Some short discussions of Things I Have Recently Read for you this week!
The Vampire Lestat (Anne Rice, 1985)
Julia and I have been reading books to each other this year; I’ve been reading Connie Willis to her (Doomsday Book and Passage so far, with To Say Nothing of the Dog coming up) and she has been reading Anne Rice to me (Interview With the Vampire first, then The Vampire Lestat, and, after the next Willis book, Queen of the Damned).
Prior to this I had not read any Anne Rice — I was of course aware of her most famous work, and was inclined to be a little dismissive. I expect this is not an incorrect attitude to have about the bulk of her stuff, based on what I’ve heard, but I enjoyed Interview With the Vampire and The Vampire Lestat just so very much more than I was expecting. Especially The Vampire Lestat, which is a delightfully earnest and full-throated exploration of what would happen if an aesthetically-obsessed late-18th century French nobleman became a vampire. Lestat’s petulance, his obsession with a twisted sense of beauty, and his deep angst all really work for me in a way I wasn’t expecting; he’s a fantastic character.
There’s an almost complete lack of irony in both of these books that I find refreshing. Everything is operatic and filled with emotion and tragedy in a mode I don’t usually go for but which absolutely works for the late 18th-century setting; this is what a lot of the literature of this time period reads like. (Have you read Frankenstein recently?) I don’t know how well this style will work when the time period moves up to the ‘80s, but I completely believe and love these Romantic vampire assholes.
There’s a reason she’s famous, I guess is what I’m trying to say, and there’s a reason it’s impossible to get away from the trappings of Rice’s Vampire Chronicles in any kind of modern vampire story. These are genre-defining texts in a way I hadn’t quite understood. What is Buffy or Vampire: The Masquerade or any modern adaptation of Dracula or, Maker preserve us, Twilight without Anne Rice? I understand the series goes deeply off the rails somewhere after Book Three (which is where Julia and I plan to stop), but the first two, at least, are really worth reading.
The Republic of Thieves (Scott Lynch, 2013)
I have written before for this publication about how much I enjoyed The Lies of Locke Lamora, the first book in Scott Lynch’s Gentleman Bastards sequence, and that holds true. All three extant novels are a good time, and if neither of the sequels quite holds up to the first book’s heights, well, such are the travails of fantasy writing.
This one sees our heroes drafted into fixing an election in a magical city-state; the specifics of the caper don’t really matter, however, as the point is really to examine Locke’s relationship with Sabetha, his childhood sweetheart who has been drafted into fixing the election from the other side. The unfolding of that caper is interspersed with flashbacks that show the first major caper Locke and Sabetha pulled, many years earlier when they were teenagers, and the blossoming of their teenage romance. It’s a fun time.
But it is very clear to me that this book was written after Scott Lynch got divorced and had Complicated Feelings about it. (Lynch has been very public about the fact that the end of his marriage and resulting mental health crises are why it has been ten years since he wrote a book.) A surprising amount of the book consists of Locke and Sabetha having heart-to-hearts wherein Locke has to own up to all the various ways he has not been a good partner to Sabetha, which is definitely the sort of thing you write in order to deal with your own divorce. (I speak from some amount of experience here, alas.)
This adds up to a book that is significantly weirder and more personal than it probably would have been otherwise; I’m not sure it’s necessarily better for this preoccupation, but it’s certainly more idiosyncratic, and I tend to think fantasy is better when it’s clearly wedded to the author’s own bizarre fascinations. I hope he’s doing well now, and I certainly look forward to reading more of these books, though no one should blame him if he decides to just move on to a different project at this point.
The Adventures of Stainless Steel Rat (Harry Harrison, 1961-1972)
Harry Harrison wrote about 12 Stainless Steel Rat novels from 1961-2010, and I have just read the first three, collected in an omnibus edition in 1978. The titular rat is a far-future con artist and thief who gets dragged into white-hatting for the cops in a series of weird little sci-fi adventures. It’s fun! It’s also weirdly sexist in the way that only mid-century sci-fi can be, and one does get tired of that after a while.
In the first novel, Jim “Slippery Jim” Bolivar diGriz is shanghaied into working for the cops and tries to track down a rampaging murderer who has covertly built and stolen a vast space-battleship. The murderer is a beautiful femme fatale who is driven to murder sprees mostly because she was ugly when she was a child and it made her very angry. Women are such mysterious creatures, are they not?
In the second, diGriz (who has married the reformed murderer) tries to understand how and why one civilization has been invading and conquering its stellar neighbors, particularly since the logistics of interstellar warfare are supposed to make this essentially impossible. The sections of the book that involve him infiltrating the fascist dictatorship are entertaining; the parts of the book that take place in a matriarchal society are less so.
The third is by far the most enjoyable of the three, as Time Shenanigans force our hero to jump between 1975, an alternate-universe 1807 where Napoleon has conquered England, and far future post-apocalyptic Earth. This is probably the most fun because there are almost no female characters in the novel and therefore fewer opportunities for sexism. (Look, I don’t mean to keep banging this drum, as I know it’s usually the least interesting thing one can talk about when discussing a work like this. But any time diGriz talks about his wife he can’t help but make some sort of throwaway comment about what women, writ large, are like, and it’s very tiresome.)
Reading this mostly made me appreciate Fritz Leiber more (as if it were possible) because, while his work can certainly be weirdly sexist, it is also trying to work through specific thoughts about the Battle of the Sexes in ways that, accidentally or deliberately, end up being more insightful than the usual stuff from that era. Conjure Wife is far from a classic of third-wave feminism but, for all that it thinks women be shopping, it also can’t stop picking at its own inherent biases and failings. Leiber’s women are rarely un-problematic, but they are also usually characters rather than caricatures — or, even when they are caricatures, they are caricatures with some shadings of real human personalities in them. The result is a much more complicated picture than, say, The Stainless Steel Rat, even if it doesn’t end up in exactly the place I’d like it to.
Anyway, The Stainless Steel Rat is more fun when it is being ray-gun Ocean’s Eleven and less fun when it’s being Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. I don’t regret reading these (also, they’re all very short; the whole omnibus was only about 400 pages long) but I doubt I’ll pick up the rest of the Rat corpus.
Tales of Nevèrÿon (Samuel R. Delany, 1979)
Uh, holy shit.
I picked these books up because Phil Christman told me to, and I generally try to do what Phil tells me to do. I was expecting to like these books, because Delany writing sword-and-sorcery sounded like a very chocolate-and-peanut-butter situation to me, but I was unprepared for how much this book rocks.
In five short stories (and some Borgesian framing matter), Delany uses the trappings of Howard and Leiber to write philosophical explorations of Freud, Foucault, Derrida, and about a dozen others. We have dragons; we also have several lengthy discussions about what the development of currency does to a society. We have a fisherwoman get attacked by a sea monster who then reflects on how her act of telling the story about being attacked by a sea monster changes her own memory of being attacked by a sea monster in such a way that now, when she tells the story, she is doing just that (telling a story) rather than recounting a memory she actually has (of being attacked by a sea monster). We have a pair of freedom fighters who are also engaged in a sadomasochistic dom/sub relationship with each other because they can’t get off unless they are wearing the trappings of the very system of slavery they are bloodily destroying.
I’ll wait to do a fuller treatment of this idea until I’ve finished the entire Nevèrÿon series (there are four books in total), but there is something spectacular about the fact that this and The Book of the New Sun came out just a few years apart. Two of the most brilliant writers of the 20th century independently decided to give Proust a sword at about the same time, and if the results are very different (as of course they are, given that Wolfe was the World’s Most Catholic Man and Delany is, uh, not) they are both staggeringly beautiful.