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happy cenotaxmas
Dec. 14th, 2007 09:01 amRussell Letson reviewed Cenotaxis for Locus's latest issue, and I'm going to use his excellent summary as a way of promoting the book's release.
"Cenotaxis," he says, "is a free-standing novella set, according to Sean Williams's 'Note on Sources,' between Saturn Returns (reviewed in October 2007) and its yet-unreleased sequel in the Astropolis sequence. While it does feature the earlier book's protagonist, Imre Bergamasc, it is not really a sequel--the precise connection to prior events is uncertain, and (more important) the viewpoint is that of one Jasper, Bergamasc's mighty opposite in a war to control old Earth. In fact, events in general float around in time, since Jasper experiences a large part of his life not in linear sequence but as a series of flashbacks. The story begins in medias res, with Jasper already Bergamasc's prisoner and the serial interrogation well established. The first word spoken is 'anachronism,' and the first crucial fact we discover is that Jasper believes himself to be a god. Bergamasc wants information from Jasper, and he is willing to take a long time and go to some trouble to get it--but he is also willing to blow his prisoner's brains out if Jasper cannot or will [not] satisfy him.
"Among the ordinary plot questions posed by this initial situation are how a god (if he is such) came to be a prisoner; how he lost the war; why Bergamasc feels the need to interrogate him over what proves to be a very long imprisonment; why Jasper is unstuck in time; plus familiar science-fictional-background matters such as the nature of Jasper's mentality and of his relationship to the entity he calls the Apparatus (which may be kin to the now-extinct post-human intelligences called Forts). Some of these do get answered, but other thematic threads are more obscure, embedded in a network of allusions and echoes that rattle around in the text."
Russell found the rattling substrate less interesting than the "clear-text" part of the tale, enjoying "the rather Silverbergian combination of exotic far-future landscape and gloomy emotional atmosphere (think Nightwings or even Son of Man)" (comparisons I'm more than happy to accept). He notes that "the space-operatic and revenge-melodrama themes of Saturn Returns are so far in the background here as to be invisible, replaced by contemplation of modes of consciousness and/or of being," but that's okay, because it's a different sort of tale to Saturn Returns. That he thought "the sightseeing was worth the ticket price" is good news for me. I think it contains some of my best writing yet, and anyone who's enjoying Astropolis will find a lot in it for them.
Available soon through bookstores stocking MonkeyBrain!
"Cenotaxis," he says, "is a free-standing novella set, according to Sean Williams's 'Note on Sources,' between Saturn Returns (reviewed in October 2007) and its yet-unreleased sequel in the Astropolis sequence. While it does feature the earlier book's protagonist, Imre Bergamasc, it is not really a sequel--the precise connection to prior events is uncertain, and (more important) the viewpoint is that of one Jasper, Bergamasc's mighty opposite in a war to control old Earth. In fact, events in general float around in time, since Jasper experiences a large part of his life not in linear sequence but as a series of flashbacks. The story begins in medias res, with Jasper already Bergamasc's prisoner and the serial interrogation well established. The first word spoken is 'anachronism,' and the first crucial fact we discover is that Jasper believes himself to be a god. Bergamasc wants information from Jasper, and he is willing to take a long time and go to some trouble to get it--but he is also willing to blow his prisoner's brains out if Jasper cannot or will [not] satisfy him.
"Among the ordinary plot questions posed by this initial situation are how a god (if he is such) came to be a prisoner; how he lost the war; why Bergamasc feels the need to interrogate him over what proves to be a very long imprisonment; why Jasper is unstuck in time; plus familiar science-fictional-background matters such as the nature of Jasper's mentality and of his relationship to the entity he calls the Apparatus (which may be kin to the now-extinct post-human intelligences called Forts). Some of these do get answered, but other thematic threads are more obscure, embedded in a network of allusions and echoes that rattle around in the text."
Russell found the rattling substrate less interesting than the "clear-text" part of the tale, enjoying "the rather Silverbergian combination of exotic far-future landscape and gloomy emotional atmosphere (think Nightwings or even Son of Man)" (comparisons I'm more than happy to accept). He notes that "the space-operatic and revenge-melodrama themes of Saturn Returns are so far in the background here as to be invisible, replaced by contemplation of modes of consciousness and/or of being," but that's okay, because it's a different sort of tale to Saturn Returns. That he thought "the sightseeing was worth the ticket price" is good news for me. I think it contains some of my best writing yet, and anyone who's enjoying Astropolis will find a lot in it for them.
Available soon through bookstores stocking MonkeyBrain!
