|
Reviews of ‘Systems of Romance’
By: Richard Kadrey, author of Metrophage and Kamikaze L'Amour
As though Gaudí's biomorphic constructions had been rendered in brushed aluminium and industrial diamonds, laser-scanned and blasted as a light show above the capitols of Europe.
By: Andy Sawyer in Foundation
Systems of Romance by Paul Evenblij and Paul Harland is the first English- language collection of two of the Netherlands' outstanding sf writers, from a new Dutch small press. The title is perhaps significant: the cold logic of scientific "systems" mingles with the vivid colours and bright passions of romance. Thousands of parrots trained to repeat French phrases swarm in a Paris dotninated by Spanish conquerors as an attempt to reclaim the secret of space flight ends with a duel involving poetry guns whose verse-emitting - bullets are exchanged in a final showdown ("The Planets"). Imagery and exoticism pours over the surface of stories like Evenblij's "My Loves Speak In Different Tongues" like a flood battering the plot. In the same author's" A Name To Ease The Pain" a complex moon-system orbiting a gas-giant known as "Heaven" is inhabited by forty-six sexes-an even more complex melange of skippyorbs, cheirons, erminedragons and jabberniice, taking part in a conflict between art and knowledge which could well be a fusion of Oscar Wilde and Cordwainer Smith. In the collaboration "The Teeth of the City" there are-or have been-a mere three genders, but the third has vanished. Visionary images of the world's flora and fauna enliven the story. With titles like "A Host of Night-Winged Butterflies" we scarcely need a story at all to follow, while the red and white roses and ice statues of "The Winter Garden" . fuse Hans Andersen with the most decadent of romancers. Imagery, however, is not all, and at their best these are stories which move with pace. This is confident writing which neither proclaims a "national tradition" nor echoes that of others, but connects with a whole range of romantically imaginative storytelling..
By: Chris Reed in BBR Directory
The wealth of ideas on display in this collection is dazzling... easily stands head and shoulders above any other fiction I've read for years.
|
