Book Reviews: City Come A-Walkin', Over the River and Through the Woods, The Truth Machine

Off the Shelf
City Come A-Walkin'
Over the River and Through the Woods
The Truth Machine

A take-no-prisoners trip into the heart of a sentient city

City Come A-Walkin'
By John Shirley
Eyeball Books
US $10.00
Revised edition, 1996

Review by L.R.C. Munro

tu Cole runs Club Anesthesia, the wildest fringe bar in a near-future San Francisco. This is a tough world where criminal organizations vie for power, vigilantes roam the streets and electronic credit is the only legal tender. Cole's club is a meeting place for all elements of the city's social fringe. One night a grim, trench-coated man in mirrorshades appears in the club and beckons Cole and Catz Wailen, a psi-sensitive singer, out into the streets.

The "man" is actually City, the living-flesh avatar of the city's collective unconscious, and he is on a mission to right the wrongs that plague its streets. City draws Cole and Catz into one violent confrontation after another, forcing them to take on its enemies, regardless of their own desires. While Cole and Catz wrestle with the personal cost of being avenging angels, City drives them on to battle a criminal "cancer" that threatens to destroy not only San Francisco, but possibly the rest of the country.

City Come A-Walkin' is considered by some (including William Gibson, who wrote the forward to this edition) to be the vanguard of cyberpunk. Originally published in 1980, it contains most of the fundamental elements of the genre, but in a raw, rough form. There is no "cyberspace" here, no AIs, not even personal computers, yet all of these concepts are implied in the book's concrete analogy of electronic-interconnectedness-as-neural-network and in the way the city (and City) operates.

What comes through even more strongly is the "punk" ethic. Shirley captures the gritty feel of subcultures evolving on the margins of a corrupt, monolithic power structure, yet since the landscape isn't die-cut from Neuromancer or Blade Runner, City feels even grittier and a lot like urban North America in the '90s. This is a revised edition, so it's hard to say if Shirley was as prophetic as he seems, but there is some striking prognostication here.

City stands up less well as a novel in its own right. The writing is choppy and raw; City's "enemies" are generic and everybody's dialogue is afflicted with annoying phonetic slang. Cole and Catz are solid enough characters to evoke some empathy, but not enough to really make readers care what happens to them. In fact, most of that caring is evoked by the bracketing story narrated by a now mysteriously disembodied Cole. On the other hand, the urgency of the ideas and the rough edge of the prose has its own energy that makes the book very readable despite its flaws.

This revised reprint of City Come A-Walkin' is a rough, energetic, often violent book full of ideas that, if no longer new, are still considered radical. Definitely worth a look, although more interesting for its place in the evolution of science fiction than for its own intrinsic charm.

I would recommend this book both to people who love cyberpunk and those who despise it as it gives a very different view of the underpinnings of the genre. -- LRC

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Over the River and Through the Woods

A new collection of Clifford D. Simak's best short fiction

Over the River and Through the Woods
By Clifford D. Simak
Tachyon Publications/Dark Regions Press
$25.00
Hardcover, March 1996

Review by Clinton Lawrence

ver the River and Through the Woods collects eight of Clifford D. Simak's best short stories, presented with an introduction by Poul Anderson. Simak, who died in 1988, was particularly well known for writing science fiction with rural settings, and that style is clearly evident in this collection. Only one story takes place in a city, and Simak's protagonists are more likely to be farmers than scientists or engineers.

This pastoralism doesn't mean Simak doesn't have solid science fiction themes, however. Several of the stories feature aliens, and others involve such classic science fiction motifs as time travel, cloning and immortality. Interestingly, many of these stories seem to be exactly what Arthur C. Clarke must have had in mind when he said that a sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic. Simak's characters, few of whom are technically sophisticated, accept wonders as fact without being either frightened or overly concerned with the details.

Along with this quiet rationality, the stories convey a sense of decency and humane values without preaching about them. Simak doesn't avoid giving characters negative traits, but it's rare to find a villain in these stories. Rather, the stories are about encountering and learning about the unknown, not about conflict, and in Simak's universe, the unknown is likely to be alien but no more dangerous than the known world. It's an approach and a viewpoint that makes Simak unique.

The two best stories in this collection both earned Hugo Awards: "The Big Front Yard" and "The Grotto of the Dancing Deer." In "The Big Front Yard," a rural handyman and antique dealer notices strange things happening around the house, while his dog becomes obsessed with digging for something outside. After he discovers a huge glass object buried in the woods across the street, he returns to find that the front of his house has become a doorway to another world. Instead of being frightened or unbelieving, Simak's protagonist explores his new front yard. The story presents Simak's rational view of the unknown at its best.

In "The Grotto of the Dancing Deer," an archaeologist discovers a hidden chamber while studying cave paintings in the Basque region of Spain. The walls of the chamber are also painted, but unlike the serious painting of the main cave, these show the animals dancing. The truly interesting aspect of this discovery is what it tells the archaeologist about one of his assistants. Again, Simak's protagonist approaches the fantastic not with hysterical disbelief, but with rational, questioning acceptance.

While all of the stories in this collection are strong, others of particular interest are "Good Night, Mr. James," "Neighbor," and the title story "Over the River and Through the Woods." For those unfamiliar with Simak's work, this collection is a good introduction, and for those who already know and like Simak, it's a must-have.

With the current state of the publishing industry, it's left up to small publishers like Tachyon to keep older works in print. I'm glad some are willing to accept the challenge. -- Clint

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The Truth Machine

Truth and consequences in the near future

The Truth Machine
By James L. Halperin
Del Rey
$24.00/$33.50 Canada
Hardcover, September 1996

Review by Curt Wohleber

hen Randall Peterson Armstrong was six years old, he witnessed the abduction of his younger brother by a recently paroled sexual predator. As a boy he blamed himself for his brother's murder, and since then he has tirelessly focused his considerable genius on curing the ills of the world.

Graduating from Harvard while still a teenager, Armstrong has little trouble building his software firm into the world's most successful corporation. But that's just a warm-up for his main act: the development of the Truth Machine, a fool-proof lie detector, which Armstrong believes will virtually eliminate crime and revolutionize politics and human relations.

But Armstrong himself harbors a terrible secret, and he knows that one day he will have to tell the truth, understanding full well that his revelation could seal his own doom and crumble the foundation of a global society just beginning to enjoy peace and prosperity.

The Truth Machine is the first novel from James Halperin, a rare-coin dealer and co-owner of Ivy Press, which first published the novel earlier this year before Del Rey picked up the rights.

It's a highly flawed book, weakened by shallow characterization, wooden writing and rampant implausibilities. Yet for all that, Halperin tells an extremely interesting and provocative story. And he advances a number of provocative ideas without lecturing the reader or, worse, having the characters lecture each other. And while Armstrong is a bit too much of a dysfunctional Tom Swift, it's a hard-hearted reader who will not be moved by the plight of this tormented genius.

Halperin spends too much time trying to diagnose and cure most of society's ills and not nearly enough time exploring the philosophical and dramatic implications of the Truth Machine. This wouldn't be as much of a problem if the main characters, and apparently the author as well, did not regard the Truth Machine as an unquestionably good thing.

Halperin seems to regard privacy as an obsolete, even harmful notion that the Truth Machine would do away with. This ignores the need for privacy in a world not yet free of prejudice or political, sexual and religious persecution. Halperin displays some of his own prejudices, revealing one character's fondness for -- horrors! -- kinky virtual sex as final confirmation of the person's utter vileness.

The Truth Machine doesn't really quite gel as either a thriller or a political novel, but for readers who can get past its flaws, this novel offers a great deal for the mind to chew on.

For all the potential benefits, I'm not sure I would want to live in a world with a Truth Machine. Would you? -- Curt

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