by David Levinson

The Matter of Britain

When I was a boy, someone gave me Howard Pyle’s The Story of King Arthur and His Knights. For many years, I would occasionally look at the pictures, but never bothered to read it. I finally did when I was 14 or 15, and I was hooked.

All things Arthur became an obsession. I wasn’t satisfied with modern retellings and hunted long and hard for a decent modernization of Sir Thomas Malory. That led to Continental poets who wrote about Arthur, like Wolfram von Eschenbach and Chrétien de Troyes. Once I had access to a university library, I discovered the Welsh legends and then the early Medieval and Dark Age historians who mentioned him by name or indirectly. Suddenly, my obsession with King Arthur merged with my obsession with ancient history, and I was off again.

Eventually my ardor cooled due to a lack of new things to learn and the demands of being an adult, but for 15 or 20 years I lived and breathed this stuff. And now, Mary Stewart has brought it all back.

The Crystal Cave, by Mary Stewart

Writing as an old man, Merlin—wizard, seer, engineer, and poet—recounts his life story, beginning with his childhood in Carmarthen as the bastard son of a Welsh princess and an unknown father. Fate eventually takes him to Brittany, where he joins Aurelius Ambrosius (possibly a real historical figure) and his brother Uther, who are planning to overthrow the British High King Vortigern (almost certainly a real historical figure) and drive out the invading Saxons. Merlin aids the two princes in achieving their goal, at one point facing down Vortigern’s priests and magicians and later rebuilding Stonehenge as a monument to Ambrosius. The book ends with Merlin’s role in the conception of Arthur and a vision of him receiving the newborn infant to take away to foster care.

Mary Stewart is well-known for her blend of romance and thriller. Her recent books The Gabriel Hounds and Airs Above Ground are prime examples, and both spent months on the best-seller lists. There’s not a lot of romance here, and this is more of a historical novel than a thriller, but the skills that have made her earlier books so popular are fully on display.

Anyone familiar with the old legends of Merlin will recognize the high points in my story recap, but Stewart makes the tale all her own. Events are firmly set in the late 5th century, after Rome has pulled out of Britain and the Saxons are beginning to move in and displace the native Celtic population. This is no Medieval Never-Never Land with knights in shining armor jousting for the favor of a fair maiden. Instead we have Roman military discipline and engineering battling a barbarian invasion against a backdrop of early Christianity tinged with superstition and older religions.

The obvious comparison is to Mary Renault’s The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea, which tell the story of Theseus set in the Mycenean Era as it was understood a decade ago. Like those books, there’s little magic here. Merlin has prophetic visions, but they could just as easily be epileptic seizures. He hints at other powers, but we never see them. Everything else is skill, intelligence, and reputation.

There’s room for a sequel. Merlin still has the best known part of his career ahead of him. If Mary Stewart writes it, I, for one, will be there the day it comes out.

Five stars.

by Jason Sacks

The Gaudy Shadows, by John Brunner

John Brunner is one of my favorite authors working in science fiction these days. His Stand on Zanzibar was one of the most striking and innovative science fiction novels I've ever read. Zanzibar was a mind-expanding yet grounded exploration of how people might really live their lives in the future, melding internal introspection with external events in a thrilling manner.

While Brunner hasn't quite reached those heights before or since, most of his other fiction has been at least enjoyable and often quite fun. In fact, Brunner is one of those writers who seems remarkably successful at conjuring up an image of modern times in his novels while also maintaining a satirical science-fiction edge.

His latest novel, The Gaudy Shadows, is more a kind of modern Victorian melodrama than an innovative book. It's also a delightful page-turner.

Sammy Logan is the most popular man in central London these days. He's young,  wealthy, extremely well-dressed, knows all the right people and goes to all the right parties and has all the right secrets.

Sammy seems like a man without any real fears, so it's shocking to friends and family alike when Sammy seems to die of fear. His American friend, Laird Walker, just happens to be visiting England to surprise Sammy. To his great shock, Laird is drawn into the mystery and embraks on a madcap adventure to discover why his pal is deceased.

Along the way, Laird finds Sammy's amazing car and Sammy's secret ex-wife, and embarks on a madcap adventure with both to discover just what in the world happened to the man. And when Laird finally discovers the truth, all the adventure twists into a bizarre melodrama which seems to flow right out of a slightly sexed-up dime novel of the Victorian era. The tale has a viciously evil madman at the center of everything, a man whose strange drugs can bring ecstasy… and madness.

I enjoyed how Brunner set the novel firmly in London with passages like this one:

He looked for the boutique by which he had formerly located the correct turning, its windows full of way-out clothes, and found its place had been taken by an equally way-out hairdresser. Nylon wigs in purple and pale green loomed behind the glass now. A girl emerged as he passed, soothing a yappy poodle which had been dyed mauve to match its mistress's trouser suit."

Accentuating the modern feel of Gaudy Shadows, the character who really steals the show is the wildly named Bitchy Lagree, an androgynous chanteuse of sorts who sings in a gothic-feeling cabaret, wearing pancake makeup, half-inch nylon lashes, and a Marlene Dietrich dress while playing bitchy, gossipy songs on his/her gold and white piano. She feels like a character from the stage play Cabaret, decadent and dangerous, hilarious and strange and oh so transgressive to society and gender… and so contemporary feeling for today's London.

Bitchy acts like a greek chorus or voice of reason as Laird and friends gallivant from place to place to uncover Sammy's secrets. And if the secrets feel like a bit of an anticlimax after they've all spilled out, the speedy journey has been bright and bold and lots of fun.

Turns out London can be more fun than Zanzibar…

4 stars.

by Amber Dubin

Hoping to Ace a Walt and Leigh Richmond Double

This is the first Ace Double I’ve read from Walt and Leigh Richmond, and I’ll admit my hopes were unreasonably high. The idea proposed by the depiction of a crazy man riding a giant ice cube through space promised to be either hilarious or insane in my expectation, but disappointingly the execution was neither. Maybe if I had known more about the set of authors, I could have known not to expect that type of experience, but I stayed the course because even if this duo weren’t comedy writers, taking the absurd and making the reader seriously contemplate it is an art unto itself. Unfortunately, what I found was that the collaboration between these authors was not as smooth or symbiotic as I had hoped. Overall I don’t feel insulted or angered by the quality of these stories, but I do feel like if reading them had been a gamble, I broke even on my bet and wasted quite a bit of time doing it.

Gallagher's Glacier, by Walt and Leigh Richmond

Gallagher’s Glacier should only barely be defined as science fiction, in that it’s mostly science with precious little fiction. It’s rather thickly written, the action thawing slowly like the glacier at the center of its plot as the story goes on and hitches often on what I think is an unreasonable amount of descriptions and explanations of every single piece of technology used by the spacefaring protagonists.

cover by Kelly Freas

The premise is that of a dystopian future where mankind appears to have been in space for several generations, but has unfortunately brought the problems of Earth with them in full force. Though spread out across the galaxy amongst dozens of planets, earth-rooted society seems to be fully in the throes of late-stage capitalism, the earth-planted colonies on nearly every system owing their establishment to corporate buy out. Each colony, then, is less a society and more a business center with an accompanying employee residential area with all the accoutrements that are necessary to keep said employees entertained and alive. Predictably, with the economic divisions that intergalactic corporations require to remain solvent, the rankings have become stark over the decades, with the skilled employees becoming an elite class and the unskilled resource gatherers falling past poverty into a stiflingly oppressive debt-slavery system.

We follow the perspective of the straight-laced, company-funded Captain of the Starship Starfire, Harald Dundee, a character that is half audience stand-in and half Wonderbread-generic everyman. He meets the titular character upon the acquisition of his eponymous glacier, in a company bar as the Captain is complaining of losing one of his most essential engineers at a crucial point in his tasked journey for his company superiors. Maverick engineer N.N. Gallagher offers to do repairs on the Captain’s ship in exchange for passage towards an unclaimed giant chunk of ice floating in space along the path that Captain Dundee happens to be travelling. Though Gallagher’s conversion of the piece of space debris into an innovative intergalactic vehicle at first appears merely to be the odd behavior of an eccentrically brilliant yet harmless spacefaring engineer, it gradually becomes a threat to the status quo of the entire structure that the corporations have painstakingly built. With his self-funded, self-innovated, corporate-unregulated ship, Gallagher is able to slowly drill a hole through and around the structure of economic exchange set up by the corporations, maintaining commerce through slowly strengthening black market back channels that increase communication between the formerly oppressed and isolated socio-economically oppressed communities on many of the corporate outposts sprinkled throughout the galaxy.

Captain Harald Dundee’s curiosity is piqued on a particular corporate colony named Stellamira, where he seeks out Gallagher’s company once more, hoping to revel in the excitement of the adventures in which Gallagher is rumored to be involved. The Captain ends up biting off much more than he can chew when he has to visit the less reputable side of the corporate-funded colony to find Gallagher, and thus gets exposed to the horrors of the way the lower classes are forced to live in the corporate society that he has always benefited from. Emboldened by alcohol and the recklessness of naïve youth, Captain Dundee returns that night to his side of the colony, railing against his superiors and citing injustice and moral failings deep seated in the corporate structure, ranting that he will send word all the way up the chain of power if he has to in order to get awareness of what Corporate Greed has wrought. In a manner that everyone seems to see coming except Harald, this outburst is not received favorably, and in short order he is confronted with the depth of moral corruption in his company as it is swiftly turned against him.

Thankfully, allying himself with Gallagher that very night is just in time, as Gallagher predicted the company’s betrayal, sending allies to override their unreasonable punishment for pointing out their flaws. Harald then is unwillingly conscripted into the full-scale revolution that Gallagher has launched on the colony and its corporate overlords.

As the conflict between debt slaves and corporate elite goes from bloodless to bloody to bloodless again, we watch Harald slowly lose faith in the structure that raised him to his original status. Trying desperately to cling to his faith in the moral correctness of Earth politicians, he consistently expresses interest in reaching out to the Earth Council at the earliest opportunity, convinced that they will still express moral outrage when they learn how inhumanely the corporate entities have been able to run their colonies when unmonitored by Earth laws. Gradually, though, when confronted over and over by the wanton disregard for human life expressed by his former colleagues, he finally begins to come around to the perspective of the reader and his compatriots, that corporate greed has rotted Earth’s entire interplanetary system to its core, and whether its founders on Earth are willfully ignorant or willing participants is irrelevant to how far the entire system has fallen.

To be sure, being guided by such a predictable and naïve narrator through the plot does a good job of emphasizing the depth of the corruption of the powers that rule this universe, but I found this role superfluous when there was so much time spent elaborating on the depictions of the human rights violations. This is why, when they splashed in a transparent and half-hearted spoonful of a romance to endear the reader to the narrator, it felt so forced and awkward that I found myself wondering why the narrator’s character was created at all.

The plot had a super interesting premise for a foundation, but I feel like it wasted a lot of time trying to get me to care about fictional feats of engineering that felt rooted in an author’s rudimentary understanding of electrical processes that were not elaborate enough to immerse me in the same amazement and wonder that the author clearly would have felt if his/her creation was made real. Where my interests and the author’s values clearly clashed was in how much focus was necessary on the socio-economic structure upon which the world was based that I felt had stronger potential to draw and maintain interest.

The foreboding warning about corporate greed, political corruption, and the oppressive power of debt slavery was hugely compelling, and the heroic quest of one engineering maverick to overthrow the system could have been an amazing story, if that had been the one told, if the narrator had been less distracting from that focus, or less time had been spent describing the minutia of how everything was done.

Three stars

[Note: I wasn't that impressed when I read the original, shorter, version of this tale six years ago. (ed.)]

Positive Charge, by Walt and Leigh Richmond

Positive Charge felt disorganized and sloppily patched together with no connecting thread, like the contents of the author’s intellectual junk drawer.

cover by Kelly Freas

Where the story on the opposite side moved at a glacial pace in one general direction, this side lacks any direction at all. The narrative focus jumps so jerkily from story to story in this collection, that I found myself regretting reading the other half first because it put me in a mindset where I spent the first three stories grasping to find the common thread between each chapter.

There at first appears to be none, and yet four of the seven stories feature the same eccentric inventor, Willy Short, who seems to be accidentally and almost single-handedly launching the technological revolution of his entire species. In the first Willy Short story, we are dropped in the middle of a ‘day in the life’ snapshot, the second is told by a father to his child as if Willy is a fabled inventor of old, the third is watched by a nebulous governmental entity set to track him, and the fourth is told from the perspective of a sentient robot he invented. The fourth I found most interesting, as we are given a hazy view of Willy through a very elongated timeline in which we witness the rise and fall of sentient robotics, as they first solve the problem of human mortality, then last long enough to see themselves made obsolete and replaced by their now immortal, time and space travelling creators.

One of the biggest issues I take with the Willy Short set of stories is that they do not appear to be set chronologically in Willy’s life, and so the reader spends an annoying amount of time orienting themselves in each story, looking for clues that would put each one in sequence. I wonder why this was printed this way, because I already found it jarring enough to be following the same character in four different narrative lenses, without the added frustration of having to navigate time as well as space.

I was also particularly perturbed by the stories that bookend these Willy Short stories, as they seem so very random that they may as well have been printed in another book: they don’t center around engineering, invention or the innovative power of one bumbling genius in the right place and the right time to make meaningful change.

[Turns out they were all printed elsewhere—this collection is entirely of stories previously reviewed on the Journey, save for the new "Shorts Wing", written for this book (ed.)]

One of the aforementioned three, the concluding tale, happened to be more fiction than science, but did surprise me by being worth my time. It follows an advertising campaign on a television broadcasting station from the perspective of its sponsor and his lawyer. It begins innocently enough, as a nervous company man watches the launch of the first commercial, a witch-themed set of cleaning products that are being sold by 13 beautiful performers that dance and chant their way through a demonstration that investing in their company can clean up the world. The man is nervous because he’s worried that the ad will appear in poor taste, as it depicts scantily clad witches spraying cleaning fluid on the epicenter of a dirty bomb recently dropped on the Suez canal. His concerns appear ameliorated the next day, however, when the projected disaster appears averted, and an antidote seems to have been distributed over night to the contaminated water supply system.

With each airing of this new commercial, however, the reader is made to feel just as nervous as the company’s sponsor, because every attempt to make these cleaning products relevant to a current societal problem is paired with a miraculous clearing out of the problem that is mentioned. It doesn’t appear as if this was the advertiser’s intention, as he is just as bewildered by these “coincidences” as the participants and observers; yet we are left to wonder if the occult-themed performances didn’t accidentally access something structural in the rules of this world that has very real and tangible power.

I would rate this half of the Ace Double lower if the last story hadn’t left me with the nagging moral quandary: ‘If you could be given a magic wand with which to delete any of the world’s problems, would it be ethical to use it?

Three Stars