Chris Roberson wisely dedicated his 14th novel to [author:Michael Moorcock], [author:Alan Moore], and [author:Kim Newman], three authors who pioneered the difficult to execute non-linear, historical, time-travel adventure. Following in their perennially successful footsteps, Roberson’s End of the Century recounts three unique interrelated tales from three distinct time periods.

In 498 Anno Domini, the timid Galaad journeys to Caer Llundain — later known as London — for an audience with High King Artor, Count of Britannia. Visions trouble the traveler; dreams of a White Lady that he is compelled to share with the ruler.

“At least that’s what I call her. At first I thought she was instead one of the goddesses of our grandfathers. Perhaps she was Ceridwen, who made the potion greal in her magic cauldron, on her island in the middle of a lake.” He shook his head, lips pursed as though he’d just eaten something distasteful. As a follower of the precepts of Pelagianism, he knew there were many paths to the divine, but still the thought of pagan goddesses contacting him made Galaad uneasy. “But perhaps it doesn’t matter who she is, only what she is showing me.”

Summoned by Scotland Yard to investigate a particularly gruesome murder on the eve of Queen Victoria’s 1897 Diamond Jubilee, legendary detective Sanford Blank, who solved the Whitechapel Ripper case many years before, and his lovely companion, Roxanne Bonaventure, fear the carnage marks the return of the Torso Killer — a murderer who was never caught.

“I’ve never seen cuts like these,” Blank said.

“And here I thought you had seen everything, Blank,” Miss Bonaventure said in a ill-advised attempt to mask her own squeamishness with levity. Blank shot her a hard look, and her weak smile grew even weaker. Subdued, and looking away from the bloody remains, she went on. “But no, I’ve never seen the like, either.”

“I take it the head and hands have not been retrieved?”

“No.” Melville shook his head. “No sign of them, same as ... ” He bit the words off, but Blank knew what he’d been about to say.

Same as last time.

Blank and Bonaventure quickly uncover at least two more recent victims whose deaths previously seemed unrelated.

With medication, the epileptic Alice Fell repressed the visions that first plagued her as a child. Now in London, 2000 CE, the 18-year-old Alice stands before the London Eye, a 400-foot ferris wheel that looms over the city, and confronts her seizure dreams:

An eye over a city. (What city, she didn’t know.)

A jewel or diamond or crystal that seemed to shine with an inner light.

Large black birds. Lots of them. (Origin-ally Alice thought they were crows, or maybe even oversized grackles, but when she saw a nature documentary a while later, she knew she’d been wrong. They were ravens.)

A small body of water, a pond or lake, the surface motionless as glass, smooth and featureless as a mirror’s face.

A man she didn’t know whose eyes were ice-chip blue.

At first clearly delineated, the three narratives of Roberson’s tale slowly coalesce into a cohesive plot about the Holy Grail and a mysterious entity known as Omega.

Roberson successfully repurposes the techniques of [author:A. Conan Doyle] and other 19th-century wordsmiths to accurately portray the world of the Bland-Bonaventure narrative. His three stated literary antecedents relied on similar tropes to great effect in their own works, most effectively in Moorcock’s [book:Metatemporal Detective] stories, Newman’s novel [book:Anno Dracula], and Moore’s graphic novel series [book:League of Extraordinary Gentlemen].

The author stumbles a bit in the third, near-contemporary, tale — Fell, a petulant adult, earns little sympathy in this least interesting story — but he captures the essence of each era, wielding his extensive knowledge of historical minutiae to set the scenes and mimic the proper literary stylings through the machinations of dialogue and even sentence structure. The use of archaic words make the Galaad selections slightly more difficult to read, but they thrust the reader into an unfamiliar world along with the young, naive protagonist, thus creating the most intriguing adventure of the three.

The latest novel in the author’s Bonaventure-Carmody Sequence, End of the Century requires no previous experience with any of his other books, though as events unfold, prior knowledge of Roxanne Bonaventure and her extended family grant the experienced reader additional insights. A World Fantasy Award finalist and winner of the Sidewise Award for Best Alternate History Short Form, Roberson ultimately delivers a superior multi-linear novel worthy of the authors to whom he dedicated End of the Century.

This review originally appeared in The San Antonio Current, January 7, 2009. ( )

Fascinating mix of periods & genres. This three-track book starts out with three different narratives that merge very well at the climax of the book. Marvelous read and it's going to force me to find more of Chris' books. ( )

In End of the Century, Chris Roberson takes us on an Arthurian quest for the Holy Grail. While that would be plenty for most writers, Roberson isn’t content to stop with only one story; he also tells the story of a search for a serial killer in London around the time of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, and of Alice Fell, a sixteen-year-old following a vision that may simply be a symptom of epilepsy in 2000. The three stories have a number of factors that seem to be similar, particularly the big fellow who goes around attacking people with a sword that can slice through anything, accompanied by dogs with blood-red ears and teeth. Only in the last 75 pages or so do things start to come together in a startling way.

The book begins in 498 Anno Domini, when Galaad arrives in Caer Llundain, home of the Count of Britannia and victor of Badon, the High King Arthur. This is no Arthur of legend, but a man who led his countrymen in battles against the Saxons and now presides over his people as best he can, settling disputes and trying to make sure that the Saxons – who weren’t really defeated, precisely, but merely fended off for the time being – don’t take away the hard-won peace. He and his fellow knights are bored with the business of governing, but understand its necessity. Still, they are ripe for an adventure, and Galaad offers a great one: he has had visions of an island surrounded by water with a castle of glass in which a lady in white is kept prisoner.

Actually, we don’t learn all of this the first time Galaad appears in the narrative. He simply arrives in Caer Llundain and manages to get inside the city gates in the first chapter. A few pages later, we’re transported to 1897 AD (the nomenclature for the date changes each time a new date is introduced, to comport with the century’s practice), where Sanford Blank and Roxanne Bonaventure, scandalously enjoying each other’s company without the presence of a chaperone, come across a newspaper account of a stolen diamond. Before they can explore the issue much further, however, the Metropolitan Police arrive to escort Blank to the Tower Bridge, where his assistance is required, though the police will not tell him why.

After that short introduction to those two characters, we find ourselves in 2000 CE, where Alice Fell has just arrived in London after a flight from New York. She’s a smart kid; when asked by the customs agent upon her arrival if she has anything to declare, she briefly considers responding, “Nothing but my genius,” though she can’t quite remember whether it was Orson Welles or Oscar Wilde who said that first. Alice manages to gain admittance to the city, much as Galaad did in the first chapter – and back we go to Galaad’s time.

Roberson juggles all of his characters and their seeming disparate stories with great skill, slowly dealing out the similarities in the different time streams, slowly building the personalities of his various characters, slowly building a plot that is going to explode at the end of the book. It is most enjoyable to skip among the centuries. I particularly enjoyed Roberson’s vision of fifth century London, and the realistic portrayal of the historical Arthur – assuming that there ever was a historical Arthur. The smell and feel of that time and place are brought so much to life that the reader starts to feel the cold and smell the dirty bodies. This portion of the book is so grounded in realism when the story begins that it is almost a disappointment when the story of Galaad, Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table takes off into the realm of the unknown. Almost, but not quite.

Blank and Bonaventure are interesting characters, too, even if the ambiance of the nineteenth century isn’t quite as cleanly drawn. There is something obviously peculiar about both of them, and it doesn’t stop with Blank’s resemblance to Sherlock Holmes – or even his resemblance to Oscar Wilde, which becomes apparent only late in the book. They both seem to know much more than they should, and while Blank’s knowledge seems to derive mostly from an uncanny ability to use deductive reasoning, Bonaventure is an altogether different story. Unconcerned with conventional mores regarding the deportment of women, she goes where she pleases and does what she will. She seems more a woman of our time than of the nineteenth century, and there’s a reason for that.

Alice Fell has been having visions, just as Galaad does, though it doesn’t seem that the visions have a great deal in common. She knows she needs to be in London, and she soon meets Stillman Waters, who has been in her visions for years. Stillman is at least as odd as Blank and Bonaventure, and seems to have something in common with the nineteenth century couple that goes beyond history.

The threads progress pretty much equally, and each is as interesting as the other. But things take a serious turn for the weird when Galaad, Arthur and the Knights find themselves inside an odd mist with even odder weapons, facing very, very strange adversaries indeed. Le Morte d’Arthur seems very far away at this point. And Alice finds herself in the Unworld, falling, endlessly falling, but she seems to have a mission. Suddenly this book starts to completely unravel, or perhaps to take a different shape, or maybe to find the shape it was heading for all along.

It’s a flaw of End of the Century that the final 75 pages do not seem to grow organically from the three stories that lead up to it, but instead to be almost an entirely new story. I have my suspicions that this may be because I have not read any of Roberson’s earlier novels, in which some of the characters may have had their first appearances, according to the Author’s Note at the end of the book. I seem to have started at the wrong place. But this only makes me want to read more of Roberson’s work – particularly Here, There & Everywhere, Paragaea: A Planetary Romance and Set the Seas on Fire (which just arrived yesterday, providentially enough), all three of which promise to tell me more about Roxanne Bonaventure and her family. I’ll also be on the lookout for new writing from Roberson. He kept me captivated for almost 500 pages with excellent characterization and world building, even if the plot did sometimes make me feel lost. I really want to learn more about his alternate – or perhaps, merely secret – history. ( )

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

When it comes to the subject of genre projects, I like to think of there being two main types of artists out there: at the top you find a small number of so-called "A-writers," people like Neal Stephenson and JJ Abrams who are able to elevate their material beyond the usual genre tropes and thus appeal to a large general audience; and then there are the much more numerous "B-writers," the ones cranking out the majority of projects in that genre, who are not necessarily that bad (not necessarily) but for sure are the ones helping to more and more cement the rules of that genre, not break them. And let's face it, most of the time this isn't such a horrible thing, which is why the ten-point scale I use here at CCLaP is designed the way it is (for those who have never gotten to read the ridiculously long guide to CCLaP's scoring system I wrote a couple of years ago); it's why books that score only in the sevens and eights here might actually be fantastic, simply that they will appeal only to existing fans of that genre, while for a title to get a nine or above it simply must in one way or another transcend its natural stereotypes, and not just be well-written.

Take for example End of the Century, the latest title by science-fiction veteran and multiple genre-award nominee Chris Roberson; because it's not a bad book at all, not by a long shot, and will be thoroughly entertaining to anyone who's already a fan of, say, Buffy or Xena or any of those other Saturday-afternoon genre television shows. But much like these shows, the novel is simply a little hacky, with a plot that is too easily guessed and dialogue that is often subpar. In many ways, after all, this is precisely how we define fans of a particular genre in the first place (otherwise slightly insultingly known as "fanboys" and "fangirls"), is by how willing they are to overlook things like weak dialogue and easily anticipated plot developments, in order to wallow in the fetishistic touches of that genre they love so much; and this book is no exception, more than making up for its general-lit problems with a whole cornucopia of string-theory-this and steampunk-that, and all the other little details that SF fanboys are always on the lookout for. And this is simply bound to please some and frustrate others, which is also the whole point of having genres in the first place.

In fact, this is not only the steampunk story just mentioned, but actually four stories rolled into one: a medieval tale, a Victorian tale, a contemporary "cyberpunk" tale, and a thread concerning a shadowy time-traveling secret society that ties all these interwoven sections together. And yes, if this sounds exactly word for word like the concept for Ian McDonald's much superior Brasyl, put out last year by the same publisher (all the way down to similar indestructible glowing "quantum swords" only a few molecules thick, which I don't mind divulging because there's one right on the freaking cover), that's because it is; in fact, such a story structure is rapidly becoming so popular within the world of SF that you could almost count it as a new subgenre unto itself, which I suppose we could call the "tri-history tale" today for convenience's sake.

And like all tri-history tales, the whole point of End of the Century is to get caught up in all the witty details on display, the various clever shoutouts to the existing pillars of these particular story types; for example, the steampunk section revolves around a Sherlock Holmes pastiche named Sandford Blank, who in this case lives on York Street instead of Baker, who plays the flute instead of the violin, who's known for his bowler and silver-tipped cane instead of a deerstalker and briar pipe, whose companion is an attractive young woman named Bonaventure instead of the dowdy Doctor Watson. And yes, if the name 'Bonaventure' sounds familiar to Roberson's existing fans, there's a good reason; as he explains in the book's postscript, nearly every character seen here has some connection or another to nearly ever other book he's already written, in effect creating a self-contained Robersonian alternate universe, yet another hallmark of prolific B-writers no matter what the genre. (And by the way, it ain't just genre writers who enjoy creating pervasive alternate universes where all their books are set; see John Updike's "Rabbit" series, Philip Roth's "Zuckerman" titles and other such "general literature" books for ample proof of that.) And so do all these references work in two different directions; not only is the subversive antihero of the contemporary section a tough leather-jacket-wearing teenage girl, just like every single other cyberpunk story ever freaking written, but the Richard-Branson-type billionaire she eventually robs turns out to be one of the major characters as well from Roberson's earlier Paragaea: A Planetary Romance.

Yeah, I know; I can literally hear the eyes of several thousand CCLaP readers rolling as we speak, even as I hear several hundred others (you know who you are) quietly muttering, "Ooh, cool, I gotta check that book out." And that's the nature of genre work, and why we invented the term 'genre' to begin with, simply because it's work that naturally appeals to some and naturally repels others. Or to use an example that I already mentioned, let's take Buffy's creator Joss Whedon again, because the fact is that I myself am not much of a fan of his although most of my friends are; and that's what lets those otherwise very intelligent people get a sincere pleasure out of such shows as Angel and Dollhouse, that to me seem more appropriate for easily-impressed fourteen-year-olds than for sophisticated grown-ups. As I'm constantly reminded now that I'm a critic, not every artistic project we consume has to be designed solely for sophisticated grown-ups wishing to challenge themselves; in fact, most of us would probably burn out within mere weeks if we were to try maintaining a steady diet of only Pulitzer winners (or only Hugo winners, or only Stoker winners).

In fact, apart from this more philosophical debate over A-writers versus B ones, there's really only one thing about End of the Century that I feel worth legitimately calling out for criticism; and that's the rushed, exposition-heavy, literally deus-ex-machina ending Roberson tacks on, which I won't spoil but will say is the literary equivalent of the Simpsons' "Poochie" episode, where at the end they quickly explain away Poochie's death with a ridiculously nonsensical story thought of on the fly at the last moment. ("I must go now. My planet needs me." And then Poochie's spaceship blew up. The End.) There's a reason that such "god in the machine" endings, once highly popular among ancient Greek theatre-goers (which is where we get the term), have fallen out of favor among contemporary audiences, because these kinds of endings always feel like a cheat; whenever the last 50 pages of a novel rely on events and concepts that were never mentioned even once in the 400 pages leading up to the climax, in many ways it feels to the reader like the author saying, "And then a big f-cking finger came out of the sky and squished them all to death." And that's a letdown, and makes many people feel like the previous 400 pages they just took the time to read were ultimately a giant waste; and that was enough of a problem here for the book's score to drop a bit by the end, just for this reason and this reason alone.

It's for all of these things mentioned that such so-called B-novels are so hard to review, and why so many critics tend to simply skip these kinds of books altogether; because I don't exactly want to recommend End of the Century to everyone out there, but neither do I want to dismiss it, even with it being full of small elements we have every right to be dismissive of. Ultimately it gets a recommendation from me today, but only a limited one, and with me absolutely not wanting to get any angry letters along the lines of, "I picked this up because you told me to, but it was crap!" You may very well feel this way about today's book by the time you're done, so consider yourself duly warned; all you fangirls, however, might very well want to pick up a copy anyway.

Out of 10: 7.3 ( )