he year 1986 saw the publication of Mike Resnick's Santiago, a novel subtitled "A Myth of the Far Future," the same alluring epithet given the current volume. In the first book, we were plunged into the galactic scene several millennia hence. The supreme power of this period is the Democracy, a somewhat autocratic agglomeration of more than 150,000 worlds. Surrounding the Democracy is the Inner Frontier, a collection of semi-civilized globes just as numerous, while beyond that lies the mysterious Outer Frontier. One dominant—perhaps the dominant—figure of the Inner Frontier is the mysterious, never-glimpsed outlaw known only as Santiago. With an immense bounty on his head, Santiago attracts the attentions of many colorful killers, including Sebastian Cain. After much hard traveling and exotic adventures, Cain eventually comes face to face with Santiago. He learns that Santiago is really a counterforce to the Democracy—a revolutionary, not a bandit. And upon Santiago's death, Cain steps in to fill his shoes as the fourth Santiago.
Now, more than 100 years have passed. The Democracy eventually succeeded in ending the reign of the Santiagos after more or less accidentally killing the fifth one. But without Santiago, the cosmic balance is out of whack. Or so believes small-time thief Danny Briggs. Discovering the manuscript of an immense ballad devoted to Santiago, written long ago by a poet named Black Orpheus, Briggs decides it's time to recreate the legend. Adopting the name Dante, the thief-turned-poet sets out for the Inner Frontier. He meets his own peculiar Virgil, a drug-taking pervert who nonetheless remains loyal and ingeniously helpful. Virgil and Dante encounter the legendary crook Waltzing Matilda, who throws her lot in with them in the quest to restore Santiago to life. One candidate eventually assumes precedence: the notorious One-Armed Bandit, whose lethal cybernetic prosthesis has given him his name. A curiously moral killer, the Bandit willingly assumes the mantle of Santiago.
But events soon prove that Matilda and Dante are not infallible judges of character. Given supreme power and an organization to run, the Bandit quickly becomes an overzealous fanatic. He's harming the cause, not advancing it. A parting of the ways occurs, and Dante and crew must flee, to search for a second Santiago. They appear to find their man in the person of Joshua Silvermane, another do-gooder who's fast with his guns. But before Silvermane can prove himself one way or the other (although initial readings seem to indicate Dante has goofed with this choice, too), an elaborate plot to lure the Bandit from his fortress world goes kablooey, and Dante discovers that only by displaying more courage than he believed he possessed can he salvage anything from the ruins.
A tall tale from a future frontier
In his original foray into fashioning a "myth of the far future," Resnick managed to concoct a winning formula. He would draw heavily on the great tall-tale tradition of American myths—Mike Fink, Pecos Bill, Paul Bunyan, etc.—much in the manner of R.A. Lafferty. He'd create dozens of bigger-than-life actors—all of them egocentric driven souls contending for wealth, revenge, meaning and fame—set them loose on a Wild-West-writ-large stage, then just stand back and record the sparks as they flew. Of course, Resnick had an overarching plot in hand as well. The search for Santiago and the enigma of his goals would shape the whole enterprise, and the surprise revelation would provide a climax.
Resnick's chosen narrative voice helped create a mythic atmosphere as well. Every chapter is introduced by one of Black Orpheus's quatrains, followed by a short, deft, colloquial info-dump on the character or world next to command our attention. The overall effect of the book is indeed a blend of immediacy and removal from the events being narrated, just as in a a real myth. In addition, the milieu was substantially the consensus-history version of the galactic empire created and refined during a century of SF. This milieu is already itself mythic in tone, and lent its never-neverland aura to the show. Echoes of everything from Heinlein's blind poet Rhysling to Jack Vance's Demon Princes to Lee Falk's Phantom abound.
The current sequel offers a lot to admire. Again, Resnick dreams up scores of flamboyant, outsized personages to populate his drama. With archetypical names and personality traits straight out of legend, some of these new characters necessarily replicate earlier ones, however. Silvermane is said to remind Dante of Sebastian Cain; the killer priest Father William finds an analogue in the Deuteronomy Priest. (Sometimes Resnick is almost too fertile, as several characters are introduced at the beginning of one short chapter only to be killed a few pages later.) His flair for writing tight, action-filled scenes is still on display. And his ingenuity at plotting is undiluted. (Although there are several holes here and there. Soldiers come to arrest the One-Armed Bandit, knowing full well who he is, yet make no move to restrain his deadly prosthesis. It's said no one knows the Bandit committed a certain massacre of schoolchildren, yet we've seen him leave witnesses behind.)
But the overall effect of this book is not the same as that of the previous one. The re-creation of Santiago does not offer the same frissons as the amazement of his existence as a fait accompli. Danny/Dante is a fine character, but he's more akin to Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat: a glib, gifted outsider who falls into doing the right thing. We're too much behind the scenes here, watching the myth-making machinery at work, to really believe in the cosmic magnitude of the characters. All warts are on display. As in Heinlein's Double Star (1956), although principle trumps cynicism in the end, it's a victory imposed from the outside. And although the stagesets are just deep and detailed enough to frame the action, occasionally a bit of threadbare weariness shows through. "Two oversized women, smoking alien cigarettes and drinking alien whiskey" might conjure up an image, but it's not a mental picture much different from two oversized women smoking "human" cigarettes and drinking "human" whiskey.
