At The Edge of the Universe, we review books that may not be classified SFF but that incorporate elements of speculative fiction. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

Evelyn and Brendan are both students at Oxford when they meet in the tiny Cornish town of Clews, where Evelyn is taking a much-needed break and Brendan is working in his father’s bookstore. A romance begins to bloom between the two, and Brendan shares with Evelyn his favorite legend: a local Arthurian variant about star-crossed lovers Gawan and Elowen. Then something uncanny occurs, and Evelyn and Brendan part and lose touch. Ten years later they meet again while teaching at Bartlett College in Virginia. They reconnect, but still all is not smooth…

Theodora Goss unfolds this love story in a unique format. The book is printed in an accordion fashion, with printing on both sides, so that if you open the book one way you read the story from Brendan’s point of view, and then you can flip it over, open it again, and read Evelyn’s. Or vice versa, because you can start with either. The downside to this is that it lacks the usual spine binding, so it is more difficult to hold than a “regular” book. There are four illustrations: one each of Evelyn, Brendan, Gawan, and Elowen. The book comes in a beautiful slipcover whose design calls to mind a medieval tapestry. The book as a physical object is a work of art in and of itself.

Inside is a story of love found and lost and found again — both within Evelyn and Brendan’s own lives and possibly over the course of a thousand years, as it’s suggested that these present-day lovers may be the reincarnations of the ones from the legend. It’s also a story of creativity lost and found. Both lovers are writers whose imaginative minds often go unappreciated by those around them and even in academia: one of Evelyn’s professors tells her to stop writing poetry on “fanciful” topics, and Brendan at one point realizes he’d rather write a story than write about stories. During the course of the book, the two characters are each navigating their own relationship with their creativity in addition to their relationship with each other.

Perhaps the most clever aspect of the “two-sided” story is that, no matter which one you start with, the ending is unresolved. But when you read the other side, it fills in other details about the ending that give it more of a sense of resolution. There is still ambiguity, but one can make a pretty good guess what will happen next.

I’m slightly uneasy with the parallel drawn between the character of Isabel and one of the figures from the legend. It seemed that this somewhat hampered the reader’s capacity to feel sympathy for her, when Isabel had done nothing wrong in this life (and possibly not ever, depending on whether the reincarnation is real).

The Thorn and the Blossom is a short read; each of the two versions of the story is only about 40 pages long. You can read it in one leisurely afternoon. The way the two perspectives play off one another, however, may have you wanting to read it again!

At The Edge of the Universe, we review books that may not be classified SFF but that incorporate elements of speculative fiction. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

Arctic Rising by Tobias Buckell

Tobias Buckell offers up a fast-paced near-future technothriller in his latest novel, Arctic Rising. Two strong main characters, an intriguing and just-detailed-enough future setting, and crisp, clear prose make it mostly a winner, with only a few flaws to spoil the fun.

Arctic Rising takes place roughly 50 years from now, by which time global warming has freed up most of the northern ocean, meaning the long-sought Northwest Passage is finally open for business. Which is good, as the lack of sea ice has also begun a boom in oil and other resource mining in the “Arctic Tiger” countries (Greenland can’t mine the stuff fast enough and has to import guest workers), which include the big players (Canada, the U.S. Russia, China), some consortiums of small players (the Caribbean islands for instance), and an autonomous enclave called Thule made up of a hodgepodge of differently-governed demesnes, including one with an official “benevolent dictator.”

The northern region is the 21^st century’s Wild West, but a lot less simple than in the Westerns. There are a host of players here, and the good guys and bad guys (not to mention the sundry grey guys) are a lot harder to tell apart and a lot more varied. For one, they’re not all guys, not even close. And they’re just as likely to sport dreads as black or white hats, hailing from a range of nations and quasi-nations.

Our main character, Anika Duncan, is originally from Nigeria, and has taken a job as an airship pilot for the UN, monitoring the northern waters and especially keeping an eye out for illegal dumping. Her attempt to pull over a suspicious ship goes quickly awry early on, and soon she is on the run — trying to avoid getting killed or arrested by a variety of adversaries, moving in and out of the embrace of a variety of allies (none of whom she is sure she can trust), and trying to solve the case that started the whole thing, which may or may not involve a stray nuclear missile and may or may not result in another World War or just possibly the end of the world as we know it.

Her possible allies include a local drug dealer (though that doesn’t do her justice) named Violet who seems to have a thing for Anika (Anika isn’t quite sure if it’s reciprocal) and a freelance spy named Roo whose island home sank beneath the rising sea waters. Her possible adversaries include a ruthlessly methodical yet sorrowful agent whose employers are never quite clear.

One of the pluses is that these characters aren’t the run-of-the-mill types; in a shrinking world it’s nice to see other nations and nationalities take some of the stage. Their differing backgrounds also offer up an unusual perspective on the Great Game of the 20^th and 21^st Centuries. At times this threatens to turn into speechifying or call too much overt attention to itself (such as a scene drawing attention to Anika’s sexuality which seemed way too forced), but these moments are rare and are more than outweighed by the positive impact of such diversity on story and character.

Specifically, Anika is a strong, determined character who simply refuses to bow out of the game no matter how many chances she gets to do so. And thanks to her background — both official and unofficial — her ability to manage events never feels implausible, as can happen at times when the ordinary person is thrust into action situations. (Violet on the other hand is a little less plausible, but not horribly so.) I actually liked Roo even better, with his relatively calm demeanor and conflicted reaction to events. Gabriel, the mysterious agent, is also painted in shades rather than broad strokes, taking on a much more intriguing role than generic bad cop.

The setting is quickly and economically conveyed, though it doesn’t lack for interest despite the relative brevity of description. Buckell leaves you wanting more: more on Thule, more on the Arctic change over time, more on what is happening with the superpowers and not-so-superpowers, more on what is happening down at the southern pole. The book has more than sufficient detail about this world; you don’t want more because the novel is lacking what it needs — you want more because it’s all so interesting and so well presented.

The action for the vast majority of Arctic Rising is fluidly and plausibly handled, especially in the first half, with a good sense of pace and sharp moments of sudden violence and longer periods of tension nicely broken up with quieter scenes of simple dialog between two or three of the characters. One reason for the fluidity is the sharp, clear prose throughout. The action spirals ever upward into higher and higher stakes the more Anika pursues things, finally reaching the aforementioned end-of-the-world scenario, which is an effectively compelling structure. The novel is weakest in its last 50 pages or so; the action feels less smoothly presented, less plausible, less clear. A few characters that appear at the end are a bit abruptly released onto the plot, and what eventually comes together doesn’t feel as well integrated as earlier plot points. A running subplot of possible romance between Anika and Violet also never felt real to me.

But despite some minor disappointment toward the end, and while I can’t say it pulled me too deeply in, Arctic Rising was an enjoyably quick read (I read it in a single sitting) that betters my (admittedly limited) past experience with the technothriller genre, thanks to the way it handles its topical themes of environmentalism, globalism, near-future economics, and Great Game politics and also thanks to its diverse cast. Recommended.

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

The Snow Child had me from the first page, specifically these two sentences:

She had imagined that in the Alaska wilderness silence would be peaceful, like snow falling at night, air filled with promise but no sound, but that was not what she found. Instead, when she swept the plank floor, the broom bristles scritched like some sharp-toothed shrew nibbling at her heart.

I loved the way Eowyn Ivey used alliteration and onomatopoeia here to reinforce the picture she described, and I was pretty sure from that moment that I would enjoy this book. And I did. I know I’ve found a good book when I find myself wanting to babble on about both the story and the mechanics of its telling.

The year is 1920. Mabel and Jack are a fiftyish couple who have moved to remote Alaska to get away from constant reminders of their childlessness and years-ago miscarriage. Mabel feels prissy and useless in this rugged land but isn’t quite sure how to change that. Jack feels that he “married up” and is ashamed that he can’t give Mabel a soft, easy life. Both are haunted by the lack of the children they wish they’d had. The Snow Child follows the evolution of these characters and of their marriage as they adjust to the harsh realities of their new home, befriend a rough-and-tumble neighbor family, and encounter the snow child of the title: a little girl who appears the morning after Jack and Mabel impulsively build a girl of snow.

The child, who calls herself Faina, is an enigma. Is she a supernatural being, a magical fairy-girl like the one from the “Snegurochka” tale Mabel’s father read to her long ago? Is she an ordinary flesh-and-blood orphan scratching out a solitary existence? Or is she a figment of Mabel’s imagination, conjured out of loneliness and cabin fever? Ivey feeds this ambiguity by writing dialogue differently when it involves Faina. These conversations are not set off in quotation marks the way the rest of the book’s conversations are. It helps one wonder whether Faina has the gift of speaking directly into people’s minds — or if she only exists in their minds in the first place. We do eventually get some answers about Faina’s nature, but later these seemingly definitive answers are called into question yet again.

The prose is skilled; one has the sense that every word in The Snow Child is carefully chosen, yet the book never seems overwritten. Ivey has a knack for using just the right word, not necessarily the prettiest word — they’re not always the same thing and she gets that. Ivey’s writing evokes both the stark setting and the moments of beauty to be found there, as well as the inner landscape of the characters. Here’s another sample that stood out to me, and seemed to perfectly describe the feeling of worrying about something and hoping that the worrying itself could somehow bring about a happy outcome:

It was a possibility she could not bear. She wound herself tightly, as if within her girdled ribs she could contain all possibilities, all futures and all deaths. Perhaps if she held herself just right. Maybe if she knew what would be or could be. Or if she wished with enough heart. If only she could believe.

The Snow Child is a moving fairy tale adaptation, and seems to tell us that no matter how we find our loved ones — whether by birth or marriage or friendship, or maybe by magic — we never know how long we will have with them. Life is uncertain; we might have more time than we expect, and we might have less. All we can do is make the best of it.

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

Like many others reviewing The Night Circus, it was the hype that first drew my attention. Talk all over the internet, a huge display case in the local bookshop, rumours of a movie deal mere months after it had been published – I thought I may as well give in to the inevitable and read it.

In my opinion, every good book requires three things: 1) rich, vivid world-building, 2) a story that captivates the reader, and 3) interesting, three-dimensional characters with equally interesting, complex relationships. Naturally, this is something of a generalization, and obviously not every good book is going to contain all these qualities to the same degree. Some may be missing one of these aspects entirely, but can make up for it on the strength of the other two. Others can utilize all three factors, but only adequately, or manage to capture one so brilliantly that nothing else is necessary. And so on.

But for the purposes of this review, let’s pretend that this three-pronged approach to storytelling is an infallible method of crafting a decent novel – in which case Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus excels in one area, is pretty good in the other, but stumbles on the third.

The draw-card of The Night Circus is (naturally) the circus itself. The Cirque des Reves, or “the Circus of Dreams,” is a gloriously imaginative creation and a dream-like experience to both readers and characters. Beautifully designed and described in prose that only occasionally turns a shade of purple, this is a circus that arrives unexpectedly in the night, consists of dozens of tents in the shapes of pyramids, is entirely monochromatic in colour, and opens only once the sun goes down. Visitors enter through the gate and are free to wander the circular paths to discover the secrets that the tents hold. Every impression is captured: the sights, the smells, the sounds – Morgenstern has crafted a fully immersive reading experience.

Within this setting of a magical circus is the story itself, though it always feels secondary to the world that Morgenstern has created in which to *tell* that story.

The stage magician Hector Bowen (who uses the ironic stage name Prospero, though he’s about as far from Shakespeare’s devoted father and wise magician as you can imagine) returns backstage from a performance to find that his hitherto unknown daughter has just been delivered to his door, her mother’s suicide note pinned to her jacket. His initial reaction to her is not promising, but his interest is raised when she displays telekinetic powers.

Enter Alexander H, an old friend/foe of Hector, who is usually referred to as the man in the grey suit. He proposes a wager, and judging from their conversation, this is neither the first nor the last time that the two men have played such a game. The exact reason behind the wager is unclear, but it seems to have something to do with each man trying to prove the superiority of their magic and teaching methods. The competitors in this game are to be their own protégées: for Hector, it is his daughter Celia, for Alexander, it is Marko, a young boy he plucks out of an orphanage. Neither child knows the rules, they don’t know how to win or when they’ll win, and they don’t even know who their opponent is. Readers who are feeling generous could call this a metaphor for life; others may think it’s just an easy excuse to create the plot.

Only one thing is clear: the Night Circus is the venue. As each child grows into adulthood, each one goes through a traumatizing learning regime under their guardians, who control practically every aspect of their lives. By the time the circus opens, the two are fairly evenly matched: Celia has natural talent but little discipline, while Marko is rigorously pedantic, but lacks Celia’s raw power. The competition begins, and the beauty and magic of the circus grows with each move they make, gradually drawing closer to one another as they construct the sideshows and attractions that surround them.

Divided into five parts of varying lengths, the narrative leaps back and forth in time between the 1880s and the 1890s, and is told entirely in present-tense, the immediacy of which can get a little tiring after a while. Furthermore, certain segments address the reader directly, recounting the various experiences that one might expect in the Night Circus: “You are amongst the crowd, of course. Your curiosity got the better of you, as curiosity is wont to do. You stand in the fading light, the scarf around your neck pulled up against the chilly evening breeze, waiting to see for yourself exactly what kind of circus only opens once the sun sets.”

But a question hangs over the proceedings: when does the contest end? How is the winner decided? And what consequences await the loser? This brings us to the third quality of any decent story: the characters, who make up the heart of almost every novel – and here’s where The Night Circus fails.

Celia and Marko are two of the blandest, most uninteresting protagonists imaginable – and that’s a pretty astonishing feat given the richness of their surroundings and the dangers of the competition that they’re embroiled in. Any other character in the story, from the circus patrons to the performers, are more interesting than these two. As a result, their relationships suffer as well. The reader is given absolutely no reason to invest in the wishy-washy love story, for the two barely interact before we’re lead to believe that they can’t live without each other.

Other relationships, which contained the potential for conflict that could have been riveting, fall flat as well. Though Morgenstern gets some mileage out of Celia and Hector’s strained father/daughter bond, there is nothing on the Marko/Alexander front, and neither child seems particularly phased by the years of neglect and abuse they suffered. Marko starts a relationship with a young tarot reader called Isobel; she later joins the circus in order to spy on Celia for Marko’s benefit, but her thoughts and feelings concerning this matter (and the heartless way in which Marko treats her) is never really explored.

A past competitor is revealed to be working in the circus, fully aware of the new contest, but no insight is given on this potentially fascinating perspective either. We never learn the reason for the rivalry between Hector and Alexander, nor the background to their animosity. A boy called Bailey becomes captivated by the circus and has an important part to play in its fate; yet his obsession with the Night Circus feels perfunctory, more a plot-device than a character trait, and his involvement in the denouement feels more of a deus ex machina than an organic choice driven out of real passion for the circus.

It all seems a dreadful waste. No one in the book feels like a real human being – they’re all as distant and insubstantial as the circus itself. It’s a pity; as their personalities and relationships could have held the necessary grit and realism to ground the dreamy circus atmosphere. A story that relies almost entirely on a mysterious competition that no one can fully understand *needed* strong characters to carry it – otherwise, nothing is at stake. Without characters to invest in, it’s difficult to care about the resolution.

I enjoyed reading The Night Circus. I liked the central conceit and for the most part I liked the execution. But I never found it riveting. I could put the book down for breaks and not feel an urgent need to return to it. Reading it was like eating candy floss: sweet and tasty while it lasted, but dissolving almost instantaneously. Apparently the rights to the books have already been sold to Hollywood, in which case movie-goers are in for a visual feast when the story is adapted for the big screen. Until then, I just wish that the characters were worthy of the fantastical setting and the intriguing plot – which would have been all the more rewarding had the players in it not been so superficial.

Five stars for the world-building, three stars for the plot, and one star for the characters.

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

To call The Night Country a ghost story or horror story does a disservice to both the author and the work. It’s like calling The Odyssey a ghost story because Odysseus speaks to the shades. Yes, there are ghosts, but The Night Country aims to be far more than ghost story, and for the most part succeeds admirably and movingly.

The ghosts are the novel’s narrators — a group of teens killed in a single-car crash exactly one year ago this Halloween (present time in the novel). Called up whenever they are thought of, this night as on many nights they follow the actions of those most deeply affected by the event: the policeman who was trailing them before the crash (Brooks), the boy who survived physically but not emotionally (Tim), the boy who survived but was left brain-damaged (Kyle), and Kyle’s mother, who tries to reconcile her desire to save her marriage and her responsibilities to her dependent son. One would assume the ghosts’ parents would also be thinking of them, especially this night of all nights, but in one of Stewart O’Nan‘s many beautifully small touches, the ghost narrator tells us those thoughts will remain private.

The small-town car crash, the ennui of the suburbs, the grieving mother and guilt-ridden survivor: these all could have easily fallen into the bin of cliché. They are saved from this by details such as the one above, by O’Nan’s wonderul array of voices, by his language which is both spare and poetic, and finally by the sheer depth of sadness in this book. The reader is sad these young kids died, but then is sad again as the narrator speaks of how already they are becoming nameless — just those “car crash kids.” One first mourns the deaths, then mourns the lack of mourning. And then one mourns more for the living — for Brooks and Tim who are bound to that night and to each other and seemingly can find no way out of that endless circle. For Kyle’s lost potential, though he is probably the happiest due to his brain-damaged oblivion. For Kyle’s mother, who has lost both the son and the husband she had only a year earlier, for Tim’s parents who take good grades and a job as the marks of recovery and don’t see the train bearing down on the tracks toward them. The reader feels too for the small sadnesses, such as the principal who doesn’t know how to or even whether to commemorate this day in the daily announcement. One of the many nice surprises in the book is that the reader feels sadder for the adults in the novel than the dead kids. Despite being alive, despite having lived if not full lives at least large portions of a life, or perhaps because of that, the reader feels their losses more heavily. Their reactions, their thoughts, are those of bitter experience and that lifetime experience lends a sense of weight to their grief and deprivation that outweighs the more abstract sadness over the lost “potential” of lives cut down too early.

There is an accretion of detail and sadness and poignancy that envelops the reader, drawing them more and more into the world of the dead or the dead-in-living. Doom hangs over the novel, past, present, and future; we are told early on that Tim plans some huge memorial act and it doesn’t take many pages or much hard thought to realize what it will be. Through the narrators we know Brooks and Kyle will be involved as well and like the narrators, we are mere helpless witnesses who can only go along for the ride. We want Tim to wake from his nightmare before it’s too late. We want Brooks to be the hero the narrator tells us he is (though we are told he is as close as we get — fair warning). We want Kyle’s mother to get smoothly through the night out with her husband. We want Kyle to recognize the faces in the photos Tim shows him. We want all the way to the end though we have a sense where all that wanting will get us. The impending doom makes this a suspense novel and the compression of time and place — a single day, a single small town — along with the spare language keep us heading forthrightly toward the disaster we are told to expect.

The book, though, is not unremittingly sad; O’Nan leavens the tone here and there with some observational humor and on several occasions through the actions of two friends of the dead who feel obligated to memorialize them through various acts of vandalism. So there are spots of humor, but they are just that — spots — and the book remains mostly bleak.

As for the ending, without obviously saying too much, I’ll say that it is unfortunately the weakest part of the book. Much of it I found simply too hard to believe. Characters seemed to start acting to serve the purposes of pre-ordained plot rather than as they would have acted if just left to respond like normal (or as close as they get in this book) people. But despite the disappointment of the few closing pages, I couldn’t help but be moved repeatedly by The Night Country and it will be hard to shake for some time. In that sense, perhaps it is a ghost story, one haunting the reader who has the luck to pick it up.

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

Alan Lightman is a physicist and a writer who often merges the scientific and the artistic in his work, both fiction and non-fiction. His newest novella, Mr. g: A Novel About the Creation, is perhaps the logical outgrowth of his unique blending of science and transcendence, doing exactly what he says in the title — telling the story of the universe’s creation from beginning to end (and perhaps beginning again).

“As I remember, I had just woken up from a nap when I decided to create the universe. Not much was happening at that time. As a matter of fact, time didn’t exist.” Thus begins both the novella and the universe and you can see at once the playfully modest voice of our omniscient, omnipresent narrator, who from the void creates time and space, then universes, stars, and planets, and then life itself, which bursts out in magnificent and surprising variety. Even more surprising is the appearance of Mr. Belhor, seemingly Mr. g’s equal in thought and ability to travel. It is Mr. Belhor whose conversation convinces Mr. g to let things unfold without his intervention or prediction and as his creation grows, Mr. g learns the act of creation changes even the creator. If Mr. g is God, he is the Deist version: the god who creates then steps back wholly and lets the world unwind according to the rules he set down from the start.

If Mr. g is the primary, unknowable cause, the rest of the creative act flows along the most modern scientific tracks. When Mr. g makes matter, we get “Electrons and muons and taus, top quarks and bottom quarks, squarks gravitons . . . W and Z bosons” and so on. We get a scientific explanation for when and why light began, even as Mr. g tells us tongue-in-cheek, “and I decided that these things were good.” Later, in definite non-King-James-Bible language, these particles formed pockets that “oscillated and vibrated in response to the electrical attractions and repulsions between them . . . unleashing a flood of polarized photons.” That isn’t to say there isn’t poetry here as well, however, for these photons “create a display far more spectacular than the evanescent veils of the void. There were cascades and blooms of light, spiraling helices.” There is also near-perpetual music, art, and beauty, joy and love. And, as Mr. Belhor argues, inevitably there is also grief and sorrow, death and cruelty, suffering and murder. And there is poetry as well in this and in Mr. g’s response to it, along with the reactions of his Aunt Penelope and Uncle Deva.

Mr. g is a slim book, which is as it should be, and it’s hard to imagine carrying the conceit much farther. To be honest, there are a few places where it lags just slightly, mostly in the scientific sections, which at times feel a little too textbook-like and as well a bit prescriptive. In other words, if one is familiar with modern day physics/cosmology, nothing in those sections is surprising and it all comes in familiar order and fashion. On the other hand, the less scientific half of the book is filled with pleasant and playful surprise, such as Mr. g having an aunt and uncle. This isn’t to say the science shouldn’t have been included; it just needed to be integrated more smoothly.

I also would have liked to see more of Mr. Lightman’s imagination play out in the variety of worlds and inhabitants. We do get a few glimpses of strange planets and peoples, such as a planet that cuts off the hands of all its females (with the females’ full cooperation) and another whose inhabitants have wholly separated body and mind. These are thought-provoking excursions and I would have loved to have seen more of them. Though perhaps Mr. Lightman felt it would have smacked too much of his earlier well-deserved classic, Einstein’s Dreams.

Mr. g doesn’t rise to the level of that novella, but it is a subtle, playful, thought-provoking book with moments of quiet beauty, one that respectfully mingles science and faith and offers up the answers science has provided most recently as well as the questions it cannot.

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

I really wanted to like Felix J. Palma’s The Map of Time. It has so many elements that usually appeal to me: nested narratives, multiple plot strands, authors as characters, parallel or alternate histories, internal resonances of image and theme and character, metafictional aspects, a mystery or two. And there were certainly parts of the novel I responded to, but overall, it left me feeling underwhelmed and unengaged.

Most simply and most concretely, it just felt way too long. My version comes in at just about 600 pages and I could have easily been happy had it been missing 200 of them. Because the dragging sense of reading a book that is longer than it needs to be colors the entire reading experience past a certain point, and tends to be cumulative, it’s hard to say just how much more I would have enjoyed the book with that one basic change. I’m guessing a substantial amount; it would have been a much more engaging and enjoyable read, though I believe it still would have left me wanting.

Beyond the length issue, I never really connected to any of the characters on a level beyond their mechanical movements through the plot. Part of this is because of the book’s tripartite structure, which means we spend time with some characters and then leave them behind. But I’ve read similarly structured books without this issue arising and certainly I’ve felt more engaged, though less often, with short story characters with whom I spend much, much less time. Here, very few of the characters struck me as particularly memorable or compelling, the exceptions being Joseph Merrick (the “Elephant Man”), whom we see only very briefly in a scene that was for me by far the most affecting one of the entire novel; and Marie Kelly (Jack the Ripper’s last victim), whom we also see for only a brief all-too-short time, and all too briefly in her own words. The other partial exception was H.G. Wells. I say partial because there were times when the character came alive for me as a fully realized person and especially as a writer — and those moments were almost mesmerizing. But as with the others, they were too few and too far between.

The plot is captivating at the start and through much of it, and, as mentioned, would probably have been so throughout had the book lost about a third of its pages. By the mid-point I was starting to feel things lag and by the latter third I was chafing at the bit to finish, not out of a need to know but simply to get to the end. I did enjoy the book’s structure and movement, but not on this scale.

I appreciated the novel’s musings regarding the power of story and words, the essence of time and memory and imagination, the power and place of deception/delusion (imposed from without or within) in human lives and loves, even if some were a bit familiar, and the many allusions that are scattered throughout the book. The prose, though it rarely wowed me, was consistently smooth and precise and it had its shining moments.

If I could pop into H.G. Wells’ machine and go back and convince Palma’s editor to cut 200 or so pages, I’d love the chance to “reread for a first time” this book, as I think I’d enjoy it so much more. But as it is, it strikes me as a clever book a little too clever for its own sake, invested a bit too much with cleverness and not enough with blood and emotion, and a book whose love of its cleverness led it to a self-indulgent length. There’s a lot to enjoy in its 600 pages, but not enough to justify that length, and that tips The Map of Time into the not recommended category. Which is just too bad.

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

The Glister by John Burnside

Reading The Glister by John Burnside was like opening a perfectly crafted wooden box and finding inside a set of components, nested into cognac-colored velvet. Some components were made of finely worked gold and brass; some were polished wood; some were ethereal blown glass; some were made of jewels and bone. Usually, components like these fit together to form a whole: a telescope, a kaleidoscope or a theodolite. Try as I would, though, I could not get the components of The Glister to merge into one coherent whole. Each piece looked beautiful in its velvet nest, but they did not combine to create a larger form.

The Glister is a literary thriller, or perhaps literary horror novel, about an isolated Scottish town that has been poisoned on many levels by the toxic chemical plant that it grew up around. There is a paranormal aspect to the story, and, at ground level, so to speak, a mystery about teenaged boys that go missing, usually one every two years.

Burnside is a master stylist. It is completely intentional that the title makes you think simultaneously of “glisten” and “blister.” Open the book almost anywhere, at random, and you will fall headfirst into rich, vivid prose, whether it is the description of the poison wood, of the morally compromised constable’s garden of atonement, or of the kitchen in the house where Leonard, a bitter fifteen-year-old boy, lives. Burnside’s concept of the “chemical plant” that has blighted the land is exquisitely rendered. The voices of Leonard and the constable, Morrison, are pitch-perfect.

Burnside has a strange and wonderful idea here, and when he is merely exploring it — describing the ruins of the chemical plant, cataloguing the many physical, psychological, and spiritual symptoms that the townspeople face, and even inventing the strangely mutated (or perhaps alien?) animals that inhabit the poison wood — the book is compelling. It is the plot elements that trip him up. He sets up a fine horror mystery with the death of a teenaged boy in the opening pages, and tells us that every two years or so another boy, a boy about Leonard’s age, goes missing. Missing is not the same as dead, and one overarching mystery about the book is why people do not leave this poisoned town and its poisoned land. There is a hint that they can’t. Are the boys, then, finding a way out? Or is it more sinister than that?

Perhaps there is a mortal agent taking the boys. Perhaps there is a supernatural element at work. Perhaps it’s both. Instead of sprinkling the breadcrumbs for the reader to follow, Burnside prefers to explore the tainted lives of other people in the village of Innertown (the wealthy homes on the hill, presumably above the poison, are called Outertown. Great economy.). The book crackles with energy when Leonard reminisces about his loved/hated mother, who left them when his father got sick, or when he gets entangled with one of the local gangs of kids, or when he visits the old plant by himself. It is bland when we are forced to spend time in the head of Morrison’s mentally ill wife, for example.

Burnside drifts from one plot element to another; the disappearances, the deterioration of Leonard’s dad, the gang; and then brings everything back to the plant and wraps it up with a series of explanations and a dramatic, if ambiguous, ending. Plainly he had some idea where he was headed the whole time, but he does not connect his ending to the previous events in the novel. Plot points are dropped or just fade away. There is an act of violence against the town loner. Where are the consequences of that act? How does it tie into Leonard’s final realization and his visit to the heart of the plant? How does what happens to Morrison provide balance for what we’ve known about him from the first pages? And what does it mean for Alice, his wife? Where did Elspeth go? Was she killed? Did she hitchhike out of town? The connections in the book are dream-connections, the connections of image and theme, very much in the literary tradition, and they make, ultimately, for disappointing storytelling.

John Burnside is an award-winning poet, and that side of him shows here. He seems to approach a novel the way a master cabinetmaker might decide to build a house. Cabinetmakers work with wood better than anyone; they understand seams and joins. They don’t always understand load-bearing walls, the importance of a foundation, or cutting a roof.

I got to my three-and-half-star rating by a strange route. I gave The Glister four and a half stars for language, and two and a half for plot. Then I averaged. I am drawn by the dark, frightening and seductive concept of the “the Glister.” This idea might have played out better as a series of connected short stories.

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

IQ84 by Haruki Murakami

In Tokyo, in 1984, a young woman in a taxi on her way to an important appointment is stuck in gridlock on an elevated highway. After getting some cryptic advice from her cab driver, she walks across several lanes of stopped traffic and makes a perilous climb down a safety access stairway to the surface streets, where she can catch a train to her destination. When she reaches those streets, she is in a different world.

Or is she?

Haruki Murakami’s 900-page IQ84 is the story of a woman, Aomame, a man, Tengo, and nine months in their lives. It is an epic literary fantasy about alternate realities. It is, with its emphasis on fiction and creating fiction, meta-fiction. And, maddeningly, it is extremely difficult to write about without spoilers.

While Aomame tries to make sense of the changes in the world around her, Tengo Kawana, who teaches math at a “cram school” and writes novels on his own time, gets roped into a scheme by a clever and unscrupulous editor, Komatsu. Tengo, who agreed to judge a literary contest, has discovered a short novel called Air Chrysalis, written by a seventeen-year-old girl. Air Chrysalis is a brilliant, imaginative and original fantasy. The writing, however, is awful. Komatsu has Tengo rewrite the novel, working closely with Fuka-Eri, the author, whose real name is Eriso Fukayama. Tengo soon discovers that Fuka-Eri is a very strange young woman, and then some disturbing facts emerge. First of all, Fuka-Eri is the daughter of the founder of Sakigaki, a spiritual community in the mountains that seems very much like a cult. Secondly, Fuka-Eri says that her story, about a girl who is put into solitary confinement for an infraction of the rules, encounters the Little People and helps them weave an air chrysalis, all really happened. It happened in a world where there are two moons.

Cults — or at least non-standard belief systems — make up a large part of IQ84. Aomame was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, but repudiated the religion when she was ten years old. The long reach of Sakigaki, with its wholesome organic vegetable business and its sinister treatment of the prepubescent girls called “shrine maidens,” touches every aspect of the book.

Another big theme in the book is physical violence against women. Aomame, a physical fitness trainer and athlete, has a close relationship with a wealthy widow who runs a safe house for battered women. The widow’s daughter was in a violent relationship and died mysteriously. Aomame’s best friend, who was also in an abusive marriage, committed suicide. Later, another friend of Aomame, Ayumi, is found dead in a “love motel,” the victim of bondage sex gone wrong. Another woman with an historical connection to a main character died much the same way. [SPOILER: Highlight text if you want to read it] In fact, the death of Ayumi almost seemed like a plot glitch. Happening where it does in the book, it seems to relate to Sakagaki, but no connection is ever made. [end SPOILER].

Woven through everything, however, is the reality shift and the question of what caused it. Shortly after we discover that there are two moons in Air Chrysalis, Aomame sees two moons in the sky. Later, Tengo sees two moons. Still later, the sinister investigator, Ushikawa, does too.

The Little People can’t be real. They must be figments of a disturbed young woman’s imagination, mustn’t they? When another girl, younger than Fuka-Eri, escapes from Sakagaki, she also mentions the Little People. Surely this is some kind of a screen memory for trauma, isn’t it? Just when I thought I knew where the story was going, Murakami changed direction with the effortless grace of a gold-medal ice skater, and upset my expectations.

A wonderful as IQ84 (published as two separate books in Japan) is, at 900+ pages, it is longer than it needs to be. Repetition is explained by the fact that the duology was published over time, and Murakami needed to remind people about what had gone before. Some of the day-to-day details could have been limited, though, and some sections, while wonderful, just go on too long. The duology is long but at the end, at least one good-sized story question is not completely answered for me.

I will also be interested to see whether other readers think there is a breast fixation in this story. Aomame, who is in peak physical condition, thinks every single day that her breasts are too small. She’s thirty. I think she’d be over this by now. She and Ayumi compare their breasts, and when Ayumi worries that hers are too big, Aomame reassures her that they are “perfectly ordinary.” (Ouch!) Murakami is at pains to tell us at least four times that the seventeen year old Fuka-Eri’s breasts are large and well-shaped. Tengo obsesses about an early memory, perhaps his first memory, of his mother’s breasts. SPOILER STARTS: This memory ushers in a mystery that is never explained. SPOILER ENDS. This constant focus may have a purpose, especially since the “air chrysalis” is compared to a womb more than once, and two invented words, maza and dohta, sound a little bit like the English words for “mother” and “daughter.” On the other hand, this could be a complete linguistic coincidence.

I can get over the breast thing, though, because there is so much else here, so many levels, so many humorous and serious insights about life, art, thought, memory and fiction. After Tengo begins to search for Aomame, he tries to locate the local branch of the Society of Witnesses, because he remembers that she used to be one. He is unsuccessful.

“At the end of this struggle, Tengo concluded that they probably didn’t want anyone contacting them. This was, upon reflection, rather odd. They showed up all the time. They’d ring the bell or knock on the door, unconcerned that you might be otherwise occupied, be it baking a soufflé, soldering a connection, washing your hair, training a mouse to do tricks, or thinking about quadratic functions — and, with a big smile, invite you to study the Bible with them. They had no problem coming to see you, but you were not free to go see them (unless you were a believer, probably). This was rather inconvenient.

Later in the book, Aomame reflects on the nature of her dreams: “All that remained were small, random images. She slept deeply, and the dreams she did have came from a very deep place. Like fish that live at the bottom on the ocean, most of her dreams weren’t able to float to the surface. Even if they did, the difference in water pressure would force a change in their appearance.”

Murakami muses on the character of the goblin-like private investigator Ushikawa: “Sentiment and a sense of justice were Ushikawa’s two weak areas.”

For much of the book, though, Tengo and Aomame use popular movies, short fiction and novels to describe their predicament. Realizing that Air Chrysalis describes the world she is currently in, one she has nicknamed IQ84, Aomame thinks, “‘In other words, I am in the story that Tengo has set in motion. In a sense, I am inside him — inside his body,’ she realized. ‘I am inside that shrine, so to speak.’” She immediately makes a connection to the old science fiction movie Fantastic Voyage.

After a discussion with Komatsu about “reality,” Tengo reflects, “But a narrative takes its own direction, and continues on, almost automatically. And whether he liked it or not, Tengo was a part of that world. To him this was no longer a fictional world. This was the real world, where red blood spurted when you slice your skin with a knife. And in the sky in this world there were two moons side by side.”

Aspiring writers, or anyone who loves to see how a writer uses language, should pay special attention to Chapter 7 of Book 2, to see how Murakami uses Raymond Chandler-like prose and timing to create an ever-tightening noose of suspense. In Chapter 9 of Book Three, a night of karaoke with three nurses turns eerie when Tengo accompanies one of them home, and it is worth reading twice also, just to see how he does it.

A book about writing is dependent on its words, maybe even more than other stories, and the English translation by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel is beautifully done with only a few odd moments, like the difference in the use of the word “taciturn” between Book One and Book Three.

With its focus on various levels, with interiors and exteriors (safe houses, wombs, chrysalises, and ladders) IQ84 reminds me the most of Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, although the resolution is completely different. Murakami’s short novel After Dark also brushes up against some of the same themes that are explored in detail here. The detours Murakami takes us on — the “town of cats,” the genuinely frightening subplot about a cable fee collector, the development of the character of Ushikawa — are fascinating.

I found the book rich and very dense, and it’s the first book in a while that took me several weeks to read. I had to walk away from it every so often. It’s a book that will stay with me, even with its flaws. At the end, whatever is left unexplained — and much is — Tengo and Aomame have reached a believable resolution. Is the cab driver from Chapter 1 right or wrong in his advice to Aomame? That’s a question you’ll come back to, after you’ve read IQ84. And you’ll want to check the night sky, just in case, and count the moons.

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

I think I can safely say that I have never read a book quite like The Sacred Book of the Werewolf before. I found the book in the fantasy section, but it had literary novel packaging with a slightly risqué cover (the back and buttocks of a naked woman sporting a plumy fox’s tail). A medallion in the corner announced that this had been a New York Times Book Review Notable Book. I thought I knew what to expect and that this would be some modern fable about consumerism or humanity’s isolation or blah-blah-blah.

That’s what I thought, but I had it wrong. This is the kind of book you bring out when you are having the debate with your literary friends about whether fantasy serves any purpose except escapism. Can fantasy provide a compelling critique of modern society? Can fantasy make us question how we think? Victor Pelevin is a Russian writer who answers “Yes” to those questions. He seems like China Miéville, except that he has a spiritual foundation instead of a political one. He also seems like William Gibson, and a little like Jonathan Lethem. And he is uniquely himself.

My edition was ably translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield but I was aware at all times that I was reading a translated work.

The Sacred Book of the Werewolf introduces us to A Hu-Li, who is a fox. She is not a canine quadruped but an ancient mystical creature like the Japanese fox maidens of the folktales. In her human form, A Hu-Li looks like a ginger-haired teenager, a gamine, and she survives as a prostitute. This choice is dictated by the needs of the foxes; they survive by drawing energy from humans, and the best way to get this energy is during sex, or rather, what the humans think is sex.

In fact, A Hu-Li hypnotizes her human clients and leads them to believe they’ve experienced an amazing sexual encounter. Foxes look human but they have tails. In its dormant state, the tail can be hidden in trousers or under a skirt or even tucked between the buttocks, but when it is active, it is a vivid, bushy antenna of illusion. Throughout history, foxes have used illusion to survive. A Hu-Li tells us that if foxes worked together, they could create illusions that would change the world. Perhaps they have changed the world in the past, or are changing it right now, and we are all caught up in the illusion.

The book is about many kinds of illusions. It is about the power of names and words. It is about post-Soviet Russia and the madness and hypocrisy of that country, and any country. It is about the magic of novelists and poets. It is dark. It is luminous. It is hilarious. As I read it, I was often laughing uproariously and feeling slightly offended at the same time, a personal sign for me that my belief system is being challenged in some way.

Early in the book, A Hu-Li gets distracted (she’s reading a Stephen Hawking book while hypnotizing her client) and the client emerges from the illusion, with some bad results. This brings A Hu-Li to the attention of the FSB, which is the name of an organization previously known as the KGB. As A Hu-Li puts it, “What a crazy idea that was – to change the name of the KGB. One of the greatest brand names ever was simply destroyed.” She is interviewed by a strange man named Mikhalich, but it is Mikhalich’s superior, Alexander Sery, who captures her attention. Alexander Sery – Sasha the Gray – is a werewolf.

If Alexander were only a werewolf and A Hu-Li only a fox, this might be a paranormal romance, but Sasha also has a vital responsibility to the state. He and his group must keep Russia’s precious oil flowing out of the Siberian oil wells. They do this not through science or technology but by setting an animal skull on a post on the night of the full moon and howling plaintively for the wells to continue. If a wolf is eloquent enough, the failing wells will replenish themselves. Insane? Surreal? Yes, and a hauntingly beautiful scene.

There is an element of danger to A Hu-Li if she is discovered by humans, and there is an element of danger to Sasha, especially when A Hu-Li’s love works a surprising transformation on him, but The Sacred Text of the Werewolf is not action-adventure. Much of the book is spent following A Hu-Li’s meditations on the nature of reality and illusion, especially the concept of the super-werewolf. Many foxes, including A Hu-Li’s sister E Hu-Li, believe that the super-werewolf is a physical being, a messianic figure who will bring enlightenment to the foxes and other supernatural entities. A Hu-Li, in contrast, sees the super-werewolf as a metaphor for a point in the development of consciousness. This is not the only thing the two fox-sisters disagree on, though. E Hu-li is a sports-fox, dedicated to the sport of hunting, (wait for it now), English aristocrats.

The book could be a quest for the super-werewolf, but it isn’t that either.

A Hu-Li takes a moment to explain the nature of the philosophy of foxes: “Foxes have a fundamental answer to the fundamental question of philosophy, which is to forget the fundamental question. There are no philosophical problems, there is only the suite of interconnected cul de sacs created by language’s inability to reflect the truth.”

Foxes, she explains, do not have a central guiding philosophy. They just have very good memories for everything they’ve read. A Hu-Li believes in “returning the serve,” keeping a conversation alive by volleying a verbal response back across the net. These apparently random conversations, however, lead to the most startling and complete (and magical) transformations in the book.

The Sacred Book of the Werewolf is sweet, profound, bitter and funny. Pelevin has an eye for the absurd, and uses it brilliantly to skewer current events in Russia. His love for his country and his anger at it come through strongly but never overpower the voice of A Hu-Li or the story he is telling. He deplores what has happened after the collapse of Soviet Russia but he is not nostalgic about those “good old days,” as we see when A Hu-Li reminisces about a piece of jewelry a grocery store director gave her.

The poor fellow was executed by a firing squad, and I felt sorry for him, although I still couldn’t force myself to wear the brooch. It was a unique example of Soviet kitsch: diamond ears of wheat surrounding emerald cucumbers and a ruby beetroot. An eternal reminder of the only battle that Soviet Russia ever lost – the battle for the harvest…

If you like your books linear, falling neatly into a recognizable category, The Sacred Book of the Werewolf is not for you. I assumed the book had been mis-shelved, and should have been in the literary section, and I was wrong. This book is a quirky example of what literary fantasy can be. It can tell a heart-touching story and ask important questions about the world, and it can be funny at the same time. It is an annoying, fascinating, entertaining and thought-provoking read that will demand your patience, and reward you for it.

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

Jake Marlowe is a monster. One night a month he turns into something lupine, a creature with the strength and senses of a wolf but the intelligence of an educated man. The monster is only satisfied by human flesh. The transformation lasts while the full moon is in the sky.

In The Last Werewolf, the horror, or beauty, of Glen Duncan’s wulf is that the Hunger that drives it cannot be satisfied by the flesh of other animals. The werewolf devours human flesh and consumes with it the memories, the essence of that person. There is no easy way out of this curse: no making do with rabbits or rats, no dreamy scenes of Jack Nicholson chasing down a stag in a manicured Connecticut forest. You can lock yourself away during the full moon, but sooner or later the Hunger will overcome you, and you will not want to lock yourself away. You will choose to kill. That is the monstrosity. Jake should know. He’s been a werewolf for over two hundred years, and now he’s the last.

Marlowe has been hunted over the decades by WOCOP, the World Organization for the Control of Occult Phenomenon, which is mostly an elaborate hunt club for werewolves. In this world, there are vampires too, but vampires are less bestial, and so WOCOP (funded originally, we are told, by the Vatican) came to an arrangement with them, and the vampire Fifty Families are allowed to have one hundred vampires each. The head of the werewolf division of WOCOP, Grainer, has been gunning for Marlowe for years, because Marlowe ate his father.

It’s the voice of this novel, the self-assuredness of the prose, that held my interest in the opening pages. Jake is matter-of-fact about his condition. He does not make excuses for the people he’s killed. The wolf does not really allow excuses; at the point you’ve been infected (bitten or scratched by a werewolf) the only choice you have, if you are not going to kill, is to kill yourself. Jake did not do that. Neither did the others. Humans are selfish, and the drive to live is strong. How about only killing bad people, then? Sure, Jake says, try that. It’s fine until the novelty wears off.

Jake is intelligent, educated as someone with two hundred years of leisure time can be, and sardonic. Here, he describes Madeline, his latest call girl, because Jake will never have sex with a woman he likes:

Madeline. . . brimming with tabloid axioms and fluent in cliché. She been there done that, bought the T-shirt. She goes ballistic. She gets paralytic. She wants the organ-grinder not his monkey. She wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire. . . her telephone farewell is mmbaah. This, more than her spiritual deficits has kept my dislike going, but it can’t last forever. A month in I can see the confused child in there, the gaping holes and wrong bulges in the long-ago fabric of love. There was a Doting and borderline Dodgy Dad, a fading and viciously Jealous Mum. This is the drag of having lived so long and seen so many: Biography shows through, all the mitigating antecedents. People teem with their own information and I start to get the headache of interest in them. Which is pointless, since when you get right down to it they’re first and foremost food.

You don’t get the full beauty of the rhythm of that paragraph because I snipped some of it, but Duncan piles up the words, starting simply and layering the images and the observations. Often it starts with a physical description and then goes deep into Jake’s history, or into his head.

For a book with such a powerful viewpoint character, others in this book border on cliché. Harley, Marlow’s human assistant, is the stereotypical Old British Queen character. Ellis, Grainer’s second-in-command, is a Grotesque, although a wonderful one. What we know of Grainer we hear from Jake, or mostly from Ellis. I think Grainer speaks perhaps three lines of dialogue in the whole book. Jake, however, is so powerful, and the book so compelling when we are in his memories, that he balances out these problems.

Jake insists that he is not a good man, that he has given himself to the monster, and that the countless good works and brave works of his life — fighting Nazis, dictators and drug cartels, funding children’s hospitals and foundations — is not an attempt to make up for the destruction his wulf has caused, but mere social book-keeping. It’s a flimsy argument. The juxtaposition of the man Jake was supposed to be — a good one, a happy one — and the monster he is kept me reading even when I was disapproving, sad or horrified. I was often horrified, at what Jake did, and what was done to him.

The plot has some problems, or at least, some loose ends. Some reviewers have said that there should be a sequel. I hope there isn’t, because the book has a certain purity by itself, even if it is flawed; but a sequel would explain some of the things that just drop through the cracks, like the mysterious journal that explains the origin of werewolves. Jake, on the run for his life, simply has to have it, then stops looking. Just like that. I mean, he’s busy dodging vampires and silver bullets and all, but still. There is a long explanation about why there aren’t any more werewolves; people stopped transforming and started dying. This is all setup for an elaborate vampire plot. The vampires want Jake alive, WOCOP wants him dead — or at least Grainer does. Some things are a bit too coincidental. A point-of-view shift away from first person near the end telegraphs things a bit too clearly.

And yet. . . the voice, the life of Jake Marlowe is powerful. There is a section where the reader follows him, in werewolf form, as he attacks and kills a human. We see him immediately before and immediately after a kill, and Duncan communicates the cruel, alien, yet so understandable joy of this sheer power.

And, you get observations like this, “You forgot sex could do this, cast the divine fragment back into the divine whole for a moment, then reel it out again, razed, beatified.”

And this,

I’m sorry Harls, for the mess I made of your life. For costing you your life. Vengeance, now, late, shamefully overdue, but vengeance nonetheless. Grainer. Ellis, too, eventually. I’m sorry it’s taken so long. I’m sorry the bare fact of you living wasn’t enough. I’m sorry it took loving someone. Someone else.

It’s difficult to write much more about this book without spoilers. I will say that there is a telephone conversation in an airport that is breathtaking in its immediacy. Plotwise, there is a surprise discovery that isn’t terribly surprising. It makes the ending of the book unavoidable and the reader will see it coming, but you’ll want to stay with it, just for the power of Duncan’s words.

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

In his introduction to Micro, Michael Crichton explains that children today are “cut off from the experience of nature, and from play in the natural world.” Crichton’s purpose, it would seem, is to take the seemingly mundane world and reveal the wonderful details that don’t make it onto Wikipedia and computer models. Crichton had reportedly finished one third of Micro when he passed away, and the novel has since been finished by Richard Preston.

Peter Jansen and his friends were just regular Cambridge students until Nanigen MicroTechnologies came recruiting. One of the recruiters is Peter’s brother Eric, who tries to be discreet about Nanigen’s very cool, but very proprietary, technology while also hinting that the company has invented tools that will lead to a new era of scientific knowledge. Peter does not find a new microscope, but he does discover a miniature plane in Eric’s car. What does Nanigen MicroTechnologies do? The students decide that they will have to travel to Hawaii to find out. However, before they leave, Peter receives a text message from his brother warning him not to come. It is afterward followed by a phone call from the company informing Peter that Eric has disappeared.

Peter decides to investigate. When he confronts Vin Drake, the psychopathic CEO of Nanigen MicroTechnologies rushes Peter and his fellow students into a “safe room” that turns out to be a “Tensor Generator.” The Tensor Generator (which seems like an homage to Star Trek’s transporter) can “dimensionally change” matter. Drake shrinks the students to an inch in height and then attempts to feed them to a snake. No fuss, no muss.

However, Peter and his colleagues escape the lab into the Oahu rainforest, where they are forced to pit their scientific expertise against the ferocity of the “micro world.”

It is tempting to compare Micro to Crichton’s earlier novel Prey, which pitted scientists against sentient swarms of nanotechnology. However, the conflict that Micro offers might actually be more akin to Jurassic Park. Rather than speculating about the eyesight of the Tyrannosaurus, Crichton spends his time outlining the chemical defenses and biological armor of beetles, wasps, and centipedes. Rather than humans fighting against terrible lizards, tiny scientists fight against monstrous insects.

Crichton’s depiction of the insect world is not speculative, and it is here that readers will see why Crichton chose to write about the natural world. It is clear that he finds the natural world fascinating, though brutally violent.

The premise works well, which is important because Micro’s characters are very flat. None of our heroes has as much personality as Dr. Grant from Jurassic Park, Norman Johnson from Sphere, or even Amy, the gorilla in Congo. However, the real weakness of the novel is Vin Drake, the psychopathic villain who madly pursues the microbiologists across Oahu. He doesn’t stroke his mustache, but the gesture would not have been out of place.

Still, the “micro-world” is an exciting place to visit. If Crichton’s goal in Micro was to make his readers see nature in a new way, I think he has succeeded. However, if his goal was to make today’s children to trade in computer models for first hand experience in nature, he may have failed. Yes, the adaptations that allow insects to survive the micro world are amazing, but I suspect that most readers will find the venom sacs of spiders and the mandibles of centipedes just as gross – if not grosser – after finishing the novel as they did when they started reading.

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

It’s difficult to talk about Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, though not because the novel’s plot and characters are especially complex. They aren’t.

Alan Grant is a paleontologist who is asked to vet a new theme park that has brought dinosaurs back to life. The dinosaurs escape, and Grant, human resourcefulness, and state of the art technology are pitted against the raw power of Jurassic era biology. It’s a simple premise, though it is also undeniably compelling.

Instead, Jurassic Park is difficult to talk about because it is overshadowed by its film adaptation. I have never once managed to mention this novel without the conversation digressing into recollections about the first time I saw the movie. (In my case, I was lucky enough to watch it as a kid in the theater.) So I tend to classify Jurassic Park as one of those stories for which the movie was better than the book.

Ironically, if not for the film, Jurassic Park would more commonly be remembered as Michael Crichton’s masterpiece. Crichton’s previous techno thriller, Sphere, had everything we could expect from Michael Crichton, including: an unusual team of academics, futuristic yet familiar technologies clearly explained to us, and a distant and adventurous setting. Readers could have easily walked away from that novel thinking that Crichton would spend the remainder of his career futilely trying to match his achievement in Sphere.

But with Jurassic Park, Crichton has consistently traded up. Mathematicians are cool, but rock star mathematicians like Ian Malcolm are even cooler. Malcolm not only explains why we should wear black clothing, but also introduces us to chaos theory. Malcolm guarantees that the dinosaurs will escape, which is one of the best uses of mathematics to generate suspense that I’ve ever encountered.

Alien technology is pretty nifty, but what about cloning technology? It’s not only hip, but also real enough to allude to ethical dilemmas that we were already reading about in magazines.

The ocean floor seemed dangerous, but how about a remote Caribbean island in the middle of a hurricane?

And let’s not forget about the most important trade of all: dinosaurs are substituted for squids.

Who could have seen this coming?

Actually, anyone.

What’s impressive about these substitutions is that Crichton has improved his formula by returning to the same playbook from which he seems to have gotten all of his ideas: adventure stories written around the turn of the century. Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World has replaced Jules Verne’s 20000 Leagues Under the Sea. I can’t help but wonder how much Crichton’s childhood library card would catch at an auction. He certainly made it pay.

At this point, the question seems to become whether or not we should still read Jurassic Park. It seems wrong to apply this question to one of the greatest techno thrillers ever written. Nevertheless, the strength of Crichton’s work has always been the plot, as opposed to the prose or the characterization. Because the film is faithful enough to the novel that readers will find themselves feeling as though the velociraptors are old friends rather than deadly adversaries, some readers may well be justified in opting not to read this one.

Still, for Crichton fans, Jurassic Park is a must.

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World begins in Murakami’s “hard-boiled wonderland.” This wonderland is postmodern territory: our disaffected hero is in an elevator that is moving so slowly that “all sense of direction simply vanished.” Murakami finds a nexus between the detective story, postmodern literature, and cyberpunk. Faced with the dilemma of the elevator, the narrator, almost predictably deadpan, reflects that

“it could have been going down for all I knew, or maybe it wasn’t moving at all. But let’s just assume it was going up. Merely a guess. Maybe I’d gone up twelve stories, then down three. Maybe I’d circled the globe. How would I know?”

Here we see the voice of the detective novel and a familiar helplessness of the postmodern hero. We’re given a nice dose of cyberpunk when the narrator passes time in his elevator by simultaneously counting the change in his right and left pocket. He explains that “it’s hard for those who’ve never attempted the procedure to grasp what it is to calculate this way, and admittedly it is tricky at first. The right brain and the left brain each keep separate tabs, which are then brought together like two halves of a split water melon. No easy task until you get the hang of it.”

This is Murakami’s way of explaining that our hard-boiled narrator is a “Calcutec.” Briefly, a “Calcutec” has a job that recalls William Gibson’s Johnny Mnemonic – he stores code in his mind. Although the narrator explains that most Calcutecs cannot do this work for long, he’s been doing it for years.

Calcultecs can divide their minds in two and Murakami has divided his novel in two. In addition to the “Hard-Boiled Wonderland,” we are treated to a seemingly separate narrative set in “The End of the World.”

In The End of the World, we read about a hero that has been separated from his shadow and finds himself in a fantasy world (it even comes with a map). This is a town that is set in its ways, where the Gatekeeper to the end of the world explains that “we do it that way and that is how it is.” Here, our hero takes on the role of a dream reader. Adjusting to life at the end of the world is a bit gruesome. Our hero’s eyes are pierced, and he works with unicorn skulls in search of dreams. However, his shadow may have the harder job. In fact, it seems that the shadow is being deliberately worked to death. Will the hero’s shadow survive the coming winter?

Of the two narratives, I thought the “hard-boiled wonderland” had more potential. Powerful corporate intrigues are hinted at, there are subterranean monsters called “INKlings,” and we even get to meet an eclectic scientist. He explains that he’s “a biologist. But the word biology doesn’t begin t’cover all that I do. Everythin’ from neurophysiology to acoustics, linguistics to comparative religion. Not your usual bag of tricks, if I do say so myself.” Like Murakami, this scientist is a man with ambitions of assembling disparate ingredients into a provocative work.

Unfortunately, I felt that Murakami may have lost control of this novel. Yes, there are many interesting ideas to entice readers, but there are so many ideas that I found myself disappointed that none of them were given a more prominent place on stage. I quite readily admit that this may be my own bias. When I read about corporate plots, the end of the world, and cyberpunk detectives, I find it difficult to put aside certain expectations. Just because Murakami opens with familiar ingredients does not mean that he has to take them in expected directions. Regardless, I found Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World a calculated but unmoving experiment from Haruki Murakami.

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

The Burning Soul, by John Connolly, is an autumnal book, reminding us that winter is coming, a time when we will be more in darkness than light. Surprisingly, given the moody, atmospheric writing, the thriller aspect of the story is grounded in everyday reality, with few supernatural elements—in fact, only a few ghosts haunt this book, and one ghost is missing, its absence a shock.

Charlie Parker is a private investigator. He is a man whose wife and young daughter were taken from him by a serial killer, and a combatant in an eternal war, the shape of which he is only beginning to see. Parker confronts garden-variety human evil in The Burning Soul. In the small town of Pastor’s Bay, Maine, a fourteen year old girl, Anna Kore, has gone missing. The unspoken truth about child abductions is that the longer they go on, the worse the outcome is likely to be, but the police have no leads. Parker is called in by an attorney he does work for, not to search for the missing girl, but to help another of her clients. The man has a terrible secret in his past, one that would make him an instant suspect in the child abduction. He has changed his identity, but someone has found out, and is sending him taunting messages. Either this is a prelude to blackmail, or someone is framing him for the disappearance of Anna.

It is difficult to see the connection between a missing girl in Maine and the crumbling empire of a Boston crime boss, but The Burning Soul spends a good deal of time with Martin Dempsey and Francis Ryan, two minions of Tommy Morris. Morris was once on top of the Boston gangs, but things have gone wrong for him over the past few years. Competitors at first nibbled at the edges of his turf; now they are tearing out bloody chunks of it. Other crime bosses are discussing having Morris killed, and the FBI is hovering nearby like a flock of vultures, hoping to get Morris to turn. Dempsey and Ryan are unlikeable and frightening at first, but as their story progresses, we begin to see their loyalty and even a kind of twisted nobility about them. Halfway into the book, Connolly reveals the connection between Morris’s story and Anna’s.

It wouldn’t be a Parker book without Louis and Angel, his two deadly friends from New York City, and they do make an appearance here. Connolly often amuses himself and us by developing an interesting character from whatever town Parker is visiting, and this time it’s the owner/barista of the coffee house in Pastor’s Bay. Connolly does a nice job of the double-twist ending. You think you see the ending, and you have—one of them, but then there’s a second one coming. For instance, it does seem for quite a while like the missing girl is really not that important to anyone, not even Connolly, but he sets us straight at the end.

The surface story of The Burning Soul, while it held my interest, wasn’t the most powerful thing in this book. Connolly uses winter imagery and evocative names (“Kore” is the Greek name of the character in the Persephone myth), to create a growing sense of foreboding. He uses shifting points of view masterfully, revealing character and giving out information without making Parker seem stupid or slow on the uptake. It also allows for moments like this, as Aimee Price, the attorney, stands by her office window waiting for Parker to arrive:

“A shape passed across the window, and a shadow briefly entered the room, moving across her body before departing. She heard the beating of its wings and could almost feel the touch of feathers against her. She watched as the raven settled on a branch of the birch tree that overhung the small parking lot. Ravens unsettled her. It was the darkness of them, and their intelligence, the way in which they would lead wolves and dogs to prey. They were apostate birds: it was their instinct to betray to the pack the presence of the vulnerable.”

Connolly finds new ways to describe things, creating the image without exhaustive detail, such as when he write “The Harveys had provided a pot of tea, served on a silver tray with china cups and the kind of dainty cookies that small girls fed dolls at parties.”

The crime-boss storyline did make me think I had wandered into Mystic River territory for awhile, but Connolly has a different story to tell, and different points to make, and the end of the crime-boss story is not the end of the book.

Connolly mixes dry social commentary on the American experience, mythology, crime lore, ghost stories and fairy tales with glistening prose to create a reading experience that works on more levels than the story on the surface. The Burning Soul is a solid entry in the CHARLIE PARKER series. On the continuum, it is less supernatural, but clearly Connolly is setting up a confrontation with Parker’s inhuman adversaries. It’s dark, and somber, and a good autumn read.

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

Shaun Tan’s The Arrival is a highly acclaimed graphic novel about immigration. There are no words in this graphic novel, allowing Tan to rely entirely on images to reveal the doubts and conflicts that his characters face. On his website, Tan explains that

In ‘The Arrival’, the absence of any written description also plants the reader more firmly in the shoes of an immigrant character. There is no guidance as to how the images might be interpreted, and we must ourselves search for meaning and seek familiarity in a world where such things are either scarce or concealed

Tan’s approach makes for a remarkably inclusive reading experience. Every reader is invited to empathize with the emotions that play across our unnamed hero’s face, particularly as he boards a ship without his wife and daughter to make a life for them in the new world. Without specific descriptions to guide our interpretation, it is difficult not to recall our own feelings of loss and uncertainty and imagine how we would face the many unknowns involved in immigrating to a foreign country.

Although The Arrival is distinguished by its many stylistic subtleties, the most memorable aspect of Tan’s story may be his imaginative depiction of the “new world.” If urban myths have taught us anything, it’s that we let our imaginations run wild when faced with uncertainty and mystery. Over time, we learn to repress that urge to romanticize the unknown, perhaps because we also simplify the complexity of other cultures during this process. Here, Tan takes the mystery of a new world and truly sets his imagination free, creating a fantastic world that is daunting, complex, and wonderful.

I was particularly impressed by the way in which Tan represents the violence and conflict that has, unfortunately, been a motivating factor for so many immigrants to leave their homes. Again, the scope of Tan’s vision is truly impressive. Each land has its own history, its own fashion, and its own architecture. Each land has its own problems and offers unique challenges and joys. We follow our hero as he explores this new country. Though often intimidated by the unknown, he is admirably determined to establish himself.

For SFF readers, The Arrival offers a powerful experience. It is possible to look at this story as an allegory of immigration to America. Our hero’s arrival on an island, where he is interrogated after waiting in line, particularly recalls Ellis Island. However, the power of Tan’s work is such that readers will themselves feel as though they are migrating into a new world, and isn’t that what SFF readers are looking for?

Many recommend Alan Moore‘s The Watchmen and Neil Gaiman‘s Sandman series as examples of what the graphic novel is capable of. Perhaps we should also consider Shaun Tan’s The Arrival. It is every bit as unique and powerful a creation.

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

Margaret Atwood was once, via a review of her work, once taken a bit publicly to task by Ursula K. LeGuin for not wanting her books (specifically The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake, and The Year of the Flood) to be labeled “science fiction,” because, LeGuin speculated, Atwood did not want to be relegated to the genre ghetto. Atwood, however, responded that it was merely a definitional issue. She preferred “speculative fiction”— which she read as fiction that really could happen but hadn’t — rather than “science fiction” — which she read as things that could not possibly happen. Eventually she and LeGuin talked it all out at a conference, determined they had different and at times overlapping definitions/interpretations, and they ended up at the pub doing lattes and whiskey chasers (OK, I made that last part up).

So to this review’s subject — The Handmaid’s Tale. Is it science fiction or speculative fiction?  Well, turns out it’s neither because Atwood has coined a new word (damn writers!); what we have in The Handmaid’s Tale is a “ustopia.” As Atwood explains in her recent collection of essays In Other Worlds, ustopia is a mash-up of dystopia and utopia because she believes each always has elements of the other embedded within it, though one might have to look hard to find it.

The Handmaid’s Tale is set in a near-future United States, part of which has been taken over by a fundamentalist totalitarian group.  Because of a plummeting birthrate for a host of societal and environmental reasons, fertile women are a rare commodity and so these “handmaids” are rounded up and divvied out to the select powerful.  The story is told from the first person POV of one of the handmaids.

So what is The Handmaid’s Tale:  science fiction, speculative fiction, dystopia, ustopia?  To be honest, I’m not all that invested in the argument. Authors are free to label (or not) their works whatever they’d like, and we readers are free to accept that or disagree, calling them “science fiction,” “literary fiction,” or “Maude” if we so choose. If I had to pick a side, on this one I’d go with Atwood. There really isn’t a lot of “science” in the fiction here: no far future, no advanced technology (a souped-up credit card system is about it), no strange creatures. Even the social system isn’t particularly unusual. In fact, Atwood is often quoted as saying she put nothing in the book that hasn’t appeared somewhere somewhen on this planet.  So no, it really in my mind doesn’t fit the science fiction label; it’s much more a thought experiment — a “what if” idea that leads to a wave of questions and answers. But in the end, it doesn’t really matter. Because what The Handmaid’s Tale is is great.

The writing is simply superb — vivid, precise, poetic in places, filled with evocative similes and metaphors, such as when she describes a set of tulips:

redder than ever, opening, no longer wine cups but chalices; thrusting themselves up to what end? They are, after all, empty. When they are old they turn themselves out, then explode slowly, the petals thrown out like shards

redder than ever, opening, no longer wine cups but chalices; thrusting themselves up to what end? They are, after all, empty. When they are old they turn themselves out, then explode slowly, the petals thrown out like shards

Beyond the sharp image itself, note the color red (specific to the handmaids), the wine and chalice (appropriate image for a book focused so much on religion), “thrusting” (appropriate for a book focused so much on sex), “”empty” (appropriate for a book where infertility is so key), “explode . . . shards” (fits not only some of the players, but also echoes the terrorism that occurs throughout the book). We get this sort of layered imagery/symbol/metaphor throughout the book, making it wonderfully rich.  Just as we see patterns layered throughout as well, such as all the ways the narrator is linked via language or image to being like or treated like a child or a doll. The short chapter dealing with the actual sexual act involving the Handmaid, her Commander, and the Commander’s Wife in its very few pages is fodder for an entire thesis examining the use of language for effect as Atwood finds all sorts of ways — word choice, image, simile, white space, sound, etc — to make this the least sexy sex scene ever presented on the page.

The structure, which alternates between three time periods adds to the sense of rich complexity as the reader moves with the narrator through the time prior to the coup, the time shortly after the coup during her handmaid “training,” and finally through present time. It also does a nice job of keeping the reader wondering about how all this happened, about what happened to the narrator’s husband, her daughter, what happened during their failed escape attempt. The answers get teased out slowly.

The narrator herself is a wonderful construction. Atwood takes a real risk by not making her heroic in the way we usually think of it. Most authors would have had their character working hard to overthrow the cruel regime. The narrator’s focus, though, is on survival.  And she is, realistically I’d say, a very passive kind of character. That isn’t to say we don’t get other sorts in here. Her friend Moira is more the stereotypical protagonist in this kind of work — the one who simply refuses to bow down. The narrator’s chief trainer, Aunt Lydia, is also a strong, active character. The same is true of the wife of the commander to whom the narrator is assigned. Both also show Atwood’s refusal to take the easy way out by making this merely a screed against men; in this world women are both oppressed and oppressor; and the women like Aunt Lydia are fervent believers in what they do. The commander, one of the higher-ups in the new government is also a believer, but things, as the book soon reveals, are a bit cloudier in that regard.

The book is chilling, moving, thought-provoking. Like all good dystopias (or ustopias), all good (dare I say it) science fiction or speculative fiction, it doesn’t present you a society to criticize for all its obvious flaws; it presents you a society that like a funhouse mirror offers up a reflection — warped sure, distorted sure — of our own and makes you see our own flaws, makes you question our own societal fixtures. If you read 1984 and criticize Big Brother, you’re missing the point. It isn’t the Big Brother in his fictional society Orwell wants you to worry about; it’s the Big Brother in our own, or potentially in our own.

And Atwood takes a page from Orwell as well at the very end of the novel, giving us in effect two endings, just as Orwell did with his Newspeak chapter at the close of 1984. And I think for the same purpose, though for spoilers’ sake I won’t go into the details.

The Handmaid’s Tale is a true modern classic and should be not just on everyone’s “to-be-read” shelf but on everyone’s “must-read” shelf.  Though perhaps Atwood would object to those labels and come up with one of her own…

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

There are a few tropes that will convince me to pick up almost any book that promises to contain them. I’ll call one of them “Searching for a Long-Lost Book,” and another “All My Forebears Were Secretly Witches.” Katherine Howe‘s The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane features both of these, so it’s no surprise that I’d wanted to read it for a long time. I confess I was privately hoping for a book that combined the awesomeness of two of my all-time favorites: A.S. Byatt‘s Possession and Anne Rice‘s The Witching Hour. Despite its inclusion of the Salem witch trials, however, this is a lighter read than either of those: cozier despite the tragic history behind it, and neither as rich nor as twisty.

Connie Goodwin is a Harvard graduate student specializing in American colonial history. Just as she’s about to start her dissertation research, her mother asks a favor of her: go through the ancestral house in Marblehead, Massachusetts and clean it up for sale. While exploring the house, Connie learns that a long-ago ancestor, Deliverance Dane, may be a Salem “witch” heretofore lost to history. Unlike the other victims of the witch craze, though, Deliverance may have actually had magical power and left behind a grimoire. Connie is drawn into the mystery of the missing spellbook. The chapters detailing her search are interspersed with flashbacks to the history of Deliverance, her book, and her descendants through the years.

Katherine Howe, who is descended from two Salem “witches,” takes us on a vivid tour of Massachusetts. The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane has sense of place in spades, from the old house itself to the sailing bar to the tourist kitsch of modern-day Salem. Another aspect of the setting that should be mentioned is time. The “modern-day” sections take place in 1991, though the book was published in 2009. 1991 is close enough to the present that it’s easy to forget it’s not — that is, until Connie encounters problems that could be solved with a cell phone or the Internet. We wonder why she isn’t making use of these amenities, then realize a moment later that they simply aren’t there.

I also enjoyed the character development of Connie. She’s closed-minded and closed-off as the novel begins, and begins to open her life in more ways than one as the story unfolds. There’s an adorable dog, too, which never hurts. Another strong point is Howe’s look at the way women’s writing was often disdained in academia, historically speaking. The way this ties in with the grimoire’s eventual location is clever. And after some of the books I’ve read lately, I have to give Howe props for writing a love interest who isn’t superhuman or creepy or both; he’s just a regular guy, and in fact I liked him better than I did Connie.

What doesn’t work is the mystery. First, it relies too heavily on Connie being slow to catch clues that would be unlikely to befuddle a grad student in her field. Second, and more problematically, the villain is just too obvious — painfully so.

Don’t read The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane for the mystery aspect. It’s an enjoyable light read if you go in with the right expectations. Expect great atmosphere, troubled mother-daughter relationships, gentle romance, folk magic, and a bit of academic politics, but not much mystery.

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

Marcel Theroux’s Far North offers all of our favorite post-apocalyptic ingredients. Our protagonist, Makepeace Hatfield, recalls Stephen King’s gunslinger, Roland, and the spirit of Far North seems to be drawn from the same zeitgeist that made Cormac McCarthy’s The Road so popular. Of course, Theroux offers a few twists: please notice the wintery setting.

Far North takes place in what once was Russia. Makepeace lives carefully in an abandoned town. Like many SFF enthusiasts, I always enjoy reading about how the world ended. Frustratingly, Theroux prefers not to explain the end in detail, though we can rest assured that it had something to do with the environment. Regardless of how the world ended, it has certainly taught Makepeace one thing: when times get tough, people turn ugly.

The setting is sparse and Makepeace’s resigned, Spartan observations about the world have all the power that plump, affluent readers expect from a post-apocalyptic hero. And there’s adventure too. When a bandit steals Makepeace’s guns, Theroux highlights some particularly clever, and nasty, ways to get even. Be careful if you choose to rob the far north’s last survivors.

Unfortunately, or fortunately for fans of the genre, this setting also adds up to a daunting atmosphere. When human beings travel far enough north, things can only go south, which is certainly what has happened to humanity. It seems that Makepeace is the only person who, in spite of it all, still tries to help people rather than rob them.

I’ll admit that I tend to find novels with these conflicts reliably entertaining, but Far North does feel a bit predictable. For example, what sorts of obstacles does Makepeace face? Well, in addition to bandits, there are also bizarre societies run by corrupt zealots that have twisted religion for their own benefit. We travel through toxic wastelands, though there are sadly no mutants. Makepeace is even the last survivor of an unusual society, this time a religious colony that left America for better prospects in the far north.

All of these motifs are quite familiar, but does it matter that we’ve seen them before? Far North was marketed to the literary community, rather than the SFF community. Mundane readers unfamiliar with this genre and premise will no doubt enjoy Theroux’s account, perhaps recalling the way that they enjoyed Justin Cronin’s much longer post-apocalyptic tale, The Passage. Meanwhile, readers that are more familiar with lone-cowboy-post-apocalyptic stories may find themselves ticking off checkboxes, but perhaps are just as likely to treat these familiar gestures as comforting milestones in an oft-read journey. So, it seems safe to say that Far North will invariably please readers.

Certainly it would be wrong to label Far North both derivative and a failure. Still, it does not succeed on the same level as many of its peers. Theroux’s writing lacks the raw power of McCarthy’s stories, not to mention the wild imagination of Stephen King’s Dark Tower books. I actually preferred Far North’s shorter length to Cronin’s interminable The Passage; however, the latter may well leave a stronger impression on most readers because of its detail. Ultimately, Far North should be approached (by the SFF community) as a pleasing read in a reliably exciting sub-genre.

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

For years I have had false memories of reading Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. How did this happen?  I think I must have seen so many movie versions that they got translated into my head as if I’d read it. Now that problem is resolved, because I have read it. It was a surprise.

Really, there were a few surprises. My first surprise was how short the book is, about 160 pages. The second surprise was that a book that flowed from the mind of Jules Verne had no fantastical or futuristic modes of travel. There is a sledge with sails that our travelers use to cross the plains of the American Midwest, which does seem fantastical, but similar vehicles were used in Arctic expeditions, notably by Sir Francis L McClintock, in 1851 (although they did not use the sails the entire time).

The final surprise, although it wasn’t much of one, was how much I liked the book, even if the characters were distant—in the case of Phileas Fogg, very distant indeed, if not downright passive. Aouda the love interest barely speaks a word until the end of the book. Without Passepartout, Fogg’s exuberant French servant, I might have lost interest, but he more than makes up for the reserve of the others.

Most of us know the story but here is a quick review. Phileas Fogg is an English gentleman (or perhaps, a parody of one) who spends most of his day at his club. He is a rational man who delights in whist and mathematics. One day, a conversation at his club leads to a bet: Fogg wagers twenty thousand pounds that he can traverse the globe in 80 days or less. To make his point, and build suspense, Fogg says he will return to the club no later than quarter to nine in exactly 80 days, December 21. This starts the clock that ticks for the rest of the book.

Fogg makes for the train terminal with the bewildered Passepartout, their passports, three shirts, underwear, and a Gladstone bag carrying twenty thousand pounds. The bag becomes very important as the story progresses. Originally, Fogg uses traditional means of transportation such as steamboats and trains, but in India he is derailed. Actually, the railroad ends. Fogg purchases an elephant for an exorbitant sum and they continue, stopping on the way to rescue Aouda, who is about to be burned alive on her dead husband’s funeral pyre. Aouda, who is beautiful, has an English education, so she has all the decorum of an English lady with the exotic beauty of an Indian princess.

Fogg needs more of an obstacle than just the vagaries of the road, the weather, and methods of transportation, and Detective Fix provides that. Just before Fogg left, the Bank of England had been robbed by someone described as “a gentleman,” who made off with twenty thousand pounds. Detective Fix stumbles across Fogg and decides he must be the robber. Therefore, Fix first schemes to delay Fogg on English soil while he gets a warrant, and when that fails, decides to help Fogg return to England where Fix plans to arrest him.

Phileas Fogg never evinces any emotion, even when he challenges a boorish American to a duel. Verne manages to suggest that he is man of passion, powerfully self-controlled, always subject to the cold equations of rationality. When the travelers stumble across Aouda in her predicament, it is Fogg who suggests saving her.

Mr. Fogg stopped him, and turning to Sir Francis Cromarty, said, ‘Suppose we save this woman.’

‘Save the woman, Mr. Fogg!’

‘I have yet twelve hours to spare; I can devote them to that.’

‘Why, you are a man of heart!’

‘Sometimes,’ replied Phileas Fogg, quietly. ‘When I have the time.’

When Passeportout and others are carried off by the Sioux warriors in Kansas, though, Fogg leads his group after them, even though it will put him hours behind.

Verne’s work is not the subject of much literary or scholarly work, and that is a shame. It’s clear to me that he is being as subversive as all get-out in this book about an English adventurer. It is Passepartout who rescues Aouda from the fiery pyre; Passepartout who uncouples the runaway steam engine from the train in Kansas, saving all the passengers; and, ultimately, Passepartout’s actions that drive the ending of the book. Fogg has the luxury of money. He is ingenious, but his solutions always involve paying someone. When action is needed, it is Passepartout who comes to the fore. Fogg, who counts on itineraries, schedules and mathematics, makes an arithmetic error at the end of the book, with nearly catastrophic consequences. Perhaps the world is a little different than Mr. Fogg realized.

It is the emotional Frenchman who steps in to make things right, but Passepartout also knows his place. He is a clever, brave and loyal servant, but servant he is:

It need not be said that the marriage took place forty-eight hours after, and that Passepartout, glowing and dazzling, gave the bride away. Had he not saved her, and was he not entitled to this honor?

Yes, he is. He is indeed.

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

AUTHOR INFORMATION: Thomas Mullen is the author of The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers and The Last Town on Earth, which was named Best Debut Novel of 2006 by USA Today, was a Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year, and was awarded the James Fenimore Cooper Prize. He lives in Decatur, Georgia with his wife and two sons.

PLOT SUMMARY: Zed is an agent from the future. A time when the world’s problems have been solved. No hunger. No war. No despair.

His mission is to keep it that way. Even if it means ensuring every cataclysm throughout history runs its course—especially the Great Conflagration, an imminent disaster in our own time that Zed has been ordered to protect at all costs.

Zed’s mission will disrupt the lives of a disgraced former CIA agent; a young Washington lawyer grieving over the loss of her brother, a soldier in Iraq; the oppressed employee of a foreign diplomat; and countless others. But will he finish his final mission before the present takes precedence over a Perfect Future? One that may have more cracks than he realizes?

FORMAT/INFO: The Revisionists is 448 pages long divided over thirty-six chapters. Each chapter is narrated by a single POV. Three of the POVs—Leo Hastings, Tasha Wilson and Sari—are narrated in the third-person. The other POV, Zed/Troy Jones, is narrated in the first-person. The Revisionists is self-contained. September 28, 2011 marks the North American Hardcover publication of The Revisionists via Mulholland Books. The UK version (see below) will be published on the same day via Mulholland UK.

ANALYSIS: The Revisionists is described by the publisher as a “fast-paced literary thriller that recalls dystopian classics such as 1984 and Fahrenheit 451.” A fairly accurate description considering that Zed—one of the novel’s main characters—is from the future. A future that may seem ‘perfect’ because of the way war, crime and racism has been largely eliminated, but in reality is an Orwellian society where all history, even the physical evidence of recently deceased loves ones, is controlled by the Government.

Zed is a Protector of this future, this ‘Perfect Present’. As an agent of the Department of Historical Integrity, his job is to go back in time and ensure that certain Events are not altered by historical agitators (“hags”). Assigned to the Disasters Division, Zed must protect such Events as 9/11, Nazi concentration camps, the bombing of Hiroshima, and, in his latest mission, the Great Conflagration which will be responsible for killing billions of people across the world. This concept of going back in time to protect history from changing is slightly reminiscent of Félix J. Palma’s The Map of Time, but Thomas Mullen never explains how time travel is possible in this future, and instead focuses on the moral complications involved with time travel, while ruminating on such matters as existentialism and fate:

“What is predetermined, what spontaneous? You get to thinking about such things after this long on the job. You start pondering options that most people don’t even realize are there, seeing secret paths and hidden escapes. Or the opposite happens: you see the larger forces that guide you against your will or without your knowledge. If you are what you do, then what does it mean if others make that decision for you?”

Despite all of this talk about time travel and the future, The Revisionists is more of a contemporary drama/thriller in the vein of such movies as Fair Game and Syriana than it is science fiction. How so? For starters, the book is set almost entirely in present-day Washington, DC. Secondly, the novel’s three other protagonists are ‘contemps’, i.e. not from the future. This includes Leo Hastings, an ex-CIA agent currently gathering intel for a private contractor; Tasha Wilson, a corporate lawyer angered by the death of her brother, Lieutenant Marshall Wilson, and the vague details surrounding what happened to him; and Sari, an Indonesian maid/nanny employed by a South Korean diplomat and his abusive wife. Third, The Revisionists features a heavy dose of espionage, while whistle-blowing, entrapment, left-wing politics (anti-war, mainstream media), racial animosities, dictatorships, urban gentrification, privatized intelligence, civil rights and other topical issues are thoughtfully examined in the book. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, there is Zed. As the novel progress, the author starts dropping hints that maybe Zed is not an agent from the future after all. That maybe he is a deluded individual who became mentally unhinged after what happened to his wife and daughter. It’s a compelling argument either way, one the author never clearly answers, injecting the book with an ambiguity that reminded me of Blade Runner, Memento and Inception.

Regardless of what classification The Revisionists may fall under, there’s no debating the impressiveness of Thomas Mullen’s accomplished writing. Sympathetic characters with fully developed backgrounds; engaging narratives written in both the first and third-person; a plot that never loses its way despite a complicated tangle of myriad threads, twists and revelations; the clever ambiguity surrounding Zed and his past; the realistic depiction of Washington, DC . . . Thomas Mullen excels at all of this and then some. Admittedly, the author occasionally goes a little overboard when writing about politics or describing aspects of a character’s background, but for the most part, The Revisionists contains a level of writing that most people can only dream about.

CONCLUSION: The Revisionists is my first Thomas Mullen novel, although I had heard of the author last year when The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers was released, a book which intrigued me, but not enough to actually purchase a copy. What convinced me to read The Revisionists was a description that seemed to promise a thought-provoking science fiction novel in the vein of 1984 and Fahrenheit 451. A promise that is only partially successful because of Zed’s ambiguity and the novel’s emphasis on contemporary issues. Then again, much of the novel’s best qualities can be attributed to these same factors. That and Thomas Mullen’s brilliant writing. So even though The Revisionists was not the science fiction novel that I was hoping for, I very much enjoyed Thomas Mullen’s new book, which offers readers a smart, relevant and engrossing reading experience…

“I am a messenger . . . sent from afar.”

Robert Jackson Bennett is the author of Mr. Shivers, the best dark fantasy novel that I’ve read in a long time. Bennett delivers again with The Company Man, a detective noir science fiction novel set in a North America that is both familiar and radically changed.

The year is 1919. The city of Evesden perches on the shore of Washington State’s Puget Sound, a precarious balance of wealth and desperate poverty. The city holds the McNaughton Company’s corporate headquarters and many of its factories, and McNaughton patents have changed the world. They invented the airships that circle the globe, harnessed lightning, and with their new invention, The Siblings, are scratching at the door of quantum physics. McNaughton stopped World War I almost before it began. No other company, or even government, has its power. The Company’s secret isn’t its many patents, it’s where the patents come from. A corporate folktale hides the true source of the lucrative inventions.

All is not well in Evesden. Bennett lets us know this in his first paragraph, describing not the elegant, futuristic city center but a nearby slum.

“The canal was a gray, rotting thing, so polluted and turgid that what it contained could hardly be called water at all. It wound below the stone arches and the spiderweb trusses of its many bridges, and at each bend it gained yet more refuse. At one turning enough sediment and muck had happened to gather and dry to become something like soil. There small, mousy reeds grew and clutched at the passing garbage, forming a staggered little delta that curved out across the canal.”

Despite its incalculable wealth, McNaughton routinely cuts the wages of its factory workers in order to enhance its profits. There are rumors that hundreds of workers, or more, have died in the tunnels underneath the city, working on mysterious machines. Workers have begun to organize, and the Company doesn’t like it.

One morning a trolley pulls into a stop with every passenger in the car dead, cut to pieces. The eleven victims all got on together at a stop four minutes earlier. They were not drugged, or gassed. Not a single victim fought back or tried to get away. All eleven were active in Evesden’s fledgling union.

Three people are drawn into the investigation. Donald Garvey is a homicide detective and a rarity, someone born and raised in Evesden. Samantha Fairbanks works for the Company, and she is assigned to assist Cyril Hayes, the Company’s enigmatic investigator. Hayes self-medicates with alcohol and opium, and we soon find out why; Hayes can hear the thoughts of people around him.

Mr. Shivers was a brief, elegant story, almost a fable. The Company Man is more elaborate, with more activity, nearly a hundred pages longer. Parts of the plot don’t work especially well; a thing called the Red Star Scandal raises more questions than it answers and is not needed. The conspiracy with the union is too obvious and too complicated at the same time. On the other hand, the “who” and the “how” of the murders is believable, inextricably tied up with the secret of the city and the Company, and heartbreaking.

Bennett’s prose hits you like a slug of good bourbon. I developed a split personality reading this book. Part of me wanted to race ahead to see what Hayes was going to do next. Part of me wanted to stop and savor Bennett’s evocative sentences.

“After a while of riding they turned down Grange Avenue and the lights and white stone buildings of Newton swam into view. The thin, smooth tunnel of the train ran between the building tops like calligraphy, and here and there it dipped to the platforms, its car windows strobing in its descent. Up above the streets an arched glass walkway stretched from one building to another, and though it was empty the starlight refracted through it to make a ghostly prism suspended in the sky. . . On nearby rooftops men and women in furs laughed and their merriness rebounded off the walls to rain upon the street. Champagne laughs, lily-petal laughs, pretty and sweet and perfect.”

“. . . perhaps it was dimness of the warehouse or the light from the small fire beside him, but suddenly he looked older than any other person Samantha had ever met before. She had seen such things only once before in her life, when she had been an army nurse and had treated wounded men returning from battle. They had been boys, always boys, no more than twenty, and when they’d walked back through the carnage and the savagery and sat waiting to be treated anyone could look at them and see that they were creatures interrupted. Boys who would never become men. They were something wounded and crippled. Something broken that could not be fixed.”

Samantha wants to salvage something before it is broken. Garvey wants to save his city, which, despite the power and money of the Company, he feels is dying. Hayes wants redemption. These three characters are well-drawn, with believable, distinct voices. Even minor characters stand out. Spinsie and Sookie, who exist to provide information to Hayes, are unique and each have their own history, fears and desires. The only characters that verge on cliché are the two Company drones we meet, Evans and Brightly.

Bennett is writing about an imaginary time and also the here and now, showing how corporate greed infects and corrupts the foundations of things, so that nothing is safe. You can’t count on your job, or your home, while the people in the jade-tipped tower with the Company name in silver letters rake in unimaginable profits. We can imagine the slums encircling the white city, or we can look at the blocks of houses in foreclosure in our own hometowns. Evans and Brightly might as well wear T-shirts that say “Corporate Villains,” but I’m going to let Bennett slide on this because so much else in the book is so good, and because the journey Hayes takes in search of the truth is so harrowing.

This may be grandiose, but I think Bennett might provide for the 2010s what Stephen King did for the 1970s: great skill, a powerful vision and a unique voice.

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

AUTHOR INFORMATION: Erin Morgenstern studied theatre & studio art at Smith College. She is a writer and artist whose work is described as “fairy tales in one way or another.” The Night Circus is her first novel.

PLOT SUMMARY: The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves, “the Circus of Dreams”, and it is only open at night.

But behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway — a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood expressly for this purpose by their mercurial instructors. Unbeknownst to them, this is a game in which only one can be left standing, and the circus is but the stage for a remarkable battle of imagination and will. Despite themselves, however, Celia and Marco tumble headfirst into love — a deep, magical love that makes the lights flicker and the room grow warm whenever they so much as brush hands.

True love or not, the game must play out, and the fates of everyone involved, from the cast of extraordinary circus per­formers to the patrons, hang in the balance, suspended as precariously as the daring acrobats overhead…

CLASSIFICATION: From a literature standpoint, The Night Circus reminded me of a cross between Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Christopher Priest’s The Prestige, Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury, and Daniel Wallace’s Big Fish. At times, however, The Night Circus feels more like a movie than a book, and in that regard I kept thinking of Tim Burton (Edward Scissorhands, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Alice in Wonderland) and Zack Snyder (300, Watchmen, Sucker Punch).

FORMAT/INFO: The Night Circus is 400 pages long divided over five titled Parts and chapters that are unnumbered, but titled and dated with the location included. Narration is in the third person — both limited and omniscient — via Celia Bowen, Marco Alisdair, the man in the grey suit, the Night Circus’ proprietor M. Chandresh Christophe Lefèvre, the clockmaker Herr Friedrick Thiessen; the Murray twins Widget & Poppet, the engineer Ethan Barris, the Burgess sisters Tara & Lainie, the fortune-teller Isobel, and the dreamer Bailey, etc. The book also features short interludes written in the second person. The Night Circus is a standalone novel.

September 13, 2011 marks the North American Hardcover publication of The Night Circus via Doubleday. The UK edition will be published on September 15, 2011 via Harvill Secker.

ANALYSIS: It’s not every day that a book receives the kind of publicity that Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus has enjoyed. This includes a 175,000 first printing through its US publisher, foreign rights sold in over twenty countries, and a movie deal with Summit Entertainment (The Twilight Saga, RED, Astro Boy, The Hurt Locker) scored several months before publication. Then again, it’s not every day that a book like The Night Circus comes along.

Erin Morgenstern’s debut is a special novel, offering readers a magical, one-of-a-kind reading experience. An experience that may vary depending on the person. For instance, some readers might find themselves enchanted by the turn of the century setting; the novel takes place between February 1873 and January 1903 with an enigmatic circus serving as the main attraction. For others, it could be the story, a non-linear narrative that cleverly begins where the novel ends, with a competition between two magicians, a love story that challenges fate, and a dreamer faced with life-altering decisions contained in between. In some cases, the novel’s cast of charming and mysterious characters — Prospero the Enchanter and his daughter Celia Bowen; the man in the grey suit and his student Marco Alisdair; M. Chandresh Christophe Lefèvre, proprietor of the Night Circus; the clockmaker Herr Friedrick Thiessen and the rêveurs; the Murray twins Widget & Poppet; the engineer Ethan W. Barris; the Burgess sisters Tara & Lainie; the fortune-teller Isobel; Mme. Ana Padva, a retired ballerina; the contortionist Tsukiko; the dreamer Bailey — might be the culprit. For yet others, it could be Erin Morgenstern’s accomplished writing and elegant prose:

“Stories have changed my dear boy. There are no more battles between good and evil, no monsters to slay, no maidens in need of rescue. Most maidens are perfectly capable of rescuing themselves in my experience, at least the ones worth something, in any case. There are no longer simple tales with quests and beasts and happy endings. The quests lack clarity of goal or path. The beasts take different forms and are difficult to recognize for what they are. And there are never really endings, happy or otherwise. Things keep going on, they overlap and blur, your story is part of your sister’s story is part of many other stories, and there is no telling where any of them may lead. Good and evil are a great deal more complex than a princess and a dragon, or a wolf and a scarlet-clad little girl. And is not the dragon the hero of his own story? Is not the wolf simply acting as a wolf should act. Though perhaps it is a singular wolf who goes to such lengths as to dress as a grandmother to toy with his prey.”

For me, it’s the sense of wonder I felt as I was reading The Night Circus. The same kind of feeling I had when I first read Alice In Wonderland or the Arabian Nights or Harry Potter. This sense of wonder is a combination of many factors including the author’s vivid imagination; a dreamlike ambiance that exists throughout the novel; characters who are full of magic, both real and symbolic like the Murray twins born at the very same time Le Cirque des Rêves first opened; and a story comprised of several mysterious subplots: the purpose of the contest, the relationship between the man in the grey suit and Hector Bowen, the bond between the Night Circus and its performers, how Bailey and the rêveurs fit in the picture, etc. Of course, of all the wonderful things that Erin Morgenstern manages to include in her novel — Midnight Dinners, a ship made of books sailing upon an ocean of ink — nothing is more captivating than the circus itself. With its black-and-white theme and astounding attractions — the Carousel, the Wishing Tree, the Labyrinth, the Stargazer, the Cloud Maze, Bedtime Stories, the Drawing Room, the Menagerie, the Ice Garden, the Hall of Mirrors, the Pool of Tears — the Night Circus is truly a “feast for the senses”:

“More than a carnival. More than a circus, really, like no circus anyone has ever seen. Not a single large tent but a multitude of tents, each with a particular exhibition. No elephants or clowns. No, something more refined than that. Nothing commonplace. This will be different, this will be an utterly unique experience, a feast for the senses. Theatrics sans theatre, an immersive entertainment. We will destroy the presumptions and preconceived notions of what a circus is and make it something else entirely, something new.”

“What it needs is style, panache. Ingenuity in its engineering and structure. To be infused with the mesmerizing, and perhaps a touch of mystery. Unusual yet beautiful. Provocative while remaining elegant.”

As amazing as The Night Circus is, especially for a debut, Erin Morgenstern’s novel is not perfect. For starters, characters lack depth and are unsympathetic because of the large cast and an omniscient/limited third-person narrative that prevents readers from becoming intimate with the novel’s characters. As a result, it’s hard to feel anything except indifference when a character dies, falls in love or is asked to make a difficult choice. At the same time, the story drags in certain places, while the novel’s climax and conclusion can feel a bit underwhelming.

Apart from these issues with the characterization and story, I have nothing but praise for Erin Morgenstern’s remarkable debut. Not only is The Night Circus one of the year’s best releases, ranking right up there with Félix J. Palma’s The Map of Time, it is a book that I highly recommend to anyone and everyone. After all, like attending an actual circus, The Night Circus is the kind of thing every person should experience at least once in their lifetime…

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story demonstrates the power of the “dystopian future” premise, arguably because it does not feel like Shteyngart is writing about a distant enough future. Much as we might prefer to disapprove of this America that is obsessed with eternal youth, rampant social networking, and a cutthroat struggle to get ahead, we can’t quite escape the feeling that Shteyngart’s future sounds uncomfortably familiar.

The trends that Shteyngart is satirizing are easy to spot, and he tweaks them just enough to justify setting his story in the future rather than the present. The dollar is now worthless due to inflation, debt, and lack of industry, and the only money worth having is that which is tied to the Chinese yuan, or “yuan-pegged dollars.”

The government is privy to all information. When the novel opens, Lenny is returning from Italy. Naturally, he is required to inform a computer avatar (in his case, an otter) of all the people he has slept with while abroad. When Lenny is asked about his friends in Italy, he responds that he spent time with “some Italians,” which the computer understands as “Somalians.” Lenny tries in vain to correct the otter avatar and is flagged by security, though he is thankfully allowed to return to his home city, New York.

Lenny works for a longevity company that targets “high net worth individuals” (HNWIs), the only class in America left with money to spend. Longevity is one of America’s few surviving industries, and it pays quite well. Lenny has good credit – rest assured that the majority of his savings are tied to the Chinese yuan – but in spite of his best efforts to scrimp and save, he may not live forever.

Just look at Lenny’s Ohio-shaped bald spot for proof.

Super sadly, things get worse when Lenny learns that his boss is intending to fire him. Lenny can tell because his boss posts his status updates on a schedule board (like we might imagine seeing at a train station). Lenny resolves to save his job, though not by working harder. Instead, he plans to make someone with power feel responsible for him. In this America, it’s not what you know but who you know that matters.

However, it may turn out that what Lenny really needs is a 24-year-old Korean-American girl named Eunice Park. Eunice is hip, fashionable, and well-liked. By attaching himself to her, Lenny instantly finds himself reborn in America.

This is the future that Gary Shteyngart describes in Super Sad True Love Story. The only things that matter are money and social influence. Seduction doesn’t hurt, either. In fact, all three of these are brought together by the “äppärät,” a device like a smartphone that not only has the ability to make phone calls and broadcast live to the web, but also allows people to find out their attractiveness ratings in any given group of people. Lenny tends to score low in spite of his strong credit.

Shteyngart’s writing is crisp and efficient, and the humor of this satire is difficult to miss. However, that humor is tarnished whenever Shteyngart’s vision of a struggling America hits closer to home than readers might prefer. Super Sad True Love Story is a novel that pulls very few punches. The future that most science fiction novels describe is comfortably removed — an abstract thought experiment — whereas the future that Shteyngart describes at times feels alarmingly close to the present.

Lenny is not a hero for us to admire, even though he is one of the only people left in America that still reads books. There is little redemption to be found in Lenny and in this depiction of America. Although this is a love story, it cannot be denied that it is a “super sad” love story. Super Sad True Love Story is an intelligent novel, but one written for readers with a taste, or a tolerance, for biting satire.

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

On the back cover of Forever Azathoth: Pastiches and Parodies, H.P. Lovecraft himself is quoted. “As a rule, I don’t think that a comic or flippant style — or one with much satire — mixes well with the weird.” Forever Azathoth sets out to dispute that statement, and makes the horror writer’s case instead.

Peter Cannon is a gifted and versatile writer. His skill and style are showcased here, but the individual pieces themselves did not engage me. The book opens with the six-part novella “Forever Azathoth,” billed as a sequel to Lovecraft’s The Thing on the Doorstep. Cannon faithfully replicates the structure, with shifting points of view, as the sorcerer Ephraim Waite serially possesses descendants of the Upton family and their associates, as they squabble over the literary inheritance of Edward Derby, poet of the weird. Some of the humor builds over time, so that the third time someone suggested a camping trip in Maine, I did snicker. Still, the focus of these long sections is more on Lovecraftian trivia and in-jokes, tidbits about hack writers versus scholars that don’t advance the story. Since it was clear what was happening, there was no real suspense, nor was there quite enough humor. I had to push myself to finish it.

Cannon is a fan of P.G. Wodehouse, so there are three stories featuring the amiable and oblivious Bertie Wooster and his impeccable gentleman’s gentleman, Jeeves. Randolph Carter, a recurring Lovecraft character, makes an appearance in one of the tales. I thought Cannon’s attempt to imitate Wodehouse was labored, and all three stories suffered from too much Bertie and not enough Yog-Sothoth.

By the time I reached “Tender is the Night-Gaunt,” the F. Scott Fitzgerald pastiche, I nearly put the book down. I’m glad I didn’t though, because the next story is the first gem of the collection. “The Sound and the Fungi” imagines what would have happened if William Faulkner’s Compson family had met the Winged Ones. It may just be that Faulkner, with his shifting, stream-of-consciousness points of view and a fine disdain for conventional punctuation, was a complete style change, but Faulkner and Lovecraft go together like chocolate and peanut butter. And “The Sound and the Fungi” is funny. Caddy, arguing with her dead but re-animated brother Quentin about her fiancé, says:

. . .it’s not like N’gah-Kthun is from Yaddith on the Outer Rim or god forbid a yankee . . .

The second charmer in the book is “Old Man,” inspired by Lovecraft’s writings about the Kappa Alpha Tau (KAT) fraternity. The prose is lovely, with a strange innocence, as the human main character does a bad thing out of love for his feline friends. The story is dark, surprisingly sweet, and definitely for cat lovers.

Two other stories pay homage to modern horror writers Ramsey Campbell and T.E.D. Klein. “The Undercliffe Sentences” captures the feel of Ramsey Clark, but I have read too many stories set at fantasy and horror conventions. This didn’t bring anything new. “The Arkham Collector” is a vignette that imagines an unusual book collection. “All Moon-Beasts Amorphous and Mephitic” spoofs the James Herriott veterinarian stories.

“Nautical Negros” uses a Lovecraftian story-frame that flirts with time-travel — or perhaps a precognitive dream. The central part of the story is written in a 1930s pulp style with lots of sly humor as the worshippers of Cthulhu struggle with doctrinal disputes and schisms. Is Gnophkehs the equal to Cthulhu, or merely a secondary godling?

Cannon knows his subject and is a gifted stylist. Dedicated, dyed-in-the-wool Lovecraft fans will find something here to love. There isn’t enough here, however, to welcome a casual Lovecraft reader or invite a new reader into the fold; and I’m afraid that the gentleman from Providence’s work just doesn’t lend itself to belly laughs.

At The Edge of the Universe, we normally review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. This week, we offer a review of a new film: Conan the Barbarian.

The latest Hollywood adaption of Robert E. Howard’s legendary hero seems to be taking an especially tough beating. Speaking as a life-long CONAN and Robert E. Howard fan, by Crom, I don’t hate. I saw the film on a Sunday afternoon – and yes, I got suckered into paying for 3-D. I’ll be the first to admit my disappointment, but it’s nowhere near as bad as the rants imply. In fact, there is much in Conan the Barbarian that can be commended.

I was skeptical, especially after first seeing some of the Fabio-ish pictures of Mr. Momoa as Conan, but when I saw the trailers that showed a few elements straight from Two-gun Bob’s creation, I grew hopeful. At the movie when I heard “Know ye o’ Prince, between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities…” spoken by the iconic voice of Morgan Freeman with the map of Hyboria – a map I know almost as well as one of Earth – jumping out of the big screen, I became as giddy as a 13-year-old girl at Justin Bieber concert. Then, almost immediately, my former doubts came back as the Howard’s famous intro was changed to fit the plot of the movie. This in and of itself would have been fine, except that it meant many clichés would follow.

Still, there is a lot for Howard fans to love about Conan the Barbarian. It starts off depicting the legendary battlefield birth of Conan, which Howard himself had only referenced. However, Conan-geeks have long wanted the actual tale told. Though never stated specifically, I’m sure the savages that young Conan has a run-in with are the Cimmerian’s ancestral enemy, the Picts.  The movie skips over Conan’s early adventures, but tales are told of his time as a thief in Zamora and the events from The Tower of the Elephant. The visuals are outstanding! The amazing settings brought Howard’s Hyboria to life. And Jason Mamoa did an excellent job as Conan, despite that he might be a little too good-looking for a barbarian. He had Conan’s brooding stare down pat and instead of the sporting fur like Schwarzenegger’s rendition, Mamao’s clothing matched what Howard described.

There’s been a lot said of the violence being too graphic, too many bare-breasted women, and the sex scene too explicit. Duh, this is Conan. Fightin’, drinkin’, and f.., well… that’s what he does. It’s why Conan is so awesome!

The movie’s story itself is where the problem lies. In defense of Conan the Barbarian, the original tales were just pulp after all, not War and Peace. And Howard’s CONAN tales were individual adventures. Conan basically gained wealth by way of his exceptional martial skills, spent it all on wine, women, and song. Thus he would have to get more money, starting the cycle all over again. (Ahh, what a life!) Understandably, a more complex plot was necessary to carry a full-length feature film, so the “avenge my father ” theme was added.

However, with all the talented writers available to big budget productions, surely someone could have created something original. Instead, they went with the standard plot used for almost every sword & sorcery B-flick ever made: evil sorcerer finds ancient relic of power, massacring villages in the process, prince and/or son survives to seek revenge, with the aid of sexy chick he rescues, warrior kills said sorcerer ending his evil reign and saving the world. Also like many low-budget films, some elements just didn’t work, including the pointless screams of rage, structures collapsing for no apparent reason, and the power of the much sought after crown — which is really a mask — never proves to be “all that.”

In summary: 4 stars for respect to Howard’s tales and vision, 5 stars for actors, setting and visuals, 4.5 stars for action (and hot babes), 1.5  stars for story, average; 3 stars. Not a bad way to spend a couple hours, though both Robert E. Howard and Conan deserved better.

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

In Sphere, the follow up to Congo, Michael Crichton asks the question: how do you top a techno-thriller that pits a team of parachuting scientists against extremely intelligent apes that protect a remote area of jungle in Congo?

Impossible, right?

Perhaps not. Sphere begins with a premise that, by now, most Crichton fans will recognize very easily. Norman Johnson is a scientist, this time a psychologist, who has done a bit of work for a major organization in the past, this time the United States government. He receives a surprise phone call asking him to pack his bags and prepare to take part in a top secret, very classified, “need to know basis only” situation in a distant location, this time the ocean floor. It turns out that the military has found something amazing, this time a spaceship from the future.

For fans of Crichton’s formula, Sphere has it all: a mysterious setting that will require unusual technology to reach, a mysterious prize that also threatens our heroes’ safety, and monsters drawn from the natural world. Intelligent gorillas were one thing, but this time Crichton includes a giant squid, a respectful nod to 20000 Leagues Under the Sea.

Clearly, Crichton has one-upped his premise in Congo.

Surprisingly, Crichton also elevates his use of character in Sphere. Up to this point, he has primarily given his characters personality in order to comment on various academic disciplines, and Crichton certainly continues this pastime in Sphere. Elizabeth Halpern is a particularly interesting example: she is aggressive, muscular, and intelligent, but also insecure ever since her lover (and supervisor) took her breakthrough research and claimed it as his own. Harry Adams, meanwhile, is a cold, almost cruelly competent mathematician, and he often irks the other characters. He is also the only black member of the team. Harry’s research into mathematics sets him apart because his field is more “pure” than others, particularly the muddy research of psychology. Can psychology even be classified as “science?” Norman Johnson is used to these taunts from his peers, though he is not above admitting that they bother him.

Crichton takes his characterization further in Sphere than he has in previous novels. Now, his characters have internal conflicts that are more than perfunctory — they actually allow their author quite a variety of options. Norman’s background is in the psychology of group dynamics, and some of his findings might surprise readers. For example, he has found that teams that work very well together often fail when given a task outside of their area of expertise. He has also found that people like Harry may stress a group but that they tend to respond well to pressure and become potential leaders. It may be that Harry, who antagonizes many of the other characters, will save the day. Whenever Crichton needs to add tension, he allows his psychologist to speculate about the health of the group. Is that person’s mental stability about to snap? Is this team’s bond of fellowship about to break?

It’s a strategy that works very well, especially after the team finds what is on that mysterious spaceship from the future. Suddenly, characterization will, arguably, become more important than we could ever imagine.

Consequently, Sphere is an easy novel to recommend, especially for readers looking for a fast-paced page-turner that touches on a variety of interesting ideas and gadgets without ever diverting momentum from the plot. Seriously, a team of scientists against giant squids on the ocean floor investigating space ships from the future… How can you top that?

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

The Whisperers is Irish writer John Connolly’s eleventh Charlie Parker thriller. The books are set for the most part in the USA, mostly in Maine, where Parker, the ex-cop turned private-eye turned something-more makes his home.

Underlying the plot of The Whisperers is a current theme, the question of how wounded soldiers returning home are treated by the government that put them in harm’s way. In this book, a group of Iraq war veterans is smuggling looted antiquities across the Canadian border. Their original purpose was to help their brothers-and-sisters-in-arms, those who returned disabled and are not getting what they need, but things have changed now and become much more sinister. One of the artifacts brings danger. And the veterans, one by one, are dying by their own hands.

Parker is hired by the father of one of the suicides. Surprisingly, he says his case is not about the death of his son. He is concerned for a woman employee, Karen, the live-in girlfriend of one of his son’s army buddies, Joel Tobias. Tobias drives a big rig and is making runs over the Canadian border regularly. He’s doing well, really well, but he may also be abusing Karen.

Two other men are interested in the smuggling operation Tobias works in. One calls himself Herod, who is directed by a companion only he can see, and then only in reflections. Herod calls this entity the Captain. The other man is someone known to and deeply distrusted by Parker; a serial killer named the Collector.

The supernatural aspect of the Parker books is woven right into the sharp, realistic descriptions of everyday life. Action scenes are vivid, filled with small details that make them concrete. The suspense sequences, especially those involving the whisperers themselves, made me shiver and look over my shoulder. Parker understands better than most of us the nature of the “honeycomb world” in which we live. Beneath the fragile crust of a surface, where most of us function, the world is filled with voids, pockets of darkness and evil. While humans do not need to be encouraged or possessed to do evil, there are still agents who will encourage and possess, or, as Parker describes it, infect, colonizing like viruses. These entities are not mindless; they are thinking, feeling beings, with a history and an agenda. Parker is a part of their history. Exactly what that part is has not been fully revealed.

Connolly alternates points of view, with Parker always narrated in the first person. This lets him build the suspense by letting the reader know things Parker doesn’t yet suspect, such as the interest of the drug cartels in the antiquities operation, and gives us a good taste of Parker’s voice. In between the mysteries, interrogations and shoot-outs, the themes of wounded warriors and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) surface. In one interview, a therapist points out that Parker, the loner, whose cop father committed suicide and whose wife and daughter were murdered by a serial killer, is at risk for PTSD himself. Parker does not appreciate the free therapeutic advice.

There is a mystery about exactly who is the ringleader of the veterans, and that was not hard to deduce, but Parker was not far enough behind me to make me think he was stupid. The Whisperers is a solid entry in the series, complete with appearances from Louis and Angel, Parker’s lethal friends. The smuggling plot is interesting enough, and explained well enough, for someone unfamiliar with the series to be able to follow and enjoy, but I think new readers would find the supernatural aspects a little confusing. I’m giving the book four stars as a reader familiar with the series. I recommend Every Dead Thing, the first Parker novel, for people who want to know who Charlie Parker is, how he got started, and an idea of just what he is fighting.

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

I read Margaret Mahy’s Carnegie-winning novel first as a teenager and again just recently, in my twenties. Despite the passage of time, I found that The Changeover had lost none of its potency. It’s still a striking coming-of-age story, still a nail-biting supernatural thriller, still a fascinating character study, and still a dark urban fairytale that fully deserves the recognition it got at the time of its first publication back in the 1980s. It has aged remarkably well, for as Mahy points out in her postscript, there is very little use of eighties lingo or technology. This story could just as easily take place in the 21st century as it did two decades ago.

The story itself is surprisingly straightforward: Laura Chant is a teenage girl who experiences “warnings” before periods of upheaval in her life, and one such warning strikes her at the opening of the book. Sure enough, on the way home from school her three year old brother Jacko is marked out by a sinister storekeeper, causing him to fall gravely ill.

Recognizing that there are supernatural forces at work, Laura seeks the help of a family of witches that live in the community; for she has long-since identified her school fellow Sorenson Carlisle as a witch. He, his mother and his grandmother come up with a solution that will allow Laura to save her brother’s life: become a witch herself by undergoing a “changeover.” Only then will she have the power to vanquish the spirit attacking her brother’s life force.

It is a plot that almost seems simplistic (you’d except to see a condensed version in the teaser on the average episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Supernatural), but the power of this story is in the telling. Through her masterful use of language, Mahy’s simple story conceit becomes a metaphorical coming-of-age tale in which Laura traverses the landscape of her mind in order to unlock her innate power. The integral chapter that lends the book its title deserves to be read twice over on the strength of its intensity, mystery and sheer effectiveness.

Balancing out the supernatural side of things are Laura’s conflicting feelings over her mother bringing home a new boyfriend and the reappearance of her absentee father, as well as the usual perplexities that beset the average teenage girl: the onset of puberty, the disillusions of adulthood, and the awareness of the opposite sex.

Mahy has a gift with words, turning the subdivision of Gardendale into a dangerous fairytale realm, portraying Laura’s family (her adored little brother and rather scatterbrained mother) as a household that a teenage girl would willingly fight to the death for, and bringing to life a mysterious, striking, incomprehensible male witch that repels as much as he attracts. According to Mahy’s postscript, Laura was originally going to seek out the help of a female classmate, but on flipping the gender of this character to male, the novel’s entire tone was changed. The chemistry between the two leads is palpable, for as a male witch grappling with a feminine heritage, Sorenson (or “Sorry” as he’s nicknamed) is inevitably drawn to Laura’s companionship in combating his own traumatic past and lonely present.

The prose is so rich that I found during my second read that I could recall certain passages as if I’d read the book only yesterday instead of years ago, and despite knowing the conclusion, I still found my anticipation rising as the story headed toward its climax.

As a kiwi, The Changeover will always be close to my heart considering it is set in (or was at least inspired by) the city in which I was born and raised, and was the book that made me aware that the fantasy genre is not restricted to faraway places. Mahy speaks of the “imagination displacement” she suffered from prior to the writing of The Changeover, stemming from the experience of being a New Zealand author raised on books that were set entirely in the English countryside. Having overcome this unusual form of writer’s block, The Changeover serves as an eye-opener for any New Zealand reader considering its blend of a familiar landscape with the wider aspects of folklore and fairytale.

That’s not to say that international readers are excluded. Its content transcends its location to become a story about universal emotions, experiences and ideas. Mahy is a master storyteller, with a firm grasp of imagery and without a single wasted or superfluous word, in which Laura’s mundane life is just as fascinating as the mysterious world of the Carlisle witches (of course it is, it wouldn’t be worth fighting for if it wasn’t). As a display of writing expertise, Mahy proves herself the well-deserved winner of the 1984 Carnegie Medal, and The Changeover demands a second read just to once again take you by surprise at how simultaneously simple and complex it really is.

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

Felix J. Palma’s The Map of Time is meta-fiction. It’s about how we think about stories. Specifically, it’s about how we think about time-travel stories. H.G. Wells, who wrote The Time Machine, is the book’s hero, acting as an agent of time through three linked stories, all set in or starting in 1888 London.

Each section opens with an address to the reader, promising excitement and wonder. The first introduction ends with the words, “Your emotion and astonishment are guaranteed.” The tone is that of a high-class carnival barker. This book, the author is telling us, is an Entertainment. It is a book, and it wants you to remember that.

The first two stories deal with love as the impetus for the exploration of time. In the first section, Andrew Harrington, son of wealthy businessman, plans to kill himself on the eighth anniversary of the death of his true love. Marie Kelly, his beloved, was the last victim of Jack the Ripper. After Marie’s death, the Ripper was captured and executed, but Andrew still pines for her. His cousin Charles comes up with a scheme to travel back in time and save her, but he needs the help of H.G. Wells.

Those of us who read Ray Bradbury’s seminal time-travel story, “A Sound of Thunder,” know the theory that the smallest change in the past creates ripples that can build to a cascade of changes in the future, but can those ripples run backward? In the second section, a lady’s parasol left behind in the year 2000 has dramatic impact on two people in 1888, and Wells must step in to help them.

In the final section of the book, Wells must act to save himself and two other famous Victorian writers from a time-traveling villain who has found a sinister way to collect the rarest of first editions.

The Map of Time’s prose is beautiful, and Palma incorporates an impish authorial voice that reminds us that we are reading a work of fiction. The voice points out that it can leave a scene and move instantly to another scene; that it can shift from one point of view to another in the middle of a paragraph. Throughout the book, characters meditate on the nature of writing, or of having written. Gilliam Murray, the successful businessman who owns Murray’s Time Travel, remains a bitter rival of Wells until the end, because Wells did what he could not — write a successful novel. Whether through books, letters or the oral tradition, words are the most powerful time-travel tool humans have, and The Map of Time celebrates that.

In the first section, a lot of time is spent with Andrew and his cousin Charles. Long before we get any sense of time-travel, we watch Andrew develop an obsession with an artist’s model turned prostitute who lives and works in the Whitechapel area. Andrew’s infatuation is believable, but there is no chance that these two people will ever have lasting happiness, and the book knows this even if Andrew doesn’t.

‘When their bodies came together again, he realized that far from being an act of madness, falling in love with her was possibly the most reasonable thing he had ever done. And when he left the room, with the memory of her skin on his lips, he tried not to look at her husband Joe, who was leaning against the wall shivering with cold.’

For all his protestations of love, Andrew has no plans to remove Marie from the life she is living, and she knows it. This changes her behavior and sets in motion the tragedy that Andrew wants desperately to undo.

The second section also deals with two unlikely lovers, separated not by social class, but by a century of time. Claire Haggerty is an upper-class girl with feminist leanings who resents the restrictions placed on women and is bored to screaming by the eligible young men her mother parades past her. As a diversion, Claire and her friend Lucy take Murray’s time-travel excursion, and in the future — May 20, 2000, the only point in the future Murray’s apparatus can reach — she meets the heroic Captain Derek Stapleton. Breaking the rules of the expedition, Claire sneaks away from the group and approaches the handsome, enigmatic Captain. They share a meaningful moment. When she returns to Murray’s dimension-spanning vessel the Cronotilus she leaves behind her parasol. This sets in motion a series of incidents that bring together an unlikely couple, and once again, Wells is called upon to help them.

In the third section, Wells is confronted with a series of murders, each with words chalked on the walls near the body. This is a chilling echo of the Jack the Ripper murders that open the book, but it is even more personal to Wells, who recognizes one passage from the book he has just completed — a book that no one else has seen.

The Map of Time isn’t about the mechanics of time-travel; it’s about the stories we tell ourselves about those mechanics. There are four types of time travel used in the book. [SPOILER ALERT: If you want to read it, highlight the following text]  One is fraudulent, made up by a character as a way to cover up how he really came to be in 1888. [END SPOILER]. Only one, Murray’s route through the fourth dimension to a specific point in the future, is thoroughly explained, and Murray himself describes it as “magic.” Characters, even minor characters, discuss possible ramifications, including time paradoxes and the moral dilemmas that crop up when someone from the future brings knowledge from the future to the relative present.

In some places, plot points were resolved a little too neatly, but I forgave that because the concepts are so heady. Palma explores the ways we most commonly travel in time, not through machines, but via thought, imagination and most of all through words. He writes a time-travel novel as if Jorge Luis Borges had written it.

The collaboration between Palma and Nick Caistor, his translator, creates a rich, textured, humorous text that holds multiple layers of meaning. Fans of pure fantasy will have to be patient, but they will be rewarded. Readers who like books about books, and books about writing, will embrace this. For those of us who are still in a pre-Kindle phase, the physical artifact of the book is a thing of beauty with a stunning cover and exquisite endpapers depicting the Map of Time.

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

It’s 1943 and World War II is going strong. There are rumors that the Nazis and the Japanese may be about to unleash a deadly secret weapon against America and people are afraid. But America may be able to create some secret weapons of its own, and who better to imagine and design them than the smartest science fiction writers of the age? So, under the direction of John W. Campbell (editor of the SFF magazines Astounding and Unknown), the Navy recruits Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, L. Sprague de Camp, and L. Ron Hubbard to turn their imaginations into scientific discoveries.

At first, the goals are simple: make the Navy’s ships invisible to radar, control the weather, defy gravity… But when the SF boys find out that recently-deceased (and possibly murdered) Nikola Tesla had a secret journal describing the construction and use of his own anti-aircraft deathray, pulp-style adventure ensues. Not only do they need to find out how Tesla’s weapon works (surely he used alternating current), they must also evade the War Department, which has suddenly taken an interest in their activities. It seems the Feds have read Cleve Cartmill’s story “Deadline” (published in Astounding) which describes how to make a nuclear bomb. But perhaps most frightening of all is that the SF geeks have to contend with a group of Navy sailor bullies. They can’t compete with them physically, but they can use their brains to get revenge!

The plot of The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown takes a while to get going and is interrupted frequently for the insertion of real facts and history because more than anything, Paul Malmont’s novel is a tribute to 1940s science fiction and the men who wrote and compiled it for the “mags.” Thus, readers will learn all about Robert A. Heinlein’s naval career, tuberculosis, hair loss, and how the biochemist who will become his third (and last) wife influences his politics. Readers will also learn about Isaac Asimov’s fear of flying and some history that explains the development of L. Ron Hubbard’s Scientology cult. Other pulp personalities such as Norvell Page, Lester Dent, Hugo Gernsback, William Gibson, and Frederik Pohl appear in unlikely but amusing places. I think Paul Malmont’s greatest accomplishment, though, is that he shows us how the imagination anticipates and creates scientific discovery and the advancement of our society.

The audiobook version of The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown, which was excellently narrated by Christopher Lane and produced by Brilliance Audio, arrived on my doorstep at just the right time. I happened to be reading some pulps recently (always trying to catch up on all the SF history I missed by being born too late), including L. Sprague de Camp’s Harold Shea stories, which are lovingly mentioned by Malmont. Any science fiction fan has to appreciate Malmont’s obvious affection for the genre.

Not only was this a fun, and sometimes very funny story, but I learned a lot, too. I recommend that anyone who’s not familiar with the Golden Age of Science Fiction, and the way that John Campbell and his favorite SF writers changed the history of SF, do a bit of research before reading The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown. I think you’ll get much more out of it. But, even if you don’t, it’s astoundingly entertaining, as any pulp story should be.

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

AUTHOR INFORMATION: Glen Duncan is the author of seven previous novels including I, Lucifer, which was shortlisted for the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. He was chosen by both Arena and The Times Literary Supplement as one of Britain’s best young novelists. Glen currently lives in London.

PLOT SUMMARY: A veil of melancholy has fallen over Jake Marlowe. Not only is he a werewolf, but he is the last of his kind. Hunted by his enemies and haunted by his past, he is worn out by centuries of decadence and debauchery, and by the demands of his lunatic appetites. As a result, he decides to submit to his fate at the next full moon. However, as Jake counts down to suicide, a violent murder and an extraordinary meeting plunge him straight back into the desperate pursuit of life…

FORMAT/INFO: The Last Werewolf is 304 pages long divided over three ‘Moons’ and sixty-one numbered chapters. Narration is in the first person via the protagonist Jake Marlowe, except for the last six chapters. The Last Werewolf wraps up the novel’s major plotline, but leaves a number of matters unresolved, hopefully to be continued in a sequel or two. July 12, 2011 marks the North American Hardcover publication of The Last Werewolf via Knopf. The UK edition was published on April 7, 2011 via Canongate Books.

ANALYSIS: Werewolves have never captured my interest the same way vampires have, but over the past few years, three books have come out that have really changed the way I look at werewolves. The first is Toby Barlow’s spectacular novel, Sharp Teeth. Then came The Wolfman by Nicholas Pekearo, rest his soul. Finally, we have The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan…

The Last Werewolf — my first Glen Duncan novel, by the way — not only stars a werewolf as the main protagonist, but also features vampires, a World Organisation for the Control of Occult Phenomena (WOCOP), and copious amounts of sex. Sounds like a formula straight out of an urban fantasy/paranormal romance novel right? Wrong. Instead, The Last Werewolf is a gritty and visceral, hard R-rated contemporary horror thriller dressed up in literary wrappings, which is mainly due to Glen Duncan’s sophisticated writing style and evocative prose:

“If this was Hollywood I’d be dismissing her fully paid and heavily gratuitied in preparation for a night’s heroic solitary brooding, a sequence of fade-shots wet-eyed Pacino would do with baleful minimalism, staring out at the city, lit cigarette, bottle and glass, the face tranquilly letting all the death and sadness gather with a kind of defeated wisdom. But this wasn’t Hollywood.”

“The moon was an inscrutable pregnancy, a withheld alleviation, a love more cunning than a mother’s.”

Personally, I found Glen Duncan’s writing style somewhat difficult to follow as I had to constantly stop and re-read passages in order to fully digest what the author was saying, while the prose can get overblown at times. That said, the author does a marvelous job capturing the voice of someone who has been alive since the early 1800s and is weary of life. Even more impressive are the subtle, but noticeable changes to Jake Marlowe’s ‘journal entries’ when he suddenly discovers a reason for living.

Werewolf elements in the book are fairly conventional. The Curse is only transferred by infection. The infected can only transform during a full moon. Benefits include increased senses, healing, and lifespan. Silver is a weakness. Et cetera, et cetera. Of course, the author puts his own spin on the werewolf mythos in the form of an amped-up libido, the infection killing people instead of changing them, and a strong aversion to vampires. However, it’s the intimate and thought-provoking look inside the mind and heart of Jake Marlowe the werewolf that is the novel’s main attraction, which includes being tormented by the memories of everyone he has ever killed, suffering from profound loneliness and a life void of love, and wondering if life after death exists for a werewolf.

Plot-wise, The Last Werewolf starts out a bit slowly with the novel focused on establishing Jake’s past — when he became infected in 1842; his first kill which he has not spoken of in 167 years; the time he saved Harley’s life, his human familiar, fix-it and friend for fifty years — his loneliness and exhaustion of life, and his desire to die. That’s when the author throws a few curveballs — vampires, WOCOP politics, a love interest — to complicate matters for Jake and increase the novel’s entertainment factor. Unfortunately, these interesting plot developments become bogged down by Marlowe’s long-winded ruminations, while a narrative shift towards the end of the book telegraphs the novel’s ending. It’s an anticlimactic ending that leaves many matters unresolved, like Alexander Quinn’s journal which supposedly contains the origin of werewolves, and the vampires’ Helios Project.

Despite these issues with the story, The Last Werewolf is a striking novel. Glen Duncan’s writing is intelligent and provocative; Jake Marlowe is a compelling and sympathetic protagonist, even if he is a monster; and the plot delivers plenty of action, sex, thrills and surprises. Admittedly, I enjoyed reading Sharp Teeth and The Wolfman more than I did The Last Werewolf, but Glen Duncan’s book ranks right up there with the best that werewolf fiction has to offer, and is a tale worthy of a sequel.

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

AUTHOR INFORMATION: Félix J. Palma has been unanimously acclaimed by critics as one of the most brilliant and original storytellers of our time. His devotion to the short story genre has earned him more than a hundred awards. The Map of Time is his first novel to be published in English. It received the 2008 Ateneo de Sevila XL Prize and will be published in more than 30 countries.

PLOT SUMMARY: Privileged Andrew Harrington is a despondent young man who plans on killing himself. Eight years earlier, he had found the love of his life. It didn’t matter that their lives were vastly different—he born to a rich and entrepreneurial family and she a woman struggling to survive as a prostitute in London’s seedy Whitechapel section. He’s determined to declare his love for her and live happily ever after, even if it means leaving his privileged life behind. Everything changes however, when his beloved Marie Kelly becomes the last victim of the villainous Jack the Ripper.

That’s where H.G. Wells comes in. The publication of his novel, The Time Machine, has set off a furor of interest and curiosity about the possibility of time travel. There is even a company called Murray’s Time Travel that offers trips through time to witness a battle between humans and robots in the year 2000. Andrew’s cousin Charles is certain that Wells can rescue Andrew from despondency by helping him travel back in time to stop Jack the Ripper from killing Marie Kelly…

Claire Haggerty is young, wealthy, and very dissatisfied with her life. She’s sure she’s been born into the wrong time in history. She has no interest in the men who court her and she certainly has no interest in marrying any of them. She fears she will never find a man who will utterly sweep her off her feet and make her fall helplessly in love.

That is, until her cousin Lucy talks her into buying a ticket to one of the expeditions to the year 2000 through Murray’s Time Travel. All the advertisements boast of an incredible battle over the fate of the world between humans, led by the heroic Captain Derek Shackleton, and automatons. Entranced by Captain Shackleton’s courage—not to mention his manly physique—Claire is positive that she’s finally found the man she’s been looking for. She’s determined to go on the expedition and steal away from the group, profess her love for Shackleton, and stay with him in the future.

But Captain Shackleton isn’t quite who he seems, and he and Claire are caught up in a dangerous situation that threatens to rip them apart. And it’s once again up to H.G. Wells to use his imagination to protect a romance that spans time and class…

In the third act of The Map of Time, H.G. Wells must “save” his own life. A brilliant writer who doubts his own skill, Wells has just finished the manuscript for The Invisible Man. No one, not even his beloved wife Jane, has read it. So naturally he’s horrified when he learns that the opening lines to The Invisible Man have been scrawled on the wall above the body of a homeless man who has apparently been murdered by a weapon not of this world. His horror mounts when two additional murders take place, each accompanied by mysterious opening lines, followed by a map requesting his presence at 50 Berkeley Square—the most haunted house in London.

Thus, Wells is compelled to embark on a desperate journey to save himself and his future. And in turn, he must make a momentous decision that will change the course of his—and his wife Jane’s—life forever…

CLASSIFICATION: Historical fiction, alternate history, time travel, mystery, steampunk, pulp adventure, romance and Victorian London collide in The Map of Time, recalling elements of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, Jules Verne, The Prestige by Christopher Priest, Gordon Dahlquist’s The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters, From Hell, and The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger.

FORMAT/INFO: The Map of Time is 624 pages long, divided over three Parts and forty-three Roman-numbered chapters. Narration is in the third-person omniscient via an unknown narrator who will occasionally break the fourth wall and address the audience directly. The Map of Time is self-contained, but I believe the book is part of a trilogy. June 28, 2011 marks the North American Hardcover publication of The Map of Time via Atria Books. The UK version was published on June 9, 2011 via HarperCollins. The Map of Time was translated from Spanish to English by Nick Caistor.

ANALYSIS: Welcome, dear reader, as you plunge into the thrilling pages of our melodrama where you will find adventures of which you never dreamt!

If like any reasonable person you believe that time is a river sweeping away all that is born towards the darkest shore, in these pages you will discover that the past can be revisited, that mankind can retrace his footsteps thanks to a machine that can travel through time.

Your emotion and astonishment are guaranteed.

So begins Félix J. Palma’s astonishing novel, The Map of Time. A novel about time travel—set during Victorian London—that was inspired by The Time Machine and pays homage to its famous author, H.G.

Wells, who is not only a character in the book, but the main protagonist. As a fan of time travel—who doesn’t like Back to the Future or Terminator?—Victorian settings and H.G. Wells, The Map of Time immediately captured my interest and filled me with excitement. However, much to my delight, reading The Map of Time was even better than anticipated.

For starters, Félix J. Palma’s writing is simply exquisite: “It felt so good to let himself be enveloped by the protective mantle of that immense unconditional love, that magic cape shielding him from life’s coldness, the icy indifference of every day that made his soul tremble, the incessant wind filtering through the shutters and seeping into his innermost depths.” Fortunately, there is much more to the author besides gorgeous prose. Félix J. Palma is the complete package, excelling in all phases as a writer including characterization, world-building, creativity and storytelling. (NOTE: As lovely as Félix J. Palma’s writing is, it would not be possible in this edition if not for Nick Caistor’s wonderful translation.)

Characters for instance, are incredibly lifelike with their innermost thoughts and feelings intimately portrayed. Fittingly, Félix J. Palma spends the most time with Herbert George Wells, fleshing out the events that fired his passion for literature and writing; his roundabout path to becoming a published author instead of a baker’s assistant; the meeting with Joseph Merrick—the Elephant Man—that inspired The Time Machine and The Island of Dr. Moreau; and his opinions on such varied topics as book reviews, the social commentary found within his novels, love, parallel universes, fate vs. free will, and so on. Since The Map of Time is a work of fiction, Félix J. Palma does take liberties with certain aspects of H.G. Wells’ life, but because the author writes with such authenticity and attention to detail, it’s impossible to separate fact from fiction. Andrew Harrington, Claire Haggerty, Captain Derek Shackleton and Inspector Colin Garrett of Scotland Yard are written with the same skill and intimacy, but none of these characters are as compelling as Wells, although Gilliam Murray—a supporting character—succeeds as an interesting rival to the author.

Félix J. Palma also does a masterful job with the setting, recreating a Victorian London that makes the reader feel like he traveled back in time. Personally though, I was more impressed with the author’s ability to integrate actual historical figures and places into the novel in a manner that felt natural and convincing, including Jack the Ripper, Marie Kelly, Whitechapel, Joseph Merrick, Dr. Treves, Henry James, Bram Stoker, and 50 Berkeley Square. I also appreciated the numerous references to the era—Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Darwin, Jules Verne, Robert Louis Stevenson, Nikola Tesla, Allan Kardec, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, King Solomon’s Mines, Inspector Frederick Abberline—that reminded me why the Victorian period is one of my favorite settings in literature.

Time travel meanwhile, is represented in The Map of Time by four different methods: the very same time machine that is depicted in H.G. Wells’ classic novel; a fourth dimension—described as a pink plain—where time is stopped and its inhabitants can create holes to different moments of the time continuum, including May 20, 2000; a machine that digs tunnels through the fabric of time; and Homo temporis, humans who developed the ability to travel through time using their minds. Only one of these methods is actually viable in the book, but all four concepts provide the reader with countless pages of entertainment, thought-provoking moral complexity, and mind-bending paradoxes.

Plot-wise, The Map of Time consists of three Parts, each Part relating a separate tale, with all three stories connected by certain characters and themes including H.G. Wells, Gilliam Murray, love, and time travel. The story’s strength lies in its unpredictability, which in turn, is orchestrated by a mysterious omniscient narrator who uses clever misdirection, well-timed surprises and shocking plot twists to constantly keep readers on their toes. At the same time, Félix J. Palma manages to keep things accessible, despite the complexity and ambitiousness of the story.

Unfortunately, as much as I loved The Map of Time, Félix J. Palma’s novel is not perfect. For one, because of an extraordinary amount of backstory, over two hundred pages go by before any real adventure even transpires in the book. An issue that recurs throughout the novel, though not at the same extreme as the beginning of the book. Not only that, but the author’s writing can be long-winded at times which, combined with all of the backstory, results in a page count that is much longer than necessary. Admittedly, the omniscient narrator’s presence helps alleviate these issues by directly addressing concerns that a reader may have—why the backstory is important for instance, or the reason for switching to another POV in the middle of a paragraph—but nevertheless, the novel could have benefited from additional editing, like the unnecessary details surrounding William Harrington’s ascent to fortune and social status. Furthermore, Félix J. Palma has a tendency to explain certain concepts, plot twists and revelations in explicit detail, as if afraid readers would be unable to figure out things on their own. Finally, as a fan of science fiction and fantasy, I felt cheated a couple of times because of the unexpected direction The Map of Time took, but the novel easily redeems itself in the excellent third act. That said, the novel’s conclusion does feels a bit anticlimactic, especially considering everything that came before…

CONCLUSION: Even with imperfections, Félix J. Palma’s The Map of Time is quite possibly a masterpiece, if not a future classic. At the very least, the novel deserves all of the praise it has received thus far, and will receive in the future. Granted, The Map of Time will not be for everyone, despite the genre-defying scope of the novel, but anyone who can appreciate what Félix J. Palma’s book has to offer will be in for a treat. As for myself, The Map of Time is certainly one of the best novels I’ve read all year, in any genre, and is a book that I will be recommending to readers for years to come…

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

Kilgore Trout, who appears in many of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels, is a science fiction writer whose ideas and stories are interesting even though his plots and characters are dreadful. My favorite Kilgore Trout story is summarized in Breakfast of Champions. Here, Trout writes about extra-terrestrials that come to earth to prevent nuclear holocaust. Unfortunately, they rely on tap dancing and farts to communicate, so the confused humans immediately kill their furiously farting and tap dancing visitors. This depressing depiction of humanity is common in both Trout and Vonnegut’s writing.

Trout is Kurt Vonnegut’s fictional alter ego. Vonnegut acknowledges that Trout isn’t a very good writer, and consequently publishes all of Trout’s work in pornographic magazines. So Kurt Vonnegut must have been surprised when he realized that had become one of the most acclaimed satirists of the 20^th century, even though his writing strongly recalls Kilgore Trout’s.

In fact, just minutes after reading Galápagos, I was already struggling to remember who was in the novel – let alone what they did. As per usual, the world happens to Vonnegut’s characters rather than vice versa and even their most heart-breaking loss is little more than another piece of evidence confirming Trout’s view that “the more you learn about people the more disgusted you’ll become.” Galápagos has any number of disgusting tragedies, ranging from the abusive relationships to a revaluation of national currencies that leads to starvation in Central America.

But don’t feel sorry for any of these people.

After all, Darwin’s great book The Origin of Species has done “more to stabilize people’s volatile opinions of how to identify success or failure than any other tome.” A sober understanding of these people as evolutionary failures is more accurate than an analysis tainted by feelings of compassion or pity. Vonnegut takes a moment to hammer home how incredibly mundane every death is in Galápagos by placing an * in front of the names of the characters that will soon die.

Before long, all but a few members of *humanity can be included on the list of casualties.

Galápagos is set in 1986, but our narrator is explaining these events to us from a million years in the future. By this time, the only representative of the human race, as we understand it, is a ghost that explains the evolutionary processes that he has observed. He explains that the last humans continued to evolve on the Galápagos Islands. Humanity is now a furry, seal-like species that survives by fishing. Thankfully, the brain cavity of the average human has been streamlined to facilitate fishing, so humanity has finally rid itself of its greatest handicap: the “oversize human brain.” Now, people live far shorter lives and they are not nearly so cruel, jealous, or destructive.

These are the survivors that live to see the future. These seal-like humans are the success stories.

Or are they?

Galápagos is a dystopian novel that explains how seals, more or less, come to realize all of humanity’s highest ideals. They are a utopian society, though nothing very interesting happens anymore.

Vonnegut often mocks his work through Kilgore Trout. However, his ability to organize a dystopian story around evolution rather than government control is impressive. I will not remember any of the characters in Galápagos, but Kilgore Trout’s alter ego is clearly a talented writer with a knack for writing interesting stories.

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

An historical mystery, a bittersweet love story, an exploration of myths and fairytales, a tribute to the power of books, and a beautiful, delicate style of prose all makes A.S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance an intriguing, rewarding, immensely enjoyable read.

Roland Michell is a research assistant for Professor Blackadder, the self-proclaimed expert on all matters concerning the Victorian poet: Randolph Henry Ash. Whilst thumbing through one of Ash’s old books, Roland uncovers rough drafts of letters, which seem to hint at a secret friendship with an unidentified woman. Since Ash was considered to be a devoted husband who led an exemplary life, this discovery could change everything that’s ever been written about the poet and his work.

His investigation leads him to suspect that Christabel LaMotte (known as “the fairy poet”) is the mystery woman, which in turn guides him to a contemporary expert on the subject: Maud Bailey, the woman’s great, great, great grand-niece. Together they take it upon themselves to secretly look into the matter further, both instinctively feeling that they’re on the verge of an extraordinary discovery… In such a way, the lovers of the past are given another chance in the two people who uncover their story.

To give away more would be to ruin the treasure hunt that follows; safe to say that it involves diary entries, love letters, old mansions, secret exertions to mystery locations, grave digging, a variety of secondary characters that provide help or hindrance, and finally a race to the finish line as competing scholars get wind of what the two are up to. Obviously, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that this unraveling of the past’s passionate love story has quite an effect on the scholars, who gradually lose their inhibitions and begin to open up to one another as the story unfolds. Through Randolph and Christabel’s example, the ordinary Maud and Roland are allowed to do something extraordinary and seize their chance at life.

Any scholar or theorist knows the excitement that comes with the thought of a new discovery, point of view, or even idea on how to view their chosen field of study. In many ways Byatt relies on this to convey a somewhat satirical view on scholarship and how one can get so wrapped up in analysis that they lose the focus of why they’re devoting hours of their life to another person’s work, and how literature is often dissected and deconstructed to the point where it loses all meaning, or is simply whittled down to banalities such as gender wars or sexual frustration. As Maud says: “Do you never have the sense that our metaphors eat up our world? I mean of course that everything connects and connects…and it all reduced like boiling jam to human sexuality.” Likewise, Roland and Maud are so constrained by the ideologies of Freud that they’re just as suppressed as anyone in the Victoria era, the two of them longing for “clean, white beds”, free of any meaning or relationships.

And yet it would be quite misleading to say that the story revolves around Roland and Maud, for Possession is all about Randolph and Christabel. In her preface, as a way of explaining why the title is subtitled “A Romance,” Byatt quotes a definition from Nathaniel Byatt: “The point of view in which this tale comes under the Romantic definition lies in the attempt to connect a bygone time with the very present that is flitting away from us.” That sentiment is this book in a nutshell, for the lovers of the past are far more vivid and real than the contemporary investigators, who cannot help but seem bland in comparison (which is probably intentional, considering that Roland Maud themselves comment on this). They are the tools and mediators through which the Victorian love affair is conveyed.

It is in the portrayal of Randolph and Christabel that Byatt truly excels, mainly because she’s written an entire secondary body of text for them: diary entries, letters, essays, poems, fairytales and other bits and pieces (even a suicide note!) penned not just by the two poets, but their contemporaries as well. The love letters themselves are beautiful: stiff and formal at first, but gradually unfolding to reveal the personalities of those that have written them: Christabel’s secretive and humourous prose, Ash’s sensitive but unmistakably masculine thoughts. It needs to be noted here that a large portion of Possession is made up of these mementoes from the Victorian era, something that may test the casual reader’s patience, but which are so poignantly and accurately written in regards to capturing the time and place from whence they come, that the line between fact and fiction is blurred considerably. I hate to admit it, but Randolph Ash in particularly is inserted so seamlessly into the time period that I originally thought he was a real historical personage.

The love story is heartbreaking and bittersweet, and the significant others of both Randolph and Christabel are treated respectfully and not without mitigating factors of their own. Although there are three important segments of text which take us directly into the life and times of the Victorian characters, most of their story, in all its piecemeal chronology, is conveyed through the evidence that Roland and Maud uncover. There are some breath-taking conceits at work here, mainly concerning the fact that the poems of each lover take on a whole different meaning when one considers the romance between them; for example, when Maud and Roland discover that the exact same line exists in two of their poems as a hidden testament to their love, gone unnoticed by legions of scholars, hidden in plain sight for all to see – I have to say, my eyes pricked with tears.

Though I’ve always loved Byatt’s delicate, beautiful prose, her complex syntax and heavily contextual style certainly won’t be to everyone’s taste. Though I’ve read Possession three times in my life, I know I’ve only brushed the surface of meaning at work here, for this is a difficult, cerebral, challenging book and relies on a lot of patience (consider for example the fact that one chapter is made up entirely of Randolph’s poetry). And don’t even get me started on the themes that the surround the titular “possession” – this review is long enough as it is!

Although I concede that not everyone will enjoy this book, sometimes you just have to throw away objectivity and gush about the things you love. For me, Possession is one of these things. What stayed with me the longest was Byatt’s comparison of the bliss and simplicity that comes with seclusion, and the equal bliss but far more complex emotions that come with the passionate madness of love, which in an odd way reflects my own reading experience of this book. In the sheer pleasure of reading, I found that, as a character puts it: “the author writes alone, and the reader reads alone, and they are alone together.”

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

Order “The Watchers” HERE

AUTHOR INFORMATION: Jon Steele was an award-winning cameraman and editor for ITN for more than twenty years. He has traveled and worked through seventy-eight countries across six continents. War Junkie, his autobiography of a life behind the camera in some of the worst places on earth, was published in 2002 and has become a cult classic of war reportage. The Watchers is his first novel.

PLOT SUMMARY: Lausanne, Switzerland...

In the Lausanne Cathedral, Marc Rochat, a strange boy with a limp, watches over the city. He lives in a world of shadows and beforetimes and imaginary beings, waiting for the angel his mother told him he’d one day have to save.

Marc believes that angel is Katherine Taylor, a high-priced escort who is about to discover that her real-life fairy tale is too good to be true.

Meanwhile, Jay Harper wakes up one day with no memory of who he is, where he came from, or what he did before. Offered a job as a freelance security specialist for the International Olympic Committee, he has no choice but to accept. On the trail of a missing former hockey star, Harper crosses paths with Marc Rochat and Katherine Taylor, which he will discover is no coincidence.

Three lives. One purpose…

FORMAT/INFO: The Watchers is 560 pages long divided over a prologue called ‘Quietus’, four titled books, forty numbered chapters, and an Epilogue. Narration is in the third person via Marc Rochat, Katherine Taylor and Jay Harper. The Watchers is mostly self-contained, coming to a satisfying stopping point, but it’s the first book in a trilogy. The sequels are tentatively titled Angel City and The Way of Sorrows. June 9, 2011 marks the UK Hardcover publication of The Watchers via Bantam Press.

ANALYSIS: Like many other reviewers, Jon Steele’s The Watchers caught my attention because of its tagline: “Imagine The Bourne Identity rewritten by Neil Gaiman.” After finishing the book, I can see why the publisher chose such a comparison, but it is a little misleading. The truth is, The Watchers is a very difficult novel to classify.

For starters, the book opens with a prologue set in 1917, at the Battle of Vimy Ridge during the first World War. It’s a beautifully written prologue – full of magic, wonder and mystery – and immediately intriguing, but how these events are connected with the rest of the book are not revealed until much later in the novel.

From this prologue, The Watchers shifts to present day Switzerland with the next 300-some pages of the novel introducing and cultivating the book’s three main characters and their relationship to one another: Marc Rochat, a 21-year-old boy, handicapped both mentally and physically, who serves as the guardian of Lausanne Cathedral – think Quasimodo; Katherine Taylor, a 26-year-old American former Playboy star who moved to Switzerland to work as an escort for the Two Hundred Club which caters to Europe’s rich and powerful; and Jay Harper, a thirty-something Brit who cannot remember anything prior to waking up and accepting a job as a freelance security specialist for the International Olympic Committee.

How these three characters are connected to one another is all part of the “mysterious mystery” that Jon Steele slowly unravels during the first two-thirds of the novel, which also involves a once famous Russian hockey player gone missing, Inspector Gobet who may or may not be crooked, extremely dangerous killers, and Lausanne Cathedral. Most of this “mysterious mystery” is presented through Harper’s narrative, which contains a detective noir influence. Over the course of the book, Harper also suddenly remembers things – understanding French, quoting poems, etc. – without knowing where that knowledge came from, which is where The Bourne Identity comparison comes in. Meanwhile, a Book of Enoch subplot – “an apocryphal book of the Hebrew Bible, long discredited until it was discovered as part of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1948” – is introduced around page 280, injecting a Dan Brown element into the novel. Magic realism on the other hand, best describes the narratives by Marc Rochat and Katherine Taylor, although a sense of ambiguity keeps the reader guessing as to what is real and what is imagined.

It’s around page 360 that The Watchers starts shifting in another direction. Before that point, I was completely engrossed by the book, thanks mainly to Jon Steele’s exquisite writing, which in turn is the key behind the novel’s compelling main characters, a vividly described setting that felt almost as real as what I imagine the genuine article would be like (especially Lausanne Cathedral), and a story that brilliantly straddles the line between reality and fantasy. Characterization in particular, is a high point of the novel because of the amount of detail and effort that is used to flesh out the protagonists’ different personalities, narrative voices and worldviews. Of the three, Marc Rochat is easily the most interesting because of his uniquely charming outlook on life (detectiveman, weather-teller, workermen, beforetimes, nowtimes) and the way he communicates with ghosts, his cat Monsieur Booty, and the bells of Lausanne Cathedral.

The story admittedly, is a bit slow-moving and lacking in the action & adventure department, which can be partly attributed to the amount of details and information used by the author in establishing the setting and characters, but it’s really the nature of the book. In other words, The Watchers was never meant to be a page-turner like a James Patterson or Dan Brown novel. Instead, The Watchers is a character-driven book, where even the environment is a character, and editing out what may seem like unnecessary details would only lessen the novel’s impact. Besides, The Watchers is gripping in its own way, as I found it nearly impossible to put the book down. At least for the first two-thirds of the novel.

Once the book starts shifting into supernatural territory around page 360, The Watchers becomes less engrossing. Part of the problem is that once the cat is let out of the bag, the novel loses its intriguing sense of mystery and ambiguity and becomes a straightforward battle between good and evil. Another problem is that the supernatural elements – fallen angels, Nephilim, dead black potion, time wake, stasis, etc. – lack the detail and clarity found in the rest of the book, giving the last third of the novel an unfinished feel. However, since The Watchers is just the first volume in a trilogy, I’m hoping the sequels will explain the supernatural war in much greater detail. Finally, the author goes a little overboard with some of The Watchers’ supernatural elements, especially compared to everything that came before, but the Epilogue was satisfying while introducing a number of interesting developments to be explored in the next book…

CONCLUSION: Because The Watchers shifts between so many different genres – historical fiction, detective noir, magic realism, religious conspiracy, supernatural thriller – it’s difficult to say what kind of audience would enjoy Jon Steele’s debut. Personally, I loved The Watchers because of Jon Steele’s exquisite writing, the novel’s compelling protagonists and the vivid setting, but I felt the supernatural elements did not work nearly as well as the rest of the book and I’m a bit worried about how the author will handle these elements in the sequels. Nevertheless, The Watchers mostly enthralls, seizing the heart and imagination, while leaving the reader satisfied, but still tempted for more…

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go is about clones, but don’t get your hopes up. This is an unconventional clone story.

That’s right. There aren’t any mad scientists, nor are there any daring escapes. There isn’t even a sterile cloning facility run by a ruthless villain. So forget about a daring infiltration scene in which the sterile cloning facility is shut down from within.

There is, however, a private boarding school – Hailsham – and thankfully, it’s a mysterious place. All of our favorite boarding school tropes are present, including the distant headmaster, Madame; the rebel teacher, Ms. Lucy; and even a bully, Ruth. We are also invited to speculate about the purpose of the students’ curriculum. At Hailsham, students study nothing but art and they have “guardians” rather than teachers. They are constantly asked to be creative, but not curious. Creative works that are especially impressive will be showcased in a distant gallery. No one knows anything more about the Gallery other than that it exists.

Like many an SFF, Never Let Me Go has its share of “vocabulary.” For example, Kathy, is a “carer,” and she cares for special patients who make “donations” until they finally “complete.” Practiced readers of speculative fiction are used to seeing “vocabulary,” so most readers will have raced way ahead of Kathy and the other two points of her love triangle, Ruth and Tommy, by the time they graduate high school.

Consequently, Never Let Me Go is a bit of a tedious read for anyone that was expecting the pacing of a science fiction adventure, or an emotional climax analogous to Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Going To Take It.” Instead, Ishiguro focuses on the minutiae of the interpersonal and introspective.

Unfortunately, Ishiguro’s characters are not very engaging. In The Remains of the Day, Ishiguro’s ability to write between the lines heightened the tension of the novel, and Stevens’ refusal to deal with his emotions directly was part of what made him such a fascinating narrator. Here, Kathy and her love triangle are concerned with whether clones can love one another. However, her emotional struggles are decidedly muted, which was perhaps intended to create thematic ambiguity but I found it irritating. Ultimately, Ishiguro’s trademark subtlety makes Never Let Me Go an emotionally flat read.

However, Kathy’s passive description of the consequences of “donations” is painful to read. Ishiguro is content to write in these details as background noise, and it is one of the few instances in the novel where this decision pays off.

If readers are interested in reading a story about clones rebelling, striving for justice, or suffering tragically, they should probably look elsewhere. Ishiguro will offer no romantic solutions. This is a bleak novel about artificial life forms whose purpose is to cure cancer. Never Let Me Go is a frustrating, uncomfortable novel that offers readers the chance to watch these passive characters endure a difficult, unhappy life. Enter at your own risk.

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

Phoebe, a woman in her thirties, is having the first serious relationship of her life. She comes from a rough upbringing and sometimes feels out of place in Sam’s wholesome world, amid his organic diet, his intellectual friends, and his seemingly perfect mother. But an old wound festers at the heart of Sam’s family: his sister Lisa disappeared when she was twelve. Family legend holds that she was spirited away by the fairies. Sam’s a rational man, though, and he insists that she was taken by an ordinary predator. As Don’t Breathe a Word begins, Phoebe and Sam receive a phone call that implies Lisa is still alive and wants to communicate with them.

Don’t Breathe a Word alternates between two points of view: Phoebe’s, as she and Sam delve into the mystery of Lisa’s disappearance and possible return; and Lisa’s, fifteen years earlier, in the last few weeks before she vanished. Lisa is a girl just on the cusp of adolescence, young enough to sing clapping rhymes and old enough to realize the adults in her family are keeping secrets. The novel’s many layers of illusions, lies, and fairy tales unfold for Phoebe, Lisa, and the reader all at the same time.

Jennifer McMahon incorporates a great deal of the traditional folklore about fairies. The story builds up to Midsummer, a date often associated with these beings. They’ve been said to enjoy offerings of childish comfort foods such as sweets and milk; as Phoebe’s fragile happiness begins to fall apart, she takes solace in cake and Hamburger Helper. Fairies are most powerful during liminal times, or liminal periods in humans’ lives; the pubescent Lisa is at a liminal point, and so is Phoebe (though she doesn’t know it yet). McMahon obviously did a ton of homework and wove it into the story in a way that flows naturally.

The book will have you thinking about how we tend to mythologize, to tell stories that help us make sense of traumatic experiences. How many of the old, scary fairy legends were actually built around catastrophic mental illness, sexual abuse, or premature death? Conversely, if fairies appeared in our own cynical time, what kinds of tales would we tell to rationalize them?

Is Don’t Breathe a Word a story about human evil dressed up as a story about fairies, or is it a story about fairies dressed up as a story about human evil? As you read, you’ll vacillate several times between the two explanations. The most significant answer McMahon seems to offer is this: either way, it’s chilling and heartbreaking.

At the same time as the tragic events tug at your emotions, the book’s layered plot will give your brain a workout. This is the kind of book that you finish and then want to start right back over at the beginning to see what new details you can catch on the reread. The ending is of the ambiguous type that is both frustrating and haunting. I wished for more certainty – but at the same time, I recognized that a more concrete ending wouldn’t stick with me as long. McMahon leaves enough questions to keep the reader thinking long after finishing the book.

I read Don’t Breathe a Word in two days, unable to put it down. It’s my favorite book of 2011 so far, and one of the most faithful evocations of the old, deadly tales of the fairies.

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

Michael Crichton’s Congo (1980) is an adventure story that should recall Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912) and Henry Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885).

However, although the formula has been used so many times as to become almost archetypal, the little details have been updated for a contemporary audience. In place of dinosaurs, Crichton offers an unusual breed of gorilla that threatens our band of scientists, and he trades in mines and lost explorers for flawed diamonds that can be used for cutting-edge communications technologies.

And our lost city (Zinj) is located in the rainforests of the Congo.

Congo is one of Crichton’s earlier techno-thrillers, but it is clear that by this time he had begun to smooth out the wrinkles in his writing. His characterization is still a little transparent – our tragic hero Karen Ross’ fatal flaw is revealed on a computer printout – but Crichton’s reliance on computers makes a rather obvious ploy feel novel. Ross’ psychological profile warns that although she is driven and intelligent, her youth and ambition could endanger her life and the lives of her team.

The adventure stories that were written near the turn of the century were often infatuated with exploration and discovery, an infatuation that Crichton clearly shares. Throughout Congo, Crichton showcases unusual academic advances, tweaked just enough to feel like science fiction. For example, Peter Elliot has trained a gorilla, Amy, to communicate using sign language. Our local guide in Africa, a shadowy mercenary named Munro, plans the route into the jungle relying on computer models. And how about those automated weapons systems? There is a sense of mystery and grandeur to these advances that is rivaled only by the lost city of Zinj, its crumbling ruins, and its violent protectors.

However, although Crichton clearly revels in the novelty of invention, discovery and progress, his purpose is actually conservative. What happens to a society that hands over its responsibilities to automated systems? Although Crichton is often dismissed for his lackluster styling, his fusion of the adventure story with science fiction still feels fresh today, and his juxtaposition of the ancient with the futuristic allows him to suggest that there is wisdom to be found in the past that can shape the decisions we make about our future.

Congo is not Crichton’s best work, but that is only because he would take the setting, character and theme of this novel and refine (or upgrade) all of them in later works like Sphere and Jurassic Park. Regardless, readers looking for an intelligent fusion of science fiction and adventure could hardly do better than Michael Crichton’s Congo.

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

A little while ago, Terry discussed Kevin Brockmeier’s latest novel, The Illumination, for “Edge of the Universe.” Having just finished it myself, I’m still thrilled she introduced Brockmeier to our audience, as he’s one of my favorite relatively new authors. Unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy The Illumination as much as Terry did, or as much as previous Brockmeier novels.

The titular event, the Illumination itself, occurs one day when suddenly all our wounds, all our pain, are made visible via light.  Our first introduction to the event happens when Carol Page nearly severs the tip of her thumb when opening a package  (her alimony check) her ex-husband maliciously layered in reams of packing tape.  At the hospital, “she saw the light shining out of her incision . . . steady and uniform, a silvery-white disk that showed even through her thumbnail, as bright and finely edged as the light in a Hopper painting . . . it seemed to her the light was not falling over her wound, or even infusing it, but radiating through it from another world. She thought that she could live there and be happy.”

It’s a beautiful introduction to how the world has suddenly changed, and Brockmeier’s trademark prose remains a strength throughout the book:  precise, elegant, sharply etched, poignant, and evocative. There are just some gorgeous lines and images in here in here, as when a dying character, coughing up blood, asks her caretaker brother, “Who brought the garden inside?” because “she saw the seven stained tissues on her bedside table as roses, the same lustrous red as the Apothecaries their mother used to cultivate when they were kids.” Or when another character walks through the aftermath of a tornado, where “everywhere there were bodies, radiating from their hands and legs, chests and genitals, faces and stomachs.  Their flesh presented a starmap of wounds . . . He felt like a man from some ancient tribal legend who had angered the gods and been doomed to walk the constellations.”

Throughout The Illumination, then, we bear witness to all sorts of pains:  cancer, old age, self-mutilation/cutting, mental illness, the resulting pains of individual beatings and wide-scale natural disasters.  Pains both obvious and hidden, the kind we all carry around us in our non-Illuminated world, as do our friends, lovers, neighbors, strangers.

The concept is genius, the prose gorgeous. Where the book breaks down for me is in its structure and its too-constant tone. Structurally, the book is divided into six stories. A side character in one appears as a main character in another, all bound together by a physical object that moves throughout the stories: a journal kept by a woman of her husband’s daily expressions of love: “I love concavities behind your knees,” “I love how disgusted you get by purees,” and so on.  The diary is a bit clumsy as a binding prop, and somewhat overly-sentimental or sappy, and while there are some nice lines within it, I can’t say there are too many memorable ones and it has a sameness to it that wearies a bit by the end. So rather than a novel, really what we have are a collection of short stories sharing a basic narrative thread and setting.  And as with most collections of short stories, your mileage will vary. My favorite by far was the one centered on the aforementioned brother of the dying girl.  It’s not only the best here, but I’d imagine it would be the best or at least among a very short list of the best in any collected anthology of differently-authored stories.  Though the book didn’t hold up as a whole for me, I’d still recommend getting it out of the library and reading at least this one story; it’s well worth it.

Individually, the other stories run the spectrum from a bit slow and difficult to care about to relatively strong, though none near the quality of my favorite. As a whole, though, like the embedded journal, they have a bit of the sameness to them:  isolated characters in pain, a somewhat resigned sadness of tone, characters who cannot speak or do so only minimally.  I’m a fan of quiet, but there was a bit too much quiet in The Illumination for me, or at least, too much of a same sort of quiet.  At one point an author character thinks “she’d come to believe that characters were made up of their ideas and perceptions rather than their actions,” and I wonder if that’s Brockmeier a little self-concerned at what he’s doing here (there’s a lovely gem of a story embedded in that story, by the way).

I absolutely love the concept of The Illumination. And I love the idea of much it, as well as its sense of subtlety, the beautiful imagery and language, the feeling that it’s all made of glass spun so thin it would blow away if handled too strongly. But it didn’t pull me in, didn’t hold my attention throughout, and so I can’t recommend it as a book. Still, I strongly recommend reading it for the one story. And if you’re going to pick it up for that story, you may as well start from the top (the beginning is quite good though Carol’s story is one of the ones that didn’t do it for me) and see how you like it. If you do, just keep going. If you don’t, don’t return it until you read Ryan’s story. It’s also a beautiful closing paragraph.

And by all means, even if you do not like it, pick up another Brockmeier. I heartily recommend both The Brief History of the Dead and The Truth About Celia.

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union is (breathe in) an alternate history science fiction noir police procedural that won plaudits from the literary mainstream as well as several top honors from the science fiction community (breathe out).

There’s a great deal going on, but perhaps it’s best to introduce the setting. In this alternate history, America created a temporary settlement for Jews in Sitka, Alaska. Today, the Sitka Jews are facing Reversion, which means that millions of Jewish settlers will have to find a new home.

Reversion should be a problem for Meyer Landsman, a detective who “has the memory of a convict, the balls of a fireman, and the eyesight of a housebreaker.” However, he has not even begun to apply for papers that will allow him to settle in a new country. Instead, he has been steadily drinking himself to sleep every night since he and his wife, Bina Gelbfish, split.

Landsman is staying at Sitka’s seediest hotel, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that a junkie has just been murdered there.  It looks like a hit. Taking it somewhat personally, Landsman has himself assigned as the lead detective on the case. What follows is as bizarre an investigation as any I’ve ever read. That murdered junkie turns out to be a chess prodigy and the son of a mobster. Women explain that he had a sort of natural magnetism and there’s talk that he was able to heal people with his blessing. So why was he killed?

Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that Landsman will solve this case. Since the precinct is now preparing for Reversion, they can’t afford to take on any new cases. Landsman’s commanding officer, who also happens to be his ex-wife, orders Landsman to forget about the murder.

The reader’s enjoyment of The Yiddish Policeman’s Union will depend upon their tolerance for Chabon’s dedicated homage to Raymond Chandler. Some authors will sacrifice narrative voice in order to keep the plot moving. Here, Chabon always chooses to give precedence to cleverly noir descriptions of Landsman’s investigation rather than the investigation itself. Readers that prefer steady suspense in their plotting should probably read an Arkady Renko novel.

On the other hand, readers that enjoy Chabon’s writing will be in for quite a ride. In fact, Chabon’s wordplay often pays off when least expected. Perhaps one of my favorite moments in the novel came when I consulted Chabon’s glossary of Yiddish terms to discover that Landsman’s “sholem” was a pistol. The glossary explains that this is a bilingual pun that plays on the Yiddish word for peace (“sholem”) and the American slang for gun, a “piece.”

What may be most rewarding is Chabon’s ability to combine a love of genre, a clever, literate voice, and middle-aged characters. When reading The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, readers will finally understand what makes literary fiction “mundane.”

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of SFF into their fiction. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

Often there is a fine line between historical fiction and fantasy. In the case of Agincourt by Bernard Cornwell, the line is especially blurry. Of course, there is no magic or elves or dragons. That’s not to say that things are completely mundane, but there is that very important distinction.

Agincourt is set in the time of Henry V and Bernard Cornwell paints a vividly bleak picture of the conditions that people lived in back then; It’s dirty, people are often sick, and the difference between the haves and have-nots is profound. It’s not a good time to be a woman and the atrocities that are committed are absolutely horrific, but true to life. Some of these events are not for the easily offended.

Although he is the main character — the “hero” — of Agincourt,  Nicholas Hook is not a very nice guy. He is a deadly English archer and we are not given many reasons to like him at the beginning of this story. After running into trouble with the local lord, Hook journeys through London and eventually to France as part of the army Henry V has raised in order to try to claim his right to the throne of France. Again, Cornwell realistically depicts the crude conditions that the army lives in as the soldiers die more often from the horrible conditions and disease that breeds in their camps than they do from actual fighting.

Agincourt skirts the line between historical fiction and fantasy when Hook begins to receive inspiration and specific instructions from saints. There are a number of instances where he is supernaturally prompted to action that he does not follow, leading to tragic consequences. Hook is surprised to realize that he is most fortunate when he listens to, and obeys, the saints. Cornwell heightens this conflict by juxtaposing the bleak state of religion and the loathsome excesses of the clergy with the voices of the saints who these priests are supposed to represent.

Cornwell’s Agincourt is a great read and a wonderful reminder of how far society has come that physical might does not always make right. From the depredations of an army at war to the heroic acts of an inspired individual, I was deeply touched by the story. There is plenty of fighting and violence, but more importantly, there are acts of honor and nobility that reminded me that even in darkness there are deeds that are worth commemorating.

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of SFF into their fiction. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

I was surprised to discover that Conn Iggulden’s The Gates of Rome isn’t a fantasy novel.

Sure, The Gates of Rome is about Julius Caesar. And there is an author’s note discussing historical authenticity at the end of the story. Clearly, this is supposed to be a work of historical fiction. Nevertheless, that doesn’t stop Conn Iggulden from borrowing liberally from fantasy’s most enduring tropes, ranging from the defiance of bullies to the ascension of a child of fate.

Caesar, or Gaius, is a willful child when we meet him. He is determined to defend his family estate and himself against bullies much older than he is. Although Gaius is defeated and humiliated several times, that doesn’t stop him from returning time and again to get the upper hand. In fact, he even contemplates his revenge while hanging upside down from a tree.

Young Gaius may have the iron will of an emperor, but he is otherwise not very intimidating. He becomes much more capable after he is trained by Renius, a gladiator who has won so many bouts that he has been granted his freedom. Julius’ father hires Renius to train both his son and his son’s best friend, the bastard Marcus Brutus.

Renius is merciless in his training of the two boys, but he knows the secret to dueling success: strong shoulders. The boys train and spar day and night, until Renius challenges them in a final test (to the death!). As Iggulden romanticizes things, Caesar would have died if not for the intervention of fate – and a Greek healer who magically uses the powers of destiny to cure our soon-to-be emperor.

There are more than a few gestures from the fantastic in The Gates of the Rome, but Iggulden offers a heavy dose of history as well. It’s difficult to read The Gates of Rome without looking for nascent signs of Julius Caesar, Emperor of Rome. Fortunately, Iggulden is prepared to offer a crash course for aspiring emperors everywhere.

Life changes for Gaius when he leaves his family estate and joins his uncle, Marius. He stands at Marius’ side during the general’s triumph, getting a taste for power. It seems that the only person that can stop Marius is Sulla, Marius’ great rival. However, Marius gives up everything he has in order to buy the Senate’s vote, and Sulla is sent out from the great city to defeat Mithridates. It’s a year that Marius will use to be Rome’s greatest man, at least until Sulla returns to The Gates of Rome from his campaign.

At times, Iggulden twists history to suit his narrative, which rarely bothered me. As far as historical fiction goes, The Gates of Rome is very fantastic stuff: the villains often come across as over-inflated bullies, and Iggulden’s focus is always on creating an exciting adventure for both his audience and our young hero. Fantasy fans that love a fast-paced adventure and a fist- or swordfight in every other chapter will find it difficult to resist Conn Iggulden’s The Gates of Rome.

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate speculative elements into their fiction. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

Mash up a mystery, a graphic novel sensibility and a fantasy time travel novel, and what have you got? The Edgar-nominated Expiration Date by Duane Swierczynski, a novel so compelling that you’ll want to read it in a single sitting.

Mickey Wade is a journalist in a time when newspapers are disappearing right and left (that is, in the present), so it’s not surprising that his alt-weekly newspaper has just given him the heave-ho. That means that Mickey can’t pay his rent in Philadelphia’s fancy Rittenhouse Square neighborhood, and has to move to his grandfather’s efficiency apartment in Frankford. Frankford is one of the busiest drug corridors in the city, and was at one time the hunting grounds for the Frankford Slasher. Five out of every eight buildings that were once bustling are now weedy lots or vacant ruins. Mickey is taking a big, big step down in the world.

Mickey’s grandfather is in the hospital, having suffered a seizure and fallen into a coma, which is why the efficiency is vacant. Grandpop Henry wasn’t big on possessions, apparently, because aside from a desk and a fold-out couch, there is almost nothing in the apartment except boxes and boxes of documents. And there’s an old bottle of Tylenol in the medicine cabinet, which Mickey finds he needs pretty desperately after a night of too many beers and no food to “celebrate” his move. Expiration date of 1982 or not, Mickey reasons that they can’t hurt and might help.

Mickey hustles back to bed, hoping the pills will help him get some sleep. The real problems start when he wakes up before dawn in the same apartment, but in a different time:  February 22, 1972, the very day on which he was born. He wanders around the neighborhood a bit, trying to figure out what the heck is going on. No one seems to be able to see him, and he doesn’t seem to be able to affect matter in quite the same way he could in the present, but the worst is that he seems to have become seriously allergic to sunlight; when the sun rises, a beam of light burns away two of his fingers. Obviously something very strange is going on.

Mickey wakes up the following day in the world of the present on a hospital gurney. His adventures in the past looked just like a seizure to his bedmate, and she assumes that he’s on drugs. He is, as it turns out, but the drug isn’t like anything anyone has ever seen. He finds he still has the two fingers he lost in the past, but he can’t use them: they’re completely numb and won’t bend or move.

The plot zooms off from there, with Mickey trying to figure out what is going on with those pills in the Tylenol bottle, what’s happening in the present that’s affected by the past — and, ultimately, whether he can save his father from being murdered when Mickey is a boy by tracking down the murderer years before that act. Somehow his grandfather is mixed up in this, as one might expect from the fact that he had a stash of the pills that allow Mickey to travel in time. And somehow the former occupant of his grandfather’s apartment — a psychiatrist — is involved; those boxes of documents Mickey’s grandfather has accumulated seem to be comprised largely of that psychiatrist’s records of medical experimentation with precisely the medication Mickey is now using himself.

Swierczynski’s writing has the brisk pace of a graphic novel, and it’s easy to envision the panels that might accompany it if it were produced in that form — a result made even easier by the fact that the book does include illustrations in black and white by comics illustrator Laurence Campbell. The plot is as complicated as any mystery reader could want, and the clues are all there to allow the reader to figure it out just seconds before Swierczynski explicitly spells it out. And the time travel device — those pills — is as fantastic as any fantasy reader could want. This book is just plain fun. I recommend you start it early in the afternoon on a free day, though, unless you want to be up all night long racing to the denouement.

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate speculative elements into their fiction. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

When Michael Crichton wrote The Andromeda Strain, he was not just writing a mediocre novel about extra-terrestrial bacteria. He was founding a (sub) genre of SFF that found a massive mainstream audience.

The techno-thriller has all of the pacing and suspense that we might expect of a John Grisham novel, but it also contains the encyclopedic detail that readers expect to find in “hard science fiction.”

To be honest, I’ve always been skeptical of the “techno-thriller” as a genre. It feels like a marketing gimmick to get skeptics to read SFF. However, while I may be skeptical of “techno-thrillers” as a category of fiction, that hasn’t stopped me from enjoying its stories.

After all, there is something very compelling about the technical details that Crichton outlines in his novels. Sometimes it’s important to know how things work, and sometimes it’s fascinating to discover how things went wrong. And it’s always fun to read about scientists poking fun at each other’s disciplines.

In The Andromeda Strain, we make fun of biologists.

Crichton tells the story of a group of scientists (a character collection that he would return to) that attempt to study and contain lethal alien bacteria. When discussing characters in The Andromeda Strain, it is difficult to resist making a list of excuses about why the characters in The Andromeda Strain don’t need to have any personality beyond a conflict between scientific method and human error. Crichton’s best effort may be referring to these characters as “Wildfire” scientists, though they are neither wild nor fiery.

In true techno-thriller fashion, it is the alien bacteria that steal the show. The Andromeda strain is not only lethal but also horrifically deadly. How villainous!

The most memorable aspects of The Andromeda Strain have nothing to do with characters, horror, or even suspense. Instead, Crichton is at his best as he meticulously outlines the Wildfire lab, the precautions that scientists have taken to protect themselves from lethal bacteria, the safeguards against human error, the fail-safes that anticipate design flaws, the futuristic crew quarters, and even the scientific experiments.

He also outlines how all of this planning goes wrong.

It makes for surprisingly impressive reading. We often celebrate poets that write innovative sonnets because the sonnet is such a challenging and restrictive form. With The Andromeda Strain, Michael Crichton has taken the form of a textbook or (at best) journal entry and attempted to make it thrilling. So although we see more evolution of bacteria than of character in The Andromeda Strain, Crichton’s achievements should not be dismissed.

The lack of character development does make it difficult to access The Andromeda Strain. As a novel, it is a middling read, but as a template, The Andromeda Strain would launch one of the most successful careers in … the techno-thriller’s history.

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

Two themes drive Kevin Brockmeier’s The Illumination.  The first is a fantasy motif, placing this novel right on the line that separates the best fantasy from the genre-that-won’t-admit-it’s-a-genre, i.e., the literary novel. This motif is the Illumination itself:  beginning at 8:17 on a Friday night, every spot of pain on every human’s body begins to shine, a bright light emanating from the impacted heel of a woman in high heels, a cavity in the mouth of a politician, the sore spot on the back of a constant reader’s neck.  The Illumination is so bright in cases of serious injury that doctors and nurses need to wear sunglasses to attempt to revive a patient in heart failure. There is no explanation for this strange light. Some think that it will end all wars, as the blaze of the suffering of others will be too much for soldiers to handle, but alas, our capacity for the suffering of others seems to be more or less infinite.

The second theme is the journal Patricia Williford keeps, the one in which she records her husband’s daily love notes to her. Jason Williford read once somewhere that, if you could find just one thing to love about your spouse every day, your marriage would last forever. He started looking for that one thing every day, and posted a mash note on the refrigerator every morning. Patricia wrote them all down in her journal.

When Patricia and Jason are in an automobile accident, Patricia winds up sharing a room with Carol Ann Page, who has sliced her thumb so badly while attempting to open a package (one wound up in layers of packing tape, the kind lined through with threads for extra security; her ex-husband’s idea of a joke, as it’s how he’s wrapped up her alimony check) that she has to have it reattached, requiring a hospital stay.  Patricia is certain that Jason has died in the accident, and therefore gives Carol Ann her journal, saying that she could never bear to read it again. Then Patricia dies in a blaze of light – heart failure, organ failure, all her physicians know is that they can barely see to tend to her. Carol Ann keeps the notebook, and reads it a page at a time. In one of the saddest lines in the book, she thinks, “The fact that the two of them were no longer kissing each other’s shoulders … it seemed like a frightening mistake.  And even if there was a Heaven, … and even if they were together in it, that would not make it right.”

Patricia was wrong; her husband survived, and he wants the journal back. Ultimately, Jason finds that it is in Carol Ann’s hands, and he retrieves it, full of anger, injured, bereft.  Now the novel turns to telling his story, telling of his life after both the Illumination and the accident, explaining from his perspective how the world works and doesn’t work.  He tries to resume his work as a photographer, and takes some amazing photographs of teenagers slicing their own skin open in order to see the light shining forth from the wounds. In the process, he winds up with an 18-year-old roommate, Melissa, whose parents have kicked her out after finding out about her hobby of self-mutilation through the publication of one of Jason’s photographs. Melissa discovers the journal, which once again plays a part in the lives of the characters, until it again disappears, and the story follows it on.

In this way, following the journal, we learn of the lives of Chuck, a child in grade school who has given up speaking; Ryan, a missionary; Nina, a writer who adapts some of the lines from the journal to her own novel; and Morse, a street person. Each of these individuals has his or her entire story told, the day-to-dayness of their lives, how they see things, how they feel about how they exist.  Their lives are all touched by the words in the journal and by the light of injury and sickness, all in their own way.

Brockmeier tells his episodic story with words of enormous beauty, words that are so arranged that they can pierce straight through to your soul.  The musing of the religious Ryan, for instance, on pain and injury and the Illumination: “Perhaps the light He had brought to their injuries, or allowed the world to bring, was simply a new kind of ornamentation. The jewelry with which He decorated His Lovers. The oil with which He Anointed His sons.”  There is no explanation for the Illumination, and there is no explanation for human suffering, Brockmeier seems to be saying, and God keeps His silence.

And if that was the case, Ryan thought, if it was our suffering that made us beautiful to God, and if that was why He allowed it to continue, then how dare He, how dare He, and why, why, why, why, why?  He loved us, or so He said, but what did His love mean?  What was it good for?  It didn’t change anything, it didn’t improve anything, it only lingered in the distance, fluttering like a bird around the margins of their wretchedness.

Why is there suffering in the world if God loves us?  No one has ever been able to answer this question to the satisfaction of most of us. Brockmeier asks it, too, and eloquently.

I’ve been a fan of Kevin Brockmeier ever since I read A Brief History of the Dead. He writes with grace, wit and beauty, and he never shies away from the hard questions. The Illumination is a great example of his quirky imagination. I look forward to the next.

Depression-era America in the Dust Bowl must have seemed like living through the apocalypse. The very earth was drying up and blowing away. Nothing would grow and the rain never came. There was no food, families were disintegrating, and death stalked the land. This is the setting for Mr. Shivers, a first novel by Robert Jackson Bennett.

Upon reading the first several chapters of Mr. Shivers, one forms a mental image of the author: old and craggy, a face like a few miles of dirt road, hard and sad. It’s something of a shock to see the fresh-faced young man who gives a Mona Lisa smile from the book jacket. He looks more like a college student than like the cross between John Steinbeck and Cormac McCarthy one would suspect of having written this bleak prose. Indeed, Mr. Shivers is a book that mostly inhabits the real world, and only crosses over into dark fantasy in a major way in the last third. No wonder it’s classified by the Library of Congress merely as “fiction,” even while horror fans welcome this new voice.

Connelly is a bereaved father who seeks to avenge the death of his young daughter, a death that has all but destroyed his marriage as well as his heart. He knows what the murderer looks like: he is man with a strangely, grotesquely scarred face. Connelly quickly falls in with others who are looking for the same man, for essentially the same reason. Together, they move from Hooverville to hobo camp to riding the rails in pursuit of the scarred man, who always seems just a town or two ahead of them.

Along the way, they encounter many who are heading west to find a better life – or, barring that, at least paying work that will allow them to feed their families. Bennett portrays the depth of desperation of these folks, as in describing one extended family that spent the last of its ready cash on a few cars. It is almost immediately clear to Connelly that the dealer conned this desolate family into taking some of the worst vehicles on the road. Bennett shows us a key aspect of Connelly’s character in his charity to this family, as he fixes up the cars so that they can at least make it to the next town without a breakdown.

Indeed, Connelly often is kind and thoughtful to those he is traveling with, as well as those he meets along the way, which is why it is so shocking when he commits acts of incredible violence. Some of those acts are required by circumstances, but others seem unnecessarily cruel, and we start to wonder exactly who Connelly is.

Even more, we start to wonder who this scarred man he chases is. The man has left a trail of death behind him, but it is never clear exactly how he killed his victims, or why. When Connelly finally meets up with the man, he asks why the man killed his daughter; the scarred man replies, “So she would be dead.” This chilling answer is a key to our understanding of the fundamental nature of Connelly and the scarred man, and it is here that we find ourselves in the horrifying territory of a struggle that is not only one of life and death for two men, but for all humankind.

Bennett is masterful at creating atmosphere. The book is permeated with brown – the brown of dust in the air, the brown of the naked earth of the Hoovervilles, the brown of clothing worn too long and too hard. It is brown, not black, that is the color of death in this book, the brown of an earth that refuses to let anything grow any longer, the brown of a world with no rain.

Bennett is also skillful with dialogue. You can hear the voices in your head, from the old man Connelly meets early on who tells him to go home to the scarred man himself, who speaks as plainly about his task on Earth as anyone could.

If Bennett’s plot is ultimately entirely predictable, well, that is the nature of writing about mythological figures. Even as one hears the echoes of Stephen King’s Dark Tower sequence in the events of Mr. Shivers (Connelly is the gunslinger, the scarred man the man in black), it is evident that Bennett is trying to say something new about his themes. His ending is frightening and sad. And true.

Glen Hirshberg is one of our modern short story masters. His first collection, The Two Sams, won the International Horror Guild Award for best collection, and was nominated for the World Fantasy Award as well. American Morons was nominated for the World Fantasy Award for best collection in 2007. Short horror fiction is difficult to write well, but Hirshberg does it consistently.

Hirshberg is an “edgy” author because his fiction tends to reside in the twilight between fantasy and horror known as dark fantasy. He doesn’t write stories that make you cringe at the splatter, and the Cthulhu Mythos doesn’t play host to his characters. Rather, they all live in a world that is ours, but just a shade off. And who knows but that we might find ourselves living in those shadows one day?

“The Muldoon” is the best story in American Morons; it was nominated for an International Horror Guild Award for best mid-length fiction. It is told from the point of view of Miriam, who, with her elder brother Martin, undertakes some midnight explorations in her step-grandmother’s room on the night following her grandfather’s funeral. The children’s ages are not stated, but they seem to be at that pre-teenage stage of maximum mischief – ten and twelve, perhaps. They begin by exploring the closed rooms of “the hags” – their great-grandmothers, both bedridden as long as the children knew them. Both women were unpleasant in their own ways – “mean,” the children say. Exploring a room where an old woman died is scary enough, but finding the belongings of their dead relatives is even spookier. Worse yet are the discoveries yet to come about exactly how those two women died. “The Muldoon” is a wonderful story about family, and especially about a family in extremity.

“Flowers on Their Bridles, Hooves in the Air” is about a carousel. The question posed by the story is where the carousel is and how much it encompasses – and how you get off. How much power did the maker of those last beautiful horses have? What magic did he wield over the three characters who brave a ride? It’s an odd, almost surreal story.

I also loved “Safety Clowns,” about a young man’s first day selling ice cream from a truck along with a more experienced driver who has been recruited to show him the ropes. “The ropes” are a whole lot trickier than Max, the first person narrator, thought they were going to be, and pose some serious ethical dilemmas. Not all the ice cream being sold from those trucks is the kind made with milk and sugar. But being a drug pusher seems like not such a big deal, not when everyone seems so happy and the driver knows everyone – and the cash rolls in. At the end of the day, Max can see that he’s got a serious choice to make. But lucky Max: fate steps in. What makes this story eerie is the mechanism that fate uses. It’s not surprising to learn from Hirshberg’s notes that this story has some basis in fact, because the details add such realism that the frisson of horror on which the story ends feels completely authentic.

“American Morons” is about a couple of Americans in Italy who get stranded on a highway when they fail to put diesel into the gas tank of their rented car, using regular gas instead. They choose to trust in the kindness of strangers, even in an era when Americans are not particularly well-regarded abroad (indeed, they even claim to be Canadian for a time). As the story closes, one is forced to conclude that their trust was misplaced.

“It’s better to die horribly than live horribly, given a choice. Don’t you think?” asks the owner of a book-crammed bed and breakfast hotel of Nagle, the protagonist of “Like a Lily in a Flood.” Nagle has been coming to this particular B&B for years now, but he’s never before seen the journals that his hostess reads to him one night. The journals tell the tale of a doomsday cult that was disappointed when doomsday didn’t arrive on schedule in the middle of the 19^th century. What do the cult members do as a result, and to whom? On whom do they wreak revenge; and those who were the victims of their revenge, on whom do they wreak revenge? This dark story reminds us that history isn’t dead – and it isn’t even over.

“Devil’s Smile” is an oddly beautiful, though horrifying, tale of a love that doesn’t die. Despite its terrifying denouement, it stays in the memory as a story of faith and endurance. “Transitway” is similar in tone, with an elegiac quality that makes death seem ugly and horrific but also peaceful. How can Hirschberg make a hideous, loud, horrible death seem so authentic?

On the strength of these stories, I’ll be tracking down and reading everything Hirschberg has written to date, and I’ll greet every new story with joy.

At “The Edge of the Universe,” we review authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

Slake-moth, Uruk-hai, or vampire, the mark of great SFF authors is often their ability to describe monsters and horrors. They say that children are desensitized to violence, but I submit that many SFF readers have become desensitized to monsters. I have read about many SFF monsters before bed, but was never once afraid of the dark until I read Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel, The Road.

The premise of The Road is simple: The world as we know it has ended. An anonymous man and his son are trying to escape winter. Other people are still alive. Those people are monsters.

Reading The Road before bed was a mistake. How come?

It may be because its horror is so unexpected. Unlike McCarthy, many authors use horror simply to propel the plot. Take, for example, Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games books, which are among the most thrilling YA SFF works ever written. Collins’ hero, Katniss, is heroic in part because she is a monster slayer.

Consider the “muttations” that appear at the climax of The Hunger Games:

“The green eyes glowering at me are unlike any dog or wolf, any canine I’ve ever seen. They are unmistakably human. And that revelation has barely registered when I notice the collar with the number 1 inlaid with jewels and the whole horrible thing hits me. The blonde hair, the green eyes, the number … it’s Glimmer.

A shriek escapes my lips and I’m having trouble holding the arrow in place.”

Collins’ muttations are abominations made in part from the genes of children that Katniss has killed. It’s pretty gruesome, if you think about it. Fortunately, Katniss takes the time to be horrified on our behalf. She goes on to reflect how disturbed she feels so that we don’t have to.

Instead, our job is to keep reading until Katniss is once more full of righteous, brutally violent fury in defense of her partner. Collins is a very talented author, but for me, this imagery is little more than the cost of doing business and these monsters are little more than target practice. The muttations are nightmarish, but they will never give me nightmares. Call me desensitized, but I will remember Katniss firing her bow much longer than I will recall the muttations.

And perhaps it’s just as well that I’ll remember the righteous heroism of Katniss rather than the monstrous obstacles that she faces. After all, Collins is writing for a young adult audience.

Still, I hope her work will suffice to illustrate how different it felt to read The Road.

Although I first read The Road over three years ago, I have found it difficult to forget the horror of what McCarthy describes. McCarthy’s imagery without confessional introspection is horrific, an approach that McCarthy takes right from the start of The Road:

“A creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark.”

This image has haunted me for three years. To be honest, I wish it was the only one, but the man and his son continue on their journey.

In McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic world, people have begun to feed on each other. Still, the man and his son are sometimes forced to find shelter, and McCarthy has no need for his hero to reflect on the horrifying reality of what is kept in the cellar of one house:

“He crouched and stepped down again and held out the light. Huddled against the back wall were naked people, males and females, all trying to hide, shielding their faces with their hands. On the mattress lay a man with his legs gone to the hip and the stumps of them blackened and burnt. The smell was hideous.

Jesus, he whispered.”

Many authors would take the time to outline in detail how their protagonist feels as if to offer the reader a guide to experiencing and overcoming horror. McCarthy resists this tendency, leaving his readers to cope as best they can.

What McCarthy describes is perhaps the most monstrous depiction of humanity that I have ever read, and I found that the impact was overwhelming. Every time the man and son encountered human beings, I had to flip ahead to see whether they survived.

The best thing about good monsters is finding a way to defeat them and most of us who read SFF – a rather optimistic genre when it comes to monster slaying – enjoy watching our heroes overcome overwhelming odds to do so. But if you’ve begun to feel that SFF’s fantastic monsters are a little flat, consider reading this bleak post-apocalyptic tale.

But be careful: when the man tells his son that “You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget,” he might well be describing McCarthy’s The Road.

At “The Edge of the Universe,” we review authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

It is well documented that SFF readers love trilogies, prequel trilogies, tetralogies, and “cycles.” Some authors describe settings, but SFF authors “build” worlds and universes. For many SFF readers, the standard of a well-built world is whether or not it warrants a series.

In Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood tells the story of Crake, a brilliant scientist who decides to save Earth by wiping out humanity, including himself, and replacing it with a new species of beings. To say the least, Crake’s is a bold solution, but does this world deserve to be expanded?

Yes.

Except, Atwood prefers not to call it a “sequel.” Don’t call it a “prequel,” either. Year of the Flood is a companion novel. It might seem like nitpicking, but Year of the Flood takes place simultaneously with the events of Oryx and Crake through the eyes of new characters. Regardless of what you call it, Year of the Flood does a fine job of coloring in the world that Atwood sketched in Oryx and Crake. The Earth is falling apart and only God’s Gardeners seem to care.

God’s Gardeners grow their own food on rooftops, strive to live beneath the notice of governments and corporations, and they teach their children a great deal about ecology and the Bible. Many of the Gardeners, particularly the members of the leading council of Adams and Eves, are former doctors and scientists that refused to lend their expertise to corporate interests that harm the environment. In our world of “New Atheists,” it might seem unlikely for naturalists to join a cult, but in Year of the Flood, they join in droves.

Atwood is often praised for her sharp wit, which may well be at its sharpest when the Gardeners attempt to unite scientific knowledge, the dogma of the Gardeners, and Biblical stories. The Gardeners believe that God created people to be vegetarians. However, the Gardener children find it troubling that people have teeth capable of tearing meat. Consequently, the Adams and Eves look for a Biblical story or verse that can resolve this potential contradiction. Why do scientists bother with all of this? Many of the Gardeners are scientists that believe that religion survived because it offered evolutionary advantages. Consequently, the Gardeners feel that the best way to save the earth is to incorporate religious teachings into their worldview. For example, many of their saints are naturalists.

The Gardeners strive to be benevolent, but not all of their members are able to live up to the pacifist’s ideal. Eventually, Adam 7, or “Mad Adam” starts a splinter group called “MaddAddam.” These dissidents seek to break apart the infrastructure that allows corporations to destroy the environment. Among other things, MaddAddam engineers organisms that eat asphalt and car tires.

One member of this splinter group is Crake, a brilliant scientist who determines that the most efficient way to save the earth is to eliminate and replace human beings. As the Gardeners would say, Crake engineered a “waterless flood.” Moments that illustrate Crake’s motives are not the focus of Year of the Flood, but Atwood fans will enjoy tracking the interplay between the two novels.

Oryx and Crake offered allegorical warnings about how our decisions are taking humanity to hell in a hand basket, and Year of the Flood’s warnings feel just as fiery. Coffee corporations are robbing wildlife of their natural habitat. Health corporations infect their low-level employees with diseases so they can test experimental drugs on them, all the while collecting the insurance money for the treatment. The gap between the rich and the poor seems insurmountable and the rich live in isolated compounds, willfully oblivious to the suffering of the earth and the poor around them. It’s almost enough to make one want to join a cult centered on compassion, living in harmony with the earth, and rooftop gardening…

SFF fans that love a good story set in a well-built world will be pleased with Year of the Flood. Exploring the dogma of God’s Gardeners is as fun as Atwood’s ecological dystopia is shocking. Year of the Flood may not be a sequel, but I for one would certainly welcome a third novel in this … don’t call it a “trilogy.”

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

In Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood details an apocalyptic plague, introduces a new species of creatures that have been genetically designed to replace humanity, and the villain is a mad scientist in love. What could be more “SFF” than Oryx and Crake?

Quite a lot, according to Margaret Atwood, who prefers to describe her novel as “speculative fiction” rather than “science fiction.” In interviews promoting Oryx and Crake, Atwood explained that everything that takes place in Oryx and Crake is based on trends that we can see today, as opposed to distant planets that have an allegorical connection to our lives. Atwood is “speculating” about where our society is headed. It’s a distinction that some readers may choose to reject, but it’s an approach that adds urgency to the world that Atwood has built.

When the story opens, “Snowman,” the last human, is standing on a beach looking at now useless skyscrapers as he considers that no one anywhere can say what time it is. This is the world after the plague. However, although Snowman is the last of his kind, he is not alone. With him are the “Crakers,” a group of genetically hybrid creatures, designed to eliminate all of humanity’s flaws. The Crakers are better able to defend themselves against nature – the scorching heat, the biting bugs, and the surviving predators – than Snowman, but they are otherwise naïve about the world they find themselves in. Snowman shepherds this new species through its early years, and the Crakers use their manufactured genes to help Snowman survive the post-apocalypse.

A second storyline introduces us to the world before the plague. Today, many scientists warn that we need to curb our emissions, our wanton use of resources, and our reliance on monocultures. Atwood speculates about what will happen if we dismiss these warnings: the sun seems hotter, the weather is violent and erratic, and bacteria have evolved to the point that the wealthy live in isolated compounds that protect them from the germs that prey on the poor. Thankfully, there are also exciting new drugs like “Blysspluss,” which protects its users from sexually transmitted diseases and is also said to improve orgasms. Readers that have little patience for allegory or obtuse allusions will not have to struggle to find Atwood’s targets.

There are plenty of targets – and warnings – in Oryx and Crake, and it often feels like a call to action; however, it is not a simple screed in which a green-thumbed hero triumphs over a cigar-smoking businessman. Instead, Oryx and Crake, as the title suggests, is a love story. Our mad scientist, Crake, is in love with a former child prostitute, Oryx, who has also had a relationship with Crake’s best friend, Jimmy. Unfortunately, as fans of Margaret Atwood’s “literary” fiction already know, love is all too often a painful experience.

Oryx and Crake can also be approached as an “SF” adventure as well. One of my favorite scenes has Snowman on the run from “pigoons,” which are extremely intelligent pigs whose genetic code has been spliced with human code. Snowman has been cut off from his protective Crakers and he has to think fast if he’s going to prevent the extinction of the human race.

Oryx and Crake is a masterpiece that sits on the edge of several genres. Atwood combines the distinctive character development and wordplay that has earned her so many literary fiction accolades with the speculative premise that we associate with SFF to create an impressive story that few readers will be able to forget. Regardless of where it’s shelved, Oryx and Crake is a must read for SFF fans.

Ryan Skardal introduced a new column that will run on occasional Fridays.

Justin Cronin’s The Passage was one of the most popular novels of 2010. In fact, The Passage may well be a tour de force of genre fiction, if for no other reason than it seems to bring so many genres together with its cowboys, vampires, post-apocalyptic society, and even a mystical nun. Yet, The Passage was often marketed, reviewed, and sold as “literary” fiction.

Has the gap between the mainstream and genre fiction been bridged?

Certainly, genre used to be a powerful concept when all the genres were kept separate from the “mainstream,” and from each other. When my father was a kid, he shopped in the science fiction section, but, by the time I was buying books, science fiction and fantasy were already sharing shelves – and even stories, as readers of Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun will report. It seems that the walls that separate one genre from another are being torn down, not to mention the walls that separate the “literary mainstream” from “genre fiction.”

Still, regardless of how books are shelved, there does seem to be a movement to keep creating more genres, or subgenres, including “steampunk,” “weird fiction,” and “paranormal romance.” On the other hand, some authors balk at these categories and prefer to place their work beneath the wider umbrella of “speculative fiction.”

Understandably, many authors, readers, reviewers, and bloggers take the question of genre quite seriously, but I’m more inclined to enjoy the discussion of genre than to want to debate it in detail. When China Miéville was asked how he felt about being labeled “new weird,” he responded that

“If someone comes up with a cool name for a movement and makes a vaguely plausible and more to the point performative, entertaining claim as to why it matters, why it’s a movement, why not? I mean, manifestos are fun.”

It is fun to discuss genre, literary movements, and manifestos – even if I’m not particularly concerned over how one differs from another. For the purposes of this column, let’s agree that there is a literary universe that occasionally overlaps the SFF universe that cannot (and should not) be ignored.

Two universes or more, some authors travel between the mainstream and SFF more easily than others do. Unfortunately, our perception of some of these intergalactic authors often fails to keep pace with their versatility. Stephen King, who has won lifetime achievement awards for his work, will probably never win a Pulitzer. Margaret Atwood, who has written several excellent SF novels and who has won the Arthur C. Clarke award, will probably never see those works shelved next to 2001: A Space Odyssey.

In fact, we don’t have a page for Margaret Atwood here at Fantasy Literature, and perhaps that’s just as well. Atwood’s career has a well-established place in the “literary fiction” universe, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want to read and review her books. Thus, I’m starting a new column called “The Edge of the Universe,” in which I will review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their work. However you want to label them, I hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with me.