Child of the RiverPaul J McAuley
Gollancz, hardback, 286 pages, £16.99
The Invisible Country
Paul J McAuley
Vista, paperback, 319 pages, £5.99
Review by David Clark (1997)
McAuley has worryingly won praise from the Mail on Sunday for previous novels Fairyland, Secret Harmonies, Pasquale’s Angel, The King of the Hill and others. On this evidence (I have yet to read the previous novels) that dubious accolade appears to be harmless. It may be that the reviewer (and I haven’t seen the review, come on, it’s the Mail) has given him points for ideas. The benefit of the doubt is partly given because the Mail’s book reviews aren’t always as bad as the rest of the paper.
No shortage of ideas in Child of the River. It’s an SF-fantasy adventure, first of a trilogy set (at least, this one is) on Confluence, an artificial world beyond this galaxy. Confluence is a flat 20,000 kilometre strip bordered by mountains on one side and river on the other, created along with the thousands of alien races inhabiting it by god-like descendants of humanity. Now its decaying civilisation is undermined by human survivors of a five-million-year-old expedition. The child of the river is Yama, found floating on it while a baby, who can control the machines that keep Confluence going.
On one hand, Child of the River is about Yama’s adventures. On the other, there’s a whole stack of subplots and themes and things hiding behind things that are yet to be fully revealed. That’s the problem with reviewing the first volumes of trilogies; Confluence is probably one long novel. If only it were possible to publish these things on one go. Anyway, there’s a lot of stuff about moving on to the next plane and so on; in short, a lot about Confluence. It’s a bit fantasy, too; there are apprenticeships, and page boys, and mercenaries.
Why do we get this stuff? So
Child of the River is a rites of passage novel, on one level. So
what? Do we have to have it laid on
in those particular terms? With a trowel? I know there’s a certain
amount of sociological regression on Confluence, but haven’t we evolved
out of this crap in Confluence’s distant future of millions of years
hence, just as we are now, hopefully, evolving out of having monarchies
and aristocracies? Can’t McAuley find a way of doing it without this?
How many books and short stories has
The Edge been sent this month with some or all of those elements? Perhaps this
old fashioned conventional fantasy strand is present in McAuley’s earlier work, and that’s why the
Mail like him. I suspect the trilogy will prove to be too long. This
volume didn’t grab me.There's even less shortage of ideas in The Invisible Country, which is bursting with them. This is much better; a collection of McAuley’s very good short stories, published with an introduction by Kim Newman. Short, useful afterwords follow each story. The shorter form is often superior; this seems especially true – for me – of hard SF. A bit like radio and television. And McAuley’s style reads better in this book. Technology is the theme, informed by biology; McAuley was a biologist.
McAuley’s second collection is brimming with clever and often witty invention. These might be the stories Kim Newman would write if he were an (exclusively) SF writer; these are up to his considerable standard or better. Some of them are a bit steeped in earlier work. Highlights: I particularly liked ‛Children of the Revolution’, ‛The Invisible Country’ and ‛Gene Wars’. Dystopian, reasoned stuff that reads well alongside William Gibson; believable. Caveat: I can’t yet (I imagine that I will) get into the stories set in the same universe as Pasquale’s Angel, so I can’t assess them properly. Indeed, I’m hoping to get someone else to review this collection at length. (They really should have sent us the hardback last year.)