| On Books by Paul Di Filippo |
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Frank Frazetta is eighty years old this year, and, despite his relative lack of public production due to age and medical issues (a number of strokes deprived him of the use of his right, or drawing, hand), he’s possibly more popular than ever. After a long string of influential coffee-table books collecting his work, the 2003 documentary about his career, Painting with Fire, seemed to solidify his place in the artistic pantheon and reawaken viewers both veteran and newbie to the magnitude of his accomplishments. Image Comics now features a line of books inspired by Frazetta’s work. Last year’s film The Pathfinder was an avowed Frazetta homage. The Pennsylvania museum devoted to his art hosts a constant stream of visitors. And his originals continue to sell for big prices. An entire strain of written and visual heroic fantasy would not exist today—at least not in the form we know—without his pioneering and utterly distinctive imagery.
To further remind us of the hard work and instinctive skillful joy inherent in Frazetta’s art, we now get a welcome nudge from Arnie and Cathy Fenner, the publishers at Spectrum Fantastic Art. They have compiled—and supplied informative text for—a new book titled Rough Work (hardcover, $19.95, 127 pages, ISBN 978-1-59929-013-3), which presents tons of heretofore-unseen Frazetta goodies, in the form of “conceptual art, doodles, and sketchbook drawings.” The book itself is sumptuous—padded vinyl covers, hefty paper stock, endpapers depicting a cool, virile, young Frazetta—but this presentation is trumped by the wonders within.
Here we find such gems as Frazetta’s concepts for the cast of a Dracula film that was never made. My favorite is one of Drac’s tasty bad-girl vampettes, on pages 54-5. But seeing this relatively refined artwork is second-best to seeing the “roughs” for famous cover art. These initial inspirations for the finished images that are now canonical show in even greater proportion the same verve, sprightliness, and exuberance that animate the finished works. You can almost sense Frazetta deliberating attitudes of bodies and compositions of landscapes. The tentative colors applied to the roughs are subtle yet evocative. Characters are sometimes left faceless, but exude attitude and personality nonetheless. These roughs show more mastery than many other artists do in their more belabored pieces.
Frazetta’s sketchbook pages likewise bristle with energy and facility. You can see a mind at play and a passion to master all forms. As Arnie Fenner states, it’s almost like watching over Frazetta’s shoulder as he actually works.
Of course, one overpowering theme of this book is the female form. There was never another fantasy artist before or since who idolized womanhood or portrayed it more solidly and powerfully. No wispy, anorexic, plasticized women here, just big, corn-fed goddesses. Look at the woman with tiger on page 69, thick-hipped and big–paunched. There’s sexy for you. I’m surprised the full-figure-pride movement hasn’t adopted Frazetta as one of their icons. Or maybe they have!
In his back-cover blurb, fellow artist Todd Schorr calls Frazetta “a cartoonist who can paint with the skill of an Old Master.” That’s really the essence of his style and success. The vibrancy and energy of an animation with the surface glow and deep substance of fine art.
Frazetta may no longer regale us regularly from the paperback or magazine racks, but his legacy shines as brightly as ever, as this volume gleefully attests.
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Dark Integers
by Greg Egan
Subterranean Press,
hardcover,
$25.00,
232 pages,
ISBN: 1596062193
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Considering the mathematical themes that inform Greg Egan’s new collection, Dark Integers (Subterranean Press, hardcover, $25.00, 232 pages, ISBN 978-1-59606-155-2), it’s only fitting that the book itself possesses a kind of formal symmetry in its table of contents. Two stories—“Luminous” and “Dark Integers”—revolve around a parallel universe tucked inside our familiar one, and distinguished from ours by the contrary theorems underpinning its ontology. Two other pieces—“Riding the Crocodile” and “Glory”—concern a far-future galactic polity called the Amalgam. And the final tale, “Oceanic,” independent of either series, is balanced by an introduction up front of the volume that is, I believe, unique among Egan’s oeuvre in that it actually lets us inside the head of this unassuming but brilliant Pynchon of the SF world. Add everything together, and you get a stunning mosaic that resembles some kind of mutant Penrose-tiling of the reader’s brain.
Let’s consider the items in their order of appearance.
Egan’s introduction speaks to the feasibility of some of his more abstruse mathematical speculations, and conveys the amount of deep thinking he’s invested in these tales. But moving on to the stories themselves, we find that they are far from arid, plotless, character-free essays.
“Luminous” begins like a thriller, with our narrator/protagonist Bruno about to be sliced and diced for the information he has concealed within his veins. After a deft escape, we learn that Bruno and his partner-in-number-theory Alison have detected a peculiar “border” in the cosmos, beyond which different rules of math apply. This new domain turns out to be inhabited by a mysterious kind of life—which fights back against humanity’s intrusive logic probes. By story’s end, a truce is reached.
An immortal couple inhabiting the post-scarcity Amalgam civilization decide to end their lives in “Riding the Crocodile,” but only after one last grand adventure: seeking to contact the Aloof, an unknown quantity at the galaxy’s center. Their pursuit takes tens of millennia, at the end of which—well, let’s say they find cause to revise their goals.
Back to Bruno and Alison in “Dark Integers.” They have an individual contact now in the other realm, a being named Sam, who calls our universe “Sparseland.” But when another human mathematician named Campbell stumbles upon the secret by thrashing about in Sam’s universe with damaging consequences, Sam turns hostile and soon a deadly war erupts, waged with integer bombs and equation missiles.
In “Glory,” two Amalgam citizens named Joan and Anne transmit themselves to the backward world of the Noudah to investigate the leavings of an extinct three-million-year-old species of expert mathematicians, whose final unified theory of all math might offer something even the Amalgam doesn’t own.
Finally, in “Oceanic,” on the watery world of Covenant, engineered humans revere the Angels who created them and their strange P-J-Farmeresque biology—until experiments into “the biochemistry of religious experience” begin to undermine their faith.
These masterful stories reveal that Egan’s art has progressed since his quietly stunning journeyman days: progressed to the point where neither speculations nor story take a backseat, but both are firmly integrated into a compelling whole. Real human emotions such as the autumnal romance between Leila and Jasim in “Crocodile” share the page easily and congenially with hardcore physics chatter.
This collection showcases one vital theme: the necessity for communication. For Egan, it’s a primal impulse as vital as sex or hunger. Humans must communicate with Sam’s people for both races to survive. The Amalgam must communicate with the Aloof. And the opposed sects in “Oceanic” must communicate across their ideological barriers to get the fullest view of reality. If this isn’t one of the core themes of SF, I don’t know what is. And Egan works the territory beautifully, proffering novel insights of great utility.
Egan’s UK publisher, Gollancz, just re-issued all his works in a uniform trade paper edition that would look gorgeous on any fan’s shelf, and which was meant to herald the appearance of a new novel, Incandescence, an adventure of the Amalgam. Perhaps we’ll be covering that one here next time.
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Year Million
ed. by Damien Broderick
Atlas & Co.,
trade paperback,
$16.00,
336 pages,
ISBN: 1934633054
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Just Another Moment in Spacetime
In Year Million (Atlas & Co., trade paperback, $16.00, 336 pages, ISBN 978-0-9777433-4-6), editor Damien Broderick—a name that should be well known to SF readers, attached as it is to a number of excellent novels—has assembled one of those stimulating seed volumes (think Eric Drexler’s Engines of Creation [1986]) from which a thousand subsequent SF stories will invariably grow, as eager magpie writers plunder the essays therein for yeasty speculations that can be fictionalized. In this, he’s done a great service to the genre. But of course, there’s a nobler and vaster accomplishment here: causing the averagely curious and intelligent general reader who might chance upon this book to ponder Great Matters beyond the immediate short-term horizon of his or her own lifetime. As more than one author remarks in these pages, such far-off speculations actually encourage closer attention to the present, and induce useful lateral thinking about our current problems and opportunities.
Broderick assembles a varied assortment of writers to tackle the prospects of mankind’s next thousand millennia, and they naturally exhibit a variety of angles of attack, from the intimate scale to the vastly impersonal. We have SF authors such as Catherine Asaro, Rudy Rucker, Gregory Benford, Pamela Sargent, Wil McCarthy, and George Zebrowski. We have physicists and computer scientists, as well as journalists, generalists, and medical specialists. Together, they examine such issues as the transformation of our planetary environment, the evolution—directed or natural—of our species, the engineering of the solar system, and, ultimately, survival into and beyond the heat death of the cosmos.
Many of these concepts will be familiar to the average SF reader. Strip-mining Jupiter, as Steven B. Harris details in his essay, “A Million Years of Evolution,” might seem like old-hat stuff. But I don’t believe I have ever before encountered a convincing rationale for strip-mining the gas giants of other solar systems and shipping the matter back home, as Harris presents. The book is full of similar ah-ha moments, when the overly self-assured reader imagines he’s heard it all, only to have the carpet yanked out from under him. Wil McCarthy’s notion of “planettes”— “artificial bodies resembling planets but with unnaturally dense cores that allow them to be much less massive than regular planets while still retaining approximately Earthlike gravity and a thick layer of breathable air”—is one such. How to create such a habitable mini-world? Easy as pie! “The moon, for example, could be compressed into a permanently habitable planette . . . by surrounding [it] with a thin jacket of antimatter . . . [creating] a planet-sized bomb that . . . produces huge pressures uniformly around the entire surface.” Just picture a gigantic invisible Superman squeezing a lump of coal to diamond.
Such a litany of physical wonders—and allied dangers and traps and roadblocks; not all is peachy super-science—leaves one’s head spinning, right up until the final chapter—a philosophical prose-poem by Zebrowski that examines the emotional and spiritual aspects of such developments. It’s the perfect restorative or perspective-granting capper to the preceding chapters, emphasizing that the reason for all this intellectual speculation is, to some degree, merely to prepare a future home for the average individual whom Ursula K. Le Guin referred to as “Mrs. Brown,” the quotidian, quintessential human character. However many alterations our environment and appearance and capabilities undergo, there is that kernel of Mrs. Brown that endures forever, and justifies everything else.
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Whitechapel Gods
by S.M. Peters
Roc,
mass-market paperback,
$6.99,
374 pages,
ISBN: 0451461932
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Grandfather Clock and Mama Engine Must Die
S.M. Peters’ debut novel, White-chapel Gods (Roc, mass-market paperback, $6.99, 374 pages, ISBN 978-0-451-46193-3), will assuredly, if there is any justice in the literary world, appear on the ballot for next year’s PKD Award. It’s a solid, thrilling piece of entertainment: flush with good characters, coherent world-building, and scintillating action sequences. It does admittedly wear its influences on its sleeve—New Weird, steampunk, dystopian cinema such as The Matrix trilogy—but that’s no real offense, especially when a newbie author is working out the anxiety of influence. I confidently predict more fine books of an even more idiosyncratic nature from Mr. Peters.
The origin of this dangerous, evil milieu we come to immediately inhabit in a slambang cinematic opener occurred in 1877. Amidst familiar Victorian London, the district of Whitechapel experienced a sudden infestation. Two alien immaterial gods of unknown provenance established themselves in the city: Mama Engine and Grandfather Clock. Their mortal (?) agent was one Baron Hume. The Baron’s soldiers were the Boiler Men, murderous cyborg automatons. The district was walled off from the rest of the city, and a bizarre architecture began to grow, resulting in an iron-bound labyrinth of many levels, towers of one hundred stories high, and the Stack—the enigmatic fortress where Mama Engine’s “Great Work” project got underway. The humans trapped in Whitechapel were fated to live a life of pain and misery.
Naturally, attempts were made to wrest the district back, to drive out the invaders. Oliver Sumner, agent of the Queen, led an abortive Uprising that was soon brutally put down. Now, years later, Oliver and his fellow plotters—a motley bunch—believe they have chanced upon a god-killing device, its blueprint encoded on a scrap of paper. All they have to do is find the scrap, avoid getting killed by Hume and his minions—including one John Scared—evade falling victim to the various horrible mech-organic plagues that stalk the city, manufacture the device, and deliver it to the very heart of the Stack. Oh, yes, not forgetting that Clock and Engine are able to infiltrate their very consciousnesses, and also that there are traitors within their ranks.
From this description, I think you’ll see bits China Miéville’s New Weird influence. The character attitudes and general culture and gadgetry bespeak the steampunk strain. My earlier mention of the Matrix films alludes to the way the victims of Grandfather Clock become wired up in series to form part of his living substance. But Peters weaves it all into a believable whole that becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
The one thing that his Whitechapel lacks, however, is a sense of daily existence. It’s hard to see how this society could have held together cohesively for any number of years. Unlike Miéville’s New Crobuzon, there’s no real sense of functioning commerce or art or politics. White-chapel is merely a Dantean hell-scape, a surreal pit of suffering. Some of this same flaw was evident in Alan Campbell’s Scar Night (2006), a book with a similar flavor. Allusion is made to jobs and family life. The character of Missy the prostitute implies the standard commercial quid-pro-quo of our world. But there’s no real fleshing out of any of this to the point where I believed in shops or jobs, saloons or theaters. The hardscrabble life is unrelentingly centered solely around not drawing down the wrath of the Boiler Men or the gods. Beneath the gaudy surface, there’s no other there there.
In any case, however, Peters provides a non-stop series of exciting crises for his characters to surmount, and a goal of freedom from enslavement that is certainly endorsable and empathy-inducing. Visit Whitechapel—but try to avoid catching the clack!
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Blue Snowmen, the Mudwife, Bottled Cities, and Over a Dozen Other Wonders
Last year saw the appearance of a really superb general-interest anthology of the fantastic: Jonathan Strahan’s Eclipse 1. This kind of non-themed collection was once central to the field. Think New Dimensions, Universe, Orbit, Nova, and others. Nowadays, as we well know, the thematic anthology holds sway. Having a specially baited hook is deemed essential for capturing and satisfying a finicky audience. Publishers seem to believe that a heterogeneous collection will inevitably contain one or more things the purchaser will not enjoy, like a box of chocolates featuring a Crunchy Frog candy or three. But I prefer these generalist volumes, for they cannot go stale with predictability, and introduce flavors you might not otherwise choose to sample, stuck in your own narrow groove of pre-determined interests.
Leave it to the veteran editor Ellen Datlow to assemble just such an enticingly variegated volume, on a par with Strahan’s. The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy (Del Rey, trade paperback, $16.00, 416 pages, ISBN 978-0-345-49632-4) is a trove of marvelous tales, no two alike. Reading it is akin to taking a high-velocity, low-altitude flight above the topography of the entire field of the fantastic.
Datlow’s contributors include the famous, the moderately well-known, and the as yet unheralded. She has gotten their best work from all of them.
We start with Jason Stoddard’s “The Elephant Ironclads,” which is a kind of Waldropian alternate history set among Native Americans in the USA’s Southwest. Lucy Sussex’s “Ardent Clouds” concerns a woman whose avocation is recording volcanic events, and it reads like prime Zelazny, of all things. A strange pastorale called “Gather” emanates from the pen of Christopher Rowe, while Elizabeth Bear channels Tom Wolfe with “Sonny Liston Takes the Fall.”
A contemporary setting and deft symbolism animate Nathan Ballin-grud’s “North American Lake Monsters.” A droll and scary Robinsonade is delivered by Carol Emsh- willer with “All Washed Up While Looking for a Better World.” My absolute favorite story comes next: Maureen McHugh’s “Special Economics,” a tale of near-future China and a charmingly self-confident teenaged girl named Jieling. Bruce Sterling or Cory Doctorow would be proud to call this one their own.
Richard Bowes deals with some very peculiar runaway kids in a Sixties setting in “Aka St. Mark’s Place,” while Margo Lanagan unleashes one of her patented scary fables in “The Goosle,” featuring a horrific “mudwife.” “Shira,” by Lavie Tidhar, utilizes a skewed Middle Eastern setting to delve into themes of art and politics. A golem in the form of a goat? Only from the uncanny Isaac Bashevis Singer brain of Barry Malzberg, with his “The Passion of Azazel.” Laird Barron puts a fugue-prone widow named Danni through some eerie changes in “The Lagerstätte.” “Gladiolous Exposed,” by Anna Tambour, is a bit of skeletal domestic spookiness.
In the home stretch we get Jeffrey Ford’s tale of contagious microscopic cities in “Daltharee,” Pat Cadigan’s Ellisonesque “Jimmy,” a second Sixties outing about a doomed boy, and finally a gonzo capper by Paul McAuley and Kim Newman, “Prisoners of the Action,” in which blue snowmen aliens wreak mental and physical havoc in an Abu Ghraib-style milieu.
Besides a pleasing myriad of themes and settings, Datlow also encourages a variety of tones and styles, from the antic to the somber, the serious to the off the wall. It’s this wide-ranging solicitation of viewpoints that endows this anthology—and others of its ilk—with power and impact. We can only hope for a second volume in this series soon.
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Copyright
"On Books" by Paul Di Filippo, copyright © 2008, with permission of the author.
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