Paper Cities: an anthology of urban fantasy – edited by Ekaterina Sedia

The problem starts when the academics get involved, of course. I should know. The problem with Paper Cities, from Senses Five press is that someone got hold of the definition of “urban fantasy” and extended it, refined it, and rendered it utterly meaningless.

I’m not a keen reader of fantasy fiction, give or take the odd exception. But I do like Tim Powers, who has variously been described as a Steampunk writer (a review of a steam punk anthology is to follow) and an urban fantasist. He’s possibly a bit of both, though there’s very little steam in his so-called Steampunk novels.

I always quite liked the description of him as an urban fantasist. My understanding of the term is that he writes works of fantastic fiction with a recognisably real-world setting. The Anubis Gates, for example, mixes magic with Victorian London. Last Call is set in a recognisably modern Las Vegas, and his most recent novel Three Days to Never is set around LA in the recent past.

Fantasy proper, of the swords-and-sorcery kind, takes place in mythical lands, and often involves invented lore, language etc. Urban Fantasy, for me, should take place in a world much like the one we live in, but with added oddness, a reality that has been manipulated, whether in the form of belief (at least) in magic; or ghosts being real. Powers is a master at this. Creating a mobiüs loop of a belt to ward off psychic interest; following rituals to gain power or avoid trouble. All of it could be ascribed to something grounded in our reality, but in the world of Powers there’s something else at play.

This anthology, then, is a huge disappointment, because it sets out to broaden the definition of urban fantasy beyond any usefulness. Its definition of “urban” includes the kind of “city” and “castle” one might find in the traditional swords-and-sorcery epic. So there are too many stories here I’d just call fantasy. The other problem seems to be that most of these stories don’t really work as stories. They all seem more like excerpts or chapters from novels. The plots don’t go anywhere, nothing resolves itself.

This, in the end, is often the biggest problem with the fantasy genre. There’s too much money involved in creating 500-page epics with multiple sequels. Few exponents of fantasy seem to know how to knock of 10-20,000 words of self-contained short fiction.

Shame. Can’t really recommend this as it doesn’t do what it says on the tin.

The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross

This new 2007 edition of Charles Stross’ 2004 novel The Atrocity Archives brings its artwork into line with other books by the same author, such as Glasshouse, which I reviewed a while ago. The Atrocity Archive (singular) was originally serialised in Spectrum SF. For the novelisation, the award-winning novella “The Concrete Jungle” (set in the same milieu) has been added as a postscript – hence the plural Archives of the title. What with the introduction by Ken MacLeod and the author’s own Afterword, this brings the page count up to a respectable 336 pages.

In the Afterword, Stross explains a few of his influences (Len Deighton, HP Lovecraft) and acknowledges that Tim Powers ploughs similar ground with Declare, which he hadn’t read when he was writing this.

Regular readers will be aware that I rate Declare very highly indeed, combining as it does the two genres of urban fantasy and espionage. But while Declare is the work of a mature professional writer at the very top of his game, The Atrocity Archive is a first novel, written when Stross was still working in IT. It carries with it a youthful exuberance and a lot of IT-crowd in-jokes, but it probably runs out of ideas too quickly, and its hero/narrator Bob Howard finds it all just a little bit too easy to work things out. He manages to stay on top of the game, and provide explanations to those around him, whereas Powers’ Andrew Hale spends much of his time struggling to make sense of the extraordinary events he’s caught up in.

Still, I enjoyed this as much as you might expect, even if the central idea of a secret government department of the civil service, which one accesses through a deserted tube station, rankles a bit on a personal level. (In 1983, I wrote a short novel called The Obald, which had as its central idea that there exists a secret government department which is accessed through those mysterious and unlabelled doorways one sees in old tube stations. It was probably not all that bad, though too short, and might even have been publishable if I’d made more of an effort. An idea ahead of its time, perhaps. At the time, the fashion in SF was heading towards cyberpunk, which dominated the field until around 1990.)

Bob Howard appears to be an IT drone working for The Laundry (the secret government department), but at the beginning of The Atrocity Archive is activated as an agent, and finds himself involved in an operation concerning parallel worlds, nazis, and magic. The difference between this and the world-within-the-world imagined by Powers is that, for Stross, so-called magic has its origins in quantum computing. Or something. Howard’s love interest, Mo, unlike Elena in Declare, doesn’t have to do much more than get kidnapped and tied up on a couple of occasions so that she can be rescued.

This is entertaining and imaginative, and certainly worth reading. As Stross says in his Afterword, if you enjoy this, you’ll enjoy Declare, and vice versa. There’s another in the series, The Jennifer Morgue, which is on my list of things-to-read.

The Drawing of the Dark by Tim Powers

Another Powers entry in the Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks series, The Drawing of the Dark takes us back to the Siege of Vienna in 1529, during which Suleiman the Magnificent’s over-extended forces were (just) defeated by an admixture of poorly supported conscripts and mercenaries.

This is another of Powers’ secret histories, one which seeks to explain just why Suleiman chose to attack Vienna so late in the season (October), and all the ill-fortune that beset the Ottoman army on their way to Vienna.

Brian Duffy, an Irish swordsman and mercenary, is recruited by the mysterious Aurelianus to act as bouncer in the ancient Herzwesten brewery and inn (former monastery) in Vienna. The beer at this brewery is renowned, but Duffy is still bewildered to find himself beset by obstacles, attempts on his life, and the kind of supernatural incidents that have dogged his life on his journey from Venice to Vienna to take up his post.

Inevitably, he finds himself embroiled in events beyond his ken, and in spite of his resistance, realises that he can be instrumental in preserving the West against the Ottoman onslaught. The message here is not that the East is necessarily evil and the West good, but that a certain balance exists in the universe, which is in danger of being overturned.

I love the idea that western civilisation is built upon the brewing of beer, and even that the true key to human progress is not the gift of fire but the gift of beer. This is the first Powers novel to really play into the Fisher King monomyth, the beginning of a long line of books in which he has explored elements of the myth from different angles (up to and including his recent novel Three Days to Never).

You could call this novel fantasy (does indeed feature swords and sorcery), or magic realism, or steampunk, or even counterfactual history: whatever it is, it’s a superb exploration of the nature of heroism and a superb sideways look at a slice of history.

The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers

Now available as part of the Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks series, Tim Powers’ The Anubis Gates was originally published in 1983, Powers’ fourth novel, or (put another way) the second novel of the second phase of his career (Powers published two early books in 1976 and then came back with a completely different approach with The Drawing of the Dark in 1979 – see separate review to follow).

What The Anubis Gates and The Drawing of the Dark have in common with those earlier books is the hero, the sometimes hapless individual who finds himself caught up in extraordinary events and gets pretty much beaten up and torn to shreds before putting himself back together again. This same hero turns up in almost every Powers novel under various names, and Powers sets out to take him to pieces and inflict pain and humiliation such as will make you wince as you read. Smashed hands are not uncommon, as are blows to the head and mortal wounds.

The Anubis Gates is a time travel novel, in which the hero (a somewhat down-at-heel academic who is attempting to write a biography of an obscure 19th Century poet, William Ashbless) joins a group on a trip back in time to witness a Coleridge lecture. As you’d expect with Powers, this time travel has less to do with science than with a kind of internally logical magic, involving gypsies, beggars, ancient magicians, homunculi, and attempts to free Egyptian gods fom the underworld.

[Ashbless is a conceit cooked up by Powers and his friend James Blaylock: a convincingly real obscure poet, contemporary of Coleridge and Byron, who leaves few clues behind as to the details of his life.]

Finding himself trapped in 1810, Powers’ hero Brendan Doyle adopts various personae in his attempts to survive, and (always lagging behind in his comprehension of events) even finds himself in a completely different body, thanks to the doings of a Ripper-like serial killer/werewolf called Dog Face Joe.

This is one of the early examples of the genre Powers termed Steampunk, and it carries his trademark: the retelling of actual events (such as the inexplicable appearance of someone claiming to be Byron in London at a time when Byron was known to be in Turkey) as a secret history, with the hidden details of magic and supernatural included.

Superb.

Three Days To Never – Tim Powers (Review Part 2)

There has to be a part 2 to this review, if only to allow my initial excitement about a new Tim Powers novel settle down. Part 1 is here. When you think about it, it’s a bit depressing: you wait five years, and then you read it in three days. And then what? The question is, can you re-read this book as many times, with as much satisfaction, as other works by Powers?

The great pleasure of his previous novel Declare, I’ve found, is that picking it up for the second time was just as rewarding. Because of its mix of actual historical figures and fiction, of recent history with fantasy, Declare gave you much to chew on. In fact, I found that further reading was required. I became so fascinated with the Cambridge spy ring that I went off on an espionage jag. I read a biography of Anthony Blunt; a fictionalised account of his life; several John Le Carrés; and many others. None of it, though, gets you even close to the brilliant weirdness of Powers.

Three Days to Never, whilst fascinating, is in many ways a little bit (whisper) formulaic. For example, one of the main protagonists is a kid on the cusp of puberty who is in considerable peril (a theme familiar from Expiration Date). Another is an ordinary man whose life is disrupted when he is caught up in extraordinary events (a classic narrative device that is present in almost every Powers novel). Then you have your opposing teams who are pursuing power (or “The Grail”) by supernatural means: your expert, government-sanctioned professionals, and your amateur disreputable Secret Society types. There’s even a familiar character in the slightly dishevelled, alcoholic, wounded older man. This wounded figure, of course, is straight out of Powers’ favourite trope: the Fisher King myth, which crops up again and again in his fiction. This is from The Wikipedia article on The Fisher King:

“Confusingly, many works have two wounded Grail Kings who live in the same castle, a father (or grandfather) and son. The more seriously wounded father stays in the castle, sustained by the Grail alone, while the more active son can meet with guests and go fishing.”

It’s worth bearing that little snippet in mind when reading this novel. Powers isn’t as explicit with his myths in this episode, but it’s fair to say that some familiarity with the Fisher King myth – with its holy grails, open wounds that never heal, spears of destiny, and severed heads that keep talking – will enhance your enjoyment of many of Powers’ novels, including this one. The joy of Powers is that he puts all this kind of stuff into recognisable historical and geographical settings. Three Days to Never is set in the Los Angeles of 1987, for example.

All these figures are familiar from other Powers works, then, and yet… there’s something else going on here, which is a bit of button-pushing and gentle ribbing aimed at some other, shall we say, more successful (in monetary terms) works of fiction. Because Powers does secret societies which are pursuing some grail-like object through history, he just throws in the odd reference to Carcassone and Mediaeval Pontiffs, the Grail itself, and alternate histories – because he can. Just a little dig at the Dan Brown crowd. But if you want precedent, Powers’ interest in the Grail and Fisher King myths go right back to one of his earliest novels, The Drawing of the Dark, and continues in more recent works like Last Call.

Then there’s the current celeb fashion for the Kabbalah: hence the presence in Three Days to Never of the Mossad, who are seeking a “little machine” discovered by Einstein and who carry amulets inscribed with hebrew characters.

All the stuff of fantasy fiction, or at least Powers’ take on fantasy, but the other thing about Three Days to Never is that you could make an argument for it being a Science Fiction book, just because of its interest in Einstein and his Special Theory. The central premise here is that Einstein discovered something (along with Relativity) that he found so frightening that he chose to cover it up. Since his death in 1955, various groups have been trying to piece together the fragments of his work to discover what it was. The “fantasy” conceit here is that Einstein’s work served to confirm some apparently bizarre statements in ancient Kabbalist texts.

The simple fact is, once you get really deeply into the post-Newtonian physical universe, and let your imagination run wild, what emerges could be science, or it could be fantasy.

It’s a toss up, then, whether this is SF proper, or “merely” fantasy. Like most Powers novels, it does send you scurrying to look up facts. For example, I’d forgotten that Charlie Chaplin’s body was stolen after his death. But Powers hadn’t, and it’s one of the many passing strange events that he uses to weave his fiction around. And then, if you think about it, the fact that Einstein turned up at the premiere of Chaplin’s City Lights could be seen as kinda weird.

The deeper you go, the stranger it gets.

As a narrative, Three Days to Never doesn’t work as well for me as Declare simply because of the old saw about showing and not telling. In Declare events take place over many years, and our protagonist finds himself caught up in them over and over again. Three Days to Never takes place over three days and the historical information (about Chaplin, Einstein, the Six Day War etc.) is narrated in the past tense. This has the effect of making the past events seem distant and less immediate than they are in Declare.

Which is not to say that Three Days to Never isn’t worth reading. It absolutely is. But if you were to read just one Tim Powers novel, it wouldn’t be this one. Still, start with one, and you’ll most likely be hooked into reading the rest.

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Note:

Some of the Powers novels kind of work in sequence, so (for example), Last Call, Expiration Date, and Earthquake Weather should be read in that order. And you should probably read The Drawing of the Dark before any of them.

Three Days to Never – Tim Powers (review Part 1)

With his previous novel Declare Tim Powers discovered a rich vein of weirdness in the strange (and apposite) affinity between espionage tradecraft and the supernatural.

Our received wisdom about the casting of spells, the avoidance of the Evil Eye, the scrying of omens (which might involve, for example, the carrying of a talisman, walking in a particular direction, oriented a particular way, the uttering of code phrases), has too much in common with, say, the avoidance of a tail, the awareness of surveillance, the exchange of secret documents, microfilm and other information: dead drops, meetings in the open air.

Both the practice of magicks and the trade of the spy involve a lot of smoke and mirrors. And we’ve all seen those TV documentaries about the crazy things the KGB and the CIA got up to: the use of so-called “remote viewers”: people with psychic powers who spied on the other side by clairvoyant means.

I was walking in London recently through the Whitehall area, and I noticed how damn noisy the place is, and how bloody hard it would be to point a microphone at two people having a conversation in the open air, at the bottom of the steps to some ministry or other. Inevitably, the information is going to come through garbled, half-finished phrases, the odd word here and there, and you’re going to have to divine the meaning in much the same way as a witch doctor would by casting the bones.

It’s obvious, when you think about it, which is all part of the pull of Powers’ work. He notices things, small pockets of strangeness in everyday life, and he weaves around them a narrative that is so compelling that you find yourself torn between the need to read for the plot and the wish that it would never end.

Three Days to Never is Powers’ latest foray into espionage and the supernatural. Instead of the Cambridge spies and the European Theatre of the Cold War, we find ourselves drawn into the milieu of the Mossad, and secret branches within secret branches of Israeli intelligence.

It’s been said that Tim Powers is incapable of writing a bad novel, and I have to confess that I buy into that wholeheartedly. I’ve read them all, and from his earliest knocked-off 50,000 worders to his most recent explorations of post-war history and espionage, he hasn’t ever put a foot wrong.

The attention to detail, the assured exploration of those tiny spots of every-day weirdness, is brilliant; moving from this:

She used to think Azusa was an interesting name for a city, but recently she had heard that it meant “A-to-Z USA,” and now she classed it with other ridiculous words, like brouhaha and patty melt.
She also disapproved of a city called Claremont being right next to one named Montclair. She thought there should be a third one, Mairn-Clot.”

To this:

“Okay,” her father went on at last. “Grammar–what, had no respect for time. You know the way she carried on sometimes, as if she was still a teenager, like going to Woodstock; and she’d plant primroses in midsummer, and they’d thrive; food got cold real quick sometimes even though she just took it out of the pan, and other times it stayed hot for hours; well, a long time. It never surprised her. Maybe she was just pulling tricks on us, but time didn’t seem to work right, around her.”

Three Days To Never opens with a widowed father and his daughter exploring in the back garden of the man’s grandmother (“Grammar”), unknowingly observed by one of Mossad’s own remote viewers (a psychic spy). The girl, Daphne (who’s a little psychic herself), pulls a videotape of Pee Wee’s Big Adventure from a VCR in the garden shed and later starts to watch it at home. But instead of Pee Wee Herman, she sees a very odd, and disturbing, old silent movie. The piano soundtrack is also strange, with lots of “missing” or implied notes, and Daphne realises that the implied notes form another, secret melody…

I’ve always felt that a Powers novel carried the same thrilling power of a mid-60s Dylan song. Instead of “Einstein disguised as Robin Hood,” we get (in one book) the ghost of Thomas Edison and the hands of Harry Houdini. In Three Days To Never, we get Israeli spies, Charlie Chaplin, Einstein, and Pee Wee Herman. It’s a richly textured and fascinating journey.

As with everything else written by Powers: Highly Recommended. Part 2 of this review is here.

Declare – Tim Powers

While I'm in an espionage frame of mind, this is something I've been meaning to do for a long time. While I've mentioned Tim Powers often, I've not actually done full-blown reviews of many of his books.

He's got a new novel due out some time this year (fingers crossed) called Three Days To Never, but his previous full-length outing was Declare, which more than anything is what started me reading both fact and fiction about espionage, a throwback to my PhD studies, when I read Mailer's Harlot's Ghost as well as Oswald's Tale.

Lee Harvey Oswald (triple-named in notoriety, as Delillo says in Libra), so it goes, was an agent, an informer. He had his handler. In my review below I mention how events in Le Carré's Absolute Friends are manipulated by an unnamed agency so as to give the appearance that a terrorist plot has been foiled. But the two dead terrorists found at the scene are, in fact, just patsies. "I'm a patsy," was how Oswald declared his innocence following his arrest for the assassination of Kennedy.

The key thing about characters like Oswald (in fiction at least) and Mundy is that they exist in a state of semi-bewliderment, not really clear on the background, the basics, but along for the ride nevertheless. The more you read about espionage, the more believeable it comes to seem that Oswald was a patsy.

Being along for the ride, playing along for a peaceful life: I think we've all been there. You have a veggie girlfriend or boyfriend, so you're a veggie while it lasts. But you're not really. You're not an ideologue, just a passenger on someone else's ideology.

This is how Andrew Hale, the hero of Tim Powers' Declare, exists. He's a classic Le Carré hero, who ends up working in espionage by default, because someone leads him to it, and he joins in the heyday – pre World War 2, when the whole thing was run by gentlemen scholars and amateurs. Hale's recruitment could almost be a carbon copy of Smiley's, or Mundy's, except for the little twist that Powers gives the story. He learns how to act, not because he understands what he's doing, but by rote: learns to react to certain cues, the instructions given by wire, by anonymous voices over the telephone: "Here is a list…"

Powers operates like this: an historical event, something everyone knows a little bit about, is examined closely for anomalous details. Powers takes these anomalies, small mysteries at the heart of events (like: what motivates people to act as they do?), and supplies the explanation: which is usually of a supernatural or fantastic nature. Everything remains internally consistent with the external facts.

So. For example, Hale is taken to the headquarters of the amateur spy organisation, the pre-war SIS, and led up a complex series of passageways and staircases to an office. Whereas we've all wandered in a bewildered way around office complexes sploodged into old buildings, Powers helpfully supplies all the strange details: just this number of exact turns, counterclockwise, just one window facing in this particular direction, and do go back in the exact opposite way you came in.

Hale, it turns out, has a destiny, a unique ability, an accident of his birth, but this orphaned son of a troubled mother doesn't know it yet. Declare covers some familiar locations and events: Paris during the Nazi occupation; Berlin in the Cold War; the Middle East; Philby, Burgess, T E Lawrence; the fall of the Soviet Union.

We were just reading about this in Absolute Friends. The fall of the Soviet Union: why? Why so sudden? Le Carré describes events; Powers offers a supernatural explanation.

Following his recruitment, Hale is sent to Paris, where he lives undercover, working with a small radio receiver, picking up and decoding messages, passing them on. He doesn't know what's going on, but somehow he's gifted, able to receive when others can't, as strange radio codes bounce off the heavyside layer. Tapping out the rhythm: in a trance, or possessed by a higher power. All the usual spy paraphernalia are here: the one-time decoding pads, the radio sets, the beautiful and mysterious Elena who assists him, who always seems to understand more than him, and who comes, perhaps, to love him.

But events drive them apart, he loses her, and doesn't know if she's alive or dead. He encounters her again, years later, in a divided Berlin, as the Communists attempt to mount some extraordinary operation. On the surface, it's tanks and soldiers, but in reality there are massive supernatural forces at work, as the djinn (or genie) that holds the Soviet Empire together is fed or appeased. In 1948, he takes place in a disastrous exercise near Mount Ararat designed to destroy a djinn, and in so doing destroy the one that protects the Soviet Empire. When it all goes horribly wrong, with most of his team killed, Hale is a broken man who returns to his books.

Philby is a constant presence. The high-profile British traitor lived under a cloud after his spy-ring colleagues defected in 1951, but he was still an actor in British intelligence until his own defection, which took place in Beirut in 1963. What happens in that year is described by Powers. As Hale, called back into service, takes part another attempt to destroy the djinn on Mt. Ararat, both Philby and Elena are present. Afterwards, Philby escapes to Moscow.

The final act in the story takes place there, in the days before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Hale is in Moscow, hoping to find Elena, hoping she remembers a rash promise they'd made each other years before. And there is Philby: the key to the Soviet Empire: when he dies (in 1988), it begins to die.

I love Declare. It's so many things rolled into one successful whole. A spy novel; a fantasy novel; a romance; a ripping yarn. The bewildered hero Hale is easy to identify with, and the implacably brave and self-sacrificing Elena is easy to love. And I love it because it mixes actual historical events and people like Philby with a fantasy plot that supplies an explanation that is in so many ways more satisfying (and believable?) than any other you might have heard. It's a dense and complex novel, too, so it's one you can read again and again with the same amount of pleasure.