FSF, October 2007 Page 4
Ironside, by Holly Black, Simon & Schuster, 2007, $16.99.
And speaking of Holly Black, in her new novel she returns to the characters of Tithe and (to a lesser degree) Valiant.
I'm not going to lie to you. Yes, you can read this book on its own and it will be a highly enjoyable experience. But familiarity with the other two books, in particular Tithe, will definitely make it a richer experience.
Ironside. It's what faerie call New York City and the vast sprawl of cityscape that surrounds it. And it's where Kaye lives—the pixie we met in Tithe who was switched at birth with a human girl and grew up thinking she was human until encounters with the courts of faerie showed her the truth.
Like Linda in God Save the Queen, Kaye has a bit of a mouth on her, but the difference is, she cares about her friends and family. She may make a terrible mess of their lives, but it's not because she wants to. It's only because when she tries to do the right thing, she often doesn't have all the necessary information at hand to make a sensible decision, and so makes things worse.
* * * *
Ironside involves more warring courts of faerie—something that, even in a contemporary setting, is starting to get old these days—but I'll forgive Black for that this one last time because she has a vigorous writing style, great dialogue, and a cast of genuinely likable characters that you can't abandon once you've started reading a book of hers.
And for those of you who have followed these characters through the earlier pair of books, there's a satisfying sense of closure for those who survive the troubles that arise for them in the course of this story.
* * * *
Neptune Noir, edited by Rob Thomas, Benbella, 2007, $17.95.
This is my long column of the year, so I think there's space for something from a little further afield. It has nothing to do with our genre except for the fact that many of the readers of SF and fantasy are drawn to the television series discussed in the essays collected here.
But I will be brief.
If you've been Jonesing for something to replace your Buffy the Vampire Slayer fixation, then you should be tuning in to Veronica Mars on Tuesday nights. No, there aren't any vampires or demons, and Mars isn't the Chosen One to fight them, but it's smartly written, with great dialogue, a likable cast, and season arcs that give a satisfying closure (with just a little tease to get you back the next year). The third season's just ending as I write this, but the first two are readily available on DVD.
Don't be put off by the idea of a high school student moonlighting as a private eye. Remember, you bought into a high school student fighting vampires, and like Buffy, this show is so much more than what it appears to be from a quick glance. And while I highly doubt it was deliberately done, I see parallels between the two shows’ characters:
Wallace is Xander, Mac is Willow, Weevil is Spike, Veronica's dad is Giles, Logan is Angel. And Veronica is Buffy, of course.
But while this show wouldn't exist if Buffy hadn't come along first—walking that perfect tightrope between humor and drama, with a strong young female lead and season-long story arcs that actually come to a conclusion—in the end, Veronica Mars retains its own character and style. It also appeals to folks who didn't like the fantastical elements of Buffy—you know, the ones who didn't get it like we did.
The book in hand was edited by the show's creator, Rob Thomas, and features essays by people with too much time on their hands, but I like it when people write about their enthusiasms. And I particularly enjoyed Thomas's introduction, where he outlines how the show came to be, and his sometimes bemused short intros to each essay.
Don't come to this book if you haven't watched the show. If you have, pick it up only if this sort of minutiae appeals to you. But if it does, you'll have a great time in its pages.
* * * *
Grease Monkey, by Tim Eldred, Tor Books, 2007, $27.95.
I used to get a real kick out of reading some of the old SF books by Heinlein, Doc Smith, Andre Norton, Clifford D. Simak, and other masters of the genre. I know that they were quite capable of writing serious books, but I remember them for their space adventures and the sheer fun it was to read their books. I miss that sort of story—and no, I'm not waxing nostalgic for my youth. I didn't read SF at that so-called perfect age of fifteen. I was reading mysteries and fantasies then. I stumbled into SF (which I was sure I wouldn't like) in my twenties, through Andre Norton's Huon of the Horn. Or rather, it was while looking for more of her books after reading Huon of the Horn (since that high fantasy book, it turned out, was an anomaly set against the sorts of stories she normally told).
It turns out that I did like SF, though I'll admit to being a little unsure I'd like Tim Eldred's Grease Monkey when I was first handed a copy of it. It's a hardcover collection of single-issue comic books that Eldred has been publishing since the early ‘90s. I figured, if it was any good, surely I would have heard about it before now? Turns out it was a failing on the part of my local comic shop for not carrying those single issues, because Grease Monkey is serious fun.
It's part Carl Barks (of Donald Duck fame—you know, back when it was good), part Star Trek (says the guy who only knows it from the outside, since I've yet to watch an episode), part manga (without the big eyes), and entirely entertaining.
Robin Plotnik is a junior spacecraft mechanic whose assignment, when he arrives on the homeworld flagship, is as a fighter maintenance assistant to Chief Mechanic Mac Gimbensky—a gorilla who, Plotnik is told, ate his last assistant. Gimbensky is a cantankerous chief, seemingly very capable of having done just that, and naturally Plotnik immediately gets into his bad books.
It's not an auspicious start.
But things aren't always what they seem, and after a few bumps on that first day, the two become friends, maintaining the fighter craft for the all-women Barbarian Squadron while trying to stay ahead of the trials and tribulations any group of beings will run into when they're all confined to a closed “world” such as the flagship.
What makes this such an entertaining book is Eldred's attention to detail. The characters are fully realized, but so is the flagship and the historical background of what put men and gorillas together into space. Much of the book is fun space opera, and following the complications of the various characters’ lives, but for all the laughs, there's also a serious thread underlying the fun.
The art—particularly after page 79—is all clean lines, expressive expression, detailed space craft mechanics, and great storytelling.
Grease Monkey is a perfect all-ages story. Kids will enjoy the fun and adventure, while adults will pick up on the inside jokes and satire.
Highly recommended.
* * * *
Emshwiller: Infinity x Two, by Luis Ortiz
Nonstop Press, 2007, $39.95.
Though readers of the pulps might not have realized it, the face of science fiction to which they gravitated in the fifties was greatly influenced by the work of Ed Emshwiller. He produced some 700 covers during that period, and who knows how many interior illustrations. His art was always inventive, wonderfully designed and executed, and though it might seem a little quaint and old-fashioned as we look back on it today, there's no denying the excitement it brought to the newsstands in its time.
Luis Ortiz's previous book was about the life and art of Lee Brown Coye, and this book is just as strong an entry into the history of early science fiction art. From the text, it's obvious Ortiz's research was just as exhaustive for this as it was for that earlier book. He writes with the grace and skill that makes you want to go out and track down Emshwiller's films and the art that isn't reproduced in the book.
But the art that is reproduced here is a terrific collection of old pulp covers and interiors, as well as stills from Emshwiller's films, archival photographs, and early art samples. It also features a sweet introduction by Emshwiller's widow, Carol (a fine fiction writer herself), and a forward by Alex Eisenstein, a collector of Emshwiller's art.
I know the
audience for this sort of book is small, but if you have any interest in our field's visual history, this book, or the one on Coye, would be a terrific place to start.
* * * *
Material to be considered for review in this column should be sent to Charles de Lint, P. O. Box 9480, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1G 3V2.
[Back to Table of Contents]
Books by Elizabeth Hand
Sides, by Peter Straub, Cemetery Dance Publications, 2007, $25.
Breakfast in the Ruins: Science Fiction in the Last Millennium, by Barry N. Malzberg, Baen Books, 2007, $14.
* * * *
The novelist Peter Straub is that rare contemporary writer whose work seems genuinely timeless. In elegance and ambition, books such as Ghost Story, Koko, The Throat, Mr. X, lost boy lost girl, and the collected short fictions of Houses with[out] Doors and Magic Terror (to name less than half of them), stake their claim to a distinctly American, artistic exurb where the supernatural and the everyday, life-shattering violence and daffodil calm, all coexist. It's a place within spitting distance of the gated communities housing the likes of Updike, Roth, McCarthy, Salter, et al.; not far removed from the sprawl that's grown up around the Gothic manse of Straub's sometime collaborator, Stephen King; it borders in its more overgrown verges briar-rose-hedges and sinister root cellars that are the haunts of Link, Carroll, Crowley, and Evenson, among others. And it's also only a streetcar stop, or, if you're feeling flush, a taxi ride from the flickering neon and broken-bottle detritus of that dive where Block and Rankin go to chase Chandler's ghost, on the nights he's buying a round.
Straub's a good neighbor to all these folks; but after reading Sides, his lovely, affecting, and keenly intelligent collection of non-fiction, one gets the impression that, late at night, when all those other writers are in bed, or just waking up, he climbs up the long hill at the edge of his demesne—the spot where, if the moon's just right, you can see both Millhaven and Dunwich—and waits as a small crowd gathers around him. These are neighbors, too, though quiet ones—Flannery O'Connor, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Brian Moore, Henry James—folks who, once upon a time, might not have had a lot to say to each other but now, with Straub in their midst, might realize they've got quite a bit in common.
Sides collects nearly all of the nonfiction Straub has penned in almost two decades, from 1985 to 2006. It's a gallimaufry that consists of introductions and afterwords to works by other writers—among them Lawrence Block, Bram Stoker, H. G. Wells, Stephen King—as well as “a frivolity” and two essays, one of them the heartbreaking elegy “Mom.” There's also a series of short, very funny misprisions, er, appreciations, of Straub's novels, written by his fictive academic doppelgänger Putney Tyson Ridge, Ph.D.
Straub provides brisk and informed introductions to books by Ira Levin (The Stepford Wives), Graham Joyce (Leningrad Nights), and Caitlin Kiernan (Tales of Pain and Wonder), but Sides really begins to hit its stride with a hallucinatory riff on Poppy Z. Brite's collection Are You Loathsome Tonight, where Straub invokes Flaubert, Bataille, and “The Duino Elegies.” It's less an intro than what Straub terms “a kind of aria, a kind of solo” when, later in Sides, he touches on Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. In his intro to Secret Windows, a collection of essays by Stephen King, Straub provides one of the best analyses of King's writing that I've read: he strips it of ivory tower cant and condescension, and makes a strong case for placing King in the company of the nineteenth-century writer Frank Norris, whose work embraces realism and naturalism, rather than horror.
"[King's] fundamental assumption ... is that writing fiction is a job like any other, and must be done honestly and well. And the basis of any such conviction is that writing done honestly and well carries its own weight, regardless of genre or (vulgar) popularity. Quietly, at the level of the lowest frequencies, King is offering an implicit rebuttal to a notion he finds elitist, absurd, and insulting, that successful commercial fiction by definition must be inferior to fiction of other sorts. Truthfulness—truthfulness of a specific kind—grants any work of fiction authenticity, strength, and dignity, King believes, and a popular commercial writer faces a greater temptation to fudge than his more “literary” colleagues, due to his consciousness of how an artificial turn or change of direction would gratify his audience, should he impose it upon the living story."
Take that, Harold Bloom.
Even Straub's more deceptively offhand remarks can nail a writer with a dizzying combination of dead-on accuracy and unexpected leaps of insight—
"Rex Stout managed to stay crisp as a snap-pea for five decades of annual visits to Nero Wolfe's brownstone, but his level of consistency over time is matched only by P. G. Wodehouse, whose Drones Club and Blandings Castle have more in common with Stout's changeless brownstone than may be immediately apparent."
This, alas, is from “Hope to Die,” a marvelous essay on Lawrence Block's Scudder series, so readers wanting more of the Wolfe/Wooster equation will have to wait. I haven't read Block's books (though I'm now presold on them). But “Hope to Die” finds that crack in the world that Leonard Cohen wrote about—the place where the light gets in—in this case, the jagged seam where the familiar fabric of crime fiction is torn away to reveal something bigger, stranger, more elemental and more powerful.
"...the Scudder series ... presents violence in its most ideologically troubling form, as a variety of ecstasy. Though you would never guess it from reading the average crime novel, violence and the sacred share a common seam, they walk hand in hand, for both invoke the ultimate things."
The connection between ecstasy and violence, the continual human striving for transcendence through heightened states—sex, the supernatural, music; romantic or obsessive or deranged love—is, of course, one of the things that informs most of Peter Straub's fiction. Which makes it all the more impressive that he can also create such succinct, almost mathematically precise (and cheeky) assessments of, say, the difference between goth and Gothic in an essay on Dracula—
"The ever-more-numerous fictions ... describing the adventures of contemporary vampires, which adopt the repression vs. sexual anarchy template by inverting it to make the vampire heroic (Repression, boo! Go, you sexy immortal!) are almost always utterly enjoyable, but they are ‘goth’ rather than Gothic: less grand, less inward, and stabilized around a less inclusive vision of human nature. The supernatural has been externalized, therefore tamed, and what we are left with are empowerment fantasies described as ‘transgressive.’ Stoker's vampires are Gothic, and the transgressive, while immensely seductive, is about as glamorous as a wound."
Straub turns a more antic gaze upon his own oeuvre, writing as Professor Putney Ridge, “long the Chairman and sole member of the Department of Popular Culture at Popham College,” “the Sewanee of the West” or “Middlebury writ small.” Professor Ridge has turned the act of damning with faint praise into an art form as rarefied as tanka. I excerpt here the final sentences from several of his reviews:
"One wishes that [Straub] had been capable of learning from his own, no doubt bitter, example."
"A trivial bit of juvenilia understandably suppressed very nearly since its publication."
"Coy, smirking references to jazz musicians are hardly the worst of Ghost Story's exhibitionist failings."
"The title of the novella has no discernible significance whatsoever."
And, my personal favorite:
"The novel does contain some excellent descriptions of snow."
Still, the heart of this collection is “Mom,” an autobiographical essay on Straub's midwestern childhood and his parents—a charming, somewhat feckless father who longed for a son who'd play with the Green Bay Packers, and a stoic, fiercely intelligent, often rage-filled mother who juggled a nursing career with the domestic rigors of housework and childrearing. Straub's father remarks, “You know, I hate art. I don't know why, I just hate it"; his mother's disappointments make her “a resentful cook” who gives voice to endless angry recitations while c
leaning the floors. But Straub is too generous a writer and person to pen a bitter memoir of childhood grievances. “Mom,” while poignant in its depiction of the nascent writer who appears, cuckoo-like, in the bewildered brown sparrows’ nest, steers a clear course between sentimentality and dry, Garrison Keillor-esque comedy. When, at a distressingly young age, Straub's mother begins to display odd ritualist behaviors and memory lapses, the reader's heart catches; but again, there's no sentimentality here, no Oprah-staged moments of closure or redemption; just real people in real pain, displaying the sort of everyday decency that the media calls Heroism, but which Straub knows is really humanism in its simplest, perhaps greatest, form. “Mom” is an elegy for a parent, a life lost not once but twice, to Alzheimer's and then to death; a meditation on loss that is as moving, in its way, as C. S. Lewis's A Grief Observed. It shows Peter Straub at his best, a clear-eyed, deeply humane writer who knows first-hand the darkest, coldest soul-gnawing terrors that the night holds for all of us, yet is unafraid to stand beside his readers and wait for dawn to come.
But it lacks any descriptions of snow.
* * * *
I read Barry Malzberg's collection of critical essays, The Engines of the Night, when it first appeared in 1982, and found it a bracingly dark, often contentious, defiantly melancholy insider's take on what at the time still seemed very much a boy's club. Damon Knight, Robert Silverberg, John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov—these, among others, were the guys Malzberg (mostly) admired and wrote about. At the time this grated on me, though I knew it wasn't Malzberg's fault the field still hadn't been successfully colonized by the mistresses of the night, though certainly the feminization of science fiction had begun and was well underway.
Now, reading Breakfast in the Ruins, a much-expanded collection that includes work from the ‘90s and noughts, I can see more clearly what took on the woman's role in the original book: science fiction itself. Malzberg writes with all the passion and fury of a true romantic, one who knows his lover is unworthy of him: of vulgar parentage, often shallow, capricious, ruthless, capable of infinite and subtle infidelities. She will betray him, and does, often—