Stunningly Original

Ian Tregillis “Something More Than Night” (Tor, 2013)

Something More Than Night is a hard-boiled crime story with dames who are easy on the eyes but hard on the heart, powerful men with secrets to hide, and a PI who just doesn’t know when to quit.  Something More Than Night is a hard SF novel about advanced physics and a post-singularity universe. Something More Than Night is a philosophical and theological examination of heaven and earth and the denizens of each.  Something More Than Night is an urban fantasy novel where angels walk the earth and use mortals for their own agendas.

The Archangel Gabriel is murdered and comes plummeting from the sky.  A low level angel named Bayliss is hanging around on Earth, and realizes that Gabriel needs to be replaced pronto, or the resulting imbalance could destroy heaven and Earth.  So he turns a human woman, Molly, into an angel.  Now Molly has to get her head around two facts: first she’s dead, and second she’s an angel.  Bayliss and Molly work together to investigate Gabriel’s death.  Who knew that angels could be killed?  And why would someone kill one of them?

Bayliss’ portion of the narrative is patterned after a post-war detective novel.  It comes complete with a greasy diner, thugs who work for unknown powerful men, and a wisecracking detective.  Tregillis does an excellent job of not only using the tropes of these types of novels, but also captures the voice of those protagonists.  

Any novel that deals with angels and heaven has to have a clear conception of how it all will be depicted. I suppose that the current vision of the angelic host is that of a rigid nofunnik.  They are loyal soldiers who have no sense of humor or flexibility.  Their heaven (usually not depicted) would be somewhat featureless and clean.  Think Danish modernism to its extreme.

Tregillis sidesteps this entirely.  His heaven is full of mathematic potential.  It is different from earth in its complexity.  It embodies potentials that do not exist on this simplified form of existence.  In practice it reminded me of the post-singularity of Doctorow and Stross, or Rajaniemi’s world for Jean le Flambeur.  Fundamentally it is composed of religious concepts described with the language of theoretical physics.  (How else would people without advanced theoretical mathematical concepts describe such a thing but through religious language?).  Yes, it can be somewhat confusing and mystifying.  To a certain extent, that is the point.  This is perhaps where Tregillis impresses me the most.  This is easily the most unique and inventive depiction of heaven and its host that I have ever read.  It is a science fictional description of a fantasy use of religious concepts.  Absolutely brilliant.

But as Bayliss might say, “yeah, that and a nickel will get you a cup of joe.”  True enough.  How does it read is perhaps the real test.  Fortunately, the reading is just as wonderful and the concepts.  All of the portions of this story hold up.  At its core it is, of course, a mystery.  Who killed Gabriel?  And like a classic detective novel, we get that investigation.  But along the way we also get so much more.

 

You Shall Not Pass

This is an every day occurrence at our house.

Sometimes Funny Is Good

Gareth Roberts “Only Human” (BBC Books, 2005)

The Doctor (Nine), Rose and Captain Jack arrive in modern London to determine who has been tampering with time.  When they discover a Neanderthal, the Doctor realizes that they will have to go back thousands of years to find the culprit.  

At this point the narrative splits. One strand concerns Das, the Neanderthal, and Jack, who the Doctor has tasked with integrating Das into the modern world.  This is clearly a secondary plot line that is mainly played for laughs.  The meat of the plot occurs when the Doctor and Rose go into the dawn of history and discover travelers from the future who have their own agenda.

The tone throughout is light and humorous, as you might expect from the writer of “The Lodger”.  Sure, there’s a certain dark undercurrent, but more often than not I found myself laughing at the book.  Even though I generally think of Nine as an angry Doctor, here he feels more light hearted and closer to Ten in temperament.  

While I don’t think that Only Human would necessarily appeal to someone who was not already a fan of the show, I found it to be a very enjoyable light and humorous read.

Speaking of Disturbing Graphic Novels

Joe Hill, Jason Ciaramella and Vic Malhotra“Thumbprint” (IDW, 2013)

You don’t have to be Stephen King’s son to know that the really scary stuff isn’t monsters or ghosts or anything that goes bump in the night.  The really scary stuff is what people do to each other.

Thumbprint is a graphic adaptation of a Hill short story.  Mal Greenfell is an American veteran who has recently returned from Iraq.  As she struggles to adapt to life after the war, she finds that her actions in the war prove to be inescapable.

Thumbprint is a brutal little story.  But Hill knows his craft, and has created compelling characters and situations that haunted me for days after finishing the story.  It’s not pretty and it’s certainly not nice, but it does have a few things to say about war and how we treat each other.