Fantastique Unfettered #1 (2010)

Fantastique Unfettered #1 (December 2010). Pp. 144. ISBN 978-0983170914. $9.95.

Reviewed by Nader Elhefnawy

M-Brane Press, the publisher of small press science fiction magazine M-Brane SF, launched a fantasy counterpart to that publication last year, Fantastique Unfettered (or FU). Under the editorship of Brandon H. Bell, FU has as its stated purpose the publication of ‘well-written, compellingly readable, original stories of fantasist fiction,’ both short fiction and poetry, which is ‘unfettered by traditional copyright,’ so that all its content carries a Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license.

Slavnikova, 2017 (2010)

Olga Slavnikova, 2017. Duckworth Overlook, 2010. Pp. 414. ISBN 9780715639108. £16.99.

Reviewed by Nader Elhefnawy

Acclaimed Russian writer and critic Olga Slavnikova’s 2017: A Novel won her a second Russian Booker Prize three years ago. London-based Duckworth Publishers has recently released an English-language translation by Marian Schwartz, which given Duckworth’s list, can be taken as either a rare foray into speculative fiction (like their publication of Brian Aldiss’s HARM back in 2007), or a reminder of the often blurry line between “literary fiction” and “science fiction.” (As might be expected given Slavnikova’s standing, and as I quickly confirmed, the latter strikes me as more useful.)

2017 centers on a gem-cutter named Krylov living in a large city in Russia’s Riphean region at the titular near-future date. (The city is unnamed, and the fictional Riphean mountains are only vaguely located for the reader, though it has been common to take them as drawing on Slavnikova’s native Urals.) In the book’s opening pages Krylov is at the train station, seeing his old colleague Professor Anfilogov off on a prospecting expedition in the Riphean mountains. Before he departs the scene he encounters a mysterious woman named Tanya, with whom he begins an unconventional liaison. Meanwhile, a bizarre replay of the events of a century before—the October Revolution of 1917—seems to be getting underway inside the country.

There is a touch of the thriller here in Krylov’s involvement in the illicit gem trade, and the intrigues in which his affair with Tanya embroils him, the stirrings of political revolution, and later on, the business scandal Krylov finds exploding around him. However, the thriller elements are essentially a framework for Slavnikova’s satirical portrait of an ultra-commodified, decaying world where humanity has become superfluous.

To be frank, I found many of Slavnikova’s themes and techniques rather familiar. The novel’s preoccupation with authenticity and its absence in a late capitalist context; the exhaustion of history and politics; the touches of conspiracism and anachronism; the epistemological pessimism and the declarations of humanism as dead; the science fictional and fantastic touches blurring the boundaries of what is conventionally thought of as reality (and the organic and inorganic); the quality of rendering the familiar strange, and the deliberately oblique, diffuse, even hazy storytelling which deprives almost everything of solidity—this has been standard, even textbook postmodern fare for decades.

Nonetheless, the central subject, Russia one hundred years after the Bolsheviks, is a substantial one, and the book is compellingly ambitious in taking it on. Some parts of the story are quite memorable, like the depiction of the funeral home business run by Krylov’s ex-wife Tamara, which offers its customers a lottery drawing with prizes like Caribbean vacations. (The “Masker’s” revolution, in which Red Cavalry did battle with White Guards, is nothing short of brilliant.) There is an impressive touch of atmosphere in various places in the story, and the whole effectively conveys a sense of a shabby, decrepit, unreal world.

Yet, the novel only occasionally reached that level, and the fragments never quite added up to the postmodern epic the book seemed to be aiming for. The Riphean mountains intended to offer a counterpoint to Krylov’s city never came alive for me, and for that matter, neither did Krylov. Additionally, the narrative rarely gave me a sharp sense of the extremes of which Slavnikova’s characters speak, and which are essential to the story—those extremes of greed and commodification run amuck, of wealth and poverty, of the vulgarization, marginalization and even destruction of what should be respected as essential to life, even the best bits losing some of the punch they should have had. The vast journalism on the state of post-Soviet Russia I have seen these last two decades (fact more striking than fiction in this case), and a great deal of far less celebrated fiction (from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World to Frederik Pohl’s The Space Merchants to the cyberpunk science fiction writers of the 1980s and their heirs) have much more vividly conveyed such visions.

Consequently, Slavnikova’s 2017 did engage me as a reader, but less often and more briefly than I hoped, especially given what the book accomplishes when it is at its best. When it was over, I felt that the book fell short of both its promise, and the unqualified praise that it has attracted from many reviewers, though its strengths still made it worthwhile.

Buy this item from Amazon.com
Buy this item from Amazon.co.uk

Zimmer, Exodus Gate (2009)

Stephen Zimmer, The Exodus Gate. Seventh Star Press, 2009. Pp. 580. ISBN 978-0-6152-6747-0. $19.95.

Reviewed by Nader Elhefnawy

In Stephen Zimmer's novel The Exodus Gate Benedict Darwin, the host of a radio talk show devoted to the paranormal, gets access to a "virtual reality" system that has not yet hit the market from a friend of his in the employ of "Babylon Technologies." He tries it out at home, playing an RPG set in an earlier, antediluvian era, during which Darwin encounters a pack of giant, intelligent wolves, the "An-Ki." Speaking with them he starts to wonder if this is not, after all, more than an elaborate program, the technology involved something more than VR. This being that kind of story, his suspicions are soon proven correct, and he finds himself drawn into an ages-old struggle between Good and Evil ("Adonai" and "Diabolos, the Shining One") in which the human players are lining up to play their roles as the shadow of a One-World government on the side of Evil looms large.

As this summary implies, the story is at its core a version of the End Times narrative which attracted so much attention when Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye's published their mega-selling Left Behind series. It is a thinly veiled one, however, the names of people, places and other such items very slightly changed, while being in all other respects nearly identical. (The United States is UCAS, Germany is Germania, Russia is Muscovy, China is Mandaria, etc.; the F-22 fighter jet has become the I-22; etc.) All of this makes it far too obvious to be regarded as an allegory in the manner of C.S. Lewis (an important influence on the author, as he acknowledges in an interview at the Something Wicked blog), which suggests other rationales: the taking of liberties with crucial story elements, the subversion of a conventional take on the material.

As it happens, an unconventional reading of the Great Flood is central to the story, specifically the idea that it was meant to wash away the giants mentioned in the sixth chapter of Genesis (giants who, in Zimmer's telling of the story, still have their role to play in Armageddon). In crafting the tale Zimmer also draws not only on this reading of the Bible, but a number of other religious traditions, not all of them easily connectable with the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Additionally, while the book does not come across as a shot in the "culture wars" in the manner of John Shirley's 2006 novel The Other End (in his own words, an "unapologetically partisan" book aimed at reclaiming this territory from right-wing fundamentalists), being more politically ambiguous (at times, it even gives off a "black helicopter" vibe) and more theologically conventional as well (even with the talking wolves), the author does step outside safe territory. In particular Zimmer works in post-September 11 anxieties about the motivations behind the "War on Terror," and the hollowing out of a U.S. economy living off foreign-financed debt in a way much less in evidence during the tech boom years. His particular handling of this combination of elements also makes the book an easier sell with "Nine-Eleven" now "Seven-Four," and the Patriot Act now the "Guardian Act."

Of course, while the theological and political touches of the story are well worth commenting on, the book is first and foremost an epic fantasy--the first part of the mult-volume "Rising Dawn" saga Zimmer envisages. To his credit, the mix of ideas he brings together has its interest, though the execution is far from faultless. His prose and characterizations are on the whole unremarkable, and at times rather flat. (The An-Ki, certainly, have little trouble stealing the show from the humans.) It does not help, either, that many members of his rather large cast of characters are not put to much use in this 566 page book. Additionally, there are few immediately significant events after the mid-point of the novel. It might be said that too much of the rather large book is devoted to setting up what will happen in later installments.

Nonetheless, Zimmer knows how to keep the reader turning the pages, and delivers a sufficiently effective foundation for a compelling enough bigger story that he earns some benefit of the doubt.
Buy this item from Amazon.com
Buy this item from Amazon.co.uk