New York Review of Books Review

THERE'S A MOMENT early in Robert Jackson Bennett's CITY OF STAIRS (Broadway, paper, $15) when one of its lead characters loses an otherwise mundane suspect during a chase through the streets of a city. The suspect runs along a chasm - yes, in the middle of a dense neighborhood - then leaps off a rooftop. Although his pursuer searches for the body, it gradually becomes clear the man has vanished not through trickery but through divine intervention. Until this point, Bennett's novel is an interesting but not especially riveting exploration of fallen empire and political intrigue. The city of Bulikov was once the seat of a superpower spanning the Continent, which went on to conquer the rest of the world. Bulikov's weapon was its Divinities: literal, incarnate gods who wielded phenomenal power on the Continent's behalf. When Bulikov's Divinities were killed, however, the oppressed rose against their oppressors, and now Bulikov has become a resentful colony to one of its former vassal states, Saypur. The people of the Continent suffered much in this reversal - and so, generations later, when the Saypuri master spy Shara Thivani arrives in the city to investigate a murder, she finds a hotbed of colonial politics and historico-religious echoes, all set against a memorably surreal urbanscape. That urbanscape is the best part of this essentially setpiece novel, and it's what makes the whole thing worth reading. The book is labeled epic fantasy, but there's no hint of staid European medievalism in its pages, and its root cultures are (refreshingly) secondary-world variants of czarist Russia and Mughal India. Bulikov is an ancient city trying to reinvent itself amid the ruins of its past, and it is very much a character in its own right. The city teems with leftover magic, warped and decaying from its heyday: walls that aren't quite real, endless twisting stairways to nowhere, shifting monuments to forgotten heroes. Bulikov is old, and it is mad, in multiple senses of the word. Despite its current squalor, it remembers the glory days, and wants that glory again - but old glory recreated, or new, modern glory? All of the novel's characters seek to answer this question in their own ways. The espionage and police-procedural components are the story's least interesting, which is frustrating because they make up its bulk. Thivani is another weak point. Her back story is enlivened by her lifelong friendship and rivalry with Vohannes Votrov, a dissolute Continental aristocrat, and by her more enigmatic relationship with Sigrud, the Viking-like barbarian who works, and kills, for her - but while these side characters make her more interesting by their reflected quirkiness, Thivani herself never quite leaps off the page. She is instead a cipher, evading the reader's eyes and wits as she delves into the city's deeply strange secrets. Those secrets are more than interesting enough to carry the tale all by themselves, however, so readers seeking a truly refreshing fantasy milieu should travel to Bulikov, and welcome its conquest. It's puzzling, at first, that Peyton Marshall's GOODHOUSE (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26), set in a dystopian America, isn't being marketed as a young adult novel. After all, it focuses on the travails of a teenage boy trying to find his place in society, and it contains any number of metaphors for a young person's struggle against oppressive parental authority. The author's pedigree partly explains the book's classification as mainstream fiction: A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Marshall has an impressive list of mainstream short story credits. Yet the average reader isn't likely to care about her education, and the book is stock Hollywood bait. Why not position it where it can gain the largest possible audience and maybe a movie deal? It's soon evident that "Goodhouse" is perhaps too stock; there's nothing particularly new here. In the late 21st century, America attempts to solve its crime problem proactively by claiming all boys bearing certain genetic markers as wards of the state, to be raised in benevolent "Goodhouse" facilities. In reality - à la "The Maze Runner," à la "Incarceron" - the boys are de facto prisoners and guinea pigs. James, the protagonist, is a generic teenage boy whose only distinction lies in his having been raised in a better Goodhouse; the system has tried to make him tabula rasa and for the most part succeeded. There's a bit of daring in Marshall's choice to set her dystopia in what's essentially a Christian theocracy - unusual for Y.A. novels these days, if common in adult fiction like "The Handmaid's Tale" - but that's it for breaking the mold. Marshall's theocracy is rampant with unethical medical experimentation and questionable genetics-based social engineering, in the manner of Scott Westerfeld's "Uglies," Lois Lowry's "The Giver" and Veronica Roth's "Divergent." The degree of violent action rivals "The Hunger Games." For anyone raised on a steady diet of dystopian Y.A. fiction, in other words, there's nothing fresh here. Yet the novel has one saving grace: It's magnificently written. Marshall evocatively captures James's confusion as he tries to reconcile his institutionalized worldview with the contradictions and grotesqueries of normal society. When he's drugged and thrown into a "Lord of the Flies"-style hellhole, Marshall depicts James's dissociation and flashbacks to an earlier trauma in a powerful, blurring stream of consciousness: "And the violins were sawing away and we were all sweating in the little church and then we were on fire, choking, clawing at each other. And there was that breath on the back of my neck: The white-haired man had found me and was going to open the back of my head. He was checking his gun. What was taking him so long?" Sadly, the beauty of the writing isn't quite enough to redeem a clunky plot. James meets a manic pixie dream girl who's possibly more of a sociopath than he is; he faces enemies inside and outside the Goodhouse who are virtually mustache-twirling caricatures; and no one seems to question the extremely questionable science that justifies the Goodhouse boys' imprisonment. (Girls, apparently, can't be genetically predisposed to criminality, so they aren't tested. The book is full of implausible whoppers like this.) It's probably for the best, then, that the book is aimed at an audience that might find more value in its style than its substance. Octavia Leander, the heroine of Beth Cato's THE CLOCKWORK DAGGER (Harper Voyager/ HarperCollins, paper, $14.99), is a medician - one of a rare cadre of healers who use herbalism, religious faith and a spot of blood sacrifice to enact miraculous cures of everything from illness to trauma. In the war-torn land of Caskentia, a gift like this is extremely valuable, so it's no surprise that Octavia rapidly becomes the focus of a complex and malevolent plot. Since this is the first book of a projected series, odds are readers will have to wait to see the full extent of the conspiracy, but the story here is complete in itself. Octavia's character growth is the hook for this secondary-world Victorian fantasy (only lightly flavored with steampunk, despite the "clockwork" in the title). Initially she's many kinds of cliché: intrepid, dangerously naïve for a woman who's grown up with war and privation, more devoted to her faith than others of her order and more powerful because of it. Her competence is the first clue that she's anything more than an ingénue in distress, but over the course of the novel, as her tragic back story is revealed and she faces stunning betrayals, she leaves the clichés behind. Unfortunately Alonzo - her love interest, and the Clockwork Dagger of the title - is less frame-breaking. Apparently the only man of color named or noted in Caskentia, he bears an unavoidable whiff of tokenism and fetishization. Though he turns out to be an intriguing character in his own right, it's tough to get past his role as the exotic interracial romance object - a device that has become frustratingly commonplace in this kind of neo-Victorian tale. More refreshing is the world Cato weaves. Caskentia is at war with a land called the Waste, in a conflict that has lasted so long and with such atrocities on both sides that there's no clear "good guy," and no visible path to peace. There are more systems of magic at work here than just the medician's art, and many of those arts have been turned to nefarious purposes, as with any weapon in war. Octavia's horrified realization that she is such a weapon, at least in the eyes of those who would wield her, forms the emotional core of the book. There's a lot of fascinating world-building here and, despite the problems, a delightful espionage-inflected adventure. All the usual accouterments of a William Gibson novel are visible in his posthuman high-concept time-travel caper, THE PERIPHERAL (Putnam, $28.95), except for the fact that it's a time-travel caper. Not that this is immediately apparent, as Gibson lavishes space on describing the book's world before delving into the plot or lingering on the key players. Granted, that world is a glory to behold, mixing the baroquely unfamiliar with the mundane made absurd: murderous plastics-recycling mutants with a twisted aesthetic; a futuristic version of the Westboro Baptist Church; "Michikoids," cute anime-inspired fembots that sprout additional eyes and limbs to commit assassinations, then go back to cleaning house; and more - all the conceptual razzle-dazzle that Gibson fans have come to expect. The difficulty this poses for newcomers, who might wish for a little less gosh wow and a little more get on with the story, is academic. The story starts in medias res; readers must adapt on their own or fall by the wayside. Gibson's prose is as powerful as ever, packing a shovelful of world-building into each sentence, and eventually - like, 20-something chapters in eventually - the reader will be rewarded with an engaging narrative. The story, when it arrives, concerns a young woman named Flynne, who lives somewhere in the American South, sometime in the foreseeable future. Life is pretty much the same for the rural poor in this future as it is now, and the only real economy in Flynne's small town is centered on the drug trade. Flynne scrapes out a living by hunting down bugs in virtual software, so she's happy to get another possible gig from her brother, a former Marine with a lingering disability from his time in haptic recon (think drone surveillance, futurized). The job is supposed to be simple; in true caper fashion, it isn't. Soon Flynne finds herself embroiled in an utterly bizarre plot involving a future timeline and the peripherals of the title, which are exactly what they sound like: tools meant to facilitate human-computer interaction. These just happen to be humanbased (but drastically modified) biomechanoids that can be interfaced with and run remotely. Flynne isn't an engaging enough protagonist to keep readers' attention, but the world she discovers and the events swirling around her are more than enough to make up for this. Gibson fans will be absolutely thrilled. Other readers might wish to visit some of his earlier works instead of on-boarding with this one. "Ancillary Justice," the first novel in Ann Leckie's far-future posthuman space opera series, recently became the first novel to win the "triple crown" of the genre (the Hugo, Nebula and Arthur C. Clarke awards), but not without controversy. The central question is whether the story's structural gimmick - the protagonist's tendency to refer to all people as "she" regardless of actual gender or even humanity - is sufficiently mind-blowing as to merit all the accolades. It isn't a gimmick, though; it's a coup. Rather than seriously entertain the endless, if stupid, debate on whether women have a place in stories of the future, Leckie's book does the literary equivalent of rolling its eyes and walking out of the room. Her refusal to waste energy on stupidity forces her audience to do the same: A few pages into the first novel, the reader gives up trying to guess each character's actual gender, and just accepts that this will be a story full of interesting women doing awesome things. The second book of the series, ANCILLARY SWORD (Orbit, paper, $16), continues this assumption-altering tradition. Breq, the vengeful artificial intelligence who spent the first novel hunting down her maker, Lord of the Radch Anaander Mianaai, has now become Breq Mianaai, after forging an alliance with part of her old enemy to help fight the other parts. To that end, Anaander gives her a ship and crew of her own, and sends her to the Athoek system, one of many worlds "civilized" by the Radchaai at the point of a gun. Breq immediately realizes something is wrong in the system, though all looks well on the surface. She must gain a greater understanding of the Athoeki in order to root out the revolutionaries, spies and alien vanguards among them - which is difficult, as the quintessentially inhuman Breq has trouble understanding even the most basic aspects of how human beings think and function. This is the most powerful element of the story. Where the first novel explored the consequences of a human transcending individuality (namely Anaander Mianaai, whose thousands of minds have split and brought the Radchaai to civil war), here we see the consequences of a many-minded entity being reduced to simple humanity. Throughout the novel, even as she struggles to unify her crew and the Athoeki, Breq shows the strain of her tremendous loss. In the process, Leckie thumbs her nose again at science fiction tradition, which abounds with disabled people being made whole by technology, and with nonhumans inexplicably yearning for humanity. The technology of the Radchaai is miraculous, but it cannot repair identity. And why would any entity with a truly nonhuman identity ever crave humanity? Where Leckie poked holes in sexist thought in the last book, here she attacks the self-absorption of science fiction itself. After all, is the genre truly meant to explore new ways of thinking? Or should it just endlessly stroke the egos of its assumed audience? Leckie once again makes it delightfully clear that one of these questions is just too stupid to be worth her time. N.K. JEMISIN is the author of the Inheritance trilogy and, most recently, "The Shadowed Sun." Her new novel, "The Fifth Season," will be published next year.