About a third of the way through Chris Roberson’s Paragaea: A Planetary Romance, I realized that I was reading a new spin on L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, though instead of a turn-of-the-century, Kansas farmgirl being swept up in a twister to the magical land of Oz, our heroine is Leena, a Soviet astronaut in the 1960s who–not unlike Farscape‘s John Crichton–is sucked into a portal to another world while orbiting Earth and spends the majority of the novel trying to get back home.
Paragaea is an extravagantly bizarre world, brimming with imagination, that combines a seemingly endless amount of science-fiction and other literary influences, a dash of Edgar Rice Burroughs here, a splash of steampunk there, a sprinkling of Rudyard Kipling, a drop of Philip Jose Farmer, even a dose of Terry Pratchett. It is full of half-man/half-animal creatures of all varieties and sizes, dinosaurs, airships, androids, nomadic empires, strange cults, and more. Naturally, when Leena first crash-lands, she has no context to explain where in the world she might be and what in the world might have happened to her. Much like Dorothy, she soon finds herself befriended by a number of outlandish characters, each of whom is on his own personal quest. There is Balam, a jaguar man whose rightful position in his kingdom was usurped by his evil sisters. He longs to reclaim his throne and rescue his daughter from their clutches. In other words, he is Paragaea‘s Cowardly Lion. There is Benu, an android, and Hieronymous Bonaventure, or Hero (ancestor to Roxanne, the protagonist of Roberson’s Here, There & Everywhere), a mortal man and mercenary, who was himself transported to Paragaea around the time of the Napoleonic Wars. While Benu is reminiscent of the Tin Woodman in his robotic/humanoid nature and Hero of the Scarecrow in his plucky, almost foolhardy, adventurous streak, their missions are reversed. An information-gathering computer, Benu is on a millennia-long search for knowledge (i.e. a brain), while Hero, who suppresses his emotions beneath a cocky, blustery exterior, spends the bulk of the novel gradually finding his heart. And sure enough, the novel’s climax finds the characters confronting a wizard, or someone believed to be so by the populace.
Like Here, There & Everywhere, Paragaea revolves around three-dimensional characters with human emotions caught up in a fantastical adventure who, in reaching the end of their journey, discover the answer to an overarching mystery whose revelation unlocks the key to their destinies, beautifully bringing the novel to a fitting denouement that both illuminates what came before and advances the story’s central themes to the next level. As in the previous novel, Roberson smoothly and effortlessly blends complex science with more outlandish fantasy, creating a world that is as theoretically sound as it is enormously entertaining. Whereas Here, There & Everywhere remains in one character’s viewpoint for the entirety of the novel, however, Paragaea is a bit more ambitious. Roberson does some very interesting things with the characters. For example, Hero has been in Paragaea longer and so should have the upper hand when it comes to dealing with the world. At the same time, however, Leena is from a later point in history than Hero, and so in some ways, is more able to cope with some of the Paragaean technology that more closely mirrors mid-twentieth-century Earth technology, such as the flying machines. And even as this is going on, as readers, we also know that Leena’s perspective is incredibly limited. She is a loyal Soviet and so sees the world through the eyes of a government we know now to have been corrupt and cruel. Furthermore, we of course have the benefit of knowing what occurs after her time. It is rather fascinating to read a novel in which we find ourselves sympathizing with a heroine, even as we find ourselves a bit disturbed by her beliefs that subsuming her selfhood for the good of her country is proper and just.
As far as the scope of the world, the intersecting characters, and their various perspectives and agendas, Roberson is dealing with a more structurally complicated work than Here, There & Everywhere, yet I can’t say that I loved it quite as much. At times, I felt like Paragaea was pulling itself in too many different directions and trying to accomplish too much. The world is so sprawling and the novel so overstuffed with ideas, plot threads, and adventures that it can be a bit overwhelming, with all of these elements vying for the central position, and I often found myself longing for the more intimate character exploration of the earlier novel. Still, it is hard to fault an author for producing such a thrillingly imaginative work, and particularly one that so lovingly dovetails with his earlier work. While neither Here, There & Everywhere nor Paragaea require one another to stand on their own as complete and compelling works, they each benefit from having read the other, and while Paragaea didn’t enthrall me as much as its predecessor, the creativity and heart pulsing throughout Roberson’s work makes me more than eager to read the next novel in the series, End of the Century.
Related posts:
- “Wibbly Wobbly Timey Wimey”: Chris Roberson’s End of the Century
- “The Long and Winding Road”: Here, There & Everywhere
- Time, Warped: Mark Hodder’s The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack
- The 10 Best Books I Read in 2009
- "Strange Bedfellows": Elizabeth Bear’s The Promethean Age
