First, a caveat: as the title of this post says, this is not a review of the entire work of Jeffrey Thomas. It´s rather a kind of analysis of the "life and times" of Jeremy Stake, his most famous character until the present moment.
The short story In His Sights (published in the volume 1 of The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction in 2007) presents us to Jeremy Stake, former corporal in the Colonial Forces in the Blue War, an extradimensional conflict between humans and a blue-skinned humanoid race known as the Ha Jiin. Stake lives in the planet Oasis (he is a native, never having visited Earth) and he is a mutant: his ability is to change his face (only that, his body stays the same) to whoever he stares at for a certain amount of time. That has proved to be a very good ability, especially when you are in combat or in secret ops and you need to sort of camouflage itself (he can even change slightly the color of his skin to look like a Ha Jiin).
He fought in the Blue War during four years, which started when he was still a teen (he´s 23 when he´s discharged). In the first few pages of the story, we see him in a Veteran´s Administration building in the capital of Oasis, Punktown (which goes by the official name of Paxton, which its own residentes never use anymore), right after the war ends. Stake does not show his face: he´s wearing a black healing mask because his mutant condition, called caro turbida (Latin for disordered flesh) poses him with a problem: he has no control whatsoever of the shapechanging process, and he has to wear the mask during most of the story because he still bears a kind of scar - the likeness of a Ha Jiin soldier he killed in his last mission and whose face he somehow can´t make disappear.
In His Sights is basically the story of a misunderstanding between a Stake who is still sporting the blue face of the enemy and Cal Williams, a former soldier turned serial killer because of his profound hate for the Ha Jiin and anyone who bears the slightest resemblance to them - including a prostitute of Asian extraction, which he has just killed the first time we see him. Williams bumps into Stake by chance in a VA´s Hospice, where both of them went to consult psychiatrists by order of the Colonial Forces.
Convinced by the psychologist, Stake removes his mask right there, but this plunges him in a downward spiral, as Williams begins to stalk him, for he´s certain that this blue-skinned man is a Ha Jiin who killed the real Stake - and must be stopped.
But the subsequent persecution of Stake by Williams and their fight (which is very short and a bit frustrating), though important for the reader´s understanding of Stake´s plight, is not the main course. What this short story really does is presenting us an almost complete blueprint of Stake´s universe. We are presented to at least two alien races of our dimension: the Choom, who look pretty much like us except for their wide, frog-like mouths (and whose name Thomas probably been borrowed from an old nation in medieval Vietnam, the Chom), and the Tikkihotto, who have bundles of tendrils in their faces instead of eyes. Other weird races are mentioned but don´t appear in this story, and one extradimensional alien race: the all-too-human blue-skinned Ha Jiin (and the independent nation of the Jin Haa, friends and allies to the human race).
We also learn of the Theta research/technology that allowed humankind to travel across universes, and the reason behind the Blue War: to collect the blue gas emitted by Ha Jiin dead bodies - in their burial places, the bodies are coated with a yellow paste that, upon body decaying, liberates this blue gas - which the Ha Jiin venerates as their ancestral spirits, but, as humans discovers, it´s a very efficient fuel to the Theta pods that make the dimensional travels (Thomas doesn´t explain, at least for now, what fueled the Theta pods before, which is kind of a mystery, since the blue gas only exists in that other dimension).
And we also learn that Stake is haunted by an obsession from the past, the deadliest Ha Jiin sniper, a woman called Thi Gonh, dubbed "The Earth Killer". The woman that Stake himself finally caught - and the prisoner he fell in love with. This obsession is what drives him to rent a flat on Judas Street, in a poor section of Punktown, and also a computer and a black market handgun, a Wolff .45. All he thinks to do when he moves in there is to find Thi Gonh.
In His Sights had a certain noir flavor to me (more Ed McBain than Chandler), and won me at once. I became very interested in reading whatever else Jeffrey Thomas could have written - specially in that universe.
And Solaris Books already had what I wanted: I read in the last page of their anthology that his Thomas´s first novel featuring Jeremy Stake, Deadstock, would be published soon. I didn´t even need to order it: one of the weeks after that, I found the pocket in the same bookstore I bought the antho. I bought it immediately.
Deadstock was good - but not quite as good as the story I had read earlier.
The story takes place ten years after In His Sights, in a Punktown much more dark and weird than the one we briefly visited before. The prologue, in which a member of a teen gang is brutally killed by a trash disposal machine in an abandoned condo, gives us a glimpse of strange creatures:
stylized human figures with barely defined features and rudimentary limbs, standing straight like soldiers ranked at attention. They reminded Brat of pictures he had seen of the outdated motion picture award called the Oscar (...)
Stake is working as a private detective now, and he is hired by a Mr. John Fukuda, a very wealthy man who needs him to do an apparently pretty harmless, even boring, certainly ridiculous, job - to find out his daughter´s doll. But this is not your average doll: it´s a Kawaii-doll, which was all the rage with the children in the Earth colonies. Kawaii-dolls are animated toys, but some of them are bioengineered organisms.
Yuki Fukuda´s own doll, Dai-oo-ka, is better yet - it´s practically a living being, created by her father´s company. The Fukuda Bioforms designs and manufacturers bioengineered life forms, including deadstock ("an unappetizing slang we use for comestible battery animals", John Fukuda tells Stake).
But things aren´t as harmless as they may seem, for bioengineered organisms that run amok in the streets become smart, learning on the fly - and soon Dai-oo-ka is a force to be reckoned with, as Stake will soon find out when he have to deal with it in a very different form and size.
That part of the story is most interesting, along with a flashback in which we know what really happened between Stake and Thi Gonh when he captured her at the end of the Blue War. They became lovers, for she reciprocated the feeling he had for her. It did not last, however, for she was sent back to her land as soon as the war ended, and he never heard from her again - until now, when she suddenly reappears to save his life in a dire situation and vanishes again. And the John Fukuda plot thickens when we become aware of a long-lost brother, James, who plays a fundamental role in the action. as one of the great things in Deadstock, the Ouija Phone, a cellphone that supposedly accesses a dimension of the dead - and plays a considerable role in the story.
As for the abandoned condo plot, that part didn´t appeal much to me - maybe because of the whole teen gang stuff. Even though this part in itself could become a very interesting horror film, featuring flesh machines instead of zombies when two fighting gangs are forced to help each other if they are to leave the condo alive.
But it is very hard to create a believable story with children/teens as protagonists - or as secondary characters, even if the story itself is good. One of the very few authors in the genre who can do that is Orson Scott Card (other one is Stephen King, but he is hors concours, as we use to say in Brazil).
I grasped what Thomas wanted to do in the story, and I don´t think he would have done a good job otherwise. Let´s just say it is not my cup of tea.
But I didn´t finish Deadstock disappointed, as weird as that may sound: the novel wraps itself nicely and makes you curious for more.
Which is why I asked Mark Newton, of Solaris, to send me a copy of Blue War, the second Stake novel, as soon as it was published.
Blue War shows us a more mature Jeremy Stake (and a more mature Jeffrey Thomas as well), even though its title sort of cheated me. I thought this novel would lead us right to the time Stake served in the army fighting the Ha Jiin. Instead, we follow him on a job commissioned to him by an old friend of the Colonial Forces, who wants him to help him solve a mystery, one year after the events of Deadstock.
As in the earlier novel, the mystery was already laid bare to us right in the prologue - a kind of a Bond-like shocker the kind of which I suspect Thomas will give us more and more in his next books (not that I´m complaining: I like them a lot): a copy of Punktown suddenly begins to form itself in the jungles of Sinan, the Ha Jiin world, eating through the wild to emulate buildings and houses of the entire city. Captain Rick Henderson hires Stake because he knows Sinan better than him and the other military personnel in charge of the case.
Stake travels to Sinan using the Theta technology he haven´t seen since the Blue War and soon meets resistance of Henderson´s superior, Colonel Dominic Gale, a no-nonsense man who doesn´t want any civilians around.
Again, I found myself with mixed feelings regarding Blue War. The Gale character is quite bidimensional if compared with everybody else around him - always angry, always scratching his scalp, he´s almost an Asimovian character. (One thing I caught myself thinking all the while was: why in hell Gale didn´t just send Stake back, since he is Henderson´s superior? After all, it wasn´t as if Gale was a very rational man anyway.)
But, on the other hand, there are many characters better depicted than Gale. Like, for instance, Ami Pattaya, a scientist who´s an hermaphrodite and with whom Stake has a brief pansexual affair; Ha Jiin Captain Hin Yengun, who helps Stake , ... and Thi Gonh, who returns this time in a more concrete, human way. Stake finally finds her former lover in a village, where she lives as a farmer with Hin, her husband. She doesn´t have children, and Hin despises and mistreats her.
Driven by a love that never died in his heart, Stake confronts Gonh´s husband and urges her to come back with him to his dimension. She is torn apart, but she can´t simply turn her back to her culture. Stake can´t understand it, but he knows deep inside that his shapeshifting condition makes him a man with no tradition at all.
Thomas´s stories seem to orbit around the theme of simulacra (his excellent story in The New Weird, Immolation, is a quite good example of this). Quoting myself in my review of the antho for The Fix:
(...) The main character reminded me strongly of Robert Sheckley's Specialist and erased the not-so-good impression left in me by the "Oscars," a kind of security robot presented in Deadstock, and which I likened to characters in the Batman Animated Series of the 1990s in a review in my blog. My public apologies to Mr. Thomas.
Not that I like the Oscars, as I made clear far above - but I do like Thomas´s stories more and more, because I can see the work in progress in his writings, and that appeals strongly to me. I look forward to more Jeffrey Thomas novels and stories real soon.
UPDATE: I read in Solaris´s blog that Jeffrey Thomas has been nominated for the 2008 John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Deadstock. Congratulations for the nomination, Jeffrey!
illustration by Fabio Cobiaco
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