From archive (archive) From: donn@CS.UTAH.EDU (Donn Seeley) Subject: THE DIGGING LEVIATHAN and THE LAST COIN by James P Blaylock Date: 29 Oct 88 08:11:12 GMT THE DIGGING LEVIATHAN. James P Blaylock. Morrigan: Bath, UK. 275 pp. hc., c1988. Illustrations by Ferret. Contains afterword by Blaylock; a special signed edition also includes articles by K W Jeter and Tim Powers. ISBN 1 870338 20 0 trade limited edition (700 copies), 1 870338 25 1 special (310 copies). There's an earlier pb. edition, but I don't know the date. THE LAST COIN. James P Blaylock. Ziesing: Willimantic CT, USA. 330 pp. hc., c1988. Illustrations by Dennis Loughner. Introduction by Lucius Shepard. Signed boxed limited edition (750 copies), ISBN 0 929480 00 7. I think all of us must have done something in our lives that we subsequently realized to be eccentric. Singing to our toothbrush in the bathroom. Talking to cats. Walking in the rain on a warm spring day, just for the hell of it. Harmless stuff, mostly -- but we realize that it's eccentric when we're caught at it and we're forced to explain it. ('I wasn't really talking to Tabby, I was just making a little noise to get her attention.') This familiarity with our own minor eccentricities is what gives us a chill when we see true eccentricity -- the steel-eyed young woman who warns us that the UFOs have arrived, the quiet elderly gentleman who knows that the Second Coming is next Tuesday, the earnest young man who maintains that the Earth is hollow and that dinosaurs have been sighted in the sewers beneath Los Angeles. But... what if these crackpots turned out to be right all along? What if antigravity really is possible, and the so-called scientists have all turned their backs on the truth? What if there is an ancient conspiracy of immortals who kill mortals that gain too much knowledge? What if Judas Iscariot is alive and well and living in Seal Beach, California? Why then we must have accidentally fallen into the universe of James Blaylock, where revelations like these are the norm. Blaylock turns eccentricity into an art -- he knows how to write a book that generates such compelling weirdness that in the end reality is inside-out, and the dear old consensus space-time seems like a vague dream. THE DIGGING LEVIATHAN starts out like a young adult adventure novel, with an extra dose of nostalgia for a childhood spent in Southern California. Young Jim Hastings lives in a house surrounded by strange people and inventions. His uncle Edward St. Ives drives an old Hudson Wasp and suspects that there may be a hidden ocean beneath Los Angeles. His friend Giles Peach has webbed fingers and vestigial gills on his neck. His father William is a hack science fiction writer who has been shut away in an asylum, but Jim thinks he might not be as crazy as everyone says he is. Professor Russell Latzarel has found evidence of a hole at the antipodes which leads to the center of the hollow Earth. The strands of plot don't follow the tight weave of the y.a. adventure novel format, however -- after many digressions and subplots, they come to resemble a tangle of kelp in a seaweed jungle, or perhaps the tentacles of a monster squid-like creature from the depths. Eventually the sheer weirdness becomes overwhelming, and I ended up laughing till my sides hurt: 'There it is,' said Edward. 'Page ten. Russ!' he shouted as William handed him the paper. Edward shook it straight, looking over the page. There was an article on a giant bullfrog -- Bufo Marinus -- that had been sighted chasing a stray dog, and another on new evidence for a tenth planet, which astronomers suggested might conceivably be flat like a disc, completely invisible when viewed from the side -- a product of the fourth dimension. Another story, only a third of a column or so, concerned an uncanny discovery by commercial abalone fishermen of an entire latticework reef of human bones off the Palos Verdes Peninsula. It wasn't known where the bones had come from, but it seemed likely that they'd drifted down on the longshore current into a declivity and had heaped up there into a strange and unlikely graveyard. Some were so utterly covered with polyps and hydras as to be unrecognizable, perhaps prodigiously old. A scattering of Spanish coins was found, leading oceanographers to speculate that among the skeletons lay mariners who'd met their fate on piratical voyages hundreds of years past. There was the suspicion that Francis Drake had journeyed farther south than had previously been supposed. But what was baffling was the sheer number of bones -- countless millions of them, heaped together in ivory spires in the midst of a forest of kelp. And in among them hovered thousands of squid, as if in a city of their own making. 'Imagine how surprised we would have been,' said William, 'if we'd come across that article yesterday. It must be baffling the devil out of a number of people.' Charles Fort had nothing on this crew -- why, they even manage to build a Dean Drive that works! A warning: the end of the novel is quite as eccentric as the rest -- if you expect neat and tidy explanations, you simply haven't appreciated Blaylock's devious ways... The afterword that appears in the Morrigan edition is just as funny and mysterious as the narrative. The Ferret illustrations are wonderful too. If your sense of whimsy hasn't had strong exercise recently, this book will help you recover. Amazing as LEVIATHAN is, I think Blaylock has outdone himself with his new novel THE LAST COIN. The title, of course, refers to the missing member of the famous thirty pieces of silver -- whoever can gather all these coins together will gain vast magical powers, perhaps enough powers to usurp dominion of the Earth. The coins' mutual attraction is countered by the Caretakers, people who jealously guard individual coins -- but someone is killing off the Caretakers... Enter Andrew Vanbergen, free spirit, sometime innkeeper, weekend fisherman, eccentric. Maybe eccentric isn't quite the word: Andrew makes the characters of LEVIATHAN seem as wild and crazy as a meeting of the Central Committee of the Supreme Soviet. One of the last coins falls into Andrew's hands and it's up to him to prevent disaster. Would you believe that the fate of the world has been entrusted to the hands of a man who can't comb his hair? 'What I don't get,' she said, peering at him over the top of the mug, 'is why you smeared ashes all over your face.' 'I tell you I really WAS after 'possums,' he said, putting down the coffee and gesturing. 'Do you know what the 'possums would do to the wiring in the roof if they got up there and built a nest? We might as well burn the place to the ground ourselves. They're nocturnal. You know that. I went out after them, that's all. Traps don't work. They're too smart for traps.' 'Did you TRY traps?' She looked at him skeptically. He rolled his eyes, as if to suggest that he didn't see the necessity of TRYING anything, when a man could round up a ladder and noose and just lasso the creatures. 'One got in through the window, you say? In among the cats?' There are some awesome stretches of sustained silliness in COIN, but here we're dealing with only one conspiracy plot, and there actually is a scary and hilarious finale in which all the long fishing-lines of plot are twisted together into an impenetrable knot. I thought that Blaylock's LAND OF DREAMS wasn't quite weird enough, while LEVIATHAN is so weird it may alienate some readers; like Goldilocks' third bowl of porridge, it may be that COIN is 'just right' enough to land a richly deserved award for Blaylock. The Ziesing edition of COIN has appropriately funny jacket and interior illustrations by Dennis Loughner, plus a cheerfully puzzled introduction by Lucius Shepard. The bad news is that this deluxe signed limited edition goes for $60... I don't begrudge a cent of it, but some of you may want to wait for the trade edition. I never realized how tough it could be to smuggle Weetabix across the border from Canada, Donn Seeley University of Utah CS Dept donn@cs.utah.edu 40 46' 6"N 111 50' 34"W (801) 581-5668 utah-cs!donn From archive (archive) From: donn@CS.UTAH.EDU (Donn Seeley) Subject: LAND OF DREAMS by James P. Blaylock, and other ruminations Date: 17 Dec 87 10:20:38 GMT James P. Blaylock won the World Fantasy Award for his story 'Paper Dragons', about a man whose neighbor is building a dragon. I thought that 'Dragons' was quite simply one of the best stories I have ever read. It has the glorious mystery of a dream and it's peppered with beautiful touches. I first heard about Blaylock's new book LAND OF DREAMS (Arbor House, 264 pp. hc., c1987) in Orson Scott Card's review in F&SF. Card 'hated every minute' of 'Paper Dragons' but was very enthusiastic about DREAMS, which shares the milieu of 'Dragons'. This was kind of a mixed recommendation for me; I've 'hated every minute' of most of Card's work, and I was worried that what Card liked, I might hate too. The plot of DREAMS is full of little twists and turns and side passages. Every twelve years, the little California town where Skeezix lives passes through the 'Solstice'. Skeezix and his friends Jack and Helen were too young to remember their first Solstice, so they are surprised and bemused by some of the strange things that they encounter -- a giant's shoe that washes up on the beach, an empty coffin unearthed in a graveyard at midnight, a thumb-sized man dressed as a mouse, a carnival that arrives by train on a rail line that was long ago destroyed by time and neglect. Jack's father disappeared in the previous Solstice, and Jack and his friends come to realize that an evil force is at work which could take them too... DREAMS has many of the good features of 'Dragons', including the notorious hermit crabs. The beautiful texture of the writing is still there and it's still impressive -- the California fog practically pours off the pages. Card's main complaint about 'Dragons' certainly is resolved, because there is plenty of plot to go around, although I got the feeling that it was like being chased by a horrible creature in a dream, where you run like hell but never seem to move very fast. The characters are drawn fairly broadly but are still funny and memorable. I really have to recommend the book highly. Having said that... I feel compelled to make a direct comparison between 'Dragons' and DREAMS. 'Dragons' is told in the first person by a fairly eccentric individual; DREAMS is told in the third person and while it's still quite quirky, it loses a lot of the flavor -- it's harder to say outrageous things in the third person because the omniscient authorial voice isn't directly involved in the action. 'Dragons' is also more dense than DREAMS, although that may seem to be an odd comment given the diffuse nature of both stories. 'Dragons' capriciously shifts its subject matter from paragraph to paragraph, leading to an overall effect without a confining sequential structure. It's sort of like building a jigsaw puzzle where you don't recognize the picture until the last piece is in place. In the case of DREAMS you inevitably lose much of the delight of this discovery because the detail is filled in for you. I had similar problems with the two versions of Geoff Ryman's THE UNCONQUERED COUNTRY; I felt that the shorter, stripped-down magazine version had more impact, a greater density of feeling. I talked about this idea with Gene Wolfe at a con once and we agreed to disagree -- Wolfe described short stories as 'finger exercises' that were by their nature less important or interesting than novels. I can see why an author might feel this way -- obviously a lot of effort goes into a novel and you don't want to denigrate that work, plus you make a lot more income from novels -- but it seems to me that some subjects have an ideal length, and it's not true that a story whose ideal length is 20 pages is inevitably less significant than a story of 200 or 2000 pages. (It didn't occur to me to use Jorge Luis Borges as an example when talking to Wolfe, to my subsequent regret.) So go read both 'Dragons' and DREAMS. 'Dragons' originally appeared in the anthology IMAGINARY LANDS (edited by Robin McKinley) and turned up in at least the Dozois 'best of' collection for 1985. I bought DREAMS in hardcover and don't regret it; if hardcover intimidates you, I'm sure the paperback will turn up soon. Still waiting for that last hermit crab, Donn Seeley University of Utah CS Dept donn@cs.utah.edu 40 46' 6"N 111 50' 34"W (801) 581-5668 utah-cs!donn From rec.arts.sf.reviews Mon May 16 02:29:25 1994 Path: liuida!sunic!trane.uninett.no!eunet.no!nuug!EU.net!howland.reston.ans.net!agate!postmodern.com!not-for-mail From: David Langford Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Subject: James Blaylock: Lord Kelvin's Machine Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Date: 15 May 1994 22:15:04 GMT Organization: The Internet Lines: 113 Sender: mcb@postmodern.com (Michael C. Berch) Approved: mcb@postmodern.com (rec.arts.sf.reviews moderator) Message-ID: Reply-To: ansible@cix.compulink.co.uk NNTP-Posting-Host: remarque.berkeley.edu Originator: mcb@remarque.berkeley.edu LORD KELVIN'S MACHINE by James Blaylock reviewed by Dave Langford [A version of this review appeared in FOUNDATION: THE REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION #60, Spring 1994.] It's steampunk again, another slightly zany Scientific Romance set in a Victorian age owing more to Dickens, Stevenson and, at a pinch, Chesterton than any mere history. Stevenson supplies the epigraph and a minor character, the erstwhile Prince Florizel of Bohemia (_New Arabian Nights_, _The Dynamiter_) -- whose part is so small that he's scarcely worth mentioning except as a further reminder that practically the whole gang from Blaylock's earlier _Homunculus_ is here. Eminent scientist Langdon St Ives, his eminent rivals (including of course Lord Kelvin himself), his eminently hissable hunchback enemy Dr Ignacio Narbondo, plus a variety of allies, henchmen and interlopers: Binger, Hasbro, Keeble, Kraken, Mrs Langley, Parsons, Pule, Owlesby.... _Homunculus_ was a novel that kept stacking up new excesses as its crowd of Sternean eccentrics tripped over one another in a prolonged and quite remarkably daft chase through London's mean streets and pea-soupers, after a variety of often inter-confusible McGuffins. The finale wrapped things up with a surreal image (the long-sought and long-offstage Homunculus piloting the aeronaut Birdlip's skeletal body towards the stars) which delivered satisfaction without actually resolving anything. Never apologize, never explain. _Lord Kelvin's Machine_ takes place on a slightly different level of unreality, with `alternate science' replacing the allusions to magic and alchemy. Here Maxwell's Equations are sixteen in number and form a unified field theory that includes gravity. Here Earth can be made to swerve in its orbit by simultaneously detonating an entire chain of volcanoes, the trigger devices including a Rawls-Hibbing Mechanical Bladder and the rhythmic tread of a marching army. This is necessary in order for St Ives (having ceased frittering away his genius by inventing dehydrated coffee pills) to save the world from the expected impact of a giant comet. But first he must sabotage Lord Kelvin's misguided plan to save the world by cancelling its magnetic field, and Dr Narbondo's diabolical counter-plan to set off volcanoes on the _wrong side of the planet_.... It's all quite straight-faced, with the tongue scarcely distending the cheek even when we find Bill Kraken trying to nullify Lord Kelvin's machine by surreptitous insertion of fieldmice and snakes, or Narbondo plunging to his doom in an icy tarn whose awful cold he couldn't possibly survive -- _unless of course_ he had been dosed with a certain extract of carp glands! At one point we glimpse Narbondo in a cheerful mood: `All in all it was a glorious day. Hargreaves had agreed to help him destroy the Earth without so much as a second thought.' This is merely the first episode. In the second, Lord Kelvin's magnetic Machine -- now stolen -- is the focus of a vast blackmail plan whereby iron ships are dragged to the bottom of the sea by its deadly influence. St Ives neglects to enquire why the Machine, small enough to be hauled around on a horse-drawn wagon, should pull ships down rather than itself being pulled up; but I dare say he knows more about all those extra Maxwell equations than I. There is a great deal of running around at a seaport, rife with gunplay, exploding baskets of fruit, and the idiot psychopath Willis Pule eager to practise recreational vivisection on all and sundry. The concluding segment is different again. St Ives, whose lady love was shot by Narbondo in the prologue, is apparently going mad from despair and frustration. His decline makes him genuinely sympathetic, but at the same time casts an odd light on much of the boys'-adventure-story material that has gone before. Can this really be the same book? But wait: in the great and implausible tradition of sf inventions, Lord Kelvin's machine (which St Ives himself has now pinched) has a third and unrelated use as the motive power for time travel -- and some at least of our hero's fainting spells are merely the notorious side-effect of coexisting with one's future self. Pausing only to bolt the Machine into the bathyscaphe salvaged from the previous adventure, he.... At this stage everything naturally becomes a trifle complex and re-entrant. Timelines shift and overwrite one another. Narbondo is dealt with by means other than the obvious, involving a trip forward to acquire certain materials from Sir Alexander Fleming. There is a happy ending. Steampunk, being traditionally written by Americans (for some reason Priest's _The Space Machine_ doesn't seem to count), does not always sustain its supposedly Victorian English tone. Blaylock, a professor of English, does pretty well and no doubt has a terrifyingly authoritative justification for Englishmen of the period who judge distances in metres. But I did boggle somewhat at a mention of lager and lime (`An exit application from the human race if ever there was one' -- Sir Kingsley Amis), and the repeated references in the final chapter to not only eating but growing, in a turn-of-the-century English garden, something called eggplant -- an un-English name which all the English characters use. Are there loose ends? Lots, but all swallowed up in that final rewrite job on history. Is it fun to read? Yes indeed, though rather less so than _Homunculus_, or for that matter Stevenson's _New Arabian Nights_. _Lord Kelvin's Machine_ is entertainingly crazy but overall, perhaps -- as Bohr said crushingly of one tentative theory in particle physics -- _not crazy enough_. %A Blaylock, James %T Lord Kelvin's Machine %I Grafton %C London %D 1993 %G ISBN 0-586-21423-2 %O GBP4.99 %P 244pp, pb -- David Langford ansible@cix.compulink.co.uk Path: news.ifm.liu.se!liuida!sunic!sunic.sunet.se!trane.uninett.no!nac.no!ifi.uio.no!sia.sics.se!eua.ericsson.se!erinews.ericsson.se!cnn.exu.ericsson.se!convex!cs.utexas.edu!news.sprintlink.net!uunet!in1.uu.net!newstf01.news.aol.com!newsbf02.news.aol.com!not-for-mail From: misterskin@aol.com (MisterSkin) Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written Subject: Blaylock's "Last Coin" reviewed Date: 9 Mar 1995 22:36:44 -0500 Organization: America Online, Inc. (1-800-827-6364) Lines: 78 Sender: root@newsbf02.news.aol.com Message-ID: <3johgc$9u9@newsbf02.news.aol.com> Reply-To: misterskin@aol.com (MisterSkin) NNTP-Posting-Host: newsbf02.mail.aol.com On the advice of a member of this interest group, I obtained and read John Blaylock's novel "The Last Coin." I was told that Blaylock was a lot like Powers. He is, in certain respects. But he's not half the writer that Powers is. My entire reading of "Last Coin" was spoiled by a fundamental error in characterization that Blaylock made: in Andrew Vanbargen, he has created a protagonist whom I not only can't identify with, but found myself actively disliking. Vanbargen is the sort who's generally described as a "dreamer" which is not necessarily a bad thing, but he also has a distinct aversion to work of any kind, even work which furthers his own interests, which is a bad thing. He lives by sponging off his wife and his Aunt Naomi, fleecing her for money on this pretext and that in order to start up a restaurant in their inn. Vanbergen also lies constantly to his patient and loving wife (read: "doormat"), making up the sort of grandiose tales generally associated with pathological liars. In fact, reading the entire novel, I didn't find a single trait of Vanbergen's that anyone could describe as likable, or even respectable. The reader is supposed to find him appealing, I suspect, as a sort of Everyman, an ordinary guy whom you can identify with and even feel kind of superior to. Well, Vanbergen's not an ordinary guy, he's distinctly inferior material. Most ordinary guys Vanbergen's age are competent at several difficult tasks and have the self-discipline to manage sustained work with no trouble. The only skill Vanbergen demonstrates throughout the story is cooking, and that's the only work he does, as well. Following episode after episode in which Vanbergen goofs off, shirks, and piffles away time when confronted with work, I found the cooking episode distinctly out of character. Frankly, I found myself rooting for Pennyman (the bad guy) after a while, who, while he was a very evil person, at least had some idea what he was doing and some ability to do it. I don't demand that my protagonists be muscular supermen, moral leaders or geniuses, but I gotta have SOME reason for liking them, folks. If Vanbergen had just ONE THING going for him as a person, I think I could have handled it, but his total uselessness was too much to take. Now, Powers' characters often have their flaws, and often start out unprepared for the kind of adventures they'll have -- like Jack Shandy, the displaced puppeteer-turned-pirate in "On Stranger Tides") but they tend to grow and mature. They actually cope with their problems. As Blaylock has written Vanbergen, it's difficult to believe he can cope with anything. The book's other major flaw is that the plot muddles rather badly. I'd call this part of the characterization problem -- the protagonist is a natural-born muddler. But in an adventure story, it's important that the plot pull the reader along. Part of the problem is that I'm not sure if Blaylock knew what sort of novel he intended to write -- a humorous, picaresque novel whose main purpose was to take a benign interest in the foibles of everyday people living in a coastal California town, or a straight adventure about an attempt to foil an ancient evil. Last Coin is more of a picaresque novel than an adventure story, but it's not enough of either to be a real success. Probably, Blaylock should have dropped the adventure aspect and gone whole-heartedly for the picaresque approach. If I had not expected Vanbergen to cope with the bad guys in some way, I might have been less disappointed in him as a character. That said, I think Blaylock has some strong points that could serve him well. Like Powers, he has mastered the art of finding fresh new interpretations of mythological material. He's not stuck in the boring morass of dragons, witches, elves and magical objects and spell that so many fantasy writers are. Like Powers, he avoids overblown, formulaic writing on magical topics that makes so much fantasy a tiresome waste of time. His characters are very matter-of-fact about magic, which greatly enhances its credibility in the story.