Steven R. Boyett
Elegy Beach
Ace, 2009
Way back in The Before Time, the Long-Long Ago (i.e., the mid-1980s), there was a writer named Steven R. Boyett who wrote two popular, well-respected paperback originals, The Architect of Sleep and Ariel. Ariel was a stand-alone about a boy and his unicorn wandering across an America transformed overnight from a world ruled by technology to one ruled by magic. The Architect of Sleep imagined a world where raccoons evolved as the planet’s sentient species and ended right in the middle of the story, and pissed-off readers have been waiting almost a quarter-century for the projected sequel, The Geography of Dreams, to appear.
Then Boyett became disgusted by publishing and went off to do other things (like become a DJ). Now, some three decades later, he’s returned to writing and has finally written a sequel.
To Ariel.
Fred, the son of the protagonist of Ariel, is an aspiring magician living with his father in a small community on the Southern Californian coast. His mother died long ago, he’s working as an apprentice to local brujo while spending his leisure time working on developing a programmatic approach to magic with his friend Yan, and has no idea that he’s named after his father’s sword. As time goes on, it becomes apparent that Yan not only wishes to understand everything possible about casting, but actually wants to reverse “the change,” no matter how many people (or magical creatures) that might kill. To do that he needs a unicorn horn, which he just happens to have taken off Ariel’s mate…
All in all, this is a more somber book than the original (which certainly had its own somber moments), but still a very good one. Boyett offers an afterword, but doesn’t mention there he’s retconned the universe since the original publication of Ariel, as in Elegy Beach, “the change” happened right about now rather than in 1983, as this book mentions iPods, the Internet, etc. (I suspect these were revised for the republication of Ariel, but I’ve only read the original.) The narrative voice is very similar to the Zelazny-esque “first person smartass” of the original, and the story is interesting and well-told (albeit a bit more traditional of a quest fantasy, complete with the gathering of plot coupon quest companions, than the original).
Also, Boyett coins the phrase “Generation Eloi,” which is too good not to steal.
If you liked Ariel (and most people, myself included, did), then you’ll probably like Elegy Beach. If you haven’t read Ariel, well, you should probably read that anyway.
Also, Boyett has put up a fairly extensive site on the novel that may be of interest.
And as for The Geography of Dreams, well, here’s Boyett’s explanation from 1998. I wouldn’t hold your breath…
(Note: I have copies of both Ariel and Elegy beach available over on the Lame Excuse Books page.)
Tags: Ariel, Book reviews, Books, Fantasy, Generation Eloi, Steven R. Boyett, unicorns
Lawrence, read you review of Elegy Beach and got interested in Boyette’s novels. Tried to use the link to Lame Excuse Books at the bottom.of
The column. Got a 404 error 3 times. Think you might have a broken link.
The link had a typo, but it’s working now.
Twelve years for a half-million words while producing other works and making a living. Plus whatever Life Issues might be going on.
Not holding my breath, but understanding.
I loved this story, couldn’t put it down once I got started. I am kind of a sucker for unicorn stories such as this (which is clearly inspired by a story about a unicorn and a wizard by Peter beagle.)
I still can’t believe that I haven’t ever heard of this story till now.
It could have been so much better, especially since it was REWRITTEN! No, the change still takes place in 1983 (I was 7 years old)…..and the glaring technical errors still rear thier ugly heads. The fact that I loved this story despite this (I’m a motorhead) speaks volumes. This said, I will now commence on my rants about why this wasn’t fixed in the rewrite! (In my opinion the story would have been vastly improved)
So here goes…
1) Ok, I get it. Some mystical magic renders electricity useless. I can dig that. So how is it that the laws of thermodynamics only work selectively? I mean tell me again why, if fire still works, chemical reactions that produce hydrogen emissions in dragons work, complex devices like MECHANICAL WATCHES and CROSSBOWS still work, why a steam engine doesn’t (or a compression ignition engine, e.g. a diesel, for that matter) ? Easy solution here, steve! How about ammo is hard to find because it was MOSTLY USED UP IN THE FINAL WAR! (you know the one that would invariably happen when the lights went out and stayed out…looting would prevail, governments would topple (but not before imposing martial law and sending out gobs of armed troops), et cetera.
2) Over 99% of the world’s human population is GONE. I guess the rapture simply happened? We don’t know, nobody knows what happened. A final-war scenario would work well here, people are scarce because we predictably killed ourselves off! (and since there is no electricity, no worries about being nuked, right? )
Well……at least not from a bomb. I can only imagine what happened to all the nuclear power plants when coolant circulation pumps no longer worked…ouch. But, at least we have a unicorn around to purify all the water 🙂
3) Glaring plot-twists involving automobiles. Example: in the beginning of the book a corpse sits in a volkswagen (with flat tires, understandable after sitting for 5 years) but nearing the end of the book cars miraculously have air in the friggin tires again! (you know, over 2 years LATER!) No corpses in any of them either (I’m guessing that some of Diana Peterfreund’s killer unicorns were snacking on human meat, perhaps.) Speaking of this….where are all the horses and buggies? Are you telling me nobody thought of this when the cars stopped working? Even though they are using horses? Geez. I mean you could use the cars as buggies in a pinch, people. Just remove the engines and build a drawbar for a team of horses. Voila! The world’s most luxurious carraige.
4)Did this story HAVE to be a coming of age story? Why did he have to boink the girl at the end and send away his one true love? I guess because sex sells, huh? I had to force myself to read the last few pages, knowing full well what was going to happen. I must admit that this has gotta be the only time that saving the world, winning the girl, and getting a nice house and a lot of land, could ever be a BAD ending….I was hoping it would have ended like a western, with the warrior and his umm….friend the unicorn walking into the sunset, westward bound. 🙁
5) There is NO FRIGGIN’ WAY the Holland tunnel (or the Lincoln) wound’t be totally FULL OF WATER after sitting unused and unsump-pumped for 5 years. You could have just had them use the damn GWB. YOu can’t see it from the Empire State unless you have one mean set of eyes.
Welp there was my rant. Hopefully a movie version will come out and they will fix some of these errors…..Loved the story nontheless.