inflicted so frequently that it's just taken for granted, despite its complete pointlessness in the society he paints.

Anyway, Jim Robenalt, a pal of Thorndyke's who has cottoned on to the conspiracy, is framed for the murder of Ben Mitchell, a pal of both of them who likewise sniffed out the conspiracy. As a result Robenalt is condemned to die by being irreversibly "jumped" into the past of an hour ago, where he will eventually dissipate, as folk do. This galvanizes Thorndyke, his boss Hollock, Hollock's number one squeeze (who happens to be Secretary of State Lillian "Call Me Lillian" Dorr), Thorndyke's own squeeze Sharla Russell, Thorndyke's mathematician pal Quentin Cottle, Cottle's squeeze Ruth – those women are all first-class citizens with admirable minds, you understand, but for some reason not remotely connected with the fact that they're merely women and sexy as hell fall short of the geniushood displayed by their respective menfolk.

And so the novel rambles on until the conspirators are defeated in a maze of spelling errors, further wacky science and poor proofreading.

There's a good bit, too, marred only by Jackson's ignorance of the fact that nouns ending in "a" are likely to be plurals rather than singulars (throughout the book we're told that "jumpers" must seek out an individual strata of Beta Light, the word "stratum" clearly being, um, terra incognita). This good bit occurs when Thorndyke and Russell go to have a meal in a restaurant where customers can call up authentic scenes from the past as ambience (they choose the court of Henry VIII), and it occurs at the top of page 82 where the waiter tells them:

If you have need of any other services, please throw a resin-polymer rib bone at the candelabra in front of the King. You'll strike a sensor pad behind that spot that will signal someone from customer services. Enjoy.

Those four lines are something of an oasis for the reader, alas; if you want to get the best out of this book, rush to page 82 and read that top paragraph again and again and again. Elsewhere we discover how infernally difficult it is for characters actually to say their dialogue; by way of compensation they have the ability to chuckle, smile, smirk or laugh not just single words but whole sentences: "'If you don't mind my asking,' Quentin frowned", the words presumably appearing on his wrinkled forehead in Braille.

There are other good bits, but only for the unpardonably vindictive reader. Here's an example of the New Botany:

... A genetically engineered virus-sized organism that can be introduced into the stem cells of plants to migrate to their leaves, then bind with the plant's own genetic material to fundamentally alter its indigenous respiratory process. Instead of simply scrubbing carbon dioxide from the air, the altered plants will take in even the most virulent form of airborne pollution, break it down chemically into harmless components, and then excrete it into the soil where it will remain a harmless constituent of the earth.

"Shitting plants!" shuddered my wife, nervously skirting a potted geranium in our back yard. The New Ecology is not far behind:

What was it they called it? Political correctness? Can you imagine actually working under conditions where basic research was so heavily influenced by the personal prejudices of petty politicians who were bound and determined to make science conform to their own preconceived notions? The ozone layer wasn't affected by sunspots and other natural climatic processes ... just aerosol spray cans and old air cooling technology. Well, we stopped the spray cans and changed cooling systems, but the ozone layer kept getting thinner. So we curtailed fossil fuel emissions and other byproducts of technological advancement, but still the problem worsened. It was only when the solutions became more and more perverse, and their anticipated beneficial effects farther and farther away, that the public finally began to see the pronouncements for what they were – tools to advance a private, social agenda.

Sort of makes you wonder why the commie bastards in authority are so keen to curtail your fundamental American freedom to light cigarettes in gas stations, doesn't it? And it makes you wonder about the ignorance of a mindset that has failed to notice the action taken on "aerosol spray cans and old air cooling technology" was a brilliant success, reversing the dangerous depletion of the ozone layer. Or that thinks the need to curtail greenhouse-gas emissions has anything to do with the ozone layer. And, as for "tools to advance a private, social agenda", I have yet to find of these frightwing antiscientific conspiracy theorists able to identify plausibly exactly what that agenda might be.

Now, apart from the candelabrum/candelabra and stratum/strata problems, and the problem of the characters mystically smirking and grinning all those words, there are a number of others. For example, things emerge from the "bowls" of the earth, someone "pours" over a manuscript, "jumpers" are shot into the "breech of history" – I promise I'm not pulling your leg here – and all in all one begins to think that perhaps the publisher didn't bother putting a copy-editor through the text; at a level even below that, quite often there are double letter-spaces between words. Of course, it would be unjustifiably sceptical to suggest that the web-based publisher AmErica (www.publishamerica.com) was merely a vanity press economizing on the editing in order to make itself more effectively profitable.

Rummaging through the more cobwebbed recesses of his memory, your reviewer recalled the time about a year ago when AmErica was actively soliciting freelance editors and copy-editors to work with their authors; offered in lieu of a fee was a royalty share and so your reviewer, reckoning that each author could have only so many moms, abruptly lost interest. It may be that he was not alone in this or there may have been some other, completely unrelated reason, but AmErica no longer boasts to the authors it recruits about the advantages of having copy-editors. Quite the contrary, the press has new strengths:

Furthermore, you are always the intellectual owner of the book. No one is allowed to tamper with the text after you have made it final. Digital printing makes it technically possible to make changes to texts at any time, therefore your contract protects you against such outside tampering. You are your book's creator, writer, and owner.

Then, last but not least, you are entitled to having fun! It is important that you enjoy being a published writer. To have your book out and have other people buy and read it, is pure joy. It makes you feel proud and fulfilled. Your name and face are in the newspaper, people discuss your work and are impacted by what you wrote: all that is sheer pleasure. Enjoy it!

In other words, a great advantage of publishing your book with AmErica is that you won't have some clown correcting the spelling without your permission – or, in fact, at all. But at least it's obvious from the rest of the site that potential authors are not expected to pay for publication; one suspects it may be rather easy to gain acceptance of your book at AmErica, but at least there's none of the nonsense other, similar organizations promulgate about it being "fair" that authors "contribute to production costs".

Over the decades, this reviewer has sometimes wondered about the advantages of publishers having copy-editors. To be sure, having a paradigm of the trade like Nancy Webber or Katrina Whone or Lydia Darbyshire going through your text is a great boon; my bacon has been often saved. At the same time, not all copy-editors meet those same standards.

All such doubts about the advisability of using copy-editors were banished on reading Timeshift. This is a fairly short novel (211 pages, big print), yet it took me a long time to read because it is – to doff my aura of demure charity for just a moment – a mess. Struggling through the last forty pages or so was an ever-slowing task made possible only by the thought that the alternative was helping my wife re-wallpaper the landing. If you ignore the bad science and the bad grammar and the bad spelling and the bad characterization and ... But you can't.

This reviewer has no wish to be unnecessarily cruel, but here is a book that should never have been published. That it has been – and that there is a sequel on the way – is a cause for great depression.

Or is it?

Like it or not – and most of the big publishers don't – there's a justified air of excitement at the moment about the "new publishing". Thanks to advances in printing technology, small presses are proliferating: it now costs only a fraction of what it did a mere decade ago to set oneself up as a publisher. At the same time, the big commercial houses have been forming themselves into ever-larger conglomerates with a redefined editorial brief: where once there was the faith that a good book would bring in the pennies, now there is the belief that only a strong media-related hook will make a genre-sf novel sell. The folly of this notion is symptomatized not just by the fact that, six months after publication, these sf novels are crowding out the remainder tables at Barnes & Noble but by the difficulty InfinityPlus's US Reviews Editor has in finding reviewers to take them off his hands – in other words, the difficulty he has even giving them away.

By contrast, what the new small presses are releasing is often very exciting. Timeshift is at the bottom end of the garbage pile, to be true, but it's not actually much worse – if for quite different reasons – than much of the stuff coming out of the commercial houses at the moment. Perhaps the price we have to pay for seeing good, un-commercially-adulterated novels from the small presses is the occasional Timeshift. If that's the case it's a price worth paying.

—Infinity Plus

The Murder Room

by P.D. James

Knopf, 432 pages, hardback, 2003

The small Dupayne Museum, on the edge of a large area of parkland, Hampstead Heath, in North London, houses exhibitions devoted to life in Britain between the two World Wars. Although the museum draws relatively few visitors, it does have one perennially popular attraction, the Murder Room, containing exhibits related to the most notorious murders of the period.

Old Max Dupayne, its founder, willed that his three children – Neville, Caroline and Marcus – should have unanimously to agree any important decision related to the museum, and what could be more important than that its lease is due for renewal? This is, in effect, a decision as to whether or not the museum should continue to exist, which Neville alone among the three feels strongly it should not.

Then Neville is murdered gruesomely in the museum garage, in a manner reminiscent of one of the killings celebrated in the Murder Room. Commander Adam Dalgleish and his officers of Scotland Yard's Special Investigation Squad are immediately called in; the crime is sensitive because one of the museum's staffers is a sleeper for MI5 – hence the prompt involvement of the SIS as opposed to a more routine squad. Before their investigation is done, another apparently copycat murder victim will be discovered – this time right inside the Murder Room itself – and many secrets will be laid bare.

The first 110 pages or so of this novel are taken up with a section called "The People and the Place." During this section almost nothing of relevance to the novel's plot takes place that could not be covered elsewhere in a few paragraphs. What we are treated to are, more or less, vastly expanded versions of the character notes that many writers make preparatory to undertaking a novel, so that they may ensure consistency of background and of behaviour. In the hands of a defter and more graceful writer than James, this long preamble might nonetheless be absorbing; however, James has always had a somewhat lumbering, drab prose style, so that for large tracts of this section one has the feeling of being subjected to some sort of literary endurance test.

And then, a few pages before the section's end, the plot starts.

This transition, however, does not curb James's urge to dollop further frequent bucketsful of exposition into her text. It seems at times that virtually every stray thought of, particularly, Dalgleish and his sidekick Miskin must be qualified by a ponderously long paragraph or three of explanation as to why they had this thought. It took a long time for me to work out why James should be indulging in this sort of apparent padding – this almost obsessive level of amplification of each action or thought – but finally I realized that it was because she was having difficulty getting her characters to come alive on the page. All these extraneous passages were attempts to conceal this; they were substitutes for characterization. Almost the sole character in the book who really does live and breathe is the museum's housekeeper, Tally; the rest, Dalgleish included, are essentially cyphers – collections of often stereotyped attributes rather than real people.

By the end of the book, the cumbersomeness of James's prose begins to work in her favor, in that by then a slow but unstoppable momentum has built up. It's arguably worth persisting with The Murder Room until that happens, but I suspect many readers will have abandoned the novel before then.

—Crescent Blues

Deadly Visions

by Roy Johansen

Bantam, 307 pages, paperback, 2003

Cop Joe Bailey used to be a professional magician and escapologist; he gave up that career to join the Atlanta PD as its one-man bunko squad – exposing fraudulent spiritualists and the like. His life is complicated by young daughter Nikki – whom he has reared as a single parent since the death of his wife some years before – and by the fact that, somewhere in the backstory, he had a torrid liaison with the only spiritualist whose claims he has been unable to disprove, Suzanne. Now Atlanta is being rocked by a series of bizarre murders, each with a different modus operandi – unusual for a serial killer – but each bearing enough in common with the rest that it's clear they're the work of a single perpetrator: the victims are prominent citizens, and each was tormented beforehand by mysterious voices.

Monica Gaines, host of a hugely popular psychic tv show, is brought in at the behest of a local lawmaker to assist the investigation, into which Joe is drafted both to keep an eye on her and to help out as he can. Initially he is mightily impressed by her seeming abilities, and his belief in her possible genuineness is bolstered when she herself is hospitalized as the victim of apparent spontaneous combustion – an event recorded by her hotel's security video. What he only slowly starts to realize is that there is much more at work here than psychic forces and a serial killer: there is also a covert espionage agenda involving the agencies of two different nations ...

Deadly Visions is often clumsily written; its characterization is at best tepid; its plot is ludicrous ... and yet, in a strange way, it's rather a delight to read. What it's excellent at doing is what it has been, in effect, paid to do: keep the pages turning. It's strongly reminiscent of the kind of midlist mass-market paperback pulp fiction that was very widely published thirty or so years ago but has now to a great extent disappeared: a rattling yarn that transcends all its flaws to offer thoroughly enjoyable, if strictly temporary, entertainment. As such, it is in its unpretentious way a better book than most of the ostentatiously published thriller hardbacks I've recently read – the ones marketed in the book-trade category "Bestseller" (whatever their eventual sales) with their embossed-print dust jackets and their screamingly huge author names and their expensively purchased cover quotes and all.

As an additional attraction, the author clearly knows his stuff when it comes to professional magic and fraudulent mediumship. Lengthy explanations of the attainment of seemingly impossible effects occasionally hijack the plot; in theory these infodumps should be infuriating distractions from the main thrust, but in fact they're fascinating in themselves.

Johansen may not soon be knocking at the doors of those who judge the various mystery genre awards, but with Deadly Visions he shows himself to be a fine practitioner of his less glamorous though nevertheless – in this reviewer's opinion – extremely estimable craft.

—Crescent Blues

Speak Now

by Kaylie Jones

Akashic, 260 pages, paperback, 2005

This is a magnificent and entirely engrossing novel about the inability we all can on occasion share to reconcile ourselves with our pasts.

Clara Sverdlow is the daughter of Auschwitz-survivor immigrant father Viktor, a faded academic; her mother died long ago and Anna, her surrogate mother – although not, apparently, her father's lover – is another survivor of Auschwitz. Both Viktor and Anna are imprisoned in the cage of their nightmare past experience, with Viktor being further haunted by the guilt of his quasi-collaborationist role in the death camp. All Clara's life Viktor has self-centredly attempted to exorcise his guilt by in effect passing much of it off onto her through repeatedly recounting to her fragments of what went on there.

But there are further ways in which Viktor, with the acquiescence of Anna, has been, for all the love he undoubtedly feels for his daughter, an appalling father, not least through his encouragement of her teenaged – in fact, somewhat underaged – sexual relationship with Niko, of whom Viktor approved because the youth clearly relished Viktor's Auschwitz reminiscences so much. Even after Clara came to realize that her lover was brutal, sadistic scum and then later, worse, that he was dangerously psychopathic, it was difficult for her to overcome her father's resistance in order to push Niko out of her life.

Small wonder that now, in adulthood, Clara has become an alcoholic. When her condition threatens her ability to cope with the stresses of the New York battered-women refuge she's in charge of, she's sent to rehab, where she encounters the gentle, sensitive Mark. Love springs between them, and they rush into marriage. Yet the psychopath Niko, who all these years has been conducting his murders and other crimes on the West Coast, has never forgotten the one woman who ever succeeded in sloughing him, and the idea of recapturing or at least punishing Clara has become an obsession to him. And now he has returned to New York with the express aim of seeking her out ...

Clearly a main storyline of this novel follows in the footsteps of classic noir, but it's only a main storyline. Equally in the foreground is the tale of Clara's struggle to accept herself as a product of her past and thereby escape its clutches, something she must needs do if ever she's to become a whole person – and, not incidentally, if she's ever going to be able fully to fulfil her role as Mark's wife. It can by no means be taken for granted by the reader that she will in fact achieve these aims.

As Jones juggles the various strands of this many-layered novel with a skill one can only gasp at, it becomes steadily more moving, fascinating, absorbing, and even white-knuckle – all these at the same time. This is a monumentally impressive piece of work, and should certainly be on anybody's shortlist of the best thriller novels published in 2005.

—Crescent Blues

Dark Terrors 4

by Stephen Jones and David Sutton (editors)

Gollancz, 352 pages, hardback, 1998

There's a rather defensive introduction to this book by its editors, saying that many reviewers will disagree with their choice of one story or another but, dammit, they stand by what they've picked. This is a perfectly fair stance for the editors to have adopted; it is also a clear indication that what we can expect from this, the 4th Gollancz Book of Horror, is a bit of a mixed bag; and on top of that it is an invitation to the reviewer – well, this reviewer, anyway – to go through the book story by story rather than simply discuss the book as a whole.

So, here goes.

It is indeed a mixed bag. Very few of the stories are horror stories (none of the good ones are); rather, most are fantasies of varying degrees of darkness, generally not very dark.

19 stories.

Deep breath now.

"The Great Fall" by Richard Christian Matheson is a mercifully short squib which has resonances of the work of the author's father, Richard Matheson. "Normal Life" by Christopher Fowler seems to be based on the career of Dennis Nilsen, albeit generally hetero rather than homo; it's neatly enough written but the ending is a bit predictable. "The Wedding Present" by Neil Gaiman is a creepy psychological number that's the best thing I've read by him. "Never to be Heard" by Ramsey Campbell is again good, but seems to be crying out to be turned into a novel. "Tumbleweeds" by Donald R. Burleson has as its central idea the notion that, if you get up a dark alley with a tumbleweed, it's going to rip your throat out; this is not a worry that has hitherto had me lying awake at nights. "Family History" by Stephen Baxter is a contemporary Minotaur fantasy; his science fiction is better. "The Incredible True Facts in the Case" by David J. Schow presents a Jack the Ripper theory, but very clumsily; some of Schow's other work is very fine, so this was particularly disappointing. "Mr Guidry's Head" by Roberta Lannes is a very moving study of parenthood: highly recommended. "Inside the Cackle Factory" by Dennis Etchison is a professional piece: it reads well enough, but a half-hour later you've forgotten what it was about. "Entertaining Mr Orton" by Poppy Z. Brite is an exercise in gay (male) pornography; as either a horror or a fantasy story it has little to say. "The Country of Glass" by Joel Lane is about alcoholism and is very good indeed, except for its last paragraph. "My Pathology" by Lisa Tuttle is the first story by Tuttle I've read that I've not liked: she is one of our best writers. This one, though, just doesn't work – for me, at least. "Curing Hitler" by Thomas Tessier is a genuine chiller. "Weak End" by James Miller is a confused and confusing attempt to explain ... well, that's the trouble: at the end of it you're pretty certain there was something goddam profound going on here, but, er ... On the other hand, "Sullivan's Travails" by Jay Russell is superbly lucid: good fantasies about the movie industry are few and far between, but this is one of them (even though it's unkind about Veronica Lake, which in my book is akin to blasphemy). "The Suicide Pit" by Conrad Williams is just dull; a pity, because Williams can obviously write well. "Making Monsters" by Geoff Nicholson is a fascinating little piece about the inability of men to understand women. "A Place to Stay" by Michael Marshall Smith shows someone trying to write a fresh New Orleans vampire story; it is a colossal pity that horror and fantasy authors don't talk more to each other, because here Smith, whose ambitions for the story are admirably high, reinvents the wheel. And, last, "Suburban Blight" by Terry Lamsley is not only extremely long but so very bad that one can't really understand why Jones and Sutton thought to include it.

All in all, that predicted mixed bag, but a worthwhile anthology.

19 stories.

Phew!

Hope you took that deep breath.

—Samhain

The Tooth Fairy

by Graham Joyce

Signet, 342 pages, paperback, 1996

Once upon a time, back when the Beatles were God, there were three schoolboys who were all each other's best buddies. Then one of them, Sam, was visited by the Tooth Fairy – who proved to be not a cute androgyne with gauzy wings but, at least initially, a vast-cocked male with razor-sharp fangs and an interest in messing up every relationship Sam tried to form. Then the Tooth Fairy became – as he grew through adolescence and discovered great love for the horse-riding Alice – a female, ready to take on the form of either Alice or his buddy's beauty-queen sister Linda in his bed at nights. The Tooth Fairy is his nightmare, as he is the Tooth Fairy's; in many ways she deteriorates as he grows out of the age of nightmares.

Graham Joyce is adept at making one turn the pages, and he supplies plenty of chills as he tells his tales. This book is no exception to the rule, but there is a certain half-heartedness about it, as if he started out with a great idea but could never quite work out a proper resolution. The depiction of characters is highly variable – Alice lives on in the mind whereas the central figure, Sam, is never much more than a cypher, the main distinguishing feature of whose personality is his compulsive masturbation: he's a sort of Everyadolescent. A murder turns out not to have been a murder, although a quite different murdered body is discovered and never explained. There is some remarkably sloppy writing: "And with every minute urging the evening on to midnight, the leather football of anxiety inflating in Sam's stomach was pumped still further"; "The shocking stillness of the room wanted to blister and peel back like a layer of skin"; etc.

But make no mistake about Joyce's page-turning capacity: if you want a good fast and enjoyable read, this is certainly for you, and there are enough good ideas along the road to make you think about the book, and its ambience, long after you've finished reading it.

—Samhain

The Anatomy Lesson

by Robert I. Katz

Willowgate Press, 228 pages, paperback, 2004

This is the third novel by Robert I. Katz. The first, Edward Maret, was a good science-fiction novel, albeit one that was somewhat rough around the edges. His second novel, Surgical Risk, marked a shift into the mystery genre, introducing the characters Richard Kurtz (surgeon with a penchant for getting into trouble) and Lew Barent (grizzled, hard-bitten NYPD homicide detective). Again it was a good novel, and again it had minor problems. With The Anatomy Lesson, however, Katz finally hits the nail on the head.

The second in the Kurtz and Barent series, this starts off with a grisly practical joke being played at a teaching-hospital Halloween party: some of the props are replaced by genuine body parts, purloined from the cadavers on which the students learn dissection techniques. Soon after, a colleague and friend of Kurtz's, Rod Mahoney, is found murdered, the corpse hideously dismembered in a manner reminiscent of what was done to the hospital cadavers. Can the prank and the murder be related? And what is the connection between them and the growing evidence of a turf war between the drug barons who operate in New York? Once again forced to be reluctant partners in detection, Kurtz and Barent swing into action, assisted on occasion by Kurtz's alluring mistress Lenore.

The novel performs well on the "soap-opera" front – the backdrop of the major characters' ongoing lives. Barent has to learn to like his son-in-law as the pair acclimatize themselves to the pregnancy of Barent's daughter. Kurtz and Lenore move marriageward, despite the disapproval of Lenore's mother. And so on.

It also performs well as a detection – really, as two detections (I'd be giving the game away if I expanded on this). What works particularly well is the way the earlier life of Mahoney, the focal victim, is slowly unraveled: the character whom one assumed to be a stock mystery victim – rather staid, rather boring – becomes progressively more three-dimensional, and is shown to have been, behind the facade, something close to a dashing romantic hero. It's a beautifully handled worked example of the inherent fallacy in our all-too-common assumption that the folks who're today superficially dull old sticks have always been thus.

Of considerable further interest is the way in which Katz manages to blend two fiction traditions in a single novel. As mentioned enigmatically above, in The Anatomy Lesson the reader is in effect offered two detections for the price of one. The first of these accords to the traditions of the classic mystery; the second belongs more in the line of the modern crime novel. In theory this should lead to a stylistic clash; in practice, Katz weaves the two skillfully together, so you're rarely conscious of any dichotomy.

If Kurtz and Barent are new to you, The Anatomy Lesson offers an ideal introduction, although you may want to pick up Surgical Risk first. If you've already read Surgical Risk, you'll be delighted by the characters' flowering in this new novel.

—Crescent Blues

Edward Maret

by Robert I. Katz

Willowgate Press, 260 pages, paperback, 2001

Although it's an unorthodox procedure, I'd like to start this review by quoting Edward Maret's blurb in extenso. I hope my reasons for having done so will become plain a little later on.

Edward Maret was a happy man. He was young, carefree, rich and engaged to be married, but Edward Maret had enemies. His cousin Philip envied him his money, Vincent FitzMichael envied him his fiancee, and Jason Deseret, a man with a dangerous secret, feared that Edward Maret could destroy him.

Six years later, the cyborg corps is humanity's first line of defence against the alien Kliya, and cyborg AX-17 is one of the best – swift, skilled and deadly. His memories stolen from him, his face and body mutilated beyond recognition, cyborg AX-17 has no choice but to obey the orders of his human masters, until AX-17 is unexpectedly set free, and Edward Maret returns, to seek revenge.

This blurb, unlike so many blurbs, offers what is actually a pretty accurate summary of the novel's plot.

But ...

The "but" is that, reading the blurb, you'd probably expect the novel to be a space action-adventure yarn, something a bit like RoboCop, perhaps, except with space-opera trimmings. In fact, Edward Maret is not really that at all, which may come as a disappointment to Battlestar Galactica-gawpers but should be a delightful surprise to most other readers. It is not flawless – a secondary element of the final plot resolution seems somewhat contrived for melodramatic effect (it involves Devil-worshipping aliens), and the novel's structure as a whole has an aura of slight precariousness without ever quite falling apart – but it is certainly absorbing reading.

Why? Because Katz has filled it with interesting ideas. Again, that's a statement that might mislead, so let me immediately qualify it. Many of the ideas are not especially sciencefictional. Some of them are: for example, Katz's snapshot portrayals of differing alien and far-future-human cultures as his protagonist wanders the spaceways in the book's central section hold a good deal of interest (although the culture with which he populates Sparta, the planet on which much of the tale unfolds, is somewhat pedestrian, as if intended only as dutiful backdrop). But many of the novel's passages – either integral or digressionary – are concerned with the working out of philosophical ideas: ethical, moral and religious.

This is not to say that the text is any way stuffily didactic – indeed, it's refreshingly well written and flows along with scarce a moment of turgidity. Instead, what Katz has done is to take some basic formulae from science fiction and use them to construct a skeleton upon which he can drape a rather unexpected flesh, with the result that the book has superficially the affect of light reading yet is constantly titillating the intellect. That, of course, is what all science fiction is supposed to do, but in fact is what very much of it does not.

It's a difficult task that Katz has taken on, and as noted he doesn't do it with complete, 100% success. (There are also a few irritating flaws that should have been picked up by his copy-editor.) Yet he comes very close – certainly close enough that Edward Maret, even though it won't keep you up into the small hours feverishly turning the pages, is an extremely rewarding piece of work.

If you want stark shoot-em-up entertainment then this is not the book for you – there is surprisingly little dramatic action of that sort, despite the blurb, and Maret's time as cyborg AX-17 occupies only a small portion of the narrative. If you prefer your sf thoughtful and more deeply involving, however, Edward Maret can be recommended ... and Katz, whose first novel this is, is certainly an author to watch.

—Infinity Plus

Surgical Risk

by Robert I. Katz

Willowgate Press, 240 pages, paperback, 2002

One night in a Manhattan hospital obstetrician Sharon Lee is murdered. Found wandering nearby is a psychiatric patient who bears scratch-marks; traces of his tissues are found under the dead woman's fingernails. It seems an open and shut case, yet NYPD Detective Barent isn't so sure – and neither is surgeon Richard Kurtz, dragged into the case initially because he once had a passionate affair with Lee but kept on as unofficial hospital snoop because of past connections with law enforcement.

Soon after, Lee's apartment is burgled, and the burglar is later found murdered. There's a gangster connection, and Barent sets out to probe it, aware it may be just a red herring. At first he gets nowhere: potential informants either know nothing, say they know nothing, have disappeared or are inconveniently dead. But at last cracks begin to open and shenanigans ensue.

Willy-nilly, Kurtz and his love life become embroiled in those shenanigans, and he it is who spots the vital clue that leads to the busting of a criminal conspiracy and the solution to the murder.

This is a very smoothly written mystery, with likable central characters. The elegance of the writing and the frequently extremely funny but always entertaining conversations of the surgeons around the operating table pull the reader along very satisfactorily. The final unveiling of the murderer comes only after a couple of very effective twists. The private lives of Barent and Kurtz are involving too; the cop's daughter is getting married, and mother and daughter are conspiring to create a Father of the Bride-style extravaganza of a wedding; the surgeon is deeply fond of girlfriend Kathy, but not so deeply that he is not tempted by the allure of svelte blonde Lenore, encountered on a solo Mexican holiday and then later back in New York – Kurtz's vacillation between the two women is especially well done.

The novel's only problem is the plethora of minor characters: it's hard to keep track of who they all are. This does dilute the effectiveness of those plot twists a little; hard to be startled by the revelation that it was Smith who did this and Jones who did that when you can't remember who either Smith or Jones actually is.

That reservation aside, however, Surgical Risk is a thoroughly enjoyable read, with exactly the right blend of suspense, bamboozlement and humor. It is also substantially tougher-nosed than many a mystery novel: the gangster villains are very convincing in their nastiness, and overall there is no sense of coziness about the novel's worldview. Uncomfortable topics such as anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry are addressed directly. And the surgical descriptions are satisfyingly revolting; this reviewer will never be able to look a rectum in the eye again without a shudder.

Surgical Risk is billed as "A Kurtz and Barent Mystery", implying that it is the start of a series. Further volumes are awaited eagerly.

—Crescent Blues

Right to Life: A Novella and Two Stories

by Jack Ketchum

Gauntlet/Edge, 158 pages, paperback, 2002; the novella Right to Life first published 1998

Sara Foster, who years ago lost her six-year-old son in a tragic accident, and who lost her husband too, inadvertently becomes pregnant during her affair with the married Greg Glover; as Greg declines to destroy his family, they decide on an abortion. As they make their way to a Manhattan abortion clinic Sara is abducted into a car by Stephen and Kath Teach, two declared Right to Lifers, and drugged into unconsciousness.

When she awakes she is in the New Jersey basement cum torture chamber of the Teaches. Kath is barren. The couple intend to secrete Sara until she comes to term, then keep the baby as their own; Sara herself will not be permitted to survive the delivery. In the meantime she is repeatedly tortured – physically, mentally and in due course sexually – primarily by Stephen, who is a sadistic psychopath with less interest in the baby than in the sexual sadism, but also to a lesser extent by Kath, who despite a sympathetic exterior is in fact little better. Of course, in the end Sara turns on her tormentors and bloodily exacts her revenge ...

And that's more or less the whole plot of Jack Ketchum's short novel Right to Life, which seems to have been inspired in some part by the ghastly case of the UK husband-and-wife sexual psychopaths Fred and Rosemary West. The tale is really quite well told, but one's left with the uneasy feeling that its subtext is a bit of a mess – perhaps intentionally so. Yes, there are Right to Lifers whose life-sanctifying principles don't stop them from maiming, shooting and lethally bombing, and on the face of it the tale might seem allegorical of this miserable illogicality; yet the allegory soon falls apart as it becomes evident Stephen has no real interest at all in the baby – indeed, he at one point wonders if the baby might be disposed of along with its mother – but is driven solely by the urge to gratify his sado-sexual urges, while Kath is looking forward gleefully to the goriness of performing an unnecessary and fatal Caesarian for the delivery.

So, sans subtext, all we're really left with is a tale of crazed inhumanity – the pro- and anti-abortion debate being just a Maguffin – yet it's a gripping enough narrative to brush off such misgivings until after the reading is done.

Of the two stories appended in this edition, "Brave Girl" is beautifully told and sucks the reader in with enviable skill, only to suffer from the lack of a real ending – it just stops – and "Returns" is a very pleasing bit of whimsy, a very short ghost story of immense appeal to cat-lovers everywhere.

This elegantly produced volume will serve as an introduction to those unfamiliar with Ketchum's work and as a gap-filler for Ketchum completists. For the rest of us, it's a pleasant enough way of passing a train journey.

—Infinity Plus

Bag of Bones

by Stephen King

Hodder & Stoughton, 516 pages, hardback, 1998

Jo, the wife of successful thriller writer Mike Noonan, dies suddenly and still quite young from a brain aneurysm. In grief, he suffers a dramatic case of writer's block, but is able to get by for a few years by covertly publishing novels he'd written earlier but never told his publisher about. But then the "spares" run out, and he must, somehow, get his act together to write something new. In desperation, he decides to go to the summer home he and Jo had in a remote part of Maine, a house he hasn't found the courage to visit since Jo's death. On arrival he finds that the house, called Sara Laughs in honour of a local turn-of-the-century blues singer called Sara Tidwell, is haunted. Also he meets and falls in love with widowed Mattie Devore and her three-year-old daughter Kyra; Mattie's vastly wealthy father-in-law Max is determined to get custody of the child, and so Mike steps in to help Mattie fight him through the courts. In so doing, Mike begins to unearth a truly ghastly tale of what happened one summer's day ninety years ago to Sara Tidwell, and the terrible revenge her spirit has been exacting from the descendants of her murderers.

King has always been a masterful page-turner – even his weakest books are usually immensely readable. But through most of his long career he has rarely aspired to be more than that – which is an observation rather than a criticism, because there's many a respected literary novelist who could improve his or her art by learning a little of King's craft. At the same time there has been the feeling that, in books like Rose Madder and Insomnia, King himself has become a little impatient with the self-imposed shackles of "mere" craftsmanship.

With Bag of Bones he's finally made the breakthrough, and it is as a serious literary novel that this book should be judged. That's not to say that he has lost any of his ability to tell a spellbinding tale – and this is one of his very best, a stunningly good and often very frightening ghost story that owes much to the tradition of M.R. James, Sheridan Le Fanu and, to name a modern example, the excellent Jonathan Aycliffe. But what makes this book so intensely gripping is something more than that – and more, too, than the fine, perceptive and often disturbingly funny writing: it is the superb depiction of character and situation. We care about these people; we share with Mike Noonan his slow discovery that his loss of Jo is at an even more profound depth than he or we could have imagined, that she was a finer person than even he had realized; and lordie do we come to share his growing love for Mattie and the child Kyra. And all this is achieved through the use of a very difficult narrational gambit: although Mike is our narrator, our storyspinner, and thus is present on every page and is the eye through which we see, he is not in fact the central character – that role is shared by Kyra and Mattie and by the dead Jo and Sara, for this is in part also a novel about women and the male perception of them.

There are various undercurrents in this novel. Inevitably there are aspects of metafiction about it – for King is like his creation a successful novelist (more successful and more prolific than Mike Noonan) and the very title is drawn from a remark by Thomas Hardy to the effect that even the finest fictional character is but a bag of bones when compared to a real person. If King falters anywhere, it is in the handling of these metafictional aspects – a slight failure, seemingly born of timidity. But the most important underlyer is the sense of and deep appreciation of human loss: Jo is lost to Mike and the world, as even more profoundly is Sara, whose songs are available only through interpretations at the hands of others, for no recordings of her survive. Mike's ability to write is lost – ask any writer and you'll be told that this is a true nightmare of the soul. The only loss that can be averted is that of the child Kyra, who is sought by both the living and the dead.

This is a very powerful book, and a fine example of what the late-twentieth-century novel can do. And should be doing more often.

—Samhain

The Knotted Cord

Alistair Kinnon

BeWrite, 316 pages, paperback, 2002

Almost a decade ago, cop Martin Nicols, working in a small Ontario town some tens of miles outside Toronto, failed to solve the murder of young S&M rent-boy Billy. He gave in to pressure from his superiors to let the "obvious culprit", Billy's regular client Frank Taylor – self-confessedly guilty of pedophile conduct but, Nicols believed, innocent of killing the prostitute he loved – plea-bargain manslaughter and take the rap. Now a string of similar murders bedevils Toronto, and Nicols realizes he might at last catch Billy's murderer.

But again people in high places obstruct him, trying once more to pin the crimes on Taylor, recently released. Nonetheless, Nicols presses on, uncovering once more the hideous details of a pedophile sexual-slavery network that spreads into all levels of Canadian society.

He also has to cope with his own guilt. If only he had persisted in the teeth of political pressure, he might have caught this sadistic killer ten years ago and thus saved the lives of several of society's most unfortunate. Now that he's based in a new force, with new superiors, it's a pusillanimity he'll not repeat.

In The Knotted Cord we follow both of Nicols's investigations, with the "flashback" occupying about two-thirds of the text – perhaps an artificial distinction, since the "flashback" is really part of the current case.

This book functions pretty well as a sort of double police procedural, despite some clumsy writing; a further distraction is that the text reads as if (although this may well not have been the case) the book was originally written as set in Britain and then revised to effect a relocation to Ontario. There's also an annoying frequency of typos, short pages (the typesetter's widows/orphans program needs adjustment), jumbled word-orders and errors of the "lead" for "led" variety.

All these criticisms seem oddly trivial – as, indeed, do the book's "mystery" aspects – when set beside the element that gives The Knotted Cord its explosive strength: its unflinching examination of the sexual exploitation of kids both for the profit of the slavers and the pleasure of the clients. The details of the criminal schemes and activities have all the authenticity of a documentary account. Hugh McCracken, using here the nom de plume Alistair Kinnon, has worked extensively with troubled teenagers in Canada, and this bolsters the sense that what we're reading is factually based. In this sense The Knotted Cord is a crusading book, and I would say an important one.

A further point. Although the author is as tough as any on pedophilia, and especially on pedophilic exploitation, he is also tough enough to take an unpopular stance and present convicted pedophile Taylor as a redeemable character. Having served his sentence and now living in a stable gay relationship, Taylor actively contributes to the hunt for the exploiters and the killer – in other words, has joined the forces of the good.

Despite the flaws noted, this very powerful novel is much recommended.

—Crescent Blues

The Moth Diaries

by Rachel Klein

Bantam, 256 pages, paperback, 2003; reissue of a book originally published in 2002

This is one of the subtlest vampire stories you could ever hope to come – subtle to the point that at the book's end it is left up to the reader to decide whether The Moth Diaries is a vampire story at all. In other words, it is one of that delicious – and rare – breed of fictions that has been dubbed the "fantasy of perception": there is certainly fantastication here, but that is not to say the events described were themselves other than mundane; they may have been fantasticated by the observer, the protagonist.

The observer in The Moth Diaries is an adolescent girl who has been sent to an exclusive and very peculiar single-sex boarding school; except for a brief prologue and epilogue added by her in much later life, the text consists entirely of her schooldays diary. In it we learn of her various friendships and enmities – all seemingly transitory – with her fellow pupils, and in particular of her largely unrecognized crush on her room-mate Lucy and her hatred and fear of the new kid across the hall, Ernessa. Assuredly there's a lot that's weird and possibly detestable about Ernessa, but Ernessa's true – if again unrecognized – crime in the eyes of the narrator is that her company is significantly more alluring to Lucy than is the narrator's own.

The other girls sense Ernessa's strangeness, too, but also that allure. She could perhaps be regarded as a personification of the adult sexuality about which they're all so insatiably curious, which they are so tantalized and attracted by, which they are so eager to experiment with for themselves, and yet which they also fear because of its unknownness and its obvious dangers. Together they spy on Ernessa to see if they can solve the perceived mystery of who – or indeed what – she is, and no one is more assiduous in this than our narrator. Even when one of the girls falls off the school roof to her death during one of these spying expeditions the narrator is not long distracted from her partially successful quest.

For she has a specific reason to unpick the riddle of Ernessa. Lucy, the girl with whom she is in love – even if she cannot admit this is the case – but who has wearied of her and instead fallen under Ernessa's spell, is afflicted by an undiagnosable illness that seems to be sapping her very life away. The diarist's claims to the school authorities that Ernessa is a spiritual vampire who is sucking Lucy's life from her are of course ignored as the nonsensical ravings of a disturbed pubescent; yet it is true that when Lucy is away from school, and thus from Ernessa, her health recovers, but that when she returns she goes once more into decline ...

Klein deliberately uses an almost flat style of narrative, eschewing linguistic melodramatics in favor of something that's much more menacing – and much more engrossing, for this is a novel it soon becomes extremely hard to put down. Written with this beautiful restraint, and functioning at a number of allegorical levels, The Moth Diaries is a book you'll almost certainly want to read more than once.

—Crescent Blues

The Buzzing

by Jim Knipfel

Vintage, 260 pages, paperback, 2003

Here is a book that's potentially enormous fun but which, through flaccid, sloppy writing, poor characterization and a general lack of coherent focus offers a major disappointment.

Roscoe Baragon was once a prominent investigative journalist, but now he's old, alcoholic and complacent. His previous achievements having brought him to the prestigious (well, sort of) newsroom of the New York Sentinel, he has gravitated towards what's popularly called the Kook Beat because reporting on the conspiracy theorists doesn't require him to get off his (literally) fat butt to go out and do any real journalism. He's the ear of choice for all the crazies of New York, of whom there is no short supply; they fax, phone or e-mail him the wildest products of their own persecution complexes, and these he translates with minimal effort into "news" stories. The job is a matter of money for as near to nothing as Baragon can get it.

But then a cluster of conspiracy theories start making a sort of synergistic sense, especially when taken together with genuine news reports coming in from around the world of multiple earthquakes along a line associated with no known plate margin, of a Japanese fishing boat being struck by a US nuclear sub, and so on. His own best friend and not-quite-girlfriend, the seemingly equally alcoholic Emily, is something in forensics at the city morgue, and she leaks him the story of a drifter found strangled in a nearby park whose corpse, on arrival at the morgue, proved to be so radioactive, through and through, that he'd have died within hours had he not been strangled first.

All of this – plus the contents of Godzilla vs Megalon (1973), one of the lesser of Toho's offerings – Baragon weaves into the granddaddy of all conspiracy theories. It can be nothing more than lunatic ravings, of course, and so his editor spikes it and fires him; yet in The Buzzing's closing pages we find indications that Baragon is right ...

Not the most original of plots, but no one would care about that if the conspiracy theories themselves were sufficiently imaginative, if the one-liners came fast, furious and witty, if there were a bizarre cast of larger-than-life characters, if the writing were full of flair or sophistication, or ...

Instead the writing is clumsy and leaden. There are a few laugh-out-loud moments, but not many grins between them; one has the feeling of ploughing on through a prose wasteland hoping that someone will have dropped a rose by the path that hasn't had time to wither. Baragon is a reasonably drawn character, and possibly his hostile editor and one of the theorists, Nastacia, just about scrape the grade as well; but all the others, surprisingly including Emily, are mere names on the page. As for the conspiracy theories, surely a potentially rich lode for entertainment, these, save alone the one that Baragon himself painstaking constructs over the course of 200-plus pages, lack the fastidious complexity – the careful plaiting of different data strands to produce a perfectly self-consistent tapestry of delusion and misinformation – that is essential for the full fascination and delight of this quasi-literary form. One has the constant feeling that Knipfel hasn't bothered to do enough research to familiarize himself with the whole ethos of the conspiracy theory, and has assumed that just coming up with a few crazy notions will humour the reader.

Some of the descriptions of New York life are evocative; overall, though, The Buzzing is somewhat dull where it should sparkle.

—Infinity Plus

From the Corner of His Eye

by Dean Koontz

Bantam, 729 pages, paperback, 2001; reissue of a book originally published in 2001

Dean Koontz is probably, right now, the most underestimated writer at work in the field of fantastic literature. The reasons are not hard to fathom. Unlike most authors, who go through the learning process before they ever see print, Koontz had the misfortune – although of course it must have seemed far from that to him at the time – to find publishers for his early, clumsy attempts, which, again unfortunately for his status within the field, sold pretty well; one of them, Demon Seed (1973), an sf novel of risible implausibility, was successfully made into an even worse movie (1977). His movie novelization The Funhouse (1980; initially published as by Owen West) is another to be recalled with the wrong sort of shudder. Through these and other books he gained a dubious reputation – and good sales figures – as a sort of poor man's Stephen King, a reputation that ignored the fact that he was slowly carving out his own individual and quite distinctive niche: his novels, which got steadily better, grew less like horror novels and less even than like dark fantasies, instead becoming what might best be described as dark technofantasies. Horrors there might be aplenty, and they might seem to be rooted in the fantastic, but almost always there was a sub-sciencefictional rationalization somewhere. By the time of a book like Mr. Murder (1993) – which is not far short of a fine novel – he had more or less mastered his art. It can be read as a technofantasy response to Stephen King's The Dark Half (1989): in both books the central character is a writer being persecuted by a doppelgänger, but in Koontz's novel the doppelgänger has been manufactured rather than generated from the psyche.

Bestsellerdom greeted many of his novels of the later 1980s and especially the 1990s, but by that time many readers of fantastic literature had given up on him, having been more than once bitten by his earlier efforts. This was a great shame.

And it would be a great shame were such readers to miss From the Corner of His Eye, because, although not blemish-free, this is a good novel by anybody's standards. Although not as elegantly polished, it has the air of the novel that John Irving, perhaps, might write were he ever to stray into Dean Koontz territory.

Most of the book is set in the latter part of the 1960s. Harrison White, a black preacher, writes a long and powerful radio sermon based on the little-regarded disciple Saint Bartholomew. This sermon provides important motivation for much of the plot, as is slowly revealed. For example, a rehearsal of it is playing in the background as psychopath Junior Cain is brutally raping the younger of White's two virginal daughters, Seraphim; she dies bearing the resultant child, a girl who, christened Angel, is adopted by her elder sister Celestina. Although Cain barely listens to the tape, the name Bartholomew imprints itself upon his subconscious. Elsewhere, at about the time of Angel's birth, the broadcast sermon much affects Joe Lampion, whose wife Aggie is expecting their first-born; he dies in a car smash while taking her to hospital for the birth, his dying wish being that the baby, if a boy, be called Bartholomew.

Cain does not stop his psychopathic career at the rape of Seraphim. Less than a year later he moves on to murder, the victim being his fairly recent bride; he fakes her death as an accidental fall from a rickety tower and is awarded millions in an out-of-court settlement by the authorities whose task it should have been to keep the tower in a proper state of repair. Not all are entirely convinced by Cain's explanation, among them his lawyer, Simon Magusson – seemingly seedy but in fact with a moral core – and most particularly a maverick homicide detective, Thomas Vanadium, who can make coins (quarters) disappear in a seemingly sleight-of-hand trick that in fact is real: he has accidentally learned the knack of flicking the coins into parallel universes. (As an aside, this offers a wry counter-explanation of the celebrated Randi-Geller dispute: what if it's not Geller who's doing conjuring tricks but Randi who's performing paranormal feats?) Vanadium hears Cain talking in his sleep, and discovers that the murderer has a subliminal fixation on the name Bartholomew – a fixation that he begins to exploit after Cain has very nearly killed him. Cain, you see, believes that he has killed Vanadium, rather than, in actuality, putting him into a months-long coma; and it is because of this false assumption that Cain's psychopathic career begins to unravel; tormented by occasional, deliberately staged glimpses of Vanadium's "ghost", by incongruously "materializing" quarters and by snatches of a meaningful song "spectrally" broadcast into his luxury apartment, he becomes obsessed with the notion that the child born of his rape must have been a boy called Bartholomew, the murder of which infant will bring him release from all the "paranormal" persecution he is suffering.

As they grow through infancy, both Bartholomew – who proves to be a child prodigy – and Angel discover they have Vanadium's ability to interact with parallel universes, only much more so; in Bartholomew's case this becomes even more pronounced after, at the age of three, he must have his eyes surgically removed to halt the spread of retinal cancer. To help him move about without accident, he can let his mind briefly camp in closely similar realities where he was never stricken by the cancer and so still possesses his sight.

Cain is the star of the show. Koontz is obviously irritated by the fallacy perpetuated in almost all serial-killer chillers that serial killers are phenomenally intelligent – all Hannibal Lecters. In real life this is total nonsense: serial killers are almost always pretty dimwitted but their psychopathy leads them to believe themselves to be more intelligent by untold orders of magnitude than the "common herd"; this false belief is what leads them to getting caught, usually through repeated acts of thundering stupidity. Koontz, going against the literary trend but more accurately reflecting reality, portrays Junior Cain as an exceptionally stupid and gullible, if at the same time cunning and certainly lucky, psychopath, and he does so through often hilarious, laugh-out-loud satire. Cain has pretensions to Culture, and is completely hoodwinked by the stances of the bad modern-art cliques of the late 1960s: no painting is acceptable to him unless it is utterly hideous, preferably stomach-churningly so, and thus he squanders much of his ill gotten gains on the dire but fashionable artworks produced by idiot poseur Sklent. In his sexual life, Cain, physically handsome but affectingly vile, is convinced of his magnificence as a lover and that he is completely irresistible to women; he is perplexed by the fact that so few of his ex-lovers ever plead with him for a reconciliation and by the way so many of the women lusting after him play the game of pretending to resist, but chooses to dismiss these facts as just quirks of happenstance. And throughout everything he is guided by the ludicrous but bestselling self-help writings of the crackpot guru Cyrus Zedd, which have titles like Act Now, Think Later and which advise that one should live always in the future, never in the present or the past. As example, Zedd's prescription for the recovery of lost memories is to stand in a cold shower for as long as it takes, tightly pressing a fistful of ice cubes to the genitalia. Cain discovers that the technique does indeed eventually help him recover a specific lost memory, and thereafter, for some reason, he becomes generally much better at not forgetting things. There are other books in Cain's library – almost all purchased from the Book of the Month Club, of which he is inordinately proud to be a member – but somehow he has never quite had the time to read more than a page or two of any of them, obviously believing that, through their very possession, he has transformed himself into Literary Man through some sort of osmotic process.

But Cain is not the only character in this long and much-woven novel to leap out of the page and permanently imprint on the mind. Celestina White is another delightful discovery. A highly talented artist, she becomes successful creating paintings of the type that Cain has learnt to detest and despise: only morons could like paintings that uplift the heart and display brilliant technique, after all. More to the point, having initially, briefly hated the baby whose birth "killed her sister" – the newborn who, while half the offspring of the loved Seraphim must also be half the offspring of the deservedly loathed (but unidentified) rapist – takes her in and sacrifices much to be an ideal mother to her. It might sound as if Celestina could read as a nauseatingly good goodie (and the portrayal of Agnes Lampion does on occasion veer this way), but in fact she emerges as a charming and extremely intelligent woman, someone one wishes one had as a best friend. While it is hard to control a grin of derision, if not outright laughter, when Cain is at centre stage, in Celestina's case it is hard to control a warm grin of affection.

As noted parenthetically, the depiction of the one-woman charity movement Agnes Lampion is less successful, and, oddly, the same can be said for the unkillable cop and retired priest Thomas Vanadium, who really should be the tale's Immutable Force of Good. Perhaps part of it is to do with the name. As will be obvious, there's quite a lot of coding going on in terms of the book's names: Cain, the black Whites, Simon Magusson, Angel, Bartholomew, and so on, and this is by no means limited to the central characters. But Vanadium – harder, of course, than steel ...? It's a highly artificial surname, and the effect is a bit hokey, damagingly so in that it colours our perceptions of the rest of Vanadium's characterization, which would be just on the verge of clichéd caricature even without the name, which pulls it (only slightly) too far in that direction. It's possible, of course, that this was a deliberate gambit on Koontz's part – to set a caricatured Force of Good against his inspiredly caricatured Force of Evil – and certainly in the rest of the novel Koontz displays a sufficiently attuned intelligence that this may very well be the case, but in this instance, at least for this reader, it is a minor irritation rather than an effective literary stratagem.

Fantasy, technofantasy, science fiction, chiller thriller or comedy of manners? From the Corner of His Eye is all of these, to a greater or lesser extent. Although it has occasional clumsinesses (almost inevitable in such a very long novel) – the final, inevitable despatch of Junior by the kids is, for example, hurriedly and rather flatly done – these are just about irrelevant in the context of the whole, which is a splendid achievement. Do not be deceived by the book's trumpeted bestseller status, or by the bizarrely misleading blurb, or by any memories you might have (no need for cold showers and ice cubes here) of early experiences with Koontz's novels: give this one a try.

—Infinity Plus

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 dissatisfied 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

i-o

by Simon Logan

Prime, 110 pages, paperback, 2002

This is a strange and original book, likely to appeal very strongly indeed to some and completely repel others. According to its form and its cover copy it's a collection of short stories, but the stories are so much of a piece – even though not overtly linked – that it's hard to see the text as other than a series of windows out onto a uniquely bleak, definitively mechanistic worldview.

The typical narrator here is a brutally cyborgized individual – presumably originally human but just as plausibly originally machine, or perhaps always a mixture, perhaps even without a physical machine component but nevertheless so dehumanized that fleshliness is irrelevant – forced by unnamed, unknown, unknowable masters to persist in a self-destructively banal, repetitive task that, at least from the narrator's limited knowledge, is no more than an exercise in terminal futility. The passions these creatures display amid devastated landscapes of emotional barbarity are at one and the same time derived from human ones and quite divorced from them.

Here are a couple of brief extracts that seem to me to epitomize the book and that may explain, by example, more clearly the ethos of the whole:

The machine was perfect, as it always had been, the production line endless and unflawed. It built the builders, an endless stream of mass-produced gods, their own creators, their own destroyers. [from "partofit"]

and

In a few hours she will be screaming and clawing once more at her pneumatic prison but for now she is as peaceful as depression itself. The great steel rods that breathe for her slide in rhythmical patterns all around the massive contraption, hissing at me and spewing hot greasy steam at odd angles. Rusted cogs turn in aged circles, grinding against one another, sparking. Differently coloured fluids pulse through thin copper veins.

I kiss the glass before her lips and whisper a prayer of solitude to her as she stirs ever so slightly on her ice-white pillows. [from "iron lung"]

This is a short book, which is a good thing; the intensity of Logan's vision is such that it's hard to take more than a short book's worth of it. By its end you may find yourself revelling in revulsion, laughing with hatred, as if somehow your emotional reactions had been unplugged from their appropriate areas of the brain and then the plugs replaced in all the wrong sockets. It's a matter for individual readers whether they'll enjoy such a mentally dislocating experience. In the end this particular reader couldn't decide one way or the other, but was left filled with admiration for Logan's ambition in achieving this effect.

Aside from those deliberate irritations that Logan deploys as instruments in his grating, rasping, tearing orchestra of the dehumanized imagination, there's one irritation that this book could have done without: the text is appallingly proofread. Perhaps the only proofing was done by a computer spellcheck ... which would have a certain thematic appropriateness but is inexcusable nonetheless.

You won't forget the ambience of this book in a hurry, although the details of the different events and scenarios within it soon become blurred one with another. You may wish you had; and you may decide to avoid i-o rather than risk such an outcome. What fantasy should really be all about is taking such risks.

—Infinity Plus

Fantastic Tales

by Jack London, foreword by Philip José Farmer, edited by Dale L. Walker

University of Nebraska Press, 223 pages + x, paperback, 1998

This is a direct photographic reprint, complete with irritating minor typographical errors, of a 1975 publication originally called Curious Fragments: Jack London's Tales of Fantasy Fiction; the only change, apart from on the copyright and title pages, is that the running heads have been deleted from all the left-hand pages so that the old title no longer appears there. I make a point of all this because whoever was responsible for preparing this book for press has omitted to alter the original title where it appears in Walker's interesting Introduction; this reader at least was baffled by a couple of the sentences therein until he checked in a Jack London bibliography and realized what had happened. There is also confusion here as to whether this reprint is published by the University of Nebraska Press (title page) or Bison Books (spine and copyright page). So, while one welcomes the reissue of the collection, the welcome is qualified.

Although not well published, the collection is an interesting one – interesting rather than entirely enjoyable, in fact, because in the case of some of the stories there is good reason why they are rarely if ever reprinted. Moreover, London was no great master of the short-story form: almost without exception, the best pieces in the collection are not so much stories as what we could describe as fictional histories – straightforward narratives, sans characters, sans dialogue, and essentially sans plot.

The prime examples of this form are "The Enemy of All the World" (1908) and "Goliah" (1908). The two narratives are rather similar, in that each is concerned with a mysterious genius who initiates large-scale mayhem through the application of his secret technological discovery; in the former case the perpetrator is adjudged evil, in the latter a benefactor (he smashes eggs to make the omelette called World Peace And Human Happiness), so the near-juxtaposition of the two tales, printed almost next to each other in this book, leads one to ruminate on what precisely is the difference between good and evil – a debate that was presumably running through London's mind as well, since the two stories were published in the same year. "The Enemy of All the World" gains an additional fascination because of the passage of time: there is an extensive discussion of the physical and mental abuse to which the central psychopath was subjected during childhood, and his psychopathy – his mental illness – is plainly attributed by the author to this. London's irony is that his narrator seemingly approves of the mass murderer's execution in the electric chair while at the same time recounting all the evils done to him by others that have made him mentally ill in the first place; this double standard, whereby it is somehow ethical to kill the mentally sick for the crimes they have committed through their sickness yet evil of them to have been made sick and thereby committed crimes, is merely presented by London rather than overtly commented upon. It is a double standard that still plagues modern US society.

The longest piece in this book, "The Scarlet Plague" (1912), is almost certainly the best known. Once again it is largely a fictional history, but this time it has a frame, being ostensibly told by an oldster of the future, decades after the eponymous plague has wiped out all but a handful of humankind, to the children of what has reverted to a Stone Age society. The frame adds considerable power to what might otherwise seem a rather unaffecting narrative despite its recounting of deaths by the million.

London, as will be evident, was not afraid to write of large-scale carnage. Indeed, this is an astonishingly bloodthirsty collection, four of its fifteen pieces being concerned with vast loss of human life and violent death being central to most of the others. One of the mass-slaughter fictions, "The Unparalleled Invasion" (1910), is a truly nauseating piece of work, saturated with the astonishing (for a self-professed socialist) racism that appears elsewhere in London's work and yet which goes, surprisingly, unmentioned in Walker's commentary: in this future history the Chinese, guilty of being yellow, slant-eyed and inscrutable and of talking funny, are becoming increasingly important in the world through a peaceful territorial expansion driven by rising population; the other races therefore hem China about with military force, so that none may escape, and use bacteriological warfare to annihilate her entire population. One seeks desperately for the slightest redeeming trace of irony amid the general narrative jubilation over this successful act of racially inspired genocide, but nowhere is it to be found.

In Walker's introduction to "A Thousand Deaths" (1899) we find a clue to such enormities of attitude. London received $40 from The Black Cat for this poorly constructed tale (at the heart of its plot is an unbelievable and utterly unnecessary coincidence) of a scientist who discovers how to reanimate the dead. This fee saved the young writer's bacon: Overland Monthly had been paying him a miserly $5 to $7.50 for significant Klondike tales, and as a result he was broke. Initially we wonder, in this context, why London didn't overnight decide to become a pulp writer of sensationalist fictions; on second thought, however, we realize this is essentially what to a great extent he already was – and remained. His natural market was indeed more The Black Cat than Overland Monthly. Despite his socialism, despite his visionary streak, despite his occasional brilliant mastery of prose (not much, to be honest, evident in this collection), he had at heart the sensibilities of a pulp writer – and unlike, for example, Raymond Chandler he was rarely really able to transcend them. Hence the ability to couch sensationalist events successfully in fictional histories but not in genuine short stories; it is perhaps significant here that by far the most successful short story in this collection, "War" (1911), is in no sense a fantastication (indeed, it's puzzling why it was included at all).

This collection could do with either more or less accompanying critical apparatus: there is not enough for the scholar and mildly annoyingly too much for the casual reader. One item from Walker's commentary causes a grin of disbelief at its partisanship: because the date 1984 is mentioned in passing in "The Scarlet Plague" and in a footnote to The Iron Heel (1907), is it not possible that George Orwell, who in 1945 wrote an introduction to a collection of London's tales, selected this date for his great satire? But, such reservations aside, Walker is to be congratulated for having done a reasonable job. For London at his best, however, one should really turn to the novels.

—unknown venue

Silence and Shadows

by James Long

Bantam, 407 pages, paperback, 2002; reissue of a book originally published in 2001

Once upon a time archaeologist Patrick Kane was renowned punk rocker Paddy Kane – a rock star with a secret, in fact, because the industry moguls were convinced he would lose his sexy image if it were to be publicly known he had a wife and infant son. As fame went increasingly to his head – not to mention the booze, and the groupies, and the drugs – so he listened more to the bean-counters' lies, until eventually, at the height of an internationally televised charity concert, he sang a hate-song targeted at his wife. Almost immediately afterwards he realized both what he'd done and what he'd become, and resolved to abandon the rock-star life. That was when the news reached him that his wife had, in the aftermath of watching the concert on tv, either carelessly, through anguish, or deliberately driven her car to the bottom of a river, killing both herself and their son.

Ever since then, Kane has been on the run from his guilt and his grief. Resurrecting the archaeology he studied at university, he has got himself a job with a seedy commercial archaeological outfit, and to his surprise he has been put in charge of a dig in rural Oxfordshire.

That dig, to uncover a Roman mosaic floor, is sabotaged by an unscrupulous land developer, but a mysterious local, Joe, who can sing but not speak, guides Kane to an immediately adjacent site – that of a rare Saxon-period barrow. Through a mixture of song and archaeology, slowly the story is pieced together of the occupant of that barrow, a woman who died defending the villagers from murderous attackers. While excited by the results of the dig, Kane is disconcerted by the passing resemblance Joe's sister Bobby, herself mourning a dead lover, has to his dead wife Rachel. But his obsession is less with her than with the seventh-century woman who was known in the vicinity as the German Queen and whose story, like her bones and funerary artefacts, is emerging from the grave.

Silence and Shadows is not really either fantasy or science fiction – although archaeology is of course a science, that aspect is not stressed – and yet one can hardly imagine that any devotee of the fantastic genres could do anything other than adore this book. That distinctive fantasy frisson runs right through it, so that we have the feeling of being constantly close to the line that divides reality from the Other – rather as in many of the nonfantasies of Peter Dickinson.

The writing is often very lovely and highly evocative – the opening few pages are as fine a distillation of destructive guilt and grief as any I have come across – but also it is often very funny, as in

"You've not tried [a brand of rough Scotch whisky] before?" said CD. "Well, as they say in the traditional distilleries of the South Bronx, there's always a first time but there's not often a second time."

Unusually, the music-industry details ring true, and the song lyrics – both those of Paddy Kane's punk barnstormers and the traditional ballad of the German Queen that Joe sings – read authentically, rather than as a prose writer's unmusical versifying. But what really bring Silence and Shadows to life are the characters and the constantly shifting dynamics among them. This comment applies not just to the major protagonists but also to a fairly large cast of bit players, some of whom perform that difficult transition from apparent comic-cut status on first introduction to real, three-dimensional people about whom one comes to care. They are a very sweetly imagined chorus to offer background to the song that is made up of the story of Patrick and Bobby and Joe ... and the German Queen.

While reading Silence and Shadows I found my mind constantly harking back to Peter Ackroyd's First Light (1989), which was also about an archaeological dig and which also sought to evoke a sense that a timeslip was always just around the corner. Although Ackroyd's novel got all the swooning broadsheet reviews, the fact of the matter is that Silence and Shadows is by several orders of magnitude the better novel. It is the more moving and better written of the two, it is populated by characters who are certainly more real and vibrant, and it is vastly more enthralling – indeed, it is as gripping a read as you could hope to come across.

In the world of art it can often be difficult to remember that a miniature can be as fine as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel: the mere disparity in size distorts one's impressions of the relative worth of the two. In the same way, one is tempted to say that Silence and Shadows is not a major novel simply because its range is small, its vision focused on a microcosm rather than events that might shape the world. Yet that would be to misjudge it; it will haunt your mind long after you've completely forgotten whatever major blockbuster it was you last read. It is not quite perfect – a few lines of the badinage between the amateur helpers at the dig grate clumsily (as would be the case in real life, of course, but that's no proper excuse) – yet, as with a beautiful human face, such tiny imperfections can almost add to the overall effect.

Although this edition is an attractive paperback, there is a strong chance that you will, like this reviewer, decide after having read it that only the hardback will do for your shelves, because Silence and Shadows is a book you will inevitably wish to reread several times over the years. You might want to save yourself some money by buying the hardback at the outset.

Yes, it's that sort of a book.

—Infinity Plus

Fat Ollie's Book

by Ed McBain

Simon & Schuster, 288 pages, hardback, 2003

It was over forty years ago that I first came across Ed McBain's 87th Precinct series, by then already well established; yet here's another novel from a writer who's still very much in his creative prime. A horrifying realization.

Fat Ollie Weeks of the 88th has written most of his first novel – a full 36 pages, no less – and is on his way to get it copied when he's called to a murder scene: rising right-wing politician Lester Henderson has been gunned down. As Fat Ollie is busy alienating witnesses, a junkie robs his car and steals the manuscript, of which Fat Ollie has no copies. Because the murder happened in the 87th Precinct, it's agreed that Fat Ollie will share the investigation with Steve Carella and Bert Kling. In the event, of course, while Carella and Kling investigate the murder, Fat Ollie shifts heaven and earth to try to get his manuscript back.

What Fat Ollie doesn't know is that the thief – who only wanted the smart attache case the manuscript came in – assumes Fat Ollie's police-procedural novel is a genuine report, but coded. If the thief could only decode the information he could find a fortune in diamonds and a beauteous babe police officer – for Fat Ollie has written in the persona of one of the young female cops whose asses he's always trying to grab.

Fat Ollie also doesn't know that the title of his novel (Report to the Commissioner) and its format (written as if a genuine report) echo precisely a crime novel of the past: James Mills's 1972 bestseller. In fact, Fat Ollie doesn't even know who John Grisham is. His knowledge of literature extends thus far: (a) bestselling writers make a pile; (b) if you read the reviews on Amazon.com it's plain that the way to write a bestseller is to make your novel as witless as possible.

So amidst all the rest of the plot we're treated to extended parodies of the efforts of bad amateur writers. Unfortunately, although some parts do raise a smile, Fat Ollie's text is actually not bad enough to have that true ring of authenticity – you can read far worse in print, thanks to the crusading efforts of companies like xLibris and iUniverse, and certainly you can easily uncover far worse, and far funnier, in the average slushpile. To put it as politely as possible, McBain has clearly quailed at the prospect of the sort of in-depth research we have come to expect of crime writers.

Still, the novel is beautifully constructed and the prose rattles along with all the speed and wit of vintage McBain; a couple of nice little sideswipes at the lemming-like "bestsellers only" mentality of too much of today's publishing industry spice the brew. The juxtaposition of the humour – not just in the parodies but also in "real life" – with the pathos exposed by the murder investigation is poignant. All in all, Fat Ollie's Book offers as much as you could expect, but just a tad less than you might have wanted.

—Crescent Blues

Rules of the Hunt

by Hugh McCracken

BeWrite, 232 pages, paperback, 2002

Five young boys on a small Scottish island are exploring a grove that has the reputation of being haunted for twenty-four hours each year; during this single noon-to-noon period, people often disappear. Sure enough, the five are suddenly timeslipped back several centuries – to a time when the local Duke has the winsome habit of conducting an equivalent of the Wild Hunt on that same one day. There has been puzzlement that quite often strangers in weird garb turn up during the Hunt, but none of them has ever survived it. The boys immediately encounter the Duke and his huntsmen, but are granted their lives until next year's Hunt – although not before one of them is accidentally killed.

During the twelvemonth they spend in the past the four – Pete (the narrator, an American staying with relatives on the island while his parents divorce), Davey (his cousin), Keith (a working-class lad subjected to physical abuse at home) and Mike (the natural leader) – integrate themselves with the locals, in particular being befriended by Andrew, a cousin of the Duke's and also leader of the Old Ones, a society that offers a sort of Gandhi-like passive resistance to the Duke's rule. The four boys come to be widely regarded as warlocks, and indeed Pete starts displaying some supernatural powers – dreaming prophetic dreams and establishing telepathic contact with the Duke, who proves to be his distant ancestor. Even so, Keith is seized and tortured on the rack; by the time he can be rescued it is evident he will never walk properly again. And always the day of the next Hunt draws nearer, and with it the enigma of whether the boys will ever be able to get back to their own time ...

Timeslip novels for young adults are not exactly thin on the ground at the moment, but Rules of the Hunt is certainly among the more interesting of them that I've encountered – and the among the more readable. The action, after a slightly slow start, fairly cracks along, to the point that once or twice I wished it would crack along a bit less enthusiastically, because a couple of plot developments went by so fast they almost rang of perfunctoriness. The setting, fascinating in itself, is very nicely realized; it has the feel of a fantasyland while at the same time being firmly rooted in a historical reality. The characters likewise come alive, although the boy Keith takes a while to do so.

What is additionally refreshing about this novel is that it is genuinely for adolescents rather than, as is too often the case with YA novels, being over-sanitized. The killing, early on, of the boy Colin, whom one had assumed was going to be one of the central protagonists – one of "our merry gang" – hammers it home that this isn't going to merely the customary romp in which all dangers are survived without much damage to life or limb; and this tenor is maintained by such events as the torturing of the boy Keith. Keith's catchphrase is "No funny stuff", referring to his only semi-joking fear of homosexual advances, the implication being strong that it's not just beatings he's suffered at home from his father and elder brothers. Pete is going through that phase of adolescence when erections pop up at all sorts of unexpected moments, and his embarrassment about this is treated with charming honesty rather than the whole matter being ignored entirely. None of this is stuff from which children should be shielded – to the contrary, it contributes to their healthy development – but most writers (and, much more importantly, most children's editors) would blench at the prospect of some bible-blinded parent in Texas taking exception and would censor reality accordingly.

This is a very nicely produced book from a new publisher; there are quite a few typos, especially in the last thirty pages or so, but otherwise it's a handsome trade paperback, with a good cover by Alan Geldard.

All the best children's and young adult novels hold many riches for adults, and this is one of them. Rules of the Hunt had me gripped; even if one ignored its various subtexts, therefore, it deserves recommendation.

—Infinity Plus

Deepsix

by Jack McDevitt

HarperCollins Eos, 432 pages, hardback, 2001

In the year 2204 a survey party led by Randall Nightingale landed on ice-age-locked Deepsix, one of the few life-bearing planets the human species has so far discovered during its expansion outwards into the Galaxy. The party was attacked by carnivorous birds and retreated in disarray, with the loss of several lives. Nightingale was made scapegoat by his Academy bosses for the "failure" of the expedition, and since then no further study of the planet has been authorized.

Now, however, nearly 20 years later in 2223, Deepsix is about to be destroyed in a collision with a wandering Jovian planet, and several vessels are here so the human species can observe the cataclysm, for purposes of either science or thrill. From orbit are noticed various abandoned artefacts: clearly Deepsix nurtured not just life but at some stage intelligent life, and a civilization of sorts, a fact overlooked during the hastily aborted earlier mission. Although time is short before the collision, a small investigatory party, which happens to include the disgraced Nightingale, is sent down in one of the two available landers to discover what they can; an overweening journalist commandeers the other to make a landing for purposes of self-glorification.

One of the quakes induced by the growing proximity of the rogue Jovian destroys both landers – and the race is on to recover the surviving members of the team from the increasingly hostile surface of the planet. Meanwhile, those team members are discovering technology of incredible sophistication, showing that Deepsix holds unsuspected mysteries ...

Embarrassing though it might be to admit, this is a page-turning, nail-biting, pulse-pounding sf adventure novel of the highest order: it is, quite simply, a riveting read. "Quite simply" in more than one sense, because it is unladen with any particular philosophical subtext – it is not a book that requires head-scratching analysis to reveal layers of meaning – save the customary hard-sf one that the search for knowledge is paramount over all other concerns save humane ones, the word "humane" being extended to cover other species. What you find here, instead of what can often be illusory or even puerile metaphysical profundity, is an example of quite superb tale-telling.

Blurb and cover quotes compare McDevitt to Clarke and Asimov, but he is a wholly different writer from either of them, with different preoccupations and territory. Instead, the book's feel is strongly reminiscent of the heyday of Larry Niven, back before all the increasingly mechanical collaborations, although it is better written and has more of a conscience. There is an acute and infectious sense of awe as the humans uncover the alien artefacts, whether these be the quasi-medieval ones of the planet's original species or the hi-tech ones of their visitors; perhaps these passages are even more powerful than the straightforward adventure sequences, although those are powerful enough. And, although the characterization and character development are often pretty rudimentary and the accounts of behind-the-scenes political shenanniganery are likewise on the simplistic side, they are nevertheless all perfectly convincing and persuasive in the context of this engrossingly helterskelter tale.

Deepsix is an excellent antidote to any belief that the day of the redblooded sf adventure is long gone. It is an unashamedly exciting novel that draws you into its universe almost immediately and then tears along at an accelerating pace. Your reviewer has desperately been trying to avoid clichés like "I couldn't put it down" and "it left me gasping", but unfortunately this is an unequal struggle and he must finally succumb.

—Infinity Plus

Guilty Until Proven Guilty

by Brian McNaughton

Betancourt and Company, 212 pages, hardback, 2003

Be warned: You're not going to like anyone in this bizarre serial-rapist/killer novel. Most are little higher on the moral ladder than the rapist/murderer is: the least vile are guilty of the corruption born of weakness, while the rest are thoroughly venal and at least borderline psychopathic.

Oh, a correction. Two of the characters, Bill and Melody, are reasonably okay, so far as we see them. Unfortunately, they're sadistically murdered in the opening chapter.

Armitage, a town in the thrall of its almost sole employer, the Burroughs Thread Company, has been terrorized by the Full Moon Maniac, who preys upon courting couples. Corrupt trigger-happy cop Frank Buchanan would like to catch the perpetrator to increase his chances of promotion, and is little concerned about anyone who gets in his way. He's convinced the killer is Sonny Corcoran, vicious dimwit son of local sex maniac Ma Corcoran, who has a history of prostituting her daughters, not to mention forcing them to have sex with Sonny so she can watch. Katy Burroughs, wife of company boss Walter, has been chaste as a nun for years, but decides to kick over the traces by seducing Sonny in a public park. Sonny violently rejects her, because he knows Walter is his biological father. Frank turns up and beats the shit out of Sonny (who recovers with miraculous speed for succeeding episodes), then half-rapes Katy – who loves him for it. Together they play the game of "Snuff Walter", which after a while stops being just a game ...

Guilty Until Proven Guilty is a novel packed with sex, violence and more sex. Sadly, because the author has striven to make his characters entirely despicable, it's impossible to believe in them as real people (always excepting the ill fated Melody and Bill, of course); thus the various beatings-up, tortures and sadistic murders have all the emotional affect of a Tom & Jerry cartoon. Something analogous can be send for the sex, although I confess I've never seen a Tom & Jerry movie to compare: there are plenty of bodily fluids splashing about, plenty of grunts and thrusts, but nary a scintilla of eroticism.

The book is an extremely quick read, partly because it's short (208 pages, big print) but partly because McNaughton's prose does have a swing to it. It's a pity he's settled for writing something so undemanding.

At $32.95 this is an expensive hardback novel. This is even more so when its production standards are so low. As a LightningSource PoD item, it's reasonably poorly produced to begin with, with an ill fitting dustjacket; not much can be done about that. However, the publisher could certainly have done something about the typographical errors, which are rife; while presumably a late change of mind, inadequately executed, means that one character's name alternates between Ronnie and Bonnie. It's to be hoped a proofreader will be employed for the paperback edition – and LightningSource's paperbacks are much better than their hardbacks anyway.

—Crescent Blues

Northern Gothic

by Nick Mamatas

Soft Skull, 86 pages, paperback, 2001

There's a strong tradition within fantasy literature of the timeslip romance, in which an individual from one era falls so profoundly in love with an individual from another that somehow love conquers the intervening decades and the pair are united. To cite an obvious example of the form, there's Richard Matheson's Bid Time Return (1975), whose pleasant but rather lacklustre filmed version was Somewhere in Time (1980).

Nick Mamatas's short novel Northern Gothic can be viewed as an obverse take on the timeslip romance, with the potent emotion in question being not love but hate.

In 1863 New York unskilled Irish labourer William Patten is caught up in the Draft Riots; sparked by the iniquitous ordinance of Lincoln's whereby those who could pay $300 towards the North's war effort were released from the risk of being drafted, these righteous demonstrations swiftly degenerated into an orgy of mob looting, pillage, arson, mayhem and lynch-murder of, primarily, blacks, who were blamed for all evils. Patten enjoys a full murderous role in these, culminating in his playing a part in the most nauseating incident of the whole nauseating episode, the assault on the Colored Orphans' Asylum in which the mob aimed to burn alive scores of black children. Finally, as the Army takes back the streets, he is given summary justice and executed.

In 1998 New York gay, broke, wannabe actor, black country boy Ahmadi Jenkins, newly arrived in the big city and still finding his feet, is tormented by intermittent full-sensory hallucinations of fire and rapine that he is completely unable, during his lucid periods, to comprehend or relate to anything in his own life. Progressively more disastrous events occur, climaxing in the burning down of the building that houses his crummy apartment and, shortly afterwards, his incarceration in the mental hospital Bellevue. There, as he drifts in out of reality, the temporal gateways are opened for Patten's blind racist hatred to reach him across the decades ...

This book has many fine qualities, not the least of which is its portrayal of the hellish emotional atmosphere of the Draft Riots; Mamatas cites as source Iver Bernstein's The New York City Draft Riots (1990) in his Acknowledgements, but his depiction accords with other historical accounts I have myself read and thus must be reckoned to be as historically accurate as any century-and-a-half-later depiction can ever hope to be. From the pages of Northern Gothic there drifts the stench of smoke and burning and blood and shit and piss and, most of all, fear – not just the fear of the hapless blacks who were hunted down, mutilated and slaughtered by the mobs but also, more centre-stage, the fear of the mobs themselves, particularized by Patten, that their own individual worlds were ending, that they would starve while the fatcats and the blacks prospered. I stress this historical veracity because it is unusual in the modern ghost story or horror story to find such an integrity: there is a story beyond the front-of-stage story, and Mamatas is not afraid to draw us into it.

That aside, the real protagonist of this short novel is neither Patten nor Jenkins – Patten's polar opposite – but the city of New York itself, a city that is, then as now, robust with vitality precisely because it is also a melting pot of violence and tensions not just between races and communities but also, on an astonishingly widespread scale, between individuals. If a spark analogous to Lincoln's War Draft Act were offered to the tinder that is New York today, then there is every chance there'd be an outbreak of something all too terrifyingly like the Draft Riots as the city – personified by its inhabitants – responded in the only way she knows how. Seen in this context, the interaction between Patten and Jenkins is less of a timeslip, more a sort of Aristotelian identification between like and like.

Despite its short span – Northern Gothic can't be more than about 25-30,000 words long – this story, with the fresh perspectives it skilfully offers on both a historical episode that is widely forgotten and on the nature of New York, delivers more of interest than many a novel five times as thick. The telling is absorbing; you will not feel short-changed through having read the book at a sitting, because reading at a sitting is what it demands.

—Infinity Plus

Windhaven

by George R.R. Martin and Lisa Tuttle

Bantam Spectra, 336 pages, hardback, 2001; reissue of a book originally published in 1981

The first two of the three linked novellas that make up this book were published (in slightly different form) in 1975 and 1980, respectively, in Analog; the third was added for the book's initial release in 1981. Martin and Tuttle have since gone on to achieve very high renown in two quite different areas of fantasy, so it may come as a surprise to some to discover not just that they collaborated but that they did so on what is ostensibly a science-fiction novel.

In fact, it's a science fantasy. Although there are occasional references to the fact that the people of the world of Windhaven came here from another world (presumably Earth) and although the rudimentary technology at the heart of the tale relies on the hi-tech material that was salvaged from the light-sails of those original spacefarers, in every other respect Windhaven is a fantasyland and the novel reads as a fantasy, albeit one refreshingly stripped of such paraphernalia as magic, wizardry and elves.

Windhaven has no significant landmasses, just islands strewn across the ocean. The winds are strong and incessant; the seas are dangerously stormy and populated by huge creatures called scyllas (for which read sea dragons). Communication between the islands is thus, for a culture that lacks radio, very difficult. Any sea journey is slow and dangerous. However, using the material from the light-sails, the people of Windhaven have learned to construct wings. Designated flyers use these wings to travel as messengers from one island to another.

Because the supply of sail material – almost weightless yet virtually indestructible – is limited, and slowly reducing over time as the occasional flyer is lost, with wings, at sea, ownership of the wings is jealously guarded: the flyers have become a hereditary caste of their own, regarded as equals even by the islands' ruling Landsmen. Since time immemorial the wings have been passed down from each flyer to his or her first-born; on rare occasion childless flyers will adopt a child to inherit their wings.

Maris is one such. Born of fisherfolk, she is adopted by the flyer Russ, who trains her in the art of flying, at which she proves to excel. However, some years after the adoption he and his wife unexpectedly give birth to a boy, Coll. Although Maris in due course takes over Russ's wings when he becomes too infirm to fly, the rules are clear: when Coll comes of age she must give up the wings to him, as Russ's genuine first-born, even though Coll detests flying and wants instead to become a wandering minstrel.

The stupidity of this is evident to both Maris and Coll, and eventually they succeed in persuading the Council of Flyers that the rules must be changed, with flying academies being set up so that the land-bound may train in the art of flying and have the opportunity, at annual contests, to challenge born flyers for their wings.

In the second novella we discover that, although the academies have been established, the scales are heavily weighted against their graduates. Maris heads the drive to alter this situation, in so doing bringing a further attitudinal change not just to the community of flyers but also in the culture as a whole. In the third novella she has become herself too old to fly, the consequences of an accident finally persuading her that indeed her future must be as a land-bound; she, her lover and her minstrel brother Coll challenge the might of a tyrannical Landsman and in so doing effect the profound cultural change of bringing Windhaven's land-bound and flyers closer together at last.

The assault on any form of caste system, however derived – through heredity, race or whatever – is a clear component of this book, but is never allowed to become dominant in the reader's mind. Rather, the three novellas are simply fine tales, imbued with the dream of flying. The character of Maris, who holds the three parts together, is a fairly riveting one, and there can be few readers who will not become completely involved in her fortunes and adventures. And there are some other fine pieces of characterization as well, most notably that of Val One-Wing, the first graduate of the academies to achieve such brilliance that – detest him and ostracize him though they might for his arrogance and his revolutionary ideas – the flyers have no choice but to accept he is qualified to be among their number. Take all these qualities together with the genuine exhilaration of some of the flight sequences (belying the rather tepid cover illustration) and you have a book that lacks anything that even looks like a dull moment, that is usually very absorbing, and that is often genuinely moving.

Although the dust jacket is covered with quotes from the worthy saying how exquisitely beautifully the book is written, this is to overstate. Both Martin and Tuttle have always been good writers and both have in the two decades since become even better than that, especially Tuttle, but at the time when they wrote Windhaven they were still merely (merely!) at the "good" stage. There are one or two youthful clumsinesses on display here – minor elements which occasionally disrupt the flow – and it's surprising the two authors didn't take the chance to revise them for this reissue. Which is not at all to say that the book is in any way badly written: just that the text has its occasional ups and downs.

But that hardly matters. The emotional power of the underlying idea, the excellence of the characterization and the strength of the three stories' flow – all go to make this a book much to be enjoyed.

—Infinity Plus

Come Fygures, Come Shadowes

by Richard Matheson

Gauntlet Press, 144 pages, hardback, 2003

In his interesting afterword to this novel fragment, the author relates how it came into being. Many years ago, when his writing career was young – annoyingly, he gives not even an approximate date – he set out to write a very major novel on the theme of Spiritualism and mediumship, of which the current book is the first quarter or so. The full novel was going to be long: Matheson reckons about 2000 pages – a quick calculation indicates he means 2000 pages of typescript, or some 600 printed pages. Of course, today this would be a healthy commercial length for a fantasy-related novel, to the point that if it came out a bit shorter the publisher would be increasing the font and margins to beef up the page count a bit; but, 'way back when, Matheson was told (he does not say by whom) that no publisher would contemplate such an enormous work. Accordingly Matheson abandoned the project, in essence stuffing into a drawer the one-quarter of it he'd already written.

Today, of course, Matheson is regarded – rightly – as one of the Grand Old Masters of commercial speculative fiction, and Gauntlet are doing an admirable job of issuing various volumes of hitherto unpublished Mathesonana, such as the volumes of Twilight Zone scripts that my colleague Randy M. Dannenfelser has reviewed elsewhere on Infinity Plus; later this year they're releasing a trade paperback of The Collected Stories of Richard Matheson Volume I and Richard Matheson's The Kolchak Scripts.

To judge by this quarter-novel, it's a tragedy Matheson no longer feels he has the creative juices, or whatever, to complete Come Fygures, Come Shadowes. The portion of the novel that we have here tells engrossingly of Claire, born and reared in Brooklyn, coming of age there in the late 1930s. She is the daughter of Spiritualist medium Morna, who, an nth-degree bitch on wheels, has managed to alienate virtually everyone else in the world of Spiritualism with the exception of a few loyal paying customers. Claire is in fact a much more powerful medium than Morna, but she has no desire to enter the profession – indeed, she does her best to ignore and rebuff the ever-encroaching presence of the spirit world. However, she is totally under the thumb of her ruthless, vicious mother, and is given no choice in the matter. Although her father – estranged from Morna – tries to intervene and save her, we see her slowly failing to save herself from being hauled by the greedy, sucking waves at the spirit-ocean's edge out towards the depths, where she must surely drown.

Secondary characters in the tale include – aside from Claire's good-hearted, simple-souled, occasionally rather drunken father – her younger sister Vera (who, to put it politely, takes after her mother) and brother Ranald, a supportive lad but inhibited by his youth, for he is the youngest of the three. According to Matheson, the later parts of the book would indeed have seen Claire die because of the excessive demands made upon her by the spirits, Vera become a conniving charlatan medium, and Ranald finally the only member of the family to more or less get things right.

As far as my knowledge extends, Matheson has done an admirable job of getting all the minutiae of the pre-WWII Spiritualist world right. I confess I'd expected to find discords between Matheson's fictionalized depiction of that milieu and the various histories of it I've read over the years, but in fact exactly the opposite was true: his account meshes so well with the historical accounts that I had to keep reminding myself that there had never been such a medium as Morna or Claire Nielsen, that this was indeed a fiction. Similarly, the descriptions of the practice of mediumship and the experience of spirit communication gelled precisely with accounts I've read by genuine (in the sense of sincere) mediums. This completely convincing setting is matched by exquisite storytelling: one is right there beside Claire as she suffers the terrors not only of the spirits, whom she regards (with justification, in her case) as parasites, but also, and even more so, of her vile, obsessively self-centred mother.

I read this book in the form of an ARC, which was clearly labelled with the caveat that this was an uncorrected proof. I take it on trust that the Gauntlet proofreaders have done a thorough job, because the version read was generously littered with minor typographical errors.

But that's merely a sidenote. The real trouble with the book that exists is this: We don't have the remaining three-quarters of the novel. The portion that we do have shows Matheson writing at his very best – I cannot remember having read anything by him that is written as well as this – but at its end there is no conclusion: we're left with what's as near as dammit a cliff-hanger. As noted, it's a tragedy Matheson doesn't feel able to pick up the reins again and write the remainder of his tale. Although in general one disapproves of the practice of secondary authors being brought in to complete unfinished works from the original writer's notes, perhaps there is actually a case to be made for it here, because the full version of Come Fygures, Come Shadowes could well stand as the novel of Spiritualism – the fictional record of a time and an environment when at least a sizeable minority, and quite probably a majority, of Americans believed in the possibility of making contact with their dead loved ones through the agency of a medium.

In the meantime, what we have is a thoroughly absorbing fragment. There are definitely rewards to be gained from reading it, because it's an example of a good writer writing out of his skin – any novelist, bar none, would be proud of this work – but obviously they're not the rewards one would expect from a completed novel.

—Infinity Plus

Noir: Three Novels of Suspense

by Richard Matheson, introduction by Matthew R. Bradley

Forge, 384 pages, paperback, 2005

The three short crime novels collected in this volume were originally published early in Richard Matheson's career, when he was writing almost exclusively for the paperback pulps. He had already established himself in the fantastic genres with short stories like "Born of Man and Woman" (1950) and "Third from the Sun" (1950), but when it came to novels his initial taste was for crime. And thus we have Someone is Bleeding (1953), Fury on Sunday (1953) and the somewhat later and slicker Ride the Nightmare (1959).

In Someone is Bleeding, young Dave picks up or is picked up by pretty widow Peggy on the beach, and falls almost obsessively in love with her. Yet she already has a man obsessively in love with her, the crooked lawyer and psychopath Jim Vaughan, whose "chauffeur" Steig is a ruthless hitman graduated from the Chicago mobs. The exact relationship between Peggy and Vaughan is for much of the novel a mystery to Dave, and indeed to us: is she in love with Vaughan and merely toying with Dave, or is it simply that Vaughan has her under a blackmailing thumb? As it soon emerges and as the murdered bodies begin to pile up, Peggy has a tragic past which has made her sexually frigid and in which she was either a victim of circumstances or a crazed killer, depending upon which version Dave is currently being told.

Matheson does a marvellous job of juggling all these uncertainties in a novel that genuinely grips despite its prose at times being somewhat bumpy. A particularly white-knuckle sequence is that in which Steig chases Dave with the intent of "eliminating" him.

The other two novels are conceptually simpler, being more suspensers than mysteries. In Fury on Sunday Vincent, who hit the heights as a concert pianist before being locked up in an institution for the criminally insane, ruthlessly murders a guard and escapes, intent on avenging himself on those in his earlier life whom he reckons destroyed him. What gives this novel its genuine strength is its portrayal of the various characters Vincent manages to bring together, and the relations between them: tarty Jane and Stan, the older husband whom she loathes and to whom she is habitually unfaithful; Ruth, the woman toward whom Vincent nurtures an idealistic but insane love, and her regular-guy husband Bob. In a manner remarkable for its time, the novel confronts Vincent's sexually tormented past so that, even while his homicidal mania chills us, we also have a strong sympathy for him.

In Ride the Nightmare, Chris and Helen Martin seem to have an untroubled life with their daughter Connie – not a cloud on the horizon – but then within minutes everything changes as figures begin to appear from a past of which Chris has told Helen nothing. Before they know it, the Martins are indeed riding a nightmare, there being seemingly no possible outcome but the deaths of all three as they vie with a pair of ruthless gangsters. What makes the mayhem all the more frightening is that the crime in Chris's past, while genuine enough, is trivial beside the consequences it's now having. Ride the Nightmare lacks the psychological depth of the other two novels, but that's no demerit in this instance, for the purpose of the novel is sheerly to thrill – which it does.

Matheson's noirs stand up well against those of other, better-known exponents of the genre such as James M. Cain and Jim Thompson, and certainly this book is well worth your discovering.

—Crescent Blues

Picoverse

by Robert A. Metzger

Ace, 389 pages, hardback, 2002

At InfinityPlus we maintain a rigorously egalitarian policy in our book reviews. Books from small presses – and even self-published books – are given exactly the same treatment as those from the larger and better-established houses. In theory at least, it doesn't matter if your book is from Bantam or iUniverse: it has the same chance of being reviewed, and will be expected to conform to the same standards.

This has one obvious disbenefit so far as the reviewers are concerned: all too often we have to plough through garbage. But that is far outweighed by the benefits of the policy, most particularly that, with surprising frequency, we come across marvellous books that otherwise we'd never have read – indeed, that otherwise would never have impinged upon our consciousness at all. To give a measure of this, this reviewer discovered that his slate of five titles he listed on his Hugo Nomination form as his personal choice for Best Novel of 2001 contained two books from print-on-demand houses.

Why are some of these books that have been ignored by the larger houses so good? What they have – the best of them – is often a freshness, a vigour, an enthusiasm. To generalize wildly, the books coming from the established imprints are, at least in the USA, tending more and more towards the formulaic, the safe. To be sure, there are a few excellent fantasies being released by the big houses, but the majority seem to be merely romantic adventures set in a thoroughly familiar otherworld. Similarly, while the major firms are publishing some excellent sf – whether of the thought-provoking or just-for-entertainment variety – all too much of the rest is just the same old same old. One has to assume this muffling of the imagination in the theoretically imaginative genres has to do with commercial pressures and the search for safety: the new and daring represents a risk, whereas a rehash of the tried and tested should be at least nearly as successful as it was last time.

I would argue that such policies are in fact commercially disastrous even in the medium term, but that is another discussion.

No such constraints apply to the small presses, of course, and most certainly they don't apply to the self-publishing author. I do not imagine there's a small press which, or a fiction writer who, doesn't desire to sell stacks of books, but nevertheless the freedom is there to experiment – most importantly, perhaps, to produce books that aren't afraid to challenge the reader, but also to issue novels that are, because of the vigour I mentioned earlier, just heaps of fun: wild romps in which the author's imagination is allowed simply to let rip, and to hell with the consequences.

There are common characteristics among many of the best novels in the latter category that come from the small print-on-demand houses and the self-publishing imprints. Some of these are not so desirable: the spelling errors, the occasional instances of weird grammar, the typos, and all the usual myriad signs that the expense of a copy editor has been spared. But others are joyous; for example, the lack of plotting conventionality, the endless inventiveness, and – to focus on sf – the exuberantly wacky science.

Wacky science need not in itself be a good thing, of course, no matter the exuberance; if it's packed with elementary errors at the most fundamental level then the reader sooner or later will lose patience with it. But wacky science that is at least plausible-seeming as it draws on the frontiers of quantum physics, cosmology, robotics, nanoengineering ... well, that sort of wacky science is probably what brought us into the field of sf in the first place, packed as it is with potential for generating the elusive Sense of Wonder.

There is a point to this long preamble, and I'm getting to it right now.

Picoverse displays all the characteristics of the very, very finest of the small-press publications. It has lashings of wacky science of the best possible type – indeed, its science is, within the confines of a fiction, utterly convincing. The enthusiasm of the text, like the pace, never flags: one has the glorious sense that the author was enjoying this wild rollercoaster ride as much as we readers do, and quite possibly even more. Ideas are everywhere. The plot skids and jumps seemingly without ever a fear the reader might be left behind, gasping. The scope is too great to be contained within a single universe, but that doesn't matter because the author blithely creates a plethora of new ones – while equally blithely destroying a fair number as well.

It has to be added that, on the downside, there are also the other characteristics of a small-press publication. Aside from a hailstorm of oddly placed commas, I spotted frequent instances of: "criteria" used as a singular noun, "lead" used for "led", "breech" used for "breach", "waddle" used for "wattle" ... The author has the very curious habit, which should have been excised – it is doubtless born from his writing of technical papers – of italicizing supposedly "difficult" words on their first appearance, even when this is within quoted dialogue. I never did work out quite what the word "cavication" was supposed to mean, although a furtive search on Yahoo! (my extensive battery of dictionaries having proved unable to assist) showed that at least the word seemed to exist. There were grammatical errors, too: "... but that one hundred pounds were well distributed", for a sole example.

Also in keeping with the traditions of the small press was that it was the author who sent IP the review copy of Picoverse, the publisher presumably balking at the expense.

The only thing distinctive, in short, is that Picoverse comes not from a small press but from Ace.

Well, Ace deserve to be congratulated on publishing one of the most riotously enjoyable pieces of hard sf to come this reviewer's way in a good while. This novel is a true feast of the scientific imagination, both utterly uninhibited and, for the reader, immensely liberating. The hugely laudatory cover quotes – and this book has lots of them, from folk like Robert J. Sawyer, Gregory Benford and Charles Sheffield – which one would normally dismiss as just so much white noise, are in this instance entirely deserved.

So what is Picoverse all about, then?

Well, in a universe that is extremely like ours but which differs in at least the minutiae of its recent history, a gang of scientists funded by covert government grant construct a device capable of generating smaller daughter-universes. It takes them a while to realize that their own universe itself could be a dependent daughter-universe created by the scientists of a greater one, and so ad infinitum, and by about that same time they discover that at least one of the officials with whom they are interacting is a rogue corrective android from the next universe up the ladder of realities. As the scientists enter and explore – are forced to flee into and explore, because of all the skullduggery that's going on in all directions – a selection of the picoverses further down that ladder from their own, they discover of course their own alternate personae, leading to much confusion and irony. In the end it seems that the young son of one of the scientists, whose versions are found scattered through the picoverses in various different guises, good and bad, and grown to various different ages, holds the key to a restitution of reality and the extinction of all the deleterious cross-linkages between the picoverses. But can the versions of the son always be relied upon? Indeed, can even the main good-guy protagonists be relied upon, either to act for the good or to be what they seem?

All is eventually resolved, of course, at least so far as our own welfare is concerned: this wonderful romp delights in taking us to very brink of the abyss but would never dream of doing anything so depressing as actually plunging us into it for a finale. Whether all the plot strands are entirely resolved is another matter; there seemed to me to be a few ends left hanging loose, but I confess that by then I was so enjoying myself that I didn't much care – besides, it must have been about 4am by then, because I couldn't bear to put the book down and switch out the light until I'd finished.

Picoverse may not be great literature – although who is to judge what that term means? – but it most certainly is great science fiction. If your taste for the genre has become jaded by constant recycling of the formulaic, well, look no further for a source of abundant refreshment. If you want a joyride through the farthest shores of the imagination, or if you simply long for the youthful time when you could read a whole book with a great big grin of sheer enjoyment on your face, then again Picoverse is for you. And if you're among the unlucky few who have yet to encounter the Sense of Wonder and are baffled by the phrase, then it's pretty obvious which book I'm recommending you rush out and buy.

And let's hope that Ace bites the bullet when issuing the paperback and pays for a proofreader/copy editor to go through the text so that the reprints which Picoverse so manifestly deserves are freed from all those trivial but irritating blemishes.

—Infinity Plus

Bronwyn Book One: Palaces & Prisons

by Ron Miller

Timberwolf, 283 pages, paperback, 2001; reissue of a book originally published in 1991

This is the first in a four-volume series starring Bronwyn, the ousted princess of Tamlaght, written by an author who is far better known in the sf/fantasy world for his artwork, especially his space artwork – although he is a much more versatile artist than that remark might suggest. He was also the author, with Frederick C. Durant III, of the enormous, Hugo-winning 2001 book The Art of Chesley Bonestell, so his auctorial credentials are well established.

Tamlaght is a kingdom in a fantasyland whose technology is primarily medieval but with some more modern stuff – up to about the 1950s – thrown in. The old king having died, the elder of his two children, the halfwit Prince Ferenc, is set to inherit. However, Ferenc is completely under the thumb of the scheming Lord (Payne) Roelt, whose sole desire is to screw the kingdom for his personal coffers. Ferenc's younger sister Bronwyn, next in line for the throne, discovers some letters that damningly reveal Roelt's plots and the extent of his domination of Ferenc. Before she can move to take these before the Council of Barons, with the intent of having Roelt banished (or worse) and Ferenc disqualified from succeeding to the throne, there is a price put on her head and she is on the run.

Somewhat snotty by temperament, she would probably last about five minutes among the common scum of the streets of Blavek, Tamlaght's capital, were it not for the intervention of the huge, grotesque, none-too-bright sarcophagus-maker Thud Mollockle. With the help of the ever-loyal Thud and various other companions – notably a gypsy called Janos Plodsku and later an iron-thewed human-reared-as-a-Kobold called Gyven – she is first spirited away from Blavek and then conveyed secretly around the country, having divers adventures.

This is a highly entertaining romp. At its end, all is well set for the next volume of the tetralogy, although the conclusion of this volume is by no means unsatisfying. The tale as a whole is one that Robert Jordan might well have told at five times the length and with only one-fifth of the fun and wit. After some orotundity that should have been edited out during the first thirty or fifty pages, the writing settles down to an engaging ease. The characters of Bronwyn, exasperatingly status-conscious though she is, and perhaps more especially of Thud Mollockle, who proves to be a Kobold changeling (the counterpart of Gyven, a human baby taken in place of a Kobold substitute), are appealing and interesting.

Miller's own excellent cover artwork depicting Bronwyn gives the clue to her interest as a fantasy heroine. This is far from the usual buxom blonde maiden who would seem more at home on a chocolate box. Instead we're presented with a real-seeming face, and this sense of reality is carried over into the written character. A disenfranchised princess with an attitude problem might seem something of a cliché in high fantasy, but in Bronwyn the bloody-mindedness comes across as an integral part of her personality, rather than, as in most such fantasy protagonists, a gloss laid over an empty shell – a means of disguising the fact that the standard Princess Cliché has no personality whatsoever, being designed to be identified with by female readers as their ideal selves and to be the target of the silent lusts of adolescent male readers. Bronwyn, by contrast, is someone you might or might not like if you actually met her, which makes her infinitely more appealing as a fictional character.

The only trouble with this romp, enjoyable though it is, is that there's nothing more to it. It is obvious Miller is perfectly capable as a writer of giving the text that extra something which distinguishes great romps from merely good ones. There are grins and gasping adventures a-plenty here, but one wishes either that the book had some sort of a subtextual interest or at least some striking conceptual originality – preferably, of course, both. As it is, the novel doesn't leave the reader with any lingering food for thought: it's merely temporal entertainment, a diversion for a few hours.

But as that – simply as entertainment – Palaces & Prisons scores highly, which is more than can be said of many of its direct rivals.

—Infinity Plus

Remnant Population

by Elizabeth Moon

Del Rey, 336 pages, paperback, 2003; reissue of a book originally published in 1996

Elizabeth Moon is best known for her military sf, and consequently I avoided her work like the plague until about a year ago, when her exquisite novel of autism, The Speed of Dark, came my way. I still have no desire to read her military sf, but I've bored people rigid ranting to them about how good The Speed of Dark is.

Remnant Population (a reissue of a 1996 novel) isn't quite that good, but nevertheless I enjoyed it more than most of the sf I read during 2003. An old woman, Ofelia, is left behind on a colony planet when the Company decides to pull out. Much later, a new colony is attempted, but it's beaten back bloodily by intelligent natives no one knew before were there. While Earth tries to figure out what to do, an expeditionary party of the natives finds Ofelia, and communication is established. She is forced into the position of acting as mediator between the natives and Earth.

That's just about the whole of the plot, actually, but the book is entirely engrossing, partly because of the character of Ofelia herself, mainly because of the aliens Moon has created: through Ofelia's eyes they become comprehensible, but always they're entrancingly alien. I recommended this so hard to my non-sf-reading wife that in the end, to shut me up, she read it. To the astonishment of both of us, she loved it too.

—Crescent Blues

The Speed of Dark

by Elizabeth Moon

Ballantine Del Rey, 340 pages, hardback, 2003

Every now and then – and it's extremely rare – a book comes along that is so very, very good that I'm actually slightly nervous of reviewing it, in case, crazily, the clumsiness of my review will somehow mar the integrity of the novel itself.

The Speed of Dark is one such book.

At some point in the near future Lou Arrendale is an autism sufferer working for a nameless corporation that employs a whole division of autists in order to exploit their highly developed pattern-recognition skills. Arrendale and his fellows know that they are among the last of their kind, for since their childhood a technique has been developed of curing autism in infancy. Their division is the most effective and productive within the corporation, a status it achieves in part because the corporation has provided for it certain special extras that enable the autists to calm their minds in times of stress, to focus their thoughts, and so on – extras like a private gym with a trampoline and a decent music system. These special extras naturally attract the attention of a freshly imported hard-nosed self-ordained management-efficiency expert, Crenshaw, as the autists' boss; he can see the autists only as sick people, and the extras that they require for their efficient working only as an erosion of profits.

Arrendale is, thanks to education and encouragement, capable of functioning reasonably well in "normal" human society; he has learned appropriate interpretations and responses that we would take for granted. He regularly attends fencing classes, and has become a very good fencer because of his ability to detect the patterns in his opponents' strategies. Also at the fencing classes he has fallen in love with fellow-student Marjory, who has in turn clearly fallen in love with him, although he is too unsure of his interpretations of her behaviour – and too incredulous that an attractive woman might herself be attracted to the mental cripple society tells him he is – rightly to be able to acknowledge this. He has to cope with the revenge tactics employed by his unsuccessful rival for Marjory's affections, something he is as ill equipped to do as he is ill equipped to recognize that others around him are friends who value his friendship.

Crenshaw, as noted, is one of those who regards the autists as crippled; despite all the statistics about their division's high profitability, he chooses to regard the corporation's employment of them as an act of charity – one whose limits should be far constrained from the current ones, with that expensive gym an' all. Employment laws inhibit him from simply firing them or abolishing their privileges – which are part of their conditions of employment – but he has come across an experimental cure that another wing of the corporation has been developing for adult autists. It works on chimps, so, despite the fact that its effects on humans are as yet unknown, he attempts to coerce Arrendale and his co-workers into becoming experimental subjects.

This presents Arrendale with a quandary. If he accepts the purported cure, and if it works, he will stop being himself. Although he will start to enjoy lots of things he currently doesn't enjoy or even finds frightening and repulsive, he will probably make these gains at the expense of some of the things he currently does enjoy. Will he still receive pleasure from pattern and (it's to a great extent the same thing) music? Will he lose his prowess as a fencer, and all the pleasure he gains from that? Most important of all, if he is a different person will he still love Marjory, and will she still at least like (for he dare not conceive that she loves) him?

There is, I suppose, quite a lot of plot in The Speed of Dark – and the above represents only part of it – but I have to say "I suppose" because that's an observation born from hindsight. While I was actually reading the book the plot elements became almost irrelevant, for here is a tale whose quite extraordinary strength of telling reduces all else to insignificance.

Aside from a few brief interpolated passages, Arrendale is our sole narrator, so we see his world as filtered through the mind of an autist. (The author has a teenage child who's autistic, so one assumes the depicted perception is as valid as it can be. I persuaded a good friend who suffers a form of autism to read the novel to see if my impression of this was correct, and he confirmed that it was – "so accurate as to be painful to me" was the gist of his remarks.) This might seem a daunting prospect, for Arrendale has painstakingly to work out situations that would be thunderingly obvious to the rest of us – nothing more tedious than having someone laboriously spell out the mechanics of something you already know – but in fact quite the contrary proves to be the case. Arrendale's narrative is utterly involving, engrossing to the point that his way of thinking takes over one's own, so that whenever I had (reluctantly) to put the book down I found I was shaking my head a few times before I was able to regain my own customary mode of thought.

Again, this statement might lead to a false expectation of what it's like reading this novel. It might seem from what I've said that it depicts the world as if through alien eyes. Yet this doesn't prove to be the case. Instead, I was struck by how very similar Arrendale's perceptions are to my own, how very like myself he actually is, how much better his thinking processes are in so many respects than my own. I never in my life thought I'd want to be an autist, but by the time I got to the last page – and of course it was a huge and infuriating disappointment that this had to have a last page, that the book couldn't just keep going indefinitely – I found myself at least halfway towards the formulation of that wish.

And that, of course, is precisely as Moon has planned it should be – for Arrendale's dilemma, faced with the prospect of a cure for his condition, is not one of giving up something paltry for the promise of emotional riches; these are riches that he's going to be giving up, and there's no guarantee at all that the rewards of a "normal" life will come close to compensating for their loss. As Arrendale approaches his momentous decision – to take the cure or refuse it – we're actually rooting for him to refuse it, because we know that his "curse" is really something treasurable.

The book's blurb makes comparisons with such works as Daniel Keyes's Flowers for Algernon in an attempt to lure us into The Speed of Dark. One can understand entirely why the publisher felt moved to do this, but at the same time it has to be said that the comparisons do The Speed of Dark a great disservice. One can empathize with or have strong fellow-feeling for characters like Forrest Gump or Keyes's Charly, but all of those emotions are experienced from the outside; for example, we feel almost painfully sorry for Charly as he struggles from moronism to intelligence and then loses it all again, but still we're only a spectator to the tragedy being played out on stage. Moon's triumph is that, by contrast, we become her protagonist Arrendale; we experience his drama from within him. The potential failure of Crenshaw's fuckwitted "cure" is not something disastrous that might happen to someone else – a close friend, perhaps. It's a threat to us, ourselves.

Because Moon's track record has been in science fiction (mainly military sf, so I confess I've never been induced to read it), and because the tale is set in the near future with one or two extrapolated items of medical science, The Speed of Dark will probably be marketed as sf. (I've been reading an ARC in advance of publication, so I can't tell for sure.) This is a great pity, if so, because it will unnecessarily restrict the readership of this fine work of mainstream literature; to epitomize, it's a book that by all rights will carry off a Hugo, but really it should be at the very least a strong contender for something like the National Book Award.

The title, by the way, concerns a conceit of the book. Arrendale is of course perfectly aware – he is extremely intelligent, something else the Crenshaws of this world fail to perceive, blinded as they are by his status as an autist – that the velocity of light in free space is a known, established quantity. But what of the velocity of dark? Dark, after all, forever retreats in the face of the invasion of light, so perhaps its velocity is actually slightly greater than that of light? This speculation of Arrendale's is carried through metaphorically by Moon, with darkness being the self-imposed ignorance displayed by Crenshaw and so prevalent throughout our culture: as a single exemplification of this force of unknowing – the exemplification presented in The Speed of Dark in the guise of Crenshaw and others – far too many people don't want to understand their fellow humans, but would rather remain ignorant of their worlds by banishing them into convenient categories that are always characterized by inferiority to the categorizers themselves.

In sum, The Speed of Dark is one of those exceptionally rare novels that has the power to alter one's entire worldview, and reading it is a profoundly rewarding and enriching experience. It is impossible to avoid superlatives when speaking of it, even though I'm all too aware I may be perceived as perpetrating hyperbole. Well ... tough. I can't remember when last I enjoyed a novel this much, but it must have been a very long time ago.

—Infinity Plus

The Dreamthief's Daughter

by Michael Moorcock

Earthlight, 342 pages, hardback, 2001

In pre-WWII Germany, with the Nazis on the ascendant, Count Ulric von Bek is one of the many who look upon developments with dismay – but a largely passive dismay, for fear of the bully-boys. He is not allowed to continue thus, however, for the Nazis, in the person of his cousin Prince Gaynor von Minct, seek the ancestral sword of the von Bek family, Ravenbrand, as well as the Holy Grail, also entrusted to the family but reputedly lost by von Bek's mad father. Von Bek contacts the Resistance, and, with the enigmatic Herr El and the lovely wildling Oona, who is like himself an albino, makes plans to retain the status quo. Another albino appears frequently to von Bek in dreams and visions – a berserk-seeming figure who has a savage cast to him.

Before much can come of any Resistance schemes, Gaynor has von Bek thrown into a concentration camp where, despite physical torture, he declines to reveal the location of Ravenbrand. At length, as he nears death, the albino of his dreams appears magically with Oona and an enigmatic British agent, Oswald Bastable, to free him. They flee to Hameln where, à la Pied Piper, von Bek splits open a rock using the regained Ravenbrand and they enter a subterranean realm, Mu-Ooria, populated by the mentally superhuman Off-Moo. Here they are pursued by Gaynor and his Nazi demon sidekick Klosterheim.

And here, too, the mysterious dream albino – who is of course Elric of Melniboné – gains a greater reality, in due course managing to combine himself with von Bek so that the two become one. The dual entity returns to Tanelorn, where as Elric it discovers that Gaynor has ambitions far beyond the mundane ones of the Nazis: through forming a duplicitous alliance with the Goddess of Law, Miggea, Gaynor hopes to overthrow Chaos and gain the rule of all the multiverse. Elric, as an arch-prince of Chaos, must resist him.

The remainder of this tale twines its way absorbingly through various aspects of the multiverse – Moorcock's great conceptual creation, the myriad related worlds in which stories are eternally played and replayed, with archetypes as the puppets of unknown puppeteers. In the end, of course, the balance between Chaos and Law is restored, at least for now.

The novel (although divided into three) has essentially four parts: von Bek's time in pre-War Germany; his and Oona's adventures in Mu-Ooria; the adventures of Elric and of the dual Elric/von Bek entity in and around Tanelorn; and the long, complex final section in which Elric, von Bek and the ever-resourceful Oona – who is Elric's daughter by the dreamthief Oone, and with whom von Bek, despite an uneasy sensation of incest (for he and Elric are alter egos), falls in love – journey between the worlds and bring a resolution to the main conflict while also, in the conflict of this world, bringing a resolution of sorts by turning the tide of the Battle of Britain back against the Luftwaffe.

The four sections succeed to greater and lesser (mostly greater) extents. The Mu-Ooria sequences, with their Edgar Rice Burroughsian ambience, in the telling hark back even further, to the sort of 19th- or even 18th-century otherworld fantasy in which the otherworld itself is deemed to be of such marvel that the reader is intended to be entertained by somewhat painstaking, plodding accounts of the geography and populace rather than any plot advancement. There are longueurs here and also a sense of alienation on the writer's part, as if Moorcock recognized while writing them that the sequences were failing to lift off the ground but could not abandon them because this section of the book is integral to the rest.

That rest, by contrast, in general sings. Von Bek's experiences in Nazi Germany, and his growing knowledge that he is part of a greater mystery, are as gripping as any World War II adventure story. The sequences where Elric and later the dual entity must quest, with Moonglum, through the bleak and alien world into which the goddess Miggea has transplanted Tanelorn, like an orchid into a desert, are superbly conceived High Fantasy and eerily evoke the dream-sense; while the long concluding section – with the small exception of the clumsily handled, contrived-seeming sequence in which a dragon-mounted Elric and von Bek attack the advancing waves of the Luftwaffe, thereby giving rise to the legend of the Dragons of Wessex – demonstrates why Moorcock possesses the towering status he does in any consideration of the history of fantasy. In this final section he is creating new structures of fantasy, rather than recrudescing the old – a rare achievement, alas, in the modern genre.

Of great interest throughout is the question of identity and the workings, through the nature of the multiverse, of not just the multiplicity of a single identity but the coalescing into a single identity of a multiplicity; one has the sensation, reading this book, of this going on all the time in a kind of endless flow, as reality itself shifts and twists – rather like an analogy of the impermanent alliances the villain Gaynor forges with the different gods. Von Bek is at one and the same time both Elric and not-Elric, and that duality persists even once their two identities have fused. (The same obviously is true of Elric, who is both von Bek and not-von Bek.) Elric's sword Stormbringer and the von Bek family's sword Ravenbrand have a single identity, even though they are physically twain and remain so, even when in proximity. Oona is both a daughter and a lover to the double identity that is Elric-von Bek. Gaynor is at one and the same time a human being and an eternal Evil Principle. There are other examples.

That this is in fact a true nature of reality is plausible in a post-Heisenberg frame of reference (whose analogue might be Chaos, by contrast with Newtonian-style Law), which sees identity as a transient property, dependent upon, among other factors, the act of perception. It is pleasing to see such notions worked out in a novel of, ostensibly, High Fantasy – not a subgenre noted for its deployment of scientific thinking, and indeed generally marked by antiscientism.

This is also an intensely political novel. Time and again Moorcock explores the motivations behind the parasitic quest of tyrants for power and their obsessional need to stamp order (Law) on that which should not be ordered – to wit, humanity. The relevance of this is obvious when Nazism is the despotism under consideration; but there are not so subtly encoded references to other, more recent, "democratic despots" of the Right. The name of the Goddess of Law, Miggea, seems a clear anagrammatic reference to Maggie/Margaret Thatcher, a political figure who while in power earned the public hatred (or fear) of many surprisingly disparate creators. Here, for example, is Moorcock's description of the world Miggea and her rule of Law have created:

Miggea's was no ordinary desert. It was all that remained of a world destroyed by Law. Barren. No hawks soared in the pale blue sky. Not an insect. Not a reptile. No water. No lichen. No plants of any kind. Just tall spikes of crystallized ash and limestone, crumbling and turned into crazy shapes by the wind, like so many grotesque gravestones.

Later Herr El (aka Prince Lobkowitz), in talking of the rise of the Nazis but also of any regime of obdurate Law, however convivial its veneer – any regime that pretends the solutions to complex problems are simple, and then imposes through the use of power or force those simple, but (or hence) profoundly wrong solutions on the world – is the mouthpiece for a sideswipe at Thatcher's American counterpart:

They are the worst kind of self-deceiving cowards and everything they build is a ramshackle sham. They have the taste of the worst Hollywood producers and the egos of the worst Hollywood actors. We have come to an ironic moment in history, I think, when actors and entertainers determine the fate of the real world.

Moorcock's contempt for the politicians of Law is of course allowed to be seen more naked when the subjects under consideration are safely distant in history, like the Nazis and (in brief references) the Stalinist despots of Soviet Russia. Late in the book there is a long and hilariously – though darkly, bitterly – satirical scene in which a disguised von Bek, inadvertently thrust into a car with Rudolf Hess, must listen to an interminable outflow of arrant, antiscientific, credulously ignorant nonsense from the Deputy Fuehrer. Hess and by implication his colleagues in the Nazi hierarchy are portrayed as what Brian Stableford has termed "lifestyle fantasists", the attempted reification of their particular brand of insane and simplifying fantasies involving, of course, untold human suffering. Hence Elric's – and one presumes Moorcock's – detestation of Law and adherence to Chaos.

As mentioned, there are some doldrums in this book, but they are in a relatively early part of it and easily ploughed through. Overall, The Dreamthief's Daughter is mightily impressive not just as a demonstration of the fantasticating imagination in full flight but because of all the different aspects of meaning which it embodies – analogues, in a way, of the myriad diversely aspected worlds of the multiverse. It is one of those rare fantasies that merits repeated reading with, each time, a different facet of its full meaning to be derived.

—Infinity Plus

Shockingly Close to the Truth: Confessions of a Grave-Robbing Ufologist

by James W. Moseley and Karl T. Pflock

Prometheus, 371 pages, hardback, 2002

Once upon a time – a glorious time – publishers used to release autobiographies by people who weren't just movie celebs or ex-politicians or pop stars, but simply people who had led interesting lives and who could write about them interestingly. The autobiography – or at least a certain subgenre of it – was thus almost like a variant form of the novel, and readers tended to approach it in much the same way. You might never have heard of Fred Gluggitt, but he'd climbed Everest blindfold, slept with an Olympic belly-dancing team and subsisted for a year in the Australian Outback eating nothing but woodworms, and he could write in a way that had you bursting out in laughter every few pages. That was what you looked for in an autobiography: entertainment, a measure of education (perhaps), a window into someone else's world, and, at the most profound level, a certain level of identification with and communication with all of one's fellow human beings, not just with the individual who happened to be telling her or his tale.

Books like that are hardly ever published any more. Instead the tables in the remainder bookshops are piled high with the heavingly fat, probably ghosted, certainly carefully spin-doctored autobiographies of famous people whom you would run a mile rather than have in your living room, or even be stuck in a bar with.

Well, here's an exception – an old-fashioned autobiography that captures the spirit right down to the deliciously hokey cover illustration.

Jim Moseley (one assumes Karl Pflock is a sort of fully credited ghostwriter) has been a ufologist for decades. Correction: not so much a ufologist as what he calls a "ufoologist", observing and commenting on the field of ufology to a much greater extent than researching UFOs themselves. He certainly has done some UFO investigation – coming to the conclusion that, while every UFO case he has personally examined is almost certainly unmysterious, nevertheless UFOs taken en masse probably do represent a mystery – but essentially he has been, as dubbed a while back, ufology's Court Jester. He has published the long-running muckraker-sheet-cum-investigative-journal Saucer News (now called Saucer Smear) – a sort of ufological Private Eye – and he has met and/or interviewed virtually all of the principal protagonists in a certain segment of ufology: what one could call the mainstream of US ufology in the second half of the 20th century.

Oh, yes, and as a sideline he's occasionally gone on treasure hunts to Peru, conducting a legally questionable trade in ancient artefacts.

His reminiscences of all this are constantly entertaining, and on occasion very funny. What's especially interesting about them is that Moseley can, as it were, reach the parts that professional UFO debunkers like Phil Klass cannot. This comment applies both to his encounters with other ufologists and to his studies of particular UFO cases.

To take the latter first: Moseley is open-minded about the existence, physically or psychologically, of UFOs, and it is with this attitude that he has approached any examination of a case. This is in contrast with either the debunker or the devotee, each of whom will go into the case expecting to have preconceptions confirmed: the debunker will find plenty to ridicule, the devotee plenty to believe. Moseley, on the other hand, has a good chance of finding what is actually there. That he, as someone who's a part of the scene, has found enough to convince him that many famous cases are tosh is much more convincing than if, say, the late Carl Sagan had found the same: Sagan (who was interested in the subject in a minor way) or any other serious scientist would have investigated only as far as the first few obvious contradictions, whereas Moseley actually went on to probe such cases in some considerable depth.

In other words, by dint of the extent of his research he's an expert in a way that few outright debunkers can ever hope to be. And this applies also to his observations of ufology. I can't actually name any names here, because some of these figures are astonishingly writ-happy, but various of the barmiest of the ufology superstars have opened up to Moseley – despite his known editorship of Saucer Smear (which must go to show how barmy they actually are) – in a way they'd never think to talk to someone who wasn't One Of Us. And Moseley, gleefully, lets them show themselves as they are.

His demolitions are all the more effective for this. Here, for example – there's a plethora of choice – is his conclusion concerning Roswell, with a conclusion also about CUFOS (one of the major organizations devoted to supposedly scientific UFO study):

Whatever the original motivation, CUFOS has long since dropped any pretense of objectivity about the case and is the one UFO group that unwaveringly stands behind it without qualification.

That single sentence tells us a lot about ufology and also a lot about the representation of ufology in the media: anyone here who hadn't gained the impression that most UFO buffs thought Roswell was likely to be pretty kosher, please raise your hands.

As the social history of ufology the publishers claim it to be in their cover blurb, even an informal one, this book is far from adequate. As noted above, it covers only a small segment of the field; plenty of really quite important ufological figures and their ideas, sane or crackpot, get no mention at all. The index lists only people, so there is no entry for, for example, Roswell, even though there's quite a lot about the Roswell fallacy in the book; bad indexes seem to be a Prometheus speciality. I noticed that Hugo Gernsback is called "Gernsbach", so for all I know there may be countless other individuals – or places, or organizations, etc. – whose names are incorrectly spelled. One could go on chipping away at the text on such grounds for quite a long time.

But that's not really what it's about. What this constantly entertaining book is about is a very haphazard (delightfully haphazard) ramble through the life of someone who's been in the ufology game primarily for the fun of it. He has teased; he has hoaxed (often in tandem with his friend the late Gray Barker, although Barker almost made a profession of it); he has exposed (the whole of the 1957 issue of Saucer News exposing Adamski is reproduced in the appendix); he has annoyed (too many to name, but they're the sort of people you feel good that someone's annoyed); he has been ufology's gadfly. At the end of the day, he was delighted when "a certain Harry Lime" wrote from Vienna, Austria (not Greeneland?), to tell him he should be proud of, not dismayed by, the sobriquet he'd recently been given in MUFON UFO Journal: "The Reigning Court Jester of Ufology."

Revealing and entertaining by turns, Shockingly Close to the Truth is a book you'll love or – assuming you're especially po-faced – hate. This reviewer devoured it, and with a grin on his face the whole time.

—Infinity Plus

Suicide Casanova

by Arthur Nersesian

Akashic, 350 pages, paperback, 2005

First of all, it should be said that this is a work of the most profound pornography.

Just before my editor rushes out to buy herself multiple copies, that remark, while true, should be hastily qualified. While it would be impossible for its various graphic sex scenes to be accomplished free of any vestige of the erotic, such eroticism as exists is purely incidental to Nersesian's much more serious purpose, which is to paint a group portrait of people consumed by their own obsessions.

The most notable figure in this portrait is, rightly, the novel's primary narrator, Leslie Caldwell. A successful lawyer, he has recently lost his equally obsessional professional-dominatrix wife Cecilia to what everyone assumes was an accident during an S&M bout. Now, awash in booze and with suspicious cops harassing him at every turn – was that really an accident or did he deliberately garotte her? – he gives in to his long ill suppressed obsession with the generously bosomed porn actress Sky Pacifica. His fixation on her began in his youth, when masturbatory addiction to her movie drove him to locate her, strike up a brief acquaintanceship, and enjoy an even briefer sexual relationship with her; later, pregnant, she shamelessly abused the friendship ... or perhaps she didn't: perhaps they both got exactly what they wanted from their time together.

Careless that his career is fast spiraling down the tube, Leslie tracks down Sky once again, discovering her to be a respectably married woman in Long Island. Incapable of making his life simple in any respect, Leslie sufficiently complicates his new approach to her that at one stage he's suspected of sexually harassing her teenaged daughter, but finally the liaison is reaffirmed. Of course, though, there can be no happy ending here: obsession creates its own dooms.

There is a further dimension to the novel. In their obsessions – and I don't apologize for the frequency with which I've used that word – the central characters of Suicide Casanova are enacting in microcosm the behavioral frenzy of New York City, specifically Manhattan. Leslie's obsessions with sadomasochistic bondage and, both youthful and middle-aged, with Sky are in a way defenses against the lure of the obsessional mire that is his chosen corporate-lawyer career. Anyone who has lived in NYC will be able to identify a part of themselves in Leslie.

Suicide Casanova is strongly reminiscent in "feel" of – and as much to be admired as – Luke Rinehart's classic novel The Dice Man. A much more recent but equally valid comparison can be drawn with Christopher Fahy's excellent Fever 42, where the obsession likewise has sex as a primary focus. Or maybe, in both instances, the sex is only the excuse for the indulgence of the obsession – if it weren't sex it could as easily be something else that the obsessive personality used as the tool to effect his slow, relentless self-destruction.

This is an impressive novel, and Nersesian an impressive writer: strongly recommended.

—Crescent Blues

The Integral Trees

by Larry Niven

Del Rey, 480 pages, paperback, 2003

Despite the title, this is an omnibus reissue of both The Integral Trees (1983) and its sequel The Smoke Ring (1987). I managed somehow to miss out on both of them when they were first released, and consequently fell on this with a delight tempered only by the knowledge that some of Niven's other writing of that era and particularly a little later has not aged well. That criticism could indeed be leveled at these two novels, I found, but so mildly as to be largely irrelevant.

Long ago a bunch of humans were marooned by a mad computer (I simplify) in a bizarre habitat: the gaseous donut surrounding a neutron star, where there's enough air and energy for life to have developed, most notably enormously long floating trees that serve as homes for many of the more mobile lifeforms, newly arrived humans included. The two novels are set some generations later, when the descendants of the original strandees have multiplied, diversified and established various different mini-civilizations.

Niven's prose is very pared down by the standards of today, which is not entirely a bad thing, and despite it he is able to convey effectively the kind of cosmic awe which has always been his main strength. However, he loses out a little on atmosphere and characterization; the two novels are highly readable, generate appropriate gasps, but are in the end result a mite uninvolving.

—Crescent Blues

Flying Cups & Saucers: Gender Explorations in Science Fiction & Fantasy

edited by Debbie Notkin and The Secret Feminist Cabal

Edgewood Press, 394 pages, paperback, 1998

The James Tiptree Jr. Award, first given in 1991, is designed to honour, according to the only definition given in this anthology of past winners and runners-up, "works of science fiction that explore and expand gender roles". This is, therefore, an anthology with a fixed and stated agenda, and must be evaluated as such rather than purely as the excellent collection of stories it is – even though it is by some distance the best fantasy anthology per se this reviewer has encountered in a while.

The term "fantasy anthology" is used quite deliberately, because in one important respect the book fails to live up to its agenda. There are only two stories here which are unmitigatedly science fiction: "Eat Reecebread" (1994) by Graham Joyce and Peter F. Hamilton (unfortunately, one of the least interesting of the stories here) and "The Matter of Seggri" (1994) by Ursula K. Le Guin, and even the latter qualifies as out-and-out science fiction only (and only when one is in charitable mood) because the timescales its story requires – generations and centuries – would be difficult plausibly to achieve outside the sf genre.

For it is impossible to read this assemblage of stories without beginning to query precisely what it is we mean by the term "science fiction". In Le Guin's "The Matter of Seggri" – which is hardly a story, more an expression in disjointed fictional episodes of various social-anthropological/sociological concerns – there is no technology to speak of and very little by way of science. The visiting anthropologists arrive by spacecraft but this is merely a device, as is admitted even in the text, in that a pair of them pretend to the natives to be shipwrecked mariners; furthermore, the opening section is a conscious pastiche of the sort of fabulous-voyage tale that attained its acme of popularity with Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726). Take away the (off-stage and scantily mentioned) spaceships and the necessary timespans involved for the sociological study to be carried out, and "The Matter of Seggri" could equally well be a lost-race story set back home here on Earth – in other words, a fantasy, not (at least according to most definitions of the term) science fiction at all.

This attempt to sciencefictionalize fantasies is made particularly overt in two of the other stories, Eleanor Arnason's "The Lovers" (1994) and L. Timmel Duchamp's "Motherhood, Etc." (1993), and in neither case to the tale's advantage. The former is set in a well realized fantasyland whose furry inhabitants regard heterosexual coupling as for perpetuation of the species only, with love, longer-term bonding or even just cheap-thrill sex being possible only in homosexual relationships. There are occasional little irritating asides along the lines of "this concept may be difficult for humans to understand" and there's a self-indulgent quasi-linguistical endnote, but these serve only to disrupt the reader's suspension of disbelief in what is otherwise straightforwardly a fantasy. Duchamp's "Motherhood, Etc." is a riveting and moving piece of work – a woman has been "infected" with hermaphroditism by her lover, and is being tormented by male bureaucrats and researchers attempting to find out what's happened. The story's effect is utterly destroyed by its sciencefictional denouement: the lover is a humanoid xenoanthropologist from an extraterrestrial civilization; he and his fellows, stranded on Earth through technological malfunction, have formed a wainscot society whose rules he has broken by interacting with a human female. Ah, so that explains everything. Fifty years ago in a pulp magazine, or even today in a mainstream novelist's critically acclaimed experiment in science fiction (à la Martin Amis or P.D. James), this might be regarded as a startlingly imaginative or otherwise satisfying deus ex machina, but in the context of our modern literary expectations it is nothing but a copout, a debasing use of a sciencefictional cliché as if, somehow, by throwing in a reference to offworlders the story is justified – if the author can't think of a mainstream, fantastic or even originally sciencefictional rationale for the tale, then chuck in a few ETs who can't phone home and at least those thickwitted sf-reading anoraks will swallow it.

This argument can be extended to at least one of the other stories, "Chemistry" (1993) by James Patrick Kelly, which, along with "Eat Reecebread", is the most overtly sciencefictional tale in the anthology. Here a young woman in search of thrills goes to a Hothouse, a technological singles club where people's pheromonal responses are artificially enhanced so that for at least a while they have the sensation, no matter what the partner they select for the night is actually like, of being in emotional and physical love. Our protagonist encounters a balding, tubby little man – not her type at all – and discovers that even after the enhancements have worn off the attraction remains: this is the Real Thing. It's a trite enough moral (it's the person who's important, not the packaging), but the tale is beautifully handled and the sciencefictional underpinning fits perfectly with the rest. Yet it's hard to regard this as a piece of sf, because the tale would in essence remain totally unaffected if, in place of all the guff about pheromonal enhancements and the like, one substituted the word "magic". In short, it's a technofantasy: the beautiful princess has kissed her frog and now sees him for the handsome prince he is.

Several of the other tales assembled here are, like "The Lovers" (didn't someone else write a story called "The Lovers" which actually was sf?), similarly fantasies with a smattering of sciencefictional terminology or an artificial sciencefictional frame. Carol Emshwiller's "Venus Rising" (1992), which one might say was the best tale in the book were it not for the fact that at least half the others could reasonably be adjudged likewise, is a beautifully realized bit of fantasy. The intruder who disturbs a water-dwelling mammalian culture on a planet that is not Earth (in other words, is a fantasyland) himself is described as from yet another planet. Surely this means that the story is sf, plain and simple? Well, since his plan is to impregnate as many females as possible through sexual intercourse, the sciencefictional underpinning works only if one accepts that his starfaring culture knows less about genetics than the average ten-year-old ... or middle-American religious fundaloon. One senses, possibly incorrectly, that the bit about him having come from space was grafted on for marketing reasons. Ian McDonald's "Some Strange Desire" (1993), again excellent, is a technofantasy based on vampirism. "Forgiveness Day" (1994), the other long Le Guin piece here, is a superb story in which a male of a culture wherein women are regarded as airheads and property, Learns Better; what is especially impressive in this story, bearing in mind the heavy-handedness of much feminist fiction, is that the woman with whom he falls in love proves to be not his intellectual superior but his equal, which is as it should be.

The remaining stories do not pretend to be anything other than what they are: fantasies – and one of them, R. Garcia y Robertson's "The Other Magpie" (1993), an evocative tale about Native American transvestism at the time of the Battle of Little Big Horn, qualifies as fantasy only because the protagonist is guided by a ghost which may in fact be only a rationalization of her own quasi-instinctive knowledges. "Food Man" (1994) by Lisa Tuttle is an allegorical fantasy which disappointingly opts for what is euphemistically called visceral horror in its last few paragraphs. "And Salome Danced" (1994) by Kelley Eskridge actually is a horror fantasy, and a deliciously chilling one: the story hinges on a hermaphroditic psychic vampire, who uses her/his sexual power for purely selfish reasons, delighting in the directly consequent destruction of her/his partners. "Young Woman in a Garden" (1994) by Delia Sherman is an entrancing ghost story involving a lesbian relationship. Finally Ian MacLeod's "Grownups" (1992) is a first-rate mature fantasy set in a culture that could be our own were it not that humanity has three sexes and the attainment of adulthood involves acute (in the medical sense) physiological and traumatic psychological change – to borrow terminology from zoology, his adolescents are neotenous larvae who, in the normal way, go through a brief pupation analogue before achieving the adult form.

To repeat, most of these are fictions that would be outstanding in any other context, and even the couple that are less interesting would probably seem fairly distinguished if read in an anthology of average quality. Since all were published within a very short timespan, the three years between 1992 and 1994, it is good to know that the genre of fantastic literature is in such raucously good health. However, taken as a whole, they cannot be said to be "works of science fiction" – or at least not without heavy qualification – so in this sense they fail to match the first part of the definition we started with.

What, then, of the second part? Do they "explore and expand gender roles"?

Well, yes and no. Hermaphroditism is a recurring theme, yet there is not much by way of exploration of the condition of being a hermaphrodite in any of the stories here except MacLeod's "Grownups", where anyway one is stretching the term if one describes his adolescents as hermaphroditic (although the third of the sexes, one possibility awaiting them on becoming adult, seems to be hermaphroditic). Another recurring theme is of a male-dominated, female-dominated or homosexuality-dominated society in which a pair of oppositely sexed protagonists in one way or another buck the system. Here we do indeed have some in-depth psychological examinations of gender, but as the exploration is of a condition which most of us experience daily it can hardly be regarded as a brave voyage into any terra incognita where there might be dragons; to take "The Lovers" as an example, it would be interesting if the tale explored the condition of lesbianism in the same way that it explores the condition of awakening heterosexuality, since most of us aren't lesbians and don't know what it's like to be one (any more than a woman can understand what it's like to be a man, or a man a woman). Others of the stories seem to have nothing much to say on the subject of gender at all – "Venus Rising" and "Young Woman in a Garden", fine as they are as stories and as pieces of writing, both fall into this category.

So, in the end, we have to assume that, whatever the parameters used by the judges of the James Tiptree Jr. Award in deciding upon their shortlists and winners, they are not the parameters set out in the informal description of the award's purpose contained in Notkin's introduction to this anthology. These are imaginative stories largely centred on sexual relationships or the relations between the sexes (in some, notably "The Other Magpie", even this is peripheral), and to claim that they are anything more than that is, in the correct sense of the word, merely pretentious.

Yet, to repeat, this is an anthology of a quite phenomenally high standard. It is a pity that it will almost certainly not receive the attention it merits because of the amateurishness of its production and publishing. (a) The title leaves a lot to be desired. (b) The cover design is Hellish Tasteful in all directions, but its designer has ignored the fact that it might be desirable for people to be able to read the title: the copy in front of me is, it seems, called Flying C & Sauce. (c) Although there is a section at the back lovingly detailing the fonts used, unfortunately nobody seems to have bothered proofreading the backmatter. Despite all these cavils, though, your shelf is incomplete without this book.

—unknown venue

Phoenix Fire

by Tim O'Laughlin

BodhiDharma, 343 pages, paperback, 1999

Between the covers of this book there lurks a very good novel trying to get out.

A group of friends in California adds to its number retired psychiatrist Larry, who has had a long interest in past-life hypnotic regression. He tries this out on first one and then all the individuals of the group, and they discover it is not accident that has brought them together in this lifetime: they have been friends, spouses, etc., in previous incarnations, notably in Nazi Germany and, before that, as members of a massacred Sioux tribe. They are older companions than they have known. A dramatic manifestation occurs when Larry realizes that in countless previous lifetimes Audrey, who is not part of the group, has been the spouse of Ryan, who is; when the two are introduced they instantly "recognize" and are in love with each other.

In each of their prior lifetimes the group members have been threatened and generally killed by the vindictively hate-filled man called The One without a Soul, who has manifested in this lifetime as tycoon Raymond Baker, boss of Amalgamated Insurance, which not only has an atrocious record of failing to settle claims but also functions as an asset-stripping company. For reasons he himself does not fully understand, Baker has just seized the traditional family firm Miller Lumber – renowned for its sensitivity to the environment – in a hostile takeover, and is intent on felling a preserve of old-growth redwoods that the lumber company owns.

Audrey is a stalwart of Project HOPE, a small, volunteer-run conservation organization. It and the other group members set themselves against Baker to save the redwoods and the trees' associated population of rare birds. In this they are aided by group member Gayle's psychic talents and her and Larry's rediscovery, through revisiting their Sioux incarnations, of the ability to spirit walk. Of further assistance is the avatar called Ariel, currently a purely spiritual being but soon to be incarnated – unless Baker is victorious – as the female expression of the Divinity, set to reverse the long dominance of the world by the male principle and thereby to attain a harmonic balance.

Got that?

But Baker has his own supernatural weapons, and these increase in both number and strength as he begins to recall his own previous incarnations, right back to when, sometime in the Golden Age where generic fantasy stories happen, he was apprentice to an unwilling sorcerer, whom he murdered for the last word of a Spell Too Terrible To Use. One such weapon is the ability to wrest a person's soul from their body and cast it into a limbo from which it can be recovered only by the power of Love and through Larry's spirit-walking facility. More often Baker relies on orthodox methods – such as hired assassins – to get rid of his foes. But, for the ones he has come to recognize as his enemies through many lifetimes, he sadistically anticipates using his full gamut of magical nastiness, including the Spell Too Terrible To Use – which has the additional advantage that it will throw the entire universe out of kilter and create misery on a correspondingly enormous scale.

What seems at first like merely yet another skirmish between voracious Big Business and the conservationists thus evolves, unknown to anyone but the participants, into a truly cosmic struggle ...

Phoenix Fire reads rather as if it were the (hypothetical) unpublished first novel by Charles de Lint, an impression reinforced by a de Lint strapline ("A Promising Debut From A New Author Worth Watching!") on the back cover and a hefty plug for him in the text. Comparison of an author's work with early de Lint is, however, something of a double-edged compliment, because Phoenix Fire shares not just the virtues but also the flaws of that writer's early work.

There is the attitude towards folk and derived-from-folk music, which is regarded as a lifeblood by some of our heroes and at the very least adored by all the rest; the notion that some perfectly good and reasonable, law-abiding people of great musical sensitivity might have tried folk music and not liked it much is obviously not one that has crossed the author's mind. The text is liberally sprinkled with his own (I assume) and other songwriters' lyrics; here O'Laughlin deserves great credit because – whatever their merits – the original-to-the-book song lyrics actually read like song lyrics rather than, as in most fantasy novels, mere written verses. Nevertheless, because of O'Laughlin's hammering away at the theme of how utterly marvellous music of the folk tradition is, by the time one's halfway through the novel one has begun to regard attendance at one of our heroes' regular jam sessions as something approaching purgatory.

Far more irritating than this is that, as in early de Lint but taken to the nth degree, our heroes are so thoroughly and unbearably nice. You itch for one of them to have a temper tantrum, light up a joint, kick an old lady, fart at a funeral ... anything at all by way of a bad habit or human weakness (unless you count the obsession with folk music). In any real-life group of people mounting a campaign that demands huge effort and sacrifice there would be constant arguments and quarrels, but not among this bunch; whenever one of them does anything that with hindsight proves to have been unwise, instead of the usual bitchy recriminations that characterize real life enterprises there's an instant rallying round of all the rest to tell the individual concerned that it wasn't her/his fault. Any mild differences of opinion that might occur are immediately resolved through use of the kind of cutesy dialogue that has one reflexively reaching for a brown paper bag.

By contrast, all the bad guys are irremediably nasty, which is lazy characterization but more acceptable because it's pretty conventional. Still, one balks a bit to discover that two symptoms of Baker's vileness are that he – ooooo – smokes and – ahhhhh – drinks spirits. The only one of our heroes who smokes is able to give it up Just Like That in an early chapter, after her first hypnotic regression. The only one who ever hit the bottle a bit did so only in the bad old days and has now successfully reformed. Nowadays they're all clean-living, right-thinking, health-loving folk with hobbies like mountain-bike riding (and, of course, folk music).

Their company becomes suffocating after a while – one can take only so much piety. The same goes for the expository passages that herald Love as the cure for all the world's – indeed, the universe's – ills. It is obviously terribly hard for O'Laughlin to restrain himself from descending into preachiness on the issues that are important to him. Here is Larry in philosophical mode:

Take physical appearance for example. What's the real value of good looks in one lifetime? Good looks, especially the kind of "good looks" that television and magazines tell us are so important, last for only a few short years. Compared to an eternity, what's the value of having unwrinkled skin for a few additional years? [...] You and the others at Project HOPE, on the other hand, are working toward things that are really important. Personally, I believe that the people who devote their time or money to organizations like Project HOPE, or who are otherwise concerned about ecology and environmentalism have more advanced souls.

Fortunately Phoenix Fire is a strong enough novel that it manages to survive the heroes' unbearable niceness of being and the preachiness and the Lurve and all the rest (including the folk music). None of these are fatal flaws, although they are serious enough that any competent editor would have guided O'Laughlin in their avoidance. This book, however, screams at the reader that it hasn't been edited.

Or copy-edited. In the short passage cited above at least two obligatory commas are missing, while the quasi-repetition of other/others/otherwise grates. Throughout the book there are probably on average at least four or five instances per page where a copy-editor's pencil would have dipped – not to make major changes, but merely to correct trivial grammatical (and some spelling) errors, inconsistencies of usage and minor stylistic carelessnesses. For example:

Larry took the turn-off for Highway 128 at the north end of town, where The Hamburger Ranch, site of Adam's and Michael's clandestine meetings with John Smith had taken place [...]

There are countless other instances. In the same category – stuff that should have been picked up by an editor or copy-editor – there's the fact that a very minor character is called Doug. Nothing exceptionable in that, you might think, except that one of the central characters is also called Doug. The page or two where Minor Doug is on-stage is a time of great confusion for the reader: "Hang on a minute! I thought Doug was still in hospital or something ..."

A slightly more major difficulty, but again one that could have been cured by elementary editing, is that, in order for the powerful spirit Ariel not simply to grab the plot by its lapels and swiftly make Good triumph, she can act only within certain rules. That these rules are never comprehensively stated lends a sense of arbitrariness to all of Ariel's interventions in the plot; more seriously, the only explanation Ariel can give for these rules' very existence involves painting the Divinity as a callous, heartless gamester – which is certainly not the author's intention but, rather, something he has trapped himself into.

I have spent a lot of time focusing on Phoenix Fire's defects, but, as noted, it is a strong piece of writing, and O'Laughlin is certainly one to watch out for in the future. For all its legion minor imperfections and several somewhat more major irritations, this long novel is better than many you'll find on the lists of much larger and more prominent houses than BodhiDharma – for the very simple reason that it is about something, rather than being a slickly written piece of floss. O'Laughlin sets out to affect the way the reader thinks, and – whether you end up agreeing with his promoted values or not – achieves his aim in a very readable way. We can hope for great things from him in the future.

—Infinity Plus

The Burden of Indigo

by Gene O'Neill

Prime, 184 pages, paperback, 2002

Sometime in the not-too-distant future, after the Collapse of Everything, California is a waste of rusting autos and semi-barbarous tribes. Across this landscape trudges the Indigo Man – indigo because the punishment for serious criminals, in this future, is that they're given a treatment that colours their skin a hue appropriate to the crime, a renewing stigma that can never be erased. Indigo is the colour that identifies a child molester, and sometime years ago our protagonist did indeed commit such a crime – or probably did, he can't quite be sure any more, but it was an accident, he's sure it must have been an accident ...

From this brief summary you might expect the novel is going to be an allegory on the theme of colour prejudice. Not so. It's much more interesting than that.

The Burden of Indigo is not a novel overly burdened with event – although there's a good sufficiency of plot to fill its 181 pages – but where O'Neill triumphs is in his evocation of atmosphere and the total involvement of the reader. In this latter respect he is, of course, creating an additional plot element: one rooted not directly in the text but rather in the reader's experience of the text. Because eventually one does, however reluctantly, come to identify with the Indigo Man; and this identification does constitute an important theme of the novel – not that one should sympathize with child molesters but that, however heinous the crime a human being has committed, eventually there must come a time when forgiveness is not just possible but the only humane option.

In other words, the dyeing of the skin (and the inevitable resultant ostracism) for the rest of the criminal's lifetime is too permanent a punishment; without the possibility that the stain will one day be removed – and the Indigo Man is fully prey to quacks promising cures – there can be no palatable outcome to the whole sorry series of events. The various other coloured individuals whom the Indigo Man meets on his travels display a sort of uneasy camaraderie not unlike the occupants of Death Row, drawn together by their shared knowledge that their fate is sealed and their eternal hope that tomorrow may nonetheless bring news of a reprieve. Although they're tagged to ensure that (hopefully) they can never repeat their crime, it cannot be thought the judicial authorities have in any sense deployed the instruments of justice usefully.

Looking back on what I've just typed I realize that what makes The Burden of Indigo so powerful is that, in a way, it's not about the future at all: it's about today. And it's about us.

—Crescent Blues

Decadence

edited by Monica J. O'Rourke

Prime Books, 169 pages, paperback, 2002

In any anthology of short stories one expects a bit of variation in standard, from Sublimely Good right through to the merely Pretty Good, but this new collection of (mainly original) erotic-horror shorts shows a far wider spread than most: from Pretty Damn' Fine to Absolutely Bloody Awful What The Hell Can The Editor Have Been Thinking? The latter category contains not just one isolated turkey but several.

The authors involved are Nancy Kilpatrick, Charlee Jacob, Jack Fisher, E.C. McMullen Jr, Brian Knight, Rain Graves, Adam Pepper, Sephera Giron, Nicholas Kaufmann, Gene O'Neill, Teri A. Jacobs, Thomas Deja, d.g.k. goldberg, John Urbancik and Edo van Belkom.

Nancy Kilpatrick's "Metal Fatigue" is an interesting piece that could perhaps be sf except that it's so engagingly hallucinatory that it might be something else entirely but dressed up in sf imagery. You may hate it – which is praise of the highest!

E.C. McMullen Jr's "Some People" is likewise sf, assuming you accept cryptozoology as a science; although it's not in the slightest erotic, despite being focused almost entirely on sex, this may be the standout story in the book. Its conceit is that the krakens exist, and that their reproductive cycle involves the parasitic use of host bodies, which are devoured while still alive and functioning. The details of the sex scenes in the story are as emetic in affect as you can imagine, yet McMullen manages to convey that, while nauseating to us, these events are nevertheless pretty all-fired erotic to their participants.

Nicholas Kaufmann's "V.I.P. Room" is, unlike the previous two discussed, genuinely erotic in aspiration and result. A married man adores his wife and they have an excellent sex life together, yet he yearns for variety while remaining faithful to her. Such a dilemma seems solvable through taking his wife to a high-priced orgy club, yet he makes the mistake of becoming sexually obsessed with the woman who runs the club ... with doom as the end of the road.

Gene O'Neill's "When Legends Die" handles nicely the fact that the incubus narrator initially doesn't know who – what – he is, and only slowly, along with the reader, finds out. The ending of the story is a little predictable, but the unusual and unusually well depicted setting makes up for that.

Teri A. Jacobs's "The False Face" overcomes slightly sloppy writing to be interesting in its use of unfamiliar elements from oriental mythology (they may, such is my ignorance, be in fact Jacobs's original inventions). It's also a cat story, which adds to the appeal for felinophiles – especially, as it happens, lesbian felinophiles!

d.g.k. goldberg's "Last Exit to Darlington" is a deliberately anti-erotic story, like so much of the noir fiction which it very successfully emulates. A good-time girl gets picked up by a fairly overt sexually psychopathic serial killer and, while she is prepared, even eager, in a way to add herself to his list of victims in that she will submit to all the sexual humiliations he demands of her, she is not prepared to let the evening end in his desired climax of her slaughter. This is quite a powerful tale, and would belong creditably in any collection of modern noir.

John Urbancik's "The Painted Woman" is an oddity which well merits reading, while Edo van Belkom's "The Uninvited" is, despite a troubling and I'm sure unintentional slight aura of racism, a joke which is both nicely executed and worth the execution; its mockery of the male obsession with penis size is also amusing.

Don't let it be thought that all of the rest of the stories are dire: some are perfectly adequate entertainments. But enough of them are so worthless in both concept and realization that it's impossible to deduce what process of editorial thought went into their selection; in general it is these stories that are most riddled with the proofreading and copy-editing gaffes that are commoner than they should be in the book as a whole, suggesting that O'Rourke herself had little patience with them.

Of course, the problem with any such collection is that horror is almost by definition detumescent if it's to be good horror, while erotica aspires to exactly the opposite criterion. Most of the stories in Decadence substitute masses of sex and, often, locker-room language for any attempt at the genuinely erotic (when will practitioners of supposed erotica learn that this discipline requires a more sensitive use of language than virtually any other form of writing, rather than a coarsening?); some resort to being about sex, substituting intellectual interest for the attempt to kindle a hormonal blaze; and just one or two succeed in uniting the two disparate literary forms. This is not overall a criticism; it's what you expect when you pick up a book like this, even though the marketing gurus of the publishing industry seem to think we're all naive enough to buy such books hoping to get our rocks off and puke simultaneously. However, it would have been nice if O'Rourke had selected a higher proportion of stories that fueled both the imagination and the intellect at the expense of those whose authors seem to think their brief is satisfied by mere, terminally dull, obscenity.

Still and all, the good stories in this anthology make up a sufficient proportion of the whole.

—Infinity Plus

Thief of Time

by Terry Pratchett

HarperCollins, 324 pages, hardback, 2001

Well, the initial report from the Front is that the cover's okay, but inexplicably HarperCollins still refuse to use the Josh Kirby cover illustrations that do so much to enhance the experience of reading each new Pratchett novel. No wonder there's a healthy trade here in the States of the UK editions of Pratchett's books – the ones that have the real covers ...

What sets Terry Pratchett head and shoulders above almost all his rivals in the field of comic fantasy is not just that he is at his best a very funny writer but that he is also a very clever and inventive fantasist. On those (fairly rare) occasions when the humour flags, he can rely on the wit of the fantasy to pull the reader delightedly through. The importance of this is exemplified by one of his own, earlier books, The Lost Continent, which has plenty of jokes – some of them good ones – but through the paucity of its fantasy inspiration is, overall, perhaps the least enjoyable to read of all his novels; it's not bad, but ... Scribes who venture into the field would do well to learn this lesson from Pratchett, or from the very few other writers who have handled comic sf/fantasy with any panache, such as Ron Goulart, Douglas Adams (who, as I write, has just died tragically young), Christopher Moore, and of course Tom Holt.

The point is worth making because Thief of Time has fewer moments of uproarious humour than most of Pratchett's books, and the best of the jokes show a darker, more satirical aspect than we generally associate with him, like:

"Hold on, hold on ... how can you take a piece of, oh, some old century, and stitch it into a modern one? Wouldn't people notice that ..." Susan flailed a bit, "oh, that people have got the wrong armor and the buildings are all wrong, and they're still in the middle of wars that happened centuries ago?"

IN MY EXPERIENCE, SUSAN, WITHIN THEIR HEADS TOO MANY HUMANS SPEND A LOT OF TIME IN THE MIDDLE OF WARS THAT HAPPENED CENTURIES AGO.

or

Every society needs a cry like ["Remember Koom Valley!"], but only in a very few do they come out with the complete, unvarnished version, which is "Remember-The-Atrocity-Committed-Against-Us-Last-Time-That-Will-Excuse-The-Atrocity-That-We're-About-To-Commit-Today! And So On! Hurrah!"

Thief of Time, more than is usual for Pratchett, must therefore largely stand or fall according to its merits as a fantasy novel rather than as a comic novel.

It is indeed full of inventiveness. The Auditors – the anonymous, unidentitied spirits who, rather like an Accounts Department from Hell, try to keep the Universe in order without the slightest heed to the catastrophic counterproductiveness and total pointlessness of such efforts – have decided that their self-appointed task would be much easier if time could be made to stop: then they could get everything sorted and it would stay that way, because, frozen in time, such irritating pests as human beings wouldn't constantly be disordering things again faster than the Auditors can sort them. One Auditor accordingly incarnates itself as the lovely but offputtingly odd Lady LeJean in order to encourage the Discworld's finest, if most unstable, clockmaker, Jeremy, in the construction of a new clock that will on completion, because of its unique precise accuracy, have the effect of bringing time to a halt. Unfortunately for the Auditors' plans, once this particular Auditor discovers itself in a human body it begins to develop human traits, like individuality and the yen for chocolate. And – it having become a she – Lady LeJean falls head over heels in love with Jeremy.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Discworld in what one might consider to be the high mountains of Tibet, the Monks of History are becoming aware of what is going on. It is their task to make sure that the world's time is sensibly managed, with reserves being held so that they may, in an emergency, be pumped to locales that suddenly need a bit extra; they can indeed stitch bits of one century into another, and have done so on occasion – which goes to explain why history doesn't make much sense if you look at it too closely. Among their number, humblest but reputedly most powerful and sagest of them all, is Lu-Tze; to Lu-Tze has just been apprenticed the mysterious Ankh-Morpork orphan Lobsang Ludd (no relation to T. Lobsang Rampa, I'm sure), who possesses in raw form the ability to locally manipulate time – an ability he has put to use by becoming an undetectable petty thief. The abbot of the Monks of History sends Lu-Tze and Ludd off on a quest to Ankh-Morpork to thwart the endeavours of the Auditors.

Death, too, is concerned by developments. Although he is duty-bound to organize the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – Five, if you count Ronnie, the one who left the group before it made it big – for their final Ride, he entrusts his granddaughter Susan (one of Pratchett's finest character creations) with a similar quest.

And that is where, as you would expect of any Pratchett novel, the complications begin ...

The difficulty with this book is that, while all is eventually resolved and the status quo ante restored, it somehow doesn't quite hang together as a fantasy novel; there is a pervasive slight feeling of arbitrariness about the developing course of events. Because of this, the narrative fails to engender any sense of urgency in the places where it should. Of course it's true of most genre novels that we know in advance that right will prevail in the end (or whatever); at the same time we expect to be caught up by the story so that we ignore the foregone conclusion for the thrill of the moment. Not so here, because of that lack of any necessary inexorability about the unfolding events. (There's also some very occasional careless copy-editing, which doesn't help.) The words do not disappear from the page, which is surely the aim of the taleteller. Reading Thief of Time is still an entertaining experience, but even to judge the book at that level it is not as entertaining as it could be because (at least this reader found) there is none of the emotional involvement in events or characters that one usually expects from a novel that is fully successful as a novel.

Still, Terry Pratchett's millions of well earned fans will presumably be undeterred by such considerations and will enjoy Thief of Time just the way it is, thank you very much. And certainly one could swiftly lay hands on a dozen genre-fantasy novels that are less worthwhile. But Pratchett himself has done far better than this.

—Infinity Plus

Song of the Bones

by M.K. Preston

Intrigue Press, 300 pages, hardback, 2003

The strapline on the cover of this novel reads "A Chantalene Mystery," and the blurb gives little indication that the book is other than a cozy murder tale. In fact, although it has many elements of the mystery, most particularly in its first half, it's really a thriller – and a very engaging and good one.

Chantalene (who has a past of her own, presumably treated in Preston's earlier novel Perhaps She'll Die) works as assistant to her lover, lawyer/accountant Drew, in the small town of Tetumka, Oklahoma. Her best friend Thelma, the local postmistress, comes to them with the request that they try to track down her husband Billy Ray, who walked out of her life decades ago but is still co-signatory to the papers on her property, now eagerly sought by an oil company. The search for him has not long begun when a handsome stranger walks in and announces himself as the long-lost Billy Ray, returned to attempt a reconciliation with his wife. Thelma accepts him as the genuine article, and at first all seems blissful; but within days she becomes convinced he's an impostor – and calls on Chantalene to help her establish the truth. Before long the tale emerges of how, all those decades ago, Billy Ray and his brother Donnie Ray, together with co-conspirator Songdog, robbed a Mob-run casino that was fleecing the Native Americans; Billy Ray fled so Thelma could not be connected to the crime by the vengeful mobsters.

Meanwhile, unknown to Chantalene, Songdog, now living as an elderly hermit, has come to believe Chantalene is a shapeshifted version of his step-daughter and lover Liddy, whom he many years ago murdered as she attempted to steal the proceeds of the robbery. He determines to murder Liddy's "new incarnation." Just to add to Chantalene's dangers, the oil company chasing Thelma's land is evidently not all that it seems, while Drew's eye-popper of an ex-wife looks ready to claim back her man.

The stage is set for further murders ... and more than once before the book's end Chantalene must fight for her life.

The telling of this excellent Grand Guignol tale is deceptively genial, mimicking the laid-back ambience of the folk of back-of-beyond Tetumka. This serves to increase the impact of the thriller elements of the plot when they arrive; they're like a punch suddenly thrown at you by an old friend in the middle of an amicable chat. In places, indeed, the writing approaches a definite lyric beauty, enhanced by its lack of selfconsciousness; alas, it's also occasionally rendered rebarbatively muddy by an inability, shared by so many current American writers and their editors, to master the pluperfect tense.

But that's a relatively small flaw, and one that can be lived with. Certainly Song of the Bones is overall impressive and enjoyable enough that I for one will be looking out for the earlier Perhaps She'll Die – and for future M.K. Preston novels.

—Crescent Blues

The Extremes

by Christopher Priest

Simon & Schuster, 400 pages, hardback, 1998

Teresa Simons, a highly trained FBI agent, is widowed when her husband Andy is shot down by a spree killer, John Aronwitz, in a small Texas town. Still in grief, she comes to Britain, the land of her birth – in particular to the sleepy southeastern town of Bulverton, which was itself, on the same day that Aronwitz carried out his slaughter in Texas, the victim of a spree killer, Gerry Grove. She finds a community that seems determined to try to deal with its collective trauma by expunging it from the public memory. This stratagem is proving all too obviously unsuccessful: people directly or indirectly affected by Grove's massacre have the sense that in its aftermath they are living an artifice, that they have been in some obscure sense scripted.

As an FBI agent, Teresa has been subjected to a new virtual- reality training system called Extreme Experience, or ExEx. By interviewing people who have been through an extreme of experience – usually involving violence – and directly scanning their memories, it is possible to construct highly detailed VR scenarios. Into these can be projected the consciousnesses of FBI trainees, who may adopt the roles and personas of those close to the event (even the perpetrators of the mayhem) and attempt to affect the outcome – to alter, at least within the context of the particular scenario, what actually happened. Now ExEx has become available to the public as leisure entertainment, and is proving immensely popular, people flocking in droves to enjoy the vicarious thrills of extreme experiences of all types, sexual encounters being of course prominent among them.

Teresa hopes in a somewhat confused way that, through finding out what happened in Bulverton, she may begin to understand or at least come to terms with the events in Texas that culminated in the death of her husband. The Bulvertonians, however, generally resent her presence and her prying; and her sense of rejection from mundane reality is intensified when officers of the GunHo Corporation, prime manufacturers of ExEx scenarios, arrive in Bulverton and pressure her to leave, because her inquiries, by disturbing the psychological status quo of the locals, are likely to affect the accuracy of the definitive VR scenario concerning the Bulverton Massacre that the GunHo people have come here to construct. Although not fully aware of her own motivations, Teresa responds to these rejections by withdrawing ever more readily into the ExEx scenarios on offer to the public at Bulverton's own GunHo centre.

Already she has experienced what seem to her to be paranormal flashbacks to that dreadful day when Grove strutted through Bulverton's streets, mowing down anyone who came into his path. Moreover, she has discovered there are inconsistencies in the records of what actually happened – for example and most notably, that there appear to have been two sets, one used and one unused, of the weapons with which Grove carried out (or did not carry out) his killings, almost as if, immediately before the massacre, he came to a crux point where the options open to him were (a) to perpetrate his slaughter and (b) not to, and that he somehow took both choices. The clues are there for her to deduce that there has arisen a conflict of realities, that there is a leakage (as it were) from the virtual reality into the historical one.

These clues, quite naturally, she fails to pick up – they defy common sense and everyday rationality – until she is drawn further and further into the web of innumerable interconnecting VR scenarios that can be explored through ExEx. For interconnecting these are, although the interconnections may not always be – in fact rarely are – obvious. Moreover, she discovers that the immensely complex compounded reality that has been constructed (more accurately, has constructed itself) within the confines of ExEx has assumed the status of an alternate reality, one that has begun to have at least pretensions to be a rival of the world outside. Some of the "actors" within the scenarios are perfectly aware of what they are doing – they have developed autonomous personalities to the extent that Teresa can hold mental conversations with them. More and more, as she affects the outcome of a particular scenario, she discovers that the change she has made to it is no longer just a temporary matter: the revised scenario has assumed an identity of its own, rather as if your playing of a video game permanently altered that game for every subsequent player of it or any other video game. And, by altering one scenario, she inevitably affects the innumerable rest as well, because of the overt or subtle interconnections between them. The distancing tricks we all use to protect ourselves from the harshness of the world around us – we read in the newspapers about (for example) mass killings and, while we know the accounts are factual, we mentally process them as if they were gory fictions – no longer work for the participant within the ExEx web: what were merely virtual realities, merely stories, have attained a higher status. Moreover, the shifts in the alternate reality that is the ExEx world are affecting the world outside, so that in a very true sense "real" reality is coming to be no more than one possibility among many.

In due course Teresa must abandon her role as perpetual spectator in the scenarios directly involving Grove, Aronwitz and her dead husband; she must not so much confront the beast as become the beast. In so doing she discovers her heart of darkness – but not in any predictable or clichéd way.

That, believe it or not, is a much simplified and only partial outline of the premise of Christopher Priest's new novel, The Extremes. In the hands of a lesser writer this conceptually extremely complicated mass of material might become muddled, but Priest controls it all masterfully. Although his concerns are, obviously, to do with the frontiers and limitations of the human mind and consciousness – our own, personal mind and consciousness – he manages to conjure from this web of probings towards the edges of our perceptual and consensual reality (and of our perceptions, our modes of perception, and our consensuses) a novel that reads with all the compulsiveness and clarity of a thriller. The effect The Extremes has on the reader is therefore, very definitely and by clear design, twofold – as if you had enjoyed, complete with popcorn, all the thrills and spills of the latest Bruce Willis action movie and then discovered, later, that this had been no mindless actioner but in fact a very thoughtful, very careful and quite rigorous philosophical exploration. In this the novel imitates its subject matter: the reality you think you are inhabiting as you read it proves to be quite different from the reality into which Priest has so deftly lured you. The book's true scariness does not come directly from the events depicted on the page – though these can be quite horrifying enough – but from the way in which we, as readers, are like the unfortunate Teresa drawn into the final confrontation with those parts of our selves we would rather leave ignored.

Beautifully written and utterly absorbing, The Extremes is a quite exceptional piece of work.

—Samhain

The Prestige

by Christopher Priest

Touchstone, 404 pages, hardback, 1995

Christopher Priest is probably the most underrated novelist at work today, almost certainly because he chooses to write in that curious subgenre that is sort of science fiction, sort of fantasy, but in no way generically classifiable as either. For some reason we Brits accept foreign writers who work in this field – John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Ben Okri, Valerie Martin and others – but not our compatriots, unless they happen to be Martin Amis or John Fowles.* Priest, who can write any of these

[* 2011 note: How much has changed in the past decade and a half!]

other authors under the table – with the possible (and it's only possible) exception of Fowles – tends to go forgotten. Yet, perhaps because he publishes so infrequently, one has the sense that the appearance of each new novel represents a publishing occasion – a moment when each of us, if we have the slightest concern about the future of fiction, should put our money where our mouths are.

The Prestige is Priest's first novel in five years (the last was The Quiet Woman in 1990). It is one of those delicious books in which truth – if there is indeed an absolute truth to the tale – is revealed only gradually, and partially. A variety of narrators, most of them unreliable, describe to us the feud that sprang up between two Victorian stage magicians, Alfred Borden and Rupert Angier. Angier made an early living as a fraudulent spiritualist, which is what incurred Borden's obsessive wrath; Borden's public debunking of Angier, prefaced by his unintended inducement of a miscarriage by Angier's wife, is the source of Angier's venom. Yet atop all this is the professional jealousy between the two. Borden has a trick that seems to require the instantaneous transmission of a human body from one place to another. Angier cannot understand how this is done and eventually, in desperation, seeks the assistance of the inventor Nikola Tesla in solving the puzzle. Tesla is able to duplicate the effect only by constructing a genuine matter-transmitter, powered by the new force presently transforming society, electricity. However, the device is really a matter-duplicator: while a live Angier reappears in some startling part of the theatre, dazzling the punters who have come to see the "magician", there remains, unnoticed in the place where he was originally standing, his corpse – the "prestige". To perform the trick he must die, nightly.

To reveal more of this novel would be to do it and its readers a disservice: Priest has many surprises up his sleeve, not the least of which is his own ability to perform as a (narrational) illusionist. Never, while reading The Prestige, are we allowed to take anything for granted: the turn of a page is likely to reveal to us that this particular magician has a new trick that forces us to re-evaluate all that has gone before.

Others have tried this game, of course. William Goldman did it with Magic (1976), which was filmed in 1978 (the "magic" involved was ventriloquism). Jack Curtis did it with a rather nasty horror novel called Conjure Me (1992). There are further examples. What these authors were trying to do was explore the area between conjuring – stage illusion – and real magic. Neither of the two cited authors was able – quite – to bring it off. Priest does.

What he also manages to do is, through lack of overt statement, to make sly satirical comment on the nature of human pettiness. Imagine: Here we have a potentially history-changing invention, the matter-transmitter, and what is it used for? A conjuring trick, whose secret must be preserved from the world at large because that, after all, is the sacrosanct ethic of professional stage magicians. Meanwhile its inventor, Tesla, is content enough to keep silent about his breakthrough because he needs a few thousand dollars to pay off his creditors – who are less interested in the benefits his work might bring to the human species than in whether or not their bills are paid.

The Prestige is a novel full of subtle nuances. I particularly liked the way in which the dual nature of Borden is handled – is he one person or is he two, is he a single soul with two bodies, is he two souls sharing a single body? – and the portrayal of the woman (Olive/Olivia) who in effect creates her own twin in order to be the mistress of one illusionist after the other. She, like the illusionists themselves, discovers how to be two people simultaneously; also like them, in the end she has to decide which of her selves she would prefer to be.

I read this novel at a sitting: it's a long novel so it was a long sitting. Here is one of our finest novelists at his peak. Need I say more?

—SFX

Dirty Boots

by Mike E. Purfield

Writers Club Press, 235 pages, paperback, 2001

Here's a strange one – and in fact a very good one, despite a blizzard of proofing errors and a lack of copy-editing, as one generally expects from Writers Club/iUniverse books.

Page has AIDS, and decides there's little for her at home in New Jersey; she might as well hit the road. Sam's problems are almost worse: an orphan of unknown antecedents, when asleep he is a focus of poltergeist-like activity, and when he awakens his physical appearance – skin colour, hair colour, etc. – takes a while to settle down. He also has clairvoyant bursts, which are reflected in his drawings; and it is these that tell him he should make his way to Sedona (read Noplace), Arizona. A long string of foster-parents have been unable to tolerate his freakishness; when the latest pair look set to stand idly by while he's murdered by a lynch mob, he obeys his clairvoyant instructions and likewise hits the road. En route he encounters Page, and she agrees, on the grounds that she has no other fixed destination in mind, to go with him to Sedona.

Dan is a psychopathic serial killer. The first of his countless victims was his elder sister, who came across him eviscerating a pet. But he believes that, just because he killed her, doesn't mean she's dead; he periodically recognizes her among the people around him, and must kill her all over again. He realizes Page is the latest "reincarnation" of his sister, and sets himself to murder her and anyone who gets in his way. Of course, he has the minor problem of not knowing where she is, because she's left town for parts unknown; but he kidnaps psychic Perry and forces her to guide him in pursuit.

On arrival in Sedona, Page and Sam introduce themselves to Scott, an artist whose painting of one of the local churches has loomed large in Sam's clairvoyant visions. But Scott proves to be a Satanist who'd like to sacrifice Page ...

But that's probably enough of the plot, and I've not even started on Uncle Ivan, who's violently rousted from a years-long coma and is likewise drawn to Sedona, or the bizarre secret within an Arizona mountain that will unlock the door to the mysteries of Sam's existence.

Dirty Boots is, if you like, the weirdest road movie you ever came across, a nightmarish comedy that makes you chuckle with guilt. While reading it I kept thinking of writers whose heyday was in the 1970s or a little earlier – writers like Richard Brautigan and Richard Fariña – but really Purfield has his own voice, and his own distinctly skewed worldview. Despite the irritations I mentioned at the outset, the fluidity of his prose makes the pages turn quickly, and the entertainment rarely if ever flags. It's much to be hoped that a non-vanity press will pick this book up, edit and proofread it properly, and reissue it in a better edition. But the book's recommended even in its current form.

—Infinity Plus

Resurrection Men

by Ian Rankin

Little, Brown, 436 pages, hardback, 2003; reissue of a book originally published in the UK in 2002

This is the fifteenth book (and the thirteenth novel) in Rankin's series about tough Edinburgh cop Detective Inspector John Rebus, but it's the first this reviewer has read; it most certainly will not be the last,* because Resurrection Men is excellent.

[* 2011 note: Indeed it hasn't been: my shelves now bulge with Rankin books.]

Rebus has had his brushes with authority in this past, but this time he's thrown a mug of coffee at a superior officer. The sin's grave enough that he's sent off to a police training establishment in central Scotland to join a group of senior cops who likewise require reconditioning; if they can see the error of their ways they'll be restored to their careers – "resurrected", in other words.

Of course, it's a setup; three of Rebus's "class-mates" are suspected of being crooked, and he's been planted among them to see what he can find out. Unfortunately for him, when they're given the file on an old crime to investigate as an exercise, it proves to be one in which his own fingers were not entirely clean.

The murder case he's been taken off is left largely in the hands of his trusty sidekick, Detective Sergeant Siobhan Clarke, who continues to work it with extremely green rookie David Hynds. Of course, the bond between Rebus and Clarke is such that they give each other covert help in their investigations. But that seems not to be the sole crossover between the two cases.

Most procedural stories that virtually taste of realism aren't particularly page-turners; most page-turning crime thrillers involve a certain fantastication that requires a suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader. Rankin manages the rare double act, though: Resurrection Men is an absolutely gripping thriller that's at the same time completely, grittily convincing. The supporting cast, and Rebus's relationships with them, are likewise superb – that dual comment applies most especially in the context of Siobhan Clarke, who's an exceptionally appealing character in her own right. There are rumours that Rankin may be planning to retire Rebus, leaving Clarke as primary protagonist in the continuing series. If there's any truth in them, it'll be on the one hand a great pity – because Rebus is a fine creation – but on the other a joy, because Clarke most assuredly deserves her own novels.

Nearly better than anything else is Rankin's capture of the city of Edinburgh, both on and off the tourist streets; it becomes almost an extra character in the story.

The two intertwined mysteries and their resolutions are entirely satisfying, and they possess a characteristic that's rare in mystery novels: as you look back at the plot from the standpoint of the denouement, you realize that there was a certain inevitability in events turning out this way, given the characters involved. Nothing, in other words, seems remotely contrived or created; all is truly naturalistic.

—Crescent Blues

Hell on Earth

by Michael Reaves

Del Rey, 280 pages, hardback, 2001

A few years ago, somewhere in the midst of nowhere, a young girl, pregnant by her father, gave birth to a monster that promptly slaughtered everyone in the delivery room before vaulting off through the window.

In the present, strange things are a-doing. New York-based occultist Colin, raised and trained by a Transylvanian necromantic order called the Scholomance, is robbed, by some entity that reeks of wrongness, of his primary talisman, the tripartite Maguffin known as the Trine; immediately afterwards a fabulously lovely lady angel called Zoel arrives on his doorstep offering to help him get it back in return for his assisting her on an enigmatic quest. They are shortly joined in this by the demon Asdeon, who has collaborated with Colin before and maintains a shifty friendship with him.

Meanwhile, in Oregon, bestselling journo and crime-book author Liz Russell is watching a serial killer called the Maneater – who has been stalking her these past few years – apparently fail to die in the execution chamber; even during the autopsy, after his brain has been removed and discovered to be lacking in the areas responsible for such motor functions as breathing and heartbeat, the Maneater is still able to wink at her. If the vile spirit that has enlivened him is able to hop from body to body, as indeed proves to be the case, then Liz's life is in eternal danger ...

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, bodyguard Terry Dane, a veteran of Desert Storm, during which he had an encounter he's tried to forget with a demonic figure amid the hellish fires and darkling skies, manages only by chance to stop an unkillable madman from assassinating his rock-star client on the street. Later the said heavy-metal artiste, stage-name Chopper, is found so hideously slaughtered in his private, locked-room studio that if the obvious comparison were made there'd be letters from angry hamburgers. The mystery of this murder is one Terry must solve, even if at the cost of his own life ...

Off go these various disparate characters on their various disparate quests, encountering demons and dangers galore. They all finish up in Las Vegas – the 21st century's Sodom and Gomorrah – where there is the most dramatic demonic manifestation yet, in the vanquishing of which all three of the main protagonists must play their essential parts ...

There is, as you will have gathered, quite a lot of plot in this not particularly long book – plenty of event to keep the pages turning.

Unfortunately, the net effect is all rather forgettable. This is the kind of novel that used to be published originally not as an elegantly produced hardback but as a mass-market paperback, designed to be read once on a long train journey and then abandoned for the next passenger to pick up. The tale is efficiently told, but I never had any deep sense of involvement in the characters and their fates or any compelling urge to discover what was going to happen next. If there are any profundities to the underlying ideas – indeed, if there are any underlying ideas at all – then they have all been pared away for the sake of that efficiency of telling. I came away from Hell on Earth with the feeling that it is one of those novels that can be adequately synopsized simply by: "They have adventures." The plethora of event somehow does not seem to tie together to form a single, unifying, inevitable plot.

There are some good points. The demon Asdeon is a fine fictional creation – by far the most enjoyable character in the book. Although he's Americanized, with a penchant for Bogart impersonations that actually are Bogart impersonations because of his shapeshifting ability, the precursor I was reminded of most was Albert Campion's butler Lugg in Margery Allingham's novels. Of course, it is not necessarily a good sign that a secondary character should steal the show on every appearance, but this shouldn't detract from the achievement.

Also of note is Reaves's facility for creating pop-culture similes and metaphors, which generously litter the pages – rather too generously, perhaps, because they can come to grate. The functioning of the Striker saw (device used in autopsies), for example, is described thus: "It worked by high speed vibration and would not harm soft tissue, although it sliced through bone like a kitchen knife through Janet Leigh." Or there's a description of the lovely-to-die-for angel Zoel: "Then she smiled, another one of those smiles that could melt an iceberg faster than Godzilla's fiery breath." All very slick and professional stuff, of course – despite the image of a halitotic smile – but not necessarily effective in the task of dragging the reader into the plot.

Then there are the times – too many of them – where one has the impression Reaves is laughing at his readers, that he's deliberately revealing the mechanics of putting together a generic supernatural-horror story in order to mock their predilections. After one particular set-piece we read:

Probably he was supposed to feel shock or fear at the sight of the priest's throat wound functioning as a second mouth. Colin felt neither; only impatience. Whoever or whatever was possessing the priest should have known that it took more than this kind of shoddy theatricality to impress him.

And the same, of course, goes for the reader, because the scene in question did smack of "shoddy theatricality". Similarly, three-quarters of the way through the book, Colin exclaims: "I've been too long in the dark. I want some answers. [...] who stole the Trine? Who sent me on this wild goose chase? And why?" They're questions the more perceptive reader, too, has long been asking, because Colin's adventures to date have indeed been a wild goose chase, with the components of the Trine being merely plot coupons – rather like the various objects you have to gather in a role-playing gamebook for reasons that never if at all become obvious. The suggestion here is that readers are too often satisfied with such stuff, and that those very same readers won't notice the jibe. And right at the end of the book, when Colin has to decide what best he should do next in order to plant the seed of a sequel, a miniature Asdeon appears on one of his shoulders and a miniature Zoel on the other, each urging him to follow a different course, much as in the old cartoons where Donald Duck might be swayed one way and the other by a devil and an angel on his two shoulders.

There's often, in fact, the feeling while reading Hell on Earth that somewhere below the surface there's a comic novel or outright parody just itching to break loose, but being held somewhat insecurely in check. Yet to judge the novel as a romp would be misguided as well, for it lacks a romp's requisite bubbling joie de vivre. What is conveyed instead – presumably by accident rather than design – is as noted a somewhat sneering contempt for readers of novels like this one.

Whether such readers deserve all they get is of course another matter ...

—Infinity Plus

Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies

by David L. Robb

Prometheus, 384 pages, hardback, 2004

This is an important book, and thoroughly to be recommended. It is also, unfortunately, a flawed one in terms of its presentation, filled with clumsy writing and egregious repetition: it reads like a collection of essays written, rather hurriedly, at different times, and it's somewhat shameful that neither the author nor his editor made the least effort to knit these into a coherent text.

The appeal to moviemakers of enlisting the cooperation of the military is obvious. For a fraction of the outlay that would otherwise be incurred, the military can lay on helicopters, battleships, nuclear subs and a cast of thousands. The peril of accepting such a huge cash savings – which may very well represent the difference between a movie being made and not made – is equally obvious. The non-cash price the military demands is script-approval, more usually euphemized as "technical advice." In Operation Hollywood Robb draws up an almost mind-numbingly wide-ranging roster of movies that have been substantially – often absurdly – compromised by the military's refusal to support enterprises that they feel fail to convey "the right message."

The ethical core of the book is summed up in a few lines about two-thirds of the way through:

And to get an idea of what's been lost by the sanitizing of hundreds of movies that the Pentagon has assisted, imagine what the films that the Pentagon refused to assist might have been like if they'd been subjected to the military's approval process. Imagine a "toned down" Jack D. Ripper, the mad army general obsessed with the purity of bodily fluids in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove; or a "more positive" Colonel Kurtz, the insane renegade army officer in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now; or a less bitter Ron Kovic, the paralyzed hero-turned-war resister in Oliver Stone's Born on the Fourth of July; or a less goofy, more soldierlike Forrest Gump [italics sic]. How would we have known if the producers of these films had toned down their characters in order to get the military's cooperation? And how would we have known that our movie-memories had been tampered with?

The answer, of course, is that we wouldn't, without the help of assiduous researchers like Robb. A case in point is the relatively recent movie Windtalkers, concerning the so-called Code Talkers, Navajos enlisted to serve alongside Marines in World War II because their language was totally incomprehensible to the Japanese and, as an evolved rather than a created "code", was invulnerable to decryption techniques. I saw this movie after I'd read Robb's book; the person I was with had not. My companion assumed the historical underpinning of the movie was, aside from the obvious Hollywood-blockbuster conventions, fairly accurate, and was quite horrified to find this wasn't the case. In particular, among countless smaller changes, institutionalized racism toward the Navajos was downplayed (there is a single violently racist Marine, and even he "learns better" as the movie progresses), and, most specific of all, the instruction given to each Marine teamed with a Navajo that, should his charge fall into enemy hands, his imperative duty was to kill him, in case the "code" could be tortured out of him, was almost completely written out of the script: it's still there in tacit form, but it's no longer an important dynamic of the plot.

The list of movies that have been similarly tampered with is a long one, as noted, and it spans decades up to the present. Even a listing of the more famous titles would be too long to reproduce here. I can guarantee, though, that many of your illusions about the integrity of your favorite movies will be shattered.

Also of interest are the tales Robb recounts of directors and producers who simply refused to be cowed by the military "script advisers" and who either scrapped their projects altogether or had confidence enough in their own box-office draw to be able to eschew the Pentagon's cooperation. Most such moviemakers have been well established figures, for obvious reasons, but not all. I was particularly struck by the story of Cy Roth, widely regarded as one of the worst low-budget moviemakers of all time, the qualities of whose three completed movies can be judged by the title of one of them: Fire Maidens from Outer Space. In 1953 he wanted to make a serious movie called Air Strike about racism aboard a World War II aircraft carrier. The Pentagon not only refused all cooperation – how preposterous to countenance that there might be racism in the military! – but also went out of their way to try to insure the movie never saw the light of day: at one point they even enlisted the FBI to see if charges of Communism against Roth might be made to stick. Despite such persecution, Roth refused to lie down and shut up, and finally he made his movie. By all accounts it's a rotten movie – and not just because of the lack of cooperation – but one cannot help admiring his courage and gumption in managing to make it against all the very considerable odds.

An additional point of interest in Operation Hollywood is that Robb has managed to obtain copies of various bits of correspondence between moviemakers and the military censors, and these he reproduces in facsimile form. He also presents a convincing counter-argument to the defense of the Pentagon's attitude that refusing cooperation is different from censorship in that no one would accuse (say) Exxon of censorship if it refused to assist a movie fiercely critical of the company's approach to clearing up oil spills. Robb points out forcefully that, unlike Exxon, the Pentagon is not a private company: it is in fact the property of the US public, and thus has no moral license whatsoever to rewrite its own and US history for the purpose of keeping that public in the dark.

Despite the irritation – even exasperation – generated by the total dereliction of auctorial and editorial duty in the preparation of its text, Operation Hollywood is one of those must-read books: no understanding of movie history is remotely complete without it. It certainly deserves far more attention than it so far seems to have received.

—Crescent Blues

Scorched Earth

by David L. Robbins

Bantam, 352 pages, paperback, 2003; reissue of a book originally published in 2002

Elijah and Clare Waddell, inhabitants of Good Hope, Virginia, have a child, Nora Carol. However, Nora Carol is born deformed and dies within minutes. So that the parents' grief may be minimized, Clare's mother arranges with the Rev. Thomas Derby that the burial take place as promptly as possible in the graveyard of her family church, the Victory Baptist Church. No sooner is the child interred, however, than the deacons object, for Elijah Waddell is black: this is the "white folks' church". It's not that they're racists, you understand, but Nora Carol must be dug up and reburied at the nearby "black folks' church".

The night of the reburial, the Victory Baptist Church is burned to the ground, and Elijah is found next to it, drunk, dancing for joy ... but adamantly denying that he set the blaze.

No one believes him, of course. His situation worsens when a body is discovered among the ashes. Worse, the body is of the brutish local sheriff's daughter, who, the postmortem reveals, experienced both a broken jaw and sex not long before death. Elijah stands accused of arson, rape and murder.

Nat Deeds, a lawyer who fled Good Hope and his job when his marriage fell apart, is called back to defend Elijah. Nat has difficulties of his own believing Elijah's story, and his ability to concentrate on the case is hampered by his emotional turmoil in the presence of his estranged wife Maeve. Yet slowly his opinions shift. As, with Maeve's encouragement and sometimes help, he unravels a tangle of corruption, hypocrisy, racism and deceit that long predates Nora Carol's birth, he realizes both the truth of that fatal night and the possibility of at least rapprochement between himself and Maeve.

That might possibly all sound standard enough stuff. But what's truly outstanding is that in no way can this be described as a legal thriller, as a crime novel, or as belonging in any other neat genre category – any more than, say, To Kill a Mockingbird could be so dismissed (and I was constantly reminded of that novel while reading Scorched Earth, even though the books aren't markedly similar). The overtly dramatic elements are played down in favour of an extremely complex plot of which they are merely a part, with characters, their interplay and the corruption of human weakness being portrayed to extraordinary depth – all this done in a writing style that has the richness and smoothness of a vintage port.

Yet don't get the idea that this is one of those novels you ought to read only because it's a "worthy literary achievement" or something equally dull. In fact, it's riveting: the bedroom lights burned late despite grumpy comments from the other side of the bed.

And, even before I'd finished reading the paperback CB's editor had sent me, I went out and bought the hardback.

—Crescent Blues

Any Time At All

by Chris Roberson

Clockwork Storybook, 213 pages, paperback, 2002

Eleven-year-old Roxanne Bonaventure, a difficult child, encounters a dying woman in the woods, and is given an amulet. By use of the amulet Roxanne is able to travel through the many worlds and times of the Myriad (rather like Moorcock's multiverse or my own polycosmos), although aging only at the speed of her own internal bodyclock. Recursive elements abound during her various adventures; the author's appendix gives brief details about such varied cultural icons as H.G. Wells, Sexton Blake and The Beatles.

No prizes for guessing the identity of the old woman who gives the 11-year-old Roxanne the amulet, but that's not the kind of game Roberson is playing in this highly enjoyable book.

I've had to choose that phrase, "highly enjoyable book", with some care. First, the word "book", because Any Time At All isn't really a novel in the accepted sense. It's not a collection of linked stories, either, or even a fixup (whereby pre-existing stories are cobbled together with additional plot elements to create the appearance of a novel). Rather, it's a pseudo-novel which takes the form of a fixup, the tales that comprise it not having the status of independent short stories.

This is a useful form for novelists to exploit, but one of its drawbacks is that, unless the segments together build towards some kind of conceptual or emotional resolution, the expectations of the reader, whatever the intentions of the author, do demand that they can indeed stand alone: that each bears its own resolution. This is where Any Time At All tends to fall down; a few of its chapters are individually strong enough to satisfy, but too many of them have the status of "build-up" chapters – and, as they do not in fact build up to anything, the reader is left with the feeling of having been stranded.

Even so, the book is, to return to the other part of my phrase, highly enjoyable in that for the most part the prose – frothy and dancing, often delightfully elegant – a joy to read. Chris Roberson is obviously an author to watch, and this book is an ideal companion for a train journey, even if at its end one wishes it could have been something a little more.

Oh, and Any Time At All has a very nice John Picacio cover.

—Infinity Plus

Salt

by Adam Roberts

Gollancz, 256 pages, paperback, 2000

A string of almost-generation starships, each bearing a different dissident culture, goes to colonize the habitable-but-only-just planet called Salt – so-named because that is what the land is largely made up of, with a consequent lack of vegetation. The two cultures upon which the story focuses are diametrically opposed: one is a sort of US market-oriented pseudo-democracy taken to manic extremes (its spokesman produces an eloquent justification for regarding the straightforward, legalized buying of votes as the purest form of democracy) while the other is a benevolent cashless communism/anarchism. There are social difficulties between the cultures through misunderstanding of conventions: one person's expression of common courtesy is another's deadly insult. Despite the fact that there are virtually no resources on Salt to squabble over, so that the only sane option is for the cultures to cooperate, the crazed pseudo-democracy declares war for ideological reasons.

The book was first published in 2000, but the power of its satire could hardly be more relevant today,* with a pseudo-democratic US

[* 2011 note: The review was written at the height of the Bush/Cheney imperium.]

administration using every doublethink technique to proclaim its adoration for freedom on the one hand while introducing increasingly anti-democratic legislation on the other, all the time pumping up public fear of external foes as a way of papering over the cracks. This is not to say that Roberts's satire, while obviously political, is directed at specific political targets; just as Orwell satirized not communism but totalitarianism in (particularly) Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), Roberts is really dissecting human stupidity, as expressed through political insanity, rather than any particular political ideology, be it capitalism or anarcho-communism. The problem with his capitalist culture is not that it is capitalist per se but that its movers and shakers are, at a fundamental level, intellectually and morally corrupt, justifying their most despicable actions through the abuse of such terms as "peace" and "freedom".

In many ways this is a brilliant piece of work, and it lives long in the mind; as a novel, however, it is less successful, in that the scenarios it sets up are, perhaps inevitably, artificial-seeming. Or, at least, one would hope they are; looking around today, one sees whole bevies of real-life scenarios that would have seemed artificial if novelized just a few years ago. This is a book I'd strongly advise you to read: almost certainly you'll hugely enjoy it.

The Years of Rice and Salt

by Kim Stanley Robinson

Bantam, 672 pages, hardback, 2002

This is a huge alternate-history novel which takes as its thesis that the Black Death didn't kill only about one in ten of the European population but instead virtually annihilated it – and in so doing extinguished Christianity (and indeed virtually all white-skinned humans). The account of how the rest of the world gets along without the WASPs over the centuries from then until now is episodic, these long episodes being linked by a set of shared characters.

Shared characters in scenes separated by decades and centuries? Well, yes. The artifice that makes this possible is the Buddhist notion of the jati, or group of souls that cyclically reincarnate together, with each person, in each new corporeal existence, having to identify the other members of the group. Between each episode on Earth we have shorter accounts of the procedures the group members go through in order successfully to renew their mundane activities. This artifice in the main works extremely well.

As do the episodes, although they each have their different characteristics, which makes for a patchy read. Probably the most enjoyable is at the same time the most artificial: "The Alchemist." The central figure of this section, the alchemist Khalid, is a sort of alternate-world SuperLeonardo, but possessed also of a greater practical bent. Khalid and his team invent practically every technological device we recognize today with the possible exception (I may have missed items) of the digital computer and MTV; they also make scientific conceptual breakthroughs likewise without number. This is of course a preposterous conceit, and it's thus impossible to suspend one's disbelief and accept the episode as a "real history"; at the same time, though, rather like a poetic truth, one can regard it as a mythopoeized history, with all the products, attained by countless nameless individuals, of a scientific/technological revolution being ascribed to a single semi-legendary figure – rather in the way that all sorts of stuff from diverse sources has been attributed to Pythagoras. And, anyway, the section is a lot of fun, so who really cares if it's plausible?

Among the other sections, those dealing with the interactions between the oriental races and the Native American cultures are especially successful, while the final section – set around now if not a smidgen into the future – is a bit of a mess, with two stories starting and neither reaching completion (which may be highly realistic, but not what one rightly expects from fiction).

This is a book that is vast in its ambition and indeed just plain vast; it is for the most part beautifully written, although there are a few short (two- or three-page) sections that seem to have been dashed off in a hurry, and the omission of hundreds upon hundreds of question marks is astonishingly irritating. There's been talk of its being the ultimate alternate-history novel, the benchmark against which all others will in future be judged; and such talk is not entirely hyperbolic. But to do both its virtues and its flaws justice would require far more than just a brief review like this one.

—Crescent Blues

The First Cut

by Peter Robinson

Dark Alley, 310 pages, paperback, 2004; reissue of a book first published in 1990

Originally published in the UK in 1990 as Caedmon's Song, the retitled The First Cut represents the first US publication of this early psychological thriller by Robinson, who has since become better known for his Inspector Banks detective novels. Although I've not read any of the Inspector Banks series,* I

[* 2011 note: A shortcoming I've now emphatically corrected.]

slowly became aware as I read The First Cut that I'd read the novel before, presumably around the time of its original UK publication. I could remember rather enjoying it first time around; sure enough, I rather enjoyed it this time as well.

University student Kirsten is attacked one night in a local park and left for dead; she has been sexually assaulted and so grievously wounded that, not only will she never be able to have a child, she may never be able to have full sexual intercourse again. She is the first victim of a serial sex-killer who comes to be known as the Student Slasher, and the only one to survive. In one strand of the novel's narrative we follow her slow psychological rehabilitation, aided by sympathetic friend Sarah and her own not-so-sympathetic parents.

In the book's second strand, we are with Martha Browne, who comes to the seaside town of Whitby, in Yorkshire, posing as a writer doing research but in fact doing her best to track down and kill the Student Slasher. Although it's presented in due course as a Terrific Revelation, it's pretty obvious from early on to the reader that Kirsten and Martha are one and the same, the latter being merely the nom de guerre Kirsten has adopted some while later as, with the help of her confused and partial recollections of the attack, she hunts the man who has ruined her life.

And she finds him – or so she thinks. Unfortunately, she discovers from the newspaper that, the same night she was exacting her terrible revenge, the Student Slasher struck yet again, in a different part of the country. Clearly she was mistaken in her identification, and has killed an innocent man. But that hardly deters her: the necessity to stop the Student Slasher from killing any more young women and to gain vengeance for what he did to her overrides all other considerations. So Kirsten/Martha, aware that she's in danger of becoming a serial killer herself, continues her hunt ...

The best parts of this book are the scenes where Robinson explores Kirsten's reactions in the weeks and months after her tragedy, as she tries to reconcile herself to the fact that she has been virtually neutered, even though her hormones continue to drive her as they always have. There is genuine insight and compassion here, of the kind that one wishes a few more thriller writers could conjure. And Martha's painstaking detective work, and her stalking of the men she suspects, could hardly fail to grip the imagination. But The First Cut is almost fatally flawed by the fact that the central revelation of the Kirsten/Martha identity falls as flat as a pancake. As a result, while still thoroughly engrossing, it falls short of being one of the great Rendell-style psychological thrillers.

—Crescent Blues

The Vampire's Violin

by Michael Romkey

Del Rey, 294 pages, paperback, 2003

Dylan Glyndwr (presumably pronounced "Glendower") is a brilliant violinist and a centuries-old vampire – a rogue vampire, indeed, because unlike most of his fellows he has no compunction about killing his prey, even revelling in it. He once briefly possessed one of the "Angel" violins – one of a series of just 13 phenomenally fine instruments made by an 18th-century Italian luthier after blindness had struck him in his old age. Ever since losing that violin, Glyndwr has combed the world seeking another.

Maggie O'Hara is a violin student whose future career seems likely to be blighted by her paralysing stage fright. But then she inherits from her dying grandfather the battered old violin he bought in a devastated Europe during the last days of WWII. It proves, of course, to be an "Angel" – perhaps the last one left in existence – and it transforms her from merely a promising tyro into a virtuoso performer. Soon Glyndwr is on her track, and only the friendship of good vampire maestro conductress Maria Rainer and lusty swain Carter Dunne may save her ...

The first thing to say about The Vampire's Violin – the latest in a longish string of vampire novels by Romkey – is that it's really very nicely written; he has an easy style, elegant without being ostentatious. The second thing is that this is an incredibly slight book: it seems entirely to lack the desire to be anything other than a throwaway quick read. All through the book I found myself baffled by the conundrum of why an author capable of writing so well should be bothering to waste his time on such an unambitious novel.

—Infinity Plus

Home Front

by Joel Rosenberg

Forge, 304 pages, hardback, 2003

Ernest Hemingway, Doc Holliday, John Crazy Horse and George Washington all suffered from being named the same as famous Americans, and all were by a cruel jest of the Army made to serve in the same tank in Vietnam.

Nowadays Ernest "Call me Sparky" Hemingway is a middle-aged, crankily divorced freelance copy-editor in the small North Dakota town of Hardwood. Out of the blue he's phoned from Minneapolis by the teenaged daughter, Tenishia, of his war buddy "Prez" Washington. Her daddy's been the victim of a gangland killing, and he once firmly instructed her that, if anything like this happened, she was to contact one of the other three old comrades. Now the gang that killed Prez is after Tenishia too.

Despite himself, Sparky is dragged in. As a first measure he brings Tenishia home to Hardwood, but the gang that killed Prez isn't going to let her go so easily. All three surviving buddies reunite to face up to the Minneapolis gangbangers and solve Tenishia's little difficulty.

The telling of this somewhat lightweight tale is appropriately light-hearted, but Rosenberg runs into difficulties with this style. The flipness is too often grating. The jocularities and observations on life are neither especially witty nor especially profound, and one's irritation with them is exacerbated by the fact that frequently they appear as if freshly coined at more than one point in the book – presumably a matter of oversight on the part of both author and editor. By midway through, as the annoyance factor rises, you might be tempted to put the book aside.

To do so would be a mistake. The book's great strength lies in the characterization not of Sparky, its main protagonist, but of Tenishia. This stubborn and strong-willed yet vulnerable and terribly frightened black teenage girl, suddenly plucked into an all-white world, is beautifully rendered by Rosenberg, so that all the other irritations with the book fade into insignificance beside the fact that we care so desperately about her fate, and hope so much that, despite all the odds, there'll be a happy ending to the tale for her. Some of the other characters are nicely done too – Jeffie, the local white boy smitten instantly by the newcomer to the Hardwood high school, and Bridget, Sparky's old flame suddenly reappeared in his life – but it's the brutally orphaned girl herself, even though she has comparatively little onstage time, who captures our emotion and keeps the pages turning. I suspect Tenishia will remain in my mind long after much of the rest of Home Front, including its rather humdrum plot, has been forgotten.

—Crescent Blues

Next of Kin

by Eric Frank Russell

Gollancz/Sterling, 181 pages, paperback, 2001; reissue of a book originally published as Plus X in Astounding in 1956, expanded for first book publication as The Space Willies in 1958, first published in the UK in 1959 as Next of Kin 1959

The quote on the back cover of this reissue in the no-longer-named Gollancz series of classic sf novels is fittingly from Terry Pratchett: "I wish I'd written Next of Kin." Don't we all? Before Pratchett, before Adams, before Friesner, before (but only just) Goulart, before countless others who cashed in on the craze for humorous fantasy/sf sparked by the success of (particularly) Adams and Pratchett, Russell was a giant fish in the relatively small pond of comedy in the genre literature of the fantastic. In novels such as Wasp (1957) and The Space Willies/Next of Kin and in countless short stories, many of the best of which are to be found in the quasi-fixup The Great Explosion (1962), independent-minded Earthlings succeeded, generally through use of their wits and against enormous numerical odds, in thwarting or defeating powerful bureaucracies or tyrannies – usually bureaucratic tyrannies, usually alien ones, always characterized by lack of mental flexibility.

Russell's classic novel in this wily-human-vs-dimwitted-alien-bureaucracy theme (The Great Explosion is rather different, concerning itself with a monolithic human bureaucracy attempting to deal with scattered and idiosyncratic human cultures) is undoubtedly Wasp, but Next of Kin is always cited in the following breath. This probably does a disservice to Wasp, which is immeasurably the better of the two novels.

There is no great plot to Next of Kin. John Leeming is sent on a super-fast scout vessel into the region of the Galaxy controlled by a hostile alien federation, the Combine, to report back on the strengths and capabilities of the various Combine planets. Far on through his trip his vessel packs up, and he crash-lands on a remote and unimportant Combine world. There he succeeds in avoiding the dimwitted aliens for a while, but is eventually incarcerated in a PoW prison from which escape by straightforward means is virtually impossible. Accordingly, he constructs from bits of wood and bent wire a series of gizmos through which he pretends to talk to his invisible alter ego – his Eustace, as he tells his captors. He convinces them that all humans possess a Eustace, who will avenge whatever crimes are perpetrated on the physical body and who even, where necessary, survives the death of that body in order to do so. The dimwitted aliens believe it, and so the war is brought to an end, with Earth and its allies as the de facto victors.

There's material here for a longish novelette or perhaps, depending on how one played it, for a reasonably long novel of which the above sequence of events would be the main, but not the sole, plot strand. What Russell produced instead was a novelette expanded to fill enough pages for book publication. (This is in strict contrast to Wasp, which perfectly fits its length.) We're nearly at page 100 before Leeming gets to the prison, which is where the story proper begins. Before that we're treated to a mildly amusing opening sequence back on Earth where the free-spirited – and to be honest rather puerile – Leeming is the exasperation of his fixed-minded military superiors, then to a long account of his solitary quest through Combine-occupied space, an account whose inescapable tedium is alleviated only by one patch of brilliant comedy:

Leeming picks up the radio conversations of a species whose spoken language, while totally alien, shares enough of the basic blocks of English to sound like a mangled version of the latter language. He eventually joins in with his own nonsense. A sample:

There came another pause, then Gnof resentfully told all and sundry, "I shall lambast my mother."

"Dirty dog!" said Leeming. "Shame on you!"

The other voice now informed, mysteriously, "Mine is a fat one."

This extract illustrates another characteristic of Next of Kin: it is decidedly, well, naughtier than one expects from that era. Although the Swingin' Sixties were just around the corner, it would only be a full decade later – with the advent of the movement crystallized around Michael Moorcock's New Worlds – that genre sf would begin to swing with them.

Once Leeming is within the prison, the dimwitted aliens become even dimwitteder. And here there is a conundrum that Russell never quite succeeds in sorting out, with the result that his narrative is never fully convincing. These aliens are of a species which has successfully developed the capability for interstellar flight; although they are merely a minor constituent of the federation that is waging war against the Earth and its allies, they are nevertheless technologically able to wage that war. In other words, they cannot be that dimwitted. To be sure, we ourselves are sufficiently able to initiate an interstellar mission tomorrow if we set our minds to it – we have the technology, but lack the gumption – and to be equally sure there are plenty of profoundly dimwitted human beings around; yet we are not a universally dimwitted species. If we were, we couldn't have attained the level of technology that we have. (You might argue that foolishness is a universal human trait, but that's a different matter from dimwittedness.) Russell's aliens in Next of Kin, though, are stupid through and through ... so how come they're able to build starships?

It might seem a bit futile to question such stuff in an overtly comic novel, but comedy – unless entirely surreal, which Next of Kin assuredly is not – depends for its effectiveness on a sort of skewed plausibility. Characteristics may be impossibly exaggerated, but there has to be an underlying reality that can be exaggerated upon. Logic may be distorted to hilarious effect, but it has to have a logic of its own. Stereotypes may be guyed, but there has to be a core of truth to the stereotype. As in fantasy/sf, there is a suspension of disbelief; but, again as in fantasy/sf, either side of that suspension has to be moored in something; nothing demolishes the suspension of disbelief more immediately or more terminally than the niggling thought: "This doesn't make sense."

There's a very simple answer to this, in the case of Next of Kin. Leeming is not a normal human being at all: he is a diehard sf fan. It doesn't say so in the book, but he displays all the characteristics of that particular type of sf fan whom you must have met a million times: intelligent, yes, but able to manifest that intelligence, outside perhaps an employment that makes specific use of it, only in the form of puerile smartassery, usually at the expense of the "mundanes", whom the fan regards as a dimwitted mob incapable of appreciating the finer points of pulp sf. Next of Kin is, in effect, Revenge of the Nerds set on a movie lot of cosmic scale. The only way in which such fictional ventures can succeed is by stereotyping all the non-nerds/fans as profoundly stupid; this fictional necessity is incorporated as if a reality into the worldview of the type of sf-fan lifestyle fantasist (to borrow Brian Stableford's term) to whom I'm referring.

Viewed from that perspective – shifting one's mind into sf-ghetto mode – Next of Kin's major implausibilities become far less troubling, and consequently the humour works far better.

Such humour as there is. As mentioned above, this book reads less like a novel than like a hugely padded novelette, and the same comment applies to the ration of humour presented in its 180-odd pages. There are some good jokes, and there are some very funny sequences; but they're spread somewhat thinly. Much the same could be said of Wasp, of course; but in Wasp's case it doesn't matter much because Wasp would still be a perfectly viable sf novel if you stripped all the humour out of it; wherever there might be a paucity of grins the story itself keeps you happily charging along. Not so in Next of Kin, where there's not really very much by way of story.

Russell's flipness of writing nevertheless does make Next of Kin an engaging read. At the end of it, however, one is left with the nagging suspicion that one might have been better off reading something else. If you're an admirer of Russell's work overall – as this reviewer is – then you'll be mighty pleased to have this reasonably handsome reissue on your shelf. If not, then you'd be better off tracking down a copy of Wasp or The Great Explosion or ...

—Infinity Plus

Ship of Fools

by Richard Paul Russo

Ace, 370 pages, paperback, 2001

To say that a novel would make a marvellous movie is one thing; to say it is a marvellous novel is another. The two statements are usually seen as mutually contradictory.

Not in this case.

The generation starship Argonos has been travelling the spaceways for centuries, its original mission long ago forgotten. Onboard there has developed a stratified, ossified society, one that has come to depend for its survival on its remaining intact and aboard the ship: colonization of discovered terrestrial planets has turned from an aim, if it ever was one, into a taboo. The downsiders (as the lower orders are called), being little more than slaves, are eager to change this status quo; but for obvious reasons have little opportunity to do so in the hopelessly long intervals between the rare discoveries of habitable worlds. In the meantime their overlords, the upsiders, squabble and play all the games of politics and coups, even though changes of personnel will and can have little effect on the fortunes of this small floating world.

Bartolomeo Aguilera, born grossly deformed but more physically capable than most men through sophisticated prosthesis, is a sort of troubleshooter and advisor-without-portfolio to the Argonos's captain, Nikos Costa – although the captain's regime seems nearing its end because of a recent series of disastrous destination choices he has made. Chief rival in the undeclared struggle for ascendancy is Bishop Soldano, semi-charlatan head of the powerful shipboard religion, which mixes Christianity with spacefaring-tinged other elements, including the tenet that the Argonos was never created but has drifted among the stars for all eternity.

Now a new planet is visited, and it is clear that at least in the past it was colonized. Aguilera leads an expedition to the surface to investigate the enigmatic signal being transmitted from one of the ghost population-centres; sent with him as representative of the church is the priest Father Veronica. She and he discover, in the vast basement of the colony's central building, the evidence of a colossal and sadistically barbaric massacre, with even infants having been impaled alive upon metal hooks. The cruelty is all too human, they assume; what they do not find out until a little later is that their discovery has triggered the sending of a fresh signal, its destination a gigantic and seemingly dead alien spaceship beyond the boundaries of this planetary system.

Despite the gruesome evidence, the downsiders wish to disembark and recolonize the world, dubbed Antioch. Believing that Costa's regime is about to die and also that Father Veronica (his initial respect for whom is slowly turning into a near-obsessive love, possible returned) covertly approves the scheme, Aguilera abets it. But Costa ostentatiously thwarts the rebellion, thereby strengthening his own position in the power struggle.

That beamed signal was detected aboard the Argonos, and so the next port of call is the alien spaceship. It appears to be a long-dead artefact, yet its very alienness renders it lethal to the exploratory teams sent in from the Argonos – lethal in ways themselves so alien that none can understand properly why various humans are slaughtered or driven mad. A further mystery is that, in all its recorded history, the Argonos has never yet discovered so much as the slightest trace of any other advanced species, yet here is an artefact of a technological sophistication far beyond the human: how could such a spacefaring civilization not have been noticed before?

Aguilera and Father Veronica head a new expedition into the alien vessel and, through trying to accept it rather than force their own humanity upon it, seem to make progress towards unravelling its riddle. They discover the relic of a further massacre of humans – but, far more dramatically, a human survivor ...

The temptation to synopsize beyond this point is almost impossible to resist, especially since so far this might seem to be a fairly orthodox piece of hard sf. Yet to do so would be to give away too much. Way too much.

To say there are constant surprises in store for the reader would be to mislead. Any competent tale-teller will make sure to have up his or her sleeve an abundance of plot twists with which to startle the reader – the apparent goodie who proves to be a baddie, and all the rest of the rigmarole. Russo goes far, far beyond such cosmetic mechanics. Not only are we forced to realize that much we have accepted at face value is in fact otherwise, but even the tale itself is otherwise, as is its telling: its motivation is not what you have been lulled into expecting.

Let's jump off this train of thought; to continue it would again be to spoil the book for you.

An important underpinning of the novel concerns the nature of religion. Bishop Soldano, with his publicly pretended beliefs and private lack of faith, might seem to be a set-up, stereotyped target for atheistic darts; yet in fact his belief system proves to be far more complex than his self-prepared veneer would suggest. Much more interesting, though, is Father Veronica, whose faith, however misguided one might believe it to be (and the word "believe" is here double-edged), is not just sincere but properly coherent. It is entirely understandable that Aguilera should fall so much in love with her; the fact that she is a woman of some physical attractiveness is almost irrelevant beside her quality of mind and her humanity.

(This entire strand of the novel is superbly handled; as Aguilera falls in love with Father Veronica he sees her with progressively greater clarity. Initially all he sees is the packaging: she is a "striking woman" rather than any great beauty. Later she is fairer by far than the stars and all under them; his initially vaguely carnal inclinations intensify and then become almost unimportant to his love. I cannot easily recall having seen, in any form of fiction, this process of tumbling into love so accurately and honestly depicted.)

Contrasted against Veronica's faith is Aguilera's atheism; with a sweetness of thought, the two worldviews are found not incompatible: Veronica's belief system may not be valid, because its axioms are not valid, yet it has full validity as a model of reality. This causes us to think – as it certainly causes Aguilera to think – about the status of his own atheism: does it reflect the truth, or is it merely another model? His own axioms are being shredded by the presence and nature of the alien starship; he clings to them, regardless, despite realizing that perhaps they are as faith-bound as Father Veronica's.

Also of great interest is the writing style. To generalize, the mode of writing used in the modern "literary" novel is one that seems designed to distance the reader from any direct involvement, as if storytelling (an art shameful, because millennia-old) were the antithesis of fiction. Russo nonetheless deploys this mode; his doing so should clash wildly with the parameters – with the raison d'être – of storytelling in general and of hard sf in particular, yet it works superbly well. Aguilera and the rest work, as characters, even better because you have to grope to reach them; the action sequences work at least doubly well because so understated.

At one level, this is an outstanding piece of hard sf. But the book is much more than that: it has subtexts below subtexts below subtexts. It's the kind of book that people pin you to the bar about at parties; it's the kind of book that academics will argue over; it's the kind of book you'll start off reading with the expectation of some Sense of Wonder and discover you never before fully understood what the expression "Sense of Wonder" actually meant; it's the kind of book that would make a marvellous movie ... but a movie after the watching of which the cognoscenti would say: "You thought that was good? Wait'll you read the novel ..."

—Infinity Plus

Drive

by James Sallis

Poisoned Pen, 158 pages, hardback, 2005

If you're going to start to play tricks with the styles and conventions of noir fiction, you have to be pretty certain you know what you're doing and why you're doing it. Although in general I'm a great fan of James Sallis's work, I found that his new revisionist-noir novella Drive fell down on both counts. The tale could have been told far better without all the undoubtedly clever but soon irritatingly confusing flashbacks: there was no need for the telling of the tale to have been made artificially convoluted; and, even if there had been, the execution is fumbling.

The story's in fact pretty straightforward. The central protagonist, Driver, is good at only one thing: driving cars, at which he's not just good but superbly good. For this reason he has become a movie stunt-driver while also developing a lucrative sideline as a confidential driver for criminals, or even as a getaway driver in the perpetration of heists. Inevitably, the seedier side of his life begins to take over, however hard he attempts to distance himself psychologically from the crimes: he's not in fact a criminal, he persuades himself, just a driver-for-hire who takes on commissions from whoever might offer them.

But then one day a robbery goes not just wrong but spectacularly, inexplicably wrong. It soon becomes evident to Driver that it was always intended to be that way, that the robbers were set up as patsies for the furtherance of an agenda at whose purposes he can only hazily guess. The sole survivor of the "tidying up" operation and hunted by the shady masterminds of this crime, he decides his only possible means of self-preservation is to take the fight to the foe, which he does with lethal effect ... discovering to his slow surprise as he does so that in fact he's superbly good at two things, not merely one.

As you'd expect from Sallis, the writing, read from one page to the next, is gorgeous. Where the novella disappoints is, as noted, in the structure. Noir fiction is often very clever indeed, but tales in this genre lose their effectiveness if they wear their cleverness on their sleeve. Drive does, and very ostentatiously does. That is its failing. At the same time, I can see how it would make a wonderful movie,* because the plot

[* 2011 note: And, sure enough, into a movie it was duly made: Drive (2011), directed by Nicholas Winding Refn and starring Ryan Gosling as Driver.]

itself, sans the pretentiousness, is a great, near-archetypal tale.

—Crescent Blues

Quietus

by Vivian Schilling

Hannover House, 600 pages, hardback, 2002

You've all read or watched the story about the small group of people who, through some trivial quirk of circumstance, fail to get killed in an air crash but are thereafter pursued by the Angel of Death who wants to put Heaven's accounting straight by bumping them all off.

Well, that's what this long novel is about – and if it were practically any other novel on the theme I almost certainly wouldn't bother reviewing it. However, with any standard theme in fiction there comes along, every now and then, a novel which seems to be the definitive treatment; and Quietus, I maintain, is it for this particular plot.

It's a very long book (small print on nearly 600 big pages) but it's utterly absorbing, and never for a moment does its plot display any signs of tiredness. Schilling has done her homework on the subject of the Angel of Death, and it shows. Moreover, her central characters aren't just the usual stereotypes – not a scantily clad co-ed among them. These are real people, with genuine rather than stereotyped problems concerning booze, their marriages, their feelings towards others, their perceptions of their inadequacies, and so on. This extends even to the particular Angel of Death who's been charged with disposing of the main protagonist, Kylie O'Rourke, and with whom she establishes a loving and intimate relationship; it feels odd to find myself typing this, but Schilling's Angel of Death is not the standard two-dimensional nemesis.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and would have done so even more had it not been for the intrusion of countless small editorial and proofreading errors – "sanctity" for "sanctuary", "peak" for "peek", "may" for "might", "eminent" for "imminent" ... One can only hope that Schilling has had stern words with her publisher so that these blemishes will be eliminated from the paperback edition.

—Crescent Blues

Louisiana Breakdown

by Lucius Shepard

illustrated by J.K. Potter, foreword by Poppy Z. Brite, afterword by J.K. Potter

Golden Gryphon, 145 pages, hardback, 2003

Somewhere in Louisiana, USA – or, to be more accurate, in the country called American Gothic – is the small town of Grail, filled with drunks, the jobless, bigots and centuries-old tradition. More centuries than there have been white human beings here, it seems, for the town's central tradition is that of the May Queen. Every twenty years, as part of a deal done with The Good Gray Man, the folk of Grail must appoint a ten-year-old girl as the new May Queen; she will, it is believed, draw all the town's bad luck to her during her period of tenure.

The current May Queen is Vida Dumars, and her reign will end tomorrow when the Good Gray Man comes to claim her as his bride. She has no thought of bucking her fate until drifting into town comes guitarist Jack Mustaine. As he slowly pieces together the town's – and Vida's – secret, the pair become lovers, and the dream dawns in Vida of running far, far away with him and escaping the Good Gray Man ...

Brite's foreword to this short novel tells us, helpfully, that unless we're from Louisiana we won't really "get" this tale; Lucius Shepard must be wondering who his friends are. Be that as it may, this Scottish reader felt he was "getting" it OK; the dialect is easy enough to follow after a few brief moments of splashing around in it, uncertain if one will sink or swim. And that's an apt metaphor, because the richness of the swirling prose Shepard manages to draw from the dialect does make the experience of reading this tale feel like a languorous swim in waters that are placid but, one is aware, deceptively so: powerful currents hide below.

There are many moments of incidental sweetness here. The jukebox in the local bar, Le Bon Chance, contains records of past and future events. Nedra Hawes, the local psychic, seems at first a perfectly ordinary middle-aged woman, but makes no secrets about her pretty young black girlfriend, Arlise – who's one of the most winning characters in the book. Local Sicilian petty crime boss Joe Dill has an outrageously sexy Vietnamese concubine, Tuyet, who may or may not be a witch and, indeed, may or may not control Dill.

Like all Golden Gryphon's output, this is a beautifully produced book, although Potter's interior illustrations, while nice enough, seem nothing special. The character portrayals are enjoyable, with Grail itself the most central character of all; and the story serves well. But what really holds one is the writing – this sea of words in which one swims.

Louisiana Breakdown is a slight book, but a very engaging one.

—Infinity Plus

The Grail Conspiracy

by Lynn Sholes and Joe Moore

Midnight Ink, 343 pages, paperback, 2005

The Da Vinci Code has a lot to answer for. For the past couple of years or more we've had floods of historical-conspiracy novels, rewriting-the-history-of-the-early-Christian-Church novels, Grail-hunting novels, secret-societies-that-seek-to-rule-the-world novels, and so on. Some of these – like The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason and even more so David Hewson's Lucifer's Shadow – are very good; most are better than The Da Vinci Code itself (not a difficult task); and a few are ... well ...

The Grail Conspiracy falls into the central category: it's better than The Da Vinci Code, but that's about as much as one can say for it. It opens with the chance discovery, amid bloodshed, of the Holy Grail in an Iraqi desert by TV investigative journalist Cotten Stone. The implausibility in that sentence is obvious – no, not the bit about the Grail, the idea of an American TV news channel (Cotten works for "SNN") employing a fleet of investigative journalists.

Cotten smuggles the artefact back home to the US in the hopes of the journalistic scoop of her life, and sure enough that's what comes her way after the goblet has been verified by various scientists and scholars, notably those in the employ of the Vatican. Indirectly linked to the Vatican is the academic and priest John Tyler who, despite being considerably older than Cotten and, like, you know, a priest, has a considerable allure so far as she's concerned – and (you've guessed this bit, haven't you?) the attraction's mutual.

But, astonishingly, there are Bad Guys after the Grail as well, and murders start happening all around Cotten and John – at least one of them, a car bomb, intended to have Cotten herself as victim. Behind all this mayhem is, of course, a secret and ancient society made up of Very Rich and Influential Men who want the Grail in order to ... Yes, well, anyway, they want the Grail a lot and don't mind killing to get it. After all, they might be able to avert the imminent Apocalypse.

There's nothing outrageously wrong with The Grail Conspiracy aside from the occasional clumsily written passage and the obvious two-dimensional nature of the characters, but at the same time there's nothing particularly right about it either. The action scenes are well handled, but there's the feeling about them of having been here before. The plot displays a lack of originality: read a pile of other, similar books, put the best bits of their plots into a bowl, stir well, and – bingo! And the book itself seems to have low aspirations: it's as if it's not trying to be anything more than a routine "product".

This is moderate entertainment which, if you're a devotee of historical-conspiracy novels, you can expect to enjoy, well, moderately. Other readers might prefer to look elsewhere.

—Crescent Blues

The Longest Way Home

by Robert Silverberg

Eos, 294 pages, hardback, 2002

Long ago, life evolved on the planet now called Homeworld without any one of several intelligent species establishing overall dominance in the way humankind has on Earth. Possibly the brightest of the species is the one now called the Indigenes, who are very roughly humanoid and probably our equal in intelligence, but of such a different philosophical bent that no comparison would really be possible – their system of thinking sufficiently overlaps with ours for the species to communicate adequately, but full communication is fundamentally impossible.

But then a first wave of colonists arrived from Earth. There was no real conquest, because of the lack of a single dominant species: the Folk, as the descendants of the first wave are now called, simply moved in and effectively became part of the ecosystem. A long while later came another colonial wave from Earth, and this time there was a war of conquest against the Folk; the descendants of the second wave are now called the Masters, and they rule the roost with the Folk as their serfs – in fact, as their slaves, although the Masters are in general benevolent overlords.

Young Joseph, a Master from the south, is staying with family friends on an estate in the north when there is a widespread revolt of the Folk. He alone is spared from massacre on this particular estate, and he decides to quest as best he can the several thousand miles back to his homeland. En route he is assisted by various of the indigenous species – including, for purposes of their own, the Indigenes – as well as some of the Folk, the latter being ignorant of his status as a Master. He has divers adventures, including the loss of his virginity to a Folkish girl.

Joseph gets home in the end, despite being captured by the Folkish army; they have an uneasy armistice with the Masters of the south, and so ship him the last distance.

All of that is a fairly thin plot upon which to construct a novel, and this feeling of thinness is pervasive while reading the book – as if Silverberg, who has demonstrated countless times that he can be a masterful writer when he wants to be, were here working on autopilot. Joseph's adventures are not particularly exciting (although obviously they'd be pretty goddam exciting if you had to live them yourself), and many of his other experiences during the quest seem fairly pedestrian. One is left looking for flashes of Silverberg's conceptual genius for want of a continuous diet of it.

And of those flashes there are a few. One delight is a moderately intelligent – it can talk – native lifeform called the noctambulo, which is possessed of two brains: one brain sleeps during the day and the other during the night, with the result that the daytime noctambulo is an entirely different person from the nighttime one. Joseph is befriended by the nighttime persona of one of these creatures, but with sunrise must struggle to be noticed at all by the other individual living in the same body.

Another treasurable moment occurs when Joseph is treated by one of the Indigenes to an exposition of the Indigene theology. The Indigenes have no objections at all to the terrestrial colonists, because in their view these are but two waves, out of many, of godlings sent by the real gods to bring knowledge, albeit in a jumbled fashion, to the intelligent species of Homeworld. Each wave of godlings will stay a while, doing a lot of good things (as directed by the gods) and a lot of bad things (because godlings are pretty flawed emissaries), and then depart. It is tantalizingly implicit in the exposition that the two sets of colonists from Earth are by no means the first waves of "godlings" to have spent some time on Homeworld, although we are given no details of the earlier ones.

But such flashes of delight make up only a small portion of a novel which otherwise, well, plods a bit. Overall, aside from a few elements of graphic sexuality, it reads like a well written but not especially inspiring young-adult novel from the era before writers (and more importantly publishers) of young-adult novels had cottoned on to the fact that the kids are every bit as sophisticated as readers as are their adult counterparts.

The Longest Way Home can, then, be viewed as Silverberg Lite. As with Bud Lite, there's froth but not a whole lot of body.

—Infinity Plus

Way Station

by Clifford D. Simak

Gollancz, 189 pages, paperback, 2000; reissue of a book originally published in 1963

There was a time between the early 1950s and the mid-1960s when every novel by Clifford Simak seemed to capture the true magic of science fiction, conveying often quite complicated ideas with an astonishing readability and flow, and displaying a delightful expertise in capturing mood and atmosphere – most often the mood and atmosphere of the American Midwest, which seemed to be Simak's natural territory.

Time and Again (1951), City (1952; in fact a fixup of stories from the 1940s), Ring Around the Sun (1953), Time is the Simplest Thing (1961), They Walked Like Men (1962), Way Station (1963) and All Flesh is Grass (1965) – one by one they came, and one by one they delighted. And then, quite abruptly, he seemed to lose it. His novels from Why Call Them Back from Heaven? (1967) onwards are generally enjoyable enough (although progressively less so), yet give the impression of a writer content to tread water.

Most of the novels of Simak's Golden Age are full of action and drama. In this context Way Station, often argued to be the greatest of them, is the odd one out. For approximately the first half of the book – perhaps more – the plot is virtually static, the concern being to set up and explore the situation in which the action of the later pages, such as it is, can take place. This of course sounds like a recipe for disaster – one is reminded of the writer manqué in George Gissing's New Grub Street (1891) who plans a novel about the owners of a corner shop who for three volumes do nothing but own their corner shop – and yet Way Station is compulsively readable for all its seeming lack of event. Because what Simak succeeds in doing is to give us a galaxy-spanning space opera all within the restricted confines of a lonely Wisconsin farmhouse.

Enoch Wallace is the occupant of that farmhouse. He was of age to fight in the American Civil War, but soon thereafter, his folks having died, he was approached by a representative of the Galactic Council and asked if his home could be converted into a way station for matter-transmitted travellers through our spiral arm of the Milky Way. Agreeing, he received the gift of immortality, but at the same time had to accept the burden of eternal loneliness, for no human being may ever be permitted to share his secret. Until now, that is, when a covert US Government agency has become intrigued by this unaging eremite ...

It might seem that the stage is being set for a tale of derring-do between the aliens and the snoops, but in fact the plot elements concerning the Government agency are really somewhat tangential, serving partly as a component of the tale's resolution and partly as a quasi-catalyst for the rest. More to the point are the political and religious shenanigans among the member species of the Galactic Council, and the way in which they reach out to affect and eventually focus on Wallace and his humble way station. Like Wallace, we do not directly experience these crises and their consequences until close to the end of the book: instead they are related to us by various of the visiting aliens, and we actually see only the tiny but crucial part of the whole that concerns Earth. In the process, however, we are treated to sketchy details of enough alien civilizations and biologies to spark off at least a couple of dozen other, more extrovert space operas.

This is not a flawless work (in his rush towards the resolution, Simak indulges in some pulp plotting), but it is nevertheless a mightily impressive one. Long after the plot itself has faded from the memory – this reviewer could remember nothing of it after thirty years – the situation delineated in the novel remains indelibly imprinted, as does the eloquent capturing of Wallace's solitude, which is not joyless, and of his timelessness of mind. In terms of human society he is an anonymous cypher living out a meaningless, monotonous life; in terms of the true reality he has a richer existence by far than any human before or since. And it will continue to become richer, and to enrich him, for all eternity, whatever the transient events of the world around. It is actually a disappointment to the reader that the novel's resolution – which in virtually any other tale would give us the typical sf adrenaline rush as horizons are suddenly hugely expanded for humanity – must inevitably lead to a disruption of this curiously idyllic status quo.

Way Station, the most unusual space opera in all of sf's canon, is a book to treasure, and one to re-read rather more often, perhaps, than once every thirty years.

—Infinity Plus

Worlds Enough & Time: Five Tales of Speculative Fiction

by Dan Simmons

Eos, 262 pages, paperback, 2002

Dan Simmons is such a fine writer that it's unthinkable that any collection of his stories would be anything less than okay. But, by the same token, one expects a Simmons collection to be a bit more than okay, and I'm not too sure this one is.

The five long stories are "Looking for Kelly Dahl" (1995), "Orphans of the Helix" (1999), "The Ninth of Av" (2000), "On K2 With Kanakaredes" (2001) and "The End of Gravity" (2002; original to this collection). The first of these is fantasy; the next three are science fiction; and the final piece is less a story than an edited movie treatment that has touches of quasi-magic realism but is really a straightforward fiction concerned with the roughly contemporary Russian space program.

"Looking for Kelly Dahl" is the story that you're likely to want this book for. Its narrator is a reformed-alcoholic ex-schoolteacher who, in a fit of depression, commits suicide by driving into a disused pit only to discover that, rather than dead, he is in a world created by one of his old pupils, Kelly Dahl, an obviously troubled, intelligent, sexually abused girl who oddly fascinated him while he taught her but of whom he has long ago lost track. He and Kelly are the only occupants of this world, which is composed of tracts of Colorado drawn from different epochs of historical and geological time. Kelly spells the rules out to him on his arrival: the game is that they are to hunt each other, most likely to the death. At the end of the hunt he returns to his original reality – but to discover that there's been a slight change: now there never was a Kelly Dahl under his tutelage; she has existed only in his memory.

A lesser writer would have tied all this together with some neat explanation – some explication of a mechanism that would make all the pieces of the story make sense. Wisely, Simmons doesn't do this: such a reduction would detract from the tale. The piece is beautifully written in a slow leisurely style that adds to the feel of its strangeness.

Unfortunately, the rest of the book is a bit of a downhill slide, and matters aren't helped by the somewhat overblown and certainly overlong introductory material scattered through the book. (I'm a great fan of authors' introductions to their stories, but I several times grew impatient with these.) In his introduction to "Orphans of the Helix" Simmons tells us how he dickered over making it a Star Trek screenplay rather than a story, and was pleased that he chose the latter option. Unfortunately, it still reads like a Star Trek scenario with the names and details changed a little; it also seems more than somewhat derivative of Larry Niven's The Integral Trees (1984), among others.

"The Ninth of Av" has much of the feel of Michael Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time tales, although its far-future decadence plays out against a more "realistic" backdrop – sciencefictional rather than fantasticated. In his prefatory remarks Simmons tells how the piece was commissioned for an anthology of tales set in 3001; racking his brains for something that wouldn't so have changed in the course of a millennium as to be unimaginable today, he came up with the notion that one permanent element of the human condition was antisemitism. Well, ho hum. A potentially fairly strong story is wrecked by this conceit.

Far closer in the future is the setting of "On K2 With Kanakaredes". The Kanakaredes of the title is a young member of a party of alien visitors who have arrived on Earth to observe us from their allocated settlement in the Antarctic. Kanakaredes wishes to experience mountain-climbing, and a somewhat amateurish trio of human mountaineers is dragooned into taking him along on an alpine-style assault up K2. Although somewhat longer than its paradigms, this is really just a straightforward sf tale of the type found aplenty in the US magazines thirty or so years ago – complete with the cheesy denouement. It's not boring, but neither is it especially interesting; it'd help pass a train journey.

The final piece is just plain annoying. The place for movie treatments is, in almost every case, on the desk of a potential movie producer, not in a story collection. It has a plot (of sorts) that might work on the screen but doesn't on the printed page; the characters never materialize because they would require actors to make them complete. There are some nice moments, but ...

By book's end one has the feeling that this whole effort has been rather half-hearted – an impression not one whit dispelled by the sloppy proofreading throughout. Neither is one cheered by the fact that this title was used for a Joe Haldeman novel only a decade ago; surely Simmons and his publisher must have been aware of this, so it's as if they couldn't be bothered looking around for something a tad more original. (It wasn't, to be honest, among Haldeman's more inspired titles to begin with.) One superb story, three acceptable ones and a swiz do not a collection make. We can only hope that Dan Simmons – the real Dan Simmons, one's tempted to say – is back putting his whole heart and soul into his next book.

—Infinity Plus

Cavalcade

by Alison Sinclair

Millennium, 299 pages, hardback, 1998

Stop me if you've heard this one before.

A huge and inscrutable alien ship arrives in the Solar System, and gives Earth a single message: all those who wish to be transported to another star, with no promise of a return, should stand at the bank of a body of open water at a specific time. So thousands upon thousands of the disaffected, the adventurous, the criminal and the saintly do as instructed and, the next thing they know, find themselves waking up within the alien and enigmatic biosphere that is the ship's interior. Everything electronic immediately malfunctions, so the motley band, perhaps a couple of hundred thousand strong, discover they're back to basics. However, the environment seems tailored to adjust to their needs: they can build elementary structures, they can eat the gunk extruded from the walls ... and they can segregate themselves according to their social beliefs.

There is a plague, and some people die. Two of the social groupings have a short-lived war. For a while it seems as if everyone will perish, for the biosphere – seemingly made up not of naturally live material but of an infinitude of cooperating nanogizmos – starts to die off, so that the worst-affected regions become incapable of sustaining human life. Luckily the intuitions of a brilliant scientist and an idiot savant pregnant girl save the day and at last let the characters (and us) solve the mystery of the ship.

Well, you should have stopped me, like I said.

Yet this book should not be so easily dismissed. To be honest, it has further flaws, the most serious of which is that, for the first third or more, nothing much happens apart from scene-setting, and the second most serious of which is that Sinclair fails to convey any sense of scale: this must be a truly huge enclosed space, a volume made up of bubbles linked by complexly intertwining tunnels, and yet there is never any feeling that it's larger than a village. Matters are not helped by poor copy-editing and proofreading, so that time and again I was tripped up by unparsable sentences. (And, if I may add a personal beef, it is infuriating that the artist responsible for the rather attractive cover is nowhere credited.)

There is, though, nothing wrong with putting a late-'90s gloss on elderly themes, and so I persevered. In fact, that late-'90s gloss never appeared – apart from a few cusswords, this novel could have as easily been published in the 1950s or 1960s – but the perseverance was nevertheless plentifully rewarded. Because, after the early plod, a first contact of sorts is established with the ship's alien crew, and gradually the text is imbued with that Sense of Wonder that is as rare to find as it is hard to define. Sinclair's characters, who had earlier been merely rather ponderously portrayed stereotypes (with the exception of one marvellous secondary character, the soldier A.J. Lowell), come to life; and it is for this reason rather than because of any original or exciting adventures that the book becomes engrossing: we are affected by the Sense of Wonder not through any startling literary marvels (there is still little by way of original conceit here – the only truly innovative notion is bundled into the last couple of pages and expanded upon hardly at all) but because we are seeing everything as if it were we who were there.

This is, of course, what most novels set out to do, but it is something hardly ever accomplished as completely as here. While reading Cavalcade the predecessor that sprang most frequently to this reviewer's mind was not the obvious homogenous mass of dimly remembered Edmund Cooper novels but George R. Stewart's Earth Abides (1949); it likewise is utterly absorbing today, even though, to the modern reader, there is nothing in it that hasn't been read a thousand times elsewhere, because of the strength of its character creation and consequent reader identification. Here, as there, one cares about these people.

So, although with this novel there is, as noted above, a lot that has to be forgiven, readers are likely to be, as I was, more than prepared to forgive.

Perhaps even forgive the ending. The book's major baddie – whereabouts unknown for the last third of the book, so that he supplies the storyline with a dynamic in that he is an omnipresent threat to any stability – is conveniently annihilated offstage thanks to the idiot savant's burgeoning psychic powers and the cooperation of the quasi-living ship. The mystery of the ship itself is at last explained, but only part-explained (no rationale for its collecting intelligent species is properly expounded) and in only a few sentences. Sinclair's wrap-up is dismayingly rapid, almost as if she were a Lionel Fanthorpe just told there were five pages to go. And there is a general feeling, right at the end, that things are being set up for volumes two and three of a series.

But, to stress, for a couple of hundred pages Cavalcade splendidly reminds us of why it was that we started reading the literature of the fantastic in the first place. Which is no mean achievement.

—Samhain

What Rough Beast

by Harry R. Squires

iPublish, 434 pages, paperback, 2001

London in 1903, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle agrees to accompany Harry Houdini on an expedition to reveal occultist Maximillian Cairo as the fraud Houdini believes him to be. Along with a half-dozen or so others, they attend one of Cairo's séances, and Houdini does indeed expose the whole affair as a sham; but Cairo, furious, tells the party to return the following night for a demonstration of his genuine occult powers. This they do, and are treated to a dramatic display which convinces all but Houdini that Cairo has indeed succeeded in calling up the god of excess, Dionysus. The sceptical Houdini breaks the septagram that has been caging the god, and the spirit of Dionysus escapes to infect not just the participants in the rite but, progressively, the whole population of London. Mad crimes and madder orgies proliferate until our friends return Dionysus whence he came, thereby saving humanity ... or maybe not.

Since Sherlock Holmes, having briefly been out of copyright, is now, through changes in copyright law, firmly back in it for another few years, authors wishing to write recursive Holmesian fiction have had to use the stratagem of turning instead to Doyle as a protagonist – frequently ignoring the fact that if anything Doyle should be a Watson character and giving him Holmesian powers of ratiocination. The best-known of what is now a flourishing minor subgenre of fantasy is probably Mark Frost's The List of 7 (1993), which has Doyle and a purported Holmes prototype battling occult Evil and meeting all sorts of larger-than-life historical personages, such as Helena Blavatsky.

Frost's Doyle books – there's at least one sequel to The List of 7 – are very enjoyable romps, but What Rough Beast surpasses them. The pace is fast and furious, the writing is a delight, and the characters are extremely well drawn: while grinning and thrilling, just as one ought to do, one also becomes genuinely involved in the characters' fates – something quite unusual in romps. There is just enough of a telling subtext to increase the enjoyment without distracting from the action.

Squires also manages his atmospherics well, conjuring up Edwardian London with admirable vividness, a very creditable achievement for an author who is American rather than British. Inevitably there are a few gaffes. The "explanation" of the game of cricket is so excruciating that it's perhaps best simply to draw a veil over it. Holloway Prison is in Parkhurst Road, not Parkurst Road, and I believe it's the case that even by 1903 it was a prison for women, not for men. But such minor cavils are easily ignored in the course of a yarn as ripping as this one.

The novel offers plenty of twists and surprises along the way – again as a good romp should – but the biggest surprise of all is that What Rough Beast wasn't snapped up by one of the major commercial publishers, instead appearing from a print-on-demand house, a short-lived experiment mounted by Warner Books as a way of testing the waters with promising new writers. That stratagem suggested the publishers lacked confidence in the writers concerned, which is why the experiment didn't last long. In the case of What Rough Beast one wonders what on earth Warner's editors must have been thinking. It's among the most straightforwardly enjoyable books I've read all year.

—Infinity Plus

Heart of Ice, Blood of Fire

by Thomas Staab

Crazy Wolf, 215 pages, paperback, 2000

Hyper-selfish rich brat Patrick once fell in love with the beautiful Angela; when she did not return his love he killed her in frustration. Patrick's father helped cover up the murder, then introduced the lad to a sinister Turkish necromancer who taught him the trick of using "Magik" (sic) to travel among many alternate realities, in each of which Patrick discovers different versions of his lusted-after Angela. Alas, all of the Angelas, young or old, spurn him as the heartless swine he is, and so he murders and posthumously rapes them each in turn before moving on to the next world, where he hopes he'll find the Angela who will love him – or, to be more objective, who will subjugate her will to him and pander to his every whim.

Patrick really is not a nice guy.

In those other alternate worlds he romps through, though, he discovers as well different versions of himself, and most of those Patricks do not share his psychopathic failings. They, too, are in love with the appropriate Angela; some are wooing her successfully, others are worshippers from afar, yet still act out of love rather than greed for her. In order to keep his Magik at full throttle, Patrick needs to bathe periodically in "the blood of his blood"; his alternate selves are the ideal suppliers of this. He therefore enslaves all the alternate Patricks, to be his craven servants and/or to be bled dry at an appropriate moment.

In the particular alternate world where this novel is largely set, Angela is recovering from the death, a couple of years ago, of her husband and her infant son. She is admired by, and admires, the socially inept Christopher, who is this world's version of Patrick. Never before has the central, reality-hopping Patrick come across an Angela or a version of himself powered by such steely resolve as these two. It's hardly a spoiler to say that, by book's end, his murderous career is stopped by them.

The central premise of Heart of Ice, Blood of Fire is a very interesting one; unfortunately the execution doesn't live up to it.

At the mundane level, the publishers, Crazy Wolf, might have afforded Mr Staab a copy-editor and a proofreader. Grammatical and spelling errors abound; throughout we have "reign" instead of "rein", "masque" instead of "mask", "pouring" instead of "poring", and countless other examples. At a more significant level, Crazy Wolf should have given him an editor. Here and there there's a shining instance that demonstrates what a fundamentally good writer Staab could be were his prose not dogged by the sort of stuff any competent editor, copy-editor or proofreader should have picked up:

Patrick was startled by the brownstone he and his Father stood before; he could have sworn there was nothing in that space a moment before.

"Wasn't there a vacant lot here?" Patrick inquired softly, his voice sounded as if he was speaking through a cardboard box, hollow and distant.

"It's an illusion he uses to ensure his privacy," James said mounting the stairs of the building... .

There's some nice work, and it is this sort of imagery that keeps one ploughing on through Heart of Ice, Blood of Fire. But it's often a pretty difficult plough. Each freshly introduced character arrives with a physical description and psychological analysis that goes on for page after page; dull stuff. All the central characters have inner voices with which they endlessly discuss their inmost motivations; the contributions to these dialogues of the alter egos are typographically distinguished, but unfortunately not consistently so (where, again, was the copy-editor?), with the result that it is often hard to work out who's saying what. As a result of all these flaws and more, characterization suffers grievously, so that it becomes pretty difficult to care what happens to the goodies – to Angela and Christopher.

That said, there is easily enough in this novel to tell us that Mr Staab is an author to look out for in the future. He clearly has interesting ideas – not at all as common a trait as one could wish for among horror novelists – and every now and then, as noted, he comes up with a scintillatingly bright piece of observation. What Heart of Ice, Blood of Fire shows is a promise as yet not fully realized.

—Infinity Plus

Has Science Found God?

by Victor J. Stenger

Prometheus, 373 pages, hardback, 2003

Stenger has set himself a phenomenally ambitious task in this book: in order to counter those popular-media and other claims that science has found evidence for the existence of God, he surveys all that we currently know about the universe around us and about ourselves to see if there is any such evidence whatsoever – and, indeed, if it is possible to enter God into the equations, as it were, without irremediably destroying them.

As he states near the outset, believers present the rationalist with the false challenge of effecting an impossible proof, the nonexistence of something that does not exist (try proving that there aren't Martians among us), while at the same time ducking entirely something that should in the abstract be far easier: a non-faith-based proof of God's existence. Consequently, it's not open to Stenger to present a simple, elegant five-line proof of his case; instead, he must (and here one's reminded of the enormously lengthy iterative proofs done a few years ago by computer of Fermat's Last Theorem) perform his extensive survey in countless fields of knowledge to produce what is, in the end, a proof by statistics. In this he succeeds, and a great deal of what he tells us along the way is fascinating; the only problem with the book is that, necessarily, it is thematically if not factually repetitive.

I would recommend this book wholeheartedly to anyone seeking a primer in what we as a species currently know about "life, the universe and everything"; but it is, necessarily, less effective as a piece of polemic. Try George A. Erickson's Time Traveling with Science and the Saints, also from Prometheus, if it's a good piece of blood-stirring, tub-thumping rationalist polemic you're after. For a more reasoned (and more factually accurate) approach, you could hardly do better than this one.

—Crescent Blues

Return to Isis

by Jean Stewart

Rising Tide, 173 pages, paperback, 1992

In the year 2093 what is now the United States has been sundered into two parts as an ill defined political consequence of an AIDS-related plague that has killed the vast majority of the population. In the East is the land called, ironically, Elysium, where a patriarchal, right-wing-fundamentalist Christianity holds paranoid sway: women are victims here, the healthy ones being confined to Breeding Pens where their sole role is to be fucked a lot so they may perpetuate the species. In the Western USA, outside the forcefield of the ultra-virtuous Elysium, there are the seven or so scattered colonies of Freeland, all up and down the coast: most of these are all-woman lesbian cultures, their perpetuation guaranteed by parthenogenesis.

Young Freelander Whit ventures into Elysium to conduct a two-year campaign of espionage. She discovers that the dread law-enforcers of Elysium, the Regulators, are after her, and makes her escape in a light plane. This plane crashes on a farm at the very edge of Elysium, where supposedly disease-ridden serf Amelia has been tending the furrows for longer than she can remember; later in the novel she will start to remember more of her life before this servitude began.

Whit initially assumes Amelia is at best an idiot savant, with the accent less on the savant, but adopts her anyway in the belief that she deserves her freedom as much as any other. Together, all the while falling in love, the two quest towards the nearest exit portal from Elysium into Freeland. At the end of their quest they are met by lesbian Freelanders, some of whom are delighted to see them, others of whom reckon that certainly Amelia and probably Whit are Fifth Columnists.

Ten years ago the Freelander colony of Isis was invaded by the Regulators, who somehow broke through all of Freeland's defenses to make a militaristic shock attack. Isis was put to the sword: all the women there were burnt alive except one, Kali, daughter of colony-leader Maat. No surprises that Kali turns out to be the submissive pseudo-Elysian Amelia.

This is a novel with a political agenda. Specifically, it is declaredly feminist. It must therefore be considered twice over, first as a political polemic, second as an sf novel.

Some of the politics of this polemic are, to be frank, a bit naive: the Elysian males are presented uniformly as racists, rapists, sadists and murderous bastards. Stewart is aware enough of the danger of stereotyping to avoid at least some of the usual simplifications: somewhere offstage there is a heterosexual colony whose men do not conform to this halfwitted portrayal. Much more interesting is Stewart's back-story depiction of the right-wing-fundamentalist Christian takeover of the Eastern USA; she clearly regards fundamentalist Christianity – and fundamentalist religiosity of any denomination – rather than males per se as the enemy. To judge by this novel, she recognizes that fundamentalist feminism falls into the same dangerous category.

She has some difficulties which she may not fully realize in her depiction of the swinish males of Elysium. Her story is set less than a century hence. It is feasible that in the space of a few decades a fascistic patriarchy might establish itself in the Eastern USA; it is not, though, feasible that within this short a span all of the males should somehow, magically, turn into mad rapist persecutors of females. To think otherwise is to assume that, sometime in the 1930s, every German, male or female, suddenly became a Jew-persecuting Nazi – even Hollywood no longer makes that assumption. It is unfeasible, analogously, that there be no feminist-collaborating, or at least non-rapist, males in Elysium. Maybe Stewart just forgot to mention them.

A good test of any political novel is to start sticking in some equivalents of whatever section of society the author has decided are the baddies. Most feminist novels fail this test; swap the sexes or the skin colours and even the most politically correct writer gets into hellish difficulties. All men are violent bastards? Sounds a good bit of polemic until you substitute the notion that all blacks, or Japanese, or Jews, or lesbians, or Scots, or whatever, are violent bastards. The truth is that human beings cannot be compartmentalized in this simplistic way; to pretend otherwise is self-delusion.

One of the most laudable things about this book is the feel it conveys of post-Holocaust societies – whether male- or female-dominated – doing their best to muddle through. In Elysium the best is not very good; in Freeland it is better, but still not perfect. Stewart's Freeland is only on the surface a lesbian utopia: the worst villains in Return to Isis are not men but women. There's the bigoted Zoe, who wants to persecute Amelia/Kali for the supposed sins of her mother. There's another completely corrupt woman whom I shall not name in case I spoil the novel for you.

And there are some glorious feminist moments. Here's one:

They rarely talked because they were both struggling. Trying to distract herself from the ache she felt with each stride, Whit sang ribald marching songs about voluptuous women. After a few days, Amelia was singing along with the choruses, though Whit doubted that she understood what cunnilingus meant.

Who apart from Valerie Solanas said that militant lesbianism had to be grimly humourless? Here's another moment, a description of Freeland that could be regarded as the political summation of this book:

This was what old America had aspired to be hundreds of years ago, before justice and freedom had become the province of rich, white men.

The neatest political trick Stewart plays with the plot concerns the forcefield surrounding Elysium. This was originally erected by the Elysians in order to keep the tainted people out – "tainted" for reasons of skin colour or religion or sexual orientation – but somewhere along the road its control has been taken over by the outsiders, so that now it is a device to keep the Elysians in ... and the Elysians, of course, have not noticed the difference.

(Mention should be made, parenthetically, of the cover by Evelyn Rysdyk. Although the style of Rysdyk's illustration for this book is unfashionable today, it is a startlingly well done example of its kind. In effect, the artwork makes you feel as if you're constantly falling into the picture. Oo-ee-oo-ee-oo.)

Leaving politics aside, what is Return to Isis like as an sf novel?

The answer is: pretty goddam good.

This is not one of the great pivotal works of post-Holocaust sf – it is no Earth Abides, no A Gift Upon the Shore, no The Gate to Woman's Country – but it is constantly entertaining and thoughtful in the manner of a Wilson Tucker or a Leigh Brackett or a Lloyd Biggle. To be true, some of the dialogue is infuriatingly and (one loathes to use the term in this context) girlishly cute – there is nothing more tedious than being told in repeated slantwise references about someone else's bonk – but it's easy enough to skip over such stuff and concentrate on the main tale, which is very fine and in general very well told. Stewart has apparently written three more sf novels and one mainstream novel; all four have been put on this reviewer's "To Be Read" list. Stewart has her own rich voice, and somewhere down the line – hopefully already – she is going to produce the major novel of which Return to Isis is a foretaste.

—Infinity Plus

The Legend of Rah and the Muggles

by N.K. Stouffer

Thurman House, 267 pages plus 12 pages colour illustrations, hardback, 2001; reissue of a book originally published in 1984

By all rights, this review should be littered with instances of the letters "TM" in superscript, just as is the front cover of The Legend of Rah and the Muggles, for Nancy Stouffer is the author who has created minor shockwaves in the book trade by pointing out that the name "Muggles", used by J.K. Rowling in her Harry Potter series, was previously used by Stouffer, who is also the author of a pre-existing series of books for the very young based on the character Larry Potter. Moreover, Stouffer's illustrations of Larry Potter bear a very considerable resemblance to the depictions of Harry Potter on the covers of the Rowling books. The response of the book trade to Stouffer's objections, in the USA at least, has been a courageous unofficial boycott of Stouffer's books and a stolid silence on the whole matter: nothing must threaten the Harry Potter cash-cow.

Leaving the Larry/Harry Potter dispute aside, the Muggles of this book bear no resemblance beyond the name to Rowling's. Instead, they are the mutant descendants – bald, huge-headed, small, childish – of the people left behind in the island nation of Aura, many generations ago, when the wealthy deserted it and them in the wake of a nuclear war. Since that time Aura has been covered with a purple haze through which sunlight can barely trickle but moonlight, paradoxically, can pass undimmed.

All this changes with the arrival on the shore of Aura of two baby twin brothers aboard a makeshift raft; they were cast adrift by their mother, as per Superman by his parents during the destruction of the planet Krypton, when she saw that her own country was plunging into an all-destroying war. Aboard the raft along with the twins is a magical illuminating stone, which brings sunlight back to Aura.

The two brothers, Rah and Zyn, are nurtured by the Muggles. Although identical in every respect to begin with, their personalities come to differ radically: Rah grows up good and wise while Zyn grows up nasty and spiteful. The dispute between them is chronicled in the Muggles' ongoing Ancient Book of Tales, upon whose account the current volume is purportedly based.

Illustrated with a central clutch of Stouffer's own rather jolly colour illustrations, The Legend of Rah and the Muggles is a much shorter book than the page-count above might suggest: the type is extremely large and the page margins likewise. It is also a very badly published book; clearly Thurman House does not believe in quaint customs like editing, copy-editing and proofreading (I liked the idea of a bright star "shinning" in the sky, and especially approved of the term "dinning room"). The text reads as if it's a somewhat inaccurate transcript of an oral presentation, complete with shifts of tense (between past and present) and countless typographical and grammatical errors – a few spelling errors, too. Furthermore, this being a fantasy for young children, someone should have pointed out to Stouffer the meaning of the word "bugger", which she uses frequently and clearly regards as innocuous.

Delivered as an oral presentation for children, this tale, which comes complete with songs (the music for one of which is supplied at the back), would one imagines be tremendous fun; it is easy to envisage a youthful audience falling around with laughter at some of the jokes, for example, while the ramshackle nature of the plot wouldn't be evident – or, at least, it wouldn't be important – in a spoken, necessarily episodic telling. As a printed novel the text doesn't work nearly so well; most of the jokes just referred to fall flat when rendered in type. In their place are moments of humour that are certainly not deliberate, such as the Monty Pythonesque legend drawn from The Ancient Book of Tales about The Year of the Rabbits:

And so it was that the rabbits with protruding teeth lost their gentleness and ravaged the continent... .

Likewise, some of the early scenes, set in the castle where the noble Lady Catherine decides the only hope for her twin babies is to consign them to the mercy of the seas aboard a raft, smack considerably of Daisy Ashford's The Young Visitors (1919). Lady Catherine, although heartbroken over the death of her beloved husband Sir Geophrey (sic), nevertheless immediately starts flirting audaciously with her butler, with a strong suggestion that onstage flirting is likely to be matched by offstage naughtiness Real Soon Now, if it hasn't started already:

"Sir, there is no woman in this room that wouldn't trade dance partners with me right now; I'm not about to give them the chance. If that makes me wicked – so be it!" she said with a poor attempt at a Shakespearean delivery, and they both laughed.

Stouffer has not fully realized her fantasy world. Aside from the curiosity, already mentioned, of moonlight being able to penetrate where sunlight cannot, there are items such as the Muggles managing to grow fruit and vegetables in a sunless land. In the same context, the traditional Muggle songs make reference to such events as dawn, which the Muggles could not have experienced before the arrival of the twins; also mentioned in a song is the "star that's shinning bright", even though the very existence of stars, brightly shinning or otherwise, must be unknown to the Muggles. There are countless other such lapses.

Nevertheless, Stouffer's achievement in conceiving the fantasy shouldn't be underestimated. Although The Legend of Rah and the Muggles doesn't bear up well in any comparison with Tove Jansson's Moomins series, of which it is in some ways reminiscent, it has its excellent moments. I was much taken, for example, with the Greeblies, creatures amply worthy of inclusion – and this is high praise indeed! – in the ecology of Rene Laloux's animated movie Fantastic Planet (La planète sauvage, 1973):

Greeblies are fat ratlike rodents that live in Sticky Icky Swamp and often hide beneath boulders. They are nocturnal little pests with faces that resemble rabbits', and their large round ears curl slightly forward at the top. Their bodies are covered with gray coarse hair with black tips that look like they were dipped in ink.

Greeblies have short legs, but they can jump five feet in the air from a sitting position. Their long, coiled tails are used to quickly grab and snatch anything of interest to them, before being seen.

They have been known to grab hold of Muggle legs from behind and drag them frantically for yards and yards, before letting them go. Most often their goal is to steal food or raid the garbage.

Only two things frighten Greeblies: sand dogs called Nardles, and getting caught in a trap set by the Muggles – who would more than likely use them as dinner for their pet Nardles.

Nardles live in burrows along the shoreline, and Greeblies won't go near them. Even though the Greeblies are difficult to see, the Nardles can smell them a mile away.

It is at times like this, when Stouffer's imagination just suddenly lifts off the ground and carries her to who knows where, that The Legend of Rah and the Muggles is at its best. Given a thorough edit, this book could be much recommended; as it stands, however, the best that can be said is that The Legend of Rah and the Muggles is worth picking up primarily for its curiosity value and, of course, for its occasional delicious flights of fancy.

—Infinity Plus

Blade of Tyshalle

by Matthew Stover

Del Rey, 725 pages, paperback, 2001

There are ways to raise a reviewer's spirits, but putting in front of him a book that has 725 large pages covered in smallish print is perhaps not one of them – even if the book in question has a Dave McKean cover and is very nicely produced.

However ...

This long novel seems undecided as to whether it should be a science fantasy or a horror novel of that variety which horror devotees call "visceral". As a science fantasy it has a fair amount of interest; from such a viewpoint, it is marred by the copious bucketloads of grue that Stover feels constrained to tip onto the page at fairly frequent intervals.

In a not-so-distant future the Earth is ruled by multinational conglomerates, governments (and democracy) having fallen by the Darwinian wayside in the aftermath of cataclysm. One of the most powerful of these conglomerates is the Studio, whose business is entertainment of the masses through "second-handing", a kind of ultimate virtual-reality trip whereby the audience can vicariously experience the generally violent adventures of heroes, or Actors. So far this is all pretty standard stuff, of course; what is interesting is that those doughties perform their mighty deeds in a sort of alternate reality where magic works, the Overworld, which we can regard as a reified gameworld – as if all the RPGs ever invented had coalesced and substantiated. This notion that created realities can be brought into existence has of course been treated before – Ralph Bakshi's 1992 animation Cool World is an obvious example – but Stover, although he does not fully explore or indeed explain it, handles it nicely.

Unfortunately, an inevitable consequence of the Overworld having this nature is that Stover's attempts at world-building are scuppered from the outset – it's by definition a generic venue, so new territories and peoples (elves, sorcerers, goblins, etc.) can be called into play at will, thereby destroying the coherence of the overall vision. But that is not too important, because Stover's focus is on the foreground – on the mighty deeds themselves, not their backdrops – so in a sense it's actually helpful that there's so little distraction from the world beyond them.

His world-building of the future Earth is much more interesting, and effective enough. The philosophy of that world is depressing; the fact that it is embraced by the character who is intended to be our hero, Caine (see below), is perhaps even more so:

There's only really two things about a man that matter: what he wants, and what he'll do to get it. Everythin' else we pretend is important – whether you're tough, or good-lookin', smart, stupid, honorable, whatever – that's just details.

Again, that is not an original philosophy; it is likewise not original to observe that this way lies the abyss. So much Stover implicity recognizes in his depiction of a future human society that is excruciatingly unpleasant – caste-ridden, with the lower castes being used as cattle by the higher ones, and ever liable to be murdered by them, with somewhat less compunction than cattle are sent to the abattoir. Oops: I shouldn't have said "murdered". I meant: legally slaughtered, on the slightest whim of the commercial aristocracy, by the faceless Social Police, who are like Judge Dredd but not so vivacious.

The greatest Actor the Studio has ever employed is Caine. His final adventure, in which he saved the goddess Pallas Ril (also an Actor) from the vile Overworld god Ma'elkoth is held to be the most excellent series the Studio has ever 'cast – the epic of which all other epics are but pale imitations. Unfortunately, in defeating Ma'elkoth, Caine was stabbed through the spine and now, a cripple, is resigned to spending the rest of his life back on Earth as a Studio executive. At least he has the consolation of being married to Pallas Ril during the six months of the year she's not off on the Overworld being a goddess; the not so good part is that their marriage is less than joyous, being gummed together – where gummed it is – by Pallas Ril's six-year-old daughter Faith, conceived just before Caine and Pallas Ril got it together but accepted by him as a full daughter.

Also back on the magicless Earth is the god Ma'elkoth, stripped of his goddish abilities because out of the Overworld, and retained as a sort of museum exhibit. He and Caine have become in an odd way almost friends, although each would still gratefully destroy the other.

For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, the Studio bosses – who are by now subsumed into a sort of hive mind and use as their physical avatar a flesh-eating rapist necrophiliac zombie called Kollberg – decide they must conquer the Overworld, and to further this end start a plague there of the deadly virus HRVP, which turns people into psychopaths before their protracted and ghastly deaths. (The fact that HRVP has the same effect on the Overworld's various Folk as it has on human beings is a minor puzzle.) Pallas Ril makes an unscheduled trip back to the Overworld to try to stop the rot; the Studio governors force the crippled Caine to follow her and to lure her to her death at the hands of yet another ready-erectioned cannibalistic zombie (Great Value! Two Zombies For The Price Of One! Buy 'Em Now While Stocks Last!); Ma'elkoth forces the Studio governors into the position where they must send him along as well, and intends to capitalize on the situation to regain his place in the pantheon.

It's not giving much away to tell you that, after several hundred pages, Caine wins and Ma'elkoth loses.

All this is told at incredible length, but Stover is a good enough writer that ploughing through Blade of Tyshalle is not nearly so arduous a task as might be imagined – although the first two hundred pages or more are a bit of a struggle. The reason the tale is so long in the telling is that everything – event, emotion, decision, whatever – is treated in exorbitant detail. This lapses into straightforward overwriting less frequently than it could; only because the book is so long does the total number of such lapses begin to mount intimidatingly up. Here, for example, is a description of someone getting hurt:

Then it [the pain] entered him with power: into his eyes, down his throat, in through his nose, his ears, ripping open his rectum and jamming up the length of his shriveled penis, forcing into him with howling lust; it filled him to bursting, swelling him from within, stretching him thinner and thinner like a weather balloon expanding toward destruction, while it dissolved and digested his guts, his heart, lungs and bones, everything within the stretching membrane of his skin. His eyeballs expanded, threatening to burst from his face, to explode from the pressure that built within them.

He screamed in pain as he squeezed his eyelids shut, trying to keep his eyes in their sockets by sheer strength ...

... and so on. It's all rather reminiscent of a Tex Avery character having a nasty accident with the zip of his fly. But, more to the point, it's 119 words where perhaps 20 or 30 might have done.

This is a flaw typical of the worst "visceral" horror novels, of course – the lubricious dwelling on the minutiae of suffering or the spilling of noisome bodily fluids. And bodily fluids there are a-plenty in this novel: people ooze, splatter, erupt and trickle shit and piss at the drop of a hat – usually because their recently chewed-off head is still in said hat. Most of the Overworld venues into which Caine and the other characters venture smell strongly of blood, piss and shit, even without there being other evidence of recent mayhem. Anyone actually being killed onstage is likely to produce a torrent.

Now, there are few who would dispute the existence of piss and shit, but one begins to wonder if in the Overworld there are any other smells at all. And these "visceral"-horror excesses of expression are to be discovered in all the other parts of the book as well; back on Earth the interplay between individuals in even seemingly quite humdrum circumstances is so shot with extreme action and reaction, both verbal and physical, that it often begins to seem that a kick in the balls has become a conventional conversational gambit.

The same extends to the book's characterizations. Although Stover seems uncertain of his female characters, who somehow never become more than names, his major male characters are not just important to the scheme of things – which would be fair enough, because that's why they're the protagonists of the novel – but players of literally world-shaking and -destroying powers and capabilities, conflicts between them escalating to Olympian proportions. Even the single human character with whom one might in any way sympathize in real life – in fact, he's probably the only one who wouldn't immediately be locked up as a dangerous psychopath – becomes (through adoption by and subsequent demise of the appropriate monarch) the King of the Elves, thereby adding infinitely to his Earth-inculcated magical abilities so that he joins the rest of the world-busting crew.

A further component of this "hyperbole of idea" – another symptom of the bad horror novelist at work – concerns the amount of damage our heroes can sustain and yet still continue plugging gamely on. Again to nod to Tex Avery, there comes a point at which excessive violence transcends horror or disgust and instead becomes hilarious. Caine starts off being almost entirely paralysed from the waist down, so he's in bad enough shape before repeatedly having bones shattered, getting his teeth smashed out (had I but world enough and time I'd go through and check how many of the characters have their teeth smashed out more than once), being thrown in this mangled state full-tilt into stone walls, developing sores that, untreated, fester and pullulate ... yet on he quests. More than one character goes further, meeting a graphically violent death yet in some way or another being restored to life. (There are fantasy/sf scenarios in which this is legitimate and indeed may be fundamental to the setup; but that seems not the case here.)

The justification for Caine's bewilderingly tenacious grip on life has already been touched upon: he is able to do so because prepared to do/endure more than any other man to achieve what he desires. Politically speaking, this is an extreme right-wing viewpoint, as espoused by those who blazon that we all have an equal opportunity – if only we try hard enough and have the gumption – despite its being blatantly manifest that this is not the case; a reductio ad absurdum would be to tell a quadriplegic that s/he could beat Ben Johnson for Olympic Gold if only s/he tried a bit harder. It's the philosophy promoted by the self-proclaimed "iron men" who destroy nations and annihilate whole peoples while being singularly unwilling to engage in a one-on-one confrontation of any kind themselves. And such notions emerge with alarming regularity in Blade of Tyshalle – which is not to say that the author himself is fascistic but that, through his fervour of brute-force hyperbole, he leads himself narratively into philosophical positions that might repel him in moments of greater sobriety. Here is even our sympathetic character, the new King of the Elves:

This is a war that is fought every day in every land; this is a war that began with the birth of life itself. This is a war the best of us fight in our hearts: a war against to get along, you go along. A war against us and them. A war against the herd, against the cause. Against the weight of civilization itself.

What Stover is presumably trying to say is that we should strive against the sort of unthinking acquiescence by the people that perpetuates the reign of the tyrant. No quibbles there; Sinclair Lewis expressed the point exquisitely in his novel It Can't Happen Here (1935) when he had his hitherto acquiescent protagonist Doremus Jessup, suffering under the yoke in a Nazified America, reflect that the problem was that "we are all Doremus Jessups". But so carried away is Stover by his own prose that suddenly he's echoing the Nazi notion that civilization must be torn down if it is ever to be improved, while at the same time deploying the Nazi trick of depersonalizing those segments of society (here, "the herd") whose untidy presence complicates the ease with which the Simple Solution might be emplaced. Because of passages like these one aches to pick Stover up by the lapels and shake him until he recognizes that we cannot all be the titanic, mighty-thewed heroes of Sword & Sorcery novels.

This is a fairly long review of an exceedingly long novel, and much of the comment has been negative. This may give a wrong impression. Blade of Tyshalle does have strengths – there are many plums to be discovered in its pudding, many originalities of thought and of fantastical imagination, while, as noted, Stover does have a genuine storytelling ability that hauls the reader through the hundreds of thousands of words of his tale; it is an infinitely more worthwhile book than any number of the slab fantasies that warp the shelves of your local bookstore (indeed, if this were not the case it might be argued that this book wouldn't have generated such a long review!). One yearns for the time when Stover will acquire the discipline to abjure the gratuitous gross-out, and for the novel he will one day write in which the quality of his subject matter rises to match that of his other abilities.

In short, you could do a lot worse than read Blade of Tyshalle, but Stover could have done a lot better than write it.

—Infinity Plus

Selected Stories

by Theodore Sturgeon

Vintage, 439 pages, paperback, 2000

Theodore Sturgeon was one of the great craftsmen of science fiction's pulp era. Like so many of his contemporaries, he excelled at the short story, novelette and novella, yet had difficulties with the novel form; his most famous "novel", More Than Human (1953), is an uneasy fixup of three novelettes that are individually excellent. In many of his stories he conformed to the pulp medium, writing tales that might just as well have been produced by any of the forgotten host who churned away earnestly for magazines that have often enough themselves been forgotten. But ever and again Sturgeon transcended the medium entirely to produce stories that could probably have sat more comfortably in slicks like The New Yorker. Quite why his pulp editors published these is something of a mystery, but publish them they did – and in so doing they contributed to the process whereby fantasy/sf, pulling itself up by its own bootstraps, established itself as a literary form rather than an adventure genre.

Any book of Sturgeon's work that is called Selected Stories and that comes from a mainstream publisher is therefore exceedingly welcome: it is long past time that he was recognized as, at his best, a major contributor to the American short story of the 20th century who just happened to work with sf, fantasy and horror. And initially this compilation looks the part, containing 13 stories of which most are long and two are very long. There are some very fine stories here – make no mistake about that – but there are also some very fine stories that are not here, and which should be; and some of the stories in this collection are pretty mediocre.

There may be some sound reason for this odd selection, but unfortunately the book has been published with any editorial apparatus – even the original publication dates of the stories are omitted – so we have no idea what principles the anonymous editor followed. Are these stories chosen as examples of phases of Sturgeon's career, or are they intended to be some kind of "best of the best" (which they're assuredly not)? We have no way of telling.

Among the significant omissions are "Microcosmic God", "Baby is Three" (the core story of More Than Human), "If All Men Are Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister", "A Saucer of Loneliness" and "The World Well Lost"; other readers may immediately be able to identify additions to this list.

Nevertheless, some of Sturgeon's very finest tales are indeed here, and it is a delight to re-encounter them. "Thunder and Roses" conveys the moral bleakness of a post-Holocaust world as well as any tale ever has. "The Golden Helix" captures the transcendence both of alien contact and of humanity's potential role within the Universe's grand scheme of things. "Bianca's Hands" is a superb horror fable that initially had difficulty achieving publication in the USA because, while never explicit, it is rooted in the warped sexuality of its protagonist. "Bright Segment" is another horror tale of great charm in that its physically monstrous protagonist, who also in the event behaves monstrously, is nevertheless portrayed with great humanity and compassion, so that he is the object of our understanding and sympathy rather than our revulsion. "The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff" is a long and moving exercise in character depiction that might have been even better had not sf elements been grafted onto it, but is in all conscience quite excellent the way it is. And "Slow Sculpture" retains all the freshness and passion it had when first published.

Mixed in among these are some stories that are jolly enough without being in any way exceptional. "The Skills of Xanadu" takes a long time telling something very simple; Eric Frank Russell could have done the same in half the wordage and twice as effectively – and made you laugh at the same time. The famous and I would suggest hugely overrated story "Killdozer!" takes an interminable amount of time to tell its simple tale of a machine being possessed by what could be the Devil but is, rather, quasi-scientifically rationalized: it's the sort of tale with which to while away a tedious plane trip; __ it is no more than that. "The Sex Opposite", "A Way of Thinking" and "The Man who Lost the Sea" are standard magazine fodder; they're not bad, but neither are they very good.

And then there are a couple of tales which are less good even than this. "Mr. Costello, Hero" serves as a reminder of why the magazines of fantasy/sf's pulp age either transformed themselves or died. At best one could describe the tale as an extremely inept satire of Soviet-style communism – one of those pseudo-satires that is ineffective through misrepresenting its target. At its worst it's just a rather flabby tale. The horror story "It", while again well known, is really just an overinflated squib, with a plot resolution that bears all the marks of having been stuffed in hastily at the last moment.

Once all of these criticisms have been taken into account, however, one's still left with a heck of a lot of pages of prime Sturgeon for one's $14.00. While this compilation cannot sensibly be regarded as a "Best of", one could name countless authors whose "Best of" collection would not be as good as this. If by some bizarre chance you're unacquainted with Sturgeon's work, this is an adequate introduction to it. If you're more seriously interested, you might be better with the ten-volume (seven so far published) Complete Short Stories of Theodore Sturgeon announced at the back of this book, and for which this book might be regarded as a somewhat quirkily chosen sampler.

—Infinity Plus

The Companions

by Sheri S. Tepper

Eos, 464 pages, hardback, 2003

I'm an enormous fan of Tepper's, and avidly read everything she publishes, even while recognizing that her novels are somewhat uneven; at their best they define a subgenre of sf that would best be called "science fantasy" had not that term been appropriated elsewhere; and even when they're not so good they're almost always engaging and readable, and always with a subtext that's of interest. The Companions is one of the not-so-good ones, alas, but you won't believe me on this until you get within about fifty pages of the end, when suddenly what has so far been a spectacularly successful novel collapses amid hurried, chaotic, and just outright bad plotting.

Civilization on Earth has reached a ghastly phase, dreadful overpopulation having created an era of gross repression that includes a powerful move to exterminate all nonhuman animals; dog-loving Jewel (a typical Tepper heroine: studious and enormously attractive) is glad of the opportunity to assist her linguist half-brother on the distant, undeveloped planet Moss (shades of the planet Grass, featured in some of Tepper's best work), where among the riddles presented by the world is whether or not the inhabitants are truly intelligent. The solution to this particular mystery is masterful, and it leads to a far greater realm of discovery than anyone could possibly have imagined – in which realm the presence of Jewel's dogs is crucial.

Unfortunately, faced with the task of producing a resolution to the enormously complex scenario she's created, Tepper in effect bottles out. I exhort you to read the first 400 pages or so of The Companions – you'd be hard pressed to find a better 400 pages of sf anywhere – and then to let your mind start dreaming up its own possible resolutions of the whole.

—Crescent Blues

Singer from the Sea

by Sheri S. Tepper

Avon, 426 pages, hardback, 1999

If the term "science fantasy" hadn't already been taken, someone should have applied it to the works of Sheri S. Tepper: novels like Grass (1989), Raising the Stones (1990) and The Awakeners (1987) offer a supremely satisfying blend between genuine science fiction and equally genuine fantasy. Some of her earlier fictions were in fact pure fantasy, with no sciencefictional content whatsoever – for example, Blood Heritage (1986) and The Bones (1987), not to mention the Marianne trilogy (1985–9) – but thereafter she established and developed this delicate fusion, with even a novel like Beauty (1991), a worthy addition to that body of novels based on the Beauty and the Beast legend (and in this case on Sleeping Beauty as well), being as much sf as fantasy. In more recent years, however, the balance of the blend has shifted markedly: starting around the time of A Plague of Angels (1993), Tepper's novels have veered more towards science fantasy in the more orthodox sense of the term, with the sciencefictional aspects playing second fiddle to the fantasy ambience to such an extent that it's almost as if they had been, rather irritably, stuck in to make sure Tepper didn't lose her stall in the sf marketplace. Science fantasies are not necessarily bad novels, of course – although her Gibbon's Decline and Fall (1996) was a major disappointment – but they do not normally make rewarding subjects for analysis.

Singer from the Sea is very definitely an orthodox science fantasy. The descendants of the colonists on the planet Haven have formed a society that is a vile aristocratic patriarchy – two societies, in fact, each as bad as the other. The women of the lower orders have a reasonable degree of autonomy, but those of the aristocratic classes are expected by their fathers and husbands to be little more than decorative sex-toys and child-bearers. Among the many limitations imposed on them is that they are forbidden to sing.

Genevieve, our heroine, is not initially rebellious, or even that way inclined, despite her possession of a formidable intellect and psychic powers. She is, however, a little different, in that her equally formidable mother, now long dead, taught her to exercise her mind, to develop her powers and, most important of all, to sing – all of which she does in secrecy. Her spirit is kindled when her militaristic buffoon of a father determines to marry her off to the vile Prince Delganor, who has ambitions to take over the world; Genevieve, despite the fact that aristocrats should wed only aristocrats, has fallen in love with the well thewed New Man commoner Aufors Leys. In the course of their adventures towards a reconciliation of true love, they discover that the incredible longevity of the most senior aristocratic males relies on a drug that can be derived only through the murder of young women, preferably suckling mothers; and that individual living beings do not have souls but only (as it were) shares of the much grander entities that are the souls of worlds – a very pretty idea with obvious eco-conscious connotations. Genevieve, through learning to sing to the planet's soul, becomes a saviour of her world, and possibly of all the human universe; Aufors becomes – well, Aufors sort of fades about two-thirds of the way through and becomes her loyal if faceless sidekick. Various lesser characters achieve their own transcendences, while the bad guys get splatted in one way or another.

The telling throughout has an aura of high fantasy, so one wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if a dragon popped out from behind a rock or a wizened witch waved a wand and explained everything. In fact, the technological underpinning that explains this strange longevity drug – the reason why its parent plant will grow only when sprinkled with the blood of young mothers – is of the order that is so sufficiently advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic, and most of the rest of the technology is likewise – for example, there is an unexplained hi-tech means of bringing rare and threatened animals from other worlds (like unicorns, perhaps?) to be released into the Eden that is Haven. The plot of the book, too, follows one of the classic fantasy templates: there is wrongness in the land; there is a period of transition; virtue triumphs as everything is set in its rightful place at last (or again). In this instance there's even the standard element of the under-rated person who proves to be the rightful monarch; granted this person is female rather than the more usual male (the mocked kitchen urchin becomes king), but even this is nowadays not an uncommon high-fantasy spin. There are visitors from other planets, but they could as easily be from across the seas – very easily, in this instance, because Tepper has chosen to restrict the landmasses of her world to only two medium-sized and neighbouring islands, all the rest being ocean.

One is accustomed to high fantasies being judgeable only in terms of how well or badly their tales are told – rarely do they actually mean anything (and many readers of high fantasy would run a mile if they did) – but this is Tepper, and so there are morals to be drawn. The first of these is ecological, as noted, and this is nicely enough handled; all of the familiar Tepper elegance of thought is on display here. The second, expectably from Tepper, is feministic, and unfortunately here her touch deserts her: the message is put across clumsily, and is based on false premises.

The aristocratic males are, of course, the villains of the piece; and the message presumably is that, if given the chance and the right combination of circumstances, any male has at least the potential to act similarly – to countenance the mass murder of "mere" women in order to prolong his own existence and thereby increase or extend his power. This is of course arrant nonsense, and one suspects Tepper realized as much full well by the time she was halfway through writing the novel and spent the rest of the time trying desperately to cover up the foolishness of the premise. Certainly this is the case if we are to deduce correctly from her handling of one of the semi-major characters, the battle-hardened tactician who is Genevieve's father – "Arthur Lord Dustin, Duke of Langmarsh, Earl of Evermire etcetera, Councilor to the Lord Paramount and Marshal of the Royal Armies", no less. The Marshal starts off as a militarist of unusually rigid mind (an odd failing for a brilliant tactician?) but, as he is drawn into the evil plot of his male peers, becomes a complete caricature – he is the stiff retired major whom bit-part character actors made a living out of portraying in countless half-forgotten black-and-white B-movies, but with a dash of malevolence added – and no attitude becomes too stupid for him to adopt. Alongside him, the wicked Prince Delganor, engaged in countless subtle machinations of the sort that might seem brilliantly Machiavellian to schoolyard kids, becomes ever more implausibly loathsome. There is also a Shah; he cannot really be called a character because all he is is a cardboard despot who behaves in ways that would give religious fundamentalists of any stripe (although clearly Islamic despotism is Tepper's target) pause for thought. Yes, there are a few males among the good guys, but almost without exception (the exception being the very daintily painted minor character Jeorfy) they, like Aufors Leys, become or have always been mere cyphers – as if they have to be cyphers because otherwise, being males, their only possible characteristic could be brutishness.

All of this does not do the feminist cause any favours; indeed, to weight the scales against the male characters of Singer from the Sea in this way is to patronize the females, as if they were pretty little empty-heads who could not compete in a world where men might be intelligent, strong-willed, free-minded, and so forth. If, for example, as I've pointed out when discussing other feminist fictions, all the blacks in a novel were portrayed as inevitably either brutish or vacuous, there would quite rightly be an uproar; feminist propaganda is not at all assisted by the use of the same tactics as are deployed in racist propaganda.

This book does have redeeming qualities, however. Tepper has always been a mighty good storyteller, and for large stretches of the novel this quality shines through – although it is somewhat undermined by frequent interruptions of the flow caused by poor editing (not to mention sloppy proofreading). First-draft-style clumsinesses abound – irritating word repetitions and the like – and some passages are quite frankly astonishing in their crudity:

He gave her a look of tragic intensity and went to gasp for breath outside the room, while she, inside the room, did the same.

At which high dramatic moment of romantic tragedy Tonstant Weader, of course, rocked with laughter, all the involving power of the preceding pages effectively dissipated.

Although Singer from the Sea is a poor thing by Tepper's standards, those standards have generally been high – and so perhaps we shouldn't complain too much.

—unknown venue

Terror Firma

by Matthew Thomas

Voyager, 437 pages, paperback, 2000

The premise of this book is that every conspiracy theory you ever heard about is true, and in fact all part of a single conspiracy theory, which is that a small coterie of unimaginably wealthy humans rule the world with the assistance of alien UFOnauts, whose own ultimate objective is conquest of our planet. Approximately.

Investigating this state of affairs are: a rogue US Government covert operative, Frank; the editor of a small-circulation UFO magazine, Dave; and Dave's permanently off-again tv production assistant girlfriend, Kate. They are opposed and eventually (when he rebels against his masters) assisted by the coterie's even more covert enforcement officer, Becker. The trail takes them over most of the globe until they reach a final cataclysmic confrontation with the aliens on a remote mountainside in the distant, backward nation of Urgistan.

This all sounds like the recipe for either nonstop pulse-pounding hilarity or a Dan Brown novel, right? Unfortunately, wrong. Well, Terror Firma is certainly sometimes funnier than a Dan Brown novel, except for those with the most masochistic sense of humour, but pulse-pounding hilarity it ain't.

Matthew Thomas is an author desperately in need of an editor. In the first place he needs an editor to trim down his text, primarily with the aim of sharpening the jokes. There is hardly a joke in this book that is not pounded to death by a torrential rain of auctorial diarrhea, hardly a potentially witty one-liner that is not remorselessly extended to fill half a page. One is reminded of the misconception small children have that, if a joke is funny when you tell it once, it's twice as funny if you immediately repeat it, three times as funny if you ... and so on until the adults have no recourse except the coalhole.

Examples:

With a screeching wheel-spin they made off into the comforting darkness. It seemed fortunate that Frank had an even higher tolerance to man-made drugs than he did to the worst ravages of Watcher biotechnology. Frank's years as a gutter junkie finally began to pay off. His body had obtained more than just an immunity to just about every infectious disease known to man, plus a few that weren't; it had learned how to survive. Under a dosage which would have killed stone-dead a normal person, not to mention a tougher-than-average African bull-elephant, his battered system established some sort of equilibrium. The gale of fresher air, blowing headlong into his face, did its part too. After thirty minutes of Kate's high-speed driving Frank seemed to be making a tentative recovery.

In other words, thanks to his past drug-use and the gale in his face, Frank recovered in half an hour from a dose that would have killed an elephant. Another:

Not that their strategy, as it stood, was likely to win any prizes. If the French Foreign Legion started awarding Palme d'Ors [sic], in the category of "Best Foreign-Language Military Operation", then General Custer and the Seventh Cavalry were more likely to be getting a phone call and an all-expenses-paid trip to the Riviera.

Overwriting of this sort is forgivable if it occurs a few times in a humorous novel, but not if examples – often more than one – can be plucked from virtually every page.

That little parenthetical "sic" is worth noting, because another reason Thomas requires an editor is to clear up his grammar and especially his spelling. An example of the shoddy grammar is shown serendipitously in the first extract cited above:

It seemed fortunate that Frank had an even higher tolerance to man-made drugs than he did to the worst ravages of Watcher biotechnology.

What's meant, of course, is that it was fortunate that Frank seemed to have this tolerance. But the spelling errors are a greater concern, especially the proper nouns. It starts with the cover, which refers to "Rockwell" (perhaps the train of thought is that James Garner, of Rockford Files fame, starred in one of the tv movies about Roswell?), and goes on throughout the book: Richard "Millhouse" Nixon, the "Illuminanti", a "femme fatal", "hair-brained", "swotted" (for "swatted"), "grizzly" (for "grisly"), "least" (for "lest"), the "Templers" ... Two famously dead rock stars are referred to in a single phrase as "Janice" and "Jimmy". I did like the idea of the "spring role": alas, poor #46, I knew it well.

Some of these are repeated numerous times, so obviously it's not the typesetter to blame.

A third reason why Thomas needs an editor is to guide him towards the notion that, as well as the short-term jokes and one-liners, there should be the "macro-jokes" – to simplify, those jokes for which the foundations are laid several chapters before the punchlines are delivered. One could claim, somewhat desperately, that the book as a whole is such a macro-joke; but otherwise the text is marked by their absence, and thereby lacks the main device used by comic writers to keep the reader turning the pages. It's rather as if a thriller writer presented nothing but nonstop action passages without any linking rationale, without any build-up to each coup de théâtre; the pyrotechnics soon become pretty boring.

The shame of all this is that it is perfectly obvious from Terror Firma that Thomas does possess comic flair. This is not an unintelligent book. But the net effect of its amazing superfluity of flaws is to render all its attempts at shafts of wit less rapier than blunderbuss. To give a charitable estimate, it raised a smile perhaps half a dozen times in 437 pages. That's less than one smile per 70 pages. Not a high strike-rate.

—Infinity Plus

Games Dead People Play, and Other Stories

by C.S. Thompson

iUniverse, 114 pages, paperback, 2001

One major purpose of most novels is to paint a world, the world in which its characters move and breathe and follow the actions of the plot. That world may be one of the unnamed moons of Saturn, or a different part of the Earth, or just down the street from the reader's home; wherever its physical location in space or in time, it is nevertheless an alien world to the reader in that it is one formed and moulded by the perceptions of the novel's protagonists. If a novel succeeds in the painting of its world, then it can just about get away with deficiencies in other areas – plot, for example.

By contrast, short stories tend to be much more plot-focused. Especially in genre fictions, they may neglect altogether the depiction of that alien world, and likewise characterization of the protagonists, to concentrate on the plot. (Whether this is a good or bad thing is not pertinent here.)

These thoughts came to the forefront of my mind while reading this intriguing collection of somewhat noir, somewhat fantasticated short and short-short stories, because many of them, taken singly, hardly function as short stories in the traditional sense at all. Rather, they are vignettes, snapshots taken of a world that is far more fully depicted by the assemblage as a whole than in any one of its constituent items. Not all of the stories in Games Dead People Play are like this: some are excellent and complete stories in their own right, and would stand perfectly well alone. But even they benefit by, as at the same time they give benefit to, the overall affect presented by the assemblage.

In other words, the collection can be read and appreciated almost as if it were a very unusually constructed novel, one in which not everything is explicit – there are gaps to be filled in by the reader's imagination – and in which the order of proceedings is not necessarily a reliable guide to the order of events.

Some of the stories share characters. Some overtly share the same setting: Nottamun, which can be either a sort of mini-Chicago or a big town that is seeing its own essence being leached from it by the ruthless force of history, depending upon the viewpoint that seems most germane to the individual tale; this dichotomy is perfectly comprehensible to anyone who has been in somewhere like Nottamun. Others of the tales, while nowhere stated as being set in Nottamun, could as easily be located there as anywhere else. There is a coherence to the depiction of this world.

The tales themselves are generally of small-time gangsters – big fish in the small pond of Nottamun, but small ones in any other terms – of murderers, of those who live on or beyond the fringes of the law, or of those whose lives are affected in some strong way by any of the foregoing. Some of the tales draw heavily upon the supernatural, such as the title story, whose protagonist is murdered but does not die; all give the impression that, even if the supernatural is not on stage during this particular segment of Thompson's world-depiction, it is waiting in the wings, its cold breath audible to the players. Perhaps the feel of the book is best expressed by Thompson's dedication: "To all the ghosts in the stones of the city."

As noted, some of the individual stories are gems in their own right. I was particularly taken by "City at Night", a brightly gleaming miniature – it can't be more than about a thousand words long – that begins "We live on an uninhabited world" and, within its tiny scope, presents a searing portrait of the alienation of modern urban life; and by "White Noise", again very short, which should be read by every Anne Rice wannabe who thinks a vampire story has to be at least four hundred pages long to create its effect.

The closing story, "Until the Day we Die", powerfully shows the final hours of a gangster boss who knows that the river of time is bearing the coracle that is his own life inexorably towards the moment of death; none of that power is lost by the fact that we already know from one of the book's earlier stories, set later in time, just how and where the gangster will meet his end. That earlier story, "Ghost Town", is another powerful exercise in its own right, depicting the coexistence of romantic and seedy subjective realities, as focused upon the figure of Wendy, who seems to all her male worshippers to be an almost unattainable goddess whom they alone have the good fortune to, as it were, succeed in attaining – all of them.

There are one or two weak and contrived segments in the twenty-part world-depiction that Thompson presents here. "The Valley of Silvio Cezar" is the prime example, having an uncomfortable self-consciousness about it, as if someone had foolishly told Thompson to concentrate on plot at the expense of all else. But these lapses are perfectly excusable in the context of the whole.

This is a very short book – not only can you read it in an evening but you'll even have some of the evening left over – yet it is undoubtedly a very good one. Reading it at a sitting is almost certainly the best way to appreciate it, to be most effectively sucked into its world. It is a visit you may have great difficulty in forgetting.

—Infinity Plus

The Book of Revelation

by Rupert Thomson

Vintage, 260 pages, paperback, 2001; reissue of a book originally published in 1999

A white dancer-choreographer, at work in Amsterdam, is accosted by three hooded women whom he assumes are fans; the first he realizes otherwise is when he notices they have slipped a hypodermic into the back of his hand. When he wakes he finds himself in a room that is featureless save for the starkest accoutrements of bondage around the walls. For what he later discovers is a period of eighteen days he is subjected by the three masked women to escalating levels of inventive sexual and sadistic humiliation and torment: one day his naked, blindfolded body is used as the table/tableau for an invited banquet of unseen guests; another, his foreskin is crudely pierced with a screwdriver so that he may be chained by it to the wall. He attempts to personalize his captors, despite their anti-personalizing hoods, which they never shed; he believes that he succeeds in this, though perhaps all he observes are incomplete jigsaws whose not quite interlocking pieces comprise tones of voice, glimpsed birthmarks and vaginas, body languages and body morphologies.

Released abruptly back into the land of the living he realizes that he cannot explain himself and his absence. The dancer with whom he has lived assumes he has been indulging in a wild fling; his description of the truth is met with blank incredulity, and so he opts for a more plausible lie that is similarly disbelieved. Unceremoniously dumped, he embarks on a years-long campaign of seduction among the women of Amsterdam whose purpose is not consummation but identification: only when women are naked might he have a chance of recognizing them. After hundreds of conquests, however, he realizes that the viewed female bodies whose characteristics were once so firmly imprinted upon his mind have now become, perhaps, overlayered by all the others he has scrutinized.

After a long period of dislocation during which he is unable to establish any relationship with a woman beyond adding her body to the extending (but dismissed) identity parade in his mind, he discovers new love with a black woman, Juliette (Thomson deliberately keeps most of the characters in this novel as cyphers, but Juliette is a joyous exception); she is certainly innocent because none of his captors was black.

Finally, meeting a woman in a bar, he is convinced that he has discovered one of the three rapists. Following her to the lavatory, he rips the clothes from her and tries unsuccessfully and finally apologetically to find the identificatory marks; he ends up in jail, where still he cannot bring himself to confess to his new (and analogous) captors what happened to him. Only in the last couple of pages can he start making the revelation that is the book you, the reader, hold in your hands.

Rationalized fantasy, to use a technical term, is not often a fertile field. For every time that an author has knowingly created a work of major impact to fantasy that consciously omits the elements commonly regarded as essential to fantasy, there are a thousand extremely tedious failures. The task for the writer is an extremely complex and convoluted one: (a) to understand the heart, the core, and the entire sensibility of fantasy; (b) to deconstruct all of this, so that one is left with a barebones; (c) to erect upon that barebones a structure that bears all the appurtenances of fantasy yet is not in itself a tale that must necessarily be fantasticated – one knows it could have happened at the same time as one knows it never did, that this is a fictional/fantasticated construct.

It's a neat trick that very few have been able to pull off. John Fowles did it with The Magus (1965) and The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969), in both of which reality eternally shifts. Theodore Roszak did it with Flicker (1991). Valerie Martin did it with Mary Reilly (1990). Donna Tarrt did it with The Secret History (1992) – Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind is a masterpiece of this form. There are other examples – while reading this novel I found myself constantly thinking of Kafka – but essentially we're talking about a select crew. In the case of The Book of Revelation we discover ourselves in the presence of someone who has been captivated into the land of Faerie – he is away for a longer or shorter time (and who can decide?) than has elapsed during his absence. At the same moment he is desperately telling himself that the thing he has gone through is reducible to the mundane – as if men are constantly being seized by predatory and preternatural women. He is entering a conspiracy to eliminate the possibility of the fantastic, even though he himself is the one who has endured the fantastic – the Tom or Tam who has survived Faerie and its cruelties.

This is a novel which can be taken in terms of its surface as a psychological thriller of sorts, but it's very much more than that. It both subverts and substantiates what fantasy is all about. It survives in the mind long after the reading is done.

—Infinity Plus

The Assassins of Tamurin

by S.D. Tower

HarperCollins Eos, 454 pages, hardback, 2003

Young Lale was discovered as a baby floating down the river by the natives of a remote village in Fantasyland. She is reared by them but not loved – indeed, she is made the scapegoat for all their ills. After one serious error she is socially ostracized by them, and so she flees to make her way in the world. Soon she is picked up by the Despotana (female Despot) of a neighbouring country, Tamurin. Taken there, she is schooled and eventually graduates to become, as she thinks, a religious acolyte. However, the Despotana's supposed convent is in fact a training academy for spies ...

And so on.

This is an amiable enough tale and it's rather nicely written in a very simple, almost simplistic style; in most contexts the plainness of the prose might be tedious, even irksome, but here it works well. Lale is a likable heroine, and her best buddy Dilara is an extremely appealing figure.

However, despite the appeal of the telling, the tale eventually does indeed become tedious, because there seems to be nothing new here. There's a certain amount of magic, but nothing we've not seen before; overall, there's surprisingly little fantasy at all in this novel except for the fact that it's set in a Fantasyland ... which is much like any other Fantasyland, although at least not a straightforward clone of Middle-Earth.

"S.D. Tower" is apparently, to judge by the cover flap and the book's Acknowledgements, the joint pseudonym of "an artist and the internationally published author (under another name) of espionage thrillers". This may give a clue as to why The Assassins of Tamurin is so unambitious in terms of its content. There is, of course, absolutely no reason in theory why artists and the authors of spy thrillers shouldn't write groundbreaking fantasies – just think of Mervyn Peake as a fantasy-writing artist! – but this particular book has the air of one whose authors are proudly re-inventing the wheel. It hardly needs to be said that a good many authors of generic fantasy do exactly this, repeatedly, and neither have the excuse of unfamiliarity with the field nor write so nicely; but that's a consideration of little relevance to the reader.

On the evidence of The Assassins of Tamurin, S.D. Tower may be an author to watch for the future, but with only moderate expectations.

Special mention should be made of the cover illustration, which is by Mark Harrison. Although it's in fact quite simple, it's very striking, probably due to the strength of its composition, and genuinely evocative. It made this reviewer's disappointment in the text perhaps more acute than otherwise might have been the case.

—Infinity Plus

Big Planet

by Jack Vance

Gollancz, 218 pages, paperback, 2000; reissue of a book originally published in this form in 1978

There have been countless sf novels over the years set on huge planetary surfaces or their equivalents, the prime examples probably being Larry Niven's Ringworld (1970) and Bob Shaw's Orbitsville (1975). It was perhaps as a result of the success of these two novels that in 1978 there was published in book form Jack Vance's 1952 Startling Stories serial that is widely regarded as having been the granddaddy of them all. Although it was good that the book was back in print, and a restored version at that – earlier, 1950s book editions having been cut – the reissue may have been a bad publishing move, since, despite its title, Vance's novel has very little in common with those other works.

For a start, it cannot sensibly be read as sf (although it has a sciencefictional underpinning) but is picaresque fantasy of a kind vaguely reminiscent in some ways of the works of James Branch Cabell and in others of those of Edgar Rice Burroughs. The term "planetary romance" is often used in connection with this work to indicate that, while fantasy, it's not quite science fantasy (there's nothing supernatural or magical here), yet it's not really science fiction either. There is no genuine attempt to persuade the reader that the events of this book could ever really happen, no invocation of the voluntary suspension of disbelief; while it wouldn't be impossible deliberately to stage such events, the chances of them ever coming about otherwise are so close to zero as makes no difference.

This isn't just a fusspot and fundamentally irrelevant terminological matter. Rather, it relates to the way in which one can read Big Planet – and it also explains the reference to Cabell a few lines ago. The art of world-building in either fantasy or sf includes the conscious attempt to convince the reader that the world built somehow "really" exists, even if its landscapes are purely mental ones and endure only until the book is closed. Like Cabell, Vance in this book (and of course others) declined the chance at world-building, preferring instead to construct scenarios which the reader is forced to accept purely on their own terms.

This is an extremely difficult writing trick to pull off – well, anybody can do it, but the difficulty lies in keeping the reader's interest sustained. After all, as a single example, a basic requisite for engrossing fiction is generally taken to be the creation of plausible characters to whom the reader can relate emotionally (and, depending on the character, identify with). But, if the setting of the novel is merely a painted backdrop upon which the artist's brushstrokes are perfectly visible, it is constantly borne in upon the reader that the characters, too, are mere artifices. Who cares about the fates of people who, we're constantly being reminded, aren't real?

Well, there are other ways to keep a reader reading, among them the sustained inventiveness of the writer's imagination and the grace and stylishness of the writing. A few good jokes – verbal, situational or conceptual – don't hurt either.

I'm not certain Vance actually does pull off the trick in Big Planet, primarily because the plot is unfulfilled.

What is that plot? Sometime in the past, Earth colonized an enormous but low-density planet; despite the planet's size, the surface gravity here is not much different from that on Earth. The planet is desperately poor in metals, which must almost exclusively be imported. The policy of the Earth government is not to enforce its laws outside the confines of the Solar System. Thus the colonists on Big Planet were all the kooks and oddballs who couldn't fit in at home, tempted here by the prospect of effectively unlimited space in which to indulge whatever practices they wished.

Now the tyrant Charley Lysidder, Bajarnum of Beaujolais, is attempting the takeover of, if not the whole of Big Planet – which would probably be impossible – at least a sizeable percentage of its surface. He is doing so with considerable ruthlessness. Earth has sent various missions to try to halt this, but all have vanished. The latest, headed by Claude Glystra, is nearing the giant world when sabotage forces a crash-landing. In order to survive, Glystra's plucky little band – aided by hormone-rich local girl Nancy – must somehow trek forty thousand miles across the surface of the planet to the safety of Earth Enclave (in essence, the Terran Embassy). No planes, trains or automobiles to help them on this journey: because of the paucity of metals, Big Planet's technology is rudimentary. Also, of course, the Bajarnum is aware of their existence and will do his best to stop them.

Off they go on their forty-thousand-mile trip. They have various adventures and encounter various fantasticated societies. But the ever-diminishing group – almost all get killed off en route – don't in fact get further than a tiny fraction of the distance before Vance runs out of steam and the curtains come down on the play: the evening's entertainment is over.

Yes, the guy gets the gal despite all vicissitudes and misperceptions; but that's not exactly a surprise and, anyway, these have never been real characters. The Bajarnum and his tyranny are somewhat arbitrarily terminated; again, hardly a shock twist. The zillion other social problems that plague Big Planet are left unaltered: the massacres, child-rapes, tortures and the like are permitted to continue in the not-so-merry fashion of the past. In sum, there's a strong sense of coitus interruptus as one finishes page 218; to put it another way, it's as if one had paid for the Magical Mystery Tour and all that happened was that the bus went round the block and dumped you back on your own doorstep.

Yes, there's some inventiveness here. A few of the fantasticated societies are fastidiously intriguing, although none has the wit and quasi-plausibility of those depicted by, say, Eric Frank Russell in his tales in The Great Explosion (1962) and elsewhere. Yes, there are one or two good jokes, but they don't stick in the mind (at least, not in this reviewer's mind, because I've been sitting here desperately trying to remember one). And, yes, the writing is stylish by comparison with much else of what was on offer in 1950s pulp sf magazines; but a little too frequently what must have seemed stylish half a century ago reads today instead as simply affected.

Picking up this very attractive new edition, I tried to remember anything at all about my first reading of Big Planet, some twenty or more years ago, and all my memory could come up with was a vague sense of dissatisfaction on having finished the book. To be honest, this was why I decided to read the novel again, to discover what it was that my youthful self had so obviously missed out on. Yet, on finishing Big Planet in 2002, my feeling was exactly the same: Well, that was okay, I guess, quite fun in places, but, er, so what?

All of that said, Big Planet is one of those books that anyone seriously interested in the evolution of fantasy/sf should ... well, not so much read as, at some stage, have read. It is significant to the history of the genre even if no longer, as a novel, especially significant in itself.

—Infinity Plus

Bloodlines

by Marian Veevers

Gollancz, 272 pages, hardback, 1996

This haunting novel has three intertwined strands set in three different times.

(1) In the 11th century Lady Macbeth, who has inherited witchery (of the Goddess rather than the broomstick kind), infatuated with her brutal and largely uncaring husband, plots in both mundane and occult ways to bring him glory. Among Macbeth's servants is the vile rapist Seyton, who is told by the three weird sisters that he will never be a king himself but will father kings. Macbeth later awards him the title Steward (which will become Stewart and then Stuart). One of Lady Macbeth's powers is that she knows the secret of seeing the weird of the Stewarts; i.e., she can see the future of Seyton's line, and all its tragedies.

(2) In the early 17th century a peasant girl called Jennet is being interrogated and is condemned to death for witchcraft and for killing her newborn baby, one of her interrogators being the man who raped and thereby impregnated her. She has inherited the knowledge of the Stewart weird: the real reason she must hang is that the newly crowned James VI & I, paranoid about witchcraft, has learnt of this.

(3) In 1996 actress Abigail West must play the part of Lady Macbeth in a production designed to relaunch the career of her faithless husband; among the cast is a certain Alan Stewart, who still bears a vengeance because of what West's line of witchery has, as he perceives it, done to his family.

To give much more of a synopsis would be to give the game away. Veevers's prose falters in the first fifteen or twenty pages, but thereafter settles into an elegant, understated smoothness; she captures the distinctive voices of all three threatened women with very great skill. This is a book that is hard to put down as it accelerates towards a resolution of the three connected lives. Veevers, whose first novel this is, is an author to watch.

—Samhain

Golem

by Greg Vilk

Ricochet, 172 pages, paperback, 2005

The author of this short novel has been a visual effects technical director for companies like DreamWorks, and unfortunately it shows. Golem is less a novel, more a treatment for a screenplay, complete with lots of explosions, cardboard subsidiary characters introduced seemingly for the sole purpose of meeting a gruesome end, unexplained (if not inexplicable) plot progressions whose illogicality a moviemaker might reckon would escape the notice of the thrilled audience but which leap out only too starkly from the printed page, the sense, as with so many modern action movies, that you're seeing bits and pieces jigsawed together from earlier action movies ... Combine all this and more with a prose style that not so much graces the page as lurches and staggers across it, and you'll understand why it took your reviewer an inordinately long while to plough his way through the novel's mere 170 large-print pages: much of the time was spent repeatedly thumbing back through previous sections in a desperate effort to find out what the heck was supposed to be going on.

It's World War II, and the Nazis have kidnapped archaeolinguist Professor Benedict and taken both him and the secret he has discovered, that of raising the Golem, to a secret base in Greenland in hopes of learning how to make lots of lethal, indestructible clay soldiers. Sent after them are a bunch of US special-ops malcontents who could well, with their exaggerated but forgettable characteristics, be the Dirty Dozen except that I never came up with the same answer twice whenever I tried to count them.

With these lovable toughs goes token female May, who's both linguist daughter of the abducted boffin and Equity-registered hot babe; from the moment she and good-guy leader Leash clap eyes on each other it's pretty obvious that he's going to be getting (a) over the fact that he's been previously Unhappy In Love and (b) into a tangle of limbs with Ms. Benedict about two sentences after the end of the book. Similarly, as soon as the troop's watery-eyed, morphine-addicted sawbones appears on the scene, it's a dead cert he's going to betray our heroes to the nasties, and our author does not disappoint.

The Golem itself is quite a fun creation, seemingly designed so the special effects crew will have a whale of a good time when the movie's made. It's capable of whipping up whatever happens to be lying around and putting all these bits of debris together into a man-like shape, in which form it can pulverize people. Further, with each such "incarnation," it gets BIGGER, so that by the time it gets its inevitable comeuppance in the face of a solid hail of American grit, pluck, determination, resourcefulness, raw testosterone and probably apple pie, it's stomping across the icy wastes like Godzilla with a hangover, its limbs being made up of assemblages of stuff like tanks and artillery.

As for that prose ... well, let a quartet of examples suffice:

• She was comely; a slight skew of the cheekbones only lent her face a stronger punch.

• The air grew so thick with tension that even the wind outside backed off to a safe distance.

• He whispered under his nose.

• May furrowed her brow. Her pupils jittered side to side, as if her frontal lobes were doing heavy lifting. Her gaze was so intense, it looked like her skull could blow up in a puff of hot steam at any moment. Then her face lit up with a divine epiphany.

—Crescent Blues

The Reunion

by Sue Walker

Morrow, 320 pages, hardback, 2004

Reading Sue Walker's The Reunion I couldn't help but be reminded of the enormous influence Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine has exerted on the modern British psychological thriller, just as she has profoundly influenced British detections (although Ian Rankin has rapidly come to be a more important figure in this latter context). This is not to say that other writers set out imitate her (although some obviously do), more that the pattern Rendell developed has come to be seen as a standard style. Nor is it to say that the influence does not extend well beyond the shores of Britain: one can very easily read books like Donna Tartt's The Secret History as psychological novels in the Rendell mould. The influence has in general been an extremely beneficial one: there were British psychological thrillers of depth, literacy and interest before Rendell came along to transform the scene, but they now almost approach the norm in this subgenre.

The Reunion is smack in the Rendell/Vine mainstream. In general beautifully written (despite some odd Americanization), it has a story that occupies three timelines: now, the recent past, and the distant past – twenty-seven years ago, to be precise – when a bunch of dangerously maladjusted teenagers were brought together for group therapy in an Edinburgh (Scotland) clinic, the Unit, under the aegis of an R.D. Laing figure, Dr. Adrian Laurie. The group members have made a conscious effort to avoid each other since their "cure," although three of their number exchange brief notes once a year, every November 8.

Innes is not one of those three. She's alarmed to receive an answerphone message one day from another group member, Abby – her best friend back in the days of the Unit – who sounds desperate. Innes cannot bring herself to respond, and the next she learns is that Abby has committed suicide by drowning. Delving deeper, she discovers that Danny, another group member, a few months ago likewise suicided by drowning. Two similar deaths recorded as suicides might instead mean a pattern of murder. As much concerned for her own safety as anything else – is someone purposefully setting out to drown Unit "alumni"? – she makes an amateurish effort to uncover the truth.

Meanwhile Simon, now a successful psychologist, suffers the agonies of his young daughter being abducted and sexually molested. He is convulsed by guilt, regarding this as a punishment for what he and three of the others once did when they were in the Unit.

But what was that "something"? The Reunion is primarily a slow revelation of the dreadful secret.

Although the novel is certainly gripping, and the handling of the characters is splendid, the overall effect is not as satisfying as it should be. Its problem is that the only thing standing between the reader and the exposure of the secret is an artificial one: the author's deliberate refusal to tell us what went on. Most of the novel's central characters know the secret; but, any time they start to reveal it, the action shifts or they go all coy. This becomes eventually just plain annoying, rather than tantalizing. The only central character who's in the same state of ignorance as we are is Innes, and it would be reasonable if we were following in her footsteps as she unravels the truth. However, Innes's little burst of detection takes her almost nowhere, and, although eventually she does discover the secret, that is only because other characters choose to tell her.

The Reunion is undeniably worth your time, and I'm certain you'll enjoy reading it. At novel's end, however, you may feel that you've tasted a lot of delicious foodstuffs but your stomach's complaining that it's never been allowed to eat any of them.

—Crescent Blues

Journeys into Limbo

by Chananya Weissman

Infinity, 118 pages, paperback, 2001

Time was, a few decades ago, that a prominent element of the paperback racks consisted of single-author (almost always American) collections of short stories that happily occupied a territory overlapping sf, fantasy and horror; these collections were epitomized by authors like Richard Matheson and Robert Bloch and Fredric Brown. Every now and then one of the stories would be a real knock-your-socks-off blockbuster, but that wasn't what you expected when you bought the collection; what you were expecting was good, solid light entertainment.

This first collection by a new young author harks back to that era, and quite consciously – in one of his sporadic auctorial glosses Weissman states:

I generally don't get too involved in characters, since my primary goal is simply to tell a good story. I think this can be achieved without creating complex characters that the reader feels he knows intimately; besides, real people are far more complex than can ever be portrayed in a work of fiction ...

It's a statement that may come as something of a shock to many more experienced short-story writers, but in fact it concords perfectly with the Mathesons and Blochs and Browns of yesteryear: the tale is the thing. The statement also of course, through its cockiness, reveals that this is a young man's collection – which is probably, on the whole, no bad thing.

A few of the fifteen stories in this slim volume (some are short-shorts, all but one are hitherto unpublished) are fairly humdrum – "Solitary", for example, has a narrator who proves, exactly as one had guessed with a yawn by about the fifth line, to be an unborn fetus – but none fail to meet the basic standard of adequate light entertainment, and some achieve more than that. I liked especially "Dream Slave", the recurring dream of whose central character features a dream creature who has become so established as to be a fully independent entity and in fact to dominate and control the dreamer's dreams. "Cogs" is a nice multiple-universe story. And "Rent-A-Friend" strays into early-Bradbury territory, albeit without the sensitivity of language, in its tale of a company that rents Best Friends to the friendless.

In short, this is a very promising first collection. Once Weissman has perhaps lost a little of that awestruck sense of exploring for the first time virgin domains that have in fact been well trammeled by others before him, we can expect great stuff; in a few years' time the contents pages of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction may well be peppered with his name. In the meantime, Journeys into Limbo serves as an intriguing taster of what may well be to come.

—Infinity Plus

The Psychotronic Video Guide

by Michael J. Weldon

St Martin's Griffin, 672 pages, paperback, 1996

I have to confess to one thing immediately: despite the description on the back of the cover of this huge paperback and despite knowing Weldon's Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, I'm still not 100% certain what the word "psychotronic" actually means. Let me make a stab at it. There are some movies you watch because they're good, improving stuff, and there are some you watch because they're crap. They may be good crap (they're well made and you really enjoy them) or bad crap (they're badly made but still you may enjoy them, if not always for the reason intended by their makers). Both categories of crap seem to fit into Weldon's definition of "psychotronic". Perhaps all would be clearer if I took Psychotronic Video magazine, which Weldon founded and edits. Perhaps not – because among the movies listed here is, to take just a single example, Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books.

But forget all the stuff about definitions. This is a glorious book, and it should be on your shelf if you're remotely interested in movies. Here are synopses and basic data about over 9000 movies, of which getting on for half are horror or horror-related, and of which probably more than half – the two categories overlap – are either the kind of movies which the more orthodox sources (Halliwell, Elliot, etc.*) are too snooty

[* 2011 note: Again, how things have changed in a decade and a half. Thanks largely to the internet and especially sites like Allmovie and the IMDB, those "orthodox sources" have, so far as I'm aware, essentially disappeared.]

to list or are direct-to-videos. Do not buy the book on a day when you've got a lot of work to do: it is addictively browsable.

Weldon's synopses are usually succinct, cutting to the heart of the movie concerned, and very frequently display a sly wit, taking the mickey out of the material yet in such a way that his affection for it shows through. There are minor errors in the synopses – for example, Chris Sarandon in Fright Night moves in next door with just one sidekick, not several, as stated here – and there are some curious omissions. Some of the omissions are only apparent, because videos can often sport a bewildering variety of alternative titles, and Weldon's cross-referring of these is not as complete as it could be: I looked, for example, for the pseudo-feminist Western Wanted Women, and found no mention, but eventually discovered it was a variant title of Jessie's Girls; René Clair's classic Paris Qui Dort is listed only as The Crazy Ray; etc. Other omissions are genuine: I was startled to discover that the Virginia Madsen/Tommy Lee Jones vehicle The Dead Can't Lie wasn't listed. Also, I would have much preferred the book had it given running times.

But these are small carps. This is a vast book (646 approximately A4 pages of three-column setting, including an index that is almost too comprehensive) and, leaving aside its very considerable reference value, it is certain to give hours and days of fascinated enjoyment.

—Samhain

The Mechanics of Wonder: The Creation of the Idea of Science Fiction

by Gary Westfahl

Liverpool University Press, 344 pages, hardback, 1998

Towards the end of this long book there is an observation (which Westfahl modestly states is not originally his) that casts light not only on the rest of the text but on a great deal of the accepted history of sf.

We are accustomed to reading of the great flowering of writing talent which occurred around the time that John W. Campbell took over the editorship of Astounding, a flowering generally attributed to his editorial skills – to his ability to draw the very best out of his writers, to stimulate them with his own originality of thought, etc. As an editor myself (albeit not a magazine or even primarily a fiction editor), I have always been troubled by this accepted truth: editors may make good writers better ones but I am unconvinced that, even if they had the time to do so, they could make good writers out of bad ones.

Westfahl clearly shares my doubts about the prevalent hagiographical approach to Campbell's editorship, because he sets out an alternative hypothesis that makes a great deal more sense: those writers who were a part of the great flourishing of talent in the 1940s were of an age to have been reading, during their formative adolescent years, the sf magazines published by Hugo Gernsback – and many of them have indeed written of the boyhood joys of scouring each new issue of Gernsback's Amazing. In so doing they must have read, along with the fiction, Gernsback's frequent editorial pronouncements as to what sf was about. Absorbing such messages, even if the surrounding fiction obeyed Gernsback's rules more in the violation than in the observance, the individuals concerned, on reaching maturity and beginning seriously to write, followed either consciously or unconsciously those dictates.

Acceptance of this hypothesis requires, of course, a radical promotion of Gernsback as an important figure in the history of sf, and a corresponding radical demotion of Campbell. And, in case this might seem heretical (although Westfahl is throughout this book unafraid of heresy), there are several cited remarks from authors of the time who significantly did not feel that Campbell was the saintly editor described by later generations: for example (page 266), Robert Heinlein remarked, while complaining of difficulties he was having with F&SF, "Still, it is pleasanter than offering copy to John Campbell, having it bounced [...] and then have to wade through ten pages of his arrogant insults, explaining to me why the story is no good." Westfahl himself has no high opinion of Campbell (pages 271–2):

Allow me to state those flaws plainly: to an extent that cannot be attributed solely to his upbringing and environment, Campbell was a racist, a bigot, a sexist, and an anti-Semite. He was incredibly gullible in believing what he wanted to believe, incredibly stubborn in refusing to believe what he did not want to believe. He played favourites and held grudges.

And so on. Such personal qualities do not of course necessarily make someone a bad sf editor, and elsewhere Westfahl is at pains to make it clear that Campbell's professional skills were not negligible: in short, it should not be thought that this book is a demolition job; it is merely an attempt to restore a more accurate perspective to studies of sf history.

Such insights of Westfahl's are invaluable to at least this reviewer. However, they come towards the end of what is a very long book, and before them, while there are many riches, there are also many extended stretches wherein Westfahl ponderously labors to prove every single step of the case he is building. He is an exhilarating writer, and one would be hard pressed to find a single boring sentence in this book; but the truth is that those sentences are quite often put together to create boring sections. The primary problem is that every assertion is rigorously supported by material that would better have been banished to endnotes;* this is of course good practice in a

[* The endnotes themselves are another matter. They are placed in the most inconvenient matter possible, at the conclusion of each chapter. Thus one must constantly have two bookmarks on the go, one of which inevitably falls out of the book and into the bathwater.]

doctoral thesis, but it is considerably less desirable in a book intended for real people.

The book essentially falls into two parts: there are four chapters examining Gernsback as (a) an sf theoretician (his views on what sf should be and should not be), (b) an historian of sf (his views on magazine sf's precursors), (c) a writer of sf (to see how he put his theories into practice), and (d) an editor of sf magazines (again to see how he put his theories into practice); the second part subjects Campbell to exactly the same scrutiny except that, because Campbell was not much of a writer, (c) uses as its exemplars Heinlein's Beyond This Horizon and "If This Goes On ...", which are taken as accurate reflections of what Campbell might have written had he had the ability. Preceding this main block of the book is an Introduction offering reasons why sf's history should be reconsidered and (deservedly) lambasting previously published historians and critics for their bêtes noires (notably Aldiss) and for their pretentious obscurities (notably Suvin); this is racy and enjoyable stuff, and Westfahl revels in it. In his Conclusion – again racy and enjoyable except when he spends pages on the necessarily abortive attempt to produce an accurate definition of sf – he rightly points out, by way of continuation of this argument, that what sf's scholarly historians and literary critics have to say on the subject has little effect on and is almost entirely ignored by sf's actual practitioners.

Here, of course, one is drawn to ask a pertinent question: if sf's practitioners ignore academic lit crit, why has this book been written? The simple answer – that it is aimed at other scholars in the hope of persuading them to review their approaches to the subject – is itself subverted by Westfahl's own (good and well argued) case that sf criticism should be considered as a part of sf rather than as merely an adjunct to it ... which means that sf critics are sf practitioners, and thus by definition largely ignore what they themselves (Westfahl included) write.

This is not the only logical tangle into which Westfahl is led by his own enthusiasm. The most overt, although far from the most important, occurs on pages 170–71:

Two years later, when Ray Palmer took over Amazing Stories, his first editorial column promised "tales based on true scientific facts. Insofar as the basic subject matter is founded upon scientific research, it will be essentially a true story magazine [...]"

In Bates, Weisinger and Palmer, one observes a [...] truncation of Gernsback's theory of science fiction [...] But these editors never claimed that scientific principles were actually being explained in these stories or that one could obtain scientific education by reading them.

To be true, Palmer did not state his intentions exactly in Westfahl's prescribed wording, and to be equally true Palmer was an unsatisfactory reifier of those intentions, but Westfahl's conclusion, however many times one reads the passage concerned, appears to fly directly in the teeth of what Palmer actually wrote here.

Elsewhere there are assumptions and conclusions that seem governed more by Westfahl's zeal than anything else. To choose a single example, a statement by David Hartwell (pages 294–5) that, in marketing and practical terms, fantasy can be considered as a subset of sf, is taken as support for the distinctly dodgy premise that "fantasy has effectively been absorbed into science fiction". Not only is this conclusion nonsense in terms of theory (a good case can be made that sf is a subset of fantasy, but not the other way round), it is palpably untrue in practice – even for generic fantasy – as a foray to the bookstore will reveal.

So much for the trees in the large forest of this book; what about the forest itself? It is hard to accept that The Mechanics of Wonder will, as the blurb promises, "stand among a small number of crucial texts [...] which every science fiction scholar or prospective science fiction scholar will have to read" for, as noted, its primary thesis can be outlined very briefly and most of the rest is taken up with what could be regarded as over-detailed substantiation of the claim. Also, it is hard to agree with its attempts to establish a new, Gernsbackian (as it were) definition of what sf is, because what this new definition accurately describes is only what could be called Gernsbackian sf, and a history of sf derived from use of the definition would not surprisingly start with Gernsback, as Westfahl finds himself claiming the history of all sf does.

That said, this is for the most part an extremely entertaining and challenging manifesto, and can be highly recommended as such. Had Westfahl's blurb-writer been only a little less ambitious with that claim ("will stand among a small number of crucial texts which every science fiction scholar or prospective science fiction scholar ought to read", perhaps) it would be easy to applaud the statement.

—Extrapolation

God Save the Mark

by Donald E. Westlake

Forge, 268 pages, Paperback, 2004; reissue of a book originally published in 1967, with a new introduction by Otto Penzler

One in Forge's "Otto Penzler Presents ..." series of reissues, complete with a new introduction by Penzler himself, this publication sees the welcome reappearance of Donald Westlake's 1967 comic delight God Save the Mark. It's not among the very best of Westlake's deliriously inventive capers, but it's close to that leading group – and certainly it's good enough that on first publication it received an Edgar Allen Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America.

The premise here is that Fred Fitch has what is almost a psychic talent or superpower for attracting confidence tricksters and associated fraudsters: he can barely walk to the local newsstand without someone smoothly conning him out of his wallet. This characteristic, while naturally irritating for poor Fred, makes him quite useful to the police: if there's a new scam on the street, within seconds Fred will have fallen victim to it, and through his friendship with the cop Jack Reilly the details will shortly be in the hands of the Bunco Squad.

But now Fred's troubles are about to enter a new and altogether more serious phase. His Uncle Matt, a fabled confidence trickster, has been murdered, and has left Fred an inheritance of three hundred thousand dollars as well as his deliciously earthy ex-"showgirl" Gertie Divine. With that amount of loot on its way, Fred obviously becomes an absolute magnet for every conman and conwoman on the Eastern Seaboard – among the latter, he strongly suspects, being the domineering Gertie, who has promptly moved herself into his apartment and more or less taken it over. But then there's also his dead uncle's shyster lawyer Goodkind, who would give weasels a bad name. Even Fred's eccentric wannabe-writer neighbor Wilkins is trying to persuade Fred to dedicate some of his hard-inherited cash to publishing Wilkins's unpublishable novel.

Of course, Fred's blood pressure isn't helped by hearing from Gertie that whoever killed Uncle Matt is out to get Fred next ...

All the elements are here for one of Westlake's classic romps, and he doesn't fail to deliver. Here's a sample, as Wilkins describes his historical novel Veni Vidi Vici Through Air Power:

I've kept the historical facts, kept them all. The names of the barbarian tribes, strength of armies, the actual battles, kept everything. All I've added is air power. Through a fluke of fate, the [ancient] Romans have aircraft, at about World War I level. So we see the sort of difference air power makes by putting it in a historical setting where it wasn't there. [...] Well, it doesn't change history that much. [...] After all, Caesar won almost all the battles he was in anyway.

This reader confesses he was filled with a powerful yen to get hold of a copy of Veni Vidi Vici Through Air Power, but, that aside, God Save the Mark satisfies on all counts.

Now, if only Forge will see fit to rerelease Westlake's I Gave at the Office ...

—Crescent Blues

Love Spell

by Karen Williams

Rising Tide, 156 pages, paperback, 2001; reissue of a book originally published in 1993

The town of Broome has a new vet, Kate Gallagher. She's adjusting well to her fresh locale but is romantically lonely, despite the presence nearby of best friend GiGi. One Halloween she encounters a green-skinned woman, Allegra, dressed as a witch on her way to a children's reading, and the attraction between them is immediate and overpowering. That night they attend a Halloween party, then go back to Kate's home and make love. The following morning when Kate wakes Allegra is gone, and over ensuing days and weeks all that Kate has of what she assumed would be a lifelong love are bittersweet memories and the occasional delivered gift.

At length GiGi spurs her to track down Allegra. Kate is at first revolted to discover that what she assumed was a cosmetic effect is genuinely green skin – that Allegra is truly a being of supernatural origin, one of a whole community of them living in and around Broome. But in due course love conquers all ...

This is an enjoyable enough romantic comedy (with an extremely explicit four-page sex scene in the middle seeming somewhat incongruous), and the fantasy elements – of which there are many more than noted here – are well blended into the rest of the froth. One does tire a little of the innuendo-ridden badinage not just between the two lovers but in virtually every conversation between the women of Broome, an astonishingly high proportion of whom appear to be gay; weak double entendres can be fun in real-life conversation but are not so much fun to read. Otherwise this deliberately lightweight novel is readable and really quite jolly.

—Infinity Plus

The Rift

by Walter Jon Williams

HarperPrism, 726 pages, hardback, 1999

The disaster novel, of which this is an example, is a subgenre in desperate search of a genre to be sub. Closer to the adventure thriller than to anything else, although quite distinct from it, disaster novels are more frequently lumped in with science fiction on the basis that the catastrophes that are their mainspring are somehow regarded as sciencefictional. Impacting comets – them's yer astronomy, and astronomy's a science so a novel involving them must be sf. In this instance the catastrophes are earthquakes – them's yer geology/geophysics, and so this novel is being published by an sf imprint and will doubtless be reviewed (or, more likely, disparagingly not reviewed) as a work of sf. Yet the "pure" disaster novel is in no sense sciencefictional: the underpinning calamities are not countered using scientific/technological means – indeed, in general they cannot be countered at all, merely survived.

Stories in which the disaster is successfully averted are a different kettle of fish, of course. Arthur C. Clarke's The Hammer of God is indubitably an sf novel (assuming one chooses to describe it as a novel), as is the movie Armageddon – though Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle arguably isn't. Post-holocaust novels generally sit happily within the sf framework, in that their concerns are with sociological implications and "sociofuturology" (even if represented only in microcosm) rather than with the disaster per se. And there are novels in which the central concern is indeed with the science, such as Richter 10 by Arthur C. Clarke and Mike McQuay, which deals not so much with earthquakes-as-disasters as with earthquake prediction and earthquake control. But none of the books here cited can be regarded as examples of the "pure" disaster novel.

So the writers of "pure" disaster novels are confronted by a marketing problem, and The Rift is no exception: as noted, it is being published as sf; as hinted, it will thereby be ignored by a huge proportion of its natural readership. And there is a further problem for these writers: disaster novels have a formula that is imposed not by literary convention – as is, for example, the formula of high fantasy – but by the nature of the subject matter itself. There is thus not a great deal that can be done to alter it, to introduce new wrinkles.

The formula goes approximately like this:

• Stage One: Before the Disaster We are introduced to a bunch of characters who we know will survive the cataclysm. We follow them as they go about their daily lives, the purpose of such a treatment being to make sure we thoroughly identify with them – know them – so that we'll fully appreciate the rigours they will later undergo. (One or two of the lesser characters involved in this Stage may be snuffed out in Stage Two or even Stage Three. Because of their thorough introduction here we will be properly affected by the poignancy of their subsequent demise and thus convinced that this particular disaster really is, you know, big.) All of these characters, no matter where their starting points, will eventually be brought together and made to interact with each other by the dictates of the plot.

• Stage Two: The Disaster Itself Millions of spear-carriers meet their ends. Our plucky heroes have lots of jolly exciting adventures while losing a few supernumerary friends and relatives and being amazingly stiff-upper-lipped about these bereavements.

• Stage Three: A New Era Dawns The comet/earthquake/defective nuclear reactor/whatever has done its worst, and the significant characters from Stage One stagger around in the sudden preternatural silence as a new order is established either worldwide, or over a significant part of the globe, or merely within the characters' immediate surroundings. Martinets spring loathsomely from the debris of society, and can be regarded as sub-disasters or (fittingly in The Rift's context) aftershocks of the main one; they must in turn be survived and in due course erased. People learn things about themselves they never knew before and indeed would never have discovered had they not been subjected to conditions of extremis. New alliances are formed, often between odd couples ("I never dreamt that I, a lesbian professor of Greek philosophy in an obscure Midwestern university and part-time lecturer on the works of Eric Satie, would fall in love with a homophobic, Harley-Davidson-riding, rap-"singing", multiply tattooed bodybuilder half my age, but we've saved each other's lives three times now ..."). By the final page either some kind of post-disaster society is well on its way towards stability and an exciting future or the US Cavalry, in the form of outside governmental aid, has come charging over the hill to the rescue.

Constrained by this formula, the writer of the disaster novel must perforce concentrate her or his attentions on matters other than the injection of anything new into the overall plot. Obviously one major concern must be to make this a better page-turner, a rippinger yarn, than any of the competition; this is exactly the concern of the non-disaster adventure thriller, which is nothing if it can't be an unputdownable read. On a different front, the disaster novel is obviously an excellent venue in which to make acerbic social comment, and here it has immense flexibility in that not only is the field wide open for the writer to generate whatever post-disaster society s/he chooses – whatever villains, whatever saints – but also in that s/he can select at will the particular focus of the novel through choice of the group(s) of characters, among the many millions involved in the catastrophe, whose stories will form the story. Or the writer may elect to use the story as a means of drawing a moral – whether it be that nuclear reactors are the preserve of God, not Man; or that there is something rotten at the core of any democracy which chooses to ignore for political reasons (e.g., getting votes by keeping taxes artificially low) any likelihood of future mayhem on the grounds that it almost certainly won't happen in this US President's term of office; or that we tolerate neo-Nazi enemies within society at our peril; or that ...

It is manifestly evident that Walter Jon Williams, a deservedly eminent writer of science fiction, was aware of all these problems and constraints when he sat down to write The Rift. So far as sf was concerned he had little latitude, and so he confined himself on that front to first-rate descriptions of and explanations of earthquake mechanisms; indeed, as a seismological primer alone this book can be recommended to the lay reader for its fascinating infodumps. He therefore determined to write a hell of a good yarn in which social comment about the restless state of the contemporary USA, and in particular about that country's racial disharmonies and the sheer barbarism of its white-supremacist racialists (the novel's title is of course a pun), would be omnipresent without ever becoming hectoring.

To take the first of these aims first, how does The Rift shape up as an adventure thriller? The quake occurs not along the San Andreas Fault but in the major fault complex underlying the Mississippi/Missouri; since this is smack in the US heartland the consequences in terms of both social infrastructure and, more importantly, human lives are far more devastating than could be those of a Californian quake, located on the nation's periphery. Furthermore, there are three major temblors – all in the Richter 8+ region – rather than just the one (although the third of these has little impact upon either an already devastated land or the plot, so one wonders why it was introduced unless for symbolic/allegoric reasons that have escaped this reviewer). The central characters introduced in Stage One are: a black divorced male and a rebellious white adolescent male, Nick and Jason, who are thrown together immediately after the first quake and whose joint story is the backbone of the novel; a vile Ku Klux Klan male sheriff, Paxton, who with his even viler supporters will have an extermination camp up and running by Stage Three, so that they can be satisfyingly squelched by the good guys (and, yes, this reviewer raised a cheer when Paxton Got His); a white male fundamentalist Christian preacher, Frankland (not, repeat not, Falwell) and his simple-minded disciples, who believe the quake heralds the gaudier bits of Revelation; and the female General Frazetta, in charge of the military's attempts to ameliorate the consequences of the situation. Williams effects the convincing portrayal of these characters with differing degrees of success, achieving his aim with exceptional skill in the case of the heroes: Nick and Jason, with whom his heart and soul clearly lie, and Frazetta, who's just eminently likeable and as a result very immediately engages our understanding (although it grates that in the narrative she's referred to usually as Jessica, whereas a male equivalent would be referred to almost always by surname).

Williams has less success with the two groups of extremists. In order to round them out as people rather than paper tigers he struggles to show they're not entirely bad. Paxton is not as murderous as the psychopaths around him, and his attempt at mini-genocide is generated partly from weakness of character and partly from that in other contexts laudable characteristic, family loyalty, taken to ridiculous extremes: he encourages mass murder in order to protect his repulsively homicidal son (who doesn't even have the excuse of being a semi-literate dimwit, since he's a college boy an' all). Similarly, the much more interesting character Frankland, despite starting out as a caricature, becomes a sympathetic angel of mercy – feeding and sheltering local refugees, doing his best to make sure the sick are tended, etc. – before force of circumstance (folk have this irritating habit of wanting to leave his encampment and its nonstop diet of shrieked sermons) reveals the true sinisterness of his bigotry. Yet neither character entirely convinces – Paxton because who the hell cares if a psychopathic racist has a minor redeeming feature (to be fair, in the very late stages of the book there are some attempts to explain the cause of his racism) and Frankland because the earlier caricature is so beautifully executed that it's impossible for later developments to shift it from one's mind. Thus, quasi-paradoxically, it's easier for the reader to be chilled by the villain who is less of a real person and more of a cypher; an observation that could perhaps be tailored to equate with the technique whereby racists deliberately pervert their acolytes' (and their own) perceptions of the victims to mere cypherhood.

But, as noted, Williams's character portrayal is first-rate where it matters most: with Nick and Jason. They spend much of the novel travelling down the river in a not particularly waterworthy small boat, encountering friendly or hostile strangers and journeying towards Nick's reunion with his daughter and ex-wife and, although this is of course unplanned by them, Jason's unconsummated union with Nick's daughter, a practical demonstration that the racial rift of the book's title is an artificial one rather than something inherent in the human psyche. (The fact that scapegoating, of which racism is merely a very significant but hopefully transient facet, seems more deeply ingrained is an issue which Williams probably wisely avoids.) Perhaps more than half of this exceptionally long novel is devoted to their adventures, and as a result the tale rattles along at a satisfyingly accelerating pace; only the dullest of sticks would fail to find themselves reading later into the night than they'd intended. Williams's skill in this respect is best demonstrated by the lengthy passages located on the river, where a succession of seemingly unrelated adventures might well have become boring (one thinks of John Grisham's attempts in similar circumstances in his recent legal thriller The Testament) but are in fact thoroughly engrossing. As a direct consequence, Nick's and Jason's later travails under the temporary subjugations of first Frankland and then the murderous Paxton suitably raise the adrenalin levels: the turning pages become a bit of a blur. Also as a direct consequence of the strength of those river scenes, the denouement – whereby, although Nick has the anticipated happily-ever-after outcome, Jason achieves only a stage-backdrop Promised Land whose thin card ripples even as you watch – carries a truly powerful bittersweetness.

The writing of all this is hewn rather than crafted. To choose a passage at random:

All he asked was that someone go to his house to make sure that his wife was okay. It turned out that one of his own people could do that on his way to his own family, so that Jessica didn't even have to detail one of her own.*

[* This novel was read as a bound proof rather than as a finished copy. It is therefore possible that this particular passage may have been "tidied" by the time of publication. However, there are plenty of other examples.]

Elsewhere, in the space of a mere page and a half, we have "Fury flashed like fire along Nick's nerves", "Anger beat a slow throb in his temples", "Rage burst like a firework in Nick's brain" and "Fury simmered in his veins". Ten pages later, just as one has more or less recovered from this onslaught, one finds that "suddenly a graveyard chill ran up his spine, and he felt the winds of desolation blow in the hollow of his skull". Blimey. Yet for the most part this crudeness of language and imagery works towards the novel's benefit: it conveys a robustness, a lack of refinement, that is entirely appropriate to The Rift's robust themes. A more refined and polished telling might all too easily have insulated the reader from the true drama of the depicted events.

And yet, and yet, and yet ... there's something missing from the novel, and it's the sense that this disaster (or series of disasters) is genuinely large-scale. Yes, we feel the full force of its physical and psychological trauma, because there are people-who-could-be-us undergoing far more intense physical and psychological violence than most of us will, we hope, ever be unlucky enough to have to cope with. Yet – and this is the difficulty of the technique of concentrating on the experiences of a few characters as examples of what is going on on a far vaster scale – we are given nothing but the haziest perception of the real nature of the tragedy: that very vastness of effect. We are told of all kinds of devastations that are manifesting themselves offstage, but they're mere statistics: we are less affected by them than if we were watching scenes from the stricken regions on television or hearing news from the front on the radio. In short, Williams doesn't really manage to convey the bigness of his catastrophe – and it's difficult to see how he could have done given the constraints of his chosen formula.

This failure has repercussions also when it comes to the social-commentary aspect of the novel. Yes, we can accept that there's a racist rift in US society because we see it in microcosm in Paxton's horrific charnel house of a camp and because we're told this is just an extreme example of a widespread poison, but there's nothing in all these 726 pages that can convince our souls this is the case. We just have to accept it as the intellectual truth which it perhaps so obviously is. And thus we underestimate it.

In sum, then, The Rift admirably fulfils its function as a rattling yarn: it offers excellent and gripping entertainment. Perhaps, however, those looking for greater depths than this should seek not just elsewhere than in The Rift but in a subgenre other than the disaster novel.

—unknown venue

Passage

by Connie Willis

Bantam, 594 pages, hardback, 2001

Connie Willis's Doomsday Book (1992) was an sf novel that not only showed both exquisite humanity and an intimate knowledge of the way that real scientists go about their business but also – rarely for a genuine sf novel – transcended all genre limitations, being loved by the "I don't understand science fiction so I don't like it" brigade as much as by the aficionado. At first glance Passage looks set to repeat that major achievement: it is entirely accessible to any reader yet is certainly science fiction, while at the same time it has enough of the feel of fantasy to be readable as a technofantasy. By any standards it is a major novel – and I would certainly recommend it to all readers, whether sf devotees or not – but for reasons that I hope will become clear it is by far the lesser of the two books.

The plot goes thus. In Mercy General Hospital, which suffers from an Escher-like construction due to architectural modifications over the years and constant repair work in the now, psychologist Joanna Lander is conducting research into the near-death experience (NDE) through interviewing patients who have successfully been brought back from the brink. Her days are plagued by the presence in the hospital of anti-scientific "researcher" Maurice Mandrake, author of the bestselling Light at the End of the Tunnel, who spends much of his energies getting to NDE survivors first and persuading them (through the phenomenon that is known in dream research as "reading back") to remember their NDE as containing all the elements that bolster his own religious bigotry – Heaven, Jesus, the dearly beloved dead, angels and you name it. Obviously such survivors become useless as case studies for Joanna after Mandrake's interventions, because they quite genuinely believe they have experienced all the baloney he has implanted in their memories.

(Infodump. "Reading back", first isolated by researchers under the aegis of the Society for Psychical Research – which in its heyday was as scientifically rigorous as many another more revered 19th-century organization – is responsible for many, probably most, accounts of precognitive dreams. The phenomenon works like this. You might dream that ex-President Bill Clinton drowned in his swimming pool. A few days later, President George W. Bush trips over his own pretzel and breaks his neck. Because of the points of similarity in the two events – president, death – you will remember your dream as one of Bush breaking his neck; especially if there's a further coincidence such as Bush having been playing pool at the time of his accident. In no way will you be consciously doctoring your memory of the original dream; what seems to be the case is that the subconscious does its best to match the dream with the real-life event, and this comes into your conscious as a true memory. Not enough research has been done into this fascinating phenomenon, which is a form of auto-suggestion.)

Into this situation comes neurologist Richard Wright, who has isolated a psychotopic drug that can be used to simulate the NDE. Richard recruits Joanna to his research, and they get a few good results from volunteers. Then, however, a concatenation of circumstances dictates that Joanna herself should become a volunteer, despite Richard's profound reservations.

She discovers that some of the elements of the NDE trumpeted by the hated Mandrake are genuine, as was already indicated by the interviews she has conducted. Typically, her NDE starts with herself in a tunnel, at the end of which is a light. Over the course of several experiments, she reaches that light and progresses through the doorway it represents; however, she finds herself not in Heaven but aboard the Titanic scant hours away from its doom. Waking researches indicate that what she witnesses during her NDEs accord with the historical reality rather than with any cultural contaminants that might have affected her, such as watching the movie Titanic; yet of course there's always the possibility that she's mentally regurgitating historical accounts she might have read but forgotten having done so (approximately the Bridey Murphy syndrome). Even so, there's independent evidence that other NDE survivors have likewise found themselves aboard the Titanic.

Theories spark between Joanna and Richard much as love sparks between them (and it does). The sinking of the Titanic – or any other major disaster – might be an analogue of the physiological disaster that is death; the subconscious, seeking to represent the process of the organs one by one giving up the struggle, might use the Titanic disaster, in close detail, as a symbol. Alternatively, the despairing signals that the Titanic sent out until the final moments before foundering could be seen as analogues of the dying body sending out desperate SOS messages.

The truth turns out to be stranger than that.

There is lots to love about this absorbing novel. Yet it suffers some from serious flaws – really, a surfeit of manifestations of a single serious flaw.

Maurice Mandrake is a bore and a philosophical bigot. Joanna spends much of her time trying to avoid meeting him; sometimes she is unsuccessful in this. She also tries to avoid the volunteer Wojakowski, booted out of her and Richard's program when they discover he's a compulsive (but unwitting) liar; his main character trait is to force his largely fictional war reminiscences on all listeners, however reluctant. Then there's Maisie, the cute kid forever on the edge of death whose hobby is historical disasters; she is a master of the art of prolonging conversations with anyone she likes. And finally there's the insane architecture of the hospital, which involves Joanna (and Richard, the other focus character) having to make protracted calculations every time she wants to get from A to B.

The trouble with portraying boring, tedious characters and circumstances is that in order to convey the boredom and tedium you have to show them being repeatedly boring and tedious ... and Willis spends a great deal of her time, certainly fifty and possibly a hundred pages, doing exactly this. Mandrake might be a comic cut to start with – likewise Wojakowski – but soon I began to dread his every appearance. Maisie is in so many ways an adorable character, but even so I soon tired of her company; she's the kid you babysit for whom you initially love for her inventive ways of putting off bedtime but eventually get heartily sick of. The calculations of navigation around the Escherian hospital pall especially rapidly.

All of these tedia formed an interesting false theory in the mind of this reviewer: that the denouement would be that Joanna was suffering an NDE from the novel's very outset, and that her NDE took the form of an anxiety dream – one of those dreams in which one is eternally entangled in seemingly meaningful pointlessness, and is constantly in the thrall of frustration. To partially reiterate, anxiety dreams are pretty tedious to experience and even more so when recounted by others.

Luckily Willis is an extremely fluent writer; in less deft hands than hers this composite flaw might see the book being thrown at the nearest wall or snored over, but she just about manages to carry one through the frequent scenes of boredom because of her sheer narrative facility – and because the other elements of the novel are so completely fascinating. Coming to the end of reading Passage is like having eaten a superbly planned and cooked meal that would have perfectly satisfied you – a delightfully memorable feast – except that some dolt added dodgy french fries, which have both somewhat overfilled you and spoiled the experience as a whole. One wishes Willis's editor had been a bit stricter.

—Infinity Plus

The Haunted Air: A Repairman Jack Novel

by F. Paul Wilson

Gauntlet Press, 462 pages, hardback, limited edition, 2002

F. Paul Wilson should listen a bit more carefully to the music of Meat Loaf. On page 124 of this novel he significantly misjudges the performances of the excellent interpreter and the accomplishments of his primary songwriter, Jim Steinman; in particular, Wilson clearly hasn't paid proper attention to the wit of Steinman's lyrics. Pshaw, I say. And pshaw again.

Repairman Jack and his girlfriend Gia are dragged along by a ditzy friend to see the psychic Ifasen in Astoria, NYC. As soon as Gia steps in the doorway of Ifasen's house there is a minor earthquake, and soon it is discovered that a gaping crack has opened up in the floor of the house's cellar. Ifasen himself is clearly terrified, and Jack spots a bullet hole in the window.

Soon a story emerges. Ifasen is in reality Lyle Kenton from Detroit, and he and his brother Charlie are running a bogus psychic operation. Because of their growing success they're taking customers from other, much more predatory bogus psychics, one of whom is attempting to terrorize them out of business. In an entertaining major subplot of the novel, Jack "repairs" this situation for the two brothers, whom he and Gia come much to like.

The two other, more major strands of the novel are considerably more sombre.

That crack in the cellar heralds the full-scale poltergeist haunting of the house, and Gia sees the ghost of a sweet little girl whose heart has been plucked out. The main protagonists – Jack, Gia, Lyle, Charlie – are obviously keen to bring peace to this pitiful wandering spirit.

Independently, Jack is hired by an enigmatic Irishman to keep watch over the Irishman's "brother" for the few days around the new moon in case the "brother" does someone harm. The brother, Eli Bellitto, proves utterly dissimilar from Jack's employer, but Jack carries out the commission nevertheless. Catching Bellitto and gorilla-like henchman Adrian Minkin snatching a small boy from the sidewalk, Jack, assuming they're paedophiles, rescues the child, beats up Minkin and stabs Bellitto privily.

The two strands in due course coalesce. The ghost-child, Tara Portman, is only one of a long, long succession of children murdered so that a thirteen-strong group, the Circle, can attain immortality through periodically eating the still-beating hearts of the "lambs" they seize.

This, the sixth in Wilson's series of novels about Repairman Jack, is at one level a tremendously enjoyable ghost story. It bears a few superficial similarities – mere coincidental details – to Clive Barker's recently published Coldheart Canyon, but as a ghost story is far more successful.

It is arguably far more successful as a novel, too. Although the plot presents plenty of opportunities for gratuitous gore, Wilson wisely eschews them, instead concentrating on the action and the fun. And there some pleasing ideas floating around as well, among them one that Wilson has been developing over the series. There is no such thing as a good God or an evil Satan each trying to gain dominion over the world, according to this notion. Instead, there are two competing entities in creation, neither of which is more good or more evil than the other – neither of which, in fact, gives a tinker's cuss about humanity. The one that would like to take over Earth is called, in Jack's terminology, the Otherness. He has no real name for the entity who currently "owns" us, calling it by default the anti-Otherness.

Through his earlier adventures, Jack has come to be regarded by the anti-Otherness as a useful tool. One could regard him as one of the anti-Otherness's field agents were it not that this term would imply Jack was promoting the anti-Otherness's cause of his own volition. In fact, Jack is emotionally not really on either side in this unseen, unimaginable contest; his allegiance is to human beings and, even more narrowly, to those human beings close to him. That the Otherness's behaviour is generally so destructive and disgusting does mean that it generally suits Jack to act in accordance with the wishes of the anti-Otherness to counter the efforts of the Otherness. The possibility remains open, however, that one day Jack will find himself in a situation where it is the anti-Otherness he wishes to fight against; should Wilson decide to explore that possibility it will make for an extremely interesting piece of fiction-writing.

One side-effect of Jack's having become the anti-Otherness's catspaw is that there is no longer any such thing in his life as coincidence. A detractor might scoff that this facilitates Wilson's plotting no end – it is, after all, a diminishingly small probability that the person whom Jack is hired to watch over, among the millions of people in NYC, should be the very villain whose deeds explain the haunting of the Kentons' house. But such a gibe would ignore the elegance of the notion that both Otherness and anti-Otherness are engaged in what is fundamentally, as it were, a contest of storytelling. Each is trying to carve out stories that will be to its own advantage; we are merely characters in those stories, largely subject to the authors' whim. Jack, of course, is again the wild card in this conceit: he is the character all fiction-writers talk about who takes on a life of his own, who is conscious of the author and who may or may not do what he's told. At the moment, as noted, he does largely what he's told; much of the dynamic arises from that possibility that this may not always be so.

There is some laziness in The Haunted Air's characterization. Jack and especially Gia never become particularly clear as real people, although this doesn't matter much in an action tale. Gia's daughter Vicky is a complete cypher. Where it grates a little is in the Identikit characterization of Jack's pal Abe, who is so stereotypically Jewish that you keep expecting him to burst into one of the songs from Fiddler on the Roof just to make sure the reader really does realize he's, you know, Jewish; and the similar treatment of the Kenton brothers, who are by far the most fully rounded and likable characters in the book despite, rather than because of, Charlie's constant and ever so self-conscious use of supposed African-American street slang. (Lyle occasionally lapses into it as well, although he has educated himself to speak quasi-instinctively as an East African, that image being better for business.) It is as if Charlie, every time he gets to the end of a sentence and realizes to his horror that nowhere in it has there appeared an item of identificatory black idiom, tacks on an extra clause just to make absolutely bloody sure we know he's not a honky. Much of this unnecessary, artificial verbiage disappears from his speech during the book's most dramatic sequence, when Charlie and Gia are fighting for their lives against supernatural malice; one wishes the same could have been the case throughout.

Wilson is no high stylist, but his prose in this novel performs its function well. The overkill present in some of his other novels – where it can seem that, whenever stuck for a new plot development, he defaults to extreme cataclysm – is absent here, and that is much to the novel's benefit. Indeed, I would recommend this brisk and lively novel to anyone who has tried Wilson before and been at best so-so about the prospect of trying him again: The Haunted Air is very good entertainment.

One can even – almost – forgive the author his silly remarks about Meat Loaf.

—Infinity Plus

Hosts: A Repairman Jack Novel

by F. Paul Wilson

Gauntlet, 363 pages, hardback, limited edition, 2001

Sandy Palmer, cub reporter for a scuzzy New York tabloid weekly, The Light, is on the subway when a maniac gunman opens up with a pair of automatics. Before the lunatic can kill too many, the guy who's been sitting opposite Sandy, and whom Sandy has hardly noticed, pulls out a weapon of his own and efficiently shoots the maniac dead. At the next station the vigilante hero leaps out and loses himself in the crowd. Sandy determines to (a) track down the man he dubs The Savior (he succeeds), (b) thereby become a star reporter for The Light (he succeeds), and (c) get into the pants of Beth, the pretty student he was hitting on when the gunman opened fire (it's no spoiler to say that he vigorously and repeatedly succeeds, oh my).

The reason The Savior is desperate for anonymity is that he is in fact the enigmatic Repairman Jack, living somewhere beyond the fringes of the law and earning his living by "repairing" bad situations – rather like a private detective but with more reliance on firepower to solve problems. Few know his identity except his pal Abe who, under cover of running a sports shop, is in fact a seller of sophisticated weaponry to Repairman Jack and, presumably, the criminal fraternity. (A nice little touch, for sf readers, is that Abe's overt establishment is called the Isher Sports Shop.)

And Jack is about to get a new client. The mystery woman on the telephone proves when they finally meet to be, by astonishing coincidence, his long-estranged sister Kate. Divorced, Kate has discovered why her marriage didn't work so well, and is now in a long-term lesbian relationship with Jeanette. But of late Jeanette has been behaving very strangely, and Kate traces this change of personality to when Jeanette was cured of a – diagnosed – inoperable brain tumour by the radical new technique developed by a surgeon called Fielding. More and more frequently, Jeanette is slipping away for sessions with what seems rather like a coven, headed by the enigmatic Holdstock.

Jack discovers a side-effect of Fielding's technique is that the patients develop such a strong sense of telepathy between each other they are creating a group mind that is somewhat more than the sum of its parts. This group mind is desperate to add to its size by infecting further individuals with contaminated blood – a mere pinprick can be enough. Kate and Jack are accordingly infected in this way, and much of the tension in this highly readable thriller is generated by the fact that both know that, unless they can do something about it, within a few days they will lose their identities to the group mind.

This reviewer has had difficulty with the various F. Paul Wilson novels he's read in the past because of Wilson's general tendency to default to the apocalyptic: if the threatened end of the universe cannot be brought into play, then at the very least the human species must be in danger of extinction. And so it is here. Jack and Kate know – and if they didn't they'd get a clue from their own apocalyptic dreams – that, if they don't succeed in stopping the rot pretty swiftly, the human species as we know it is doomed. In the case of Hosts, however, the melodramatic possible consequences of the success or otherwise of our heroes do not seem so intrusive: they seem a logical follow-on from the less ostentatious actions of the characters, and are kept at a reasonable distance from the main thrust.

Refreshingly, there is humour here, too, mainly brought about by a subplot involving a pair of bumbling hoodlums who have sworn to assassinate Jack in revenge for his having helped them hoist themselves with their own petard – almost literally – in a previous adventure.

This is by no means a major novel – in no sense could it be thought of as having the ambition to extend its genre in any way, or even to make the reader think – yet it certainly is a hugely enjoyable sf/fantasy/horror thriller, and very hard to put down. My only real criticism is that it doesn't allow the group mind properly to put forward its own case. An argument could be, but isn't, made that the loss of our individualities into, eventually, a single species-mind might have benefits as well as drawbacks – in other words, if the group mind of the tale is genuinely philanthropic (albeit misguided), which it clearly believes itself to be despite its readiness to kill in order to advance its cause, then it should be permitted to state its rationale, even if we reject (as inevitably we would) its reasoning. Instead, it is assumed that any form of group mind is per se a complete evil, an anathema to all that is human, and that the reader will regard it with complete revulsion and accept the slaughter of the human members of the group mind as of no consequence – or, rather, something to applaud. As, to be true, probably most readers will. Yet there is something slightly unsatisfying about a novel that in effect says to us: the baddies are bad because they're bad. A more ambitious work might have offered us a fair presentation of the motivations of the foe.

—Infinity Plus

The World and Other Places

by Jeanette Winterson

Jonathan Cape, 234 pages, hardback, 1998

This is a cute little book. Its pages are (I know, because I've measured them with the battered plastic 12-inch – or should that be 30cm? – ruler that my daughter used at school, which was a very good school, a dearie-aye-and-dandy school where the rich folk with their big cars and their peacock-feather strutting chests sent the children of quality) seven and one-quarter inches tall and five and one-quarter inches by the horizontal dimension – although both of my measures would be different if issued as by order of God Herself in the European system.

That is one of this book's mysteries. Its cuteness.

It is also cute because there are wide spaces between the lines of text, so there are not so many words on each page that the senses are confused. There are also lots of blank pages. For both reasons, there are not many words in the book as a whole. Dedicated Winterson devotees will perhaps be grateful: less to memorize.

Another mystery is that it has very pretty endpapers but that no artist is acknowledged for these.

Maybe there was no artist.

~

The book would have had even fewer words had it been copy-edited. No verb is unadverbed, no noun unadjectived.

~

There are seventeen stories in this book, as well as a half-finished Afterword and an Acknowledgements section that mentions no names and gives no details of the stories' original publication. And why should we want such details? After all:

... when we read something for the first time, for us, that is the moment at which it is written. When we read something again, our own past and present collide.

That is a good point about our own past and present colliding. I do not understand what it means, but it is obviously a good point: it has poetic truth.

If I could understand what "poetic truth" is I could hear the bang as my past and present collided.

~

Most of the stories in this cutely shaped book (did I mention the cuteness?) are not really stories at all. They are more like leaves from a journal, albeit a journal that may on occasion be a fictional one. "The Poetics of Sex", for example, is a collection of thoughts, arbitrarily arranged, that Ms Winterson has (or has had?) about her lover, as if these needed to be explained (justified?) to a heterosexual, such is their uniqueness. Yea, the bright armour of lesbianism gleams! (I'm not sure what that means, either, but the stream of my consciousness, like the eyes of a person flu-inflicted on television and in possibly Haiti but maybe somewhere else, plashes whither it will.) And unique such thoughts are, for straight old me has never had any like them:

She is all the things a lover should be and quite a few a lover should not. Pin her down? She's not a butterfly. I'm not a wrestler. She's not a target. I'm not a gun. Tell you what she is? She's not Lot no. 27 and I'm not one to brag.

When I have listened to the bang of my past and present colliding I will move on to wrestling with butterflies.

~

Others of these stories, these "stories", these pretend-stories, these pseudo-stories, these essays of the vital, pumping organs, possess, obfuscated among their roiling and rollicking poetry, their exquisite ecstasy of word-weaving, woven into their tapestry of iridescent (coruscating?) prose, something approaching a plot. "The 24-Hour Dog", to choose one at random, is about someone who gets a puppy and, discovering that it needs to be looked after, takes it back. I had never thought of this before, and am unlikely to again.

Indeed, a recurring theme, a trope, of these pieces is of failure, of the inability, for reasons good or ill, to finish something started, or even properly to start it at all.

I am wondering if I am going to be able to finish this book.

~

There are frequent line-spaces – often two in every page – to break up the prose. At first I wonder if this is roisteringly, ruddily done in an attempt not to overchallenge the reader's attention span. But then I realize Ms Winterson is using the device to emphasize the good bits.

Rather like Stella Gibbons used asterisks.

~

There is the whiff of fantasy to all the pieces gathered here, but most of them – where my limited understanding can encompass their meaning at all – are to do with the mundane. (The prime example is the title story, which is about the making of fantasy and then its ultimate reduction to, almost, the mundane.) They pour a fantastic sheen onto the everyday, as when someone "shakes his head like a collecting box for a good cause". (Did he, in that case, shake it right off? A more prosaic writer would drably inform us on this point. But to do so

here would

cast an unwanted pebble

into the tranquil pond of

prose poetry. Making it ripple like a raspberry. I scream. Quietly, so as not to offend the neighbours. If I still have any.)

~

There are, however, some straightforward fantasies (phantasies?). "Turn of the World" presents us with four fantasticated settings yearning to have something set in them; they are prettily described but not especially nouveaux, so that the overall effect is of four Ratners (Ranters?) rings sans their artificial gems.

"The Three Friends" is a brief fable and, although its meaning is obscure, is affecting: Ms Winterson has successfully tapped into the true stuff of fairytale.

"Disappearance I" is more like sf than fantasy, being placed in a world – most probably a future world – where it is at least illicit and possibly illegal to sleep, but where some are paid to sleep so that the non-sleepers can witness their dreams. This is a world we have visited before, and again there is little new said.

And then there is "Disappearance II", a skein of silver lining (linen? linoleum?) amid the clouds of self-indulgence. This is a taut little horror story where, for once, the flurry of misplaced words works to advantage. It is that rare thing, a successful fantasy of perception: we can accept the banal explanation of the tale (that the owner of some vastly vast stately pile has made love and death to an out-of-season visitor, then stowed the corpse in some remote antechamber where it will never be found, not even by himself), but the narrator doesn't, and we don't. The whole can be read – and preferably read several times – as an allegory of the losing of brief love, as a moving portrait of a mind going awry, or as a fantastication, and is rewarding in each respect.

~

One fine story out of seventeen pieces, most of which resemble the excesses of (hey ho) feasibly talented but as yet hardly promising students at creative-writing evening classes. The strike rate is not bludgeoningly high. For the most part (

She drifted away from me, her dress clinging to her like a drowned man.

), reader, I am that drowned man.

—Foundation and Infinity Plus

Going, Going, Gone

by Jack Womack

HarperCollins Voyager, 218 pages, paperback, 2000

This is one of those great little novels that's far, far too likely to go unnoticed: a cheaply produced, seemingly uncopyedited, possibly unproofread and certainly rather expensive paperback original, it has been shoved hesitantly onto the market in the traditional book-trade death zone of early December, when booksellers are too tied up in the festive frenzy of discovering how vastly they've over-ordered all the October books that no one wants to buy for Christmas to be remotely interested in stocking any further titles. The bright side of this is that publishing a new book at such a time is almost inevitably an express one-way ticket to the remainder bookshop, so that by the time you read this you may be able to pick up Going, Going, Gone for a fraction of the price indicated above.

And pick it up you should, because this novel is a delight. A glorious mixture of almost Ron Goulartish humour with the sensibilities and linguistic style of cyberpunk (albeit without the cyber), it's not just a great entertainment but also an alternate-reality story of sufficient conceptual complexity that its ramifications continue to turn over in the mind for some while after the last page has been read.

In an alternate USA where black people are officially considered related to the great apes rather than Homo sapiens, and have therefore been exterminated or forcibly deported, Walter Bullitt is a government-sponsored terrorist whose task is to infiltrate perceivedly radical groups and disrupt or destroy them by selling them the latest psychotopic drugs – which drugs he habitually samples himself for kicks. When first he starts being haunted, he assumes the ghosts are bye-products of the hallucinogens. By the time he realizes this is not so, two strange and strangely talking people have entered his life: one a huge and cheerfully homicidal cyborg and the other a petite and oddly fascinating woman, Eulie, with whom he promptly falls in love. They prove to be from an alternate reality; the ghosts are symptoms that the alternate reality and Walter's own reality are in danger of imminent collision. After much else, the two realities do indeed collide; the result of their fusion is seemingly our own reality, and in it Walter, now united with Eulie, is seemingly Jack Womack himself.

There are plenty of jokes and injokes – about a decaying New York hotel Walter remarks that "you could tell it wouldn't be long before management finally wrapped its mouth around the gas pipe, and let in sci-fi conventions" – and any amount of sparkily witty stylishness in the writing, so the occasional jolts and jars caused by the lack of copyediting seem hardly to matter. (For example, it could be the case that the hotel just described is near Schubert, rather than Shubert, Alley in Walter's reality, but one suspects this is simply an error.) One mistake does grate: once in Eulie's reality Walter can make no sense of the language spoken there, yet can read the ingredients list on a packet of instant coffee without any difficulty. Slight though this discrepancy might seem, it has the effect of puncturing the very effective portrayal Womack has been up to that point creating of an alternate New Jersey. It should have been picked up by his editor.

But that's a small grump in light of the many delights that Going, Going, Gone has to offer. The one regret a newcomer to this author is likely to have is that there are only six other Womack novels to read while waiting for his next one.

—Infinity Plus

The Otherhood

by Lytchcov Zammana

American Book Publishing, 340 pages, paperback, 2001

Sometime not too far from now, Victor Jones falls foul of a family/business feud, and his mind is genetically transported into the following: (1) the year 2084; (2) the body of one of his descendants, Viceroy Jones; (3) an organic, sentient California megalopolis called the Terramyd, ruled by descendants antagonistic to him. Meanwhile, the mind of Viceroy Jones has been transported back to near-future California and into the body of his ancestor, Victor Jones. In their two different and differently unfamiliar new-found eras, the "brothers" have adventures battling against a tyranny headed by a member of their own family.

Zammana's ambition in this fiction is to be commended – indeed, admired. Unfortunately, the standard of writing isn't quite up to the ambition; if ever there was a case for a nurturing editor, this book is it. With the characters being little more than names and the immensely complex interior of the Terramyd being always described rather than experienced, it becomes virtually impossible for readers – this reader, at least – to keep a grasp on what's actually going on at any particular moment. That said, for the ambition and imaginative fervour alone, The Otherhood is well worth a look.

—Infinity Plus

Magic Time

by Marc Scott Zicree and Barbara Hambly

Eos, 373 pages, hardback, 2001

Crackpot scientists at a covert Government research centre have been working on a device whose purpose is unclear. The team leader decides to press the button even though the proper testing hasn't been done. For some reason, all electrical devices, including communications devices, stop working throughout the USA and possibly the whole world. Most people start transmogrifying into exaggerated archetypes based on their pre-existing personalities and, often, develop paranormal powers. Looters, rapists and murderers fill the streets. Planes plummet from the sky. Headed by Martha Stewart, mobs crazed through being deprived of watching Martha Stewart on tv rampage through the city streets, slaughtering everyone in sight by cramming them into kitchen blenders ...

Okay, I admit it: that last sentence was a fib. But you get the general idea. This is a disaster novel in which, as in so many disaster novels, idiot technologists bring about global doom through their asinine recklessness. Where it differs, of course, is that the ramifications involve nothing so trivial as nuclear winter but the rapid alteration of human beings into strange monsters and superhumans possessed of seemingly magical abilities.

As in most disaster novels, we follow the adventures of various groups of plucky survivors whose fates eventually intertwine. The main group is that of which callow lawyer Cal Griffin is a part. In order to save his teenage ballet-dancing sister Tina, now transformed into an aethereal floating creature, from the clutches of his rapacious ex-boss Stern, now transformed into a dragon, he has to become in effect St George, complete with sword. He's aided by buddies like Colleen, a real tough broad with a heart of gold; Doc, an exiled medic from behind the Iron Curtain who since arrival in the USA has been flogging hot dogs; and Goldie, a Manhattan street crazy who's (nudge, nudge) not so goddam crazy after all. Tina picks up from the ether that there are two sources of the disturbances, one to the south and one to the west, so off go our disparate pals on a quest to Do Something About It.

More, perhaps, than any other form of genre literature, the disaster novel has a template; the broad outlines of that template can be easily enough deduced from the above. When reading a disaster novel, therefore, you don't expect to find many surprises in terms of the overall plot. What you look for instead are strong involvement with the characters and gripping, fast-paced adventure narration – as well as for any new variations on the template, although this latter is less important. Unfortunately, Magic Time – at the end of which the tale is only half told, so, oh fuck, a sequel seems inevitable – falls short on both counts.

The main problem is the characterization – without much feeling of involvement with the protagonists, any adventures they might have seem distanced, as if they were players in a tv soap opera glanced at from time to time while one's doing something else. Who really cares if Cal saves Tina from a fate worse than death at the mercy of the dragon – and at the best of times it's pretty difficult to imagine how a massive dragon is going to have its way with a small, aethereal humanoid – if in fact all three characters are merely jerkily moving puppets on someone else's stage? There's a sense, too, while reading Magic Time that the authors were likewise less than fully convinced by their own characters, rather as if they'd planned out a movie script with all the requisite stereotypes and plot events but left it to the actors to bring the characters to life, to make them people.

Another obstacle to involvement is the nature of the catastrophe. One can accept that the side-effects of the device might be pretty implausible, but there seems no rationale for the device ever having been invented in the first place. What was it intended to do? Was it some new bit of war technology? – something of the order of the Goons' Bracerot, perhaps: "The enemy will never be able to resist us if they're all turned into parsnips, Neddy." Or was it supposed to transform humanity into something superhuman, shoving us along through a passel of evolutionary leaps? Neither answer seems to be the correct one, yet there's no other on offer; with the result that we seem to be reading about a disaster that has no cause. This lack of any underpinning once again distances us from the characters: since there's no obvious reason for them to be in the situations they're in, the fact that those situations are mere artifices, mere whims of the storytellers, is constantly at the forefront of the mind, as is the realization that the novel as a whole has been written according to template.

Still, still, all could maybe be rescued if the writing itself were gripping. Sadly, it plods – and it's not helped by disruptive misspellings all over the place: "ibuprophen", "Gurjieff", "leeching" (for "leaching"), "peddled" (for "pedalled/pedaled"), "nickle" ...

There is one aspect of Magic Time, however, that is really exceptional: the cover illustration, done by Iain McCaig. This appears to be a piece of concept art for a tv series or tv movie related to the novel, and it's very striking indeed.

Pedestrian writing, cardboard characters, a plot without rationale, an adherence to template ... All of these comments might suggest that Magic Time is an out-and-out stinker. In fact, it's not quite that bad. Its real problem, for all the reasons cited, is that it's boring.

—Infinity Plus

TWO GROUP REVIEWS

Cruci-Fiction

The Jesus Thief

by J.R. Lankford

Great Reads Books, 285 pages, hardback, 2003

Cloning Christ

by Peter Senese with Robert Geis

Orion Publishing & Media, 333 pages, hardback, 2003

It seems there is a season for novels about the cloning of Jesus Christ, and we're in the middle of it; in addition to the two discussed here there has recently (January 2003) been published the first volume, In His Image, of an entire trilogy of them, James BeauSeigneur's Christ Clone Trilogy. The tv miniseries cannot surely be far away, doubtless to be followed by the reality show: Survivors of the Cross. The two novels discussed here are of astonishingly different standards; I cannot speak for BeauSeigneur's series as I have not seen it.

J.R. Lankford's The Jesus Thief is essentially a thriller with sciencefictional and theological overtones. Improbably wealthy Dr Felix Rossi is part of the latest team permitted by the Vatican to examine the Turin Shroud. He has plotted to snip a tiny thread from one of the apparently bloodstained areas in order to attempt to create a clone of Christ. His plans become more urgent when he discovers, just before his trip, that, while raised a Catholic, he is in fact the child of Jews who sought refuge from Nazism in the USA and adopted Catholicism in order better to fit in; since Jews are held responsible for Christ's death and persecuted as a result, reasons Rossi, then his restoration by a Jew might decrease the attacks.

Thread snipped, back home he goes, and he sets to work in the laboratory in his luxury Manhattan apartment. His maid Maggie, discovering what's up, volunteers herself as the vessel for the developing fetus; she, it proves, is a virgin, so could hardly be more suitable for the role.

The owner of Rossi's apartment block is a Mr Brown, whose enigmatic doings are mysterious indeed; even his closest aides seem to know little of their nature beyond that some of the most powerful people in the world seem to be beholden to him. One of the building's doormen, Sam, is among Mr Brown's little army of agents-cum-hired-muscles. However, Sam falls in love with Maggie, and thereby soon becomes allied to Rossi's cause – which, for reasons scrutable only to himself, Mr Brown strenuously opposes.

Despite this opposition, Rossi has enough money to evade pursuers, with Sam's active help, and Maggie's pregnancy slowly advances ...

It's all tremendous page-turning fun, and it has also some more thoughtful elements that make it – unlike so many thrillers – a rollercoaster ride that one actually remembers after finishing the book. Here, for example, is a little bit of dialogue that not only gives the rationale for the tale but also rather nicely deals with any idea that the cloning of Christ might be in some way blasphemous:

"That's true," Maggie said. "Every Sunday in my church the preacher climbs the pulpit and talks to mostly women and children and precious few of them. Can't hardly find a man there at all. You know why? Because religions won't change. We got six billion people already, and the Pope's out telling Catholics to have billions more. People got common sense. They know better than that. The Jews are still carrying on about eating pork chops and Trick or Treating on Halloween. So is the Christian right. I mean, do you really think an all-loving, all-knowing, omnipotent God is worried about Trick or Treat?"

[Rossi] looked confused. "Then why are you doing this, Maggie?"

"Because I think we need him to come back. Religions have stood still but their congregations haven't. People have moved on and, Dr. Rossi, I'm telling you that's God's plan. It was him that made us thinkers, him that made us curious. Take a baby in diapers, put him alone in a room with a box, and the baby's gonna crawl to that box and see what's in it."

As befits a first novel, The Jesus Thief isn't entirely flawless. I could personally have done with a few less than the half dozen or so moments of spontaneous religious ecstasy (or whatever) experienced by one or other of the characters – you know: okay, so we know s/he's a holy roller, now could you please get on with the story? And just once or twice Lankford fumbles with the motivations of her characters; for example, Sam's reaction, when he first discovers that Rossi is experimenting with Maggie, seems totally out of proportion to the situation. Quite frankly, though, the tale rattles along so fast in all other respects that these minor blips are easily ignored.

The contrast with Cloning Christ, by Peter Senese "with Robert Geis", could hardly be greater. To be honest, I'm somewhat hesitant to say what I really think about this novel, because any description I give of its dreadfulness will surely come across as just a spate of negative hyperbole.

Archaeologist/geneticist Max Train, who a decade or so ago was accused and acquitted of massacring his family, is in Israel excavating with his old friend Luke Gartner and a couple of graduate students. In a cave they discover what appears to be the True Cross. As they examine further, an explosion kills all except Train, who escapes a fusillade of gunfire to bear much of the Cross away for analysis and in due course, using the bloodstains, for the attempt to clone Christ. Nasty Cardinal Anselm Mugant, hearing of this, mounts a clandestine, unsanctioned mission to stop him at all costs, including mass murder – which is carried out joyously by a psychopath called The Scorpion. We know that The Scorpion is very nasty indeed, because the authors tell us so, repeatedly; one suspects they'd have shifted to boldface in order to make this even plainer had they thought they could get away with it.

The problem Cloning Christ has is that it is execrably written, so that for much of the time I was scratching my head trying to work out what the hell was actually going on. The main characters do presumably have motivations, but I'm as baffled as to what they might be as I was before I started reading. The blurb, perhaps, gives a clearer clue than the book itself in this latter regard:

Mugant is made to represent how Man, when completely self-serving, can actually do great harm, including the destruction of God's Way no matter his original intention... . Mugant soon enlists the services of the internationally rumored assassin known simply as "The Scorpion" to track down Max and silence him with death. The Scorpion, a one-time penitent of the Cardinal, is a force of pure evil and who challenges life. He forces this same challenge onto Max as he casts a deadly shadow over his praised soul and every move he makes.

Adding intricate subterfuge to the plot is the existence of Mugant's "Fifth Crusade", five international industrialists with great power and reach devout in the Cardinal's perspective on human genetic science. Together, Mugant launches an all-out attack to find the ancient artifacts in Train's possession, and prevent the genetic scientist from doing the unthinkable in his eyes – announcing to the world a cross containing bodily remnants could indeed be the True Cross of Jesus of Nazareth – and clone the body of Christ!

I've quoted a little more of the blurb than need be in order to give you a flavour of the writing; please let us have no cheap jokes about the phrase "prevent the genetic scientist from doing the unthinkable in his eyes". The text is littered with homophones – "threw" for "through", "shown" for "shone", "their" for "there", "scene" for "seen", "peaked" for "piqued", etc. – but the problems go far, far beyond mere lack of proofreading. Or lack of copy-editing, come to that: a kindly copy-editor might have introduced the authors to the pluperfect ("He clapped his hands in song, participating in the gypsy-like festivities that occurred daily on the Spanish steps for centuries") and other items of basic grammar:

Rapid sonorous beats of turmoil and uncertainty pulsed in his head to near unimaginable proportions as the potential ramifications perpending if what he expected to discover was to come true overtook him.

Here are some further curios that any competent copy-editor would surely have picked up:

His itinerant brown eyes darted onto the dim city street outside.

Presumably they were on their way to some gypsy-like festivities.

The Scorpion smirked before sending a bullet into Francesco's forehead. Looking around the blood and gut-spattered dining room, the killer ...

How a single bullet to the head could have spattered the room with guts is anyone's guess.

"The Crusader vision of our equestrian order is at the service of our faith" were words from Muhlor's investiture into a centuries old order of Church knighthood that he carried with him everywhere.

A weighty religious burden indeed. And:

The patron licked his fingers with saliva.

It is of course a great shame for Lankford that these two novels, with such similar themes, should have come out almost at the same time, since word of mouth about the Senese/Geis book will inevitably affect sales of hers: "You know that novel about cloning Christ? Well, I found it unreadable ..." It's worth your effort to make sure you have the two clearly distinguished in your mind, because The Jesus Thief is a thoroughly entertaining tale with just about the right amount of thought-provoking ingredients in the mix.

—Infinity Plus

Across the Sea of Genre

Vitals

by Greg Bear

Del Rey, 368 pages, hardback, 2002

The Visitor

by Sheri S. Tepper

Eos, 416 pages, hardback, 2002

The Dragon Queen

by Alice Borchardt

Del Rey, 480 pages, hardback, 2001

This is a column about three fantasy novels. To be sure, two of them would be more generally described as science fiction, but we should bear in mind the final, all-encompassing definition of sf as promulgated by none other than this reviewer, who should therefore know if anyone does: "Science fiction is that subgenre of fantasy which panders to the scientific pretensions of its readers and writers." So here are three novels which, between them, cover the full spectrum of fantasy from hard(ish) sf to the purest stuff itself.

I suppose Greg Bear's Vitals is more likely to find its way onto the technothriller shelves than the hard sf ones, despite Bear's excellent credentials in the latter discipline. Gene scientist Hal Cousins is a researcher into immortality, his approach being that Death entered the ecosystem not at the same time as the emergence of Earth's first lifeforms but some little while after. Accordingly he retrieves from the deep ocean trenches some of the most primordial organisms there are, and finds that indeed his hunch is backed up by the facts. What he doesn't know is that others have been here before him; not only are they murderously eager to protect their secret but they have learnt how to use what are effectively the same techniques to create insane monsters out of the innocent. Researchers into longevity, including Cousins's own brother, are being knocked off on all sides, and it is soon brought dramatically to his attention – not least by the endeavours of an enigmatic eccentric called Rudy Banning – that he's more or less next on the list. Naturally, Cousins teams up with those he assumes are the good guys in order to counter the secret tyranny of the quasi-immortals ...

This is all promising stuff, of course. Throw in a loony scientist or three – which Bear dutifully does – and you have all the makings of the standard technothriller. The trouble is that Bear, while getting the "techno" part right, paints in the "thriller" aspects as if by numbers. Yes, there's the paranoia of not knowing whether any particular character among the goodies can actually be trusted, because the baddies have spies and double agents everywhere; and there's the added paranoia that the insane-monster syndrome can be spread merely by touch, the more intimate the better. But the reader is only halfway through the first quick paranoid frisson when a recently introduced addition to the band of goodies promptly starts boffing our hero, behaviour unusual in one who's only just been bereaved of a spouse. Well, lemme guess, Watson, who the traitor might be ...

Those fairly detailed sex scenes are about as erotic as a catalogue: "Positions #41 (lite version, omitting live octopus), #76 and #129-#131 inclusive", perhaps. Similarly, there are shoot-ups galore, but they appear on the page as dry, accurate and somehow rather academic descriptions of events rather than as incidents in which one feels at all involved: as per a police report, there is no whiff of blood or gunpowder in the reader's nostrils.

Bear is manifestly capable of much more enthralling writing than this, and one can only assume – perhaps wrongly, but this is the way the book feels – that this essay at the technothriller discipline was born more of a desire to move into a subgenre where sales, and hence royalty earnings, are generally rather higher than for sf proper, that the lack of excitement in the book reflects a lack of genuine interest on the author's part.

~

Sheri S. Tepper is an author who has probably never written an uninvolved novel in her life – although a few of her earliest attempts are somewhat rote and some of her efforts of the 1990s smack a little of the formulaic (to be fair, the formula is one of her own devising). In the course of her extremely distinguished career she has established a sub-subgenre of her own that so far doesn't really have a proper descriptive term in the critic's vocabulary. A good term would be "science fantasy" except that that's already been largely appropriated for tales of sword 'n' sorcery on exotic planets where technological development has come grinding to a halt with the invention of the loincloth. Yet Tepper's novels suit the term far better than this: for the most part they can be read either as fantasies that are eventually shown to have a scientific rationale or as exercises in sf that nevertheless deploy all the tropes and characteristics of high fantasy. Such matters of definition, of course, are hardly germane to the average reader, who sensibly ignores them altogether and just judges each book according to whether or not it's any good.

Tepper's novels are generally not just good but extremely good. Even the weaker among her recent offerings – such as Singer from the Sea, The Family Tree and especially Gibbon's Decline and Fall – are nevertheless more interesting and conceptually challenging than most other novels on the fantasy/sf shelves. Still, there's been the undoubted sense that it was about time for Tepper to return to the very peak of her form, and this coming April sees that joyous event with the publication of The Visitor.

It's fair to say that the plot begins with the discovery by astronomers, in the near future, that a rogue cosmic body is on an impact trajectory towards Earth. Accurate but misleading, I should hastily add before your eyes glaze and images of Bruce Willis and a team of moronic but plucky, goddammit plucky, all-Amurkan miners come to mind. This is not a disaster novel in any accepted sense of the term. The main action concerns the aftermath of the holocaust that occurs when the object hits, but not the immediate aftermath; instead the setting is many generations later, when science is, as it were, a dead language and the route to knowledge is seen as lying along the road of magic – more specifically necromancy. This future Earth is a world in which the case for magic is actually quite a good one, for supernatural monsters – with some of whom humankind operates in uneasy alliance and of others humans are rightly terrified – are all over the place. The biggest and most psychically powerful of all these monsters is the Visitor itself, the main raison d'être for the coming to this planet of that rogue celestial object: the Visitor squats enigmatically over much of the Arctic, but is known to have the ability to move elsewhere should circumstances so advise.

Central to the tale is a typical Tepper heroine: a young orphan called Dismé Latimer. She possesses a book that is seemingly incomprehensible but which she eventually deciphers as the diary of her ancestor Nell Latimer, one of the scientists who documented the course of the Visitor's unorthodox spacecraft as it sped towards the Earth. More, Nell and select bands of other scientists took the precaution, before the impact, of setting themselves into cryogenic sleep at various centres throughout the world, emerging from their slumbers in widely separated shifts to observe their descendants' rebuilding (or, more like it, building anew) of civilization.

There are delicious baddies galore, both human and supernatural; and in due course there is what is in effect a Last Battle straight from more traditional high fantasy ... which, I would argue, is what The Visitor actually is. And this is what's so exciting about this book, I feel: where before Tepper has written fantasies that are finally rationalized to become science fiction, with The Visitor she at last takes the obvious next step. Yes, there are many of the trappings of sf here – aliens, a far future Earth, classy human technology, and so on – but at the end all is not rationalized: extraterrestrial in origin those monsters and indeed some of the goodies might be, but that doesn't affect in the slightest their status as beings of the supernatural, rather than of physical reality. What Tepper has done is to create a full-blooded fantasy – and a superbly realized, gorgeously readable one at that – which just happens to be set in a sciencefictional venue and draws upon some aspects of science and technology (and sf) as elements of that fantasy.

~

One might be tempted to come out with the old cliché that, if you're going to buy just one book this Spring, then The Visitor should be it, but actually there've been a lot of extremely good books in the field of fantastic fiction these past few months. A few that come randomly to mind are Harry Squires's What Rough Beast, George Foy's The Last Harbor, Richard Paul Russo's Ship of Fools, and of course Michael Moorcock's The Dreamthief's Daughter, while a couple of glorious revised reissues have been Nancy Collins's Tempter and especially Sylvia Louise Engdahl's long-neglected Enchantress from the Stars – one of the best sf novels ever published, but published into the YA ghetto. (The new YA imprint Firebird is shortly to release the paperback of the Enchantress reissue.) And also there's been Alice Borchardt's The Dragon Queen.

Borchardt, you will recall, was the author much heralded a while back as doing for werewolves what Anne Rice had done for vampires; accordingly, and particularly because he'd read a couple of the early Borchardts, this reviewer opened The Dragon Queen with a certain deeply rooted feeling of malaise. What, he wondered, might Borchardt do with the tale of Guinevere, Arthur's queen, that hadn't been done very much better before? Little reassurance is to be gained from the fact that the very first character we're introduced to is ... a werewolf. (Well, OK, he's a shapeshifter who alternates between man and wolf, but that's splitting bristles.) The book almost went back on the shelf in the wake of that discovery, but – very, very fortunately – it didn't.

Arthurian fantasies do tend to be much of a muchness: some are better than others, but almost all are written in similar style and have similar preoccupations – one that is outstandingly different in both style and mood is the Fay Sampson series Daughter of Tintagel, which is a sort of oral history of Morgan Le Fay, but it's well out on its own limb (and excitingly so). Guinevere is generally treated as the least interesting of the central Arthurian characters: a sort of bimbo for the Age of Chivalry.

Not in Borchardt's book she ain't. The version of the Arthurian cycle rendered in The Dragon Queen is a completely revisionist one. The villain of the piece is Merlin, here rendered as a youthful necromancer with an almost insane lust for power and power-broking. He is ably assisted by his lover, Arthur's mother, Queen Igrane, her youthful beauty preserved by foul necromantic means. Guinevere, who tells much of the story herself, is orphaned in infancy and reared by a family of (were)wolves, headed by the wily Maeniel; the family is shortly joined by the fussy rebel druid Dugald and the freed slave Kyra (one of the best characters in the book). The girl-child has an affinity for dragons, which are an accepted if rare part of the ecosystem in Dark Age Britain; she also has a natural aptitude for magic and, most importantly, a spiritual identification with the Fertility Goddess, here rendered under various names, including Athena and the Flower Bride, but generally appearing simply as "She", no proper noun being required.

From the description so far you might still be tempted to think that The Dragon Queen is going to be just yet another feminist-slanted rehash of the standard Arthurian fodder, with a few dragons chucked in to give the cover artist something evocative to work with. Nothing could be further from the truth. Borchardt uses her materials, some traditional but many of them original, to create a fully fledged work of the fantastic that is wildly imaginative and astonishingly exhilarating. One symptom of true fantasy (as opposed to generic pap) is that the reader hasn't a clue what to expect in the next chapter but that, when the chapter in question arrives, filled with fresh and unanticipated marvels, it seems to belong rationally to the whole, whatever the logical system upon which the novel is based. Lewis Carroll's Alice Through the Looking-glass is a fine example of a fantasy based on a highly non-mundane logical system, yet it passes this test; and The Dragon Queen is another. For neither Guinevere nor Arthur, preordained to be a breeding pair yet beating the system by genuinely falling in love, spend all their time in this world, being cast often instead, by the magical machinations of their elders, into otherworlds of varying degrees of strangeness, from a truly bizarre Land of the Dead to unnamed lands where "alive" and "dead" are merely arbitrary terms.

Looking along the dreary bookstore shelves filled with myriad interchangeable titles of the general form Quest of the Dragonspume Volume VI: The Realms of Kumquat, one often has the dispiriting sense that high fantasy, for misguided commercial reasons, has departed the realm of fantastic literature to become an adjunct of the bodice-busting romance; it is a dismal truth that this is more or less an accurate statement of the case. The Dragon Queen, which – joy! joy! – has no central quest, no kitchen-boy-who-will-come-to-the-throne, no wise old mage apt to produce Dale Carnegie-style pronouncements, and no twee elves, is, like Tepper's The Visitor, a timely and heartening reminder that the potential of the discipline is still as great as ever.

—Interzone (Special Infinity Plus Issue)