Fantasy

No Present Like Time — Steph Swainston

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No Present Like Time
Steph Swainston
294 pages
published in 2005

I was quite taken by Steph Swainston’s debut novel, The Year of Our War, which I read from the library back in 2008. When I was looking over my bookshelves late last year to decide which books I was going to use for my Year of Reading Women project my eye fell on the omnibus edition of Swainston’s Castle series, of which The Year of Our War had been the first and I had the idea to save the second book, No Present Like Time for November as a treat. I knew I was going to like it which I wasn’t sure of with some of the other books I was going to read and I needed some incentive to keep me going.

Steph Swainston is one of the new breed of British science fiction and fantasy writers that rode to prominence under the ill fitting “New Weird” label in the first half of the noughties and one who got a lot of both commercial and critical succes. Unfortunately however she choose to stop writing to pursue her dream of becoming a chemistry teacher, which means that for the moment we’ll have to make do with the four novels she has written so far. A shame, as I quite liked both the novels of her i’ve read.

As said, No Present Like Time is the second novel in the Castle series, but this is not a proper fantasy trilogy and you can read this as a standalone; you’ll just miss a bit of context. It’s set a couple of years after the crisis of the first book, but moves into an entirely new direction. The Year of Our War had a fairly standard fantasy plot of the countries of the Fourlands being threatened by a unending horde of Insects which had already taken over the northern part of the Fourlands and which was only held in check by the powers of the immortal emperor San and his Circle of Immortal warriors only for political intrigue threatening their very existence. In No Present Like Time barely play a role, as a new, insect free island is discovered in the middle of the world ocean and the emperor sends out an expedition to persuade them to join his protection. Things quickly go wrong.

No Present Like Time starts with a duel, as one of the immortals of the Circle has been challenged by someone wanting to take his place. The Serein Gio, the greatest living swordsman has been in the Circle for hundreds of years and seen off challenge after challenge, but this time it’s different and his challenger takes his place: for the first time in centuries he starts to age. Most immortals replaced this way either slink off to die, or attempt to win back their places a year later, but Gio is a sore loser who leaves the Castle angrily to swear vengeance.

As in The Year of Our War, our hero and narrator is the emperor’s immortal messenger Jant, or “Comet”, the only winged human who can actually fly, as he’s a crossbreed of the winged Awia and the light boned and very fast mountain folk the Rhydanne — and he’s been damn careful nobody else like him is ever born. He’s also a drug addict, hooked to a drug called cat which if he takes to much of it transports him to the Shift, another world or dimension nobody else knows or believes in. He’s been clean for five years, but being ordered on the expedition to the newly discovered island of Tris, travelling for weeks over the ocean, frightens him so much he relapses.

The expedition is no success, as disastrous in its own right as in our world the Spanish discovery of the Aztecs was. Tris turns out to be an island paradise with gold common enough to be made into chamberpots and ruled democratically, with little difference in classes and a refined civilisation. The expedition having brought an insect along to demonstrate their danger, which promptly escapes and wreaks havoc. Which is the last straw for the senate and the expedition is sent home only to run straight into the rebellion set up by Gio….

Jant is who gives No Present Like Time its voice. Cynical, somewhat cowardly and inclined to mope about his love life, but on the whole with his heart in the right place, he may sound like another dozen fantasy anti heroes, but Swainston makes him believable and likeable in spite of or perhaps because of his flaws. What also helps to set the Fourlands apart is that while like in other series the technology and society is vaguely European and Medievaloid, it also has cigarettes, newspapers, t-shirts and professional football matches: it’s clearly not our Middle Ages. Swainston never tries to explain these incongruities; it’s just the way the Fourlands are and it works. In some ways her world building reminds me of China Miéville’s, only less gorey and incessantly baroque, though she comes close in the scenes set in the Shift, another element never fully explained or even understood by Jant, part hallucination but very real in its own terms.

Which is what I like about both The Year of Our War and No Present Like Time is the complexity of Swainston’s world building and effortless way it is presented to the reader. She never shows off and it always feels real, with new elements dropped in naturally. Her characters don’t know everything about their own world, may need time to understand the events they’re caught up in and most importantly, they rarely lecture the reader…

Naomi Novik — Temeraire

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Temeraire
Naomi Novik
327 pages
published in 2006

So that’s why the Temeraire series is so popular. I had heard of it of course, the first novel in the series (called Her Majesty’s Dragon in the original American edition) having been the subject of much hype and enthusiastic reviews when it first came out, but I had been skeptical. It had all sounded too high concept to me: Horatio Hornblower with dragons? Interesting, but it all seemed a bit too slight to hang a novel on. As I quickly found out when I flipped through Temeraire in the library, I was wrong. Naomi Novik knows how to tell a story, to keep you turing the page until it’s finished and leave you wanting more.

Frigate captain William Laurence manages to capture a French blockade runner but is puzzled why it resisted so fiercly when it was clear it could not win the fight. His puzzlement ends when he discovers it’s transporting a dragon, one near to hatching to boot. Dragons are rare and valuable, both as status symbol and instrument of war. Because it’s clear that the egg will hatch before his ship will be back at base, Laurence knows it’s his duty to get the dragon to imprint on one of his men, to get it into service for England, notoriously weak on dragons. Imagine his surprise — if not the reader’s — when it turns out the dragon imprints on him. It means the end of his career in the navy and the start of a life in the country’s most despicable arm of service, the Aerial Corps.

Laurence, who’s very much the perfect Napoleonic Wars era gentleman, has a lot to learn in his new career. Not the least important of which is learning how to deal with his newfound companion. Temeraire, as he has called his dragon, turns out to be intelligent, very intelligent, much more than just an animal, but a person in his own right. It doesn’t take long for Laurence and Temeraire to become friends, companions. Naomi Novik takes her time to establish this relationship, developing it naturally.

This is a very leisurely book in general, as we follow Laurence and Temeraire to their training post in Scotland, where they meet other, more conventional dragon/rider couples and get introduced to the ways of the Aerial Corps. I always like that sort of thing, as I also mentioned in my review of Sheepfarmer’s Daughter. Novik does provide a proper plot and climax in the second half of the book however, as of course Temeraire and Laurence are instrumental in foiling a Napoleonic plot against England.

As should be obvious, Temeraire should not be taken too serious as alternate history. From the backstory given in the book, it’s clear dragons have always existed through recorded history, yet it developed along generally the same lines as in the real world. In fact, there’s even a mention of the Battle of Trafalgar that happened almost entirely the same way as in real life, save for the presence of dragons. This didn’t bother me too much, as it’s clear that Novik never intended this to be a “serious” alternate history, rather than a cool setting to have the adventures in she wanted to write about.

What did bother me a bit was the subplot about Laurence’s supposed betrothed, who he has to say farewell too as he becomes a dragon rider. It’s all done in pseudo Jane Austen language and doesn’t convince at all, but luckily Laurence gets better and less uptight in the later half of the novel. A minor flaw in an otherwise excellent adventure novel.

The Good, the Bad, and the Uncanny — Simon R. Green

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The Good, the Bad, and the Uncanny
Simon R. Green
275 pages
published in 2010

Simon R. Green is, in the best possible meaning of the word, a cheerful hack writer. He’s been writing professionally since the mid seventies and specialises in long series of easily digestable, fun adventure science fiction and fantasy, in commercially interesting subgenres. The Good, the Bad, and the Uncanny is a good example of this, the tenth novel in the Nightside series of urban fantasy. Which I didn’t know when I got it from the library, or I probably would’ve left it on the shelves. In the event it turned out not to matter fortunately; you needn’t have read the previous novels to understand this one, even if there are a lot of references to earlier adventures. It reminded me of when I first started to read Marvel comics way back in the eighties, trying to figure out a complex backstory that’s only hinted at.

The Nightside is the hidden part of London, where it’s always three a.m., magic is real, but so is super technology, demons and angels and nightmares cloaked in flesh roam the streets, time travel of one sort or another and all other sorts of crazy shit is commonplace. This is the world John Taylor works in, a private investigator in a pristine white suit, not quite a knight in shining armour but the closest equivalent. He’s cursed with awesome, having a magical gift that can get him out of trouble but which costs him to use it, not to mention can be a beacon to his enemies. He has powerful friends, but equally powerful enemies and the difference between the two is not always clear. The job he gets at the beginning of The Good, the Bad, and the Uncanny is simple but dangerous: escort a envoy from one side in the Elven civil war through the Nightside on his way to the court of the other side. There’s only one small problem, which is that Walker, the most powerful man in the Nightside, the one appointed by the Authorities to keep some sort of order, doesn’t want this envoy to reach his destination, as the civil war suits The Authorities fine…

But this is just the appetiser before the main action, like the teaser scene before the titles in a James Bond movie. The real story is about Walker and how he’s dying. He wants John Taylor as his successor, which John himself is wary about. Meanwhile one of his PI colleagues/rivals, Larry Oblivion, the Dead Detective (having been murdered by his former partner, then brought back as a zombie) wants John to help him find his dead brother Tommy, who bought it in a previous novel. Of course the two plot threads hang together as you’d suspect, with the fun being in how they hang together…

The Good, the Bad, and the Uncanny is high octane adventure from the very beginning, with Green making sure every scene is as badass as possible and the plot largely functions as an excuse to fit set pieces together. The end effect is a bit like watching a greatest fight scenes ever compilation video, but not unpleasant. Coming into the Nightside world in media res is a bit confusing, but much less than it could’ve been. The story is told in first person singular, with John Taylor doing most of the narration and Green is careful in letting him explain where yet another old friend/enemy first appeared. All in all this was a fun book, if not necessarily a good book. I don’t think anybody inclined to try this will mind very much though if this isn’t the literary sensation of the century.

The Best of C. L. Moore — C. L. Moore

Fantasy, science fiction
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The Best of C. L. Moore
C L. Moore
372 pages
published in 1975

In the mid seventies Ballantine Books, just before it renamed itself into Del Rey, launched a “Best of” series of short story collections by classic science fiction and fantasy authors which I personally think is perhaps the best such series ever produced. Just at a time when science fiction was switching from being a short story, magazine orientated genre to one in which the novel is supreme, here were collections by all the old masters who had made their name in the pulp magazines of the thirties, forties and fifties. The series offered a sense of history to the genre just when science fiction was in danger of losing touch with its roots. It offered both a reminder to old fans of what had attracted them to the genre in the first place and to new fans a sampling of authors they may have thought oldfashioned or perhaps never had the chance to read in the first place.

One of such authors must have been C. L. Moore, who had made her reputation writing science fantasy stories for Weird Tales in the 1930ties. In the 1940ties, after she met and married Henry Kuttner she almost completely stopped writing on her own, instead collaborating with him (often under the Lewis Padgett pseudonym) on a series of classic sf stories, then moving on to writing crime stories and for television, both of which unfortunately paid better, in the late fifties. By the time The Best of C. L. Moore was published it had been the better part of two decades that she had written much new science fiction. Now that more than twice as much time has passed, this collection is still a great introduction to what C. L. Moore had to offer when not collaborating with her husband.

The story that first introduced me to C. L. Moore Vintage Season, was however originally published under both her and Kuttner’s names. I first read it in a Dutch anthology of crime and detective stories written by women, which sort of made sense as it can be read as a detective puzzle story. For years that was the extent of my C. L. Moore reading, until I read this collection. It was enough to realise how great a writer she was.

The Best of C. L. Moore is a well balanced collection, with most of the stories from before she met and married Henry Kuttner. Both of her best known heroes, Northwest Smith and Jirel of Joiry are represented but do not dominate. In general the stories here vary from outright fantasy to pure science fiction, but what they have all in common is the human touch. Her characters are fully human, three dimensional in a way that was rare for pulp science fiction. She builds her stories around the characters of her protagonists, even in the science fantasy of her Northwest Smith and Jirel stories. There are no clunkers whatsoever in here, as we’ll see.

Shambleau (1933)
This is the story that introduced both Northwest Smith and Moore herself to Weird Tales, her first published story. It’s space fantasy of the kind Leigh Brackett also wrote, with some of the cliches of that genre, but already with the same craft and power brought to all the stories here. It starts with a mixed race mob –Martians, Venusians, Earthmen — chasing a slim nutberry brown beauty in a radiant scarlet cloak down the streets of a Martian town and Northwest Smith rescuing her. But she’s shambleau and Smith does not know what this is and only finds out — almost too late.

Black Thirst (1934)
Another Northwest Smith story, about a Venusian castle where they breed beauty and its master who feast on it. Almost as good as the first story.

The Bright Illusion (1934)
A man dying of thirst in the great Saharan desert is set on a quest on a strange world by an intelligence so powerful it can only be described as a god, to meet this god’s priestess and fall in love with her, no matter her innate alienness. This should be schmaltzy as hell, but Moore’s skill as a writer make this work.

Black God’s Kiss (1934)
The first Jirel of Joiry story, a Medieval French swordwoman whose kingdom is taken over through sorcery, who manages to escape her capturer, then has to travel much farther than she could’ve ever imagined for her vengeance. As with the first Northwest Smith story this has an immediate impact: everything Jirel is, is here fully formed.

Tryst in Time (1936)
Another love story, where a man who has grown bored with everything the modern world has to offer, who has tasted all adventure and sensation that’s in it, volunteers to be the guinea pig for his genius friend’s time machine. He gradually realises that in all the historic scenes he witnesses one girl remains constant and falls in love with her — but does she know him and could they ever be together?

Greater Than Gods (1939)
On one man’s decision which of the two women he loved he wanted to marry rested the faith of the future. Hinging on this decision, Earth would become either a slowly dying, rural idyllic paradise, or it would rule the universe but at the cost of human happiness. Which alternative is better and is there truly no other option? As a story it does depend on a certain gender essentialism we’ve largely grown out of, but if you can swallow this, this is a clever, sentimental story.

Fruit of Knowledge (1940)
According to Jewish legend, before Eve Adam had another wife, Lilith, who refused to be dominated by him and therefore was cast aside. Normally I don’t like this kind of Biblical fantasy, but Moore manages to make this story interesting by making Lilith a sympathetic character without quite making either Adam or Eve into the villains of the piece.

No Woman Born (1944)
A woman, the greatest dancer of her generation, is caught in a horrible accident and given an experimental cyborg body, her brain in a metal shell. The male scientists and psychologists responsible for her transformation worry about her and whether or not she can remain human living like this. An interesting psychological story.

Daemon (1946)
A simpleminded Brazillian boy is shanghaied on a Yankee clipper as a cabin boy, but he has a secret: he can see the soul or daemon every person but he himself carries with him. It keeps him alone in a world full of people, until on a small remote island he discovers others like him…

Vintage Season (1946)
The best story in the collection, this bittersweet tale of how a group of strange foreigners hiring a house at the edge of an unnamed American city slowly are revealed to be timetravelling tourists with a penchant for the horrible and tragic. In this way Moore shows us the mirror image of how we ourselves treat historical horrors as entertainment, where whatever tragedy we’re witnessing can be dismissed as destiny, just as these tourist from the future dismiss what happens to the narrator and his city and world as something that happened long ago in their past…

The Hour of the Dragon – Robert E. Howard

Fantasy
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The Hour of the Dragon


The Hour of the Dragon
Robert E. Howard
292 pages
published in 1936/1977

When I think of Conan I see John Buscema’s Conan: feet planted firmly on the ground, glaring at you from under his helmet, the weight of his muscular frame apparant in every picture. That’s the image I had in mind while reading The Hour of the Dragon, Robert E. Howard’s sole original Conan novel. Written in 1935 as an attempt to interest a British publisher, it was instead serialised in Weird Tales when the publisher went out of business. Recycling scenes and plot twists from earlier stories, it’s somewhat of a greatest hits story: Conan has to fight an overwhelming horde of enemies, is captured and has to escape a dungeon through his great strength, wrestle a supernatural creature and so. Buscema’s Conan naturally came to mind therefore: no other version has the sullen determination and toughness Buscema put in his Conan.

The Hour of the Dragon is set at the end of Conan’s career, after he has become king of Aquilonia. He doesn’t remain king long though as a conspiracy between neigbouring country Nemedia and Valerius, the last remaining heir of the old royalty of Aquilonia use magic to invade the country and depose him. They do this by raising an ancient evil, Xaltotun, an ancient sorcerer from the pre-Hyborian empire of Acheron. As the Nemedian army invades Aquilonia, Xaltotun nearly kills Conan and demoralises and destroys his army. Conan comes to as prisoner of Xaltotun who has … plans … for him. Valerius meanwhile has become nothing more but a pawn for the evil sorceror.

Conan escapes the dungeon with some unexpected female help and has to find the one thing that can stop Xaltotun, the gemstone that controls him. Of course this gemstone is halfway across the world, so the rest of the book has Conan getting into all sorts of dangers to get to it. Every few pages Conan escapes yet another dangerous situation only to be confronted by the next; it’s all very pulpy and the pacing is a bit odd, but it works.

The Hour of the Dragon was the first entry in Berkley’s late seventies’ reprinting of the original Conan stories, or at least those that were in the public domain, from their first magazine appearances. This was edited by Karl Edward Wagner, himself somewhat of a cult fantasy author and is presented as the first Conan series based purely on the original and untampered Howard stories. In his introduction to the series Wagner is critical of earlier series; as you probably know the old Lancer/Ace series edited by L. Sprague de Camp was heavily retouched and expanded by him to the point at which many stories are more de Camp than Howard. This series on the other hand is so faithful as to not even fix inconsistencies in spellings or what seems like obvious mistakes, like e.g. the jump from chapter 19 to 21 in this book. Of course in the end whether or not this editorial strategy is an improvement or not is a personal choice; what really matters is the story itself.

The Hour of the Dragon is not Robert E. Howard’s best Conan (my favourite would be either “The Tower of the Elephant” or “Red Nails”) but it is a good introduction of what Conan is about: pure pulp adventure, purple prose and more than a glimmer of something special.