More on "Escaping infinity"

On Wednesday, I posted a review of Richard Paolinelli's Escaping Infinity, in which I lamented the inclusion of an extended post-script that felt like a separate story in its own right.  After giving this book more thought, I have to revise my opinion of it. 

The #PulpRev channel has been crackling over the last few weeks with discussions about the foolishness of the traditional hero's journey story structure, of which Dario Ciriello's post at the Castalia House blog is just one example.  It occurred to me after writing my review of Escaping Infinity that my view of it has been unduly affected by a lifetime of exposure to the standard 3-act story structure.  This book defied my expectations, and my initial response was one of confusion, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that Paolinelli should be commended for taking a huge risk. 

He didn't stick to traditional story structures, and instead let the story unfold in a far more natural manner than if he had tried to squeeze it into a formula.  Risks like these are what the #PulpRev is all about, and we should always be on guard against adhering to the old rules.  Richard Paolinelli has the guts to ignore them to craft a better story.  As readers, we should learn from his example.

Escaping Infinity

At its core, Richard Paolinelli's Escaping Infinity, presents a Twilight Zone style mystery of a strange hotel that appears in many times and places, and that once you check in, you can’t check out.  The guests at this hotel become so taken by the perfect luxury of the place that they succumb to it like sailors on the isle of the lotus eaters.  Not so for our trusty hero, however.  He immediately notices a number of things out of place and sets out to unravel the mystery and escape Hotel Infinity.  I really enjoyed this part of the book. 

Peter Childress, the architect at the heart of the story, makes for a fine protagonist.  He is clever, determined, and has just the right level of randiness about him.  The romance set up and resolved during this portion of the book is natural, with a truly feminine ingénue who glides back and forth between dame and damsel with an ease that lends her a likable vulnerability without ever painting her as a knuckle biting coward.  The action and puzzles are original and believable.  It’s a great book.

The wonderful middle-section of the book – really three quarters of the book – suffers for the inclusion of a prologue that spoils much of the mystery and a postscript that veers away from the extra-dimensional nature of the Hotel Infinity and into a strange space opera “Happily Ever After” ending.

The funny part is that both the prologue and post-script are well written and great reads.  The Prologue makes for a great short story with characters struggling to react to a catastrophic error.  It touches on everything from acceptance of responsibility to loyalty in the face of disaster in ways that are heartfelt and intense.  The general spoilers in the Prologue leave enough specifics unspoken for the reader to still wonder about the nature of the Hotel Infinity, leaving that short chapter a great little tale in its own right.  The characters in the extended postscript are also great, even if the entire section reads like the unholy marriage of a Mary Sue and a deus ex machina.

The Prologue might have worked better had it been included as an omnipotent POV explanation for the origin of the hotel, and placed after Peter makes his escape.  The Postscript, with its entirely different tone and scope might have worked better as a sequel.  It’s hard to say, really.  Because both are necessary parts of this story – without the origin and denouement the escape sequence might feel like half of a story.

Which leaves this reviewer in the awkward position of concluding that Escaping Infinity might not be the perfect science-fiction story, but it’s a darn good three of them.

The Scythe of Kronos (Cold Stars Book 2)

I picked up a copy of this on the recommendation of Jeffro over at the Castalia House blog, and once again he did not steer me wrong.  The Cold Stars series is less a long string of novels and more a string of short stories all set in the same universe.  It's a bit like a one man Berserker series with a few threads running through the background, but a primary focus on one story at a time.

The first tale in the series is actually The Thorne Legacy, which presents a sad sack corporal deliberately sabotaging his career because, "Screw you, Dad!"  When the big bad shows up, he doesn't necessarily see the error of his ways, but he does redeem himself by the end.

The star-drive conceit is a nice touch - an hour of subjective time for the star-farers costs them twenty hours of time in the outside universe.  It's a hand-wavey way to deal with relativity that opens up a lot of potential for drama.  Although FTL is present, there are no hop-skip-and-jump voyages.  Even a short round trip will see the star-farers returning a day later.  Which allows for considerable tension as a ship races to a planet, knowing that they will get there too late to do the defenders any good.

It also means that those travelling on starships age slower than their ground-pounder cousins, which results in space marines being 'men out of time'.  It means that space travel is conducted only by those who leave nothing behind or who have nothing to lose.

It's an interesting series, and one that I'll be watching as it develops.

Cirsova, Issue 5

Issue 5 of Cirsova represents a return to form after an average outing with Issue 4.  While Issue 4 included a few gems, it also suffered from the inclusion of far more stinkers.  Frankly, the double issue was a mistake - at half the size it would have offered the same value for the price by cutting the dross.  Issue 5 on the other hand is strong from top to bottom, with stories by several of my favorite authors:

• Schuyler Hernstrom brings the heat with another grim faced barbarian encountering ancient future-tech in a quest to save his village.
• Misha Burnett continues to show the world how to give the old New Wave spin on things a fresh face.
• James Hutchings reminds the world that there's life left yet within the Homeric epic genre with more of the John Carter saga. 
• Brian K. Lowe's outing doesn't quite rise to the level of his fantastic Invisible City, but he's another author that has yet to let me down.
• Michael Tierney manages to present a heroic Sacagawea who doesn't feel like a forced "U Go Grrl" within that sadly neglected setting for fantasy - the American frontier.  Okay, so it wanders from the frontier back to Madison's Washington D.C., but it still counts.

Even the stories in this issue that didn't pin my ears back left me feeling satisfied.  Lynn Rushlay, Jay Barnson, and Louise Sorensen's tales only suffer from being sandwiched so close to works by the authors listed above.  They are all fun stories that round out the issue without feeling like additions made just to fill space and pad the word count.

Beyond just proving that Cirsova can survive a dip in quality and come roaring back, this issue made me sit up and take notice of something that has happened over the last year.  After a decade long spell of having roughly one go-to author names (Glen Cook, for the record), I now have more than I can keep track of.  I was eagerly anticipating this issue not just because I trust the editor, but because I really enjoy the authors on the cover.  They give me something positive to look forward to, and that's something that I haven't had in a long time.

It's a great sign, this return to fun, and the rise of a new culture of writers dedicated to 'Cirsova style fiction' serves as a much needed corrective to the market.

Cirsova Four, Part Six

Shadow Vision

Preston Dennett’s tale of an outcast, a half-mad sage, and a young girl exploring a land plagued by a near-sentient darkness gives the reader plenty of mystery, magic, action, and even romance, but his delivery never rises above workmanlike.  Dennett writes impending doom well.  He writes casual banter well. The decision to do both at the same time in this story doesn’t allow either of those skills to truly shine.

He conveys a real sense of malice and ever present danger within the dark lands that are the setting for most of this short story, but the frequent sly winks at the reader and the light, teasing behavior of the characters provides a jarring contrast.  As a result, the story cannot seem to decide if it wants to be a dark and harrowing journey, or an amusing lark into mystery, and the lack of clear focus prevents this story from taking full advantage of Dennett’s talents.

The Ride

As any old school gamer knows, there’s nothing like a dungeon crawl.  Edward McDermmott spins this short tale of a man pursued by demons of the literal sort who trap the hero of the piece inside the sort of dungeon that would do any DM proud.  The dungeon crawler explores a large complex and faces the usual sorts of troubles. He needs light, faces unseen things that scrabble in the dark, encounters bizarre lost shrines to long forgotten gods, and discovers hidden doors through clever observation.  He even faces danger of a far more alluring kind.  Overall, a tight and compact story, but the challenge of temptation faced by the brave adventurer, and the ending of his troubles in the dungeon, feel a little rushed, even by the standards of short fiction. 

Cirsova Four, Part Five

The Priests of Shalaz

Jay Barnson presents us with this story of a gateway linking turn of the twentieth century earth with a far flung alien world populated by almost humans.  Our hero, Jesse, had been marooned on a small island somewhere in the British Empire and survived for six months by sheltering within a small village on the alien side of the gateway.  His forcible exile from earth ends when a British ship happens past the island, but his rescue only complicates his life.  The brash and cocksure British Naval officers do what comes naturally and assume that the alien world is ready for British intervention, which triggers a confrontation with the local powers.  Those powers consist of a forbidden temple operated by a secretive and cocksure priesthood. 

Two decades of exposure to historically illiterate fiction and literary criticism has taught me to raise shields whenever British officers show up in a new world scenario like this.  Barnson plays with the reader for a bit, setting up the standard, “British colonials learn their lesson,” style tale, but at the last moment, he surprises you by presenting the British as stoic and heroic in their own fashion.  They might be arrogant, but not without reason, and their arrogance is leavened with more than a touch of humanity. 

If the story has one weakness, it’s that the alien world feels small.  For all that the story takes place millions of light years away from earth and contains alien splendors and threats, in the end it amounts to nothing more than two villages and a temple.  Understandably for a short story, these are all that are required for a short story, but Barnson misses a number of chances to make the world feel much larger with a few simple additions – nothing big, just a reference here, a hint at the larger world there, and it would have made the alien planet feel more like a full world.  Barnson has the chops for this – his description of the world’s skies and flora and fauna are brief, but they convey a depth and feel of alien beauty that is as touching as it is terse.

 

The Last Dues Owed

Ancient Egypt stands as a much underserved fantasy setting.  As the cradle of Western Civilization, its ways are just familiar enough to need no explanation.  Readers know of the centuries long cycles of their histories, the roles of cats in their mythology, and the importance of the Nile as life-bringer.  At the same time, the millennia that separates us means that all of these things bear slight twists that provide a newness and oddness that evokes a mystery and magic all of its own.

Christine Lucas takes full advantage of this strange yet familiar setting in The Last Dues Owed.  In it, a battle between assassins dispatched by rival priesthoods opens up into something far more meaningful than a simple back-alley brawl.  In a brilliant display of writing, Lucas uses the fight to show the character of the combatants and slowly reveal their long backstory.  At the fight’s conclusion, the tale shifts to a rescue mission that takes on greater import thanks to the patience and restraint Lucas uses in allowing the story to unfold at its own pace. 

A fight.  A rescue.  Some magic and mystery.  A satisfying (if not entirely happy) ending.  The world needs more stories like The Last Dues Owed.

Cirsova Four, Part Three

Great news for Cirsova Fans: Issues Five and Six are fully funded.  The Kickstarter managed to beat it's goal by more than 25%, and we get another year of great short fiction.  Let's celebrate with some reviews!

The Witch of Elrica

A nice light read featuring an illegitimate prince who falls for a foreign sorceress.  Stories like these are the glue that hold a magazine like Cirsova together.  This isn’t a deep or particularly meaningful story, but it hits all the right notes.  It’s a straight ahead fantasy that gives you a taste of politics, a bit of magic, and a fight where the stakes are real and important.  It also features a cast of sympathetic royal characters struggling to find a path through trouble caused by old customs and an easily riled populace.  Jennifer Povey’s unpretentious style here is a welcome breath of fresh air.

The Vault of Phalos

The light read of The Witch of Elrica is followed by a heavy handed tale, and it works.  You’ve had your palette cleansed, and you’re ready to sink your teeth into something meaty, and Jeffery Scott Sims is there for you, man.  His comma-filled prose is wordy, dense, and almost poetic:

A company of armored legionnaires trooped down the rocky defile from the chill forest into the green valley wherein lay Maronais amidst its budding fields.  At their helm, on powerful steeds, rode two of Dyrezan’s finest, the aristocrats Nantrech and Morca, the former a wide-ranging scholar esteemed for his legendary mind, the latter famed for his prowess in battle.  Both belonged to the highest rank among magicians, and their sending into such an isolated region indicated the importance, and understood in their distant home, of this undertaking.

The two have been dispatched to deal with a demonic disease-cult ravaging the small bucolic land of Maronais, and the answer to their quest lies within the titular vault.  The whole story reads like that paragraph, and that strange style takes a few paragraphs of getting used to.  It’s strong, heady stuff that gives the story a mythic air and turns a routine story about an investigation into a disease-themed death cult into a gripping read.

The Bubbcat
This is the sort of story that makes me love Cirsova.  The seventh story in Cirsova’s Winer 2016 issue represents the first no-foolin’ science-fiction story.  The Sands of Rubal-Khali hints at a broader sci-fi setting, but the story has its feet planted firmly in a pre-gunpowder fantasy setting.  The Bubbcat takes place in a near-future that feels very much like today’s world, only more so.  The general plot is a chase scene featuring a protagonist holding onto a powerful MacGuffin, and always trying to stay one step ahead of the billionaire tycoon that wants the MacGuffin for her own. Alex Monaghan tells this story with a deft touch, packing a lot of information into very few words.  The whole story – plot, motivation, setting – is presented in a casual, almost off-handed manner that forces the reader to pay close attention and fill in a lot of gaps.  The resulting slow reveal gives the end of this story a lot more punch than it should.  Given the shortness of the story, it’s astonishing how much investment Monaghan draws out of the reader.

A Suit of Haidrah Skin

Here’s another story that cheerfully dances along the line between fantasy and science-fiction, gleefully pulling ideas and touches from both and mashing them together into the pulpy style of adventure that just feels right.  An ancient wizard’s tower/rocket ship returns to the planet from whence it was banished after a long and terrible war.  When the great heroes die casual deaths fighting the menace head-on, a barbarian girl gets some advice from an oracle that leads to a much more convoluted heist/assassination mission.  Rob Lang’s writing doesn’t leap off the page the way Jeffery Scott Sims or Schuyler Hernstrom’s does, given that this adventure tale features so many new and imaginative creatures, villains, tricks, and traps, that’s actually a good thing.  The prose remains unobtrusive and allows the weirdness of the setting and characters to take center stage.

Down to Sheol: A Review

I’m glad I read Down to Sheol, even though it is well outside of my normal bailiwick.  This book contains no ogres, princesses, zap guns, hyperspace malfunctions, or hungry gods lurking in lava filled arctic caves.  Instead, it’s a modern day noir set amid the small stakes of rural south Texas county politics.  Add to that, I’m a PG guy who tries to avoid R rated media, and Down to Sheol is a brutally explicit book filled with explicitly loathsome villains.  The camera never looks away from them as they engage in their various depredations. 

Right off the top, let me just state that I bought this book after reading a few articles that the author, M. T. White, had posted on Return of Kings.  Those articles provided independent confirmation for the Pulp Revolution’s push for masculine narratives that reflect real people and real relationships is not an outlier.  In fact, the Pulp Revolution is not unique.  There are a wealth of people coming around to the need for actual heroic protagonists.  For whatever reason, there is a growing market for stories featuring black and white morality coupled with men driven to do the right thing no matter the cost, and who win against all odds.  M. T. White is an author who came to that conclusion outside of the Pulp Magazine framework, and I wanted to read Down to Sheol to get a sense of the parallel development of these ideas inside the modern day thriller world of self-publishing.  If my initial scouting foray is any indication, masculine writing is in the nascent stages of making a real comeback.

M. T. White writes with a ruthless minimalism that results in a gripping read.  This story of small town politics might read like a small stakes version of the Dallas TV show, but White’s characters leap off the page and his plot races ahead at breakneck speed.  This is the closest thing to a modern day noir story written with the plain-writ style of a Dashiell Hammett or Mickey Spillane that I’ve read in a long time.
 

I could have done without the explicit sexual content.  As mentioned above, my preference is for scenes where that sort of chicanery occurs off-screen.  A few hints and suggestions suffice; my imagination can fill in the details.  That’s a personal preference, and if you have a stronger stomach for that sort of writing, don’t let my warning hold you back.  That said, none of these scenes felt gratuitous.  They each provide an all-too-clear look into the dark souls of the novel’s antagonists.  These scenes revealed their true character and helped establish the stakes and give the reader concrete reasons to sneer and feel disgust whenever the villains were on screen.  The brutal honesty with which White presents these villains is as transparently manipulative as it is forgivably effective.

I have an easier time reading explicit violence, but found myself wincing at times.  White's writing isn't just graphic, its gripping.  He writes fight scenes in such a way that you almost feel each blow land yourself.  It's powerful stuff, and it gives his fight scenes a weight and suspense that you don't read very often.  The stakes in each scene are very real, and even if you think the right man will win, the action goes so fast and so visceral that you always have that little shred of doubt whether the hero really will make it out alive.  

The villains are balanced out by protagonists who are both fully fleshed out, completely sympathetic, and good-hearted down to their core.  The female lead starts off in a very compromising situation, and watching her slowly extricate herself from the clutches of evil is gratifying.  The hero of the piece has his flaws, but they are understandable – it’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you.  He is the strong, plain-spun, quiet and capable type of hero that’s hard not to root for.  He also has a wisdom beyond his years that give him that competent underdog status that again, makes your heart go out to him.  As if that wasn’t enough, White presents him as a natural romantic leading man.  He doesn’t white knight – his first meeting with the female lead, he basically shuts her out…which of course makes her all the more intrigued by him.  It’s refreshing to read a masculine lead who knows how to handle a woman like that.  It’s a rarity these days.

This is a good read.  Due to its explicit nature, it wasn’t a particularly a fun read for a square like me.  Even so, White’s writing pulled me in.  The man knows how to craft a good story with great characters.  If you need a break from the aliens and dragons, then you should give him a shot.  If he keeps writing like this, he’s going to be one of those self-publishing authors who succeeds based on his own talent and hard work, not due to his friends in the publishing world.