Plot-wise, the novel is relatively straightforward. Jevick is the son of a pepper farmer/merchant. He grows up on a distant island, hearing stories about the mainland, many from a tutor hired by his father. This tutor also introduces him to the pleasures of reading. When his father dies, Jevick takes his place on the annual trip to the mainland to sell pepper. Once there, he becomes enamored of city life and the availability of untold numbers of books. He also finds himself haunted by the ghost of a girl, and when he seeks help from Olondrian priests, he becomes involved in the struggle between powerful cults.

What’s possibly this novel’s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness: Sofia Samatar’s gorgeously rich but overly descriptive prose. Open this novel to any page and you’ll find a long, beautiful paragraph full of delicately constructed sentences, interesting images, language that resonates with joy and meaning. Once Jevick gets to the city of Bain, his delight in the sights and sounds of the city is expressed in what feels like a torrent of wonder. At the same time, as lovely as the sentences are, some of them just have no real import. I can deal with an author indulging in this type of thing here and there. Unfortunately, Samatar indulges in it throughout the book, to the extent that you begin feeling that maybe it’s okay to skip a paragraph here and there. It’s beautiful, but sadly, it becomes meaningless after a while.

At the same time, there’s a plot here. And an interesting, if somewhat faceless, main character—very much an observer who neglects to observe himself. And many interesting thoughts about art and religion, life and death, culture shock and adaptation. Jevick’s discovery of the written word and the world it opens up for him is something any avid reader can probably connect with. There is so much in this novel that I want to know more about.

There’s a beautiful novella hiding inside this novel—one in which the ideas are expressed with clarity and purpose, the plot is allowed to shine, and the prose finds a balance between insight and bloat. I want to know how this story ends. I even want to know more about Olondria. I’m the kind of reader who revels in lyrical, evocative prose. Sofia Samatar just didn’t manage to strike the kind of balance between evoking atmosphere and nailing down her plot and ideas in the way that authors like Catherynne M. Valente achieve with equally elaborate prose. I wanted to like A Stranger in Olondria, but I ended up putting it down after reading almost exactly half of it, simply because I got tired of fighting through the underbrush to reach the destination.

Further reading: for a very different opinion, check out Amal El-Mohtar’s beautiful review on Tor.com. You can also find an excerpt of the novel there.

Here’s a brief excerpt:

DOHERTY: You wrote some poems, too, didn’t you? Don’t I remember a poem about whether or not Isaac [Asimov] was going to freeze himself?

BENFORD: Oh, right. I wrote a poem called Isaac From the Outside. It’s about this curious phenomenon among science fiction writers, all of whom I knew. People like Heinlein, Cliff Simak, Isaac, Fred Pohl. They wrote novels about cryonics, but none of them had a cryonics contract. Fred Pohl has repeatedly been offered a contract, but he doesn’t want it. So I wrote about this strange contradiction, which I largely don’t understand. Because I have a cryonics contract.

DOHERTY: These were guys that all wrote very positively about onward‑and‑upward and a future that would be worth seeing, but they weren’t in a hurry to see it.

BENFORD: Yeah. Of course it’s a very, very high risk, right? But you’re dead anyway. What’s your downside?

Please click here to read the entire conversation at Tor.com!

Conservation of Shadows

It’s not that there aren’t any hooks or approaches; it’s more that there is such a bewildering number of them that, as a reader or reviewer, you feel somewhat like you’ve wandered onto a hitherto undiscovered island full of skittery, unfamiliar species that keep turning out to be something else than what you initially expected. More than a review, Conservation of Shadows needs its own monograph. Towards a Taxonomy of Yoon Ha Lee’s Short Fiction, maybe.

Yoon Ha Lee’s first professional sale came in 1999—to the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, no less. Since then she’s released about thirty pieces of short fiction into the wild, in markets such as F&SF, Lightspeed Magazine, Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and here on Tor.com, among others. Her works have been included and honorably mentioned in annual “best of” anthologies, and two of her stories (“Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain” and “Ghostweight”) were finalists for the Sturgeon Award. Conservation of Shadows includes sixteen of the author’s best stories, as well as a great introduction by Aliette de Bodard and extensive story notes by the author herself. It is, to the best of my knowledge, the first collection of Yoon Ha Lee’s short fiction.

I’m going to take the opening paragraphs of the very first story in this collection as an example to develop some ideas. This quote is from the astonishing “Ghostweight,” originally published in Clarkesworld in 2011:

It is not true that the dead cannot be folded. Square becomes kite becomes swan; history becomes rumor becomes song. Even the act of remembrance creases the truth.

What the paper-folding diagrams fail to mention is that each fold enacts itself upon the secret marrow of your ethics, the axioms of your thoughts.

Whether this is the most important thing the diagrams fail to mention is a matter of opinion.

So, obvious first observation: Yoon Ha Lee’s prose is gorgeous. It’s the kind of prose you want to read out loud. Every word counts, although that’s not always obvious upon first reading. Sometimes what’s left unsaid is equally meaningful, as the last sentence of the quote already suggests. As a rule, the author manages to evoke and/or imply a wealth of information in these relatively short tales: theories, histories real and imaginary, races, concepts you’ve never seen in the genre.

There’s a striking contrast between the gentle images Yoon Ha Lee uses and the all-but-gentle objects to which they refer. The kite in that quote from “Ghostweight” is a war-kite: a far future interstellar battle ship. Other stories feature swanships and ships powered by mothdrives. In one story, music is used as a weapon; in another, a book. Paper dolls. Each word in the title “Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain” refers to a different gun.

Likewise, there’s a strange, pleasing dissonance created by the simple, naturalistic bent of these same images and the science level they refer to. Sometimes this turns out to be “technology sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from magic,” sometimes actual magic. (There are both interstellar empires and necromantic mecha to be found in Conservation of Shadows.) The most advanced concepts—also frequently the most terrifying ones—are often expressed using single words that could be found in any child’s vocabulary.

This is, obviously, deceptive. Note the author also uses “diagram” and “axiom” in that brief origami quote above. These stories frequently build out from (but rarely make explicit) theoretical starting points that might please fans of hard SF. Warfare is waged by means of competing calendars. One clash of civilizations appears to be taking place almost entirely in probability space. I imagine the author wincing at these clumsy summaries, but in my defense, she recently summed up every story in Conservation of Shadows using just a handful of words each on her blog. A few examples: “theorem magic,” “quantum chess warfare,” “tactical linguistics.”

In a recent interview on Clarkesworld, Yoon Ha Lee explains some of her thinking behind all of this: much like a proof, she builds her stories towards a pre-established conclusion. There’s a didactic methodology to this: extraneous elements and unnecessary arguments are left out. Of course, as readers we don’t know the destination beforehand. In the same interview, Yoon Ha Lee frames this technique as an assassination: “I don’t want the reader to see the short sharp point clearly from the beginning, but I want it to make sense afterward as the angle of attack.”

All of this explains, at least in part, the reason behind these stories’ notable economy of words, their usage of deceptively recognizable imagery and innocent-seeming vocabulary. To be clear, the point is (usually) not a “gotcha”-type surprise revelation; rather, the author uses the stories’ meticulous construction to guide the reader towards understanding. If there’s any disorientation, it serves a point, which is frequently building a unique atmosphere and implying a much broader fictional universe than what’s glimpsed in the stories.

The purest examples of the author’s unique narrative approach may be those stories that start out by deviating from traditional storytelling technique. “Iseul’s Lexicon” begins with a fictional lexicon entry. (She really wasn’t kidding about the “tactical linguistics” thing earlier.) “The Black Abacus” includes an exam question with dizzying implications, and is structured around chess moves. “A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel” is something like Calvino by way of Borges and Moorcock. The author’s notes for this story (which was originally published on Tor.com) made me happy: “I am aware that there is an egregious amount of arrogance involved in the idea of pastiching Calvino, but [...] I figured it wouldn’t tear a hole in the universe for me to have a go.”

The rare missteps in this collection occur when the author indulges in prose that’s just a shade too flowery. In the story notes, she refers to this as “overwhelming the material with tinsel” and admits that she’s “already prone to that fault.” If so, this is very much an exception rather than the rule: most of the time, Yoon Ha Lee is incredibly efficient in her expression of ideas and plot.

Because of this efficiency, the highly informative story notes included at the back of this collection are more than welcome. Read story, read notes, re-read story. Rinse and repeat. As an example: Yoon Ha Lee, who is Korean-American, makes a few references to Korean history, something I suspected but didn’t fully understand during my first reading. Those stories have broader application and meaning, but learning about their origins definitely added a new layer to my appreciation.

The highest praise I have for this collection is simply this: in a genre that all too frequently works within the same old patterns and strictures, Yoon Ha Lee’s stories are unique. After reading Conservation of Shadows, I believe I could pick any future story by this author out of a blind line-up. That’s not because the collection is monotonous or repetitive—far from it—but because the author’s genre sensibility and writing style are completely sui generis. Conservation of Shadows is an excellent collection of stories: filled with beautiful puzzles of thought and emotion in which math and magic frequently walk hand in hand. Highly recommended.

This review was originally published at Tor.com on May 9th, 2013.

From Tachyon Publications’ site:

The employees of Dr. Zeus Incorporated travel through (and meddle with) history in Kager Baker’s final collection of six stories of espionage, capers, and important affairs gone terribly wrong.

The Company, a powerful corporate entity in the twenty-fourth century, has discovered a nearly foolproof recipe for success: combining time travel and immortal employees. They specialize in retrieving extraordinary treasures out of the past, gathered by cybernetically-enhanced workers who pass as ordinary humans. Whether a client wants a jewel worn by Cleopatra, an original Shakespeare folio, or to make a baby with the genes of Socrates and Marilyn Monroe, Dr, Zeus can make dreams come true. But there is one major rule that must not be broken: the recorded particulars of history cannot be changed. The operatives of the Company must function with extreme stealth and caution, since avoiding the curiosity and greed of everyday mortals proves much more difficult—and sometimes ridiculous—than anyone had foreseen.

Included in this exciting collection are four previously uncollected stories, “Mother Aegypt” (a classic tale of Transylvanian intrigue), and one brand new story from a collaboration with Kage Baker’s sister, Kathleen Bartholomew. History awaits, though not quite the one you remember.

And just look at that cover by Tom Canty! The font alone… Oh my. Add to that four previously uncollected stories, and one new story completed by Kage’s sister Kathleen (who I interviewed extensively here earlier this year), and, well… I’m excited about this one. Ridiculously excited.

In the Company of Thieves is due out in October 2013 from Tachyon Publications.

Joel, the son of an ordinary chalkmaker, can only watch from the sidelines as Rithmatist students practice their art. But when students start disappearing, Joel and his friend Melody end up helping with the investigation. This will lead them to a discovery that will change Rithmatics—and their world—forever…

I always thought that Brandon Sanderson and YA would be the perfect match. His writing style has always been incredibly direct, with easy-to-follow plots and uncomplicated characters. The attention he puts into designing and describing his famed magic systems is something that younger readers should immediately respond to, with their sets of reliable rules and possibilities that wouldn’t be out of place in a video game. If you imagine some of his previous novels with the vaguely darkish edges of his worlds toned down, they would almost work as YA as it is.

It was incredibly surprising for me, then, to find that The Rithmatist is possibly his weakest work to date, at least out of the ones I’ve read (Elantris, the original Mistborn trilogy and The Alloy of Law, Warbreaker, The Way of Kings, and his two recent novellas Legion and The Emperor’s Soul. You can find my reviews of the two novellas here and here.).

The Rithmatist’s main character is Joel, the son of a lowly chalkmaker (chalk being the main ingredient in this magic system) who is studying in a Rithmatist school. Joel wants to be a Rithmatist, but he doesn’t have the magic. He’s like an envious, almost obsessed muggle stuck at Hogwarts. The novel starts off with him recounting, in incredible detail, a magical duel from the past, then sneaking into a Rithmatist lecture. He’s surrounded by what he can’t have, a point the novel mentions over and over.

The second main character is equally one-dimensional: a Rithmatist named Melody, who is great at one aspect of the magic (drawing detailed chalklings) but can’t draw lines and circles with enough accuracy and detail to be effective. She’s in many ways the opposite of Joel: she has the magic he wants so badly, but she’s not all that interested in it. She’s rich, he’s poor. She’s also incredibly theatrical, a point the novel mentions over and over until an initially charming quirk becomes annoying.

Joel and Melody are thrown together when they start working with Fitch (your standard distracted Professor, one-dimensional), who is investigating the recent disappearance of a Rithmatist student. Fitch recently lost his tenured position to Nalizar in a duel. Nalizar has strong echoes of Severus Snape and is, unfortunately, also rather one-dimensional in his aggressive abrasiveness.

Unfortunately these four fairly uninteresting characters are all there is to maintain the reader’s attention during the first half of the novel. Most of what happens in this section involves life on the Rithmatist campus: walking around, chatting with friends, classes, and more than anything else, discussing the ins and outs of Rithmatism in detail.

In detail? In excruciating detail. If you ever felt like Sanderson maybe paid a teensy little bit too much attention to his magic systems, you’re in for a surprise here, because he’s outdone himself. As mentioned before, we start off with a detailed recap of a famous Rithmatics duel in the past, which leads straight into a lecture about Rithmatics and then another duel. Unfortunately, neither of the duels are particularly high-tension: they’re mainly an excuse for Sanderson to explain Lines of Warding, Lines of Forbiddance, Lines of Vigor, bind points on magical circles (four point circles, six point circles, nine point circles), and the way all of these are used to construct various magical defenses and attacks in Rithmatism.

I initially thought the artwork for The Rithmatist was a neat touch: each chapter starts off with a diagram-style example of a Rithmatist defense or technique. (You can see an example of this in the excerpt I posted a few months ago.) However, after a few chapters, it starts to feel like you’re reading the manual for a strategy game you’ve never played. The Sumsion Defense. The Osborn Defense. The Easton Defense. The Advanced Easton Defense. On and on and on it goes.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s a neat magic system, and you’ll have a good understanding of it by the time you are done. Still, I probably had a better time reading the manual for the last strategy game I played because it didn’t try to dress up its inner mechanics as a novel and at least I knew that I got to play the damned thing afterwards.

Now, to be fair, the second half of The Rithmatist is better. It becomes clear that those disappearances may be part of something bigger, connected to the ongoing war in Nebrask. We learn about the history of the world. We eventually leave the Rithmatist campus, which is a huge relief. There are magical duels that actually mean something. Joel becomes slightly more interesting.

It all just takes an uncommonly long time to get going, and until then there’s no sense of urgency because we don’t know much about the people who got kidnapped and all everyone ever talks about is Rithmatism. You’re basically stuck with flat characters in a fairly standard YA magic school environment having theoretical conversations about magic.

Sanderson is a great storyteller with interesting ideas, so I expect this series to improve with the next book, especially now we’ve got Rithmatism 101 out of the way and the world and main character have gained some detail. As an opening volume, however, The Rithmatist is disappointing.

You can currently purchase Speculative Fiction 2012 in paperback as well as ebook formats. All proceeds from sales of this book will be donated to Room to Read, a charitable organization that supports literacy and gender equality around the world. In addition, many of the writers (including me) have donated the payments for our essays to the same charity.

With fifty separate entries, the list of contributors is rather long… but here goes: Joe Abercrombie, Daniel Abraham, Niall Alexander, Elizabeth Bear, Rob Berg, Liz Bourke, Maurice Broaddus, Myke Cole, Kate Elliott, Katherine Farmar, Chris Gerwel, Christopher Garcia, Daniel Goodman, Ana Grilo, Niall Harrison, Dan Hartland, Matt Hilliard, Kameron Hurley, Thea James, N.K. Jemisin, Paul Kincaid, Lady Business, Rose Lemberg, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Cynthia Martinez, Tim Maughan, Foz Meadows, Jonathan McCalmont, Martin McGrath, Aidan Moher, Ken Neth, Larry Nolen, Abigail Nussbaum, Christopher Priest, Stefan Raets, Adam Roberts, Tansy Rayner Roberts, CS Samulski, Penny Schenk, Ro Smith, Maureen K. Speller, Aishwarya Subramanian, Matthew Surridge, Sam Sykes, Gav Thorpe and Lavie Tidhar. (And: the gorgeous cover was designed by Sarah Anne Langton.)

I’m not going to post a full review of the book, partly because it could be considered a conflict of interest (given that the book contains one of my reviews, and many of the writers are friends and acquaintances), but I can honestly say that the range of material included here makes the book very much worth it. I’ve by now read through most of the essays, and I’m truly impressed, not to mention somewhat intimidated, by the insight and ability displayed by some of these writers. (Honestly, I’m not sure why they let me in!) In either case, if you’re looking for a snapshot of the best genre-blogging of last year and would like to support a great charity, consider picking up a copy!

And… if you’d like to submit something for consideration, Ana Grilo and Thea James (of the excellent Booksmugglers site) will be editing next year’s edition and are currently accepting submissions.

Ten year old Hubert Anvil is an incredibly gifted soprano, but as puberty approaches, his voice will break, inevitably destroying his ability to sing in the higher registers. Hubert’s superiors are considering an “alteration”: removing the offending parts of his anatomy before hormones ravage his angelical voice….

The Alteration is a 1976 alternate history novel by English novelist, poet and critic Kingsley Amis. It won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Novel. This new edition, out on May 7th from NYRB Classics, also features an insightful new introduction by William Gibson.

The world portrayed in The Alteration by Kingsley Amis is a meticulously constructed and plausible dystopia that accounts in large part for the fascination this novel still holds. The Catholic Church has controlled life for so long and in such a complete way that most characters take it more or less for granted. The novel’s title is very effective in the way it implies multiple meanings: not just Hubert’s proposed castration, but also the larger alteration of history.

Amis mentions many of these historical changes in passing or simply implies them, which may make it tricky for readers who aren’t very familiar with (real) history to fully appreciate some of the many clever references. Just the first few pages contain a list of visiting dignitaries whose titles imply a completely different history of Europe (no unified Italy, for one) and vastly different roles for some historical figures (as evidenced by the last names of Monsignors Henricus and Lavrentius). You don’t have to be a historian to appreciate this novel, but as William Gibson indicates in his introduction, a basic familiarity with the concepts of the Reformation is probably helpful.

In the world of The Alteration, science has literally become a dirty word. Progress has more or less been stopped for a few centuries. Electricity is unknown after having been banned. As a result, vehicles run on Diesel engines (which don’t require an electrical spark for ignition) and intercontinental travel by steam train is common. At least in terms of technology, there’s something steampunk-like about this novel.

Another consequence of the Church’s opposition to scientific progress is that science fiction has become forbidden literature. There’s an underground circuit for people who enjoy TR, or Time Romance, as the genre is known in this reality. The most controversial of TR’s subgenres is dubbed CW, Counterfeit World, which imagines worlds and histories different from the one portrayed in the novel, such as Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle—an alternate history that exists inside this alternate history and portrays a world in which the events that led up to the reality portrayed in The Alteration never happened. Other genre classics have been changed to fit into the Church’s proscribed worldview, such as Lord of the Chalices and The Wind in the Cloisters.

For me, The Alteration is at its best when it explores its setting and its premise by showing both subtle and overt changes to established history. Finding the references to real history is somehow both exhilarating (at least for history geeks like me) and utterly depressing (in all its implications). In terms of plot and characters, the novel is not the author’s best work, but like William Gibson in his introduction I’d rather not go into too much detail here, so you can approach the story without preconceived notions.

The Alteration is both an interesting take on alternate history and a broad indictment of the way religious dogmatism can impact people on the most personal, intimate level as well as on a society-wide scale. If you’re a fan of alternate history, definitely check out what Gibson calls this “most admirably foul counterfeit world.”

This review was originally published at Tor.com on April 24th, 2013.

As the title of this new collection indicates, Shepard approaches aspects of his own life and personality from five different directions.  Calling these stories “autobiographies” is as meaningful as it is deceptive. “Pseudo-autobiographies” or even “meta-autobiographies” would be more appropriate, but it’s understandable why Shepard and Subterranean Press avoided those horrible mouthfuls.

First things first: Five Autobiographies and a Fiction contains, as you might expect, six stories: “Ditch Witch,” “The Flock,” “Vacancy,” “Dog-Eared Paperback of My Life,” “Halloween Town” and “Rose Street Attractors,” varying in length from short stories to full length novellas.

Before you get to the stories, however, there’s an introduction by Shepard that’s as essential as the stories themselves, because it places the entire collection in the context of the author’s life. Shepard describes his troubled adolescence in a way that’s so frank and open that reading it borders on the uncomfortable. He mentions that the genesis of this project was a realization that the two main characters in the story “The Flock” may represent “two halves of my personality that had not fully integrated during my teenage years.”

In “The Flock” and other stories in this collection, most notably the stunning “Dog-Eared Paperback of My Life,” Shepard examines his personality “from the standpoint of an essential divide, sensing perhaps that some mental health issues remain unresolved.” There are similarities between many of the protagonists, some easily identifiable as parallels with the author, others less obvious. Taken on their own and without the overarching “autobiographies” moniker, it might not have been as clear that Shepard is dissecting his own life, or at least alternate versions of his life. Seen together in the context of this collection, there’s no getting away from it.

All of this makes reading Five Autobiographies and a Fiction an odd, thrilling process. Yes, they’re instantly recognizable as Lucius Shepard stories, full of interesting twists and gorgeous prose, but there’s also something voyeuristic about the reading experience. Shepard makes it clear that these characters are potentialities, near-hits (or near-misses?), versions of himself from some parallel dimension that could have been real if his path had been slightly different.

Most of the main characters in these stories range from “annoying” to “spectacularly unpleasant.” Many of them treat women like objects and other cultures like caricatures, even when it’s clear that they have the mental and emotional capacities to step beyond this. They’re stuck in the ruts carved by their inglorious pasts. They coast along because it’s easier than reaching for something new, until they’re bumped out of their paths by some confrontation or realization.

Some examples: Cliff Coria, the main character of “Vacancy,” is a former actor turned used car salesman whose past misdeeds come back to haunt him. He self-describes as “an affable sociopath with no particular ax to grind and insufficient energy to grind it, even if he had one.” One of the main characters in “The Flock” reflects, after sleeping with his friend’s girlfriend, that “Getting involved was the easy way out. Not the easy way out of Edenburg, not out of anywhere, really: but with Dawn and a couple of squalling kids in a double-wide parked on my folks’ acreage, at least my problems would be completely defined.” The main character in “Dog-Eared Paperback of My Life” describes himself as follows: “I knew myself to be a borderline personality with sociopathic tendencies, subject to emotional and moral disconnects, yet lacking the conviction of a true sociopath.”

If you tried to make a Venn diagram of these people’s characteristics, the areas of overlap would be clear. If you’ve read Shepard before, you can probably add some examples from past stories, but in this case the stories are offered as “autobiographies,” contextualized and dissected in the introduction. Some autobiographers self-mythologize, casting their lives in a more pleasing light. Shepard is, at least indirectly, doing the opposite. I can’t say that I’ve ever experienced anything similar in fiction.

“Dog-Eared Paperback of My Life” adds another fascinating dimension to the collection by having its main character Tom Cradle (a bestselling author) come across a novel by another Tom Cradle, one who took a different path in a number of ways, including the fact that Cradle Two didn’t listen to some advice an editor gave him early in his career: “long, elliptical sentences and dense prose would be an impediment to sales (she counseled the use of “short sentences, less navel-gazing, more plot,” advice I took to heart.)” I don’t think anyone who’s read Shepard before can work through that tangle without grinning, but just to make sure, he concludes the paragraph with “It was as if he had become the writer I had chosen not to be.”

Later on in this story, the (fictional) author quotes one of his fans (who strayed in from a parallel universe) while she cuts apart postmodernist fiction, in a way that feels very much like quotes taken from real reviews. It doesn’t get much more meta than that. It’s also hilarious, especially when the author wishes the woman would turn back into her previous, hypersexual self rather than this “pretentious windbag” who’s over-analyzing his fiction. (Writing some of these quotes down as a reviewer is, by the way, a great cause for reflection.) Elsewhere in the story, Shepard/Cradle rips apart a number of SFF fan and author archetypes in a gloriously misanthropic, multi-page rant that will probably piss off as many people as it amuses.

Even though “Dog-Eared Paperback of My Life” gets a bit muddled towards the end, it’s my favorite entry in the collection because it crystallizes the ideas from the introduction and the other stories in one dark, hallucinatory Heart of Darkness-like journey. It’s a novella that deserves a full-length review in itself, but then so do most of the other rich, thought-provoking stories in Five Autobiographies and a Fiction.

The “fiction” mentioned in the book’s title refers to the final entry, “Rose Street Attractors,” a twisted ghost story set in the underbelly of Nineteenth Century London. It’s a great story, but I felt that it took away somewhat from the impact of the preceding five stories. In itself it’s perfectly fine, but there’s a sense of disconnect between it and the others. I don’t think the collection would have suffered if it had been titled “Five Autobiographies,” or (as I somehow thought before reading this book) if the title’s “fiction” had referred to the introduction, making explicit the idea expressed at its very end: “[...] it has every bit as much reality as the fiction I am living, a narrative that becomes less real second by second, receding into the past, becoming itself a creation of nostalgia and self-delusion, of poetry and gesture, of shadows and madness and desire.”

For fans of Lucius Shepard, this collection will be revelatory, but I wouldn’t call it his best work. Several of the stories follow a pattern that’s maybe a bit too obvious. Some of the endings feel too similar, some are a bit rushed. Maybe most importantly, some of these stories work mostly because of the context they’re in: without the introduction and the instant additional layer of meaning it imparts, I wouldn’t rank them with my favorite Lucius Shepard stories. Even an average story by this author is worth reading, but I’d still steer new readers to some of his previous works instead, especially last year’s collection of Griaule stories (review).

I wrote down so many quotations from Five Autobiographies and a Fiction that I might have been able to compose this review using quotes only, communicating in the way the soldier who told a story using only slogans did in Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. To conclude, let me add one more quote. This theory from “Dog-Eared Paperback of My Life” offers one possible explanation how one author can write five vastly different autobiographies: “[...] our universe and those adjoining it were interpenetrating. He likened this circumstance to countless strips of wet rice paper hung side by side in a circle and blown together by breezes that issued from every quarter of the compass, allowing even strips on opposite points of the circle to stick to each other for a moment and, in some instances, for much longer; thus, he concluded, we commonly spent portions of each day in places far stranger than we were aware.”

This review was originally published at Tor.com on April 19th, 2013.

Inexorably pulled into this odd black tunnel, Ransom’s mind enters the body of a young man who has just been given a drug overdose in an attempt to make his death seem like a suicide. While inhabiting this unfamiliar reality and body, Ransom discovers that the initial investigation he was contracted for has much farther-reaching implications than he could have possibly imagined….

Tunnel Out of Death is a spectacularly bizarre realities-within-realities story. The obvious comparison is Philip K. Dick: the down-the-rabbit-hole structure, the frequent doubt whether the reality the main character perceives is real, the combination of vaguely defined technology and paranoia, the androids who are almost indistinguishable from humans. Even the title sounds like it could be a hitherto undiscovered work by the grandmaster of existential alienation.

Unfortunately Tunnel Out of Death falls far short of that level. As an exploration of the nature of reality it’s interesting. Jamil Nasir actually pushes the envelope here, taking some of these metaphysical concepts as far as I’ve ever seen in SF. As a novel, however, it has too many flaws to work.

On the plus side, Jamil Nasir skillfully evokes an interesting future by throwing small but significant references to new technologies into the story. Early on, a character discusses a new religion saying “they have their services in a lovely half-size replica of St. Peter’s Basilica in a sub-basement of the Bank of China building,” effectively forcing readers to scale up their imaginations in just a few words. When Ransom’s assistant chides her employer for taking an emergency appointment, she says: “You’re supposed to get your blood exchanged and your lymphocyte firmware upgraded this afternoon.” Jamil Nasir understands how to use small details to paint a big picture.

It’s a shame that the implications of endovoyancy and Ransom’s travels between various realities are never explained with the same economy of words. Instead, the author frequently attempts to explain them in rambly sentences, such as: “If the substrate of your consciousness were not a meat creature full of evolutionary tropisms and aversions, would consciousness still be better than unconsciousness? Without the impersonal biological urges that used you as a disposable tool of species proliferation, would you still use being over non-being?”

This type of wandering, vaguely stoned-sounding discourse even creeps into the dialogue:

“I don’t know what it was, but what it seemed like was—I don’t know. Nothingness—but as if everything and its opposite had come together and canceled each other out, leaving just absolute absence of anything anywhere.

“Except that everything and its opposite combined is also everything—everything in potential form, do you see? That’s what I saw. Everything and nothing together, pure empty potentiality.”

I confess that I found it somewhat reassuring when, after another handful of sentences in this vein, the speaker concludes with “Does that make any sense?”, and the reply is a simple, one word “No.”

To be fair, the concepts Nasir explores in this novel aren’t easy to summarize. The whodunit-like plot that sets off the story is mainly a vehicle to get to a place where the author can explore an almost mystical understanding of reality that touches upon religion, science, psychic abilities, artificial intelligence, human mutation, alien lifeforms, and much more.

The main problem is that, as the novel progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that that exploration of ideas takes precedence over everything else, and that telling a good story sort of fell by the wayside. The mystery that starts off the plot drops from the radar for a while when it becomes clear that there’s a much farther-reaching plot, but that plot is so utterly bizarre and incongruous that it practically invalidates what came before.

The novel wraps back around to the initial mystery, but by then it’s clear that it wasn’t the real point anyway. Towards the end, the story dissolves into the mystical insights quoted earlier in this review, making it feel as if entire sections and plot points were incidental to the academic noodling about the nature of reality.

This impression is reinforced by the fact that the only character whose background is explored in any kind of detail is Margaret Biel, the target of Heath Ransom’s investigation. Even the main character and narrator, Ransom himself, lacks depth and mainly feels like a vehicle for ideas and lecture-style dialogue. All others are basically props and, in a few instances, are treated like props: one character has an almost human-seeming android girlfriend; a not-quite-living sex doll, basically. There’s something incredibly icky about the way she’s described: her status lies somewhere between human, animal and object. This aspect of the novel left a bad taste in my mouth.

Still, there are also moments that are truly memorable. There are a few instances where Nasir effectively pulls the rug out from under the reader, calling into question everything that came before, creating the spine-tingling sense of doubt that Philip K. Dick excelled at. There’s a tremendous scene set in a parking lot that’s also a transitional reality of sorts, in the style of the hellwalks in Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber. There’s a section where the protagonist ping-pongs back and forth between two realities for such a long time that my head was truly spinning. Jamil Nasir stretches this type of story and setting to new limits, which is admirable in itself.

If you’re in the mood for a novel that explores the same kinds of concepts Philip K. Dick frequently dealt with (and that occasionally feels like the product of PKD’s mind around the time he thought a sentient pink beam of light was sending him messages), Tunnel Out of Death will scratch that itch. It’s not every day you read a novel that casually throws in sentences like“You reified an astral sensorium” or “It had been years since he had last died, and it was shocking.” I enjoyed the high-flying metaphysical concepts Jamil Nasir explores in Tunnel Out of Death, but in the end the novel felt like a missed opportunity.

This review was originally published at Tor.com on April 12th, 2013.

Reading this book was an odd experience for me, because the one story by Rivera I was familiar with, which I also thought to be his best known story, is possibly the one that’s least representative of his general style: the World Fantasy Award-nominated “Tu Sufrimiento Shall Protect Us.” Maybe that’s why it was placed towards the end of this collection: it forces the reader to experience Rivera’s entire range before hitting that spectacular, shocking story. Of course regular readers of Interzone, where the author contributed a number of these pieces, will have a different experience. For me, Across the Event Horizon was somewhat of a revelation.

In his introduction to this book, Terry Bisson makes the one crucial point that describes Mercurio D. Rivera’s fiction: the presentation of “weird, wonderful and thought-provoking ideas” is central to these stories. (Rivera was a student in Bisson’s Writing SF course at the New School in New York.) As a matter of fact, you can boil down almost all of these pieces to one premise, one innovation or twist or evolution. Just like in the best classic science fiction, everything derives from one point of speculation.

These echoes of classic SF are reinforced by the names in the first two stories included here: “Dance of the Kawkawroons” and “Longing for Langalana.” Those alien names are so melodious and smooth they instantly remind of a bygone age, evoking echoes of old-fashioned, straightforward planetary adventure. There’s a sense of romanticism to them, reinforced by the patterns of exploration and colonization that will immediately ring familiar to genre fans.

This immediately proves to be deceptive, of course. Mercurio D. Rivera gradually introduces a surprising level of ambivalence and complexity into these two first stories. What initially seems benevolent becomes quite the opposite, before evolving again. There are twists followed by more twists, heightening a powerful sense of alienation and menace. The conceptual and ethical switchbacks in these stories are dizzying.

“Snatch Me Another” and “Dear Annabehls” are more obviously connected. A new technology allows people to reach through a portal, into a parallel universe, to pull objects into our reality. Rivera squeezes an amazing amount of this idea’s implications into the first story: comical, economical, societal, existential. The end result is thought-provoking and emotionally gut-wrenching. What should remain unique versus becoming a commodity? What happens when we confuse material comfort with emotional connection? What does “do unto others” even mean when the chances of retribution are inversely proportional to the number of possible universes?

In “Dear Annabehls,” the author then further explores these ideas in the form of a series of gradually escalating “Dear Abby” letters that combine the comical (she recommends intoxicants as the solution for almost everything) with the poignant (watch her automatically put a heteronormative spin on the first story).

A third pair of stories have a less overt but equally interesting connection. Both “Rewind, Replay” and “Naked Weekend” play on the themes of escapism and self-deception, one of them in the context of dealing with a personal trauma, the other expanding the idea to a regulated, society-wide scale. One of them allows editing memories, the other editing emotions. The inability to cope with reality is a theme running through this entire collection, but never so overtly as in these two excellent stories.

Another major theme that pops up in almost all of the stories in Across the Event Horizon is alienation and the difficulty, if not impossibility, of effective communication. “Scent of Their Arrival” is the most literal exploration of this idea (and another great example of using a classic SF format to explore much more modern concepts.) The two interlocutors in “Bargonns Can Swizzle” are separated by time rather than species. The main character of “The Fifth Zhi” is maybe the most tragic example: the loneliness of a clone who discovers there’s a vast gulf even between himself and his clone-brethren.

“Missionaries” is one of my favorites stories in the collection. It explores faith in what I can only (rather lamely) describe as a quantum context. It’s an incredibly moving piece of fiction that reminded me somewhat of Ted Chiang’s excellent “Stories of Your Life.” As evidence of Mercurio D. Rivera’s range, compare this with “Sleeping With the Anemone”, a story that uses blunt comedy to explore some of the same themes as Kij Johnson’s “Spar.” It’s perversely (in more than one way) just as horrific.

And then, maybe just to put a final spin on the entire collection, after all the twists, all the failures of communication, all the ideas that seem to confirm Paul Kincaid’s The Widening Gyre, there’s that final story “Answers from the Event Horizon”: a surprising grace note that’s confusing for its sheer optimism. I glanced at the page for a while, somewhat suspiciously, wondering if I’d misread. In the end, then, a ray of hope—if only, maybe, one that emphasizes the darkness of what came before.

My only reservation about some of these stories is that Mercurio D. Rivera’s tendency to explore a single concept occasionally feels almost too straightforward. The thematic wealth of these stories is sometimes masked by the simplicity of the narrative. This is, of course, deceptive—hence “masked”—and also makes these stories instantly memorable. Still, I’m eager to see how Rivera would carry over and expand on some of these ideas and concepts in the longer format of a novella or even a novel.

Rivera put me on the wrong foot several times throughout this collection by mixing traditions, themes, and ideas. As a reader, I was forced to reconsider initial impressions in several ways. Across the Event Horizon manages to be both accessible and challenging, which is not an easy feat. Recommended.

This review was originally published at Tor.com on April 10th, 2013.