Ambrose & Elsewhere

Courtesy of John O’Neill, here’s a review of Black Gate 9 from the Australian blog Horrorscope:

http://ozhorrorscope.blogspot.com/2006/11/review-black-gate-9.html

I always enjoy reading kind words about myself (or Morlock), but I was especially pleased to see the reviewer take notice of the issue’s art. Black Gate is stunningly produced, everything a genre magazine should be and seldom is, and some of the artists are really remarkable (especially Chuck “Trismegistos” Lukacs).

The latest word seems to be that Black Gate 10 (with, among other things, a new Morlock story “A Book of Silences”) will be out in December.

sartorias discusses kids’ early language and how it represents creative thought. It provoked an interesting discussion, but my own reaction wasn’t really on her topic, so I put it here.

My youngest brother, when he was still a preschooler, used to get tired of hearing about things that happened before he was born. He would make up things that never happened and then, when questioned, would say sharply, “It was a long time ago; you don’t remember.” At the time I thought this was hilarious. Now it makes me a little queasy: he was obviously mirroring dismissive attitudes he perceived in his mob of older siblings, including me. He was at war with us and imagination was his primary weapon; he was making up his own history to compete with ours.

The more I think about this the more it seems to be a primary impulse in the writing of fantasy fiction, maybe fiction generally: to create an imaginary history to defend one’s own identity. In its cruder forms, this produces the log of the USS Mary Sue. In subtler forms you might get something like Joyce’s quasi-autobiographical fiction. But maybe even stuff where the authors disappear behind their creation (like Vance’s fantasy or LeGuin’s or, on a more elevated plane, the work of Shakespeare or Homer) serves the same function.

So maybe the archetypal fantasy story doesn’t really begin with a polite Once upon a time… but with a surly subvocal mutter, It was a long time ago; you don’t remember.

Since I won’t normally be reviewing books here, I thought I’d make my first entry a book review.

The book is Chris Roberson’s Paragaea.

http://tinyurl.com/uyb42

The book involves a female cosmonaut falling through a hole in space to land on a Pangaea-like continent on a parallel Earth full of various kinds of human, human animal hybrids (“metamankind”: jaguar-men, snake-men, fish-men, crocodile-men etc.), a couple of demi-mortal androids and a forbidden city of high science-magic. Metal is rare, but technology is not necessarily low. There are air-ships, preyed upon by pterosaur-riding air-pirates, sword-fights, nomadic nations on sea (“the Drift”) and land (“Roam”), a metallic forest of highly but bizarrely intelligent trees, etc. The cosmonaut has to fight her way through most of this stuff to get back home to peace-loving peoples of the Soviet Republics. Roberson has invented a wonderful world and sketched out some interesting figures in it: the ostensible lead character, Akilina Mikhhailovna Chirikova (Lina); Balam, the exiled ruler of the jaguar-men (who are mostly women, it seems); Hieronymus Bonaventure, a swashbuckling lieutenant in the 18th C. British navy who also fell through a hole to Paragaea.

What’s not to like?

Unfortunately, there is a great deal not to like in the book. I hate to say this, as I badly wanted to praise Paragaea, and it does have some great things in it. But…

Roberson is a careless and often inept stylist. Characters frequently “sigh a sigh” or “dream a dream” or “VERB a COGNATE-NOUN”, and excess verbiage of that type is a hallmark of Roberson’s style. One character cycles between dog-Latin and ineptly constructed archaic English, for no very clear reason. More importantly, Roberson’s bland indefinite descriptions and his addiction to clichés take the world out of focus, make it harder to see what he’s talking about.

Still, that would be a minor problem if the storytelling were there. It’s not. One example. The heroes go to the bizarre society of the Roaming Empire, a vast nomadic city. Pages of exposition are spent on the place. Once there, one of the characters goes offscreen (as it were) to get horses for the next stage of their journey, and they leave. I am not making this up. Roberson has invented the weird and intriguing society, but never tells a story using it which, in a nutshell, is his problem throughout the book. At the end of the novel, in a development set up with unusual care, the forbidden city of Atla has been breached and an army of metamen (including the daughter of one of the protagonists) is raging through the city. It would be nice to know how this works out, but we don’t because Roberson leaves the reader hanging.

The adventure, too, is often lacking in adventurousness. The heroes go to the Temple of the Forgotten God and fight through a dungeon full of useless monsters to reach the heart of the temple where a rather pompous android named Benu is resurrecting himself. The monsters are meant to keep people out of this place that Benu returns to once every thousand years. (Why not just shut the door behind you and lock it? Who tends the giant scorpion etc. in the thousand years between Benu’s visits? I know, I know: If you’re wondering how he eats and breathes and other science facts etc.) The heroes defeat all the challenges with such off-handed ease that they themselves seem bored. Why should the reader be interested? This one wasn’t.

In summary, there was some wonderful stuff here, but the story just didn’t work. When and if Roberson figures out how to conduct a story worthy of his splendid background he’ll be someone to reckon with. But, based on Paragaea, he’s not there yet.

Those who disagree can find more Roberson goodness (including an entire novel about Hieronymus Bonaventure) at http://www.chrisroberson.net/