Michael Cisco has been a favorite of mine for almost ten years, from when I read his 1999 International Horror Guild Award winning, The Divinity Student. Cisco is not strictly horror, he lands in a category I can’t quite place, dark fantasy, Lovecraftian, gothic, something unto himself. His hallmarks are tremendous world-building, extremely rich visual description, character driven plots, unusually rendered and memorable side characters, and worlds as mysterious and magical as they are unorthodox. Cisco landed with Prime books for The San Veneficio Canon, The Tyrant, and The Traitor. Prime seemed to be a good fit for him, but the imprint proved difficult. A blog entry some time ago on why you should avoid Prime books began, “I think I remember what money looks like.” The Narrator takes place in a tangential connection to The Traitor, by use of a language and culture called Alak, and mention of the Soul Eaters, a sort of marginalized religious figure, but this does not play prominently in The Narrator. It seems to be a time period on the future of the same world, and events are not related between the two books.
The mess with Prime resulted in only one novel being released in six years despite his assertion of having fifteen done. Another book is set to be released by another publisher in the spring, a couple other titles are known, but have not found a home.
The Narrator was released in October 2010 by Civil Coping Mechanisms, which promoted it as his most mature and ambitious novel yet. The title character, named Low Loom Column begins the book at a university, training to become a narrator when he is drafted into military service despite having an exemption. When he tries to protest he is told time and again it is a futile effort, and he is forced to report to the nearest city for service. He continues seeking ways of getting out of conscription, even considering desertion, as he meets others from his unit, notably the conscripts Jil Punkinflake, and Silichieh, and Captain Makemin. He has some time in the city before they gather and move out, which he spends in his occupation. He records a séance, and provides his services for a wealthy and mysterious resident of the city, the cannibal queen who is said to have killed and eaten her husband after the death of her child, and who is socially imprisoned in her mansion. Here he illustrates just what a narrator does, he records the story that is told to him.
Forgive me a brief foray from the plot at this point, to set up what Cisco is so good at. Cisco can write sentences better than anybody. Long and lush descriptions, brilliant similes and metaphors, a tremendous mastery of language which always inspires me. While still in the city, he lays out the matter of the book in this paragraph.
“I find unaccountable difficulties always arise in searching out the narrative sections of any marketplace, but of course, how could I know that? Anyhow there always seems to be some distraction, or the sort of wrong turn that, having drawn you into the trammels of its mischief, dodges behind the innocent turns and loses itself among them like an absconding pickpocket. No shortage of the real ones either—at the wine store, Jil Punkinflake took my wallet slowly from my hand as I was about to restore it to my pocket and deftly slipped it into my shirt, where my vest holds it now against my skin. I ask him about the narrative market and he gives me a swift, canny look. With a nearly invisible toss of his head I realize he is one of those go-betweens who are involved with the narrative merchants, the storiers and letterers and calligraphers and abcedarians. We flit out into trough like stone lanes.”
Here Cisco lays out exactly what to expect in this book. This is a story about story, existing on many levels simultaneously, and it will steal your wallet if you aren’t careful. Low is an unreliable narrator, as unreliable as this narrative market. It is also here that he is seen by an Edek, and once the Edek sees you, there is no sneaking away from conscription. They assemble, and we find Makemin is a hard officer, intent on making a name for himself, and forget about his pending divorce, mostly by taking out his personal anger on his troops. Low tries to avoid him until on the march our of the city, Makemin notices he is a narrator. Low is given a horse, and ordered to ride alongside him to record the story of his unit.
They are attacked on the road, enemies described as “blackbirds” ambush them as they make their way out of the city. They take some casualties, but curiously, the blackbird dead hover above the ground. Their first stop is a mental institution. In the run up to the war, the caretakers locked the residents in, leaving them to die. Makemin releases and treats many, and then conscripts the able bodies into his unit. A woman, Saskia describes how the Blackbirds have metal body suits, cast specially so lightly they float, and can therefore attack from the sky, cover great distances in a jump, and be gone in seconds.
They make their way to the shore, where they commandeer a ship to make it an island which is a strategic stronghold for their side of the war. Their ship is attacked en route, and they suffer large casualties before reaching port. The port is designed to be very easily defended from the sea, and mountains protect the city from the inland side of the island, but the enemy is known to be on the opposite shore. The unit disembarks and makes friends with the natives, largely through Low’s translation skills, and soon marches on the enemy, Makemin eager to make a name for himself. Early exploration reveals a larger than expected enemy presence, and Makemin is forced to make a decision, return to the city and defend it from there, leaving the rest of the island to fend for itself, possibly leaving it to become a stronghold, or wait for reinforcements in the form of Predicanten, (also known as predicates), soldiers locked in giant armored suits, essentially walking insane tanks. There is another option, however. The interior of the island is said to possess ancient magical weapons, enough to destroy any army, if the spirits of the island decide they like those seeking to use them. If not, well, no one makes it back alive. Only Low, the Narrator, has the ability to translate the languages needed to convince the spirits to fight on their side, and so he leads a final expedition into the interior to gain the spirit weapons before the opposing army realizes they are there and makes its own attempts. But to describe it like this is to leave out all of the details that make a Michael Cisco book so rich and engrossing.
The book is rich in ambiguity. It is never clear what the matter of the war is, or who the enemy is, nor is it clear how anybody in the country feels towards the war, the enemy, or the soldiers. There are mentions of separatists, but these seem to be more an ethnic minority and never figure into the fighting. Even the soldiers have very little to say about the why of the war, and only discuss the circumstances they find themselves in.
The Narrator is a book that rewards a slow read due to its rich text and subtle storyline. This is certainly an gifted author coming into his own, though I think The Tyrant left me more satisfied emotionally as a reader.
Cisco succeeds here at writing a rich story on several levels, not just telling a story of this military regiment, but a story of people, a nation, and a story about story telling, and the strength narrative holds personally and culturally. It is interesting to see how the pursuit of story affects the characters through the book. For Low, being a narrator should have been a blessing, a way out of this war, and it soon becomes a burden, but a burden he must carry as his training requires. Makemin does not set out in search of honor, glory or country, it is to make his own story, and all along the way, story drives every character. Low is the historian on the spot, setting each down, it is only with reluctance that he takes control of the narrative, and it is up to the reader to decide how unreliable a narrator he is.
Cisco also succeeds in re-imagining the unreliable narrator story, creating a narrator always suspect, seemingly capable of everything he undertakes, and yet incapable of the tasks he takes on.
So I think it is time for me to make a writing comment on Avatar since by now everybody, even impoverished children in Africa have probably seen it. While it was pretty, and the story was epic, it wasn’t without its writing flaws. James Cameron is, I think, the best person in Hollywood for polishing the turd. I think he has had only a couple of original stories (The Abyss and Strange Days), and even those I’m beginning to doubt. He ripped off the Terminator from a Harlan Ellison written Outer Limits storyline. Titanic was based on “A Night to Remember” which I first read in fourth grade. This one was widely known to be a take off on Dances With Wolves, Pocahantas, or any other of 20 or so books. Given how lazy he seems to be in coming up with stories, I’m guessing he didn’t go too deeply into the more obscure of the list. Most of the issues I had were issues of laziness, and I think they are from the laziness of not being hungry. Somebody who isn’t given five years, $300 million and complete control from the outset of filming would have fixed these problems. Let me ruin the movie for you.
Actually, I found the movie tremendously enjoyable, let me start by saying it. The world Cameron created is richly detailed, down to creating a full language and ecosystem. But you’d think if you could come up with such a world, you could come up with a better name for the rock the humans want than “Unobtanium”. This name is a joke from materials scientists and materials users that should never have made it into a movie. You’d think after 5 years of production, you could come up with a better name for a mineral. There were two ways around it. One, come up with a better name, or second, mention “unobtanium TM, I don’t know what it’s made of and I don’t care, I just know it makes money.” The repetition of the name in serious context just made it silly. Another example of this is Pandora. We couldn’t come up with a better name for it than this? Really? Star Wars can do it just fine.
The other issue with the unobtanium is that we don’t know what it does. This entire three hours of this epic tale and epic war was fought over something that so far as we know is a rock, by the looks of it, a piece of pyrite or hematite. At least in Dune (another story parts of Avatar’s plot could have been stolen from) we knew what the spice did. You could say it’s a MacGuffin, but in this case, we deserve more than a MacGuffin. MacGuffins only work when it’s a story about characters, and this is a story about a war. The characters are absolutely secondary to plot. They don’t really have their individuality, much as James Cameron would like you to think. There’s the grizzled military leader, the money-driven company man (last played by Paul Reiser in Aliens, another James Cameron movie), Sigourney Weaver’s native liaison is nothing more than a Jane Goodall without a past. Think about it, what do we know about her, what did she do before coming to Pandora? Where are the telltale tics and tremors of any of these characters? No, not a character piece, and so we have to care about what the pathetically named unobtanium does.
The next issue I have was a reference to a “Daisy Cutter” in reference to a bomb to be used on the natives. If you look up “Daisy Cutter”, it is not a generic term. It is used in reference to a particular weapon of the current U.S. Military, the largest conventional bomb in the world, which fills up the entire cargo bay of a C-130. It is nickname the daisy cutter for the blast pattern it creates. What the future military creates on Pandora is the mother of all cluster bombs, not a single gigantic and comparable conventional bomb. All comparisons aside, when she said, “Fricking daisy Cutter,” it pulled me out of the world of Pandora, and back into the very familiar war-torn world we live in, and that worked counter to all of the work they did in creating the world of Pandora. Eight years of development and execution thrown away in one word. Now, if they had used “cluster bomb”, it would have made plenty of sense, as this is a generic term for a bomb made of many little bombs. It would also have made things that much more horrible, as cluster bombs are now banned by the U.N.
And really, robots that carry guns and knives? What possible utility does that have? I can’t imagine we’d build anything so anthropomorphic as we’d have a device for the knife, a gun with much more design efficiency. Didn’t we see enough of this with the Matrix? Aren’t the robots and weapons of Robotech much more likely than these cheesy things?
I have a love/hate relationship with Warren Ellis. The first thing I ever read by him, Transmetropolitan, was a comic masterpiece that inspired me to do things like I Hope You’re Happy and Inside. Then I began to read some of the other things he was doing as that series was winding up, and while decent as stories and comics, weren’t up to the same caliber. To be fair, I found them at about the time Transmet was finishing up, they may have been written and released much earlier. I’d have to check and see.
In the wake of Transmet’s end, he put out some real dogs. I remember a story called “Orbiter” or something like that which was released as a hardcover comic that was about two issues in size. The story was about a crew of a space shuttle which had disappeared on a mission, and then returned several years later, covered in flesh and with the crew alive. It landed as usual, the crew was debriefed and held in isolation, and then they decided they liked the now living space shuttle and they climbed back in and took off. That was it, and I began to sour on Warren’s writing. The characters were not very interesting, the conflict was nonexistent and the whole thing seemed to exist as an excuse to put flesh on a space shuttle. I never really saw anybody who had anything to lose in that story, and that’s why it failed.
Then you get to interact with Warren Ellis, the personality who is larger than life, brutish and sardonic in an almost chipper way. I began to realize Warren Ellis has an incredible gift for the profane, an ability to succinctly and freely call out the bullshit of life, and somehow be entertaining at it, and “Orbiter” hadn’t allowed that voice to come out. I also realized that he isn’t a storyteller by craft, more the stories are mediums by which his voice is brought to the masses.
Going into it, I was hoping for something closer to Transmetropolitan, and further from Orbiter. It starts out great. Here’s the opening paragraph:
I opened my eyes to see the rat taking a piss in my coffee mug. It was a huge brown bastard; had a body like a turd with legs and beady black eyes full of secret rat knowledge. Making a smug uffing sound, it threw itself from the table to the floor, and scuttled back into the hole in the wall where it had spent the last three month planning new ways to screw me around. I’d tried nailing wood over the gap in the wainscot, but it gnawed through it an spat the wet pieces in my shoes. After that I spiked bait with warfarin, but the poison seemed to somehow cause it to evolve and become a super-rat. I nailed it between the eyes one with a lucjy shot with the butt of my gun, but it got up again and shat in my telephone.
That’s the Warren Ellis I know and love. His freedom of expression is practically unmatched.
The story of Crooked Little Vein is of a detective, Mike McGill who is hired by the White House Chief of Staff to find a book, an alternate version of the Constitution written by the founding fathers to be enacted when things in the country became a little too crazy to control anymore. You see, in their infinite wisdom, the founding fathers knew their little document wouldn’t suffice totally for the future, so they planned ahead. The catch is, by reading the book, those in the live audience would become hypnotized, brainwashed, and just go along with it, kind of like a Fox News viewer. Thing is, the book has become a bargaining chip for people who have power and got into a little, uh, trouble. Think about Bill Clinton when his relationship with Lewinsky was made public. If he had the book, he’d give it to Ken Starr in exchange for silence on the matter, and then Ken Starr would get caught with, say the pool boy, and he’d have to give it to somebody else and so on.
So Mike McGill sets off into the underbelly of America, to experience first-hand the oddest of fetishes, cults, and power hungry families in search of the book. Did I mention that Mike is as straight an arrow as you could ever find?
After his first run in with perversion, he meets his companion for the adventure, Trix. She’s a freeloving modern girl of the underground who thinks this sounds like a great adventure, and something about writing a thesis that never really gets addressed again.
On his journey, Mike comes face to face with a reality he might not have been prepared for, namely, that weird is normal, freaky fetish is main street, and that he should just lighten up about all of that stuff.
The tone of the book is unwaveringly strange. Ellis confronts the reader with as much strangeness as can be handled at any one point in time, and it gets really hard for the uninitiated to distinguish fact from fiction, or real versus made up, or in other words, which fetishes and oddballs are actually out there, and what aren’t. I really admire Ellis’s voice, his facility in creating brilliantly fun voice.
On the other hand, the book is paced incredibly quickly. It felt like I could read 10 pages in a minute, which was just too fast. The speed in storytelling didn’t allow him to slow down and develop characters and the danger of the plot. Because I didn’t really feel the characters were more than devices of the story, I was never really concerned when they got into trouble, and since the story was told so fast, I never got the feeling the characters were in danger, in over their heads, or so fucked it was hopeless unless they just broke down the door and hoped to get some lucky hits in. It always felt like Mike was going to find his way through a problem, nothing would ever go wrong, and nothing did. In short it was too easy for them to achieve their objectives.
And also, in the end, when of course the private dick and the dame were deciding if they were going to stay together, I didn’t believe it for a second. On the other hand, it is a fast, entertaining read, so don’t worry about getting too caught up in something with little payoff. There’s nothing like Warren Ellis’s twisted vision, and for its faults, it was still a worthwhile read.
I think I’ll write some reviews of what I’m reading so that some of you might be able to follow what is going in that creates some of my output. I picked this book to read because I like things that start off with obscure science and math and tries to make it accessible to the reader. I’m certainly not an expert in any of these topics, but usually I can follow well enough to get the book on a more than the average human. I am also feeling a little shy on my hard SF background, and I had the money and the book was there and I wasn’t finding much more at the time. Seem fair? I’ll try to give you an idea of what I learned about writing for each book that I review as well.
The plot centers around Ranjit Subramanian, a math student at a university in Sri Lanka. The first act of the book sets up some of the later characters, but I’m going to focus on Ranjit. Plus, I don’t remember most of their names (shows how memorable they were) and I’ve loaned the book out. The second plot-line features a race of super beings called the Super Galactics who decide the humans on Earth are a threat and need to eliminate them. They send some races there to observe while they send in their henchmen. We’ll discuss some of the races of aliens in a bit. The first act doesn’t really do much in reality, so we’ll move to act 2. In the setup parts of act one, a family friend gets into some trouble, and disappears, leaving a family behind.
Act 2 focuses on Ranjit reuniting them, and finding out that he is now working as a pirate. Ranjit winds up as a hostage on a cruise ship, watching the children and teaching them maths tricks. Eventually the ship is liberated, but Ranjit is held prisoner, during which time he solves Fermat’s last theorem. Shortly after he memorizes his proof, his ransom is met, and he is freed. It is worth mentioning that a new weapon is used to fight the pirates, a non-lethal weapon, and this kind of weapon is interesting to the races rushing to destroy the human race, after all, if they can fight their battles without killing, they aren’t a threat anymore.
Act 3 begins with an ethical dilemma. There is a new weapon on Earth and it is used first on North Korea. The weapon is kind of like an EMP which disables all electronics and weapons in a given area. The group that is in charge of this weapon is part of the U.N. Ranjit is asked to be a part of the group by a childhood friend who is now working on codes and the like for some intelligence services. Ranjit decides not to join.
This is the point where I’ll stop giving you plot details because this is where for all intents and purposes, the plot ends. Ranjit spends the rest of the book, something like 60% of it, watching the world as he gets older, has kids, watches the space elevator get built on Sri Lanka, and teaches at a university. And that’s the real problem with the book, halfway through, the main character walks away from the conflict. Had Ranjit taken the job, and been entwined in the ethical issues presented by the weapon, there would have been a book there.
Fred Pohl indicates that by the time the book was handed to him, Clarke was getting spotty, and so he had to interpret and invent a little bit to get the book right. Problem is, the main character is as much of a spectator as the reader. This is emphasized by how much business Pohl had to invent for Ranjit to do while watching. He has problems figuring out how to be a good professor, he reads a lot of newspapers. He has some personal business to attend to. Nothing that makes for an interesting book. You keep hoping that this is just a lull that is leading to something else, but it never does.
Another disappointing element of the book is the aliens. They can fly millions of light years, and then they get here and ask some of the dumbest questions, like “Why do you live in certain areas of the planet, instead of spreading strictly evenly about the world?” Apparently their planet is evenly rosy and beautiful all over.
They also describe some of the aliens and they make little sense. There’s a race called “The nine limbeds” that are so called because htey have eight limbs that they walk on, kind of like a centipede, and one on their butt that they use to do all of the rest of their “business”. I’m tired of the notion that aliens are stranger than we can imagine, and certainly not beings with two arms and two legs like us and every Star Trek episode. I’m more of the idea that there’s a good chance that they are. We evolved this way for a reason, because it is an efficient model for what we need to do to survive. I think there’s a reason that throughout our planet’s history, the larger animals had four limbs, and it isn’t directly related to a common ancestor with four limbs, and the rest of us are just variations on a theme. The menagerie of aliens in this book reads like a spore creature designer on a little too much acid, and not enough good design sense.
So my review of the book is this: a promising act one, no conflict, dumb and poorly designed aliens, flat characters, and a book that could have been much better.
The plot centers around Ranjit Subramanian, a math student at a university in Sri Lanka. The first act of the book sets up some of the later characters, but I’m going to focus on Ranjit. Plus, I don’t remember most of their names (shows how memorable they were) and I’ve loaned the book out. The second plot-line features a race of super beings called the Super Galactics who decide the humans on Earth are a threat and need to eliminate them. They send some races there to observe while they send in their henchmen. We’ll discuss some of the races of aliens in a bit. The first act doesn’t really do much in reality, so we’ll move to act 2. In the setup parts of act one, a family friend gets into some trouble, and disappears, leaving a family behind.
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