Faren Miller safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.’’ And Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ringing declaration (1932), ‘‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.’’ Walton herself notes in the opening Acknowledgments, ‘‘I’ve always been a very hopeful and optimistic person. That’s why I wrote these books.’’ Considering their dark vision and the trials she puts her chief characters through, that comment might seem ironic. But viewed as a rejection of the fear that leads to mindless hysterias – historical, alternate-historical, and all too real today – it makes perfect sense. A series of little changes, small jolts or awakenings, can have many different results for humanity, not all of them disastrous. Judith Moffett began the trilogy now called Holy Ground back in 1991 with The Ragged World (reviewed in #360), a science-fantasy mosaic novel set in a future world where various human lives encounter the extraordinary when powerful aliens and their gnome-like intermediaries the Hefn intervene to save us from ourselves, in a near-future Earth threatened with ecological collapse. Sequel Time, Like an Ever-Rolling Stream (reviewed in #379) had the traditionally difficult ‘‘middle-book’’ task of chronicling failure without driving the reader away. In some respects, Moffett’s approach resembled Walton’s in Ha’penny: a ‘‘still life’’ focus on domestic experience while grand events swirl in the background, until they finally draw relative innocents into the action. But the focus on country-girl teenager Pam gave the book an American pastoral quality so close to mainstream, its sense of the sacred land could not quite compensate for a general lack of SFnal tension – even in a future where humans can bear no children and deeply resent their helplessness in the face of alien power. Middle-Book Syndrome nearly capsized the entire ambitious project, for Moffett lost her bigname publisher and it has taken 16 years, and resort to a very small press, to bring the trilogy to conclusion with The Bird Shaman. For fans and interested readers of the previous books, is it worth the wait? Indeed it is! Though mainstream elements remain, particularly in a plot thread looking back at several generations of Pam’s dysfunctional family, the second book’s relatively narrow focus has opened up to much bigger questions of religion, ecology, morality, and the effect of unfathomably vast alien technologies upon individual humans. The overall failure of the ‘‘Gaian Directive’’ over the past decades has baffled the locals who became the aliens’ eager Apprentices, but now some of them have finally come to see the flaws in the ‘‘carrot-or-stick thing’’ – not only the Baby Ban but the threat of mindwipe or death for the worst offenders makes many humans equate the Hefn with devils, or Nazis (with the Apprentices, whatever their race, standing in for ‘‘blue-eyed Aryans’’ smugly safe from harm). In a private journal entry, Pam takes an even gloomier view of human nature: 22 / LOCUS October 2008
We remain a captive people, not a convinced one. We still think Earth is all about what people want. Released from the Directive, fertility restored, fear of mindwipe canceled, we’d go straight back to our old wasteful, arrogant ways. ... [Y]ou can’t save people from their truest selves. Which is exactly what we’ve been trying to do: save them, convert them. Lead them to renounce their sinful ways and be redeemed, born again as Gaia’s stewards.
Put in those terms, evangelical Gaians do sound a bit like Nazi advocates of ‘‘racial purity,’’ or Americans trying to shove ‘‘democracy’’ down the throat of the throat of the Middle East, as well as militant ecologists. Broad tactics of any kind may be useless, but events and individuals have a way of sneaking their way into the most intractable dilemmas, finding cracks in the monolith and setting off change. In The Bird Shaman, a kidnapping and a dream (or ‘‘dream’’?) start things moving and lead to sensational results. Unlike most works of SF or science-fantasy on this scale, it continues to portray these people in very human terms, with major characters who don’t become avatars, demigods, or even heroes with a capital H. A book this long and complex, with ‘‘mainstream’’ flashbacks and reflective interludes on everything from anthropology and religion to the Wordsworthian Sublime, does require some patience. But yield to its spell, and you won’t be subjected to some endless ecological lecture or tedious immersion in mundane lives. Moffett provokes you to think and feel: sharing Pam’s fury at a little act of alien ‘‘magic,’’ her awe at an ancient Southwestern cliff painting, her fears for a (pre-Ban) daughter, as well as sitting in on a discussion of possible futures she has with a friend while he’s busy making tomato sauce. All this leads to two distinct visions of the fate of the world – though they may not be as separate as all that, from the Hefn’s perspective. Like ours, their science and technology can provide no real explanations to justify the core element of their philosophy, yet it continues to resonate past this book’s end: ‘‘Time is one.’’ Daryl Gregory’s first novel Pandemonium boldly gives new life to an idea that might seem more suited to comics, film and TV shows than to thoughtful SF or fantasy: ordinary people transformed when possessed by ‘‘demons’’ that may be avatars from the collective unconscious. This strange plague, which began in the 1950s, isn’t limited to a handful of incipient superheroes and villains but can strike anyone, anywhere, and then (if they’re lucky) move on to another victim. As a child, first-person narrator Del Pierce was possessed by the Hellion, ‘‘a Dennis the Menace, a Spanky, a Katzenjammer Kid’’ that only afflicts boys between the ages of four and nine, turning them into incorrigible pranksters, ‘‘scampering brats with Woody Woodpecker laughs.’’ After long sessions with a shrink, that demon was apparently exorcised and Del went on to live a normal life – as normal as any life can be in this alternate America where some unholy mixtures of medieval demons, Jungian psychological concepts, and comic book characters are running rampant. (‘‘Best
guess, there were perhaps a hundred distinct strains – a science-weasel way of saying one hundred demons.’’) A few of them turn adult victims into killing machines in the service of Truth or ‘‘good wars’’ (The Captain), or entirely chaotic impulses, while others are more eccentric and seem unique to the 20th century where they arose. Deranged individuals may invent their own pseudo-demons, though it’s not always easy to distinguish them from the real thing. There’s some doubt about Valis, the voluble and rather donnish personality that took over a formerly druggy and stroke-damaged writer named Philip back in ’82, restoring both speech and health. (Between this book, Disch’s The Word of God, and several movies, Philip K. Dick seems to have become a full-blown avatar by now.) What usually doesn’t occur is a re-possession by one’s original demon, still less a reawakening that leaves it ‘‘quarantined’’ to one corner of the mind and trying futilely to escape, yet that’s what happens to Del after a car crash that leaves him with other odd mental symptoms. Once he has physically recovered, he begins a desperate investigation of the symptoms and possible origins of his new state, along with the whole phenomenon that has been variously ascribed to ‘‘aliens and archetypes and asuras, psychosis and psionics, hellfire and hallucinations.’’ As academics and obsessives futilely debate, avatar fandoms develop and religions come up with their own varied responses to the whole thing. ‘‘Most Anabaptist strains of Protestantism incorporated possession into their theology, and quite a few used the disorder on both ends of the equation: demons could take you, true, but so could Jesus.’’ It has already had a larger effect on history. One example, mentioned in passing as Del pores through old government records: ‘‘If Nixon’s Secret Service guys hadn’t taken their boss out in ’74, he’d probably still be president and the internment camps would still be open.’’ Whatever the changes, Gregory’s alternate world is as thoroughly American as Jo Walton’s is British. And despite all those archetypes, it’s as full of individuals – emotional, inconsistent, inexplicable even to themselves – as Moffett’s books, with their bedrock sense of ‘‘real life.’’ Pandemonium pays sometimes impish homage to a variety of sources (as the final notes and Acknowledgments point out), but also manages to be moving and quite memorable in its own right. Part historical novel of high cultures where Mughal East meets Renaissance West, part biography and fable of ‘‘three friends,’’ Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence interweaves magic and politics, avatars and ghosts, artists and skeptics, with a fine disregard for direct narrative. Taking his chapter titles from the first words of each section, he immediately sets the tone – here are the first three: ‘‘In the day’s last light the glowing lake’’; ‘‘Aboard the Scottish milord’s pirate ship’’; and ‘‘At dawn the haunting sandstone palaces’’. A traveler makes his way from Italy to the p. 56