here is no new thing under the suns. Seven or eight years ago I
reviewed an earlier novel by William Barton, Dark Sky Legion
(1992), and it might be better to say exactly what I said then rather
than say it worse a second time around.
In that novel by Barton I thought I detected a pattern of story,
which I traced back through Gene Wolfe's There Are Doors (1988) and
John Crowley's The Deep (1975) and Mark Geston's Lords of the
Starship (1967) to Margaret St. Clair, whose Agent of the Unknown
(1956) was in 1992 and remains now one of the great forgotten texts
of SF.
All of these stories, I thought, were examples of what could be
called the Puppet Dark tale, "an SF or fantasy story whose hero is in
some sense a projection or avatar of a God or godlike figure behind the
arras of the plot; but who does not turn out, in the end, actually to
be the God. This caveat," I said, "distinguishes the Puppet Dark tales
from the vastly more numerous category of stories in which the amnesiac
hero turns out to be his own father or god, or in which the heroine who
has denied her menstrual roots turns out to be her own mother or the
Earth Herself. The hero of the Puppet Dark tale--he or she will typically
be an android, or computer projection, or tied clone, or ghost--is, in
other words, the Dark Twin of the Competent Man whose wetdreams have
engined the Future Histories of most 20th century SF writers."
The concave palm of God
In the course of this impressionistic analysis, I described the
enclosed world in which The Deep was set as resembling "the concave
palm of a God upraised into the immensity of a starless welkin," so when
Barton's newest novel, When We Were Real, arrived in the post, and I
thought Bingo!, I may be forgiven. Because Chris Moore's cover for the
new book depicts a small figure standing within a vast concave
overshadowing palm, whose fingers point upwards to a dark sky, as though
to grab it; rather than gazing up at the sky (the way SF protagonists
always used to), the small figure is looking down at his feet, where the
creased base of a giant imprisoning finger joins the vast palm. He is
looking away from a welkin he will never own.
This, I said, is going to be a Puppet Dark tale.
And so, mostly, though less oppressively than Dark Sky Legion,
it is. The setting of Barton's new tale of entrapment is, as before,
interstellar; but, as before, there is no faster-than-light travel to transfigure our
local corner of the galaxy into a space opera arena. There are actions
galore, but no climax engendered by the protagonists. Nor is there any
dramatic irony in the Barton universe--unlike the narrative shape we
experience in Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky, reviewed here in Issue No. 101--no hint that the protagonist could break through
into wonder if only he knew what we know.
The world of When We Were Real is, therefore, a penitentiary;
and the story is a tread in the exercise yard. Darius Murphy tells his
own tale, in a tone of lassitudinous hindsight jostled occasionally into
petulance, for he is no hero, exactly. He is born into a matriarchal
society that occupies a vast obsolescent arcology in deep space; he
escapes this entrapment only to find himself recruited into the
worlds-spanning private army of an interstellar corporation known as
Standard ARM; and he spends the rest of the novel doing grunt work or
touring the local arm of the galaxy on leave.
He is no hero of the old sort
The worlds he encounters are standard fare, limned with a dark
brush. There is a city world; a tainted Eden ruled by sexually diseased
heavy-gravity plutocrats; a planet whose inhabitants are doomed to
grinding decimation after rebelling uselessly against one of the faceless
corporations that dominate the cruel lanes of space; etc. Darius obeys
orders, mostly. He has little choice: he is no hero of the old sort. He
knows no secret. He finds no ancient cache. No alien godling selects him
almost at random to rule the sevagram. He does not happen upon a crux
only he can activate. He does not escape.
So he travels, he kills, he travels, he is trained to operate
some new killing machine or other, he kills again, he travels. By the end
of the novel he is a century old, measured by the passage of time in the
universe, though relativistic time effects due to constant travel mean he
is still young in the flesh.
Which is where the real story takes place: in the passages of the
flesh. Darius is a beautiful young man. Women love to sleep with him; he
loves to sleep with them. Back in the matriarchy, a woman's vagina is known
as a gate--perhaps there is a sly reference here to Sheri Tepper's The
Gate to Women's Country (1988), a title which always struck me as
highly arousing--and young Darius constantly demonstrates his love of
gates. He is a gentle and persuasive lover. He spends much of the novel
making love. It is being human. It is what makes sense.
The only tensile thread element in the plot--most of the book is
picaresque, but without the underlying thrust of the great picaresque
novels, which is the search through Puppet Dark devastations of Spain or
Germany or America After the Rain for a father (or a mother) and a
home--traces the love story between Darius and an "optimod" named Violet,
a vat-distilled half-human half-fox. They meet and make love; they are
separated in a vicious Standard ARM dogfight for much of the book; they
come together again (they come together lots) near the end of the tale,
and then, without warning, a deus ex machina climax relieves them of
their bondage to ARM.
In essence, however, as the book closes, Darius remains what he's
always been: a ghost of his past, and a kind of clone, as he's been
reconstructed a few times after savage injuries in combat. Violet remains
a ghost of the vat. They are puppets in the penal closure of the dark.
When We Were Real is an anecdote of our next bondage.
John Clute is a writer, editor, critic and scholar of science fiction. He is the author of Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia and co-editor of both The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, all Hugo Award winners. He is also a co-founder of the Hugo-winning British SF publication Interzone. His criticism and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and other places too numerous to list.
