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Steady as she goes, now.
Trafalgar by Angélica Gorodischer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Continuing my quest to sample science fiction from outside the English-speaking world, I came across this in a local indie bookstore. I’d never heard of Argentinian author Angélica Gorodischer before – she’s had a long and successful career, but this 1979 book is only the second of her novels to be translated into English. The blurb sounded interesting enough – Trafalgar Medrano is a space-faring businessman who tells friends over coffee (lots of it) about his travels to other planets and the adventures and mishaps he gets into.
The twist is that it’s not set in the future or in some space bar somewhere in the galaxy. Trafalgar lives in the contemporary world where interstellar space travel is not a thing. Yet he talks about flying his “clunker” to one world after another as if this is a perfectly ordinary thing to be doing. He tells tall tales about the planets and societies he encounters – on one planet, the dead don’t stay dead; on another, timelines shift back and forth daily. Another planet resemble Earth circa 1492, complete with Queen Isabella and Christopher Columbus. Etc. So less sci-fi and more thought-experiment space fantasy.
What really stands out is that the people he tells his stories to don’t question whether the stories are true – they don’t necessarily believe them either, but they seem happy to play along and indulge him, if only to see whatever new wild story he comes up with the next time they meet. And that might be what makes this more or less work. Trafalgar is a well-drawn character who grew on me as I kept reading, so I could see how his friends could roll with it rather than calling him out. Some stories are better than others, but overall it’s an interesting variation on the space bar / intergalactic tourism trope.
Archibald Lawless, Anarchist at Large by Walter Mosley
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I’ve never read Walter Mosley before, although I’ve been meaning to – it’s just that he’s one of those authors who is prolific and successful enough that I don’t feel any sense of urgency because at least some of his stuff is always in print. Also, with that many books to choose from, it’s hard to know where to start. So when Warren Ellis recommended this novella in his newsletter, I figured it was as good a starting point as any. It’s also something of an outlier in his portfolio – Archibald Lawless was a minor character in Mosley’s Trouble Is What I Do, but one Mosley apparently found interesting enough to devote a standalone story to.
That said, the central narrator is Felix Orlean, a New York journalism student in need of a job to cover his rent. He answers an ad in the paper for a “scribe” and meets Archibald Lawless, who is indeed an Anarchist At Large, a radical detective who “walks the line between chaos and the man”. Which more or less means he seeks justice in America’s corrupt capitalist system that exploits the weak to enrich the corrupt and powerful. Felix’s initial duties involve reading the newspapers, organizing Lawless’ archive and tracking down four people to make sure they are where they’re supposed to be. One ends up killed and Felix is the suspect.
It sounds a fairly straightforward set-up, but it’s actually a lot weirder than that. Apart from being a riff on the Holmes/Watson template, the story has a surreal quality to it. Lawless is arguably insane, but he’s well connected, there’s always a car or boat waiting for him to take him where he needs to go, and as the story goes on it becomes more clear that at as mad as he is, he’s not living in a delusional fantasy world either. It’s an odd, complex little book with a mysteriously compelling title character, and apart from a couple of tangents that seem gratuitous, I enjoyed reading it. Mosley is definitely going to find his way on my “to read” list again.
View all my reviews
At large,
This is dF
Trafalgar by Angélica GorodischerMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Continuing my quest to sample science fiction from outside the English-speaking world, I came across this in a local indie bookstore. I’d never heard of Argentinian author Angélica Gorodischer before – she’s had a long and successful career, but this 1979 book is only the second of her novels to be translated into English. The blurb sounded interesting enough – Trafalgar Medrano is a space-faring businessman who tells friends over coffee (lots of it) about his travels to other planets and the adventures and mishaps he gets into.
The twist is that it’s not set in the future or in some space bar somewhere in the galaxy. Trafalgar lives in the contemporary world where interstellar space travel is not a thing. Yet he talks about flying his “clunker” to one world after another as if this is a perfectly ordinary thing to be doing. He tells tall tales about the planets and societies he encounters – on one planet, the dead don’t stay dead; on another, timelines shift back and forth daily. Another planet resemble Earth circa 1492, complete with Queen Isabella and Christopher Columbus. Etc. So less sci-fi and more thought-experiment space fantasy.
What really stands out is that the people he tells his stories to don’t question whether the stories are true – they don’t necessarily believe them either, but they seem happy to play along and indulge him, if only to see whatever new wild story he comes up with the next time they meet. And that might be what makes this more or less work. Trafalgar is a well-drawn character who grew on me as I kept reading, so I could see how his friends could roll with it rather than calling him out. Some stories are better than others, but overall it’s an interesting variation on the space bar / intergalactic tourism trope.
Archibald Lawless, Anarchist at Large by Walter MosleyMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I’ve never read Walter Mosley before, although I’ve been meaning to – it’s just that he’s one of those authors who is prolific and successful enough that I don’t feel any sense of urgency because at least some of his stuff is always in print. Also, with that many books to choose from, it’s hard to know where to start. So when Warren Ellis recommended this novella in his newsletter, I figured it was as good a starting point as any. It’s also something of an outlier in his portfolio – Archibald Lawless was a minor character in Mosley’s Trouble Is What I Do, but one Mosley apparently found interesting enough to devote a standalone story to.
That said, the central narrator is Felix Orlean, a New York journalism student in need of a job to cover his rent. He answers an ad in the paper for a “scribe” and meets Archibald Lawless, who is indeed an Anarchist At Large, a radical detective who “walks the line between chaos and the man”. Which more or less means he seeks justice in America’s corrupt capitalist system that exploits the weak to enrich the corrupt and powerful. Felix’s initial duties involve reading the newspapers, organizing Lawless’ archive and tracking down four people to make sure they are where they’re supposed to be. One ends up killed and Felix is the suspect.
It sounds a fairly straightforward set-up, but it’s actually a lot weirder than that. Apart from being a riff on the Holmes/Watson template, the story has a surreal quality to it. Lawless is arguably insane, but he’s well connected, there’s always a car or boat waiting for him to take him where he needs to go, and as the story goes on it becomes more clear that at as mad as he is, he’s not living in a delusional fantasy world either. It’s an odd, complex little book with a mysteriously compelling title character, and apart from a couple of tangents that seem gratuitous, I enjoyed reading it. Mosley is definitely going to find his way on my “to read” list again.
View all my reviews
At large,
This is dF
