Doc Sidhe by Aaron Allston
Published by Baen Books
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
I first discovered Doc Savage by accident as a youngster, scouring our tiny small-town library for anything even vaguely in the ballpark of science fiction. The brightly colored hardcover reprints from the 1950's of the 1930's serials were right there with the Tom Swift and Mike Mars books, promising just enough super-tech to be interesting to a mind that craved adventure beyond the fields we know. There were only six volumes on the shelf, but I devoured them with excitement for the visions of such ultra-tech as a process a crime boss used to make his henchmen invisible, which Doc and his fearless band of brothers, veterans of the Great War (which I in my ignorance failed to recognize as what I knew as World War I) infiltrate. In his superbly developed body and mind Doc Savage was sort of like Batman, another of my perennial favorites.
Looking back at them with a more mature perspective, the Zeerust seems almost painful. Not just the technology -- with the rise of retrofuturism, that view of Yesterday's Tomorrow can still be appreciated as dieselpunk. But some of the attitudes -- the assumptions of eugenics and socialism and technocracy and all those ideas that were in vogue back in those days which are tucked into the worldbuilding. It's easy to overlook for the naive reader because it doesn't preach, so that it slides right into your mind as you're thrilling to Doc Savage's brilliance in defeating criminals and would-be tyrants. When you read about Doc Savage performing some sort of super-advanced psychosurgery on criminals to relieve them of their "criminal impulses," it seems so cool, even humane -- and only afterward do you think hey, what about the rights of the accused?
Of course the 1930's were a very different world, still rather naive about the perils inherent in such things as eugenics. They really thought that science and technology could be employed to transform human nature for the better so that we'd all lead clean, healthy, sane lives in the beautiful cities of the future with their towers of steel and chrome. It was also the time of Robert A Heinlein's early short stories of our glorious future on the Moon and beyond, which showed a similar optimism about the power of technology (although less completely naive, given his inclusion of a theocratic tyrant and a hiatus in space travel in his Future History) to give us a new Age of Exploration and spread humanity beyond this cradle Earth.
Yet the longing remains for the spirit of adventure that infused the old Doc Savage serials even in the reprinted edition. The idea that a good man and his boon companions could make a difference, that the world could become a brighter place as the result of someone standing up and taking action for good. That the future didn't have to be ever more grim and grubby with narrowing horizons and the light at the end of the tunnel having been turned off to cut expenses. Could that feeling be recreated believably in a contemporary setting?
Those considerations are far from the mind of professional kickboxer Harris Greene as we first meet him in the beginning of the novel. He's far more worried about his crumbling career and his disintegrating relationship with his girlfriend Gaby. As he goes back to her apartment, head full of crazy ideas about winning her back, he sees strange men drive up and break into her apartment.
Realizing she's being kidnapped, he knows he has to do something. And that something leads him straight into a confrontation with the kidnappers. One's an old man, another's a rather typical thug type, but the third, the one the ringleader calls "Adonis" in an ironic tone… That creature is the sort of which nightmares are made.
Even as Harris fights a desperate battle against this eldritch monstrosity, the old man starts chanting and the world begins to change. The skyscrapers of New York stretch and twist as if made from taffy. And then it pops and he knows from one look at the landscape around him that he's beyond the fields he knows.
And he's badly wounded from the nasty claws of "Adonis," and he doesn't know how to tell friend from foe. Thus begins a nightmare flight through a city in which every familiar element makes the strange ones all the more alien. A city where roads are made of brick, where the aesthetic hearkens to the 1920's and Art Deco, both in the buildings and the automobiles.
But it is also a city where the kindness of strangers can turn a bad situation for the better. A man who saw too many wounded men's injuries go bad in "the war" Or Jean-Pierre, the man who talks him off the weird alternate version of the Brooklyn Bridge.
And thus Harris falls in with the Sidhe Foundation, and the mysterious man they call Doc Sidhe. They heal his injured leg and listen to his story, and take everything he says very seriously.
It takes Harris a little time to process the extraordinary situation in which he has landed. When everything twisted and changed, he moved between worlds. This is the fair world, and its inhabitants call the world we know "the grim world." The man who masterminded the kidnapping of Gaby appears to be notorious deviser (magician) and criminal Duncan Blackletter, with whom Doc has a long and bitter history. A man whose manipulations of debts and the magic that goes with them set nations against one another -- and he appears to have done it purely for the pleasure of mischief, like a cat playing with a mouse.
It's a fascinating world, and one in which one can still have stories of adventure in the mold of the old Doc Savage serials. Faerie has undergone an Industrial Revolution of its own, an interesting proposition in a world where most of the population cannot endure the touch of iron and steel, yet those metals are essential to constructing high-rise buildings, high-compression engines and myriad other items of industrial culture. But Faerie is still the Perilous Land, its people and their magics just orthogonal enough to humans that it is not shocking when we see in their present shades of an earlier time's attitudes and ways of doing things. It's also a world where less is known about distant places (as Harris notices when looking at the map), so they can still be exotic and surprising places in which to have adventures and derring-do.
As Harris recovers from his injuries and gets his bearings, he discovers that his enemies have not forgotten him. Once he feels confident he can safely drive by this other world's rules of the road, he goes out on a little outing to pay some debts (having learned just how perilous it can be to carry a debt in that world), only to be attacked en route. He's able to force his attackers off the road and escape, but the implications are troubling -- they knew he was going out, and in which vehicle.
To test it, Doc Sidhe sends out a decoy vehicle, and discovers that yes, they do have a spy within their own walls. There is also something very strange going on with a beautiful young woman who can use their communication system to send warnings -- is she some kind of subconscious echo of Harris's old girlfriend? Or something even more perilous to this young woman whose kidnapping got Harris into this fix?
Things are turning out to be a lot bigger and more complicated than any of them expected. But one thing's for sure -- they have to get to the bottom of it, because the machinations of Blackletter and his allies threaten the safety of both worlds.
The further things go, the more Harris becomes enmeshed in this strange new world of magic and technology, discovering that he has something to live for, something to fight for. Whether it's getting Doc Sidhe back out of duress vile during an ill-advised visit to the grim world or trying to prevent a vile magical scheme which will forever alter the balance between the fair and grim worlds, it's a story of adventure and derring-do that really does recapture the spirit of the old pulps, complete with a happy ending and a promise of more adventures to come.
There was a sequel, Sidhe-Devil. However, it appears that the series didn't show the returns that Baen Books wanted to see, or Allston was able to get more lucrative contracts for his media tie-in work and didn't have the time or energy to write any more books in the series, which is a real shame. And now that he is gone (passed away in 2014 during setup for Visioncon, where he was to have been Author Guest of Honor), there will be no more unless his heirs were to authorize posthumous sequels, which can be problematic in their own way.
Review posted June 20, 2018.
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