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Filter House (work-in-progress), ink on cut paper, product packaging, map pins, 96" X 63" X 6"
For some reason my fiction-reading lately has all been in the "chain mail and microchips" genre. What the hell's that? Stories set in pre-industrial times but rife with technology. For example, Brian Aldiss' recently republished Helliconia Trilogy, which I avoided in the '80s when The Multi-Volume Series Taking Place on One Imaginary World invaded science fiction. I should have known that British new-waver Aldiss's version would be slightly twisted, and it is. His characters just don't behave rationally! Helliconia is a planet in a binary star system; it experiences a "small year" (about as long as one of our years) as it revolves around Star A, and a Great Year, as Star A revolves around the much bigger, hotter Star B. The latter year lasts a couple of millennia and goes from the climate extremes of a centuries-long winter to a shorter, severely scorching summer. Humans have evolved on the planet, but they must share it with an older race, called Phagors, who resemble minotaurs. The Phagors dominate in winter and the humans rule in summer, but because of the climate extremes the technology of neither species gets far past that of, say, Renaissance Europe. However, orbiting the planet, a permanent Earth station monitors and records everything that happens on Helliconia. If you think there might be a mass mingling of Earthlings and Helliconians at some point, forget it: when terrestrials visit the planet's surface a virus kills them within days. So, imagine a combination of Lord of the Rings (swords and sorcery), Thomas Hardy (tortured romance), the last hour of AI (the movie, that is, based on Aldiss's short story) and Hothouse (an earlier Aldiss novel with a richly-imagined ecosystem). As befits the experimentalism of '60s new wave sf, the story mostly consists of frustrating anticlimaxes, but I enjoyed being marooned for several months in this strange, barbaric environment.
Before Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke, Japanese animator Hayao Miyazake produced a four-volume graphic novel called Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (there's also a much different film version). Set in the distant future, the story takes place after we Earthings have screwed the planet beyond recognition. Much of the globe is covered by a toxic, insect-ridden ecosystem called the Sea of Corruption. Bits of old machinery and biotech still exist, used as leverage by the surviving humans, who are factionalized and warring as always. Pessimistically written and beautifully drawn, the only thing wrong with this volume is the size of the reproductions: tiny pictures make the book's convoluted post-apocalyptic politics even harder to follow. Lastly, I'm midway through Michael Swanwick's fascinating tome The Iron Dragon's Daughter, and thoroughly enjoying it. In this weird universe, magic exists side by side with advanced war materiel and cybernetics. Elves are a distant, snooty upperclass, lording it over a hoi polloi of dwarves, giants, trolls, meryons, and assorted feys and sprites. Dragons are dangerous weapons of war made of metal but activated by reciting spells. The protagonist is a human girl named Jane, who steals a dragon named Melanchthon, tries to get her doctorate in alchemy, and...that's as far as I've gotten.