CHASM CITY
by Alastair Reynolds
Ace, $23.95
ISBN: 0441009123

The new novel is set in the same universe as Revelation Space. Reynolds sets the scene by quoting a tourist brochure for the Epsilon Eridani system, where Chasm City is located. Some catastrophe called the Melding Plague has turned what was once one of the jewels of the galaxy into a zone of random destruction. The plague didn’t attack people–at least not directly–but instead targeted the nanomachines that sustained advanced civilization, including the very buildings of Chasm City. Not content with mere destruction, the plague actually transformed the buildings into new and bizarre configurations, almost as if it were creating some alien art form from the destruction.

When the action opens and we meet two men in pursuit of a fugitive, it is clear that the flight and pursuit will take them to Chasm City. The narrator, Tanner Mirabel, is a professional hunter, and the man he and his partner are pursuing is Reivich, who apparently killed Tanner’s previous employer. (The reader gradually learns that not everything Tanner remembers is entirely reliable.) Almost before he realizes it, Tanner is headed off-planet aboard a ship to Epsilon Eridani–just enough behind his quarry to put him at a major disadvantage upon his arrival.

At this point, several complicating factors arise, making digressions into the past necessary. The histories of the ambush in which Tanner’s employer died, of Sky’s Edge (the war-torn planet of their origin), and of the fleet of generation ships that settled their world turn out to be of key importance in understanding what is happening. Tanner learns that he is infected with a virus that turns him into an avatar of Sky Haussman, a starship captain who combined extraordinary heroism with inhuman villainy during the settlement of Sky’s Edge.

Meanwhile, he has to cope with the complex and hostile society of Chasm City if he is going to survive to confront his quarry. Reynolds gives the city a variety of edgy subcultures, most of which view Tanner as a victim to be exploited and gotten rid of with no further ado. Surviving them takes all his carefully honed hunter skills, as well as a knack for spotting just when an apparent ally is about to turn traitor. At the same time, the whole sordid tale of the founding of Sky’s Edge plays itself out in his consciousness as the virus infection runs its course. At the end, Reynolds splices together the hunt for Reivich, the saga of Sky Haussman, and the backstory of the murder of Tanner’s previous employer into a virtuoso ending reminiscent of Alfred Bester.

Reynolds’ second novel is even more fun than the first; full of action, worldbuilding, myth-making, and all the plot surprises the author can concoct. If you’re wondering where good old space opera has gone to, wonder no longer: Reynolds is doing it as well as anybody in the business.

THE ALCHEMIST’S DOOR
by Lisa Goldstein
Tor, $23.95
ISBN: 0765301504

Goldstein’s latest takes place in the 1580s, early in the rein of Elizabeth I of England. Dr. John Dee, the most famous English alchemist of the renaissance, journeys to the continent in hopes of escaping a demon he has inadvertently summoned.

Dee is accompanied by his wife Jane and their children, and by Edward Kelley, his assistant–whose main value to Dee is his ability to view distant and future events in a crystal stone. But Dee finds himself in trouble over Kelley’s prophecies that Prince Laski, a Polish nobleman, will soon come to the throne–prophecies that show no sign of coming true. Faced with growing impatience by Laski, Dee takes his entourage to Prague, where Emperor Rudolf is reportedly consulting all the alchemists and sages he can find. In Rudolf’s anteroom, Dee meets Rabbi Judah Loew–the most accomplished Kabbalistic scholar of Europe. Loew is puzzled by an inexplicable recurrence of the number thirty-six in his life. Dee is unable to help him, but he does discover signs that Rudolf is mad–and that his ambition is likely to prove dangerous to everyone around him.

At this point, the plot becomes complex. Dee discovers that, as he had feared, the demon has followed him to Europe–although Loew helps him temporarily banish it. For his own part, Loew decides that the number plaguing him is related to the legend that the world depends on thirty-six righteous men, and that one of them must be in danger. Kelley finally shows his true colors, betraying Dee to insinuate himself into the emperor’s favor. At the same time, Loew convinces Dee to help him in the creation of a golem, an artificial but soulless man who can help him with his various tasks. Dee, temporarily exiled from Prague, travels to the Hungarian court, where he meets the uncanny Countess Bathory, who is reputed to bathe in the blood of virgins. In the end, all the disparate elements come together to produce a more than satisfactory conclusion that pretty clearly precludes any sequels–a pleasant change from the fad for interminable fantasy series.

Goldstein presents all this in a quiet, matter-of-fact style, revealing the alienness of the landscape and its people largely through the phlegmatic Dee’s reactions. A number of historical figures make appearances, and the settings are deftly drawn without detracting from the characters. Central Europe has not been a favorite setting for fantasy (with the notable exception of Dracula and its derivatives). Likewise, the fashion for medievalism has steered many talented fantasy writers away from the renaissance, a period every bit as fascinating, and with its own exotic blend of magic and myth. Goldstein goes a long way to show what her predecessors have missed.

This book is strongly recommended for readers looking for character-rich fantasy that breaks out of the medieval mode.

CHARISMA
by Steven Barnes
Tor, $25.95
ISBN: 0312870043

Barnes’ latest novel posits an innovative day care program designed to give disadvantaged children a chance to realize their full abilities. What nobody expects is that the products of the program will become a good deal more than simply gifted students. . . .

In other words, Charisma takes a new look at the theme of the superhuman child, which has a long and honorable history in SF. In Wyndham’s Midwich Cuckoos or Clarke’s Childhood’s End, visitors from another world are the primary cause of the children’s sudden alteration; in Sturgeon’s More Than Human or Bear’s Darwin’s Radio the cause is a sudden leap in evolution.

The main story begins in Claremont, a smallish city in Washington, where a scandal centering on alleged abuses shuts down the local day care. We learn that several of the former students are now in their early teens. Among them is Patrick Emory, whose mother runs a costume shop, and is about to break up with his father, a factory worker. Patrick and his friends have a strong bond that arises from their day care experience, which included martial arts as well as fundamentals of the arts and sciences. Their difference from their peers may not be obvious to a casual observer, but Barnes quickly makes it clear that they are working on an intellectual level far above most of the adults around them.

Not that they are without problems. . . . For all the benefits of their training, they still live in a hostile environment. A group of outlaw bikers have moved into Patrick’s development, and are systematically eliminating everything and everyone they perceive as a threat to the drug ring that provides their living. When the bikers notice Patrick and his friends meeting on land near their clandestine methamphetamine laboratory, the youngsters–and their families–become targets.

But they have unwittingly come to the attention of even more dangerous enemies. We learn that the day care centers took as their model a successful black entrepreneur, Alexander Marcus. Marcus founded an impressive media empire, and was widely talked about for national political office, before his untimely death. But behind Marcus’s success were several ugly secrets– known only to his inner circle. The surviving members of that inner circle have become aware of the graduates of the day care program, and consider them threats. And their resources are far more extensive than those of a biker drug gang.

Barnes convincingly portrays the kids and their more mundane parents and the other adults in the world, and builds the tension effectively as the threats against the very likeable kids mount. A real page-turner from one of the most accomplished (and too often overlooked) storytellers in the business.

KAREL CAPEK: Life and Work
by Ivan Klima
Translated by Norma Comrada
Catbird Press, $23.00 (hc)
ISBN: 0945774532

If the Czechoslovakian writer Karel Capek (1890-1938) is known at all nowadays, it is as the author of the play "R.U.R." ("Rossum’s Universal Robots"), in which he coined the modern word for what earlier eras would have called a mechanical man. Those who have read somewhat in SF history know a bit more: Capek was one of the leading European writers of SF in the era between the World Wars, the author of such provocative satiric works as The Absolute at Large and War with the Newts.

But in recent years, SF in languages other than English has been of minimal interest to American publishers. Moreover, satire written in the twenties and thirties seems less and less relevant to the modern world. Perhaps inevitably, Capek’s reputation has faded. Comparatively few Czechs–and far fewer Americans–now know that he was once among his country’s most famous writers, a name seriously mentioned during his lifetime as a possible Nobel Prize winner. In this new biography, Klima undertakes to redress that neglect.

Capek first came to prominence as a young man in the years preceding World War I; he and his brother Joseph arrived in Prague as an inseparable couple, already well versed in the work of the modernist school in the visual arts. The brothers had visited Paris in 1911, and upon their return to Prague, they set about bringing the artistic revolution to their home country. Klima shows the brothers establishing themselves as writers, at first largely in collaboration but increasingly doing separate work. He covers Karel Capek’s fairly modest non-literary career–Capek, like most authors, spent the majority of his time sitting in a room quietly writing. The book gives brief summaries of all Capek’s major work, and a complete list of what is available in English translation. A fair amount of the list could easily be construed as SF or fantasy of one sort or another. But Klima makes no attempt to judge the work on its merits as SF; he is far more interested in Capek as Czech nationalist and as an explorer of new literary modes.

As a result, readers who think of Capek primarily as an SF writer may be disappointed at Klima’s emphasis. But while Klima’s failure to take note of Capek’s SF contemporaries may seem a shortcoming, it is really a matter of perspective. In fact, it seems presumptuous to gerrymander Capek posthumously into a genre he was largely unaware of. Capek undoubtedly knew the work of European SF pioneers such as Verne and Wells. But he seems unlikely to have encountered the American pulp magazines of the twenties in which genre SF was molded. And one wonders whether he would have found them of much interest if he had stumbled across them.

The sfnal devices found in Capek’s best-known work should be taken primarily as evidence of his active imagination and his willingness–shared with such of his countrymen as Franz Kafka–to abandon realistic technique when there was a shorter way to achieve the effects he sought. Klima’s account of Capek’s early years makes it clear that he was very much a modernist, interested in the Cubists and others who were laying down the new esthetic that swept through all the arts in the second decade of the twentieth century. The issues that primarily concerned him were those of his time: the struggle to create a new society in the wake of World War I, and then the struggle to prevent the slide into chaos that led to World War II.

Does this mean that Capek’s work "isn’t really SF"? The answer depends on how widely we’re willing to cast our nets. If we exclude him, we must exclude many other European writers whose work owes little to the American pulp tradition. As noted, the commercial SF publishers have already made their opinions clear. But by that logic, many names from earlier eras of American SF could as easily be wiped from the slate. One wonders how much luck a new Cordwainer Smith or R.A. Lafferty would have finding a publisher nowadays. In any case, it is good to see a fresh evaluation of this pioneering writer, which with luck will lead others to look at Capek’s place in SF history more carefully–and, most important of all, to read the works that make Capek of interest to begin with.