So, anyone up for some comfort reading? BECAUSE I SURE AM.
This week we’re going all the way back to 1991, and a book I’ve been meaning to read for a while now: Ray Aldridge’s first novel, The Pharaoh Contract, book 1 of The Emancipator series. It follows reluctant enforcer Ruiz Aw, who’s been sent undercover to the pre-industrial planet Pharaoh to find out who’s been poaching valuable slaves. And just to make an unpleasant job even worse, he has a security measure installed in his brain that will instantly kill him if he’s captured by the unknown enemy.
I first came across Aldridge’s writing in the short stories that appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. A lucky find in a back issue was the story “Cold Cage”, set on a prison spaceship and told from the point of view of a lonely warden who has to constantly create new virtual hells for the 179 prisoners who are guilty of such horrible crimes that one lifetime of punishment isn’t enough.
Adridge’s most recent short story was “Soul Pipes”. It features a small team of archeologists, each of whom are from a different planet, with a different backstory, and a different reason for thinking that maybe going out past the campsite defenses and into the midst of the alien shape-changing lifeforms might be anything other than a really bad idea.
And then we have The Pharaoh Contract. The group Ruiz Aw works for – the Art League – isn’t running some kind of illegal slave trade. It’s a galaxy-spanning organization that’s basically turned entire planets into captive breeding pens.
“The Art League – the foremost supplier of sapient merchandise in the galaxy for over three thousand years. The Art League – the foremost practitioner of the greatest art, the art of shaping sapience into usefulness.”
Whole civilizations are allowed to think that they’re living free and completely normal lives, while all the time the Art League is tampering with their governments, preventing wars (can’t damage valuable merchandise) suppressing technological advancements (can’t let the merchandise get too much power), and fine tuning every possible aspect of their lives so that each planet can supply slaves that have been bred for a specific requirement, like beauty. Or fighting ability. Or, in the case of Pharaoh, a very specific theatrical talent: magic shows. The most talented troupes are the ones who can perform a play that’s also a religious ceremony/sacrifice, and some collectors will pay a lot of money in order to own the very best performers and have the ceremony performed whenever they want. Complete with condemned criminals executed onstage as horrifically as possible. It’s art.
Are you starting to see a theme with these stories? Aldridge is an absolute master at world-building. Worlds within worlds, practically a new society in every chapter, all with their own religion and fashion and drugs and fascinating ways to break laws. The technology can be Star Trek science-fiction (faster-than-light travel, body-modifications into cyborgs or animal-forms) or sword-and-sorcery fantasy (steam-powered carriages, hallucinogenic drugs made from lizard venom.) The Pharaoh Contract starts in the very dangerous slums of the planet Dilvermoon and eventually travels to a space station run by slavers, and a planet run by pirates, with a fantasy underwater city and a maze with endless rows of windows and a different enslaved alien race behind each one.
Aldridge’s writing has been compared to Jack Vance, and occasionally Edgar Rice Burroughs. Mostly what this book reminds me of is pulp sci-fi novels. The writing and Ruiz Aw’s internal monologue has that kind of epic, tale-spinning quality (with phrases like “interunit chicanery” thrown around). Ruiz himself has a James Bond level of skill as a spy and assassin. Women practically throw themselves into his bed, and he’s always ready with a very threatening quip, like when he breaks up a stoning in progress by flattening the ringleader.
“A bit of wisdom, paraphrased from an ancient sage of the Home Worlds,” he said. “‘Let he who is without good sense cast the next stone.'”
A clatter of dropped masonry sounded in the plaza, and the crowd evaporated.
The author keeps this from getting too trope-y by making Ruiz a surprisingly complex character. He’s a former slave himself, and you can imagine he’s gone through a very complicated life to end up on the payroll of the biggest slavery organization in the galaxy. Most of his background seems to be a long chain of regrets. There are moments that he finds himself being kind, even when it won’t make a damn bit of difference, and he constantly has to tamp down his reactions towards the attitudes that come from treating people as property. (Including “harvesting” the slaves and “weeding” what’s been collected.)
Ruiz also had something done to him at the start of the story that makes him a lot more open to, ahem, emotional attachments than would usually be safe on a dangerous mission. So definitely expect some sexy good times there.
As for the women, okay, yes there’s definitely some of the worshipful-alien-women-strangely-drawn-to-the-mysterious-stranger trope going on here. But at least a couple of the female characters have a few moments where they’re more than a fantasy stereotype.
(Especially Nisa, damn. She fills the role of the princess-in-peril, but then does something at one point that honestly shocked me; I didn’t know she had it in her.)
I found this an incredibly tasty book, filled with betrayal and romance and some pretty brutal violence and all those tiny details I love. It also made me a little wistful, since there’s a finite amount of Aldridge’s stories to enjoy before I run out. Aldridge’s career spanned from 1986 to 2002 – three novels and twenty-seven short stories – and then just stopped. You can find his novels in ebook format, but his short stories only exist in old magazines. It’s odd to think of someone with this much skill and imagination in writing just not being a writer anymore, but apparently he’s gone on to become a full-time potter and also a designer and builder of catamarans, and by all accounts doing an amazing job at both.
So I’ll raise a glass to Mr. Aldridge, creator extraordinaire, and start hunting for back-issues of F&SF on ebay for my next fix. I understand “Gate of Faces” is supposed to be really good…