Fighting the Darkness
Review: The Failures by Benjamin Liar
This is the kind of debut novel you know has at least a dozen novels in the trunk behind it. The Failures reminds me of Swanwick’s Chasing the Phoenix – a high compliment and Liar admits that Swanwick is one of his influences.
Keep an eye on this author. The Failures has some rough edges, like all debuts, but it’s far more ambitious than most new authors attempt – and Liar mostly gets away with it. I say mostly because the time jumps are, perhaps, a little bit brittle and often confusing; a more experienced author would have done a better job.
It’s also a book one that fails to stand alone, and I hope it does well, because that is a split of the story, not an ending…I assume that it got way too long and had to be separated. Even in its current state it weighs in at over 500 pages. (And yes, I was given THIS one in Kansas City too. Somebody really wanted to weigh the plane down).
500 pages of strange. Liar subverts one of the oldest tropes in pulp fiction - the Earthman with superpowers by writing most of the book from the perspective of the locals. The Behemoth are alien beings to this world, even as their names and stories reveal their origins.
There’s also the pedigree of Gene Wolfe in here; likely subconscious or through multiple layers, but this is a classic Dying Sun book, set on or in or around an alien world that very clearly is not going to turn out to be future Earth…but rather some variance, perhaps, on fairyland. Certainly there’s a bit of a fae feel to this, even if the pixie is a robot.
Technology and magic blur together in this book, although I personally find it feels more like a certain brand of far future science fiction epitomized by such works as the already-mentioned Chasing the Phoenix, Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun series and, to an extent, Silverberg’s Nightwings.
I liked it. It’s classed as science fantasy, and I suppose that is where it lands, but it still feels as if this is the magic of strange technology, a Clarkean spell rather than a Vancean one.
Recommended for those who like the weird.