"SF in SF"
Reviews of Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature
With San Francisco Settings

It's no surprise that many writers of fantasy and speculative fiction have chosen to tell weird tales which have their setting in the city of San Francisco. This fog-strewn city with its odd people and beautiful Victorian houses seems to automatically lend itself to tales of the otherworldly--whether they're true-life tales or fictional ones.

During the decades that I've lived here, I have enjoyed all sorts of sci-fi, but have particularly enjoyed reading novels and stories which are set here, because it's always such a strange trip to run into the names of familiar streets, and notice other familiar points of reference - but instead of seeing them in my everyday reality, I'm experiencing these familiar things in the unfamiliar environment inherent in a work of fiction--and this puts them in entirely new frames, which makes me learn to re-notice them when I see them again in reality.

It's got a psychedelic sort of effect--that of mixing the familiar and the unfamiliar in odd patterns that present themselves to be run through, played with, and figured out. The familiar landscape of "one's own backyard" imparts a remarkably surreal feeling to both the environment of the books and the so-called Real World. I encounter descriptions of buildings and streetscapes that I see so often, they've sometimes ended up becoming almost invisible. Seeing them through the eyes of science fiction authors often leads me to learn to notice all those places and things all over again. Sometimes, I even come to notice for the first time things that I may have never noticed before in all my years of living here.

I present here some brief descriptive reviews of all the San-Francisco-based "SF" books and short stories (the "SF" meaning "science fiction","surreal fantasy" and/or "speculative fiction") with which I am currently familiar. If you know of any other "SF in SF" books, please do let me know about them, so I can read and review them.

THE CITY NOT LONG AFTER - by Pat Murphy

The future San Francisco that Ms. Pat Murphy portrays in this wistful tale has been abandoned by the greater portion of its citizenry, after a huge chunk of the world's population has been wiped out by a mysterious plague. In the plague's aftermath, a young girl discovers her past - as well as her future - as she whiles away her time rooting around the city's remains. The streets and buildings have become overgrown with unpruned gardens, which provides a home for the wackier elements of the sector of the population which have survived the plague. A new City is building itself on top of what's left of the old, but a dark threat from the pre-plague world threatens to lay it all to waste. The City Not Long After is a truly beautiful book, one that's not as well known as it deserves to be.

The undisputed Father of Cyberpunk gives us, with this book, a goofy, sardonic adventure where NoCal meets SoCal, as bicycle courier Chevette Washington decides not to mind her own business one too many times, and takes a look inside a package she's couriering. In this near-future tale, there's a shantytown on the no-longer-functioning Bay Bridge, a religious cult where television is a manifestation of the Holy Ghost, and many more oddball sights and occurrences.

A short story involving the ghost of cities past, who come to haunt a disaffected late-twentyish bohemian seeking solace in his Geary Street apartment (which happens to be in the same block as the one where I live) but due to a chance trick of the light from the view out his window, he soon comes to have even less sleep or relaxation as he plunges headlong into an obsession with a hidden secret of times long gone.

This novella has a vaguely gothic sort of feel to it: it is a moody exploration of how the leftover revenant energies of the dead could perhaps affect the unsuspecting living.

STREET MAGIC - by Michael Reaves

We've always known San Francisco is the home of the fairies...but Street Magic's fairies are the other kind--the ones with the little wings and funny ears and suchlike. No, it's not a stupid cutesy-bootsy kiddie-level fantasy story; instead, iit is bent in a different direction. Follow a runaway youth as he tries to escape his abusive past by running headlong into the potentially abusive future of San Francisco's streets, and see what - and who - sets his compass in a different direction - leading him to a world weirder even than the freakshow of the Frisco street scene.

MORNINGSTAR - by Peter Atkins

Here we have a San Francisco journalist, Donovan Moon, getting mixed up with a homicidal maniac calling himself "Morningstar"...a serious wingnut who hires Moon, it seems, in order to have someone who will listen to him tell his gruesome life story. See, Morningstar's not your everyday homicidal maniac: he claims that the people he's been wiping out are vampires. I couldn't help but roll my eyes at this - vampire stories are kind of done to death, if you know what I mean. Though this book doesn't contain all of the corny tropes present in the most typical vampire stories, it does suffer from numerous other cliches, as well as having an inordinate amount of focus spent lingering over the physical descriptions of young teenage girls. Another big minus: not a great deal of attention is paid to the San Francisco backdrop...but at least the guy didn't get the street names wrong at every turn like so many other cheesy paperbacks do.

I didn't get much more out of this book other than that it was mostly a vehicle for Peter Atkins to focus on the thing that attracts him sexually, which seems to be skinny, underage-looking girls. This is a sort of personal objection, though - and your mileage may vary.

MacKammon is a sort of "sci-fi horror fantasy folk writer" - it's difficult to wrap genre labels around his books. Blue World is a collection of short stories with the title story running more towards the length of a novella. It's about a priest living in North Beach who falls in love with a porn star. This unlikely combination seems as though it would be too ridiculous to write a serious scary story about, but McKammon actually manages to bring it off by introducing into the mix a obsessive psychopathic stalker of doom, the terror of every working girl in the West Bay. Soon, the sacred and profane come to clash as he chases both of them through the seedy world of the Tenderloin sex houses and clubs.

HOLY FIRE - by Bruce Sterling

Imagine a world 100 years into the future where a polity made up of rejuvenated elderly people is society's most active power base. This story is about a ninety-six year old San Francisco woman named Mia who lives her life as a bureaucrat...and after the death of an old lover, and an odd run-in with a young girl, she comes to the realisation that she has never really  lived. A radical new cellular replacement therapy gives her a chance to do life all over again, and she goes about it with a vengeance. Required reading for anyone who has ever contemplated youth and old age, and their relationship with one another. This 21st Century San Francisco is truly beautiful: fantastic, earth-integrated and yet somewhat believable as well...a world that's very different from the apocalyptic 21st century you've likely been conditioned to believe in.

ALL TOMORROW'S PARTIES - by William Gibson

Seldom does a sequel or a segment of a multi-part series deliver the sort of satisfaction that you got from the original. William Gibson is good at breaking rules, though, and has managed to make this sequel (a continuation of not just one but two of his other books: one being Idoru, and the other being the above-discussed Virtual Light) go even further than the originals into territory that is speculative, scary and funny from one turn to the next, and sometimes even all three of these at once.

Again, we visit an all-too-near future in which the disenfranchised nouveau poor of mid-twenty-first century San Francisco lives in a rickety shantytown that's lashed with duct tape, plastic tarps and antiquated circuitboards onto the cantilevered framework of the Bay Bridge, in the years following a quake-shake that finally managed to render it unsafe for vehicular traffic. It becomes a more-or-less Permanent Autonomous Zone. In this between-place, a bridge of another kind over the future's yet more troubled waters, as a whole slew of characters from Gibson's last two books draw closer and closer to each other - and into a slowly unraveling situation without knowing or understanding what forces are binding them.

We encounter characters from Gibson's earlier books: Chevette and her strange friends from Virtual Light and Idoru's techno-chanteuse Rei Toei, who has a way of bending reality into unpredictable shapes when she is around. And it seems she may have found her way to San Francisco....All bets are off. And the chase is on. I found this a wild, wonderful, wacky book with characters who are alive in their feelings as well as their foibles. Of course, I'd expected nothing less from a writer with Gibson's imagination and wit. (The title of the book is borrowed from an old Velvet Underground song.)

DESTROYING ANGEL - by Richard Paul Russo

It's a hardboiled-cop story crossed over into grunged-out cyberpunk territory. It's the mid-21st century, and a serial killer has been terrorizing a city with so much street violence and so many scary people, you'd think they'd be inured to anything. But this psycho is chaining people together back to back with chains locked to clamps fused into their skins, and inside of the victims' nostrils, a pair of angel wings is tattooed. The killer went at this for a few years and racked up a large docket of killings, and suddenly for two years, there had been no sign of his workmanship. This was a relief to ex-narcotics cop Tanner. But when the killings start again, and two more bodies are dragged out of the bay, he knows he's going to have his work cut out for him...he might not be a cop any more, but he's bound to this case by something he knows, and it seems that he's going to have to hunt down this maniac singlehanded.

There's a lot of room for cliches here, but miraculously enough, I didn't see that happen often. I liked the fact that a lot of attention gets paid to the environment of the city which is the backdrop here. Global warming, progressing steadily along, has made a virtual rainforest out of the City--bromeliads hang from its metal pipes and houses, defoliants are used to control renegade vegetation, and it's hot enough to be Florida. There's an autonomous zone here, too: what the Tenderloin has ended up becoming. It's cordoned off and made into a haven for the people who can't cut it in ordinary society. Tanner knows he will have to go into this very scary place to seek clues to the identity of the killer. And the Tenderloin even has its own "autonomous zone's autonomous zone" at its center - a place where it seems everyone fears to tread. Except angels, perhaps...

The only thing that irked me a bit about this book was a recurring anti-drug sentiment, even so recurrent as to be considered part of Russo's thematic here. But he makes up for this by approaching the issue with a certain sense of fatalistic realism - which is better than not approaching it realistically at all.

-by Demimonde Mesila Thraam