Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 (52 page)

So long as writers such as Paolo Bacigalupi fight the good fight on the printed page, that ultimate threat of narratological extinction will be staved off a little longer, although, as Bacigalupi knows and shows, the battle will not be painless or without losses.

97

Nancy Kress

Kress starts with a simple yet deep premise and then unfurls it to a wide, enigmatic banner. An alien race calling itself the Atoners arrives at Earth in the year 2020. (In a clever conceit, First Contact is achieved through a website!) They ask for volunteers to visit a variety of planets on which reside our human cousins, “kidnapped” and relocated by the Atoners themselves 10,000 years ago. The Terran volunteers have one mission: to witness—actually, to ferret out
sans
alien help—some specific yet undisclosed wrongfulness inflicted millennia ago upon the human race. When this knowledge is finally gained, it proves to be sheer dynamite. We won’t give away the surprise, except to say that the revelation regards the human soul, and will have immense impact back on Earth. “It was a bomb the Atoners were sending back with these twenty-one young people, a bomb that would hit all the continents at once, igniting controversies hot enough to scorch them all.”

So much for Part One of the book, which resembles a kind of
The Man Who Fell to Earth
in reverse, given the plight of the human observers adrift on two alien planets, Kular A and Kular B. Our main emotional and rational locus in this investigation, splendidly limned, is Cam O’Kane, an American woman full of youthful impatience, survivalist vigor and lateral insights into the culture of Kular A. In communication with her counterpart on Kular B, Lucca Maduro, she manages to uncover the ancient alien misdeed, which involves tampering with our species’ genetic heritage.

Part Two of
Steal Across the Sky
documents the chaotic, consensus-reality-shattering effects this discovery has on human civilization—and on the private lives of the Witnesses who returned. Kress employs a clever “multimedia” approach, shifting among many points of view and offering us fake “documents,” to create a dazzling patchwork impression of global upheaval.

Kress achieves a hybrid glory in her bipartite novel. The first half certainly harks back to the anthropologically inclined novels of Michael Bishop (
A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire
) and Ursula K. Le Guin (
The Dispossessed
, especially for its similar mirror world motif), offering us “thick” immersive descriptions of a puzzle culture. That the puzzle culture is an underlying human one, by genetic evidence, only adds to the sense of estrangement. (This trick is often employed by another master, Jack Vance; see Entry 48.) Kress’s book also resonates with Gardner Dozois’s
Strangers
, a grim catalogue of cultural misunderstandings, culminating in a shocking truth.

The second half of the novel reads like one of those classic Damon Knight vehicles, such as “I See You” or
A for Anything
, in which a radical bit of technology (an omniscient viewing device or matter-duplicator, respectively, in Knight’s work) rips the foundation stones out from under all human existence. That Kress chooses to show the power inherent in a simple meme (the revelation of what humanity has lost by alien tampering) instead of a gadget is indicative of the way our perspective and attitudes have changed since Knight’s day, as the value of information has become paramount over material objects.

In the end, the ultimate depths of the revelation are left unplumbed, and Kress refuses to write the explicit future of humanity. But the almost Lovecraftian lesson remains clear: contact with the larger universe is bound to expose us to concepts our puny human brains are almost unable to process.

98

Cherie Priest

Generally speaking, by the time a subculture such as steampunk secures the attention of major media, resulting in extensive coverage of the craze, that phenomenon is already on the way out. But despite numerous and growing features about steampunk in the global press, such does not seem to be the case this time. The juggernaut that is steampunk, like Dr. Loveless’s giant mechanical spider in the 1999 film version of
The Wild, Wild West
, seems capable of crushing all naysayers.

Yet what of the literature itself—now transformed into something of an appendage—that spawned the movement? Has it exhausted all the radium bullets in its Gatling gun, or is fresh work still capable of surprising the reader? Contemplating Cherie Priest’s bright-faced contributions, one can hold out hope for continuing literary quality and novelty within the sub-genre.

Priest’s career arc is contrary to that of many authors, writers who began in the smaller arena of sf and then moved to the bigger and better-paying fantasy venues. She commenced with a fantasy trilogy consisting of
Four and Twenty Blackbirds
,
Wings to the Kingdom
, and
Not Flesh Nor Feather
, before venturing into science fiction of the archaic sort. But she immediately displayed a ready grasp of the tropes. Funky brass and leather and thick-lensed goggles are a trademark signifier of steampunk. Frequently, though, beyond a certain fashionableness their utility is negligible. So when Cherie Priest goes to the trouble in her novel
Boneshaker
to provide a clever rationale for the existence and prevalence of such eye-gear, you know you’re in for a meticulously conceived and executed ride, featuring an adolescent protagonist whose actions are circumscribed within a tiny venue, in a book that nonetheless sports a fully adult texture and range.

Seattle, 1863: the giant tunneling machine of mad inventor Levi Blue manages to destroy a sizable portion of the city and unleash a subterranean gas—the Blight—which zombifies all who inhale it. (The gas is made visible through those special goggles.) The citizens respond by walling off the infected district and leaving those trapped inside to die—or worse. Sixteen years later, Blue’s ostracized widow, Briar, lives in the ghetto just outside the wall with her teenaged son Zeke. Intent on clearing his father’s name, Zeke takes off one day across the wall, and Briar has no recourse but to follow.

Priest’s focus on a steampunk wasteland is playfully and productively anomalous. Generally, the genre likes to focus on intact and functioning societies, whether dystopian or mundanely civil. Her depiction of the interzone as an outlaw realm of freedom, however dangerous, evokes the punk dream of life outside establishment strictures—a dream too often actually neglected in the genre that borrows half its name from that music. The horror tropes are another entertaining divergence from standard steampunk templates.

Likewise, the parallel domestic quests of mother and son (Priest divides the action in half between Zeke and Briar) is a freshening of both motivation and character from the rote adventurers the reader often encounters in this type of tale.

Priest’s small, carefully constrained sphere of action (some widening dialogue pertains to the Civil War still raging back East, long after our version had ended) does, however, feel claustrophobic and slightly unambitious at times. But within that limited domain, she manages to impart a vivid sense of strangeness and adventure.

Fresh off her success with
Boneshaker
, Cherie Priest maintained her heady steampunk momentum with
Clementine
(2010). As you might suspect from its less-weighty title, which surely will evoke childhood memories of a silly ditty,
Clementine
is more of a romp—less fraught and dire—than its predecessor, despite being set in that exact same fictional universe. Consider it as the best episode of The Wild, Wild West never filmed.

Focus is initially on two larger-than-life characters, veritable forces of nature, who entertainingly and suspensefully split alternating chapters of the narrative until their paths finally cross. First comes Captain Croggon Beauregard Hainey, ex-slave and now a legendary sky-pirate. Hainey is in hot pursuit of his own stolen airship, the
Free Crow
, which a dastard named Felton Brink has stolen and rechristened
Clementine
. Brink is heading to Louisville, Kentucky, bearing a mysterious cargo, and Hainey wants revenge. (The secret of the cargo will tally with the re-naming of the ship, if you like clues.)

On Hainey’s trail is Maria Isabella Boyd, a woman “nearly forty years old and two husbands down,” in her own words. Not that Boyd has ever relied overmuch on men. She’s been a Confederate spy, an actress and a general survival expert. Now, having been hired by Allan Pinkerton himself, she’s a private detective/cop. She’s leery of her first assignment, but determined to give it a go.

When Hainey and Boyd meet, it’s a titanic dustup that ultimately settles down in strained cooperation. The rigors of their madcap odyssey will mellow that prickly relationship into respect and friendship, and leave each antagonist with a forced but genuine friendly feeling for their rival.

Priest’s tale in this sequel benefits from a wider canvas. With
Boneshaker
being set exclusively in Seattle, and mostly in that city’s walled ghetto, events got slightly claustrophobic, and we did not see as much of her alternative-history America as we might have wished.
Clementine
remedies that small deficit, as our heroes ricochet around the West and Midwest, and we get a larger sense of the festering Civil War back East.

Priest exhibits a minute and juicy particularity about her imagined past, grounding us in tons of sensory details. We can feel the jouncing flight of the dirigibles, smell the booze-redolent cellars and cheap hotel rooms of the tale. When Boyd is sent in a long trip in an unprotected two-person airship, the
Flying Fish
, we shiver with her, and brace for the dangerous descent. The
Flying Fish
is the proud creation of one Algernon Rice, another Pinkerton agent, and Rice’s rich depiction and coherent actions, despite his being basically a walk-on character, illustrate the care and ingenuity which Priest lavishes on even the most minor personages in her story. She’s mastered the Dickensian trick of doing quirky-memorable-but-not-overbearingly-so.

With a woman and a black man—three black men, actually, given Hainey’s two memorable sidekicks, Lamar and Simeon—at the center of her tale, Priest could have chosen to go all heavy-handed pot-of-message on us. But although both Boyd and Hainey do get off some good quips and ripostes refuting their alleged second-class status, the theme of equality remains objectified mainly in their actions, residing at a subtle, almost subliminal level. The thrilling tale is Priest’s main concern here—as it rightly should be—as she lets adventures serve as enlightenment in a most admirable fashion.

A third volume,
Dreadnought
(also 2010), broadened and deepened the saga of what Priest has called her “Clockwork Century.”