Barnacle Bill the Spacer and other stories
Lucius Shepard
Orion hbk, £16.99/trd pbk, £9.99 (now a Millennium paperback)
Review by David Kendall (1997)

'Genuine stylists' are probably even rarer than 'born storytellers'; on reading this volume I have to consider Shepard a touch of both. Sf, more than horror, feels dull and flaccid these days. There are plenty of competent writers out there, but most of them seem to be filling in areas already marked out rather than exploring further afield, exploring one area of the surface and lacking the depth and imagination that periodically invigorates a genre. There was a lot of bollocks produced under the tattered New Wave banner, but there was also some wildly enthusiastic writing that ignored what sf was supposed to be about and just got on with things. In many ways, Shepard is a sort of bastard link with that time, combining beauty of language with a wide-ranging imagination.

'Barnacle Bill' itself is novella-sized and the outstanding piece in the collection, though the haunting 'A Little Night Music' comes very close. Bill is a retard on the space station Solitaire, a vessel devoted to sending out ships to explore for habitable planets. John the Chief of Security has to deal with Bill's odd behaviour and untangle a plot involving a right wing religious group, The Strange Magnificence, a wonderfully conceived mystical amalgam of Nazism, Thuggery and the Klan. It's the depth of consideration Shepard gives to the issues at stake that mark the story as exceptional. Bill's mental state is viewed both sympathetically and practically - on a space station dedicated to founding a new planet, what place have the mentally deficient? Even the 'normal' members of Solitaire are plagued by the futility of their hopes:
Each successive failure struck at our hearts and left us so crucially dismayed, we developed astonishing talents for self-destruction. Like neurotic Prometheans, we gnawed at our own livers and sought to despoil every happy thing that fell to us.

Earth is a mess, but Shepard locates his character's despair in London, to give the reader a focus. The city is one of 'Nightmare, grief and endless fever'; William Blake meets JG Ballard.

By the climax of the story Bill, like many holy fools, is both justified and crucified in a totally unsaccharin way. After that opener it wouldn't be surprising if the rest of the stories paled a little. 'A Little Night Music', though, is an excellent chiller reminiscent of Shepard's novel Green Eyes. My only gripe was 'Human History', which I found barren of interest. The other stories, read over an extended period, held me with their delicate beauty and heartfelt sense of the numinous, which pervades them and links them across the many genres they encapsulate, including as they do characters ranging from half blind boxers to smugglers and mathematicians. Excellent.