FSF Magazine, August 2007 Read online

  That's certainly the case here with eleven old favorites and three new ones, two of which feature his continuing character, the ghost hunter Eli Mothersbaugh. The pair are set in a near-future world where science has perfected a machine (the sensic) that allows one to record ghosts digitally. Eli's job is to differentiate between actual ghosts and simple bioremnant energies (sort of like an energy “recording” that repeats in a loop), and then try to free the souls so that they can move on.

  The stories feature the ghosts of an opera diva ("Diva") and a collector of Japanese woodblock prints ("Hanagan's Kiyomatsu, 1923"), but they're not really about ghosts or the science that lets one record them. They're not really about the mysteries that lie at the heart of the hauntings, either—though all of that comes into play. Like the other two stories featuring Eli that appear in this collection, what they're really about are the living people left behind: the haunted.

  Because this is where Parks excels. No matter how outlandish the setting of the story, or how other from us his characters appear (in additional stories, he regularly features gods, denizens of fairy tales and legends, and every sort of strange protagonist), Parks always manages to convince us of the humanity that lies at their hearts and has us care for them.

  He's also a bit of a jack-of-all-trades when it comes to style, but he writes so credibly, in so many different kinds of stories, that it's a required talent. And whenever I think I prefer one style over another, he nudges me elsewhere.

  For instance, I might say that I like his ones that take place in historical or secondary worlds, but I think he really shines when he brings the mythic elements into the contemporary world and then explores how ordinary people deal with the sudden appearance of the impossible in their lives (as he does in the collection's other new story, “The Wizard of Wasted Time.") At least I think they're my favorites until I read something like “Kallisti,” the opening salvo in Worshipping Small Gods, and find myself enamored with how effortlessly Parks puts a contemporary spin on the “true story” behind the events that led to the Trojan War. Or one of the Eli Mothersbaugh stories. Or one featuring Japanese fox spirits ("Fox Trails").

  I'd say there's something for everyone here, but really, I think everyone will enjoy all of these stories, even if you think you wouldn't. Parks is a perfect example of a multifaceted writer who can't—and shouldn't—be bound by anyone's idea of who he is. Instead, we should appreciate the diversity and skill he brings to the page and just be glad that there still are writers who have so many different things to say, with so many unexpected settings and characters.

  There's also a hardcover edition available of Worshipping Small Gods that sells for $29.95.

  But now, just to stay with Parks for a moment, I do find myself wondering if he'd still seem so fresh and innovative in a novel, where one needs to pick a style and stick with it at far greater length than a short story.

  With PS Publishing's edition of Hereafter, and After, we get a taste. It's in the novelet/novella range, but it's the longest piece I've seen from Parks to date and it certainly whets my appetite for that as-yet unpublished—perhaps unwritten, perhaps not even started—novel.

  Here we meet recently deceased Jake Hallman who, after getting hit by a garbage truck, awakes to find himself in the afterlife on something called the Golden Road. An angel comes to escort him to Heaven, but Hallman has questions, which leads him to have an “insight,” which makes him that rare being in the afterlife: a dead person who is capable of change. The dead aren't supposed to change after their death; those who do become free souls.

  And that leads Hallman on a stranger journey through the afterlifes of all sorts of myths with only the company of an equally bewildered ex-Valkyrie named Freya for company. All of this allows Parks to poke gentle fun and make some serious commentary on our belief systems, and it gives us a terrific read.

  Hereafter, and After is a story that would have made Robert Nathan or James Branch Cabell proud—and probably would James Morrow, too, who's still alive and could read it. And it certainly shows that Parks has the chops to work at a longer length.

  There's also a more limited hardcover available for $45. Check the publishers’ web sites for ordering information on both these books.

  Before we go on to the next review, I should mention that PS Publishing appears to put out their books in quartets. The other worthy titles coming out the same time as the Parks book are: The Lees of Laughter's End by Steven Erikson, The Scalding Rooms by Conrad Williams, and The Colorado Kid by Stephen King.

  The latter (reviewed in an earlier installment of this column) makes a welcome hardcover of this paperback original, but it appears in three different versions, each with cover art by a different artist, and each in various editions. All of which seems a bit like overkill, but what do I know?

  Well, I know that it's a great story and one of my favorites by King.

  * * * *

  Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction, by Jeff Prucher, Oxford University Press, 2007, $29.95

  I'm not a professional etymologist by any means, but I do love words, and I love to trace their origins. So I was particularly pleased to receive a galley of Jeff Prucher's Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction.

  Unlike all the other scholarly books on the subject of science fiction, Prucher concentrates on the words and concepts that have become the sf lexicon. It's terrific to browse, full of all sorts of citations of first appearances of words and their subsequent usage, showing how many of the words commonly used today had their origin in our genre—and not hard science as one might sometimes suppose. Shuttle, robot, timeline, extraterrestrial, cyberspace ... our language is that much richer for the infusion of sf terms.

  I often suggest with this sort of a reference book that you should have a look at it in your local public library—and you might still want to do so, just to get an idea of its breadth, depth, and entertainment value. But then you're going to want a copy of your own. I'm off to pre-order one for myself as soon as I finish this column.

  * * * *

  A Fine and Private Place, by Peter S. Beagle, Tachyon, 2007, $14.95.

  Synchronicity's a funny thing. There I was in last month's column, mentioning how this is one of my favorite books, and the next thing I know there's a new reprint of it sitting in my post office box.

  Now the fear I always have of going back to something I haven't reread in a long time is that it won't measure up to the warm affection I carry for it in my memories. But happily, that wasn't the case here. I didn't even mean to reread it. I simply thought I'd try a few pages to see how it fared and the next thing I knew it was late at night and I was halfway through.

  For those of you new to this classic, it tells the story of a druggist who gave up his profession and moved into a mausoleum in the Bronx's Yorkchester Cemetery. Jonathan Rebeck has lived there for nineteen years when the book opens, his only company a talking raven and the ghosts that haunt the cemetery for a few weeks after their burial. The ghosts start to lose their memories over those weeks and eventually they're gone. But until they go, Rebeck can see and speak with them.

  Rebeck is more than content to stay hidden away from the outside world, but the arrival of a certain pair of ghosts and a Jewish mourner seem set to change everything, and we have our story.

  A Fine and Private Place is just as wonderful as I remembered it to be: beautifully written, the characters warmly drawn, the pages filled with conversations that run the gamut of the human condition. In these days of everything coming in quick sound bites, at a faster and faster pace, Beagle's novel might seem quaint as it takes its time to tell its story. But you know, there's a reason that people still read Dickens and Austen, and there's a reason they'll appreciate this book: quality counts.

  This edition is apparently the definitive text, but I have to admit that whatever small changes Beagle might have made, I didn't notice them. What I do know is that it's a great book, in a lovely affordab
le package. To give you an example of the attention to detail that everyone involved with this new edition took, cover photographer Ann Monn flew to New York to take a photo in the same cemetery that provided Beagle with his inspiration.

  And the book's worth it.

  * * * *

  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]

  Musing on Books by Michelle West

  The New Moon's Arms, by Nalo Hopkinson, Warner Books, 2007, $23.99.

  Divergence, by Tony Ballantyne, Bantam, 2007, $6.99.

  The Society of S, by Susan Hubbard, Simon and Schuster, 2007, $25.

  * * * *

  I've long been a fan of Nalo Hopkinson, partly because she never does the same thing twice, and partly because, even when the work is flawed, her ambitions—in something as mythically and historically dense as, say, The Salt Roads—make her books worth reading. True to form, she's gone from that textual density to something completely different in The New Moon's Arms, turning to the Caribbean Island of Dolorosse in the present, and focusing on the middle-aged-and-resenting-it-greatly Calamity Lambkins. Born Chastity Theresa, she changed her name to something she felt was more suitable. Calamity has a daughter, Ifeoma, born when Calamity herself was sixteen years old; she has no husband, and, as the book opens, is burying her father; her mother disappeared one long-ago night when she was young. She is a grandmother as well, a state that she would dislike intensely if she weren't fond of Stanley, although she still hates it when he calls her anything but Calamity; Grandma is for old women.

  When Calamity was a girl, she was a Finder. She could find things that were lost, just by reaching out to touch them. When her mother disappeared, so did the gift, ebbing like the tides around her small island home. But now, late in life, accompanied by hot flashes and chills, that gift has come back with a vengeance. And with a difference: Almost all of the lost things Calamity finds are her own—old books that she loved in childhood, old foods, even the orchard in which she grew up. It's not a metaphor that Calamity thinks twice about—but it's particularly apt that she doesn't; she's never been one for questioning her own motives.

  But the most important thing she finds is a half-drowned child on the beach—life coming out of the water in the lee of the burial of her father. The child she finds is a boy, age three at best guess; he speaks, but not in any language that she can understand. She suspects he's not entirely human, that he is, in fact, a sea-child, someone who lives, like seals, in the water. She ends up fostering the child—who adores her—and with the child, her own relationship with her daughter comes into focus, on both sides, and she has to take a good, hard look at herself.

  Calamity is a brittle, fractious, judgmental, narrow-minded woman—someone who knows how to hold a grudge better than she knows how to breathe. But she is also conversely generous, impulsive, and helpful; when she understands her duty and her obligations, she does her best to live up to them. In short, she's bitingly real, and in spite of the obvious ways in which she's wrong, it's impossible not to like her, even when you're wincing at the latest thing that's fallen out of her mouth. This is one of Hopkinson's gifts—she never argues that Calamity is right, but clearly holds her in great affection regardless. You like her, and you want her to move on, to grow, and to let go of the things she holds on to too tightly.

  Which makes the novel itself rewarding, because in many ways, it is a coming of age—and it doesn't matter that it's middle age; Calamity Lambkins, in spite of herself, has the opportunity to change, to look at her past as an adult, rather than clinging to the ferocious memories of a teenager forced to take on the trappings of adulthood before she'd grown into them. Letting go of pain is hard; understanding the pain you caused while you were in pain, possibly harder. She has to do a lot of both.

  This is both moving and quiet; it has no end-of-the-world threat, no big pyrotechnics—but the wonder, if quiet, is strong. I highly recommend it.

  * * * *

  Tony Ballantyne's second novel is in no way a quiet, small drama. A direct sequel to Capacity, it returns us to the world in which Judy lives. Judy, one of thirteen sisters, used to work for Social Care, utilizing the empathy drug MTPH to understand better the people she was sent to evaluate and help. That was before Kevin, Chris, and The Watcher, all AIs of incredible intelligence and cunning (although Kevin was in denial), destroyed her life and her simple understanding of the near-perfect world she helped support.

  That world has changed markedly with the appearance of Dark Crystals—apparently natural phenomena that feed on, well, intelligence, but Judy's life had already slipped away; she's been in hiding for more than a decade. But hiding time is now over, even in free space, where The Watcher doesn't rule. What rules instead is the Fair Exchange software by which merchant ships of all sizes and categories are making their living.

  The book starts out with a very chaotic and largely unhappy vessel, the Eva Rye, and its very conflicted crew. The captain of the ship, Michel, doesn't actually want to be captain, and in his attempt to please everyone, he succeeds—as is usually the case—in doing pretty much nothing. But the Eva Rye stumbles upon a derelict ship, a robot vessel whose AI is asking them for a tow to the nearest space dock because it doesn't want to drift into a floating field of Dark Crystals.

  The shipmates argue about this, then vote to use the Fair Exchange Software to trade systems repair (theirs is in need of an overhaul) for the tow.

  But the system that the Stranger sees as most in need of repair is actually the crew itself, and in fixing the physical difficulties the ship has, it activates the replication software, and a second Eva Rye is born—with less than half the crew. It's the second ship that will eventually accept Judy as cargo.

  The crew of the second ship? A caustic, hyper-critical young woman named Saskia, a competent but doubtful young man named Maurice, a severe and somewhat unkind old woman named Miss Rose, and a very severely learning-disabled man named Edward. It's upon these people that Judy's life depends—because they've agreed to take her to Earth, which is heavily quarantined and almost impossible to reach, due to the density of Dark Crystal formations around the planet.

  The Fair Exchange software is under some scrutiny; it is certainly not trusted by the crew, because as far as they can tell, they've gotten nothing useful for anything they've traded away. But ... if you break a deal that the software has calculated is fair, you're out of the FE network for good—and their livelihood, such as it is, depends on that network. So, bitterly unhappy, they soldier on.

  Judy herself has discovered that she's not exactly human, which, given everything else, is a blow. She's also discovered that whatever she is, DIAMA Corp believes her to be its property, and they've activated a meta-intelligence in her that takes the place of her brother's interior voice. And also takes the place of the empathic MTPH residue that she's grown to depend on to read the emotions of people around her.

  She doesn't have to be a genius to figure out this crew—but she's tired, and she knows that no matter what happens, she's headed back to Earth. Everything has transpired to send her back to The Watcher, and Judy is tired of running.

  But the Fair Exchange software adds a few twists to the journey itself. And to the book as a whole.

  Divergence is an interesting novel; it can be read as an all out space-opera with current technical trends (the proliferation of Von Neumann Machines among them); it can be read as a social commentary on any utopia, and also as a commentary on free will and consequences. Ballantyne never slows down—the book moves, and moves with verve and style. I'm not entirely certain I agree with his take on what is, in the end, God—but the book's audacious, unique, and highly readable.

  * * * *

  I would like to remind people up front that I don't really go in for Vampire novels. They're just not my sub-genre. (Although I did read all the Marv Wolfman Dracula comics that
Marvel put out in my childhood and early youth.) But I have always had luck with those novels that skirt the borders of the genre—that are not, in the end, Vampire novels so much as they are novels in which the symbolism of the Vampiric blends with the author's specific voice.

  So, with this firmly in mind, I picked up The Society of S, by Susan Hubbard. What made me curious was the following, excerpted from the back blurb of the advance reading copy: “a taut, character-driven literary mystery, The Society of S is the future of vampirism, told in a voice that will haunt you—and make you think."

  I'm all for thinking.

  But one of the things that I should also have remembered is never to read the PR copy of any book I want to enjoy; I should, by now, know better than to judge a book by any part of its cover, and I cannot now divorce the book and my reading of it from my expectations going into the reading itself.

  Perhaps because I was expecting more, I found the book curiously flat. The protagonist-cum-author (the book is, in theory, a diary), one Ariella Montero, was abandoned by her mother at birth; she's been raised entirely by her father, his best friend, his ugly, irritable lab assistant and Mrs. McGarritt, a woman with many children of her own, who comes during the day while her own children are at school to prepare meals for Ariella.

  Ariella is, of course, home-schooled by her father, and when the book opens she is thirteen years old, on the brink of adolescence. She has a thousand questions about her mother, which her father has always avoided answering, and is slowly coming up with a thousand questions about her father—and herself. Because Ariella is not, she is coming to realize, normal. And not all of the strangeness can be attributed to her very isolated upbringing.