here is no joke about Jack Frost in Michael Swanwick's Jack Faust, which is his sixth novel (Griffin's Egg from 1991 is short but has the multiplex attack of a true novel), and the only one which is very funny.
It is very funny.
And--for a while--it looks as though it's going to stay funny. We do not much miss the presence of a commedia dell'arte Jack Frost, a Haagen-Daaz Pierrot with a terrible mortmain wink, because what we have is scurrilous enough and fast enough to carry us through, maybe.
We start in the 15th century, in Wittenberg, in what would eventually become Germany. We start in what seems to be this universe, though we know (from the Avon imprimatur, and from Swanwick's own name) that the text will certainly make an SF or fantasy turn; but we have no idea which turn Swanwick will take.
He fools us.
Jack Faust seems to become an SF novel.
Dr. Faust, driven nearly crazed by a somewhat anomalous Enlightenment disdain for traditional forms of knowledge, is burning his books--an act which, in the first century after the invention of printing, is
profoundly scandalous; evil, in fact.
After he is finished, he invokes the powers of darkness.
They come to him in the form and face of the Devil.
The crew of Mephistopheles
But Mephistopheles turns out to be a constantly changing construct operated--manned, womaned, impersonated, crewed, it is hard to say precisely--by beings from a bubble universe adjacent to ours. Unfortunately for the moral and aesthetic ease of these beings, the universe they occupy runs--like the Beyond in Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep (1992)--at far "higher ambient levels of heat" than ours, so that "chemical and physical interactions transpire almost instantaneously." The beings who crew the Mephistopheles construct live full lives and die, as far as Faust's senses are concerned, almost instantaneously. Their race will soon die. They find it intolerable to think that sentient beings as gross as we are will doltishly persevere.
So they tempt Faust with the gift of knowledge: "true" knowledge, the kind of science and technology 20th century humanity thinks of as the real thing.
It's an SF concept.
Most of the text is constructed as a Rake's Progress depicting Faust's transformation of the world, and his increasingly baleful misogyny. As in Hogarth's narrative etchings, each chapter is given an exemplary label, like "Apes" or "Tabloids," and each chapter--after an initial crowd scene that could almost be a paraphrase out of Hogarth--works out the exemplum or "stage" in detail.
For a while, Jack Faust is a comic Merlin, a humour of frustrated pedantry. (Even a glimpse of Auschwitz, given him by Mephistopheles as an augur of the future he is going to create, fails to daunt him, initially.) For a while, his attempts to inculcate the principles of pure science into his contemporaries seem doomed.
But as soon as he discovers the trick of persuasion--which is how to make money from the technological exploitation of pure science--his success is assured.
Two-thirds through, the scherzo turns into delirium and shadowings of Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus (1947). Faust's beloved Margarete/Gretchen suffers a cruel fate. The Spanish Armada is savagely decimated, according to 20th century dicta about absolute war. Saturnalia beheads the masques of Reason. SF turns--as the centuries spin beneath the wheels of plot--into fantasy.
Into a fantasy as grim as Swanwick's The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993), a book which is--like this one--all about the cost of getting what you want. "Do anything, take anything," the old saying has it: "Take anything. And pay for it."
The end, with Faust spinning on his wheel of fire into Hitler, is apocalyptic, grim, very slightly finger-pointing. Jack Faust is more of a cartoon, at times, than perhaps it quite should aspire to; but if it's a cartoon, it's a cartoon like they used to make them, in the 18th century.
Vicious, unforgivable, savage. And irrefutable.
Swanwick and A Geography of Unknown Lands
The stories in Swanwick's astonishingly well-titled A Geography of Unknown Lands are various. "North of Diddy-Wah-Diddy" is perhaps the only (partial) failure amongst them, too much story cakewalking on ice much too thin for more than brief shenanigans. "The Wireless Folly," set upon a giant grasshopper in interstellar space, tells itself in beads of utterly lucid but Gnostic metaphor like something out of the mists of Story: it is one of the finest tales this reviewer has ever come across, and is new to this volume. "Radio Waves" is a stunning Posthumous Fantasy. "The Changeling's Tale"--like the best of Paul Hazel--treats the transformative heart of true fantasy with a mesmeric deadpan semblance of calm: the story itself is horrific, warm, intimidating.
There are others.
Jack Faust will be easy to find. Get it.
A Geography of Unknown Lands may be hard. But get it.
John Clute is a writer, editor, critic and scholar of science fiction. He is the author of the Hugo Award winning Illustrated Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, as well as one of the co-founders of the British SF publication Interzone. 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. His latest book, Look at the Evidence, has been nominated for the 1997 Hugo Award.
