Conference noted::sf

551.0. "Talking Man - Terry Bisson" by AD::REDFORD () Sat Dec 05 1987 17:12

    "There are two ways to tell a wizard.  One is by the blue light 
    that plays around his tires when he is heading north on wet pavement
    under the northern lights, his headlights pointed toward the top 
    of the world that so many talk about but so few have actually seen."
    
    This is a nice low-key fantasy with an odd setting.  Talking Man is
    a non-speaking wizard who lives in a trailer in back-country Kentucky, 
    grows a little tobacco, and fixes cars.  He comes from the beginning
    and the end of time:
    
    "He looked anywhere between forty-five and sixty, but he was 
    older than that.  He was older than the hills.  He was older than 
    the words people used or the things they talked about with them, 
    older than the ground he hunkered down on when he was making a trade,
    older than older than stone.  Talking Man was so old that, 
    watching the buzzards float overhead, he could remember not only before
    there were buzzards, but before there were birds, before there 
    were plants between the stones on the shore.  Since time, like 
    the world, is round, he could remember forward as well as backward:
    He could remember after the birds were gone, even their memories
    gone, their white bones piled up in drifts like snow, the air too
    weak for flying anymore."
    
    He has a 16-year daughter named Crystal.  When his wife and fellow
    immortal, Dgene,  comes hunting for him, he takes off.  His daughter
    goes looking for him in his '62 Chrysler, and follows him to the North
    Pole and the end of time.  She and her boyfriend, Williams, have
    various strange adventures alongs the way: crossing the mile-deep
    canyon of the Mississippi, dodging Dgene and her redneck thugs
    in a junkyard, escaping the roadblocks and looting of Denver.
    It's all told in a laid-back, easy-going style, interspersed
    with digressions into car mechanics.  It's a fine first novel
    and I look forward to more.
    
    /jlr