Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
New York: Tor Books, 2014; $26.99 hc; 414 pages
The Revolutions is certainly one of the more peculiar novels I’ve encountered in a long time. It starts out in a steampunk-inflected Victorian London with a Difference Engine being used (we eventually learn) to further the purposes of an occultist-magician who is in a deadly battle with a rival magician over the project. But the second half takes us into quite different fantasy/quasi-sf territory, startling and disorienting at first. I’m glad I came upon the novel “cold”—I hadn’t, for example, read the Amazon blurb for the paperback edition, which gives everything away in the very first sentence—but to offer any sort of meaningful commentary (i.e., go beyond blurb writing) I, too, must reveal all.
To wit: in the book’s second half the main characters find themselves on Mars: not the Mars we know via Curiosity and its fellow rovers or can envision by way of The Martian (novel or film), but a Mars of breathable air and tolerable-to-humans temperatures. This Mars is out of the era of Edgar Rice Burroughs, though more ghostly and ruined than his Barsoom and with its moons inhabited by angel-winged warriors, philosophers, and lovers. To get to this Mars from Earth, one needs to attend a séance. Lest this all sound whimsical, I must add that the mood of the tale changes as much as the locale does. The Revolutions starts out rather playfully and fancifully with the lover-protagonists meeting as “cute” as in any rom-com (thanks to a bit of bad weather: the nonhistorical and unnatural Great Storm of 1893); howver, the tale turns darker even before we get to Mars and considerably darker afterwards. Does it all cohere in surprising new ways—or does it perhaps richly succeed at thumbing its nose at coherence or genre expectations? Or is it an ultimately unsatisfactory amalgam of fanciful adventure and baneful saga in an occult-fantasy and scientific-romance mashup?
The early chapters are centered on Arthur Shaw, a writer of “popular science” articles. (“He wasn’t any kind of scientist himself, but nobody seemed to mind” [13].) He is also attempting to write a detective story, hoping to fill the vacuum left by another Arthur’s killing off his celebrated detective at the Reichenbach Falls that same month (December 1893). Our Arthur’s first draft is horribly derivative, even to the point of hero and villain falling together to their (possible) deaths, though curiously Arthur wonders if his detective might solve future crimes from beyond the grave, “through the aid of a medium” (14). If Gilman is portraying Arthur with a certain wry detachment, he is also foreshadowing his protagonist’s own fall nearly 400 pages later. One checkmark for overall coherence.
Arthur begins to be displaced as our sole protagonist after he meets his love interest, Josephine Bradman, and is drawn into her sphere of employment. She is the secretary for a woman who (like Arthur Conan Doyle and, it now seems to us, the greater part of Victorian England) dabbles in the occult. In a short article, Gilman has called this era “a real historical moment where the line between what we now think of as science and what we now think of as magic was still being sorted out” <upcoming4.me/news/book-news/the-story-behind-the-revolutions-by-felix-gilman>. In any case, at one gathering, Arthur and Josephine meet the sinister Martin Atwood, who displays an “excessive and unseemly ... curiosity” about her (47) and notices Arthur enough to recommend him for a job at a disturbingly odd factory, manufacturing who knows what. Josephine becomes the protagonist/third-person point-of-view character in alternate chapters after Arthur becomes obsessive and secretive about “the Work,” as if he were losing his mind. Their lives drift apart during these early chapters of a rather long book but are strangely linked at a significant moment when a fire in the factory temporarily destroys “the Work” and nearly wipes out Arthur while simultaneously, at one of Atwood’s séances in which Josephine is taking part, a wounded, winged, humanlike creature appears from some Beyond. The lovers are eventually reunited, but they compulsively hide their activities from one another. (In her case, “She was afraid of what he might say, or do. She was afraid he wouldn’t believe her; she was afraid he would.” [99])
The reunion is unfortunately short-lived, and the rest of the novel follows their separate adventures after Josephine’s mind/soul, having departed her physical body during another séance, is literally lost in space, the rest of her remaining in a trance à la Snow White. In this bifurcating narrative we meet a number of vivid secondary characters, notably Atwood’s considerably more likable (though mutually antagonistic) allies. In Josephine’s pretrance chapters, Jupiter, aka Moina, a major participant in the séances, rescues her from sinister figures who seem to have stepped out of Alex Proyas’s film Dark City. In Arthur’s narrative thread (where he bravely fights some of those creepy figures himself), we make the acquaintance of Mrs. Archer, a literally witchy woman living with her hulking son in a ramshackle house near Gravesend, who somehow links the analytical engine and the séances.
Very gradually we put together the underlying plot even before it is spelled out explicitly: the engine is designed “to carry out astrological and astronomical calculations, to a degree of refinement that would have been unimaginable to the sages of less enlightened eras”; the goal is “to project a human consciousness entirely out of Earth’s sphere of existence and into the higher or lower Cosmic Spheres: up toward the Sphere of Venus, down toward the Sphere of Mars” (149). Due to Arthur’s interruption of the second séance, Josephine’s astral projection is drifting in an outer-space limbo though soon to gravitate (whether in a Newtonian sense, I am not sure) to a moon of Mars. Arthur’s seemingly impossible task is to “retrieve” her even if it means cooperating with Atwood’s oddball crew, calling themselves the Company of the Spheres, and getting involved in the rival-magicians war.
For a number of chapters, The Revolutions focuses on the education of Arthur in the occult arts, as he develops self-confidence, strength of will, and awareness of his own adeptness, i.e., attunement to hidden powers though he is not without his somewhat comical setbacks. In these chapters, London and its environs continue to be a vital part of the story along with a pronounced wry humor. After the death of an admired lord, London indulges in “a brief ecstasy of sudden and rather theatrical grief.... Sunday crowds on the Embankment wore black, and even the sellers of roast chestnuts and iced lemonade and apple fritters somehow contrived to do their jobs in a mournful way” (28–29). Gilman indulges in many a deft turn of phrase: “There were unforeseen difficulties, as anyone might have foreseen there would be” (260). Or take this exchange between Arthur and the crone Mrs. Archer:
“What is it you do for Mr Gracewell, madam?”
She gave him a long flat look. “We all do our part,” she said. Then she went back to her work.
Arthur felt ready to hit the next person who presented him with a mystery or uttered a Delphic word in his presence. (127)
Some whole passages are wittily suspenseful, like one of Arthur’s seeing a menacing reflection as he inspects a glossy calling card. And one entire scene is a tour de force: a confrontation at the exceedingly proper Savoy Restaurant where a battle between magical powers brings spectacular mayhem to the venerable establishment.
But The Revolutions becomes mystical or at least eerie and haunting, rather than droll or wry, when we follow Josephine’s life in a gray-stone city, a ghost among its denizens, on the “ivory moon” of Mars, bathed in the light of the “red moon.” Nor does the mood lighten when Arthur, Atwood, and the rest of their Company manage to transport themselves to the surface of Mars itself. The only continuities of style I find in the Mars episodes are the author’s admirably fanatical attention to detail and his skill in describing complicated fight scenes.
The White Moon chapters portray Josephine’s attempts to make something of her new life faced with the unlikelihood of her ever seeing Earth and Arthur again. At first, invisible to the Martians, she merely observes their lives and puzzles over their interactions and history as we do. Eventually she manifests herself, poltergeist-style, then finds herself able to communicate telepathically—terrifying the Martians at first but after a while achieving a sort of diplomatic rapport, cordial but still somewhat distrustful on both sides. And sometime after that (passage of time is vague to both her and us) she is invited to inhabit the undecayed body of a deceased Martian brought down by some war—and to learn to use her new wings.
Gilman’s imagination is truly remarkable in these chapters, and I can single out only a few important passages. There are pages on Josephine’s learning the Martians’ language, largely semaphoric with hands and wingbeats, and perhaps via flushing their skin shades of blue, purple, or rose, though, fortunately for Josephine, telepathy works, too. She has glimpses of their violent history stretching back to their tribal lives on the surface of Mars (the backstory feels rather Tolkienesque) and their emigration to the moons though much remains shrouded in mystery with hints about a tribe called the Nation of the Eye and its connections to dark forces in outer revolutions of the Spheres. She becomes acquainted with the individual personalities of some Martians but recoils at their ability to act collectively in terrifying swarms. And we experience her learning to fly, though for a while she resists trying, on the grounds that it would be too much “going native” as if she were abandoning hope of ever returning to “the Blue Sphere.” Most impressive of all are Gilman’s descriptions of the arrival and departure of a swarm of Martians from the Red Moon: they fly over in killing raids whenever the two moons come close enough in orbit to make “boarding” the other moon possible. These passages are too lengthy to quote here but are fantastically vivid in their detail like some lost John Martin mezzotint for Paradise Lost.
Arthur’s own experience on the surface of Mars is a rather bleaker affair though gripping in its own way. He and his party seem to have arrived with fully physical bodies even if their “originals” are left entranced on Earth. Gilman gives considerable attention to their survival efforts, beginning with enumeration of the supplies they brought along but including too the quarrels among the party, hinting at a looming mutiny against the unrelentingly detestable Atwood and his thuggish bodyguard. The desolate landscapes are broken up only by an occasional melancholy ruin—where (in the tradition of other fantasy writers, not to mention graveyard legends) one is liable to awaken the still-dangerous ghost of some violently dispatched Martian. Arthur is close to despair over the remoteness of the prospect of his finding Josephine while Atwood seems increasingly possessed by what we eventually learn are the spirits of the power-lusting Nation of the Eye.
Yes, the lovers are reunited amid a deadly clash of humans and Martians, and humans fighting humans, within another vast ghost-haunted ruin. But alas, it is a Tristan und Isolde sort of reunion, and Josephine doesn’t even get to sing a Liebestod—though she does become a science-fiction writer back on Earth! (She becomes a rival to Burroughs, but of course she knows her subject rather more intimately.) I’ve debated for a long time over this ending, and even after a second reading of the novel I can’t say it feels inevitable or “right,” even though Gilman foreshadows it on the very first pages with Arthur’s detective and villain falling arm in arm from the dome of St. Paul’s like Holmes and Moriarty at the falls. (To be precise, Arthur falls from Josephine’s arms and Atwood falls alone.) But regardless of those hints, the trajectory of the entire novel has set Arthur up as an action hero rather than a tragic one, so our genre expectations are thwarted. Of course, the possibility of a sequel looms, and it would loom even without the pointed parallel to Doyle though the epilogue makes it feel like a stand-alone affair.
More troubling (perhaps only to this reviewer) than any question of a happy ending is the great difference in tone of its London and Mars sections. Certainly, many acclaimed novels deepen markedly in their tone and incidents—one need look no farther than The Fellowship of the Ring or the Harry Potter novels—but I can’t think of other works in which there is such a sharp divide. I mustn’t exaggerate: it’s not as if Douglas Adams turns into H.P. Lovecraft. Gilman’s London and Mars episodes both have violent action scenes, but what would be grave moments in the London chapters are typically described with a levity or irony that seems largely absent in the Mars chapters.
A troubling matter of a different sort is the way killing becomes “naturalized” for both Josephine and Arthur in the Mars chapters; that is to say, both become quite caught up in the act of slaying others albeit in self-defense and righteous anger. For example, faced with a marauder from the Red Moon, “A Fury, dripping with blood, wild-eyed,” and “no possibility of communication, and nothing to say[,] Josephine, who’d never in her life lifted a hand in anger against anyone, was as eager for confrontation as the killer was” (312). Of course it’s a commonplace of war stories and hardly unknown in real life at the extremities that peace-loving humans can quickly become adept at killing, indeed carried away with it. But I can’t decide whether Gilman is making some serious observation about the human ability to respond to violence with violence or is merely citing that primal capability in order to make action heroes out of our initially humdrum though psychically adept protagonists. Even if we conclude that he is doing both, we are back to the tricky matter of tone, i.e., determining the stance he is taking in regard to his characters: ironically distant or unironically up close.
Clearly, I haven’t found an easy answer to the questions I began with about whether Gilman successfully manages (one could say gets away with) the shift in tone that accompanies the shift of setting. I do believe my irresolution is connected to a sense that Josephine is not as vividly characterized as Arthur and Atwood are, and thus the author’s perspective on her is different—less ironic. She plays more the role of observer, a “sensitive” as she is called, a camera eye—on wonders of Martian life in particular—yet her ultimate role in the novel calls for her to exert will power and take heroic action, which is exciting and satisfying in itself. After two readings of The Revolutions, I’m still dissatisfied by the impression that it’s (to a degree) two different novels. But both of them are brilliant.
Joe Milicia lives in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.
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