Dreadnought by Cherie Priest

Well, thisis a change. After plodding through the meticulously recreated (in military terms at least) 19^th-century of the Sharpe books, Cherie Priest’s Dreadnoughtcomes as quite a different flavour, to say the least. It’s a far more free-wheeling, unashamedly fun take on the 19^th century that even apologises on its opening pages for not really giving a shit about history. Right off the bat, we’re warned that we’ll be encountering zombies, a twenty-year American civil war, and all manner of other strange stuff.

See, Priest is part of a wave of writers who write very deliberate steampunk. Unlike the founding writers, who were cautiously feeling their way into terra incognita and unwittingly creating a new genre, Priest and her ilk know exactly what they and their readers now expect from a ‘steampunk’ novel. These writers are light on the history (alternate or otherwise) and heavy on the zepplins and men with brass goggles. The pseudo-Victoriana setting is often used as a backdrop for fantastic adventures rather than as a study of what might have been. All of which is perfectly acceptable, if the writer is any good. And Priest is pretty damn good.

Mercy Lynch is a nurse at a Confederate hospital. When she finds out that her Yankee husband has died in a prisoner-of-war camp, she decides to pack in her job and travel across the country from Virginia to far-off Washington State to see her ailing father before he croaks. Of course, this being an alternate, steampunk 19^th century America, her trip involves airships, feuding steam-powered automatons, and armoured train engines built like battleships. This part of the book is tremendous fun; it reads almost like a road trip novel set in a world slightly askew from our own. Anyone who’s ever enjoyed crossing continents will get a little buzz every time Mercy pulls into one of her many stops Mercy is a fun protagonist, she’s a professional and level-headed woman. Her independence as she moves about the country, and the degree to which most characters accept it, might strike a little bit of a false note for anyone who knows a bit about the real attitudes of the 19 century, but this is not a big barrier to enjoying the book. It is an alternate reality, after all, so I’m willing to suspend my disbelief a little! Mercy meets a lot of characters as she travels, most of whom don’t stick around long enough to affect the plot much. This kind of thing does annoy some readers, but I found it added to the ‘road trip’ feel of the book, and added a real sense that anything could happen next.

Priest doesn’t really go to town with the steampunk touches: apart from a few uses of improved technology and machinery, the setting is still a recognisably Victorian one. Most of these changes are required to drive the plot- in particular the battle-engine Dreadnought, which ferries Mercy out into the wild, unincorporated west where the second half of the book takes place. Here, unfortunately, the fun pace of the earlier chapters drops, and Mercy’s train seems to drag quite a bit. Other small issues niggle too: the earlier hype about the train’s feared battle prowess seems to be forgotten as the Dreadnought is attacked by a paltry group of Confederate raiders who manage to cause the train’s soldiers some real worry. I thought this was the pride of the Union army, yet it seems to have real trouble brushing off some yahoos on horses!

Though there are definitely pacing issues with the second half of the book, it’s Priest’s smooth prose style and likeable characters that kept me reading. Relatively late in the proceedings, we even get an interesting insight into the politics of this America, and its relationship with the independent state of Texas and its southern neighbour Mexico. I’d definitely have appreciated a little more of this.

My final criticism of the book concerns its finale. The plot slowly builds to a ‘revelation’ that is not only obvious to anyone over the age of five, but also features elements that have been massively over-represented in media recently. To be blunt, won’t everyone just get over zombies already?

All that said, I did enjoy Dreadnought and will probably pick up the other books in the series at some time.

King of the Cloud Forests by Michael Morpurgo

In empire-set fiction, a classic set-up for European folks living in exotic climes is to have the main characters be missionaries. Missionaries, by their very nature, go out into the wilds, spreading their own brand of Western interference exactly where it’s not wanted. In King of the Cloud Forests, the protagonist Ashley (oddly, Americans still insist on saddling male children with this most effeminate of names) is the son of a Christian missionary in a city in western China in the nineteen-thirties.

I read this book as a child (well, most of it) and it always stuck with me as being extremely odd. Though I never finished it, it lingered in my memory as that book with the yetis. An 80’s book, it’s considered a bit of a minor classic in children’s literature, and I originally found it in my school library, but because it takes place in a rather serious and grim time and place, it was never going to be the kind of thing I would have chosen to read as a child (I hated historical fiction then, and only wanted to read about the future and fantastic alien worlds), but I ploughed through because I knew that there was going to be some cryptozoological element. But I was to be somewhat disappointed…

Before I go any further, I’d like to note that the classic, haunting cover remembered from my childhood in which a mysteriously-shrouded figure makes its way through a howling snowstorm has been replaced in the Egmont Press edition by a CGI monstrosity. A horrible font, cheesy-as-feck ‘spooky staring eyes’ and a misshapen reject from a PS1 game wandering among the Himalayas made me almost not want to open the book. You may be ‘committed to ethical publishing’, Egmont, but Christ, get your act together regarding covers.

Anyway, the story opens with Ashley (heh heh) living a relaxed life with his father, his friends and a Himalayan helper named Uncle Sung. Reading the book now, I’m impressed at how the religious element is handled. Ashley’s father is a good man who’s devoted to his faith and helping others. Too often nowadays in all kinds of fiction, the religious character is a figure to pity or mock. But the religious debates that are very briefly touched on (it is a children’s book) raise unsettling questions about the possible conflict between faithfully observing religion and being a truly intelligent and moral person. It’s played very subtly- so subtly that I doubt even religious folk would find anything objectionable- but there’s just enough there to leave the door open for debate in the mind of an intelligent child reader (it obviously flew over my pre-teen head). I like the idea that Ashley’s father is still a good man even though his own worldview may not necessarily be very realistic. He’s also not portrayed as being any better or worse than the Buddhist Uncle Sung. Sung himself is something of a realist, remaining cynical about aspects of even his own religion. None of this is idle background, either; Morpurgo is working up to something big.

Then the Japanese invade. Reading his book the first time around is almost certainly the earliest memory I have of being aware of this terrible conflict. There’s no real detail about the war or why it’s happening, and young readers are spared any mention about the many, many Japanese war atrocities committed. Instead, the war is played as a plot-device to get Ashley and Uncle Sung to leave the city and head into the Himalayas, bound for Tibet and ultimately British India, where Ashley will get a boat to England.

The hardships of their journey also stuck with me for many years. It felt like an enormous, epic quest equal to The Hobbit. The two travel across plains and high into the snow-covered mountains. The landscape is vast and cruel, the hardships broken only by rest at the occasional house or monastery. Also introduced to me by this book was the idea of Tibet as being a seriously mystical place- Ashley and Sung encounter superstitious locals, including a llama who tells Ashley’s fortune. He claims that Ashley will be a ‘king of the cloud forests.’ Sung merely scoffs. They also come across legends of the yeti, the wildman who supposedly inhabit the mountains.

The friendship between the two travellers grows until, almost unbearably, Sung fails to return from a trip to gather supplies during a snow storm. Ashley holes up in a hut, waiting for Sung’s return. Instead, he gets a very different kind of visitor…

Ashley gets taken in by a tribe of yetis, and this is where it all went south for me as a child. I remember losing interest as soon as the beasts were revealed to be a lovable, caring bunch of critters. I wanted my crypto-creatures to remain mysterious, dammit! I never have had time for the ‘noble savage’ plot, and still find it boring today.

Anyway, Ashley has a lovely time living with the yetis, and over time he comes to know them all, giving them token cave-man type names (you know the kind of thing: One-Eye, Big-Leg, No-Face, etc). True to the noble savage stereotype, they know no anger or selfishness, and live in perfect harmony with their surroundings. He stays with them for almost a year until he realised that they pretty much worship him, and after their devotion causes a disaster to the tribe, he knows that he can no longer remain as a false God; he must leave. Ah, now it becomes obvious what all that religious sub-text was for earlier! It’s subtler than I’m making it sound, and Morpurgo definitely deserves credit for getting his point across naturally without any overt God-bashing.

I loved the scene where Ashley leaves the tribe during a goat-raid on a monastery. His first contact with humans in a year does not go well, and he realises that he will probably never feel the same towards his fellow man (or woman? The mind boggles) again. And to his credit, the author allows this trait to persist without sugar-coating it: Ashley is allowed to grow up as a somewhat isolated boy who, true to his experiences, never quite fits in and dreams of someday returning to his mountain idyll.

There’s also an odd reversal when Ashley meets a man who has come to wonder if the yetis are after all not a step above mankind, given that they have managed to live a ‘better’ lifestyle than we do and exist in a sort or unspoiled garden of Eden, thereby putting themon a sort of God-like pedestal. Even though the book finishes on a note of aching loss for this departed ‘paradise’, the subtext is clearly that revering anyone as a perfect being, and surrendering reason to such worship, is an act of folly.

I would certainly recommend King of the Cloud Forests for anyone who’s interested in challenging their children (or themselves) with a haunting story that raises some uncomfortable questions, and provides no easy answers.

Sharpe's Triumph by Bernard Cornwell

As I've noted before, Cornwell's famous Sharpe novels seem to me to exist in a bit of a cultural and historical vacuum. The author provides just enough context and background to make the story work, but no further. In Sharpe's Triumph, for example, we learn that the Brits are now fighting the Mahratta Confederation, which is a conglomeration of Indian states and rulers who have banded together, and who are using some renegade European generals such as the German Pohlmann and the traitorous Englishman General Dodd, to lead their troops. From this set-up all Cornwell's heroes, villains and conflicts spring, and this he does well. But as in Sharpe's Tiger, there seems a curious lack of depth; a fear to look into any of the issues encountered when writing about the early 19th-century British Empire. Once again, neither Sharpe nor the reader gets more than a cursory reason why these mighty forces are opposed to one another.

Perhaps I'm being too harsh. The book is still very entertaining, and at heart it's a very well-written action extravaganza, and wants to be nothing more. It's just a shame that Cornwell, who clearly does know his history, and can write epic battle scenes like nobody's business, doesn't put the same care into recreating other aspects of his historical writing.

The book begins with Sharpe surviving a massacre perpetrated by Dodd, who has fled from the British ranks to avoid being punished for murder. It's a great opening that cements Dodd as an intriguing villain (this potential doesn't really come to fruition, but he's still a pretty good character). In the intervening four years since his last adventure, Sharpe's been comfortably stationed at Seringapatan, the former capital of the Tipoo Sultan. Nobody knows that Sharpe himself killed the Tipoo, nor that he still hides the dead king's jewels among his clothes.

Sharpe makes an appearance at the siege of the city of Ahmednuggur, where Dodd's men are stationed alongside the forces of the Mahratta Confederation. Scottish troops storm the walls, led by one Colin Campbell, who will later meet the equally fictitious Flashman(!) during the Sikh wars in the 1840's. Campbell joins Wellington as one of the few real-life people who have met both famous fictional Empire-builders. Meanwhile, Sharpe's nemesis Seargeant Hakeswill, who somehow survived his tiger ordeal at the end of the last book, is still alive and looking to make trouble for our hero...

The best part of the book comes when Sharpe and his mentor McCandless visit the Mahratta troops commanded by the General Pohlmann. Pohlmann takes Sharpe aside and tells him that he could join the Mahrattas and rise up the ranks. For once we get a look inside Sharpe's head as a real human being and not as an action hero as he is tempted by Pohlmann's offer- in the British army, he is cast forever as a low-ranking soldier due to his social class, with no hope of rising up the ranks regardless of ability, while as a traitor in Pohlmann's ranks, he could become a rich, decadent officer within a few years, because the Mahrattas value his skills.

There are some great scenes as Sharpe wrestles with this idea. After all, unlike the right-wing Flashman, Sharpe is an apolitical sword-for-hire who has been scorned by his own establishment and bears no real loyalty towards the British army or the East India Company. Unfortunately, Cornwell declines to use this plot point to critique the morality of the British Empire (I know, it's not that kind of book, but he came so close!), and a conveniently-timed act of treachery of Dodd's causes Sharpe to shelve any idealogical notions and once again side with McCandless and the British.

The book does finish with a tremendous (if exhaustive) description of the battle of Assaye: the battle that made Wellington's youthful career. Nobody else does battles like Cornwell, nobody else can handle the epic amounts of men, animals and troop movements. It's only disappointing that the aforementioned lack of context spoils things somewhat. The fact that we don't really know what's at stake, or what the Mahratta's motivations are, somewhat robs this superb technical exercise of its emotional heart. Nevertheless, it's exciting stuff, and the various plot points associated with the cast of heroes and villains tie together nicely- except of course, those necessary to set up the next book.

Of Irish interest, there is one or two fleeting references to the old sod, including when when a sly Indian fighting for the British asks McCandless about his Irish-bred horse.

'County Meath is in Ireland?' Sevajee asked.

'It is, it is.'

'Another country beneath the British heel?'

'For a man beneath my heel, Sevajee,' the Colonel said, 'you look in remarkably fine fettle. Can we talk about tomorrow? Sharpe, I want you to listen...'

Sigh. So close...

(Incidentally, if you get your hands on the book, please note the grossly misshapen faces of the soldiers on the front cover. At best, they're pulling faces that suggest they've just taken a spoonful of the Tipoo Sultan's elephant dung. At worst, their heads are twisted at an Exorcist-style angle. It's really a horrible painting.)

The Jewel Of Seven Stars by Bram Stoker

Ok, so what if I'm always willing to give an Irishman another chance? So Dracula didn't do it for me when I finally got around to reading it; no matter. The old boy's such a big name in Victorian horror, and has been so influential, that there was bound to be something he'd written that I'd like. And after a chance viewing of the original 1932 The Mummy, I was on something of a Mummy binge. I watched the Hammer Mummies, I re-read refutations of Tutankhamun's curse, and I gobbled up every Victorian era piece of Egyptian horror hokum I could- and that didn't take long, because there aren't that many.
Besides Conan Doyle's formative takes on the genre, and a few others (including The Beetle, and that crazy story where the mummy comes back to life in the far future), there was only one other serious piece of 'classic' mummy fiction that I had yet to tackle- and that was The Jewel of Seven Stars by old Abraham Stoker. And so we were to spend several more nights together, sifting through lumpy prose, spelunking for plot points and keeping a watchful eye in case any action showed up.

The action (or inaction as it'd be more accurately described), gets underway when a young lawyer called Malcolm Ross gets called to the house of one Margaret Trelawny. What's that you say? Not the daughter of the famous Egyptologist, Abel Trelawny? Why, the very same (Yeah, this is one of those universes where Egyptologists are household names)! Ah, but Stoker's playing it cool, and this plot-relevant tid-bit is kept from us for some little time. It's all part of his plan to make us think that Jewel is not a mystical horror story, but in fact one of those boring Victorian locked room whodunnits (look, I really don't care whodunnit, unless it was a mummy, in which case, GET TO THE MUMMY). Instead, we get to spend lots of time with several police officers who potter around in Trelawny's house, mostly not even leaving his room. They learn that old man Trelawny's been somehow put into a coma. Eventually, something that would have been immediately obvious to the characters is revealed to the reader: that Trelawny's room is absolutely crammed with Egyptian artifacts, including several mummified cats and even people.

At this, Malcolm and the policemen and doctors who are now on the case wonder if the artifacts could possibly be disseminating some kind of poisonous odour that the old man has picked up, so they start wearing face-masks when they're in the room. Strange things begin happening in the house at night, and suspicion quickly falls on young Margaret. This bothers Malcolm, because though he can see that she's the most likely culprit, she still makes his head go giddy and his stomach turn to mush. Well, that's something I can get behind, you know. I mean, we all know how much love sucks. But Malcolm is such a typical late-Victorian chaste goody-two-shoes romantic hero that he makes me a little bit sick myself. He puts Margaret up on a ridiculous pedestal constantly, making the love subplot contrived and unbelievable. His anguish and mood swings are the only things about him that strike a note of truth for a young man in love, but when it comes to Margaret herself, he never thinks anything that a real person would in such a situation. Did Victorian gentlemen really have to restrain even their thoughts like this? This part of the book goes on for way too long.

Anyway, after some time Abel Trelawny wakes up, and things start to look up for the reader. When one of his Egyptologist colleagues shows up at the house, Abel is forced to tell the gang some of the backstory behind the mysterious goings-on. It turns out that Abel and his man have something of a history of mucking about in cursed tombs- in particular, the tomb of one Queen Tera. Finally the story escapes the confines of Abel's bedroom (in the form of a flashback), and there's a few very effective chapters describing the history of this rogue queen, as well as the Englishmen's violation of her tomb.

Here Stoker manages to conjure up the mystic side of Egyptology, which really is what we all came for really, right? Tera's perfectly-preserved hand (notably white, mind you) gets removed, and starts turning up in some really weird places. My favourite part of the book is when they are lugging Tera's coffin through the desert after plundering her tomb, only to find their missing Arab servant lying dead with the missing mummy hand on top of him. If anyone is ticking boxes, yeah the Englishmen are accompanied by a bunch of untrustworthy, superstitious Arabs who come to nasty ends at the hands of the curse while their white masters, who instigated the tomb robbery, make it out alive. I guess the writers of the Hammer movies must have really loved that bit.

Tera's character herself is drawn pretty sketchily, and though she does control all the events of the plot, we never really feel like we know her. From what we do learn though, there's definite echoes of Ayesha from She going on- a powerful woman from an ancient civilization who uses sorcery to gain immortality. Tera plans to bring herself into the nascent 20th century in the 'northern land' she has always dreamed of: England. The particulars of her plan are very intricate, and Stoker has constructed a set-up of spells, amulets, and centuries-long plotting that Dan Brown would be proud of (err... might not seem like it, but that's a compliment). Another of my favourite bits is when the protagonists realise that the titular jewel of seven stars matches the stars of the plough, even though thousands of years ago, when Tera constructed it, they would not have been in the same position. It's a nice touch that brings home the vastness of the time involved and the perfection of her plan. There's plenty of other interesting Egyptological information, and it shows that Stoker really knew his stuff.

Meanwhile, the crew has relocated to Cornwall so that Trelawny can... help to raise the obviously evil (or at best extremely powerful, troublesome and unpredictable) Tera. He comes over all Doctor Frankenstein here, pondering on what modern people could learn from messing with Things Man Was Not Meant To Know. It's hinted that the Egyptians may have been far more advanced than us in many fields, including possibly having knowledge of radioactive materials (here Stoker again includes some ripped-from-the-headlines stuff). They begin to wonder what a successful resurrection of Tera would mean for their religious beliefs, which is a step further than most Victorian fiction usually goes! A good old-fashioned storm brews as they assemble the necessary equipment around her sarcophagus in a cave beneath their Cornwall house. Meanwhile, Malcolm is wondering why Margaret (who was conceived the moment her father had a mysterious 'missing time' episode in Tera's tomb, and who is the spitting image of the ancient queen) hasn't quite been acting herself lately...

It should be obvious that there is a lot of good stuff in The Jewel of Seven Stars. Stoker was something of a minor expert in Egyptology, and the book is better-researched than most of its ilk. There's definitely more going on here than just using Egypt as a handy place to pull spooky stories from; there's the fear that this time (unlike in Dracula), even science and modern technology might not be enough to save us from ancient evils. And like She, that evil will take the form of what a turn-of-the-century man would fear the most: a powerful, liberated woman.

But these interesting themes are marred by a pace that's slower than intercontinental drift, turning the non-Egyptological sections into quite a slog. And it would have helped if Malcolm wasn't such a wet blanket either. I would recommend this one only to those with a serious interest in the development of the 'Egyptian' theme in Victorian weird fiction. Well, that's what you get for trusting an Irishman...

Only If You Wear That Dress: Street Fighter (1994)

Being the first of several possible reviews of 90’s video-game movie adaptations!

Fans who were at the right age when Street Fighter 2 ruled the world in the early 90’s remember that there were two films based off this franchise at the time. One of them was hard to find (in Ireland at least!) since it was a Japanese animated effort, and anime hadn’t yet become the ‘nerd-chic’ powerhouse market that it now is in the west (before the information age, ‘niche’ actually meant ‘niche’! As in, you couldn’t buy it anywhere!). But if you did manage to come across a copy of it on VHS, bootleg or otherwise, you were in for a shock: to kids used to Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles, this stuff was somewhat adult. It was definitely aimed at an older audience, and, unfamiliar with any form of Japanese weirdness, we didn’t quite know what to make of it. We certainly didn’t know what to make of the Chun-Lee-in-the-shower-scene, that’s for sure. April O’Neill never did anything like that.

In Celebration of the Ghost Ship

Being an insane over-analysis of one of my favourite sub-genres!

You know this story, you’ve seen it a million times. It’s two parts sci-fi and one part horror, and it owes its ancestry almost entirely to movies and later, videogames; its only direct literary ancestor would by the haunted house story. Usually taking place in the future, the story will feature a group of humans (often military) who either stumble upon or are sent to investigate a mysterious space ship, space station or remote colony or outpost of some sort. At first it seems as if the place is deserted. There will be no signal and no response to any attempts at communications. There may be some evidence that the previous occupants came to a sticky end. The characters will wander around in the dark with flashlights. Sooner or later, they will encounter whatever it was that killed the original crew, and things will get nasty. It’s often aliens, zombies, ghosts, demons, or some combination of the above. Depending on the ratio of horror to sci-fi, members of the team may be killed off one-by-one, or they may fight the threat outright.

Fictionpress

So, maybe you’ve heard about this fanfiction thing, eh? I remember when I first did, because it was in an article in the Sunday Times, and it was opposite a review for Jurassic Park 3. Nothing dates a moment like a reference to a tired film franchise.

The idea always intrigued me- the presence of a large base of readers and writers of amateur fiction out there seemed like a positive thing. But, by and large, playing in other people’s universes did not really appeal to me. These writers were stuck on using characters and situations that were not their own. Fanfiction.net is the biggest collection of this stuff out there, but it’s got its own sister site for ‘original’ fiction too at Fictionpress.net.