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Author: Matthew David Surridge

The Steel Seraglio: a Review

The Steel Seraglio: a Review

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The Steel SeraglioThe Steel Seraglio
Mike, Linda, and Louise Carey
ChiZine Publications (424 pp, $15.95 US/$17.95 CAD, trade paperback)
Reviewed by Matthew Surridge

The Steel Seraglio is a fantasy novel by husband/wife/daughter trio Mike, Linda, and Louise Carey, put out by ChiZine Publications. There’s also a chapbook set in the same world (which you might be able to get if you order the book directly from ChiZine). It’s a story set in a pseudo-historical Arabia, in a desert of city-states ruled by sultans. When religious zealots stage a revolution in the city of Bessa, a chain of events is set in motion that results in the former Sultan’s former harem of 365 women banding together to take the city back, and installing their own enlightened rule. The book tells the story of the women, and the rise and fall of the city they make.

I thought it was a decent adventure novel with some nice touches; good enough, and the touches nice enough, that I wished it had been better — either a better adventure, or a better novel. I think the book narrowly fails to achieve all the grand effects that it aims for, mostly due to staging and logic that don’t feel entirely thought-through. And I think that what is most interesting about the book, specifically its narrative structure and use of narrative to establish character, is not particularly well-served by the epic adventure format. I also found I had some qualms about the setting, or at least how the setting was developed in the course of the story.

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Clockwork Angels III. Hope is What Remains to be Seen

Clockwork Angels III. Hope is What Remains to be Seen

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Clockwork AngelsToday, July 1, is the one-hundred-and-forty-fifth anniversary of the date the British North America Act came into effect, which effectively established the modern country of Canada. We still celebrate that as our national holiday: Canada Day. So it’s only appropriate that I’m posting now about three men who have together been named as official Ambassadors of Music by the Canadian government, who have been made Officers of the Order of Canada, and who have as a group won the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award. I’m talking about Rush, and after two posts recapping their career (the first here, the second here), I’ll finally be writing about their new album, Clockwork Angels.

It’s a long album, over 66 minutes, and tells a single story. Although reminiscent of some of their older songs, not least due to lyricist Neil Peart’s use of themes and images that’ve clearly fascinated him for years, it’s also new ground for the band, who have never before created a fully-fledged concept album. Clockwork Angels is a steampunk epic in 12 songs, with accompanying passages of narrative prose that help to tie the story together. A novelization’s forthcoming in September by author Kevin J. Anderson, in collaboration with Peart.

To reiterate something I said in the first of these posts: this is a brilliant album. It’s lyrically and musically complex, constantly challenging, a treasure trove of ideas that’s impossible to assimilate in a single listen. The conceptual and narrative structure works, and lends the album a distinct feel — literally, a novelistic (and novel) sensibility. The relation of the songs, the recurrence of symbols that both resonate with the album’s story and derive from earlier in Peart’s career, gives Clockwork Angels significant thematic depth.

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Clockwork Angels II. Winding Like an Ancient River the Time is Now Again

Clockwork Angels II. Winding Like an Ancient River the Time is Now Again

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Permanent WavesThis is the second part of a look at Rush, whose new steampunk epic Clockwork Angels came out earlier this month. I think it’s a wonderful album, but to explain why it seemed to me worth looking at their earlier work — I looked at what they’ve accomplished as a band, and what drummer and lyricist Neil Peart has become as a writer. Last time, I looked at their records up through 1978’s Hemispheres; I therefore begin here in 1980, with the next album, Permanent Waves. (You can find that first post here; the third post, looking closely at the new album, is here.)

Permanent Waves began a process of moving away from the extensive side-long epics of past albums toward more concise songs. In this the band may have been influenced by the contemporary music scene — the title of the album, in addition to being a reference to the last song of the album, also glances at New Wave. Peart originally planned a long song based on the medieval poem Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight, but at some point plans changed. The lyrics were scrapped, and the music adapted for what became the record’s longest song, “Natural Science.”

“Natural Science” is a three-part composition about the complexity of time and space. Some of the imagery verges on the science-fictional (the second part’s titled “Hyperspace”), but it’s not necessarily sf itself. Similarly, “Jacob’s Ladder,” which concludes side one, is a seven-minute-plus song that describes the sun emerging from clouds, filled with nature imagery by way of mythic or fantastic language. Again, though, not explicitly fantasy.

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Clockwork Angels I. Wonders in the World

Clockwork Angels I. Wonders in the World

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Clockwork AngelsOn June 12 the new album by veteran Canadian power-prog-rock trio Rush was released. I went out in pouring rain to buy a copy because I had to have it that day. In reading what follows (the first of three posts, with part two here, and part three here), understand that I’m a fan, and that this has been my favourite rock group for over two decades. But then there are few casual Rush fans: bassist and singer Geddy Lee’s said that he thinks of Rush as the biggest cult band in the world.

Clockwork Angels, the group’s 19th full-length studio release, is worth talking about here because it’s a picaresque steampunk concept album. It is, technically, the first concept album of the band’s career; they’ve written 20-minute songs before, and they’ve had albums that examined one theme through different angles (like Hold Your Fire, in which each song examined a different kind of emotion, or Roll the Bones, which looked at various aspects of chance), but never one that told a single story as they do here. Drummer and lyricist Neil Peart has spoken about how he wanted this album to represent his highest achievement as a writer and musician; he set himself a considerable challenge, and I think pulled it off. The record eschews narration and plot-oriented lyrics, instead including brief sections of narrative prose in the album booklet while the songs present emotional high points and sometimes move the plot forward. It’s oddly like listening to the songs from a musical, with an accompanying plot synopsis. A full treatment of the story will be coming in September, with the publication of a novelisation of the album by Kevin J. Anderson.

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Cerebus

Cerebus

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CerebusI’ve been writing a fair bit lately about Canadian fantastika, and I’ll be doing so again next week, looking at a trio of grand masters who’ve just released what may be one of the most accomplished works of their career. But there’s been a bit of news lately about another notorious Canadian fantasy epic, so I want to talk about that first.

Late in May, Dave Sim began a Kickstarter project, trying to raise $6,000 to create a digital version of the 25-issue “High Society” storyline from his comic book Cerebus. He raised the money in a matter of hours. Each comic issue will be digitised; the story, the letter columns, and the editorials will all be scanned (I don’t know whether the work by other cartoonists that Sim used to run in the back of the book will be included). Sim will also read the text of the comic, performing dialogue and captions, and he’ll provide commentary, as well as show and discuss sketches, notebook entries, and the like. The extra money the Kickstarter will raise from this point will go towards higher-quality audio production, and, if funds allow, towards the digitising of the entire 300-issue run of Cerebus. As of June 13, Sim’s raised just shy of $40,000, with the Kickstarter still running for the rest of June.

In light of the Kickstarter success, I want to give a brief introduction to the series for non-comics readers. There’s no doubt that Cerebus was and is a major work, tremendously significant in the history of comics and in the medium’s development. And it’s relevant, I think, as a fantasy story; as a story that sometimes struggles with its use of fantasy, and as a story that works with and often against action-adventure tropes. But while parts of the work are startlingly effective, parts of it are equally-startling misfires. And the main theme of the book, reflecting Sim’s stated beliefs, is undoubtedly sexist (per Merriam-Webster, sexism is “prejudice or discrimination based on sex; especially : discrimination against women”) and in the opinion of many readers misogynistic. Sim disputes the term misogyny, arguing that he’s merely not “feminist,” but when he writes that a sensibility based on “reasoned and coherent world views … occurs more often — far more often — in men than it does in women,” it’s hard to see the difference between that and misogyny. Note that the foregoing statement isn’t an external statement that happens to shed light on Sim’s ideology; it’s a part of the text of Cerebus. Sim’s attitudes to gender and sexuality can’t be evaded in discussing the book. Still, I want to try to present here an overview of what makes the book important, with all its flaws.

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Fall From Earth: A Review

Fall From Earth: A Review

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Fall From EarthFall From Earth
Matthew Johnson
Bundoran Press (236 pp, $19.95, 2010)

It’s been suggested that Canadian fiction often features a collective protagonist rather than a single dominant personality: a group of interlocking characters who drive the narrative forward. I don’t know how accurate that is; but it’s interesting to consider in the context of Ottawa writer Matthew Johnson’s 2010 novel, Fall From Earth. In addition to following a group of characters, it’s also a story of colonisation in the face of an unfriendly natural environment, and of the interaction of different cultures; both typically Canadian themes. Is this significant?

Fall From Earth tells the story of a group of convicts sentenced by a far-future imperial state, the Borderless Empire, to colonise a new planet. They’ve committed all manner of crimes: murder, heresy … and rebellion. We follow them as they land on the planet, and find that all is not as they had been led to expect. Complications arise and are dealt with, only for more complications to arrive; mysteries are piled upon mysteries; and the sense of scale grows as the novel goes along.

It’s a very strong book. The writing’s exceptionally tight, with no wasted words. The story’s told in short, well-chosen scenes; point-of-view shifts easily and naturally from character to character. The various conundra the colonists find on the planet develop, show strange ramifications, and then begin to resolve themselves. By the end of the book, it’s all been neatly explained, and the plot’s neatly worked through to a satisfactory ending.

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Triptych, by J.M. Frey: A Review

Triptych, by J.M. Frey: A Review

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TriptychTriptych
J.M. Frey
Dragon Moon Press (286 pp, $19.95, March 2011)

Science fiction typically makes certain assumptions about alien races. For example, that they use language in ways we understand. Or, that they imagine gender and sex in ways familiar to us. The second is a far more unlikely assumption; language, or communication more broadly, is something one would expect to develop in intelligent species, and in a way defines for humans what intelligence is. But sex necessarily is a thing of the body, and so will vary with the composition of the body. An alien body won’t have human sexual responses.

J.M. Frey’s novel Triptych tries to tell a story with that awareness in mind. I’m not entirely convinced by the book, but I think it’s effective overall. Both its flaws and virtues seem to me to follow from specific genre traditions, with the result that it feels oddly like an old-fashioned science fiction novel that happens to have some twenty-first-century attitudes about sexuality.

A triptych is a work of art, typically a painting, in three parts. Usually the central part is the most prominent. That’s essentially the structure of the novel: three parts, plus a prologue and epilogue. The prologue sets up a near-future world in which alien refugees have come to earth. Their integration into human society comes through working with a multinational organization called the Institute, physicists and linguists and other specialists, all given military training. The first part of the story proper then skips back to 1983, setting up a time travel plot. The second part gives us the tale of one of the alien refugees, up to the point where the prologue begins. The third part, and the epilogue, wrap up the plot and solve the remaining mysteries. And through all these sections, the book is actually telling a love story, or at least the story of an unconventional relationship: another triptych, a polyamorous love between an alien and two humans.

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Rio Youers’ Westlake Soul: A Review

Rio Youers’ Westlake Soul: A Review

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Westlake SoulWestlake Soul is twenty-three, a good-natured surfing champion with a loving family, loving girlfriend, and loving dog. Then a terrible fall leaves him in a vegetative state, unresponsive to the outside world — but, locked in his own mind, he’s a superintelligent superhero, astrally projecting to the moon and battling the mysterious villain named Doctor Quietus. Westlake can’t affect the outside world; can’t even twitch a finger, can only sit and be cared for by his mother and father and little sister, and the nurses they hire. But he can see what goes on around him, and react, if only internally.

Rio Youers’ novel Westlake Soul is Westlake’s account of his life and opinions, and of his fights against Doctor Quietus. Youers pulls off a tricky proposition; Westlake’s completely incapable of actually doing anything, of changing anything in his physical environment. He can only view the world, describing what he sees and how he feels. That ought to make him too passive to work as the centre of a story — and make no mistake, more than simply a narrator, Westlake is the heart of his own story, speaking as he does with the unselfconscious egocentrism of youth — but it is precisely his struggle to make a change, to accomplish even the smallest of actions, that becomes involving.

In fact, the book succeeds due to its directness of affect. Westlake Soul’s had no choice but to become thoughtul and empathic, and those qualities, along with a certain precision of diction, make his voice endearing and highly readable. The book doesn’t hesitate to tug at the heartstrings, but the writing’s effective: it feels like a kind young man’s voice. And Youers deploys that voice nicely, giving us Westlake’s observations of both his exterior and interior worlds, keeping things moving briskly.

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Leah Bobet’s Above: A Review

Leah Bobet’s Above: A Review

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leah-bobet-above-smallAbove
Leah Bobet
Arthur A. Levine Books (368 pages, April 1, 2012, $17.99)

The first novel by Toronto writer Leah Bobet, Above is a remarkable and in some ways brilliant book. It’s a Young Adult novel that doesn’t condescend to its audience, and doesn’t shy away from complexity of diction or worldbuilding. It’s a considerable achievement stylistically and thematically, a strong debut that promises much for Bobet’s future. Not every aspect of the book is equally successful, perhaps, but the things that work are the important things.

The story follows Matthew, a young storyteller born and raised in a community of outcasts who live under the streets of Toronto (the city’s not named, but if you’re familiar with it you can identify it from street names and the like — to say nothing of the cover). This community, Safe, is home to people who have strange powers and deformities: Curses. Matthew has scales over part of his body. Jack flickers with lightning. Whisper talks to ghosts. Atticus, the leader of Safe, has crablike pincers instead of hands. In creating Safe and its inhabitants, Bobet’s acknowledged taking some inspiration from the Beauty and the Beast TV show; personally, I found it reminiscent of the Morlocks in Chris Claremont’s run of X-Men.

Matthew’s trying to convince a troubled, Cursed girl named Ariel to live with him in Safe. But Safe’s more and less than it appears; an old crime comes back to haunt it, and Matthew, Ariel, and a few other survivors have to flee up to the frightening world Above. There, they’ll try to understand what happened, and work out what to do next — if they can stay together. If they can survive.

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When The Hero Comes Home: A Review

When The Hero Comes Home: A Review

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When the Hero Comes HomeWhen the Hero Comes Home is an anthology from Dragon Moon Press co-edited by Garbielle Harbowy and Ed Greenwood. It’s a surprisingly thin book, given that it holds nineten stories by twenty writers (including two Black Gate contributors, Peadar Ó Guilín and Jay Lake, in collaboration with Shannon Page). Its theme is exactly what it says: the homecoming. The point where the story usually ends. I have some reservations about how the book turned out, but the idea’s intriguing: what do you find when you make it back to where you began? Has the place changed, or have you?

One thinks of Odysseus’ return to Ithaca, or of Frodo’s discovery of what’s happened to the Shire. The conclusion of the story that sums up the themes of all that’s gone before. The last unexpected twist, the discovery that heightens emotion and gives the protagonist one final conflict. Arthur Miller said that every great play has to do with the question “how may a man make of the outside world a home?” But what, ultimately, is home? How do we recognise it?

Not all of the stories in When the Hero Comes Home have these kinds of questions on their minds. Overall, though, the tales do tend to examine the idea of ‘home,’ rather more than they do the idea of ‘hero.’ Then again, the existence of a hero, however defined, is inherent in the theme; it’s the nature of the home that implicitly has to be established. So: these are stories about fairly unambiguous heroes, finding that things at home are more complicated, and often more disappointing, than they’d thought.

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