Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #226 (18 page)

Suddenly, I see it for what it is. I scrabble backwards, but my heels can't get a foothold in the mud and I slip over.

It's a mould of a human curled up like a foetus.

A cocoon.

I struggle away, kicking mud everywhere, limbs flailing like a demented insect turned upside down. This is too much. I need air. I need light.

I turn onto my front and jump up...only to come face to face with the man.

We fly over the brackens, the mist dispersed, the majestic landscape clear all the way to the horizon. Everywhere I see renewal, growth. Dazzling brooks, blooms of water lilies in blue lakes. My eyes flitter between the terrain and the man beside me.

They are one and the same.

"One and the same,” I say, giggling like a child.

He's been born many times—as many times, and in as many guises, as the number of races who've settled on the planet.

Call him an avatar.

A caretaker.

The joke of an ancient race.

The planet's fortunes mirror his own. Kill him and you murder the planet. Wound him and you scar it. Poison him and toxins will course the veins of every piece of vegetation, rotting and sickening the land. It is the ultimate test of a society's health; how does a civilization treat its lowest common denominator, its average citizen?

Not very well, apparently. Not even amnesty from a natural death has prevented his demise thus far.

He'll always come back though. Come back when the next race drops by.

Hope springs eternal, I guess.

So, he is no longer the nameless man.

He is Aquestria.

When we return to the cave on the cliff face, while he sleeps, using the sledgehammer that sits propped against the passageway wall, head rusty from an age of sea air, I break both his legs.

I couldn't let him go back, could I? To let him go back would be to kill us all. I may be a monster, but I'm not that great a monster.

And I have kept my other promise.

My promise to never abandon him. To always care for him so long as it is in my power to do so. Like him the land is crippled. But crippled is still alive, and alive is better than dead.

Sometimes, when I indulge myself, I think that the poor harvests and the stunted animals might be a great leveller for the two sides—that I have actually helped contribute to the fragile peace. But that is only sometimes.

I grow old while he doesn't age. One day I'll be too frail to prevent him escaping. Of course by then he'll have been forgotten and will just be another refugee from across the border.

I hope my people treat him better that time.

Copyright (C) 2010 Stephen Gaskell

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Reviewed by Andy Hedgecock

Once I'd recovered from my exasperation at the editors’ pompous and fatuous introduction and picked the book up from where I'd flung it, I was utterly absorbed by Kelly and Kessel's collection. Almost every one of the 19 stories collected here is well crafted, provocative and crammed with vivid imagery. So I'm going to take a leaf out of master lyricist Johnny Mercer's songbook and spread joy up to the maximum. I'll deal with bringing gloom down to the minimum in due course.

The collection covers 40 years of writing by glittering stars in the sf firmament, such as Thomas Disch, Ursula Le Guin and Gene Wolfe, as well as sf stories by the likes of Steven Millhauser, Don DeLillo and T.C. Boyle—writers lauded by mainstream critics in spite of a predilection for the fantastic. The editors set out to present a historical sweep, and the stories are printed in order of publication.

The book opens with ‘Angouleme', a tale of urban anomie, violence and teenage disaffection from Thomas Disch's deeply dystopian
334
saga. Set in a society blighted by overpopulation and class division, the tale has lost none of its impact since it first appeared in
New Worlds
in 1971.

The next story is another classic, Ursula Le Guin's fable ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas', which concerns a shining utopia with a dark secret at its heart. I loved it when I read it 30 odd years ago and, again, it still packs a punch. More alert readers will already appreciate that the ‘Secret History’ of the collection's title does not relate to the undiscovered nature of the authors or their stories.

Carter Scholz's ‘The Nine Billion Names of God’ offers a more accessible version of a philosophical game on the theme of plagiarism played by Borges 40 years earlier. If Scholz lacks the philosophical rigour of Borges, he did, at least, make me laugh.

One of the most harrowing tales in the collection is ‘Salvador’ by Lucius Shepard. First published in 1984, six years before the film
Jacob's Ladder
dealt with a similar theme, the story features US combat troops fuelled by hallucinogenic drugs and struggling to distinguish reality from chemically induced perception.

The book closes with ‘The Wizard of West Orange', Steven Millhauser's tale of a nineteenth century VR machine, the development of which is driven by hunger for knowledge and lust for sensation. Millhauser's image rich but precision-pared prose paints a picture of spiritual growth and moral corrosion, capturing perfectly the complex psychological impact of tools and technologies.

The collection also includes fine stories by Margaret Atwood, Michael Chabon, Kate Wilhelm, Jonathan Lethem and Connie Willis.

The value of this collection is that it showcases some of the best work by some of the most influential exponents of fantastic fiction over the last four decades. If I have a quibble with the make-up of the collection it's that some of the stories will be familiar to older readers, particularly the well established classics from the 1960s and 1970s.

If only the editors hadn't treated themselves to a lengthy, irritating and utterly irrelevant introduction setting out the purpose of the collection. This is, it seems, to demonstrate genre boundaries are crumbling: apparently the best sf is informed by developments in literary fiction and the literary mainstream has been revivified by genre influences. Come on guys, this isn't a secret: anyone likely to lash their cash out on this collection will take this idea for granted. If only the editors, and the burgeoning ranks of sf manifesto writers, subscribed to the view expressed here by Steven Millhauser: “I'm fanatically reluctant to say that fiction ought to do one thing rather than another... I want it to exhilarate me..."

Copyright (C) 2010 Andy Hedgecock

Reviewed by Paul F. Cockburn

Technologically augmented humans, surviving in a galaxy where humanity has spread and evolved across the stars, haven't yet become a cliche of modern space-based science fiction, but it's already becoming a challenge to do something different with them—a challenge that Colin Harvey successfully takes on here. Starting with a bang—almost literally, with main character Karl Allman's ‘intelligent’ ship being attacked and ultimately destroyed by distant, unseen enemies—the focus of the novel quickly switches to a young woman called Bera, who lives in a small farmstead on the overlooked colony world of Isheimur. Through her eyes, we begin to see this as a place where the daily struggle for personal and communal survival leaves little room for looking to the future.

As an imagined human colony, Ishmeimur has two notable selling points to the jaded sf reader: firstly, the society portrayed has an interesting slant, based as it is on Icelandic/Scandinavian lines; secondly, the planet's ecology can be best described as ‘not quite enough’—not quite enough gravity to permanently hold on to the atmosphere, not quite enough carbon dioxide to hold on to the heat, and not quite enough water to allow planet-wide settlement. This is a colony that's slowly but surely falling backwards, forgotten and overlooked after a galaxy-spanning human conflict that still echoes in the distance.

The titular
Winter Song
is a near-mythical colony seed ship that Karl realises could be his only route off the planet. Getting to it, however, is problematic. For starters, his fall to Ishmeimur almost killed him, and the months of food and care provided by Bera puts him in significant debt to her stepfather and his host Ragnar, hard leader of the small farming community who originally found him. When Karl and Bera decide to make the 500-odd mile journey towards the
Winter Song
, they not only face the dangers of the planet's ecology, but also a pursuing Ragnar who is determined to issue his own kind of justice to the ‘starman'.

If you're looking for a lightweight, post-cyberpunk tale of augmented human against the weird inhabitants of a hostile alien world, then this may well surprise you—it's a relatively slow burner, but the drama that holds your interest is grounded on the believable conflict of interests between Karl (who for much of the first half of the book is also coping with a rather frayed-at-the-edges downloaded personality nicknamed Loki), Bera and Ragnar. This draws you into the main section of the novel, the long trek towards
Winter Song
that pushes the characters to their physical and psychological limits, punctuated by the many genuine sacrifices each must make in order to survive.

This is a novel about many things, not least the shape and form a culture will revert to when the hard times come, and to what extent both individual and communal freedoms are lost as a result. The novel also touches on the all-too-human ability to fail to see sentience and intelligence in another species. Ultimately, though, the focus of the novel becomes the relationship between humans and an environment that was only partially ‘terraformed'; and this, perhaps, is where the novel is less satisfactory when huge ideas—such as Karl's comet-shattering plan to try and repair the planet's ozone layer, or at least mend it sufficiently to delay an impending environmental collapse—take precedence over the intimate character interaction that had successfully powered the novel up to that point.

Winter Song
is solidly plotted, and the reader can forgive some obvious chestnuts (not only does Karl discover the ancient ship, he's still able to fly it into orbit) thanks to some genuine surprises along the way. Given the relatively open ending—though it does work as a satisfying conclusion in its own right—you can't help but wonder if the author plans to visit Ishmeimur again.

Copyright (C) 2010 Paul F. Cockburn

Reviewed by Ian Hunter

In case you haven't guessed from the title, we are in seventeenth century Paris in a world that might have been created by Alexandre Dumas writing with Anne McCaffrey, because this is a France—nay, Europe—where humans and dragons co-exist. If you are familiar with Dumas’ novels, or even just the many movie adaptations of
The Three Musketeers
, there are a few names you might recognise, including Cardinal Richelieu, the Comte de Rochefort, and a certain Athos. There are also dragons, which come in various guises: some are kept as pets, some act like winged horses, and others are scaly carrier pigeons. Some have even mated with humans, producing human-like people (until they open their eyes), but others are ancient, more powerful creatures with terrible ambition. There is even a disease called ranse which can be contracted from dragons and which turns humans into horrible mutations.