inally, after a hundred pages or so, at the beginning of a story
called "Stride," there is a clue. Up to that point, the tales assembled
in The Dragons of Springplace had somehow seemed too private to live with.
It wasn't a question of Robert Reed's professionalism. Indeed, he
seems almost doctrinaire in the strictness of his adherence to good
storytelling rules; in the sober and seemly way he fits character to
theme, input to outcome. He paces infodump to a nicety. He knows all the
stuff it is possible to learn from writing workshops. He is a pro. He
gives good value. He writes a lot.
But in the end this did not help.
In the end--for several novels, and for the hundred pages or so
of the solid sensible tough-minded competent collection on review before
"Stride" began--it was impossible, for this reviewer, to feel comfortable
with the pulse of any single tale. The ostensible point of each
story--neatly unpacked before the eye--somehow never seemed to unlock the heart of whatever was going on.
Each story was jogging to a mute daemon.
Here is how "Stride" begins:
Phillip finds himself awake, finds himself running,
midstride and charging hard down the left rut of a little ranch road; and
he stops and turns, and turns, confusion becoming panic and someone close
uttering a shrill moan. Then he realizes that he's moaning. Nobody else
is here. And he shuts his mouth, feeling dizzy and weak and wondering:
Where is this?
And suddenly it was clear. Not that it was exactly a secret--the
bio on the flap of this very collection says of Reed that his interests
include "running too many miles on aging legs"--but it still had the
force of revelation.
The protagonist of "Stride" is a long-distance runner who has
been hijacked into a parallel world by a terrifying bird-like creature
that wishes to sport with him unto death. This surface narrative differs
from other Reed stories; but Phillip doesn't. All of Reed's
protagonists are, in essence, long-distance runners (though only Phillip
is literally one). The pulse at the heart of each of his protagonists is
the obdurate slow pulse of a man or woman who runs miles or marathons,
fruitlessly seeking a burn which will blaze the way to Eden.
Perpetual exile
The metaphysic of long-distance running--and almost certainly a
lot of the hard truth--is that those who engage in the sport are
obsessive loners: thin-bodied, stringy, intense, dourly humorless beings
whose sexual impulses (which may be powerful) have almost certainly been
diverted; men and women in a state of perpetual and uneasy exile from "normal" society; folk who have somehow been hijacked, conned out of paradise.
But it is no simple exile, not simply the exile of the displaced
or the inadequate (though "The Utility Man" does treat its loner
protagonist as being innately stale, as a man whose "insides" are simply
unlikeable); almost invariably, the protagonists of the stories in The Dragons of Springplace long for something beyond the burn, some
heart-melting epiphany on the other side of burn where Eden may be found: Eden being the taste of others.
They do not get there. In "The Dragons of Springplace," which may
be the only weak story in the book, a savage epiphany is achieved when a
man is transformed, at a peak of anguish, into a statue, ironically
reversing Thorne Smith's The Night Life of the Gods (1931), where two lovers become statues at the point of orgasm.
The protagonist of "Waging Good," having pursued a course of
vengeance with the astonishing attention span of the long-distance
runner, endures a dark deadly pregnancy in order not to murder a planet.
In "Chrysalis," one of three long stories set in planet-sized
interstellar ships, a young woman, who--like the protagonist of Gene
Wolfe's The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972)--is a thinned and fined
clone, escapes, through a slightly overcomplicated plot, from the anguish
of being known only as the culmination of a set: her epiphany is to go to
beings who don't know her.
Communion and betrayal
The other two tales--"The Remoras" and "Aeon's Child"--are set on
a ship known only as the ship, and both feature immortals who truck
down the centuries with an obduracy and attention span that have become
familiar. Though one of them is rich and the other immensely powerful,
they are both solitary; both seem to be visitors to the lives they lead,
just as a long-distance runner may be nothing but a visitor to the
lodgings he uses for purposes of raw recuperation; both seek communion
with beings profoundly dissimilar to them; both are betrayed, as are all
runners, at the finish line (promoters always cheat long-distance
runners).
At heart, his worlds are just as solitudinous, just as likely to
judder at the unseen touch of the confidence-men who cheat runners of
their due of Eden, as any fantasia of justified paranoia by (say) Barry
Malzberg, who could almost have written "Stride," and who is, by the way,
renowned as a walker.
I bet Reed writes stories in his head as he runs.
All the same, in the end, there is the achievement of the
surface. Reed's worlds do look different from above; his characters would
not necessarily recognize each other on the street; and his stories do
unpack differently as they progress, even though they tend to close on
the same revelation: that the blaze beyond the burn is dust. And if there
is an invariant solitude at the heart of each tale, a recurrent whiff of
the grind of being, the reader does end up feeling that Reed's take on
things is honorable. That it is good to know him.
A strong slow pulse drives these dragons.
John Clute is a writer, editor, critic and scholar of science fiction. He is the author of Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia and co-editor of both The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, all Hugo Award winners. He is also a co-founder of the Hugo-winning 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.
