Patricia AnthonyAnmeldelser

4.5. Flanders is the Southern Gothic World War I novel you didn't know you wanted, and is a significant entry in the "war is hell" genre.

Our Texan narrator, the surprisingly compelling and uncorny Travis Lee Stanhope, signs up to be a British sharpshooter and struggles with all sorts of demons and ghosts, both figurative and (ambiguously) supernatural. An epistolary novel composed of letters whose destination becomes increasingly unclear, the prose is sharp and evocative and Travis Lee is an unforgettable character.

The novel's rhythm is set by the company's tour of duty, with intense days in the trenches followed by days of respite in the rest area. This cyclical structure manages to capture the boredom, anxiety, and angst of front-line combat in a way I've rarely seen.

That said, the dense repetition and slow pacing made this book at times a slog. Yet I was sufficiently invested in the story that it kept my attention to the end.

An interesting perspective on WW1. In addition to that, the book is written completely in letters written by the main character. It is also magical realism in the sense that the main character can see ghosts. The book touches on topics of abuse, being gay during the war, and alcoholism. Overall it is a good book but not a great book read if interested in a slightly different than the average WW1 novel.

Anthony's first published novel set the pattern for all her books. A SFnal premise, usually involving aliens, that challenges the endurance and beliefs of a number of characters. Here, global warming has made the Middle East unlivable, Arab warriors have been engaged in a successful march into Europe, and the US has been helping Europe primarily with remote-controlled tanks called CRAVs. To complicate things, mysterious blue lights have been watching the battles and sometimes killing or mutilating soldiers, but only the Arab ones. Are they potential allies in this losing war?

As in other Anthony books, the aliens never provide answers. They only raise more questions, questions our characters either don't understand or can't answer. To me, the mood that permeates this novel of hers and others is helplessness. Which is not to say the novel fails. I think she was a brilliant author, just not a comforting one.

Recommended. You should read at least one Anthony novel, and this as strong as any of her books.½

In a word: silly. In another word: boring. Maybe it was my mood of the day. Maybe it's because I've been reading so many excellent military sci fi books lately. Whatever the case, when I started reading this book, I was immediately put off by what seemed to me to be the author's lack of knowledge and professionalism. Further, the book didn't seem as realistic as I want my military sci fi to be. Wait. Let me back up. Some of it actually was. A future Earth, suffering from easily believable accelerated global warming that has so increased the rate of desertification that the Arab world, faced with starvation, has created an Arab National Alliance army and has invaded Europe. The European forces are a nervous group of Russian, Ukrainian, Pole, German, and other European countries, with the US as a hesitant ally whom their partners worry might pull out at any moment, as things aren't going very well over there either.

Enter one Sgt Gordon and his CRAV, the first real futuristic weapon in an otherwise boring book of near-current twentieth century weaponry. The CRAV is a VR controlled mini-tank that is a reconnaissance and attack vehicle. Gordon is attached, seriously attached, one could say in love, with his. And while his is out surveying dead bodies one day, fa, la, la, he spots a floating blue orb coming toward him and wonders what it is. Then he is ripped from his VR equipment and suffers a near breakdown.

That's about all I could take. It was frankly pretty laughable. The floating blue orbs are aliens who appear on both sides and you don't really know if and who they're fighting with or for. You do know that after they've been somewhere you find dead bodies with puncture wounds and bodies drained of all fluids. So they're vampire aliens. Yep.

This book has a really low rating on Goodreads. That doesn't necessarily mean it's bad. I've read some poorly rated books and enjoyed them. However, I just didn't think this would be one of them. I was laughing too hard in serious spots. I couldn't take it seriously and it wasn't remotely believable in parts where it was desperately trying to be. Maybe I'm being too critical. Maybe I'm unfairly comparing this book and this author with some of the best military sci fi writers out there. But if you're going to write in that genre, shouldn't you strive for the best, to be the best, for the best book? Do you want to pump mediocre, at best, crap out there just for a couple of bucks? I don't think so. I read the first several chapters and gave up. One star and not recommended.

Father Inquisitor Manoel Pessoa arrives in the small Portuguese village of Quintas as is immediately confronted by strange confessions of abductions and fornication with angels, of pregnant virgins and lights in the sky. Pessoa, a man of tentative faith and even less respect for his priestly vows, attempts to quell the wild talk lest more zealous prosecutors of heresy take interest. To this point, Anthony plays coy with her setup, using writers' sleight-of-hand to offer teasing glimpses of the supposed "angels," and the books plods deliberately along. But then the aliens pull a Roswell, plowing their silver acorn of a space ship into the side of a mountain, and all bets are off.

Portugal's idiot King Afonso sees the fiery crash, takes it as a sign from God, and mounts a quest after the falling star from heaven. Inquisitor-General Gomes hears of the King's quest, mysterious grey "angels" and other heresies, prompting him to travel to Quintas to open a full inquiry of his own. Pessoa is caught in the middle, desperate to protect villagers--ignorant of their peril--who defy his protection; baffled by the strange, silent, grey "angels" within whose eyes some see paradise and others see damnation; and Inquisitor-General Gomes, who's hell-bent to burn the entire heretical village at the stake and none too discreet about his desire to consign the Jesuit-trained Pessoa to the flames as well.

As she has in previous books--Brother Termite, Cold Allies and Happy Policeman--Anthony uses her aliens as a catalyst, a mirror held up to the provide greater insight into the human condition. The aliens don't explain themselves--they don't have to, and if they did, it wouldn't matter. From Pessoa to Gomes to Afonso, everyone sees the aliens as they want to, and no amount of argument or evidence affects those beliefs in the slightest. The aliens remain enigmas to the end, their thoughts and motivations unknown, unknowable. The humans remain enigmas as well, despite the fact that their thoughts and motivations are naked and exposed.

With subject matter as serious as the Inquisition, there's a danger of portraying events as black-and-white melodrama. Fortunately, Anthony avoids this, without slighting the brutality and horror the Inquisition fostered. Pessoa and the other protagonists are not sainted, aren't even necessarily nice. Gomes and his ilk aren't baseless caricatures of evil--Gomes truly believes the burnings work to save the souls of the condemned--even though they bring untold suffering to Quintas.

Religious fiction is a tricky business, usually falling into the categories of satire or inspirational. Religious science fiction is an even rarer bird, given the genre's tendency to embrace atheism. Anthony manages to carve out a niche all her own with God's Fires. Rather than the irreverent lampoon of James Morrow's Towing Jehovah or Only Begotten Daughter, Anthony's God's Fires owes more to Poul Anderson's High Crusade and A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter Miller, Jr., although it's more earthy and immediate than either of those two titles, as firmly grounded in reality as any work of speculative fiction can be.

My reaction to reading this novel in 1994. Spoilers follow.

My disappointment with this book is probably partly due to the hype surrounding this book. I’ve read several reviews praising this novel for its depiction of future war during a Greenhouse crisis, a war in which both sides try to exploit enigmatic aliens who show up.

I was intrigued by the plot and by one of the characters. Linda Parisi is a purveyor of charlatan ufo literature and drafted into Army service. I expected a humorous treatment of the situation but didn't get it.

The future warfare stuff was only adequate. I had some real problems with the Arab mission to knock out Allied military satellites with a large, truck mounted laser. Why does the firing have to be done at night? Why not mount the laser on a plane? Do considerations of trajectory really necessitate putting the laser in the Pyrenees and not ground based in an Arab country? Is the laser so weak it has to fire from a mountaintop? It’s an important plot point for much of the book (half to two-thirds). I did like the virtual reality aspect of the Computerized Robotic Assault Vehicle (CRAV) and its operator Gordon Means (his mission is to stop the Arab laser cannon). He’s a lover of sf movies, a gaming nerd, and understandably involved in teleoperating the CRAV to the point where he is traumatized at the prospect of losing it and combat feels real though he’s hundreds of miles away. It’s a realistic portrayal of what such combat via telepresence would be like emotionally. (For instance, watching troops die you can’t help with the CRAV.) To be fair to Anthony, she does include other realistic military details like noting the logistical problems of the Russians and the antiquated nature of Arab hardware.

But these are only minor elements of the story. The crisis of the Greenhouse Effect is mainly shown by references to characters’ family members killed in migration or by famine. The scene set in a Colorado refugee camp was competently done but certainly nothing new. (There probably are a small number of ways you can depict such a place.) The characters didn’t interest me much. I liked Means and that was about it. Parisi, far from being humorous, is an absolutely self-centered con-woman with no compassion or empathy for anyone else – especially when their behavior does not absolutely conform with her sense of propriety. (Thus she mentally criticizes refugees for looking disheveled, thinks nothing of demanding unreasonable favors of her agent, criticizes people in a drought plagued city for not maintaining their lawns.). Maybe Anthony thought her outrageously humorous. I didn’t find her boring. But I didn’t like her or find her interestingly hateful. The other characters – Arab, Russian, American generals; a downed pilot; a medical doctor; a young boy – were not that interesting.

Neither was the plot which involves American military efforts -- ultimately successful as the aliens cause a snowstorm which cripples the Arab siege effort at Warsaw -- to use the aliens as a terror/real weapon against the Arabs. (An effort that puts Means in a sort of schizophrenic state.). I think the problem lies in Anthony’s prose which, while brief and sparse, attempts to evoke emotion for the characters and story through constant allusions to their past and the aliens. Yet, there’s just not enough prose to do this, and the writing is too “literary”, constantly trying to do variations on the meaning of the aliens and themes having to do with cold (Alienation, greenhouse effect, death, loneliness). Anthony said in a recent interview that she didn’t know what the aliens represented till she was two-thirds of the way through writing. It shows in long scenes of surrealism where the aliens intrude on characters mind. These are not bad scenes. In fact, they’re the best part of the novel as you get a sense of an alien intelligence trying to probe the human psyche while pretending to be a dead mother and a gentle father that never existed. (I also liked the sort of dog-like relationship they develop with Means.) Yet I thought this part of the story didn’t mesh well with the rest of the war tale or the Parisi subplot or the American General Lauterbach who desperately wants to believe in and talk to aliens, (He recruits Parisi.) but he’s perfectly willing to exploit them to beat the Arabs. (I didn’t think his emotions of guilt at this or the conflict allegedly in his soul was really depicted.).

I was also annoyed when the aliens’ nature was not revealed. (They simply leave after tampering with the sun to eliminate the Greenhouse Effect.) Granted leaving aliens mysterious and enigmatic and unexplained is one of two techniques that can be used with aliens (the other is to explicate their nature wholly or partially) and is a valid technique. Here, though, it only adds to the sense of a book full of literary pretensions but undeveloped emotion and half finished plots.

Back in the summer of 2010, I decided to see about curbing my book spending, and instead work on reading books already on my shelves. This was an obvious failure, when I was on the Powells Books website and found a bargain Sci-fi bin of books for about a dollar. I bought seventeen books and have been slowly working my way through them.

Patricia Anthony’s ‘The Happy Policeman’ was in that pile of books. I am not sure how this ended up in the dollar bin. Turns out, this book was incredible, worth far more than the dollar I paid for it. I bought it sight unseen, had no idea what the novel was about, but the cover art painted by Mark Smollin caught my attention, the title was unusual and the book became mine.

THIS BOOK WAS NOT ACTUAL SCI-FI. Do not auto-ignore this book if you are a genre snob, you may be missing out. Likewise, do not pick this book up thinking it will be handed to you on a platter, Patricia Anthony did a great job in obfuscating the end game and (as in my case) it takes some analysis to fully grasp the outcome. I actually sat for ten minutes after finishing this and thought to myself “What the hell was that?”. Once it sunk in, I found I had been presented with a confusingly brilliant story that is very recommendable.

The novel opens with DeWitt Dawson, police chief, riding his horse down Main Street, Coomy Texas. He has no gasoline for his police cruiser, the Torku have no trouble providing everything they need, but for some reason, gasoline takes them far longer than other supplies. DeWitt investigates some broken glass at a convenience store, wonders why anyone breaks into a store when the Alien Torku give people whatever they ask for.

Just outside town, DeWitt is called to investigate the body of Loretta Harper, naked-mutilated-never reported missing. She was found close to the plaid/paisley/rainbow colored dome that protects their town from the horrible radiation killing the world; Again, courtesy of the Torku. For six years, the Torku have helped the towns folk survive post ‘Bomb Day” when the world died. The Chief must determine if this murder was caused by a human survivor, or by one of the alien saviors who up this point have been hospitable and welcoming.

Labeled alternately as either Fiction or Science fiction, I believe it does this novel a disservice to pigeon hole it as SciFi based on the alien element or other “less tangible” aspects. It is more fringe than that. The Happy Policeman rides the cusp of multiple genres and is a potential read for any number of individuals. It is an investigative crime drama starring a pothead policeman. It is a human nature piece, showing the human desire for independence, the intrinsic need for self reliance that drives rebellion. It has cheating wives, and secret perversions; over-protective fathers and guilt laden decision making. It gives a shout out to ’12 Angry Men’ and ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’. And, because a number of the characters are aliens, it could loosely be considered Science Fiction,.

Based on the ending: I would consider this Speculative Buddhist Fiction (does the genre exists?).
The Alien Torku are a metaphoric plot device. Read the book, then read this review again. Afterwards we can fist fight over the details..
By fist fight, I mean drink beers..
By details, I mean discuss it’s awesomeness…

Rating: 4* of five

The Book Report: Travis Lee Stanhope leaves Harvard for France to join in the fighting of The Great War (WWI to thee and me), as so many of his generation of young American men did, on the side of the Allies. He chronicles his experiences as the lone Texan among European officers and men who, unlike the cruel and dismissive Yankee boys he's been spending his education among, chaff him good-naturedly about his accent and his origins.

He becomes, by virtue of his origins, a sharpshooter, and develops a track record of success in his task. He also makes some very...well...some discoveries, shall we say, that completely revolutionize his view of the material world, and what it contains, and what it conceals.

War isn't hell. War is only the gateway to it.

My Review: This wasn't a bestseller in 1998, when it was published. It wasn't widely reviewed. It wasn't a succès d'estime. High Literature, as defined by the unofficial and unconstituted American academy, excludes all forms of genre fiction...that condescending little shudder-word used to mark off the territory of Serious Books by excluding those which a writer without an MFA from Iowa, or a PhD in Literature, might wish to produce and an ordinary person might wish to read.

I'd direct those academicians, self-appointed or recognized at large, to books like this one Magical realism isn't simply a Latin American phenomenon. This epistolary work (and right there is the reason it was never a bestseller) rivals the storytelling gifts of Mujica Lainez or Cortazar or Vargas Llosa.

Oh. Bobby, I can't remember what he said—I only recall the joy of it, the terror of watching the dark approach. Then we were at the cypress; O'Shaughnessey had to see it coming. He had to. The dark took up all Here, all Now. I wanted to run, but with the helplessness of dreamers, I trailed O'Shaughnessey inside.

I don't remember closing my eyes as we passed through that shadow membrane, but I remember opening them. Around me lay the broken countryside of No Man's Land. That was all. Nothing frightening, but a place like a thousand others—a spot where ghosties wander, searching for the land of the found,

O'Shaughnessey stopped, offered his hand in a goodbye, no extraordinary power but that of affection in his touch. “Travis?” he said.

“Yes?”

He leaned close to whisper a secret. His breath was warm and smelled of chocolate. “It's love.”

Don't overlook Travis Lee's magical adventures. You'll be the poorer for it.

Adorable sequel to the adorable Double, Double Silicon Trouble

Adorable story of an enterprising young witch, her grandmother and friends, and her mortal friend. I love fantasy-science fiction mashups, and this is a nifty example.

Conscience of the Beagle is science fiction police noir. It certainly had all of the necessary noir tropes: rundown, has-been protagonists, gritty mean streets, some sort of corruption or conspiracy, and one or two women as empty plot devices rather than actual characters (protagonist can't move past dead relationship). Ugly people, ugly scenery, ugly imagery, ugly premise, ugly resolution, plus the stereotypes and cheap exploitation of women (yes, I know the author's a woman). What's not to like? (/snark) It reminded me of The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon, but without the layered world-building, intricately self-referential plot, fascinating characters, and amazing prose (again with the ugly imagery though). Michael Chabon is a Class A writer (again, sample size of one), while Patricia Anthony is definitely second-rate, comparing these two books side by side.

The narrator is Major Dyle Holloway, a police detective from Earth who is famous for catching a serial killer who was executed not too long ago. However, he's a broken man after the mysterious, brutal murder of his beloved wife. Next on his team is the android (called a beagle) programmed with the personality of the most famous and intelligent now-dead police detective (sorry, already returned the book and can't remember the name)--take the data processing and pattern recognition of a supercomputer and combine it with the intellect and deductive abilities of a human and there you have it. Makes you wonder why the others on the team are necessary and why the beagle isn't in charge. Then there's Szabo and Arne, a telepath (also broken) and a demolitions expert (can't get along with anyone). On the surface, the best Earth has to send when the colony planet Tennyson sends for help.

What's the trouble you ask? A string of bombs in public places left by some unknown terrorist(s). But wait, this is a peaceful fundamentalist Christian colony--so who could be doing this and why? Is someone trying to overthrow the government? And why no evidence for the local law enforcement to follow? Is the government involved? Our sad-sack heroes suspect each others' and everyone else's motives, agendas, and actions as people continue to die.

Some of the connections in the book escaped me. The supposed utopia run by a religious cult leader and involving omnipresent surveillance by secret police being called Tennyson obviously had some significance. And I suspect calling the android a beagle was a reference to Darwin and the theory of evolution. But while I could perhaps recognize the presence of allusions and metaphors, I wasn't able to interpret much of the symbolism. Someone who was able to connect all of the dots would probably have a deeper appreciation for this work. Certainly, other reviewers have commented positively on Patricia Anthony's ability to satirize and subvert genre formulas. I might try another book at some point, one that isn't noir. Based on a sample size of one, Patricia Anthony is a good, competent writer; I just don't like the story.½

There appears to be a glitch listing this as part of an Elric collection. The Patricia Anthony book is a sequel or part of a series in an alternate history wherein the little gray aliens took over America around the time of the Kennedy assassinations (which they engineered in that timeline). I don't know how good the previous installment "Cold Allies" was (for some reason I get the impression it was better), but this one just wasn't very gripping. The story is told from the point of view of Reen, an alien who is White House Chief Of Staff for a President Womack, who has apparently been kept alive and in place for many terms since the takeover, and yet is not a complete figurehead. Seeing how that situation came about, or more on the society of the aliens themselves, which seems to both have some depth and appears genuinely alien, would have made for good reading. Without that, what remains is a tale of two conspiracies, the aliens trying to keep quiet an ongoing existential threat to humanity, the humans trying to quietly engineer one for the alien race. It's readable and will pass a few hours pleasantly enough, but this reader is left with the impression that all the really interesting stuff happened in the earlier volume, and the ending is frankly a total non sequitur.

It has been years since I've read Patricia Anthony's masterpiece God's Fires. I am not one to read books a second time. But to this day I remember being stunned by Anthony's amazing vision of another world. It will always be one of my favorites.

Anthony weaves disparate, seemingly incompatible elements. First, she takes her reader back to the world of Realpolitik and religious warfare tearing apart Portugal during the Inquisition. Then, she submerges them in a dreamy Never Neverland Close Encounter of the Third Kind with the Grays of Whitley Strieber's Communion. To attempt such a feat is an imaginative and ballsy play for an author. To have pulled that marriage off flawlessly is an achievement worthy of the best of the best literary talents. This book ranks up on my list of speculative and science fiction with Frank Herbert's Dune and William Gibson's Neuromancer.

God's Fires is perfect in both the beauty of its sentences and paragraphs, and its humor and poignancy. But most stunning is the story's depth of characterization and plot detail that render the unbelievable, absurd even, believable. Were aliens to crash their spacecraft in Portugal during the Inquisition rather than Roswell, New Mexico during the Cold War, Anthony shows us what likely would have happened - surely must have happened. Yet while the intricacies of the plot and insight into the psychology of the characters are thorough, still the author moves the story along. The pacing too is perfect.

Patricia Anthony's other books I've read - Flanders, and another foray into alien-human worlds colliding, Brother Termite - were interesting, imaginative, and certainly decent enough reads. But God's Fires is special. It is a great, ambitious, wonderful, and haunting tale.

Don’t girls just write Harlequin romances and chick lit?
Nope.
Smart cool and dangerously perverse.

Don’t girls just write Harlequin romances and chick lit?
With shopping is the plot?
Nope.
Smart cool and dangerously perverse.

Patricia Anthony's Cradle of Splendor is a fascinating, provocative political thriller. While its extended opening scene only hints at the stakes of the characters' often covert contention, it reveals straight off the tendency of the characters to (a) talk (or perceive) at cross-purposes (sometimes with grievous consequences), especially where sex and gender are concerned and (b) always serve associations and interests that are either invisible to arrogant eyes or deliberately concealed. But then Anthony's characters-- across the spectrum of her novels-- generally do not enjoy mutual knowledge of one another; power relations always figure seriously in how her characters perceive and relate to one another.

The extended opening scene shows most of the novel's cast of characters watching the lift-off of a Brazilian rocket. In an utterly paradigmatic exchange, Roger, a NASA nerd, UFO buff, and CIA spy, asks Brazilian artist and CIA-trained spy Delores Sim what she makes of the rocket. Delores says (quite correctly, in the symbolic terms of the novel) that the rocket looks to her like a big breast with a gray nipple, "useless as tits on a boar." Spy nerd Roger doesn't get it. His response is to whoop loudly, "nearly fall onto the Sudanese ambassador's wife," and say "God! So cool! I love it when a woman talks dirty!" The reference to the boar goes right over his head. By contrast, most of the men watching see only a "big dick." As Delores says to the nerd (one day later), "You know the problem with men? They have tunnel vision. It comes from looking at everything through their dicks... A little bitty hole, Roger. The penis has this little bitty hole." Here she isn't talking about what he sees when he looks at the rocket, but what he sees when he looks at photographs of her, when she was younger, hiking through the Amazon and the Andes. As Delores says, "The Amazon jungle. The Andes. And all it [i.e., Roger's "tunnel vision"] lets you see is a good-looking chick in khakis." Who can be surprised when because she derides his inability to see her in anything other than sex-object terms, he tells her she's a lesbian?

This "seeing through the dick" fuels the action of the book. The president-- and dictator-- of Brazil is a black woman, Ana Bonfim, a long-time close friend of Delores. Their relationship-- the central relationship in the book-- is caught up in the frustration and obstacles that are the consequences of the extent to which male power and plots shape who they are and how they perceive themselves and the world. Ana has what is essentially a deal-with-the-devil, whereby a special source provides her (and Brazil) with items of powerful technology (cold fusion, room-temperature super-conductivity, anti-gravity) that not only lift Brazil out of poverty but also allow her to enforce social reforms that benefit women and the poor. But her deal with the devil makes her complicit with abuses of power that she is completely incapable of controlling. Moreover, she has a history of abusive relationships with men (from which Delores has several times in the past "liberated" her by murdering the men-- which is the main use to which she has put her CIA training). Most of the action in the book, however, involves the US's panic and rage over Brazil's possession of the technology (and of course it doesn't help that a black woman is their principal "opponent," which makes US media and government officials even more hysterically virulent than usual). Once the rocket goes up-- and precisely because it fails as a normal rocket is clearly seen to be powered by anti-gravity-- the US gets hysterical (a la Iraqi crisis-hysterical) and manufactures an excuse to attack and destroy Brazil (which has no defensive capability and doesn't even try to defend itself). It's no accident that the battered-wife scenario appears at several levels, from the concrete to the metaphorical to the elaborately symbolic. Ana and Delores were battered wives; Delores killed Ana's batterer, and Ana in turn has made it possible for Brazilian women to deal with their batterers. For the women, battering is a concrete, known, material evil. But the men talk about battering (and killing) women metaphorically and symbolically (which follows, of course, from "seeing through the dick"). Ultimately, the book is extremely pessimistic about women working with phallic forms and structures to achieve an agency that is free of male control.

Seeing through the dick is one of the three axes of the book. (All the axes intersect through the phallus/penis, which is, conceptually, the zero-point of the book.) Another axis is the knowledge/technology axis. "You don't know dick," one male character says to another early on in the novel. This is another telling expressing that at first glance one tends to read as just another boy-talk cliché (like the "talking dirty" misconnaisance I mentioned above). Most of the men in the book take "dick" (the phallus) and "knowledge" or "science" as equivalents. US and Japanese corporate executives and US government officials (and CIA officers) are all bent out of shape over Brazil's apparent possession of advanced technology not only because they see this technology as deeply threatening their own political and economic interests (though that is the most explicit level on which the discussion takes place), but because they conflate that technology with a bigger and more powerful "dick." Anthony has these government and corporate characters mixing up the levels of discussion without even noticing they're doing it. This is true to real-life, of course. (For an explication, see Carol Cohn's justly famous and influential article on the language of nuclear weapons, "Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals," Signs 12, 4; Summer, 1987.) Such talk sounds and feels cool and cute and in-control to the men-- but Anthony makes the significance of the linguistic conflation inescapable, especially as she reveals the source of the Brazillians' technology. (It's all a question of instrumentality, I suppose one could say.) Interestingly, the men themselves are confused about the relative power found in science and that found in raw military force. (I.e., they aren't sure where the real phallus is when the powers of science and the military are competing in an all-out pecking-order struggle.) We see this explicitly played out with Roger, the NASA nerd who is terrified of the CIA officers who are running him, and in the simultaneous articulation of idolization of Roger's scientific knowledge by the CIA station chief (who has been running him) even as he is preparing to kill him. This station chief, by the way, also indulges a riff about romantic love and how romantic love almost requires battering and murder and how the ultimate form of romantic love is necrophilism and beyond (the "beyond" being the deliberate "creation of the corpse" solely to have it to idolize, and not simply to possess the object of the romance-- i.e., deliberately creating the object to idolize with the full intent of doing so, rather than simply trying to control the object after one finds oneself idolizing her or him).

The third axis is sex in general and, more specifically, a homophobic sexuality that Anthony clearly sees as a twisted form of homoeroticism. (I don't believe she's implying that all homosexual relationships are based on homophobia, but rather that the stronger a man's homophobia, the stronger his repressed sexual desire for men, which may, if I understand her correctly, be directly related to the degree to which the man is obsessed which phallic power.) At any rate, the homophobic male sexuality in the novel is all tied up with phallic obsessions and confusions. And in any case, as far as the sexual goes in this book, where men are concerned, their "seeing through their dicks" makes them totally destructive-- and blindly self-destructive. For the female characters, though their own sexual desires make them more vulnerable to this idiotic phallic destructiveness, since they don't basically "see through" their own genitals, their problem is getting caught up in seeing through men's (i.e., in adopting the "tunnel vision" that comes through that "very small hole" in the penis). In other words, their own sexual desire and pleasure is not destructive or generative of genital "tunnel vision" per se, only likely to sway them to seeing through male genital tunnel vision. It is the phallus that is the empty zero, the all-important determinant that makes people unable to see straight or behave decently...

Maybe I haven't gotten this right. But Anthony puts it all so explicitly it's hard to believe it's not intentional (particularly since I believe her rage at the Gulf War is the driving energy behind the novel). The women aren't victims; the men aren't monsters. But the desire for the phallus makes all of them tragically unable to see or understand what they're doing, either to the people they supposedly love, or to the world at large. --- review written: March, 1997½

Story:
Travis Lee Stanhope is a misfit that doesnt fit in at school or home. So he volunteers to join the British army at the onset of WW1. Travis quickly shows a talent for sharp shooting that moves him to the front lines. It's not long before the constant battle and terrible conditions begin to wear on Travis. When he sleeps he begins to dream of a peaceful grave yard where a girl wearing a calico dress walks among the graves. Even more frightening to Travis is that he begins to see the people he has shot and his dead squad mates in the graveyard and they even occasionaly talk to him. To deal with all this Travis begins to drink heavily which lands him in all sorts of trouble and gets him paired up with the disturbed Leblanc. Leblanc is the companies most decorated solider but he has some very dark demons that he cannot control and Travis finds himself in the unwelcome role of keeper to a man he does not understand and has no way of controlling. This is the beginning of Travis's long journey to understand his self, his puropose, and what lies beyond the darkness of the grave yard he seems to be the unwilling caretaker of.
-----
This is a different book I will say that. There aren't many supernatural war stories and proably even less are set in war world one. The author does a good job of protraying the main characters gradual decline from college kid on a summer lark to a severly depressed, shell shocked no -mans land survior to a man that has come to a grim acceptance of his past and his presnt. This definetly is not a Hollywood take on World War 1. People die and often it is not in heroic circumstances. One minute Travis is talking to someone, the next they were a little to slow to dive into the trench or little to slow to put there gas mask on and then there not there anymore and it turns out the ones that get shot or blown up are the lucky ones. What I'm getting at is that if you don't like violence or the aftermath of it, this book proably isn't for you, the author doesn't shy away from the horrors of the world war 1 trenches. I would reccomend this book to anyone who is looking for a different kind of historical fiction book. I would also recommend this to any one who likes stories such as Odd Thomas.
m.a.c

I was a bit gobsmacked by this book. Unrelenting and lovely all at the same time. Travis Lee is a great character, and Patricia Anthony has a well-defined moral view-point that doesn't get in the way of the characters or the story. The final battle scene is really grim and I wept at the end of the book. Something I haven't done in a long time.½

A 'first contact' story set in medieval Europe. I think I liked this story better when it was called "Eifelheim".

A hovering blue light interacts with people as the world is focused on the next world war.

Excellent sad ending. It's a tragedy. Good writing, good setting. Could have been funnier or more serious. Nothing like I thought it would be.½

Eating Memories by Patricia Anthony (1997)

Contents:
Blood brothers
What Brothers are For
Sweet Tooth at Io
Good neighbor
Anomaly
Eating Memories
Bluebonnets
Belief Systems
The Name of the Demon
Coyote on Mars
The Deer lake Sightings
For No Reason
The Murcheson Boy
The Holes Where Chickens Lie
The Shoot
Blue Woofers
The Secret Language of Old White Ladies
Dear froggy
The Last Flight from Llano
Born to be Wild
Guardian of Fireflies
Alone Again in Dweebland
The Dark at the Corner of the Eye
Lunch with Daddy
White Boy
Young Wives
Scavenger Hunt
Two Bag Goddess