FSF, January-February 2010 by Spilogale Authors Read Free Book Online Page B

characters—from his straight-arrow G-men to his Swanson-esque horror divas—are clever riffs on atomic age stereotypes. But in the end it is the story itself that feels antique. Our big fears have changed over the last few decades. Nuclear annihilation seems almost quaint compared to humanity's other self-inflicted wounds. (Yeah, I'm talking about you, global warming, religious wackjobs, dying oceans, and that creepy thing that's happening to frogs lately....)
    In the end, reading this book felt like listening to an oldies station. And to the extent that Morrow fails to grapple with this disconnect, the book remains a charming and nostalgic romp and not the powerful political satire that Morrow is capable of delivering.
    Still, there's a lot to be said for a charming romp. It's sure as heck more fun than sitting around thinking about six-headed frogs.
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    If we are picking our favorite literary fantasy writers, then I vote for Graham Joyce. Early and often. Okay, maybe Geoff Ryman can give him a run for the money. Maybe. But I wouldn't bet Auntie Em's farm on it.
    How to Make Friends with Demons is the story of William Heaney, a man who has lived his entire adult life convinced that he is under a curse. He tries to neutralize the curse by living a rational “demon-free” existence and performing convoluted (and not always legal) acts of charity. When a scheme to sell counterfeit first editions of Jane Austen throws him into the path of a demon-possessed Gulf War vet, Heaney's carefully constructed life comes unraveled and he is forced to resurrect his past in order to figure out where things went so terribly wrong for him.
    This novel builds up a powerful head of steam—but it does it slowly enough that I wondered at times how Joyce was going to pull all the threads together by the end of the relatively slender volume. This is typical of Joyce's novels. They aren't zero to sixty in point six seconds Ferrari-style books. They're more like old-style Soviet tractors: the kind that run on bear grease at eighty below zero, plow a straight furrow in solid rock, and can be conveniently retrofitted as tank chassis the next time the Germans invade.
    Also vintage Joyce is the book's slightly off-kilter narrative arc. His novels always have an odd little hitch in their get-along that keeps you from ever truly relaxing into the story. Every time I pick up a new Graham Joyce book I'm terrified that some idiotic editor will finally have put the thumb screws on him to “fix” these “mistakes” ... which of course aren't mistakes at all, but elegant crimes against reader complacency committed with malice aforethought.
    Happily, Mr. Joyce seems to be fairly resistant to thumbscrew-wielding editors. But just in case he ever wavers—where do I mail my check in support of the Keep Graham Joyce Just the Way He Is Foundation?
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    I hope I get old like Frederik Pohl and Arthur C. Clarke. In fact, I hope we all get old like these guys. If we could figure out how to do that we could probably end war, stop global warming, and maybe even fix that thing with the frogs. Sorry to say, most people are already on the wrong track by the time they're about seven.
    Be that as it may, The Last Theorem is a genuine and highly satisfying blend of these two great writers. True, it does not have the austere majesty of early Clarke. True, it didn't really pan out as a novel about number theory. True, there isn't really any Big Sexy New Science Idea in the book. And true, the science ideas and social mores of this book feel rather quaint at times. Sometimes the quaintness is charming. ("Hey, look, Myrtle, it's a Sky Hook!") At other times ... not so much. (For example, the hero's homosexual affair with his college roommate is written off as a “youthful indiscretion” from which he recovers with about as much emotional conflict as most people recover from a head cold. And then his suspiciously June Cleaver-ish wife gets her Ph.D. from MIT and