Gezlinger's Knot - exciting possibilities

"Gezlinger’s Knot", Book 1: Traveling Rimside Blues
By JG Nair/J. William Myers
Mutant Horse 2011

Review by Lyda Morehouse

The world of Gezlinger’s Knot is nifty, a cool as heck concept and is accompanied by Myer’s strong visuals that evoke a kind of cross between “Blade Runner” and “Road Warrior.”

In a future where we’ve destroyed the ecosystem beyond repair, Earth is now a wasteland riddled with plague and pestilence and freakish mutations. Most of humanity survives in the remaining domed cities, while a few rugged individuals brave the soup of disease looking for clean genetic code to sell to gene tailors who can rebuild extinct animals for fun and profit.

The story starts with Jim Gambol, a gene trader, and because things begin with him one must presume he’s ultimately the hero of this tale. Unfortunately, I learned much more about him in the publicity materials attached to the comic than I did in the first issue. What we see of him in this book has minimal emotional impact. There seems to be a lot of wandering around the rim (another cool concept – a subculture that exists in the maintenance spaces between the dome proper and the outside,) but, otherwise, there’s not a lot in the text to latch on to. I have no sense of what’s at stake for him, or why I should care.

That could be a massive fail, but the last couple chapters follow a free trader (one of the brave/insane souls who venture outside) called Jobeam and his awesome mutant horse, Stogo. (I can’t explain it, but I really loved this horse.) I found myself much more emotionally attached to both of them because they faced an immediate conflict – the dangers of outside. Their section also ended is a startling cliffhanger that left me wanting more, right now!

My only regret is that the first part of the issue was not as strong as the last. However, as a science fiction reader, I can wait. I was given enough of a taste that I can be patient for the story to progress. Thus, the debut issue functions as a successful hook and the good news is that subsequent issues are planned every 1 – 2 months, with a graphic novel compellation when the story is finished.

If episode two delivers Jim Gambol’s conflict and thus, engages the reader in his story, I think “Gezlinger’s Knot” will spin a
marvelously rich, exciting tale.

Ashes of the Earth - the mystery runs dark and deep

Ashes of the Earth: A Mystery of Post-Apocalyptic America
By Eliot Pattison
Counterpoint Press April 2011

Reviewed by Deirdre M. Murphy

Many things in the dark world depicted in this post-apocalyptic murder mystery aren’t what they first seem to be—a facet of this book that starts with the very first paragraphs:

The faces of the many child suicides Hadrian Boone had cut from nooses or retrieved below cliffs never left him, filled his restless sleep, and encroached in so many waking nightmares that now, as the blond girl with the hanging rope skipped along the ridge above, he hesitated, uncertain whether she was another of the phantoms that haunted him. Then she paused and reached out for the hand of a smaller red-haired girl behind her. Hadrian threw down the shovel he was using to dig out the colony’s old latrine pit, gathered up the chain clamped to his feet, and ran.

He scrambled up the steep slope of the ravine, ignoring the surprised, sleepy curse of his guard and the shrill, angry whistle that followed. Grabbing at roots and saplings to pull himself forward, he cleared the top and sprinted along the trail, his spine shuddering at the expectation of a baton on his back, his gut wrenching at the sound of a feeble shriek from the opposite side of the ridge. As he reached the open shelf of rock, he sprang, grabbed for the swinging rope that hung from a limb over the edge, heaving it up with a groan of despair. He froze as he hauled the child at the end of it back onto the ledge. What he found himself holding was an old coat fastened over a frame of sticks, and he found himself looking into the blank eyes of a pumpkin head with dried wheat for hair.

As fascinating as this opening is, much of what follows in this opening scene grated on me. Parts were heavy-handed and, well, gross. I really am capable of figuring out who’s supposed to be the hero and who’s supposed to be the villain without seeing the protagonist attempt, mostly futilely, to rescue pages of destroyed books from a latrine pit. Happily, as I got further into the book, I found an interesting, nuanced, multi-faceted future world, with an abundance of heroes, villains, and (best of all) people with aspects of both roles.

Other than the first scene, my primary quibble was an inability to resolve two facts: our protagonist, Hadrian Boone, knows nearly everyone in Carthage because he taught nearly every child born there and because he was a founding father of this first thriving settlement after biological agents and radiation killed nearly everyone in the world. Yet he keeps seeing lots of people he doesn’t know or even distantly recognize wandering around Carthage, and this doesn’t surprise him. At times, this contradiction acted like a speed-bump for me as I read, jostling my attention away from the immediate events of the story to the question of just how large Carthage is.

It isn’t long after Hadrian rescues the pumpkin that the first corpse is discovered, and the Governor of Carthage—a former friend of Hadrian’s—rushes to hide the body and the news. It is only when Hadrian points out that this murder could point to a threat to the Governor himself that he commissions Hadrian to find out what happened to the man. The governor attempts to keep Hadrian in line by threatening Hadrian’s oldest living friend, a threat that Hadrian fears even though the old man is the scientist behind much of Carthage’s success, and who is, we are told, the only reason Hadrian has not been exiled already.

Hadrian has only barely started his investigations when there’s another murder—one closer to Hadrian. This new loss turns his determination to find out what happened from a tired and fearful longing for knowledge and justice into a passionate quest.

Hadrian's investigation of the murders leads him to the gritty roots of corruption in this new world, which is all too reminiscent of the flaws in our pre-apocalyptic world. Can he redeem the dreams of the dead men and turn the children away from their suicide cult? Can he redeem himself, and overcome the emotional scars of losing his world and his family before the first log was cut to build Carthage? Can he at least save some part of the history and literature of the modern world from being used as toilet paper and cigarette wrappers?

There's an inherent promise to mystery readers that the murders will be solved. But will doing so do any good, for Hadrian or his world?

I enjoyed finding out.

Envisioning a near future that works - examples?

Post-apocalyptic tales are still popular, with and without zombies. I read three such novels this year: Directive 51 and Daybreak Zero by John Barnes and Soft Apocalypse by Will McIntosh. I arrived in San Diego for Conjecture on September 9th, the day after the wide-spread blackout. That's all anyone talked about wherever I went: the wait staff, the bellmen, convention-goers from San Diego, everyone. And they all said the same thing: I finally met my neighbors. People pulled together, had block parties and helped each other out. The restaurant served sandwiches by candlelight. People at the bar, without the constant noise and distraction of the game on TV, had real conversations.

Two nights ago, I had a conversation with a friend about the other response to impending doom: folks stockpiling food - not just for a month or a year, but for many years. They envision an utter collapse, a semi-permanent loss of infrastructure. And they're buying guns. That's nothing new, but they may be gaining in numbers, although I'm hesitant to take a poll. I'm afraid of the results.

I'm reminded of the Twilight Zone episode "The Shelter". The family with the only bomb shelter on the block is assailed by previously friendly neighbors when the nuclear threat turns real and immediate.



Personally, I'd rather work on community solutions, not "us and them" or "every (hu)man for himself" ones. The folks in San Diego had the right idea. I'm not sure where the Occupy Wall Street movement will lead, but I see people identifying with each other across a multitude of demographics. Pulling together for a solution for us all. I hope they find one that can then be implemented. Corporate greed and political ambitions have made such a huge mess of things, it's hard to know where to start. I'm glad that doesn't stop them trying.

Then I had a conversation with someone last night about how hard it is for humans occupying this planet at this time to envision a different way to live. We only know what we know. He wants to help start the discussion about a better way. Ways we haven't considered. And where is he looking? To science fiction authors, of course.

But even for us, it's a challenge. As I told him, "How do you write alien thought? Or a truly alien alien?" It's very hard and few of us can pull it off. Extrapolating our present into a better future with a healthier planet, people who solve problems together and politics that work can be just as hard. When I thought about examples for him, I kept coming up with examples from current science fiction of how we make it worse, not better. I find it easier to write tragedy. Somehow, the happy endings just seem too implausible. Perhaps I'm not alone.

Identifying the problems and seeing where they're leading is easy. Finding the different path that no one is seeing is the challenge.

I invite my readers to help me come up with examples of plausible, near-future utopias from current works of science fiction - or at least ones plausible to an open mind. Post a comment with your favorites.

Now if only we knew how to open minds…

Daybreak Zero and Barnes on system artifacts, apocalypses

Daybreak Zero
by John Barnes
May 2011, Ace

Reviewed by Ann Wilkes

With Daybreak Zero, John Barnes continues his post-apocalyptic saga which began with Directive 51. Most of the "Daybreak" disasters have happened already: nuclear bombs, EMPs (electromagnetic pulses), nanoswarm – nanotechnology that attacks electronics - and biotes that turn plastics and rubber into odiferous, brown goo. The government is fractured into two when Directive 51 kicks in and the National Constitutional Continuity Coordinator and the acting President he appoints have a difference of opinion on how to proceed during the current crisis. The NCCC wants a military leader capable of bringing the fight to the enemy while the President believes there is no enemy. Daybreak seems to be the result of a system artifact, the propagation of an idea across the Internet and across the globe inciting people to wish to cleanse the Earth by destructive means to "heal" it.

In Daybreak Zero, Heather O'Grainne's Department of the Future sets up shop in Pueblo, Colo. to discover what's behind Daybreak and to help America get back to a semi-industrial society with transportation, communication, and a 1940s or 1950s level of comfort. Meanwhile, the Daybreak followers storm the populated areas like raging bands of primitives bent on destruction and annihilation.

Arnie Yang, an uber-cyber analyst, still believes a system artifact is behind Daybreak and that the ongoing, moon-based attacks are automated.

The country is set to split down the middle or launch into a second civil war with two governments claiming authority. Both sides finally agree to meet to discuss putting the country back together under one government. The talks are delayed when it's learned that some of the negotiating parties have been brainwashed by Daybreak followers.


He could see the watch's lantern glinting half a mile away. I could run and join them and just stay with them till they passed my house. Lots of people do that. But the time to have done that would have been to catch them on Main, in front of the courthouse; no, they'd wonder what had frightened him. They might ask. What could he say?

Deep breath. Walk and breathe like you're going to fight; if it turns out you are, it's one less thing to wrry about, and if not, it calms and clears the—

"Doctor Yang. Doctor Yang, doctus in the doctrine, the indoctrinated doctor."

Arnie spun ne step backward into the space he'd been about to walk into, cross-drew his knives and held them at ready. "I've been expecting you."

Teeth gleamed in the dark under the blanket; the eyes were black blobs around the greasy promontory of the nose. "Expecting to stab me?"

"If necessary." Arnie shifted his weight for a better stance.


Barnes' style, at least in this series, includes quite a few rambling, conversational sentences that seem to derail in the middle, which kind of bugged me, but his excellent gift for storytelling kept me reading. In fact, as I said in my Directive 51 review, I couldn't stop reading to wait for Directive 51 to arrive, so I finished reading it out of order.

I liked Heather's tactile, old-school war-room. And teenage couriers sprint messages to and fro and are tipped with meal coupons. People who used to be obscure hobbyists are new tech leaders making radio tubes, building printing presses, and creating steam and water-powered this and thats.

And castles! Their neo-land-baron owners could pose a threat to the government or be a lesser evil that keeps order in their vicinities.

There were quite a few witty monologues and inner dialogs. I would expect the survivors of the apocalypse to have a good sense of humor. It would be a survival mechanism, right? Anyway, I enjoyed Heather's wit and Cameron Nguyen-Peters' (the NCCC) ironic sense of humor.

This novel provided a good balance between science, politics and the human condition. Barnes' offers believable characters with engaging conflict both external and internal. I look forward to the next book in this series.

Now let's get to know John Barnes.



AW: Can you explain what a system artifact is for my readers?

JB: Actually, I'd love to. The editor and I disagreed about what the basic appeal of the book is (and there was no market research to settle the question), so a lot of my "how it works" material ended up on the cutting room floor. Warn your readers there'll be a quiz after this …

System: in communications, anything where multiple communicators are passing multiple messages over time. That might include networks, like the internet; communities, like small town gossip; discourses, like Shakespeare scholarship; or distribution systems, like mass media.

Artifact: something that arises arbitrarily from the way things work, an emergent property. Classic examples are that our inability to think about more than seven objects at a time, give or take, is an artifact of our brain; the potential for a stalemate is a system artifact of the rules of chess; the discomfort of time at the DMV is a system artifact of the way that our time is structured and the number of clerks and what they are and are not allowed to do.

So a system artifact is a message that doesn't have a single author/speaker/sender within the system, but arises in the interstices of the system. Cars on the highway send and receive messages, but congestion is a system artifact – it's a property created by all the cars, the highway, weather, work schedules, real estate prices, etc. together. A performance of a play is a system artifact – the audience's experience is created by everybody working together, including the playwright who is usually absent, the past experiences and expressions of other artists, and the behavior of the audience. Catholicism is a system artifact produced by the interactions of all the Catholics with each other and with the world around them, and possibly with things beyond this world, depending on whether or not you're Catholic.

Some system artifacts have fairly person-like qualities – hard science fiction, for example, tends to be stern and tough, telling people the world is this way and you can't just have it any old way you like. (Imagine a hard sf novel titled The Cheerful Void or Planet of the Soft Life). Whereas the whole self-help category is relentlessly positive and never-say-die (you'll never see anything on the self-help shelves titled Oh, Get Over It, You Big Baby! or Childish Dreams: How to Know When It's Really Too Late and You Should Just Give Up.) Those personalities of genres, again, are not any one person's conscious decision; they just happen over time, but they're nonetheless real.

Other system artifacts seem to be a relentless overall value or commandment repeated forever – very often we become aware of those when someone finally objects, as with, for example, the Disney Princesses, a complicated message that says girls should be plucky and cute, their fathers are bumbling nitwits, and the whole universe including inanimate objects and singing seafood will unite to bring them a boyfriend, which is the most important thing that a princess can have. There's a system artifact in Christianity that says that people who suffer are good, and one in the American version of democracy that says the lone arguer in the middle of a consensus is a vital resource to be protected, and one in the environmental movement that says energy conservation is nearly always preferable to energy production. Nobody thought those up individually and sold everyone on them; they evolved out of thousands or millions of exchanges.

Still other system artifacts seem to have evolution-like purposes, seeking to be reproduced, mutating to accommodate it. I don' t mean so much the simple ones like tweets with RT in them so much as songs like "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," which goes far beyond earworminess and turns into a whole collection of feelings, symbols, words, notes that partly take over the recipient's musical taste ever after; Heinlein juveniles keep trying to reproduce at science fiction publishers despite their dwindling audience (which doesn't include very many young people anymore), partly by constantly waggling the attractors of "this is where many existing customers came from" and "remember how much fun these were when they were new?" which they obviously acquired long after Heinlein wrote the original texts.

Now, a really complex message coming out of a really enormous system – say, two thousand years of Christianity, or a million lines of computer code, or tens of thousands of interactions within a family – can have all three kinds of qualities: a personality, a value, and a reproductive drive. And at that point you have the kind of system artifact I'm talking about – a little like the way some compulsions seem to pass from parent to child, or some religions seem to be more extreme than their own practitioners, or the way that whatever physics is reaching for, it has gotten beyond the comprehension of any individual physicist. But, of course, since this is a science fiction novel, I have it magnified in the imaginary future, increased enormously by the power of the internet and by an improving understanding of what really happens in motivational psychology and brain chemistry.

AW: What sorts of hobbies do you have that would come in handy in your Daybreak scenario?

JB: I enjoy looting, inciting mobs, and leading from the rear. Also, I know the locations of several survivalists I expect to have large caches ready. All right, that's a joke. Sort of. I was an Eagle Scout ages ago, back when you had to earn your own badges instead of having your mommy do them for you. I can cook wild game and have cooked and eaten critters for which I did not have directions. Having worked in theatre tech for many years I can improvise machines pretty well. And I'm not a bad teacher; I could open a school if people would feed me in exchange for teaching.

AW: If you lived in the aftermath of an apocalypse, what would you miss the most?

JB: Whatever was gone; different apocalypses would have different patterns of what was missing afterwards. I'm an old fat guy with bad eyesight, I prefer to live in densely urban areas, and I'd be a sitting duck. Almost certainly, I'd miss civil order briefly and intensely until whatever got me, probably in the first week.

AW: What are you working on now?

JB: At this moment I'm finishing The Last President, the third of the Daybreak trilogy. Then I'll do some finishing work on Losers In Space, a hard-sf YA. My agent is peddling The Wordly Evidence of Grace, a mainstream YA, because Tales of the Madman Underground has done much better than most of my science fiction. In between, I'm working on moving to the self-publishing model; in the grand old ship of publishing, water is pouring into the hold, and I am not going to be the last rat down the hawser.

McIntosh poses hard questions in Soft Apocalypse

Soft Apocalypse
Will McIntosh

Night Shade Books, 2011

Reviewed by Ann Wilkes


Soft Apocalypse gives readers a close up and personal view of an apocalypse caused by a convergence of many different and unfortunate political and natural disasters. It focuses not on the causes, but the effects. McIntosh delivers this tale of doom and gloom in a fresh, hip first-person voice that draws the reader immediately in.

Jasper, an unemployed college graduate who had his whole future ahead of him, now has to fight every day to have any future at all. Jasper's parents died three years earlier in a water riot. He hangs onto whatever vestiges of "normal" he can find, while trying to come to terms with the prospect that it may not be getting better after all.

Jasper, his best friend, and eight others live as nomads, going from town to town, trading energy cells for food to whatever businesses are still in operation. The group uses portable windmills along the sides of roads to charge the cells from the gusts raised from passing vehicles. They also gather solar energy with solar cell-equipped blankets.

As the story progresses, those end up being the "good days" though Jasper complained bitterly about the reality of it at the time. He is forced into situations where he must kill or be killed and kill or let his friend be gang-raped. It's not an uplifting read, but it's definitely a thoughtful one.

Most Americans hadn't known what suffering was until the depression of '13. In school we used to hear about the so-called "Great Depression," as if having a lot of unemployed people who were reasonably well-fed was this terrible holocaust. We were wimps. We're not any more—we've learned how to eat bitterness, as the Chinese say.

Soft Apocalypse explores some hard questions. What would we do in desperate situations that we may never have to face? Can we ever know until we're in them? Do people forced to kill lose a piece of themselves in the process?

My head was spinning from the last twenty-four hours. I felt great and awful, exhausted and exhilarated. Afterimages of Ange in the shower were superimposed with the priest feeding me from a beverage lid. Now the puddle of blood where Amos had fallen swirled with this opportunity. I guess I needed to take my joys where I could find them, and the hell with the notion that it was selfish to be happy amidst suffering. There was always suffering.

Adding to the pathos, Jasper goes from one hopeless relationship to another, all the while wondering if there ever will be such a thing as a normal relationship again. From a married woman who won't let go of their precious snatched, chaste meetings and texts to an abusive, self-absorbed rock-star with a death wish. Then it’s a friend who doesn't mind the occasional comfort bang, but doesn't want a romantic attachment.

When the world is falling apart, relationships matter all the more. They don't cost money, but they do make you vulnerable on yet another level at a time when you're scared of shadows.

McIntosh shows a lot of insight into this struggle and includes believable inner dialog to further delve into the depths of the grueling existence that forces so many hard choices. It's about trying to do more than survive. Trying to preserve one's humanity in a world turned upside down. Trying to find love when tomorrow may never come. I heartily recommend it.

Time Enough at Last - apocalyptic views

First, my good news! My tongue-in-cheek space opera, Awesome Lavratt, is now available for Kindle! You can read the first chapter on my website. Then, once you're hooked on the adventures of Horace Whistlestop and the evil Aranna Navna, you can scoot on over to Amazon and download it. I'm working on the another tale in that universe now which will reprise many of those characters. It's also available as an app for Android and iPhone/iPad.

I've been reading apocalyptical books one right after another. I picked up Soft Apocalypse from the Night Shades table at FOGcon -playing my reviewer card, of course. Jeremy Lassen, Editor in Chief, said he's the author to watch. He told no lies! You'll be seeing a review and possibly an interview with author Will McIntosh in May.

Penguin had sent me Daybreak Zero by John Barnes. I had just finished my just-for-fun historical fiction novel and it looked interesting. And why not stay with the whole apocalyptic theme? I was half-way through when I read on the one-sheet that the first Daybreak book (Daybreak Zero is the second) was just released in paperback. I asked for that, too, since I was reading Daybreak Zero. But alas, I'm reading them out of order because Daybreak Zero was so good I couldn't put it down to wait for and read Directive 51.

Soft Apocalypse gives the personal, close-up view of a deterioration of society from a convergence of many devastating events while Daybreak Zero looks at an apocalypse from a single, yet unknown, source from an ensemble cast that ranges across the former United States.

The historical fiction book, The Seekers by John Jakes, is set in the new US of the early 19th century. It made for some interesting parallels. I have no romantic notions about the past. Having our washer out of commission for a month (in spite of two previous visits by repairmen) was enough deprivation, thank you. I like my modern conveniences. No matter how tired or sick I am, I can still feed my machines and have clean dishes and clothes. A vacuum bot would be a nice addition. It's on my wish list. I put the rest of my wish list into a flash fiction piece that has all kinds of fun gadgets including a robotic lizard that eats the spiders and other bugs in the house.

But what would we do if we were suddenly without power for an extended period? Like at least a decade? We've become very dependent on those gadgets. Both of those books dealt with this issue along with that of survival. The most compelling thing about both was: How far will people go to save themselves and their loved ones in a world turned upside down?

And imagine your whole library is on your Kindle. It's the 21st Century version of Twilight Zone's Time Enough at Last with Burgess Meredith.



If your power was cut for a decade or so, what would you miss the most? What would you gain from going without for a while?

And more importantly, would you be an every man for himself coper or would you be organizing the neighborhood?