Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 (8 page)
Read Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 Online
Authors: Damien Broderick,Paul di Filippo
11
Lucius Shepard
(1987)
CATAPULTING
to prize-winning prominence in the early 1980s, Lucius Shepard effortlessly surpassed the achievements of the previous generation of once-routine sf writers—Robert Silverberg, Harlan Ellison—who had remade themselves more ambitiously in the 1960s and ’70s. But Shepard, unlike most of the brilliant kids who created modern science fiction in the late 1940s and ’50s, was already (like Gene Wolfe, Entry 36) in the middle of his life. He had experience of the Vietnam war (perhaps as a reporter rather than warrior), had traveled widely in dangerous places from Latin America to Afghanistan, performed in rock bands, married and divorced. This is the
curriculum vita
of a Conrad, a Hemingway, a Robert Stone rather than an Asimov, and his work is clearly affiliated with those writers, and with the baroque lushness of the magical realists of Colombia and Argentina: Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar. The superb opening stanza of
Life During Wartime
first appeared in
Asimov’s
as the novella “R & R” and won 1987’s Nebula and Locus Awards, but the novel, published without conspicuous genre trappings, was hailed as well by non-genre reviewers and critics.
From this remove, we see that Shepard’s future did not quite come to pass, yet its vividness and edge still bite. Tel Aviv has not been nuked, Guatemala has not been invested by US troops on the scale of Vietnam—but parallels are evident in Iraq and Afghanistan and the relentless drug wars in Mexico and other nations south of the US border.
David Mingolla is a 19 year old conscript, stationed in the preposterous Ant Farm, a military termitarium of tunnels and weapons quickly reduced to uselessness by guerrillas. It is a
reductio ad absurdum
of the protracted engagement in Vietnam, and serves as well for the massively armored western military enclaves in Iraq and other oil-rich nations. What makes New York art student Mingolla special is his possession of that old sf standby, psychic abilities. He has been headhunted by Psicorps, a kind of merciless psi training branch of the armed forces distantly akin, but far more ferocious, to the actual US Star Gate remote viewing program that was still deeply classified when Shepard wrote his fiction.
Mingolla rejects the call: “These guys think they’re mental wizards or something, but all they do is predict stuff, and they’re wrong half the time. And I was scared of the drugs, too. I heard they had bad effects.” He cannot deny his own nature, though, and the impulses drawing him after he meets Debora Cifuentes, a sexually compelling Sombra enemy psychic. Soon he is in the appalling “therapeutic” custody of Dr. Izaguirre, doped with a rare flowered weed that elicits and enhances psi powers—not just gappy precognition but an uncanny ability to shape and control the emotions of others. And the drugs do have very bad effects. They turn Mingolla, step by crazed step, into a sort of monster. It seems no accident that his name is a near-homonym for Mengele, the Nazi experimentalist doctor from Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp who fled to Argentina and Paraguay.
[1]
In the 1950s, this could have been a standard “psionics” adventure seeded by John W. Campbell, editor of
Astounding.
In the hands of a luminous, tough-minded, politically embittered writer like Shepard, it moves far beyond those catchpenny limits. Sometimes the diction is a little too ponderous, portentous—“The memories of the dead men in his wake were weights bracketed to his heart, holding him in place”—but mostly Shepard’s writing is various and fluently fitted to its purpose: raspingly obscene and brutal when the grunts talk macho trash, driven through superstitious rituals of self protection from magical assault, or sexually frank and fervent, or richly descriptive, drifting from lyricism to terror:
A couple of dozen butterflies were preening on Coffee’s scalp—a bizarre animate wig—and others clung to his beard; a great cloud of them was circling low above his head like a whirlpool galaxy of cut flowers... Butterflies poured down the tunnel to thicken it further, and [Coffee] slumped... the mound growing with the disconnected swiftness of time-lapse photography, until it had become a multicolored pyramid towering 30 feet above, like a temple buried beneath a million lovely flowers.
Mingolla’s progression is a sort of J. G. Ballard-meets-Philip K. Dick descent through a nightmarish Purgatorio or harrowing of Hell, hallucinatory, compulsive, stripping flesh from bone. At the outset, he regards “the core problems of the Central American peoples,” like his own, as being “trapped between the poles of magic and reason, their lives governed by the politics of the ultrareal, their spirits ruled by myths and legends, with the rectangular, computerized bulk of North America above and the conch-shell-shaped mystery of South America below.”
Granted, this is a patronizing appraisal by an untested youth, yet it eerily foreshadows the magical war between two old Spanish families that proves to be the hidden core of the mad, arbitrary conflict tearing at the Americas. Mingolla sinks ever deeper into this nightmare of myth, drugs, paranormal intuition, and personal command, held from the pit of absolute power by his bond with Debora yet ruinously energized by it. Is his final temptation to drag them together into a Faustian hell of survivalist banality?
The titular “Life During Wartime” was a Talking Heads’ song of rebellion in an imagined 1980s’ epoch of urban terror. Messages are sent only in uncertain hope that they’ll reach their destination and get a reply, identity is masked, preparations for attack by the nameless narrator are readied, even day and night are reversed—and there’s every chance that nobody will ever make it home. That’s Mingolla’s bleak prospect, too. Let us hope we might yet escape it ourselves.
[1]
Shepard did not consciously intend this pun, stating that he drew the name Mingolla from a newspaper. But the story he published immediately after “R & R” was titled “Mengele,” and the unconscious is tricky.
12
George Turner
(1987)
THE TWO
most important Australian science fiction novelists to date are Greg Egan, for his brilliant ingenuity and scientific depth (Entry 38), and the late George Turner (1916-1997), for what one critic called his “moral seriousness” and his determination to avoid classic sf clichés.
A quality of gravitas attends almost all Turner’s writing, beginning with his award-winning non-sf novels of the 1950s and ’60s. (He shared the 1962 Miles Franklin award for
The Cupboard Under the Stairs
and the Commonwealth Literary Fund award for
The Lame Dog Man.
) He entered the science fiction world with a series of ferociously contentious and hard-bitten critical reviews of much loved work such as Alfred Bester’s
The Demolished Man
, and finally decided to try his own hand at the genre.
His first sf novel,
Beloved Son,
was applauded by critics, and earned him a Ditmar award, but his best is probably
Drowning Towers
(the US retitling of the original
The Sea and Summer
), a Greenhouse mid-catastrophe study of human nature under extreme pressure, climatic and social. It won the Arthur C. Clarke award, and was regional winner in the international Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. (Another significant novel is
Genetic Soldier
[1994], which drew upon Turner’s own military experience during the Second World War.)
A thousand years after the melting of Antarctica’s ice, Lenna, a scholar, and Andra, a playwright of the Autumn People, explore the drowned high-rise towers built to accommodate the swarming Swill, living on State charity, of mid-21st century Melbourne, Australia. Each of these monstrous, crowded tenement ghettos housed some 70,000 uneducated, stinking, workless victims of a collapsing society, eight to a bedroom. Most of the book proves to be a novel written by Lenna, reconstructing a key moment in the failure of this makeshift bureaucratic solution to overpopulation and global climate change. Each chapter is told by one or other of the players in this drama, although their voices share Turner’s irritable, tin-eared truculence. (Ventriloquism was not one of his gifts; the biographer of J. G. Ballard, John Baxter, complained that “if there is an awkward way to express a simple thought, Turner will find it.” But George Turner had different game in his sights.)
The tragical history of our coming century is observed by the Autumn People as a new ice age closes in on a less populated, more modest world better prepared for disastrous change and its amelioration. Their editorial chorus serves Turner’s purpose as a propagandist, but the meat of the book is the tale of the Conway family: mother Alison, her paramour Billy Kovacs—Boss of one teeming tower block, thug, and police toady—and her clever, thwarted children Teddy and Francis, dragging themselves upward again through dystopia. The Conways stand midway between high and low; they are Fringe, formerly Middle Sweet (the well-off with jobs), and now live in a wretched small house near Kovacs’ monstrous ghetto.
“In 2041,” Francis notes in his diary—presumably Lenna’s reconstruction, not a remnant document—“the population of the planet passed the ten billion mark.” (This is still considered plausible by UN demographers, if on the high end.) Francis was six, Teddy nine, meat rationed, the wheat belt crushed against the southern coast, gasoline unobtainable on the open market, the top third of Australia taken by desperate Asian invaders, nine-tenths of Melbourne’s 10 million crammed into a tenth of its area. These
barrios
for the Swill are arrayed in “ten close-packed groups of monoliths snuffling blunt snouts at the sky.”
Evidently the grim lessons of the 20th century, when inner city slum communities were razed and replaced by appalling, dysfunctional high-rise Projects, have been forgotten or ignored. The sea is inexorably rising. And a Final Solution of some kind looks inevitable: either the extraneous living must be culled (although at least not butchered; there is no horrified cry here that “Soylent Green is
people!
”), or their fertility snipped. Kovacs suspects that a plot is underway at the highest levels of authority—genocide of the Swill via mass sterilization—and he is prepared to take any vicious steps necessary to unmask it.
Teddy enters Police Intelligence, while genius lightning-calculator Francis weasels his cunning way into various criminal enterprises. A coalition of Teddy, his revered Police Intelligence chief, and father-figure Kovacs, creates from select Swill the “New Men”: “people who do what they can instead of sitting on their arses waiting for time to roll over them.” Unlike A. E. van Vogt’s Slans, and other supermen of classic sf, these New Men can do little to hold back the literal and figurative tides.
Sly Francis is the most entertaining and pleasingly picaresque character in this very Australian version of Dickensian social critique. He is not euphemistic in his hatred of the Swill: “I used to be afraid of their violence but that can be avoided; now I just detest their dirt, their whining voices and their lack of interest in anything but enduring through the night to the following day.” But
The Sea and Summer
is no mere finger-wagging. The intertwined stories tear along, “little human glimpses,” as Lenna puts it, that “do help, if only in confirming our confidence in steadfast courage.”
