e first meet Rosa Coleman in 1952, when she is an elderly woman in her 70s. Rosa is writing the story of her long, eventful life, using the 40-plus volumes of her diary as raw materials, and her tale proves to be a vivid and curious one that veers midway from a scrupulously mimetic historical novel to a cosmic speculation.
We see Rosa's childhood as an orphan of the Civil War, and her maturation into an intelligent but naive young college-educated woman. She marries a wealthy man named Edward Tolliver, but he proves to be a brute. Enduring a decade and a half of a rough marriage, Rosa calls it quits when Tolliver sexually abuses their 14-year-old son, Daniel. On the run, Rosa and Daniel journey across the sprawling canvas of frontier America. They find refuge in Dodge City, considerably calmed down from its gunslinging heyday. But four years of peace is shattered by the arrival of a Pinkerton investigator hired by Tolliver.
Escaping the clutches of the detective, Rosa and her son light out for the furthest possible destination: the gold-rush Yukon. On the West Coast, they fall in with a man and his son, Doc and Chuck Coleman. The four pool their resources, and after some hard traveling the three men are established on their distant claim, while Rosa holds down a teaching job in Skagway. Here is where her life shunts off onto a strange track.
Bad news from Daniel and company motivates Rosa to attempt suicide. Just on the point of shooting herself, she is interrupted by the appearance of a deific raven, a bird that has helped her three times before. The raven reveals himself to be an order of being above the human, a "guardian of life." He takes Rosa on an interstellar mystery trip, enlarging her intellectual and spiritual conceptions of the universe. Returned to Earth, she finds that she has been given a chance to divert the whole world onto a better timeline—only if she can get those closest to her to believe her visions.
A pastoral recreation of period America
Just this year, Wesleyan University Press printed a new translation by Brian Stableford of Camille Flammarion's famous but little-seen proto-SF novel Lumen. This publishing synchronicity benefits any reader who would like to compare the explicitly namechecked inspiration for Haldeman's new novel against his intriguing transfiguration of the French model. In my opinion, Haldeman manages to honor his inspiration while crafting a solid tale that's much more readable to modern tastes. This book, however, due in part perhaps to its old-fashioned influences, does not break any radical new speculative ground, and at times seems a tad wispy in its SF content.
First off, however, Haldeman must be commended for his meticulous recreation of period America. As a richly sensual evocation of the late-19th-century United States, this book will surely captivate the reader looking for exotic wonders of the recent past. From the technology of steam travel to the odd cuisine to the cultural attitudes of the average citizen, Haldeman recreates a vanished era and plonks the reader firmly into it. Furthermore, the first-person narration by Rosa is flawlessly done. We fully believe in the three-dimensionality of this woman, and inhabit her sensibility fully. Curiously enough, this book evokes the ambiance and plot of the recent Marvel Comics series Origin, the backstory on the X-Man Wolverine.
But fascinating as this necessary grounding in period reality is, it occupies more than two-thirds of the novel. It is not until the final 70 pages that the speculative content materializes. When it does, it's gripping in a low-key way, a kind of Olympian and Stapledonian perspective on life and death, with New Age tints. Then come some fairly clever revelations about shifting timelines, and a coda in which Rosa summarizes the 20th-century portion of her life. (She becomes a pulp writer, of all things, and finds a kindred spirit in good old Hugo Gernsback!)
Bruce Sterling recently propounded the question: Could honest and vital SF with real speculative impact be set in the historical past without cheating either history or SF? Almost as if in answer, Haldeman's novel proves that SF is up to such challenges. But one wishes that the balance between history and SF had been a little less uneven.
