The Eyes of the Overworld

Jack Vance The Eyes of the Overworld (1966)
Excepting Moorcock on the grounds of him being pretty much his own genre, Jack Vance is the first author of unambiguous fantasy to whom I've truly warmed, and by unambiguous fantasy I mean sagas of wizards in pointy hats inspiring quests across hill and dale, and so on and so forth. Actually, he's the second come to think of it, the first being Matthew Hughes whose tales of Raffalon are set against the backdrop of Jack Vance's Dying Earth, and this is one of Vance's Dying Earth novels - so I'm sure the sense of whatever I was trying to say can be found somewhere in that lot.

The Dying Earth is host to a post-technological society vaguely resembling our Renaissance but with magic, all occurring in the improbably distant future, at which point the sun routinely blinks out like aging strip lighting, hence the name. It was a significant influence on Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time. I could probably leave the review there, but I won't.

Cugel the Clever is discovered attempting to steal certain valuable mystic items from Iucounu the Laughing Magician. Iucounu wraps an extraterrestrial squid around the thief's liver and obliges him to travel to the far north to procure the eyes of the overworld. The eyes of the overworld allow one to see the higher reality, transforming conventional perception of our world of rancid paupers screwing and pooing in stinking hovels into a reality of Disney princesses daintily wafting from one sparkling palace to another. The novel is a quest with a spell or enchantment resolving pretty much every scrape and episodic dilemma strung along its familiar path - and with no greater sense of consequence than in any other magically driven narrative - and yet Vance proves that it really is all in the telling. His fiction is heavily stylised, erudite almost to the point of shameless ostentation, and feels fresh and lively - more so than anything involving wizards surely has the right to be. I'd be surprised if he hadn't influenced Pratchett to some extent - although his wit is possibly sharper and less obviously satirical - and he assails the reader with a disorientating barrage of peculiar ideas and images to incredibly surreal effect - somewhat like Cordwainer Smith, but - frankly, better done. I don't know if The Eyes of the Overworld exactly says anything, but then it doesn't have to. Sometimes the mood, spectacle, and delightful confusion can be enough by itself.

Nine Tales of Raffalon

Matthew Hughes Nine Tales of Raffalon (2017)
My initial impression of the Raffalon tales first featured in Fantasy & Science Fiction were of a sword and sorcery take on E.W. Hornung's Raffles the Gentleman Thief. The author himself happened upon this observation and set me straight, explaining that he regarded the setting of his tales as renaissance more than medieval and what I misread as significantly influenced by Jack Vance's Dying Earth novels. This made a lot of sense once I read Vance's Rhialto the Marvellous which inhabits the distant future of Earth's final years with magic having returned to human society, which has itself resumed a mostly pre-technological economy. Anyway, it turns out - as I now realise - that I hadn't fully grasped the proverbial stick and that the Raffalon stories quite deliberately inhabit the very same world as Vance's magicians; so it all makes sense now.

Rather than merely playing with someone else's train set or indulging in mimicry, Hughes explores aspects of the Dying Earth which Vance didn't seem to touch on, at least not in Rhialto the Marvellous. Where Rhialto at least inhabits the surreal world of reality warping wizards, Raffalon relies upon his wits to get him by in the semi-feudal lowlands of craftsmen and wandering pugilists; and it works because Hughes writes with the sort of elegant wit and wild invention which worked so well for Vance, whilst retaining what I've come to recognise as absolutely his own voice. Raffalon is funny without feeling the need to pull faces, and the stories wrap the reader up in all sorts of logistic knots before leading us to conclusions we could never have predicted, all of which makes for immensely satisfying reading, high on roughage and essential vitamins. Fantasy has never really been my genre of choice, but Raffalon is an exception, and I can confidently say it's because it's rare to find an author so convincing or so well versed in his craft as is Hughes.

Rhialto the Marvellous

Jack Vance Rhialto the Marvellous (1985)
This one is part of the Dying Earth series, as it's called, which I picked up purely because Matthew Hughes cited it as a significant influence on his Raffalon stories - which I can see now that I know what to look for. I tend to avoid anything involving wizards as a general rule, but as with Hughes' writing, this is clearly something else. More than anything it reminds me of Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time in being set in the improbably distant future amongst a community of peculiarly eccentric beings with strange powers. That being said, it's quite different to Dancers while being similarly distinguished as betraying no tangible influence from Tolkien or any of the usual pointy-hatted suspects.

What actually seems to distinguish Vance from everybody else - at least everybody else that I've read - is the language, ornate, luxuriant, decadent and never afraid to use an archaic term if it suits the sentence, or even to just make something up. With that which is described being at least as strange and ornate as the composition of its description, Rhialto is a delight to read, resembling surrealist fiction as much as fantasy, conjuring images as much resembling traditional Japanese art as Heironymous Bosch as Yellow Submarine; and it's nothing if not witty.

A big-bellied old man with grey wattles sidled a few steps forward. He spoke in a wheedling nasal voice: 'Must your disgust be so blatant? True: we are anthropophages. True: we put strangers to succulent use. Is this truly good cause for hostility? The world is as it is and each of us must hope in some fashion to be of service to his fellows, even if only in the form of a soup.'

The only downside here is arguably that the language is such as to require the reader's full and undivided attention, because it can be otherwise quite easy to lose one's footing and slip, mid-narrative, and a little of Vance's prose goes a long way. Then again, if that seems like it might be a problem, you should probably stick to Terry Brooks or one of those guys.

The Damned Busters

Matthew Hughes The Damned Busters (2011)
I've been reasonably knocked out by Hughes' pseudo-Rennaissance Raffalon stories in Fantasy & Science Fiction, and enough so as to find his name imprinted on my admittedly short mental list of authors whose work I look out for when in Half Price - Murray Leinster, Katherine MacLean, Moorcock, Robert Moore Williams, and those six A. E. van Vogt novels that I still haven't read; and so it was that I came to The Damned Busters, which is actually the first part of a trilogy in an approximately contemporary setting; so it wasn't quite the Hughes I was looking for, or at least which I expected to find, but it seemed worth a go.

The Damned Busters is, of all things, a superhero novel, sort of, although you could probably call it urban fantasy if you felt so inclined. Our guy acquires his powers when accidentally summoning a demon and inadvertently driving all the minions of hell to industrial action, resulting in a period of nothing bad happening anywhere on Earth, which turns out to be disastrous; and the aforementioned powers come as part of the settlement deal. Thus does he embark upon a career fighting crime, inspired by a favourite comic book - naturally - and thus does his life become greatly more complicated than he could have anticipated.

It's an odd book in that it reads nothing like you would expect from the description, or how you might imagine superhero prose fiction would read for that matter. Our man is a high-functioning autistic and might therefore be described as tightly wound - which hopefully isn't too insulting to anyone - and although the story isn't directly told from his perspective, his somewhat analytical tone informs the narrative, lending everything an unusually even pace. This apparently put some readers off, but I personally found it quite refreshing to read this kind of story without having to wade through the sort of overwritten gothic melodrama which may as well have been Bauhaus lyrics. It also helps that Hughes is witty without feeling the need to crack jokes all the time, so The Damned Busters feels like a distant relative of Pratchett, albeit with aesthetic parallels to certain Vertigo comics from the nineties. Most surprising of all are interludes of philosophical debate on the nature of morality - amongst other ideas pertaining to the field of sin and punishment - with some depth, or what felt like some depth to me - certainly very satisfying and without assuming the reader needs everything spelled out in primary colours. I'm looking at you, John Bunyan.

If I have a complaint, it's probably that the book could have been a little shorter; but The Damned Busters was otherwise highly satisfying, quietly impressive, and I'm now particularly looking forward to the Raffalon book which Mrs. Pamphlets gave me for Christmas.

Fantasy & Science Fiction 752

 

C.C. Finlay (editor) Fantasy & Science Fiction 752 (2020)
The Fantasy & Science Fiction Twitter account has taken to bestowing hearts upon the links I've posted to my reviews of previous issues, which is nice, but has additionally fostered a certain sense of dread regarding this issue, the current one. I picked it up because I saw Matthew Hughes' name on the cover, then immediately realised that I would now feel obliged to say nice things about the magazine, which would be awkward if it turned out to be awful.

Thankfully it isn't. There were a couple of stories which weren't to my liking to greater or lesser degrees, but the general standard is exceptionally high, and enough so for the quality of the good stuff to fully eclipse that of material which wasn't to my taste. For the sake of balance, I'll get my objections out of the way first.

How to Burn Down the Hinterlands by Lyndsie Manusos is probably the only contribution I didn't really enjoy on any level. It has dramatic potential, although I found the author's claim of there being a lot of nods to fantasy worlds, tropes and video games that I love in it massively off-putting, particularly once we encounter entire paragraphs of faux-dramatic non-sentences impersonating a portentous voice-over of the kind usually describing the sort of exhausting CGI overload you get in superhero movies wherein Fatso the Human Flying Saucer breaks open the eternity stone and becomes as one with the reality interface of an entire universe; and usually describing this because Hinterlands seems to do just two things - that being one, the other being the scene where the music swells and we zoom in upon a craggy frown vowing to do this not just for its children, but also for its children's children, so mote it be.

Everything paused, stood still. My vision was speckled with glinting metal, shards and liquid drops of shine. The sword's essence waited there. It was not a person. It was an intangible thing, indescribable. Waiting for me.

You see, waiting for me doesn't really work as a sentence in isolation. They're just three words staring forlornly at the space just ahead where the comma should have been. Then there are plenty of other similarly inert constructions effecting to resemble portentous expectorations which work better as titles than as sentences. It's as though someone has devised a written equivalent of the art of Jim Lee - an endless swirl of ninja daggers, cinematic bodies in billowing togas, and grimacing faces with far too much cross-hatching.

I had fewer problems with Nick DiChario's beautifully written La Regina Ratto, but something nevertheless didn't sit right with me and this urban fable. Possibly it's that our main character shagging a human-sized female rodent sails a little too close to furry territory for my liking, although the parallel seems most likely unintentional

Then somewhat on the cusp we have Sarina Dorie's A Civilised and Orderly Zombie Apocalypse per School Regulations. Dorie is introduced as author of something called Womby's School for Wayward Witches - a series, naturally - which seemed ominous; and this story begins as an apparent response to the question, what if we combined Harry Potter with zombies? As a proposal, it was never going to score bigly in this house, and makes me think of Who fanfic types who list Douglas Adams as their greatest inspiration; and then about halfway through, we come to this:

In the news, they had reported that a newly developed serum could arrest the side effects of becoming infected. I just had to keep these students safe long enough for the police and paramedics to arrive and deliver the antidote.

Right. Thanks for that. My expectations weren't great, but this reads like the sort of heavy handed improvised exposition one finds in stories written by persons still in school, and while Dorie is herself a school teacher, I'm thinking ninth grade here.

Yet, despite such objections, a trace of Joyce Grenfell politely failing to keep her class from anarchy creeps in towards the end, perhaps revealing that for which Dorie had been gunning all along, and the last few pages deliver a very satisfying if admittedly gruesome conclusion. Consider me impressed.

Elsewhere, I have Gregor Hartmann's, On Vapour, Which the Night Condenses down as generally decent; and Nadia Afifi's The Bahrain Underground Bazaar and Cylin Busby's The Homestake Project are both powerfully evocative, although you can somehow tell that Busby also writes children's books.

Theodore McCombs' The Silent Partner is wonderful and reminds me a little of Ray Bradbury. A Tale of Two Witches by Albert E. Cowdrey is exceptionally good, with horror employed as an aspect of the story rather than the whole point, which I really appreciate. It's the third I've read by Cowdrey and I'm yet to be disappointed.

Amman Sabet's, Skipping Stones in the Dark is likewise wonderful. My only criticism would be that through being narrated by an artificial intelligence which observes from a distance, much of what occurs reads like a synopsis, albeit a synopsis for something I would quite happily read if expanded to novella or even novel length with all of the details filled in.

Coming at last to the main attraction, at least for me, Matthew Hughes, The Glooms, is worth the admission price alone. This is the second of his short stories that I've read, and the second to inspire me to the realisation that I really need to buy his books, which is unusual because it isn't ordinarily the sort of thing which would appeal to me - a pseudo mediaeval world of wizards and castles. Hughes writes fantasy like no-one else I've read, with a wit which really draws the reader in; and with genuinely unexpected narrative twists and turns making for a story which defies expectations; and without resorting to the clichés which often make the genre such a chore; and all occupying a plausible magical reality which feels very much as though it works as well under its own steam even after we've finished reading. Oddly, Hughes writing with the texture of daily experience combined with the clarity of what he writes - no easy magical solutions here - reminds me of Stephen Baxter albeit in a very different genre and without Baxter's occasionally overpowering pessimism.

So thankfully, it hasn't been at all difficult finding nice things to say about this issue, given that pleasing most of the people most of the time is nothing to be sniffed at; and additional praise is due for Jerry Oltion's brain-strangling essay, Is Math Real? and the poetry of Beth Cato and Mary Soon Lee, which I say as someone who very rarely connects with poetry.

Fantasy & Science Fiction 717

Gordon Van Gelder (editor) Fantasy & Science Fiction 717 (2015)
The last digest magazine I tackled was an old issue of Analog which left me feeling slightly unclean, and this, combined with a failed attempt to read the work of Yukio Mishima - a man whom I'm fairly certain Kenneth Clark would have denounced as quite, quite beastly - I've really come to appreciate Fantasy & Science Fiction, a digest which has yet to let me down. Even given that not everything in such a collection is going to click with every reader, and that I'm really not even that struck on fantasy as a genre, the standard is such that you can even appreciate the quality of the occasional turkey, and that turkeys tend to be in the eye of the beholder with Fantasy & Science Fiction; or to put it another way, even the weaker material is usually a decent read. As for this issue, I was less than knocked out by Francis Marion Soty's interpretation of a tale from One Thousand and One Nights, but the rest range from respectable to even wonderful.

Telling Stories to the Sky by Eleanor Arnason, and Jubilee: A Seastead Story by Naomi Kritzer both have enough going on for it to be worth mentioning. Better still is Dale Bailey's Lightning Jack's Last Ride, which seems to suggest that the western is alive and well, despite the author substituting cowboys for post-apocalyptic NASCAR drivers. It's also a refreshing change for being an actual narrative rather than just a plot with characters attached.

Matthew Hughes' Prisoner of Pandarius seems to be a fairly literal fantasy transposition of E.W. Hornung's Raffles the Gentleman Thief as Raffalon, who inhabits a pseudo-medieval world of taverns, spells, imps and the like. I've often found such settings to be something of a stumbling block, but Hughes really drew me in with a tightly knit and elegantly delineated mystery nevertheless based around people who nick stuff from castles and hang around with wizards. In fact Prisoner of Pandarius was so engaging that I'm  going to see if I can't find some more by the guy.

Bud Webster's Farewell Blues is actually the reason I bought this issue, having faintly known Bud online as part of a Simak appreciation group. We were hardly brothers from other mothers, but Bud was one of the people I liked in an online community which nevertheless managed to attract the usual quota of disagreeable arseholes, despite our having been brought together in mutual appreciation of an unusually gentle and pacific author. I'd enjoyed Bud's excellent and informative online articles about the aforementioned Simak, Murray Leinster, and other favourites, and he mentioned having a story featured in Fantasy & Science Fiction then departed this mortal coil before I actually had a chance to read the thing. Farewell Blues is, with a certain irony, about death and the passing of loved ones, and is dedicated to Bud's father. It's centered around jazz players in New Orleans, two of whom are named Hardy Fox and Homer Flynn after alleged members of the Residents, and refers to an afterlife which is actually the place we all go when we dream - a Mexican folk myth which I used in Against Nature; so it turns out we would have had plenty to talk about had I read this while he was still with us, not least being that Farewell Blues is a wonderful tale and the peculiar likelihood of Bud actually having known the Residents; but never mind.

Once again, I feel thoroughly restored by this thing and encouraged by the fact that it is still able to exist in a world of corporate entertainment product, franchises, and cynical marketing.