n his 1995 novel Resurrection Man, Sean Stewart conjured an alternate universe wherein magic slowly returned to the world shortly after World War II. But apart from the occasional minotaur, angel or other strangeness, everyday life in Resurrection Man wasn't too different from life in the real, magic-deprived world.
Night Watch fast-forwards to the year 2074, when the rising tide of magic has transformed the world utterly. A supernatural apocalypse called the "Dream of 2004" shattered civilization, leaving isolated pockets of humanity to contend with monsters, ghosts and capricious enchanted forests.
The novel is a tale of two cities, or what's left of those cities. The south side of Edmonton, Canada, is a military dictatorship ruled by a man named Winter, who has kept the magic and monsters at bay through a terrible bargain with the dark forces of the city's north side, a land of the dead where it is always winter.
Hundreds of miles to the west, all that is left of Vancouver is Chinatown, protected from chaos by a mysterious group known as the Shrouded Ones. Chinatown is under attack by hordes of once-human barbarians, and the city's leaders hire Winter's well-armed, well-trained Southside troops to fend off the incursions.
Two events topple the uneasy alliance: The firebombing of a Southsider barracks in Chinatown, and the defection of Emily Thompson, Winter's granddaughter and heir-apparent. Winter desperately needs Emily back so that she can repeat the gruesome sacrifice Winter himself made decades earlier.
A worthy successor
Night Watch is a much more plot-driven novel than its meditative, occasionally meandering predecessor, but it has the same qualities that made Resurrection Man a memorable and unique work of science fiction: exquisite writing, an exuberant imagination, and characters and relationships rendered with the kind of resonance and complexity usually found only in mainstream, "literary" fiction.
For all the deserved critical acclaim Resurrection Man received, its juxtaposition of small-scale family drama against a surreal, science fictional background didn't quite mesh. In Night Watch, Stewart supplies a gripping, near-epic storyline more suited to the fascinating universe he has created.
Stewart adroitly juggles a large and diverse cast of characters, including sad old men, proud women, warriors and poets, and worried parents. The pivotal character of Winter is conspicuously underdeveloped, slightly blunting the story's powerful finale.
A few things in Night Watch beg further explanation: In a world of isolated city-states besieged by gargoyles and minotaurs, how do the Southsiders manage to get fuel for trucks and aircraft, not to mention personal AIs that seem as commonplace as ballpoint pens?
Such quibbles aside, Night Watch is a richly enjoyable novel by an increasingly impressive young writer.
n February 13, 2001, the universe experienced a glitch. The ceaseless expansion that had occurred since the Big Bang back at the beginning of time halted for a moment, reversed itself about 10 years, then resumed its forward progress. The net result of this space-time continuum hiccup on Earth was that everyone had to relive the last 10 years of their life.
But this was no second chance allowing people to right their wrongs or to do things differently, because during the rerun everything would happen exactly as it had the first time. When the down-and-out (and long out of print) SF writer Kilgore Trout wrote a book about the rerun after it was all over, he would appropriately title his work, My Ten Years On Automatic Pilot. Because that's how people experienced the big do-over, as automatons being moved through life like marionettes are moved through a play: somebody else is at the helm, no steering required.
This causes quite a few problems when 2001 rolls around for the second time, since suddenly everyone around the world experiences free will again for the first time in a decade. The consequences are far from joyous, especially for those people who were doing something that required some attention, such as driving a car or operating heavy machinery. More than a few undirected vehicles mowed down unsuspecting pedestrians after time resumed its normal course, and that was just the tip of the iceberg in terms of disasters. The entire population was experiencing post-timequake apathy (PTA), and suddenly it looked like Kilgore Trout was the only one who could get them to wake up and start living again.
Last gasp or graceful exit?
Timequake is the last novel Kurt Vonnegut will ever write, at least according to his prologue, and it is not what readers will expect from the old master-of-the-unexpected. Because Timequake really isn't a novel at all, at least in the conventional sense. What sounds like a plot is merely a framework on which Vonnegut--who is one of the main characters of the book--hangs a lot of little vignettes about his life.
The other main character is Kilgore Trout, a person who appears in many of Vonnegut's books and who is the well-known alter ego of Vonnegut himself. So when Vonnegut is talking about Trout, he is also talking about Vonnegut. This makes Timequake something of a semi-fictional autobiography, although it definitely would not fall under that label either.
So where does that leave Timequake? That is something most readers will have to decide for themselves. The publisher suggests it's an entirely new literary form, which makes for good jacket copy but which may not be quite accurate. What Timequake most seems to be is a brilliant writer at the end of his career offering readers a few thoughts and insights on life.
There is a last hurrah with the writer's semi-famous, SF-writing alter ego,
who may not be in print but who can sure teach the world a thing or two. And there is the pretense that Vonnegut himself will still be alive in 2001 for a post-PTA clambake that allows him to bid adieu to Trout, and to imagine himself still alive in 2010. All of it is thoroughly readable and enjoyable, and in the end that should be enough for most readers. As Vonnegut himself might say, "Hokay?"
