Interzone 251 (18 page)

Headline hb, 538pp, £14.99

reviewed by Jack Deighton

The Citadel contains within its labyrinthine caverns not only the trapped remains of the old gods (bar one) but a supposed treasure trove. By reputation no-one escapes from it alive yet it still attracts adventurers and has guards who must be bribed to allow entry. Sell-swords Wydrin of Crosshaven (the Copper Cat) and Sebastian Carverson, disgraced former Knight of Ynnsmouth, are engaged by the mutilated Lord Aaron Frith of Blackwood to penetrate its secrets. They agree somewhat offhandedly considering the apparent dangers. Amid adventures which in part are curiously reminiscent of the 1980s children’s adventure game TV show
Knightmare
and
Indiana Jones
films they succeed up to a point. Sebastian suffers a mortal wound but Frith is restored to fitness – and beyond – by immersing himself in the lake underneath the Citadel. In the process Frith acquires magical powers by which he involuntarily transports our three heroes to Blackwood in an instant when they are threatened by the old god Y’ruen, a dragon, which their foray into the Citadel has raised from its confinement. Frith’s new powers allow him to heal the wounds of both Sebastian and Wydrin.

In the Blackwood village of Pinehold, they encounter the source of Frith’s misfortunes, Fane, who is torturing the inhabitants to find the secret of the Frith family vault. While wearing a peculiar glowing helmet – which channels the influence of the demon Bezcavar, the Prince of Wounds, an enthusiastic harvester of pain – Fane is immune from harm. His equally cruel henchmen, the Children of the Fog, Enri and Roki, wear enchanted gauntlets to manifest copies of themselves which confuse and confound any opponents. With help from an old woman, Holley, and her magical glass spheres, our heroes escape, cross an invisible bridge to the vault, find in it little but maps and return to free Pinehold from its oppressors. Meantime Y’ruen and her indistinguishable brood army – whose members have numbers but no names (though some of them have developed an interest in words and their own individuality) – is devastating the land of Relios.

The three then split up to pursue their own projects before being reunited for the final scenes. Wydrin returns to Crosshaven, Sebastian goes to fight the brood army. On the Hollow Isle of Whittenfarne, Frith meets Jolnir, who turns out to be O’rin, the untrapped god, and, without much protest or questioning, bestows on Frith the power to control his magic. As a by-product Frith realises that the maps describe a weapon.

This is Williams’ first novel and I’m afraid that shows. We start with a torture scene – never auspicious – from the viewpoint of a character who is not even mentioned again for about a hundred pages and is encountered in the narrative just once more – and that after she has already been killed. Chapter two introduces the Citadel and some of its menaces. Sebastian’s erstwhile friend Gallo is killed. Only in chapter three do we meet our heroes, the two sell-swords, in a tavern, awaiting their client, the tortured party from chapter one, Aaron Frith, whose escape from torture is dealt with exceedingly sketchily. (Not quite ‘with one bound he was free’, but near enough.) Descriptions of fights are leaden, we have changes of viewpoint within scenes, suggestions by a character of what to do next are followed by the sentence, “And so they did”. At various points a touch of economy with the prose would not have gone amiss. For example, who else would a cluster of people be in proximity to but each other?

There is also a curious prudishness to the proceedings. None of the characters really swears. (Williams tells us they do but no expletives save two “bloody”s appear in direct speech.) They might as well be neuter for all the sexuality we are shown. The one time even the faintest possibility of sex arises the subject is treated with absurd coyness and the opportunity is snuffed out abruptly. We infer early on, and later are told – but without description – that Sebastian is gay. Wydrin, I suspect, is intended to be a spiky young woman but instead appears rather foolhardy and unreasonably cocky. All are hauled hither and yon by the necessities of the plot. Gallo’s reappearance as one of the walking dead is a case in point. None of them come across as having agency of their own.

For all these reasons
The Copper Promise
fails to breathe. There is no sense in it of a life beyond the page, and little but death on it.

by Jonathan McCalmont

Back in 1998, the author Jonathan Lethem wrote an essay entitled ‘Close Encounters: The Squandered Promise of Science Fiction’. About as incendiary as you’d expect from a long-time genre fan settling in to a career as a mainstream novelist, Lethem’s essay describes 1973’s Nebula Awards as a landmark moment in the history of science fiction.

Perhaps the most prominent cultural narrative of mid-20th Century science fiction is that of ever-increasing literary sophistication: From Burroughs to Bester and on through Ballard, Delany and Disch, science fiction was moving away from the simple-minded pulps and embracing complex characters, progressive politics and a modernist approach to prose style. Now associated with the British and American iterations of the New Wave, this movement towards greater literary sophistication earned the field a good deal of attention from literary journalists and academics but it did not enjoy universal support. Stuck in the past of whichever present you happen to name, the Hugo Awards largely ignored the New Wave but the real setback came in 1973 when the Science Fiction Writers of America gave the Nebula Award for best novel to Arthur C. Clarke’s
Rendezvous with Rama
rather than Thomas Pynchon’s
Gravity’s Rainbow
. Jonathan Lethem describes the 1973 Nebula Awards as “a tombstone marking the death of the hope that science fiction was about to merge with the mainstream” but a better way of looking at it would be to see it as the moment when the New Wave finally broke and rolled back down the beach.

As frustrating as the 1973 Nebula Awards must have been for people heavily invested in bringing down the ghetto walls and merging with mainstream literary culture, the collapse of the New Wave simply marked the end of a single cycle in a much broader cultural system. Just as the collapse of the pulps cleared the decks for a new generation of writers with a new set of goals, the collapse of the New Wave created a cultural vortex that sucked in a number of female writers, fed on the energies of second wave feminism and created the swell that would later come to be known as Feminist SF. Indeed, the reason people keep talking about the death of science fiction is that the genre is forever moving between a state of collapse and a state of renewal. Each breaking wave starts the process again and, as much as we may cheer, denounce and agitate, there is really no telling which set of cultural energies the next wave will draw from. Like the scientists in Asimov’s ‘Nightfall’, we know that the end is coming and we know that something will eventually emerge on the other side but we are separated from that future by a wall of darkness, a tyrannical now.

The big movements and trends may draw the eye but the field of science fiction is actually far more diverse than simple historical narratives might suggest. For every great cultural wave there are a hundred tiny eddies that never quite crest but whose cultural energies still contribute to the rise and fall of the cultural ocean. In 2002, Geoff Ryman’s Clarion workshop issued a statement foreswearing the use of scientifically implausible technologies in their fiction but while Mundane SF never caught on as a movement, its principles live on in the fact that FTL seems to have joined ESP as one of those tropes whose presence in a story signals a more nostalgic or fantastical bent. Between 2002 and 2005, Charles Stross worked on a series of stories that tried to rejuvenate Golden Age narratives by shifting their focus away from physics and engineering and towards a more 21st Century engagement with computer science and economics. The resulting fix-up novel
Accelerando
may have secured a Hugo nomination but rather than inspiring a new approach to hard SF, the stories actually accelerated the evaporation of genre boundaries and the collapse of traditional science fiction by providing Hard SF credentials to a great tide of post-Singularity fantasy stories. While both of these moments contributed to the evolution of the field, neither acquired sufficient energy or momentum to change the face of science fiction. Every innovative story is an eddy and every eddy is a Jonbar point at which the history of science fiction goes one way when it could just as easily go another. What might have happened if hard SF had been reborn with an interest in economics? What might the field look like today if the original New Weird discussions had not been co-opted by people looking for a way to sell postmodern fantasy stories? Thinking about the history of science fiction is not just about reading old books and paying deference to the heroes of generations past, it is also about wondering what might have happened if things had played out differently and yearning for some of those more pregnant possibilities. Jonathan Lethem has his broken wave and you probably have yours.

This one is mine.

The American academic Brian Attebery argues that while stories from the Golden Age of science fiction undeniably drew inspiration from both literary (Poe, Verne, Shelley, Wells) and commercial (Buchan, Hammett, Sabatini) fiction, they also drew from the emerging field of scientific journalism. Many people look at early works of science fiction, see the weird plotting and poorly drawn characters, and take these things as indicators of a lack of artistic maturity. However, a more fruitful way of approaching these early texts is to view them as stories written to an entirely different set of aesthetic principles. One that is simply no longer in fashion.

In 1950, the French author Alain Robbe-Grillet produced an essay in which he called for the novel to cease its preoccupation with plot, character and action in order to focus upon objects and a depersonalised vision of the world. Robbe-Grillet’s argument for this radical departure was that the principles of the modern novel were laid down in the 19th Century by people seeking to cultivate an audience of upper middle-class people who wanted to see their bourgeois ideals legitimised by art. By 1950, the world was said to have changed sufficiently that an entirely new form of novel was required. Robbe-Grillet was undoubtedly correct but what he did not realise is that science fiction was, by that point, selling hundreds of thousands of magazines packed to the brim with stories that tore down the traditional boundary between fiction and non-fiction.

In his own crooked way, Hugo Gernsback was a far more radical literary figure than Alain Robbe-Grillet. Gernsback began his publishing career with a magazine called
Modern Electronics
but despite setting out to cater to the then-trendy hobby of amateur radio, Gernsback treated his audience’s interest in electronic communications as a Trojan horse for getting them into the habit of thinking about society and the future in a more systematic way. One of the ways in which he encouraged people to think about the future was to embed those patterns of thought and speculation into what were ostensibly works of fiction. Given Gernsback’s enormous influence on pulp science fiction, it is unsurprising that many of science fiction’s native techniques (including info-dumps and eyeball kicks) are means of either directly presenting readers with a scientific concept or forging subtle connections between existing ideas that cast them in entirely new lights. In fact, much of what is now hastily dismissed as ‘weak plotting’ or ‘poor characterisation’ is actually a result of using literary techniques to pursue non-literary ends. Moving from magazine to magazine, Gernsback carried with him the idea that the tools of literary and commercial fiction were only a means to a far more interesting end: Equipping his audience with the conceptual tools required to make sense of rapid technological change.

Gernsback’s campaign to create a new form of figurative popular non-fiction effectively ended with the collapse of the pulp fiction market at the end of the 1950s. Incapable of supporting themselves, science fiction’s remaining professional writers began to adapt their style in order to meet the demands of a publishing industry built around the traditional novel. This shift ended careers, buried reputations and set the stage for the New Wave, but what if the pulps had never collapsed? What if science fiction had nurtured its journalistic influences rather than striving to outgrow them? What if science fiction had devoted itself to explaining and critiquing an increasingly complex world? What if Olaf Stapledon had emerged as a more influential writer than Robert Heinlein? That is a Jonbar point worth thinking about.

If the recent history of the Arthur C. Clarke Award tells us anything it is that Jonathan Lethem was intensely foolish to write-off science fiction’s ability to engage with the mainstream. His mistake lay in assuming that once a wave broke its energy would be lost but the New Wave is no more dead than Feminist SF. Science fiction is an ocean made up of a thousand once and future waves.