Collection of SF Site Review

Sfsite.com is no longer regularly publishing fortnightly editions, but putting things up as they are submitted. I have decided to put these reviews together in some form, possibly an eBook. In the interim, I'm going to post a huge, very reader-unfriendly text here to help back them up... I think I have most of them, but maybe not... Red Inferno 1945 Robert Conroy A review by Seamus Sweeney Advertisement There is a famous anecdote about the British humourist Alan Coren. He was once told by a publisher at a party that the three categories of sure-fire bestsellers were books about golf, cats, and the Nazis. His next book was entitled Golfing For Cats and featured a huge swastika on the cover. When we think of alternate history, it is likely that the first books that come to mind are those whose timelines derive from an altered World War II. We think of The Man In The High Castle, or Robert Harris' Fatherland, two of the key texts in the genre. The spectre of Nazism does not only haunt literature of the actual Twentieth Century, but that of our attempts to imagine another way things might have happened. It isn't hard to work out why. Their meteoric rise to a fortunately brief continental dominance, their indulgence in a politics of theatricality, their commission of the gravest atrocities in history, Hitler's near-official status as The Most Evil Man In History all conspire to give the Nazis a continued dark fascination. Add to this the neat, good-versus-evil narrative the conflict allows us (how different from most wars before and since), the lasting geopolitical effect of the conflict, and the twist that in order to defeat the Nazis another villain of history, Stalin, was required (and to defeat the Japanese two atomic bombs were dropped) -- and it is no surprise that World War II exerts as much fascination today as ever before. Furthermore, the lasting impact of the war can be traced to a few key military and political decisions. What if Britain and America has stood up to Stalin more about Poland? What if the atomic bomb had been developed in time to be used on Germany? What if the Allies had crossed the Rhine before the Winter of 1944? Robert Conroy is now a veteran of alternate histories -- his previous novels include 1942, in which the Japanese occupy the Hawaiian Islands after Pearl Harbor, and 1945, in which the Emperor Hirohito is kidnapped by diehards minutes before announcing unconditional surrender. In Red Inferno: 1945 he begins with the American advance troops whom, in the dying weeks of the war in Europe, crossed the Elbe in small numbers. The newly inaugurated President Truman decides, in the twist on what really happened that gives any alternate history its impetus, to send two divisions to Berlin to try and ensure that the liberation of the city is not entirely a Soviet Affair. At first, one of my concerns was that this could decline into an exercise in American triumphalism, like Caleb Carr's essay "VE Day -- November 11th, 1944" in the collection of counterfactual essays What If? 2 which essentially blames Field Marshal Montgomery for the failure to allow General Patton to cross into Germany and therefore end the war. Carr's essay is a textbook example of why counterfactual writing can get a bad name among historians. It's crassly simplistic, and is a classic case of armchair generalship blind to the messy complications of combat and politics. Starting the book, and reading the early pages, I feared that Conroy might perhaps go down a similar route. I should not have been so concerned. History is very different, but certainly war is no less hell, and the full complexity of the nightmare that ensues is fully conveyed by Conroy. I particularly liked his depiction of the agonising of Harry S Truman, whose decision it is to send the two divisions to Berlin, and whose agonising at the ramifications of this decision is convincingly depicted. For the two divisions do not simply ride into Berlin, thus wowing the Soviets into abandoning their plans to dominate Eastern Europe. Hostilities break out, and quickly the USA and the USSR are at undeclared war. US troops are isolated in a pocket in the city of Potsdam, where they join forces with German refugees and settle into a state of siege. Conroy adopts a classic technique of the sweeping historical blockbuster and focuses on a few key characters while introducing brief, poignant cameos of those whose function is more to advance the plot and get killed. The main protagonist is Steve Burke, a gangly academic who now advises the military on the Soviet mentality. We first meet Burke while he is experiencing post-date disappointment that things didn't go better having "taken the lovely and amazingly sensuous Natalie Holt" out. Lovely and amazingly sensuous Natalie Holt is also a Russian emigré who loathes the Soviets for destroying her family. Along with a budding romance between and American officer and German refugee in Potsdam, Burke and Natalie provide the emotional ballast for the novel. As may be obvious from the above epithet for Natalie, Conroy's writing style sometimes strays into potboiler territory. I found him most convincing describing the conferences of the powerful, whether American, British, or Soviet. Stalin's paranoia and ruthlessness is effectively captured. Conroy does not assume that a continuation of war in Europe with the Germans almost extinguished would enjoy public support -- we read of riots in England and sabotage in France. The moral dilemmas of whether to link in with German forces on the one hand, and whether the elemental forces harnessed in Los Alamos should be used on the other, are also explored. Despite what I said above about a potboiler tendency, Conroy does engage one's feelings in his story. Somewhat despite myself, the final scene of reunion (I won't tell you whose reunion exactly) left my eyes teary. I raced through Red Inferno: 1945, just as I devoured The Eagle Has Landed or Fatherland or other tales of derring-do with a World War II setting. Badly done, alternate history can echo a famously cynical definition of history -- "one damn thing after another," except that the damn things aren't even real. Well done, alternate history entertains and provokes thought in equal measure. Red Inferno: 1945 is alternate history of the latter school. Copyright © 2010 Seamus Sweeney The Extra By Michael Shea A review by Seamus Sweeney Advertisement One of the most abused clichés of reviewing a thriller is to describe it a "ride" -- or sometimes a "roller-coaster ride" or "roller-coaster." One book that merits the tag is Michael Shea's The Extra, a fun blend of many speculative fiction subgenres -- the near future dystopia, the reality TV show satire, the hunt for "the most dangerous game" of them all -- man. Added to the mix is a witty send-up of the pomposity and greed of the movie world. This near future dystopia is an LA in which current social trends have continued, creating a highly stratified society. Some of the story is the first person narrative of Curtis, a black man from gigantic developments called The 'Rise who, along with his white friend Japh, runs or tries to run a book stand. One of the many amusing sides to The Extra is the description of a near future world where the love of the physical object that is the book persists, and if anything has intensified. The 'Rise is home to the struggling middle class, and another strength of the book is while that life is much tougher for the underclass in "the Zoo" that surrounds The 'Rise, life is not that much fun for the middle class either. Curtis and Japh consider "quarter-employment" to be considerably better than the full unemployment their peers endure, and live with relatives in cramped apartments. Shea also portrays the economy of this world -- where contraband from the Zoo filters in to the 'Rise enough to keep both systems going -- convincingly. Curtis has developed a crush on Jool, a tough Zoo-dwelling bookseller, and when an act of vigilante impulsivity brings home to them the crushing nature of 'Rise life, Curtis and Japh light out for the Zoo territory. There, they manage to inadvertently aggravate the protection racket which, rather half-heartedly, was shaking down Jool. On the run, Curtis, Japh and Jool notice a call for extras. Not just any call for extras, but for a Val Margolian movie -- Alien Hunger. Val Margolian is the creator of Live Action cinema. Two of his assistant directors, the obnoxious Rod who claims to have invented the high concept at the heart of Alien Hunger, and Kate, who actually did, feature as twin embodiments of the moral vision -- or lack thereof -- of Live Action cinema. Margolian has realised that real death is good box office -- and enormous action movies shot in real time with extras battling and being devoured by Anti-Personnel Properties (APPs), as the mechanical killing machines that populate the set are known. In the Zoo (and lesser degree 'Rise) enough desperate no-hopers will run that risk for the promise of rich rewards for survival that it is almost a public service. The prissy, status conscious Kate is infatuated with Margolian's artistic vision, while despairing of the crass Rod. She comes to realise that perhaps Rod represents the reality of Live Action more accurately than the lofty egomaniac Margolian would like. While I thoroughly enjoyed this book, which had a lightness of touch and sense of humour often absent in both dystopian novels and media satires, I felt a little disappointed at how the sparkling set up unfolded. There is a certain sameness to the action scenes that end up comprising most of the story. Mild spoiler alert -- not enough is at stake for the main characters. Fairly quickly the APPs turn out to be somewhat more vulnerable than their horrible reputation would suggest (having said that, late on in the story, one character suggests that Alien Hunger may have an unprecedentedly high survival rate of 30 percent, maybe 35 percent) Hardly any of the main characters die, or even seem in all that much peril, which robs the action of real urgency. It is a cliché that speculative fiction reflects the times it was written in much more than it reflects a possible or potential future. With its plentiful gallows humour, competitive struggling in a world of scarcity, and dark extension of the reality TV concept to a logical extreme, The Extra is an entertaining mirror of our own strange days. Copyright © 2010 Seamus Sweeney Edge Thomas Blackthorne A review by Seamus Sweeney Advertisement Thomas Blackthorne (a nom de plume of John Meaney) has created in Edge a near-future Britain which is in many respects hardly distinguishable from the present state of that green and pleasant land. It is a country of privatised surveillance, economic angst, and fears of arbitrary terrorism -- like today, except more so. In a world where the United States has broken up into fissile fragments, and the fundamentalist President of the rump US destablises what seems to be a fragile world disorder, Britain has seen the return of legalised duelling. Knives are now ubiquitous, and the most popular television show features a series of duels. Private citizens can demand satisfaction, and failure to deliver results in the forfeiture of life or of money (in one of the nice touches, among the wealthy this has already resulted in a strictly ritualised approach to duelling). All the exposition is very much in the background, gradually revealed over time. The novel begins with Josh Cumberland, a former member of an elite unit within the (itself elite) Special Air Service, driving in a fury into the English countryside, his alienated wife by his side. Their marriage disintegrates in these opening pages, as they are both haunted by the thought of their daughter, in some kind of vegetative state after an incident whose nature is only gradually revealed to the reader. Cumberland -- made up of fundamentally decent impulses wrestling with post-traumatic horrors and increasing paranoia, and possessed of highly lethal fighting skills and highly infiltrative coding skills -- is by far the best thing about this book. His character draws one into Blackthorne's world. Unfortunately, other characters are not quite so vivid. A therapist, Susanne Duchesne, is asked by Broomhall -- the rich, widowed, drunken father of a shy, terrified, boy called Richard -- to cure his son of haplophobia -- the fear of blades. Duchesne is a preternaturally skilled therapist (her techniques are borrowed from Neuro Linguistic Programming) but, as a character, is kind of boring. Her skills are so indistinguishable from magic that there seems little she can't accomplish using mirroring, hypnotic trances, and so on. After the first session, young Richard goes missing, and Cumberland is recruited as a private agent in the search. Duchesne, for reasons that increasingly go beyond professional embarrassment at failing to predict what the boy would do, joins in the search. The story runs out of steam somewhat about a third of the way through. The moment when I felt that all the promise of the initial premise, and of the character of Cumberland, was going to be less than fully realised was when the runaway Richard Broomhall falls in with an all too clichéd group of vaguely anarchic underground tech geniuses, one of the great tropes of modern dystopian fiction. I read this book immediately after Michael Shea's The Extra, previously reviewed on this site, and while Edge is more accomplished piece of literary work, The Extra was a whole pile more fun and readable. Why was this? There was a certain depressive, rather funereal tone to much of Edge, without it ever becoming satisfyingly Gothic or neo-Gothic. This dystopia is a nation far along in the terminal phase of decline, rather than the colorful, chaotic world of The Extra. Perhaps this sense of decline and defeat seeps into the prose. Secondly, both Cumberland and Duchesne are so accomplished in their different ways that there is little tension in reading about their search. This is notwithstanding their increasing need for each other, which is nicely conveyed by Blackthorne. Edge is far from a bad novel, indeed it is in many respects an exceptionally well written story and one featuring a memorable character in Josh Cumberland. In discussing the novels of Wyndham Lewis, George Orwell wrote that they were faultless in terms of technique and innovation, but lacked "some literary vitamin" that engaged the reader and kept them reading. While Edge is not entirely deficient in that vitamin, it is somewhat undernourished by it. Copyright © 2010 Seamus Sweeney Aldebo 1 Issue 39 A review by Seamus Sweeney Advertisement Produced in the North Dublin village of Lusk, Albedo One has, for a long time, borne the speculative fiction standard in Ireland. For a country with such a strong literary tradition, speculative fiction per se does not loom large in considerations of Irish literature. Of course, some of this is the same blend of snobbery and ignorance seen elsewhere, and some of this is due to the understandable but, to my mind, rather tiresome preoccupation with exploring the same themes of "Irishness" again and again. And Ireland is the land of Lord Dunsany and Flann O'Brien, authors of the fantastic and (in very different ways) the grotesque. Albedo One is the kind of literary magazine I like; a few carefully selected, high-quality stories. I note from perusing the Wikipedia article on Albedo One that some sniff at its production values -- personally I found the design and general look and feel of the magazine pleasing and approachable. Albedo One 39 (having a number in the title of one's publication does lend itself to some confusion) begins with an interview with Mike Resnick. This is an entertaining exploration of his journey from churning out "adult fiction" in the 60s to holding the record for the most award-winning short stories. Resnick makes several interesting and illuminating points. There is so much flim flam and general spoofery written and talked about the impact of the internet on publishing and writing that it's refreshing to hear from an author who is just getting on with it. And Resnick also makes a point which I believe all fiction writers, no matter what genre, would do well to keep to the forefront of their minds: stories are about creating characters and events that the reader cares about, that there is an emotional connection. If you want to make some point about international relations or about the environment or whatever, by all means do so in story form; but without some emotional connection, you may as well just write an essay or an op-ed piece. The stories in this issue of Albedo One all involve the readers emotions. For me, Mari Saario's "The Horse Shoe Nail" and Annete Reader's "Frogs on my Doorstep" were the two highlights of the magazine. Both share common themes of families under stress and unusual quirks in space-time. Sarrio, winner of the 2009 Atorox Prize for the best Finnish science fiction story, contributes a particularly moving tale. It begins with a young girl in the mid-80s, taking refuge from her abusive father in her deceased grandfather's disused forge. Which isn't, it turns out, as disused as that, as figures from some kind of medieval fantasy world visit the forge desperate for a blacksmith's assistance. Saario weaves this into an intergenerational tale of magic and longing, one which I found an assured, moving story. "Frogs On My Doorstop" won the 2009 Aeon Award for short fiction, and is another well-crafted story of a family torn apart by their young daughter's mysterious disappearance, only to be revisited by her some time afterwards in a disturbingly altered incarnation. I liked this story very much also, although I did find some of the metaphors and phrasemaking a little awkward. There are also fine stories by Uncle River and J.L. Abbott, as well as Resnick himself (this is a reprint from Asimov's Magazine), and a short short story -- nearly flashfiction length -- by Martin McGrath called "Eskragh." This too has a mid-80s milieu, and captures in a few unforced phrases the child's perception of life in rural Northern Ireland in that time, at once somewhat removed from the intensity of "The Troubles" but with army helicopters hovering in the horizon. The story is described as a "dark fantasy" one in the introduction to the magazine, but really it functions just as well as a brief mainstream vignette on the loss of a friend in childhood and the aftermath. Copyright © 2010 Seamus Sweeney Ghost Seas Steve Utley A review by Seamus Sweeney Advertisement Steven Utley has been described (by Gardner Dozois) as possibly "the most under-rated science fiction writer alive." With Bruce Sterling, Howard Waldrop and Lisa Tuttle, he helped form the Turkey City Writer's Workshop in Austin in the 70s. The prolific contributions between these authors lead to, amongst other things, the first stirrings of steampunk. Utley took something of a hiatus from science fiction as the 70s ended, pursuing other interests, only to resume in the later 80s. Perhaps this hiatus helped secure his status as a self-described "internationally unknown author." On the one hand, it is richly undeserved -- Steven Utley should be as famous (and rich) as anyone else. On the other, there is a certain pleasure in discovering an author unknown to one who induces the literary version of love at first sight. The eponymous opening story of this brilliant collection is a haunting tale of the West Texas sands, a strange triangle between a dementing (but rich) old man, his apparently guileless nephew, and the nephew's young wife. This story was reminiscent of all those J.G. Ballard stories and novels set in imagined landscapes that powerfully reflect mindscapes. The exotic and the eerie is a mirror of ourselves. For me, reading this entire collection was an exhilarating experience that brought me back to the excitement of discovering Ballard's short story collections in Dublin Central Library as a young teenager. There is not a weak, forgettable story among these tales. Even more impressive is the range of Utley's prose -- we have outright sci-fi, slipstream, alternate history, "straight" history, outer space, inner space, a dream Texas, a real Texas. All these worlds are created and explored in an utterly absorbing manner. From the hilarious slice of space opera "Upstart" to the alternate historical fragment "Look Away" to the time travel glitch "Michael Bates Michael Bates Michael Bates Michael," each story describes a world perfectly. Another highlight is the palaeontologist versus creationist murder mystery "The Dinosaur Season." With humour and sympathy, Utley captures the cultural clash between the scientists and the local law enforcement very well. The long historical story "The Electricity of Heaven," in which a venal, pompous newspaper editor experiences the last days of Confederate Richmond, was for me the collection's centrepiece. "The Electricity of Heaven" is a straight historical fiction, and yet one does not notice the distinctions in this collection. Writing an unreservedly enthusiastic review that is both interesting and avoids repetitive use of superlatives is actually quite difficult. So at this point I will bow out and simply encourage those who have not yet encountered these stories to acquire this fine edition from Ticonderoga Press. Copyright © 2010 Seamus Sweeney Writing In the Digital Generation. Ed. Heather Urbanski A review by Seamus Sweeney Advertisement The dedication of this volume reads "this book began in science fiction and fantasy fandom and so is dedicated to all those in that community." This is an intriguing set of academic essays on writing in the digital generation. One of the familiar tropes of declinist narratives of a lost golden age of the humanities is that writing and reading are in decline. Radio, television, the cinema, the internet -- all were supposed to kill off the written word. What has really happened is that a whole new arena for writing has been opened up to a mass writership. As Steven Johnson wrote in Everything Bad Is Good For You, the medium that has most to fear from the internet is television, and as has become clearer since, the internet's plethora of fora, blogs, wikis and chatrooms seems largely devoted to old style "real world" art and entertainment, rather than the creation of utterly new forms. Of course, "devoted" in this case does not imply an inert reflection, or a worshipful discussion, but a moulding into something entirely new. Academics who wish to approach the exciting worlds of underground or alternative culture are often caught in a bind. They wish to retain the rigour and analytical stance of the academy (and, one could more cynically add, the tendency to jargon and verbiage), while nevertheless appearing comfortable in a protean world of shifting identities where credibility is king. The academic humanities are increasingly (some might say at times boringly) focused on exploring the liminal, the radical, the transgressive -- and yet the discourse of the academy can sometimes seem to drain what it considers of passion, of colour, of interest. Heather Urbanski, assistant professor of English and director of composition at Central Connecticut State University, has edited a book that generally manages to remain engaging and engaged with its subject matter, while exhibiting scholarly rigour. In her essay, "Dean, Mal and Snape Walk Into A Bar: Lessons in Crossing Over," Julie Flynn writes "I find it difficult, if not impossible, to divorce my fannish and scholarly selves. Both worlds color the way I read any given text and each sphere influences the way I act in the other. The larger community that is Fandom, as opposed to one small fandom centered on a particular narrative, provides a way to consume narrative that incorporates unique rhetorical and exegetical strategies." Leaving aside my distaste for the phrase "consuming narrative," this passage provides an introduction to a theme of the essays -- the possible use of the techniques of Fandom in analytical and educational contexts. Thus in Susanna Coleman's "Making Our Voices Heard: Young Adult Females Writing Participatory Fan Fiction," we read that "by applying these strategies of participation and interruption in the classroom, students (and instructors) can both better comprehend assigned texts and make their own voices heard regarding academic writing." Coleman uses a fanfic by Madam Luna based on a Japanese video game series called Pop'n'Music to illustrate and explore these strategies. Fanfic, and particular slashfic, is of great interest to many contributors, and it seems in the fields of rhetoric and composition in general. Their interest in particular in women's slashfic, is seen as a way of subverting heteronormative narratives of romance (to coin a phrase). The book ranges beyond science fiction and fantasy fandom, and one essay I found particularly interesting was Michael R. Trice's "Going Deep: What Online Sports Culture Teaches Us About the Rhetorical Future of Social Networks." I never realised that Google produces more hits for "Sports" than for "Politics" and "Sex" combined. I would have welcomed more dissenting voices amidst the general cheerleading for the digital age. Perhaps some of this is my old fashioned, possibly quite patriarchal and Eurocentric and so forth suspicions that fanfics about Pop'n'Music may not quite be the zenith of global literature. However, there are more serious points to be made. In her introduction, Urbanski acknowledges the challenge posed by Siva Vaidhyanathan to the whole concept of a digital generation. Even in elite American universities, there is a digital divide -- many are simply not rich enough in either time or money to fully partake. Imagine what the situation is outside this microslice of humanity. For all the utopian claims of techno-evangelists, the information age is becoming one of greater inequality. Last year there was a by-election in the area of Dublin in which I live. Generally my first preference is given for the most hopeless independent candidate who at least has the merit of some original idea. In our constituency, this was a chap who advocated a form of direct democracy by means of the internet -- essentially pledging himself to obey whatever is decided by his constituents via web polls. What about those without internet access, whether through lack of means, lack of confidence, or indeed lack of ability, I asked in a post on his forum. There was no reply, at all. The irony that, for all the rhetoric of "interrupting" and "subverting" narratives, digital media may be becoming a tool to entrench rather than change social realities. Further, I feel the book would have benefited from a firm, astringently cynical voice. In the final essay, Urbanski's own "Meeting the Digital Generation in the Classroom," what is described as "the virulence of the technophobes" is discussed. Urbanski describes encountering "what felt like a brick wall of nostalgia" for the printed text ("with its corresponding devaluation of digital media rhetoric") from colleagues for many years. "This perspective crystallised in the postings to the web site of the Chronicle of Higher Education by Emory University professor Mark Bauerlein. Urbanski finds Bauerlein "reflects what seems to me an ironic rejection of the very medium in which his ideas are often communicated." And yet, I feel the book would have benefitted from a Bauerlein, or even better the late great Neil Postman. Postman, author of Amusing Ourselves To Death and The Disappearance of Childhood, two books that combine a quality of provoking a new way of looking of the world with that elusive thing, "readability," died in 2003, just as the age of the blog was getting into its stride and before social networking became ubiquitous. It is hardly ironic to use a blog post or an online magazine article to reflect on the consequences for literacy of the digital age, and it is hardly hypocritical to be wary or critical of them. Despite the caveats outlined above, there is much to ponder on reading these essays. Fanfic is, quite frankly, not my thing, but I can see how it is of great interest to the essayists. Copyright © 2010 Seamus Sweeney Chasing the Dragon Nicholas Kauffman review by Seamus Sweeney Advertisement Horror fiction has resorted to the familiar monsters of myth and legend many times. Most notoriously, and notably, the vampire, but also the other familiar weird and/or undead creatures of the horror canon. One exception is the dragon. The dragon is the creature of fantasy, from the story of the Hobbit who lived in a hole to the Dragonriders of Pern. Dragons have not featured much in contemporary horror writing. Perhaps because it is harder to integrate dragons into an otherwise plausible here-and-now setting. Perhaps it is because dragons are inextricably linked with foundation myths and medieval epics. Our consciousness of vampires, on the other hand, even though the vampire myths are probably as old as those of dragons, is primarily shaped by Stoker's creation of a Transylvanian gentleman hiring lawyers from Victorian London, which at the time was as contemporary as you could get. Need more evidence? There never was a X-Files "Monster of the Week" episode involving dragons, and after all Chris Carter and friends raided every other trope of horror, fantasy and speculative fiction generally. Nicholas Kaufmann sets this novella in a definite present. We begin with Georgia Quincey, dragonslayer, fighting the dragon in the ruins of an isolated New Mexico diner. This dragon does not, at this stage, fight directly, but through the reanimated corpses of her victims -- "meat puppets." Mutilated, eviscerated corpses pursue Georgia through the story as she follows her family business. For Georgia is a born dragonslayer, and not only that but a direct descendant of George of Cappadocia -- patron saint of England and of Moscow, portrayed on innumerable Orthodox icons and English pub signs expertly lancing a scaly dragon through the mouth. Except things didn't quite work out that way. George of Cappadocia didn't kill the dragon. His descendants are bound to try, but have so far all failed. Through the generations, the lore of the dragon is handed down, as well as the ability to sense by means of bloody visions in what, apparently random, location the dragon is wreaking bloody havoc. The visions become bloodier, and the locations of these massacres gradually is revealed to be less random than they had seemed. One of the themes of modern horror fiction is the disconnect between special powers of any kind and the ability to live even the semblance of a normal life. The dragon butchers her parents, and her knowledge of what her destiny is destroys Georgia's only shot at a loving relationship. She turns to heroin in despair. The pun of the books title is only one of the many ironies relating to Georgia's addiction to an opiate, as well as the unwelcome compulsion to try and slay the dragon. Suffice it to say that this habit, that shames her, that leads her to question her worth as a person and a dragonslayer, also keeps her alive and plays a crucial role in the climax. Kaufmann provides a coherent, culturally credible mythos drawing on a eclectic range of traditions for this dragon story. He does not engage in too much explanation of technicalities as to how the dragon gets around the place, for instance, and this is all to the good. This is an intense little novella that packs quite a punch. Poe wrote on the superiority of the short story to the novel, despite the tremendous cultural bias towards the novel, because the short story could be read in one sitting and could thereby deliver a more powerful effect. In an age of literary elephantiasis, it is good to encounter a rich imagination that does believe in indulgent prolixity. The book could be read in a short flight or long bus ride, and possesses the essential quality of page-turnability. There is a satisfying amount of gore, and the later appearance of the dragon in quasi-human form makes one's flesh creep. Perhaps it is too obviously "cinematic" in structure -- with an action-packed beginning, numerous emotional flashback scenes, and an appropriately gargantuan climax. At times it reads too much like a novelisation of a somewhat more stark than usual blockbuster. There is also a feminist thread, lightly worn, to the story -- Georgia is the first female dragonslayer, her birth bringing to an end an era of male-preference primogeniture dating back to George of Cappadocia. Georgia's father appears to her periodically, as she wallows in the shame of heroin addiction, somewhat in the fashion of Hamlet's father. No man really lives up to her father, and what male characters she encounters -- with one exception -- are creeps, lowlifes, or lack belief in her. Then again, the one female character she encounters is a vacuous junkie who seems to be a meat puppet even before the dragon appears on the scene. Chasing The Dragon is a novel take on one of the oldest monster stories we tell ourselves. It is refreshing to read of a dragonslayer that belongs more in a Tarantino movie than in some kind of quasi-medieval epic. Perhaps the dragon won't take over from the vampire as the favoured monster of best-selling horror fiction, but it is good to think that it is rejoining the horror menagerie. Copyright © 2010 Seamus Sweeney The World House Guy Adams A review by Seamus Sweeney Advertisement Done properly, the story within a story can have a vertiginous effect, a sense of being caught in an infinite loop, best described by Jorge Luis Borges in his lecture on "The Thousand And One Nights" collected in the book Seven Nights. The world-within-a-world story can have a similar effect. In a way, the hidden world is a theme not only of literature -- from Horton Hears A Who to, it could be argued, the three stages of the afterlife in Dante's Divine Comedy (Dante enters the afterworld through "a dark wood") -- but of myth of the underworld may be the first world-within-a-world story. Guy Adams has created a rollercoaster of a story set in a world within a box -- a world-within-a-world that is itself a Divine Comedy. For the box is, for most of those inside, a kind of after-life -- those humans who enter the box do so at a moment of imminent death in this world -- and it is certainly more an Inferno, or at best a Purgatorio, than a Paradiso. This is a world created out of the nightmares and fears of humans themselves, contained inside a box that is in fact a prison, with a very special prisoner. The first third or so of the book is taken up by gradually introducing the multifarious cast of characters. From Spain during the Civil War to Harlem in the early 30s to the late night bars of New York in the 70s to Florida and an unnamed corner of England today, the pre-box lives of the characters are sketched artfully and speedily. We begin with Miles, an English antique shop owner with poor financial judgement and a gambling habit, who gets on the wrong side of some very nasty characters indeed, and just before they blow him away on account of an unpaid debt he vanishes into the box. We also meet Penelope Simmons, a fun-loving Boston socialite in the 30s, who, about to be raped and murdered by her psychopathic fiancé Chester and his chauffeur at the end of a night out in Harlem, also disappears into the box. Both turn up at the same time and in the same area of the rambling, seemingly infinite house, which is where most of the action in the world takes place. If there is a main protagonist to the book, it is Miles, whose mordant world-view and lack of appetite for heroics, and lustful longing for Penelope (in fairness to Miles, at their first encounter Penelope is totally naked having escaped from Chester's clutches just in time) are an earthy anchor point as the surreal action ensues. Miles and Penelope luckily team up with Carruthers, an Edwardian big game hunter and general man of action along the lines of Lord John Roxton from The Lost World who is determined, with admirable pluck, to escape the box altogether. Interspersed with the stories of the box's human inhabitants are brief vignettes of the story of some kind of super-powerful entities, probably extraterrestrial, who are responsible for the box's existence. The box is a kind of prison for a renegade entity, one who stayed behind to enjoy tormenting the puny, pitiful humans whom its fellows had just been bored by. In the early stages, it seems at times that Adams is throwing in yet another character from yet another setting, seemingly at random. As the story progresses, we realise that there are connections and commonalities there. And there seems to be another kind of inhabitant of the box -- who seems able to exit and re-enter both the box and our own timeline. Alan Arthur, an academic in modern Florida with a large chunk of his memory missing, is drawn to this box (which, unsurprisingly for an artefact of such power and mystery, has been the subject of confused and fragmentary articles in some of the more out-of-the-mainstream media) for reasons that become clearer as the story progresses. Too much more would give away not only the plot but the pleasure of reading the unfolding of this intricate tale. The world of the box is one of subtly altered reality, where benign seeming surfaces mask mortal dangers. From a jungle to snow-capped mountains to a sea of literal dreams, there are all the unnatural environments that one could think of. This may be a kind of after-life, but the box is a highly lethal place. Most of the visitors have a short life expectancy, and many resort to a brutish subhuman existence of cannibalism and fear. Some of the most endearing characters are, unfortunately, not with us for long -- although the conclusion does raise the possibility that the arrows of causality may have to be tinkered with, if not actually reversed. There will be a sequel, Restoration, which I for one will certainly be reading to see where the ride will go next. World-within-a-world stories, like stories-within-stories, can be horribly self-indulgent and dull. After a while, the reader can lose interest in a story in which anything can happen with no real consequences, or in which random settings can be created. The crucial trick which Adams pulls off is to create compelling characters whose destiny becomes a matter of all-consuming interest in the reader. Adams is also adept at keeping the various strands of his highly productive imagination together, and creating a real sense of nightmare and indeed of menace in the story. Copyright © 2010 Seamus Sweeney Greatest Uncommon Denominator 5 A review by Seamus Sweeney Advertisement Greatest Uncommon Denominator is a substantial magazine, weighing in at a page count about the same as a medium length novel. Its cover features a striking image by the digital artists MichaelO of a lissom young lady in a white dress peering into the pupil of an enormous human (or humanoid) eye. Greatest Uncommon Denominator #5 is a mix of prose, poetry, fiction, fact, art, comics and even drama. The good folks at GUD proclaim on their site to be unconstrained by genre or form -- bringing the world sci-fi for the literary crowd and literary stuff for the sci-fi crowd. The dichotomy between sci-fi and "literature" is of course a false one, but it does reflect perhaps a divergence of interests among groups of readers who ultimately value originality and literary quality. One could crudely put it that some readers value originality of ideas and settings over literary craft per se, while others prefer originality and quality of literary expression. Curating an anthology that goes even some way to satisfying these different preferences is quite a task. I enjoyed the very first piece, Rose Lemberg's "Imperfect Verse," with its evocation of Norse myth combined with an earthiness and forward momentum. For me, it possessed a winning blend of high-register epic discourse and fleshy concerns. Other stories that were particular highlights for me were Paul Hogan's casually fantastic "The Pearl Diver With The Gold Chain" and Isabel Cooper Kunkle's "Aftermath." Hogan, whose bio informs us is 82 years old, spent time in the Merchant Marine in WWII and the Eleventh Airborne Division during the Korean War, and has designed and built over four hundred playgrounds, contributes a particularly engaging tale of a happily rootless wanderer who discovers an odd power in a mundane place. On the comics front, we have Sydney Padua's witty take on Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage in "Ada Lovelace: The Origin!,"" and Joseph Calabrese and Harsho Mohan Chattoraj's "Gunga Din," a rendering of the Kipling ballad that firmly nails it as a sweaty, bloody, thirsty war story. "Gunga Din" is a short-spinoff of Calabrese and Chattoraj's longer comic Her Majesty's Bulldog Brigade, which I will be keeping an eye out for. We also have a funny Shakespearean parody from Tristan D'Agosta, "Sweet Melodrama," which I would love to see actually performed. Non-fiction wise, we have Paul Spinrad's "Prophet of Menlo Park," about the personal computing pioneer Paul Engelbart. An anthology such as this will have something for everyone, and also inevitably not everything will meet with everyone's approval. Some of the stories were a little too much post-apocalyptic cliché for my liking. Most of the poetry left me largely cold both intellectually and emotionally, and left no lasting impression. However my favourite piece of any kind in Greatest Uncommon Denominator #5 is Zac Carter's poem "desideratum" -- a warm, poignant account of a session playing Risk that evokes much more. Overall, Greatest Uncommon Denominator lives up to its promise as a high-quality forum for new voices. Copyright © 2010 Seamus Sweeney Greatest Uncommon Denominator 6 A review by Seamus Sweeney Advertisement Following my review of GUD Issue 5, it was a pleasure to receive the next volume to review. This edition of the high-quality, book-sized journal features Dave Migman's "Flat Worm" on the cover, a darker image that MichaelO's cover for GUD #5. "Flat Worm" shows what could best be described as a bronze skeleton of what looks like a trilobite with vertebrae (I am very very open to correction on this), on a stony background. This cover image sets the tone for a somewhat darker collection this time. There seems to be a lot more poems (of higher quality generally, I especially liked Jim Pascual Agustin's "Sand Clings To Me Toes, Daddy" with its capturing of one of those moments in childhood that are both magical and sad, presaging the inevitable passage of time), the stories seem to be longer, and there are none of the short comics of the previous volume. As well as being longer, I detected a darker tone to these stories. One, Lavie Tidhar's "The Last Butterfly," deals with the darkest subject it is possible to tackle in fiction -- the holocaust. In the last weeks of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, a young girl already forced into premature disillusionment with the world (interesting how anthologies provide counterpoints, in this case with the girl of Agustin's poem) encounters a mysterious artist amidst the horror. Caroline M. Yoachim's "What Happens in Vegas" gives us a succession of points of view of a love quadrangle (of sorts) in a world in which a drug called munin, which induces a sort of Korsakoff syndrome in which memories cannot be laid down, and is used to facilitate orgies. This story is a portrait of a marriage in decline, under the stress of disease and disillusion, as well as an ironically entertaining portrait of the pursuit of controlled irresponsibility. Lydia Ondrusek's "Hateful" is another depiction of family life; this time a woman who dreams that those she hates will never die, while those she loves will. This is a touching vignette really of a self-sacrificing mother and her world. The longest story here is Lou Antonelli's "Dispatches From the Troubles," which takes the form of a series of newspaper stories from an alternate history universe in which an American Irish Republic was established in 1850, between the Rio Grande and the Nueces River. New York born Eamon de Valera did not return to Ireland as a child but remained in America (as Edward de Valera) and became the universally beloved President of the AIR in the early to mid-twentieth century. There was no partition of Ireland into Free State and Northern Ireland in 1921, but the victorious IRA gave the Loyalist and Unionist communities in Ireland the choice of "the suitcase or the coffin," leading to mass emigration to the AIR. The mock news stories discuss the descent of the AIR, which has a sizeable Loyalist (or "Orange") minority, into sectarian strife that in some ways mirrors what happened in Northern Ireland from the late 60s. It is interesting, as an Irish reader, to encounter this alternate history universe. There are lots of entertainingly tweaked versions of real life figures, from William F. Buckley (a sectarian Catholic rabble rouser here, with his loquacious use of language intact) to "John" Paisley (an Americanised Ian Paisley) and a lot of clever references to real events. I must say however that something about the whole conceit did not ring true; an odd thing to say about an alternate history, but after all one of the tests of good alt history is whether it feels like "this could have happened." Certainly the ultimate outcome of the story (which I won't reveal) does not reflect anything that happened in Northern Ireland. There were also some odd references to the Orange community being enthusiasts of "Irish football," which if it is meant to be Gaelic Football seems unlikely. Perhaps it is some kind of AIR version of gridiron. Antonelli's correspondents (who include R.W. Apple, Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson) make a few solecisms with the real historical record; for instance Apple describes the Battle of the Boyne as "a famous victory over Catholic forces." As William Of Orange's supporters included the Pope, and you can't get more Catholic than that, "Jacobite" would have been more accurate. In any case, the story is diverting and, as with the previous GUD issue, this is a collection worth reading. Copyright © 2010 Seamus Sweeney Yellow Blue Tibia Adam Roberts A review by Seamus Sweeney Advertisement A coven of Soviet science-fiction writers are summoned by Stalin to a dacha sometime in 1945 for an act of dark enchantment. The war against Germany is won and, as the atomic bomb is yet to be dropped, Stalin predicts a brief, victorious struggle against the decadent USA. The Soviet Union, however, needs an enemy to keep the engines of permanent global revolution stoked. Thus the Soviet writers are given a task by the dictator -- to create the narrative of an alien invasion that will serve as a global unifying myth. Except this myth, the terrified authors are given to understand, is going to be enacted in reality. Motivated initially by fear and then their own professional, creative pride, the writers begin to construct a tale of radiation aliens, of an American rocket destroyed by a high-intensity beam and an alien nuclear attack in the Ukraine. All this under the eye of Malenkov, Stalin's henchman, there to serve as a permanent reminder that this is an assignment which it is not an option to refuse. One day, without warning, Malenkov tells the writers that their work is finished, that they are to depart and never to acknowledge, even to themselves, that the event even happened. Such is the force of terror embodied in Stalin (and, by extension, his underlings) that they do so without demur. Our narrator, Konstantin Andreiovich Skvorecky, goes on to abandon the world of science fiction and to work as a translator; his real devotion becoming an exceptionally heavy drinker, even by Russian standards, and a terrible spouse and father. The years go by and he loses wife and family and, in a drunken act of self-destruction, manages to set fire to himself and loses much of his facial skin. He finally gives up alcohol, faced with a choice between continuing to drink and continuing to live, and lives a drab, modest life of solitude. The years up to 1986 are eked out in this fashion. Living alone, he believes himself to be sole survivor of those weeks in the dacha that followed the meeting with Stalin, a memory he hardly dares recall. Konstantin Andreiovich is mistaken, however. Konstantin Andreiovich encounters -- apparently by complete chance -- Ivan Frenkel, born Jan Frenkel, who back in the dacha was at pains to conceal his Slav origin. Frenkel is accompanied by muscle-bound giant called Trofim, who at first seems some kind of minder. Frenkel's bizarre behaviour and eagerness to -- in front but ostentatiously out of earshot of Trofim -- recall the time the two former writers met Stalin unsettled Konstantin Andreiovich. This is only the beginning of the his unsettling, as the narrative that follows marries the riotous sense of the absurd of Gary Shytengart's Absurdistan with the quizzical, maybe-counterfactual-maybe-not tone of Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle. Konstantin Andreiovich describes how in 1985 when the Challenger disaster occurred, it was observed in the USSR with a mix of sorrow and schadenfreude (characteristic of the mix of envious inferiority and boastful superiority with which Russia views America). One of his translating jobs is for the Office of Liaison and Overseas Exchange. Called to the Office one day, he is asked to translate for a roaringly obscene official who just wants these pesky foreigners out of his hair the words of Dr. James Tilly Coyne and Dora Norman, two pleasant Americans who report that they represent the Church of Scientology, which is hoping to establish itself in the Russia of Gorbachev, glasnost and perestroika. An apparently humdrum piece of work, surreal in the way all translation is surreal, is followed by our narrator's abduction by friendly UFOlogists who believe his denials of the existence of UFOs and his involvement in the "Stalin affair" are a brilliant piece of misdirection, the mysterious death of Coyne, and one of the most hilarious set-pieces of the book as Konstantin Andreiovich is interrogated by an ineffectually angry policeman incapable of anything except threats against testicles. From then on the plot is gloriously unpredictable and unpredictably glorious. Like a glorious express train, Yellow Blue Tibia is one of those novels that sweeps the reader along. Stalin's interest in science-fiction and UFOs is well documented, and the Soviet Union rivalled the United States for UFO sightings (presumably for similar reasons -- the reader can decide for themselves which reasons based on their own view of UFOlogy) Adam Roberts uses nuggets of real (so to speak) incidents in Soviet UFOlogy to build his counterfactual-that-isn't-counterfactual narrative. The ideas come thick and fast, from dialectical materialism to the nature of tyranny to quantum mechanics. Close attention is rewarded, and is absolutely necessary for some of the more speculative moments, but this is a book that wears its learning and innovations lightly, never becoming dry, pedantic or afflicted with the curse of clumsy exposition. As intelligent and provoking at it is humourous and even touching, the book even acts as an entertaining (and never pompous or portentous) disquisition on the nature of science fiction. A female doctor, who late in the novel saves Konstantin Andreiovich's life repeatedly (in one of the many great lines, he observes "to be clear, by smoking a cigarette, inside a nuclear facility, whilst having my skull blown up by a radioactive RGD-5 I have extended my life expectancy") observes that "Science fiction is for adolescent boys and people who make models of aircraft from plastic and glue. I am a mature woman, which is to say, the opposite of a science fiction fan." This, of course, is the default position of so many general readers, and it is customary for reviewers of literary fiction, enthusiastic about a book that just maybe could possibly be described as sci-fi, to deny that it is so, especially if the book is by a Big Literary Name (David Langford has collected a very entertaining collection of these quotes that can be viewed at news.ansible.co.uk/others.php) Elsewhere, we read a more nuanced but even bleaker meditation on the sci-fi writer's craft: "A realist writer might break his protagonist's leg, or kill his fiancée; but a science fiction writer will immolate whole planets, and whilst doing so he will be more concerned with the placement of the commas than with the screams of the dying. He will do this every working day all through his life. How can this not produce calluses on those tenderer portions of the mind that ordinary human beings use to focus their empathy?" In a novel in which one of the most entertaining supporting characters suffers from a "syndrome" characterised by lacking empathy, an inability to detect sarcasm and a compulsion for order (in the post-Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time world, most readers will know exactly what this is), a concern with empathy and human connection is central. Yellow Blue Tibia is most fundamentally a love story, a less than conventional love story to put it mildly, but one of great richness, power and beauty. If it was written by a Big Literary Name, we'd have reviewers falling over each other to clear their throats by announcing that it isn't science-fiction, a genre for adolescent boys and people who make models of aircraft from plastic and glue, after all. (This review first appeared on nthposition.com.) Copyright © 2010 Seamus Sweeney The Raw Shark Texts Steven Hall A review by Seamus Sweeney Edgar Allen Poe was once described by James Russell Lowell as "three-fifths genius, two-fifths sheer fudge" (and who reads James Russell Lowell today, one might ask?). It might be a stretch to call any segment of The Raw Shark Texts genius, but the second three-fifths certainly pass the fudge test. The first 130 pages, however, are gripping. "Gripping" is one of those over-used terms of critical (or indeed sub-critical, being largely a staple of the blurb writer) praise, but every so often a piece of prose exerts a physical power to keep one reading. The Raw Shark Texts has this in spades, until typographic tricksiness and rather stale pseudo-avant garde ideas about texts and communication intervene. We begin with Eric Sanderson. He wakes in an ordinary yet unfamiliar suburban house to a new life, in the literal sense of dissociative amnesia. He finds a card from "The First Eric Sanderson," the man he was, giving him directions to a local psychologist, Dr. Randle. She tells him he has dissociative amnesia, and in a neat scene explains the condition very well: "Can you give me a line from Casablanca?" (asked Dr. Randle) "Sorry?" "A line from Casablanca" I was in danger of being seriously left behind but I did what I was told. "'Of all the gin joints in all the world, she has to walk into mine.'" "Good," Randle nodded. "And who says that?" "Bogart. Rick. The character or the actor?" "It doesn't matter. Can you picture him saying it?" "Yes." "Is the film in colour or in black and white?" "It's black and white. He's sitting with a drink at..." "And when was the last time you saw Casablanca?" My mouth opened and an almost-sound happened in the back of my throat. But I didn't have an answer. "You see? All that seems to be missing, Eric, is you." The Raw Shark Texts is generally written in a rather matey, blokey style. In the beginning, this is part of the appeal, reinforcing the what-if-this-was-me effect that most adventure stories evoke. However, as the book comes by, and especially as the mythological and semiotic baggage gets heavier (more of which anon), the style grates. At first, however, it captures perfectly the suburban dullness of Sanderson's house and town: I walked over to the bedroom window. The outside world was a long street and a facing row of terraced houses. There were regular lamp posts, irregular telegraph posts and the sounds of a distant busy road -- constant car engine hum, truck band-clatter and occasional bass box thump, but -- I squashed my nose up against the glass and looked left and right -- no people. It was a cloudy day, grey and edgeless. Apparently it's been claimed on the internet that Sanderson's house is in Derby, England. Dr. Randle attempts to counsel Eric, but further postings from the First Eric Sanderson warn him off the increasingly sinister psychologist. I don't want to set the scene too much more, as these early chapters, with their sense of menace amidst mundanity, are by far the best of the book. In the early films of M. Night Shyamalan, the thrill was seeing a hoary comic-book conceit worked out in humdrum everyday life. In Unbreakable, we saw what having superhuman powers might mean in everyday, dull life. What holds the attention so viscerally in the early pages of The Raw Shark Texts is how closely Eric Sanderson's attempts to make sense of his life tally with our own attempts to make sense of what is going. Reviewers of the book have gone straight to the multiplex (the headline of Tom McCarthy's generally approving review in the London Review of Books) in search of anchors of comparison. On the blurb, we have Mark Haddon pronouncing it "the bastard love-child of The Matrix, Jaws and The Da Vinci Code" while other anonymous critics invoke Jaws, Donnie Darko and Memento. A particularly hysterical Scotsman raves "Steven Hall's brilliance aspires to Bach", which is putting it pretty steep. As McCarthy observes in the LRB, the book reads like a movie treatment, and a less than innovative one in these post-Matrix days when Reality Is Not What It Seems has become one of the great clichés. The slew of movie comparisons provides a clue as to why I felt so let down by The Raw Shark Texts. The 130 pages read like watching Memento -- the heady sense of disorientation accompanying the gradual development of personal theories about what the hell is going on. "Tricksy" isn't always a pejorative term, and Memento showed how a hoary old convention -- the "experimental" or "non-linear" narrative -- can sometimes enhance a plot, especially what is essentially a mystery or whodunnit. The problem is, Memento told a fundamentally simple story of lost love and of corruption. The Raw Shark Texts includes a simple story of lost love and bereavement, but actually tells a story of conceptual sharks. Yes, you can't beat an old conceptual shark story, can you? As an aside, I'm not ruining anything by telling you that Jaws is referenced and more than referenced pretty heavily throughout the book. These sharks are virtual and yet not virtual, for the world itself is virtual. Virtual sharks are made from bits and pieces of the detritus of human interactions. Eric is cursed by, or rather with, a Ludovician. A Ludovician is the Great White of the conceptual shark world, feasting on memories and thoughts belonging to a vulnerable mind. How does the Ludovician manifest itself in The Raw Shark Texts? Firstly, in the relatively old fashioned means of purplish prose: The dark shape glides up into the flow of conversations and stories, swims through the word-hum of packed Saturday night bars, circles the loops and edges of exchanged mobile numbers. A telephone call is misdialed and, miles away, my unconscious self shifts in sleep, disturbed by a ringing bell. From four degrees of separation, the shadow under the water catches the scent. A curved, rising signifier, a black idea fin of momentum and intent cuts through the distance between us in a spray of memes. Advertisement Heavy, eh? But more directly, we get to see the Ludovician, as well as a variety of less fearsome conceptual fish, in textual format. In the manner of the self-conscious conceptual cul-de-sac that was concrete poetry, pages and pages of the book are festooned with gobbets of text made up to look like sharks. There is a sterility to these typographical experiments that leaks into the human story of the book. Once you've seen one shark made up of characters on the page, you've seen them all. Readers who persist with The Raw Shark Texts and who, like me, are tiring somewhat of the whole proceedings can be of good cheer. Towards the end -- just at the stage when you have read so far that 'tis more tedious to go back than to go o'er -- we are treated to 40-odd nearly blank pages. Blank except for flick-book style representations of a looming shark coming closer and closer. To return to the plot, once the conceptual sharks appear, the taut mystery of the early pages disappears, and we embark on a rather tedious exercise in a thriller of memes. Essentially, Eric Sanderson goes in search of Dr. Trey Fidorous, a supposed expert in the conceptual shark world. His search is aided by Scout, a girl of the irritating pseudo-sassiness with which male writers encumber their attempts at strong young female characters with. It turns out that Scout has been stricken with Mycroft Ward. Mycroft Ward (note the hat-tip to Mycroft Holmes) was a Victorian who vowed to cheat death. This proved physically impossible but psychically quite straightforward -- Ward cataloguing the key aspects of his persona, and then transferring them to a widowed doctor, who in later life began to repeat the process with two other subjects. The personality of Mycroft Ward begins to take over more and more people, and becomes an online entity, a gigantic self feasting off the selves of others. The only thing that can destroy Ward is the Ludovician. Imaginative readers can perhaps work out the terms of the final, Jaws-influenced climactic battle. Baffled readers will probably never bother finding out. The mythical ballast is as heavy as the conceptual one. The first Eric's girlfriend is called Clio (muse of memory, don't you know) The tender, funny, ordinary love story sequences are set on Naxos, where Theseus abandoned Ariadne. There's a boat called the Orpheus. Was it Philip Larkin who objected to the lazy use of classical allusion to evoke what should properly be described? Hall is trying too hard to give his love story some resonance, to act as a balance to the conceptual sharks and Mycroft Ward and such. It may make more sense in the multiplex, where the conceptual sharks may find their natural home in the world of CGI, but on the page they remind one once again that the avant-garde tricks of the early 20th century were an artistic blind alley. The genie's bottle that is Reality Is Not What It Seems is a little like the "It Was All A Dream" ending that all schoolchildren are taught to avoid for their stories -- it imposes a narrative sterility, making it hard to take anything entirely seriously. When everything is possible, nothing is at stake. When nothing is at stake, all the fish in the conceptual ocean won't make your story interesting. (This review first appeared on nthposition.com.) Copyright © 2010 Seamus Sweeney The Yellow Rose of Texas Douglas Brode A review by Seamus Sweeney Advertisement "This is the West, Sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." This famous quote from John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is invoked by Douglas Brode and Joe Orsak in the introduction to their telling of a life story (not, perhaps, the life story) of Emily Morgan/Emily West. Emily may, or may not, have been in General Santa Anna's tent at the Battle of San Jacinto, able to alert the attacking Texican forces where their adversary was. And she may, or may not, have been the direct inspiration for the ballad "Yellow Rose of Texas." In any case, Douglas Brode and Joe Orsak take the print-the-legend approach, and who are we to question the wisdom of a John Ford movie? What did I know of the "Yellow Rose of Texas" before reading this book? Beyond the Mitch Miller song, nothing. And while I'd heard of the Alamo, I would have assumed that the Battle of San Jacinto took place in Spain. It is perhaps the most fitting tribute to Brode and Orsak that after the graphic novel, my next port of call was Wikipedia to read about the people and incidents of the story. For a non-American, the quasi-mythic foundation stories of the United States are both familiar in the general and unknown in the specifics. We've all heard of Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie and the Alamo; we know when we come across the characters of Sam Houston and Stephen Austin that these chaps must be important too -- after all aren't there cities named after them? But we don't know the specifics. Just as writers such as Washington Irving and Henry Adams (and, indeed, Thoreau and Emerson) loom much larger in American literature and are often only barely know even by highly cultured Europeans, the actual details of American history from Independence to World War II (aside from the dates of the Civil War and Lincoln's assassination) are much less known. This is particularly true of the West, at once the most powerful American mythos and the most abstract. Westerns tend to reduce to a set of archetypes -- sheriffs, rustlers, prospectors, local magnates, schoolmarms, good time gals -- and entered into the reductio ad absurdum that killed it off as the dominant movie genre. The spaghetti westerns became Platonic ideals of the Western, stripped of all but the interplay of archetypes. Europeans were, at the same time, paying homage to the horse operas and stripping them of specificity and context. Which is all a high-falutin' way of saying that us Europeans aren't nearly as clever or as cultured as we like to think. And while we like to think we are immersed in Americana (some of us, although not me, like to complain about that fact), the reality of America can still be jarringly foreign. For instance, in Brode and Orsak's story, the events of the Alamo are not directly narrated -- for American readers they are presumably too familiar to require explication, but for me, alas, it was another trip to Wikipedia. Nevertheless the authors do not demand a high level of prior knowledge of the history, and I was never confused by the action; all my Wikipedia-ing came later. And perhaps all these digressions on the Western-as-archetype are a distraction from the business at hand, which is a mighty fun and entertaining old timey graphic novel. Emily Morgan is a feisty young African American woman, whom we first meet travelling as a slave of the Morgan family as an emigrant to Texas. Slavery and racism are recurrent themes here, with the prejudices of Anglos nearly driving Emily from Texas. Erastus "Deaf" Smith, a handsome frontiersman with only partial hearing, is blind to Emily's colour but not to her beauty, and the love story that follows underpins the plot and helps humanise the historical derring-do. In short order, Emily attracts the attentions of Santa Anna himself, and while she spurns him, this encounter will have far reaching consequences. Above all, this is a birth of a nation story. The core theme is freedom and independence. We see the evolution of the Texan Revolution from unhappiness at the centralising authoritarianism of Santa Anna via confusion at just what the revolutionaries wanted to the outright demand for independence. In the story, it is only when this demand is finally clearly articulated that the rebellion can succeed. I greatly enjoyed this graphic novel which tells the foundation myth of Texas in an appropriately traditional and direct fashion. It's very easy to imagine it as a John Ford western. There is no great iconoclasm or revisionism, although the issue of racism is not shirked. In the love story of Emily Morgan and Deaf Smith, we are presented with a story of hope overcoming prejudice. Texas is to be a new land, a clean slate. Those great mottos of the Lone Star State -- "Remember the Alamo," "Come and Take It," and "Don't Mess With Texas" -- emerge from the Revolutionary action. And whatever one's own political beliefs, I defy anyone not to feel a little bit more ornery, a little freer, a little more likely to light out for the territory and a little bit more, well..., Texan after reading of the myth of Emily Morgan. Copyright © 2010 Seamus Sweeney Love in Vain Lewis Shiner A review by Seamus Sweeney Advertisement Ticonderoga Publications have produced a beautiful limited edition paperback of Lewis Shiner's 1997 collection. These are great stories, ranging over genres and locations with admirable disdain for the artificial boundaries that disfigure literature. To use one of the great clichés, there is something for everyone. More accurately, there are multiple stories to suit multiple tastes. There are some wonderful fragments (or, if you prefer, "short shorts") such as "Oz," in which the lives of two villains, a pantomime pop culture villain and a real one (or, possibly, history's greatest patsy), intersect. Similarly, "Mystery Train" takes an icon of rock and roll and puts a strangely horrific slipstream spin on him. For my money, the worst problem that writing about popular music faces is taking itself too seriously, putting a portentous spin on every aspect of itself, and forgetting the excitement, menace and atmosphere of the best popular music. Shiner's prose -- in a mysterious, ineffable way -- captures the sinuous shimmering strangeness of rock at its most expressive and evocative. Reading these stories, I couldn't get a remix of the Swiss band Young Gods' song "Child in the Tree" out of my mind. The "straight" stories are as well-observed, and as thought-provoking as anything else here. For instance, "Dirty Work," the story of a down-on-his-luck man who is forced to take a job for a former high school classmate which involves tailing a rape victim, is a searing and sad account of male brutality and a decent man who tries, ineptly, to make amends. "Castles in The Sand" is a sweet snapshot of a mismatched couple at the beach -- if it was a song, it would be The Mamas And Papas juddering version of "Dream a Little Dream." There are also two pictures of father-son relationships -- the intergenerational rivalry of "Match" and the casually poignant "Flagstaff." Then there are the historical stories, some of which are overtly science fiction, such as the portrayal of Nicola Tesla as Promethean magus in "White City," and some of which are less so, such as the proto-Marxism of the pirate Jean Laffite in "Gold." The most haunting stories are "Dirty Work," again a straight story in which a down-on-his-luck family man takes a job from a former high school friend, now a successful-seeming lawyer, tailing a rape victim. The lawyer is defending the alleged rapist, and the narrator -- a decent man trying to make a living -- is immersed in a world of moral dilemmas. "Love In Vain," a precursor of the Hannibal Lector/Dexter meme of a serial killer who "helps" the authorities, except this time the killer tells the police where to find the remains of victims he couldn't possibly have killed -- because the cases are entirely made up. Shiner is able to create an atmosphere and to evoke a tone of voice that suits each of the disparate settings of his stories. This is a masterful collection, with hardly a bum note (Ok, I'll admit it, there was one story that left me cold -- the parable "The Tale of Mark the Bunny" which by my reckoning is trite and facile, but there you go) and one which I highly recommend. Copyright © 2010 Seamus Sweeney Sybil’s Garage Number 7 A review by Seamus Sweeney Advertisement This is an anthology of pieces with suggested musical accompaniment. Oddly, as the reader will see, the writing tended to remind me of images from films; fragments, moments, individual scenes and shots rather than complete features. Music ostensibly permeates the collection; I found images more prominent. After reading any literature (broadly defined), what remains can be emotions, quotes, images, characters, plot twists, ideas -- anything from an infinite assemblage from the jumble sale of life. While the stories and poems in Sybil's Garage 7 include clever ideas, compelling characters, witty turns of phrase and some strong emotions, what remains is image. The musical theme that also runs through the structure of the anthology reminds me of the links between literary anthologising and the whole process of compiling albums and mix tapes. One of the losses of the age of the download is the eclipse of the album structure. Once, a great album would have an arresting opening track, an appropriate closer for side 1 and opener for side 2, before a suitably climactic final song. A great album was the sum of its songs, and then some -- the relationship between each song and the next (and the song before), the overall mood and atmosphere of the music. Even the greatest albums tend to have one or two filler tracks, and this perhaps is an essential feature. Great anthologies are like albums in this as in so many ways. The best anthologies are the sum of their parts, and more; dependent on the individual quality of contributions, of course, but also an experience beyond simply reading a collection of stories. My favourite anthologies -- Alberto Manguel's Flamingo Book of Fantastic Literature, Kingsley Amis' Oxford Book of Comic Verse and Faber Popular Reciter, and Helen Gardner's Penguin Classic The Metaphysical Poets (I am unsure what common thread runs through these) -- are as much experiences, ideal ways of spending an evening, as they are compilations of literature. Sybil's Garage 7 marks a leap for the series from zine to book. Hoboken-founded, Sybil's Garage is now edited from Brooklyn. For those at a remove from New York, the literary scene of the city in general and Brooklyn in particular can seem off-puttingly cliquish and parochial -- but even though there are plenty of references in the acknowledgments to the East Village's KGB Bar, seeming epicentre of would-be bohemian literature in NYC, Sybil's Garage achieves a satisfyingly universal appeal, and an extremely high degree of literary quality. While I would not quite admit it to my personal pantheon of anthologies, it is pretty wonderful stuff -- beautifully produced, and never dull. The stories are a mix of slipstream, near-future, horror, comedy horror, mythic and pseudo-mythic -- eschewing anything as vulgar or misleading as a neat straightjacket of genre. For the readers of this site, it is as well to point out that there is nothing that really could be called hard sci-fi. Each story comes with a suggested musical accompaniment. Regarding myself as I do as something of a fanatic about music, it was sobering to find that only a couple of pieces were familiar to me. Thus I tried reading the book with YouTube providing the musical background. Sometimes the music and writing dovetailed nicely; sometimes the connection seemed a little forced. However this introduced me to a wide range of artists and repertoire I wasn't at all familiar with. E. C. Myers's "My Father's Eyes" deals with a son who discovers that his father's mysterious disappearance some years previously was due to Hollander's Disease, a form of dementia which reduces the individual to a state akin to the classic Neanderthal Man caricature. This was one of the most moving, and in an unforced way original, stories in the collection -- my joint favourite with M.K. Hobson's "Kid Despair in Love." This is a rollicking mock epic of corporate titans (literal corporate titans) slugging it out. Evoking both the heroic battles of The Iliad, and the scenes in Duplicity in which Tom Wilkinson and Paul Giamatti's moguls literally battle it out in an airport, the story mixes the language of B-school with the syntax of mass destruction. Other highlights include Eric Schaller's "How The Future Got Better" (available to read on the Senses Five website, set to the soundtrack of Talking Heads' "Once In A Lifetime," which was one of the more natural fits of music and story. Megan Kurashige's "The Telescope," which relentlessly reminded me of the films of the Brothers Quay, with its finely wrought sense of tragedy (often critics describe prose as "painterly" -- Kurashige, a dancer, writes with the vigour, precision and delicacy of the dance) leaves the reader with some of the most lasting and haunting images of any of the stories. Alex Dally MacFarlane's "An Orange Tree Framed Your Body" also haunts, with its unreal city ruled by a totalitarian emperor. This is a classic example of a story initially cryptic and allusive, which gradually draws the reader into its emotional world of despair, betrayal, and resistance. Sam Ferree's "The Ferryman's Toll" evokes an afterlife of uncertainty and torpor, reminiscent of the City of the Immortal's in Borges' "The Immortal." The poems are of a high standard, and are consistently strongly-worked and compelling. Standouts include Sonya Taaffe's "Candle for the Tetragrammaton," Jacqueline West's "One October Night in Baltimore," and Adrienne J. Odasso's "The Hyacinth Girl," and Marcie Lynn Tentchoff's "Pathways Marked in Silver." West and Odasso invoke literary history, specifically the shades of Poe and Eliot. Tentchoff's is a neat meditation on paths taken and not taken, and for my money here the recommended music (Dory Previn's "Mystical Kings and Iguanas") matches the mood and theme of the piece most naturally. Ironically, given my musings in the opening paragraph, the least impressive piece is a rather pointless and pedestrian essay on Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, which I guess takes the filler role quite neatly. Otherwise this is a strong and readable anthology with much to recommend it. Copyright © 2011 Seamus Sweeney Tommorow’s Guardian Richard Denning There are stories which seem to belong in a certain medium. Think how many outstanding novels become turgid movies, how many trashy books become great films. Opera, perhaps, is the one art form that can adapt Shakespeare on something like equal terms. Perhaps it is the fact I read one of the Blake and Mortimer adventures of Edgar P. Jacobs (The Francis Blake Affair, specifically, which I know purists will tell me isn't the work of Edgar P. Jacobs) just before writing this review, but I couldn't help thinking the Tomorrow's Guardian's natural form would be as a Tintin/Blake and Mortimer style adventuresome graphic novel (the French phrase la bande dessinée is much more evocative) rather than as a novel. Richard Denning has written a rather endearing time travel tale for younger readers, one covering a wide range of settings and historical periods. There is something charming and old-fashioned about the plot and characterisation. "Old-fashioned" may seem a pejorative term, but when it comes to the adventure story it is (usually) the operative term. Stevenson wrote somewhere that was most important in writing a scene of action was a simple, direct, descriptive style. Adventure stories do not depend on a wealth of florid descriptions or on stylistic disruptions for their effect; the laconic mode is the mode of the adventure. Eleven-year-old Tom is a rather ordinary English schoolboy, who fears bullies and enjoys games. He begins to experience unusual déjà-vu episodes -- some of which are genuinely terrifying experiences of impending violent death; his parents bring him to a family doctor and then a psychologist. It seems that perhaps growing pains are taking their toll. But things don't add up, in true hero-with-hidden-special-powers-story fashion, and then, he encounters an adventurer Septimus Mason, who shows him that he is a "Walker" -- a person who can transport himself to other times and places. Septimus explains that these powers can be easily renounced, which given the distress and bother Tom is experiencing, seems like a good idea. And as always in hero-with-hidden-special-powers stories, it isn't that simple. Tom has experienced the lives of others in great mortal danger. He has been at the Battle of Isandlwana in 1879, about to be killed by the massive Zulu army; he has been Mary Brown, consumed by flames in the Great Fire of London, 1666; and he has experienced what it is like to be about to die by drowning as a British seaman during World War II. A wide range of adventuresome settings and situations that are almost crying out for the treatment of the linge claire drawing style of the Belgian pole of bandes dessinées culture. Reluctantly, he agrees to travel back in time and rescue them. And it turns out, of course, that Tom and Septimus are not the only Walkers; indeed there is both an establishment organisation devoted to the responsible use of the ability for meliorist purposes, and a sinister agency devoted to using it for amassing power and wealth. The "technicalities" of the time travel scenes are elided over -- time travel is a trait of a select group, and is largely a matter of conscious visualisation for them. I can't help feeling that this would work somewhat better in graphic novel form than on the printed page, although this is not a major barrier to enjoying the book. Like so many young heroes of adventure, Tom is a rather lonely boy, initially baffled by the odd events that are happening. It is always challenging for an adult reviewer to adequately evaluate a book intended for a younger readership. The only thing to do is to try and imagine back to the world of one's own childhood (always, after all, not that terribly far beneath our 'mature' surface) and wonder if it would engage one's younger self. My judgement on Tomorrow's Guardian is that it does pass this test. There is something winningly ordinary and decent about Tom. Denning does not fall into either trap of over-sophistication or over-sentimentalisation, or trying to be self-consciously cool or down with the kids. This ordinariness is a great strength. This book is at times rather ploddingly written and will not change the face of books, whether children's or time-travel literature, but it will beguile a young mind for some hours. Perhaps Denning will find a Hergé or a Bob de Moor or a Jacobs and we could see a new generation of Anglo-French or Anglo-Belgian bandes dessinées. Copyright © 2011 Seamus Sweeney The Invention of Morel Adolfo Bioy Casares A review by Seamus Sweeney Advertisement "Dreamlike" is a disconcerting word when used to praise a work of art. "The dream has nothing to communicate to anyone else... and is for that reason totally uninteresting for other people" pronounced Freud, whose famous work on oneiromancy was based on his own dreams -- perhaps thus proving his own point. Anyone who has been bored at a party by a detailed description of a weird/freaky/astonishing dream of utter banality will concur. "Dreamlike," when used to describe art, is usually shorthand for "boring and impenetrable but vague enough to perhaps seem artistic." The Invention of Morel, however, deserves the reclamation of "dreamlike" as a word of unambiguous praise. Adolfo Bioy Cesares is somewhat in the shadow of Borges, his great friend, in the South American literary canon. They collaborated on detective novels various other projects; Borges once called Bioy (as he was universally known), 15 years his younger, his "secret master" for helping to lead him from Baroque overwrought prose to a leaner, Classical style. Suzanne Jill Levine, in a perceptive introduction that pleasingly doesn't reveal any of the secrets of the narrative to follow, observes that Borges meant this in a double sense; the great Anglophile was well aware of the meaning of "master" as the formal title of a young boy. Borges, for his part, led Bioy away from an over-suffusion with Surrealism and Joycean stream-of-consciousness. In this volume, Borges's "prologue," really an introduction, is a defence of the fantastic in literature. Like the prefaces to his own collections, it is an understated mini-essay steeped in the familiar erudition. Octavio Paz wrote of The Invention of Morel that it "may be described, without exaggeration, as a perfect novel" and Borges writes "to classify it as perfect is neither an imprecision nor a hyperbole," all of which has the ring of exaggeration, imprecision and hyperbole. But it is "perfect," in the sense that it is an exquisitely formed little tale with no superfluity of plot or language. The apparently slightly arbitrary features of the physical setting make perfect sense in the end. It has the property of the detective story, the sense that nothing is included that won't directly affect the plot -- as Borges observes, "the odyssey of marvels he unfolds seems to have no possible explanation other than hallucination or symbolism, and he uses a single fantastic but not supernatural postulate to decipher it." Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad was modelled on Bioy's book, and the tale is suffused with loss and regret and a haunting beauty. According to Levine's introduction, a number of films and TV movies purport to be based on Bioy's story, surprising perhaps because of its emotional delicacy but unsurprising because of the major role film and the representation of reality come to play in the novella. Bioy's own fascination with the 20s star Louise Brooks, whose pensive, bobbed image adorns the cover, informed the genesis of the story. The story is of an unnamed narrator, a fugitive from Venezuela after some unnamed crime, who comes to an island in what seems to be the Indian Ocean. As the narrator's informant, an Italian rugseller in Calcutta, puts it "Chinese pirates do not go there, and the white ship of the Rockefeller Institute never calls at the island, because it is known to be the focal point of a mysterious disease, a fatal disease that attacks the outside of the body and then works inward." The disease is hardly mentioned for most of the rest of the book, only to play a crucial part in the neat way it all comes together. On the island, the narrator finds he is not alone. A group of men and women -- they seem like holidaymakers, but he is unsure -- are also there. Hiding from view, he falls in love with one of the women, and tries to make his feeling known to her. Like Levine in her introduction, I am reluctant to say much more about the plot; too much, perhaps, has been given away already. Borges' comparison with The Turn of the Screw is apt -- it is an eerie, brief masterpiece, of the right duration to make for a supremely vivid afternoon's reading. (This review first appeared on nthposition.com.) Copyright © 2011 Seamus Sweeney Music For Another World Ed. Mark Harding A review by Seamus Sweeney Advertisement "All art aspires to the condition of music." Walter Pater's famous axiom is directly invoked in one of the stories in this anthology of speculative fiction linked by the theme of music, and is one of the first quotes that springs to mind when considering the artistic challenge of capturing music in words. Another well-known quote about music and writing is Frank Zappa's -- "writing about music is like dancing about architecture." Like sex, like religion, like love, music is one of the more difficult things to write about. In a few bars, music can evoke emotions, passions, memories and desires. All of this can seem clod-hopping on the page. Writers about music either seek refuge in the technical vocabulary of the conservatory, or write not about the music but about the sociology, the fashion, the politics, the personalities, or the history related to it. Look at the music reviews (in any genre) in your local paper -- how many of them fall back on clichés, on regurgitated press releases, and how few make you approach the piece in a different way? What is a writer to do? My own sense is that (as with writing about sex) a direct approach will invariably fail. Sentences, paragraphs, pages will seem heavy-footed and all too literal, compared to the immediate access music grants to the senses. All the stories in Music For Another World are well crafted, readable, and in that most damning of phrases of faint praise, interesting. Few leave much of a lasting impression, however, and overall I was left with a sense of disappointment. There are definite highlights. Cyril Simsa's opening tale, "The Three Lillies," is an atmospheric vignette set in a subtly altered Eastern Europe that is the closest any story in the collection comes to the condition of music. Jim Steel's "The Shostakovich Ensemble" is a clever alt-history story in which Dmitri Shostakovich was purged in the Twenties, the USA never entered World War II and the Iron Curtain fell across the Atlantic, and the post-punk music of the late 70s and early 80s (like all music) is under the control of a centralised state agency. Chris Amies's "Cow Lane" has something of the sweaty frenetic energy of punk, married to a delicious frisson of the supernatural. Vincent Lauzon's "Festspeel" is an engaging epistolary piece which becomes a meditation on being maimed and encounters with the alien. There is wit and imagination in abundance. There is literal space opera (Jackie Hawkins' "Figaro"), there is an afterlife segregated between secular and devotional music (David H Hendrickson's "Blue Note Heaven"), there are Bruckner-devoted Manicheans hurtling through deep space (Sean Martin's "Deep Field") These are all entertaining, diverting stories, in their own way. I realised something when I came to consider why the stories, well-crafted etc. as they were, didn't engage as much as they could have. Music features in all the stories, not only as a background or plot point, but as something integral. Indeed, it is the transcendent power of music that is key in almost all the stories. So all feature passages of prose bordering on purple describing the moment of transcendence. And here is where the authors hit the heavy-footed, all too literal (in every sense of literal) factor mentioned above. Simsa's story, so brief it is more of a parable really, is the one that comes closest to the condition of music. Perhaps transcendence is best hinted at, approach from the side, than described literally. Copyright © 2011 Seamus Sweeney Burning Days Glenn Grant A review by Seamus Sweeney Advertisement One of the perhaps unexpected impacts of personal technology on our lives is a hyperlocalism. The futurism of days gone by has often emphasised the abolition of distance and the opening up of a global arena of action for all of us, but the smart phone and the social network seem to be instead opening up space for the nearby, the quotidian local. Science fiction has often tended to emphasise universal dreams -- space operas are replete with Federations and Empires and Intergalactic Thingummies of all sorts, and even less interplanetary works often focus on a humanity in which regional and local identity is less important than fancy posthumanisms. All of which musings are prompted by both Glenn Grant's fine collection of tales and Bruce Sterling's introduction. Sterling, as always, is thought-provoking (why does that always sound like the most damning of faint praise) in his tribute to a man of whom he writes "like most people, I don't know much about him. I've known about him for decades now. He's an oddly elliptical character." The introduction is full of gems; the observation that Grant is "the world's greatest example of a truly regional cyberpunk writer. Most cyberpunks are painfully global in their intentions and attitudes. They like to propel their characters to Istanbul, Tokyo, or Borneo. Glenn's work is keenly Canadian. Specifically, it's a crushed, underclass, deeply alternative, bottom-of-the-barrel Canada." is worth quoting at length (so I just have). It helps capture some of the exciting qualities of these stories. Sterling describes Grant as a connoisseur of the Tomason, those solid parts of our urban environment which once had a definitive, eminently practical purpose but are now shorn of this, yet are still adrift and rooted in our everyday world. Grant also, apparently, is one of the few cyberpunk authors who would look physically at home in the world of his creation. The stories themselves are of uniformly high quality. This is a collection that demands to be read slowly. Normally I like to read hedonistically, keeping going until finished. Burning Days demanded to be read in multiple sittings. The six stories are like six artworks which can be displayed in various combinations, each permutation bringing new synergies of meaning. Aside from the alt-hist tale "Thermometers Melting," which takes as its point of departure a teenage Ernest Hemingway interviewing an interned Leon Trotsky in late 1917 -- in Canada, all the stories are set in a future of slightly varying degrees of squalor, technological advancement, and social discord. The standout tale is the closer, "Burning Day," which is part hard-boiled noir pastiche, and part a meditation on what it means to be human. Set in a future in which, amidst much global unrest, robots and humans live in a tense co-existence that cannot help recall the situation of many marginalised groups in our own societies, the atrocious bombing of a robot birth ceremony (the "burning day" of the title) is our lead into a world of strange doublings and correspondences between the human and robot worlds. "Memetic Drift" and "Storm Surge" are the two stories with perhaps most closely match Sterling's description of Grant's work as exemplifying a kind of marginalised, counter-cultural Canadian milieu. "Flowers of Avalon" is a neatly circular tale of medical nanotech with very unintended consequences, which plunges the narrator into a nightmare version of Nietzsche's eternal recurrence. "La Demoňa" is another bracingly off-grid tale of a sort of robotised Mexican wrestling, and the eternal perfidy of the dumb feckless male. Cyberpunk, as Sterling alludes to in his introduction, has become to some degree a repository of clichés -- technodystopias, postapocalyptic wastelands, plucky tech-savvy counter-culturalists. Grant's stories give this world a new life, and embody rather than simply narrate their themes. Sterling also implies that Grant, unlike almost everyone else, is to all intents and purposes already a denizen of a cyberpunk world. Perhaps this is what gives the stories their force. While he hasn't actually (well I presume) lived the exact lives or in the exact worlds he describes (if he has, considering what happens in "Flowers of Avalon" in particular, I'm quite worried), there is a mental equivalent of verisimilitude that gives the stories ground and force. Realism is a much abused word in critical evaluation, and means nothing as vulgar as an exact facsimile of "exactly what happened," but should me a kind of spiritual fidelity to a world that can be entirely created out of whole cloth. Glenn Grant has written realistic cyberpunk fiction. Copyright © 2011 Seamus Sweeney Pink Noise Leonid Korogodski A review by Seamus Sweeney Advertisement Why do you read science fiction? Has it is been a lifelong affair, immersing yourself in altered worlds? Do you come for the science or for the fiction? For the adventure, for the characters, or for the ideas? If you asked me in my more sober, respectable moments, I would say my attraction is to both new and innovative ideas, but also at encountering our own world slightly altered, or with some little quirk taken to its logical conclusion. I generally tend to be a soft SF man, patrolling the waterfront between the waters of the lit world and the wharves of slipstream (clumsy metaphor or what?). However, sometimes I am more honest and less high-falutin' with myself and admit that I'm basically a hedonistic reader, one who is into the thrill of it all. The thrill can come from ideas, from action, from character, from sheer good writing -- it doesn't really matter. While I am as susceptible to talk of the blurring of genres as the next man, it has always struck me that there is a fundamental distinction between the lit and sci-fi worlds; one values the quality of expression as much (if not more so) than the ideas, the other values the ideas more so (much more so) than the quality of expression. A loose distinction, and there are plenty of counter examples on both sides, but a valid one I feel. Pink Noise is one of the most thought-provoking and enjoyable books I've read in a while. And I'm not all that sure that I understood much, if any, of it. And I'm pretty sure that, with its great dollops of explication (and fifty pages of notes and essays after the story itself) it is squarely on the sci-fi rather than lit side of the above mentioned artificial (but not totally arbitrary) divide. Nevertheless, it is a long time since I have read something so arresting and haunting. The post-human future, depending on your point of view, will either be a glorious time of unlimited health and creativity, or a dystopian dehumanised nightmare, or won't happen at all because that's the way life is. Perhaps the post-human movement, if I can call it that, is best defined as a series of attempts to go beyond the human condition. From Aubrey De Grey to Nick Bostrom to Ray Kurzweil, post-humanists refuse to accept the barriers to human life that most of us don't even question. Post-humanism may be best understood as a subgenre of sci-fi, although maybe that would annoy the post-humanists. Or maybe not -- one of Nick Bostrom's key papers is a (to my mind ridiculously twee and simplistic) parable in which a population stoically accepts the deaths of thousands annually at the hands of an evil dragon, and indeed develop an entire system of delivering those condemned to the dragon, until a little boy pipes up that he doesn't want his granddad (supposed to embark on the train to the dragon's lair) to die, and suddenly everyone realises that Death is a Bad Thing, and you understand that our health system is like the system they use to deliver people to be killed by the dragon, and we should be trying to defeat the dragon, i.e. conquer ageing. Or something like that. Such simplicities are a world away from Leonid Korogodski's short book, which combines the force of a parable with a sense of what Wordsworth called "something more deeply interfused," that strange, almost mystical effect of the whole being far more than the sum of its parts. It's the sense that we get in The Great Gatsby and Heart of Darkness, like Pink Noise brief works in which a mocking critic could find much to sneer at, but filled with glimpses of worlds beyond the world of the story. Nathi, who, five hundred years before the story begins, uploaded his mind and became a post-human, is one of the most talented brain doctors of his time. Working to save a comatose girl, he maps his mind onto her brain, only to discover that she is the carrier of a Wish Fairy. The Wish Fairy's role is to kill the Wish, a virus implanted by the ruling Wizard Orders into all post-human brains -- including Nathi's -- to enslave them, trapping them in an illusory world in which ultraviolence is disguised as gaming. Nathi's liberation from the Wizard Orders is only the beginning of the adventure. It's a fast paced tale, full of ideas and imagery. And action, both on Mars and in. There are nearly fifty pages of notes -- a glossary, three different chapters on the ideas that underlie the book -- Ilya Prigogine's work on complexity, Gerard Edelman and Rodolfo Llinás' work on neuroscience and evolution, and Hannes Alfvén's plasma cosmology. These chapters are wittily and accessibly written, and certainly the ideas explored are stimulating -- Prigogine in particular has been added to my list of thinkers to explore more. The book is extensively illustrated with haunting pictures by the artist guddah (www.guddah.com), which are specific enough to relate to the action, but not so defined that they rob the imagination of its prerogative of visualising as it pleases. It is one of the most beautiful books I have ever held and reviewed (the only slight quibble being that the pink bookmark ribbon frayed very quickly, and I had to cut it off) Korogodski marries the heavy science and the exciting action with the primal motifs of defenceless children, of mothers, of patrimony -- the echoes of Nathi's Zulu ancestry, of identity, of loss, of belonging. These themes lend the story its power. It is an intoxicating story, one that demands to be read quickly, and one that draws you back into its world as soon as you have finished. Copyright © 2011 Seamus Sweeney Tom Harris By Stefan Themerson A review by Seamus Sweeney Advertisement Successful novelists are impresarios. I choose the word "impresario" deliberately, rather than, say, "theatre director," because of its connotations of old-school music hall theatre and indeed rather hard-headed commercialism (oh, and by "successful", I mean of course successful in achieving the objective of the writing, even if that objective be abstract or unknown to the author, rather than any commercial consideration). As he wrote the sequence of novels that would become known as the Sword of Honour trilogy, Evelyn Waugh found himself creating one of the immortal comic characters of twentieth-century literature -- the thunder-box owning old soldier Apthorpe. A secondary character who threatens to overwhelm the action, Sibthorp shuffles off the stage, victim of tropical illness, relatively early in the sequence. Waugh compares the decision to that of an impresario knowing when a beloved, but perhaps domineering, character should leave the stage. The novelist-as-impresario may seem an unusual, even irrelevant comparison for an avant-garde or experimental or modernist writer. Yet the successful writer of experimental fiction will have more in common with the old-fashioned creator of "well-made" novels than one might think. Tom Harris has the form of a detective story, one that consistently throws the reader off kilter, does not allow complacency or certainty, yet a detective story nevertheless. A detective thriller, even. A detective story that suddenly breaks down, for this is a book of two halves, the second very different from the first. Some questions are answered but most aren't. This is no classic whodunnit, partly because we don't quite know whatwozit in the first place. We begin with an unnamed, unknown narrator, recounting the time in 1938 he waited outside Paddington Station where the eponymous Harris was being interrogated. Why? And why do his interrogators let him go, to take the train to a small village where Harris has a mysterious encounter with a woman and her lover -- followed by the narrator and two detectives? We don't find out, at least not at this early stage. On his return to London, Harris manages to purchase a monkey and to break the invisible barrier between himself, the men trailing him, and our narrator. Next we are in Milan, Spring 1963, and our narrator is on a train. Opposite an older man and a younger woman canoodled -- "to me, they looked refreshing. Especially as just the day before, a young Italian poet, whose father owned a cinema and whose sister was a teacher, had sighed and said his grandfather was the happiest of us all: a peasant in Calabria. This remark whetted my appetite for any human being that looked happy; all in vain... til I saw them." We soon discover this happiness is illusory too. This is one of the recurrent themes of the book -- the disparity between appearance and reality, especially in the everyday way we make judgements and decisions based entirely on initial appearances. Why do we see some faces as "noble," "honest," "kind," etc. and others as their opposites? Mirrors, appearances, beauty, truth, goodness -- all are in the mix. Harris himself is a detective, a self-appointed one whose mission is to discover the truth behind appearances. Or is it? This is to jump ahead, to mix the detective story style plot with the later metaphysical speculations of Tom Harris. Perhaps this jumping ahead is appropriate. The rest of part one is an enjoyable read, an immersion into a world of passion and intrigue, set in Northern Italy around the time of the death of Pope John XXIII. Part two consists of attempted reconstructions by the narrator of Tom Harris's notebooks. The stream-of-consciousness of Harris's notebooks (or rather, our narrator's reconstruction of those, we think) would not be nearly as effective without the intrigue of the first section. As it is, Tom Harris's thoughts are fascinating, irritating, sometimes a little boring, answering some of the questions posed by the first half of the book but by no means all or many. Tom Harris, we learn eventually, was a working class boy, "a dull boy," who had exactly the kind of face people expect to be coarse and stupid, who rather liked being thought dull because people tended to leave one alone and therefore drifted out of school into hairdressing. He stole an encyclopaedia once which becomes the foundation for his transformation into an autodidact. His thought processes, as represented in the reconstruction, have the fascinating, tangential, somewhat obsessional quality that the self-educated often have. A few words on the author, one who is largely unknown but has his knot of devoted devotees. Themerson was Polish, who during the First World War lived in Russia with his parents before returning to Poland after the Revolution. He began and then abandoned studies in physics and architecture, but left both to devote himself to avant garde film making. In 1938, he moved to Paris and thence to London. He successively wrote in Polish, French and English. Like his compatriot Conrad, his achievement in not merely mastering but excelling in a foreign tongue is humbling. And in some respects, while Conrad's English always bore a somewhat French, abstracted stamp, Themerson has the demotic quality of Harris's inner monologue and of English discourse down perfectly. You can believe that the younger Harris is a man of the 30s, while the narrator is one of the early 60s. Themerson and his wife founded and ran Gaberbocchus Press, whose mission was to produced "best-lookers rather than best-sellers" and published Jarry and Queneau in translation. Gaberbocchus became a sort of collective at which artists, scientists, philosophers and others could meet and discuss common ground. Tom Harris and the unnamed narrator, as well as other characters, reflect these preoccupations, and there is an eerily predictive quality to some of the discussion of neural nets and what sounds like chaos theory. From a literary point of view, the experimental features seem necessary and organic to the story. There is experimentation, there are games played with narration, with characters overlapping -- but none seems like a literary game. The detective thriller touches suit the theme, just as the stream of consciousness does. Perhaps the most salient characteristic of the novelist-as-impresario is that you cannot see the joins, that the work seems as logical and necessary as a theorem. Tom Harris amply succeeds on those terms. Even if, reading purely hedonistically, the latter stages in which we enter Harris's febrile, disjointed, creative and rather sad thought-world are harder work than the elegant, William Gerhardiesque world of absurdity and chaos of the first part, it is worth persisting with. Part of me wonders if the whole was written in the style of the first half, would it have been overall more successful as a novel -- but perhaps then Harris's mind would never have been unveiled for the reader. Bertrand Russell -- who struck up an epistolary friendship with Themerson in the last years of his life -- described another novel of Themerson's as "nearly as mad as the world." Tom Harris -- the novel -- is nearly as chaotic and exciting and sad and lonely as life. (This review first appeared on nthposition.com.) Copyright © 2011 Seamus Sweeney The Adventures of Tintin A review by Seamus Sweeney Advertisement Santa Claus, one magical Christmas in the mid-1980s, brought me a stash of Tintin books. "Comics" or "graphic novels" they aren't; they were and always will be "Tintin books." bandes dessinées, as the French call them, are a sort of hybrid form, don't seem to me to fit easily into either the American or Japanese comics/manga tradition, influential as they have been. Anyway, the haul of Tintiniana cemented my belief in Santa for a good few years, aided by a peculiar note (in writing completely unlike my parents) from the great man. I also remember it as shifting the focus of my attention from toys to books. I would not class myself as a member of "fandom" for any other film/programme/book series/whatever in particular (well, maybe Sherlock Holmes) but I make an exception for Tintin. So to those readers who both dread and long for a cinematic adaption of a beloved book, or original series, I can truly say I feel your pain. A few years back, apparently Steven Spielberg approached Peter Jackson to see if Jackson's special effects company would CGI-ize Snowy (Tintin's dog, for those not in the know) for a live action adaptation of the adventures of Hergé's most famous creation. Jackson advised Spielberg that live action just wouldn't work; motion capture was the thing. I'm glad that Spielberg listened to his fellow blockbusterist. Some years ago there was a traditionally animated TV series of Tintin adventures, which while not offensively distorting the originals, was uninspired. The wit, invention, detail and range of Hergé's world was not remotely captured by these tolerable but insipid adventures. I can't imagine live action managing to capture Tintin's world at all successfully; the irony being that the scrupulously realistic plein air style of the original created an air of hyper-reality which would make live action look bland. I'm also glad Spielberg has avoided one of the besetting temptations of Tintin adaptions; camping it up, drawing attention to the absurdity of the boy detective, with no family or romantic attachments whatsoever, mixing it in a worldly milieu of thieves and desperadoes. The Adventures of Tintin is an adventure film, pure and simple. The only woman to be seen is the Milanese nightingale herself, Bianca Castafiore, and her only function is to sing (though in so doing she advances the plot ingeniously) There have been various novels and plays depicting a disillusioned Tintin grappling with the problems of sex and general cynicism in the modern world; such a conceit illustrates why the words "undergraduate" and "sophomoric" are pejorative in literary or any artistic criticism. The Adventures of Tintin have never been published in North America; in an era where Hollywood film making is increasingly seen as a risk-averse profit-driven sequel factory (though was it ever thus?), Spielberg is to be lauded for taking a multi-multi-million dollar risk on Tintin. Or perhaps it marks a further sign of the geopolitical power shifts of the modern world; no longer does a character have to be Big In America to merit the full blockbuster treatment. The Canandian writer Brendan Blom, in a piece written in 2007, writes about how his childhood love of Tintin books (influenced by a Dutch father) marked him out as separate from other Canadian kids of the same age. It would be interesting to know how popular the books are in Quebec (or indeed in the rather more soi-disant part of the Francophonie, Louisiana). Appropriately enough, a Scot (Steven Moffat, lead writer for Doctor Who and co-creator of the wonderful BBC modernisation of Conan Doyle, Sherlock) and two Englishmen (Joe Cornish, director of Attack the Block and Edgar Wright, director of Shaun of the Dead and Paul) wrote the screenplay, fairly faithfully drawn from three of the books -- The Crab With The Golden Claws, The Secret of the Unicorn, and Red Rackham's Treasure. I can't help feeling that this must have been a dream assignment for the three credited screenwriters (it certainly would be one of mine). And how is it? Not half bad, actually. No adaption will ever satisfy Tintin fandom utterly, and already the film has garnered some quite hostile reviews and commentary -- for instance this piece in the Sydney Morning Herald. While I can understand this critique to a degree (the Tintin books are indeed "great art," this film isn't) it is more than a bit harsh to call this film "thuggishly moronic." Perhaps I am not such a fanboy after all, even of Tintin, but this film is best approached with low to medium expectations. It is a straightforward adventure story, one that may even seem a little creaky to contemporary tastes. And what is more enjoyable than a straightforward adventure story, especially one a little creaky to contemporary tastes? I am now going to issue a mild spoiler alert, before discussing the pros and cons of the film. Mild because I won't be giving any really crucial plot points away, but a spoiler nevertheless as the hardcore Tintin fans will want to see for themselves what Spielberg has done to their beloved. I will sort these points under the headings Borduria (for the negative ones) and Syldavia (for the positive ones). Fans will recognise the two Mitteleuropean powers locked in perpetual Manichean Cold War (even down to a successful, albeit stowaway-ridden, moon shot from Syldavia). Borduria: Thomson and Thompson. In the books, the mishaps of the near-identical moustachioed detectives are reliably entertaining. In the film, their malapropisms are leaden and their motion-captured selves are strangely tubby and unconvincing. Having said that, they do have a nice scene with the kleptomaniac (don't worry, it isn't a big deal). Syldavia: While Snowy doesn't contribute unheard comments as in the books, he is a convincingly animated, cute-yet-fierce doggy. Borduria: I didn't think Captain Haddock was a disaster, but he wasn't the linchpin that he is the later books. Is it any coincidence that the books chosen by the moviemakers to adapt are those in which Haddock makes his first appearance? The earlier books seem pallid and lacking beside the later ones; the primary reason being the advent of Haddock. While Andy Serkis' (the go-to guy for motion capture, what with Gollum and Rise of the Planet of the Apes) performance is sturdily adequate, this Haddock is burdened with a slightly jarring Scottish accent (why should this be jarring? Maybe because, as the most verbally vivid Tintin character, Haddock has made an impression on the reader that is shaken by too much specificity). Syldavia: Tintin himself. Neither camped up nor too sickly sweet, the boy detective is an effective lead character. In a fictional world inhabited by such larger than life figures as Haddock and Professor Calculus, Tintin is an oddly uncharismatic figure. He essentially incarnates the boy scout spirit Hergé always professed to hold. Jamie Bell does a great job of breathing life (albeit motion-captured life) into this potentially wooden incarnation of do-goodery. Bell's Tintin is brisk, to the point, impatient, and effective in the pursuit of adventure. Borduria: I am not that sure how effective the film will be in luring a new generation into Tintin. It is quite scary for young children. One wonders will older children in this media-saturated age find the adventure story a little old-fashioned. Of course, as Brendan Blom's article hints, a certain snobbery attaches itself to Tintinolatory; you wouldn't want the film to be too populist. Syldavia: The great set piece that is Tintin, the Captain, and Snowy's trip to the emirate of Bagghar. This is an outstanding sequence brimming with fun and invention. What I particularly liked was the subtlety of the details. At the very start, we see the citizens of Bagghar queuing for scarce water; the sultan himself lives in a lush palace. Skipping forward over the enjoyable bits of business in the palace, our heroes depart pursuing the villain while being pursued by the Sultan's men. In so doing they inadvertently bust a dam; we see water flowing down empty channels, joyous citizens filling their water jars at last. No character explicitly comments, and much of the detail is fleeting and in the background, but the nature of the Sultan's rule is evoked with great wit and economy. Those moments of telling detail were the essence of the Tintin books; in some set pieces at least, Spielberg has managed to capture the spirit of the adventures of Tintin. Copyright © 2011 Seamus Sweeney The Lady of Situations Stephen Dedman A review by Seamus Sweeney Advertisement The Lady of Situations is a hugely accomplished short story collection from one of Australia's premier science fiction writers. Originally published in 2009, this beautifully produced edition from Ticonderoga Press, illustrates the range of his work. The stories remind me of the story collections of other authors published by Ticonderoga and reviewed by myself on this site, Lewis Shiner's Love in Vain and Steven Utley's Ghost Seas. There is the same range and sense of controlled exuberance. There is the same disregard for easy genre categorisations. For instance, the title story is pretty much a mainstream literary piece about a lady with an eidetic memory, while the immediately following "Ever Seen By Waking Eyes" is a vampiric twist on Lewis Carroll's much-analysed and much-debated interest in young girls. Two very different "genres," yet both have the same tone and emotional impact, and share a concern with the horrific realities of child sexual abuse. "The Lady of Situations" is a good example of Dedman's story telling technique. Essentially it is a narrative told by a character within a fictional framing vignette. This kind of technique reminds me of the Marlow of Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, and allows the writer in an unforced, even rather traditionalistic way, to allow a character to show their revealing elisions and hesitancies, with a group of listeners whose reactions and preoccupations reflect on and deepen the story itself. It is a technique which can have radical narrative implications; done badly it can just seem arbitrary and pointless, done well it profoundly alters our reading. "The Lady of Situations" will reward study by writers themselves as rich example of the type. Dedman's spins on the alternate history format -- "Amendment," with Lee Harvey Oswald working at a Texan sci-fi convention, and "The Godfather Paradox," which brings together Alan Turing, the Mafia, and time travel -- are particularly well done. Too many alternate history stories simply have a twist on history as we know it, and that's all. The secret of any story is that through embodied action, some kind of reaction -- usually emotionally, but it can be intellectual or even visceral -- is evoked in the reader that is stronger than the explicit content of the words themselves. The book has a witty introduction-in-dialogue by Sean Williams and Mark Radium, which manages to say many acute things about Dedman's prose along with various gross out jokes. There are various themes and tropes that recur, and Williams and Radium identify many -- but the real strength of Dedman's work is a power far beyond didacticism. Dedman's stories have an evocative life beyond what is simply written. His style -- engaging, lucid, never obscure but nevertheless allusive and richly evocative -- is perfectly suited to a range of themes, genre tropes and structures. All these stories insinuate themselves into your consciousness slyly and irrevocably. Someone once wrote that the cinema of Stanley Kubrick "is not about things, it is things," and something similar could be said about The Lady of Situations. Copyright © 2011 Seamus Sweeney Dark Tangos Lewis Shiner A review by Seamus Sweeney Advertisement Few countries have had as dark a half-century as Argentina. Once one of the ten wealthiest nations on earth, and blessed with outstanding natural resources, Argentina's post-war history became a catalogue of repression, oppression, exploitation and (perhaps worst of all) a pervasive sense that justice was never done. The most intense and damaging period of repression was the so called processo, which introduced "disappeared" as a noun to the lexicon. Anyone suspected of leftist sympathies was liable to vanish, and in one of those particularly sinister twists of the human capacity for cruelty, pregnant women would give birth in captivity only to be killed and their children adopted by the elite. The CIA and various American corporations were complicit in this abuse, yet another murky drama of Cold War powerplay. As Lewis Shiner's narrator observes, while the absolute numbers of dead (thirty thousand or so in the processo) is not near as high, the evil and determination to utterly destroy The Other is reminiscent of the Holocaust. In the novel, the narrator, Robert Cavenaugh, works for a fictional American corporation whose Buenos Aires office was, it turns out, complicit in all this. He himself is a relative innocent, a frequent visitor to the city even before the posting, and recovering from the breakup of his marriage. This is, for him, far from a hardship posting; he is keen to master the tango, and embraces the Buenos Aires lifestyle, the antithesis of the suburban commuter life he knew, with gusto. Shiner has weaved a compelling and sharply observed tale. The tango is Robert's key to the nocturnal, sensuous world of Buenos Aires nights, and Shiner takes the reader into this culture with subtle, unshowy erudition. I have never been to Buenos Aires myself, but Shiner manages to create a convincing portrayal of a vast, vibrant city with the intimacy of a village. There is plenty of local colour, but it does not overwhelm. What follows is a by turns entertaining, erotic and disturbing account of how Argentina's and America's pasts and presents intersect and interact. Falling in love with Elena, a beautiful Argentinian he sees one day at his workplace and meets one night at the tango, Rob enjoys a blissful interlude of eroticism, suddenly cut short by Elena withdrawing all contact. Determined not to let this relationship just end, Rob insists of entering her world, and through this determination is drawn into the darker heart of Argentinian politics. The darkness of Argentina's past is counterpointed with the bright, romantic world of the tango, and the gentleness of the love story counterpoints the viciousness of the political plots. At times I found some of the contrasts Shiner's narrator drew between Americas North and South a little laboured; Argentina, too, is the New World. However they are perhaps necessary for us to understand the transformation from political innocent to someone whose involvement goes beyond the superficial, touristic liking of a country to something deeper. Shiner, whose short story collection Love In Vain I reviewed, has written a "straight", mainstream novel that reminded me most of all of Graham Greene's tale of painful moral awakenings and difficult comittments. There is no real speculative element to this fiction; when you read the torture scenes, and read about the tragedy of Argentina in the last half century, you'll wish that these were the products of imagination rather than grim reality. Copyright © 2012 Seamus Sweeney Tiny Book of Tiny Stories review by Seamus Sweeney Advertisement Virginia Woolf famously said that throughout history, the author "Anonymous" was usually a woman. An equal if not greater case could be made that Anonymous was usually more than one person. While the pendulum of scholarly opinion as to whether there really was a historical individual called Homer who wrote the epics now attributed to that name goes back and forth, there can be little doubt that many of the classics we enjoy were collaborative efforts. The romantic notion of the writer as a lone genius struggling to bring their unique consciousness to light -- James Joyce's A Portrait of the Author As A Young Man being the exemplifying text -- is of course a misleading one. For starters the whole process of an individual's inspiration finding its way to book form in the reader's hand obviously involves a whole chain of people -- eBook revolution or no eBook revolution -- from the publicists to agents. And yet, while no writer is an island, collaborative fiction has been a minor feature of the last couple of hundred years of Western literary history. Science fiction, perhaps more than other genres, has seen fruitful collaborations (usually on the part of a duo of authors, or on a "shared world" basis) -- nevertheless, the act of literary creation is by and large attributed to an individual. There are exceptions from the avant garde, such as the Italian collective Luther Blisset, and occasional experiments online (such as Penguin Books' A Million Penguins and the almost self-explanatory www.wikistory.com, which unfortunately last time I checked was overrun with spam). hitRECord (www.hitrecord.org) is an online collaborative website curated by the actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Using the nom du hitRECord ordinaryJOE, Gordon-Levitt himself participates on the site. According to his Wikipedia entry, Gordon-Levitt originally founded hitRECord as a place to explore some of his own artistic and collaborative interests in a relaxed site somewhat removed from the scrutiny of Hollywood; the decision to open it up to all comers came later. From a look around, hitRECord is a fresh, easy-to-use and exciting site and one which clearly has a strong community spirit. Anyone interested in playing around with collaborative ideas and perhaps stumbling (as a by product of having interesting fun) onto The Future of Literary Art should really have a look around and dive in. Gordon-Levitt announces on the site, "I direct our community in a variety of collaborations. When one of our productions makes money, we split the profits 50/50 between the company and the contributing artists." Volume 1 of a projected trilogy of tiny books of tiny stories, this is one of those productions. It is a beautifully produced and illustrated book, which features 67 of the 8569 contributions to the Tiny Stories collaboration. A randomly selected sample of the text of some of the Tiny Stories gives a flavour of the purely literary element of the enterprise: "When people have insomnia, they lie awake all night watching TV. When racoons have insomnia , they go catch a matinee." www.hitrecord.org/records/416748 "In winter, when the leaves have gone, the owls swoop in the keep the trees warm." www.hitrecord.org/records/439847 "The motes of dust in the window's light danced with such delish delight that she joined them." www.hitrecord.org/records/442837 Of course, the above quotes isolated from the illustrations give a false impression. Perhaps it is fairest to say that this aims to be an integration of text and illustration. The links above connect to the textual part of the collaboration; you can get a sense of how the rest is put together. For instance, for the racoon story the final "result" as it appears in the book is here: www.hitrecord.org/records/695395. There are a few Tiny Stories which work as standalone pieces: "The doctor's wife ate two apples a day, just to make sure. But her husband kept coming home." www.hitrecord.org/records/123588 "One day before breakfast, an orange rolled off the counter and escaped its fate, bounding happily through the kitchen door. Filled with hope, the egg followed." www.hitrecord.org/records/220621 This story, my favourite in the book, appears as so: www.hitrecord.org/records/698178 Almost any consideration of "tiny stories" will inevitably, and rather predictably, turn to Twitter. Most of the stories contained herein would certainly make the 140 character or less mark. The aphorism has long preceded Twitter and the various other means of compressed, instantaneous self-expression which are so popular nowadays. Various attempts have been made in the English-speaking world to revitalise the aphorism as a literary form, one of the most notable being the Scottish poet Don Paterson's various books. Paterson has, in a way typical of our time, often reflected on the aphorism itself. In his recent collection Best Thought, Worst Thought, Paterson writes: "Despite our attempts to imbue them with some flavour, any flavour -- aphorisms all turn out so... generic; they all sound like they were written by the same disenfranchised, bad tempered minor deity." This is a common effect of any literature that strives for universality by omission, including the science fiction story set in an abstracted, nameless world. Paterson, to my mind, could easily be describing even the wittiest Twitter feed; after a while, even the most fascinating personality becomes shrill and predictable when reduced to 140 (or less) characters. A few towering geniuses such as Borges and Daniil Kharms nthposition.com/reilluminationii.php could produce short pieces of genuine power, and concision is a worthy enemy of flabby longwindedness, but all too often the limit of concision becomes as stultifying as the overinclusion of detail. Perhaps the above is too more freight to put onto this slim, beautifully produced volume. The illustrations save the Tiny Stories in this volume from the pitfall of over genericness (generality? genericity?) tiny stories themselves are variously charming, moving, whimsical, thought provoking, at times a little twee to my taste but generally diverting. Combined with the illustrations this is an beautiful little artefact. Future of literature or pleasant diversion? I can't help thinking that this would be a nice present to let someone else decide. Copyright © 2012 Seamus Sweeney Kafkaesque Anthology A review by Seamus Sweeney Advertisement "Kafkaesque" is a word used very often to describe bureaucratic snafus and paradoxes. Even people who have never read a word of Kafka use it to describe their encounter with the Department of Motor Vehicles, or airport security. So pervasive has "Kafkaesque" become that it has nearly lost its link with the works of Franz Kafka. When it comes to trying to summarise this wonderful anthology, I have something of a dilemma. I would recommend it unhesitatingly to anyone who has ever read any Kafka (even -- perhaps especially -- if they didn't like the experience), but what about those for whom Kafkaesque is a noun they use but Kafka is not someone they've read? On reflection, the answer is yes. This anthology -- which after all includes Kafka's own "The Hunger Artist," and a version of the same story by R. Crumb -- is both an ideal introduction to Kafka's writings and an surpassingly excellent anthology in its own right. An ideal introduction as the stories capture the strangeness, wonder, despair and humour which Kafka's work exemplifies (often all at the same time). And an excellent anthology in its own right as stories such as Jeffrey Ford's "Bright Morning" and T.C. Boyle's "The Big Garage" would be worthy inclusions in any collection of speculative, surreal, slipstream-ish (not to nail the genre coffin lid on too tight) stories. This beautifully designed little volume consists of eighteen stories (as well as a witty, insightful introduction from the editors, and a handy Kafka chronology) each of which is preceded by a brief piece from the story's author on Kafka's influence on them and the story. After each story the editors provide their thoughts on the story. So what we have is a sort of extension of the anthology concept. Not only does each story itself reflect and deepen our reading of Kafka, the authors' and editors' contributions deepen our appreciation not just of the story, or of Kafka, but of the whole web of influences and reflections that every author exists in. In a famous essay, "Kafka and His Precursors," Jorge Luis Borges identified a diverse band of stories, poems and essays which bore the mark of Kafka. They were an assorted bunch -- Browning, Kierkegaard, Léon Bloy, Zeno of the eponymous paradox inter alia. As Borges wrote, these were not necessarily authors we would have linked were it not for Kafka. Yet there is unmistakably something of the Kafka spirit about the works he discusses. Kafka creates his precursors, as much as his precursors created him. His work modified our perception of the past, as it will modify that of the future. Of course, our perception of Kafka is modified by our own preoccupations and concerns. Kafka's own work never contains the word "Jew" and explicit consideration of Jewishness is absent. Many of the stories in this collection deal with themes of Jewishness. Our contemporary concern with ethnicity and diversity is surely part of this; more significant may be the Holocaust. Kafka's work is often seen as a prefiguration of the totalitarianisms of the Twentieth Century, and also as a premonition of the attempted industrial extermination of a whole population. Orson Welles, in his film version of The Trial, described his final scene as an explicit invocation of the Holocaust; we read Kafka now in the shadow of an event that began fourteen years after he died. Tamar Yellin's excellent "Kafka in Bronteland" explores Kafka's Jewishness -- and the narrator's -- in a way that is never strained or (despite what one might think from the title) overly "literary." It is the final story in the anthology and one that has a real sense of compressed power, a sense of being a summing up that opens up new possibilities. I am being rather perverse discussing the final story first. Some of the stories, such as Borges' own "The Lottery in Babylon" and J.G. Ballard's "The Drowned Giant," are Kafkaesque in spirit. Others, such as Carol Emshwiller's "Report to the Men's Club," Damon Knight's "The Handler" and Boyle's "The Big Garage" use Kafkaian tropes and themes (with varying degrees of explicitness) but do not invoke Franz by name. Of course, as readers we may think we are finding allusions when the author hasn't meant there to be. Eileen Gunn, in her reflection on her insect transformation story "Stable Strategies For Middle Management," describes how her inspiration came from a particularly anthropomorphic sentence from David Attenborough's Life On Earth: A Natural History. It was only later, discussing her work on the story with a writer friend, that she realised the Kafkaian parallels. And now the story takes its place in an anthology of stories "inspired by Franz Kafka." Another strain -- and possibly the stories which Kafka aficionados will perhaps get more out of than the Kafka virgin -- is the story in which Kafka and his works feature directly. I have to say these were the stories I enjoyed most myself -- and in their invention and wit, I personally feel confident that the hypothetical person who had never read a word of Kafka would too. "Bright Morning" is a perfect example, a tale which Jeffrey Ford wrote partly to exorcise the overwhelming influence of Kafka, which combines weird wit, vampirism, and a very literary ghost story into a package that may be the most haunting short story I've read all year. Johnathan Lethem and Carter Scholz's "Receding Horizon" has Kafka survive his tuberculosis and cross the Atlantic, changes his name to Jack Dawson, become a screenwriter and work with his near-namesake Frank Capra. The story becomes a retelling of "It's a Wonderful Life." Quentin Tarantino said once that what he found really interesting about Capra's seasonal tale of Everyman realising his indispensability was not the redemptive ending but the despair and alienation of George Bailey. Lethem and Scholz insert themselves into the narrative in the best metafictional tradition, yet the whole thing works and never seems overly contrived or clever-clever. Scholz, as a solo writer, is represented by "The Amount to Carry," which takes Kafka's day job in the insurance industry and imagines him crossing the Atlantic (a recurrent theme of quite a few of these stories) to attend a conference where he meets his fellow insurance professionals Charles Ives and Wallace Stevens. Lethem and Scholz have co written a book of five stories on Kafka in America, Kafka Americana, published originally by Subterranean Press and republished by W.W. Norton. Paul di Fillipo's "The Jackdaw's Last Case" (at this point the reader may be interested to know that kavka is the Czech for "jackdaw") is perhaps the wildest, most fun reimagining of the real Franz Kafka, this time as a caped crusader against crime in New York. Kafka writes for a newspaper owned by Bernarr Macfadden, a historical figure I had never heard of and I am eternally grateful to di Fillipo that now I have. What this collection is, above all, is entertaining. This shouldn't be a surprise. Kafka is actually very funny, which is not what one is usually meant by the popular word "Kafkaesque." As Rudy Rucker, author of gothic identify-shift of "The 57th Franz Kafka," observes in his pre-story reflection: "Kafka himself considered his stories to be funny. His friend Max Brod reports that Kafka once fell out of his chair from laughing so hard while reading aloud from one of his works, perhaps from Die Verwandlung, that is, 'The Metamorphosis.' Our puritanical and self-aggrandizing American culture tends to make out Kafka's work to be solemn and portentous. But it's funny the same way as Donald Duck comics." The one literary work I thought might have been included but wasn't was an excerpt from Alan Bennet's play Kafka's Dick, or Bennet's mordantly witty introduction, which explored the legacy of Max Brod and what it means to be talented and hard working yet overshadowed by genius (I do not know enough about Brod's real life to know if this reflects reality, or if it is a Amadeus style myth). Beautifully designed, typeset and presented, it is an example of what superb artefacts physical books can be. Even the less engaging or entertaining stories manage to provoke thought, to be part of a great conversation between Kafka, the authors, the editors, and ourselves. Borges described how Kafka both created and was created by his precursors; the stories in this anthology are not only to be read in the shadow of Kafka but modify our own perception of the master. Copyright © 2012 Seamus Sweeney Future Media Ed. Rick Wilber A review by Seamus Sweeney Advertisement In the influential 2010 essay "Reality Hunger: A Manifesto," David Shields argued that the age of fiction is past; non-fiction in its many variants (some of which borrow the conventions and practices of fiction) is the key literature of our time. Future Media, a splendid anthology of fiction and non-fiction on mass media edited by Rick Wilber, could almost be Exhibit A in the case against Shields' thesis. The fiction is almost always not only more entertaining, but conceptually richer. Take, for instance, the two authors represented on both sides of the fiction/non-fiction aisle. James Patrick Kelly's Asimov's Science Fiction column "New Brains For Old" reproduced here is a solid and thought-provoking piece, but his story "Feel The Zaz" is a wonderful, witty, moving story which also "says something" about celebrity culture and the protean masks mass media allows us to wear. Cory Doctorow is represented by a brief text from his website on free downloading and an extract from his novel Makers -- and again, it is the fiction which not only works as fiction but also illuminates our world more. The non-fiction highlights are the two typically gnomic Marshall McLuhan extracts that bookend the anthology, Andrew Postman's introduction to the twentieth anniversary edition of his father's Amusing Ourselves To Death (my own two cents on this occasion can be read here) and Nicholas Carr's Atlantic Monthly essay "Is Google Making Us Stupid?," since expanded into the book The Shallows. Most of the other non-fiction pieces seem almost deliberately chosen as pale shadows of their fiction equivalents. We have a rather pedestrian essay on various feminist approaches to technology by Judy Wacjman which is completely overshadowed by James Tiptree, Jr.'s story "The Girl Who Was Plugged In." We have Henry Jenkins' exercise in mash-up/fan flick boosterism "Dude We're Gonna Be Jedi" which is completely overshadowed by "Feel The Zaz" or Kit Reed's "At Central." When I say "completely overshadowed" it is not to denigrate the perfectly serviceable examples of non-fictional, academic writing featured mentioned above, which are interesting enough, but to make the point when fiction succeeds in creating an alternate reality (forget genre limits and definitions, even the most sturdily realist novel is an alternate reality) the life of this reality carries a force not merely rhetorical. Cinematic fictions have far more force in our culture than the slickest documentary; we read Tolstoy and Balzac to illuminate the past despite the fact that they, too, made it all up. Wilber's anthology (and it would be remiss not to mention his excellent introduction, an essay of considerable power in its own right) certainly captures any aspect of the fluid modernity of our age. We are all media people now; our lives increasingly seem mediated through and modulated by media. Facebook and Twitter have made us all broadcasters, media moguls of the self. Whether all this ceaseless media activity is actually leading to the expression of anything worthwhile and hitherto unexpressed, or is simply a practical realisation of the famous thought experiment about a million monkeys with typewriters, is another matter. One of the catchphrases of the internet revolution in publishing is disintermediation; a term borrowed from economics and with a similar meaning, as reader and author are linked directly without the middlemen and middlewomen of publishing, marketing or retail. Sometimes it seems that what the internet is doing overall is a process of reintermediation of experience; increasingly we experience, interact with, and even recall the external world through the prism of various technologies. Perhaps twas ever thus, or at least since the daubing in Lascaux and the notches in cuneiform of Sumeria, but our lives seem increasingly marinated in media. All media has within it the seeds of fantasy, of nightmare. Extend any media technology to its logical conclusion, extend it to omnipresence or omniscience, and you have science fiction. Jorge Luis Borges' The Library of Babel brings us face to face with the dream and nightmare of infinity, in which all possible texts and therefore all possible worlds and fates. Huxley's Brave New World -- a dystopia not of repression but of hedonism -- takes the pleasure principle of media and extends it to a whole society's raison d'etre. Indeed, when it comes to that perpetual pseudo-argument between "literary" fiction and "speculative fiction," perhaps one notch for the sci-fi side is that in imagining where mass media would go, they dealt with one of the determining forces of modern life -- perhaps the determining force -- long before the literati. There is something comforting -- something, dare I use the term -- old fashioned about an anthology about the media landscape of the future, with its kaleidoscopic innovations and transformations, in which the most profound and engaging thoughts expressed are expressed in stories. Perhaps this reflects my own biases, and perhaps David Shields would read this book marvelling at the non-fiction and glumly annoyed by the fiction. A book is a mirror, and an anthology is a kaleidoscope, and Rick Wilber has produced one of the most impressive anthologies of recent times. Indeed along with the wonderful Kafkaesque, it has been quite a year for superb anthologies from Tachyon Publications. Copyright © 2012 Seamus Sweeney The Roberts Michael Blumlein A review by Seamus Sweeney Advertisement One of the many false dichotomies sometimes posited between speculative and "literary" fiction is that speculative fiction is more concerned with ideas, concepts, technologies and archetypes; lit-fic is more concerned with emotions, lived experience, and the messy realities of individual lives. Whatever broad-brush truth there might be to this caricature, this is a limiting and misleading opposition that does a disservice to the possibilities both genres. The Roberts is an impressive novella (originally published in the July 2008 issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction) packing an emotional as well as intellectual punch which serves as an example of how speculative ideas and approaches can enhance rather than detract from the emotional core of a story. It tells, in clean straightforward prose, the story of Robert Fairchild, an architect of global renown; his innovative career, personal isolation, the solution he finds to the search for love, and the unexpected consequences of that solution. Michael Blumlein begins with Fairchild, "first and only child of June and Lawrence, warm and cozy in his mother's womb. He was two weeks overdue at birth, as though reluctant to leave that precious corpuscular, sharply scented, deeply calming place -- determined, as it were, to remain attached." From this opening themes of attachment, rootedness, loneliness and companionship echo through the prose. Robert's father, "a physicist, an academic devoted to his work, highly respected by his colleagues and rarely at home," is the precursor of the elder Robert, an architect whose very success seems to isolate him. Robert initially seems set to follow his father's path even more directly by studying mathematics in college. However halfway through, he abandons "the queen of sciences" for art -- painting, then sculpture. But "his work was never more than mediocre; some of it, by any standard, his own included, was out and out ugly. And these were not the days when ugly was beautiful." Robert literally runs into an architecture student called Claire, falls in love, and begins on his architectural career. From Claire "he learned... how sweet and vivifying love could be... she invigorated him and inspired his earliest work." Despite this, she leaves "citing his self-centredness and preference for work over her... he had poured his love for her into his work, to a fault, neglecting the real live person." After this, he loses one eye in a freak accident. Again, the themes of love versus work, love expressed through work, the love of work, the work of love are introduced. Up to now, there have not been any explicit science-fictional elements. They begin to accrue to the story with Robert's meeting Julian Taborz, a bioengeering entrepreneur. Their collaboration ultimately leads to the creation of Pakki-Flex, a "living skin" or more specifically a "bio-epidermic membrane applied to a matrix of polycarbon activating thread... it was flexible, it was durable, but its biggest selling point was that it mended itself." Living cells are part of the material: "living cells were needed for it to work its magic. The immunocompetence of these cells, the mechanism by which they protected themselves from harm and guarded the surrounding extra-cellular environment, had been enhanced." What's more, the Pakki-Flex structures reflect the emotions of their residents. A dream building material if ever there was one. A few paragraphs later we read that "the first lawsuit was settled out of court." Pakki-Flex, like skin itself, turns out to be prone to a range of auto-immune and allergic phenomena; the material goes from being Robert's signature innovation to Fairchild's folly, the object of the schadenfreude of his peers. Again Robert is in the slough of despond, lonely, embittered and isolated. The search for love, and increasingly desperate reflections on why he lives with a lack of love, begins to dominate. Finally he meets Julian and discusses his dilemma. Julian has "followed Robert's decline with both sympathy and chagrin, offering various well-meaning and sometimes outlandish pieces of advice culled from chat rooms, blogs, immersible realities and the like, where he got most of his information, including information about the opposite sex. Women themselves, in the flesh, were more of a mystery to him. But all mysteries, sooner or later, yielded to science and technology. This he firmly believed. And science and technology were nothing if not concrete. Julian tells Robert that he "knows a guy", a parthenogeneticist, who can help the initially horrified Robert pursue what could be called the Bride of Frankenstein solution to loneliness. Overcoming his initial scruples (in the world of the novel, "the process succeeded much more often than not. Though there were no guarantees") Robert embraces the process, leading to the creation of a bespoke woman, Grace. Beautiful, compassionate, in every way lovely, Grace provides Robert with the secure foundation and inspiration for him once again to scale the heights of his profession. And so a cycle begins again, and a tale of artificial humanity and cloning ensues with manifold ironies and ramifications. The emotional impact in day-to-day life of speculative fiction concepts is a fertile and, in my view, under-utilised source of inspiration. Michael Blumlein has provided a model with this text that haunts the reader far beyond the brief hour or two required to read it. Copyright © 2012 Seamus Sweeney Simulacrum and Other Possible realities David V Brock A review by Seamus Sweeney Advertisement Jason V. Brock's collection, Simulacrum and Other Possible Realities, consists of sixteen stories with thirteen poems interspersed. The poetry, which could be described as free verse with a vaguely horrorish, vaguely science-fictional, vaguely misantrophic vibe, left me cold. The stories vary in length from a few pages to novella length. Many have arresting premises, such as "The Central Coast" with its riff on the theme of an old world curse in a New World wineskin, and the Lovecraftian (in every sense) "The History of A Letter." These two stories are well executed excursions in horror and are the best in the anthology. Others however are ruined by wildly implausible, unnatural dialogue and inner monologue. The tone is set in the first story, where we read the father of a murdered girl report to the TV news that "Now she's gone. The marriage, the kids, the SUV, and the big house in the suburbs -- her list was left undone." Immediately before the innermost thoughts of his wife and himself are reported as being "she had never been right, not like her brother, the short-haired, God-fearing Republican." Throughout, characterisation is fatally undermined by a tendency to delineate the dramatis personae as if they were personifications of the most irritatingly hackneyed online argument. The nadir of this is undoubtedly the opening pages of "Milton's Children," which would otherwise be a promising horror tale (with various nods to Mr. Lovecraft) set in the Antarctic; instead we read pages of straw man characters attacking each other. Sample dialogue: "Obviously elephants have culture, customs, burial rituals, and long memories. Do they have religion? Who can say? Doesn't seem to have helped us much. The Crusades, jihad, the Inquisition, terrorism – " "Yeah? Well, fuck those towelheads! They just want to destroy our way of life. They hate it that we have freedom!" On and on it goes, two characters whose opening scene never allows them to rise above the level of the most entrenched ranting YouTube Commentators. One rarely loses the sense, with Brock's characters, of stock figures defined by the formulated phrases of a few attributes -- the God-fearing Republican, the righteous atheist vegetarian, the meat-headed jock. Brock clearly has a conceptual élan and, when the story is either a brief execution of a concept, or a longer pastiche of another writer or style, things go well. When characterisation of any depth or length is required, things break down. For some readers this may not matter much, but for me the stories were far too full of the jarring, implausible notes which can break the spell of even the most conceptually interesting story. Copyright © 2013 Seamus Sweeney The Complete Rainbow Orchid Garen Ewing A review by Seamus Sweeney Advertisement P.G. Wodehouse wrote of George McDonald Fraser's Flashman novels that "if ever there was a time I felt that 'watcher-of-the-skies-when-a-new-planet stuff,' it was when I read the first Flashman." I feel something the same about The Rainbow Orchid and Julius Chancer. Who knows what the future may bring (SF writers rarely do) but I sense that Julius Chancer will be with us for many happy years to come. What we generally think of as graphic novels in the Anglosphere is a fairly recent innovation, deriving from more traditional comic books. In the Francophone world, bandes dessinées have a longstanding status and popularity which belies the slightly desperate quest of mainstream acceptability that often characterises English-speaking comics aficionados. The ligne claire style of Tintin or Edgar P. Jacobs' Blake and Mortimer adventures is, of course, not the only style of bandes dessinées, but perhaps it is the best-known and loved in the English speaking world. The blend of near-photo-realist draughtsmanship with exciting adventure plots, often overlaid with a certain Anglophile nostalgia, is a seductive one. One review of Steven Spielberg's Tintin movie noted that, while so many action blockbusters of our day burden the hero with saving humanity, or the world, or at least some cute orphans and a hot blonde, Tintin simply wanted to get his hands on the treasure. Blake and Mortimer adventures are still being produced, well after Edgar P. Jacobs' death, but nevertheless it is a real thrill to discover a series of graphic novels which capture their spirit but also have their own unique voice. Garen Ewing is an English illustrator, designer and graphic novelist who has created the 1920s-set Rainbow Orchid series, the first (hopefully) adventures of Julius Chancer, a young WWI veteran turned assistant to Sir Alfred Catesby-Grey, freelance antiquarian extraordinaire and former director of the secretive Empire Survey Branch. The nature of the Empire Survey Branch is gradually revealed as the series continues; originally dedicated to the more obscure branches of antiquarian research within the British Empire, it came under military control, triggering Sir Alfred's resignation. The series begins with a client visiting Sir Alfred and Julius to receive a lost Henry Purcell opera the antiquarians have tracked down for him. Despite the afterglow of this success, a tension between knight and assistant is immediately evident; Julius encourages Sir Alfred to consider selling some of his collection of artefacts to shore up their parlous finances, which he refuses to do. We are then introduced to the news reporter William Pickle, a newspaperman of the school which would culminate in phone hacking in our own time, as he machinates a story about a potential rivalry between Sir Alfred and a shadowy plutocrat, Urkaz Grope, over an upcoming flower show. This competition is less innocuous than it sounds; Grope manoeuvred Sir Reginald Pritchard Lawrence, "who owns half of Staffordshire," into wagering his patrimony on the floral contest. Sir Reginald's daughter, Lily, who has made the leap from London stage to Hollywood, is determined to stop Urkaz winning, and enlists Julius in the quest for a fabled rainbow orchid, mentioned in an Ancient Greek manuscript. Thus begins a rollicking Lost World yarn, partly in the spirit of H. Rider Haggard and Arthur Conan Doyle but with a slightly more worldly air of Roaring Twenties Cosmopolitan. Much of the comic relief comes from Lily's agent, Nat, whose devotion to his client includes accompanying her on high adventure. There are countless lovely touches alluding to the culture and society of the time, especially Nat's evocation of pre-talkie Hollywood with Sam Goldwynesque turns of phrase and general wild overspending. Ewing's ligne claire style is a distinctive one, not a blind echo of his famous European forebears. Overall this is a pleasure to read and look at, and one hopes many Julius Chancer adventures will follow for many years. Copyright © 2013 Seamus Sweeney How To Build An Android David F Dufty A review by Seamus Sweeney Advertisement Just over seven years ago, the head of Philip K Dick went missing from an America West Airlines flight between Dallas and Las Vegas. A tired roboticist, transferring the talking robotic replication of Dick's head from one tech presentation to another, left it in an overhead baggage locker. An incident which has already inspired a radio play (Gregory Whitehead's Bring Me The Head of Philip K Dick) and received substantial media coverage at the time, it initially seemed to me somewhat too slight to merit book-length treatment. Perhaps a long piece in Wired would do it justice. And indeed, surveying what other reviewers have made of the book (David F. Dufty has handily compiled prior reviews, including poor ones, on his website), I find that some have concluded with my initial impression. For instance, New Scientist's Sally Adee found "50 pages of detailed historical introductions to every last person involved in the android project... Dufty recounts conversations in exhausting detail, and finds nothing too small or insignificant to share with the reader: we learn where the Starbucks is at several convention centres, we learn of one room that "the frame was made out of timber." We learn that Google created a famous search engine." I however found Adee's criticism unfair, and somewhat beside the point. Dufty, a postdoc in the University of Memphis at the same time as many of the events described and therefore working with many of the personalities involved, has crafted a readable narrative which ranges from the nature of academic politics (and the grant applications that take up most of any senior researchers time) to the distinctions between Alan Turing's and Philip K Dick's visions of what distinguishes -- or could distinguish -- computers from humans. In the end, the book dealt with weighty themes, some of the weightiest themes we can think of. As Henry Markham of the Blue Brain project so eloquently describes in his TED talk on the subject, computational simulation of the human brain is one of the grandest challenges we can conceive (and possibly an unattainable one, although that's another debate) Dufty may have a somewhat flat, deadpan style, but it reminded me of the dictum (possibly one of Robert Louis Stevenson's) that extraordinary narratives should have an unadorned, simple style. If the book has a protagonist, it is the man who left the head in the overhead luggage compartment on that fateful flight, David Hanson, a trained sculptor turned roboticist who passionately argued -- contra to the prevailing wisdom in the robotics community that aesthetics don't matter -- that beautiful and lifelike humanoid robots were crucial in the development of robots that would truly revolutionise our lives. Hanson emphatically rejected the notion of the "uncanny valley," the supposed phenomenon whereby, as robotic models and digital representations of humans come closer and closer to being lifelike (while missing the mark slightly), we are more and more repulsed. Intuitively the uncanny valley makes sense to many, yet as Hanson has pointed out there is a lack of empirical evidence to support its existence. Artificial intelligence has evolved to become focused on specific tasks, often those of intellectual prowess (such as beating Garry Kasparov at chess) rather than the overall simulation of human mental functioning in all its manifestations. This has lead to great, headline-catching successes (such as beating Garry Kasparov at chess) but has arguably lead away from a visionary, transformational view of the possibilities of AI. Hanson advocates approach to robotics grounded more in a gestalt view of humanity and human-ness than the mere performance of tasks in isolation, and one which emphasises the aesthetic nature of the whole android concept. For Hanson, leaps of scientific progress are as much artistic and aesthetic as anything else. Dufty describes the combination of sculpting craft and high tech that goes into the creation of a Hanson style robot very well. Philip K Dick was an ideal candidate for potential immortalisation as a robot head in many ways. Obviously, his fiction had dealt explicitly with themes of humanity and humanoid robots, and the difficulty distinguishing between them. Empathy, rather than Turing's imitable intellectual functioning, was the key. Dick has become more than a cult figure and is now widely regarded as a key American author of the second half of the Twentieth Century. Any Dick related project will garner attention, and the project coincided with the production of the Richard Linklater film A Scanner Darkly, and indeed was identified as a publicity aid for the film. Also, Dick's reputation as a sort of neo-gnostic eccentric meant that elliptical or cryptic responses which might otherwise be seen as failures of artificial intelligence would be seen as just typical Philip K Dick. Another characteristic of Dick made him an ideal subject for such a project. Although he was dead and therefore his head couldn't be directly modelled from life, there was a vast archive of conversations he had had with all comers in his California bungalow in the 70s, when his house had been a sort of perpetual symposium of dropouts and outcasts with whom he would hold court. These conversations covered a vast range of topics, esoteric and everyday, which allowed the team to create a bank of possible responses to a great deal of questions. They also programmed some standard responses to questions such as "what is your name?" They never programmed Dick with a response to "do androids dream of electric sheep?" The head was a hit at the various conferences and exhibitions it was displayed at, to the extent that each member of the public who patiently queued up to meet it could only have a minute or two of interaction. Dick's daughters were consulted about the project, and after being convinced of the good intentions of those involved agree, but had an understandable ambivalence about it. The head did tend to get caught in infinite verbal loops, which the roboticists tried to manage by creating a "kill switch" to terminate logorrheic conversations. In its exhibited life the head was, to a certain degree, something of a Mechanical Turk, with a human behind the scenes desperately trying to maintain the illusion of spontaneous conversation. I was reading the English psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist's The Master and His Emissary around the same time as Dufty's book. McGilchrist's book is a massive, sweeping, visionary book which argues that the division between the two hemispheres of the brain -- the one which is grossly simplified into the dichotomy of logical left brain and creative right brain -- has been not only a determinant of human history and culture but THE great determinant. McGilchrist has marshalled an enormously impressive range of philosophical, empirical, artistic and other forms of evidence for his argument, and while it is not utterly persuasive in all respects and hemispherical specialisation is itself far from a binary, dichotomous phenomenon, it is a book worth arguing with. In any case, McGilchrist again and again assails what he terms the left-brain tendency towards decontextualized analysis and away from an appreciation of holistic and of nuance. Artificial Intelligence's turn to a task-focused approach is, in McGilchrist's terms, a classic case of the triumph of the left brain. Dufty's book is deceptive. Initially it seems a rather bald account of the story of Dick's head, but it builds into a thought-provoking book. Dufty marries the exciting, speculative world of contemporary AI and robotics with the prosaic reality of grant applications and presentations at noisy, busy, conferences. There is an amusing thread of Talking Heads references throughout -- indeed David Byrne is a not insignificant player in the story . One of these references is slightly off the mark though -- while Talking Heads did do a version of "Take Me To The River," it is originally an Al Green song. Why does this come up? You'll have to read the book to see. Copyright © 2013 Seamus Sweeney The Time of Quarantine Katharine Haake A review by Seamus Sweeney Advertisement The post-apocalyptic, dystopian novel has become one the most respectable speculative tropes for mainstream literary types to dabble in, without risking the snobbish ire that can be turned by critics on anything that even hints of sci-fi. One thinks of Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake (and the dystopian vein, her The Handmaid's Tale), and Cormac McCarthy's The Road. We also had the literary novelist Justin Cronin going full bore into the vampire apocalypse genre with The Passage. There are various reasons for this. The apocalyptic strain in Western thought is strong, and one that persists even if the explicitly religious element declines (some might say it gets even stronger). Post-apocalyptic fictions clearly tend to involve critiques of contemporary society, and don't exactly mark an endorsement of the sunny uplift of scientific progress. The post-apocalyptic also involves a stripping down of society to a kind of elemental state, and one in which the messiness of everyday modern life is reduced to a certain essence. All of this is grist to the mill of the modern literary imagination. Plus the daily news -- climate change, Manichean debates between self-professedly polar political opposites that increasingly take on the tenor and rhetoric of wars of religion -- is itself the stuff of apocalypse. The opening chapters which form a prologue, are hauntingly written. We are introduced to Peter, the seemingly solitary boy, the lone resident of an Intentional Community in Northern California, maintaining the machines that keep the near-deserted community going and keeps him alive just as his father directed him. Some kind of environmental catastrophe denuded the colony of humans. There is some wonderful nature writing as well as the more purely dystopian elements. Indeed, Katharine Haake often capture the dislocation any of us can have if we spend time -- even a short time -- alone away from urbanity -- even a very tame wilderness. Themes of growth, rebirth, renewal, and stuntedness, silence and betrayal echo and re-echo through the book. Sometimes the more "literary" apocalyptic fiction tends towards a certain level of abstraction and telling-rather-than-showing, which I found in this case particularly marked in the sections immediately following the prologue. I wonder if some readers may find some passages surfeited with longeurs. However Haake has created a story which is worthy of being called a genuine piece of literary art. A hoary old cliché about speculative fiction is that it reflects the contemporary anxieties and hopes of its time to a greater degree than it tells us about the future. In this case, the cliché is quite true. Copyright © 2013 Seamus Sweeney Through a Distant Mirror Darkly Mark Lord A review by Seamus Sweeney Advertisement Mark Lord's new short story collection comprises features five Medieval tales. This is neither a romanticised pre-modern idyll, or a brutish world of superstition; Lord's characters are by turns befuddled, reflective, lusty, pious, cynical, brave -- in short, very like our own age. Four of the stories feature supernatural/horror elements, to slightly varying extents. Only the first, "Stand and Fight," is pure historical fiction. Historical fiction often oscillates between two poles; one being an approach from the perspective of those at the centre of Great Events, the traditional schoolbook history of "maps and chaps." The other reflects contemporary historiography's concern with "history from below," with ordinary quotidian experience and with those marginalised or written out of history. Of course, as the great historian of technology Lynn White noted in the opening lines of his Medieval Technology and Social Change, emphasis on literary sources means that those written out of history may include the once-powerful and influential; ecclesiastical dominance of European literacy for several hundred years meant mercantile and military actors, who could hardly be considered marginalised, are often voiceless in documentary records. The English novelist Alfred Duggan approached historical fiction somewhere between the two poles; his protagonists tend to be near Great Events, but in a supporting, subsidiary role. The modern reader, often baffled by the strangeness of a medieval world and worldview which is much richer than the various caricatures often offered up, can identify with the oft-baffled heroes as they struggle with daily life amidst epochal events. The first three stories all take this approach. The aforementioned "Stand and Fight," set in English-held Aquitane in 1374 during the Hundred Years War, features Richard Stone, representative of the English forces desperately trying to shore up the resistance of his truculent local allies during a siege. Stone's sense of personal honour is not quite shared by the Gascon commander, Bertrand, and yet Stone manages to shape events -- but only up to a certain point. There is a grittiness and mordant irony that reminded me greatly of Duggan's Knight With Armour. Jake Savage, an English Archer in "Chivalry," is waging a war that, in Lord's telling, resembles some very contemporary quagmires in the apparent senseless, pointless nature of it all to the men on the ground. A strange encounter with an apparently enchanted knight and dame exemplifies the rampant absurdity and savagery of war. The central encounter has something of the quality of a tableau; one can imagine it depicted in tapestry form. "Bird Talk" is the most earthy and bawdy of these stories, with a young priest discovering his efforts at tracking down a necromancer instead seem to entangle the woman he lusts after. A supernatural element is hinted at, all the more spookily for that. The last two stories, "Stupor Mundi" and "Bisclavret," are somewhat different from others. Here the protagonists are members of the elite; the Chancellor of Frederick II (the eponymous "World's Wonder") and a young yet not innocent French noblewoman. The supernatural element, of a Classical-style vengeful shade and a lycanthrope respectively, is more explicit and front-of-centre. I found the slight change in authorial style and narrative tone refreshing; five stories of history-from-the-middle-somewhere might have been a little repetitive. Lord's stories are engaging and possess the page-turn factor. There is a fleshy realism to his Medieval World, and yet there is no condescension either to a worldview different from ours. The supernatural element is lightly worn; those who prefer more straightforwardly "historical" fiction will still have much to enjoy, those whose preferences are with the otherworldly will find well-realised, subtle thrills in store. Copyright © 2014 Seamus Sweeney Pop Manga Camilla D’Errico A review by Seamus Sweeney Advertisement Watching CBeebies (the BBC channel of programmes for preschool children) or similar stations, the influence of manga on contemporary children's visual culture becomes very clear. There are some programmes with an explicit manga aesthetic. There are many more, such as Tree Fu Tom and Octonauts, in which the visual cues of manga are more hidden (large-eyed teens with spikey, action-lined hair, rotund creature caricatures of maximised cuteness) and yet pervasive. Recent Disney heroines and heroes such as those of Tangled and Frozen owe much to manga; indeed they often occupy a mid-point between classic Disney-style animation and manga style. Camila D'Errico is a veteran manga illustrator, creator of Tanpopo who has produced, with the screenwriter Stephen W. Martin, a beautifully produced step-by-step, user-friendly guide to drawing manga characters. This is a fun, non-technical introduction that is nevertheless clear and rigorous in its instructive illustrations. A book for active learning and working through, there is a relaxed, friendly tone. D'Errico is in the Wikipedia Category Lowbrow Pop Surrealism Artists", though her author bio actually describes her as "a leader in the international pop surrealism movement," and her creations are interspersed through the book (one features a lollipop-sucking pink-haired teen with an array of plush toys, including Hello Kitty, in her hair, and the following exegesis from D'Errico: "I love Hello Kitty! Love, love, love! I went to Japan by myself and I went crazy in the Hello Kitty store! Honestly, if they sold Hello Kitty toilet paper I would buy it. So you can imagine how amazed and touched I was when Sanrio bought this painting from me!") These paintings illustrate what is possible in manga style, but the bulk of the book guides through the more basic skills of drawing. D'Errico and Martin show the learner how to build up their skills, starting with drawing faces, with a focus on the characteristic manga eyes, and moving on to drawing human (and humanoid) forms. As in so many how-to-draw books, the key is beginning with circles, ovals, cylinders and other simple shapes, and gradually building in detail. From the human form at rest through to the human form in motion, and then we come to a chapter entitled "Turn up the Cuteness!" which, unsurprisingly, focus on mascots and chibis (the cuterrific miniaturised humans of the magna universe) The book functions very well as a general guide to drawing, with a manga flavour. Towards the end the reader is introduced to more complex drawing projects and there is a guide to covers, style sheets and layouts. There is a brief sidebar on "breaking into the biz" but by and large this is a book focusing on the drawing. I thought a thirty-five year old who can't draw (that would be me) and with an unfortunate habit of spelling "manga" as "magna," and a five-year-old who can would be a good reviewing team for the book. Did it transform my drawing from woeful to masterful? Well, no, but I could draw a recognisably human, or rather manga-humanoid, face. As for my daughter's review, here it is verbatim: "I love this book, it is very great, it is helping us to do designs, thank you, it is a great book." Copyright © 2014 Seamus Sweeney The Casebook of Carnacki, The Ghost Finder W H Hodgson Just as we have (nearly) forgotten what was then a seemingly endless string of filmic James Bond imitators of the 1960s, the vast impact of Sherlock Holmes on popular literature at the turn of the twentieth century is now underestimated. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's creation opened the door to a series of fictional detectives, most of whom were pale imitations of the original. Time winnows away much dross, but as W.H. Auden said, "Some books are unjustly forgotten; none are unjustly remembered." The psychic detective married the detective story with another cultural motif of the era, one whose prominence has diminished somewhat: spiritualism. Carnacki, created by W.H. Hodgson, is the exemplar of the psychic detective. Wordsworth Press, in a repackaged edition of their 2006 release, have published an edition of Hodgson's The Casebook of Carnacki, The Ghost Finder, part of their Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural series. Hodgson was one of the legion of writers and artists who would meet their deaths on the battlefield of World War I. Even by the standards of that War to End War, his death at forty was replete with tragic ironies; having been thrown by a horse and injured in 1916, Hodgson returned to the fray only to be killed in Ypres in April 1918. Carnacki first appeared in The Idler in 1910. Carnacki is an eccentric character, who regularly has four friends to dinner. Carnacki holds forth to the company after dinner about one of his experiences, which form the narrative core of the story. All the stories end with the same rather endearing event; Carnacki falls silent, and then suddenly evicts his guests with the words "Out you go!" The friends depart, each time "through the darkness to our various homes." No outright religious context is mentioned, but there is a mythos behind the stories which is hinted at rather than described. We read repeatedly of the Sigsand text, and the incredibly powerful Saaamaaa ritual. There is a physicality and specificity to much of the description, especially in the story "The Hog." Carnacki draws various pentacles and protective circles with a great deal of ritual precision. An example: "After I had drawn the circle, I took a bunch of the garlic, and smudged it right 'round the chalk circle, a little outside of it. When this was complete, I called for candles from my stock of material. I set the police to lighting them, and as they were lit I took them and sealed them down on the floor, just within the chalk circle, five inches apart. As each candle measured approximately one inch in diameter, it took sixty-six candles to complete the circle; and I need hardly say that every number and measurement has a significance." Sometimes Carnacki reveals, for want of a better term, a rational explanation; at other times he solemnly informs that he has been dealing with forces beyond this world. At times, Hodgson tells rather than describes -- tending to directly tell the reader "it was horrible/terrible" rather than allowing the reader's flesh to creep of its own accord. These were the relatively early days of recognisably modern horror fiction, so much which now seems old fashioned was innovative at the time. Hodgson's magnum opus is commonly held to be The House on the Borderland, which like two of these stories is ostensibly set in Ireland. The Irish setting is not quite incidental; early on the narrator recounts coming to an area where only Irish is spoken, not English, emphasising the strangeness of this part of what was then officially part of the United Kingdom. The House of the Borderland turns from a somewhat exciting tale of possibly supernatural beings besieging a remote house into an interminable intergalactic, interdimensional dream sequence. Its interest is now largely for historical reasons; the Irish setting, the cosmic preoccupations revealed by the reverie. These stories, however, are fresh and entertaining and don't outstay their fictional welcome. They teeter on the edge of hoariness without quite falling over. Readers will enjoy these tales, in their various homes. Copyright © 2014 Seamus Sweeney