Devon Monk’s Dead Iron: The Age of Steam is a mash-up urban fantasy-meets-steampunk-meets western. Set in a 19th century Oregon small town facing change as the rail comes closer, Dead Iron is a satisfactorily well-written but by-the-numbers example of how steampunk ought to be written.

In Monk’s formulation, the veil between faery and Earth is very thin, and a mysterious, rare substance called glim enables those blessed with the Gift of Artifice to empower marvelous steam-powered “matics” with force and capacity and will. Monk’s world features mad agents of The Faery King tracking down a banished prince of faery and his dark magics, a college-professor cursed to be a werewolf by a god of an other-than-faery and now turned bounty hunter, and a witch whose only spells are vows and curses, and a chaotic good zombie. Dead Iron is the kitchen sink.

Monk’s prose style is amazing. Every character’s voice is utterly unique, and Monk attunes both grammar and vocabulary chapter by chapter to the needs of the point-of-view character: Bounty Hunter Ceder Hunt is lettered and well-mannered, but brutalized by his curse; witch Mae Lindstrom is simple, home-bound, but determined; the zombie’s thoughts are stuttering, guttering, but driven by a savage force of will. Monk’s language gives every character the room he or she needs to be clear and expressive.

The plot is solid, but predictable. Monk is very good about getting her characters center-stage and setting things in motion. It’s steampunk clockwork, and not a piece is out of place as the chess game goes from opening moves to its explosive ending. She pulls new pieces into the plot smoothly and without raising your sense of disbelief, she lays down foreshadowing with skill and experience.

However, the book is not perfect. The heroes are all too damned Good, the villains too damned Evil, the ordinary townspeople too damned Stupid. Dead Iron‘s morality is pure fairy tale, and none of the main characters really grows much during the course of the book. Each character is led by circumstance and reconcilition with one’s existing values, rather than growth and maturity or avarice and decay, from one scene to the next. They’re all wonderful people, but that’s about it. The book relies on language, likability, and a predictably relentless buildup to the final cinematic confrontation to sell its successor. It works, but just barely.

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The New York times positively gushed about the stories in this book, but I went back to the well of the writer: A story is telling about a person with a crisis, what he or she is willing to do to overcome that crisis, and how she reacts to the success or failure. In Salter’s book, however, there is no overcoming. Nobody ever overcomes their crisis. They just muddle through, tragically.

Salter likes to tell his tales in glimpses. “Cinema” is about a film company falling apart after a big film utterly bombs, everyone involved knew it would suck, especially the scriptwriter, who knew the director and the actors were all wrong for the words he wrote. Salter jumps around, like a cinema verite director himself, point of view here, then there, then over there, never keeping us in place, making us read frantically and nervously. But what we’re getting is anecdotes: These people made a terrible movie, and they live in denial of the consequences. There’s nothing to overcome. They don’t even want to overcome. The writer consoles himself by sleeping with the director’s secretary: that’s as close as the story gets to coherent response to the crisis.

“Dusk” is about a woman dealing with being 46, as Tom Ford described, “Long past that moment when men stopped turning their heads to look at her.” Her husband left her for a younger woman, her son was killed, and in the story her lover announces that he, too, is moving on, and she is at best second-best. But again, the character never once moves to resolve her crisis. She just muddles through.

“Akhnilo” is about a managing ex-alcholic having a nervous breakdown. The main character follows a hallucination into the night, one that the writer describes with breathtaking beauty. In the final paragraph, the story comes crashing down again as he loses that beauty, and the camera suddenly jumps to his daughter, who in one gorgeous sentence reveals all the fear and heartache a child has when a parent wrestles with those kinds of daemons. But again, it’s not a story.

“Foreign Shores” is an insanely Freudian story about an American woman, her attractive Dutch au-pair, and the woman’s strange sexual notions about the au-pair and her six-year-old son, notions which are hightenend when she discovers, by illicitly reading letters, that the au-pair has been recruited by a pornography filmmaker in Germany. But her crisis is about how this beautiful young woman’s life is so interesting while hers is so dull, and by the end of the story… nothing. She seethes and hates, and changes nothing.

All of the stories in Dusk are like that: sad anecdotes about people seeing the world through lenses of ruin and chaos, the ends of days, of careers, of lives. Nothing changes: they just go on, convincted to their eternal withering. The tales are incredibly well-written, and I’ve taken notes, but if I wanted anecdotes I’d read poetry. Maybe that’s how these are meant to be read: as long prose poems, antipaeans to life.

The Stone Gods is science fiction written as an excuse to do whatever the hell she wants, without regard for the reader’s sense of continuity or rationale.  The sense of used furniture is stronger than ever.

Winterson is trying to do too much: she’s trying to tell a love story.  She’s trying to tell a story of ecological disaster.  She’s trying to tell a story about fatalism, and about how fatalism is the only logical attitude to take given Mankind’s tendency to destroy himself.    Individual death is a metaphor for the world’s end– not in an entropic sense, but in a personal one, and an immediate one.

Toward the end of the book her lyricism returns, coupled with some really stupid scenes stolen from the worst post-apocalyptic fiction you could possibly imagine.  Think Shirow’s Appleseed, watched without translation or subtitles, and the author then tries to re-write what she saw as farce.   That’s where it’s going.

But the ending makes me cry because the writing is so good, even if the writer is telling you the character is hallucinating as she dies.   But Winterson makes me cry reliably.  I wouldn’t waste my time reading her “science fiction” ever again.  If you love breathtakingly beautiful writing, check out The World, And Other Places, her collection of short stories.  Each is small, worth your time, and not an insult to your intelligence.

But as I was reading, the love scene started and the characters got into positions and suddenly it turns out, completely unremarked-upon before this, that the woman in the story is black.  I was at first annoyed by this revelation: how did the idiot author let the story get this far along before dropping this little bombshell?  And then I recalled, annoying myself further, that that had been part of the point of the damn series.  Bombshells like that were the fun stuff of the Journal Entries.   I had enjoyed tweaking the audience by doing exactly that: dropping in details that the characters themselves wouldn’t have cared about until it mattered, not bothering to announce the color of another character’s skin as an identifier but rather as a source of pleasure, an aesthetic quality independent of personality, or culture, or expectation.  I was pleased to note that the trick had worked.

Then I became further annoyed with myself for feeling tweaked by my previous self.  I wonder what other annoyances I’ll have to grind away at in the future, to get back to my former egalitarian gorgeous self?

Meanwhile, down in Vaginaland, Mr Condom’s beginning to feel a bit iffy. He’s overheating. For some reason, the shagging seems to be twice as fast this evening, and he grimaces as he gets flung willy-nilly in and out of the pink tunnel. He starts getting friction burns, hanging onto Bobby’s stiff penis for dear life, headbutting Georgie’s cervix at 180 beats per minute. ‘Help me!’ he yells in the darkness, feeling himself melting. The sex only seems to be getting faster though, and Mr Condom squeezes his eyes shut as Bobby groans and the friction starts getting unbearable and Mr Condom thinks he’s going to be sick and the searing pain the searing pain and Bobby groans again and suddenly squirts a gallon of white molten lava from his Jap’s eye, exploding through Mr Condom’s heavy reservoir end and Mr Condom screams and screams and vomits ice cream into Georgie’s vagina. Shivering and spasming, Bobby suddenly feels the endorphins kick in and he falls onto the carpet with a happy bump.

Somewhere in the middle of the book he drops this gem:

Writer’s block is never because you cannot come up with an idea.  Writer’s block is when the story that wants to come out is blocked by the part of you anxious that it will be too personal and will reveal the truth: that you, like everyone else, are not quite so sane and secure as you pretend.

Put that on a post-it note and keep it next to your writing desk.  The next time you have writer’s block, feel a little shame that you’re not quite courageous enough to tell the truth.

And that’s what disappoints me most about Matter. It feels phoned-in. A phoned-in Iain M. Banks novel is still infinite worlds better than 90% of the dross on the shelves, but when you pay for a Banks novel, you kinda expect… more. Matter feels like a mortgage payment.

The plotline is a bit meandering. There are two basic threads: the first involves a complex and long-abandoned-by-its-owners vast artificial world, to which an aggressive quasi-medieval civilizations was brought some centuries before by the Culture or one of its agents, in the hopes that the enormous distances between civilizations would give each a chance to grow and mature peacefully. This doesn’t really work; the Sarl, as these medievalists are known, immediately make deals with their overseer aliens (whom they’re aware exist), who are themselves client species of a more advanced species, and there’s another species above them, all working in stifling bureaucratic layers to keep the peace. The Sarl’s deal with the Oct allows them to invade a far distant land of the artificial world where an ancient enemy hides, and the end result is war. In the midst of war, a treason emerges, a king is murdered, and a prince flees for his life.

Meanwhile, in another part of the galaxy, a young woman is undergoing Special Circumstances training. SC is the part of the Culture assigned to deal with unusual first contact situations, often those involving the use of force. She is also a princess, a daughter of the murdered king, traded away in some obscure political deal, and has long ago become a creature of the Culture. She learns that her father was killed, presumably in battle according to all accounts, and heads home for his funeral. These two threads: the prince fleeing his world, and the princess heading back, converge. Banks attempts a moment of awesome, but it falls flat: anyone who’s ever read an X-Men comic knows what’s coming next, and sadly it’s a “It’s the Culture, you poor humans can’t possibly understand how it works” Marvel comics handwave that strides into the final, rather ordinary battle scene.

If you love Iain M. Banks’s work (and I do), you’ll pay your money anyway. He really is a master of the vast, creative settings into which to toss his characters. And often his characters are interesting in themselves. But Matter is a long way from the heady, glory days when we fans were all learning about the culture, and nowadays something about it all seems forced. Iain ought to write in other universes, and leave the Culture to whirl on, remembered for its greatness, and not reduced to a petty background setting for Spaceways-like fantasies.

After all, that’s what the Pendorverse is for.

Actually, Iain, no, it’s not cool. Superstructures are old hat, as are abandoned giant manufactured worlds, even ones that occasionally kill you. I’m sure you’ll do something interesting with your usual mix of characters, ending with some wry observation on human nature that may or may not be completely off base, and possibly attempting to reach for some crowning moment of awesome that quite possibly will leave some of your audience starstruck and the rest of us going, “Yeah, that was almost as good as Karl Schroeder dropping a house off the edge of a ringworld in Lady of Mazes.”

Anyway, Matter feels like a classic Banks chess game: lining up all his pieces and then playing them off one against the other, kings, queens, knights, bishops, and pawns. I’ll read it all the way through, I’m sure. Banks’s literatary skills are good, honed so sharp even a formulaic Culture novel can survive being formulaic. The info dump is heralded by four pages of a dialog between two aliens in which just enough is revealed to make you want to read the infodump just so you’ll know what the hell those two are talking about, and followed by the characters resuming their conversation as if any listeners were now fully educated, although with some foreshadowing so painfully obvious it had better red herring in the end.

Also, last night I have the nastiest, dirtiest, most repulsive “How can I fuck with the character’s mind” moments I’ve had in years. It makes the situation on Discovery ever more dire, it puts the Linia character into a tailspin of self-analysis and reproof, and it does a better job of getting Chelle and Nooj into the relationship I want. All the better.

The book is set in the era of Melville, of whaling and whale ships. We have our hero, Jonah, a merchant marine captain famous among captains for his sea knowledge and his never having lost a crewman. We have our heroine, Marianne, a recently widowed sea captain’s wife who can’t quite bring herself to mourn the end of her functional but loveless marriage.

Huxman starts off with a pair of interesting foreshadowings. The first is when Jonah touches shore on Cape Cod:

Then he began to move and a path opened before him. He heard snatches of whispered conversations eddy in his wake. He’d always heard them.

“Jonah, bad luck name for a sailor, mate….”
“Never lost a ship or cargo to storm, heard tell….”

“Swims like a fish….”

Jonah grimaced at that one. The truest of the lot, yet no man had ever seen him swim. If he had, Jonah would have lost his foothold in this world.

My first reaction when reading that, and probably not what the author intended, is, “Oh, interesting. A ship’s captain who can’t swim.”

Of Marianne, we learn of her childhood:

Her home had been in the hills of Jamaica, the ocean visible but distant. It had called to her as a child. She’d begged to be allowed to visit it. Her papa, who shared her sea-green eyes, finally allowed a visit. Her nanny had strict orders to keep Marianne dry, but the child had been too fascinated to heed the woman’s calls. She’d plunged into the waves wide eyed. She swam as if made for the water, and when they finally were able to pull her out, she remembered crying for hours.

That had been her one and only trip to the beach as a child.

So now the set-up seems obvious, if a bit of role-reversed. Jonah is a hard-charging sea captain who can’t swim, and Marianne is a lonely woman who’s been denied her love of the sea by social mores. This is a pretty formulaic setup and every romance writer knows what to do next: Let’s put these two in a small space together and see what happens.

What happens is fail.

First, an aside: show, don’t tell. Even worse, don’t show, then tell. Don’t do this:

Marianne had never been one to sit around idle. Her books did not intrigue her as they generally did. Her knitting and crocheting were nothing more than games to keep her hands busy. In short, she was lonely and bored, and didn’t much like herself for either feeling.

“In short, reader, I think you’re too much of an idiot, and I’m too lazy a writer, to type out a few paragraphs showing Marianne’s frustration with her idleness and isolation, so I’ll just tatter off a sentence or two and then tell you the rest.”

Back to the fail. It’s pretty simple to illustrate. After a paragraph or two in which Jonah contemplates the dolphins riding in the ship’s wake, Huxman drops this anvil on us:

He stared out the portholes and considered. His time in the world of men was almost over. He must return home before the moon was full again, or never return at all. His father, the king, was anxious for Jonah to marry and fulfill his duties to the throne. Though the Mer people were long-lived as compared to human lifetimes, they did have finite lives. Dynasties depended upon princes like Jonah to propagate and secure the throne.

Oh, good grief: Jonah’s the Prince of the Merpeople!

Note: I don’t think that’s a bad schtick. Forbidden romances with supernatural creatures is a perfectly fine set-up for formula romance.

What’s wrong with this paragraph is how Huxman info-dumps this overwhelmingly major factoid right in the middle. She blows the mystery, the suspense, and just about everything interesting about Jonah in that weak mid-paragraph sentence starting, “The Mer people…”, as if she were tentative about introducing this idea that Jonah was from Beneath The Sea to the reader.

There were so many other ways to go about this. She could have done it in chapter two, Jonah’s first chapter, and made the tension about how Jonah goes about reconciling his more-than-human conflicts; she could have done it in chapter five, when the ship is wrecked and the now much fishier Jonah has to rescue her, and the tension becomes how Marianne deals with this revelation just when she was starting to feel feminine again, especially toward him.

Huxman gives us only one major tension in the first half of the book: will they or won’t they? Well of course they will: it’s a goddamned romance novel. It’s the rest of the revelations about character that make a romance novel interesting, and Huxman just drives past one opportunity after another, missing each one and moving on, hoping you won’t notice before she gets to the boink.