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The Whispering Mountain by Joan Aiken

Puffin, 2016, 369 p, plus 2 p Map and 12 p Extras.

This is set in Aiken’s world of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase where the Stuart King James III is the ruler of Great Britain, but being a kind of prequel does not feature most of the characters from those stories.

Our protagonist here is young Owen Hughes who lives in the town of Pennygaff in Wales. His mother is dead and his father serving in the navy somewhere in Asia. As a result he stays with his grandfather, the keeper of the town’s museum whose most precious holding is the golden harp of Teirtu.

Pennygaff lies under the lea of the local mountain Fig-Hat Ben which makes a sound when the wind is up, hence the book’s title. It is also rumoured to be the home of small, possibly magical, humans who are only occasionally glimpsed.

The local laird, Lord Malyn, wants the harp for himself but Owen’s grandfather disputes his title to it since it belongs to the last survivor of an order of monks. Malyn sets two criminals, Prigman and Bilk – who converse throughout in thieves’ cant – to steal the harp. Queering the pitch is the mysterious foreigner, The Seljuk of Rum, prone to speaking like a thesaurus. Sand somewhere in the neighbourhood, incapacitated by a hunting accident, is David James Charles Edward George Harold Richard Tudor-Stuart, the Prince of Wales. Who for some reason speaks in a kind of cod Scots.

Other notable characters are itinerant Tom Dando and his daughter Arabis who make their living by selling herbal remedies and the like and whom Owen met on his way to Wales from London.

When the harp is stolen from the museum Owen is kidnapped by Bilk and Prigman and given the blame for it. Many scrapes and adventures ensue including meetings with the clan who live secretly in the mountain and gave rise to the rumours of people living there. Their Middle-Eastern origins – they use camels for transport – tie them to The Seljuk of Rum.

The text deploys a lot of Welsh words but there is a glossary of them to be found among the Extras. The thieves’ cant might have been a hindrance to a young reader but context usually makes it obvious what is meant.

In these books we are never in any doubt as to who is good and who the baddies are. Aiken characterises the latter in just enough of an over the top way to ensure that while her heroes and heroines are all resourceful and competent they have to struggle to overcome them.

It’s all a jolly good romp and as is to be expected in YA fiction, all’s well that ends well.

Pedant’s corner:- “the castle of Balmoral” (in our timeline the royals did not acquire the Balmoral estate until the mid-nineteenth century and then built the castle there,) Yehemelek (elsewhere always Yehimelek,) “there were numerous opening leading out of the big cave” (openings.) “‘I hope your lassie wisna come to harm’” (willna come to harm.) In glossary of welsh words; perwinkle (periwinkle.)

The Moon and the Sun by Vonda N McIntyre

Pocket Books, 1997, 422 p, plus ii p Major Characters and v p Afterword

I’m not quite sure how to categorise this. I’ve seen it described as Alternate/Alternative History (what I prefer to call Altered History) but I can’t see any change in actual history in it. It has no discernible Jonbar Point, no ramifications for its future. Yes, it’s set in the reign of the Sun King, Louis XIV of France, but it’s not a purely historical novel either, though that aspect of the novel is very well executed. What it does have – and what tends to make it more of a fantasy than anything else – is a “sea monster,” a mermaid-like creature which turns out to be near human, brought to Louis’s court to provide him with immortality by eating a part of its flesh. (The first part of this premise – the human-like sea creature – is not really too far-fetched. There has been scientific speculation that humans spent part of their evolutionary history as aquatic creatures.)

Our viewpoint character is Marie-Josèphe de la Croix, lady in waiting to Mademoiselle Elisabeth Charlotte d’Orleans, Louis XIV’s niece. Marie-Josèphe was brought up in Martinique and her relationship to the court is, to begin with, opaque. She is an innocent, (she has not heard the word ‘whore,’ has never drunk wine, nor encountered the idea of homosexuality,) sent to a convent when her parents died and subjected to its repressive strictures. Her brother Yves is the Jesuit priest and enthusiast for scientific enquiry who was instrumental in capturing two sea-monsters and bringing them to Versailles. One of the monsters is dead and Yves is to carry out an autopsy on it. Questions of protocol and the need for the king’s presence tend to delay this though.

Marie-Josèphe finds herself sensitive to the creature. She can hear it sing, feel its pain, discern its meaning, and ends up relating its stories of persecution by humans to the court.

Coincidentally, Pope Innocent XII is on a diplomatic mission to Versailles (as a kind of rapprochement with the King) but he is keen for the live sea creature – which due to its tale-telling soon comes to be called Sherzad – to be taken back to Rome for study.

Other historical notables to appear in the text include Philippe, Duc d’Orléans, (Louis’s brother and Mademoiselle’s father,) Charlotte (Philippe’s Duchess,) the Chevalier de Lorraine (Philippe’s male lover,) James VII (II of England) and his wife Mary of Modena (in exile due to the so-called “Glorious Revolution.”)

Marie-Josèphe is talented, not only does she sketch the dissection of the dead sea-creature, she also composes music. This latter outrages the Pope, who insists – using Biblical references – that women ought to be silent. She is not short of enemies at the court but also forms friendships. Her relationship with her slave Odolette is complicated and develops in a way more attuned to modern sensibilities than those of the seventeenth century.

The writing is accomplished throughout and the interpersonal relationships depicted tend to strike true.

Pedant’s corner:- Yves’ (Yves’s. Since the ‘s’ of Yves is not pronounced then without an ‘s’ after the apostrophe then the possessive’s sound is not signalled by the spelling. All the possessives of names ending in ‘s’ are treated like this, Chartres’, Louis’, etc) “the duke and duchess d’Orleans” (these are specific titled people, not merely an unspecified member of a class. Their titles are proper nouns. So, “the Duke and Duchess d’Orleans. McIntyre generally tended to adopt a similar practice of using lower case whenever specific titles were used, even for mademoiselle de la Croix. Note in English she would be Miss de la Croix, not miss de la Croix,) perruke (innumerable times, peruke,) “His Holiness’ route” (His Holiness is singular, so, ‘His Holiness’s route’,) “she kept her own council” (counsel, is council a US usage in this context?) “her royal mistress’ ridicule” (mistress’s,) “Father de la Croix’ medal” (again, no ‘s’ is sounded at the end of Croix, it needs an ‘s’ to render the possessive accurately, ‘de la Croix’s medal’,) “her left aureole” (areola,) “and has sense of humour failed him” (and his sense of humour,) “a hareem” (x 2, usually spelled ‘harem’.)

The Hood by Lavie Tidhar

Head of Zeus, 2022, 445 p.

After tackling Arthurian legend in By Force Alone Tidhar turns his reworking of the many and varied Matter of Britain onto that of Robin Hood. The book’s title is a little inappropriate, though, as that gentleman is not its principal focus. To be sure we have Maid Marian, Will Scarlett, Sheriff(s) of Nottingham, Much, Alan-a-Dale and, later, Little John and a Friar Tuck, but we also have the Lady Rowena, Isaac of York and his daughter Rebecca, plus Guy of Gisbourne (all taken from Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe – as Tidhar acknowledges in his afterword – but altered here) to contend with. Not to mention a riff on Frankenstein wherein a simulacrum of Jesus is animated from (authenticated) relics collected by a man called Gilbert Whitehand. And the other Hood, Little Red Riding. This is not quite the familiar tale, then. Emphasising this, the forest is the domain of the fae and Nottingham is festooned with images of The Green Man.

We start off in the time of anarchy where Stephen and Maude (not the historical Matilda, note) are vying for the crown of England and Will Scarlett takes part in a robbery of the London headquarters of the Knights Templar. This London is your typical fantasy city modelled on an imagined Dark Age, with ale-houses, cutpurses and rogues of various kinds and a casual attitude to life. How realistic this depiction is of day-to-day existence in such a place is another matter. However, “Men have murdered women with impunity since the beginning of time,” is sadly still an apposite observation.

From thereon, Knights Templar not being ones to cross, Will has to look out for his life. After his companions in the raid start to die off in inventive ways he decides to light out for Nottingham, barely surviving a multiple stabbing because his intended assassin has a soft spot for him. In this tale women are as hard-edged and ruthless as the men. Sometimes more so. But sweet and demure they are not.

We also have two characters who may be transgender – or at least cross-dressing. Alan a Dale, who plays a harp made from the bones of his sister and is seeking vengeance on the man who killed her, sometimes manifests as Alanah Dale and there is a priest called Birdie who is in touch with the fae and discovered to have breasts and female genitalia.

Rowena is far from the character found in Ivanhoe. She is a hard-nosed dealer in dwale, the drug of choice in Nottingham, and subject to as much double-dealing and betrayal as drug baronesses ought to be accustomed to.

Many of the men have returned from the Crusades and subject to the usual ex-servicemen grouses, “Nobody gives a shit about returning soldiers.” There is a constant background drip of information on events in the Holy Land and the fortunes of the various Kings of the times.

The characters tend to speak in a down to earth demotic style as of our times, which is anachronistic as far as the setting goes but this is fantasy; in that respect perhaps anything goes. There was a nice aside on the origins of dietary custom evolving from the Church’s ban on meat on Fridays. The common people soon worked out that fish was not meat and so indulged themselves, “everybody likes a loophole.” One of the Sheriffs has a side line in procuring piscicultural delicacies.

Tidhar can certainly illuminate character and spin a story but we also have here an abundance of allusion. I confess I admired the reflection of a prisoner on discovering himself to be incarcerated, “Then I awoke and found me here on the cold cell’s hide,” (a Spoonerism will always get me, one based on a Tiptree quote from Keats still more so) but the book is over-stuffed with this sort of thing. At times it seems as if no reference cannot be elaborated on. A meeting with a Jack and his friend Jill calls up a description of that male name’s connotations – some steal from giants, others go down hills, or bring frost, or light up like a lantern. Some even go around murdering people. But the page or so riffing on the Rumpelstiltskin story was surely unnecessary.

Pedant’s corner:- “off of” (just ‘off’, no ‘of’ please,) “are at each others’ throat” (throats,) “the plague comes and goes like the tides into London” (‘the’ plague. In 1145? There were earlier plagues but ‘the’ Plague came to England in 1348. Okay it’s an altered history but “Plagues come and go like the tides” would avoid this particular anachronism.) “In the Jewry a mob of good Christians attack shops” (a mob attacks.) “He think of Joan” (thinks,) ass (arse,) supressed (suppressed,) “with bones wove in their hair” (woven.) “Perhaps this bides well for the knight” (bodes well,) Raynard (elsewhere Reynard.) The rest of the men were knights and unsavoury looking civilian” (civilians.) “There’s a tapestry on the wall behind him that look like he’d” (that looks like,) “‘no matter whence it comes from’” (OK, it was in dialogue but ‘whence’ = ‘from where’, so, ‘whence it comes’.) Greensleeves (as a tune this is supposed to have been written by Henry VIII [born 1491] though it is most likely later. Another anachronism, then.) “The gate open” (opens.) “The small monk’s shoulder’s fall (shoulders,) Rebeca (x1, Rebecca,) “gristly corpses” (grisly, I would think,) “shakings his head” (shaking.) “In his time Rome had not yet even bothered to turn its attention to this shitty little island” (Julius Caesar first invaded Britain in 55 BC. Before his time, then,) dwarfs (dwarves,) “Little Boy Blues” (Little Boys Blue,) Poitier (Poitiers?) “A solider learns to sleep where he can” (soldier.)

Unholy Land by Lavie Tidhar

Tachyon, 2018, 264 p, plus Mem>iv p Preface, 3 p Historical Afterword, and 2 p Afterword by Warren Ellis.

Taking as its inspiration an expedition by Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, and Nahum Wilbusch into Africa in 1904 seeking out a possible homeland for the Jews, and Herzl’s own utopian novel Altneuland (Tel Aviv in Hebrew: and yes it did give its name to that city) which he set in a peaceful Jewish state in Palestine with equal rights for Arabs, Unholy Land imagines what it could have been like if both had come into being. It is also a meditation on the treacherous call of home.

Here, that homeland in Africa, on the borders of Uganda and Kenya, came to pass. It is called Palestina and viewpoint character Lior Tirosh, a writer of crime novels, was brought up there. When the novel starts, he is making the journey from his present home in Berlin, on the suggestion of his agent with the hope he might write something on the political situation there. Unlike in the similarly (though unhistorically) inspired The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, there are tensions between the Jewish settlers and the original inhabitants, paralleling the conflict between Jews and Arabs in the Israel of the reader’s reality. A wall is being built to keep terrorists out. (Of course, as one character says, it serves equally well to keep Jews in.) Tirosh himself witnesses a suicide bombing of a bus.

This aspect of the novel is an Altered History where the Holocaust never happened and (in an aside) Hitler was assassinated in 1948. There are too, allusions to stories Tirosh either has written or might write which, in our universe, Tidhar has actually written – Osama and one featuring Hitler as a private detective. The sections following Tirosh are told in the third person but it soon becomes apparent that these passages are being written by a Special Investigator Bloom who also contributes first person sections to the book. To complicate things further there is a third strand, written in the second person, describing the calling back to service of a special agent, Nur Al-Hussaini, who, like Bloom, has travelled between various realities via what Bloom calls a crosshatch and she a sephirot, places where the boundaries between the worlds blur and crossover can occur. Depending on which reality you inhabit the city Bloom ruminates on can be thought of as Jerusalem, Ursalim or Yerushailam.

Of this unsteady landscape Bloom says, “people think of reality as immutable: solid and reassuring, that it is true merely because it is there.” But, “The world is the sum of what it could be, what it might have been and how it could have been.” Of his calling he says, “There are always borders, and there are always those who guard them lest they fracture.” Tirosh experiences the blurring slowly, in the end all but forgetting his connection to his world and agent in a quest to find Deborah, a niece who has gone missing from Palestina.

It is a measure of Tidhar’s skill as a writer that this all makes sense as you read it. Jewishness is obviously of salient importance to him (naturally enough, since he is an Israeli.) The place of Jews in this world is problematic at best. He puts this into Bloom’s thoughts, “That is the condition of being a Jew, I sometimes think – to always be one thing and another, to never quite fit. We are the grains of sand that irritate the oyster shell of the world.”

As well as being an intensely readable thriller if you care to look at it that way, Unholy Land pleads the case for somewhere, in one of the realities, being a place where that last sentence no longer holds.

Pedant’s corner:- “a row of cars … were queued up” (a row was queued up,) “for the people seek retaliation” (for the people to seek,) “and its fruit were skulls” (its fruit was,) “the lay of the land” (lie, it’s ‘lie of the land’,) “over an irritant embedded it in the host body” (no need for that ‘it’,) “when a different peoples had to share the same land” (omit the ‘a’,) “‘you are nought but the ephemera’” (nought = zero, the number, and is not equivalent to ‘nothing’: ‘you are naught but the ephemera’,) “body wracked with painful coughs” (racked.)

The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal

A Lady Astronaut Novel, Solaris, 2019, 506 p, including 3 p Acknowledgements and 6 p Historical Note.

The Calculating Stars cover

Each chapter of the book is prefaced by a cod news clipping. Kowal uses these to provide background (and commentary on the times) but takes care to make clear that this is an altered history in her first two words, President Dewey. In case you were in any doubt about the timeline, the chapter proper then starts with “Do you remember where you were when the Meteor hit?” Said meteor (actually, as Kowal points out, a meteorite) hits the sea just off Maryland on March, 3rd, 1952, and wipes out most of the surrounding area, US government and all. Narrator Elma (Wexler) and her husband Nathaniel York were luckily up in their mountain cabin and so survived. Elma is a woman of many talents, a mathematician, a pilot and a war veteran. Due to her hothousing in maths (and proficiency relative to her male counterparts, which in turn led to her being held up as an example to them; never a good place to be) she has developed a visceral fear of speaking in public, manifesting in a vomiting reflex. She is also the first to calculate the likely results of the impact. After the initial cooling phase due to reduced sunlight hitting the ground the volume of water raised into the atmosphere will induce runaway global warming since H2O is a potent greenhouse gas. Her husband realises that humans will have to get off Earth. After persuading the new powers that be an accelerated space programme is the result.

The scenario allows Kowal to address the inherent sexism of the times – but women are eventually allowed onto the space programme (it would be silly after all to engage in a colonisation programme without them.) The Yorks’ initial billeting on the black Major Lindholm after their survival of the impact also leads her to an awareness of racism, her own heretofore more or less unconscious attitudes, but also that of wider society. The figure of Colonel Stetson Parker (here the first man into space) provides an embodiment of sexism and sense of sexual entitlement, from which Elma was only saved during the war by being a General’s daughter.

This isn’t great literature but it is story and all passes easily. The reader can have some fun looking out for resemblances and differences to the space programme in our timeline – the Moon rocket here is an Artemis 9 instead of a Saturn V, for example. Despite an attempt to be forthright in the opening paragraph, there is a rather awkward treatment of the Yorks’ sex life.

I do have a couple of quibbles with the scenario. Given much of the US eastern seaboard has been wiped out would there have been sufficient resources left to mount a space programme? Okay it’s an international effort, but still. And in this perennially cloud bedecked post-disaster world (“Do you remember when you last saw the stars?”) would enough crops have been able to grow to sustain life as we more or less know it?

However, Elma is an engaging enough narrator to encourage me to read the next two novels in the sequence.

Pedant’s corner:- “Neither of us were squeamish” (neither of us was,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech (x 2.) “‘What.’” (it was a question, therefore ‘What?’) “export of corn and oats were blocked” *export … was blocked,) “I was looking for ejecta that wasn’t going to be there” (ejecta is plural; ‘ejecta that weren’t going to be there’,) “some involvement over was chosen” (over who was chosen,) “a small women” (woman,) O2 (O2,) “lays over the Earth like a blanket ” (lies over,) “smoothes out” (smooths out,) Williams’ (Williams’s.)

Spy Fiction Bookshelf Travelling for Insane Times

This meme, originating with Judith, Reader in the Wilderness, has now been taken over by Katrina at Pining for the West.

Spy Fiction Books

Back in the days of the Cold War spy fiction was a big thing. The two main purveyors of the form – in the UK anyway – were my (sur)namesake Len Deighton (although he pronounces the “Deigh” part to rhyme with “day” rather than “die”) and John le Carré. I also have a le Carré omnibus of his early works shelved elsewhere.

These, too, are housed in the garage, below the last of my SF paperbacks (see last week’s post.)

I have read all the books by Deighton here. His book Fighter is not on these shelves because it’s a history of the Battle of Britain but then Blitzkrieg is also a history book and it is here. Winter is not a spy novel but reflects Deighton’s knowledge of Germany (specifically Berlin) in the first half of the twentieth century. Goodbye Mickey Mouse is a novel featuring members of the US Air Force which took part in the campaign in World War 2 in the lead up to the invasion of Normandy. SS-GB is an altered history set in a Britain where a German invasion of the UK in 1940 succeeded.

I’ve not read all the le Carrés. Spy fiction lost a lot of its resonance when the Cold War ended whereupon he moved on to other things. I always meant to get round to his later stuff but life (and other books) got in the way.

Britain in the the 15th Century

I’ve just been perusing the blurb on the publisher’s page for a book called Divine Heretic written by one Jaime Lee Moyer.

The blurb starts with the sentence, “Everyone knows the story of Joan of Arc, a peasant girl who put Charles VII on the throne and spearheaded France’s victory over Britain before being burned by the English as a heretic and witch.”

Britain? In the 15th century? That’s some Altered History! The United Kingdom didn’t become so until about 300 years later, 1707 in fact.

I wonder who at Jo Fletcher Books (for it was they) thought Britain had an army in the 1400s – or that back then such a country existed that could have one. Or doesn’t know the difference between Britain and its constituent parts. Or mistakenly thought they might offend some not English inhabitant of the present day UK by saying England (in which case they failed miserably.)

(At least they put the blame for Joan’s burning in the right hands.)

Beneath the World, A Sea by Chris Beckett

Corvus, 2019, 283 p. Published in Interzone 282, Jul-Aug 2019.

 Beneath the World, A Sea cover

“The ground of one world is the sky of the world below” runs one of the myths and legends of the Submundo Delta, the most inaccessible place on Earth, the Delta Beneath the World. A place of magenta trees with spiral leaves and flowers with bright pink mouths, overhung by a huge sun and moon as if inside a magnifying bubble, and not really below the outside world, it can be accessed only from South America via a long boat trip on the (perhaps too obviously named) River Lethe, passing through the Zona de Ovido, the Zone of Forgetfulness, all memories of which disappear the moment you leave it. The Delta has no radio communication with elsewhere, aeroplanes which try to penetrate its airspace all crash.

Such a cut-off world is a staple of fantastical fiction of course – fairyland, hollow hills, parallel worlds, alien planets and so on – but Beckett’s vision is a fresh take on the sub-genre even if the Delta is a slightly recycled though embellished version of the Caramel Forest of the planet Lutania in the same author’s collection The Peacock Cloak.

The Delta’s local human inhabitants are called Mundinos, and are descended from a group tricked into going there by a Baron Valente in the semi-distant past, long enough ago for them to have developed their own gods in the benign Iya, whose idol adorns every Mundino household, and the less indulgent Boca. More recent incomers are scientists and adventurers or hippie types plus the odd business man on the lookout for profitable exploitation.

Following a UN decree that a Delta life-form known as duendes, grey long-limbed, frog-like flaccid creatures with black button eyes, (somewhat reminiscent of the goblins of Lutania’s Caramel Forest) and which may be the offspring of trees – with which they perhaps form a single dimorphic species – are ‘persons’ entitled to the protection of the law, police Inspector Ben Ronson has been delegated from London to investigate their endemic killing by Mundinos. Duendes can project settlers’ thoughts back into human minds, “‘Things already inside your head ….. become as powerful as things you normally choose to focus on,’” and build enigmatic structures called castelos. Despite their persecution the duendes keep intruding on Mundinos’ space.

What makes all this SF rather than fantasy is the attempt at scientific rationale. “‘There’s no DNA equivalent. No ‘animals’ or ‘plants’ in the delta,’” Ronson is told. “It seemed to him that it was just about possible to imagine that a completely different form of life might not only have a different chemistry and different anatomy, but might even involve the mind-stuff itself being configured in some manner unfamiliar to human beings,” while, “‘the trees and the harts and the duendes and so on aren’t competing against each other … any more than our blood cells are competing against our bone cells,’” but quite why the story is set in nineteen ninety is not clear. The Delta is obviously not quite of this world, making the tale an alternative history does not add to that.

Beckett also undercuts expectations. Despite the set-up what we have here is not a police procedural, nor a straightforward crime novel with a clear-cut resolution, nor indeed an action adventure. The author is more interested in the psychological aspects of isolation, the effect a strange environment has on human behaviour and particularly the influence the Zona might have on motivations and actions. Ronson is almost paralysed by the thought of what he might have done during those four days he cannot remember but is reluctant to consult the notebooks he compiled while in transit.

There are faint echoes here of other odd worlds, perhaps even a nod to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, there is a touch of Ballard in the detachment of many of the characters. We do not have the complete isolation that applied to the inhabitants of Beckett’s Dark Eden, nor the genetic paucity of that environment, and the existence of the duendes adds a distinctive flavour but at the end the nature of the enigma they represent is not unravelled. Perhaps Beckett intends to return to the Delta.

That might be a misstep, though. Beneath the World, A Sea is not really concerned with its backdrop. Instead it uses that backdrop to question how much a person can know of him- or her- self. While not in the highest rank – the characters indulge in too much self-examination for that – like all the best fiction it explores the nature of humanity.

The following did not appear in the published review.

Pedant’s corner:- “whose contents, she learnt, turned yellow and shrank as it dried” (as they dried.) “Their only child, wherever she went inside the house, she was surrounded by” (that second comma distorts the meaning and should be removed,) outside of (outside, just outside, no ‘of’,) “before continuing towards to the west” (either “towards” or “to”, not both,) “a posse of men and woman” (it’s possible only one woman was involved but it reads oddly,) “for hundreds of millions of year” (years,) automatons (automata,) “‘take it out in the duendes’” (on the duendes,) ambiance (ambience,) a tendency to use ‘her’ and ‘him’ where ‘she’ and ‘he’ are more grammatical, “for goodness’ sake” (if the apostrophe is there it ought to be goodness’s, best to leave it out altogether,) “‘she’ll always being able to support herself’” (always be able.) “There were also a number of” (there was a number,) “all the holes on the ground” (in the ground,) “‘a range of tawdry attractions are duly provided for them’” (a range of tawdry attractions is duly provided,) epicentre (centre,) “cheer fully” (was split over two lines without the necessary hyphen when “cheerfully” was meant,) “‘to see if Rico’s turned up If you run into him’” (needs a full stop after “up,”) “three young woman were smoking” (women,) engrained (ingrained.) “He had a mango in there He’d bought at the last village” (No capital H after “there”, ‘he’d bought’.)

All That Outer Space Allows by Ian Sales

Apollo Quartet 4, Whippleshield Books, 2015, 155 p, including 2 p Notes, 4 p You Have Been Reading About writers and editors, 1 p Further Reading, 2 p Bibliography, and 1 p Online Sources.

 All That Outer Space Allows cover

Like previous books in his Apollo Quartet the author does not take a straightforward approach in this short novel. It is ostensibly the life story of Ginny Eckhardt, wife of Apollo astronaut Walden Eckhardt (a character based on actual Apollo 15 Lunar Module pilot Jim Irwin.) On the quiet, though, Ginny is a writer of Science Fiction, and the book, as well as delineating the lot of an astronaut’s wife in the 1960s, describes the evolution of Ginny’s idea to write an alternative history of the US space programme in which women were the astronauts. She knows they are at least as capable as the men, if not more so. However, her personal life as first an Air Force wife, and then an astronaut’s after Walden is picked in the latest round of recruits, becomes increasingly circumscribed. This is how it was in the 1960s. Ginny’s mother, along with others of her generation, had been quickly levered back into the home after working during the Second World War, and forever resented it. Ginny herself had made sure to obtain a degree before marrying but has no opportunity to use it. (The role of astronaut’s wife is as prop and support, adornment, rather than a person in her own right.) Given her inner thoughts, the solidarity she feels with other female writers of SF in the 1960s and of the position of women generally, Ginny’s attitudes to this might have been expressed more forcefully, she seems too willing to conform to the role set – even if she does resolve to find out as much technical detail of the Apollo Programme as possible in order to enhance her fiction. We are told she loves Walden, but we don’t really feel it, and Walden gives little back in the way of emotional support, not even wondering how the sanctuary of his room manages to stay tidy and clean.

In common with other instalments of the Apollo Quartet Sales gives us (in boxes lined-off on the pages) technical and biographical information. So here we have a table of contents from Galaxy magazine, Vol 26, issue 3, February 1968 (which contained Ginny’s story “The Spaceships Men Don’t See” as by V G Parker;) comments on the position and relative scarcity of female SF writers of the time; biographical details from a NASA press release of the 19 newly recruited astronauts of 1966; a letter to Ginny from another woman SF writer signed YouKay; the utterly male Hugo Awards Winners listings for 1966; a historical overview of Ginny’s writing career; the complete text of “The Spaceships Men Don’t See” (a nice piece of literary ventriloquism by Sales, though it reads more like a 1950s piece;) a specification for Lunar Module Cockpit Simulation training; a letter to the editor of Galaxy bemoaning “Mr” Parker’s contribution to that Feb 1966 issue; another NASA spec, this time for the Lunar Module; one-sentence extracts from SF stories by women each commenting on some aspect of the female experience; a Wikipedia biography of Walden Eckhardt’s life; the Nasa specs for spacesuit materials; a short transcript of Neil Armstrong’s early exchanges with ground control just after he set foot on the Moon’s surface that first time; the launch schedule for Apollo 15 (Walden’s mission;) a NASA description of the Apollo 15 landing site; V G Parker’s entry from the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.

This is an Altered History, though. In Ginny’s world, SF is written, edited and read mainly by women and denigrated more (if that’s possible) because of that. At several points Sales addresses the reader directly by interpolating comments on his choices as a writer when composing the story and on the subject of Science Fiction as an enterprise, especially on how it generally does not reflect the harsh realities of space travel. Worth reading in and of itself All That Outer Space Allows also acts as a kind of primer in the history of women writers of SF in the world the reader knows.

Pedant’s corner:- “makes turban of a second towel” (makes a turban is more natural sounding,) “and so predates Ginny’s migration” (postdates,) “Only a Mother” (“That Only a Mother”), “There was loud thunk” (a loud thunk,) “The descent stage measure ten feet seven inches high by… ” (‘measures ten feet seven inches high’. This was in the NASA Lunar Module spec so I assume was their mistake,) vapourised (vaporised,) “as she lays on the beach” (as she lies on the beach,) misrembering (misremembering.)

Mexica by Norman Spinrad

Abacus, 2006, 510 p.

Mexica cover

Spinrad is no stranger to readers of Science Fiction, coming to prominence around the time of the New Wave with works such as Bug Jack Barron and The Iron Dream (an Altered History SF novel whose author was supposedly Adolf Hitler.) In the early part of this century, though, he took a turn into historical fiction with The Druid King, about Julius Caesar’s adversary Vercingetorix the Gaul. Mexica is his take on conquistador Hernán Cortés (in the text always referred to as Hernando Cortes) one of History’s supreme adventurers – or villains, depending on your viewpoint.

Our narrator is Cortés’s companion, and unwilling advisor, Avram ibn Ezra (an Arabised form of the Jewish Ben Ezra,) who was baptised Alvaro Escribiente de Granada since being a Jew in the newly united Christian Spain under the scrutiny of the Inquisition was not a healthy prospect. This choice allows the narrative to distance itself both from the brutal Christianity of the Spanish invaders and from the sanguinary religious practices of the indigenous Mexica and their vassals. (Only once or twice is the word Aztec mentioned. This apparently was an insulting term deriving from the bumpkinish highlands down from which the Mexica came to replace their predecessors, the Toltecs, whom the Mexica still revered, after that earlier people had vanished into the east.)

It is arguably a necessary choice, as religion mattered. For how else can a few hundred men bring down a mighty empire? In this telling the Mexica – or at least their emperor Montezuma – were undone by their beliefs. The Toltec god Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent, was prophesied to come back from the east with a light skin whereupon the fifth world (that of the Mexica) would end and the sixth begin. On hearing of the arrival of the Spaniards Montezuma awaits a sign from his god of war, Huitzilopochtli, as to their true nature, and receives none. A native woman, Malinal (known to present day Mexicans as Malinche but here dubbed Marina by the Spaniards as it’s easier for them to pronounce,) a princess of one the Mexica’s vassal states, sold into slavery when they were defeated, takes up with Cortés and, aided by Alvaro, becomes his translator. She it is who nudges Cortés (despite his own religious qualms) into affecting the appearance, and, in native eyes, substance, of Quetzalcoatl. The prospect of not having to pay blood tribute to the Mexica in the form of the hearts of their young men also leans on the Mexican vassals whom Cortés enlists as allies, vassals all but mystified at the thought of a god who gives his flesh and blood to be eaten by his worshippers rather than requiring their own of his believers.

It was still a very long shot, emphasised when after a couple of military victories against allies of the Mexica on the journey to the central high plateau, Alvaro briefly views through the clouds the magnificence of the Mexica capital Tenochtitlan, from the mountain pass above. The city was built on a series of lakes and joined to the surrounding land by four causeways. An impregnable fortress it would seem.

Later, after falling in love with the place, Alvaro wonders, “How could the civilization that had built Tenochtitlan rip out human hearts on such a bloody altar?” but also, “How could the civilization of the Prince of Peace who commanded men to love their neighbours as themselves burn human beings at the stake in his name? How could those who worshipped an Allah who was styled the Beneficent and Merciful behead the infidels who would not bow down to him?”

Whle the central figure here is always Cortés, the most sympathetic and tragic is Montezuma, who is entrapped and imprisoned by Cortés and thus in conversations with Alvaro vouchsafes to the reader his philosophy. Here is a man who, in trying to do the best by his gods as he sees them, loses not only his empire, his people and his city, but also his life. That those gods were horrific taskmasters and not worthy of any such soul-searching or devotion does not diminish this. Religious beliefs make people do strange and bewildering things. From his religious perspective Alvaro sees, “This is the crime for which I have no name. Having conquered their lands, now we were conquering their spirit.”

Mostly a self-serving – not to mention greedy – hypocrite and casuist there are contradictions too in Cortés’s behaviour, illustrated when he gives full military honours to the dead Montezuma and Alvaro tells us, “There were so many reasons for me to hate Hernando Cortes…. But … there were moments …., when no matter how I tried, I found it impossible not to love the bastard.”

Before the story gathers momentum with the landing in Central America the reflective nature of Alvaro’s account can be a little tedious. The text is liberally larded with the word ‘thereof’ and vocative asides to “dear reader”, a tendency which drops out when the action sets in only to reappear many pages later. ‘Alvaro’’s intent in setting this down is to expose and expiate his guilt at the part he played in the downfall of the Mexica and the beautiful city they constructed. But in the end he rationalises that, “..it could not have been prevented. Even if Columbus had never set sail it could not have been prevented, for Europe had the ships, and sooner or later someone would have discovered this New World.” The fulfilment of Montezuma’s omen was inevitable. “For this new world held treasure and unbounded virgin land unknown in the tired old one, and Europe had the greed to covet and the means to sieze it.” The greatest devastator of the Mexica though, would be what Alvaro names as the small pox, a weapon more deadly to the natives than either cannon or arquebus. The Mexica live on, however, in the adaptation of their name to that of the modern day country sitting on their lands, a process which had begun even in Cortés’s time.

Alvaro’s profoundest thoughts are however inspired by the much older civilisation that built the huge pyramids at Teotihuacan, whose people were forgotten even by the Mexica. “This was not a New World. This was a world old beyond imagining…. Five worlds come and gone … And now the breaking of the fifth and the coming of the sixth.” He consoles himself with the thought that in the end great events do not matter; civilisations amd conquerors may come and go but, “It is in the small things that life comes closest to eternity.”

Pedant’s corner:- Cortes’ (innumerable instances, Cortes’s,) sprung (sprang,) “to the point where no one dare approach him” (the narrative is in past tense so, ‘no one dared’ – and ‘no one’ ought to be ‘no-one’,) maws (mouths was the intended meaning, not stomachs,) imposter (I prefer impostor,) “but more than not wearing only simple cotton shifts” (more often than not is a more usual construction,) “in a foreign land as Britain might be to a Spaniard” (there was no Britain as a foreign ‘land’ (in a political sense) in the time of Cortes – only the geographical island.)

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