THE WALLS OF THE UNIVERSE
By Paul Melko
Tor, $25.95 (hc)
ISBN: 978-0-7653-1997-5
Melko takes on a classic SF theme and gives it an up-to-date feel—as well as a fair number of very satisfactory twists.
The story, expanded from the Asimov’s Readers’ Award winning novella of the same name, is built around John Rayburn, an eighteen-year-old farm boy from Ohio, who has a more or less normal life at the point when the tale begins. He’s a starter on the school basketball team, has a good record in school, is a bit shy around girls, and works hard on the family farm. He’s just gotten in a bit of a scrape after beating up another kid in school, but he can probably get out of it without serious consequences. The victim, Ted Carson, is a known troublemaker, and an apology will probably smooth things over.
Then, in the midst of an argument with his parents over the apology, John stomps out of the house into the night and encounters—himself. John Prime (as the other John designates himself) introduces himself as a traveler from a parallel universe. He convinces John to hide him in the barn overnight.
Then, playing on John’s natural curiosity, Prime talks him into trying the device that transfers him to another universe—and the ride is on. Prime says John can return home after twelve hours, the time it takes the battery to recharge. That, however, is a lie. John quickly discovers that the device only works in one “direction.” He can move to a new universe with the push of a button, but he can’t go back to any of those he’s been in—most definitely not his own. Prime has stolen his home, his parents, his entire life.
Prime doesn’t really want all the benefits of John’s accomplishments. He has no idea of how to play basketball, no interest in apologizing to Carson’s family, and no intention of going to college. His plan is simple: get rich quick by using ideas that have made huge amounts of money in other universes. (Stephen King novels and Rubik’s Cube are two of them.) And while he’s at it, he strikes up a relationship with Casey, a cheerleader whose analogue Prime has seduced in one universe after another—and whom John had longed for at a distance.
Melko splits the plot between the two Johns, as they find their way in worlds they aren’t quite at home in. A reprise of Prime’s journeys before finding John shows just how dangerous some of those worlds are: a North America where prehistoric mammals still roam, or others with oppressive governments.
John’s travels end up in a world very close to his own, but where his parents are childless. He takes a job as their farmhand, and finds his way to college to study physics, hoping to find out how cross-universe travel can work—with the ultimate goal of returning home and evening the score with Prime—and getting his life back.
Both Johns run into complications. For one thing, Prime inherits John’s troubles with Carson, whose father is foreman at the only place he can get a job. For another, it turns out to be a lot harder for an uneducated nobody to market his “inventions” than Prime expected. Writing a King novel involves a lot more than just remembering the plot of the movie.
Meanwhile, John finds himself sidetracked by a lucrative “invention”—pinball—that he hadn’t planned on introducing to his world. In the process, he finds out there are other travelers between worlds—and they don’t appreciate competition.
Melko brings the two plots to a highly satisfactory joint conclusion, with just enough new twists on the parallel-worlds plot to keep even long-time SF readers from figuring it all out. With its young protagonists and fast pace, this would be a great book to give to a high-schooler who’s shown an interest in the genre.
THE CITY & THE CITY
by China Mieville
Del Rey, $26.00 (hc)
ISBN: 978-0-345-4951-2
Mieville’s latest is a police procedural of sorts, but it’s got more in common with Jorge Luis Borges than with Ed McBain.
Tyador Borlu, the protagonist, is a police detective in the city of Beszel, capital of a society best described as Balkan in its general ambience. The story begins with the discovery of a murder victim, a young woman who appears at first to be a prostitute dumped in a park. As expected, the detective doesn’t buy the surface explanation, and starts off on a trail of evidence that takes him much farther than he could have foreseen. In the process, the reader learns all about his world—which is considerably stranger than it first appears.
Shortly after the body is found, Borlu asks his assistant, a woman constable named Corwi, a question that the reader will only understand after gaining considerably more context: could this be an instance of “breach”? Corwi rejects the hypothesis, on the grounds that the area where the body was found is “almost total,” and there is no nearby “cross-hatching.” Exactly what these terms mean will only become clear over several chapters.
What emerges is that Beszel is in an odd relationship with the rival city of Ul Qoma, where even the language is different. Traffic between the two is as rigidly controlled as between the two halves of Berlin during the Cold War. As the novel progresses, we learn that the two cities have different status in the international community—Beszel, for example, is not on good terms with the United States, whereas Ul Qoma is. This favorable relationship with the U.S. gives Ul Qoma considerable financial advantages over its rival city. So when it turns out that Borlu’s murder victim is an American student at a university in Ul Qoma, the case takes on far more serious implications.
Ultimately, the chase requires Borlu to travel to Ul Qoma and work with the police in that city. An outsider whom the local cops automatically close ranks against, he decides to push the investigation on his own—to the annoyance of his Ul Qoman contact, another veteran detective who’s willing to bend a few rules to get to the bottom of things. After poking around at the university—and at the archaeological dig where the victim had been working—they learn that the murdered student had been involved in political conspiracies that revolved around the two cities and their joint-yet-separate histories. One of the victim’s faculty advisors and a fellow grad student are also involved, and Borlu decides that saving them (and solving the case) requires smuggling them back to Beszel.
Of course, things go badly awry just as Borlu thinks he’s pulled off his plan. At that point, the complexities of the connection between the two cities jump to another level, and the truly bizarre relation between them becomes fully evident.
Mieville takes an apparently impossible premise and turns it into a virtuoso examination of perception and reality, with a paranoid energy worthy of Philip K. Dick. Without any overt fantastic or futuristic element, the book is probably most easily categorized as an alternate reality. But its gritty use of everyday detail and its tough, cynical protagonist make it easy to accept as a realistic portrayal of a society that in many ways makes sense. If you haven’t tried Mieville before—and even if his other fiction hasn’t grabbed your interest—give this one a try.
Powerful—and convincing—work from a writer who’s being touted as one of the hottest in the business.
THE EMPRESS OF MARS
by Kage Baker
Tor, $ 25.95 (hc)
ISBN: 978-0-7653-1890-9
Baker’s latest is another novel that comes from an Asimov’s novella. It takes place during the frontier days of a Martian colony, and most of the action is set in the only bar on the planet—after which the book is named.
In this future, Mars is a British colony —settled and administered by the British Arean Company, on the model of the British East India Company. Not surprisingly, the British Martian enterprise has many of the flaws and quirks of its terrestrial predecessor. The administrators are short-sighted, often incompetent, and far more interested in the quarterly profit than in the long-range health of the colony or its economy. Not surprisingly, the terraforming of the planet is in a decidedly rudimentary state.
Mary Griffith, who immigrated to Mars with her three daughters, is the founder and proprietress of the Empress, serving beer and whiskey brewed from the local grain. A Celtic clan that has emigrated to the planet provides both the grain and a significant quota of her customers. So when the head of Clan Morrigan tells her that the settler who raises the only barley on the planet has been chosen to return to Earth to look after the clan’s affairs, it falls to Mary to buy the land or see it revert to the Arean Company—which she knows would plow under the barley crop just to put her out of business. That puts her in a tight spot, because she barely has the cash to keep her own operation going.
Luckily, Mary finds allies—a motley crew, but that’s what you get on a frontier world. They include a con man who figures out that Mars is going to require newer and bigger schemes; the ne’er-do-well son of an Italian business magnate, who thinks of Mars as a Western movie; the genius son of the Morrigan headsman, who’s invented robot bees. Her enemies are an equally odd lot, including a group of priestesses from Luna who decide she’s a heretic, and the head of the Arean Company, who wants to keep the planet under his thumb. Baker draws them all with a rich sense of humor, and piles one outrageous surprise on another as she generates a rip-snorter of an action plot.
The book is full of delicious twists on familiar tropes, witty bits of dialogue, and hard-SF extrapolation worthy of the masters. Between this novel and her outstanding 2008 fantasy, The House of Stag, Baker has put herself well up on my list of authors to keep an eye on.
LAVINIA
by Ursula K. Le Guin
Harcourt, $24.00 (hc)
ISBN: 978-0-15-101424-8
Taking a secondary character of the Aeneid, the Italian woman whom Aeneas marries, Le Guin gives us a new look at one of the key epics of European civilization.
Le Guin’s focus is on the pre-Roman society of which her protagonist is a member, and on the changes spurred by the arrival of the Trojan exiles led by Aeneas. And while the larger shape of her plot is dictated by Virgil’s epic, she finds plenty of room for invention.
The story begins by filling in the bare outlines of the world Lavinia inhabits. The daughter of King Latinus, she is in a privileged position to see the whole sweep of her society. At the same time, she is under considerable constraints. As a marriageable young woman, her course is clearly determined: she will marry a prince and cement an alliance with one of the other tribes inhabiting the land around the mouth of the Tiber. Her mother is determined that she marry Turnus, the warlike king of the neighboring Rutulians. Turnus is handsome and ambitious; but Lavinia has her doubts.
As we learn early on, Lavinia, as the only child of her father, has long assisted him in the rituals that constitute a central part of a king’s role. And in so doing, she has had an unsettling encounter that she can only understand as a prophecy of her own future. A poet—whom the reader will recognize as Virgil himself—appears to her and tells her that she is destined to marry a foreigner. After hearing the basic outline of the Aeneid, Lavinia is determined to follow the path her poet has outlined. The rest of the book shows her doing so, even as she is appalled to see the birth throes of a new world tearing apart the one she has grown up in.
Le Guin tells the story with subtle touches, building from domestic scenes to violent battles, with a large cast of well-drawn characters. The Aeneid was once among the essential texts of European literature; the decline of Latin is probably the main reason for its current state of neglect. One consequence of that is that material that would have been richly evocative to an earlier generation of readers is likely to be uncharted ground to many moderns.
Still, Le Guin’s recasting of one of Virgil’s story lines, with glimpses at the others, is clear enough to give a hint, at least, of the mythical richness on which she is drawing. The power of the original comes through—although it takes on a very different cast when shown through the eyes of a character whom the old Roman saw as a distinctly minor part in his tale of the birth of an empire.
Anything by Le Guin is a treat, but when several of her strengths combine, the result is something special.
SHADOW MAGIC
By Jaida Jones & Danielle Bennett
Signet, $25.00 (hc)
ISBN: 978-0-553-80697-7
The sequel to the authors’ debut novel, Havemercy, is set in Ke-Han, a society analogous to China. A peace conference is underway to negotiate terms between Ke-Han and Volstov, the Russia-like society that was the setting of the previous book.
The action is seen through the eyes of four characters. Prince Mamoru, younger son of the Ke-Han emperor, and his servant Koujie are set against two members of the delegation from Volstov, General Alcibiades and the magician Caius Greylace. As the novel begins, the old emperor has just committed suicide to atone for losing the war, and Mamoru’s older brother has taken the throne. This happens just as the Volstovan delegation arrives.
The four point of view characters are a study in contrasts, allowing a wide view of the world they inhabit. Alcibiades is a stereotypical military man, brusque and unsophisticated. Caius is a bit of a butterfly, preoccupied with style and decorum. Mamoru is a creature of the imperial court, with little down-to-earth knowledge of his nation beyond what he saw in a brief participation in the war. Koujie is his practical, fiercely loyal right hand man, rigidly traditional in his adherence to the norms of Ke-Han society.
The death of the old emperor is just the first is a series of waves that crashes over the peace conference. Shortly after the formal dinner that initiates the conference, the new emperor declares his brother a traitor, and sends men to kill him. Koujie overhears this, and he and Mamoru hastily flee the capital—with the prince disguised as a woman. Meanwhile, the foreign diplomats find themselves trying to make sense of a society whose rules are utterly different from what they have come to expect; Alcibiades, in particular, finds the Ke-Han incomprehensible. The food is awful, the language impenetrable, and the manners infuriating.
More to the point, he also finds Caius incomprehensible—and irritating to the point of madness. Caius, meanwhile, makes Alcibiades his project, trying to dress him in appropriate colors and introduce him to more sophisticated ways of life. Things don’t click between them till they’re on a trip out to the city, where Alcibiades discovers peasant food, and they get a look at the satiric popular theater of the city.
Koujie and Mamoru, meanwhile, flee the capital and find themselves in a world that the prince has never even imagined. Disguised as a woman, he is exposed to the harsh realities of gender difference in peasant society. The fugitives find that internal border guardposts have been alerted to watch for them, and cast their lots with various groups of travelers—including a troupe of itinerant actors—to ease their way through inspections. In the process, the previous relations between master and servant have to be jettisoned, with traumatic consequences for both men.
Eventually, the plot brings together the four protagonists in common cause. This one feels a bit slower getting started than the previous novel by Jones and Bennett, but the play of characters and the clash of well-drawn exotic societies works to make this an even stronger novel in the end. Highly recommended. m
