Ceres Storm
by David Herter
Review by Stephen Dedman
(Stephen's updated bibliography of short fiction)
(Review first appeared in Nova Express)
Ceres Storm is David Herter's first novel, and (according to the blurb) his first publication, though he has previously attended Clarion West. It is an intriguing novel, sparkling with linguistic inventiveness, and I look forward to reading it again... particularly as I have a strange feeling I missed something, and perhaps a lot of things, on first contact.
Daric, the novel's protagonist, is the clone of Darius, the Leader, who ruled a stellar empire (now dissolved) for a millennium. Daric has spent his boyhood living in a crumbling monument, the former home (now the cenotaph) of the Mind of Mars, the hero who saved the planet from the nanotech whirlwind that has ravaged Earth and several other worlds. Daric's robotic Grandpapa orders him to visit the nearest city, Oppidum, where he narrowly avoids being kidnapped by an eidolon, Penthesilia. Realizing that he can no longer hide, Grandpapa prepares for Daric to leave Mars, but the kidnappers find him and take him to the quarantined Earth. There, Daric is hailed as Darius, learns more about the nanotech storms and his own origin; he also meets some of Darius's other clones, who persuade him to travel to the asteroid belt and beyond the Heliocracy as Darius's emissary in an attempt to restore the empire.
Whether or not he succeeds in this, or whether or not we should wish he had, it's difficult to be sure: as Alice said of 'Jabberwocky', "Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas - only I don't exactly know what they are! However, somebody killed something; that's clear, at any rate -". While Herter is long on inventiveness and originality, he's rather less generous with explanation. That he enjoys language for its own sake is beautifully demonstrated on the first page, in the line "The shade called the ceiling a domical vault." - and sometimes, I suspect that was all Herter was doing, using phrases like 'domical vault' when there was no reason for not saying 'ceiling'. Or, as Damon Knight once put it, calling a rabbit a smeerp. Perversely, one of Herter's characters explains the word 'cenotaph' to Daric, but nothing else; even if I didn't know what a cenotaph was, I could have looked it up, which I can't do with some of Herter's other inventions, as there is no glossary.
Tor's publicist describes the book as being "in the tradition of Alfred Bester", among others, and while there are echoes of Bester's love of wordplay and format and exuberantly picaresque bouncing from setting to setting, it's less emotionally engaging than Bester's better works, or those of (for example), the equally poetic Richard Calder. It's less gripping than Wil McCarthy's Bloom, which covers similar ground, and can also be compared to Douglas Adams without the jokes. It's difficult to identify with Daric, who is part boy and part god-king but still very much a pawn for much of the novel. When he does act of his own volition, it's difficult to know exactly what he's done, or whether it matters.
Nonetheless, there is a certain definite charm to Ceres Storm - not just the sort of pleasure you can get from listening to a beautifully sung opera in a language you don't understand, but in the sheer alien-ness of much of it. In reality, we will probably have less chance of understanding the language and culture of the human race a few thousand years hence, than Shakespeare would have of making sense of the instruction manual for a video-cassette recorder. While there are occasional slumps in Herter's inventiveness - e.g. the bodies competing for dominance of the solar system are an empire and a corporation - it's a very welcome break from those distant futures where people still wear neck-ties.
Copyright © Stephen Dedman
Publisher: Tor Books (Nov 2000); Tor Science Fiction (Dec, 2001)
ISBN: 0
312 87493 6