The Caryatids, by Bruce Sterling, $25. In classical Greek architecture, caryatids are female statues used as columns to hold up the roof. Bruce Sterling’s caryatids are cloned women designed to hold the weight of the world.
He tells the story of three of them who don’t like one another and are spread far apart across the planet, living very different lives. Each aspect of the women is a fascinating character.
Contemporary Mljet is a Croatian tourist destination. In Sterling’s world of 2060, it’s one of many victims of climate catastrophe and the place where a Serbian war criminal raised her cloned children. The book begins with Vera literally holding up the ceiling in the reclamation of a polluted mine. She does it with the aid of a high-tech body suit that is a product of a group that networks its brains to be a global power.
In Los Angeles, Radmila is a movie star dedicated to maintaining her wealth and fame. California is suffering from earthquakes and a decaying coastline but is still the power base of the disaster capitalists who are trying to rebuild the planet for profit. Radmila’s husband is a globe-hopping businessman who seeks to link the cloned women.
China is the one nation that has survived this far into the century as a nation. Sonya is a legendary nurse and warrior in Western China. Her latest marriage is to a primal Mongolian warrior whom she nurses back to health at the Chinese space center in Jiuquan.
Nobody is better than Sterling at developing the cutting edge in culture and science over the next 50 years. His keen wit provides telling details and dark humor throughout his Cassandra-cry warning of the deep troubles we face.
Shambling Towards Hiroshima, by James Morrow, $14.95. The original Godzilla was a city-smashing metaphor for the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. James Morrow makes the monster into a hilarious literal truth that will end World War II with killer lizards instead of bombs.
Syms Thorley is a veteran actor in Hollywood monster movies. He is being honored at a fan convention but is holed up and preparing for a jump out the hotel room window. He spends his last night writing the story of his biggest secret and biggest accomplishment.
In 1945, he was part of a secret demonstration for the Japanese government of America’s monster-breeding program. The plan was to show the monsters destroying a miniature Japanese city. When the miniature monsters prove to be too peaceful, Syms is drafted to put on a monster costume, pretend to be a gigantic fire-breathing mutant iguana and win the war.
It will be a first-rate production with a famous director. It is top secret, but cavorting on the beach in his monster costume isn’t the best way for Syms to maintain this secrecy.
“Shambling Towards Hiroshima” is rich with warm humor and nostalgia about the monsters and their portrayers of a past era. Just as those movies have their deeper meanings, Morrow shows how far we are willing to go to create weapons of mass destruction.
Kitty and the Dead Man’s Hand, by Carrie Vaughn, $6.99.
Kitty Raises Hell, by Carrie Vaughn, $6.99. Carrie Vaughn’s publisher has given us a delicious winter treat with back-to-back books featuring Denver’s werewolf talk radio host.
Kitty Norville has returned to Denver as the alpha wolf of her pack and is set to marry Ben, her former lawyer, now also a werewolf. When family expectations become too high in Denver, they fly to Las Vegas.
They can’t keep it simple. Kitty does a televised version of her show from Vegas while Ben disappears to the poker table for hours. Kitty is rightfully nervous about a gun convention in their hotel that has attracted some supernatural bounty hunters who would be happy to kill her.
Kitty wonders why there seems to be no werewolves in Las Vegas. She finds the answers in the act of trained tigers who have an unpleasant human side.
Not all of Kitty’s troubles stay in Vegas. One follows her back to Denver in “Kitty Raises Hell.” She is learning the difficulty in being leader of the pack and that there are more unexplained things in the world than she has yet imagined.
Each novel is a delight on its own, but Vaughn is writing something deeper. Kitty is growing from book to book as she learns new truths about herself and her world.
Fred Cleaver is a freelancer who writes regularly about new science-fiction releases.
