Robert Holdstock - Mythago Wood & Lavondyss (1984, 1988)

This is late as I have been on holiday and then busy back at work, but my review of Robert Holdstock's two classics 'Mythago Wood' and 'Lavondyss' went up on Fantasy Faction. These books are firm favourites of mine, and I had been wanting to write something about them for a while, so I am thrilled that I got the chance to do so.

Ellen Kushner - Thomas The Rhymer (1990)

My review of Ellen Kushner's 'Thomas The Rhymer' is up now at Fantasy Faction. It's a fantastic book, a wonderful reimagining of the True Thomas legend, with a genuinely moving conclusion. Click on the link to read about it.

Chris Beckett - Dark Eden (2012)

"Watch out for men who want to turn everything into a story that's all about them. There will always be a few of them, and once one of them starts, another one of them will want to fight with him."

'Dark Eden' is an engaging SFnal coming of age tale, in which a young man, disillusioned with the world he's grown up in, breaks free from its confinements and discovers a truth about the world that shatters the status quo. SF is particularly well suited to telling this kind of story, as demonstrated by the number of iconic works in this mold, from exemplary works like 'The City And The Stars' by Arthur C. Clarke and 'Non-Stop' by Brian Aldiss to more experimental or unusual takes on the form such as Russell Hoban's 'Riddley Walker' and John Crowley's 'Engine Summer'. What makes Chris Beckett's story so fresh rather than being merely an admittedly well done revisiting of familiar themes is its vivid and striking setting, and its willingness to deconstruct its protagonist's role as hero in his own story. The end result is a powerful, uncompromising look at society's need for change, despite the frequently high cost.
   The book follows a colony descended from two people who crashed on Eden, a sunless, isolated world heated by geothermal activity alone, who preserve the culture of Earth whilst waiting for rescue. The protagonist, John Redlantern, resents the authority of the Council, the traditions of a planet he has never lived on, and the way nothing ever changes, and realises that the small valley they are trapped in will not support the colony for much longer. Part of the appeal of 'Dark Eden' is the vivid way in which Beckett evokes this alien world. This is partially achieved by the language; the story is told in the first person from a range of characters' perspectives, and they all speak in a degraded, slang-heavy English. While not as radical as Anthony Burgess' nadsat in 'A Clockwork Orange', or the thick future dialect of Russell Hoban's 'Riddley Walker', it still creates a sense of estrangement, of stepping into a different world with a different perspective. However Eden is more prominently and effectively rendered by Beckett's imaginative descriptions. Much of the appeal of science fiction is its ability to transport the reader to fantastical worlds, and Eden, with its eternal darkness punctuated by glowing geothermal trees and insectoid, six-limbed, luminous animals, is gloriously and enticingly strange.
   The use of multiple point of view characters is unusual for a book of this type. Most coming of age stories are intensely focused on their protagonist's point of view, a reflection of adolescence's self-obsession, and the need to know oneself before one can know the world. Frequently, shifting the point of view to another character would in some ways dilute the intensity of the vision. However, while this doesn't always mean that the author always means for us to agree or approve of the protagonist's actions, it can be easy to get more swept up in the protagonist's own view of their importance and rightness than perhaps we should. While it would probably be possible to tell this book's story using only John Redlantern's viewpoint chapters, that would deprive us of the opportunity the other viewpoints give for us to see John in a less flattering, more rounded light, and also to fully experience the damage and disruption his actions cause. The standard narrative of all these coming of age stories is that the protagonist breaking up the restrictive society that he comes from is a good thing, and whilst Beckett argues that John's innovations and pioneering spirit are necessary for the colonists to break out of their rut and actually start living their lives, he also explores the impact the destruction of the old culture has on the ordinary people living in the colony, as well as the selfishness and naivety that drives a lot of John's decisions. Tina Spiketree's chapters are particularly valuable. In a less well conceived book she'd be merely John's love interest, but Beckett crucially makes her a well-developed and strong willed character in her own right, who is friends with John, believes in his cause and has a sexual relationship with him but is perceptive and well grounded enough to see all his flaws, and strong enough not to be pushed round by him.
   'Dark Eden' also explores aspects of gender and how they relate to society. The book describes a matriarchy on the verge of transforming into a patriarchy, as the society splits up into factions in direct competition for resources and the spectre of war begins to raise its head. It is refreshing to read a story about a society that has reverted to the primal without erasing women's roles, or setting up the men as hunter gatherers while the women stay behind, look after the young and cook. Most of the leaders are women, with a secret history passed on from mother to daughter from Angela, the original stranded colonist. The society is by necessity sexually very liberal, and the women choose who they want to sleep with. However, despite the fact that they do not have a word for rape, it's clear that sexual abuse does happen, an early sign that the naive society of the Family is not as idyllic and innocent as at first it appears. The scene in which John is molested by group leader Bella Redlantern is intentionally deeply uncomfortable, with Beckett exploring the confusion and difficulty this awakens in John by having this done to him by someone he cares for and respects; it would be a very different scene if the characters were gender flipped. Beckett is also interested in how people with disabilities live in his fictional society. Due to the level of inbreeding, deformities of the mouth and feet are common, and are stigmatised in the society. However Jeff, one of the most compelling characters in the book, is born with foot problems, and so is excluded from the hunting and other social activities. But this gives him the chance to hone his intellect and his unique perspective, and he becomes a key figure in the story of the progression of the tribe, figuring out how to domesticate the animals of Eden so that he can transport himself more easily.
   The loss of innocence is a common thread running through the book, as John becomes not only the first person in Eden to find away across the barren snowy mountains above the valley but also the first person to kill another human. John is always aware of the historical implications of his actions, that people will tell stories of the things he is doing, but as he grows and matures he is able to see other people's side of the story. He realises that his actions have had dire consequences as well as good ones, and that history may judge him very differently from how he judges himself. The ending of the book is bleak and deeply moving, with John and his tribe discovering that they truly have no chance of ever being rescued by Earth, but it is not without hope, as this gives them the closure to begin living their life fully on Eden, no longer recirculating useless traditions and huddling round the spaceship landing site, but free to explore the world around them and make their own culture.
 

Gene Wolfe - The Book Of The New Sun

http://fantasy-faction.com/2015/the-book-of-the-new-sun-by-gene-wolfe

I am thrilled to announce that I've written an article for Fantasy Faction, one of my favourite websites. Just had my first article published by them today, about an old favourite of mine, Gene Wolfe's The Book Of The New Sun. This will hopefully be the first in a pitched series about overlooked classics of Fantasy. It's so exciting to see a piece of my writing up on a website that's so obviously run by and for a passionate community of fans, and I'm looking forward to contributing more articles in the future.

Patricia A. McKillip - The Forgotten Beasts Of Eld (1974)

"Sybel, there must be a silence deeper than the silence of Eld between those stars; shall we go listen to it?"

"The giant Grof was hit in one eye by a stone, and that eye turned inward so that it looked into his mind, and he died of what he saw there."

'The Forgotten Beasts Of Eld' is a gorgeously told tale of love and the human cost of war and revenge. It has a love of riddles, inventive magical beasts, and a well-drawn cast of believable characters with a strong, engaging female protagonist. However what truly elevates the book is Patricia A. McKillip's poetic language. Her command of striking imagery and finely balanced phrases places 'The Forgotten Beasts Of Eld' in another category altogether from the faux-archaisms employed by Lord Dunsany and his imitators, a high Fantasy that almost qualifies as a prose poem.
   'The Forgotten Beasts Of Eld' takes a stock character that is usually a villain in most high Fantasy stories, the ice-queen wizard alone in her mountain fortress with only her enchanted animals for company, and turns her into a sympathetic, believable protagonist. Sybel is the descendant of a line of wizards with the ability to summon magical animals: the falcon, Ter, Gules Lyon, the Cat Moriah, the Dragon Gyld, the Black Swan of Terleth, and the Boar Cyrin, who answers all riddles save one. Her attempts to summon the White Bird Liralen are complicated when Coren of Sirle turns up at her gates, asking her to care for the baby Tamlorn, the son of King Drede. As Tamlorn becomes poised to fall between the rebel forces of Sirle and Drede's armies, Sybel finds herself drawn away from her hideout on the mountain of Eld and into the world of people, of which she wants no part.
   What follows is the story of the isolated, lonely Sybel learning to interact with people, as she becomes a mother figure for Tamlorn and negotiates the affections of Coren and Drede. This could be a standard, if wonderfully told, romance plot, if not for the nuance and depth. McKillip is fully aware of the depth and complexity of love, but also of the negative end of the spectrum of human emotions, how fear, hatred and jealousy can consume people. 'The Forgotten Beasts Of Eld' works so well partially because of how well grounded it is in real emotional depth.
   This is demonstrated in the book's treatment both of its villains, and of its protagonist as she makes more and more questionable decisions. There is no question that Drede's plan to have Sybel magically brainwashed so that she will love him and not attack him is monstrous, but Drede is not portrayed as a monster. He is shown to be a person who, because of the rumours about his wife's betrayal of him and his unsteady grip on power due to the forces of Sirle, is utterly hounded by fear, to the extent that he makes decisions that he knows are horrific. Even the wizard Mithran, who he hires to do the job, is revealed to be a bitter, lonely old man who has let his own lust for power consume his life. None of this excuses either characters' actions, but because we can understand where their motivations come from, and because we can believe that these people could end up like that, it makes the whole situation much more believable.
   Drede's plan is portrayed as the horrendous violation it is, and whilst neither Drede nor Mithran succeed, the event still clearly traumatises Sybel, and the book realistically explores the fallout from this. Sybel marries Coren so that she can move to Sirle and plot with his brothers, the Lords of Sirle, and her magical animals, to get her revenge on Drede. However, she soon becomes so obsessed with utterly destroying Drede that she stops thinking about what will happen to Coren, whom she has grown to truly love, and Tamlorn, who is now living with his father Drede and clearly loves and admires him. This is made worse by the fact that, in her desire to protect both of them, and to keep her revenge for herself, she refuses to tell either of them what happened. The book never condones Drede nor suggests that he doesn't fully deserve his comeuppance, but it does portray how Sybel's entirely understandable desire for revenge starts to consume her and cut her off from the people she loves.
   The book becomes increasingly morally complex as it goes along, exploring how good people can be driven to do bad things through entirely understandable motivations. This is illustrated by Cyrin's riddle about the giant Grof - the idea that we sometimes hide our own true motivations from ourselves, and to truly look into them can be painful. This is also symbolised by the Blammor, the ugly and frightening aspect of the Liralen that manifests to Sybel, Coren and Mithran as a cloud of smoke with ice for eyes that reflects back your own worst fears. Mirthan is too corrupted to survive his experience with the Blammor, but both Sybel and Coren have to face their own worst impulses before they can happily be with each other. As Coren says to Sybel,

"What do you think love is - a thing to startle from the heart like a bird at every shout or blow? You can fly from me, high as you choose into your darkness, but you will see me always beneath you, no matter how far away, with my face turned to you. My heart is in your heart. I gave it to you with my name that night and you are its guardian, to treasure it, or let it wither and die."

The complexity of the book's view of love, as something that ties the couple together but that can also be twisted and subverted into something damaging and ugly, is refreshing. In the end it is not just their love that pulls Coren and Sybel back from the brink, but knowledge, wisdom and self-awareness. Both Coren and Sybel, having looked into themselves, can see something of Drede in themselves, a man who let his feelings for his wife be twisted into something unpleasant and destructive by his fear and jealousy. Coren and Sybel first have to reject their own destructive, violent impulses, before they can return to each other purified, as symblised by the Liralen shedding the aspect of the Blammor to take its true form.

Brian Aldiss - The Malacia Tapestry (1978)

"'Somebody told me that Satan has decided to close the world down, and the magicians have agreed. What would happen wouldn't be unpleasant at all, but just ordinary life going on more and more slowly until it stopped absolutely.'
   "'Like a clock stopping,' Armida suggested.
   "'More like a tapestry,' Bedalar said. 'I mean, one day like today, things might run down and never move again, so that we and everything would hang there like a tapestry in the air for ever more.'"

'The Malacia Tapestry' is a lyrical Fantasy about a stagnating magical city. Following on from his experimental New Wave works 'Report On Probability A' (1967) and 'Barefoot In The Head' (1969) but before his re-invigoration of hard SF with the Helliconia trilogy (1982 - 1985), Brian Aldiss turned to Fantasy to explore his usual themes of degeneration and decay. Like the later Viriconium novels, the only other books it much resembles, 'The Malacia Tapestry' forgoes traditional plot in favour of atmosphere, generated by some of Aldiss's finest prose. The impoverished actor Perian de Chirolo undergoes a series of misadventures in the city of Malacia, cursed by ancient magicians never to change, and the course of these events reveal the life of the city, in which myth and superstition have mingled inseparably with very real magic. Malacia is rendered in hyperreal, magical realist intensity, its languid decadence allowing Aldiss to reflect on the nature of art and the necessity of change.
   Much of the distinctive flavour of 'The Malacia Tapestry' comes from its invocation of the grotesque and the grime, something it shares with Viriconium but descends back to Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast books. Perian and his actor friends are all heavy-drinking, philandering lowlifes, as comic as they are tragic, and the image of the plague-ridden corpses being airlifted through the sky on inflatable balloons to infect the camps of the invading Turkish army is equally ridiculous and horrifying. As well as creating a compelling tone, this approach allows Aldiss to ground the novel, making Malacia feel more real and lived-in than your standard high Fantasy setting, which in turn allows him to blur the line between magic and myth within the story. Malacia features winged humans, dinosaurs, (called 'ancestrals' by the Malacians), and magicians, placing it firmly in the realm of the fantastic. However, the magicians don't use their powers to fight evil, but sell fortunes and perform tricks for bored tourists by the side of the road, the winged humans are not angels but are just another kind of people, who interbreed with normal humans to have children with vestigial wings, become frustrated housewives, and lose their ability to fly as they get older, and the dinosaurs are either used as domestic animals or hunted for sport by the upper classes. Thus Aldiss subverts the fantastical elements in the story by making them mundane.
   Aldiss then goes on to explore the interaction between the magical elements and the myths and superstitions of the Malacians. The city of Malacia has its own distinct culture, which is different from ours partially because it has been shaped and molded by these fantastical elements, however the ambiguity between what is real and what is myth makes it difficult to tell by how much. Malacian cosmology is an inversion of the Christian creation - they believe that the world was created by Satan, and that God appeared later to rebel against him and act in the interest of humans. Magicians, who worship Satan, and symbolise stasis, coexist with priests who worship God, who symbolises change. Thus the people of Malacia live their lives caught between these two opposing forces not of Good and Evil, but of Law and Chaos. Malacia's ancient curse preventing change symbolises the encroaching victory of Law, a society sliding into its own decadence. However, how much of this is the result of the magicians' curse, and how much of it is the ruling elite of Malacia and its council brutally preserving their own power at the expense of the downtrodden and exploited working class, is left to the reader to interpret. Aldiss hints at how seriously we shouldn't take the Malacian's own traditional views in the use of 'ancestrals' to describe the dinosaurs, and Perian's father's research into the Malacian's evolution that suggests they are descended from the dinosaurs, despite the characters' blatant mammalian natures.
   All of this hints towards the political thrust of the book. Despite the best efforts of the ruling council, rebellion is fermenting in Malacia due to the horrific conditions faced by the city's large, working class population, whose exploitation keeps the aristocracy of Malacia in power. Aldiss explores how the feudal societies standardly depicted in Fantasy would be fairly miserable for the majority of the population, and the necessity of social change to give more power to the people. The Malacian aristocracy are all portrayed as hopelessly decadent, self-absorbed and manipulative, whilst the working class cast of Bengstohn's play are much more sympathetic, their anger stemming from the struggles they face trying to make the best of life in a system that is unfairly stacked against them. Bengstohn hopes that his play, captured by the new medium of his innovative photo system, will spread his message that the ruling classes are morally bankrupt and prove a useful tool for bringing down the whole stagnant system. Thus, the actors in his play will play a part in bringing change to Malacia, ironically by standing still for long stretches of time while his device captures the image. Aldiss also explores how resistant people are to change, and how insidiously the forces that maintain the status quo enforce themselves on people's world view. Perian, as an actor with an academic father and a well-married sister, codes as middle class, but to all intents and purposes he lives in comparable poverty to the rest of Bengstohn's workers. However, his greatest desire is not to overthrow an unfair system that does him no favours, but to become part of the ruling class himself, improving his lot but doing nothing for anyone else. Perian complains that the plot of Bengstohn's play is unoriginal and cliche-ed, its moral too obvious, but he remains impervious to its message until he lives out the plot in exact detail himself. It is this alone that is sufficient to awaken the revolutionary instinct in himself, rather than the message in any art.

Lauren Beukes - Moxyland (2008)

"'What, like the kids' games? That Moxyland shit? Murder and mayhem. Training them to be savage, don't you think? It's not about making friends with kids all over the world, it's about getting ahead, getting one over.'
"'But don't you think it's appropriate? Considering.'"

'Moxyland' is a brutally cynical yet frighteningly believable look at state surveillance and viral marketing, and how digital technology's utopian potential can be co-opted by forces of social control. Set in a vividly realised near future Cape Town, and shot through with future slang, it follows its four young, frequently unsympathetic protagonists as they struggle to express their individuality in an increasingly corporate-sponsored world, and find out, in no certain terms, who really holds all the power. Lauren Beukes deftly evokes a dystopian near future, a divided society living in fear, still suffering from the after effects of apartheid. She uses her characters' differing backgrounds to explore the diversity of different peoples living in the city. Through the ambitions, fears, prejudices and viewpoints of her characters, Beukes expertly dissects the attitudes, disparities and jealously-guarded privileges that have shaped their society.
   The plot is kicked off when Kendra, an up and coming photographer, is injected with a nanobot tattoo by the makers of the soft drink Ghost as part of an underground marketing campaign. She soon finds herself caught up in the schemes of Toby, a smug, arrogant trust-funded blogger, Tendeka, a homosexual would-be revolutionary trying to balance his anti-corporate ethics with the need to secure funding for his programmes to improve the lives of Cape Town's streetkids, and Lerato, an AIDS orphan who has been put through education by corporate funding and now works for Communique in a high powered corporate position that she hopes to advance from by selling company secrets. As all four of them fight for their own autonomy against the government and corporate forces that control their lives, the full nature of that control is revealed, along with the awful trade-off that both the characters and their society has made of their rights for the illusion of comfort and safety.
   'Moxyland' presents a chilling portrait of a government which, hand in glove with the corporations that prop it up, has gone to war with its citizens in the name of protecting them. This is a government that uses the threat of terrorism to justify releasing bio-engineered Marburg virus on a subway full of people, that uses fake identities over the internet to lure would-be dissidents out of the woodwork, then uses those dissidents to justify greater power for itself. Beukes draws out the similarities between the totalitarian government and the corporations that prop it up; both are self-serving institutions that are nominally meant to have the interests of the people at heart, but both place their own bottom lines above human rights, and even human lives. The book is darkly cynical about the idea of any person maintaining their own agency in such an atmosphere. All of the characters believe they are acting in their own interests and to further their own agendas, but in the end all of them are revealed to have been manipulated by government and corporate forces to serve ends other than their own.
   Beukes asks some very interesting and pertinent questions about digital technology and internet culture, especially about their utopian intent verses their use as tools for government surveillance, corporate spying, and even the petty and vindictive use that people frequently put them to. The book takes its name from a children's game in the novel, a massive multiplayer online role playing game in which the rules are enforced by a cute monster character called Moxy. Tony plays it in order to earn some quick cash, and observes that the game doesn't encourage children from all over the world to play and interact with each other, but rewards those who form gangs and bully those weaker than them, which is cynically pointed out as being good practice for the real world. It's also echoed in what the government in the book is doing in its plan to entrap terrorists, hiding behind fake identities and sock puppets, the standard operating procedures of your standard internet troll, and it foreshadows Lerato's ultimate recruitment into the government's secret internet security force, after training in the playgrounds of petty corporate theft.
   It also goes some way to explaining the selfish, narcissistic outlook of the characters, who are very much products of their society. The characters are all compelling and well developed, and the book explores how their various flaws stem from the intersection of their personalities and their social positions. Lerato's ruthless ambition partially arises from her upbringing as an AIDS orphan with very little in the way of future prospects if she didn't get a very comparative corporate sponsorship. Tony is intelligent, witty and charming, but because he is a pampered, spoiled rich kid who has never had to do a day's work in his life, he is sickeningly self-obsessed and self-absorbed, with almost a sociopathic lack of empathy. His obsession with digital technology and live-blogging everything through the cameras in his jacket contrast him with the more down-to-earth Kendra, who has an abiding interest in analogue technology, reflecting her more grounded perspective before she is corrupted by selling her soul to a corporation. At the beginning, Tendeka does genuinely seem to care for the streetkids that he looks after, however his preciousness over his ideals, which lead to him not accepting corporate sponsorship for his streetkids project, winds up stopping him from helping them, unlike his lover Ashraf who is just as idealistic but a lot more practical. Tendeka has his family's money to fall back on, which allows him to be picky about where he gets his money from, but Ashfar, who comes from a poorer working class background, doesn't have that luxury, and realises the importance in actually getting the work done. Tendeka's own high ideals and his desperation ultimately make him an easy pawn for the government, and he winds up causing much more damage than he does helping people, despite his good intentions.
   'Moxyland' shows science fiction at its best, examining in unflinching detail our interface with technology and how this is changing both our society and ourselves. It does so with a diverse range of well-developed and believable characters, and with powerful, succinct prose. It ranks as one of the most disturbing and haunting dystopias in recent history. The end result is a stark warning that has only become more pertinent in the years since it was published.