Chasing the Phoenixby Michael SwanwickTor, 2015There's an old-fashioned kind of rococo self-consciousness to much of the fiction of Nebula Award-winner Michael Swanwick, a kind of “come, stranger, sit by the fire with a flagon of ale and let me tell you a story” Grand Gesture flair that flourished in the pulp-magazine era that was all but over when Swanwick was born in 1950. That flair is, to put it mildly, no longer in fashion; word-poor and Apocalypse-obsessed, most of modern science fiction and fantasy is as serious and focused as Captain Ahab. Adolescent love-triangles (in which the young woman, herself miserable, must choose between a Solemn Boy and an Even More Solemn Boy) from the YA branch have dominated the sales charts for years, and their ethos – and sometimes their slender substance – has seeped into the adult titles to such an extent that the books of such antic practitioners as Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams seem doubly antiquated. A story that, among other things, revels in its own story-ness will be an uphill sell to audiences waiting eagerly until 2019 for S. M. Stirling to write George R. R. Martin's next “Game of Thrones” novel.How well those readers can adapt to such a rococo flair will determine how well they like Swanwick's fantastic new book Chasing the Phoenix, which stars the freebooter and conman Aubrey Darger and his genetically modified dog-human companion Surplus. The two starred in a number of popular short stories and in Swanwick's 2011 novel Dancing with Bears, and he's never written them better – or more floridly – than in this latest adventure.The setting is so far in Earth's future that the Apocalypse that ended the “Utopian” civilizations is long forgotten, cropping up in the present only in the form of scattered, uncomprehended technological remnants and the occasional leftover bio-hazard. In the course of their adventures, Darger and Surplus have encountered one such bio-hazard, with dire results faithful Surplus describes to the one man he thinks might be able to help him:

Careful not to let his annoyance show, Surplus said, “I have no desire to deny my ancestry, sir. Your services are required not by me but by my friend. In Mongolia, he caught one of the war viruses that still linger from the mad times following the fall of Utopia. To save him, the doctors there swiftly and painlessly put him to death. Then, before putrefaction could set in, they wrapped around his body a silver exoskeleton, a revenant of antiquity, which (and this may sound incredible, but I saw it with my own two eyes) sank beneath his skin like butter melting into toast, leaving neither scar nor incision behind. Finally, they injected him with drugs and packed his body cavities with herbs. Together,these things preserve him in perfect stasis, dead but not deteriorating. One week in this state, they assured me, would be enough to starve the virus, thus destroying it. Unfortunately, while they could preserve his body, they had long ago forgotten how to resurrect it.”

Surplus has trekked across the strange, altered world of Chasing the Phoenix and led his body-burdened yak into a dystopian China (Swanwick makes sure to stress that his China is no version of any China that's ever really existed; Barry Hughart made the same protestations thirty years ago in his great Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox series, and they were no more convincing then than now) in search of a rumored master healer who might know a way to revive his friend. When asked about the moral character of this “nonpareil of his profession and the best and truest of friends,” Surplus recounts not virtues but valor:

“In London, he freed Queen Alice from the clutches of her greatest enemy. In France, he rediscovered the long-lost Eiffel Tower. In Prague, he single-handedly defeated an army of golems. All of Moscow reveres him for waking the Duke of Muscovy from his decades-long slumber and, shortly thereafter, making certain vital improvements to the Kremlin and indeed to the city itself.”

But even after Aubrey Darger is successfully revived, he seems fundamentally altered. The sheer boundless joy of living (a joy that tends to characterize more of Swanwick's characters than perhaps he realizes, fun as it is to read) that once endeared him to Surplus is gone, and in their earliest post-revival conversations, Surplus is at a loss as to how to get it back. “The sun is risen and there is work to be done,” he cheers Darger at one point:

“Work,” Darger said in a voice that might have come from the depths of a tomb.“Yes, work.”“What's the point?”“You astound me. Honest labor is what we were put here on earth to do. By our efforts we improve our lot and in the process increase the common share of happiness for all mankind.”Darber shook his head shaggily. “I died.”“I was present at the time,” Surplus reminded him.“Now I am alive.”“You state the obvious. The man I thought I was resurrecting would never have lowered himself so.” Moderating his tone, Surplus crouched down and took Darger's hand. “Tell us, dear friend. Tell us the reason for this perverse refusal of yours to embrace the miracle of life restored.”

The two go on to have hundreds of pages of thrilling and plot-twisty adventures pattered rather self-consciously on Marco Polo's encounter with his own fantasy-version of China, and it's all done in a grand, high-flying style no working sci-fi author captures better than Swanwick. If there's an audience left in readerdom for such bravura stuff, that audience will be thrilled.