While the world-building is magnificent, the other elements of the novel -- plot, characters, themes -- are less substantial or compelling. An enjoyable read. ( )

http://bactra.org/weblog/algae-2021-09.html#mcauley ( )

http://bactra.org/weblog/algae-2021-09.html#mcauley ( )

Bit by bit McAuley lays out the setting of a gigantic world in the far future with technology forgotten or rediscovered, and ties it together with with an ex-lawman's hunt for his nemesis. There's a methodical stoic tone throughout, with perhaps too much seriousness to make one love the characters. But it's an engrossing work and meticulously imagined. The best set pieces work very well, there's throwaway details that conjure up whole settings and societies, but much of it is shaped by the obsessive and stubborn lens of its protagonist. ( )

Every time I finish reading one of McAuley’s novels I get the distinct impression he is channeling Vance, and I say this in the most respectful way. I’m not sure whether I can explain this any better. I think Jack Vance is still the most underrated writer given that he was very influential in a general cultural way through the Dungeons and Dragons route as well as on fantasy and SF (The Dying Earth books and the Planet of Adventure books). That's quite aside from his ability to create whole worlds in just a few, albeit often ornate, sentences. He's second to none in that respect. Well, in my mind McAuley has stepped into Vance’s shoes so to speak.

McAuley is a peerless creator of genuinely unearthly mindscapes. “The Quiet War” series, whilst wonderful and much more thouroghly developed, owes a fair amount of basic inspiration to Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique, (not a book so much as a setting for a number of his short stories) also set at the end of time amid feuding magicians and a red sun (if I recall correctly). Smith was a poet who wrote horror/fantasy during the depression to make ends meet, his prose is highly stylised and may be hard to take for some contemporary readers (though not to the same extent as Hodgson's “The Night Land”- I would recommend anyone interest in but unfamiliar with Hodgson's trying his classic “House on the Borderland” first), but will be enjoyably different for others.

Much modern SF suffers from a need to be perceived as dark, and combined with a desire to out-epic the competition it's led to something of a sameness in the huge-number-of-mutilated-dead count, tougher-than-the-last-tough-guy hyperinflation, and characters flawed by their amorality or brutality. McAuley maintains a personal scale, even through world-changing events (though his worlds always have a sparseness to them - rarely any heaving multitudes), and his characters are flawed by their vulnerabilities. There's darkness aplenty - I find more horror in his themes of erasure or corruption of identity than in how many hundreds of thousands of anonymous bodies line roads to cities (Baker, Martin, etc.). This approach pays dividends in McAuley’s mastery of character development. His books follow anything but an expected path - unexpected events shape characters in entirely unforeseen ways, and while that can lead to great emotional investment on the part of the reader, McAuley can also be bruisingly unsentimental.

“War of the Maps” clearly shows McAuley is one of the very few worth reading now. McAuley is one of the most influential of SF masters with a chilling ability to hide cruelty and horror behind an amusing or bizarre phrase. McAuley, at his best, is a very good genre writer: which is not to say that genre writers can't be as good as (if not better than) their literary counterparts - but they have not been taken as seriously, which is true even now. Folk finding McAuley’s “War of the Maps” to be overwritten just proves what sort of literary world we now inhabit: Orwell's plain English has come back to bite us on our collective arse, and we can no longer cope with sentences with sub-clauses, or paragraphs full of metaphor via elision. Oh well. It's just that when folk actually write stuff like "The Game of Thrones" is the best fantasy ever written, I have to assume that they haven't read much to compare it to, genre fantasy or otherwise.

SF = Speculative Fiction. ( )