Now in a new edition from Babbage Press!
John Shirley on A Splendid Chaos:
Zero and Bowler and Angie and Cisco strolling through night-time New York City looking for a. good time. They walk into a new club with no cover charge, no minimum; the music is loud and the drinks are free. But the fun ends when the entrance seals seamlessly and a man extrudes from the wall...
Zero wakes up in an alien environment. He has been abducted by the Meta and become a pawn in a weird cosmic game of survival. The Earthers have thirty other intelligent, ambitious, and sometimes monstrous species to deal with. But the their greatest enemy may be a fellow human, Harmon Fiskle, a power-mad adovocate of a strange form of social Darwinism. Despite Fiskle's oppostion, a cross-species expedition embarks on a quest that takes them into a surreal adventure as the search for truth.
A counter to his realistic vision of future-Earth in the Eclipse trilogy, John Shirley shows us, here, another dimension of his talent. A Splendid Chaos is a fantastic feat of imagination, populated with the most frightening succession of alien life forms since Harry Harrison's Deathworld. Although utterly fantastic, Chaos still has meaning and social comment. The garish images of horror are linked, and balanced, with a sober assessment of the human condition.
"A Splendid Chaos was an attempt to write surrealism that nevertheless made sense...writing allegorically and using archetypal characters."
OtherRealms #23, Winter, 1989 (Four Stars):
In a chaotic system, two points that begin next to each other can end up arbitrarily far apart. John Shirley starts off next to the standard "kidnapped hero wakes up on strange world as plaything of superior beings" story and ends up with a solid Movement novel. Along the way, Shirley reworks the "quest across the world" cliche, the "good versus evil" cliche and a host of others.Zero is kidnapped from the streets of New York. He wakes up on Fool's Hope, a world populated with dozens of alien intelligences, deadly carnivorous flora and fauna, and with a human settlement reduced to early Medieval technology. The whole mess is run by aliens called the Meta who have brought the humans and other inhabitants here to fight it out for survival. Each species tries to reach stations where the Meta have placed some item of technology which can give the holder advantage.
To spice things up, there are the Currents: tornado-like bursts of IAMtons, the basic particles of chaos. (I think, therefore IAM--get it?) These Currents cause wild mutations in the creatures they touch, turning them into Twists. Twists reveal their innermost natures by the powers they acquire from the Currents: some become vampires, some become brainless muscle-bound hulks, and so on.
The villain is Harmon Fiskle, an advocate of violent social Darwinism, of selective eugenics and breeding. He is a tight-assed, prissy university professor who didn't like Zero before and certainly doesn't like him now. When Fiskle is Twisted and begins a campaign forcing the humans to Twist and join him or die, Zero and friends set out for the greatest Technology Station of them all, hoping to find something that will help the humans. As fantasy readers know, no quest is complete without elves and dwarves (in some guise). Some strange aliens accompany Zero and his friends.
Shirley sets up the idols of fantasy to smash them with a hammer of eighties' sensibility: the leader of the human encampment is a lesbian woman, the Meta are not benevolent providers or evil slave-masters, the Twists are a running commentary on the venality of people. Fiskle is a Reaganaut carried to its right- wing extreme, and Zero is an eighties version of a young Everyman. Despite carrying the load of this double-level message (or perhaps because of it), Splendid Chaos manages to be entertaining and engrossing.
Library Journal, April 15, 1988:
Suddenly transplanted from Earth to an alien world to play a deadly game of survival against a host of creatures from distant planets, a group of humans elects to undertake a risky quest to transform the nature of the game itself. Shirley's (the Eclipse trilogy) imagination veers between the sublime and the grotesque in this nightmarish new wave version of humanity's search for meaning. While not for squeamish readers, this sf adventure is recommended for large sf collections.Publishers Weekly, March 18, 1988:
Kidnapped by the alien Meta, college student Martin Wirth (nickname: "Zero") wakes up on another planet. The previous abductees call it "Fool's Hope" for its combative population of shanghaied extraterrestrials (31 different races) and its own poisonous wonderland of an environment. Is this a game, an experiment, some sort of punishment? No one knows, and the never-seen Meta aren't saying. To counter behavioral psychology professor Harmon Fiskle's warlike, imperial dreams, Zero mounts a multi-species expedition to a Meta progress station, seeking answers. This lively adventure does come to a rather moralistic ending, and Shirley's fertile imagination sometimes outstrips his descriptive powers; but the world he's created is a knockout, from telepathic Venus's-flytraps to the floating radioactive Current that instantly Twists a person into a grotesque parody of his inner fears and desires.
