ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, June 30, 1996 TAG: 9606280006
SECTION: BOOK PAGE: 5 EDITION: METRO
TYPE: BOOK REVIEW
THE GOLDEN COMPASS. By Philip Pullman. Alfred A. Knopf. $20.
"The Golden Compass" is a high adventure tale set in a fantasy world of the author's outsized imagination. Pullman has created "a universe like ours, but different in many ways" - different indeed!
For those of us prosaic enough to want to know about time and place, there are hints that the time parallels the invasion of the Muscovy by the Tartars (13th century) and the movement of the seat of the papacy to Geneva by Pope (!) John Calvin (16th century). The place moves from Jordan College, Oxford, to Bolvanger in the far, far North to Svalbard in the still farther North.
Reality ends with place names, and a world "different from ours" begins - a world both good and evil, peopled with flying witches, English-speaking bears, daemons and children. It is a world of aeronauts, aerodocks, snow sledges, zeppelins, hot air balloons, anbaric power not unlike electricity, naphtha lamps, smokeleaves not unlike tobacco and a truth measuring device, the alethiometer.
The main character is a feisty, precocious, prepubescent girl named Lyra who, accompanied by her daemon, Pantalaimon, sets out to prevent her best friend, a Jordan College kitchen boy, and other kidnapped children from becoming the subjects of unspeakable experiments in the Far North.
The fairy tale-mystery story has certain inherent uncertainties: a daemon may be a soul just as Northern Dust may be Original Sin, the Magisterium and Consistorial Board of Discipline may or may not be arms of the Church as we understand it, and the Northern Lights may be a pathway to a city in the sky.
Daemons, however, exist under certain immutable laws. They are animal in form and of the gender opposite to their master; they can change their animal form at will until their master reaches puberty; at their master's puberty their animal form is set; all servants' daemons are dogs; and only the daemons of Northern witches can travel at great distances from their masters.
Philip Pullman is an Oxford graduate with a degree in English literature, and it shows. "The Golden Compass" is finely wrought, tightly crafted and highly literate. It is a gripping and suspenseful story which has as its centerpiece a mortal combat between two armored bears - a duel epic in description and simile, with Homeric echoes. Even Pullman's word inventions are drawn from classical Greek. Pantalaimon is a combination of two Greek words meaning all spirit, and alethiometer is from the Greek for truth and measure. Lyra (lyre) and daemon are Greek loan words.
"The Golden Compass" is a mystery that is unresolved at the end. Even the character development is open-ended, for who is good and who is bad is the biggest and most frustrating mystery of all. This is a story which will remain a mystery because it is the first book of a trilogy entitled "His Dark Materials."
Will I read the next two books in the series? At this point, that, too, is a mystery.
Margaret Grayson teaches Latin at North Cross School. White Wolf reissues two old favorites Reviewed by WENDY MORRIS
ILL MET IN LANKHMAR. B Fritz Leiber. White Wolf Publishing. $19.99.
ELRIC: Song of the Black Sword. By Michael Moorcock. White Wolf Publishing. $19.99.
Two recent titles from White Wolf Publishing are hardcover omnibus editions collecting the adventures of three of the greatest heroes in sword-and-sorcery fantasy: Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, and Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melnibone. Both books are nicely made (the Leiber has full color maps for end papers) and priced at a very reasonable $20 each.
Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser first appeared in 1939. From then until his death in 1992, Fritz Leiber continued to write about the two characters; these stories have been collected and reprinted in several editions through the years. Now White Wolf is releasing Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser for a new generation of readers. The four-volume set begins with "Ill Met in Lankhmar," reproducing the earlier "Swords and Deviltry" and "Swords against Death." "Lean Times in Lankhmar" ("Swords in the Mist" and "Swords against Wizardry") is just now being released. Books three and four will follow. Also planned is a fifth companion volume, a guest anthology of original stories featuring Fafhrd and the Mouser by other authors.
White Wolf does a good deed with this series. As Michael Moorcock says in the introduction of "Ill Met,": "The publication ... should do much to help remind readers of fantasy of their debt to [Fritz Leiber] who is ... still the greatest of us all."
With Moorcock's own writing, White Wolf tackles an even more ambitious project: the definitive publication of the many books and stories of Moorcock's "Eternal Champion." Elric, undeniably the author's most popular character, is just one aspect of the Eternal Champion; the adventures of the other heroes are collected in the other books of this 15 volume series.
Book six is due in August. Of this definitive Elric, Moorcock says, "While I've put his adventures in this final order and made some minor revisions, I've made only a few changes to the prose, which ... does the job it's meant to do with, I hope, a bit of diverting gusto."
Visual media translates poorly to written form Reviewed by WENDY MORRIS
SHADOW MOON. By George Lucas and Chris Claremont. Bantam. $22.50.
In 1988, George Lucas (of "Star Wars" fame) produced the fantasy film "Willow," about the misadventures of a would-be wizard who rescued an infant destined to deliver the world from evil. Now for the rest of the story.
"Shadow Moon," described as "First in the Chronicles of the Shadow War," takes place 13 years later. Willow, now an itinerant wizard calling himself Thorn, travels to the capital to attend the ceremonies for Elora Danan's ascension as Sacred Princess. Instead, he finds himself in prison while a Willow impostor tries to pervert Elora's destiny to his own evil ends.
Lucas and Claremont take an interesting twist on an old theme - the sacred princess destined to save the world - and botch it. For one thing, the book is badly paced. Except for vaguely described destruction 12 years earlier and an opening skirmish with some hellhounds, nothing overtly evil appears until halfway through (this in an epic fantasy!).
The writing is worse yet. Both authors come from backgrounds in visual media (Lucas in film, Claremont in comic books) that do not necessarily translate well to the written form. They write as if trying to compensate for a tendency toward visual action, and, doing so, have stifled the book in suffocating prose and metaphor. They even try hard to kill the action as well: "Khory used her sword to block it, her blade slicing the thorn in twain and thereby dissipating its force."
It's a lot of words for a lot of nothing.
Wendy Morris lives with her husband, her cat and a growing number of books.
BOOKMARKS
Virginia writers of science fiction are scoring with fans of the genre this spring.
Science Fiction Age, a bimonthly magazine, featured the work of Radford's Charles Saplak in its March issue. His story, "Brain Artist: A Romance," is still winning accolades. It's a melancholy tale of a struggling young comic book artist. Magazine Editor Scott Edleman, who previously scripted comic books for Marvel and DC Comics, wrote in the May issue that Saplak "managed to mold my fond memories into a work of art that was a wonderful commentary on art itself and the mystifying nature of love."
Bud Webster, a former Roanoker now living in Richmond, had his first short story, "Bubba Pritchett and the Space Aliens," published in the July 1994 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine. It won the readers' poll for the most popular story of the year. Webster's sequel, a novella, is in the June issue. "The Three Labors of Bubba" continues the adventures of a laid-back but highly intelligent Virginia country boy who uses down-home common sense (and a healthy sense of humor) to straighten out the problems of clandestine UFO visitors.
Meanwhile, the work of Patrick County's Rebecca Ore is included in an anthology of the year's top sci-fi. Her seventh book, "Gaia's Toys," was recently released.
Jane Lindskold, a former Lynchburg College English professor who has relocated to New Mexico, has published four novels since the end of 1994. "Chronomaster," her latest, is a novel based on an Intracorp Entertainment game she had developed with the late Roger Zelazny.
Steve White of Charlottesville continues to amuse and amaze readers with a series mixing alien encounters with time travel, the novels so far being "The Disinherited," "Legacy" and "Debt of Ages."
Paul Dellinger covers Pulaski County and Southwest Virginia for The Roanoke Times.
Nancy Willard, winner of the 1982 Newbery Medal for "A Visit to William Blake's Inn," is writer-in-residence for this year's summer session of the Hollins graduate program in children's literature. She will present a lecture on Monday at 8:15 p.m. in Babcock Auditorium of the Dana Science Building at Hollins College. The public is invited.
Fascinating stuff found in reference Reviewed by PAUL DELLINGER| SCIENCE FICTION: The Illustrated Encyclopedia. By John Clute. Dorling Kindersley. $39.95.
There are reference books that provide more data on the science fiction field but none prettier than this glitzy, 1-foot-tall, 300-plus page volume. It is chock-full of color pictures from the earliest pulp magazines, grade-B movie serials, blockbuster films and TV shows from this country and others. It includes authors, book and comics cover illustrations and other fascinating stuff available nowhere else.
It is almost worth its hefty price just for the bibliographies of the 112 authors profiled, from Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe right up to those writing today.
Clute, a Canadian living in Great Britain, has definite points of view (the best SF is being written today; Philip K. Dick rates right up there with Verne, Wells, Heinlein, Clarke and Asimov), but his knowledge of the field is undeniable.
Sprinkled throughout are articles on Mars, the atomic age, flying saucers, cyberpunk and much more as reflected through the SF lens. Clute also includes two-page time lines illustrating events in the field (including the first publications by key writers, year by year) and in the world from one decade to the next.
Clute was co-author of two massive editions of "The Science Fiction Encyclopedia," so perhaps his breadth of SF knowledge should not be surprising. His ability to encapsulate it all so succinctly and with such wit, however, is. Some of his viewpoints may be arguable, but they are never dull.
LENGTH: Long : 187 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: headshot of Lucasby CNB