Fountain of Age by Nancy Kress

Published by Small Beer Press on May 8, 2012

Nancy Kress puts the science in science fiction, but more importantly, she tells stories about people. Too many writers of hard sf believe that inventive ideas are enough to carry a story. Kress knows that there is a difference between a science essay dressed up as fiction and an actual story. Beyond her emphasis on realistic characters and human emotions, her stories are defined by graceful, elegant prose. With only one exception, the stories in this collection -- all of which were published between 2007 and 2009 -- are excellent. Six of the nine are outstanding.

Kress blends humor with intrigue in "The Erdmann Nexus" as an elderly physicist and other senior citizens in his retirement home share flashes of memory -- or, as the physicist perceives them, not memories but real-time experiences. Meanwhile an alien ship executes a hasty and unexpected change of course and a ballet dancer's necklace becomes the focus of everyone's attention. How do those storylines intersect with that of the battered woman who acts as the physicist's caretaker? Ingeniously. With its sharp ideas, multi-faceted characters, and elements of mystery shrouded in science, "The Erdmann Nexus" won a well-deserved Hugo. This is short sf at its finest.

A senior citizen also headlines the Nebula-winning title story. "Fountain of Age" deals with tissue regeneration, the history of the Romani people, and creative crime, but it is fundamentally a story of enduring love tempered with sacrifice and regret. Suspense and deft plotting make this a riveting read, but it is again the carefully crafted characters that make the story memorable.

Genetic modification is a recurring theme in these stories. After a biological attack devastated Sichuan Province, a Chinese woman travels to America and becomes pregnant with a child who, unbeknownst to her, has been genetically modified. She returns to China to give birth to a child who needs to ingest a protein inhibitor every week. "First Rites" focuses on the unusual relationship between the hyperactive child and the neuroscientist who created (and illegally administered) his life-saving drug -- and the child's even more unusual response to his genetic modification. This is the cleverest application of the principle that "observation affects outcome" I've encountered. It also highlights another recurring Kress theme -- the danger of treating scientific skepticism as if it were a religion.

Kress takes the concept of children as weapons to another level in "Safeguard," as children genetically enhanced to serve as bioweapons escape from the dome in which they were raised. The story poses a moral question by pitting compassion for innocent children against the safety of a nation. Unfortunately, the potential power that lurks in this story is diluted by an ending that I regard as something of a cop-out.

Aliens visit Earth in two stories. In "The Kindness of Strangers," a woman's life is complicated in mundane ways before aliens cause cities to vanish. Stranded with a group of people inside an invisible dome outside of Rochester, the woman eventually learns why the aliens acted as they did, while at the same time learning something important about herself. Aliens have a less conventional reason for dropping by in 'Laws of Survival," a strange, touching, and wonderfully imaginative post-apocalyptic story about dogs and love.

Also taking place in a post-apocalyptic setting -- one where religious superstition has flourished -- is "By Fools Like Me." The paper books that have survived are sinful; trees are sacred. Still, an elderly woman, rejecting the doctrine that "a little bit of sin is as bad as a big sin," finds comfort in Alice in Wonderland, Jane Eyre, and a field guide to birds that no longer exist.

"End Game" posits that the ability to concentrate intensely on a single subject, blocking out all unrelated thoughts, is less desirable than it may seem -- and it may be contagious. This is an interesting story but not one of Kress' best.

"Images of Anna" answers the question "How much should you change for love?" as a photographer takes pictures of Anna that show individuals other than Anna. More fantasy than sf, the story is, to my mind, the weakest in the collection, the only one I didn't much like.

Still, two-thirds of the stories in this collection struck me as nothing short of brilliant. The stories showcase Kress as one of the premiere writers of science fiction -- and as a remarkably skillful storyteller, regardless of genre.

RECOMMENDED

Trapeze by Simon Mawer

Published in the US by Other Press on May 1, 2012; simultaneously published in the UK under the name The Girl Who Fell From the Sky

The child of an English father and French mother, Marian Sutro speaks both languages like a native. While serving as a WAAC, Marian is recruited to join a secret organization. After receiving commando and espionage training in Scotland and England, she parachutes into France as part of Operation Trapeze. Marian has also been given a second clandestine mission, involving the delivery of a microdot to Clément Pelletier, an older man who was rather fond of her when she was living in Geneva. Pelletier, like her brother Ned, is a physicist doing the kind of work that could have a profound impact upon the course of the war; the British would like to smuggle him out of Paris and put him in a London laboratory.

During Marian's first undercover trip to Paris, it becomes obvious that Britain's clandestine agents have been betrayed. Much of the novel's tension is generated by the mystery of the traitor's identity. A couple of potential romances lurk in the background of Marian's dangerous life, which naturally cause the seasoned reader to wonder whether one of her potential love interests might be working for the wrong side.

Trapeze tells a fast-moving story in better-than-average prose. The characters are well developed and entirely believable. The novel's only drawback is its failure to surprise. The plot contains no unexpected twists and the identity of the traitor is rather obvious. The ending is probably intended to shock, but its abrupt arrival drains it of its force. Given all the tension the story creates, it's a bit disappointing that it doesn't deliver a stronger climax. Still, the ending is true to the story that precedes it; it isn't artificially happy, and to that extent it is satisfying. On the whole, Trapeze is an enjoyable and occasionally fascinating, if conventional, spy story.

RECOMMENDED

Deadly Valentines by Jeffrey Gusfield

Published by Chicago Review Press on April 1, 2012

Deadly Valentines takes its name from Chicago's St. Valentine's Day Massacre in 1929, the bloody conclusion of which is described in the book's prologue. While Deadly Valentines tells the story of Vincent Gebardi, a/k/a "Machine Gun" Jack McGurn, a charming gangster who almost certainly planned and may have participated in that gruesome event, it does so within the broader context of crime and politics in Chicago during the 1920s.

Deadly Valentines is divided into three parts. The first chronicles Vincenzo Gibaldi's life from his arrival in Ellis Island as a Sicilian immigrant in 1906 at the age of four through his family's move to Chicago during the era of Prohibition. As he grows up in Brooklyn, he is instilled with Sicilian values which, according to Jeffrey Gusfield, center upon the necessity of revenge, obedience to a code of honor, and keeping your mouth shut. By the age of sixteen he is calling himself Vincent Gebardi. Later he adopts the Irish-sounding name Jack McGurn to give his boxing career a boost. He gets a different sort of boost when his boxing is noticed by Al Capone, who employs him to guard shipments of bootleg liquor. On a parallel track Gusfield describes the wild and rebellious young life of Louise Rolfe in Chicago.

Part two begins with the murder of McGurn's stepfather, who unwisely competed against the Genna crime family in the distribution of illicit alcohol. Gusfield then shifts the focus away from McGurn to set the stage for Chicago's gang wars, beginning with the burgeoning rivalry between Capone and Dean O'Banion. McGurn returns to center stage in 1926 when he orchestrates a series of murders that Capone has sanctioned. As odies pile up on the streets of Chicago, McGurn moves up to a leadership position in Capone's organization. In 1928, Gebardi hooks up with Louise in a merger of two unstoppable egos.

Part three, appropriately entitled "Massacre," addresses the St. Valentine's Day killings and their aftermath. Impetuous prosecutors look like boobs after predicting with certainty their ability to convict McGurn. Federal prosecutors do only a little better, obtaining a short-lived, absurd conviction of a Mann Act violation -- a conviction justly overturned by the Supreme Court. With Capone in prison for tax evasion and facing constant harassment by police, prosecutors, and rival gangsters, McGurn decides it is time to focus on his golf game. Organized crime is transitioning from bootlegging to gambling and racketeering and McGurn's influence and health begin a steady decline that culminates in a violent death.

Deadly Valentines captures the colorful culture and rapidly changing attitudes of the Roaring Twenties. Gusfield writes in some detail about the growth of jazz and the live performances that (together with the free flowing hooch) made Chicago a swinging town. The hypocrisy of Chicago's news media and the corruption of Chicago's police, politicians, and judiciary are recurring themes. Another is public tolerance, and even a degree of admiration, for celebrity gangsters who, at least, could be counted on to keep the local speakeasy stocked with safe alcohol. Still another is the lust for publicity displayed by the few Chicago police officers who aren't on the take, a desire that causes them to arrest McGurn repeatedly on bogus charges. My favorite theme concerns the eagerness of police and politicians to destroy civil liberties when they can't solve crime by conventional means.

Although Gusfield tells McGurn's story in lively prose, his sentences are occasionally awkward and the writing becomes less polished as the book progresses. Some of the information he provides is redundant. The text is well documented with copious endnotes but the writing doesn't have a heavy, academic feel. There is abundant drama in McGurn's life and Gusfield allows it to shine through in his narrative. He is perhaps too judgmental about Louise's sexual freedom (girls just wanted to have fun even before Cyndi Lauper wrote their anthem); Louise's alleged "hedonism" seems perfectly ordinary when compared to the 90210 crowd of modern times. In addition to being a "gold digger" and a "boozy barfly," Louise is, in Gusfield's view, "morally bankrupt," a harsher judgment than he ever visits upon serial killer McGurn. Why Gusfield reserved his invective for Louise is puzzling. On the other hand, he properly condemns the bluenose view (popular at the time) that blames jazz and other "race music" for the demise of female virtue. On the whole, despite my qualms about Gusfield's treatment of Louise and occasional lapses in his writing style, I would recommend Deadly Valentines to "true crime" fans and to anyone interested in an convincing portrait of a celebrated gangster.

RECOMMENDED

The Lola Quartet by Emily St. John Mandel

Published by Unbridled Books on May 1, 2012

Returning to his hometown in Florida to report a story despite his susceptibility to heatstroke, journalist Gavin Sasaki learns from his sister Eileen that a ten-year-old girl, Chloe Montgomery, may be his daughter. Chloe looks like a younger Eileen and has the last name of Gavin's former girlfriend. Gavin hasn't seen Anna Montgomery since she dropped out of high school, when Gavin was in a jazz quartet with Anna's sister, Sasha. Rattled by the discovery and under the gun to produce good stories or perish in the next round of newsroom layoffs, Gavin begins to play roulette with his career by fabricating sources and quotations.

Meanwhile, a third member of Gavin's former jazz combo, Daniel Smith, is in Utah negotiating with a meth dealer to pay a large debt. Daniel is now a Florida cop. The novel's opening scene lets the reader know that the debt is somehow related to Anna, but its exact nature remains a mystery until much of the story has been told. The final member, piano and sax player Jack Baranovsky, is still in Florida, making a contribution to the story as a pill addict who knows more about Anna's situation -- and his own involvement in it -- than he's prepared to tell Gavin.

Why is Anna on the run? Why does everyone but Gavin seem to know that she was pregnant when she left school? Why is her baby turning up in Florida ten years later? How does acclaimed jazz guitarist Liam Deval fit into Anna's plight? These are the absorbing questions that kept me reading. The novel fills in the backstory as it progresses. Eventually the pieces fit together tightly, leaving the reader to worry about the present danger that occupies the last third of the novel.

Unlike many modern stories of suspense, The Lola Quartet doesn't stretch the bounds of credibility with an outlandish plot. Everything that happens seems real, and that credibility heightens the novel's tension. The characters are equally realistic: they gamble, they use drugs, they ignore inconvenient truths, they betray friends. Their well-developed personalities, complete with failings and flaws, add to the story's authenticity.

The novel's fault is that it builds toward a climax that seems anti-climactic. The real action occurs offstage, perhaps because it is too predictable to make it worth describing. A bit of added drama near the end focuses on a character who has played a minor role until that point; it seems oddly out of place. On the other hand, I wouldn't categorize this novel as a traditional thriller. It is more a story of guilty secrets, of relationships that evolved over time, a novel of characters who are overtaken by events they feel powerless to control. Still, the storyline wraps up too neatly. Given the hardships the characters have endured, it is difficult to accept that their lives work out so well by the end of the novel. The characters are not unscarred, their lives do not suddenly become idyllic, but -- despite Gavin's hand-wringing and moralizing at the end -- the characters resolve their problems more easily than I would have expected.

Despite my mild disappointment with the novel's ending, I admired the characterizations and enjoyed Emily St. John Mandel's fluid writing. The Lola Quartet isn't everything it tries to be but it is nonetheless an entertaining, well-written story.

RECOMMENDED

Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

First serialized in Russian in 1971; published in tarnslation by Chicago Review Press on May 1, 2012

Soviet science fiction tended to be dark and surreal and ironic, a response to the oppressive environment in which it was born. Roadside Picnic, written by the Strugastky brothers in 1971, is no exception.

When aliens visited Earth, stopping briefly for (some speculate) a roadside picnic, they left their detritus behind in an area now known as the Zone. Surrounded by a wall and guarded by police, the Zone is accessible only to scientists and other employees of the Institute, including the explorers for alien artifacts who have been dubbed stalkers. A stalker who enters the Zone looking for alien treasure -- either as an employee of the Institute or to smuggle out items at night -- is always at risk: pockets of accelerated gravity, hell slime, and death lamps pose a constant threat. Apart from causing mutations in stalkers and their children, contact with the Zone leads to other anomalies, including animated corpses and -- for those who move away -- a tendency to attract accidents and natural disasters.

Red Schuhart is a stalker until, having seen enough friends die, he quits. After fathering a furry daughter, Schuhart returns to his old ways, dodging the police outside the Zone and death inside. He knows that stalkers who continue to push their luck end up dead, but when a final prize is dangled before him -- the mythical Golden Sphere that is said to grant wishes -- Schuhart cannot resist one last journey into the Zone.

Why does Schuhart risk his life as a stalker? Because self-reliance is all that has ever saved him from oblivion. He has always wanted to be his own boss, free from the slavery he associates with reporting to an employer. He considers himself an animal, riffraff, but he has never sold his soul, and that is the source of his strength. Perhaps the Zone represents the black market -- the illegal and dangerous entrepreneurship, full of hidden hazards -- that was often the only path to upward mobility in the Soviet Union. Perhaps the Institute that seeks to control the artifacts removed from the Zone represents the Soviet government and its belief that power should reside in a central authority. Or perhaps this is just a good, apolitical story that happens to have been authored by Soviet writers. The novel's last words are unmistakably political, but they can also be read as a manifesto in support of intellectual freedom.

Roadside Picnic contains some interesting (but far from original) conversations about the nature of intelligence. It ends on a similar note, as Schuhart ponders his own intelligence, his own humanity, almost challenging the departed aliens to understand what it means to be human. Roadside Picnic is a philosophical novel as much as it is an action story, and it therefore isn't surprising that the ending is ambiguous, albeit powerful. This is a seminal work of Soviet science fiction, but it has much to offer sf fans the world over.

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