Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews (38 page)

The Years of Rice and Salt

by Kim Stanley Robinson

Bantam, 672 pages, hardback, 2002

This is a huge alternate-history novel which takes as its thesis that the Black Death didn't kill only about one in ten of the European population but instead virtually annihilated it – and in so doing extinguished Christianity (and indeed virtually all white-skinned humans). The account of how the rest of the world gets along without the WASPs over the centuries from then until now is episodic, these long episodes being linked by a set of shared characters.

Shared characters in scenes separated by decades and centuries? Well, yes. The artifice that makes this possible is the Buddhist notion of the
jati
, or group of souls that cyclically reincarnate together, with each person, in each new corporeal existence, having to identify the other members of the group. Between each episode on Earth we have shorter accounts of the procedures the group members go through in order successfully to renew their mundane activities. This artifice in the main works extremely well.

As do the episodes, although they each have their different characteristics, which makes for a patchy read. Probably the most enjoyable is at the same time the most artificial: "The Alchemist." The central figure of this section, the alchemist Khalid, is a sort of alternate-world SuperLeonardo, but possessed also of a greater practical bent. Khalid and his team invent practically every technological device we recognize today with the possible exception (I may have missed items) of the digital computer and MTV; they also make scientific conceptual breakthroughs likewise without number. This is of course a preposterous conceit, and it's thus impossible to suspend one's disbelief and accept the episode as a "real history"; at the same time, though, rather like a poetic truth, one can regard it as a mythopoeized history, with all the products, attained by countless nameless individuals, of a scientific/technological revolution being ascribed to a single semi-legendary figure – rather in the way that all sorts of stuff from diverse sources has been attributed to Pythagoras. And, anyway, the section is a lot of fun, so who really cares if it's plausible?

Among the other sections, those dealing with the interactions between the oriental races and the Native American cultures are especially successful, while the final section – set around now if not a smidgen into the future – is a bit of a mess, with two stories starting and neither reaching completion (which may be highly realistic, but not what one rightly expects from fiction).

This is a book that is vast in its ambition and indeed just plain vast; it is for the most part beautifully written, although there are a few short (two- or three-page) sections that seem to have been dashed off in a hurry, and the omission of hundreds upon hundreds of question marks is astonishingly irritating. There's been talk of its being the ultimate alternate-history novel, the benchmark against which all others will in future be judged; and such talk is not entirely hyperbolic. But to do both its virtues and its flaws justice would require far more than just a brief review like this one.

—Crescent Blues

The First Cut

by Peter Robinson

Dark Alley, 310 pages, paperback, 2004; reissue of a book first published in 1990

Originally published in the UK in 1990 as
Caedmon's Song
, the retitled
The First Cut
represents the first US publication of this early psychological thriller by Robinson, who has since become better known for his Inspector Banks detective novels. Although I've not read any of the Inspector Banks series,* I

[* 2011 note: A shortcoming I've now emphatically corrected.]

slowly became aware as I read
The First Cut
that I'd read the novel before, presumably around the time of its original UK publication. I could remember rather enjoying it first time around; sure enough, I rather enjoyed it this time as well.

University student Kirsten is attacked one night in a local park and left for dead; she has been sexually assaulted and so grievously wounded that, not only will she never be able to have a child, she may never be able to have full sexual intercourse again. She is the first victim of a serial sex-killer who comes to be known as the Student Slasher, and the only one to survive. In one strand of the novel's narrative we follow her slow psychological rehabilitation, aided by sympathetic friend Sarah and her own not-so-sympathetic parents.

In the book's second strand, we are with Martha Browne, who comes to the seaside town of Whitby, in Yorkshire, posing as a writer doing research but in fact doing her best to track down and kill the Student Slasher. Although it's presented in due course as a Terrific Revelation, it's pretty obvious from early on to the reader that Kirsten and Martha are one and the same, the latter being merely the
nom de guerre
Kirsten has adopted some while later as, with the help of her confused and partial recollections of the attack, she hunts the man who has ruined her life.

And she finds him – or so she thinks. Unfortunately, she discovers from the newspaper that, the same night she was exacting her terrible revenge, the Student Slasher struck yet again, in a different part of the country. Clearly she was mistaken in her identification, and has killed an innocent man. But that hardly deters her: the necessity to stop the Student Slasher from killing any more young women and to gain vengeance for what he did to her overrides all other considerations. So Kirsten/Martha, aware that she's in danger of becoming a serial killer herself, continues her hunt ...

The best parts of this book are the scenes where Robinson explores Kirsten's reactions in the weeks and months after her tragedy, as she tries to reconcile herself to the fact that she has been virtually neutered, even though her hormones continue to drive her as they always have. There is genuine insight and compassion here, of the kind that one wishes a few more thriller writers could conjure. And Martha's painstaking detective work, and her stalking of the men she suspects, could hardly fail to grip the imagination. But
The First Cut
is almost fatally flawed by the fact that the central revelation of the Kirsten/Martha identity falls as flat as a pancake. As a result, while still thoroughly engrossing, it falls short of being one of the great Rendell-style psychological thrillers.

—Crescent Blues

The Vampire's Violin

by Michael Romkey

Del Rey, 294 pages, paperback, 2003

Dylan Glyndwr (presumably pronounced "Glendower") is a brilliant violinist and a centuries-old vampire – a rogue vampire, indeed, because unlike most of his fellows he has no compunction about killing his prey, even revelling in it. He once briefly possessed one of the "Angel" violins – one of a series of just 13 phenomenally fine instruments made by an 18th-century Italian luthier after blindness had struck him in his old age. Ever since losing that violin, Glyndwr has combed the world seeking another.

Maggie O'Hara is a violin student whose future career seems likely to be blighted by her paralysing stage fright. But then she inherits from her dying grandfather the battered old violin he bought in a devastated Europe during the last days of WWII. It proves, of course, to be an "Angel" – perhaps the last one left in existence – and it transforms her from merely a promising tyro into a virtuoso performer. Soon Glyndwr is on her track, and only the friendship of good vampire maestro conductress Maria Rainer and lusty swain Carter Dunne may save her ...

The first thing to say about
The Vampire's Violin
– the latest in a longish string of vampire novels by Romkey – is that it's really very nicely written; he has an easy style, elegant without being ostentatious. The second thing is that this is an incredibly
slight
book: it seems entirely to lack the desire to be anything other than a throwaway quick read. All through the book I found myself baffled by the conundrum of why an author capable of writing so well should be bothering to waste his time on such an unambitious novel.

—Infinity Plus

Home Front

by Joel Rosenberg

Forge, 304 pages, hardback, 2003

Ernest Hemingway, Doc Holliday, John Crazy Horse and George Washington all suffered from being named the same as famous Americans, and all were by a cruel jest of the Army made to serve in the same tank in Vietnam.

Nowadays Ernest "Call me Sparky" Hemingway is a middle-aged, crankily divorced freelance copy-editor in the small North Dakota town of Hardwood. Out of the blue he's phoned from Minneapolis by the teenaged daughter, Tenishia, of his war buddy "Prez" Washington. Her daddy's been the victim of a gangland killing, and he once firmly instructed her that, if anything like this happened, she was to contact one of the other three old comrades. Now the gang that killed Prez is after Tenishia too.

Despite himself, Sparky is dragged in. As a first measure he brings Tenishia home to Hardwood, but the gang that killed Prez isn't going to let her go so easily. All three surviving buddies reunite to face up to the Minneapolis gangbangers and solve Tenishia's little difficulty.

The telling of this somewhat lightweight tale is appropriately light-hearted, but Rosenberg runs into difficulties with this style. The flipness is too often grating. The jocularities and observations on life are neither especially witty nor especially profound, and one's irritation with them is exacerbated by the fact that frequently they appear as if freshly coined at more than one point in the book – presumably a matter of oversight on the part of both author and editor. By midway through, as the annoyance factor rises, you might be tempted to put the book aside.

To do so would be a mistake. The book's great strength lies in the characterization not of Sparky, its main protagonist, but of Tenishia. This stubborn and strong-willed yet vulnerable and terribly frightened black teenage girl, suddenly plucked into an all-white world, is beautifully rendered by Rosenberg, so that all the other irritations with the book fade into insignificance beside the fact that we care so desperately about her fate, and hope so much that, despite all the odds, there'll be a happy ending to the tale for her. Some of the other characters are nicely done too – Jeffie, the local white boy smitten instantly by the newcomer to the Hardwood high school, and Bridget, Sparky's old flame suddenly reappeared in his life – but it's the brutally orphaned girl herself, even though she has comparatively little onstage time, who captures our emotion and keeps the pages turning. I suspect Tenishia will remain in my mind long after much of the rest of
Home Front
, including its rather humdrum plot, has been forgotten.

—Crescent Blues

Next of Kin

by Eric Frank Russell

Gollancz/Sterling, 181 pages, paperback, 2001; reissue of a book originally published as
Plus X
in
Astounding
in 1956, expanded for first book publication as
The Space Willies
in 1958, first published in the UK in 1959 as
Next of Kin
1959

The quote on the back cover of this reissue in the no-longer-named Gollancz series of classic sf novels is fittingly from Terry Pratchett: "I wish I'd written
Next of Kin
." Don't we all? Before Pratchett, before Adams, before Friesner, before (but only just) Goulart, before countless others who cashed in on the craze for humorous fantasy/sf sparked by the success of (particularly) Adams and Pratchett, Russell was a giant fish in the relatively small pond of comedy in the genre literature of the fantastic. In novels such as
Wasp
(1957) and
The Space Willies
/
Next of Kin
and in countless short stories, many of the best of which are to be found in the quasi-fixup
The Great Explosion
(1962), independent-minded Earthlings succeeded, generally through use of their wits and against enormous numerical odds, in thwarting or defeating powerful bureaucracies or tyrannies – usually bureaucratic tyrannies, usually alien ones, always characterized by lack of mental flexibility.

Russell's classic novel in this wily-human-vs-dimwitted-alien-bureaucracy theme (
The Great Explosion
is rather different, concerning itself with a monolithic human bureaucracy attempting to deal with scattered and idiosyncratic human cultures) is undoubtedly
Wasp
, but
Next of Kin
is always cited in the following breath. This probably does a disservice to
Wasp
, which is immeasurably the better of the two novels.

There is no great plot to
Next of Kin
. John Leeming is sent on a super-fast scout vessel into the region of the Galaxy controlled by a hostile alien federation, the Combine, to report back on the strengths and capabilities of the various Combine planets. Far on through his trip his vessel packs up, and he crash-lands on a remote and unimportant Combine world. There he succeeds in avoiding the dimwitted aliens for a while, but is eventually incarcerated in a PoW prison from which escape by straightforward means is virtually impossible. Accordingly, he constructs from bits of wood and bent wire a series of gizmos through which he pretends to talk to his invisible
alter ego
– his Eustace, as he tells his captors. He convinces them that all humans possess a Eustace, who will avenge whatever crimes are perpetrated on the physical body and who even, where necessary, survives the death of that body in order to do so. The dimwitted aliens believe it, and so the war is brought to an end, with Earth and its allies as the
de facto
victors.

There's material here for a longish novelette or perhaps, depending on how one played it, for a reasonably long novel of which the above sequence of events would be the main, but not the sole, plot strand. What Russell produced instead was a novelette expanded to fill enough pages for book publication. (This is in strict contrast to
Wasp
, which perfectly fits its length.) We're nearly at page 100 before Leeming gets to the prison, which is where the story proper begins. Before that we're treated to a mildly amusing opening sequence back on Earth where the free-spirited – and to be honest rather puerile – Leeming is the exasperation of his fixed-minded military superiors, then to a long account of his solitary quest through Combine-occupied space, an account whose inescapable tedium is alleviated only by one patch of brilliant comedy:

Leeming picks up the radio conversations of a species whose spoken language, while totally alien, shares enough of the basic blocks of English to sound like a mangled version of the latter language. He eventually joins in with his own nonsense. A sample:

There came another pause, then Gnof resentfully told all and sundry, "I shall lambast my mother."

"Dirty dog!" said Leeming. "Shame on you!"

The other voice now informed, mysteriously, "Mine is a fat one."

This extract illustrates another characteristic of
Next of Kin
: it is decidedly, well,
naughtier
than one expects from that era. Although the Swingin' Sixties were just around the corner, it would only be a full decade later – with the advent of the movement crystallized around Michael Moorcock's
New Worlds
– that genre sf would begin to swing with them.

Once Leeming is within the prison, the dimwitted aliens become even dimwitteder. And here there is a conundrum that Russell never quite succeeds in sorting out, with the result that his narrative is never fully convincing. These aliens are of a species which has successfully developed the capability for interstellar flight; although they are merely a minor constituent of the federation that is waging war against the Earth and its allies, they are nevertheless technologically able to wage that war. In other words, they cannot be
that
dimwitted. To be sure, we ourselves are sufficiently able to initiate an interstellar mission tomorrow if we set our minds to it – we have the technology, but lack the gumption – and to be equally sure there are plenty of profoundly dimwitted human beings around; yet we are not a universally dimwitted species. If we were, we couldn't have attained the level of technology that we have. (You might argue that
foolishness
is a universal human trait, but that's a different matter from dimwittedness.) Russell's aliens in
Next of Kin
, though, are stupid through and through ... so how come they're able to build starships?

It might seem a bit futile to question such stuff in an overtly comic novel, but comedy – unless entirely surreal, which
Next of Kin
assuredly is not – depends for its effectiveness on a sort of skewed plausibility. Characteristics may be impossibly exaggerated, but there has to be an underlying reality that can be exaggerated
upon
. Logic may be distorted to hilarious effect, but it has to have a logic of its own. Stereotypes may be guyed, but there has to be a core of truth to the stereotype. As in fantasy/sf, there is a suspension of disbelief; but, again as in fantasy/sf, either side of that suspension has to be moored in
something
; nothing demolishes the suspension of disbelief more immediately or more terminally than the niggling thought: "This doesn't make
sense
."

There's a very simple answer to this, in the case of
Next of Kin
. Leeming is not a normal human being at all:
he is a diehard sf fan
. It doesn't say so in the book, but he displays all the characteristics of that particular type of sf fan whom you must have met a million times: intelligent, yes, but able to manifest that intelligence, outside perhaps an employment that makes specific use of it, only in the form of puerile smartassery, usually at the expense of the "mundanes", whom the fan regards as a dimwitted mob incapable of appreciating the finer points of pulp sf.
Next of Kin
is, in effect,
Revenge of the Nerds
set on a movie lot of cosmic scale. The only way in which such fictional ventures can succeed is by stereotyping all the non-nerds/fans as profoundly stupid; this fictional necessity is incorporated as if a reality into the worldview of the type of sf-fan lifestyle fantasist (to borrow Brian Stableford's term) to whom I'm referring.

Viewed from that perspective – shifting one's mind into sf-ghetto mode –
Next of Kin
's major implausibilities become far less troubling, and consequently the humour works far better.

Such humour as there is. As mentioned above, this book reads less like a novel than like a hugely padded novelette, and the same comment applies to the ration of humour presented in its 180-odd pages. There
are
some good jokes, and there
are
some very funny sequences; but they're spread somewhat thinly. Much the same could be said of
Wasp
, of course; but in
Wasp
's case it doesn't matter much because
Wasp
would still be a perfectly viable sf novel if you stripped all the humour out of it; wherever there might be a paucity of grins the story itself keeps you happily charging along. Not so in
Next of Kin
, where there's not really very much by way of story.

Russell's flipness of writing nevertheless does make
Next of Kin
an engaging read. At the end of it, however, one is left with the nagging suspicion that one might have been better off reading something else. If you're an admirer of Russell's work overall – as this reviewer is – then you'll be mighty pleased to have this reasonably handsome reissue on your shelf. If not, then you'd be better off tracking down a copy of
Wasp
or
The Great Explosion
or ...

—Infinity Plus