Jeff Vandermeer's ABSOLUTION

Did I know, when I got my ARC of Absolution, Jeff Vandermeer's coda/prequel to his Area X trilogy, that I was about to add a new deity to my shrine of household gods? Of course I didn't. Should I have known that was a distinct possibility? Yes, yes, of course. 

 Listen.

 

When I was a kid, somebody gave me a rubber alligator that I imaginatively named Allie. I was fascinated by everything about it: the smell of the rubber, the textures of its skin and tail, the weird flexibility of its teeth, and especially its evil, oversized eyes. I used to take it with me into our wading pool of a summer, along with my barbies, knock-off and branded. At first Allie attacked them, of course. But later, when I decided it would be more fun if my barbies were villains instead of whatever they were supposed to be, I decided that he was their pet and ally, chiefly used to destroy tiny toy cities or help them to go on terrifying crime sprees. Allie made them badasses, though it would be years before I would dare to use such a word, that had "ass" in it. 

Many, many, many years later, Jeff Vandermeer, who had already written a whole trilogy in which the ecosystem itself has become a kind of villain/punisher figure, or, more accurately, has developed a whole new set of priorities that have nothing to do with humanity at all except in that humanity keeps sending walking and talking raw material into its clutches to play with, brought back these weird early memories of Allie when he wrote the best saurian antagonist since that crocodile ticked and tocked its way through Peter Pan, and he gave this saurian monster the best possible name: Smaug.*

But then, for reasons I cannot begin to fathom, he, and his army of biologists who first introduce Smaug onto the Forgotten Coast that will be known as Area X in 20 years, immediately rename her The Tyrant. I hate this decision and stomp my ineffectual little foot at it, but this giant mutant alligator of preternatural awareness and uncanny ubiquity is referred to for the rest of Absolution as The Tyrant. Phooey.

But this is my review, dammit, so I'm gonna keep calling her Smaug.

Smaug and a few other gators introduced to the Forgotten Coast, play merry hell with the biologists who bring them almost from the very first. Collectively known as the Cavalry (Central's code word for the series of enormous" packages the biologists hump into the area, sufficiently large and heavy and mysterious to lead the suspicious locals to conclude that they're not alligators -- which the FC already has plenty of -- but bars of gold with which the biologists will buy necessities and bribe suspicious locals), they're allegedly being released to study their migration patterns and to see if any of them make their way back to their original habititats. Which, of course, they don't. Much more fun to drive scientists crazy with anomalous signals from their tracking harnesses, stalk scientists, mysteriously turn up dead yet still be giving off signals that indicate purposeful movement in other locations, etc. 

I would read a whole novel of this alone, but of course Vandermeer has other, bigger, weirder ideas. Like mysterious echoes of beautiful piano music that turns out to be the exact same piano music played by one of the latter day suspicious locals of Area X in, I think, Acceptance. You know, when Old Jim plays his hands off that one night in the bar. Except, you know, that's 20 years in these biologists' future. 

And the music is the least of their problems.

In these dreams, the meadow "had become some other place," ill-used by "constant battle." A weird green-gold light came from the horizon, framed by the cleft between two mountains. An army of "scientists and psychics" struggled "across a plane of sand and bones toward the light." Grim-looking men and women, "who looked like veterans of some longer conflict..." All three claimed to see figures "stitching their way" through the undergrowth outside of Dead Town, and that these figures wore "old fashioned armor and helmets and some rode upon horses." But these figures had no faces, only the toothed hole of a lamprey's open mouth, endlessly circling a limitless gullet (italics mine)**

This passage is an amalgamation of text from the notebooks of three of the biologists who first bring Smaug to the FC in the first of Absolution's three constituent novellas, "Dead Town," as pieced together by none other than Old Jim, long after Smaug and a mysterious humanoid figure called The Rogue have inflated into legend, yet some time before Old Jim becomes the piano-bashing barkeep of the original trilogy. 

Old Jim, it turns out, was indeed more than he seemed in those original three books. 

Which, now that I think about it, kind of correspond to the three novellas of Absolution: the first, Annihilation, told from the point of view of the 12th Expedition's Biologist, aka Ghost Bird, as she first encounters Area X, to "Dead Town," relating the story of a team of biologists sent to study the region 20 years before it became Area X; Authority, focusing on the bureaucratic eccentricities of the Southern Reach as experienced by the grandson, Control, of the great Jack Severance of Central fame, to "The False Daughter," which relates Old Jim's maddening and dangerous experiences with that same Jack Severance and his terrible daughter/Control's mother, Jackie, as they come to grips with how weird the FC is/was even before the Border came down and Area X became an undeniable thing; and Acceptance, weaving the two prior storylines together even as the whole weird train disappears into the Cacotopic Stain possibly a whole 'nother galaxy or universe, to "The First and the Last," similarly syncretizing the prior two novellas into an even weirder whole that also manages to make the original trilogy even weirder than it already was, just by context! 

Oh, but see all that stuff about "old fashioned armor" and a "plane of sand and bones" and whatnot? Yeah, I'm pretty sure there's goddamned time travel in this witches' brew of a fictional milieu, too. I can't swear on it; I think I need to re-read this whole quartet again, possibly in reverse chronological order, before I commit like that, but I'm pretty sure that both wibbly wobbly and timey wimey are at least factors, if not driving forces, in Area X. Though possibly they've only become so now, as is hinted in bits of dialogue like "I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. It should be different already."

But lest I make it sound like Jeff Vandermeer has finally disappeared up his own asshole, I must take this moment to assure you that no, he is still very much here with us and still very much in control of what he is doing. This is still our man at the peak of his powers, and he makes sure he knows it by playing to all of his strengths: rapturously lovely nature writing, deeply researched and probably lived redneck anthropology, grotesque body horror, and, of course, wildlife behaving badly. As in rabbits devouring live fiddler crabs badly. To say nothing of the swimming, wallowing, munching, rushing, biting anomaly that is Smaug and her Manfriend.

Look, I could talk about this all day. I could rage on for a few hours about the howling fantods this book gave both me and my best reading buddy, SJ*** with its extended sequences involving house centipedes. I could share all of our slightly disjointed theorizing about who Smaug's Manfriend "really" is (we were both wrong, by the way). I haven't devoted any lines yet to how the character I despised the most in the original trilogy is now my favorite character in the whole cycle. He really loves drugs, you guys. Like a lot. You think Hunter S. Thompson loved drugs but that was a casual fling compared to how much this character regards drugs with the worshipful devotion of a Bacchante of old. And you really want to know who I'm talking about now, don't you? 

You've got to read the book your own self to find that out. Which, come on: you probably have it from Netgalley already, too. And probably already agree with me that while Absolution may not be the best Area X book, it is absolutely (heh) the most Area X book.

But I'm still gonna buy this when it's available. On audio. I can't wait to hear how a narrator handles this madness.

And yes, I still think Adrian Tchaikovsky's Alien Clay is still the retroactive origin point of this whole fictional universe. If that's even a thing. Well, it is now. I've made it one. Area X is Ground Zero of the Kilnification of Earth. If you get it, you get it.

*After the dragon in The Hobbit, natch.

**I'm much too lazy and fatigued from a vaccine hangover as of this writing to check the text right now, but I swear the bit I've italicized is more or less a verbatim description of one of the cacogens in Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. Possibly even that of my sometime namesake (in that I've copped its name for a gamer tag or social media handle more than once), Ossipago?

***Aka Popqueenie, who buddy read this with me and wrote of Absolution one of the most glorious book reviews of a glorious career of snarky book love. Go read it!

Kontakt: An Antholgy of Croatian SF (Ed Darko Macan & Tatjana Jambrišak; various translators)

I love a good speculative fiction anthology, especially one with a theme. Kontakt: An Anthology of Croatian SF wouldn't seem to have much of a unifying theme beyond the nationality of its authors, but  while it's a hodgepodge of sub-genres and styles, some interesting similarities emerge that make it hang together brilliantly. 

Originally printed as a sort of souvenir for the 2012 European Science Fiction Convention, which was held in Zagreb, Croatia that year, it's a great showcase of a single nation's best and brightest established and up and coming writers of speculative fiction -- only a handful of whom I had heard of before grabbing this book!

From weird alternate universe godpunk-cum-Christian eschatology (Katarina Brbora's "Avaleon and the Black Feather") to Kafka-esque military sci-fi (Darko Macan's "The Corridor") to accounts of the practical impact of mind-bending metaphysics that would do Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky proud (Goran Konvični's "Time Enough, and Space"), pretty much everything that speculative fiction lovers look for in an anthology. Unlike many that are more concerned with adhering to the conventions and restrictions of English language speculative fiction publishing, several of these stories express national and regional concerns that might alienate less careful or curious readers. A few minutes of research, or at least clicking on unfamiliar words or proper names in the ebook edition, will greatly enrich the experience of reading Kontakt. 

Nowhere is this more clear than in the aforementioned tale of Brbora's, "Avaleon and the Black Feather," which the anthology's editors describe as "a breezy treatment of that trinity of heavy topics: religion, patriotism and cheap jewelry," in which a young man of Italian heritage but Croatian birth, Santino, becomes low-end jewelry store clerk Tamara's new roommate and quickly establishes himself as even stranger than he already seemed. For one thing, he has a good-sized collection of Croatian editions of books that have not yet been published in Croatia. And his Bible turns out to have content that differs somewhat substantially from the one we and Tamara are familiar with. The famous Well to Hell hoax gets discussed as Tamara discovers that in Santino's Bible, "Sataniel" isn't the obnoxious boaster and tempter we know but is in fact the supreme authority on Earth, which he rules ruthlessly from a mighty fortress near the North Pole! Before we can say "portal fantasy" Tamara has followed Santino into an alternate universe where the city of Zagreb still looks a lot like her city of Zagreb but is in much better shape and is located near the Black Sea, where an ikavian dialect is the official language and the ugly blue stone in Tamara's janky ring (which her weird boss makes her wear around for marketing purposes) actually has vitally important supernatural properties. The story is plenty engaging as translated (by the author herself, as is generally the case in this anthology. Monolingual education is not a Slavic value!) but I suspect it resonates much more with Croatian readers. 

Kontakt also contains some first rate body horror. In Danilo Brozović's "Fingers" the protagonist discovers a unique affliction waiting in his DNA like a time bomb - but too late to do anything about it. At first he has a glimmer of hope when he learns that his father had the same grotesque problem at his age but doesn't now... until he realizes that his father, who has succumbed to dementia, might not remember how he got over their condition. Brozovć is more interested in letting us contemplate what life would be like suffering from such a condition than in explaining it, though, and the story takes off in an unexpected direction, leaving us with even more questions but still satisfied as the story ends. 

Less satisfying because perverse and icky if you are, as I am, on the prudish side, is the vividly imagined "De Cadenza" (Danjiel Bogdanović) in which a crew of bon vivants in space begin their list of perversions with using living human beings as furniture, with and upon which to have imaginatively perverse zero-gravity sex, and then develop even greater manias for acts the Marquis de Sade would balk at recording because they don't have any philosophy with which to dress up their indulgences. Eventually the story dispatches with them satisfyingly, though. But still, pass the brain bleach.

For my money, the most enjoyable of the lot is Tatjana Jambrišak's exciting and ultimately hopeful tale of a group marriage of space explorers who suddenly find themselves having to plan to re-start human society on a distant and newly discovered planet. "Give Me the Shuttle Key" is maybe the most conventional story in Kontakt but that doesn't make it dull or ordinary. The characters and their imperfectly fitting agendas are engaging enough and their situation compelling enough for me to long for a much longer work exploring their relationships and how they rise to meet their fates as maybe, but hopefully not solely, the founders of humanity's second chance.

Another standout, Aleksandar Žiljak's haunting "The Dead" plays off cultural memories of Nazi concentration camps* as it sees what might well be the site of one put to use for a new purpose: the economic exploitation of zombies, the cheapest and, if you have a willing bokor on the payroll, most easily managed labor force there is. The story has a whole camp full of them toiling day in, day out, assembling cell phones under the watchful eyes of Kevlar-clad overseers, armed to the teeth and well practiced at head-shots. Double tap to, uh, select. Good science fiction should afflict the comfortable; I was more uncomfortable reading this story (on my electronic device of choice) than I was any of the other stories except maybe "De Cadenza" (because I really am more than a little prudish). Your results may vary.

One way or the other, not a single story in Kontakt left me unmoved, and most drove me to look up their authors to see if anything else they've done is available to me. Many of the writers gathered here are associated with a Croatian speculative fiction magazine called Ubiq (hooray!) and I find myself wondering how hard it would be for language nerdish little me to just subscribe and bull on through with a dictionary (once I've figured out what dictionary to buy; the intricacies of language in this part of the world are beyond what I'm accustomed to)? But meanwhile, I know the gang at Apex have already discovered and shared Alexandr Žiljak, and that Dark Horse and Marvel gave Darko Macan a whole lot of work in the 90s that I haven't read yet, so maybe I'll start there. Regardless, next time you're hankering after some spec fic that's a little stranger than you've been getting lately, look to Croatia! Because wow! They are quite familiar with our stuff, but they're not by any means just producing more of the same. 

*One of which, Jasenovac, was located in Croatia back when it was part of occupied Yugoslavia. 

Hiron Ennes' LEECH

A lot of books I read nowadays feel like video games in prose, and Hiron Ennes' debut novel, Leech is a perfect example of this. It starts with our narrator riding a train through a snowy landscape to a destination that feels very much like the end of the line at the end of the world, and I couldn't stop thinking of that great old classic point and click adventure that was Benoit Sokal's Syberia games.

The world our unnamed protagonist inhabits, though, is somewhat lacking in those games' clockwork charm (aesthetically it's closer cousin is Mark Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet's City of Lost Children) though it is heavy on their air of decayed glamor as our protagonist enters a decrepit chateau in the extreme north to take up the post of resident physician amidst a family straight out of the best gothic fiction: a baron, on the brink of death for decades but kept alive by all sorts of gimcrack technology that allows him to, for instance, leave his colon upstairs in his tower bedroom when he joins his household for formal dinners (a memorable moment of maintenance has our protagonist holding "the congested metallic sponge that passes for his spleen" for instance); the baron's feckless and alcoholic son; the son's louche and perpetually pregnant wife; their twin daughters, all but literally joined at the head and possessed of strange paranormal abilities; the capable but mute houseboy who keeps it all running more or less smoothly...

But the chateau's denizens are nowhere near as weird as our multiform (and, for many reasons, delightfully unreliable) narrator, who is quite possibly the most unusual protagonist I've encountered in literature, in that they are a hive mind that parasitically occupies innumerable human bodies scattered throughout what's left of the world.* Calling themselves the Institute, this parasite has taken over the entire health care industry, such as it is in a post-apocalyptic hellscape in which the moon has cracked open and the land is mostly toxic and frozen and inhabited by all kinds of bizarre monsters.  

The instance of the Institute who is our narrator, therefore, is constantly** experiencing things their other selves are doing in warm research libraries and cold operating rooms and filthy tenements and down dangerous mine shafts while they sip water at the baron's miserable dinner table and get felt up under that table by the baron's daughter-in-law -- or, as happens quite soon in the narrative, dissect a corpse that used to be one of their selves only to find that what killed that body was another parasite!

Late in the novel, or narrator has questions and insights that really apply to us all:

I don't know if I'm even human, or if I'm only the synthesis of all my infections, if bits and pieces of Pseudomycota and The Institute and every other organism that has colonized me are still fighting in my blood, trying to conquer the territories of my muscles and consciousness. I don't know if I'm only an accumulation of organized cells that has deluded itself into thinking it's something more.

I'm reminded a little of one of my favorite books that I hate (as in it squicks me out every time I read it, but I keep re-reading it because it's so good), the late Greg Bear's Blood Music, in which the somatic cells of a researcher's body become individually sentient and self-aware after he injects himself with a research product in order to steal it. Bear didn't address all the other cells that occupy a human body like, say, gut bacteria, but if he had the result might be something like our narrator and their struggles to understand themselves as the novel's central drama evolves inside them. 

Even before the existential dilemmas kick in, Ennes slips in clues here and there, starting very early into the story, suggesting that our narrator's grasp on the situation and even on their own identity is not what it seems, and it's only the least of these that relies on well-known canards about how parasites can manipulate their hosts! There's so much more going on here. So much! And I haven't even talked really about Emile, the aforementioned mute houseboy who is the product of a few centuries of an isolated human population's evolution into what might be a whole new sub-species of gray-skinned human with an apparent resistance to both of the novel's weird invasive organisms! Or about the whole Montish culture from which he comes, with its tradition of shaggy dog stories which... kind of signpost that the reader is in for an ambiguous ending, as fits a tale told by an unreliable narrator...

I am certainly finishing my reading year on a high note, even if nothing else is going all that well. I'm going to try to finish a few more reads before we ring in 2023 (ugh) but if I don't, happy new year. Or something. Watch out for creepy black grassy things in jars.

*And of course, since our protagonist has multiple bodies -- multiple lives -- at their disposal, there is also a potential for respawning, making this story even more video game-like.

**Except when it's not; distance isn't entirely obviated by the Institute's nature. Much like radio signals can't penetrate very far underground and attenuate over vast distances, the Institute's ability to communicate with itself diminishes at inconvenient moments, too.

"I cannot quite understand these fables, not can I discern their use. I suspect they are born from the peculiar, suspect anxiety that there is something fundamentally fragile about humanness. The dead that perhaps, if one takes time to peel back the skin of another, they will find an imposter, a machine, or, stranger still, something like me."

Justin Robinson's EVERYMAN

I mostly know of Justin Robinson as a cleverly goofy writer of fun stuff like his Mr. Blank books and City of Devils -- imaginative, occasionally silly romps that take an entertaining premise and run buck-wild with it.* I only vaguely knew that he wrote more traditional genre fiction, too, with a bent towards horror.

What I didn't know was that when he does so, if Everyman is anything to go by, he achieves even more impressive results.

Everyman goes on my virtual shelves alongside the works of Tony Burgess (Pontypool Changes Everything, The N-Body Problem), Ben Marcus (The Flame Alphabet) and Colson Whitehead (Zone One).** What do these have in common? They're ostensibly horror, but they transcend the genre in various amazing ways.

Superficially, Everyman is treading through Tim Powers territory, and I don't just say this because it so lovingly traces its way through the geography of Los Angeles. Its monsters (well, at least one of them) would be at home in a Powers novel, as would its depiction of the warm and happy but doomed marriage at the heart of its narrative, and it has chills similar to those that Powers occasionally offers, but Everyman has emotional beats and trappings that are entirely its own thing.

The book can be read as an extended ad absurdam metaphor for identity theft; its antagonist, Ian, can do so with frightening completeness, just by rooting out what thing among all of a person's possessions actually carries the most of his victim's emotional identification and stealing it. Possession of this possession allows him to mimic the person so completely that even those closest to the victim believe that Ian is the real person and their loved one is a bad and terrifying imposter -- even if both of them are in the room.

The victim is quickly expelled from his paradise, and finds that not only those who know him or her, but everyone, reacts to him or her with a deep lizard-brain level of hostility.

Such happens to our first protagonist, David, in the first act, and we spend a lot of time with him as his new unreality sinks in. He is suddenly friendless, homeless, loveless -- his own mother, his friends and neighbors, even, most importantly, his truly beloved wife, Sophie (who winds up the real hero of this novel in lots of poignant -- and kickass -- ways) threaten violence or law enforcement involvement at the very sight of him. This material is every bit as gut-wrenching as you might expect, but never strays into melodrama, remaining merely deeply effective, and eventually, quite Kafkaesque.***

And then things get bad.

Ian's power works in weird and grotesque ways, ways that Robinson spent a lot of time and effort reasoning out (again, in a very Tim Powers way that I can't applaud enough. Yes, it's supernatural/magical, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be internally logical!). Ian's victims don't just wind up lonely and homeless: there is a far sadder, weirder and grosser fate awaiting them. And their chosen objects. Yuck.

I am seriously impressed.

*And as a hilariously snarky lover of television and movies of questionable quality, which he loves (?) to share with us over at The Satellite Show.

**I suppose Doris Lessing belongs there, too, but I've only read The Fifth Child and don't want to read any more as a result.

***I mean, really, is anything more Kafkaesque than a well-constructed doppelganger story? To be truly Kafkaesque I suppose our heroes would have to have gotten tangled up in the justice system's red tape, but still.

Scott Sigler's PANDEMIC

What if Alastair Reynolds' Inhibitors found us back when we lived on just the one planet, and instead of harnessing the destructive power of stellar physics to destroy us, were masters of biotechnology instead and just hijacked our own brains and bodies into doing it?

Such is the malevolent force Scott Sigler has created for his Infected series, my fondness for which I have covered elsewhere. The machines working to wreak apocalyptic havoc on humanity refer to them as The Creators, but we could really maybe call them Space Republicans, for their knee-jerk reaction to the idea that the universe might contain sentient life other than themselves is to seek to destroy that life utterly before it evolves to the point of developing space travel and the ability to destroy The Creators. See also Douglas Adams' Crikketers.

The result is a combination of first rate body horror and disaster porn, rather than space opera, but the comparison stands. As Reynolds draws on a prior career as a professional astronomer, Sigler draws on the expertise of his rabid fanbase (known as "Junkies" the ranks of whom include the likes of Bad Astronomer Phil Plait, who gets a hilarious cameo-tweet mid-story) and his own formidable attention to scientific detail, again almost to a fault. Reynolds' books occasionally threaten to drift into becoming astronomy primers; this series of Sigler's has passages that might stand up in a college biology textbook -- but it's all the service of selling the story. And lots of people are buying, including your humble blogger.

Pandemic, the third and final volume in the series takes all of the bio-medical creepiness, apocalyptic threat and heroic angst of Infected and Contagious, turns the volume up to 11, and rips off the knob. With each novel, the Creators' semi-sentient minions have learned more about human biology on both the individual and the social levels and have exploited that knowledge to nearly destroy humanity, only to be barely thwarted by the combined efforts of a team of scientists, soldiers and politicians who contain the threats posed in the nick of time, and through the individual bravery of a few early victims like washed-up football hero Perry Dawson, patient zero in the first novel, who still looms larger than life after death in this third one.*

Dr. Margaret Montoya, the woman who failed to save Perry, but who saved a lot of other people at great cost, is more or less the hero of this one, or at least she's supposed to be, but once again, despite her scientific brilliance, her strength, her crippling guilt and her marital problems, she's the least interesting character in the book. But this isn't because she's a badly drawn or boring character; she's just got a lot of competition, not the least of which from the disease itself, whose "point of view" Sigler relates in several interludes of frightening plausibility and maximum grossness (seriously, trigger warning for you germophobes out there. If someone blowing his/her nose in your presence squicks you out, if you're one of those people whose hands are constantly drenched in hand sanitizer, this is maybe not the book for you). And the other characters, including Ancestor's Dr. Tim Feely, still yucking it up even as he fights to save the world again. And the plot. And the colossal world-wide scope of the problem she faces, a plot so apocalyptically epic that the most vivid and compelling character in the world would pretty much get lost in it.

The fact that she doesn't, nor do the new characters introduced in this novel, says everything about Sigler as a writer; he achieves a near-flawless balance between character moments, dire exposition and insane-to-the-point-of-thigh-slapping ACKSHUN. The result is a compelling and ickily plausible read even before the climactic hijinks.

I expected nothing less.

*As well he should. He and his chicken scissors are unforgettable.