Fantastic Metropolis

Compiling this list has been a chastening experience. It’s forced me to acknowledge how little I’ve read outside the genre this past year, and how little of what I’ve read within the genre has been for my own pleasure rather than as a paying gig. I didn’t read more than a handful of nonfiction books, and none of them were noteworthy. All in all, a pathetic performance. Here’s what stood out, in no particular order.

The Skinner, by Neal Asher. Give Charles Darwin the sensibilities of the Marquis de Sade and the powers of an omnipotent deity and you might come up with a planet as gleefully violent as Spatterjay, where the dominant life forms are gigantic variations of the phylum Mollusca. Throw in some all-but-immortal sea captains, intelligent hornets, a dead detective, creepy aliens with a taste for human flesh, and a flying head, and you’ve got a science fiction novel that’s as smart as it is pulpy. You can read my review at Science Fiction Weekly.

Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell. A post-modern visionary who is also a master of styles and genres, Mitchell combines flat-out adventure, a Nabokovian love of puzzles, a keen eye for character, and a taste for mind-bending philosophical and scientific speculation in the tradition of Umberto Eco and Philip K. Dick. I was also reminded of the The Sea of Fertility quartet, Yukio Mishima’s masterpiece tracing the twisted paths of reincarnated souls through time. But Mitchell while may recall these writers, he very much goes his own way.

The Wizard Knight, by Gene Wolfe. Wolfe is a writer who can make me gasp with admiration and shiver with pleasure; he is also a writer who can make me seethe with frustration. His hyperconscious, hyper-intelligent fictions are intricate puzzles of meaning, memory, identity and faith set up with an almost preternatural degree of control. Like Tolkien’s masterpiece, which is its model, The Wizard Knight was written as a single work, and though it was published as two volumes (The Knight and The Wizard), those who approve of courtesy (at least) to living authors will read The Wizard Knight as Wolfe intended it. I could go on ad nauseum about the novel’s purposefully fractured structure and intricate world building (which features seven spheres of existence, hierarchically arranged from smallest to grandest, foulest evil to purest good, least to most real, and so on, with the smaller encapsulated within the larger and time running at different rates in each), but I’ll restrict myself to stating that, although marred by Wolfe’s utter inability to write convincingly in the voice of a contemporary teenage boy, and by a style that paradoxically grows more opaque even as it approaches a surface simplicity and directness that Hemingway might envy, and despite my conviction that Wolfe is no longer writing fantasy or science fiction in any meaningful sense but instead crafting sophisticated religious fables, The Wizard Knight is nevertheless essential reading. A fascinating gloss on the novel, on Wolfe’s debt to Tolkien, and on his own reactionary political beliefs, which stem from his Catholic faith, is available here.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke. A novel that may—may—prove to be as much a benchmark in the history of the genre as The Lord of the Rings or Little, Big. But while those novels are about the ebbing of magic and its ultimate loss, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is about the return of magic to the world, and to England specifically. Clarke works her literary magic with shrewdness and artistry, setting the novel during the Regency period of English history, when many aspects of the English national character were forged in the crucible of the Napoleonic wars. The book purports to be a true record of events, more history than novel, narrated by a character whose identity is never revealed but who is clearly omniscient (this narrator is not, as some reviewers have inexplicably maintained, the minor character John Segundus). Clarke gives her narrator a style whose sense and sensibility wonderfully capture the graceful ironies of Jane Austen, combined with something of Dickens’s inspired comedic flair. Readers will probably split over whether the liberal use of footnotes replete with facts and incidents both invented and real is a delightful enhancement or an annoying affectation; I come down firmly in the former camp. Much of Clarke’s complex and engaging back story is communicated through these footnotes, and a full understanding of what is going on in this book, behind the scenes, as it were—and make no mistake, the real story of the novel takes place behind the scenes, largely invisible to the eponymous main characters, who through most of the intricate plot falsely believe themselves to be acting on their own behalf, of their own volition—would be impossible without them. The novel is replete with sparkling wit, delightful anecdotes, breathtaking set pieces of historic battles, including Waterloo, and the kind of imaginative strangeness and weirdness that are the unmistakable signs of genuine originality, even genius.

Gardens of the Moon, by Steve Erikson. It’s hard not to be hyperbolic in praise of this terrific first novel by Erikson, the opening installment in his titanic Malazan Book of the Fallen series. Four of these novels have already come out in the UK, to great acclaim, but this is the first to appear in the U.S. The word “epic” gets thrown around a lot in the fantasy genre, mostly to describe works that are simply long, if not interminable. Very rarely does the length of these works have anything to do with the legitimate requirements of the story they have to tell: stories that in many cases could be told to better effect with more economy, or to best effect by not being told at all. But Gardens of the Moon is the real thing, an epic in the Homeric sense. It’s impossible to read these novels, filled with humans and gods and things in between struggling for supremacy or simple survival or plain dignity or love across a magically ravaged landscape in a brutal and seemingly endless war of conquest, without being reminded of the Iliad and the Odyssey. It’s the first heroic fantasy I’ve read that is powerful enough to wrest the genre out from under the dead hand of Tolkien.

Mortal Love, by Elizabeth Hand. Lush, intoxicating, harrowing prose. A romantic tale of madness, obsession, art, creativity, inspiration, and love. And faeries. And Swinburne. Who could ask for more? This exploration of the dangerous potency of the muse is Hand’s best, and perhaps most personal, book. The author’s website is a remarkably brave and generous gift to her readers.

The Pastel City and A Storm of Wings, by M. John Harrison. As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to appreciate Harrison more and more. I was a bit disappointed in his last novel, Light, but the gorgeous prose in these early works, combined with their rigorous attention to detail, both physical and emotional, never fails to inspire me.

Paul Witcover’s much-anticipated second novel, Tumbling After, is forthcoming in March 2005 from Eos.