Katharine Kerr: Snare (2003)

Edition: Voyager, 2004
Review number: 1296

Katharine Kerr has long been an author I have enjoyed reading. She is best known for her long running Deverry series, which is basically standard fantasy, albeit well written and with some nice individual touches. I think that her other books, closer to science fiction, are more interesting, but now Snare brings that inventiveness back to a new fantasy world. (A slight caveat about what I've just said - this is fantasy with a fairly remote science fiction background, like Anne McCaffrey's Pern or Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover.)

The world of Snare is divided between four main groups, three human and one native to the planet. To begin with, we seem to be in fairly standard genre territory - the groupings appear to be loosely based on Earth history, with a Persian-like civilization opposed to barbarian steppe nomads. The Great Khan has become corrupt, ruthlessly destroying any threat to his power; at the start of the novel, a small group of cavalry offices set off across the steppe to find the only remaining survivor from the ruling family, who escaped the Khan's murderers. Then invent an excuse (investigating a business opportunity), but fail to allay the Khan's suspicions: he sends one of the Chosen (his secret police force) after them. So far, so similar to innumerable other novels. But soon things become, by almost imperceptible steps, different.

This is achieved through good writing. Most fantasy is pretty melodramatic, featuring a cast of heroes ranged against an unspeakable but one-dimensional evil (this of course follows Tolkien's example: orcs are not characterised beyond being vulgar and unpleasant members of a horde). By building the characters properly, by giving them realistic motivations, Kerr makes the reader simpathise equally with the Chosen and with those he hunts. Very little fantasy makes a credible attempt to humanise both opposing sides, and to do so necessitates something else unusual about Snare, which is that the situation is made more complex than a straightforward black and white division between good and evil. She does this by introducing interactions with the other groups already mentioned, who naturally have their own agendas. Her acheivement is not just unusual within the fantasy genre; very little fiction tries to make the reader sympathise with those who work for evil masters, no matter what the justifications they make for their actions.

Though as long in itself as many fantasy trilogies of earlier years, Snare is truly a standalone novel, as it amounts to a journey of discovery - both generally, as much of the hidden past of the planet is revealed, and for the individual characters. This is Katherine Kerr's trademark construction, and gives her novels a depth which is unusual in writing that seems to be typical of the fantasy genre, because her characters develop as they make discoveries, and the nature of their quest itself changes as a result. This complex novel is a top class piece of fantasy.

Katharine Kerr: Freezeframes (1994)

Edition: HarperCollins, 1994 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 819

The Faust legend is the inspiration for this science fiction novel. It begins in the sixties, when a middle aged professor at a minor university sells his soul to the devil for a younger body and takes up a new life as a drug dealer in the San Francisco hippie culture. His story is quite a straightforward version of the legend; it is the role of the virtuous Margaret that he meets in California which forms the main part of the novel. The devil, in the form of student Nick Harrison, wants to destroy Margaret, but is unable to; when she becomes pregnant, he thinks he has won, but she just points out that this is the nineteen sixties and has the child. From this point, the novel consists of a series of episodes in the lives of Margaret's descendants as Nick tries to attack them. The longest is the previously published novella Resurrection, about Margaret's great granddaughter Tiffany. This has a paranoid plot like a Philip K. Dick story: Tiffany is recovering from a few moments of clinical death when she begins to realise that she is no longer in the same reality as that in which she grew up.

The episodes which make up Freezeframes are perhaps a little too disjointed for it to feel that it is a unified whole, but its main problem is that it has too many ideas. The best of these is the concept of the devil undertaking a personal vendetta against Maggie's family in a world which barely believes in him, but we also have telepathic contact by alien invaders and alternate worlds (both favourites of Dick). The main stories are interesting in themselves, and the novel is well written, but it remains unsatisfying.

Katharine Kerr & Kate Daniel: Polar City Nightmare (2000)

Edition: Gollancz, 2000
Review number: 773

Unlike Palace, Katharine Kerr's previous collaboration, Polar City Nightmare follows on from her earlier solo novel Polar City Blues. Instead of an entirely new scenario, the background and characters are already in existence. This made it harder to believe the claim at the begging (also made in Palace) that this is an "old-fashioned collaboration" in which both partners play a major part, as opposed to the well known author merely lending her name and a little guidance for a novel based on a well known one of her own, as seems to be increasingly common in the genre.

Polar City Nightmare is in fact a direct sequel to Polar City Blues. The Republic of which the planet Hagar is a part continues its precarious existence as a small state between two enormous superpowers. Once again, a problem arises with one of their embassies, this time when a junior attaché and an irreplaceable cultural relic go missing. Once more Bobbie Lacey reluctantly assists the police investigation with her psychic partner Jack Mulligan. In this novel the stakes are higher; the other major difference is that baseball plays a much larger part.

By being such a novel, Polar City Nightmare reads as though Kerr were sole author, though it does lack something of the spark of its predecessor. That may be due to the part played by the sport, which limits the novel's appeal to one who is not American and is not particularly a lover of any kind of sport. Polar City Nightmare is diminished a little by this, but it remains well written, exciting, and an interesting portrayal of the future.

One interesting point, shared with the earlier novel, is made by Kerr in her introductory note. As she says, in most fiction - and, really, in most Western fiction - it is the intention of the author that, unless explicitly stated, the race of a character should be assumed to be white. Here, the opposite holds, and race relationships are generally a mirror image of late twentieth century America - whites in crime ridden ghettos, black and Hispanic people in most positions of power. That this assumption is made by readers (and that it is expected by authors) is a sad reflection on our culture, and is probably a consequence of an unequal distribution of education and prosperity - more white people have jobs which leave time and energy to read novels. It is effectively the same point made in Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, and it is a pity that it can still be made. (I suspect that a lack of black TV and film stars of both sexes also contributes to the way that characters in novels are imagined.) I should note that the background to Ursula le Guin's earlier Earthsea novels makes the same assumptions about race as Kerr does here.

Katharine Kerr & Mark Kreighbaum: Palace (1996)

Edition: Voyager, 1996
Review number: 259

At a time when many well-known science fiction authors seem to be putting their creations on the market for exploitation by new writers (books based on Isaac Asimov's robot stories or set in the universe of Anne McCaffrey's The Ship Who Sang spring to mind), Palace seems to be an unusual, old-fashioned collaboration. Here, the more famous author and the newcomer claim equal shares. The resulting novel is itself evidence that backs this claim; the prose generally is reminiscent of Kerr's solo writing (particularly of Polar City Blues), with distinct touches of another style - though to my mind Kreighbaum's influence is perhaps clearer in the background.

Palace is set in a large city (the name is a corruption of Polis), on a planet in the Pinch, a sector of space colonised many years ago by four of the intelligent species of the galaxy. Since then, they have lost contact with the Colonizers and suffered a considerable loss of technological knowledge - particularly following the religious Schism Wars, during which attacks were made on the artificial intelligences considered blasphemous by some groups.

Following a more recent war, racial tension is high in Palace between humans and the lizard-like Leps. Groups in both species are trying to exploit these feelings for political gain, and this is the volatile situation at the start of the novel.

The physical events are paralleled by a series of attacks on the Map, the computer network which holds together the worlds of the Pinch. It is accessed through virtual reality devices implanted directly in technicians' bodies or through public terminals scattered throughout the city. The destruction of equipment and loss of knowledge during and since the Schism Wars gives a plausible explanation of why the computer equipment is not a great deal more sophisticated than that we see today; the existence of a Cyberguild keeping its trade esoteric to maintain its monopoly explains which the natural language capabilities of the machines are sophisticated in some areas, weak in others (Unix terms turn up occasionally, for example). The technological ideas are those that have been current in much of the cyberpunk sub-genre; many being found in that archetypal cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer. I rather liked the term "Map" as an alternative to "Net" or, worse, "infohighway".

To say that I found the relationship between the background of Palace and other science fiction of the past two decades interesting is not to deny the quality of the novel, which is considerable.