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Eifelheim,
Michael Flynn,
Tor,
$25.95,
320 pp.
(ISBN: 0765300966).
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Eifelheim may be Michael Flynn’s best yet. By any measure, it’s an extraordinary piece of work, well worth awards, readers, and royalties galore.
You may recall the Analog novella of the same name (November 1986) from which the novel grew, but I will pretend you don’t as I discuss the book here. The starting point is the notion that historical records are incomplete, fragmentary, and scattered, and some very science-fictionally interesting things may have happened in the past. So meet Tom Schwoerin, a cliologist who studies history in terms of such things as topology. He has found a blank spot in the Black Forest settlement pattern, a town that was there before the Black Death is no longer there, even though other died-out towns were promptly resettled. It is as if the location had become taboo, and perhaps its new name of Eifelheim (which he learns was Oberhochtwald originally, and then for a time Teufelheim) says something about the reason why.
His partner, Sharon Nagy, is a physicist studying brane theory and the structure of space-time, and the Astute Reader immediately intuits that the two topics will become closely connected. Nor does Flynn let that reader wait for long, for the tale alternates times and locales, with prolonged visits to Oberhochtwald, where the pastor, Dietrich, is an intelligent and rational man who is apparently in seclusion from the centers of European culture, politics, and Inquisition. When thunder, a wind that topples trees, and lightning that sets houses afire are accompanied by strange phenomena that Dietrich recognizes as kin to the sparks generated by rubbing fur on amber and promptly names electronikos, and strangely shaped beings show up in the woods, the shape of the tale is clear. An alien ship has crashed, and now the castaways must somehow survive. But the medieval mind has no room for aliens. It knows angels and demons, and of course, no one suspects for a moment that the aliens are angels. It takes Dietrich awhile to get his flock to see that the Krenken are people like themselves (at least in some ways), and if he does not succeed in all cases, he shows that he himself, at least, has a remarkable mind. As the tale develops, he even proves able to put modern concepts of physics and electronics into terms that fit what he knows, a feat that also gives Flynn something to brag on (the fitting of modern to old is sometimes strained but is on the whole impressive). Yet Oberhochtwald has neighbors, and as the word of the Krenken leaks out, as it inevitably must, concern grows that the town will become known for harboring demons, Dietrich will be summoned to account and his past will be discovered, and the Krenken themselves will be destroyed before . . . Before what? Some of the Krenken are frantically struggling to repair their ship’s engines, using what they can of medieval technology. All the Krenken are facing a nutritional deficit. And the Black Death is spreading across Europe, drawing ever nearer to the Black Forest.
Meanwhile Tom is discovering, with the aid of Judy Cao, a librarian and narrative historian, numerous clues to what happened at and to Oberhochtwald. (At one point, he even muses that he has enough to write the story.) One of those clues is a document with an elaborate illumination. At the same time, Sharon’s theorizing is advancing apace, until she can begin to think in terms of circuitry.
In the end, the pieces come together in a rush, marred only by a certain cryptic painting that struck me as an unneeded detail. The painting is hidden away, but it is known to some and it is so strange that if anyone at all knows of it, it must surely be announced to the world. If it were, Tom would surely have known of it much sooner and the path through the mystery would have been more direct. Yet this is only a small thing that in no way detracts from the judgment with which I began this review.
Read it. You’ll love it.
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Gene Wolfe’s Soldier of the Mist (reviewed here in May 1987) and Soldier of Arete (reviewed here in August 1990) introduced us to Latro, a mercenary of classical Greece who, because of a head injury, must live his life one day at a time. When he sleeps, he forgets the previous day, with only a few minor, intriguing exceptions. Too, he can see such supernatural beings as the gods, talk with them, and do their bidding. Naturally enough, he yearns for the home of his childhood, for peace, for an intact mind. But he is perhaps a god himself, forfeiting the memory of his origins in order to work out some Earthly plan.
When Soldier of Sidon opens, Latro is on his way to Riverland (Egypt) to learn what has happened to him. He is with an old friend, Muslak, who takes him to healers and explains to the readers how Latro left his home and wife to go with him. Now he has a “river wife” from the temple of Hathor. The healers can’t help, of course, and when Muslak is summoned to sail up the Nile to see the satrap, Latros is embarked on a new adventure. The mission is to reconnoiter the upper reaches of the Nile, above the cataracts, and report back. Along the way, Latros discovers that he still sees gods that no one else can glimpse, as well as strange beasts and the wax bride of the warlock. They all seem to have missions for him. The wax bride wants to be his, and the gods, among other things, want him to visit the temple beyond the last temple. But first he must choose to go in search of a noble youth sent to discover the truth of the rumors about Nubian gold mines, and now missing. Now things become disjointed, for he is separated from his scroll and his memories for a time. But he gets them back, with a little help from his friends, though not his mighty sword, Falcata, the recovery of which must await another volume.
Wolfe tells the “Soldier” tales from a very limited viewpoint, that of what a man of impaired memory manages to record of his days and thoughts. If Latro mislays or is separated by events from his scroll, if he forgets to write, if the scroll is damaged, days and events, forces and motivations, are lost to us forever. His life is a series of vignettes. If there is any continuity, any theme, it is whatever of personality and destiny remain without memory. It is, in fact, his friends who constantly reintroduce themselves and each other and rededicate themselves to him. In the first two books, Wolfe examined memory as internal, which can vanish as the morning dew, and memory as record, which can survive the flesh but can still be lost or forgotten and can also suffer gaps. Now his theme is memory as web of social relationships, which can also survive the flesh but may be less vulnerable to loss, at least in the short term. What is left? What kind of memory survives the flesh and is even less vulnerable to loss, even in the long term? What but our genes, as long as we breed. Perhaps that will be the focus of the next volume.
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Deep Storm,
Lincoln Child,
Doubleday,
$24.95,
307 pp.
(ISBN: 0385515502).
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Lincoln Child is a thriller writer known for Death March and, with Douglas Preston, The Book of the Dead and others. Given titles like those, when Deep Storm opens with a prologue set on the Storm King drilling rig where strange things that make folks go “Oh, my God . . .” are happening deep in the well, the reader expects to find out that the drill has broken through into Hell and a gusher of the damned is about to rise.
Well, it isn’t that. In fact, it’s much worse, though when Doc Peter Crane is recruited for a top-secret assignment, it seems just weird. Atlantis? At the bottom of the North Atlantic? C’mon now! The people feeding him the line seem to believe it, and even though he is being recruited for his skills at medical detection, he shows a sore lack of critical thinking. Or perhaps it is just that he is focused on medical detection, for he is being hired to diagnose bizarre medical conditions that have no clear cause or even common factor, other than the residence of the patients—on the sea bottom, where the Defense Department has spent billions to install a nuclear-powered research facility the size of an office building. The whole place is so top-secret that no one is allowed to leave, no matter how sick they get, and the bottom levels are surrounded by security barriers that even a doctor has trouble getting through.
What’s going on? It doesn’t take long for Crane to learn that all this money and secrecy is not being devoted to uncovering Atlantis. There is something very strange under the seabed, down in the mantle actually, and excavation is proceeding apace in search of what just might be wondrous technological gizmos, origin unknown, spurred on by the discovery of smallish gadgets that emit multicolored light and other radiation.
But there is sabotage. The security chief is a goon from Central Casting who is not above committing a bit of sabotage himself to keep Crane from discovering any answers that might interfere with the tunneling into the depths. But Crane is a competent fellow, able to find allies who can decrypt hidden messages, reconstruct trashed hard drives, and finally . . .
If I say too much, I’ll spoil it for you, and though the story has its problems, it’s good enough not to spoil. If you need more clues, let me refer you to Greg Benford’s Deep Time (reviewed here in September 1999), which deals with the difficulty of marking dangerous sites in ways that will be meaningful to our descendants a million years hence.
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In The Atrocity Archives (reviewed here in June 2006), Stross presumed that mathematics, topology, physics, and computers all had the power to open portals and let the eldritch horrors of Lovecraft, et al., through. Naturally, there are government agencies whose business it is to prevent disaster, either by stopping meddlers (sometimes by recruiting them) or by cleaning up the mess after the meddling. One of their employees is Bob Howard, once a graduate student whose work became meddling, now a computer geek whose usual job at the Laundry was keeping the computers running smoothly until they needed him for something more active.
Since Archives was great fun, I was happy to see The Jennifer Morgue in the mail. It’s the sequel, and this time Stross has chosen to send up the greatest of all British spies—James Bond himself. The tale begins with a look back in time, to when the drilling ship Glomar Explorer was trying to raise a Russian submarine but was stopped by the tentacular denizens of the abyss who objected to the intrusion on their territory in defiance of the treaty. Before long, Bob Howard is discovering he has been teamed with the deadly Ramona Random, human-Deep Blue hybrid, and is expected to infiltrate the schemes of Ellis Billington, who operates from a yacht that used to be a battleship and is planning to raise a device belonging to ancient chthonic (magma-dwelling) enemies of the Deep Blue folk. Remember that the Earth has more seabed than dry land, and underlying both is much, much more space for the chthonics. Humans are a footnote. If the other guys just get peeved, we are a smear on the pavement. The Laundry really wants to keep that from happening.
But Billington holds all the cards. He even has a spell generator that creates a Bondian eigenplot (like an eigenvector, an eigenplot is invariant under transformation). There is a villain, a scheme, a Bondian hero, a Good Bond Babe, and a Bad Bond Babe, and the more everyone acts their parts, the stronger the spell grows. The trouble is that Bob is pretty clueless, and everyone seems to be trying very hard to keep him clueless. Is he supposed to be the Bond? He fumbles his way through the obligatory baccarat scene, but it’s not long before he’s safely locked up. So is Ramona. Or is he one of the Babes? And where’s Mo, his girlfriend? Well, she has just exited a Laundry training course and found out what is happening. She’s pissed, she has her magic violin, and she’s on her way to help.
It gets complicated, but it’s all a lot of fun. I highly recommend it, and it doesn’t hurt a bit that Stross tosses in a short story, “Pimpf,” in which Bob hunts for meddlers in the virtual worlds of computer games, and an essay on “The Golden Age of Spying,” in which he links the Bond myth to the Cold War era, in which international espionage was very active and people badly needed a feel-good version of current events and apocalyptic anxieties. Today, he says, espionage uses fewer secret agents and more electrons, and though we dodged Armageddon, SPECTRE actually won.
That makes a good line, but I’m not sure he’s right. We certainly have plenty of corrupt captains of industry, but we also seem to be bringing many of them (think of Enron) down.
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Brass Man,
Neal Asher,
Tor,
$14.95,
485 pp.
(ISBN: 0765317311).
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Neal Asher’s Polity universe is a realm which humans share with the artificial intelligences they have spawned, some of which are so powerful that they rule. Humans themselves are protean, able to move from body to body, change gender, move into virtualities, and even become AIs themselves. Boundaries are fluid and the norms to which we are accustomed today no longer exist.
Nor are we alone in the universe. Star-spanning civilizations have arisen and vanished, perhaps because they ran afoul of the self-reproducing Jain technology, which infiltrates both flesh and silicon, gives an illusion of control, and bends all to its purposes. There is also Dragon, a creature—if that is even the right word—consisting of four kilometer-wide spheres. When attacked, it broke apart. One sphere crashed and gave rise to the reptiloid Dracomen. Another went to ground on a frontier world, Cull.
And then there’s the Brass Man, Mr. Crane, a Golem (robot) who instead of serving and protecting the Polity as designed has been stolen and subverted by uploading the mind of a mass murderer. His mind—and brain—wound up fractured into several pieces, and in an earlier novel he was defeated, dismembered, and buried. At the time, Asher’s heroes thought the threat of the Jain technology was buried too—or at least quarantined—but as Brass Man opens, it is reemerging, crawling from a wrecked ship to seize a prospector. Worse yet, the villain Skellor, who thinks he has mastered the secrets of the Jain technology, at least enough to make it part of his body and will, is digging up Mr. Crane and reassembling him to assist in Skellor’s hunt for Dragon. Soon Ian Cormac, an agent of Earth Central Security who does not understand his own powers, is also on Dragon’s trail, as, on Cull, is a thoroughly retro and rather Vancian Knight of Rondure who, mounted on a strange beast called a sand-hog, seeks a dragon to spit on his lance.
The strands perforce converge in an action-packed climax that leaves the world of Cull reeling, the reader a bit breathless, and enough loose ends for at least one sequel. Yet the reader is not satisfied. There are so many flashbacks to fill in past events that the plot line is not always easy to follow. There are also a great many characters, so many indeed that none are developed past the point of comic strip caricature. The reader has a pretty good idea who the good guys are—Cormac’s one of them, and so seem all fully human beings. Anything tainted by Jain is evil. But whose side are the AIs on? Some become enemies, but the rest have their own rather cryptic agendas. And as for Dragon, it seems relatively benign and more than a little wise, but it is also cool in its emotional tone, perhaps more neutral than we would like to see. The overall effect is that the tale is marred by a distancing of the reader.
If you’re an Asher fan, this may not put you off. If you’re not, I don’t think this book will make you one.
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Outbound,
Jack McDevitt,
ISFiC Press,
$30.00,
352 pp.
(ISBN: 0975915649).
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Sixteen stories and eight essays by Jack McDevitt fill the pages of Outbound, and if in his introduction Barry Malzberg can lament that his favorite McDevitt story (“Time Travelers Never Die”) isn’t here, neither is “Cryptic” or “The Jersey Rifle.” But there are plenty more, all of them well worth your attention.
But that’s Jack for you. Not only is he a marvelously nice guy (says Michael Bishop in the celebratory afterword), he is always well worth your attention. If you see a new book with his name on the cover, grab it. You’re not likely to be disappointed.
At least with the fiction. He is a limpid and original writer not given to modernistically baroque futures but rather to bringing classic themes of exploration and discovery into the present. The essays, however, show a tendency to repeat himself as if he has only so many things to say about himself and his work and he would rather put his energy into the fiction than into saying the same old things in fresh ways. He is hardly alone in this, though some writers do seem to put as much (or more) energy into talking about themselves as into writing, but here it jumped out at me.
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There is a persistent rumor that SF editors don’t buy funny SF stories. Granted, funny stories are hard to write, partly because what strikes the writer as funny may not seem so to anyone else and partly because balance and timing are more crucial to humor than to any other kind of SF. The latter may make humor more challenging to the writer than other types of fiction, which explains why almost every writer tries his or her hand at it, at least once. Enough are successful to explain why there are so many gems of SF humor on our shelves.
There are? But editors don’t buy the stuff, do they? They do? Oh, yeah, he called it a rumor, didn’t he, and rumors live in the garret upstairs and have very little to do with what goes on in the front parlor.
A bit too feeble for you? You’ll have better luck with This Is My Funniest. Mike Resnick asked Harry Harrison, William Tenn, David Gerrold, David Brin, Jack McDevitt, Spider Robinson, Robert Silverberg, Howard Waldrop, Esther Friesner, Michael Swanwick, Joe Haldeman, Harry Turtledove, Connie Willis, the late Robert Sheckley, and fifteen more, including Jane Yolen, whose “Dick W. and His Pussy, or Tess and Her Adequate Dick” needs no more than its title to make you grin.
So. Grins and smiles, chuckles and guffaws. The perfect book for an airplane trip, or a guest room, or a gift, or just for fun. Enjoy it! |
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"The Reference Library" copyright 2007, Tom Easton
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