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 Calenture by Storm Constantine
reviewed by Underview
Original appearance: Albedo one issue 5, 1994
For some years now I have been studiously avoiding the novels of Storm Constantine. When I ask myself why the reason is always one of those dismissive waves of the hand and a nondescript mumble about it not looking like the sort of thing I'm into, or about it feeling too much like hard work. Was it the covers, which all have a similar look to them, or could it even have been something as irrational as an unwillingness to take anything seriously from a person called Storm?
Who can tell? All I know is that having read her latest, Calenture, I feel like kicking myself. What have I been missing all this time?
Calenture is a timeless fantasy, a novel of ideas, a weird investigation of the human condition as viewed from an obscure angle. It is gothic horror, literary science fiction and quest novel seamlessly interlinked. It is a jewel of so many facets that it dazzles even upon reflection.
Casmeer is the only living human left in the city of Thermidore. The rest of the population have succumbed to a sickness which turned them into strange, opaque statues called roches, whose blood can still be seen within if one looks closely enough. Casmeer is also possibly immortal; it is hundreds of years since the last of his fellow citizens calcified and he has yet to age even a day. But he is trapped within the city by creeping agoraphobia.
To entertain himself, Casmeer begins to write a speculative novel about the world beyond the mountains in which he lives. It is this novel, which features vast moving cities guided across the vast wastes of desert and plain by lines of pilot stones laid by the enigmatic terranauts, that provides the bulk of the narrative of Calenture.
Few people in this world of moving cities have any interest in exploring beyond the bounds of their homes and those that do are judged to be at least partially insane by their peers. But Casmeer creates two characters, a priest from the flying city of Min and a terranaut youth who are forced to leave their societies and travel through the untracked vastness of their homeland.
Inevitably their quests must lead them to Thermidore and a confrontation with their creator whose interfering hand is felt directly by the protagonists of his book. At one stage he even changes one of them into a woman for a single night so that the fictional Casmeer can experience sex with him (or her as it were).
Calenture is a startling achievement. Not since Geoff Ryman's Was have I been so overwhelmed by a piece of fiction. I cannot recommend it highly enough. Storm Constantine may be the natural successor to Mervyn Peake. Now, wouldn't that be nice.
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