Read Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 for Free Online Page B

fiction, from at least John W. Campbell’s time (Asimov’s Mule, anyone?). Thus we get the wild talent of psychometry—invoking the historical information trail of an object via touch—which comes awfully close to seeing ghosts
    In any case, the protagonist of The Falling Woman, Elizabeth Butler, is indubitably a scientist—an archaeologist—who sees ghosts, as does, intermittently, her daughter (thus suggesting a genetic basis for the ability). So exactingly and empathetically is the mother’s professional field depicted that we accept the ghosts as merely one more tool in her toolkit, a handy technic that her less-gifted peers simply lack.
    Elizabeth Butler and her professorial co-worker Tony Baker are on their annual summer dig at the Mayan site of Dzibilchaltún, riding herd on the usual set of horny and lackadaisical and sincere students. (The camp’s interpersonal dynamics summon up allied notes from such safari scenarios as Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.”) Elizabeth, long prone to seeing animated shades from the past while not interacting deeply with them, now experiences visions of the last inhabitant of the once-flourishing Mayan settlement, an old woman named Zuhuy-kak. More vitally, Elizabeth discovers she can converse with Zuhuy-kak, and begins to learn information she could not otherwise have access to. But the spirit is bitter and vengeful, and has bad things in store for Elizabeth, generating the book’s considerable suspense, which is compressed into a mere two weeks or so.
    Into this fraught scenario comes Diane, the estranged daughter, fleeing bad times of her own. She wishes to reconnect with her mother, and Elizabeth reluctantly agrees to take her on as an untrained helper. (Diane’s inexperience allows Murphy conveniently and unawkwardly to educate both character and readers in the methodology and goals of a dig.) Murphy splits the narrative between mother and daughter points of view, and the resulting see-sawing insights and battling failures of communication prove fertile.
    The mother-daughter relationship obviously is a central engine of the book, and Murphy explores it passionately and deeply. Likewise, the patriarchal roadblocks Elizabeth has experienced in her career are highlighted in a judicious yet righteously ireful manner. Elizabeth’s damaged psyche receives an airing as well, nowhere more tellingly than in Chapter Thirteen, where she muses on the central dead space inside her heart. “I had sealed off the part of me that knew how to love. It was too close to the part of me that knew how to hate, and that was at the center of the madness. I had sealed them all away, leaving a dead place...” Then Elizabeth all unconsciously segues to a discussion of the cenote—the Mayan sacrificial well that plays such a pivotal role in the tale—never realizing that, metaphorically, just such a cold vacuity full of skeletons and sacrificed virgins lies inside herself. Murphy’s deft symbolical identification of inner and outer topography is complete.
    Murphy’s novel consorts well with the elegantly enigmatic work of Graham Joyce, Jonathan Carroll and Jo Walton, although with an emphasis on science rather than fantasy. Elizabeth Butler is no Indiana Jones. In fact, she belittles her profession. “Archaeologists are really no better than scavengers, sifting through the garbage that people left behind when they died... We’re garbage collectors really.” But the dedication and intellect she bestows on her chosen field, the scrupulousness with which she follows her protocols into the territory of artistry, her unselfish desire to expand humanity’s knowledge base, all belie her protests, and her adventures of the mind—whether with trowel in hand or conversing with the dead—end up outshining anything Harrison Ford has yet brought to the screen.

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    Pamela Sargent

The Shore of Women (1986)

     
    EDITOR OF THE FIRST, and still important, anthology devoted to