Archive for the ‘Authors’ Category
A Bit of Summer Reading
Tuesday, August 18th, 2009
Review: Through the Wonderglass and Adventures in Lookingland by Seelie Nican
Given all the adaptations, rearrangings, and reimagings to which Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland books have been subjected over the past 150 years, a steampunk Alice was, I suppose, inevitable. Nican’s books are more a techno-Victorian translation of the originals than a wholesale reworking on the order of Frank Beddor’s recent Looking Glass Wars. She keeps the sequence of scenes intact and even weaves a sentence of two of Carroll’s prose into each chapter, which lends an interesting patina to the text.
When her method works, which is most of the time, Nican’s visions can be striking. Her steamwork caterpillar is a cyborg fused to its own hookah. Her hatter, afloat in his mercury tank, is unsettlingly mad. Her Cheshire cat is a holograph generated by the ivory mechanism of its own smile. Her mock turtle might have swum over from the island of Dr. Moreau, and her dodo/gryphon is a metaphysical Machiavelli, orchestrating Alice’s journey among all these creatures.
With the basic method set out in Wonderglass, Nican really cuts loose in Lookingland, riffing on the more dreamlike movement of Carroll’s second book, to create such extended sequences as the tulgey wood (where the forest is the jabberwock), the Dickens-meets-Dante bleakness of the walrus and carpenter’s story, or the Escheresque sprawl of the sheep’s seagoing millworks.
While the gears and airships treatment works well for Alice, the approach is less fruitful in Nican’s space opera Hunting of the Snark. Perhaps because the Snark offers less material to work with, she spends far too long establishing the world and backstory against which she can set the voyage of Carroll’s doomed questers. The book occasionally delivers some of the frisson of Nican’s Alice books — as in the final chapter, where the Baker makes his way through the echoing, flickering caverns of the generation ship’s vast computer in search of the android that may be programmed as either snark or boojum, or, tragically, both.
Next, I’m reading Ulro’s Dream, book one of the Zoasiad, Nican’s nine-volume epic fantasy series based on the work of William Blake. The cover, melding Blake’s artwork with stereotypical fantasy art in a Frank Frazetta vein, isn’t all that appealing, but I hear the story’s good, once you get past the first couple hundred pages of the prologue.
Proof Positive
Monday, August 17th, 2009
Sitting serenely under the shade of a banyan tree, the essayist wrote: “Sitting serenely under the shade of a banyan tree, the essayist wrote that a crazy, angry monkey squatted in the banyan tree, plucking and eating figs from the vines and getting fat. He read his beautiful, rice-paper composition aloud.
” ‘I am not a crazy, angry monkey and I’m not fat,’ said the crazy, angry monkey who was getting fat, which must be so because it was written on rice paper. The monkey paused to listen, then let out an angry monkey shriek, ripping out a banyan branch. The monkey hurled the branch at the cherubic essayist. The branch smacked him in the head and splattered blood all over the beautiful, rice-paper composition.
“Hopping gleefully up and down in the banyan tree, the monkey proved the essayist’s point. He lived long enough to scribble a few more lines.
” ‘That’s it. I want a divorce,’ the monkey said, climbing down. But it could not resist grooming the beatific essayist’s bloody scalp.”