+ Provender Gleed : Grant Watson
+ Doorways for the Dispossessed : Russell B.
Farr
+ Exultant : Nicolee Baxter
+ Wintersmith : Karen Miller
+ The Cosmic Puppets : Lev Lafayette
+ The Anubis Gates : Russell B. Farr
+ Keeping it Real : Liz Grzyb
+ The Book of the Dead : Nicolee Baxter
Victor Gollancz Science Fiction (Orion), 2005
ISBN: 0-575-07684-4
331 pages
RRP: AU$32.95
Review by Grant Watson
A parallel universe of oligarchic celebrity families and anagram-obsessed private detectives provides the setting for Provender Gleed, a lightly science fictional novel of conspiracy and kidnap by British author James Lovegrove.
In Provender Gleed, Lovegrove creates an alternate history in which the aristocratic houses of Renaissance Venice have expanded and evolved into a worldwide elite of "Families". Impossibly rich and unfeasibly glamorous, the Families enjoy all of the benefit, attention and scrutiny given in our real world to rock stars, movie actors and supermodels. In the book we are invited into the estate of the Gleeds, home of the titular reluctant heir Provender. Surrounded by eccentric relatives in a lavish old estate, Provender's situation reminds one more than a little of Mervyn Peake.
Bringing the political family houses of the 16th century into the 21st is an interesting conceit, but one that Lovegrove fails to push hard enough. Instead his world winds up almost identical to our own: the Gleeds are hardly different from the Murdochs, Hiltons and Packers of the real world. Contrasting to this are a range of small details designed to flesh out the book: dirigibles have supplanted aeroplanes, telephones are people with enormous radios strapped to their backs, and so on. Given the banal similarity to the real world that the book has as a whole, these details wind up feeling odd and quickly start to jar.
Also strangely out of place are a pair of "anagrammatic detectives", two private investigators who solve their cases by re-arranging the letters of their target or victim's name into new words. The idea has a curious sort of merit, but completely fails to match the rest of the novel.
The result of all of these elements is a novel in which an author clearly had a lot of interesting ideas and concepts, which were then thrown haphazardly together to see if they would all fit. For this reader, it didn't. It's a pity: Lovegrove's writing style is fluid and enjoyable, and the book breezes along at a strong pace. In the end, it seems to lack sufficient purpose.
This is the most annoying kind of book: you can see the brilliance hiding in between the lines. In this case, however, the author has failed to draw it out.
Provender Gleed is available from Allen & Unwin and Slowglass Books.
Prime, 2006
ISBN: 0-8095-5740-1
284 pages
RRP: AU$24.95
Review by Russell B. Farr
Paul Haines has made an impressive entrance into SF, seeking fame and fortune (see interview this issue). Doorways for the Dispossessed is his first collection, comprising stories from the last five years and two originals.
The collection opens with (I'm ignoring the 69-word lightweight 'Jealousy' that appears where a dedication page should be) arguably its best story, 'The Last Days of Kali Yuga', a horror tale of sex and death and backpackers. The story has a thick vein of evil running through it; fallible humanity at its worst. Haines has taken characters that are almost beyond redemption and built an empathetic story around them, an impressive achievement. This story also won the Aurealis Award and Ditmar.
The next two stories, 'The Feastive Season' and 'The Garden of Jal'Adin' are also strong stories, the former a fairly gruesome horror tale and the latter a speculative Middle Eastern historical piece. The latter, Haines' first published story, is marginally stronger and shows a writer who very early showed promise.
The collection contains several stories inspired by Asia and the Middle East that could have been placed better in the collection: their early grouping gives the book an intial unbalanced feel. Similarly the originals in the collection, 'Burning From the Inside' and 'Mnemophonic' are a bit of a let down. Both stories are competent, more experimental than his other work, but appear unpolished and in many ways lacking the strength of voice in 'Kali Yuga'.
While Haines has an affinity for dark fiction, Doorways for the Dispossessed provides glimpses of an ability to craft excellent sf stories. 'The Skin Polis' and 'Warchalking' (a collaboration with Claire McKenna) are extrapolations of a dark future grounded in present concerns. 'Warchalking' displays impressive characterisation combined with ideas, while 'The Skin Polis' combines elements of thriller in an excellent sf setting.
The collection's title story should have been the strong piece to finish the collection. 'Doorways for the Dispossessed' again captures Haines in strong voice, drawing on backpacker experiences, character-driven narrative and the demons that inhabit dreams. A little overlong, the story is easily among the best two in the collection.
Doorways for the Dispossessed opens and finishes with some very strong stories, though close to half of the collection are nothing more than competent filler, and turn the book into an odd, variable assortment. A couple of the stories, 'They Say It's Other People' and 'The Sky is Turning Black' struck me as being pointless and predictable, examples of a writer hitting well below the mark.
When Haines is an unpretentious narrator, in 'Kali Yuga' and 'Doorways', he crafts stories that are among the best being written today. At other times he appears as a writer trying too hard, looking for shock value in cheap expletives and bodily functions: like a middle-class white boy whose favourite word is 'mother-fucker' and can't seem to use it enough.
Haines shows a lot of promise, and I think that in time he'll get his conscious desire to shock out of his system and concentrate more on telling the stories. This collection proves he has an eye for characterisation and demonstrates the intention to experiment with style and form. When he does this consistently, concentrating on the characters and exposing the foibles and fallible nature of humanity, he'll have few equals in the genre.
Doorways for the Dispossessed is worth it for the handful of excellent stories it delivers, though I'm led to believe that finding this collection at a bookshop in Australia could be difficult, and would suggest trying amazon.com (hardcover US$29.95) or through Prime Books.
Victor Gollancz Science Fiction (Orion), 2005
ISBN: 0-575-07655-0
520 pages
RRP: AU$19.95
Review by Nicolee Baxter
The human race has been fighting a war with the Xeelee for a millennia. Not much is known about the alien Xeelee, except that they are the enemy. All of the human race's resources and ideology are channelled into fighting the war. The future and the past are irrelevant. Children are "hatched, not born" — artificially conceived and trained from birth to do their duty and fight. 10 billion humans are lost in the war each year. Few make it to their twentieth birthday. The humans have reached a stalemate with the Xeelee but they can not maintain the stalemate indefinitely.
Soldiers are expected to obey orders, not to think. When a soldier chooses innovation over obeying suicidal orders, the military seeks to punish him. A bureaucrat wrangles his freedom by initiating a daring research project that could end the war for once and for all.
Exultant is your standard science fiction novel with explanations of physical science interspersed with the character action. This is actually a sequel although it is not necessary to have read Book One in the Destiny's Children sequence, Coalescent, in order to make sense of, or enjoy, Exultant. The story is engaging and inoffensive but I found it did not stimulate much examination of human culture and society as some science fiction does.
One minor thing about the novel that struck me as odd was the default reference of “she” to a person who could be a “he” or a “she”. If the intent was to infer a matriarchal society, in contrast to our current patriarchal society, there were no other references to reinforce the idea of a matriarchal society. From the beginning of the novel, I was acutely aware that all the main (and powerful) characters I was encountering in the book were male. Female characters did appear in powerful positions but were minor characters in the story. Although this convention did not detract from the story at all it did make me wonder what the author was attempting to convey.
According to "The Baxterium", Stephen Baxter applied to become a cosmonaut in 1991 but was not selected. He has degrees in Mathematics and Engineering which he obviously draws upon in his writing and became a full-time author in 1995. He has published over 30 novels and won numerous literary awards (see Wikipedia ). Approximately ten of those novels, including Exultant, make up the "Xeelee Sequence" stories.
Exultant is available from Allen & Unwin and Slowglass Books.
Doubleday, 2006
ISBN: 0385609841
336 pages
RRP: AU$45
Review by Karen Miller
When I learned there would not be a new Discworld novel in 2006, only another installment of the newish Tiffany Aching Y/A series set on the Discworld (so NOT the same thing) I was, to put it bluntly, pissed off. Because for the last 15 years I have looked forward to the new annual Discworld novel. I confess my passion for Discworld is practically embarassing. I felt bereft, cheated; my year's end was ruined.
No new Discworld? No new Death, Granny Weatherwax, Sam Vimes, the Archchancellor? No new Carrot????
As a Mac Feegle would say: Oh waily waily waily crivens.
But.
If I can't have a new grownup Discworld novel, then Wintersmith is a pretty good substitute. In a nutshell: Tiffany Aching, apprentice witch, gets carried away and dances when she shouldn't. She draws the attention of the wintersmith, the elemental force of winter. It mistakes her for the goddess summer, falls in love with her, and basically starts stalking her. With unfortunate results. And icebergs. If Tiffany doesn't work out how to stop her unwanted admirer, the whole world will be turned to ice and that, as they say, is that.
Regular Discworld characters in Wintersmith include Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg and Death. There are also a group of other interesting witches, Roland the Baron's son from a previous adventure, and the inimitable Nac Mac Feegles. I believe Pratchett is the only writer breathing who can handle Scottish brogue so it isn't hideously painful to read. Where the Mac Feegles are concerned, it's just hysterically funny.
Because this is a Y/A novel, Pratchett's regular social satire/commentary is far more gentle and ultimately less sophisticated. For me, that makes the book ultimately less satisfying, but I suppose it's to be expected. He does, however, continue his tradition of acutely observed human nature. When it comes to characterisation, he possesses the rare ability to create maximum effect from minimum words. Here is Roland's Aunt Danuta: 'She looked like Miss Tick in general outline, but with the eyes of the perpetually offended and the mouth of an instant complainer.'
I found Wintersmith to be a great read, richer and more complicated than the first two books in the series (The Wee Free Men and A Hatful of Sky). I am now interested in Tiffany Aching, and I look forward to her next adventure.
Wintersmith is available from Slowglass Books.
Gollancz (Orion), 2006 (reprint)
ISBN: 0-575-07670-4
144 pages
RRP: AU$21.95
Review by Lev Lafayette
Appropriately, it was within the first few pages that I realised that some ten to fifteen years ago, in a more hallucingenic era, that I immersed myself in this and a range of other Phillip K. Dick books. The Cosmic Puppets was first published in 1957; this year the good folk at Gollancz have republished under the modest price of $21.95 for the modest length of 144pp.
Phillip K. Dick is surely known to all science fiction fans; almost fifty novels, a swag of short stories, and even an prominent SF award named after him. Consistent themes appear in Dick's stories; similcra, alternate universes (and alternate history), hallucinations and so forth. Some of these received acclaim during Dick's lifetime; The Man in the High Castle won a Hugo in 1963, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said a Campbell in 1975, and five of his novels were nominated for Nebula awards. Greater moments of fame were reserved subsequent to his passing; the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was transformed into the premier cyberpunk film Blade Runner, the short story 'We Can Remember It For You Wholesale' was the foundation for the film Total Recall and Spielberg adapted the short story 'Minority Report'.
We can gently acknowledge that Phillip K. Dick was a visionary in the very crazy modern urban shaman style. He gobbled down more amphetamines than a hospitality worker. Throughout his life he had recurring dreams and visions which he accepted as reality. His oft-paranoid state led him to believe that he was under observation by the C.I.A. and K.G.B. (and why not?) Seriously tripped-out novels such as A Scanner Darkly and VALIS were heavily derived from his own experiences. He was married five times; a enticing character who was impossible to live with as everyday experiences were all of cosmic importance.
The Cosmic Puppets is certainly archetypal Dick. The story revolves around one Ted Barton who decided to visit his boyhood home for the first time in eighteen years, much to the frustration of his superficial wife. His anticipation turns to panic as he realises that everything in the town has changed: streetsigns, stores and individuals. Along with clay golems, ghostly wanderers, Barton eventually discovers that the town is the battleground between two deities, one representing a God of Light and Creation and the other of Darkness and Destruction.
The setting is quite charming; the 1950s Appalachian Mountain township of a few thousand is presented in an evocative manner. The expenditure of a few dollars is lavish; forty follars is a fortune. The narrative is expressed in a traditional and consistent manner: there are chapters which introduce the main characters, motif and central theme. These are followed by chapters which bring the main characters into deeper contact with each other, which unearth the setting and conflict and finally there are chapters which bring the story to a climax and conclusion. It's all a no-nonsense, easy-to-follow plot.
Characterisation in the story isn't exactly a big issue. The main character, Ted, does go through development which corresponds with the plot — first anticipation, then panic and bewilderment, then investigative and finally on a steely mission. This is understandable as to an strong extent the plot is about Barton's development. Other major characters tend to have a dominant personality trait with a twist of interest, such as the town drunk Christopher, the intelligent and cruel Peter, the precocious Mary.
Despite all this, various motifs in the story can be annoying. Some simpy do not gel, and some are too childish. For the former, the "big bad guy" of the story is supposed to represent destruction and darkness; OK, this is fair enough. But the main theme of the story (or rather, the author) is deception, hallucinations and madness. For the latter, some of the local animals participate in the cosmic battle. The forces of Light and Creation have bees and moths on their side. The forces of Darkness and Creation have the predictible nasties of spiders, snakes and rats. I swear the sociable and affectionate rat gets worse press from novelists than evil stepmothers.
Where Dick truly shines however is in both the aforementioned theme and style. The theme has already been explained and its expression in the undemanding plot allows the reader to engage in sufficient further imagination of the story's trajectory whilst reading. Stylistically, there is nothing awful or unusual in the story either. It is solidly written, in a popular manner, confirming Michael Moorcock's praise that Phillip K. Dick produces "serious fiction in a popular form".
All in all, this is an excellent introduction to some of the more mind-bending works that Phillip K. Dick produced and is thoroughly recommended. Its brevity and style means that it can be finished in a couple of lazy hours but the thematic considerations allow for much further mental travels. This is an extremely important fact to note; a brief book with a deep theme is much better than a long book without one — a simple fact which contemporary sf and fantasy could pay a lot of attention to in our increasingly time-poor lives. Perhaps once again, Dick was being a visionary.
The Cosmic Puppets is available from Allen & Unwin and Slowglass Books.
Victor Gollancz Science Fiction (Orion), 2006 (Reprint)
ISBN: 0-575-07725-5
464 pages
RRP: AU$22.95
Review by Russell B. Farr
Egyptian magicians, Regency and Stuart London, thieves, mad poets and the mysterious Dog-Face Joe; The Anubis Gates is a fine work indeed. Tim Powers is the king of the weird weird, that work too crazy to be true yet plausible enough to make you wonder.
Coleridge scholar Brendan Doyle is presented with the opportunity of a lifetime by millionaire J. Cochran Darrow: the chance to travel back to 1810 to attend a lecture by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in London. All he has to do is be the tour guide to a group of time tourists paying one million dollars a ticket, give a bit of a background lecture, and he'll walk away with a pile of cash and an experience he'd never forget. Following the lecture he is kidnapped and ends up in an adventure involving Regency and Stuart London, thieves, and everything else in the opening sentence, as well as the enigmatic poet William Ashbless and having his foot anchored to the frozen Thames with a dagger.
The Anubis Gates moves at a cracking pace, it's an addictive, page-turning adventure through a well-researched history. Power's plotting is second only to his research; he brings the tale alive through an impressive attention to detail. Just as Doyle is anchored to the frozen Thames, Powers anchors his stories with a plausible historical setting, surrounding his fiction with actual events. It doesn't feel like you are reading a book — you are instead experiencing an unusual moment in a weird Earth that that is both tantalisingly close and tantalisingly not this one.
A tragedy is the way that lot of books go out of print, or are not readily available in Australia. So it is a very good thing that Gollancz have included The Anubis Gates in their Fantasy Masterworks series, and even better that Allen and Unwin are distributing this title down under. You'll be hard pressed to find anything like it. The Anubis Gates is a must own.
The Anubis Gates is available from Allen & Unwin and Slowglass Books.
Gollancz (Orion), 2006
ISBN: 0-575-07862-6
279 pages
RRP: AU$29.95
Review by Liz Grzyb
Keeping it Real has everything a self-respecting chick-lit/fantasy/cyberpunk lover needs: cyborgs, AIs, kick-butt heroines and sexy elves.
When I first saw this book, I was instantly reminded of Marianne de Pierres' Parrish Plessisseries. However, there aren't terribly many similarities apart from the cyberpunk style, the cover artist (Larry Rostant) and the heroine who can well and truly take care of herself. Lila Black, Robson's protagonist, is an AI-augmented cyborg working for the National Security's Intelligence division. Much to her disgust, she is assigned as bodyguard and spy, watching over Zal, the devilishly attractive elf rocker.
Enter love interest and the people trying to kill him, who just happen to have an old quarrel with Lila... Internal conflict ahoy! There's also some interesting inter-world (and inter-species!) politics and tension.
At times this novel is predictable; it starts with a three-page info dump, but soon shakes off the cobwebs as the action kicks off. Lila is an interesting character; she's flawed enough to be very human despite (or because of?) her mechanical and electronic additions. Her self-doubt allows us to warm to a character who otherwise might be too hard and cold a protagonist.
The world is also realistic enough to keep the disbelief at bay: the Quantum Bomb of 2015 has caused the dimesions to shift so that humans are living alongside elves, elementals and demons. The twist to our world is subtle yet strange enough to keep the reader guessing.
If you enjoy cyberpunk with a curl of humour and passion, Keeping it Real is for you. Once you get into it, it's a non-stop rollercoaster of a read.
Keeping it Real is available from Allen & Unwin and Slowglass Books.
Overlook Press, 1997
ISBN: 0-87951-798-0
215 pages
RRP: US$15.95
Review by Nicolee Baxter
Tanith Lee has been writing since she was 9 years old. Her first publication was in 1971 (The Dragon Hoard) and she has published at least one book almost every year since. She has written over 50 novels as well as radio plays and two episodes of the television series Blake's 7. She is generally categorised as a fantasy writer.
The Book of the Dead is made up of a number of short stories, with death as a common theme. The stories are all based in a city called Paradys and details within the stories, such as clothing and cultural attitudes, suggest various periods in the past. We are never sure whether the story is set in a real historical period or an alternative one. This allows us to go along with the story without getting caught up in verifying the historical accuracy of the story, with enough of a sense of the historical period so that the actions of the characters make sense. For example, a female character's body is pulled from the river by her corset. It is therefore no surprise when the story describes her polite but modest behaviour — this is not just a trait particular to this character, it is how women were expected to behave at that time.
The stories have something of the folk tale to them — fantastic events occuring to ordinary people with a dark twist at the end. A couple of stories feature the transformation of a person into an animal — a common device used in fairy tales. The brevity of the individual stories makes the book easy to pick up and put down if you only have short periods for reading. On the other hand, it is unlikely that you will become as engrossed in the book and its characters as you would with a longer novel but this is simply due to the length of the stories, not the quality of the writing.
The subtitle, The Secret Books of Paradys: Volume III, is so named because Lee has also written The Book of the Damned, The Book of the Beast, and The Book of the Mad (Volumes I, II, and IV respectively). I read The Book of the Dead first (for no deeper reason than I was most attracted to its title) but I actually found that I liked the stories of Damned, Beast, and Mad even more than Dead. The books do not have to be read sequentially.
I would recommend Tanith Lee's writing to anyone. Occasionally her syntax strikes me as a little odd but the rich folkloric qualities of her stories keep me reading. The themes of her writing would appeal more to adult readers, rather than young readers.
The Book of the Dead is available from Dymocks Online and amazon.com.
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