I often think of Gateway as being the last great hurrah of the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Although published in 1977, to me it has always felt like a Campbellian classic — as if it should be a contemporary of Childhood’s End or the Foundation Trilogy. A throwback to the 1950’s.

I probably wouldn’t have that impression if I had been reading science fiction when Gateway was published, but there it is.

And there’s really no denying, in my opinion, that Gateway‘s crowning achievement is the perfect melding of multiple branches of the science fiction tree.

On the one hand there is the Big Concept: The Gateway itself. A concept so breathtakingly original that people have been imitating it ever since. (Basically, it goes like this: Humans find a space station abandoned by aliens. Inside they find hundreds of ships. They don’t know how the ships work, but they can operate the auto-pilot. Brave prospectors board the ships, hit a button, and go God-knows-where in the search for Heechee technology.)

Hidden within that Big Concept are the hints of space opera: Small bands of adventurous heroes journeying into the unknown on missions of thrilling exploration.

But while Pohl teases us with the structure of space opera, he weds it to the best literary traditions of hard science fiction: His prospectors are exploring the cold, hard worlds and braving the impossible terrors laid bare by the cutting edge of science. And rather than proving indulgences, the carefully extrapolated detail of the milieu is instead used to provide dramatic sauce for the goose.

Meanwhile, wrapped around all of this, Pohl is tapping the alternative literary structures and deep, psychological characterizations of the New Wave to illuminate the personal struggles of Robin Broadhead, one of the richest and most rewarding characters in science fiction.

The plot of Gateway doesn’t merely happen; it is made painfully relevant by the effect it has on Broadhead. Indeed, the greatest triumph of the novel is the creation of Broadhead: A deeply sympathetic, flawed, and yet (on some very real level) noble human being. His transformation — revealed through complex and interwoven flashbacks and flashforwards — is the heart and soul of the book, lending true meaning to the amazing universe that Pohl has crafted.

In short, Gateway pushes all the buttons. It’s a true highlight of what the science fiction genre is capable of achieving.

GRADE: A+

Frederik Pohl
Published: 1977
Publisher: Del Rey
Cover Price: $14.95
ISBN: 0345475836
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Steven Brust’s Khaavren Romances comprise three novels spread across five volumes: The Phoenix Guards, Five Hundred Years After, and The Viscount of Adrilankha (published as The Paths of the Dead, The Lord of Castle Black, and Sethra Lavode). As the titles might suggest, Brust wrote the entire series as a pastiche of Alexander Dumas (and, most notably, his tales of the Three Musketeers).

This is not to say that the novels are merely fantasy regurgitations of Dumas. Far from it. Although the first chunk of The Phoenix Guards is heavily inspired by The Three Musketteers, from that point forward the tales diverge quite rapidly. Brust is merely using the stylings of Dumas to tell his own tale. A tale which, in point of fact, becomes increasingly remarkable as the series continues.

The strength of the series is that it captures the swashbuckling fervor and derring-do of Dumas’ tales, adapts it for its own purposes, and then raises the stakes. Much as Brust’s Jhereg takes the trappings of Raymond Chandler, weds them to high fantasy, and then prefects the resulting gestalt into something unique and powerful, so the Khaavren Romances make Dumas’ stylings their own.

The overwhelming weakness of the series, however, is that it also whole-heartedly embraces Dumas’ weaknesses as a novelist.

There are two unpleasant truths when it comes to the work of Dumas:

(1) He was part of a tradition among many 19th century authors — such as Victor Hugo and Herman Melville — in which the phrase “show your work” was taken to be some sort of holy writ. Their ability to interrupt their own stories in order to engage in long factual discourses with only the most tangential relationship to the surrounding text is truly astounding. The term “infodump” cannot satisfactorily summarize these turgid pace-killers, some of which could persist for the length of an entire chapter before finally drawing to a close.

Such works are aptly parodied in William Goldman’s The Princess Bride, in which the conceit is that Goldman is not actually writing the novel, but rather presenting the “good parts” of a novel by the 19th century author S. Morgenstern. The footnotes in which Goldman describes the material he’s “cutting” for our benefit are made even funnier if you’ve suffered through such passages in Dumas, Hugo, Melville, and their like.

At first, I thought Brust was going for a similar sense of parody. But it quickly became apparent that he was, in fact, embracing the tradition. He succeeds in making it more generally palatable (mostly by limiting the interminable length of such passages), but he is not always wholly successful in his efforts.

(2) Similarly, it is important to understand that Dumas was effectively paid by the word. And Dumas was quite adept at wringing as many words as he possibly could from his work. Brust enthusiastically captures this “art” in passages like this one:

“If there is a conspiracy around me, Jurabin,” said the Emperor, “I am unable to see it.”
“It is not, perhaps, a conspiracy, Sire,” said the Prime Minister.
“It is not?”
“Perhaps not.”
“Then, you are saying that perhaps it is?”
“That is not precisely my meaning either, Sire.”
“Well then,” said the Emperor, “What is your meaning?”
“To speak plainly—”
“The Gods!” His Majesty burst out. “It is nearly time for you to do so!”
“I believe that many of the Deputies are, quite simply, afraid to appear.”
“Afraid?” cried the Emperor. “Come, tell me what you mean. Are they afraid of me, do you think?”
“Not you, Sire; rather, of each other.”
“Jurabin, I confess that I am as confused as ever.”
“Shall I explain?”
“Shards and splinters, it is an hour since I asked for anything else!”
“Well, then, this is how I see it.”
“Go on. You perceive that you have my full attention.”

The first time I read such a passage I thought to myself, “Ha, ha! Very funny! You have aptly parodied Dumas there!”

The ninth time I read such a passage, the joke had worn itself thoroughly thin.

The ninetieth time I read such a passage, I wanted to scoop out my eyeballs with a rusty spoon.

The nine-hundredth time I read such a passage, I decided it was actually Steven Brust’s eyeballs I wanted to scoop out with the rusty spoon.

It’s simply bloat. It’s not funny. It’s not clever. It’s not stylistic. It’s just copy-and-paste, by-the-numbers, rubber-stamped bloat. It’s a form for rapidly generating empty verbiage so that you can fill up your quota for the weekly serial, get paid, and head down to the local tavern.

So why did I keep reading — even after I had long since perfected the art of detecting passages like this and adroitly skimming ahead a page or two pages in order to get the next bit of pertinent narrative?

Because the stories are, in point of fact, quite compelling. The plot is epic in its scope and fascinating for the depth of insight it gives you into the Dragaeran Empire. The action is both exciting and humorous. The characters are charming, endearing, and memorable.

In short, despite their rather systematic failings, I have no hesitation in recommending the Khaavren Romances.

I would, however, heartily recommend starting with the Vlad Taltos novels. A good deal of the fascination I had for the setting derived from my knowledge of the Taltos series, and I’m not sure I would have actually persevered if I did not have the context of the Taltos novels in which to root the Khaavren Romances.

GRADES:

THE PHOENIX GUARDS: B-
FIVE HUNDRED YEARS AFTER: B-
THE PATHS OF THE DEAD: B-
THE LORD OF CASTLE BLACK: B-
SETHRA LAVODE: B-

Steven Brust
Published: 1992 / 1995 / 2003 / 2004 / 2005
Publisher: Ace
Cover Price: $7.99
ISBN: 0812506898 / 0812515226 / 0812534174 / 0812534190 / 0812534182
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I came to this novel by way of Gary Gygax by way of Appendix N of the 1st Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide by way of James Maliszewski at Grognardia.

I think it’s safe to say that, if not for that rather remarkable (and lengthy) chain of recommendations, I would probably have never read this slim volume — which, as far as I know, was published in 1963 and never seen again.

Sign of the Labrys is a post-apocalyptic tale of the sort commonly found in mid-20th century science fiction. What sets it apart is that it is also, although it doesn’t strictly look like it at first, science fantasy. (This becomes clear fairly quickly, but the exact reasons for its fantastical nature constitute a spoiler so drastic that I won’t even hint at it here.)

The ways in which Sign of the Labrys inspired Gygax’s dungeoncraft become both rapidly and intriguingly apparent: Sam Sewell, the protagonist of the tale, lives in a vast underground complex of modified caverns that was built as a refuge before the collapse of civilization. The apocalypse thinned out the population (killing nine in ten) and eradicated central authority, leaving behind vast catacombs of uninhabited space which small, spontaneous societies have repurposed in a variety of ways.

In short, Sign of the Labrys reads like a strange hybrid of Dungeons & Dragons and Metamorphosis Alpha. Here we find a clear predecessor of Castle Greyhawk: A multi-cultural, subterranean menagerie laid out in a pattern of levels and sub-levels connected by both the well-known thoroughfares and a plentitude of secret passages and hidden ladders.

This, by itself, would have made Sign of the Labrys a fascinating and worthwhile novel for a D&D afficionado like myself. But I also found the novel to be very entertaining in its own right. Addictive, in fact. It’s got a page-turning, pulpy pace mixed together with some nigh-poetic language and a strange, enigmatic mystery that leaves you yearning to know the answer.

Stylistically Sign of the Labrys reminds me quite favorably of Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore. It possesses the strange, otherworldly, and fantastical approach to matters of science fiction which characterizes the best of their work. Particularly Moore’s. Like Moore’s classic Jirel of Joiry stories, Sign of the Labrys reminds me of Alice in Wonderland smashed through the broken mirror of another genre’s conceits and set pieces. If I were to say that Sign of the Labrys periodically reads as if the author had taken a tab of LSD before sitting down at her typewriter it would not be wholly inaccurate. (It would, however, be rather less than charitable, as St. Clair’s writing is not merely a drug-induced rambling. In fact, it works consistently towards a larger stylistic and revelatory purpose.)

In the end, I found Sign of the Labrys to be delightfully entertaining. And since, like me, you are unlikely to encounter it by chance, I shall pass on the same recommendation that was given to me: From Gygax to AD&D to Grognardia to me to the Alexandrian and thus to you…

Find a copy if you can.

GRADE: B-

Margaret St. Clair
Published: 1963
Publisher: Bantam Books
Cover Price: $0.60
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With this novel, Brust seems to have lost the unique voice of Vlad Taltos. Instead of the clever wittiness of previous volumes, the Vlad of this book is merely sardonic and shrill. There’s also an oddly anachronistic tone in a patter drawn with distinctly 20th century rhthyms and tone.

This loss may have something to do with the fact that Brust is, once again, jumping back to a much earlier time in Vlad’s life. He handled this back-and-forth movement of the meta-narrative adroitly in the past, but the Vlad that we had last seen in Orca had been deeply transformed. Brust wouldn’t be the first author to demonstrate that, sometimes, you just can’t go home again.

The other failings of the book are less understandable, perhaps, but might ultimately have the same origin: If Brust was struggling to find young Vlad’s voice, that inauthentic note can very easily spread to other aspects of the work.

Notably there’s a narrative bloat coupled with a lack of focus. There’s lots of stuff on the page here that doesn’t seem to serve any real purpose and a lot of it is authorial meandering of the worst type. (“I’m going to talk about my inability to cook a particular type of bread because I’ve got a word count to hit by Friday and I don’t know what else to write just now.”)

Even the non-traditional narrative structure doesn’t work. It’s not actually being used to accomplish any specific effect (unlike the similar structure used in Taltos). So it just comes off as gimmicky and trite. In fact, the novel probably would have been better without this cheap trick. (In Taltos the same technique improved the novel because the structure reinforced the themes of the book and gave wider context to the individual events.)

In the case of Dragon, Brust tries to blatantly tell you that he’s giving you wider context. But, in actual practice, he just deflates the entire plot: The fact that you know what’s going to happen long before it happens just adds an even larger sense of bloat to the mild bloat which is already dragging the novel down.

It should also be noted that things generally improve as the novel continues, feeling almost as if Brust was warming up to his subject. In the end, however, I found this to be the weakest of the Taltos novels.

GRADE: C+

Steven Brust
Published: 1998
Publisher: Ace
Price: $7.99
ISBN: 0812589165
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Reading Orca is a somewhat surreal experience right now. Written in 1996, it nevertheless feels as if it should have a “RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES OF TODAY!” blurb blazoned across its cover.

In my reaction to Jhereg, I described the novel as: “A pulp detective novel by Raymond Chandler, except that the main character is an assassin instead of a private detective and his seedy office is in a world of high fantasy instead of the 1940s.”

Orca, on the other hand, is just a flat-out pulp detective novel. It feels like Chinatown played out across the financial headlines of today in a world of high fantasy.

And, much like Jhereg, that’s pretty much as cool as it sounds.

Orca also continues Athyra‘s approach of using non-Vlad points of view to tell the story. I have two thoughts on this:

First, Brust makes this approach work in Orca for reasons completely different than what made it work in Athyra. In Orca the technique is used to show us Vlad from the angle of one who knows him not at all.l In Athyra, Brust uses the technique to show us Vlad from the angle of one who knows him very well… and in the process reveals a lot about both Vlad and the narrator.

Second, there is a very deliberate effect being created in choosing to tell the story of this portion of Vlad’s life through the eyes of others. There is, in fact, a layering of narratives: The story is being told to a very specific character (Cawti) by another character (Kiera); and as she narrates to Cawti, Kiera also re-tells parts of the tale which were only told to her by Vlad.

So while some portions are, at first glance, still being narrated by Vlad in a traditional fashion, even that narrative is being filtered through a second point of view.

Unreliable narrators are often used for cheap effect. But there’s nothing cheap — or simple — about what Brust is accomplishing here.

GRADE: B+

Steven Brust
Published: 1996
Publisher: Ace
Cover Price: $7.99
ISBN: 0441001963
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