The Ninth Circle

Alex Bell
Gollancz (www.orionbooks.com)
978-0-575-08027


Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A man wakes up in an apartment in a pool of his own blood, with no memory of his life before that moment. He has to piece together his existence from clues around the house, from the cryptic hints of new (or are they old?) acquaintances who might not be what they seem, and from mysterious letters posted beneath his door which suggest his past may hold secrets so dark he’d rather not remember them…

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A man wakes up with no memory of his life before. The only hint as to his identity, to his past, is an incoherent book review smeared onto the wall in blood. No More Amnesiac Protagonists!!, it reads, over and over again…

Stop me… or rather, stop publishers. The preponderance of books feeding off the same old premise isn’t Alex Bell’s fault, although she could possibly have considered taking up residence in a slightly less crowded literary niche. Cliché it may be, but the amnesiac protagonist needn’t be the death of a well-written novel.

Unfortunately, The Ninth Circle isn’t a particularly well-written novel. There’s a certain energy to its prose, but it suffers from many of the same flaws that have plagued other debut novels. Bell keeps things rattling on at some pace, thanks mostly to a stream-of-consciousness narration which never lets the book become bogged down in detail. But this isn’t stream of consciousness like Virginia Woolf employs, with meaning layered into the broken thoughts and half-completed imagery which the human mind throws up; it’s more like a running commentary for the hard of thinking, wherein every event or emotional cue is accompanied by high-energy explication of exactly what’s going on inside the narrator’s head. There’s no opportunity for interpretation of the depths of meaning here, because there are no depths – it’s all dragged straight to the surface in a frenzy of italicised overemphasis.

The reason behind this onslaught of angst is that Gabriel Antaeus, its narrator and the recipient of that unfortunate lack of backstory, makes up for his existential uncertainty with a hysterical mania which really begins to grate after a hundred pages or so. He’s like an idiot child, filled with a driving need to understand everything right now and lacking the emotional filters which most adults develop as a way of keeping the world at arms’ length. In a way this makes sense, considering his memory loss as a kind of rebirth, and there is a touching innocence to the way he latches desperately onto every snatch of human contact or hint of his past. There’s a running ‘fish food’ joke through the first quarter of the novel which is at once funny and pathetically exemplary of his tendency to make staggeringly unsubstantiated assumptions and cling to them no matter what. But it’s a trait which endures throughout the entire novel, even after the inevitable revelation of Gabriel’s past, and there’s only so much sympathy one can sustain for a protagonist who is clearly, inescapably moronic. Gabriel persists in seeing the world in terms of clear-cut absolutes, despite the regularity with which Alex Bell goes out of her way to paint it in shades of grey. Touches of irony encouraging the reader to laugh at Gabriel’s sheer wrongheadedness do provide some respite from his parade of idiocies, but it’s an irony so heavily telegraphed as to suggest Bell lacks faith in her reader’s intelligence:
‘Besides, I’m okay on my own. I’m certainly not one of those people who are for ever needing others to boost their sense of self-worth. For ever needing to be surrounded by friends and loved ones to tell them how wonderful they are all the time. That would be pathetic.’ (p.33)

While its narrator remains The Ninth Circle’s biggest flaw, there are a number of other problems which plague it. The voluminous superficiality of Gabriel’s emotional outpourings leaks into other areas, and Bell’s description often veers into the overwritten. Her sense of action, meanwhile, is somewhat lacking – a battle between angelic and demonic forces in the sky over Budapest should be an action highlight, but has so little impact that you barely remember it’s going on. Long, complex descriptive sentences do a poor job of conveying movement or intensity. Having the supernatural combatants take to the air, meanwhile, seems transparently contrived in order to move the action out of the foreground and save Bell from having to juggle it with other events.

Not that the reader is given much incentive to become particularly invested in those goings on, nor in the characters whose ons are going. When they’re not suffering the absurd compulsion to shout their current emotional state from the rooftops, Bell’s characters all too often throw out painfully self-conscious Tarantino-esque pop culture references, regardless of whether it’s appropriate to the moment, the character or the novel as a whole. What seems like it’s intended to make The Ninth Circle seem cool and hip and down with the kids instead come across as trying too hard.
“It’s because I don’t have a costume, isn’t it?” I wept. “You can’t be a real superhero without the spandex suit and the mask and the fucking cape!” …
“You mustn’t do that, you know. After all, superheroes only ever fought super-villains, not angels.” (p.238)
Hearing a demon nitpick like the Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy does somewhat squash any sense of drama, and doesn’t exactly help stabilise a novel so uneven in tone it’s practically capsized. Bell’s writing lacks the requisite wit to pull this off, and to add insult to inanity her aping of superior stylists also makes The Ninth Circle’s dialogue rather generic. Any sense of individuality is sacrificed on the altar of the achingly cool, smeared across multiple speakers with a broad-headed brush until you can only tell them apart by their nametags.

I haven’t really talked about the actual plot yet, you’ll notice. Mostly this is because the nature of the amnesiac protagonist makes it rather hard to talk about anything without giving too much away. It’s not awful, but there’s nothing there you haven’t seen before – no surprises, and not much in the way of original thought. This sort of book requires a light touch in foreshadowing its revelations, and what foreshadowing The Ninth Circle displays is either as subtle as a choir of  sign-waving angels or so abstruse as to foreshadow anything from to the Second Coming to the title of Dan Brown’s inevitable next moneyspinner.

‘Neil Gaiman meets the Bourne Identity’, The Ninth Circle’s back-cover blurb tells me, but that’s doing a disservice to them both. A reference to the Bourne series in particular is the kind of cultural shorthand which seems at both staggeringly lazy and somewhat spoileriffic, in the same way that mentioning ‘Fight Club’ alerts you to the probability of imaginary friends. And The Ninth Circle does seem to be the sort of cynically calculated novel which always tends to come in the wake of awakening public perception, riding the coattails of one or another runaway success. It’s the X-Factor of fantasy fiction, more interested in marketing than the quality of the product. Even the back of my reviewer’s copy notes Alex Bell as ‘massively promotable’ and ‘sure to gain extensive publicity coverage’, as if writing the words can make them true. Self-fulfilling prophecies don’t just self-fulfil, after all - you have to work at them. And Gollancz’s marketing department would probably be better off investing their hard work in something a little more assured.

This review was originally written for SFcrowsnest.com

Moxyland

Lauren Beukes
Angry Robot Books
978-0-00732-389-0


2018, in some unnamed South African city. Not that you’d know it was South Africa; apart from the occasional African flavour to the name of a character or location, everything in 'Moxyland' is so homogenised that this could be London, or Singapore, or Chicago. Everyone speaks the same, too – blending casual technobabble with casual profanity and teenage skaz, as they talk their way around the bleeding edge of popular culture and anti-establishment politics in a city where the former is trying too hard to shock and the latter is dangerous indeed. This is what the world looks like, once the internet has smeared any kind of cultural identity across all corners of the world and technology has infiltrated our lives to such an extent that to separate oneself from it is to separate oneself from society. Advertising is omnipresent, and intrusive on a level far beyond the webpage pop-ups and data-mined Facebook ads which niggle us today. Giant corporations exist on a separate plane from ’civilians’, their employees treated as a cut above the masses, while corporate executives hold complete control over every aspect of their workers’ lives – the feudal lords of a new world.

The most unsettling thing about 'Moxyland' is that this is a world clearly recognisable as a descendant of our own, the near-future setting making every erosion of civil liberties or cultural landslide all the more shocking for their proximity to events we read about in the news. This is a novel of horror and social realism as much as science fiction, taking the familiar and showing how easily it could turn on us. Our modern world is one in a state of tremendous flux, as the exponential curve of technological development clashes again and again with a social system no longer able to cope with it and too slow to adapt. 'Moxyland' is one way the world could develop, one frightening in its imminent possibility. Technology is integral here – your phone is housekey, communicator and bank card all rolled into one, and disconnection is a penalty more crippling than any physical punishment or prison sentence. The more centralised and automated the systems which govern your day to day life, the easier it is to control; 'Moxyland' is an examination of what happens when society forges its own chains, examining the balance between the technology of convenience and the surrender of freedom.

It’s also a chilling, effectively written novel. Its protagonists are an unlikeable group, for the most part: a self-centred celebrity wannabe, a short-tempered anarchist, a naïve artist who’s sold out, and a ruthless security programmer on the corporate fast track. They might not generate much early sympathy with the reader, and the slow burn of plot development can make the novel difficult to get into. The depth and pace of the society Lauren Beukes’ characters inhabit, however, and the sheer intricacy of the world she has built, are enough to pull you in. This is a place where corporate advertising departments put their brand – quite literally – on up-and-coming athletes, musicians and artists; where the fluffy, cartoon aesthetics of online gaming for the pre-teens does nothing to disguise the violence of the behaviour they propagate; where advertising hoardings squat unassailable in a sea of viciously intelligent barbed-wire; and the publicity-starved broadcast every moment of their lives on the internet in a hope of getting that one big break. In this teeming, dynamic city - so like the world we know, but yet so alien – subtle, back-seat character building lets those characters slide quietly under your skin. You might not like them, but by the time the novel builds to its climax you’ll certainly care what happens to them.

And 'Moxyland' isn’t a novel which lets its characters off light. Actions have repercussions, good guys don’t always win, and there are no easy answers. This uncertainty builds real tension as the novel progresses towards its climax, as the various strands of reality weave around each other and the relentless minimalism of Beukes’ style evokes an oppressive atmosphere to match that hanging over the city – a tension leading to an utterly terrifying scene in which the police deploy biological weapons as a crowd-control measure.

Worse than the moment when electric-shock devices built into the protesters’ phones are activated, worse than seeing the faceless riot police turn as one and march away, is the sugar-sweet recorded announcement as bio-agents fill the air, listing the progression of symptoms with merciless compassion and ending with the following:
‘South African Police Services strongly advises citizens exposed to the M7N1 Marburg variation for their protection to report to an immunity centre immediately. Should you be too weak to report to an immunity centre, please call the South African Police Services and we will dispatch a mobile service to collect you. Again, this service is free, provided in the interests of public health and safety. The South African Police Services are dedicated to serve. How can we help you?’ (p.219)
The disbelief of the protesters – and those simply caught in the wrong place and time – is something shared by the reader. Surely no government, no matter how divorced from its citizens, could travel so far down that path? But humanity has willingly placed the tools of fascism in the hands of those with the motive and the will to use them, men and women who care only for power - as one says, ‘any action is justified in a state under terrorist threat.’ (p.293). It doesn’t take much effort to recognise the parallels with recent history, or even with current affairs – the uncomfortable question Moxyland raises is whether it’s truly terrorist to oppose a system which no longer recognises the rights of its individual citizens. There is a line between terrorist and freedom fighter, that much is clear – but when does it get drawn, and who gets to do the drawing?



This review was originally written for SFcrowsnest.com

The Automatic Detective

A. Lee Martinez
Tor
ISBN: 978-0-7653-1834-3


Imagine you were a seven-hundred pound engine of destruction, built to enforce your master’s diabolical will and bring the world to its knees. If you developed a conscience, some essential spark of free will which led you to break free of evil henchrobot-hood, what would you do with it?

Mack Megaton drives a taxi. At least to start with, that is; destiny seems to have other plans, and events seem to be conspiring to fit him for an existential niche roughly the shape of Sam Spade. Before too long he’s snappily dressed in trenchcoat and fedora, searching for the lowlife who abducted his neighbours, and getting caught up in circumstances far above his pay grade. From the dazzling heights of Proton Towers to the radioactive depths of Venom Park, he’ll leave no cliché soft-boiled…

Everything about ‘The Automatic Detective’ is as familiar as well-worn shoes, from the tropes of Chandler-esque PI fiction to the setting itself. Mack lives in one of those Cities of the Future! (exclamation mark compulsory) we’ve seen on the covers of pulp SF magazines since the thirties, where flying cars zip through the street-space and robots mix with mutants, psychics and talking gorillas. Mad science isn’t just a hobby in Empire City, it’s a way of life. The Learned Council runs the place in their own special way, apparently by inventing every last lunatic technology that sparks their imagination and then dumping it on the streets when the next mad concept leaps to mind. As Mack himself says, when faced with one of their experimental vehicles blocking traffic:
‘Nothing got perfected in Empire before it was replaced by something better. The Big Brains loved science for science’s sake.’ (p.25)

Unfortunately, considering ‘The Automatic Detective’s aspirations to noir, A. Lee Martinez must have only got halfway through The Big Sleep, and skim-read over the best bits. This isn’t hardboiled so much as half-baked, aping the forms Chandler and Hammett made famous but failing to really understand what makes good noir tick. It’s not enough just to dress your protagonist up in pinstripes and hat; he has to walk the walk and talk the talk, too. Mack Megaton doesn’t have much of a talent for snappy dialogue, nor much of a taste for the bottle or a sleazy dame. Neither are much use to him, after all.

The lack of a femme fatale in particular damages ‘The Automatic Detective’s noir credentials; while the novel does have one strong female role, it’s not giving anything away to point out the tragic waste of a good opportunity in Lucia Napier. But much like Mack, she only looks the part. Instead she seems to fulfil that irritating narrative function labelled ‘deus ex machina’, i.e. to bail the protagonist out of trouble or provide whatever techno-whatsit he needs to overcome the problem of the moment.

But even more fatal a flaw is Mack’s sheer indestructibility, swiftly killing any sense of suspense before it can get up to speed. For all he might play the hard man, the appeal of any good hardboiled hero is in his fragility – both physical and emotional. Mack takes a knock or two, but by the climax of the novel he’s carving a swathe through the villains with an easy nonchalance that even an eighties action hero would envy.

As for the emotional side, Martinez deserves a little more credit here. Mack’s first-person narrative is detached, machine-like, with only little sparks of warmth – it’s an effective portrayal of how a robot on the cusp of true sapience might view his world, but it leaves the reader standing on the outside looking in. And the deeply formal language in which Mack describes his encounters with various science thugs can make even the most desperate situation seem tame, even ludicrous:
‘No matter how the variables shifted, my difference engine put the odds of escape at 0 percent in the current situation.’ (p.194)

For all that it damages ‘The Automatic Detective’ as a novel, the style of Mack’s narration does make for an interesting character study; those flashes of warmth, of humanity amidst the unfeeling drone, gives Mack a personality not unlike that of a child, learning to understand the world and how to respond to its complexities. The occasional chilling reversion to ‘engine of destruction’ amorality, meanwhile, does much to paint a picture of a character struggling to overcome the worst demons of his own nature:
‘Napier was right. I didn’t have mercy. Not that I wanted to hurt Ringo. His bones snapped too easily to give me much satisfaction.’ (p.119)
This nature/nature war going on inside its protagonist provides the novel with an interest the narrative itself seems to lack, and shows a level of thoughtfulness usually lacking in pulp.

While ‘The Automatic Detective’ isn’t much of a noir detective story, it might have been forgiven had Martinez dazzled his reader with science! (there’s that exclamation mark again) and wonder. But Empire City has none of the presence and evocative sense of place a novel like this needs; it’s a crayon sketch of a city, superficially effective until you get up close. Then you start to see the white bits in between the hypercolour whizz, and the bits where they’ve scrawled over the line. There’s no sense of how it all fits together, how it functions. Like the endlessly repeating backdrop in a scrolling cartoon chase sequence, Empire City doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Terry Pratchett said that an author ‘had to start out by wondering how the fresh water got in and the sewage got out’ (The Discworld Companion, p.475), and it’s advice A. Lee Martinez might want to take under advisement.

‘The Automatic Detective’ seems to be aiming to blend pulp detective and pulp sci-fi, but ends up doing a fairly half-arsed job of both. It’s a pleasant read, diverting enough and undemanding despite some unexpected depth to its protagonist. But if Mack Megaton’s still looming large in the back alleys of your brain a week after you’re done reading, I’ll eat my fedora.



This review was originally written for SFcrowsnest.com

Swiftly

Adam Roberts
Golancz
978-0-575-08232-8


This is an odd one. Adam Roberts’ Swiftly announces itself as a 280-year-delayed sequel to Gulliver’s Travels, that immortal satire which aims its scattershot wit at every aspect of human society from academic hubris to the absurdities of economic inequality. It seems reasonable therefore to expect a similar brand of overt satire from Roberts, but while Swiftly has a lot to say, it unfortunately forgets to keep its reader entertained.

Set a hundred and twenty years after Gulliver’s last journey, Swiftly posits a world where the great European powers have done precisely what they did so well, when presented with an alien culture: moved in and exploited its resources for everything they’re worth. Tiny Lilliputian and Blefuscan slaves produce fine embroidery and clockwork, while regiments of berserker Yahoos and ‘sapient cavalry’ serve in the armies of France and England.

The hero of the novel, Abraham Bates, makes his first appearance as an advocate of rights for these ‘Pacificans’, as the varied inhabitants of Gulliver’s travelogue are collectively known. Yet Roberts immediately goes out of his way to deny Bates the moral high ground; it isn’t with slavery as a whole that Bates disagrees, but that the tiny workers are white. ‘God has allotted slavery to one portion of his creation, and marked that portion by blackening their skins…’ (p.11) he tells an owner of Blefuscan slaves, before being ejected from the premises. Bates’ is a pompous, moralising twit, whose attack-dog religiousness disguises a deep-seated self loathing. So disgusted is he by his own sinful thoughts and deeds that he wields his religion against others in a kind of masochism by proxy.

This first chapter, pitting Bates against the factory owner Jonathan Burton and detailing Swiftly’s England, is superbly written. The characterisation, as described above, is excellent, and Roberts does a decent job of extrapolating a functional world from the fantastical elements of Gulliver’s Travels while deftly satirising the moral elasticity of Bates’ Christianity. Even as the man betrays his country and French-allied Brobdignagian giants march on London, he’s convincing himself with every thought that his actions are righteous.

Then the focus moves away from Bates, skipping back in time and introducing another main character: Eleanor Davis, soon to marry the industrialist Burton, whose Blefuscan slaves Bates objected to. As with Bates, Eleanor is a fascinating and flawed character who draws and keeps the interest, reminding us in her naivety of nineteenth-century heroines from Eliot through to Austen, but bucking the trend with a streak of cold, clinical curiosity quite at odds with the usual Victorian stereotypes of the emotional, unreasoning woman. As with Bates, the reader’s sympathy is tested by her calculating coldness, as she resolves to ‘pin one down and bring an enlarging glass over them and have a proper look’ (p.72).

Roberts continues in the same vein, building on the undercurrent of sly satire winding through these two lengthy character studies, but the strong realist grounding of the first half gives way to a stream of metamorphoses in the second; now a war story, now a twisted love story, now farce.

All this tonal fluctuation weakens the sense of narrative and lessens the sense of consequence felt from the characters actions. Bates in particular seems a different man every time we meet him, as Roberts refuses both hero and reader the time between dramatic, life-changing events they require in order to reflect upon and internalise the lessons learned. As such Bates’ character arc seems jagged and broken, developing arbitrarily from tightly-wound moraliser to coprophiliac adulterer to war hero (of a sort) with little more than token gestures towards introspection.

Instead, as Roberts’ careful character-building falls by the wayside, we hurry through something of a grand tour of nineteenth century fiction. Brobdignagian giants striding up the Thames evoke the alien tripods of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds (or the artwork of Jeff Wayne’s musical version, at least to me); Eleanor’s conflicting attitudes towards her husband remind the reader of Middlemarch’s naïve Dorothea, while her mother’s venal attitudes towards the same evoke Pride and Prejudice’s Mrs Bennet; even Jules Verne’s moon-shooting cannon makes an appearance.

Yet this isn’t just a series of throwaway references, but thoughtful intertextuality which brings an additional dimension to the work. Mrs Davis, for example, might seem superficially similar to Mrs Bennet, an object of gentle (or not so gentle) mockery, but just as in Pride and Prejudice that surface layer is deceptive; both women understand the harsh realities of the world far better than their families. As a widow raising her daughter alone on the fringes of nineteenth-century London society, the lengths Mrs Davis is forced to in order to provide for both her daughter and herself are a logical extension of Mrs Bennet’s compulsive desire to ensure her daughters’ financial stability; a powerful condemnation of the way rigid societal structures force individuals to debase themselves. Yet while Swift condemns with satire, and Austen with irony, Roberts plays it more or less straight.

The result, unfortunately, is that Swiftly isn’t really very funny. Gulliver’s Travels wore its learning lightly, and however biting its satire it never ceased to raise a smile. Swiftly, by comparison, is heavy going and frequently drenched in gloom. Bates self-loathing permeates those chapters he dominates, while Eleanor’s detachment casts a chill over hers. Roberts’ Lilliputians and Blefuscans are inscrutable, cruel and alien; his giant Brobdingnagians are similarly alien, viewing the workings of mankind with a ponderous, philosophical melancholy. Only the cocaine-addled Dean of York, who accompanies Bates and Eleanor thorough an England increasingly resembling something from the book of Revelations, provides a streak of broad humour (at the expense of the church).

Despite the meandering second act, things pick up again towards the end of the novel, particularly in a stunning sequence where Eleanor watches a battle between French and British troops as if from the viewpoint of God. There’s also much to admire in Roberts’ world-building, as he extrapolates a fully-functional reality from the tools of satire. He extends the implications of Swift’s creations with precise, sometimes terrifying logic, and the philosophical arguments regarding man’s place in the grander scheme of things are thought-provoking. The novel simply seems to lack any real pleasure in the reading.

Perhaps I’m looking at this the wrong way, analysing Roberts’ work in terms of its illustrious predecessor, but a book calling itself Swiftly creates certain expectations of social comment and knife-edged wit. The former is present, but the latter? Perhaps it’s just too tiny to detect.


All page references are taken from an uncorrected manuscript proof.

This review was originally written for SFcrowsnest.com

Armageddon’s Children

Terry Brooks
Orbit
ISBN: 978-1-84149-480-7


Armageddon’s Children sports the subtitle ‘every legend has a beginning’, but a crueller man than me might consider mentioning more suitable ones. ‘How to kill your sense of wonder’, perhaps, or ‘Leave no cash cow unmilked’. No, wait, I just mentioned them. Get your own.

This, then, is the first in the long unwaited-for trilogy bridging Terry Brooks’ The Word and the Void and Shannara series’. The knightly protagonist of the former, John Ross, was plagued with visions of the nightmarish future which awaited humanity if he should fail to defend it from demons of the Void, while the Shannara books have always hinted at the idea that they were wallowing in the ruins of a post-apocalyptic Earth. In the later series’ particularly, said hints had all the subtlety of a thermonuclear exchange, and true to the trend Armageddon’s Children substantiates all those prophecies and hints with gleeful disregard for any sense of tact or, well, sensitivity.

Yet bizarrely, leaving aside for the moment the question as to whether this book needed to be written at all, Brooks for some reason cheats even those die-hard fans who really did want all their dots connected. Armageddon’s Children kicks off fifty years in the future, long after the last missile fell to Earth, and his characters are too young to remember the Apocalypse. Certainly there are good reasons to pass over the end of the world: doing so allows Brooks to avoid all the hoary clichés of apocalypse-in-motion, while giving Armageddon the attention it deserves would probably require another trilogy’s worth of fiction before this one even got started. There might be another reason, though; the authorial freedom granted by a few years’ disconnect between the impossibly complex reality of modern life and Brooks’ post-nuclear landscape. The world of Armageddon’s Children isn’t a natural evolution of the one we know, or even a decent attempt at it; it’s a cardboard cutout, flat and stale. There’s no sense of organic history, of how these terrible developments might have come about. Just same tired clichés trotted out. Walled compounds filled with semi-benevolent fascists: check. Packs of feral street kids roaming the ruined cities: check. Giant mutant beasties, made giant and mutant through the miracle of radiation! Check.

And of course the armies of marauding raiders, devoid of humanity or reason; what self-respecting post-apocalyptia would be complete without them? And in case you didn’t know about them, Brooks lays them bare before his reader in the first chapter:

The real enemies were the once-men, humans subverted not by radiation and chemicals but by false promises which went something like this: “Do you want to know what it will take to survive? A willingness to do what is needed. The world has always belongs to the strongest…”
Once they embraced the propaganda of the demons, they fell quickly into the thicket of resulting madness. (p.11)

The tragedy of what men must do in order to survive? No, it’s demon propaganda making them Bad Men. In half a page of amateur psychoanalysis, Brooks builds a ghetto fence down the centre of his book: good on this side, evil on the other. Good guys, you have your orders: kill the evil ones with impunity, and without remorse. They’re evil, after all.

It might be a genre trope of high fantasy, but in a gritty post-apocalyptic setting like this such black and white distinctions tend to erode the suspension of disbelief somewhat. And Brooks’ reductive tendencies also deftly render the once-men fairly useless as any kind of credible threat; they’re predictable, one-dimensional and boring, entirely free of suspense. And sure enough for the rest of the book they’re little more than pop-up targets for the heroes to eliminate, like some apocalyptic game of whack-a-mole.

It’s possible that my mistake is in identifying Armageddon’s Children as gritty, however; when nine-tenths of the world’s population has been wiped out and demons roam the earth, you might think you’d be justified in assuming a little grit. But Brooks’ ruined Earth is like the painted backdrop of a theatrical production; it looks the part, but has nothing to do with what’s actually happening on-stage. Instead we get a peculiarly PG-rated version of apocalyptia, where cutesy ‘Street Kids’ play baseball in the mutant-haunted ruins and even the mean and moody ghetto stereotypes refuse to swear:
“You’re out!” shouted Sparrow.
“Out!” Panther laughed. “No frickin’ way!”
“Out!” Sparrow repeated …
Panther picked up the broomstick, waved it her threateningly, and then threw it down again. “What are you talking about? That don’t count! ...”
“It hit you last, and you’re out!”
“You’re frickin’ crazy!”
Sparrow stalked over to him, brushing her mop of straw-coloured hair out of her blue eyes, brow furrowed in anger. “Don’t talk to me like that! Don’t use that street language on me, Panther Puss! Owl, tell him he’s out!” (pp.170-171)
…and so on, like some bizarre amalgam of On the Beach and The House at Pooh Corner.

But the most jarring moment comes about halfway through the book, when the narrative turns its focus on a young Elf caring for the magical Ellcrys, the tree which maintained the Forbidding which kept demonkind in check since the time of Faerie. And if you’re wondering what on earth that sort of high-fantasy language is doing in a post-apocalyptic setting, you’re not alone. It’s as though Brooks forgot which series he was writing for a couple of chapters, and slipped into Shannara without realising. Yes, this is supposed to be the series which bridges the gap between the modern world and Shannara’s high fantasy, but the change of tone is so sudden and jarring that the book never really recovers. If the world is slowly slipping into magic and wonder, shouldn’t the subtlety of the transformation be reflected in the written style? There are any number of ways Brooks could have allowed the fantastic to seep into his apocalypse; the sudden plunge into fantasy tropes we’re given here smacks of nothing more than laziness.

Nonetheless, it’s a change that even the more grounded characters seem to accept with little more than token protest. Witness the baffling moment when Angel Perez, paladin of the Word, is sent off in search of an Elfstone:

Angel scowled, angry now. “Elves created it? You’re saying there are Elves out there? What does that mean? Look, I don’t know what any of this is about. I don’t know anything about Elves and their stones. I’m a barrio girl, a street girl, never even been this far north before in my life, and this Elf stuff is just words that don’t mean anything. You want to tell me what you’re talking about?” (pp.232-3)

Thanks for explaining yourself so thoroughly, Angel. But one short burst of expository dialogue later, she’s quite at home with the idea:

Well, she thought, if you’d accepted that tatterdemalions were real, how big of a jump was it to believe in Elves? (p.233)

How big of a jump indeed? Again, it’s a difficult line to walk; the conversion of the sceptic is a hoary old cliché of contemporary fantasy, and it would have been hard to do it well. But even retreading old ground would have been preferable to the writer’s fiat Brooks employs again and again in Armageddon’s Children.

Better to have left the genesis of Shannara alone than do it badly; at least that way fans of Brooks’ earlier work would still have a mystery to hold onto, to wonder and to talk about. But Brooks has taken that raw potential, that untapped possibility which excites the imagination, and wrung it dry to produce a very ordinary book. Which is such a shame.


This review was originally written for SFcrowsnest.com

Star Wars: Dark Lord - Rise of Darth Vader

James Luceno
Ballantine Books
0-345-47732-4

At the height of the Clone Wars, as Jedi are betrayed and the Emperor’s dark new order rises from the ashes of the Galactic Republic, Jedi Master Roan Shryne and his companions manage to escape the clone troopers seeking their deaths and go on the run. But there is one thing they could never account for – the Emperor’s sinister right-hand man, Darth Vader, assigned to hunt down those few Jedi to escape the massacre. Yet that mysterious black-armoured warrior, once the brightest star of the Jedi Order, finds himself struggling not only with the task at hand and the crippling injuries sustained in his last battle with his former master, but also with the burden of guilt at the betrayal of his friends and colleagues.

Unfortunately Anakin Skywalker was no less petulant and self-pitying at the end of Revenge of the Sith than he was at the beginning. Where was Star Wars’ malevolent, implacable crusher of throats? If ever there was a character in need of a good smack around the back of the head it was Anakin, and for all its melodrama Revenge just didn’t deliver. James Luceno’s unenviable task, then, was to polyfilla over the gaping plot holes George Lucas left and give those few Star Wars fans not yet choking to death on their own bile a decent emotional through-line. The mutilated, snivelling manchild still had to become Darth Vader, dammit!

And to give Luceno credit, he does an adequate job. The self-pity that Anakin wallows in at the novel’s opening quickly dwindles in the face of the Emperor’s emotional manipulations, and the decapitated heads of Jedi mark the excision of each scrap of humanity like morbid milestones. Vader’s hunt for the fugitive Roan Shryne is interspersed with periods of emotional self-interrogation which show quite effectively, if a little heavy-handedly, how the headstrong boy grew into a monster.

Just about the most interesting part of Dark Lord is the way Luceno balances Vader’s emotional development with that of his nominal hero, Roan Shryne. Vader’s star might be rising, but at the novel opens Shryne doesn’t even have one. He’s lost his faith in the Force, and feels inadequate to the task of training the bright-eyed Padawan he’s inheriting from a dead friend. The near-extermination of the Jedi order is just another crushing weight on his shoulders, but Luceno develops him with just the right lightness of touch. And the way the fortunes of Vader and Shryne seem to intertwine, their emotions and decisions forcing the other character off in new and unexpected directions, makes for an interesting and dramatically narrative – and a surprisingly tense climax, considering the inevitable survival of one participant.

For those looking for something a little more space-opera and a little less introspective, there’s all the usual furniture of a Star Wars novel – sleazy space-bars, heroic smugglers, unnecessarily complex sub-plots, exotically themed planets and the cross-eyed marksmanship of stormtroopers. It’s decent enough diversion, and the description of the Wookie homeworld is powerful enough to almost redeem the fact that it allows bloody Chewbacca to be shoe-horned into yet another Star Wars novel. All the standard parts are present and correct, and trotted out with the regularity of somebody running their way down a checklist. Yet I feel I’m missing something…

Ah, of course. The lightsaber battles. Well, there are lots of them.

But the problem with swordfights, particularly ones involving improbable laser-based weaponry, is that they look better on screen than on the page. Without a first-rate writer to make something fresh of the action, it’s about as interesting as reading a kendo manual. So it is in the case of Dark Lord – dry description of slashes and parries doesn’t mean very much unless you can visualise what’s happening. It’s a knack, and James Luceno doesn’t really have it. Instead he’s made the common mistake of confusing dramatic conflict with physical violence, the result of which was me skim-reading over the fight scenes in search of something more substantial.

While there is meat on these bones, particularly in the parallel development of Vader and Shryne, overall Dark Lord isn’t the richest of feasts. It’s a diverting few hours, but that’s time which could be better spent. Read Matthew Stover’s Revenge of the Sith novelisation instead, if you haven’t already; James Luceno’s offering just isn’t quite convincing enough to lift it off my ‘Star Wars by the numbers’ shelf.


This review was originally written for SFcrowsnest.com

The Complete Chronicles of Conan

Robert E. Howard
Gollancz
0-575-07766-2


These are the tales of Conan the Cimmerian, whose life of slaughter and thievery leads him from lost cities to decadent ones, from the deepest jungles to the dark heart of underground kingdoms, and pitted him against warriors, foul sorcerers, and supernatural horrors summoned from nightmarish realms. He is the quintessential barbarian, whose animal cunning and primitive strength of arms has carried him from humble beginnings amid the uncivilised tribes of the north to the throne of the greatest kingdom of the Hyborian Age and back to the gutter again.

Robert E. Howard’s stories of Conan, first published in pulp magazines over seventy years ago, are considered some of the most definitive works of fantasy ever written. Together with Tolkien, Zelany, Vance and a handful of other great names, Howard stands as the cornerstone upon which much of modern fantasy is based. But how well have his tales stood the test of time?

The Complete Chronicles contains twenty-seven stories, varying from a few pages to near two hundred, and Howard’s own invented history of the Hyborian Age. An afterword details Howard’s life and the development of Conan from pulp pages to comic book hero to Hollywood, while an appendix and a map detailing the various people and kingdoms of the Hyborian Age provide additional depth to Conan‘s world. But it is the stories themselves which are the core of this compilation, and Howard’s visceral, emotive storytelling makes for some powerful tales of adventure.

His hero is an old-fashioned one, straight-forward in both his desires and his approach to realising them. Quick to anger, larger than life, and a paragon of physical prowess, Conan is the very archetype of the barbarian warrior. However, in reading Howard’s stories together they all begin to blend into one. While Conan’s adventures take him to fantastic locations and pit him against terrible foes, little stands out but the Cimmerian himself. The women who stand at his side are invariably weak and timid stereotypes of the fainting heroine, unable to resist the barbarian‘s fierce passion. Only Bêlit, the eponymous co-heroine of ‘Queen of the Black Coast’, shows any real deviation from this pattern and even she can do nothing to resist Conan’s feral charms. The exotic locations Conan visits are wildly imaginative and richly painted, but serve only as a backdrop to the barbarian’s exploits and as such are given little depth in their own right. As for the villains of each piece, they range from ancient iron giants to monstrous snake-demons to greedy merchants. But the most common of Conan’s foes is the dark magician, whose sorcery calls upon creatures from beyond the pale… so many versions of the same character, with little difference between them but their names. Another, more uncomfortable trend is the common portrayal of black people as unsophisticated, brutish and bestial. While it might be understood as a result of the period in which the stories were written, this aspect of the tales is no less distasteful for it.

However, the main cause of the tales’ similarity is their sharing of the same basic narrative template. A woman is threatened by some dark beast or sorcerer, and Conan confronts the villain and defeats them through sheer force of arms. An effective story generally requires some sort of significant challenge, the possibility of the hero’s failure. But this is Conan, and there is no spell or supernatural horror that he can’t defeat through stubborn will and straightforward violence. Such a simplistic structure makes for unsatisfying conclusions, a trend not helped by the lack of any real resolution. Conan kills things and goes on his way, caring little for loose ends or the devastation he leaves in his wake. Each story ends in much the same place as it starts, but with a woman in Conan’s arms. By the time the next story begins, however, she has vanished as if she had never been. James Bond would be proud.

Howard’s stories of Conan are sexist, rife with unsettling hints of racism, and struggle to show any real depth. They do contain, however, what is without a doubt some of the most exciting and visceral fantasy ever written. This is a book to be dipped into rather than devoured whole, and in such small doses the tales’ flaws are concealed behind a fast-moving rush of action and adventure. As a result ‘The Complete Conan’ will find a place on my ‘all style no substance’ shelf, where I can get to it quick when I need an antidote for more complex tales.


This review was originally written for SFcrowsnest.com