Book Review | Strange Weather by Joe Hill

One autumnal day in Boulder, Colorado, the clouds open up in a downpour of nails, splinters of bright crystal that tear apart anyone who isn't safely under cover. 'Rain' explores this escalating apocalyptic event, as clouds of nails spread out across the country and the world. Amidst the chaos, a girl studying law enforcement takes it upon herself to resolve a series of almost trivial mysteries... apparently harmless puzzles that turn out to have lethal answers.

In 'Loaded' a mall security guard heroically stops a mass shooting and becomes a hero to the modern gun movement. Under the hot glare of the spotlights, though, his story begins to unravel, taking his sanity with it...

'Snapshot, 1988' tells the story of an kid in Silicon Valley who finds himself threatened by The Phoenician, a tattooed thug who possesses a Polaroid that can steal memories...

And in 'Aloft' a young man takes to the skies to experience parachuting for the first time... and winds up a castaway on an impossibly solid cloud, a Prospero's island of roiling vapour that seems animated by a mind of its own.

***

"After writing a couple seven-hundred-page novels back-to-back," Joe Hill has it in the afterword to his electric new collection, "it felt particularly important to get lean and mean," (p.436) and Strange Weather is exactly that: it's not long, and damn it, it's nasty.

A striking selection of novellas ranging from the playfully apocalyptic to the wickedly political, Strange Weather starts with an actual flash in 'Snapshot,' the unsettling story of a boy who crosses paths with a man in possession of a magical camera. This old Polaroid captures more than just those Kodak moments, of course: it captures the very memories of those moments, in sum leaving its subjects with holes in their souls.

Michael Figlione is just a kid when 'Snapshot' begins, so when he sees his old babysitter Shelly Beukes walking around the street they share, barefoot and swearing, he assumes she's simply senile. As a decent human being he does the decent thing and takes her home to her husband, who gives Michael ten bucks for his trouble. It's only when he goes to the local truck stop to spend his earnings and sees a creepy guy pointing a camera like a pistol that Shelly's seemingly insane story—about a man who's been stealing her essential self, picture by painful picture—starts to make sense.

Gripped by this suspicion, Michael stands guard over a sleeping Shelly later that same day, determined to catch the so-called Polaroid Man in the act. And he does, ultimately. But the story doesn't end there... though I rather wish it had. Economical in its narrative and affecting in its Stranger Things-esque setting, the first half of 'Snapshot' is stunningly done; sadly, the second section struck me as superfluous: slow and unfocused except insofar as it speaks to the themes at the centre of Strange Weather.

There is, to be sure, some seriously weird weather in this collection: between the storm that rages on as Michael confronts Shelly's tormentor in 'Snapshot,' the cyclonic blaze that looks likely to raze the town where the next tale takes place, the custardy cumulus the lovelorn protagonist of 'Aloft' lands on and the razor-sharp rain that gives Strange Weather's final fiction its name, the pathetic fallacy is in full effect in all four stories. But in terms of connective tissue, another, markedly more meaningful motif pervades these pieces: the struggle to let go of what we've lost.

What Shelly has lost is obvious; what Michael loses, less so. George Kellaway, the accidental hero at the heart of 'Loaded'—a straight story suggestive of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in December of 2012—has lost his family. The restraining order his wife has taken out against him means he's also had to sacrifice his right to bear arms. But he still has a gun, by gum! A gun he's horribly happy to use when a woman who's been abused by her boss opens fire in the middle of the mall where Kellaway works.

Bodies promptly drop, including those of a Muslim woman and the bundled-up baby Kellaway mistook for a bomb—not to mention the only other witness to the incident. That guy gets one in the head as well, because otherwise, Kellaway would be in a whole bunch of trouble. As is, he has a good story to tell the first proper responders; a tale as tall as time that leads people to believe he saved the day instead of devastating it.

Celebrated as a hero by the media-savvy mayor, Kellaway is soon sitting for interviews, and starting to hope that not only will he get away with multiple murder, perhaps he'll even get his family back. But as the irregularities in his account start to surface, things take a terrible turn. "Kellaway felt like a bullet in a gun himself, felt charged and ready to go off, to fly towards some final, forceful impact. Loaded with the potential to blow a hole in what everyone thought they knew about him." (p.161) He does just that in a conclusion so unbearably brutal that it chills me still.

It's a shock to the system when Strange Weather's darkest story segues into its slightest and lightest, 'Aloft,' which follows a fellow on his first skydive. He isn't your everyday daredevil, however. "Aubrey has always been scared of heights. It was a good question, why a man with a dread of heights, a man who avoided flying whenever he could, would agree to jump from an airplane. The answer, of course, was maddeningly simple: Harriet." (p.254)

Harriet is "the girl [Aubrey] wanted as he'd never wanted anyone else," (p.300) and as the dismaying details of the pair's relationship to date are doled out, readers will realise that 'Aloft' is their story. Their story just so happens to wrapped around a particularly peculiar premise. You see, Aubrey doesn't make landfall with the love of his unlucky life. Instead, his dive terminates early when he loses his parachute on a semi-solid cloud that looks and feels like it's made of "acre after acre of mashed potato." (p.301) Stranded on this desert island of sorts, he must to come to terms with his feelings for Harriet, and her feelings for him, if he's to have any hope of touching terra firma again.

That 'Aloft' is the most whimsical of Strange Weather's four stories is fitting, considering it was written in the back of a notebook containing the finale of The Fireman basically because Hill hated "to see so much paper go to waste." But, as the author himself explains, it was 'Rain,' the collection's closer, that "arose from a desire to spoof myself and my own sprawling end of the world novel." (p.436)

'Rain' really is rather a lot of fun, particularly as it pertains to the White House's comments on the catastrophic change in climate that results in a hail of nails:

The operating theory—lacking any other credible explanation—was terrorism. The president had disappeared to a secure location but had responded with the full force of his Twitter account. He posted: "OUR ENEMIES DON'T KNOW WHAT THEY STARTED! PAYBACK IS A BITCH!!! #DENVER #COLORADO #AMERICA!!" The vice president had promised to pray as hard as he could for the survivors and the dead; he pledged to stay on his knees all day and all night long. It was reassuring to know that our national leaders were using all the resources at their disposal to help the desperate: social media and Jesus. (p.348)

It's a testament to Hill's not insignificant abilities that even here, in the midst of this rather ridiculous apocalypse, there remains resonance. Its protagonist, one Honeysuckle Speck, is haunted by the loss of her sweetheart, who was one of the first to fall victim to the disastrous downpour. Unable to accept Yolanda's death, she determines to deliver the news to her other half's father, which means navigating a stretch of highway that showcases the slippery grip civilisation has on society. Turns out all it takes to cause a collapse is—snap!—some strange weather.

I found the conclusion of 'Rain' is a touch too tidy; similarly, 'Snapshot' suffers from this occasional proclivity of Hill's, this inclination to offer answers to unasked questions. It's telling that 'Aloft' and 'Loaded' are Strange Weather's strongest stories: their ambiguous endings allow them to live past their last pages. That one is wacky and wonderful while the other's twisted tragedy proves all too easy to believe evidences the tremendous diversity of this collection. If NOS4A2 and The Fireman were Hill's Salem's Lot and The Stand, then this, dear readers, is his Different Seasons: a demonstration of his range and readiness to tell the hell out of any tale, be it supernatural or straight, silly or completely serious.

***

Strange Weather

by Joe Hill

UK Publication: November 2017, Gollancz

US Publication: October 2017, William Morrow

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Recommended and Related Reading

Book Review | Europe in Winter by Dave Hutchinson

Union has come. The Community is now the largest nation in Europe; trains run there from as far afield as London and Prague. It is an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity.

So what is the reason for a huge terrorist outrage? Why do the Community and Europe meet in secret, exchanging hostages? And who are Les Coureurs des Bois?

Along with a motley crew of strays and mafiosi and sleeper agents, Rudi sets out to answer these questions – only to discover that the truth lies both closer to home and farther away than anyone could possibly imagine.

***

Both in Britain and abroad, so much has changed in the years since the release of Dave Hutchinson's Arthur C. Clarke Award nominated Europe in Autumn that the mind positively boggles. In 2014 I described its depiction of a Europe decimated by division "as plausible as it is novel," but I'll be damned if it isn't beginning to look visionary.

What shape the differences democracy has recently wrought will take is, as yet, anyone's guess. Everything's up for grabs, not least the ideals we hold nearest and dearest—just as they are in the world of the Fractured Europe sequence: a manic mosaic of "nations and polities and duchies and sanjaks and earldoms and principalities and communes." (p.12)

The situation was, if anything, even worse the further East you went. Beyond Rus—European Russia—and Sibir was a patchwork of republics and statelets and nations and kingdoms and khanates and 'stans which had been crushed out of existence by History, reconstituted, fragmented, reinvented, fragmented again, absorbed, reabsorbed and recreated." (p.43)

But that's not all—hell, that's not even the half of it—as readers of Europe at Midnight will recall. That "mad story about a family of wizards and a map" elaborated brilliantly on the existence of a place called the Community: an impossible plane of space modelled on idyllic little England. Next to no one knew about it till now, but having kept its distance for decades, the Community is finally making its presence felt by way of a revolutionary railway.

The Line is being laid all across the continent, connecting the Community to the real world in a real sense, and although most folks don't mind, there are, of course, those—now more than ever there are those—who want to keep the outsiders out, and are willing to do whatever it takes to make their isolationist case. To wit, Europe in Winter opens on an awful atrocity, as a train packed with passengers travelling along that mathemagical track is attacked.

You'd think the authorities would come a-running with such loss of life rife, but Europe is so splintered that no one of its gaggle of governments wants anything to do with it. Even the innumerable NGOs are steering out of fear, such that solving the problem, if it's going to be solved at all, falls, finally, to the Coureur and erstwhile cook Hutchinson introduced us to in Europe in Autumn.

Book Review | Those Below by Daniel Polansky

For centuries beyond counting, humanity has served the Others, god-like Eternals who rule from their cloud-capped mountain-city, building a civilization of unimaginable beauty and unchecked viciousness. But all that is about to change.

Bas Alyates, grizzled general of a thousand battles, has assembled a vast army with which to contend with the might of Those Above. Eudokia, Machiavellian matriarch and the power behind the Empty Throne, travels to the Roost, nominally to play peacemaker... but in fact to inspire the human population toward revolt. Deep in the dark byways of the mountain's lower tiers, the urchin Pyre leads a band of fanatical revolutionaries in acts of terrorism against their inhuman oppressors. 

Against them, Calla, handmaiden of the Eternals' king, fights desperately to stave off the rising tide of violence which threatens to destroy her beloved city.

***

The conflict between the privileged and the impoverished comes to a hell of a head in the concluding volume of Daniel Polansky's deterministic duology: an inconceivably bleak book about the inevitable effects of generations of oppression that makes the most of the fastidious foundation laid in the flat first half of The Empty Throne as a whole.

Happily, because the bulk of the busywork is behind us, Those Below is a far more satisfying work of fantasy than Those Above. Its world of bird-beings and the human beasts bound to them has been built, the backstories of its expansive cast of characters established, and as regards its narrative, all the pieces of Polansky's game are plainly in play. Be that as it may, some rearranging remains...

A handful of years have passed since the Aubade overpowered the previous Prime in single combat. Now, Calla's meditative master really does rule the Roost—the highest rung of the hollowed-out mountain Those Above call home—but his people are still struggling to accept that the Aelerian Commonwealth, under the Revered Mother and her infamous man-at-arms Bas, represents a real threat.

As one of the Eternal's pet people puts it to Pyre, a misbegotten boy become a symbol of the unrest rising from among the lower rungs, "the mote of grime you scrub from your eye in the morning is of more concern to you than you and all your people are to them." (p.126) The absolute arrogance of the Eternal could be their ultimate undoing, to be sure; equally, their unequivocal conviction that they are "superior in every fashion that one creature might be to another" (ibid.) could be something of a saving grace at the end of the day. Who can say?

One way or the other, war is coming.

Book Review | Those Above by Daniel Polansky

They enslaved humanity three thousand years ago. Tall, strong, perfect, superhuman and near immortal, they rule from their glittering palaces in the eternal city in the centre of the world. They are called Those Above by their subjects. They enforce their will with fire and sword.

Twenty five years ago mankind mustered an army and rose up against them, only to be slaughtered in a terrible battle. Hope died that day, but hatred survived...

Now, whispers of another revolt are beginning to stir in the hearts of the oppressed: a woman, widowed in the war, who has dedicated her life to revenge; the general, the only man to ever defeat one of Those Above in single combat, summoned forth to raise a new legion; and a boy killer who rises from the gutter to lead an uprising in the capital.

***

They say money makes the world go round, and maybe it does—but for who? For me and for you, or only the few?

According to Oxfam, the wealthiest one percent of the people on planet Earth now have more moolah than the rest of the population put together. Redistributing said wealth would certainly solve a lot of problems; it would save a lot of lives, and set right a lot of wrongs. Sadly, it simply isn't in the one percent's interests to do what needs doing, basically because it would make money meaningless, and money is what gives the the moneyed meaning.

The bottom line is that to have haves, you have to have have-nots. Just as darkness makes daylight distinct, and summer would be insignificant without winter, the poor are a prerequisite of the existence of the rich, thus the latter need to keep the former at their feet—financially in the first instance, and factually in Daniel Polansky's devastating new duology.

Those Above, or else the Eternal, are the one percent of this manifestly metaphorical milieu, and they make their eminence altogether evident by literally lording it over the impoverished populace of the lower rungs of the Roost:

Since the Founding, when Those Above had forsworn the wandering of their ancestors to create and populate the Roost, to leave the summit of the City was considered, if not quite blasphemous, at the very least extremely distasteful. The Eternal lived in the sky, or as close to it as they could reach, and in general left the First Rung only to make war. (p.165)

The advantages of living on First Rung are near enough numberless. There, Those Above—and the few mere mortals who wait on them without question—are tended to with an excess of tenderness. Every meal is a feast, medical care means most mortal wounds are mere inconveniences, and advances in technologies unknown to Those Below have taken every difficulty out of the day-to-day. Theirs is a world, in a word, of wonder; such wonder that even indentured servants like Calla—one of the overarching narrative's four protagonists—cannot imagine anything eclipsing it.

Book Review | The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson

Baru Cormorant believes any price is worth paying to liberate her people—even her soul.

When the Empire of Masks conquers her island home, overwrites her culture, criminalises her customs, and murders one of her fathers, Baru vows to swallow her hate, join the Empire's civil service, and claw her way high enough to set her people free.

Sent as an Imperial agent to distant Aurdwynn, another conquered country, Baru discovers it's on the brink of rebellion. Drawn by the intriguing duchess Tain Hu into a circle of seditious dukes, Baru may be able to use her position to help. As she pursues a precarious balance between the rebels and a shadowy cabal within the Empire, she orchestrates a do-or-die gambit with freedom as the prize.

But the cost of winning the long game of saving her people may be far greater than Baru imagines...

***

I like to think of myself as a relatively well-mannered man, but if, a year or so ago, you'd told me that one of 2015's very finest fantasies would come from the same creator who gave the video game Destiny its at best forgettable flavour, I dare say I may have laughed in your face.

That would have been my mistake, because The Traitor Baru Cormorant (AKA The Traitor in the UK) is, as it happens, practically masterful—not a word I can recall deploying to describe a debut in all the years I've been a book reviewer, but in the complete and total control Seth Dickinson demonstrates over his intricately crafted narrative and characters, this is exactly that: a first novel so clever and subversive that it bears comparison to K. J. Parker's best and most messed-up efforts.

The titular traitor is but an innocent in the beginning. Beloved by her mother, Pinion, and her fathers, Salm and Solit, Baru Cormorant is a precocious so-and-so at seven, with a passion for mathematics and a habit of staring at the stars, so when the Masquerade invades tiny Taranoke—bearing life-changing gifts, initially, such as sanitation and better education—she's secretly pleased.

Unfortunately, a plague waits in the wake of the Masquerade—a plague that devastates the poor Taranoki folk—and the schooling Baru was so happy to have has a couple of cruel and unusual caveats attached, not least the notion of the "unhygenic mating" (p.49) her fathers apparently practice. Add to that the punishments imposed by the empire upon unlicensed lovers, which is to say sterilisation and "reparatory childbearing," whereby women are "confiscated and sown like repossessed earth." (p.187)

These rites are revolting and Baru knows it, but to stand a chance of expanding her horizons, and ultimately improving the lot of those like her, she holds her tongue. Even when her father Salm mysteriously disappears, she keeps her own counsel. In that moment, though, Baru turns on the Masquerade—she just doesn't tell anyone about her change of heart. Rather, she rededicates herself to its perverse principles, thinking that "if the Masquerade could not be stopped by spear or treaty, she would change it from within." (p.39)

Book Review | No Harm Can Come to a Good Man by James Smythe

How far would you go to save your family from an invisible threat? A terrifyingly original thriller from the author of The Machine.

ClearVista is used by everyone and can predict anything.

It’s a daily lifesaver, predicting weather to traffic to who you should befriend.

Laurence Walker wants to be the next President of the United States. ClearVista will predict his chances.

It will predict whether he's the right man for the job.

It will predict that his son can only survive for 102 seconds underwater.

It will predict that Laurence's life is about to collapse in the most unimaginable way.

***

Pay attention, people of America, for today is a day unlike any other.

Today, I want to talk to you about tomorrow; I want to talk to you not about what the world was, but about what the world will be. Today, it is my tremendous pleasure to introduce you to your next president, so put your hands together, please, for a father, a son and a husband—for a family man who can. For a soldier, a senator, a standard bearer of vibrant views and vital values. Ladies and gentlemen... Laurence Walker!

A word to the wise: he's the kind of guy who'll look you in the eye whilst telling you what he's going to do for you. And unlike the other lot, he'll follow through, too:

That's been one of his major arguments the last few years: politics has become about empty words and even emptier eyes, promises made that are for self-aggrandising reasons rather than because somebody believes that they are the right thing to do. This is how he's become popular, a man of the people. (p.24)

But politics is power, and power, of course, corrupts, so how can a man of the people—a good man, goddamn—hold the highest office? According to ClearVista, the simple fact of the matter is... he can't.

Book Review | Tigerman by Nick Harkaway

Lester Ferris, sergeant of the British Army, is a good man in need of a rest. He's spent a lot of his life being shot at, and Afghanistan was the last stop on his road to exhaustion. He has no family, he's nearly forty and burned out and about to be retired.

The island of Mancreu is the ideal place for Lester to serve out his time. It's a former British colony in legal limbo, soon to be destroyed because of its very special version of toxic pollution—a down-at-heel, mildly larcenous backwater. Of course, that also makes Mancreu perfect for shady business, hence the Black Fleet of illicit ships lurking in the bay: listening stations, offshore hospitals, money laundering operations, drug factories and deniable torture centres. None of which should be a problem, because Lester's brief is to sit tight and turn a blind eye.

But Lester Ferris has made a friend: a brilliant, internet-addled street kid with a comicbook fixation who will need a home when the island dies—who might, Lester hopes, become an adopted son. Now, as Mancreu's small society tumbles into violence, the boy needs Lester to be more than just an observer.

In the name of paternal love, Lester Ferris will do almost anything. And he's a soldier with a knack for bad places: "almost anything" could be a very great deal—even becoming some sort of hero. But this is Mancreu, and everything here is upside down. Just exactly what sort of hero will the boy need?

***

I don't doubt that it's difficult to be different, but Nick Harkaway makes it look obscenely easy. In just two books, he's made such a mark on the landscape of imagination that his legions of readers will come to Tigerman bearing certain expectations: of an endlessly energetic narrative that streaks about like something stung, complete with a cacophony of lively characters and replete with ideas which bleed bananas.

This isn't exactly that... but it is undeniably of the award-winning author's oeuvre.

Whereas The Gone-Away World and Angelmaker were noisy novels, with ninjas and ass-kicking grannies, mad monks and clockwork killers, Tigerman, by comparison, is quiet. Being the origin story of a superhero and his sidekick, it's not silent, not entirely, but it is... stealthy, yes. Sneaky, even. All in all a much softer, sweeter and more surprising something than I had imagined.

Book Review | Europe in Autumn by Dave Hutchinson

Rudi is a cook in a Krakow restaurant, but when his boss asks him to help a cousin escape from the country he's trapped in, a new career—part spy, part people-smuggler—begins.

Following multiple economic crises and a devastating flu pandemic, Europe has fractured into countless tiny nations, duchies, polities and republics. Recruited by the shadowy organisation "Les Coureurs des Bois," Rudi is schooled in espionage, but when a training mission to The Line—a sovereign nation consisting of a trans-European railway line—goes wrong, he is arrested, beaten and Coureur Central must attempt a rescue.

With so many nations to work in, and identities to assume, Rudi is kept busy travelling across Europe. But when he is sent to smuggle someone out of Berlin and finds a severed head inside a locker instead, a conspiracy begins to wind itself around him. 

With kidnapping, double-crosses and a map that constantly re-draws, Rudi begins to realise that underneath his daily round of plot and counter plot, behind the conflicting territories, another entirely different reality might be pulling the strings...

***

Maps are a way of rationalising landscapes, but what kind of map can help us come to terms with a country that changes every day? With a world that defies definition?

Dave Hutchinson's vision of Europe in the near future is as plausible as it is novel. In the aftermath of catastrophic economic collapse and a flu pandemic which led to the death of many millions, the Union begins to splinter:

The Union had struggled into the twenty-first century and managed to survive in some style for a few more years of bitching and infighting and cronyism. Then it had spontaneously begun to throw off progressively smaller and crazier nation-states, like a sunburned holidaymaker shedding curls of skin. 

Nobody really understood why this had happened. (p.27)

However unclear the reasons may be, "pocket nations" (p.27) now proliferate across the continent, each with its own borders and orders. Anything goes in some, whilst in others, next to nothing does. With more and more of these micro-countries appearing every year, a gap has opened in the market: there's a dire demand for people prepared to brave Europe's impossible topography in order to transport packages—or perhaps important persons—from state to state in spite of tight guidelines.

Some call the organisation which has sprung up to meet the needs of this new niche a company of "glorified postmen." (p.124) Others don't believe in them, even. But they exist, I insist, and they call themselves Coureurs.

Book Review | The Madonna on the Moon by Rolf Bauerdick

November 1957: As Communism spreads across Eastern Europe, strange events are beginning to upend daily life in Baia Luna, a tiny village nestled at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains. As the Soviets race to reach the moon and Sputnik soars overhead, fifteen-year-old Pavel Botev attends the small village school with the other children. Their sole teacher, the mysterious and once beautiful Angela Barbulescu, was sent by the Ministry of Education, and while it is suspected that she has lived a highly cultured life, much of her past remains hidden. But one day, after asking Pavel to help hang a photo of the new party secretary, she whispers a startling directive in his ear: “Send this man straight to hell! Exterminate him!” By the next morning, she has disappeared.

With little more to go on than the gossip and rumors swirling through his grandfather Ilja’s tavern, Pavel finds curiosity overcoming his fear when suddenly the village’s sacred Madonna statue is stolen and the priest Johannes Baptiste is found brutally murdered in the rectory. Aided by the Gypsy girl Buba and her eccentric uncle, Dimitru Gabor, Pavel’s search for answers leads him far from the innocent concerns of childhood and into the frontiers of a new world, changing his life forever.

***

In Baia Luna, a small village of some 250 self-sufficient souls hidden away at the base of the Carpathian Mountains, "today was like what yesterday was and tomorrow would be." (p.50)

But not for long. On the contrary, a time of great change awaits. It's November 1957, and the fictitious nation of Transmontania is about to be sucked whole-hog into the socialist bloc. Communism is of course on the cards, and whomsoever stands in the way of the Conjucator shall surely be squashed.

"About to turn sixteen [and] stuck in a swamp halfway between a boy and a man," (p.78) Pavel Botev has more immediate problems to attend to at the outset of The Madonna on the Moon, the first novel by Rolf Bauerdick, an award-winning German photojournalist. Raised by his aunt and his grandfather, a "formerly commonsensical" (p.325) sort convinced that the body of the Virgin Mary is on the moon, Pavel becomes caught up in a bizarre conspiracy which will dog him to the end of an era that has hardly started.

Film Review | Red State, dir. Kevin Smith

I came up on Kevin Smith... on Clerks and Mallrats and Chasing Amy. Insensible stoner comedies they may have been, to a one, but I loved them. For me, the downturn began with Dogma, and though Clerks 2 didn't entirely suck, and Zack and Miri Make a Porno showed some modicum of promise - not to mention rather more of Jason Mewes than I'd counted on seeing - hindsight insists that these are exceptions to the frankly embarrassing trend Smith has established in the interim, rather than evidence of some upswing. 

Red State is basically Mallrats meets Hostel: torture porn with so many self-serious soliloquies as to rival every word spoken throughout the entirely of the SAW franchise. It begins with three horny teens whose names you needn't even stress about... though one is played by Kyle Gallner, who's impressed me before, and surely would do again had he or any of the other impressive bit-part players (among them Michael Parks, John Goodman and True Blood's Stephen Root) had but the slightest chance to shine in this unfortunate affair.

Anyway, there's these three dudes, right? And they've been offered sex on a platter. They need only go to a trailer somewhere out in the sticks and drink two beers before they get theirs... and oh, they do get theirs. Just not in the way they might have imagined. Instead, they're drugged, gagged and captured, and when at last they awake, they find themselves in the barnyard church of a little Christian cult with a lotta God's guns.

Unusually, what follows is not in fact the narrative of their attempts to escape the clutches of Pastor Abin Cooper and his unwaveringly faithful congregation. Actually, as distasteful as that sounds, that might have been better. Instead, Smith tries to do action (again), and fails (again), because when word gets out that the bloodthirsty minister has himself a holy trinity of hostages, the ATF get involved, and not a little predictably, a shoot-out ensues. And ensues. And ensues.

I guess that'd have been all well and good if the shoot-out had been in any sense tense or engaging or exciting. It isn't. Though it is, I'll say - and do pardon the pun - stylishly shot; faint praise which I think it's safe to attribute to cinematographer David Klein in any event, rather than writer/director (not to mention editor/distributor) Kevin Smith, whose most notable contribution to these long-winded sequences - namely a series of absurd pauses to allow for the deeply dippy dialogue that is typical of his work - quite undercuts the kinetic quality Klein otherwise achieves. 

Red State is in every other sense a mess. Maybe if it had had a few dick jokes I would've been able to look upon it more kindly, but no... no suck luck. In fact it is written with so little coherency and so little interest in - or even seeming awareness of - pace, character, narrative and the like that it seems defiant; positively transgressive - which, to be sure, has been Smith's business all along - but against what? Church? State? Common sense? Only Smarties have the answer.

I've been a Kevin Smith fan through thick and through thin, but the thick has been thin on the ground of late, no doubt about it. Here I was thinking at least it couldn't get much worse than Cop Out.

It can.

Book Review | The Departure by Neal Asher

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Amazon.co.uk / The Book Depository

Visible in the night sky the Argus Station, its twin smelting plants like glowing eyes, looks down on nightmare Earth. From Argus the Committee keep an oppressive control: citizens are watched by cams systems and political officers, it's a world inhabited by shepherds, reader guns, razor birds and the brutal Inspectorate with its white tiled cells and pain inducers.

Soon the Committee will have the power to edit human minds, but not yet, twelve billion human being need to die before Earth can be stabilized, but by turning large portions of Earth into concentration camps this is achievable, especially when the Argus satellite laser network comes fully online...

This is the world Alan Saul wakes to in his crate on the conveyor to the Calais incinerator. How he got there he does not know, but he does remember the pain and the face of his interrogator. Informed by Janus, through the hardware implanted in his skull, about the world as it is now Saul is determined to destroy it, just as soon as he has found out who he was, and killed his interrogator.

***

I have my problems with Neal Asher's politics. 

Perhaps you're already wondering what in the world I'm going on about. If that's the case, do yourself a favour and skip the next bit, because by the dead, it's got to be better not to know.

So where were we? Ah yes: Neal Asher and his contrarian politics. Well, truth be told, he makes no secret of them. Take this tirade:

...the restriction imposed on public travel - quickly becoming the privilege of the government bureaucrats only - had started way back with numerous bogus crises used to divert the public eye from what was really fucking over the planet: too many people. That was a problem no democratic government could attain office by offering to solve, and one that would only be cured by Mother Nature applying her tender mercies, or by some totalitarian regime applying Nazi-like final solutions. It seems that, here and now, Earth had both. (p.60) 

Long story short, Neal Asher is a global warming denier - a real right-winger - and thanks to the mainstream success of his various sf series, uppermost amongst them The Polity, he's a man with some standing, and a very visible platform from which he often espouses the tenets of his particular faith; his faith as opposed to the facts and the science that stand strident against his beliefs, I mean.

None of which makes Neal Asher a bad person, and certainly not a bad writer... only misguided, in my view - of course in my view; after all we're talking politics here, and few things could be further from the truth than politics - only misguided, as I was saying, and (here's what really bothers me) not a little irresponsible. Because it's one thing to use your standing as an author to publicise those things you have authored -- another entirely, I think, to abuse your position of power to pitch your particular idea of the facts, such as they are, to those folks who admire you for your fiction. 

So I have my problems with Neal Asher's politics. But truth be told, I had no issues at all with Neal Asher's novels... not till I read The Departure. It was my first of his works, and though I am wise enough never to say never, it will, I expect, be my last.

And not for the reasons you might foresee -- though, you know... those too.

The Departure is the first novel in a new series from the Daily Mail favourite: the origin story of one Alan Saul, so-called Owner of the Worlds. He begins, in the grand tradition of protagonists all through the ages, an amnesiac, bereft of his personality, his memories, and by and large his very humanity. Exactly how he came to be such a blank slate is the primary concern of the first third of The Departure, during which act the reader is also brought up to speed on the state of the world in the 22nd century.

Brace yourself, folks: for even according to Neal Asher, a hundred-odd years from now it's not all raindrops and lollipops for Earth and us mere mortals. Never one to show rather than tell, however - and here we arrive at that aspect of The Departure I found most problematic - at the outset of each chapter, Asher outlines a thankfully brief lesson in the inner workings of his near-future milieu. In the first, we are instructed how "as politicians worked diligently to weld together the main blocks of world nations into a coherent and oppressive whole, and their grip on people's everyday lives grew steadily tighter, government increasingly monitored, censored and stifled the Internet." (p.1) In the next, we learn how "the latest news about Mars began getting shunted into second place by the latest scandal about a paedophile footballer or the latest religious fanatic with an overpowering urge to convert unbelievers into corpses," (p.26) and so on and so forth.

This paranoid, deeply pessimistic perspective is the not the sum total of what Asher aims to pass off as world-building in The Departure - there are a legion of other, equally egregious examples (some still more insidious) - but so surfaced, and so tied into the narrative which eventually comes to accompany these thinly-veiled invectives, there's really nowhere else to look, however much you might like to. In short, Asher so foregrounds his politics that it proves quite impossible to avoid them.

Again I should stress: it's not the politics that bother me, strictly speaking - though of course they do - so much as the awkward, obvious way in which Asher presents them. There are no real rules for writers to abide by, as it is often said, but it is also said (at least as often) that if there was just one, it would be: show, don't tell.

In The Departure, Neal Asher flies in the face of this guidance at every turn, and in so doing exposes the essential sense behind it, because these moments - these many, many moments - add nothing to the narrative next to what they subtract from it. Rhythms are interrupted, themes are obscured, belief is regularly beggared... which isn't to speak of the barely functional prose and stilted dialogue which seems to me telling of Asher's haphazard approach:

'I have attained my first goal,' he said emotionlessly. 'I now know who I am, so it is time for me to attain my next goal.' His faced showed extreme emotion, raw hate. 'Now I must show these fuckers they've really made an enemy.' (p.103)

With this ho-hum identity crisis finally behind him, Alan Saul promptly declares war on The Man, because "justified by his vision of the greater good, anything was permissible, even murder." (p.14) Thereafter, what little character there is in The Departure diminishes into the middle distance to make way for what amounts to Total Recall meets The Terminator in a universe painted "mostly shit-brown and battleship-grey." (p.47)

And I expect that will appeal to some. The bare bones of the premise attracted me, even, despite my misgivings - rather than that I might herein find fodder with which to reinforce them - but the loathsome way in which Asher opts to flesh out his skeleton characters and narrative left this particular reader, at least, distinctly dissatisfied. Carelessly composed and, alas, not at all apolitical, The Departure is for the larger part practically intolerable. By all means look beyond the right-wing agendas Asher serves up with such relish... treat them merely as inappropriate appetisers, but you will likely find all that remains is an excruciatingly violent and unapologetically amoral novel, such that the experience of reading The Departure seems "part of a journey through some lower circle of hell: just canyons of concrete and the partially dismembered dead, bloody splashes and body parts." (p.85)

Saying that, I did not despise the sequences set on a Mars base being downsized in the most nightmarish way you can imagine. These lamentably occasional interludes seemed to me substantially more interesting than Alan Saul's one-note origin story; in fact they brought to mind certain elements of Gardens of the Sun and The Quiet War by Paul McAuley. Markedly superior works of sf, needless to say -- and not because they were without ideologies of their own, nor because those beliefs more closely aligned with mine, but because there was rather more to them than dubious politics and gratuitous violence garbed in genre fatigues.

If only Asher could reign himself in a bit, and focus on those things that are actually meaningful in terms of character and narrative, I expect the inevitable next Owner novel - particularly given how The Departure concludes - could and should be much improved over this meaningless misfire. Hope springs eternal.

***

The Departure

by Neal Asher

UK Publication: September 2011, Tor

Buy this book from

Amazon.co.uk / The Book Depository

Recommended and Related Reading

Opinionated Speculations: On The Polity of Politics

So this thing came up on Twitter last weekend. A few particularly droll twitterers twittered that they'd twittered about it before, so I'll make no claims as to - God forbid - original thought, or even framing the argument in a way it hasn't been presented before. Make no mistake: I'm sure other people have said these very things, and perhaps in this very way!

So as I was saying, this thing came up on Twitter the other day. Except it didn't really come up on Twitter at all; I guess that was just where I thought out loud about it. It came up here, on Mark Charan Newton's blog - as, I might add, thoughtful and interesting things are often wont to. Mark begins with a disclaimer, saying "Neal [Asher] has been a science fiction writer for several years, and the quality of his books are not in dispute here," and that seems to me symptomatic of the thing that bothers me most about the whole discussion: the fear of stepping on a toe, of infringing on another's territory: of the mincing of words in a space that should be all about words, shouldn't it?

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Mark's post is a systematic rebuttal of a blog post written by Neal Asher - author of (among many other novels) The Technician, one of Amazon UK's top ten bestselling SF&F books throughout 2010. Asher, as Mark asserted, "wishes to discredit Global Warming." And you know, it really seems he does. His argument is here, and we all owe a debt of gratitude to Mark for caring to demonstrate its inadequacies; I for one applaud the fellow.

Asher is an influential gentleman, after all. The Technician is sandwiched between China Mieville's Kraken and The Passage by Justin Cronin in the aforementioned end-of-year list (published somewhat sickeningly before November's even upon us - though I suppose the advent calendars are out, and there's no sense fighting a losing battle). Those are some stonking good books - full reviews of each here and here - not to speak of bestselling, and for a bit there I was thinking perhaps I'd give Asher's latest a shot before the year's out. I've got a copy and The Technician's success teased full-blown curiosity from my mild intrigue... why not?

Why not indeed. Because it seems Neal Asher's politics - at least in terms of his opinion as regards climate change, which he gives every impression of believing to be left-wing bullshit - bother me. Of course, the politics, ideologies and prejudices of plenty of my friends and even (dare I say particularly) my family members bother me too. I'm not suddenly going to drop a mate or a mother because they think a thing I don't; a lonely life that would be...

But.

It's one thing to have an opinion. It's another to have an opinion, particularly as regards a hot-button issue like global warming, that you can back up. It's still another thing to perpetuate misinformation as if it were the truth because it fits with your perspective and to do so from a position of considerable influence.

Neal Asher can believe I and the others who share my beliefs a gaggle of liberal twits. That's fine. That wouldn't dissuade me from reading The Technician. But to assert that we're such because he's heard a bit of knock-off knowledge in the pub one night and deemed it absolute truth; to then use his status as a bestselling author in this climate of exponentially more intimate interaction between reader and writer to preach a bunch of potentially very harmful claptrap; and to do so without fact-checking his inherently controversial assertions even in the least... that does the trick, you know?

And I'm forthright enough to say so. Well blow me down.

You hear a lot of talk about objectivity, about consummate professionalism in what is - let's face it - an amateur arena, and I'm sorry, but I simply don't buy into it. Objectivity, as I tend to think I've said before, is a lovely idea, but be you a blogger, an author, a paid critic or an awards judge, who you are plays some part in what you read and do and say and think, what you like and dislike. I wouldn't have it any other way, for myself. When I read a person's thoughts and opinions, I'm buying into that person as much as the thing they're thinking and opining about. And I don't believe I'm alone in that. Particularly in this climate, where you can tweet Brandon Sanderson out of nowhere and HE GIVES YOU THE TIME OF DAY, by God.

I said it on Twitter, I'll say it again: I have to wonder, would I have given Tome of the Undergates a chance if it hadn't been for Sam Sykes seeming such an upstanding fellow on Twitter? Well, maybe. Probably, even; it was right up my street. But the fact that he said a few nice things, or funny things, the fact that from what I could see of him - as perceived through the filter of social media - he seemed a clever guy and a right nice bloke at that made me that much more amenable to cracking the covers of his (needless to say very fine) first novel.

Why, then, does it seem so very unacceptable to take into account the more negative stuff that Twitter and its ilk have opened the door to inasmuch as one absorbs the good? Can those authors employing social networking primarily to publicise and promote really have it both ways? Or is it that because we're so near to reaching out and touching these people who'd have been as good as Gods a decade ago, we're afraid to say a thing that might rub a dude whose books we respect the wrong way?

Don't misunderstand me. The Technician might be a brilliant book. I didn't think it was likely to be when my review copy came through the door a couple months ago - but I'm wrong, let's face it, rather a lot. It sure sounded like a lark. At this point, though, having read Neal Asher wax on about his own inconvenient truth - crucially in the face of the facts (such as they are) - makes me that much less likely to give his bestselling novel more than the time of day.

It could still happen.

If I'm honest, though, it probably won't. Not now.

Tell me: does that make me judgmental? Do I need, mayhap, to be reminded that in the end, the books are all that matters? Perhaps they were a decade ago, but can one really sustain such an isolationist perspective in this climate?