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Psycho Shop
A posthumous "collaboration" by Alfred Bester and Roger Zelazny
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Psycho Shop
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By Alfred Bester and Roger Zelazny
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Vintage Books
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$12.00/$16.95 Canada
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Trade Paperback, July 1998
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ISBN 0-679-76782
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Review by Nalo Hopkinson
 orn in 1913, Alfred Bester was already dying when the Science Fiction Writers of America pronounced him a Grandmaster in the 1980s. Bester passed away in 1987, leaving behind an unfinished manuscript. Roger Zelazny, who crafted the tough-minded poetics of the Amber chronicles, took up the challenge of finishing the story, which he did before dying himself in 1995.
The result is Psycho Shop, a novel centered around Alfred Noir, a reporter for the chic jet-set magazine Rigadoon. He's sent to Rome to interview Adam Maser, supposedly the owner of a mysterious hockshop where people can trade their realities for someone else's. Customers arrive at the shop by wishing hard enough.
The shop exists. Maser takes Noir there, and the fun begins. Maser's name is an abbreviation of the acronym "magfaser," or "Maser Generated Fetal Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation." He's a cat person whose intelligence and physiology have been "uplifted" to hominid status. Maser has an assistant named Ssss, a gorgeous snake woman with "quadroon" skin.
The storehouse of Maser's psycho shop is a black cavern filled with "psychic moieties" for pawn or sale: a "kaleidoscope of Man's rejections and desires, discontents and remedies."
Alf greets his next client, a college boy named Gaffy from early 19th-century America. Gaffy has an asthmatic wheeze which he thinks is an unfamiliar language. Instead of curing him, Maser gives him the ability to understand the wheezing, which turns out to be passages from the epic poem "Shah Namah," the inspiration for Scheherazade and the Arabian Nights. As Gaffy leaves, he informs Maser and Noir that "Gaffy" is a hated nickname. His given name is Edgar Poe.
The novel is full of this kind of display: two literati--Renaissance men both--in a written joust of wits that challenges readers to keep up. It's almost possible to retain the fantasy that the novel is a true collaboration, rather than one master craftsman finishing another's work.
Jazz masters who love language
Psycho Shop is in many ways vintage Bester and Zelazny both: the Chandleresque style, the throwaway details that add so much texture, the delightfully deadpan weirdness. The two share a hard-boiled appeal and a love of language. In his introduction, Greg Bear calls them both "jazz masters."
There are some blips. As snakes do, Ssss sheds her skin. She thereby becomes more beautiful...and lighter-skinned. Which would perhaps not have been disturbing, except that Ssss's skin color is very clearly described in terms that denote Africanness: quadroon, octoroon. The equation of fairer skin equaling greater beauty was saddening.
And one of Psycho Shop's most appealing characteristics is in some ways its chief weakness. A la Heinlein, Noir is the classic science-fictional Competent Man, a mild-mannered gentleman who can conduct witty repartee in any number of languages while simultaneously fighting off hundreds of bad guys with the martial-arts skills he picked up in the course of an interesting but unassuming life.
Of course he gets the girl (and of course it's a girl he wants), and of course she is beautiful and talented, and of course he treats her as an equal. Everyone wants to be this man, or some equivalent. But he meets every challenge with such relative ease, and a lack of fuss, that it becomes emotionless and flat in affect. There is some element of the Competent Man in both Bester's and Zelazny's writing, but both of them usually infused more complexity into their characters. It's as though the odd way in which their work was combined has burred some of the edges off them both.
Still, the novel is a good, nostalgic read, like re-encountering an old friend. There are conundrums to be solved, naturally. Where did Beethoven get his ideas? Is Maser what he says he is? Is Noir? Does Ssss really have a venomous bite? And whose are the seven human bodies hanging in suspended animation in the vault of Maser's psychic pawn shop? Somehow the madcap plot comes together in a satisfying conclusion that involves a golem of sorts, a hand-to-hand battle, Dr. Cagliostro, and a god. And it works.
An amusing curio about an unusual curio shop, this seamlessly grafted novel by two departed masters of their craft is a conversation piece for anyone's bookshelf.
-- Nalo
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The Alien Years
Earth is occupied by a vastly superior species, and there's not much humans can do about it...
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The Alien Years
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By Robert Silverberg
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HarperPrism
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$24.00/$35.00 Canada
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Hardcover, Aug. 1998
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ISBN 0-06-105035-0
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Review by Clinton Lawrence
 lien invaders have conquered Earth, virtually without a fight, in Robert Silverberg's new novel, The Alien Years. It becomes instantly clear that the invaders, called the Entities, are a vastly superior species when, early in their occupation, they shut down everything that uses electricity for three months, setting human technology back more than a century and plunging civilization into chaos. When they finally allow electricity to be restored, it's clear that humans have few options but to submit to their authority. Many people are enslaved by the Entities, who have a telepathic ability to force cooperation.
Anson Carmichael, a retired army colonel living on a secluded ranch near Santa Barbara, is one of the leaders of an underground resistance movement. Although communication links haven't been reliable since the Entities restored electricity, they still exist. When he gets word that a group in Denver plans to attack the Entities with a satellite-based laser, he brings his family to the ranch and asks them to live there with him. They agree, and after the Denver group launches its attack, the Entities retaliate by launching a plague that wipes out half of the global population. Fortunately, a strict quarantine at the ranch leaves the Carmichael family unaffected. But while they strive to maintain the idea of resistance, there's little they can realistically do to hurt the Entities.
In England, Khalid Burke, son of a Pakistani mother and an English father, is being raised by his grandmother Aissha. Then his father, Richie--who had been missing for years--suddenly appears and moves in. Unfortunately, he's abusive to both Khalid and Aissha. Khalid eventually learns that Richie is an Entity collaborator. Although Khalid doesn't hate the Entities, he decides to kill one to hurt his father--something no one has been able to do. And the potential reprisals don't worry him.
A fresh perpective on alien invasion
In The Alien Years, Silverberg avoids the usual invasion cliches and creates an aliens-conquer-Earth story with a fresh perspective. His Entities are truly alien, with motives and actions the human characters never understand, but abilities they comprehend all too well. The most interesting and successful parts of the novel deal with his characters' frustrations in dealing with the invaders, and in the case of Colonel Carmichael's descendants, living up to the family's proud legacy in a time of global enslavement and humiliation. Silverberg conveys the psychological toll, especially on the leaders of family, very effectively. Perhaps the most interesting character, however, is Khalid, whose background has scarred him in ways that are obvious, but whose decisions and actions are often still almost as mysterious as the Entities'.
While the characters carry the story, Silverberg's post-invasion world is convincing and richly detailed. Particularly interesting is Silverberg's inversion of social normalcy, in which the Carmichaels are portrayed from the inside as logical and stable, while to outsiders they must look like dangerous recluses, and possibly fanatics, with their armed guards at the gate and their life of subsistence farming. Also intriguing is the underground hacker culture in Los Angeles, which infiltrates the Entity computer network and grants pardons and passes for a fee, and the tyrannical and seemingly arbitrary rule by the aliens in the city. But perhaps the most poignant details come in the final scenes of the novel, in what at first appears to be a deus ex machina ending, but with a little reflection, evokes an elegant resonance with current events.
The Alien Years is a fine addition to Silverberg's legacy that brings intelligence, artistry and maturity to the alien invasion story.
I might mention here that Silverberg's story "Beauty in the Night," which opened Gardner Dozois' The Year's Best Science Fiction this year, is an excerpt from this novel. It covers the first part of Khalid's story.
-- Clint
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