Interzone 251 (15 page)

Gollancz hb, 413pp, £14.99

reviewed by Maureen Kincaid Speller

I cannot remember when I did not know one version or another of the Norse myths. Most likely I began with Roger Lancelyn Green’s
Myths of the Norsemen
(1960), or Oxford University Press’s
Scandanavian Folk Tales and Legends
(1956) by Gwyn Jones. The version that sticks best in my mind is John James’s masterly reworking of the myths, in
Votan
(1966) and
Not for All the Gold in Ireland
(1968). Here, Photinus, a Greek trader, undergoes a series of adventures in Northern Europe that bear an uncanny resemblance to aspects of Norse, Welsh and Irish mythology. While James suggests that some myths might have a factual basis, and that Photinus is also working old stories to his advantage, there are places when Photinus crosses into a liminal world where events are not easily explained.

Photinus is a quick-witted and charming rogue, who tells a good story. Joanne M. Harris’s
The Gospel of Loki
suggests that she may have some acquaintance with James’s work as her Loki tells his story in a not dissimilar way. However, while Photinus kept one foot firmly in the real world, Loki is a purely magical creature, moving through mythic worlds; a shapeshifter, who gives birth to an eight-legged horse and fathers a werewolf. When Loki enters our world – the Middle World – it is a generic fantasy world of hovels, ale-houses and beddable young women in vaguely pre-medieval homespun, not a contemporary setting.

Like Photinus, Loki is jaunty and colloquial; a little too colloquial, in fact. His account is marked by a self-conscious use of contemporary language, as though he’s desperate to show how relevant he still is. Which is strange given that one theme of this narrative is supposedly the power of words. This is Loki’s own version of a story in which he is so often cast as the villain. Odin may have charge of the
authorised
version of events, but Loki is here to give us the
gospel
truth. (The Christian analogy is deliberately stressed, although it is picked up and put down at the author’s convenience throughout the novel without ever becoming integral to the story.) Yet Loki’s version of events turns out to be surprisingly, even disappointingly, similar to Odin’s account. No revisionist narrative, this, whatever Loki might imply. Instead, it turns into a rather tedious justification of epic bad-boy behaviour, on the grounds that as the Aesir will never truly accept Loki, it is perfectly fine for him to embrace his outsider status and fulfil the Oracle’s prophecy whichever way he chooses, because he is going to anyway. Thus, the creativity of free will is sacrificed to ‘the Oracle made me do it’.

Harris’s Loki is indeed more man-child than mythic figure. He may be Wildfire, son of Chaos, but this daemon behaves more as though he is suffering from a mid-life crisis. He might as well be propping up a bar in the Middle World, whingeing about how he hates his wife, his mistresses don’t understand him, his children are running wild, and worst of all, his dad has it in for him so he won’t inherit the family firm, all the while eyeing the barmaid and hoping she’ll take pity on him.

Harris’s retelling is faithful in many ways to the original stories – all the familiar events are here, from the building of Asgard, through Odin’s acquisition of writing and magical objects, the humiliations of Thor, and the death of Baldur. Yet somewhere along the line, Your Humble Narrator has turned into the worst kind of pub bore, droning on relentlessly, while myth becomes second-rate soap opera. There is little variation here: Loki describes all events in much the same tone. There are no moments of grandeur – not even in the fall of Asgard – or of pathos, though Sigyn’s protection of Loki, chained while a snake sprays venom into his eyes, momentarily touches the heart, though one does want to lean in and say ‘leave him, Sigyn, he ain’t worth it’.

It may be that every generation gets the reworking of Norse myths that it most deserves. Harris’s reworking is perfectly competent but to my mind bland: all surface, no depth, like a coat of magnolia paint in a rented property. Myths persist, surely, because of their continuing power to move the reader or listener yet Harris’s version offers stories that have been somehow denatured. Loki provides a smoothly commercial account that reeks of mythic suburbia rather than epic grandeur. For all he may chafe at the situation in which he finds himself, it is Loki who told us this story in the first place. And Loki, it seems, has no imagination.

Jo Fletcher Books hb, 389pp, £20.00

reviewed by Duncan Lunan

Empress of the Sun
is the third of a series of young adult novels, set in a series of alternative worlds – which puts the reviewer new to the canon at something of a disadvantage. There are an infinite number of alternative worlds, but hitherto only ten of them have been accessible to ours. The novel begins with the airship
Everness
emerging over an eleventh, unexpectedly in a nosedive instead of level flight, and not pulling up sufficiently to escape becoming embedded in the treetops, with two engines pulled off and lying somewhere astern on the forest floor.

The teenage navigator who finds himself unpopular as a result is Everett Singh from Earth 10, whose preoccupation is to find his father Tejendra, missing somewhere Out There among the many worlds (not the other father who died on E1). But Everett too has his counterparts on the other worlds, and the one on E10 has to deal with the usual young adult issues of school days, the opposite sex, etc, with the additional burden of hidden weaponry to deal with an infestation of the self-replicating nanotech nasties which made E1 uninhabitable. So he has to keep his best mate, his girlfriend and his family from becoming targets without telling any of them what’s happening or why his behaviour has changed so much.

The alternative Earths have major differences between them but there’s an attempt at overall government called the Plenitude of Known Worlds. The technology of the nonhuman Thryn is everywhere, especially on E4, whose people “had not developed a technology or made a scientific discovery of their own in thirty years”; E2 has the fullest grip on what’s happening and the best of everything, E5 has Victoriana and five different varieties of humans, and E3 is a good compromise if you can live where you choose. E7 is a world of twins which has adapted most readily to an expanded reality of multiple worlds. On E2 Britain is apparently merged with Gibraltar, on E4 Michael Portillo is Prime Minister, E3 has no oil and E8 is “an ecological wreck with a runaway greenhouse effect”.

There are a lot of in-references. Terry Pratchett is explicitly cited, but in real life Hugh Everett was the originator of many-worlds theory, and Tejinder P. Singh is a prominent researcher in the field. Here the unique device which gives access to all possible worlds is called the Infundibulum, the word for a space-warp in
The Sirens of Titan
; Everett’s arch-enemy is Charlotte Villiers, sharing her surname with M’s assistant in the Bond canon, and her sidekick is called Zaitsev, after the real-life chief planetary scientist of the Soviet space programme. Everett’s featured counterpart is Everett M. Singh, not to be confused with Iain M. Banks, either. The all-devouring Nahn have a lot in common with the nanites of
Stargate SG-1
; and of course E3 has to have airships to go with the steampunk and Tesla’s electricity, but the airship’s captain is called Anastasia, like Dan Dare’s personal transport. When invasion comes, it focuses on London, not Washington, as if in honour of H.G. Wells. On E7 the land bridge between Europe and Britain still stands, as it does in Stephen Baxter’s Northland trilogy. Everett M.
’
s 
difficulties are very like the android’s in
The Last Starfighter
. But the school bullies whom he faces down are Jennings and Derbyshire, inescapably linked in my day to the public school fiction of Anthony Buckeridge; either you loved it or you hated it, and I’m glad to see them parodied at last.

But younger readers may not get these references, or may be amused to catch up with them later. The big idea of this novel is that the world of the Empress is the one where the Chicxulub impact never happened, and the dinosaurs’ descendants are in charge, with a culture of six ‘clades’ locked in rivalry and conflict. Yes, there are echoes of Harry Harrison’s Eden trilogy…but their 65-million-year lead on us is in physics, not biotechnology, and they’ve cannibalised the planets of their Solar System to create an Alderson Disc, a filled-in Ringworld like a giant DVD with the sun in the middle (hence the airship crash at the beginning). The sheer scale of the thing, the multiplicity of life it supports and the alienness of rulers who could destroy it for purely personal gain, make the threat that the winners pose to the Earths of the Plenitude truly chilling. For adult readers that may not sit too easily with the in-jokes and the girlfriend problems, but we are not the target audience, who will probably enjoy it all.

Amazon Media ebook, 240pp, £3.21

reviewed by Matthew S. Dent

I’m reliably informed that this is the first self-published book which
Interzone
has reviewed. So no pressure then… Tim Lees is very well known to readers of TTA publications. His short story ‘Unknown Cities of America’ featured in issue #249 – of the others in the collection, three each appeared in
Interzone
and
Black Static
, and two in
The Third Alternative
. When he sent me the collection, Tim said that he saw e-publishing as the future, and viewed this as a sort of experiment. So at least I’m not the only one sailing boldly into the unknown here.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, ‘Unknown Cities of America’ doesn’t itself feature in this collection, but thirteen other tales do.

Opening story ‘Grumps’ starts the collection in exactly the way that a collection of short stories should begin: punchy, creative, and filled to the brim with often-troubling ideas. Narrative-wise, it consists of an inter-dimensional exploratory mission to meet God, turning into a grotesque theological arms race with a form of life beyond anything imaginable. It takes the classic nature of god philosophising, and twists it with levels of what-if to bring it to a dark conclusion.

‘Two Moon City’, on the other hand, is a different beast, painting a picture of a colonised Martian landscape which put me in mind of
John Carter of Mars
. The harsh landscape and society is rendered beautifully, and the indulgent world-building is tempered with a gentle plot which leads the reader through. It feels, though, like there is a lot more to tell of this world, if Lees so wished.

‘Homeground’ is, at first glance, a rather quaint story about aliens visiting a small town. Which it absolutely is. But it captures the realities of such a happening, the way that the weird can simultaneously be humdrum. The interplay of local politics with an alien spacecraft as a visitor attraction rings depressingly true, and the simmering frustration of the main character at the interference of trivia with both life and big picture ideals is understandable. It’s an understated story, with a power of its own. Greedy, officious men and women toting easy answers and get-rich-quick schemes would – unfortunately – of course be drawn to an alien landing site.

One of the
Black Static
offerings, ‘Cuckoos’ was a story I loved when I read its first appearance. Nestled here amongst its siblings, I found I enjoyed it even more. Or perhaps that isn’t the right word. Because as with ‘Grumps’, it’s a resonatingly dark story, this time emphasised by its sheer plausibility. A totalitarian regime takes power during a possibly alien incursion, only to be less than willing to surrender it once the danger has ostensibly passed. The personalisation of it all will make this story chillingly real to anyone with the slightest knowledge of history.

Continuing on what seems like a fascination with odd alien arrivals, ‘The Corner of the Circle’ envisions a world where extra-terrestrials are an established – if mysterious – part of life. It is a growing-up story, focused on the main character’s encounters with an eccentric aunt, who claims to be pregnant by her alien lover. As with some of the other stories in the collection, it does an excellent job of putting the absurd next to the everyday, and this story is pregnant with meaning – no pun intended. We see a part of the main character’s story, with events and motives hinted at, but the focus all the while remains on the oddity of the aunt. As much as anything, it is a masterful demonstration of storytelling.

The final story, ‘From the House Committee’, takes us to an alternate 1950s, with a world beset by monsters and Bobby Kennedy (along with Joe, Jack, and even Tricky Dicky) the only hope. Or maybe not; maybe God is simply winding down to die, and the world with it. It seeps with culture and mystery, and the yawning maw of complete lack of understanding.

Lees is an excellent writer, and these stories stand testament to that talent. It is easy to delve into the fantastical, the endlessly odd. What makes it all the more moving, all the more relevant, is for a story to keep a foot firmly planted in reality. If those fantastical elements have a grounding in the everyday lives of readers, how much more significant it makes them.

Lees moulds ideas and stories together, in a fusion of entertainment and speculation which opens a wider world for the sheer, joyous fun of it.