The NESFA Press, 2002, 155 p.

How could I resist a novel with an illustration of the Periodic Table on its front cover? Still less “a book for chemists who might appreciate magical realism” as the publisher’s prefatory lines have it. It could have been designed for me.

Don’t let that put you off though; it’s also a very powerful and intricate novel exploring those eternal themes of love, sex and death – with a very unusual ghost.

Charles L Harness is one of my favourite SF writers of the last century but due to the fact that it’s quite rare I only bought this book recently. It was, then, a little disconcerting that in the first page we find narrator, Joe Barnes, mentally undressing his female Chemistry teacher Miss Wilson (Miss Cybele Wilson) down to nothing but stockings, garters and low-heeled shoes as she enters class. Adolescent male fantasy no doubt but a bit much for page one.

There is a plot strand relating to a cup said to be the Holy Grail (the “real” one was lost in the Atlantic in its evacuation from Europe during the Great War.) Joe takes a job modelling for artists and recognises, though the face is turned away, one of the pictures the tutor rotates on the studio’s walls as being a nude Cybele holding the cup. A mystery about the cup’s disappearance from the religious institution where it is held is resolved by Joe’s knowledge of the refractive index of borosilicate glass.

Cybele becomes the love of his life and a major influence on it, her characteristic scent of bluebonnets (the State Flower of Texas apparently) coming to him at significant turning points. She inspires him with a love of Chemistry and encourages his thirst for knowledge.  She is a strong character but her prognostications about the future invite suspicion from the school authorities. It is not until well after he has left school, however, that they get together and that not for long as she has cancer. Here Harness inserts Joe’s thoughts on his loss. “And life goes on. It goes, but it doesn’t go anywhere. We begin, and end, in the middle.” At this point there is still half the book to go with many more opportunities for Cybele to affect Joe’s progress through life.

Joe was growing up in the 1930s and there is a lot of incidental detail about life in small town US in those times. Cybele’s background was unconventional, her mother was a madam in a local house of ill repute whose activities are policed by arrangement of times to raid the premises. A fair amount of Chemistry adorns the pages but I’m sure the details will not faze the average reader.

All of this is interspersed with incidents of what can only be termed magical realism. Young Joe’s discovery of a millions of years old skimming stone which skips from the river into a cave where something spooks him as he goes to retrieve it, the panther which saves his brother from a snake, the voice which he hears warning him to run from a lab accident, the unusual circumstances surrounding his daughter’s birth.

Almost innocent at times, Cybele, with Bluebonnets is a wonderful book; insightful, humane, knowledgeable, rueful. Here is a human life in all its glory and pain.

Pedant’s corner:- “into the gaping white maw of the snake” (maws do not gape, they are stomachs,) clear is used as a synonym for colourless (it isn’t, clear means ‘see-through,’ which many coloured things are,) barring one, all chemical formulae in the text are rendered correctly – even the subscripts are correct – however bicarbonate is given as having the formula -HCO (bicarbonate – now known as hydrogencarbonate – is actually HCO₃,) focussed (focused,) “Munch’s The Shriek” (usually known, at least nowadays, as The Scream,) miniscule (several times, minuscule,) “a unisex washroom” (in the 1930s I wondered? Apparently separate toilets only came into being in the US in the 1920s as a response to more women entering the workplace,) “a few less bullets” (a few fewer bullets,) spit (USianism for ‘spat’,) cartilege (cartilage.)

Pocket, 1981, 207p

This book is nearly thirty years old; and it shows. The characters are never more than cut-outs, present merely to illustrate the plot which is, in itself, pretty implausible.

Two computers, Largo and Czandra, collectively known as Control, are able to enforce actions or inactions of this universe’s inhabitants by means of a silicon neural net which is encoded into developing foetuses. The people are referred to as human but are actually members of Phelex Sapiens, having cat like features such as whiskers and manes. However, they are to all intents and purposes bipedal hominids like ourselves with neither discernible feline drives nor habits, except in one (late) instance.

Control has completed the Cancelar project which seeks to prevent the re-collapse of the universe in a Big Crunch and so allow Largo and Czandra to “live” and rule forever. Two characters (I use the term loosely) called Demaq and Gerain have, with the aid of the Diavolo – who comprise a group which is somehow able to work against Control – evaded (ahem) control by drinking a strange liquid. They embark on a voyage on a star ship, Firebird, which can subvert the loss of Universal mass engendered during the Cancelar project by travelling the universe at close to light speed for millennia.

There are several flaws in the playing out of this scenario, not the least of which was that while being chased at relativistic speeds by ships belonging to Control, Firebird was nevertheless able to stop dead in space to evade the chasing ships.

There is also some byplay involving travelling in time via the Cancelar black hole. I know as readers we should be perhaps one step ahead of the characters but Dermaq’s failure to realise the implications of this makes him seem irredeemably thick.

The “Phelex” words Harness uses for time and distance are particularly annoying; tench and meda for example. Yes, he is describing a different culture, yet nearly everything else is rendered in standard English (or, rather, American.) Moreover, the characteristic Phelex musical instrument, named as the violetta, isn’t italicised.

Finally, the denouement has more than a hint of the hoariest cliché about it.

In sum, this is not one of Harness’s best. His The Rose, The Catalyst, The Ring Of Ritornel, Lurid Dreams, Redworld, Krono, Lunar Justice and The Venetian Court are all more rewarding. Try any of them before considering Firebird.