If it weren’t blasphemous, I would worship Martin as a god; instead I will hold him up as my inspiration. I will summon his presence whenever I sit down at a keyboard to write. I will strive to make my scribblings interesting and exciting and enlightening as if I was writing for him only. He is my muse. I must only ask myself, “What would George do?”
Anyway, Sandkings is my first dip into Martin’s fiction, and I am completely overwhelmed. Abuzz. Aglow. What great stories! His characters are more real than some people I know. His worlds are thoroughly sketched in a paragraph or two, a skill I am always polishing but has to come natural to him. His stories fold in upon themselves, wrap around past and present, and always test the protagonist, likable or not (and even if not – you still care about their fate). He strips his characters to their very core in merciless conflict. I honestly do not see a weakness in his prose.
His stories are set in the deep future, on distant worlds, and are populated with generally down-on-their-luck men and women, colorful and dangerous alien species, and all sorts of sentient entities not normally found in mainstream writing. Liquid pools of wisdom, black energy beings, hivelike insects, civilizations that can manipulate time with architecture. Many of his characters are downright unlikable, but somehow he twists you into rooting for them.
Immediately, I realized that Martin constructs his stories in this way:
* Step 1: Come up with a weird character and a weird setting
* Step 2: What is the very absolute worst thing that can happen to this weird character?
* Step 3: Make it happen, and let the story unfold.
How can such a writing system fail?
Sandkings – the best of the bunch. One of the most horrifying and suspenseful SF story I’ve ever read. Certainly the best horror I’ve read since early Stephen King. A particularly nasty man gets just desserts after abusing some warlike insect pets. The story just keeps descending into dread, nonstop, and we know that there’s absolutely no way poor Simon will make it out, though we hope he does. A+.
The Way of Cross and Dragon and Bitterblooms I gave each a B, but still, such stories still outweigh 90 percent of the junk that’s out there. Incredibly imaginative, descriptive without being boring, I read both in one night. The first is a futuristic take on the Inquisition, the second a girl’s near-death encounter with what may be a witch.
The Stone City. Interesting take on sailors stranded in a port. Only they’re deckhands for starships and the port is some out-of-the-way hyperdimensional highway nexus, and they’re forced to live in close quarters with all sorts of alien nasties. And the city itself, which turns out to be an increasingly dangerous character ... B+.
My wife is now obligated, by me, to read Fast-Friend, the shortest but I think the most idea-driven story of the collection. Suffice it to say it’s a mixture of the bitterness of lost love and the fear of annihilation when uniting with a being of pure energy. A.
The longest tale, In the House of the Worm, is second in dread to Sandkings. Set in the far future, when the sun is hot and fat, when mankind has mutated into a different species that lives underground, living in fear of the great worms. Superb characters, visceral claustrophobic fear. Imagine yourself in the dark with Annelyn, trying to find your way back home, using up your dwindling supply of matches, one-by-one … A.
And finally, Starlady, completely 70s in its feel. Oh, and the best opening paragraph of any short story, period:
This story has no hero in it. It’s got Hairy Hal in it, and Golden Boy, and Janey Small and Mayliss, and some other people who lived on Thisrock. Plus Crawney and Stumblecat and the Marquis, who’ll do well enough as villains. But it hasn’t got a hero … well, unless you count Hairy Hal.
First I thought it was about a superhero, maybe a tongue-in-cheek tale of a world populated by supermen. But no. Hairy Hal is a futuristic pimp. Picture Will Ferrell in the movie version. I give it an A-, only because it had no hero in it (winks).
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