few issues ago, I reviewed a novel called Revelation Space, by Alastair Reynolds. I thought there was quite a lot wrong with it, and still do; but Rick Kleffel's letter about what I said then gave me to think.
I don't go all the way with Kleffel's feeling that I reveal too much plot in my reviews, but I do feel he was right to demur about the tone (and some of the substance) of this piece in particular. I now think it gives a more negative impression of Reynolds's galumphing but gamely gargantuan tale than I'd intended, probably because I got caught up in speculations about the nature of space opera that Revelation Space (which is a space opera) evoked. Those thoughts may have been sound enough in isolation, but it was untoward of me (as Kleffel hints) to lambaste poor Reynolds for not obeying a bunch of rules I'd just thought up.
I do still think he nearly hamstrung his story by setting Revelation Space in a physical universe unfriendly to the kind of drama he eventually unfolded, which was why so much of the book is made up of backstory--long chapters mainly there (it seemed) to get the cast all together, in the same place and time, so the real story could (finally) begin. But that story, once it got up speed, is vivid and sharply realized, with cosmogonic bigthinks galore (the sort of thing Dan Simmons does so well, and which Reynolds does extremely well too). In the end, Revelation Space is the genuine thing: a space opera with good tunes.
And it gives off that aura that all great space operas do: the thrilled melancholy of the abyss.
Vile fluids and exudations
We move to another huge book from the small island called Great Britain. The UK edition of China Mieville's Perdido Street Station is generously typeset (let us hope Ballantine Del Rey will be as bountiful), but at 710 pages there is still a lot to read. Almost all of it should be read.
There are, as in most novels of this length, pages and chapters you wish the author had wrung dry before sending the disk off; and there are some headachy passages of gonzo hectoring where all too many short pounding colorful phrases congregate in gangs to describe the clangorous convulsive congested really quite big city of New Crobuzon. But New Crobuzon, a great boiling metropolis in the heart of the world of Bas-Lag, is, in the end, an astonishing creation. It is everything a fantasy/SF/horror City should seem to be, in the mind's eye, as we slide further into what is likely to be a truly crowded century.
Because Perdido Street Station contains a certain amount of magic, which Mieville scientizes by calling it thaumaturgy, and because most of the books this one evokes are fantasy or dark fantasy, it is at times hard to realize that this novel--as so many novels are going to be over the next years and decades--simply does not fit neatly into any generic category.
It is fantasy because of the magic, and because most of the central members of its large cast are morally purged through their involvment in the terrible events at the heart of the book. After they have gone through fire--after they have defeated the giant slake-moths who suck minds dry of quiddity and flow, who leave their victims brain-wiped and moribund--they begin to experience a vulnerable healing, and they leave the City.
It is horror or dark fantasy because the slake-moths are creatures who impart a sensation of horror, and they manifest the fragility of the surface of the world (partly because they are multi-dimensional and pierce that surface at will); because horror, unlike fantasy, is submersed in the vile fluids and exudations of the physical body (Mieville has a sweet tooth for words like "vile"), and Perdido Street Station is ranker than a urinal with the suppurations adherent to flesh (ours) that melts. And because New Crobuzon is a nightmare parody of London or Paris.
It is SF because, in the end, it is about possible transformations enacted upon a possible world. Magus is just another way of saying Edison.
It is fantasy and horror and SF, and a thing in itself. It is reminiscent of--and it pays frequent homages to--Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, M. John Harrison's Viriconium books, Michael Swanwick's The Iron Dragon's Daughter, Michael Moorcock's godfather oeuvre in its entirety, Mary Gentle's Rats and Gargoyles, Terry Pratchett's Discworld series (specifically for Chancellor Ridcully of the Unseen University, and the filthy world-city of Ankh-Morpork), and (perhaps most of all) to The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. It is reminiscent of these books and others, but it obeys none of them. It stands up by itself.
It is the best steampunk novel since Gibson and Sterling's.
The coming of the slake-moths
As the book begins, a garuda--a humanoid with wings--comes to the great city; his own wings have been chopped off by his people as a punishment for the sin of taking the choice of another (a sin which runs from murder or rape to the theft of a stamp). He wants wings. He hires a Falstaffian rogue scientist, Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin, to make him wings.
In attempting to fulfill this commission, Isaac acquires one of five pupae of what turn out to be slake-moths, imported into New Crobuzon by a Remade criminal named Motley (Remades are humans who have been surgically transformed into cyborg-like creatures, usually as a punishment) because they exude a potent narcotic.
But slake-moths are profoundly dangerous to any sentient creature, and once hatched they begin a reign of terror over the great city. The garuda, and Isaac, and his lover (a human-insect painter whose medium is spit, and who is hired and captured and tortured by Motley), and a Construct Council (a budding AI straight out of The Difference Engine), and a Weaver (a spider-like creature who slips through the skin of the world babbling), and other humans, all become embroiled in an attempt to save themselves, and their world, from the slake-moths.
Isaac applies a unified field theory (which he has just come up with) to the construction of a crisis energy engine, which the Weaver and the Construct Council focus their own energies through in a pyrotechnical semi-final battle against the enemy. In the meantime, torturing has gone on, and politicking, and sex, and alarums and excursions. There is a great deal of shouting--sometimes you almost want to shut the book so as not to disturb the neighbors--and a lot of pain.
A high hoarse burning voice
At times we lose sight of the sufferers; at times they are drowned out in the punk pomp of the telling of the long, crowded, fulminating tale. But they come back; they break through the succulent sucking scum of city life and say something we recognize.
Perdido Street Station--its title is the name of the vast Gaudi-esque edifice at the heart of the city, where all the steam-train lines converge and the action climaxes--is a lot of things, and everything it is is told in a high hoarse burning voice. But underneath the blare and the fun and the horror and the nag, there are faces we recognize. These faces are scummy, dolorous, laughing, false and true.
Our faces. Our faces tomorrow. They're our faces.
John Clute is a writer, editor, critic and scholar of science fiction. He is the author of Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia and co-editor of both The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, all Hugo Award winners. His criticism and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and other places too numerous to list; much of this material has
been collected in Strokes: Reviews and Essays 1966-1986 and Look at the Evidence: Reviews and Essays.
