The Ryno Pen

No, this is not not the Isaac Asimov tale of intrepid adventurers in a small ship, injected into the bloodstream of I-forget-who to perform crude nanosurgery on his whatever-it-was. It’s been a long time.

This is SF, but it’s not the hard-science-and-humour of Isaac, though I loved his work.

I’ve done some twisting to title the blog post after a song, gentle readers A through D, but don’t scorn me.
It seems to be a popular choice for a song title.

This is not a book review: it is the harbinger for a series of posts that will include reviews of some of the works of Terry Dowling, namely his Rynosseros cycle.

Above: Left-handed guitarist and Mr Squiggle alumnus, Mr Terry Dowling.

Note for latecomers: Yes, Rynosseros is the name of the blog. See here for Sekrit Origin Story: I was a Rhino before I became a Ryno.

The voyage in question is mine: the fantastic vehicle is Terry Dowling’s. He has done far more than steer the figurative vessel. The strange Australia, dominated by the Ab’O¹, is of his making, but mine to dive into again and again when time permits. There’s a wealth of pearls in the depths… there are Vanities, too.

¹
As somebody with options to be offended by the term first-hand, should I so choose, I asked Terry The Question. I’m quite satisfied with the answer I got, which dealt with “ab origine” = “from the beginning”. Terry has guided the mutation of many of the words and terms in the Rynosseros stories: they become new wonders in which the ancestral seed-of-meaning is dimly recalled, like Eohippus³ in a thoroughbred racer.

Enough of the umbrage, already. Who has Dowling placed in charge of Distant Future Australia,anyhow?
This has been a rhetorical question from The Office Of The Inexorably Obvious.

I’ll admit I came along in the first place for the Daring Adventures. With the possible exceptions of (some) Jack Vance and Cordwainer Smith, I had come to expect that my SF reading would not necessarily contain the sort of writing which satisfies on a number of levels².

²
There’s Good Yarns and there’s Good Writing; there’s Good Yarns Well Written; and then there’s the real Islay Malt writing. You don’t get it that often, and your beer-taste reader will make screwed-up faces at a whiff of it.

My suggestion would be to give such persons a couple of dozen of those Dumarest paperbacks and leave the room quietly. Extra marks if they fail to notice the Obviously Boilerplated Paragraphs in the Cyclan passages.

And oh, but the Dowling is an Islay Malt! Smokiness, peatiness, a phantom hint of what may have been salt water… thinking “What am I doing imbibing salt water?”… but it wasn’t really salt water, it was the soul of fire, lurking until the moment of greatest possible impact.

Yes, the above looks like rubbish! It’s almost beyond me to describe the rapid change of impressions that reading Dowling can bring to a sufficiently literate reader. Flashes of Shakespearean word-filigree share paragraph space with pirates, concepts akin to giri, philosophical musings on intelligence and being, and plot devices as ornate and unfathomable as the contents of a master locksmith’s toolkit.

Gems of etymology rotate and rumble in the light of different narrative perspectives: could the result be anything other than kaleidoscopic?

There is more than a story arc in the cycle. There is a Murray-Darling, complete with seemingly-dry beds and the myriad streams of a flooded Channel Country. I have drunk from the waterholes of stories, seen the bends of the winding narrative, and tasted the tributary myths.

Next time, come with me to the Source Of Things.

Late Edit:
³
While I wasn’t looking, Eohippus/Hyracotherium was discovered to be a palaeothere – “related to tapirs and rhinoceros and probably ancestral to horses. ”

Just like bloody Rynos of any spelling: barging in everywhere seems to be a way of life.

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