THE DRAGONS OF BABEL
By Michael Swanwick

Tor,
$25.95 (hc)
ISBN: 0765319500

THE DRAGONS OF BABEL
By Michael Swanwick

Swanwick’s new novel takes place in the world of his Iron Dragon’s Daughter, where magic and technology interact in what one might as well call a Swanwickian manner. I don’t know if anyone’s used the word as an adjective before, but I think it’s about time we broke it out and put it to work.

The story begins in a backwoods village, a hick town that has all the trappings of a farm community in a fantasy world—the kind of place heroes are supposed to come from. But Swanwick throws the reader a twist almost at the beginning—the town is part of a country caught up in a high-tech war, except that the tech here is a kind of magic, with iron dragons playing the role of bombers. When one crash-lands near the village, the protagonist, Will, finds his whole life changing.

The dragon, damaged but still dangerous, moves into the village and begins to control its inhabitants. It decides to make Will its agent for controlling the others. Horrified at the demands of the role, the boy eventually escapes and goes on a long journey that brings him to the capital city, Babylonia. Along the way, he becomes the guardian of a girl—at least, that is what she looks like—named Esme. He also becomes the protégé of a con artist named Nat Whilk, who introduces him into the ways of the city.

Will’s career in the city takes up much of the course of the book, and Swanwick has built his city from a wildly heterogeneous set of materials. The city is a hodgepodge of ancient and modern, with allusions to dozens of mythologies, from Sumerian to Rastafarian—appropriate to a city that is synonymous with the fragmentation of the human race into all the different languages and cultures of the world. Will begins his career as a rebel, literally in the underground, hunted by the powers that be. He graduates, under Nat’s tutelage, into a political hireling, doing dirty jobs for a series of officials.

Esme, who comes and goes in Will’s life, turns out to be someone who has gotten the gift of eternal youth at the cost of forgetting everything almost immediately. Her greatest talent is the ability to find someone to take care of her, whatever situation she finds herself in. But it seems to be Will’s fate to have her constantly turning up in his life, just as he has moved to a new phase of it. Not quite his daughter, Esme remains one of the few people whom Will can call family.

Swanwick leads Will through a series of adventures culminating in his rise to the pinnacle of Babylonian society, encountering new layers of danger at every step. As always in Swanwick’s stories, the journey is full of the unexpected, much of it wryly allusive to a whole spectrum of myth and legend—including, for example, a cameo appearance of Ellen Kushner’s swordmaster St. Vere to deliver a wonderfully cynical observation on the society Will is trying to become part of.

Witty, constantly inventive, written with enormous flair, this is one of Swanwick’s most complex and rewarding novels.

END OF THE WORLD BLUES
By Jon Courtenay Grimwood

A near-future thriller with a strong fantastic element, set partly in Japan, partly in England. The story has two protagonists, one an expat Englishman who isn’t entirely at home in either country, and a homeless girl whose apparent Japaneseness turns out to be a cover for something much more esoteric.

The story begins in Tokyo; Kit Nouveau, owner of an Irish bar whose clientele consists largely of outlaw bikers, encounters Lady Neku, a teenage runaway who apparently lives on the fringes of society—yet somehow has come into the possession of large sums of money. Kit is living on the edge himself, carrying on an affair with the wife of a rich Japanese businessman, a woman to whom he is supposedly giving English lessons.

The trouble begins when Kit, on his way home from a tryst, is robbed at gunpoint, then unexpectedly saved by Neku, who almost without any effort disarms and kills the gunman. By the time Kit sorts out this event, he is late getting home, and his wife Yoshi, a renowned pottery artist, has been stuck taking care of the bar instead of going for an overnight visit to her sister. They argue; he goes outside in the night, and behind him the building explodes into flames. It burns to the ground, killing his wife.

Kit’s problems are just beginning. It turns out that, under Japanese law, the two were never married, his Japanese wife not having registered the marriage, which took place abroad. He therefore doesn’t own the property on which the bar stood, which is suddenly prime territory for development. He is also a prime suspect in the burning of the bar, which the police are treating as arson—and possibly murder.

Meanwhile, we are beginning to get a glimpse of who Lady Neku really is in the world from which she comes—a strange castle that keeps changing shape in an off-world habitat called Nawa-No-Ukiyo or Floating Rope World. Here, she is part of a rich and powerful family, which has arranged her marriage to the son of a rival clan. Grimwood feeds the reader pieces of her story, gradually creating an image of the life from which she is escaping by coming to our world—and a hint of why she might want to.

Freed by the police, Kit encounters a figure from his past, Kate O’Mally —mother of an old lover—who convinces him to return to England to investigate her daughter’s disappearance, which the officials have appar- ently ruled a suicide, although there is no body. He agrees, leaving a group of his biker friends to guard the site of the bar. The would-be developers are still trying to chase former bar denizens off with force. But instead of a return to a safer, more familiar place, Kit finds himself in another deadly game—and finds that Lady Neku has somehow come to England, and means to take a role in his future, whether he likes it or not.

Writing in a compulsively readable style, Grimwood propels his characters into the midst of strangeness and danger. Whether in the unfamiliar world of Nawa-No-Ukiyo, the somewhat more familiar one of modern Japan, or the superficially familiar London, Grimwood knows how to catch the reader off guard with the unexpected detail. At the same time, he knows how to ground his most exotic scenes in reality with a homely touch. And he has a very good ear for dialogue in several quite exotic flavors.

Grimwood doesn’t really qualify as a new writer—this is his fifth book for Spectra, and he has several with other publishers—but he is definitely one to watch. You might want to look for some of the others—for example the “Arabesk” trilogy, also from Spectra—when you get your copy of End of the World Blues. This stuff is likely to be habit-forming, and it’d be a shame to finish one and have nothing else to follow it with.

THE SPIRAL LABYRINTH
By Matthew Hughes

Night Shade,
$24.95 (hc)
ISBN: 1597800910

THE SPIRAL LABYRINTH
By Matthew Hughes

This is the latest in a series featuring detective Hengis Hapthorn, perhaps most succinctly described as “Sherlock Holmes in the Dying Earth.”

Hapthorn is an inhabitant of a high-tech world, but his mind has been invaded by a denizen of a more primitive world, where magic is triumphant. His alter ego, Osk Rievor, excels as much in untrammeled intuition as Hapthorn does in logical thought. Neither of the two is entirely happy with this arrangement, since each has separate interests. In particular, Rievor wants Hapthorn to delay accepting an assignment that will take him into space, since Reivor wishes to investigate certain possibly magical phenomena that have come to his attention.

Reivor identifies a spot where several “lines of power” evidently come together, and asks Hapthorn to take him there. Hapthorn, intent on his space trip, insists on postponing the investigation. But the space voyage turns out to be a trap set by a mad ship’s control system, which the two (aided by Hapthorn’s formerly robotic assistant, now transformed into a grinnet, a creature that combines characteristics of cat and ape) finally manage to evade and return home.

After this odd (and seemingly disjunct) episode, Hapthorn agrees to go to the junction of the power lines, where he leaves the ship to investigate the odd landscape. Suddenly he finds himself propelled into a world where none of his technology is available—here, only magic works! Reivor is now in his element. Unfortunately, Hapthorn is well out of his, a problem compounded when the two of then are separated. With Reivor gone from his mind—whereabouts unknown, at least for a time—Hapthorn must make his way forward with only the grinnet, which is by turns a complete annoyance and an indispensable aid.

This begins a series of droll adventures in which Hapthorn encounters various bandits, mages, supernatural beings, and other creatures who fail to fit into his rational world picture. There are several plot twists that border on the outrageous, jumping through a series of settings that at first glance might seem utterly incompatible. Through it all, Hapthorn hovers somewhere between brilliant and clueless—a sure recipe for amusement.

DIFFERENT ENGINES: How Science Drives Fiction and Fiction Drives Science
By Mark Brake & Rev. Neil Hook

This is a provocative short history of SF, from precursors to modern times, by two Welsh academics. Its particular slant, on the interplay between SF ideas and scientific discovery, is what makes this one different from the usual academic fare.

The authors begin in the renaissance, probably the earliest point in history at which it makes sense to describe any kind of story as science fiction. Previous voyages to strange worlds and encounters with odd beings may have been perfectly credible to their readers, and perhaps even to their authors, but it is only with the arrival of the systematic investigation of the natural world that a writer could borrow the authority of what we now recognize as science to support his creations.

Interestingly enough, several of those renaissance scientists were quite at home with speculative fictions, beginning with Johannes Kepler himself. Somnium (The Dream), Kepler’s 1623 story of a lunar voyage, begins a line of scientifically informed fictions. True, Kepler’s travelers get to the moon with the aid of spirits; but what they find there is based on the cutting-edge astronomical theories of Copernicus and the latest observations of Galileo.

The authors follow the genre through several eras of science, each given a neat label and characterized by a certain approach to fiction and science. While much of the material will be familiar to anyone who’s investigated the history of the field, their take on some of the material shows it in an unexpected light. In particular, they reject some of the orthodoxies American historians of SF have been prone to. The “Astounding Age,” as they refer to the period between H.G. Wells and World War II, spends little time with the U.S. pulp writers who were the bread and butter of First Fandom. Instead, the focus is largely on European writers and filmmakers, with an emphasis on the Soviet and German pioneers of rocketry. Interesting stuff, about which many U.S. readers don’t know a lot.

But the writers’ omissions are also telling. A number of important authors are conspicuous by their absence. This is particularly evident in the chapter “The Atomic Age,” which deals with the era from World War II to the 1960s, characterized by atomic standoff and cold war paranoia. The authors concentrate on George Orwell’s 1984, Walter Miller’s Canticle for Leibowitz, Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, and George Stewart’s Earth Abides, along with two films, “On the Beach” and “Dr. Strange-love.”

Granted, all are first rate. Granted, Miller and Stewart deserve wider recognition outside the field. But the authors’ picture of the state of SF in this era is decidedly flawed without some mention of Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke, Heinlein, or Pohl—just to mention the first names that pop into my head. Not a word about them—although, to be honest, they are mentioned in other parts of the book. Heinlein even serves as the lead figure in the next chapter, which discusses Stranger in a Strange Land—a book that many readers consider a departure from the kind of work that made him important. On that point, I would side with the authors, who treat it as a major catalyst of the era that followed. Still, it seems a distinct oversight not to recognize his work of the forties and fifties.

The best way to come to grips with the book is to see it not as a history of SF in the usual sense, but as a history of ideas, predominantly scientific ideas. The authors use SF to illustrate the way those ideas entered into the imagination of writers, some of whom did things with them that ended up influencing the thinking of scientists. From the SF reader’s point of view, the book omits or distorts a fair chunk of our history. It also tends to blur lines of influence, often acting as if people were aware of developments that didn’t occur until some years later; not impossible, of course, but a bit disconcerting.

On the other hand, the writers’ seriousness about the ideas behind SF and their unerring taste in picking some of the best work of the last half century to illustrate those ideas is worthy of high praise. They take it for granted that SF is important, and that its best authors are well informed about the scientific and intellectual movements of their times. Their exposition of some of the science behind SF is sometimes a bit perfunctory, but they do make a serious effort to show the connections. And, like much of the greatest SF, the book is an excellent starting point for passionate arguments on fascinating subjects.