New in bookstores: bite-sized epics

The curse of contemporary life: Not enough time.

It is a real challenge to find a few moments for yourself just to be still, to meditate, to inhale deeply.  But what if you're a reader of epic fantasy? How do you fit a thousand-pager into your week? (I remember managing to do it with George R.R. Martin's "Storm of Swords," but it nearly killed me.)

You can't simply give them up, can you?  They're a necessity to life: The worlds constructed by Martin, or Patrick Rothfuss, or Jay Lake, or Neil Gaiman, or Carrie Vaughn, or Kelly Link are wonderfully interesting when our own lives aren't. But they also require big, fat commitments of time. So what do you do?

Editor John Joseph Adams has hit on the solution in his latest anthology, "Epic: Legends of Fantasy," published by Bay Area-based Tachyon Publications. If you haven't heard of Tachyon, you need to check them out. They're a great publishing unit doing an invaluable service -- like Link and husband Gavin Grant's Small Beer Press -- to keep the work of some very fine writers in circulation.

In "Epic," Adams gives us tales from contemporary practitioners of epic fantasy. Some of the names mentioned above are included -- like Martin (his contribution, "The Mystery Knight," is a story of Westeros that's a good supporting piece to "A Song of Ice and Fire"); and Rothfuss ("The Road to Levinshir" plunges its narrator down in an uneasy, murky landscape).  But there are others here are well -- like Robin Hobb (whose dragon series is worth picking up) and Ursula Le Guin and Vaughn and Brian Sanderson (who took on the project of finishing the late Robert Jordan's "Wheels" saga).

It's an excellent selection that gets us back to the point mentioned at the top of this post. How do you manage to squeeze in epic tales when you don't have enough time in your life?  The answer is, you do the best that you can when you can. Or else you can turn to this anthology by Adams which, in a phrase I've used before, gives readers evocative stories delivering the full caloric load of a novel in half the time. You'll come away from this fine edition feeling very satisfied.

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New this month: John Banville's "Ancient Light" and the fantasies of young men

In his new novel, "Ancient Light" (Alfred A. Knopf), John Banville does what he's always done best: Gives us a brooding narrator with an evocative, meaning-laden name and a past in need of unraveling. And don't forget the lyricism. Always there's lyricism. There must be lyricism. We meet Alexander Cleave (there's the name, suggesting some inner turmoil, division), his troubled daughter, and his memories of his youth. Those memories include his teen affair with an older woman, and that's all I want to center on now. When you're caught in the middle of countless distractions, when your mind is cluttered, a little dose of Banville clears the mind. Restores focus. Reminds you of the possibilities of language again.

As in the following lyrical reflection about Cleave's desires as a young man, and his youthful inexperience:

I knew precious little about girls--and consequently the little I knew was precious indeed--and next to nothing about grown women. At the seaside for a summer when I was ten or eleven there had been an auburn beauty of my own age whom I had adored at a distance--but then, who in the honeyed haze of childhood has not adored an auburn beauty by the seaside?--and a redhead in town one winter, called Hettie Hickey, who despite her less than lovely name was as delicate as a Meissen figurine, who wore multiple layers of lace petticoats and showed off her legs when she danced the jive, and who on three consecutive and never to be forgotten Saturday nights consented to sit with me in the back row of the Alhambra cinema and let me put a hand down the front of her dress and cup in my palm one of her surprisingly chilly but excitingly pliable, soft little breasts.

Banville captures an entire kind of experience in a single paragraph: an incredibly difficult feat he makes seem effortless. A memory of youth that acquires a mythic aura in the adult narrator's mind. And for me it was that phrase "honeyed haze of childhood" that refreshed me, just when I needed it.

Glimpses and sightings of an epic

Dipping into the pages of a new poetry collection by David Ferry, "Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations" (University of Chicago Press), makes me feel as giddy as I do when I hear that a new trailer of Peter Jackson's "The Hobbit" is about to be released.

Why?

Ferry is an acclaimed poet in his own right -- check out "Of No Country I Know" -- but what I've eagerly followed over the years are his translations from Virgil.  His "Eclogues" and "Georgics" translations (both published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux), are beautiful songs of the Earth, of prophecy, of pragmatism and protest.  Reading them has always made me wonder, When is Ferry going to tackle the big one?  What about Virgil's "Aeneid"?

His new collection "Bewilderment" gives the answer: He's working on it.

Along with the sharp clarity of original lyrics "Coffee Lips" and "Street Scene," there are long passages from books II and VI of the Mantuan's masterpiece.  I'm more than giddy, however; I'm also humbled by it. Ferry's book is dedicated to his late wife, critic Anne Ferry, and near the end of this collection, his version of Aeneas' departure from Troy feels informed by Ferry's own grief.

After he evokes the image of Aeneas hoisting his lame-legged father onto his back:

I take up the tawny pelt of a lion and

Cover my neck and my broad shoulders with it,

And bowing down, I accept the weight of my father...

he then continues on with Aeneas' grief when he fails to find his wife at a reunion site before the fugitive Trojans escape from their burning city:

When all of us,

At last, had gotten there, we all were there,

But she had vanished and she wasn't there.

Gone from her people, gone from her child, and her husband.

That final line is searingly painful to read. Anyone who's lost a loved one knows what this is. Everyone is Aeneas in their grief.

Glimpses and sightings of Virgil's epic -- I feel a little like Palinurus with Carthage behind and the deep sea ahead.  Can't wait for the rest of Ferry's project.

 

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Blowing off some steam with an old column

If my old Times column was a burning house, and I could only escape with one of the columns in my arms, it wouldn’t be hard for me. I’m proud of them all, but one of the earliest pieces – about a wonderful steampunk anthology – is the equivalent, for me, of grabbing your sleeping child and rushing through a smoky doorway. From June 29, 2008

Despite the obvious danger, a determined postman climbed to the top of Mt. Etna to complete a delivery. Once there, he took a small parcel from his satchel. He stared at the label again, just to be sure. It read:

Hephaestus' Workshop

The summit, Mt. Etna

Sicily

And underneath that, the following:

Special instructions: Drop it in

That's what he did. If some publicity office wanted to waste its money, he thought, then let them. His job was done. He turned, his thoughts already on the descent.

The little package fell for what seemed like days and, impossibly, resisted the fires inside the volcano until it wound up in the hands of a very old man with a limp. He carried it to a table deep inside a cavern and, by the light of a naphtha lamp, opened the package to find a book: "Steampunk," edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (Tachyon Publications: 400 pp., $14.95 paper).

"What is this, now?" said the fellow, who happened to be the divine craftsman himself. Nothing ever came down the volcano's throat, so he was pleasantly surprised. Lately, Hephaestus had been feeling especially lonely. The many automata he created, beautiful though they were, just didn't satisfy the yearning for companionship that had gripped him ever since the Greek gods were vanquished by the modern world's arrival. He could use some good reading to lighten his mood. . . .

The publication of "Steampunk" -- along with the recent attention that the eponymous science-fiction genre has received in the New York Times and elsewhere -- has presented an opportunity to reintroduce readers to a brand that has been around for at least 30 years now. Steampunk writers create fantasies that combine a Victorian-era mise-en-scène with advanced technologies. Machines are made of antique brass, glass and wood, leather and cast iron, powered by steam and full of lethal possibility. It is as if a mad scientist had done all his shopping at Victoriana instead of Sharper Image.

Why send such a package to the mythic blacksmith?

For a simple reason -- in the stories of "Steampunk," there are unavoidable echoes of Greek myth and artifice. The steampunks are clearly descended from the ancient makers of myth, and the one figure recalled many times in the course of reading the VanderMeers' excellent anthology is Hephaestus, the patriarch of steampunk engineers. In Homer and elsewhere, we learn that he built brazen bulls that puffed fire, a golden bed for the Sun, the automata that helped him in his workshop, a guardian made of bronze who fought the Argonauts, and golden chairs and beds rigged with traps to catch the other gods in their lust.

Who else, then, deserved this recognition? Forget that other artificer, the maker of mazes -- better not to mention his name around the grouchy smith, for it angers Hephaestus to hear the name of any rivals.

"Steam . . . punk?" Hephaestus chortled, opening the book.

The anthology offers three essays establishing the context of the steampunk genre, before moving into the stories and excerpts. Jess Nevins' essay lays out the origins of steampunk and the writers whose work has defined it -- among them, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling (co-authors of "The Difference Engine") -- along withthe 19th and early 20th century writers who anticipated it: H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Edward S. Ellis, Harry Enton and Garrett Serviss, to name just a few. Rick Klaw's survey, "The Steam-Driven Time Machine," points readers to sites to help them comphrehend this expansive genre that, as Steampunk Magazine says sternly, is "more than a sub-category of fiction." Bill Baker's essay lists and describes the genre's influence in comic books and graphic novels.

These are followed by an excerpt from "The Warlord of the Air," a 1971 novel by the stunningly prolific Michael Moorcock in which the menacing approach of a zeppelin army at first seems "a massive bank of black cloud moving over the horizon of the hills" and evokes the Achaean ships approaching Troy to begin their nine-year siege. In James Blaylock's story "Lord Kelvin's Machine" (later expanded into a novel), secret agents battle a nefarious scientist who holds the Earth hostage: An approaching comet will collide with the planet if his demands aren't met. Good eventually triumphs, as the heroes tap into the sole source capable of pushing the Earth out of the comet's path -- the power generated by the Earth's molten core.

Hephaestus heartily approved of Blaylock's story. "Of course!" he exclaimed.

In Joe R. Lansdale's "The Steam Man of the Prairie and the Dark Rider Get Down," the space-time continuum has been torn by the Time Traveller from H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine." With the universe in chaos, four villains encased in a giant, steam-powered cowboy stomp through the wilderness seeking to find and destroy the Time Traveller, who is now called the Dark Rider. As the mechanical giant strides across rivers and up hills, its inhabitants swivel in their hammock-chairs, operating levers and pulleys and peering out through the stained-glass windows that are the giant's eyes.

"I wonder what Epeirus would say," the old god mused, thinking of the builder of the horse that fooled the Trojans.

The stories in "Steampunk" are about the romance of technology: They present a picture of formidable but fragile machines whose wires and clockwork innards are exposed for all to see. In Ted Chiang's "Seventy-Two Letters," for instance, scientists create human life by imprinting names on unfertilized ova, recalling a rabbi's insertion of a scroll containing God's name into the mouth of a golem. Chiang's story crosses microbiology with the Kabbalah and uses improbably crude instruments: A long glass needle "could be clamped into the brass framework with its tip approaching the slide beneath the microscope; the knurled wheels presumably were used to bring the needle into contact with an ovum."

In Michael Chabon's "The Martian Agent, A Planetary Romance," there's a menacing war machine called a land sloop -- a giant, steam-powered wagon -- that pursues and captures a rebel against the British Crown in an alternative world in which the American Revolution never happened. The sloop is described thus: "She was a Model 3 Terror, long and canine, a steel greyhound powered by a hundred-horsepower Bucephalus engine. The relative frailty of her armor-plating was more than compensated for by her maneuverability . . . riveted leather treads clattering against the gangway of pine planking. . . . " The appeal of such a contraption seems to be in its combining of undeniable power with obvious design flaws -- something not unlike that glorious pair of wings, powerful but, fastened by wax, fatally flawed for the young Icarus

"You'd never find me using wax," Hephaestus muttered. He looked over at the mechanical women as they worked the forge's bellows. They were beautiful. They made his isolation easier to bear. He turned to Jay Lake's "The God-Clown Is Near," in which Cosimo Ferrante, a "flesh sculptor," is commissioned to build a god-clown. "A creator like myself," he thought. Ferrante's creation, however, is built for menacing reasons, not for companionship. Lake's story refers to the Dark Towns -- strange, twilight communities existing alongside those of Earth, though they are somehow obscured from our view and go unnoticed. The creation of this clown is part of a secret plan to begin a war with our world (called the Cities of the Map). The clown is to be the first of an army, and its circus-y, cheerful exterior conceals "something else entirely, a steel-armatured horror of biological toxins, chemical hells and radically overdesigned muscles."

At this point, a sultry young woman approached and interrupted the smith. She was covered entirely in gold; she looked quite a bit like Jill Masterson, in the James Bond film "Goldfinger."

"What is that, Hef?" she asked.

He held the open book out to her.

"Here, darling. This, I think, is for you," he said.

She took it up and glanced at the description of the clown creature without its festive appearance: "It resembled an enormous garden slug in its pale nakedness, folds of flesh rolling along the rib cage and gut, massive thighs, yet with narrow, long-fingered hands like a strangler. There were no genitals, just a little dimpled mound for urination..."

"Disgusting," she said.

He smiled. "There's no creation more cunning than you," he said. "But the creature described here is built for military reasons, not beauty. And don't be too quick to judge Ferrante or to call him sadistic. Remember" -- and here he was thinking of Talos, the bronze guardian he made for Minos -- "that I dabbled once in similar horrors."

After Hef had delved into the rest of the anthology -- stories by Paul Di Filippo, Neal Stephenson, Mary Gentle and many others -- he felt a good deal more cheerful. For here, in this group of writers, he sensed a connection to the ancient makers of myth. Both told stories in which contrivances, willful humans and divine influences all merge. The VanderMeers' anthology (would that it were longer) effectively captures what the steampunk genre is all about.