Fantastic Metropolis

I read books for a living. As a freelance writer existing on the periphery of the publishing industry, I don’t often have the opportunity to choose my reading material; I am grateful for everything that comes my way. But this makes it difficult to read the books I want to read; I fall further and further behind. What follows, in no particular order, and not limited to books published in 2002, are books I read this year that were important to me.

The Fall of Chronopolis, Barrington J. Bayley

“With a hollow booming sound the Third Time Fleet materialized on the windswept plain.” Thus begins one of the greatest time travel space operas ever written. This baroque masterpiece of loopy paradox, earnest temporal and existential philosophy, perverse sex, and pulse-pounding action was first published in 1974, which is roughly when I first discovered it, circa age sixteen or so. Boy, did this one warp my impressionable young mind! Many years later, when writing my novel Waking Beauty (review), I pillaged my memories of Chronopolis shamelessly. Now Wildside Press has reissued it; I reread it; guess what? It still kicks ass!

The Scar, China Miéville

Let me quote from my review of this novel in Realms of Fantasy magazine: “China Miéville loots the traditions of a multitude of genres to explode boundaries, confound expectations, and, out of the ensuing chaos, create an extraordinary hybrid—at once beautiful and grotesque, violent and lyrical—that is far more than the sum of its parts.” The Scar had the added benefit of inspiring me to return to the Viriconium tales of Miéville’s master, M. John Harrison.

The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook, Paul Pipkin

Okay, I confess to a personal interest here. A little more than a year ago, I was the science fiction and fantasy editor of the short-lived iPublish.com, AOL Time Warner’s eBook and print-on-demand division. Of the fifteen books edited by me that were published between March and November of 2001, this first novel was the one closest to my heart. It’s a wildly ambitious fictional working out of the many-worlds theory featuring a large cast of characters both real and imaginary, all revolving around the now-almost-forgotten Lost Generation writer, mystic, libertine, drunk, and eventual suicide, William Seabrook. This is a novel that deserves much wider recognition, but it’s so damn audacious and in-your-face that no “reputable” publisher will consider it. Still available on Amazon.com…

Metaplanetary, Tony Daniel

A thoughtful and absorbing space opera that posits a Final Solution directed against AIs. Chilling, moving, utterly engrossing. The second volume should be out in spring 2003.

Appleseed, John Clute

You had best believe that the long knives were out and at their sharpest for the appearance of this novel by SF’s leading take-no-prisoners critic, a man respected and feared throughout the galaxy for the fierce rigor of his intellect, the infinite capacity of his memory, and the implacable moral authority of his critical judgment. Alas for lovers of schadenfreude, although rough going at times, liberally bedecked with the displays of abstruse knowledge Clute’s criticism is known for, Appleseed is an excellent book, strangely reminiscent in tone and style of the mid-to-late-seventies work of Delany but thoroughly up to date in its future worldbuilding. And it’s funny!

Quin’s Shanghai Circus, Edward Whittemore

Like The Fall of Chronopolis, here is another book that first blew my mind long ago and far away; by a strange coincidence, it too was originally published in 1974. Now Old Earth Books has reissued the novel, Whittemore’s first, along with his incomparable masterpiece, the Jerusalem Quartet. All these books are blindingly brilliant works of eccentric genius: hilarious, profoundly moving spy stories and secret histories on a first-name basis with the fantastic. Whittemore’s neglect by both the literary and genre establishments is shameful… but writers and a few discerning critics have always recognized his importance. Read him.

Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal, John M. MacGregor

Darger (1892-1973) has gained fame as an outsider artist both for his stunningly beautiful and violent artworks and for the 15,000-page text, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in what is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, that those unforgettable artworks were composed to illustrate. Darger’s brilliant and terrifying creation of a fantasy world in which children, mainly girls (often depicted naked, and often with penises) are slaves to adults who brutally torture and murder them, must be counted as among the supreme artistic triumphs of the 20^th Century… and one that uncannily seems to predict some of the darkest tendencies of the 21^st. It is also one of the most fascinating and revealing looks into the mind of a psychotic individual since Schreber’s autobiography, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. Like Schreber, Darger remained functional, though on a low level; a friendless recluse who escaped as a young man from the home for feeble-minded children to which he had been incomprehensibly committed as a child, Darger worked his whole life as a janitor in a series of Catholic hospitals, wrestling with God in the privacy of his conscience and, at night, alone, in the privacy of his small Chicago apartment, where, over the course of decades, without ever showing so much as a single sketch or word to anyone, he invented and mastered artistic techniques that astonish experts today and composed his own Iliad. Elizabeth Hand, in a brilliant essay in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, provocatively and persuasively painted Darger as a sort-of shadow figure to Tolkien, with whom he shares an amazing number of personal details. Carrying echoes of Carroll and Baum, the writings of whom were known to him, Darger’s work is, in the end, sui generis. It is of special importance, I think, to writers and artists in our genre: indeed, I would argue that it cannot be fully appreciated or understood apart from our genre any more than Tolkien’s work can. John MacGregor, a psychotherapist and art psychologist, author of the groundbreaking study The Discovery of the Art of the Insane (1989), is an indispensable guide into this simultaneously seductive and repellent world. A nice introduction to Darger’s life and work can be found online, although the art must be seen in person to be truly appreciated; on your next visit to New York, swing by the American Folk Art Museum on 53^rd Street.