Electronic OtherRealms #23 Winter, 1989 Part 3 Copyright 1989 by Chuq Von Rospach All Rights Reserved. OtherRealms may not be reproduced without written permission from Chuq Von Rospach. The electronic edition may be distributed only if the return address, copyrights and author credits remain intact. No article may be reprinted or re-used in any way without the permission of the author. All rights to material published in OtherRealms hereby revert to the original author. Behind the Mountains with: Spirits of Cavern and Hearth M. Coleman Easton Copyright 1989 by M. Coleman Easton Spirits of Cavern and Hearth (St. Martin's Press) started with a documentary about Mt. Kilimanjaro. The camera began near the snowy peak and showed how the landscape changed gradually during the long descent to the plains. Suddenly, I imagined a much larger mountain--one that spanned a continent, with civilizations thriving at many different levels along its flanks. The concept of WorldMount was born. As I explored the idea, it changed Instead of a single mountain, I ended up with a series of ranges, each higher than the next but with deep valleys in between. In the center stood the ultimate mountain, the Peak-of-the-World. And I settled for depicting, in this one book, only a small portion of the continent. I have plenty of territory to explore if I choose to write a sequel. I wondered what sort of people inhabit this portion of the world. At first I imagined two distinct races--one based in the north and more primitive, the other based in the south. Later I decided that the two groups were of common ancestry, but had separated some hundreds of years earlier, one group continuing a nomadic existence in the north while the other settled down to farming. The split had left a long-lasting enmity, for the southerners had driven the nomads up into the highlands, then built a huge wall to keep them there. In my earliest notes I find the notion of a "call," a sudden emotional and physical change that can drive a person to leave his family and pursue a somewhat mystical goal. This was a rare occurrence, and in the south was viewed as an affliction. In the north, however, the called person was considered godstricken. I chose a southern physician, a man of a prominent family, to discover for himself what such a call might mean. I have long been interested in folklore and mythology of Northern Europe and Asia, and my yurt-dwelling nomads are the result. My characters names are based on Mongolian patterns, in which certain vowels are feminine, others masculine, others neutral. The nomads follow a shamanistic religion, and believe in spirits of all sorts--hearth-sprites, water-sprites and imps. The spirits serve as intermediaries between humans and their gods, but also have lives of their own. The nomads of my book depend on horses for their survival. To learn more about horse behavior and care, I consulted several books and also talked to an experienced horsewoman, Avis Minger. Finally, convinced that some practical experience would be useful, I rented a sturdy beast. It was only my fourth time in the saddle, and I felt apprehensive from the start. All went well, however, until we reached a fork in the trail. I had no idea which way I wanted to turn. Apparently the horse realized this and decided to take charge, for it turned around and headed for home. Nothing I did could convince it otherwise, so shortly we were back at the stable. With a bit of help, I finally managed to get my oat-burner on the trail again. In memory of the event, I added a few stubborn horses to my story. The book was about half written when my agent, Russ Galen, called with the news that it would be published in hardcover. I had not expected to jump out of the paperback ranks that quickly! At last, after many revisions, the manuscript was done. My editor, Stuart Moore, mentioned that he wanted Tom Canty to do the cover, and I innocently asked if I could talk to Tom about it. To my surprise, Stuart agreed, and I had several fascinating conversations with the artist. What particularly impressed me was that Tom was doing not just a painting but a whole cover design. Did I have any influence on the cover? You may notice the curved knife in the skeletal hand. I suggested that, but you'll have to read the book to understand its significance. Will I do a sequel? That depends. For now I am off to a different realm--Iceland at the end of the tenth century. I suspect I'll be there awhile. Creme de la Creme Alan Wexelblat Copyright 1989 by Alan Wexelblat Always save the best for last. We start out the new year with a selection of six of the best works I could find. This is no Christmas generosity, though. All of them earned the high marks they got. Chaos: Making a New Science [****+] James Gleick Viking paperback, 1987, 0-670-81178-5 The world we live in is not the neat, orderly, linear, solvable world we learned about in physics. In fact, Euclidean-geometric-type physics describes a vanishingly small portion of the real problems of the real world. In most cases it's not even a good estimate. The world is fundamentally chaotic; disorder and unpredictability reign. In everything from the formation of clouds to the rise and fall of animal populations to the occurrence of line noise on a modem-to-modem data line, chaotic models are better predictors than conventional models. The dimensionality of the coastline of England is 2.7; the coastline is infinitely long, but bounds a finite area. Is it weird enough for you yet? This strangeness of the universe encompasses Lorenz attractors and Mandelbrot's fractal sets--patterns that repeat themselves at different levels of detail and can be worked out on the simplest computer. Out of it is emerging a new science, a way of seeing new things in the swinging of pendulums, and the boiling of water. Gleick gives us glimpses over the shoulders of these new pioneers. The book is a fascinating look into an emerging revolution in the way scientists, economists, meteorologists and others are looking at the world. For my taste, Gleick spends too much time on the people and too little on the science they are doing. But this book is a must-read if you want to know what the next scientific revolution is going to be. A Splendid Chaos [****] John Shirley Franklin Watts, 1988, 0-531-15065-8 In a chaotic system, two points that begin next to each other can end up arbitrarily far apart. John Shirley starts off next to the standard "kidnapped hero wakes up on strange world as plaything of superior beings" story and ends up with a solid Movement novel. Along the way, Shirley reworks the "quest across the world" cliche, the "good versus evil" cliche and a host of others. Zero is kidnapped from the streets of New York. He wakes up on Fool's Hope, a world populated with dozens of alien intelligences, deadly carnivorous flora and fauna, and with a human settlement reduced to early Medieval technology. The whole mess is run by aliens called the Meta who have brought the humans and other inhabitants here to fight it out for survival. Each species tries to reach stations where the Meta have placed some item of technology which can give the holder advantage. To spice things up, there are the Currents: tornado-like bursts of IAMtons, the basic particles of chaos. (I think, therefore IAM--get it?) These Currents cause wild mutations in the creatures they touch, turning them into Twists. Twists reveal their innermost natures by the powers they acquire from the Currents: some become vampires, some become brainless muscle-bound hulks, and so on. The villain is Harmon Fiskle, an advocate of violent social darwinism, of selective eugenics and breeding. He is a tight-assed, prissy university professor who didn't like Zero before and certainly doesn't like him now. When Fiskle is Twisted and begins a campaign forcing the humans to Twist and join him or die, Zero and friends set out for the greatest Technology Station of them all, hoping to find something that will help the humans. As fantasy readers know, no quest is complete without elves and dwarves (in some guise). Some strange aliens accompany Zero and his friends. Shirley sets up the idols of fantasy to smash them with a hammer of eighties' sensibility: the leader of the human encampment is a lesbian woman, the Meta are not benevolent providers or evil slave-masters, the Twists are a running commentary on the venality of people. Fiskle is a Reaganaut carried to its right- wing extreme, and Zero is an eighties version of a young Everyman. Despite carrying the load of this double-level message (or perhaps because of it), Splendid Chaos manages to be entertaining and engrossing. Deserted Cities of the Heart [****+] Lewis Shiner Doubleday, 0-385-24637-4, 1988 The time is today, the place is Mexico. It's a bad year for the PRI, the party that has ruled Mexico since 1946--they have brushfire rebellions springing up all over, the peasants are as unhappy as ever, and the gringo soldiers from the north are trampling about doing as they please. In the ruins of Na Chan three Americans, a handful of descendants of the Mayans, and a ragtag band of Mexican revolutionaries are coming to grips with experiences that will change them, will change Mexico, and may change the world. Thomas is an idealistic anthropologist trying to complete his studies of Mayan culture and figure out why an apparently-thriving civilization vanished almost overnight. His brother Eddie, a burned out rock guitarist, signed himself out of the psychiatric hospital one night and vanished into the Mexican jungle apparently in search of himself. Lindsay is Eddie's wife and the object of Thomas' unrequited love. She is looking for Eddie and will use any means and anyone, including Thomas, to find him. Eddie's trail leads them to Na Chan, where Thomas had led a previous excavation of the ruins. The Lacondes, descendants of the Mayans, have brought Eddie here. For them, Na Chan is a mystical city and civilization is ending another of the cycles recorded in the Mayan calendar. Their last living shaman will perform a ritual here to usher out the old cycle and bring in the new. For Carla, revolutionary hero, Na Chan is a place to make a last stand with her peasant brigade against the guardia and the Americans. Outmanned, outgunned, and wounded, it doesn't look good. And then there are the mushrooms. Hallucinogenic, extremely toxic, native only to this region. To the Lacondes, they are sacred; to Eddie they are a siren call, a last escape. It is claimed that one who takes them spiritually travels into the past and experiences what went on in history. Throughout all of this, Shiner's writing is top notch. He carefully avoids explanation or interruption of the flow. As a result, the levels of real reality (the Mexico city earthquake, the Iran-Contra scandal) blend with the levels of unreal reality (time travel that reveals details no one should have known) until the reader isn't at all sure what's going on. I was strongly reminded of the best parts of Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus trilogies. There are no guideposts; you are left to figure out what's real and what's the author playing with you. Neon Lotus [****] Marc Laidlaw Bantam, 0-553-27165-2, 1988 Laidlaw has a talent for making the most outlandish ideas work by sheer force of writing talent. His Mirrorshades story, "400 Boys," about post-nuclear mutant gangs made an interesting read of a ludicrous-seeming plot. Neon Lotus strains the reader's credulity again and Laidlaw succeeds again. The plot revolves around Tibetan lore. A brilliant Tibetan scientist has developed a device to track souls as they journey from death to reincarnation. When he is assassinated, his soul is tracked to the body of Marianne Strauss. Grown to young adulthood, she goes to Tibet to try and deal with the half-felt memories and urgings she feels in a classic journey in search of herself. Tibet is occupied by the Chinese, who have suppressed Tibetan religion and culture. When Marianne is deemed by the State Oracle to be the Gyayum Chenmo--the Great Mother--who will free the land from the Chinese and bear the child that will be the next Dalai Lama she becomes an instant target. Marianne is given a mission by Chenrezi, the patron god of the Tibetans, to retrieve five magical relics. The book is the story of her search for the artifacts and her journeys across Tibet. The novel is rich with the feel of Tibet. It's blended with equal helpings of science fiction (night-flying radar-absorbing CIA jets) and fantasy (bodhisattvas that live in Marianne's mind). This is no easy task--given our unfamiliarity with the legends and culture involved it would be easy to stoop to condescension or triviality. Similarly, it would be easy to portray the occupying Chinese as monolithic brutes and the natives as noble savages. Laidlaw avoids these pitfalls and others. My only gripe with the book is the ending. Somehow it all seems too easy in the end. The story just stops. Not with a bang, not with a whimper--just ends. Still, it's a worthwhile read. Mindplayers [*****-] Pat Cadigan Bantam, 0-553-26585-7, 1987 I can't say enough good things about this book. Simply put, Cadigan's writing is the most mindblowingly brilliant stuff I've seen since I first read William Gibson. Every few pages I found myself shaking my head in amazement as Cadigan wove in new idea after new idea. In the not-too-distant future, the drug of choice will be the mind. We will enter the artificial realities inside our skulls. Here simple things like the laws of physics have no sway; reality is what we imagine it to be and it changes with our whims. We will have whole classes of professional mindplayers: neurosis peddlers, reality affixers, pathosfinders, and more. You can buy madcaps--helmets that will induce a small insanity for a little while. Why not; it's a trip like any other, right? Yes, you read that right--the word is "madcap." One of the brilliant strokes of the book is the weaving in of obvious puns and humor. Cadigan manages to walk the tightrope between funny-haha and funny-crazy and use the best of both worlds. Who else could have a sardonic heroine called Deadpan Allie? When Alexandria Victoria Haas gets stuck with a madcap's paranoia that doesn't go away when it should, she is left at a mental drycleaners and picked up by the police. Faced with the alternatives of jail and psychological service she opts for the latter, entering training to become a pathosfinder. So she goes to J. Walter Tech, the country's premiere school for mindplayers. The book tells the story of her training there, the people she meets, and her graduation and move to the Nelson Nelson agency. N.N., head of his self-named business, hires out mindplayers to help clients. Deadpan Allie meets some pretty strange folk while working for Nelson Nelson. The book's only real weakness is its structure. Told as a series of episode- chapters, the format works well until Allie is established at the agency. After that, one chapter begins to look like any other and the recurring characters--though interesting--don't do much to help. In a way this is less a novel than a novella and a couple of short stories. Nevertheless, this is still the most devastatingly original writing I've seen in a long time and I highly recommend it to one and all. Mona Lisa Overdrive [*****] William Gibson Gollancz hardcover (British edition), 0-575-04020-3, 1988 This is where it all began. The Sprawl. Home to cyberspace, to the cowboys and their decks. Home of gomi--the detritus of the upper classes--and the hustlers and hackers who make use of it. William Gibson has brought us home one last time. If you haven't read Neuromancer or Count Zero recently, go back and reread them. They and their characters figure prominently in Mona Lisa Overdrive and Gibson doesn't stop to let you figure it out. If you can't pick up on the hints and whispers, you're out of luck. There is also a cast of newcomers mixed in with the old favorites. Kumiko-- daughter of a Yakuza warlord, she is sent to England to be safe from her father's enemies. But her English guardian may or may not have sold her out. Slick Henry-- small-time ex-con and hustler in the Sprawl. In payment of a favor, he takes in the comatose body of The Count, jacked permanently into an advanced cyberspace rig. Angie Mitchell--now the world's favorite simstim star, drying out from a designer-drug habit, still haunted by memories of Bobby and still running with the loas of cyberspace. Unable to escape them and the biochips in her head, she has changed, they have changed, and cyberspace has changed. Mona--hooker, drug addict, attached to a useless dreamer, dying for a ticket out of the Sprawl. Of no interest to anyone, until one day someone important notices that she looks like Angie. Gibson uses the spiraling plot technique of Count Zero to great effect in this book. You know that these people will, somehow, get together--that their destinies are intertwined. Yet Gibson skips among them with such ease and fluidity that it's still a surprise. There's been a lot of talk about whether or not this will be the last Sprawl novel. Gibson is reputed to have said so, but people doubt that he can walk away from such a huge money-maker. After reading this book, I have no doubt. Gibson has, in Mona Lisa Overdrive, pushed the envelope of mirrorshades writing. He either has to move on or crash and burn. The style was thought to have been worked for all it's worth--certainly cheap imitators are moving in in droves. But Gibson proves once again that he's the master, the one whom the others are trying to imitate. If you don't like William Gibson's writing, you're not going to like this any better. But if you have any respect for a writing genius, don't pass this one by.