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Poetry and the key to rewinding the world
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Published: August 31, 2008
MAINSPRING. By Jay Lake. Tor Books. 320 pages. $24.95.
This has to be science fiction; it is too strange and wonderful to fit into any other category. A world postulated runs on clockwork, the Earth follows a brass cogway through the heavens, and the hand of God is visible everywhere. Young Hethor, clockmaker's apprentice in Queen Victoria's port city of New Haven , New England, is about to finish his apprenticeship and take up his work as a Journeyman, when he is visited by the Archangel Gabriel and entrusted with a momentous mission. The mainspring of the world is nearly wound down, and Hethor must find the Key Perilous to set the world's mechanism to rights.
Such a ludicrous synopsis, but Lake, a master of the sci-fi short story, easily transcends disbelief with the sheer poetry of his language, breadth of vision and the precision of detail. This might be magic realism, or realist magic, but in any case Hethor is launched on an epic quest that involves Her Imperial Majesty's ship of the air, "Bassett," the wall around the equator, and assorted monasteries, mages, winged or furred native people and many more wonders.
Although science fiction has become the default paradigm for movies, video games and graphic novels, to the extent that those media are distinct anymore, it still is dismissed by the literati as "that Buck Rogers stuff." That's true even though there have been at least five separate and distinct re-imaginings of the genre since old Buck made his debut in 1926. Literary fiction should have had so many reincarnations, so many genius writers.
There were the original "space operas," written by and for engineers, the dystopian social satires of the 1950s, the "dangerous visions" of the following decade, followed by huge outpourings of feminist, fantasy, and alternative-history works in the past 40 years, each with its own political convictions and followers.
And now? Now, things have gotten complex. The rap used to be, in the '60s, "Now that men have landed on the moon, science fiction is obsolete." That misapprehension turned out to be the starting gun for the next Golden Age of speculative literature. Now that 23 of the top 25 movies of all time are science fiction and fantasy, writers are moving even further out, bending genre and gender with abandon, gay or otherwise.
In a field where the Old Guard is largely composed of 50- and 60-year-old women, the Young Turks in their 30s, male and female, are bringing exquisite literary craft-skills and encyclopedic world-building talents to their appointed task of creating universes for fun and (some small) profit. One can only hope the mass media eventually catch up to these wonderfully creative visionaries.
And Jay Lake is as good a place as any to sample the latest re-creation of the genre. This is a wonderful book; it is full of wonder. The first quarter of the book is sheer poetry; every chance-met stranger rings with the resonance of ancient myth, and even the buildings sing in unknown tongues.
■ Steve Wishnevsky is a writer who lives in Winston-Salem.
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