FSF, January 2008 Read online

  I had shaped a hero with incomparable command and wisdom, and now I was being hailed as that very hero. It would have been so easy to let myself be swept along. I could have been King Arturian, ruling lands and peoples, commanding armies, and living in such splendour as was possible in Britannia in that twilight year of the Roman Empire.

  I could not do it.

  As Arturian, I would be a disappointment. Arturian was greater than the rulers of kingdoms like Wessex, Mercia, or Deria, and he was certainly far greater than a mere bard like me. I could have prospered as Arturian, but he would have been diminished by me. What father could wish that upon his child? Were Arturian to remain a legend within ballads, however, he would always be what I had made him.

  * * * *

  That night I declared a great feast to honor our victory, then slipped away into the woods while my followers distracted themselves with drink, song, fighting, and all associated revelries. Falling snow covered my tracks, and thus it was that I vanished out of time, legend and chronicle, leaving Arturian in my place.

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  Books To Look For by Charles de Lint

  Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J. K. Rowling, Scholastic/Arthur A. Levine Books, 2007, $34.99.

  So here we are at the end. A few thousand pages after Harry Potter stepped onto the stage in the first book of this seven book series, we've finally come to the story's conclusion.

  At this point in the proceedings, everyone has pretty much made up their mind as to how they feel about the books, so there's no point in my trying to convince anyone about their worth, one way or another. But having looked at a number of the installments from time to time in this column, I thought I'd check in one last time, now that we have the whole story.

  First, I have to admit that The Order of the Phoenix (book five) pretty much exhausted me—so much so that I didn't get to the sixth book until the week before The Deathly Hallows was released. It wasn't the length of Phoenix that bothered me—I was quite happy through the first 600 pages or so, not at all overwhelmed by the wealth of detail as the familiar cast went about their business in another school year at Hogwarts.

  No, it was the last section of the book, when the action took over, that felt tiresome. I'm not sure why. Perhaps there were simply too many characters running about, fighting the good fight. I got a little bit of that feeling at the end of The Deathly Hallows with the climactic battle in Hogwarts, too. But in both cases, the feeling went away after the Big Action scenes.

  Now, I'm not going to say Rowling is one of the best writers we have working today. While her prose always gets the job done, it's sometimes clunky, and it rarely sings. She tends to have her characters tell information, rather than showing the reader. And really. Those kids—while they're seventeen by the last book—have always seemed like precocious fourteen-year-olds. Kids grow up fast. By their late teens they may not have the emotional maturity that they'll grow into later in life, but they're miles away from how they were when they were thirteen and fourteen.

  Except in the Harry Potter books.

  But with all that said, Rowling is a born storyteller, and that's why her books have been embraced as widely and as passionately as they have been. Sure, we're always looking for someone who delivers the whole package, but for most of us, storytelling trumps everything else. And while you might be able to pick out her influences, like a master chef working with tried and true ingredients, the end result of Rowling's books is something new and different, and effortlessly readable.

  So I admire Rowling. She began this series without artifice—a poor, single mother who had a story she wanted to tell. The initial success had nothing to do with the publicity hoopla that accompanied the later books. It was born of reader enthusiasm and word-of-mouth. In other words, she did this on her own and she deserves all the success the series has brought her.

  And lastly, in a culture that is fractured as much as ours is with information overload—as well as how that information comes to us—the publication of these last few Potter books has been, perhaps, one of the last instances we'll see of a massive audience, all enjoying the same entertainment phenomenon at the same time. The complex splintered structure of how entertainment is delivered to us these days makes that element of the release of this last book certainly something to celebrate.

  * * * *

  Coyote Dreams, by C. E. Murphy, Luna, 2007, $14.95.

  Now, I highly doubt that C.E. Murphy was taking the advice I had for her in my review of her last book, but in her third outing with Joanne Walker, the character finally accepts the magic that's been going on all around her for the past two books and gets down to dealing with her problems. There's still some complaining, but now it's mostly along the lines of Walker wishing she was more prepared—understandable, given her latest predicament.

  In Coyote Dreams, the citizens of the city of Seattle are falling asleep and not waking up. Not all the citizens, but primarily people who have had some contact with Walker, and since she's a cop, it's mostly the police who are falling asleep. Needless to say, that does not bode well for the safety of the citizens of Seattle.

  Walker figures the cause has to be magical, but now that she's willing to accept her magical abilities, she finds herself needing a crash course on how to use them properly. Unfortunately, her spirit guide is missing, she keeps having weird dreams, people continue to fall asleep all around her, and everything seems to be spiraling out of control.

  This series has always been fast-paced and entertaining—and continues to be so—and Walker makes a good viewpoint character, especially now that she's not spending every few pages questioning her sanity. I also like how Murphy feeds us more of Walker's backstory with each book, which adds a certain poignancy to her present situation.

  I'm guessing there'll be more volumes in this series, and I know I'll be reading them.

  * * * *

  The Good Guy, by Dean Koontz, Bantam, 2007, $27.

  I'm really not sure how Koontz does it. He takes such simple concepts and unwinds them into hair-raising stories that simply won't let you go until you get to the end of the book. And then the characters stay in your mind for weeks afterward.

  The title character of this novel, the “good guy,” is Tim Carrier, a man who just wants to be left alone. He's a mason with no real ambition because he likes the idea of looking ahead and seeing himself making walls, having a drink in the local bar after work, and then going home to a life with no surprises. There's the hint that it was different for him once, but before Koontz gets into that, he has Carrier mistaken for a hit man and given an envelope of money with the photo of an attractive woman and her address in it.

  Carrier doesn't have the chance to protest, because by the time he realizes the stranger's on the level—the man really does want someone dead—he's gone. And then it gets worse, because another man sits beside Carrier, obviously the hit man. Carrier puts him off. Pretending to be the hit man's client, Carrier says he's changed his mind. When this second man leaves, Carrier realizes he has to warn the woman that someone wants her dead.

  The hows and whys of what brought her to have a price on her head are beautifully constructed. But at this point in the story, neither Carrier nor the woman know anything except that the hit man hasn't been put off, he might be a policeman, and he certainly has incredible resources to draw upon. No matter how fast or far they flee, he always finds them. Sometimes he's even waiting for them at their next supposed safe haven.

  A good thriller runs by a ticking clock, and they don't count off the seconds much more successfully than in a Koontz book. But it's the characters I love: The good ones, with their banter and their secrets. The antagonists who'd give Thomas Harris's serial killers a run for their money, except the difference here is, Koontz writes with great heart. He takes us into a killer's head so that we can understand them, not to revel in their despicable amorality.

  I've said it before, but it bears repeating: it's a wond
erful thing when a writer with such a large body of work continues to write better books each time out.

  * * * *

  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.

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  Books by James Sallis

  Emshwiller: Infinity x Two: The Life and Art of Ed and Carol Emshwiller, by Luis Ortiz, Foreword and Artwork Captions by Alex Eisenstein, Nonstop Press, 2007, $39.95.

  When come upon by current friends and fellow writers, the photograph on the jacket of my first book occasions great hilarity. It was the sixties, after all. And the photo was taken on the porch of the Anchorage, Damon Knight's and Kate Wilhelm's home, at the beginning of the last day of the week-long Milford Conference. I was very young, next door to starving, and very, very hungover.

  Many young people at the time believed they were going about the work of changing society. A few of us, with somewhat more focus and a tad less ambition, but with equal assiduity, were going about the work of changing science fiction.

  I bring this up here because the book at hand deals with a very specific time in our cultural history and with segments of our culture that until recently have been poorly documented, and because my recollection speaks to those obscure drives that can impel us, first, to create art at whatever personal cost and, second, to choose to work in marginal forms. I was a very serious young science fiction writer, and I wrote short stories. Believe me, I was well out of the thick of things.

  But I also bring up the photo for another reason. Look closely at the credit on that first book of mine: Photo by Ed Emshwiller.

  There was a time, boys and girls, back just after the war—no, not this war, and not that one either, the one back around the forties?—when being an artist or writer was the coolest thing possible. Wild, huh?

  Not coincidentally, that was also the time that science fiction was truly coming into its own. Think man-made lake. Think lots of boaters. Speed, whoops of joy, a bit of apparent danger, a bit of romance.

  Among the many other things Emshwiller Infinity x Two does (and we'll get to those in a moment), it gives fresh documentation to that era, the early boom years of science fiction, using as fulcrum the career of one of the field's finest artists.

  A new popular art, be it jazz, action painting, hip-hop, or science fiction, passes through a number of stages. First there is rebellion, as the evolving form, clearly derivative, begins to conceive of itself as something new on the Earth. There is synthesis, the manifesto stage, during which it tries to define itself, generally in terms of exclusion. There is the stage at which the forms become set and begin to harden, to calcify. There is challenge, as those set forms are broken, fresh influences imported; then a time of factions. And finally there is mainstreaming, as the “new” form flows into the general culture.

  The first great generation of science fiction, readers and writers alike, is almost gone, yet still, for some, existed within our lifetimes. Many of us have had the chance to meet Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, Phil Farmer, Fred Pohl, Damon Knight, Fritz Leiber. And many of us as readers vividly recall the raw power, the visceral impact, of the early days of Galaxy, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Astounding, and original paperback novels.

  Looking through the reproductions here, I am amazed at how closely Ed's work circled the days of my late youth and early adulthood—just as it did the early adulthood of the genre. The cover painting “Get a Horse,” with its depiction of a crashed spaceship being towed by a mammoth stallion? I read that issue of If at band camp, summer after the ninth grade. F&SF with his cover for “The Silver Eggheads” or “Have Space Suit Will Travel” or “A Day at the Beach"? Other summers, other seasons, sitting under trees or in lawn chairs or on porches in various cities. Emsh's work was for many of us, as Alex Eisenstein writes in his introduction, “a kind of terrific SF wallpaper, a continuous surround of space adventure and the far future.” As was the science fiction that Ed illustrated. And yes—as Ortiz and Eisenstein note—we took both for granted.

  Emshwiller recalls those times, the wallpaper, the surround, that moment in our youth and cultural collective when everything ahead was bright and shining. In that respect, certainly, it serves nostalgia. It also evokes wonderfully the sf world of the fifties and sixties: Horace Gold sequestered in his apartment on East 14th Street, the succession of cheap magazine offices in midtown, Friday gatherings in which writers would pick the artwork around which they'd write their story. Ed Emshwiller was witness to much of that, and, with this book, we become the same.

  Ortiz catches up marvelously the insularity of sf, its missionary zeal, its fulsome power—and the shabbiness and tawdriness that's always been a part. For as much as we love the mind-stretching nature of the genre, many of us embrace as readily its rude appeal: its garishness, its outlaw nature and adolescent rebelliousness. R. A. Lafferty is quoted here as saying “The covers were the best part of those old magazines, by a long ways.” And Isaac Asimov: “The images are what attracted me in science fiction, more even than the surprises and the ideas and the crazy plots."

  By 1952 Ed's images had become so prevalent that, of 29 sf magazine titles and a total of 153 issues published that year, Emsh art was in or on a third of them. A fine sampling of this work is offered herein, in beautifully done reproductions with intelligent, witty commentary by Alex Eisenstein. But the book's aim is far higher.

  One may have good reason to approach such a book with misgivings, fearful of fannish hyperbole, pauperish content, lack of horizon and perspective. This, however, is a serious inquiry into one artist's life, a book whose excellent production values mirror its overall ambition. Nor does Ortiz ever lose perspective, constantly drawing back, be it from the sf subculture or from the artist's narrowly focused world, to the larger. Of the debate over the genre's origins he notes that “the reality is—outside of science fiction fandom—no one cares.” Writing of the Eleventh World Science Fiction Convention in 1953, he lists the six sf or fantasy movies playing within easy distance from the convention hotel.

  Emshwiller then is, first, the biography of an artist who moved from success as a commercial illustrator into the rarefied air of avant-garde film. As such, it is also an inquiry into the nature of creativity—what causes it, what drives it, how it manifests—and a portrait of the nonconforming artist doggedly pursuing sparrows that perhaps he alone can see, relentlessly and even obsessively stealing time and energy from other parts of his life, subsidizing the work however he can.

  This aspect gains density in that the book is also a portrait of Ed's marriage to Carol, and of her development from novice to writer's writer to general acclaim. The couple met at art school and were married in 1949; Ed's career as illustrator began taking form on the boat trip back from their honeymoon year abroad as Ed passed the voyage reading American magazines bought at a Paris newsstand: “Between waves (I'd never make a good sailor), I let the obvious idea grow. As soon as I hit shore I started knocking out samples."

  That career ran just over fourteen years, leading to 700-plus covers and untold interior illustrations for such as F&SF, Infinity, Super-Science Fiction, Mercury Mystery Book-Magazine, Ace Books, Fantastic Universe, Untamed, Gnome Press, and Lion Adventure Magazine. Painting so often to tight deadlines, Ed worked mostly in gouache, or opaque watercolors, because other mediums were too slow drying. Again for expedience, his interior illustrations were often done on scratchboard, a board covered with chalky substance that is inked then scratched with a sharp object to bring out white lines.

  As one might imagine from the range of venues, there was considerable variety, from stylized neo-realist painting to surreal juxtapositions of color and form, but there were also many strains in common—his importing of modernist design, for instance, which is perhaps best seen in line drawings for pulps like Planet Stories and Startling Stories. His draftsmanship and figures are instantly recognizable. But gi
ven all else, it is Ed's wit that stands out. An Emsh cover hits you in the face. Then you begin to take notice of the details, the small jokes and twists and visual puns occurring off center, almost out of sight....

  By the mid-sixties Ed had mostly given up illustration for art cinema and, eventually, a professorship at CalArts. Several of his films, such as Relativity, Image, Flesh, and Voice, and Sunstone, are landmarks in the development of experimental film. He died in 1990, age sixty-five, of chronic lymphocytic leukemia, a cancer of the blood and bones. In an introduction included here, Carol writes of those final days.

  She had been undergoing a development similar to Ed's in her own work. Trying her hand after years of hanging around with sf people who “talked about writing as if it was a chess game and a normal person could learn to do it,” she began writing with genre markets in mind. “Something clicked. So this is what writing is all about. It's not at all that stuff in high school or freshman English.” Following the tenor of the times, her stories ("Pelt,” “The Piece Thing,” “A Day at the Beach") tended toward dissent and coded protest.

  Ed had remarked that from his earliest films he was interested “in making almost pure visual abstractions with practically no allegorical implications.” He strove, he said, toward “the sense of the unfolding of a small universe.” Likewise, Carol had begun looking beyond conventional fiction, slowly letting go of her hold on plot and embracing the avant-garde as a means of saying “something different than has ever been said before.” Reading John Cage and Frank O'Hara, she had come to the realization that there were volumes and positive and negative spaces in language just as there were in paintings or sculpture or film, and that these could be manipulated, nudged into new, non-linear, non-narrative relationships that might at once reflect and reconfigure the world.