Instantly Celestial…Richard Garfinkle’s Fiction of Imagination

I first discovered Richard Garfinkle whilst browsing the Sci-fi/Fantasy/Horror section of Aardvark Books (back in the days of yore, when I still lived in San Francisco, circa 2004).  The cover you see to the left piqued my interest.  I routinely judge books by covers.  It’s just what I do.  In any event, I picked up the book, titled Celestial Matters, and read this on the front cover:

A novel of alternate science among the crystalline spheres.

I sure as hell didn’t know what that meant but boy was I intrigued.  Looking at the back gave me this little jem:

A thousand years after Alexander the Great, the Greek empire has expanded over the world with the help of advanced technology.  Its plans for Total Domination of the entire planet will be complete once the war with the Empire of the Middle Kingdom has been won.

See, the deal is that all of Aristotle’s ideas about physics were right, and thus, Greece was able to create advanced technology (guns, planes, hovercraft, even space ships) based on Aristotle’s work and, you know, conquer the world.  Except for Asia, where the Taoist science of the Middle Kingdom (China) rules.

The two empires are locked is a seemingly endless war.

The book’s concept alone is amazing.  I had to buy/start reading it right then.  I’ll be honest, though, and say it isn’t the greatest thing I’ve ever read.  It does read a bit slow because it is told in first person by a Greek and Garfinkle nails a certain attitude for that character that lends itself to slow story telling.

But I did enjoy it quite a bit and, once I was done, looked for other works by Garfinkle.  What I found was one other book (which, just like Celestial Matters, was out of print) titled All of an Instant.  I think I paid, after shipping, in the 3 dollar range for the trade paper version (the only version in existence, I imagine) and it might be the best three bucks I’ve ever spent.

Imagine there is a dimension wherein time can be traversed like an ocean so that one could navigate to any point in human history and enter back onto Earth.  Now imagine that there exists in this dimension, known as the Instant, thousands of (for lack of a better term) people fighting for dominance of said dimension.

That’s the basic premise of the book and really doesn’t even scratch the surface in describing what it is about.

If you click on the link above (the one that goes to Amazon) you’ll see that the work has just about 15 reviews and, of those, only three are poor reviews.  The one and two star reviews complain, mostly, about the density and complexity of ideas in the book.  One mentions that the characters are poorly written, though I disagree.  The three main characters (each of whom is wildly different from the other two) in this work were, for me, much easier to empathize with than nearly all the characters in Celestial Matters.  But really, all three are all complaining that All of an Instant is a challenging book.

And you’re damn right it is!

If you just want summer beach reading, don’t pick up this book.  If, however, you like to be challenged by a book.  And when I say challenged, I mean in every possible way.  This book challenges our (often assumed) notions about plot, character, setting, even the very ideas of time and causality.

You know what, though?  I read this one much more quickly, much more fervently, than I did Celestial Matters.  In that book, the premise was just the foundation of the work, whereas the plot really was the focus of the thing.  Here, the premise is the plot, and the characters, and everything.  And the three protagonists are amazingly well rendered considering how disparate they are from one another and from normal humans.

I wouldn’t tread lightly with this book.  If, however, you accept that it is a work of fiction that will challenge you as a reader, then you will enjoy it.

Even though both these books are out of print, you can get them easily on the internetz.  On the flipside, Garfinkle just released his third novel, Exaltations, which looks awesome but, sadly, is only available on lulu for the princely sum of 40 dollars, American.

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