Black Helicopters
Ratings4
Average rating4.1
15
Ratings4
Average rating4.1
A dark jewel of a novella, this definitive edition of Caitlín R. Kiernan's Black Helicopters is the expanded and completed version of the World Fantasy Award-nominated original. Just as the Signalman stood and faced the void in Agents of Dreamland, so it falls to Ptolema, a chess piece in her agency's world-spanning game, to unravel what has become tangled and unknowable. Something strange is happening on the shores of New England. Something stranger still is happening to the world itself, chaos unleashed, rational explanation slipped loose from the moorings of the known. Two rival agencies stare across the Void at one another. Two sisters, the deadly, sickened products of experiments going back decades, desperately evade their hunters. An invisible war rages at the fringes of our world, with unimaginable consequences and Lovecraftian horrors that ripple centuries into the future.
Featured Series
3 primary booksTinfoil Dossier is a 3-book series with 3 primary works first released in 2015 with contributions by Caitlin R. Kiernan and Caitlín R. Kiernan.
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I liked this story, but I'm not sure that I should and I can think of a lot of coherent reasons why I shouldn't.
The story is juggling a lot of balls. Each chapter flicks back and forth between different storylines. Some chapters of the story are set in the modern day, in places like Dublin and Albany; some are set around Mars two hundred years in the future; and some are set one hundred years in the future in the post-Climate Change apocalypse. Characters are assigned code names - Beta, Ivoire, the Signalman, the Egyptian, sixty-six - and do their bit at various times and sometimes across time.
It's hard to know what's going on.
The story opens with an apparently immortal woman called the Egyptian meeting with renegades from “X.” Apparently, she represents “Y.” Beyond that we don't know who these people are, although it seems that the Signalman from Agents of Dreamland - so called because he has his grandfather's pocket watch - is part of the “Men in Black.” The Egyptian is engaging in spy craft with the renegades.....cut to Deer Island, Maine where Ivoire and Sixty-six are shooting at Shoggoths emerging from the ocean and cut to Mars where the albino assassin - Ivoire two hundred years in the future - is planning an attack on Mars and waiting for the Egyptian...and cut to a fishing boat off of sunken Boston where someone is doing something on the information system that is attracting someone else's attention.
Back and forth it goes.
The author has a backstory and is not sharing. I noted in Agents of Dreamland that I was puzzled by the Signalman's sobriquet. We get the answer in this book and it isn't that special. We don't learn what is going on with X and Y or who they are or why we should care. Was Deer Island real? Seems like it was because the Signalman had to blow the bridge, but why did he do that? And really what was going on with Sixty-Six, Bete and Ivoire?
It all came across like a puzzle to me and I like puzzles, but I sure hope that there is a pay-off here, otherwise this will be a wanking mess.
