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Across the Sea of Genre
John Grant revels in the diverse
Three reviews:
Vitals
by Greg Bear
(US edition: Del Rey, $24.95, hardback. UK edition: Voyager, £17.99,
342 pages, 2 April 2002, ISBN: 0007124023.)
The Visitor
by Sheri S Tepper
(US edition: Eos, $25.95, hardcover, 416 pages, 26 March 2002, ISBN:
0380979055. UK editions: Gollancz, hardback, £17.99, 416 pages,
18 July 2002, ISBN: 0575074159. Gollancz, trade paperback, £10.99,
416 pages, 18 July 2002, ISBN: 0575074167. Gollancz, £6.99, 407 pages,
mass market paperback, 10 April 2003.)
The Dragon Queen
by Alice Borchardt
(Del Rey, hardcover, $25.00, 480 pages, 30 October 2001, ISBN: 0345443993.)
This is a column about three fantasy novels. To be sure, two of them
would be more generally described as science fiction, but we should
bear in mind the final, all-encompassing definition of sf as promulgated
by none other than this reviewer, who should therefore know if anyone
does: "Science fiction is that subgenre of fantasy which panders to
the scientific pretensions of its readers and writers." So here are
three novels which, between them, cover the full spectrum of fantasy
from hard(ish) sf to the purest stuff itself.
I suppose that Greg Bear's Vitals is more likely
to find its way onto the technothriller shelves than  the
hard sf ones, despite Bear's excellent credentials in the latter discipline.
Gene scientist Hal Cousins is a researcher into immortality, his approach
being that Death entered the ecosystem not at the same time as the emergence
of Earth's first lifeforms but some little while after. Accordingly
he retrieves from the deep ocean trenches some of the most primordial
organisms there are, and finds that indeed his hunch is backed up by
the facts. What he doesn't know is that others have been here before
him; not only are they murderously eager to protect their secret but
they have learnt how to use what are effectively the same techniques
to create insane monsters out of the innocent. Researchers into longevity,
including Cousins's own brother, are being knocked off on all sides,
and it is soon brought dramatically to his attention -- not least by
the endeavours of an enigmatic eccentric called Rudy Banning -- that
he's more or less next on the list. Naturally, Cousins teams up with
those he assumes are the good guys in order to counter the secret tyranny
of the quasi-immortals...
This is all promising stuff, of course. Throw in a loony scientist
or three -- which Bear dutifully does -- and you have all the makings
of the standard technothriller. The trouble is that Bear, while getting
the "techno" part right, paints in the "thriller" aspects as if by numbers.
Yes, there's the paranoia of not knowing whether any particular character
among the goodies can actually be trusted, because the baddies have
spies and double agents everywhere; and there's the added paranoia that
the insane-monster syndrome can be spread merely by touch, the more
intimate the better. But the reader is only halfway through the first
quick paranoid frisson when a recently introduced addition to the band
of goodies promptly starts boffing our hero, behaviour unusual in one
who's only just been bereaved of a spouse. Well, lemme guess, Watson,
who the traitor might be...
Those fairly detailed sex scenes are about as erotic as a catalogue:
"Positions #41 (lite version, omitting live octopus), #76 and #129-#131
inclusive", perhaps. Similarly, there are shoot-ups galore, but they
appear on the page as dry, accurate and somehow rather academic descriptions
of events rather than as incidents in which one feels at all involved:
as per a police report, there is no whiff of blood or gunpowder in the
reader's nostrils.
Bear is manifestly capable of much more enthralling writing than
this, and one can only assume -- perhaps wrongly, but this is the way
the book feels -- that this essay at the technothriller discipline
was born more of a desire to move into a subgenre where sales, and hence
royalty earnings, are generally rather higher than for sf proper, that
the lack of excitement in the book reflects a lack of genuine interest
on the author's part.
Sheri S. Tepper is an author who has probably  never
written an uninvolved novel in her life -- although a few of her earliest
attempts are somewhat rote and some of her efforts of the 1990s smack
a little of the formulaic (although, to be fair, the formula is one
of her own devising). In the course of her extremely distinguished career
she has established a sub-subgenre of her own that so far doesn't really
have a proper descriptive term in the critic's vocabulary. A good term
would be "science fantasy", except that that's already been largely
appropriated for tales of sword 'n' sorcery on exotic planets where
technological development has come grinding to a halt with the invention
of the unwashed loincloth. Yet Tepper's novels suit the term far better
than this: for the most part they can be read either as fantasies that
are eventually shown to have a scientific rationale or as exercises
in sf that nevertheless deploy all the tropes and characteristics of
high fantasy. Such matters of definition, of course, are hardly germane
to the average reader, who sensibly ignores them altogether and just
judges each book according to whether or not it's any good.
Tepper's novels are generally not just good but extremely good.
Even the weaker among her recent offerings -- such as Singer from
the Sea, The Family Tree and especially Gibbon's Decline
and Fall -- are nevertheless more interesting and conceptually challenging
than most other novels on the fantasy/sf shelves. Still, there's been
the undoubted sense that it was about time for Tepper to return to the
very peak of her form, and this April saw that joyous event with the
publication of The Visitor.
It's fair to say that the plot begins with the discovery  by
astronomers, in the near future, that a rogue cosmic body is on an impact
trajectory towards Earth. Accurate but misleading, I should hastily
add before your eyes glaze and images of Bruce Willis and a team of
moronic but plucky, goddammit plucky all-Amurkan miners come
to mind. This is not a disaster novel in any accepted sense of the term.
The main action concerns the aftermath of the holocaust that occurs
when the object hits, but not the immediate aftermath; instead the setting
is many generations later, when science is, as it were, a dead language
and the route to knowledge is seen as lying along the road of magic
-- more specifically necromancy. This future Earth is a world in which
the case for magic is actually quite a good one, for supernatural monsters
-- with some of whom humankind operates in uneasy alliance and of others
humans are rightly terrified -- are all over the place. The biggest
and most psychically powerful of all these monsters is the Visitor itself,
the main raison d'être for the coming to this planet of
that rogue celestial object: the Visitor squats enigmatically over much
of the Arctic, but is known to have the ability to move elsewhere should
circumstances so advise.
Central to the tale is a typical Tepper heroine: a young orphan
called Dismé Latimer. She possesses a book that is seemingly
incomprehensible but which she eventually deciphers as the diary of
her ancestor Nell Latimer, one of the scientists who documented the
course of the Visitor's unorthodox spacecraft as it sped towards the
Earth. More, Nell and select bands of other scientists took the precaution,
before the impact, of setting themselves into cryogenic sleep at various
centres throughout the world, emerging from their slumbers in widely
separated shifts to observe their descendants' rebuilding (or, more
like it, building anew) of civilization.
There are delicious baddies galore, both human and supernatural;
and in due course there is what is in effect a Last Battle straight
from more traditional high fantasy ... which, I would argue, is what
The Visitor actually is. And this is what's so exciting about
this book, I feel: where before Tepper has written fantasies that are
finally rationalized to become science fiction, with The Visitor
she at last takes the obvious next step. Yes, there are many of the
trappings of sf here -- aliens, a far future Earth, classy human technology,
and so on -- but at the end all is not rationalized: extraterrestrial
in origin those monsters and indeed some of the goodies might be, but
that doesn't affect in the slightest their status as beings of the supernatural,
rather than of physical reality. What Tepper has done is to create a
full-blooded fantasy -- and a superbly realized, gorgeously readable
one at that -- that just happens to be set in a sciencefictional venue
and draws upon some aspects of science and technology (and sf) as elements
of that fantasy.
One might be tempted to come out with the old cliché that, if
you're going to buy just one book this Spring, then The Visitor
should be it, but actually there've been a lot of extremely good books
in the field of fantastic fiction these past few months. A few that
come randomly to mind  are
Harry Squires's What Rough
Beast, George Foy's The
Last Harbor, Richard Paul Russo's Ship
of Fools, Robert Katz's Edward
Maret and of course Michael Moorcock's The
Dreamthief's Daughter, while a couple of glorious revised reissues
have been Nancy Collins's Tempter
and especially Sylvia Louise Engdahl's long-neglected Enchantress
from the Stars -- one of the best sf novels ever published,
but published into the YA ghetto. (The new YA imprint Firebird is shortly
to release the paperback of the Enchantress reissue.) And also
there's been Alice Borchardt's The Dragon Queen.
Borchardt, you will recall, was the author much heralded a while
back as doing for werewolves what Anne Rice had done for vampires; accordingly,
and particularly because he'd read a couple of the early Borchardts,
this reviewer opened The Dragon Queen with a certain deeply rooted
feeling of malaise. What, he wondered, might Borchardt do with the tale
of Guinevere, Arthur's queen? Little reassurance is to be gained from
the fact that the very first character we're introduced to is ... a
werewolf. (Well, OK, he's a shapeshifter who alternates between man
and wolf, but that's splitting bristles.) The book almost went back
on the shelf in the wake of that discovery, but very, very fortunately
it didn't.
Arthurian fantasies do tend to be much of a muchness: some are
better than others, but almost all are written in similar style and
have similar preoccupations -- one that is outstandingly different in
both style and mood is the Fay Sampson series Daughter of Tintagel,
which is a sort of oral history of Morgan Le Fay, but it's well out
on its own limb (and excitingly so). Guinevere is generally treated
as the least interesting of the central Arthurian characters: a sort
of bimbo for the Age of Chivalry.
Not in Borchardt's book she ain't. The version of the Arthurian
cycle rendered in The Dragon Queen is a completely revisionist
one. The villain of the piece is Merlin, here rendered as a youthful
necromancer with an almost insane lust for power and power-broking.
He is ably assisted by his lover, Arthur's mother, Queen Igrane, her
youthful beauty preserved by foul necromantic means. Guinevere, who
tells much of the story herself, is orphaned in infancy and reared by
a family of (were)wolves, headed by the wily Maeniel; the family is
shortly joined by the fussy rebel druid Dugald and the freed slave Kyra
(one of the best characters in the book). The girl-child has an affinity
for dragons, which are an accepted if rare part of the ecosystem in
Dark Age Britain; she also has a natural aptitude for magic and, most
importantly, a spiritual identification with the Fertility Goddess,
here rendered under various names, including Athena and the Flower Bride,
but generally appearing simply as "She", no proper noun being required.
From the description so far you might still be tempted to think
that The Dragon Queen is going to be just yet another feminist-slanted
rehash of the standard Arthurian fodder, with a few dragons chucked
in to give the cover artist something evocative to work with. Nothing
could be further from the truth. Borchardt uses her materials, some
traditional but many of them original, to create a fully fledged work
of the fantastic that is wildly imaginative and astonishingly exhilarating.
One symptom of true fantasy (as opposed to the generic pap we're most
often fed) is that the reader hasn't a clue what to expect in the next
chapter but that, when the chapter in question arrives, filled with
fresh and unanticipated marvels, it seems to belong rationally to the
whole, whatever the logical system upon which the novel is based. Lewis
Carroll's Alice Through the Looking-glass is a fine example of
a fantasy based on a highly non-mundane logical system, yet it passes
this test; and The Dragon Queen is another. For neither Guinevere
nor Arthur, preordained to be a breeding pair yet beating the system
by genuinely falling in love, spend all their time in this world, being
cast often instead, by the magical machinations of their elders, into
otherworlds of varying degrees of strangeness, from a truly bizarre
Land of the Dead to unnamed lands where "alive" and "dead" are merely
arbitrary terms.
Looking along the dreary bookstore shelves filled with myriad interchangeable
titles of the general form Quest of the Dragonspume Volume VI: The
Realms of Kumquat, one often has the dispiriting sense that high
fantasy, for misguided commercial reasons, has departed the realm of
fantastic literature to become an adjunct of the bodice-busting romance;
it is a dismal truth that this is more or less an accurate statement
of the case. The Dragon Queen, which -- joy! joy! -- has no central
quest, no kitchen-boy-who-will-come-to-the-throne, no wise old mage
apt to produce Dale Carnegie-style pronouncements, and no twee elves,
is, like Tepper's The Visitor, a timely and heartening reminder
that the potential of the discipline is still as great as ever.
Review by John Grant.
Elsewhere in infinity
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