review by Brian Charles Clark
Vancouver
David Cruise and Alison Griffiths
Publisher: HarperCollin, 2003
Cruise and Griffiths had plenty of models for their thick novel, Vancouver, and all by one writer: James Mitchner. Mitchner was the pioneer of the “sweeping saga” sub-sub-genre of historical fiction, and Cruise and Griffiths have followed closely in his steps. The model is simple: step forward in time, starting at some suitably dim point in the ancient past, to the present day.
Vancouver starts, not in the Pacific Northwest of British Columbia, but somewhere farther north 15,000 years before the present. Like Mitchner (and, incidentally, like Ayn Rand), Cruise and Griffiths subscribe to the “great man” theory of history: progress, advance and change are made by unique individuals who rise above circumstance to do great things. The great man who first came south to the present location of the beautiful city on the coast of British Columbia, they imagine, was a fellow named Manto. Manto traveled through an ice-free corridor. Never mind that the existence of an ice-free corridor probably never existed, and that the most likely route to the peopling of North America was by coastal island-hoppers: Manto’s story, like all the stories in this novel, is exciting. Read the rest of this entry »
The art of the science fiction book cover has a problem: it seems to be stuck in infancy. This is strange, considering the fact that science fiction writers have done their best to bootstrap the “genre” into a genuinely expansive literary form. The whole point of the New Wave movement in the 1960s and ‘70s was to bust SF out of the genre ghetto, and, for the most part, those writers were successful. To read one of Michael Moorcock’s “Cornelius” stories (written from the mid-60s to the present) is to read a story as strange, wonderful and literary as anything written by a so-called mainstream writer. To read a mainstream novel by, say, Thomas Pynchon, is to likewise plunge into a speculative world as fraught with paranoid unlikeliness as any great SF story. 
James Thurber, the great American humorist, poked fun at “the battle of the sexes” in a long-running series of cartoons in The New Yorker, and in a 1959 film starring Peter Sellers. Thurber, like so many men, then and now, didn’t like strong women. This isn’t just a dying stereotype: Wal-Mart is currently embroiled in the largest class-action lawsuit in history because management has strived to keep the girls down. The on-going fact of women earning 79 cents to a man’s dollar gives bite to the feminist critique of our patriarchal culture—I should say, is just one of the many sharp teeth in that bite.
