David Drake is known first and foremost for his importance to the field of military science fiction, and many of his recent books have been space opera or heroic fantasy.  However, many of Drake’s early publications were in the horror genre, often influenced by the classic pulp fantasy, horror, and “weird fiction” of writers like H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and Manly Wade Wellman.

Balefires: Tales of The Weird and Fantastic contains 24 of Drake’s fantasy and horror stories.  The emphasis is on Drake’s early work from the 1960s and ’70s, but the stories included span almost three decades.  A few have previously appeared in the David Drake collections released by Baen Books, but many have been largely unavailable since the 1960s or 1970s.

The settings are quite diverse.  Several of the stories, drawing on Drake’s own experiences, involve American troops in the Vietnam War.  Drake’s interest in history also frequently comes to the fore, with a number of stories stories set in Viking Age Scandinavia, the Roman Empire, or other eras.  There are also a number of stories set in contemporary America (including one about 30 miles from my home, which I got a kick out of.)  Some of the stories are clearly influenced by cosmic horror in the vein of Lovecraft or Howard.  Others portray evils on a more human scale, and a few stories are more in the mode of heroic fantasy, albeit of a very dark sort.  The one anomaly is “A Land of Romance,” a fun, light-hearted story written in tribute to influential SF writer L. Sprague de Camp.

Drake’s talent for depicting intense, furious action manifests itself a number of times, but the dominant mood of many of the stories is not visceral terror but a relentless feeling of cold.   Horror that draws its atmosphere from the idea of a pitiless, uncaring universe beyond human comprehension is quite common thanks to the popularity and influence of H.P. Lovecraft, but Drake does it better than most, and the effect is quite chilling.  (Among other things, I think Drake’s relatively austere writing style, which is highly evocative while remaining very straightforward, is generally better-suited to this sort of bleak tone than the more ornate style often associated with Lovecraftian horror.)

Despite the cosmic horror aspects, however, much of what is horrifying in the stories is more personal in nature.  As is the case of in much of Drake other work (most notably his military SF),  the most terrifying things arise from human psychology- the psychological devastation left by trauma and violence, what suffering and brutality can twist people into, the dulling of emotion and conscience, and the things that  human beings will do, condone,  or become.

In addition, each story has a short preface written by Drake about how the story came about and the idea behind it.  These provide some very interesting information about various stages in Drake’s career, as well as some of the influences that have shaped his work- growing up in Iowa, classic science fiction and fantasy, his military service in Vietnam, and his love of Classical history and literature.  It’s quite interesting for the insights it gives on Drake’s work, as well as his thoughts on horror fiction more generally and his first-hand accounts of what the field was like in the 1960’s and 70’s.

All in all, Balefires is a great collection of stories and an intriguing look at David Drake’s roots.  I would enthusiastically recommend it for anyone who is a fan of Drake’s work, and for anyone who enjoys horror and dark fantasy.

Stories collected in Balefires:

The Red Leer
A Land of Romance
Smokie Joe
Awakening
Denkirch
The False Prophet
Black Iron
The Shortest Way
Lord of the Depths
Children of the Forest
The Barrow Troll
Than Curse the Darkness
The Song of the Bone
The Master of Demons
The Dancer in the Flames
Firefight
Best of Luck
Arclight
Something Had to be Done
The Elf House
The Hunting Ground
The Automatic Rifleman
Blood Debt
Men Like Us

I virtually never buy new hardcover fiction books; I read too many books to pay $20+ for one very often. I have made exceptions, however, and Alastair Reynolds is a rare case where I’ve made an exception more than once. The Prefect makes me glad I did.

The Prefect is a return to Reynolds’ best known creation, the “Revelation Space” universe. It takes place in the orbital habitats around the world of Yellowstone- but this is not the decaying, technologically ravaged Rust Belt seen in previous novels. Set a century before previous books in the Revelation Space universe, before the time of the catastrophic Melding Plague that killed millions and left much advanced technology unusable, The Prefect reveals the time of the Glitter Band, when ten thousand human habitats orbited Yellowstone, bearing within them one hundred million human beings enjoying a standard of living that would have seemed godlike to those born after the time of the Plague.

The ten thousand habitats of the Glitter Band are joined together by the Demarchy, a government based on the ultimate form of direct democracy. (Reynolds here uses the term “Demarchy” in something like the sense it was used by John Burnheim and especially Joan Vinge, rather than Friedrich Hayek’s slightly older use of the word.) Each citizen carries neural implants in his head that continuously interact with the computer polling core of his habitat, allowing instant access to affairs of state. Individual habitats largely run their own affairs, creating a stunning variety of different societies. Protecting the people of the Glitter Band is a law enforcement agency called Panoply, charged with policing the Demarchy as a whole.

The main character of the story is Panoply Field Prefect Tom Dreyfus. Years ago Dreyfus lost his wife to the Clockmaker, an experiment in artificial intelligence that went disastrously and murderously awry, and he remains plagued by odd memories of her that he can’t understand. Now his work is his life. His services are called upon when it is discovered that Ruskin-Sartorious, a small habitat on the edge of the Glitter Band, has been destroyed along with all its inhabitants, torn open by a force of staggering destructive power. The evidence points to the Conjoiner drive of a lighthugger ship, powerful enough to propel the huge vessels of the space-going Ultras to near-light speed- and powerful enough to tear a human habitat apart, if it’s pointed the wrong way. Tension between the Ultras and the Glitter Band begins to build, raising the specter of war or economic collapse while, within Panoply itself, a highly placed traitor conspires with an enigmatic being called Aurora.

The Prefect is a great book and a worthy addition to the world of Revelation Space. The central mystery of why Ruskin-Sartorious was destroyed is compelling, budding off more and more intriguing questions as the story progresses. The Glitter Band itself is a fascinating creation that Reynolds explores, a place with nearly unlimited possibilities for the wondrous and strange. Reynolds’ talent for the horrifying frequently comes to the forefront, and he merges it seamlessly with the story’s science fiction core. The book manages to successfully combine science fiction, action, mystery, and horror in barely more than 400 pages, and makes it all work together.

Though part of a much larger fictional universe, The Prefect works extremely well as a stand-alone story, set as it is in an era not previously shown directly. The book does reference things from other stories- the Transmigration and the Eighty, Exordium, Lascaille’s Shroud- but these are explained to the extent necessary in The Prefect as well. Readers with knowledge of other Reynolds works will be rewarded with a few new insights into events and characters from other stories, but this knowledge is not at all necessary to enjoy the book. It may also be a good introduction for a reader new to Alastair Reynolds because the story is comparatively constrained in scope, taking place around a single planet over a fairly brief time period rather than the light-years of space and decades of time often encompassed by other Reynolds books. The book is also much less dependent on theoretical physics or cosmology than many of Reynolds’ books; this, combined with the book’s incorporation of multiple genres, might also make it a good choice for someone new to science fiction in general.

As is often the case in Reynolds’ work, there’s an effective element of horror in the story. It isn’t as pronounced as in some of the other Revelation Space books- there’s nothing in the book as disturbing or chilling as Reynolds’ novella Diamond Dogs, for instance (but then, there’s virtually nothing in the last 2,500 years of Western literature as disturbing and creepy as Diamond Dogs)- but it is a presence nevertheless. The gradual revelation of the true nature of the threat faced by the Glitter Band is effectively disturbing and creepy. The Clockmaker is an especially powerful creation, and Reynolds manages to make it horrifying even offstage, simply by its aftereffects and characters’ references to it. Reynolds also does a nice job of taking something unpleasant but fairly mundane- insomnia- and giving it a science fiction twist that makes it a much more disturbing idea.

The book also delivers nicely purely on the level of speculation. The hyperdemocratic Demarchy is a fascinating society, and Reynolds delves into in interesting ways- for instance, showing how a polity with no distinct legislature and virtually no executive arm makes minute-to-minute decisions during a crisis. Reynolds takes the reader to a variety of the Glitter Band’s diverse societies, from relatively mundane places to a community of live disembodied heads to the bizarre Voluntary Tyrannies.

The Prefect is another winner from Reynolds and further establishes him as one of the most enjoyable writers in modern space opera and hard science fiction. I’d highly recommend this book to any science fiction fan, and to anyone curious about the genre as well.

There’s a good post by Mike Brotherton at Science Fiction and Fantasy Novelists arguing against the idea of a dichotomy between fantasy and science fiction, in which fantasy supposedly is (or should) be about things that are not amenable to rational analysis. I’ve never agreed with the idea, which I hear from time to time, that fantasy and magic become less fantastical or magical if they follow rationally explicable rules. Aside from the fact that a truly unscientific world would probably be incomprehensible to minds built for a causal, rule-governed universe, it’s bad for the narrative- you can’t have drama without constraints on what the characters can do, and the characters can’t have constraints if just anything can happen. (This is known in literary theory as the “Superman Just Invents New Powers Out of Nowhere Every Five Minutes” problem.)

A rather large caveat: just because phenomena follow rules doesn’t mean they need to be explained, necessarily. H.P. Lovecraft was a materialist who expressed that worldview in his fiction- his monsters and “gods” were generally beings with unimaginable technology or subject to alternate physical laws, but not “supernatural” in the sense of being apart from the material universe. Nevertheless, Lovecraft did not go into much detail- we don’t learn just what the Colour Out of Space was, or how Cthulu’s biology allowed him to survive being rammed by a boat, or why the Great Old Ones can only awake when the stars are right, and we’d probably sink into gibbering lunacy if we tried to fit that knowledge into our brains. There’s nothing wrong with leaving things unexplained, or even saying that some things in the story are beyond the capability of humans to ever understand. But they should be in principle understandable, even if not from a human perspective. This approach also calls for some caution, since “this fictional world is a place where some things are beyond our comprehension” can degenerate into “stuff happens for no reason aside from the author writing himself into a corner” if care is not taken.

Even a supernatural, animistic universe is potentially amenable to scientific analysis, though perhaps without the rigor of physics. If earthquakes are what happens when the land spirits quarrel with each other, a knowledge of plate tectonics won’t help you predict earthquakes- but studying how the land spirits think and interact might. That would be quite an interesting setting, actually- a world where humans understand and control nature not through the hard physical sciences, but through psychology and sociology. If someone wants to go to the trouble of writing an entire book about it and then give me half the money for the thirty seconds of work I contributed, knock yourself out. And, more conventionally, fantasy magic is rule-based- say certain words or perform a certain ritual or whatever and get a certain effect, even if the actual mechanism is not understood.

More subjectively and personally, with a very few exceptions (such as some horror stories, where the unknown nature of the horror makes it scarier) I’ve never understood the idea that explaining something makes it less interesting or less impressive. The little glowy thingamabobs in the night sky are pretty, but knowing that they’re colossal nuclear reactors putting out enough energy to be seen trillions of miles away makes them much cooler, and in general the night sky is more sublime when you have a sense of the true scale of it. I’ve spent over a year childishly infatuated with a woman working at my neighborhood bar, which is pretty damn stupid, but my excitement when she stops to talk with me and my inane attempts to amuse her with my horrible jokes and patented Guinness Mustache embarrass me slightly less when I think of how the flood of phenylethylamine in my brain that turns me into a mumbling idiot around her is an adaptation forged over millennia of evolution that promotes the survival of the human species. (I acknowledge that this is not a terribly romantic sentiment.)

Brotherton also hits one of my pet peeves- stories where the skeptical “scientist” character keeps insisting that blatantly supernatural events must have a mundane explanation, no matter how untenable the notion becomes in the face of mounting evidence. To be fair, a certain amount of this is probably realistic- people don’t give up a strongly held view of the world easily. It often gets taken to ridiculous lengths, though.

It’s especially annoying if the character lives in a fantastical world and has been frequently exposed to supernatural events in the past, yet once again becomes a dogmatic materialist every time another clearly supernatural phenomenon comes along. “Look, I know we’ve previously encountered vampires, werewolves, nymphs, Goetic demons, leprechauns, the Wandering Jew, valkyries, the prophet Elijah, tengu, nephilim, the Spear of Longinus, Satan, our own time-traveling past life incarnations, and the entire Aztec pantheon. But the idea that ghosts might be real is just absurd!”

Update: Edited to fix a typo.