Book Review | Children of Earth and Sky by Guy Gavriel Kay

From the small coastal town of Senjan, notorious for its pirates, a young woman sets out to find vengeance for her lost family. That same spring, from the wealthy city-state of Seressa, famous for its canals and lagoon, come two very different people: a young artist traveling to the dangerous east to paint the grand khalif at his request—and possibly to do more—and a fiercely intelligent, angry woman, posing as a doctor’s wife, but sent by Seressa as a spy.

The trading ship that carries them is commanded by the accomplished younger son of a merchant family, ambivalent about the life he’s been born to live. And farther east a boy trains to become a soldier in the elite infantry of the khalif—to win glory in the war everyone knows is coming.

As these lives entwine, their fates—and those of many others—will hang in the balance, when the khalif sends out his massive army to take the great fortress that is the gateway to the western world...

***

Children of Earth and Sky sees contemporary fiction's finest fantasist return to the site of the Sarantine Mosaic and the subject of The Lions of Al-Rassan in a magnificently modest affair more interested in the myriad men and women caught in the crossfire of the holy war that flickers around its fringes than it is that momentous event.

The most apparent casualty of the the conflict so far is the city of cities itself, for just as Constantinople was toppled by the Ottomans, Sarantium in all its unimaginable majesty has finally fallen to the followers of an indomitable conqueror. It's known, now, as Asharias, "and the man who ruled there amid gardens where silence was apparently the law on pain of strangulation [...] wanted to rule the world." (pp.64-65)

You might imagine his megalomaniacal designs would inspire the several cities in the vicinity to put aside their trivial differences—after all, if Sarantium can be successfully sieged, then nowhere is safe from the Osmanli Empire's plans to expand. You'd be mistaken, I'm afraid. Sadly for the people of Seressa and Dubrava, the governing bodies of Kay's vibrant versions of Venice and Dubrovnik are entirely too dependent on trade to even consider open conflict:

For the Seressinis, the idea of peace, with open, unthreatened commerce, was the most important thing in the god's created world. It mattered more (though this would never actually be said) than diligent attention to the doctrines of Jad as voiced by the sun god's clerics. Seressa traded, extensively, with the unbelieving Osmanlis in the east—and did so whatever High Patriarchs might say or demand. (p.5)

Book Review | Central Station by Lavie Tidhar

A worldwide diaspora has left a quarter of a million people at the foot of a space station. Cultures collide in real life and virtual reality. The city is literally a weed, its growth left unchecked. Life is cheap, and data is cheaper.

When Boris Chong returns to Tel Aviv from Mars, much has changed. Boris’s ex-lover is raising a strangely familiar child who can tap into the datastream of a mind with the touch of a finger. His cousin is infatuated with a robotnik—a damaged cyborg soldier who might as well be begging for parts. His father is terminally-ill with a multigenerational mind-plague. And a hunted data-vampire has followed Boris to where she is forbidden to return.

Rising above them is Central Station, the interplanetary hub between all things: the constantly shifting Tel Aviv; a powerful virtual arena, and the space colonies where humanity has gone to escape the ravages of poverty and war. Everything is connected by the Others, powerful alien entities who, through the Conversation—a shifting, flowing stream of consciousness—are just the beginning of irrevocable change.

At Central Station, humans and machines continue to adapt, thrive... and even evolve.

***

World Fantasy Award winner Lavie Tidhar rewrites the rules of the short story collection in Central Station, an ambitious assemblage of thirteen tales tall but indubitably true that are all the more remarkable when read together.

"Substantially different versions" (p.251) of eleven of the efforts it collects were previously published, in various venues, between November 2011 and September 2014, and the handful of them that I read then impressed me immensely. 'The Smell of Orange Groves' and 'The Lord of Discarded Things,' for instance, represented intimate glimpses into the lives of a few of the disaffected folks who call the "bordertown" (p.34) at the base of the Central Station spaceport home.

In one, after decades in the Belt, birthing doctor Boris Chong returns to his roots to tend to his ailing parent, only to end up hooking up with his childhood sweetheart Miriam Jones, who's grown older in the intervening years—as has he—and adopted a boy. In the other, Ibrahim, an alte-zachen man, or "junk gypsy," (p.48) finds a genetically modified messiah in a small shoebox, and resolves to raise him himself—free of his fate as far as is possible in a place like Central Station, which is so rife with religion that it boasts a "faith bazaar." (p.23)

They were little things, those stories; lovely, and lively, and large of heart, but little, admittedly. Not so in Central Station, which generously extends the two tales I've touched on at the same time as seamlessly stitching together their characters and narratives with those of the other eleven featured here.

Book Review | Zero K by Don DeLillo

Jeffrey Lockhart’s father, Ross, is a billionaire in his sixties, with a younger wife, Artis Martineau, whose health is failing. Ross is the primary investor in a remote and secret compound where death is exquisitely controlled and bodies are preserved until a future time when biomedical advances and new technologies can return them to a life of transcendent promise. Jeff joins Ross and Artis at the compound to say “an uncertain farewell” to her as she surrenders her body.

“We are born without choosing to be. Should we have to die in the same manner? Isn’t it a human glory to refuse to accept a certain fate?”

These are the questions that haunt the novel and its memorable characters, and it is Ross Lockhart, most particularly, who feels a deep need to enter another dimension and awake to a new world. For his son, this is indefensible. Jeff, the book’s narrator, is committed to living, to experiencing “the mingled astonishments of our time, here, on earth.”

Don DeLillo’s seductive, spectacularly observed and brilliant new novel weighs the darkness of the world—terrorism, floods, fires, famine, plague—against the beauty and humanity of everyday life; love, awe, “the intimate touch of earth and sun.”

***

"Everybody wants to own the end of the world," begins Don DeLillo's first new novel since Point Omega in 2010, and like the finest opening lines, Zero K's is soaked through with significance.

Fittingly for a work of fiction interested in "fathers and sons," this is a remark Ross Lockhart, a billionaire in his sixties, makes to Jeffrey—his aimless heir, and our narrator—as they stand in his opulent New York office, surrounded on all sides by abstract art and other markers of money: motifs readers will encounter repeatedly as they make their way through Zero K. It's important to note, furthermore, that this phrase is not spoken in the moment, but rather recalled by "a man propelled into obsessive reflection."

As to the words themselves... well. To own is to possess, yes, but these days, it also denotes domination, and this is what Ross wants: to use his dollars to dominate the end of the world. That's not to say the apocalypse, but the end of the world as we mere mortals perceive it, at the very end of our selves—in death.

Ross makes this startling statement, we learn a little later, because his second wife Artis Martineau is dying. But the owner and operator of the Lockhart fortune isn't a man so easily beaten. See, he's been led to believe that his riches might give her a future in the future, which is why he's flown her to the home of a clinical cult called Convergence, where—in exchange for substantial donation, I dare say—she'll be frozen at a temperature approaching absolute zero in her last moments, to be re-awoken one day, decades or centuries or millennia hence, when medicine is in a position to correct her condition.

Book Review | Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel

A girl named Rose is riding her new bike near her home in Deadwood, South Dakota, when she falls through the earth. She wakes up at the bottom of a square hole, its walls glowing with intricate carvings. But the firemen who come to save her peer down upon something even stranger: a little girl in the palm of a giant metal hand.

Seventeen years later, the mystery of the bizarre artifact remains unsolved—its origins, architects, and purpose unknown. Its carbon dating defies belief; military reports are redacted; theories are floated, then rejected.

But some can never stop searching for answers.

Rose Franklin is now a highly trained physicist leading a top secret team to crack the hand’s code. And along with her colleagues, she is being interviewed by a nameless interrogator whose power and purview are as enigmatic as the provenance of relic. What’s clear is that Rose and her compatriots are on the edge of unraveling history’s most perplexing discovery—and figuring out what it portends for humanity. But once the pieces of the puzzle are in place, will the result prove to be an instrument of lasting peace or a weapon of mass destruction?

***

When the ground beneath her feet disappears for the first time, eleven year old Rose Franklin is excitedly riding her bike around the block in her home town in sleepy South Dakota. Hours later, she wakes up in the clutches of "a giant metal hand" (p.5) with a bit of a headache, but otherwise unharmed.

The military take ownership of the hand almost immediately, and a cover-up of course commences. Once everyone has been sworn to secrecy, the Powers That Be bring the boffins in, but nothing they discover makes any sense. The artifact appears to be something like six thousand years old, which "flies in the face of everything we know about American civilisations." (p.11) It's primarily made of iridium, an immensely dense metal mined from meteorites, mostly—yet the hand is "inexplicably light given its composition." (p.14) Last but not least, the piece came complete with a handful of panels covered in carvings that glow even though they've no light source.

It takes seventeen years for the military to admit that it doesn't have the first clue what to do and hand the hand off to the University of Chicago for further research. Its experts, too, are baffled to begin with—until they bring Rose Franklin in to head up the study.

Now nearing thirty, Rose is a qualified physicist who recognises how unlikely her entanglement with the aforementioned artifact is. "I don't really believe in fate," she says, "but somehow 'small world' doesn't begin to do this justice." (p.12) At pains to prove her history with the hand hasn't clouded her judgment, she approaches it with an open mind:

Generally speaking, people tend not to question what they've been told was true. Scientists are no different; they've just been told a lot more things. As a physicist, it would never occur to me to question the four fundamental forces, for example. I take them for granted, like every other thing I learned, and I try to build on that. We always look forward; never look back. But this thing... it's different. It challenges us. It spits in the face of physics, anthropology, religion. It rewrites history. It dares us to question everything we know about ourselves... about everything. (pp.30-31)

And it's this—Rose's willingness to question everything—that ultimately unpicks the mystery. She becomes convinced that there's more than just a hand out there in the big wide world, and as it transpires, she's quite right.

Book Review | Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

Welcome to Black Spring, the seemingly picturesque Hudson Valley town haunted by the Black Rock Witch, a seventeenth-century woman whose eyes and mouth are sewn shut. Blind and silenced, she walks the streets and enters homes at will. She stands next to children's beds for nights on end. So accustomed to her have the townsfolk become that they often forget she's there. Or what a threat she poses. Because if the stitches are ever cut open, the story goes, the whole town will die.

The curse must not be allowed to spread. The elders of Black Spring have used high-tech surveillance to quarantine the town. Frustrated with being kept in lockdown, the town's teenagers decide to break the strict regulations and go viral with the haunting. But, in so doing, they send the town spiraling into a dark nightmare.

***

An ancient, archetypal evil meets a miscellany of modern motfis—such as surveillance and social media—in HEX, the first of Dutch wunderkind Thomas Olde Heuvelt's five genre novels (of which this is the fifth) to be translated into the English language.

You may well have heard of the aforementioned author already; after all, he won the Hugo Award for Best Novelette in 2015, and was nominated for another unsettling short story, 'The Boy Who Cast No Shadow,' two years previously. HEX is long-form horror, however, and long-form horror is hard, not least because the unknowable, on the back of which so much such fiction is built, can only remain so for so long before folks get sick and tired of not knowing.

Yet in HEX, we know what would be unknowable in most horror novels from the get-go: the cause and the consequences of the ghost that has haunted the heart of the Hudson Valley for hundreds of years. We know her name and approximate age:

"It was in Black Spring that [Katherine van Wyler] was sentenced to death for witchcraft in 1664—although they didn't call it Black Spring back then; it was a Dutch trappers' colony known as New Beeck—and it's here in Black Spring that she's remained." (p.63)

It's even worse than that, though. This too we know; that before the noose was wrapped around her neck—as "an act of mercy," (p68) if you can credit it—Katherine was made to murder her own son in order to save her dearest daughter. Little wonder, then, that she's been making life difficult for the residents of Black Spring since; so difficult that an infrastructure unlike any other has had to be erected around her.