Teaser

The world as we know it is long gone, replaced by a new one of alien travellers, men with psychic powers, and a war between good and evil that may never be resolved . . .

Review

I’d heard a lot of buzz surrounding Radix. Buzz that made me pick it up even if post-apocalyptic adventures with superpowered young men aren’t usually me sort of thing. Ultimately, I got a hard lesson in being persuaded by cult favourites, but the journey there was an odd one, to say the least.

Radix is an absolutely bizarre novel. It was first published a year after Gene Wolfe’s The Shadow of the Torturer, and I think Wolfe’s famous work is the best comparison, though Radix also feels like a throwback to the weird pulp adventures of David Lindsay or C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy. There’s a complete disregard for any real science, and instead we get a boatload of psionic abilities, some waffling about the innate nature of mutation, and an awful lot of gibberish about Earth passing through a magical Line that changes everything. It’s not as self-consciously obscure as Book of the New Sun, but it does share one important quality. First, I rapidly lost the ability to follow what was going on. Second, I stopped caring whether or not it could claw back my attention.

In some ways, 1980 marked the end of science fiction’s New Wave. Cyberpunk was on the horizon, and a fresh tide of space opera was on the way. But first we had books like Radix. Books that sought to challenge a paradigm that no longer really existed. This is a book designed to shock and confuse, and is certainly successful at the latter. There are no proper chapters, just lengthy sections. At one point, musical script appears on the page, and is presumably meant to mean something to the reader. The book opens with our protagonist taking out his fury on a gang of ruffians before visiting a prostitute. He’s ugly and fat, but has good pure genetics, so all the women want to carry his offspring. This is weird enough, and becomes horrific once we find out that Sumner is only eleven years old during these scenes. No wonder he still lives with his mother. After this, when he is thankfully a little older, he is united with his son, whose mother is an alien, and who sends him on a dream quest.

Dreamlike is definitely how I would describe this book. It’s marketed as science fiction, but oftentimes feels more like a fantasy. Or even some weird occult manuscript left hidden since the nineteen twenties. To Attanasio’s credit, he can turn a marvellous sentence, and there are some great turns of phrase, but there is precious little logic holding the story together. Events drift in and out of coherence, while characters do the same. This is not helped by people having multiple names. There are some good ideas in here. It’s nice to see some aliens who are genuinely alien. Even if (sigh) they need to breed with humans to have strong, healthy babies, the voor’s backstory did hold my attention, which is more than can be said for anything to do with humans in Attanasio’s post-apocalyptic world.

Unlike other books of its ilk, Radix does include an appendix, with a glossary that proves a little helpful when trying to figure things out, even if I personally had lost any interest in doing so. The timeline, however, helps me not at all. Likewise, the map at the start of the book may as well not have been there.

Don’t get me wrong. I can fully appreciate how a book this odd can gather a cult following. I didn’t enjoy Gene Wolfe’s work either, so take my thoughts with a pinch of salt. If you want something completely out there, maybe you’ll enjoy Radix. If, on the other hand, you have a rapidly dwindling tolerance for absolute nonsense, stay well clear.

Book Stats

• The Radix Tetrad (#1)
• First Published in 1981
• 446 Pages