The Bodhisattva

Time for another Forgotten Friday (a special Friday edition of Forgotten Friday for those in continuity) and I dare say the most disappointing. It seems that  something like the San Diego Comic Con should not be allowed to occur unless I’m in the house, but alas via several reports and press releases, I’m sure that it has. This is like the Imperial March playing, with soldiers at attention and no Vader. At any rate according to Damon he will be a bit of force at some cons next year and will act as The Bodhisattva’s Hand.  For now I’m left once again with my weekly contribution to something a group of bloggers whom I don’t know share a book that is not spoken of enough, and for my own part also isn’t a book that I already am known to support that everybody should be reading but isn’t (People of Paperby Salvador Plascencia for instance). In this way being somebody who has several rubbish ‘recommending reading’ list out there works against me  as I’m trying to avoid ground I’ve already covered. Nobody has to be told that a Jonathan Carroll, Graham Joyce, Jeff VanderMeer or a Tim Powers are necessary buys - this is understood. I am also the forgotten contributor to this feature as while the others are collected elsewhere weekly, my efforts go unmentioned, to one day be dug up on a wayback as the lost scrolls of Forgotten Friday to be kept silent by whatever ruling junta of the day.  Again, this is not a review but a brief pointer to a book that future rebels and heretics should be reading.

I was recently rethumbing through The Book of Dreams, an anthology of stories utilizing Neil Gaiman’s Dreaming that he mad part of speculative fiction canon with his run on Sandmanwhere he gathered some of the best writers in our field: Lisa Goldstein, Gene Wolfe, Susanna Clarke, Caitlin Kiernan, Colin Geeenland, George Alec Effinger,  and Steven Brust among them.   John M. Ford was among them with Chain Home, Low and I found my subject for this week’s feature. Ford passed away in 2006 and you’d be hard-pressed to find somebody that was as well liked by so many, he was like the Archie Goodwin (The DC Editor, not Nero’s sidekick) of the SF/F novel field who got props from people like a Gaiman to a Robert Jordan,  a writer in a way everybody felt and if you look at his body of work (which is admittedly irrelevant when considering a/the person) you see a glimpse of why. Ford left behind a body of work that includes pieces that can stand up as prime examples of whatever label anyone wants to attach to them. From one of - in my mind - fundamental, must read, alternative history novels with The Dragon Waiting or a classic SF coming-of age story like Growing Up Weightless or a showcase of the breadth of his ability with collections like Heat of Fusion, all worthwhile reads on any Forgotten Friday or any  day of the week with a number of accompanying adjectives - but his last novel The Last Hot Time may indeed be his best; a comment that may seem impossible with those familiar with either of the first two aforementioned novels.

fantasy doesn’t make different
stories possible, but sometimes it makes different outcomes possible,
through the literalization of metaphor that is one of the key things
fantasy does. Moral strength can change the real world — and a good
thing, too — but in a fantastic story it can make dramatic,
transformative, immediate changes. The idea that such transformations
always have a price is what keeps fantasy from being morally empty –
magic may save time and reduce staff requirements, but it offers no
discounts. - from an interview with Patrick Nielsen Hayden

This is Ford’s play into ‘urban’ fantasy bringing a classic depressions-era gangland feel to a likely locale that is Chicago, though the setting itself is not in our past, but our near future.   When Chicago becomes a gate to earth’s former rulers - elves - we follow one young paramedic Danny Holman as he morphs into ‘Doc’ Hallownight and enters a world partly from fanciful myth and our societies own in regards to a glamorous crime.

We have seen books in a semi-similar mode. The Butcher Dresden books fail to make one feel any of the citizens of either world different from each other giving everyone essentially human attributes in all but words that fail to sway. Ford’s Elves are decidedly alien even as they take on persona’s that are familiar and their reactions and motivations to play or assimilate either way adds to an image that should sell the book on its own: elves with gats running around Chitown. We see this through a very effective POV of the protagonist where you may pick up on an ability of Ford to detach himself from a work that allows each of his books to become unique quantities.  Even as great a writer as someone like a Wolfe or Gaiman, they have a stamp that identifies their books and while this can be a sign of greatness in itself,  with Ford it was  almost as if a different person writes each book - a person who apparently more than has brushes with several connected subcultures; be it techy, Trekkie, or immersed in pulp traditions enough to know when Maxwell Grant creations needed a nod - yet Ford plays the method actor, avoiding niche by continually searching for it - master of all trades proving it -  and was truly a writer early in his career that we have come to admire more just recently who uses ideas of genre as a flying carpet not to run in place on and here we see Ford tell what is really a love story where retro is not only cool, it is fact, and is a pocket in between the known and fantasy.

The Last Hot Time is sad only in the unfortunate real-world veracity of the title as we sit here with nothing more too look forward to in world that one day may need another 110 stories.

Previous Forgotten Fridays:

The Steam Magnate by Dana Copithorne

Dossier by Stepan Chapman

Black Brillion by Matthew Hughes

Pandora, by Holly Hollander by Gene Wolfe

Coelestis by Paul Park

Sarah Canary by  Karen Joy Fowler

Brittle Innings by Michael Bishop