Ian TREGILLIS, Bitter
Seeds – The Milkweed Triptych: Book One, Orbit/Little Brown Book Group,
London, 2012.
Octavo; paperback; 398pp.
Ex-library: somewhat rolled; the usual cancelled ink stamps and library
accoutrements; covers wrapped in adhesive plastic film. Fair only.
Like most long-term
roleplayers (I assume), at some point the rules just don’t suffice, or the game
setting no longer tantalizes; and so, the ardent gamer sets about trying to
cobble together a rule set or a gaming environment – a game in short – that
covers all of the bases that they’re hankering for. I’ve done this several
times; people I know have done it too. Do these games get published? Usually
not. Those created and abandoned - especially in the days before Kickstarter
- are now unregarded testimonies to an ardent fandom. A genre that I
encountered several times through my association with this process was the
notion of an arcane World War Two setting, drawing heavily on the ideas
surrounding occult Nazism and its associated kookiness. To be fair, it’s
fruitful ground for working supernatural, or science fiction, storytelling – “Achtung!
Cthulhu” and “World War Cthulhu” are two games that have mined this
aspect fervently, not ignoring those elements that are now canon within the “Call
of Cthulhu” roleplaying game itself. I mean, what’s not to like?
In this vein, Ian
Tregillis has written this trilogy of speculative fiction titles which are a blending
of one-part horror story, one-part science fiction and one-part alternative
history, à la Harry Turtledove. My copy of this came into the shop,
abandoned by its former owner, who bought it from a sale at the library from
whence it was withdrawn. Having play-tested much occult Nazi gaming material in
the past, I put this aside to have a look at it on my own time. I’m glad I did.
The premise of this
series is that, in the lead up to World War Two, starting right after the Great
War, a mad German scientist begins experimenting with the notion of creating
super-soldiers and is able to generate several super-powered entities, who come
into their own just as the Axis and Allied powers turn their warlike attentions
towards each other once more. The powers displayed by these hot-housed
youngsters read like a splice of the X-Men and the Fantastic Four:
a guy who can fly; a girl who turns invisible; a fellow who can surround
himself with super-hot flames; a kid who can phase through solid objects; a
cretinous man-mountain who can tear up the scenery with his mind; and Gretel,
who can see the future. Their super-powers were brought about by means of them being
horribly tortured as infants and by being surgically equipped with batteries
connected to wires implanted in their brains. They are a formidable team of
Nazi super-commandos and, in our narrative, they are enthusiastically embraced
by Heinrich Himmler as everything to which the Aryan ideal should aspire. Of
course, things are not entirely happy down on Professor von Westarp’s
experimental farm. The scions of his medical tinkering are riven by arrogance
and competitive aggression, fostered by von Westarp in a foolish attempt to
urge his creations on to greater efforts. His ‘parenting techniques’ only make
his creations turn on each other in hatred. And then, to make things worse,
there is Gretel:
Much of this
narrative turns on the fact that Gretel knows what is coming and uses this
knowledge to her own advantage. All the way through the story, we learn that
she is subtly manipulating the timeline to ensure that her own desires are met,
often at the expense of everyone else around her. Across the narrative, we are
privy to the thoughts and feelings of her brother Klaus, the phasing master,
and his increasingly appalled recognition of the fact that Gretel is willing to
destroy everything and everyone – including himself – to see the world shaped
as she would have it be. Her long-game cruelty is riveting to watch: she allows
the flying kid to get caught in a missile strike - which she herself foresees
and evades - for criticizing her less-than-Germanly-perfect ethnicity; she
allows herself to be captured by the Allies in order to infiltrate their secret
operations, and to annoy her brother, who is sent in to rescue her; she drives
the invisible girl to suicide in order to spite the fiery lad, who sees her as
a target for his lust (her death doesn’t actually stop him in this regard, but
it does somewhat spoil his moment). At every turn it becomes clear that Gretel
is in charge, and everyone is dancing to her tune, whether they realise it or
not.
I was reminded
strongly of Bill Willingham’s 80s comic narrative “Elementals” and the
story arc that it was launching shortly before it was cancelled. At that point
in its overarching plot, a televangelist with world-domination ideas had corralled
a large number of the Faithful, who signed away their rights to life and
liberty and who were horribly tortured to death. In the aftermath of this
hideous carnage, a handful of the killed were returned to living existence with
new and alarming superpowers and were set on a collision course with the
titular heroes… Of course, the inevitable super-punch-up never took place
because, it seemed, the origin of our bad guys was deemed too controversial to
put before the readership and the entire comic run ground to a halt (and also, Comico
went into receivership, so I’m probably just reading too much into the
timing!). Given that the origins of our evil super-crowd in Bitter Seeds
are remarkably similar, I’m thinking this ‘Horrific Mass-Killing Leads To
Superpowers’ idea has become a trope in its own right, thanks to Mr. Tregillis.
The nature of this
book means that the characters fall distinctly into two obvious camps – the
nominal Good Guys and the evil Nazi Malefactors. Of the two, the baddies are
the most compelling crowd, riven as they are by internal conflicts, twisted
worldviews and full-on madness. It’s easier to write evil characters, and
writing Nazis is easiest of all, because they rely on a stereotypical
presentation that’s been common to everyone since before WWII even ended; here
they’re treated with a touch more nuance than the material overtly calls for,
and that’s quite pleasing. That’s not to say that the White Hats are less
crafted than the evildoers; it’s just that the reader is forced to go a lot
further in order to believe in them. Mr. Tregillis is more than capable of
writing compelling characters of all stripes and, if these were British personae
of 1940s-era England, they would be truly great. As it is, they’re not: they
are Twenty-first Century Netflix television-show characters pushed against a faux
WWII London backdrop.
This is a personal
beef and I’m more than willing to own it and be pilloried for it. The
characters that comprise our ‘good guys’ team in this book (along with all the
others) have clearly been written by an American, who has an obvious outsider’s
view of the interiorality of the characters that he is trying to craft. The
dialogue has clearly been penned by someone not raised on decades of BBC
dialogue – idiom and usage fall down periodically into a thumping mess. Brits
of this period did not say “half seven” when they meant 7.30, for instance –
that’s a modern expression, and there are plenty of others just like it, lurking
in these pages. Also, class distinction is deeply ingrained in characters of this
milieu, and the lines were rarely, if ever, crossed, no matter how
‘anti-establishment’ a character is supposed to be. Here, we have a member of a
landed family eschewing the costume and behaviour of the upper classes for no really
believable reason, and it would not have stood in the time wherein this story
is set. Conversely – even perversely – the lower British classes were as
proud of their place in society as the toffs, and any attempt to blend in would
have been seen as the worst type of parody; here, we’re asked to lap it up.
Well: no. No, thank you.
There are other indicators
of an American hand at work here: Yanks love their armaments and periodically
here, we’re treated to a ballistics info-dump that distracts from the story in
progress. Just say “he packed his rifle and revolver”, for chris'sakes; don’t
give us the makes and models of each and every gun. American authors also like
to treat us to Scottish stereotypes; in this instance our “Scotty from Star
Trek” tech-expert analogue is borderline offensive and saddled with the
same false anti-class sentiments mentioned above. This just doesn’t wash. Also,
Brits were not as effusive in swearing as these people are, not by a long shot,
and certainly not within the confines of a workplace hierarchy – here the
dropping bombs are as often F-bombs as they are doodlebugs. To be fair, I’ve
read far worse along these indicated lines than Mr. Tregillis has
provided here; on balance, ignoring these egregious elements, his style of
writing is captivating and thoroughly enjoyable – well worth the price of
admission.
There is a final
issue I have with the writing of this book before I return to the things that
are good about it. Firstly, it’s the easiest thing to write plot: pages and
pages of writing can be generated just by saying “and then…; and then…; and
then…”. It’s the reason why, nowadays, so many books are so huge and yet say so
little. Mr. Tregillis has this in spades, and then he does something weird:
every so often, the action jumps and the surrounding dialogue and description
shifts to accommodate stuff that’s implied but not seen. It feels almost as if,
every so often, a few pages have gone missing. Sometimes it’s just an attempt
to impinge an arbitrary structure onto the material (the “Prelude” and “Interludes”
which really add nothing to the tale) and at other times it’s as if someone took
a set of pruning shears to the manuscript, chopping out huge tracts of the
plotting and then just roughly ‘making-good’ around the raw edges, like a
workman cutting a door into a blank wall. It’s peculiar and yet, I’m not sure
that it’s completely a bad thing: in part, it forces the reader to work a
little harder to make sense of the proceedings (and therefore, engage more with
the text); at other times, it feels like the unwelcome intrusion of a
ham-fisted editor. Strange…
Now on to the good
stuff…
The ideas in this
book are what makes it work. By making a bifurcated plot – with points of view
from both teams – Tregillis has to juggle the notion of what each faction knows
and understands about the other side. Our goodfellows have only the merest scraps
to work with in the beginning – a burnt dossier, part of a crisped photograph
and fragments from a melted film reel. They don’t know what it is that they’re
looking at and barely know how to begin investigating the matter. When they
start to get it all pieced together and to formulate their own response, the
baddies get swiftly thrown into the same predicament – what is the enemy up to
and how do we counter it? Tregillis handles these viewpoints with ease and
makes them work well, elegantly displaying the players’ bewilderment and
confusion. In part, he’s able to rest firmly on the fact that his readership is
all too aware of what’s going on – we all know what the X-Men can do so
he doesn’t need to waste time talking to us about it; he can concentrate
entirely upon his own characters’ responses. In a sense, this book is just like
Harry Turtledove’s Guns of the South, but instead of imagining what the
Confederacy would have done with AK-47s, he’s riffing on the idea of what if
the X-Men were real and were captured by the Nazis as instruments of
war?
Of course, if you
mess with history, you get to re-make it how you like, and Mr. Tregillis has a
bunch of fun doing this. We see the Nazi advances into France and Belgium through
the Ardennes perform far better than they actually did; the Dunkirk rescue
becomes a shambles and we read a heart-breaking litany of sea vessel names that
are suddenly far less successful than they were in reality; and the London Blitz
has its atrocities ramped up to 11. If you know your history of World War Two –
and it’s clear that Ian Tregillis does - there are a lot of very satisfying
little asides to take away from this.
Most intriguing
though is the way that the Allies – the Brits, anyway – choose to address the
issue of Nazi Superbeings. They call upon the services of warlocks, strange
little trainspotting men able to speak in the Enochian tongue and who concoct
bargains with powerful entities that dwell upon the fringes of reality, and which
actively despise humanity. By working blood magic to get these “Eidolons” to do
things that they want, these warlocks slowly help turn the tide of the supervillain-led
Nazi menace. It’s a nice idea to conjure, harkening back to a tradition of
nationalistic hedge-wizards using magic to defend the Sceptred Isle, from John
Dee to Aleister Crowley. Along with this, the entities ramp up the cost of
their services in blood, and the willingness of the SOE commanders to pay this
fee – and the way that they do pay it - speaks nicely to the callousness
that the British leaders displayed in reality, in instances such as Coventry,
India and Pearl Harbour. Injecting this morally-dubious element into his
portrayal of the ‘Good Guys’ lends a nice equivocal touch to the narrative.
(One thing that the
Eidolons do however as part of their blood-pact with the warlocks, is to block
the English Channel with icebergs and blind all the traffic there with pea-soup
fog. I guess, if anyone’s going to fantasize about how magicians might counter
an invasion force against the UK, they’ll be thinking of a way to stop them
crossing this watery barrier; but Susanna Clarke did this too in Jonathan
Strange & Mr. Norrell (along with phantom ships), so it felt a bit
tired. I would have preferred something more in line with Roger Bacon’s
invisible brass wall, but that’s just me.)
Ian Tregillis has a
PhD in Physics which allows him to explore aspects of his manufactured reality
that are unique and peculiarly piquant. I said that he doesn’t need to
quote chapter and verse to us about his Marvel Superhero analogues but, in
describing how their powers work, he looks at their operation through a
physicist’s lens and treats us to the ‘reality’ of how such abilities might
manifest. Phasing doesn’t allow the one so doing to breathe, for instance, and
being able to melt fired bullets on your chest doesn’t let you escape the force
of their momentum. These wrinkles in the effectiveness of our supervillains’
abilities allow for some clever observations, and also help to put some brakes
onto characters who are otherwise undefeatable. Go science!
Then there’s time
travel. Initially, there’s just Gretel, seeing the future and using her knowledge
of it to confound and manipulate everyone around her. This makes for some
incredibly chilling moments for the reader and seeing them being set up and
followed through is a delight. However, once the Allies start to work their
mojo, they realise that the Eidolons, existing as they do outside of time and
space, can carry men and munitions anywhere in Reality that they’re paid to,
and so they start to mess with temporal events as well. As with Gretel’s
prescience, Tregillis handles this stuff well: things happen that don’t seem to
make much sense – a man appears out of nowhere and vanishes shortly thereafter;
one of our heroes has a leg wound that mysteriously heals; whenever these
things occur, we generate question-marks, but Mr. Tregillis doesn’t leave us
dangling in the dark for too long. It all starts to crystallise beautifully in
short order. Having, until recently, been engaged upon a writing project along
these lines myself, I’m aware of just how much cogitation and fine-tuning these
“timey-wimey” narratives involve, so my hat is off to the writer on that score.
On balance, I liked
this book far more than I thought I would. I have to confess that I get
irritated out of all proportion by clunky attempts to re-create past times and
places, but – despite the shortcomings listed above – the strengths of this
novel far outweigh these altogether far-too-common faults. Many writers
struggling with this stuff tend to come off as tourists, doggedly typing while
tracing a line on a map of a place they’ve never visited and with which they
have no resonance; Ian Tregillis manages to rise above such amateur efforts and
displays a real understanding of his setting and a real sense of the place about
which he writes. It’s good. If you want a template for magical Nazi occultism
in speculative fiction, sadly, you can do worse. You should just stick
with this.
Three-and-a-half Tentacled Horrors from me.