Interzone 251 (17 page)

Tor pb, 400pp, £7.99

reviewed by Elaine Gallagher

Fiddlehead
is an adventure yarn set in Cherie Priest’s steampunk background of the Clockwork Century. The American Civil War has been toiling on for twenty years and is at a standstill. Advances of technology in electrical, mechanical and steam applications have changed the face of the nineteenth century, but neither side has a decisive advantage. Unacknowledged by the leaders of either side, a plague from the unincorporated West threatens to overrun the war and devastate both North and South. Meanwhile a conspiracy of hawks and profiteers is set to unleash a horrific new weapon which, although promised to end the conflict, will instead relight it for another generation.

The plot of the novel is in two threads. In the first, inventor Gideon Bardsley has developed an electrical analytical engine, called the Fiddlehead project, which predicts the oncoming plague. He must survive attacks from the forces that are out to suppress his results and, with the aid of ex-president Lincoln, his sponsor, publicise the danger and persuade the public and politicians to end the war before it is too late. In the other thread, Pinkerton agent Belle Boyd is assigned by the ex-president to gather evidence of the plague and to thwart the warmongering conspiracy.

The story rocks along with gunfights and races against time and aerial Zeppelin battles and zombies. Yes, zombies. The plague that threatens both North and South is the walking dead, animated by a compound which seeps as a gas out of a fissure in Seattle. This gas is collected by opportunists and distilled into a drug, the use of which is endemic among the soldiers of both sides of the war. The drug has the unfortunate property of acting in the same way as the gas, only more slowly. Wounded drug-using soldiers are dying in hospitals on both sides of the front, immediately rising to attack the staff and other patients, and passing the contagion on to their victims.

Fiddlehead
is, for now, the last in the series. There are some recurring characters; Belle Boyd first appears in the novella ‘Clementine’, and there are others who show up, acknowledged in the text by people who have heard of them and their previous adventures. While this is a nice continuation for fans of the earlier stories, it does not get in the way of enjoying this one and there is no feeling that one need have read the previous stories.

The Clockwork Century stories are notable for their strong female characters. Belle Boyd is a fascinating character: in her forties, ex-actress, ex-spy and what might be known as an ‘adventuress’. At the same time she is at the end of her resources and can’t afford a warm coat. Belle’s adversary, Katharine Haymes, is forceful, manipulative and sociopathic in exactly the way that a supervillain ought to be. There is also no watering down of the sexism and racism of the time. The reactions of the characters meeting with Belle range from contempt to patronisation. Haymes must get herself sponsored into meetings of government committees by flattering the Secretary of Defence. Bardsley is easily discredited by his enemies because he is black.

Steampunk stories tend to take liberties with science and technology in the pursuit of their aesthetic; they are much more science-fantasy than science fiction.
Fiddlehead
is quite reasonable in its steampunkery, with hydrogen Zeppelins and petrol-driven vehicles as technology is distributed from the war effort. The computer of the title is a basement full of valves with a huge mechanical printer on another floor for the output. It is not magically intelligent, relying on sufficient data to be input and on its users to correctly interpret the probabilities which it computes as its results. Even the zombies are reasonable, being treated as a plague which is susceptible to analysis. While they are a central conceit of the Clockwork Century stories, they take a back seat to the political machinations and conspiracies which are what this novel is actually about.

I enjoyed this book a lot. For me, the choice of words and phrases and how they evoke the setting are among the most important qualities of a period novel. Choices that are slightly off, or that try too hard, can throw me completely out of a story. Priest’s language on the other hand feels completely right for its American Civil War setting and I found
Fiddlehead
and the other Clockwork Century stories to be completely immersive. Worldbuilding details are described from the characters’ points of view and only as the characters are affected by them, which again gives a reading experience that keeps up at a good pace.

Solaris Books pb, 269pp, £7.99

reviewed by Ian Hunter

Things couldn’t get much worse for American crime writer William Cole, stuck in the UK after the death of the love of his life. He can’t hit a deadline to save himself, but he can hit the bottle and the pills without much effort, and he really does need to save himself, or find someone who can, because some ugly-looking characters are out to kill him.

The only way to escape from this mess is to take refuge on the nuclear-powered airship known as the
Tereshkova
, under the captaincy of Amazon-like Victoria Valois. Fortunately the airship is piloted by the most famous primate in the entire world – Ack-Ack Macaque, the gun-toting, cigar-smoking, Spitfire-flying hero of Powell’s previous novel, the eponymous
Ack-Ack Macaque
. (You don’t necessarily have to have read that one before
Hive Monkey
, but you are missing out on a whole load of fun if you haven’t.) Cole might think he’s on safer territory now he is up in the air; however, someone turns up, mortally wounded, to warn him about how bad things really are, and that dying person is Cole himself.

Yes, the world might have been saved from nuclear Armageddon in the first book – but that leaves it nice and ripe for an invading force from an alternative reality that has been cutting swathes through the dimensions and subjugating all it encounters. It wants to make us join with the hive-mind, regardless of whether or not we are willing, and it has the nanotechnology to ensure it happens anyway. Cole, with his imagination and creativity and writing prowess, is an anchor point for these alternative realities and he has to be controlled, or killed – whatever is easiest. Despite his self-pity and self-loathing, the prospect that his wife didn’t die in another world and is still out there – somewhere – gives him a reason to live.

Set in the mid twenty-first century, this novel takes place in an alternative reality which has its origins in the 1950s when France and Britain united out of necessity, with the Queen becoming the head of the French state, creating a European superpower to rival the United States and Russia.

In this slightly steampunkish world, Ack-Ack is a convincing character, full of rage and self-doubt. Uplifted from a computer game and made into a real-life walking, talking monkey, he is truly alone, and out of place in a world of humans despite the fact that he is much sought-after for his celebrity status by both the media and by members of the mysterious cult, or religion, known as the Gestalt who want to give him the chance to combine with them and never be alone again. However, Ack-Ack has chosen to hide on the airship and stay with those few people he knows and loves, such as Valois and the precocious, computer hacker, and hard-nosed Glaswegian teenager, K8 – not to mention Valois’ deceased husband Paul, whose consciousness has been downloaded into the airship’s computers until he finds a nifty way to get around as a mobile hologram with a constantly changing, if weird, wardrobe.

Hive Monkey
is a highly enjoyable romp with page-turning action spread over forty chapters and has an enjoyable penchant for the surprising narrative twist due to the monkey being in charge, or thinking he is, and the narrative nicely fuses several sub-genres together. Think that the cover gives the game away? Well, almost – and when you are in the company of Ack-Ack Macaque you can always expect him to do the unexpected, no matter how badly the odds are stacked against him. My only quibble with the plot would be the times when we concentrate on a lead character for a couple of introspective chapters that tend to go over old ground as Ack-Ack thinks about how much K8 means to him, and vice versa. However, that minor quibble is more than compensated by the delightful interruptions to the action as we get various “Breaking News” updates from a variety of sources (including good old-fashioned blogs), each one generally giving us the option to “Read More” or “Like”, “Comment”, or “Share”. Following these news bursts are little headlines from related stories that have to do with the economy, or world affairs, or sport, or which animal has been declared extinct, or, crucially, when the next royal wedding will be.

No spoilers here, but the last four lines of the book probably diminish any prospect of a sequel – which is a shame, really, as the monkey and I were just getting started. File under: More. Monkey. Magic.

Tachyon pb, 240pp, £12.50

reviewed by Jo L. Walton

Thirteen very gripping stories –
sometimes gripping with uncomfortable vigour
– including a generous helping of near-future thought experiments about neuroscience, consciousness and identity (‘The Eyes of God,’ ‘Hillcrest v. Velikovsky,’ ‘Mayfly,’ etc.). ‘The Things,’ a fanfic of John Carpenter’s
The Thing
, might also be lurking in that camp. It’s ‘told from the point-of-view of the alien’, though the story plays pretty violently with the notion of point-of-view.

Watts chooses a religious term – ‘communion’ – to describe the way the Thing’s singular self synchs with its various offshoots. Religion gradually emerges as the collection’s most pervasive preoccupation, rearing its ugly Godhead in some surprising places, like ‘The Things’, but also built into central conceits of several stories. For instance, there’s the alternate history ‘A Word for Heathens’, one of the collection’s highlights, even if its neuroscience feels a bit dated: Koren and Persinger’s solenoids-based ‘God helmet’ started sprouting question-mark antlers shortly after the story’s publication.

Two longer, fairly God-free adventures form the collection’s real backbone. ‘The Island’ is about a cyborg starship crew on a golem-esque interminable assignment, roused from cryo by their dodgy TomTom to confront an anomalous megastructure, whilst unintelligible posthuman peril teems in the mouths of wormholes in their wake. Watts traces the outlines of these venerable space opera tropes with a peremptory, almost contemptuous deftness, then fills the rest of his canvas with emergent weirdness of peculiar raw intensity. ‘A Niche’ is a tense, moreish tale of deep sea geothermal engineers under a lot of pressure at work.

In the brutal, relentless, dystopian afterword, we join Watts as he Googles himself, resists his caricature as a miserabilist, reflects critically on his writing and finally positions himself as “an angry optimist”. Despite the spiky and declamatory tone, you never get that sense of ‘like it or lump it’ which is so common when authors explore their own weaknesses.

Whilst Watts is an insightful critic (or troll) of his own work, he is also a rather sly one. Watts characterises ‘Nimbus’ as “pure unresearched brain fart”, a typically sharp précis – insofar as the story imagines vast, gaseous sentience emerging in the firmament of the near future, posing the provocative question:
what if our planet could fart brains?
– but also disingenuous. Humanity’s massacre by the wrathful-deity-cum-planetary-immune-response is the background, and Watts knows he could have plastered the foreground with feelgood. Instead he’s gone for the one about the daughter who is more-or-less indifferent to her dad’s likely suicide. Ecological catastrophe swells the generation gap into a gulf no schmaltz will traverse.

By the time the afterword is referring to the traumatised cyborgs of ‘A Niche’ as “mermaids”, I
know
Watts has his lung firmly in his cheek and a bioluminescent photophore lure twinkling in his eye. Many readers who call Watts’ work ‘dark’ probably do so for reasons different to those the afterword addresses.

First, there’s the enthusiasm for scientistic reduction of aspects of stuff which – perhaps because it’s intrinsically resilient to existing scientific ways of knowing, or because the stakes on a botched scientific account are so high, or because there’s some pragmatic value in occasionally
treating
it as scientifically inexplicable –should maybe be treated gingerly, tenderly, with a bit more negative capability. All that’s hardwired into
me
is an alarm bell which trills when I see the word ‘hardwired’.

Second, there’s rhetoric: Watts often relies on visceral, corporeal and violent connotations to manage the ebb and flow of his prose energy. The first page describes the “half-finished lifeboat cannibalized from the viscera of dead helicopters”. Sometimes it’s sexual violence – from ‘The Second Coming of Jasmine Fitzgerald’: “The wound swallows the coroner’s rubberised hands like some huge torn vagina, its labia clotted and crystallised”.

We all live our lives through approximations – scientific, humanistic, other – and often what prioritises certain models at a certain moment is simply
tact
. Or else, it’s deliberate
anti-tact
. It’s the late
timor mortis conturbat me
of the gothic, whose object is to discomfit, disquiet, to stir up a dread-like awe.
Sometimes
Watts with his moralist, scientist or philosopher hat on will collaborate with Watts with his gothic or horror or thriller hat on. Tit-for-tat, Watts hats! But just as frequently, their interests collide. Then they’re hardwired to
fight
. And I have the model to prove it.