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The Stone Chameleon
by Nick Wood
(Maskew Miller Longman, Young Africa Series, 92 pages, published 2004,
ISBN 0636062554.)
Review by Nick Gifford
 This
is an intriguing one: science fiction/fantasy for young adults, set
in South Africa, and also set reading in that country,
having been placed on schools' reading lists aimed at readers for whom
English is a second language.
YA fiction tends to be covered at infinity plus
either when it has potential to crossover to the adult market, or where
the author is of interest to the site's readers for other reasons. This
one falls into the second category (Nick Wood wrote the haunting African
Shadows, featured elsewhere in infinity plus)
- while The Stone Chameleon has plenty of charm it's not likely
to work for most adult readers purely on its own merits.
Taking it for what it is, though - an engaging adventure for teenagers
- it stands up well. On his first day at school, Kerem finds himself
an innocent pawn caught between two gangs fighting for control - and
with his head forced down the toilet. Surely things can only get better
... They do, after a fashion, as Kerem finds his feet, refusing to conform
to peer pressure and managing to find a small number of friends he can
trust.
What makes this of interest to genre readers is its rather odd mix
of science fiction and fantasy tropes. I'm always a bit uncomfortable
when authors mix these two genres in the same story: while SF and fantasy
sit side-by-side in the bookshops, they tend to do very different things
in the pages of a book. I love good SF, I love good fantasy, but it's
very hard to find a blend of the two that works as well as either taken
neat. To his credit, Nick Wood makes a pretty good fist of it. This
is SF because it's set in 2030, and one of the gangs includes members
with bodiliy modifications: the features of wild animals grafted on
for show ... and for more practical applications. This is fantasy because,
after a rather lengthy build-up, The Stone Chameleon turns into
a quest story involving a lost artefact, an animal with special powers,
ancient wisdom.
On balance, it works better as a fantasy than as SF: while the quest
is central the SF trappings only really serve to add a few neat touches.
If the author had concentrated on making it a real fantasy story, launching
into it sooner and developing the themes of ancient knowledge, this
could really have been something special; on the other hand, the early
passages suggest very strongly that Wood could write excellent gritty,
contemporary stories in this setting. As it is, The Stone Chameleon
falls somewhere in between, a book with merit and which will probably
work well with a young audience, but which might have been far more.
Elsewhere in infinity plus:
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