Author: Emma Bull
Cover Artist: Rick Berry
Published By: Tor Books
Binding: Trade paperback
Publication Date: July 2009
In a Post-Apocalyptic world, after the Big Bang, when the button was pushed to unleash nuclear hell on the Earth, not much is certain. There’s the nightbabies, the Jammers, the Tarot, the last remaining Horsemen, the Deal, and hoodoo overriding it all. Only a handful of people are left alive to keep technology from totally going the way of the dinosaurs. The androgynous Sparrow, the hero/herione of Bone Dance, is one of these people.
Like S.M. Peters’s novel Ghost Ocean this one’s plot is also heavily influenced by the Tarot. Bone Dance was first published in 1991, so it is the precursor of the two. Whether or not it was read by Peters or had any influence on that author, I don’t know; what I can say is that both are very good and interesting novels, and both reference T.S. Eliot, though Bone Dance only mentions his Four Quartets, while Ghost Ocean has references to both The Wasteland, and The Hollow Men.
The setting of Bone Dance is Minnesota. Sparrow works the Night Fair stock exchange as a trader. The Night Fair is a wild place where just about anything can go down, a place filled with wheelers & dealers, nightbabies, the Jammers (who are psychically linked and seem to be of one mind), and it is filled with other things you’d expect at a fair, like derelict rides, food of all sorts, and con artists.
Sparrow’s specialty is in the locating and trading of a rare commodity: pre-nuke videos, CDs, and books. Sparrow’s main client of import is the boss man of the City of Ego, A.A. Albrecht. There is a person who is actually the boss behind the boss, a Horseman by the name of Tom Worecski, who manipulates Albrecht like a marionette, while he remains largely behind the scenes. When Sparrow starts experiencing segments of missing time and wakes up in strange places, the only solution that comes to mind is to go to a local tarot reader, Sherrea, to discover the answers.
Who are the Horsemen? They are people who can take over the bodies of other people and “ride,” them, as if they were horses. They were used by America’s government to do things like overthrow other country’s governments by taking over local leaders or their advisers, and they were also the ones behind the pushing of the buttons that resulted in a nuclear war. They were thought to have died out, though some remnants of their DNA had been passed on to the Jammers, whose prophetic statements often came true.
The nightbabies are another of Emma Bull’s unique and pretty cool creations. They aren’t as important to the plot of Bone Dance as are the Jammers and the Horsemen, but they are still worth noting here. They reminded me of people who go to Raves and take Ecstasy, in that they liked to look like babies, walk like toddlers, and talk in slurred baby-like voices. But, unlike babies, they potentially might kill you in a heartbeat, with no remorse. They also, like Ravers or the Goths, got the money for their wealthy parents:
The nightbabies, who every sunset brought their parents’ money down from the tops of the towers or from the walled compounds of parkland at the City’s edge, would follow a cloud of Jammers like gulls after a trash wagon. They’d try to copy the steps. But that dance has no pattern, no repeats, and the caller is the defect or disease that makes the Jammer bloodbeat and the shared mind that goes with them. The hoodoos claimed the Jammers as kin, but I never heard that the Jammers noticed. The nightbabies pestered them for prophecies, for any words at all that they could repeat down in the clubs to give them a varnish of artful doom for a few hours, until something else went bang.
Sherrea’s tarot reading of Sparrow is used as a framing device for the chapters of the novel. I liked this and that before each chapter one of the cards in the Major or Minor Arcana that was in the layout for Sparrow’s reading was mentioned, and several possible interpretations of it, by people like Waite, Crowley, and Gray. What I liked about it was that as I was reading each chapter, I thought about which of the interpretations, or which combination of them, would seem to be the one that proved to have the most validity to what actually happened to Sparrow.
Rather than discuss the plot itself, which is best left for the readers to enjoy, I’ll just say that the novel is – if my interpretation of it is correct – one of Sparrow’s self-exploration and attempt to establish an identity and a place in the society of the novel.
Sparrow is a cheval, a ready-made creation to serve as a body for the Horsemen, so they wouldn’t be tempted to take over the bodies of potential allies who might be around them if death was imminent. This is one of the many things Sparrow doesn’t know at first, but learns throughout the course of the novel. Sparrow’s learning about his/her origins and the reasons for his/her sexual ambiguity is also interesting reading.
The Horsemen are the main antagonists if the novel. Despite what most people of the City believe, they are not entirely a dead race of people-three exist. Sparrow finds that he/she has friends that will help, and that realization is also an unexpected one for Sparrow to arrive at.
One last tidbit to note-the novel is subtitled: A Fantasy For Technophiles. You don’t have to be a technophile yourself to get into and enjoy reading Bone Dance, though. What the title refers to is that, along with knowledge of several other subjects, including multiple languages, Sparrow also has knowledge of how to repair the audio and video equipment that keeps breaking down in Ego, and has a nostalgic love for the movies and music he/she deals in. There are many references to old movies and music in the novel, and it’s fun to read them and see if you can place where they came from.
Bone Dance is a novel that anyone who likes the fantasy genre should enjoy. It’s really a combination of SF and fantasy because technology as well as hoodoo and strange beings like the Horsemen and the Jammers are a big part of the action and the plot. If you like novels that also base much of their plots on mystical subjects like tarot card readings, this reprint of an enjoyable 1991 young adult post apocalyptic chronicle is a book that you should add to your reading lists.
