Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #213 Page 18
* * * *
* * * *
The self-explanatory Flight Of The Living Dead: Outbreak On A Plane (2007) takes half its runtime to really get started, making it feel like an episodic TV spoof stretched beyond its limits. However, when the infected zombies finally break free of the cargo hold, squirming through crawlspaces aboard the Pentagon-targeted 747 stuck between storm fronts over Canada, the hyper sadistic picnic becomes almost relentless. All the usual Airport or Airplane stereotypes are hastily dismembered in enjoyably gory set pieces. Obnoxious oversexed teens get what they deserve. Watch out for a starving undead Asian strap-trapped in his business-class seat, the guilty biotech scientist refusing to accept responsibility for the air crisis, the golf pro with a beheading putter and, shamelessly best of all, beware of the legless nun. As directed by Scott Thomas, the main cast all play it straight, often seeming bland in contrast to salivating and energetic mobs of flesh-rippers, but this works in the shocker's favour. Basically, it's The Return Of The Living Dead (1985), crossed with Snakes On A Plane (2006), and such blackly comic horror-action hybrids have rarely been this amusing.
* * * *
* * * *
The greatest TV series of all time, The Prisoner, celebrates it 40th anniversary this year with a digitally re-mastered edition of the DVD boxset. Having recently visited Portmeirion, the picturesque coastal resort in Wales used for location shooting, my perspective on Patrick McGoohan's genre brainchild has changed, but only insofar as a brief stay in—and successful escape from—the ‘village fantastique’ has increased my critical appreciation of the timelessly original show. While this century's Bourne and Bauer provoke controversy as heroic icons revealing everything that's wrong with the west's paranoiac and divisive socio-political spectrum, the dramatic impetus granted this series by struggling freedom fighter Number Six is more powerfully relevant now than ever. Shattering the standard formula of home entertainment with its innovative techniques and overlapping metaphors, developing surreal platforms for intriguing SF adventures, breaking the constraints of studio bound conformity and censorial acceptability, and challenging viewers to always question whatever they see or hear, became astonishingly routine for McGoohan, and his production team, such that The Prisoner has since been elevated by fandom into the ultimate cult TV show.
* * * *
Animation of a very different style and content to The Invincible Iron Man is now available on disc in Gandahar (1988), about the conquest and thousand-year occupation of an imperfect paradise; and Les Maîtres du temps (aka: The Time Masters, 1982), during which a starship crew attempts to save a boy stranded alone on an inhospitable planet. Directed by the late René Laloux, still best known for The Fantastic Planet (aka: La Planète sauvage, 1973), these French sci-fi adventures embrace a mysterious sensuality, in contrast to much Japanese animation. Here, there's less focus on hardware or the visceral impact of monster violence, and aliens exhibit a strange beauty like Cronenberg's mutations, Clive Barker's deformed creatures, or J.K. Potter's bizarre photo-art. First in designs by Jean ‘Moebius’ Giraud, and then Philippe Caza, these consistently amazing films have fascinating otherworldly landscapes that transcend mere quirkiness, expressing the world-building affect of SF in more deliberate fashion than most similarly themed live-action productions. Evocations of traditional space opera are readily apparent in telepathic gnomes, comet rides, temporal paradoxes, superhuman minds, symbiotic relationships, orphaned characters, and FTL communications. Instead of nitty-gritty politicking, Laloux delivers considered appraisals of perversely utopian idealism, and so the faceless angels on Gamma 10 achieve unity by abolishing difference, while the nurturing matriarchal society of Gandahar flees the Nazi-like onslaught of seemingly destructive robot-men. Maintaining, from start to finish, a defiantly enigmatic tone—both memorably visual and weirdly aural, Laloux's challengingly ambivalent, vaguely schizophrenic SF, effectively critiques the fairytale simplicities of Star Wars, cultural imperialism and moral preaching of Star Trek, and comfort zone anthropomorphism of Disney. Despite momentary lapses into those grindingly unimaginative areas, and the (inconspicuous?) absence of high-speed action scenes, Laloux's craftsmanship of persuasive SF-fantasy scenarios populated with grotesques and glamour is certain to delight a whole new generation. Both DVDs from Eureka include 36-page booklets of critical notes by Craig Keller, and interviews with the films’ artists.
Copyright © 2007 Tony Lee
[Back to Table of Contents]
SCORES—John Clute's Regular Review of the Latest Books
* * * *
One For Sorrow
Christopher Barzak
* * * *
* * * *
There is something about growing up which seems to fascinate many of us who may have done so. This seems odd. Novels which focus on the process—as both Christopher Barzak's quite brilliant One for Sorrow and Randall Silvis's seepingly morose In a Town Called Mundomuerto both do in differing ways—tend to focus on the helpless-helpless churnings of your imprisoned soul generated when you first experienced hormone GBH (remember? wow!), the blaring wilderness of the cruel world that draws blood when you scrape your self against its prison bars, the badlands that bar escape, the deep unresolvable belatedness of the inner self you must finally leave behind, on the cutting room floor, eternally feculent from the fall of Being Born. (Barzak, a technically proficient young American writer, necessarily goes in as well for a gingerly oleaginous redemption scene at the end, in which he gathers his astonishingly dysfunctinal family around something theoretically resembling a ‘hearth', but maybe being American is a belatedness or homiletic he'll grow out of; Silvis though American is less young, and the main strength of his tale lies in its refusal of any reemption whatsover.) A Martian might find nothing fascinating in this stuff except for the fact that it can be found fascinating.
So YA novels marketed ostensibly for adults can't exist for the sheer pleasure of the thing. Most adults are happy not to be reminded of their prison days, nor to recollect too vividly that our inner child awaits the slightest hint of dementia, that the moment we stop turning tricks we're arrested. And the few adults who claim to have really enjoyed their adolescence tend to emit a sweetness that kind of sucks, an imago-like pretense that they actively welcome being haunted from within; that the caul-encumbered inner child, which had somehow failed to pass the baton, was somehow still their friend. In any case, they are not ideal readers of the typical YA novel, which is mainly about learning how to escape being YA.
One for Sorrow is YA in the same sense as J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye—Barzak's main epigraph is from that book, and his text is laced with homaging semi-quotes and echoes throughout—is YA: in its attempt (almost successful) to render the first-person narrative of a fifteen year old boy as though he were a person—a tabula rasa the reader puts on with the first sentence and sees the story through—not a fifteen year old boy gnarled by hormones and very bad luck in his actual real life and haunted by a posthumous-fantasy like assemblage of the dead, all of whom are transfigured, as in any Posthumous Fantasy, by transpontine longings. (In this case, this aspiration to pass over from limbo is enacted quite literally: once their claws have been extracted from the world they have died in bondage to, they literally cross a railroad bridge to Somewhere Else.) One for Sorrow is a novel about how it feels for a human being to grow out of bondage; unlike its great model, though it is a close call for young Adam McCormick, it is a success story.
Adam begins where he must, at school, in a small-town Ohio desolated by global capitalism, with a boy he loves: “There was this kid I used to know who always sat in class with his head propped up in one hand.” The kid, Jamie, has already been murdered as the tale begins (the murderer is never found: Barzak knows precisely how not to resolve a plot, which makes the hearth-scene at the end seem all the more tacked on), and has begun to haunt Adam. They lie together: Adam gives him succour: which is to say he gives him sex. It is one of the great strengths
of One for Sorrow that it depicts its adolescent protagonists as absolutely untroubled by sexual guilt or hangups, maybe in part because the tale is free of any religious concerns whatsoever; Adam's sexual melding with Jamie, and the warmly explicit scenes in which he and young Gracie engage in heterosexual fucking, are so openly written that the reader is actually able to focus, without prurience, on these experiences. It is a rare absence of cant and miasma, reminiscent perhaps of a similar lack of cant in Elizabeth Hand's Black Light (1999) and Illyria (2007). When—in the free space he has thus reserved for himself and his characters—Barzak ends his tale without ‘resolving’ the ‘question’ (which the text never asks) of Adam's sexual ‘orientation', there is an almost palpable release from prison: Barzak's, Adam's, yours, mine.
But there is much for Adam to free himself from. The crippling of his mother, by a drunk driver who ensconces herself bloodsucker-like in the family home, in order to take care of her victim—the murder of Jamie—the seriously uninteresting (which is to say American) dysfunctional relationship between Adam and his father—all this and much more encumber young Adam like an unkindness of cauls. We gradually learn how deeply damaged he is, partly through his almost supernatural inarticulacy, except when he is telling us his tale (from a point some way into the future perhaps); and we gain a sense that the knotted anguish of the yet-unreleased dead, who surround him, and who need to word their fate as badly as he does, is almost exactly isomorphic with his own imprisonment. (But this is a tale of fantastika: nothing is metaphorical for anything else: what is written is what is told: period.) Again and again, Adam is trapped by the ghosts, whose hunger to be storied out of bondage is deftly conveyed:
And then there they were, clambering through the brush, pushing aside branches until they were on both sides of Sugar Creek, stretching their arms out toward me. One said in a voice like someone who's just awoken from a nightmare, “Say something. Say anything,” and held his trembling hands out as if he was waiting for me to give him something to eat.
And whenever Jamie begins to thin, he burns his own memories to keep himself warm: death in this novel being a race between amnesia and the tale that lets you pass.
The penultimate paragraph of the novel—it begins “Right then I thought, You can live again."—should not be read. I have done so, one reader is enough. The rest of the book, despite a few obeisances to Workshop Twee, breathes the mountain air of escape. Adults may read One for Sorrow and remember the mountain air.
* * * *
In a Town Called Mundomuerto
Randall Silvis
* * * *
* * * *
It would have been a very great pleasure to have liked Randall Silvis's In a Town Called Mundomuerto as much as its heart is good; but this did not happen. The problem may be length: it is a short novel, but much too long for the vignette recounted, with late-Hemingway sententiousness, to a young boy by an old man who, decades earlier as a young boy himself (a parallel which is stapled frequently into the telling), had participated in a romantic tragedy. The setting is a Latin American fishing village. Young Lucia Luna has breasts like moons and everyone can smell her virgin sex, and she sings like wow in the evenings, accompanied on the guitar by the narrator. Tragically, a dolphin-man, a guy in a porkpie hat, arrives in the village and seduces her, arouses the superstitiousness and spite of the villagers, and things go from bad to worse. She is pregnant. She asks the boy—who is intoxicated by the smell of her and by her almost full moons, though nipples never do quite, I think, manifest—to go to the neighbouring town and bring back the porkpie hat guy; but he fails.
A long day passes before the tale is told. The village, which was once known as Mundosuave, turns into the village known as Mundomuerto. The jungle, which was once impenetrable, is disappearing into the end of the twentieth century. The last sentence of the tale expresses, with some urgency, a longing inflected by the Anglo Magic Realism of the author: “As for the boy, until he grows beyond it he is content to be sustained on hard work and wonder, and on the hope that this world of ours is not truly what it seems."
* * * *
Blaugast
Paul Leppin
* * * *
* * * *
A short note: Paul Leppin (1878-1945) was a German-speaking Czech writer—there are none left in 2007—who depicted Prague between 1900 and 1930 as a Theatre of Memory whose inner screed was Decadence: ash and fog and fatal sex (he died of syphilis, long after the Nazis had tortured and Disappeared him). His Prague and Kafka's are each other's inner child: each other's belatedness. His last novel, Blaugast, was never published during his lifetime; and only now appears in English from the elegant Twisted Spoon Press. Blaugast's astonishingly violent decline, from bourgeois life into the most savagely depicted human degradation I can remember encountering in fiction, is so couched that everything he experiences must be understood literally: even Prague itself. Here is the rag and bone shop of true urban fantasy. It is not a great novel; but it is our story, lest we forget. John Clute
Copyright © 2007 John Clute
[Back to Table of Contents]
BOOKZONE—More of the Latest Books Reviewed
* * * *
Making Money
Terry Pratchett
* * * *
At first glance, recent Discworld books divide into those with clear-cut plots featuring multifaceted characters like the city guard or the Lancre witches, and those tackling complicated real-world issues with a new, straightforward cast. But as Granny Weatherwax knows, a second look can show things in a different light. As in Thud, straightforward plots have hidden depths. So do recent arrivals in Ankh Morpork.
Consequently, the reappearance of former conman Moist Von Lipwig is a delight. In Going Postal he revitalised the moribund Royal Mail because it was take the job or be hanged. Surely success means Lord Vetinari has nothing on him now? But his shrewd lordship sees Moist struggling with boredom. Before he succumbs to hobbies like Extreme Sneezing, the city is far better served by introducing him to Mrs Topsy Lavish, aged owner of the Royal Bank and its associated Mint. When she bequeaths Moist her little dog, and thus, the entire banking operation, he faces a whole new set of challenges.
His talents for making mischief and profit in the financial sector are not appreciated by the unnervingly humourless, Mr Bent who, as Chief Cashier arrives before dawn and works till nightfall. The rest of the Lavish family are outraged, notably the selfish and snobbish Cosmo and Pucci. Moist doesn't like snobs; his earlier life fleecing the common man depended on understanding folk who keep their money in socks under their mattress. Now he's their champion. Besides, he and Lord Vetinari both take a dim view of anyone threatening an innocent dog. But Moist doesn't just have new enemies. An old acquaintance arrives ready to show the world Moist's feet of clay for the right price. With his fiancée, Adora Belle Dearheart, occupied with ancient golem concerns, Moist has to think fast and move quicker to avoid catastrophe.
Published in a month when queues threaten calamity for real-world banks, one might imagine Terry Pratchett has been channelling the precognitive Mrs Cake. She makes an appearance, as do old friends like CMOT Dibbler. Self-indulgent? Not really. They're ideal characters to feature in episodes key to developing plot and setting. Similarly, readers shouldn't be distracted if a villain with a mutilated hand, an undead wizard and massed ranks of golems strike faint echoes of recollection. The logic of their inclusion is sound as sub-plots draw threads from the entire Discworld tapestry, ultimately woven into the highly-charged and dramatic conclusion.
Going Postal reduced free enterprise's pitfalls and predators to simplicity through the absurdities of the Discworld. Making Money clarifies the fundamentals of economics in a bank where modelling liquidity involves glass tubes going gloop. Along the way, Pratchett's exploration of the morality of capitalism should be applauded. His writing remains seemingly, deceptively, effortless. Don't be fooled. With a light, precise touch for characterisation and mastery of unobt
rusive plot-construction, his instinct for comedy and timing is second to none. Once readers have revelled in the laughs, they should take a moment to really appreciate the skill underpinning this fine entertainment.
Copyright © 2007 Juliet E. McKenna
* * * *
Beyond Human
Gregory Benford and Elisabeth Malartre
* * * *
* * * *
Speculation is the life's blood of science fiction. Most of us will, by now, have read scores of stories and novels exploring the possibilities of space travel, imagining the architecture of futuristic cities and hypothesizing the physiology and behaviour of alien races. However, arguably the most celebrated stalwart of the sci-fi feature is the robot. What effect will it have on the life of man? How will it evolve? What forms will it take and functions will it carry out? In Beyond Human, Benford and Malartre address these questions and more.