Lion's Blood
The Eyre Affair
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Brave new worlds of alternate historyREVIEW BY GAVIN J. GRANTIt must be fun for a writer to imagine how history would change if certain key elements were altered, and this month two authors give us very different answers to the question of what might have been. First up is the huge adventure novel, Lion's Blood, by Steven Barnes, which many science fiction fans will no doubt consider the book to read this year. Barnes has written well above his game with this alternate history set in 1850. The kicker is that in 400 B.C. Socrates refused to drink his goblet of hemlock as ordered and instead escaped from Athens to Egypt. He opened a school of philosophy, and -- voila! History is changed! Lion's Blood opens in an idyllic Irish village where a boy, Aiden O'Dere, lives a simple and seemingly near-paradisiacal life. He is just on the edge of manhood and is beginning to understand the adult subtext running through life. There's a girl, Morgan, who, in the games the village children play, might let herself be caught someday soon. This existence comes to a quick and bloody end, however, when Vikings raid Aiden's village. Aiden's father is killed and he, his sister and his mother are loaded into a longboat on the first stage of what will be a hellish transatlantic journey. Aiden's new masters are the Moors, as he knows them, the masters of Bilalistan, the New World -- the place we know as the United States of America. Lion's Blood is an old-fashioned adventure story, in which two boys -- Aiden, the slave from technologically backward Europe, and Kai ibn Jallaleddin ibn Rashid, his master -- grow up to be friends. Soon, circumstances and the changing times force them apart. From the tiny details (a "flesh-colored" ebony piano) to the complicated politics of this new world, Barnes has worked and worked until every facet of this epic hangs together. Barnes' re-imaginings of the U.S.A., where Zulus and Aztecs face one another in war, and free whites have to show their passes everywhere they go, is a strong vision of what might have been. Lion's Blood should not be missed. Jasper Fforde's first novel is a different kettle of flying fish, and if you enjoy the energetic frenzy of Douglas Adams' or Ray Vukcevich's novels, then The Eyre Affair is for you. The memorable main character, Thursday Next, works for Special Operations Network in London. Her beat is literature (SO-27, Literary Detectives, a.k.a. LiteraTecs) and she and her colleagues have to ensure that no one messes with the classics. From fraudulent copies of the early works of Samuel Johnson to firebombing splinter groups of Shakespeare scholars, Next has her work cut out for her in Fforde's hilariously different world, where people really care about their classics. And that's before someone somehow walks into a room under close-circuit surveillance and walks off with the original manuscript for Charles Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit. The Eyre Affair tumbles from absurdism to surrealism without breaking a sweat. It's an uninhibited romp through Fforde's favorite books, with a nod to Ian Fleming and Sherlock Holmes (Next's Uncle Mycroft is an absent-minded inventor who creates a machine to unscramble eggs, translates carbon paper and so on), a tip of the hat to Borges (characters are ripped from novels into Thursday's world), and the love between the dark and passionate Rochester and the plain but determined Jane Eyre. There aren't many authors who could pack this much hilarity, wordplay and just plain silliness into a novel and get away with it, but Fforde can. He has a lightness of touch and the ability to push a joke just so far, then turn it inside out to look at the other side. He keeps the reader amused and entertained -- even as the novel becomes more serious and Next faces the third most-wanted criminal in the world, Acheron Hades. Since the publication of The Eyre Affair last year in Great Britain, Fforde has been anointed as the latest star in a line of British comedic writers that includes Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett. Thursday Next is expected to return in another adventure soon, and by then many readers will be waiting eagerly to see what's gone wrong in the world of the LiteraTecs. Gavin J. Grant lives in Brooklyn, where he reviews, writes and publishes speculative fiction.
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