Tag Archives: fictional work

Radiance

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Radiance: A Novel [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Catherynne M Valente

Valente Radiance

Catherynne M. Valente’s cinema-themed space opera fantasy Radiance is decidedly non-linear, jumping around an alternate continuity that runs from the middle of the nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth. Fragmentary shooting scripts, press clippings, recording transcripts, promotional materials, business records, and other documents are assembled to gradually immerse the reader in a solar system where humans live on all the planets, and Earth’s moon is the center of an interplanetary movie industry.

The book’s jacket copy characterizes it as “decopunk,” a feasible nanogenre, and not inapt. But in fact it progresses through a set of different genre moments–like movements of a musical work–established through the framing device of a movie in pre-production, going through major revisions. What starts out as film noir (The Deep Blue Devil) gets re-tooled as gothic horror (The Man in the Malachite Mask), then a fairy tale (Doctor Callow’s Dream), then a musical revue (And If She’s Not Gone, She Lives There Still), with a vein of mystery throughout that is more spited than satisfied by the brief final cut (Radiance).

I did find it a little slow going at first, but I did eventually take to it. It’s definitely it’s own thing, both in the story it tells and how it tells it. The cinematic dimension is integral, thus setting it apart. But the organization around the vanished girl Severin Unck seems to place it in or near the catena of elegiac mysticism that runs from the Middle English Pearl through Schwob’s Monelle. In contrast to the authorial motives understood for those books though, Valente confesses herself to be (at some remove) the basis for Severin, since the germ of the book was her own experience as the daughter of a filmmaker father.

The book is wonderfully weird throughout, with its recurring refrain of “X which is not really an X” to describe all manner of otherworldly creatures that have been quasi-terrestrialized through language. The descriptions of what X “really is” become crazier and crazier. (Patsy replies, “It’s only a model.”) For all that Radiance is a book about movies, it is intensely literary, and the reading of it is nothing like the rhetorical ductus of popular Hollywood. It’s an art film of a science fantasy, full of classical allusions, narrative ruptures, and character enigmas. Yum.

Under the Moons of Mars

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] ed and intro by John Joseph Adams, foreword by Tamora Pierce, with Joe R Lansdale, David Barr Kirtley, Peter S Beagle, Tobias S Buckell, Robin Wasserman, Theodora Gross, Austin Grossman, L E Modesitt jr, Genevieve Valentine, Garth Nix, Chris Claremont, S M Stirling, Catherynne M Valente, and Jonathan Maberry, with different illustrations for each story by different artist (including Molly Crabapple, Charles Vess, Michael Kaluta, Jeremy Bastien, Meinert Hansen, John Picaccio, and Daren Bade), and an appendix by Richard A Lupoff; “inspired by the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs” but also it was not “prepared, approved, licensed, or authorized by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. or any other entity associated with the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate.”

Adams Under the Moons of Mars

While the publishers of this anthology of new Barsoomian fiction probably hoped to capitalize on the concurrent Disney movie John Carter, the commercial failure of the latter certainly shouldn’t be held against them. Designer Tom Daly seems to have taken into some account the lovely Frazetta-illustrated editions of ERB’s Barsoom under the Nelson Doubleday imprint that were my initiation to that planet in the 1970s. This book sits next to them on the shelf like a member of the family. All of these stories were written for this collection, and there is a piece of original art (black and white) to illustrate each. The world of science fiction writers teems with those who love Barsoom in one way or another, and artists also enjoy its charms. 

I found all of the stories reasonably enjoyable. Only a few are straightforward pastiche; most attempt some inversion or diversion of the received standards of the Barsoomian tale. A few are told from the perspective of John Carter’s foes, a few by green Martians, one by Woola the calot, and one by a “sidekick” earthling who didn’t appear in the ERB stories. Two involve Tarzan cross-overs. Prose styles vary from the straightforward fantasy adventure narrative that Burroughs did so much to invent, to more poetic and introspective pieces. 

The art was less impressive to me. Each illustration is given a full page, and while some were terrific (those by Charles Vess and Michael Kaluta of course, and also Jeremy Bastien, Meinert Hansen, John Picaccio, and Daren Bader), many of them seemed on the weak side, not to mention sometimes overdressed. After all, artists working with this subject matter have to endure comparison with Richard Corben and Michael Whelan, in addition to the aforementioned Frazetta. I certainly would have liked to see one of Frank Cho’s drawings of Dejah Thoris here. Still, including this great variety of illustration was a sound idea.

I liked Tamora Pierce’s forward, even if it wasn’t very enlightening. The glossary by Richard S. Lupoff seemed pretty comprehensive and accurate, but not terribly necessary. I can recommend the book as an acquisition for die-hard collectors of Barsoomiana, and as a good one to borrow from the public library for those looking for light entertainment of the sword-and-planet flavor.

The Hundred Tales of Wisdom

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Hundred Tales of Wisdom [Amazon, Bookshop, Local Library] by Idries Shah

Shah the Hundred Tales of Wisdom

The Hundred Tales of Wisdom mostly consists of extracts from the principal medieval hagiography of the 13th-century Sufi master Jalaludin Rumi, supplemented by some teaching stories attributed to Rumi, or consistent with his milieu. The general run of the teaching stories is content typical of the many volumes on Sufism by Idries Shah. 

The old stories about Rumi (who is here called by his name Moulana) most often involve miraculous feats (or tricks?) and penetrating insights by which the Sufi wins disciples to his following. In these, and other didactic scenarios, the virtues emphasized are humility, courtesy, forgiveness, and rejection of material care. 

My favorite tales from the collection include the simple thaumaturgy of “The Miracle of the Candles” and the enigmatic allegory of “The King’s Slave.”

If This Book Exists, You’re in the Wrong Universe

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews If This Book Exists, You’re in the Wrong Universe [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Jason Pargin, “A John, Dave, and Amy Novel”, part 4 of the John Dies at the End series.

Pargin If This Book Exists Youre in the Wrong Universe

This book is the fourth in a series with a label that has been expanding in a failed effort to keep pace with its central cast of characters. The original volume was John Dies at the End. Later books/editions were called “John and Dave” books, adding the name of principal narrator David Wong–an in-story pseudonym and also the pen name later abandoned by author Jason Pargin. If This Book Exists… is tagged a “John, Dave and Amy” book, including a character who has been central for previous volumes, but there is a fourth who earns poster placement rights in this installment.

Anyhow, the series consists of supernatural horror with a little science fiction, a lot of lowbrow humor, and a fair amount of unsubtle but essentially humane social commentary. I felt like this book had the most conventional plot arc of the four, despite overt courting of time travel paradoxes and multiple denouements. It didn’t make me laugh out loud as often as the earlier ones, but I experienced more odd synchronicities while reading it, which was a definite point in its favor.

There’s an evil cult to thwart in the course of the novel, and the very end (before the author’s afterword) supplies the key commandments that Dave and his pals add to the cult’s scriptures to keep them from becoming a pernicious world religion. These few pages really could stand the frank consideration of earnest “seekers,” even out of context.

Etidorhpa

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Etodorpha, or The End of the Earth [Amazon, Gutenberg, Abebooks, Local Library] by John Uri Lloyd, illustrated by John Augustus Knapp.

Lloyd Knapp Etidorpha

Etidorhpa is the vishuddha chakra of the long nineteenth century: It is a maddeningly metatextual initiatory fantasy, Masonic-Rosicrucian psychopharmaceutical philosophy to make steampunks cry, a hollow earth odyssey with laboratory experiments you can try at home, a vision of the End from which all arises. And possibly a key to hidden treasure. Supplemented with the awesomeness of J. Augustus Knapp’s illustrations.

“Science thought begins in the brain of man; science provings end all things with the end of the material brain of man. Beware of your own brain.”–I Am the Man (191)

Utopia Avenue

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Utopia Avenue [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by David Mitchell.

Mitchell Utopia Avenue

This review is for my recent and extremely tardy read of a LibraryThing Early Reviewer copy of Utopia Avenue. My explanation–though it’s not an excuse–is that when the book first arrived, it was filched from my TBR pile by my Other Reader. It was the first David Mitchell she had read, and she liked it well enough to read six other novels by him right away. (I think she still hasn’t read Cloud Atlas, although we saw the film together.)

Utopia Avenue is very much of a piece with Mitchell’s universe of psychosotery and atemporals; it may even make connections of plot and character among earlier novels that had previously seemed to be detached from each other. I found it distinctive from my other Mitchell exposure (Cloud Atlas, The Bone Clocks, and Slade House) in having a smaller number of viewpoint characters and keeping them all contemporaneous, with the action (outside of ten pages of epilogue) contained within a very limited timeframe of 1967-8.

The story centers in loose rotation on keyboardist/vocalist Elf Holloway, bassist/vocalist Dean Moss, and lead guitarist Jasper de Zoet, the three songwriter members of the English psychedelic rock-folk fusion band Utopia Avenue. Drummer Peter Griffin (oops! a search engine could have saved Mitchell from accidentally evoking a character from a long-running US cartoon!) got a writing credit on one track, and a corresponding viewpoint chapter–as did producer Levon Frankland. The entire book is structured around the band’s three albums, and each chapter is named for a song, focuses on the member who wrote the song, and generally includes the moment of the song’s inspiration. It is an impressive, tightly-built container. (I’ve seen the novel-as-album, chapters-as-tracks conceit done before, notably in Newton’s Wake by Ken MacLeod, but not with this level of rigor.)

Within the container, there is a lot of rich character development and a healthy mix of tragedy and triumph. The sfnal psychosoteric business is pretty much invisible until halfway through the book, and becomes the dominant concern at about the 3/4 mark, which is a pattern I have seen in other work by Mitchell. I didn’t find so much of the authorial and publishing reflexivity he has dropped into other books. Instead, the story is full of delightful and borderline-gratuitous cameos from music and counterculture celebrities of its era. The chapters are long, but they read quickly. There are plenty of sex and drugs, and they are treated with realistic ambivalence, rather than celebratory glee or cautionary horror.

The sort of brother-sister dynamic between Elf and Dean is quite sweet. After the first third of the book, the band of initial strangers–“curated” by the benevolent Levon–have become fast friends. By the novel’s end, they feel like old friends of the reader.

The Long Tomorrow

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Long Tomorrow [Amazon, Bookshop (New), Publisher (New), Local Library] by Leigh Brackett.

Brackett The Long Tomorrow

As an SF author, Leigh Brackett is known for her planetary romances, which are indeed very fine. But this novel, perhaps her most lauded book-length work, involves a more serious and credible look at the future of our society. Indeed, the book’s scenario for the not-so-distant time to come is not much less believable now than it was when she wrote it about sixty years ago. The only ways it seems dated are that she didn’t predict the microprocessor, or describe any anthropogenic climate change. Given the nature of the story, the first of these is not a significant lack. 

In some features, this book resembles Logan’s Run, which I read recently. Both involve a protagonist rejecting a stultified society and looking for a possibly-mythical site of organized resistance which has continuity with the lost values of the past. Where Logan’s Run has Sanctuary, The Long Tomorrow has Bartorstown. But while Logan flees an urban technocracy, Brackett’s Len Colter is trying to escape an American anti-civilization in the etymological sense: a society that has overtly rejected the idea of the city, along with all of the industries and technologies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. 

With this rural, piously conservative, post-apocalyptic environment as the setting for what is in large measure a coming-of-age story, the novel invites an even more direct comparison with John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids. On the whole, I consider Brackett more successful. She better realizes the ways in which even those oppressed by the prevailing morals have internalized them, and she traces a more extensive and nuanced process of maturation in her characters. 

The Long Tomorrow reads quickly — “I finished The Long Tomorrow today,” I remarked paradoxically to my Other Reader — with digestibly short chapters divided into three component “books,” which might have been titled “Piper’s Run” (the village of Len’s childhood), “Refuge” (a community where his exile leads him as a young man), and “Bartorstown.” Although it was not issued as YA fiction, it would serve that increasingly sophisticated market well today. And it continues to deserve the attention of adults willing to reflect on social and technological change outside the myth of progress.

3001: The Final Odyssey

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews 3001: The Final Odyssey [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Arthur C Clarke, book 4 in the Space Odyssey series.

Clarke 3001 The Final Odyssey

This “Final Odyssey” is the last and least of the three novels that Arthur C. Clarke wrote to extend the ideas introduced in 2001. The setup is clever enough: Frank Poole, a Discovery expedition member murdered by HAL 9000 back in 2001, is recovered in his excursion pod still exiting the Solar System, and he is restored to life by fourth-millennium super-science. Much of the book–the more interesting parts, really–concerns his difficulties and successes adapting to a “braincapped” posthuman society after a thousand years out of circulation.

At one point Poole’s birthdate is specifically given as 1996 (199), which would have made him only five years old when crewing the Discovery. This sort of retroactive discontinuity is common to the Odyssey Sequence, which Clarke called “variations on the same theme … not necessarily happening in the same universe” (261, quoting 2061).

The interactions with Poole’s previously monolith-integrated colleagues were a little disappointing. In particular, Heywood Floyd went missing altogether, while Dave Bowman and HAL were collapsed into a character called “Halman.” This element of the plot is focused on a threat posed by the monolith network, and defeated by human ingenuity. Clarke later rather sadly noted that his narrative resolution here was notably similar to that already used in the film Independence Day, which “contains every known science-fiction cliche since Melies’ Trip to the Moon (1903)” (253).

There is a certain irony in the book’s extensive criticisms of religion and metaphysical thought generally, while the Prologue and Epilogue construe the “Firstborn” creators of the monoliths as basically divine entities who may yet judge and sentence humanity. Perhaps inspired by the then-recent (in 1997) Aum Shinrikyo attacks, Clarke makes religiously-motivated terrorism responsible for biological and informational attacks that lead to greater global cooperation among governments in the early twenty-first century (216).

The book includes two pieces of interesting end matter. The Sources and Acknowledgements provide a chapter-by-chapter review of scientific justifications for the speculative technological elements of the novel and references to relevant current events. The Valediction is an author’s retrospective on the full Odyssey Sequence. In it, Clarke protests too much perhaps that “it’s all [his] own fiction” (262), disclaiming any co-authorship for the four books, but thus downplaying the significant contributions of Stanley Kubrick to the development of 2001 from “The Sentinel” and the features of the cinematic narrative later retrofitted to the not-sequels.

The Best Ghost Stories of H Russell Wakefield

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Best Ghost Stories of H. Russell Wakefield [Amazon, Local Library] by H Russell Wakefield, ed Richard Dalby.

Wakefield The Best Ghost Stories

This collection of Wakefield’s stories is very good. Although there is a slightly larger range of supernatural horror than might be suggested by the title’s category of “ghost stories,” most are in fact about spectral hauntings and the effects of genii locorum — always malign. “The Red Lodge” and “Blind Man’s Buff” are, for example, almost painfully traditional haunted house tales in terms of plot, but told with great skill and effect. Wakefield’s curses and ghosts are never exorcised; at best (and that rarely), the living characters manage to flee and escape their further influence.

A couple of the stories are concerned with sport. “The Seventeenth Hole at Duncaster” drew on the author’s own long-term enjoyment of golf, and is in many ways a solid example of his work in the ghost story genre. As usual, the origin and nature of the spirits are much murkier than their effects. “Professor Pownall’s Oversight” is a chessghost story, and not only a good one, but perhaps the best chess ghost story possible.

Another notable feature is in the two stories featuring characters modeled on the magus Aleister Crowley. In “He cometh and he passeth by …” Crowley is made over into the homicidal sorcerer Oscar Clinton, while in “A Black Solitude” Apuleius Charlton is based on an older and more benign Beast: “He was sixty odd at this time and very well preserved in spite of his hard boozing, addiction to drugs and sexual fervour, for it was alleged that joy-maidens or temple-slaves were well represented in his mystic entourage. (If I were a Merlin, they would be in mine!)” (128)

The stories are a rough mix between those in which evildoers meet some justified comeuppance, and others where the supernatural afflicts characters merely mediocre or already cursed with unusual talent. In several cases, there are both, or it is left to the reader to judge which of these categories applies. Wakefield’s work had the admiration of M.R. James and H.P. Lovecraft alike, and it is easy to see why.