THE MALACIA TAPESTRY, a late 1976 Club review

THE MALACIA TAPESTRY
BRIAN ALDISS
Open Road Media (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$7.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In a grand medieval city where all change has been outlawed, a roguish young actor tempts fate and dinosaurs, all in the name of love

By law, nothing can change in Malacia—a teeming, eternal city of dukes, players, wizards, merchants, beggars, ape-men, lizard-boys, and courtesans—but that is of no great consequence to Perian de Chirolo. An out-of-work actor and unabashed rogue, he is well satisfied with his lot as long as there’s coin, eager young women to bed, and the occasional adventure. Perhaps it is this thrill-seeking spirit—or simply the lure of noble beauty—that makes Perian imprudently agree to take part in a mad inventor’s illegal experiments, since such foolishness will never be tolerated in Malacia. But Perian’s rash actions will only lead him on to further indiscretions, winning him first fame and then notoriety, causing him to be hunted, hounded, martyred, and trapped in a fight to the death with a razor-toothed Ancestral Beast on the outskirts of the city. And perhaps most frightening of all, Perian de Chirolo will find himself in love.

Grand Master Brian W. Aldiss, one of science fiction’s most able and ingenious creative artists, performs a truly astonishing feat of alternate-world building, immersing the reader in an unforgettable Medieval fantasy realm rich in color, incident, invention, and peril—and of course, giant lizards. Welcome to Malacia.

I USED SWEETIENUBBINS' YULE GIFT CARD ON A SALE FOR THIS LOVELY TREAT. THANK YOU.

My Review: A hangover from The 1976 Club, I had this tee’d up on my Kindle to give myself a bit of backup in case I really hated my chosen title, WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME, and needed to abandon ship. I didn’t like that read too terribly much, but it wasn’t so awful I had to Pearl-Rule it. This book, as a back-up choice, would’ve fared about the same.

I don’t hate it; I’m as drawn to the fantasy of a medieval Balkan city trapped in Time by powerful forces that aren’t christian in the way of our world as I ever was. The existence of Ottomans (a very real branch of the Turkic peoples of Central Asia) doesn’t necessarily mean they’re Muslim…and I didn’t specifically notice but am pretty sure we’re not really made privy to their religious beliefs. (If no christians, then no Muslims.)

I’d forgotten a lot of my skills at navigating heteronormativity. Forty-five years on, living in a world where even the slow-moving laws of the land now recognize my right to marry anyone I choose to, I’d completely forgotten how it feels to have to insert myself into straight stories without recourse to my real home. There are oodles of SF/fantasy stories with men who love men in them now. I don’t *have* to come to the straight-people’s table to get a scrap grudgingly thrown!

And that was worth three stars to me. I’m clear now about how very, very much my world has changed. The flipside of that is I’m also clear on how awful it is for bigots and small-souled withholders to live in this more accepting and generous world…why they’re fighting so hard to close the floodgates that were opened very much against their wishes and desires. It is, after all, Author Aldiss’s primary thesis. The great and the good of Malacia have, in concert with the rest of this not-our-Earth, stopped Progress since they can’t stop Time. My half-formed hypothesis is that (fictional) Malacia and its Byzantium and Duchy of Tuscady and so on are in exact parallel with 1976…just on a different Earth in a Multiverse. Not being a Copenhagenist about matters quantum, I’m pretty sure that’s Reality.

If you need any further evidence for my hypothesis, there’s the continuing existence of dinosaurs aka “ancestral animals” and the presence of actual half-human, half-goat satyrs. But tech is stalled in the sixteenth-ish century, and has been for quite a long time if the internal chat is to be credited:

”Perian thinks the story banal, Papa, Armida said, “flashing me a glance I could not interpret. “He says it might as well have been written a million years ago.”

“An interesting remark. Surely one’s interest in the play is precisely that it might have been written a million years ago. Some things are eternal and must be eternally re-expressed. Those desperate straits of love…appeal to us because they apply as much today as yesterday.”

It is absolutely no surprise at all, having read that…peroration…to learn that Author Aldiss describes the speaker, a nobleman of Malacia, as speaking with “...words {of} a dry quality, as if his mouth had developed a prejudice against saliva.” Oh myyyy, as Takei would say.

The tale’s a solidly crafted one. It is, I confess, a bit of the read’s pleasure that it rides the rails already laid down by generations of tale-tellers gone before. What I enjoyed was the worldly setting, the worldbuilding that Author Aldiss chose. His zahnoscope, that not-quite-daguerreotype means of photography…do pardon, mercurization...described in it outlines so the reader can see in their own eye the end results. The careful and wordy descriptions of clothing…after all, a first-person story told by an actor would dwell on surfaces and details!...the same with the ceremonies, the hurly-burly of Malacian life, the small and immediate circle of roving player Perian de Chirolo’s eyesight. It also establishes reasons for Author Aldiss to make snide remarks like the director of the story being told in the new photographic process “moving us about like chairs” and Armida, his love-light, being snappish with his faithless self so he observes, “We bit our tongues—being unable to bite each other’s…”. That’s the fourth star right there.

Then the lumpen-ness endemic to Aldiss's expository writing obtrudes.

”Beware of all things fair, my son, whether a girl or a friend. What looks to be fair may be foul under the surface. The Devil needs his traps. You should regard also you own behaviour, lest it seem fair to you but is really an excuse for foulness.” And so on.

That last is Perian making it plain Author Aldiss knows he’s moralizing and in a tiresome way…a suitable ironic distancing from the fact that he means it. How can I say that with such certainty? Because this is merely the first iteration of the same “shiny surfaces do not cover great depths” message. The second, more beefily stodgy, is the plot of the play that Perian and his Armida are part of in this new mercurization zahnoscope technology: It is literally, beat for beat, the plot of the book we’re reading. You’d have to be insentient not to Get It.

Therein the lack of that fifth star. While I agree with the reviews of the time that this is a good entertaining story, I don’t think…and didn’t then, because of my lack of memory of anything except the broadest strokes of it…that this is a Great Work, a Classic of the Field.

Good read, though.