REVIEW SUMMARY: A bizarre (but ultimately satisfying) reading experience.

MY RATING:

BRIEF SYNOPSIS: A scheming ship captain wishes to lay claim to a planet-sized diamond, but discovers that there is an alternate Earth inside it.

MY REVIEW:

PROS: Cool sf-nal ideas; sense of wonder; humorous.

CONS: Hard to initially get a handle on; slow beginning.

BOTTOM LINE: A good story told in an unconventional fashion.


I’ve never quite has a reading experience like the one I had with The Crystal Cosmos, a novella written by Rhys Hughes. It is simultaneously high-concept, bizarre, wonderful and a little frustrating. There were times when I was confused and times when I was enraptured; there were times when I thought it was hardly worth continuing and times I thought it was pure genius. It’s a strange dichotomy that I still can’t quite resolve. I ultimately liked it – and as I mull the story over I like it more and more – but it’s one of those things that I would have to read again to fully appreciate.

The story concerns the discovery of a planet-sized black diamond by a scheming-but-charismatic ship captain named Terence Cankar. To legally lay claim to the giant gem, he brings along a member of the Trust, an opposing political faction. Enter Saphho Ritsos, the Trust operative who, based on her namesake, is intended to be insusceptible to Cankar’s irresistible manly charms – the result of him producing “eleven times as many pheromones as ordinary males.” Their trip to the crystal leads to the discovery that the diamond is actually hollow and harbors an alternate Earth.

Meanwhile, in the ancient Greek setting that we learn early-on exists inside the diamond, a simple goatherd named Daphnis is charged with heresy. He believes that the world was created through intelligent design and not through randomness, as dictated by the philosophers who run his society. While dealing with his troubles, we also meet Anthia, the girlfriend of Daphnis who will do just about anything to further her acting career; and Gnathon, an animated man made of bronze who hints at knowing the true nature of things.

It’s late in the story before these two story lines intersect, as we know they inevitably will. In the meantime, the reader is subjected to an eclectic mix of science fictional concepts, philosophy, creation myth, and humor. This last one threw me a bit as I was not sure if this was meant to be a humorous sf story or a sf story with humor; the former aiming for comedy, the latter being sf that’s occasionally funny. The initial effect was off-putting, like I was trying to hold something I couldn’t quite get a handle on. Eventually I just went with flow and read it as a sf story, but just didn’t take it too seriously. Perhaps it’s because I struggled as I tried to put the odd-shaped pieces together that the first parts of the story tended to drag on a bit. (Is it a comedy? Is it space opera pastiche? Bah!) It wasn’t until later on, when the story came into focus, that the value of the beginning exposition was seen, but those parts were nonetheless a bit frustrating to wade through.

One really cool sf-nal aspect of the story was the use of alternate universes to travel vast distances, thus bypassing the thorny problem of space travel. (Or as Hughes puts it: “The problem of crossing interstellar distances had occupied so many scientists for so long that a proposed documentary of their achievements was abandoned as too costly.) Traveling, then, consists of a ship sitting in a hangar somewhere while it navigates through the “altwhere.” The catch here is travel to these other realities may alter things in various ways: a traveler might simply lose some memories, gain some new ones, or altogether cease to exist. Or a person may be transformed into something else entirely, like the unfortunate head chef who was transformed into a radiator. Oh, and furniture has a problem traveling the lateral universes. (This was around the point I learned to stop taking it seriously.) Another side effect could be that laws of the physics might be different from our own, which is the case here. Daphnis learns, for example, that gravity is not a constant; a discovery that falls on the deaf ears of the town’s humorously oblivious – but ill-humored philosophers.

By the end of the story – when all the weird-shaped pieces finally started falling into place – I could finally see the big picture. To be sure, Hughes had taken me to a good destination; it’s just that he took a bumpy road to get there.

Note: A book’s introduction is usually not worth mentioning, yet I must make note of Michael Bishop’s lengthy introduction to the novella. The intro itself is a kooky piece of meta-fiction concerning Bishop’s and Hughes’s adventure to find a lost a perfume mogul. (A little Googling reveals this to be an unplanned entry into Hughes’s proposed 1,000-story project.) This piece of bizarreness, which was as unconventional The Crystal Cosmos, should have prepared me for what was to come, but I simply ignored the road sign.

Related posts:

  1. REVIEW: Crystal Rain by Tobias S. Buckell
  2. REVIEW: The Iron Giant by Ted Hughes
  3. REVIEW: The Commons by Matthew Hughes
  4. REVIEW: Majestrum by Matthew Hughes
  5. REVIEW: The Gist Hunter and Other Stories by Matthew Hughes

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