Sean Melican

When the Barenaked Ladies sang “Everything old is new again,” they probably weren’t referring to science fiction and fantasy. But if this month’s offerings are any indication, they certainly could have been. For August we have a new vision of elves, a Dyson sphere populated by historians, pirates and fools, and an anthology of vampires inhabiting a multitude of ecological niches.

The title of Elfland leads one to expect a traditional fantasy story—the orphaned hero, the last surviving remnant of the monarchy, a motley and moral fellowship, a great quest—but readers will be pleasantly surprised by the directions in which the story branches. Yes, the narrative engine is driven by the threat of a world-ending ice giant, Brawth, and the efforts of one man, Lawrence Wilder, the Gatekeeper between Earth and the Otherworld, to contain Brawth.But Freda Warrington’s novel rises above other fantasies by focusing on the lives of the densely interwoven Wilder and Fox families who are concerned with the threat, but not consumed by it. Though it’s branded as a fantasy, Elfland shares as much with mainstream fiction as it does genre. The novel begins when the oldest child is not yet an adolescent and ends well after he’s spent time in prison for murder and has (borrowing from the romance genre) stolen the heart of a woman who once despised him. The novel generates greater emotional responses from the warp and weft of the families’ twisted skein, including adultery, betrayal, incest, love, lust, murder and brutal secrets brought to light. It is a strong beginning for a series that has the potential to attract a diverse group of readers.

A fantastic new world
Even though three books in the Virga series come before it, The Sunless Countries doesn’t require any outside knowledge—an odd discovery in light of the novel’s philosophical stance. Virga is a mini-Dyson sphere with a nuclear fusion engine as its sun, and various wheeled cities rotating around even smaller fusion engines. Leal Maspeth is a tutor hoping to be promoted to faculty, but what is a historian to do when the ahistorical Eternists (straw-men stand-ins for Creationists and Wikipedia-ists) have taken control of her city? And what is she to do when she falls in with Hayden Griffin, the hero and sunlighter, just as a voice resounds through the world warning of impending doom for all Virga? As in many otherwise excellent hard science fiction novels, the characters here suffer from a certain flatness. Virga is a superb example of world-building, with complex visual wonders deftly handled by Karl Schroeder’s writing. Curiously, Leal’s historical view is oddly old-fashioned, seeing history as a collection of static, objective facts, which she sticks to despite the evidence that her own historical role will be read one of two ways—heroine or quisling—depending on whether she is alive or dead when the Eternists eventually fall. A fifth novel is demanded.

The vampire authority
Popularly, vampires have ranged from bogeymen to darkly sensual to angst-ridden, but John Joseph Adams’ hefty anthology, By Blood We Live, resurrects 37 incarnations. There are familiar names with familiar stories, most notably Armstrong, King, Lumley and Rice, who is represented by her only published piece of short fiction. Vampires appear in historical and mythological contexts, from the sinking of the Titanic to James Wentworth’s South Pole excursion, the American West to 1930s China, Roanoke to Fallujah. Often the setting is merely a place to locate the vampire, but some authors venture much further. In “Snow, Glass, Apples,” Neil Gaiman brilliantly re-examines the underlying assumptions of the Snow White mythology, and with Lilith Saintcrow’s pitch-perfect “A Standup Dame,” we are treated to a consideration of gender roles in noir genre. We learn what happened to Elvis and Gatsby, Jesus and the devil’s own son, among others. There is also lust, parasitism, violence and narrow escapes. More than anything, this anthology demonstrates that the vampire is not only undead but mutable, and in the best writers’ hands, a tool for analyzing our mortal frailty and resilience in the teeth of unadulterated evil and unimaginable love.

Sean Melican is the new science fiction and fantasy columnist for BookPage. In alphabetical order, he is a chemist, father, husband and writer.
 

Obsession with work, the economy and plain old love take center stage in this month’s science fiction and fantasy selections.

While preparing for a documentary about his life in The Atlantis Code, linguist Thomas Lourds is shown a strange artifact featuring a language that even he, the foremost authority on ancient languages, cannot identify. Almost immediately, he is attacked and were it not for the fact that Leslie, the producer of the documentary, is a crack shot, Lourds’ life might have reached its untimely conclusion. Now, the race is on! Lourds and Leslie must outrace and outwit the psychopathic mercenaries hired by one Cardinal Murani, a member of a secret society dedicated to preserving the true history of Eden and Atlantis as well as resurrecting the power of the papacy. The characters rarely move beyond stereotypes—impossibly attractive, impossibly gifted at their chosen vocations, impossibly good or evil—and the scenes often feel reminiscent of other novels and movies; but the linguistics aspect of the novel is new and well-researched and has the potential to do for the field what Indiana Jones did for archeology. A captivating and fun read with a plethora of literary and cinematic antecedents, The Atlantis Code is best read with a big bowl of popcorn and enormous soda close at hand.

The price of success

The embers of the U.S. economy, the evils of giant corporations and the absurd notion of a fat-curing pill are just three of the targets in Cory Doctorow’s Makers. Oddballs Perry and Lester are two down-and-out, on-the-edge and off-the-grid inventors/hackers who create novel products, such as a robotic car driven by Tickle Me Elmos, as well as revolutionary economic systems such as the “New Work.” Slavishly following its basic tenets of capitalism, the New Work explodes, only to implode much as the dot-com bubble did. Rather than admitting defeat, Lester and Perry exploit the New Work bust by developing user-altered theme park rides (built in abandoned Wal-Marts) that revel in the boom of the New Work. But when the rides infringe on trademark law, lawsuits abound and things spiral woefully out of control (including Lester’s weight). Makers is the essence of good science fiction: extrapolating from today to tomorrow, though there is an inherent awareness in the book of the fragility of predicting the future, as evidenced by Disney’s Tomorrowland, which is laughably dated. That said, Makers is a wild ride through capitalism and American obsessions. Even if its praise of individual productivity and creativity while simultaneously condemning corporate America appears contradictory, the book does offer a possible, if not probable, escape from this dilemma. This is Cory Doctorow and science fiction at its purest and its best.

Fantasy pick of the month

In a field known for padding, A.M. Dellamonica’s debut novel Indigo Springs features exceptionally tight and evocative prose, without a wasted word or scene. It is a demanding novel, expecting readers to extrapolate important information regarding the past merely from textual clues, but it is well worth the effort. Like the reader, Dellamonica’s heroine, Astrid, cannot recall the past and must assemble it from the present. Returning home after her father’s death, she realizes that her father had discovered magic and was enchanting items for those most in need. Naturally, Astrid also has this ability. Her best friend Sahara wants to use the power for greater purposes despite the inherent risks, and this desire ultimately leads to a dark future for the young women. With rare subtlety, Indigo Springs explores gender and sexuality and power; Astrid is bisexual and in love with Sahara, while Sahara uses sexuality (and later magic) as a means of achieving power and control. Astrid’s mother’s sexual identity is perhaps the clearest indicator of the novel’s strengths, for it is only through careful reading that her identity becomes clear, and while not critical to the story, it is a playful take on the standard reader’s guide question of ‘Who do you identify with and why?’ This is a gentle and sharp novel for any serious, thoughtful reader.

In alphabetical order, Sean Melican is a chemist, father, husband and writer.

With two mysteries-cum-morality tales featured in this month’s science fiction and fantasy selections, the themes for our New Year’s picks are clear—even though the characters and their actions may be questionable.

Mike Resnick’s Starship series has taken Captain Wilson Cole and his crew from mutineers to a navy capable of fighting the Republic’s multi-million-ship Navy. Throughout, Resnick has kept the story narrowly focused on the behavior and morality of the crew: the level of weapons are described only by numbers, the power of starships by letters. The previous novel in the series considerably raised the consequences and the seriousness of Resnick’s plot as the captain’s best friend was tortured to death. Now, in Starship: Flagship, Resnick directly confronts the issue of whether torture is ever morally acceptable and concludes that indeed it is (provided that the victim is not seriously physically harmed), psychological damage be damned. While the novels are enjoyable and Resnick should be lauded for bringing cold logic to a genre that sometimes emphasizes force over diplomacy, this last novel suffers slightly from a lack of perspective (Wilson Cole is clearly a mouthpiece). However, the series and this novel are highly recommended, developing a hero that is the antithesis of most heroes and a Republic that is in stark contrast to most utopian federations, and confronting a moral issue in a manner that should nonetheless generate a serious, thoughtful response worthy of Wilson Cole’s hard logic.

The weaknesses of man
Many fantasy novels portray magic as an unquestioned fact of life for the characters, but Carol Berg’s The Spirit Lens builds a medieval world where magic is indeed real, even as natural science and its practitioners successfully argue that magic is nothing more than, well, smoke and mirrors. The king is a proponent of natural science, but the queen, who has lost a child, employs sorcerers to explore the possibility of bridging the gap between her world and the afterworld. When a murder is committed that potentially involves blood magic and implicates the queen, the king employs failed magician Portier de Savin-Duplais to solve the crime and exonerate his wife, failing to realize that unmasking the murder may unleash an even greater evil. Aiding Portier are a Shakespearean fop and a brilliant but unsophisticated sorcerer. In an ever-shifting landscape of alliances and betrayals, half-truths, lies, violence, cruelty and evil magic, Berg builds a unique world of science, magic and divinity, cumulating in a disturbing conspiracy. This is a unique world in the fantasy genre, an excellent story and a morality play that bases the threat to order not on the embodiment of evil, but on the familiar weaknesses of women and men.

Science fiction pick of the month
In the fourth installment of Timothy Zahn’s detective series, Frank Compton and his partner Bayta are aboard a galactic train, the Quadrail, continuing their search for the mind-controlling alien known as the Modhri. They are sidetracked when, despite the supposed impossibility of bringing weapons or poisons aboard, passengers are inexplicably turning up dead. The Domino Pattern is a pitch-perfect blend of mystery and technology that owes as much to Agatha Christie as Larry Niven. Borrowing from the English mystery genre, the novel is populated with numerous fully developed characters harboring believable secrets. Full of red herrings, false leads and dead ends, the complex novel is driven by terse dialogue. While the set-piece climax is a little too long and elaborate, Zahn redeems himself with an ending that uses the carefully drawn backstory to propel his characters into the next novel—all the while raising the stakes from the relatively slow Modhri to a much more immediate and inhuman danger. This is an exceptionally enjoyable series that will appeal to both science fiction and mystery fans.

In alphabetical order, Sean Melican is a chemist, father, husband and writer.

This month’s picks take us from the exciting world of artificial intelligence to that of a criminal genius to the very best best-of-the-year collection.

One of the most wildly anticipated technological feats possible in our lifetime is the development of genuine artificial intelligence. Luckily for us, Robert J. Sawyer has written a series covering a wide range of the issues and obstacles surrounding AI, including perception, tactility, beauty, language, game theory, neurophysiology and morality. In WWW: Watch, the second book in a trilogy, teenager Caitlin Decter continues to discover the visible world after receiving her eyePod implant. Webmind, the emergent AI she has awakened, grows into a full being of its own, but is discovered by American spook agencies and the military—who, ironically, are determined to destroy any entity with the potential for evil, regardless of actual intent or action. As the agencies close in, Webmind announces its existence and demonstrates its beneficence. Sawyer covers an astonishing breadth of concepts, but perhaps does so at the expense of depth; for instance, Webmind’s massive social engineering comes with surprisingly little cost. If Sawyer is a bit overly optimistic about the future of AI, his writing is still a welcome breath of fresh air after decades of machine intelligences portrayed as necessarily inimical to human existence. Webmind may never exist or may arise under vastly different circumstances, but Sawyer has given us a wonderful primer for our potential future.

Twin trouble
Gene Wolfe has always written eloquently about the plasticity of identity and the subjectivity of the narrator—indeed, his last name is now an adjective describing such stories—but never has he so thoroughly entwined these two things as in The Sorcerer’s House. In a series of letters, the book’s narrator, Bax, tells us he is a recently released, exceptionally well-educated convict who has been given a house haunted by, among other creatures, a Japanese shape-shifter, a werewolf and twin brothers. But Wolfe being Wolfe, the story is not as obvious as it first appears. Bax is himself a twin whose brother George is the ‘good’ one—though with a short and violent temper—while Bax has always been the ‘bad seed.’ Such duality also exists in the brothers who haunt Bax’s house, but at one point the mysterious brothers’ behaviors make us wonder if George and Bax’s roles are perhaps reversed. Bax writes of the fantastic events only to his brother and his brother’s wife, while he mentions nothing of these odd occurrences to a friend from prison; the pedestrian tone in these letters is in sharp contrast to those written to George. Since everything Bax tells us must be viewed with suspicion, his apologetic and contrite narrative is almost certainly a fabulous invention intended to cover up real-estate fraud. Or is it? While The Sorcerer’s House is not the best of Wolfe’s stories, it is nevertheless an important addition to a giant’s oeuvre.

Pick of the month
An anthology of the best of the year is more a reflection of its editor’s vision of which stories are important than it is an objective collection. While there are a few traditional stories in Jonathan Strahan’s The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Four involving first contact, time travel and so forth, it is the stories that directly address sexuality and gender that make this a must-have volume. The science fictional and fantastical aspects of Nicola Griffith’s “It Takes Two,” Andy Duncan’s “The Night Cache” and Ellen Klages’ “Echoes of Aurora” are less important than the three stunningly beautiful love stories between women that are depicted within. Besides a powerful exploration of identity, Kij Johnson’s graphically sexual story “Spar” is unlike any other first-contact story. Sara Genge’s “As Women Fight” extrapolates sex roles in a dichogamous species, while Kelly Link’s “The Cinderella Game” examines gender type in fairy tales. And Rachel Swirsky’s “Eros, Philia, Agape” combines parental roles, robotic free will, identity, sex and love into a bittersweet broken romance tale. It is a rare feat for one story to use genre tropes to radically rewrite Western assumptions; to have multiple such stories in one volume is a singular, priceless accomplishment. Quite frankly, this is a book that should top every science fiction and fantasy fan’s need-to-read list.

In alphabetical order, Sean Melican is a chemist, father, husband and writer.