caitri | Entries tagged with book reviews

Xueting Christine Ni (ed. and trans.), Sinopticon: A Celebration of Chinese Science Fiction. Solaris Books, 2021. Pp. 448. ISBN 978-1-78108-852-4. $14.99.

The 2014 translation of Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem by Ken Liu into English became an unexpected defining moment in the field; there is now only “before” and “after” when talking about Chinese science fiction in the Anglo world. It is significant, then, that in her introduction to Sinopticon: A Celebration of Chinese Science Fiction, that editor Xueting Christine Ni describes her experience looking for science fiction books after walking into a Xinhua bookstore (China’s biggest bookseller chain). She is surprised by the lack of genre fiction aside from Wuxia (historical fiction concerned with martial artists)*, and when she asks for Kehuan (Chinese science fiction) the clerk gestures her towards the children’s section. When Xueting protests and asks if they are really shelving material like Liu there, the clerk responds with “Oh! Why didn’t you say so before?” and leads her where the material is shelved near science education textbooks. This preliminary scene explains the value placed on Kehuan in China: still at the margins of popular culture despite undergoing a remarkable renaissance both at home, and especially, abroad. Xueting’s purpose in editing this volume is to illustrate the wide range of Chinese science fiction, translating thirteen stories that were originally published between 1991 and 2021. This thirty year review, as it were, is not presented chronologically or thematically, but rather lets each work stand against one another for the reader to enjoy. Xueting also provides, after each story, notes that discuss the author as well as context for the story’s creation and contents. Xueting also makes a point of providing gender parity in these selections, with just over half of the authors being women. The overall result is an incredibly solid, thoughtful, and exciting anthology that is genuinely one of the best I’ve read in ages.

The story selections themselves run the gamut of hard science fiction. AI and space colonization figure heavily, but importantly, the focus always remains on the humanity of the characters. “The Great Migration” by Ma Boyong, for instance, imagines the biannual seasonal migration of workers from Mars back to Earth. Calculated to align with the close approaches of the two planets in their orbits in order to save fuel and travel time, the occasion becomes a festival as well as a lottery for people hoping to return to their families. Though situated in a futuristic space context, the emotional heart of the story is found in the thwarted efforts of two people trying, and failing, to get home. In real life, this scenario finds itself in the annual Lunar New Year celebrations, but as an American reader, I was struck by the similarities to seasonal migrant labor here in the US.

Zhao Hiyong’s “Rendezvous: 1937” is a multiperspective time travel story about resistance and survival in the Nanjing Massacre—an incredibly fraught subject in today’s China. It contains a coda by the author touching on the controversy of the subject in Japanese textbooks, and deploring the supposed lack of a “real” resistance from the Chinese occupants at the time. These are charged and messy statements. Originally published in 2006, reprinting and translating this story against current geopolitics is a charged choice. For instance, amid the ongoing cultural crackdown, the actor Zhang Zhehan has been newly criticized for visiting the Yasukuni Shrine (for Japanese war dead) in Tokyo several years ago. I have to wonder, then, at the placement of this story amid the other selections.

Finally, the story that struck me the most is “Starship: Library” by Jiang Bo. Told over epochs, this story is about the efforts of an immortal, Ehuang (who in mythology is a wise demigoddess), to both save and salvage the entirety of human knowledge. In the far distant future, Earth’s sun has gone to red giant stage and humanity has long since left the solar system; Ehuang and her library make up the last great ship to depart, despite an absence of visitors. Humans can now directly download knowledge, and so have no need to either read or learn–but Ehuang remains confident in her mission. The story checks in with her over millennia as she remains devoted to her mission despite the doubts of others. This is a story about the safeguarding of knowledge, unsure whether you will ever actually get to meet the one you’re saving it for, and is thus the perfect story for librarians like me.

Sinopticon would be an invaluable anthology when published at any time, but its arrival now makes it even more precious. Xueting’s introduction gets at the current difficulties in East-West relations, not least because of the COVID-19 pandemic which was occurring while this book was in process:

One value of science fiction lies in its ability to reflect and explore current preoccupations of the culture that generates it. … I hope readers will also find reflections of their own hopes and fears, and realise that the things the Chinese dream of and fear, are not a million miles away from what you yourself wish for, and hide from. (20)

Readers who have never encountered Chinese science fiction will find this book educational and illustrative; more familiar readers will find it incredibly entertaining and thought-provoking. The book is also inexpensive and would make an excellent choice for academics teaching science fiction; while reading I kept wanting to place the Chinese stories in dialogue with Anglo-American works. One can only hope for peace and stability between the great powers of our time, and this anthology amply demonstrates the intellectual exchanges that we should make more commonplace.

*Note: As an American reader, I fervently wish the translation of Wuxia novels into English would become more commonplace. For example, the classic novel The Legend of the Condor Heroes by Jin Young, first published in 1957 and likened to Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings in terms of genre impact and popularity, was not translated into English until 2018.

Current Mood: thoughtful

Crossposted to The Future Fire:

Katherine Addison, The Angel of the Crows. Tor Books, 2020. Pp. 448. ISBN 978-0-7653-8739-4. $24.99.

Reviewed by Cait Coker

The Angel of the Crows is the sort of high concept story which should be ridiculous and yet totally works: Sherlock Holmes meets “war in Heaven,” or rather, its aftermath. Nineteenth century Afghanistan remains Afghanistan, but now with fallen angels and hellhounds. (The BBC Sherlock, another recent albeit problematic retelling of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s eponymous detective stories, similarly played with a background conflict in Afghanistan that was specifically twenty-first century.) Addison’s novel isn’t a straightforward retelling of Sherlock or Doyle, but nonetheless riffs cleverly on familiar plot beats to tell a story at a slant. Sherlock is an angel called Crow and Watson is called Doyle; neither of them are the characters that we already know so well, except for how they are.

Let me back up for a moment. Addison is upfront in an “Author’s Note” that the novel has its origins in a Sherlock wingfic (a genre of fanfic in which a character has wings), and the book begins with dual epigraphs quoting lines from the BBC series as well as one of the original Doyle stories: “Nothing is more deceptive than an obvious fact” Sherlock states in “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” (1891). Thus the tone is set not only for this novel but how for we the readers should interpret it. The joy of fanfiction, both in the reading and the writing, is not just in adding to known stories but in transforming them; indeed, the game for many is to see exactly how far a story can be changed and still remain the same. Knowing something of Doyle’s Sherlock stories is integral to making sense of Angel in some ways, and yet as much if not more pleasure can be gleaned from these iterations of the characters as could be gotten from them either in their written nineteenth century iterations or their televised 2010s incarnations.

Here I must confess that my own attempts to read the original Sherlock stories left me cold both as an adolescent and as an adult, and while I enjoyed some elements of the BBC series I was honestly baffled by its runaway success. The Angel of the Crows I enjoyed very much for its own sake, delighting in those references to the earlier texts that I recognized but also likely totally missing many more. Does this book stand on its own? That I’m honestly not sure; reading it is the experience of reading a work by a fan author you love that takes place in a fandom (whether book or media) that you aren’t familiar with—I’m aware that I’m missing context, but I’m having enough fun to enjoy the story for its own sake.

And speaking of the story itself: This isn’t a conventional novel by any means, nor is it a set of independent short stories; like everything else, it is both a single tale and a collection of episodes linked into a continuing narrative. There is a logical conclusion rather than the story coming to an abrupt halt, but this too feels like it could be a jumping-off point to further adventures if the author so wishes (and I do hope she does). Crow and Doyle meet, become roommates and then friends, solve mysteries, and have a queer friendship. And it is very queer, albeit not sexual; the fannish preference for reading the BBC’s version of Sherlock as an asexual is clearly present, and there is a major spoiler in the uncovering of one character’s gender and sex. (Did this plot point make sense in the context of the story? Yes. Was it a delightful discovery gently dropped in medias res, blink-and-you-might-miss-it, and left there to percolate beautifully, lending a new resonance to everything? Also yes.)

Fannish reading can be contentious in some circles: the same elements that make a text pleasant to one reader is going to put another off entirely, and this book is very fannish in its idiom. In many ways Sherlock Holmes is the first mega-franchise with its own literal long-running fan club (the Baker Street Irregulars were founded in 1936 and are still extant), but to some it is still quasi-literary due to its venerable age. As such, The Angel of the Crows is inherently a controversial work to some simply for what it is and the ways it transforms well-known characters and properties. Therefore it is a vital and necessary read for anyone who fancies themselves a connoisseur of Sherlockiana, a delightful read for those like myself who know just enough to get into trouble, and likely an irksome puzzle for those expecting either a conventional fantasy or Sherlock work. But to all, I recommend this book with great enthusiasm.

Current Mood: thoughtful

Belated realization I forgot to repost this; crossposted to The Future Fire:

Rebecca Roanhorse, Black Sun. Solaris Press (UK edition), 2021. Pp 436. ISBN 978-1-78108-947-7. £8.99.

Reviewed by Cait Coker

Rebecca Roanhorse’s novel Black Sun is an epic fantasy drawing on the pre-Columbian cultures of the Americas for its world-building, social structures, mythos, and terminology. Like other fantasies that draw on history at a slant, it makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar. It is a true masterpiece of suspense and storytelling, and is simply the best new novel I’ve read in ages. Roanhorse structures the story in shifting times, and across several characters, leading up to the Winter Solstice and a celestial convergence leading to a solar eclipse that creates the titular Black Sun. The story moves forwards, backwards, and forwards again to illuminate what various characters know and when they know it, and providing new readings for different characters. If this novel were a film we would think of it as an homage to Tarantino; in the context of this story, in which scenes are placed against quoted texts, it is more like if Frank Herbert’s Dune series had dialed the anti-imperialist message all the way up.

A line from a scene early in the book, repeated in the blurb on the back, tells that ‘when a man is described as “harmless,” he usually ends up being a villain.’ This simple quote already plays with our expectations as readers, as it describes one of the protagonists, Serapio. Serapio is a mysterious and somewhat threatening figure to other characters in the book: blind and disfigured, dressed all in black. In the chapters told from his point of view, he is very different—an abused and neglected child who has had to grow up much too quickly. He can communicate with and see through the eyes of crows, an ability that has been done elsewhere and could have been hackneyed cliché, and yet in this universe feels completely organic and natural. As one of the two primary characters—the other being Xiala, a woman boat captain with her own mystical abilities—he provides much of the plot’s impetus with his need to travel to the city of Tova for the solstice. Serapio is also a charming and empathetic character whose Tragic Backstory™ could have been a real hindrance for the reader. Instead, Roanhorse matter-of-factly presents a narrative of horrifying abuse and makes it actually horrifying, rather than an exercise in pornographic horror that other novelists, such as Paolo Baciagalupi, have been known to indulge in.

Xiala, on the other hand, has the ghost of her own history, as a member of a marginalized culture, the Teek, that is simultaneously admired and abused. In some ways, her narrative reminded me of elements from N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy. Xiala can Sing Songs that, variously, can psychically influence people as well as, in a limited fashion, manipulate weather and the sea. Her abilities make her, alternately, valuable as a boat captain, and vulnerable to make crew members see her as unnatural. Roanhorse writes about the intersections of Xiala’s identity as a Teek, as a woman in a largely misogynist society (versus the comparatively freer culture in a different part of the continent), and as an open bisexual, that deftly draws a picture of everyday cultural struggles in both the real and fantastical worlds. (I’ll also note here that the advanced reader copy that I received did not contain maps, but the released book does have them so that readers can understand the geography referenced.)

There are two other characters that provide point of views for the narrative. Naranpa is a Sun Priest who has climbed the social ladder from the poorest region of Tova to the highest rank in the city’s religious order. Upward mobility is presented as a complex thing both personally and culturally; her family feels abandoned and her brother in particular despises her for perceived betrayal, while the rest of the priesthood is torn by the politics of a designated leader from the lower classes (and this goes about as well as you would think). Finally, Okoa is the son of a murdered clan leader who must balance the responsibilities of state, clan, and family—in that order—to investigate the crime and receive a semblance of justice. Okoa is the character most neglected by this first volume in a planned trilogy, and it will be interesting to see how his role expands later on.

In her notes in the back of the book, Roanhorse presents a brief bibliography of her research with some commentary. She notes in particular that she was inspired by the city of Cahokia, which exists today as a complex of some eighty mounds in southern Illinois, and that much of that research will be seen more fully in the next volume. Since I personally have been long-fascinated with Cahokia (it is nearby, and at its apex would have been significantly greater in size and complexity than the contemporaneous European city of London), I am eager to read more and see what happens next.

Finally, Roanhorse dedicates the book “For that kid in Texas who always dreamed in epic.” Roanhorse grew up in that state, so these words have a particular meaning for a particular audience. (I myself lived in Texas for a number of years as an adult.) Texas is the second-largest state in America, where many of the country’s cultural divides are thrown into sharp relief: it contains some of the wealthiest and the poorest citizens in the country, its gerrymandering system has effectively quashed democracy for decades, and as recent news items have demonstrated, its governing and regulatory mechanisms to provide and protect people are dysfunctional. Nonetheless, the members of minority communities in the state, including people of color, LGBTQ+, and indigenous people have long been loud and proud. To be a reader of fantasy in Texas is to be aware of one’s cultural stakes and, frequently, vocal in calls for justice. In addressing those readers, Roanhorse is not just talking back to her younger self, but to those readers who are actively fighting for a better world both in the science fiction and fantasy community and in broader politics.

Current Mood: awake

Crossposted to The Future Fire:

Nisi Shawl (ed.), New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Colour. Rebellion Publishing, 2019. Pp. 308. ISBN 978-1-78108-638-4. £8.99.

In her Afterword to New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Colour, editor Nisi Shawl explains the genesis of this anthology as stemming from a thwarted suggestion, years ago, to have a class of the Clarion West Writers Workshop consist of all students of color. Other committee members opposed the idea, including one who argued that they would “use them all up” in a single year and therefore it made sense to spread out nonwhite attendees for other years. The persistent belief, reflected in this account, that SFF is a genre primarily by and for white people has only recently begun to be dismantled, making collections like this one both a celebration of POC writers and a useful remedy for readers. The book is also firmly reflective of the political moment in America, going beyond the crises in popular culture from Racefail to Puppygate, with veiled (and not so veiled) references to Trump’s demagoguery and other sociopolitical tensions. The collection also encompasses both fantasy and science fiction stories, providing stories that hint at hope and at dystopia.

New Suns opens with a brief Foreword by LeVar Burton, who is perhaps best known for his dual roles as the host of Reading Rainbow and proponent of literacy, and as playing the character Geordi LaForge on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Burton meditates on his love of the short story form and on genre more generally, noting that

The exploration of space and our eventual close encounters with other intelligent species will require us to leave our “colonizer” mentality behind and embrace an attitude of openness and humility we have yet to cultivate, let alone master. When a world leader advocates for the creation of a militaristic Space Force to exercise “dominance” in the heavens, we are moving further than ever from Gene Roddenberry’s United Federation of Planets. (10)

Indeed, the notion of decolonization is a critical subtext (if not text) of the volume, with many of the stories and their authors coming from non-Anglophone or Euro-centric contexts.

There are seventeen short stories in the book, and while they are all very strong, I will only discuss a few here. My personal favorite is a story that will haunt me for a while: “The Freedom of the Shifting Sea” by Jaymee Goh. Taking place in contemporary Malaysia, it is the story of a mother, a daughter, and a “mermaid” named Mayang. Instead of the usual fish tail, Mayang has the articulated body of predatory marine worms; the Eunice aphroditois species is referenced in the story, and a brief Google brought new and appreciated layers of the story to me. This story confronts colonization and the climatological genocide inherent in climate change in fascinating ways in its handful of pages; it is simultaneously perfect and yet I wish it were much, much longer. Minsoo Kang’s “The Virtue of Unfaithful Translations” is a delightful secret history told in the form of a historical anecdote, complete with citations and an extended marginal note. It retells a great war that wasn’t through the unexpected love story of two translators who find that a costly war can be averted through the use of unusual diplomacy and a certain freedom with translation. Presenting the story as a historical account sans dialogue lends it a verisimilitude that is incredibly appealing.

“One Easy Trick” by Hiromi Goto is more like magical realism than speculative fiction per se. In this story an overweight woman, Marnie, goes on a hike and abruptly loses her belly fat. The belly fat is an autonomous being who, feeling unappreciated, decides to go off with an appreciative bear instead. I was reminded of the Doctor Who episode with the “adipose” aliens, but under the amusement of this story’s premise is a darker story about insecurity and abandonment. Losing the fat does not improve Marnie’s life; indeed, she is left alone in the forest and seemingly determined to get the belly fat back in a rather different way….

“Come Home to Atropos” by Steven Barnes is a darkly comic satire told through the shooting script and notes for a commercial advertising euthanasia services for the elderly by way of a Caribbean vacation. Barnes manages to compactly combine the history of the transatlantic slave trade, late-stage capitalism, the pharmaceutical industry, the ongoing tragedies of tropical islands receiving no aid in the wake of ever-increasingly devastating hurricanes, and Greek mythology in a tight marvel of a story. Similarly, E. Lily Yu’s “Three Variations on a Theme of Imperial Attire” retells Hans Christian Anderson’s famous fable of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” for the age of social media and political figures. (It is utterly transparent who the misbegotten “emperor” is modeled on.) The story concludes with the beginning of the inevitable revolution, and the question of whether things will indeed change.

New Suns begins with an epigraph quoting Octavia Butler: “There’s nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.” It speaks to the current issues preoccupying genre, and even the mainstream, today. Despite our hellscape reality, SFF is in something of a new golden age: For every space cowboy opera there is now one, if not more, volumes exploring non-European settings, queerness, and racial politics. New Suns does all of the above, showcasing contemporary talents with a purpose, and doing so extraordinarily well. This book is one of the strongest anthologies I have read in years, and I highly recommend it!

Current Mood: awake

Crossposted to The Future Fire.

Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro (ed.) & Fábio Fernandes (trans.), Solarpunk: Ecological and Fantastical Stories in a Sustainable World. World Weaver Press, 2018. Pp. 271. ISBN 978-0-9987022-9-2. $14.95.

Solarpunk is the latest in a series of themed anthologies—previous installments include Vaporpunk (2010) and Dieselpunk (2011)—edited by Brazilian SF author Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro. First published in Portuguese in 2012, the English edition was funded through a Kickstarter in 2017, and it provides an intriguing window not only into Brazilian genre writing but into the complicated politics of sustainability. “Solarpunk” as a genre has emerged in the 2010s as one of numerous forms of climate fiction, even as climate reality continues to change and converge a number of preoccupations. It has also promised a form of optimism at odds with popular dystopia, managing to combine hopeful science with a cynicism regarding human nature itself. As Sarena Ulibarri notes in the preface, while Americans view even the idea of a world economy of renewable energy as inherently utopian, in other countries it is a matter of necessity and survival: Brazil is one of the world’s leaders in renewable energy with 76% of its energy drawn from wind, solar, and hydropower, but it is far, far from being a liberal utopia. Consequently, the stories collected here run an emotional and genre gamut that is highlighted by the accompanying art work by José Baetas.

Several stories make use of dark humor to get their points across. ‘Soylent Green is People!’ by Carlos Orsi is a murder mystery which follows a private detective investigating the death of a biodiesel engineer and the disappearance of his aged mother. As one might guess from the title, it goes about as well as one might expect. Similarly, Telmo Marçal’s ‘When Kingdoms Collide’ reads almost like a satire, envisioning conflict between humans and human-plant hybrids called Greenies for their chlorophyll-containing DNA. The unnamed protagonist narrates both events and fury after the Swiftian murder of his girlfriend. ‘Sun in the Heart’ by Roberta Spindler is a smaller, more intimate story that likewise plays with the possibility of hybridizing human DNA, but more seriously. It concerns a family that faces the question of whether or not a beloved son is still human when he is, functionally, mostly a machine. It concerns the invention of nano-implants that convert solar rays into “photonutrition,” preventing the increasing numbers of cancers in an overheated world and solving the problem of diminishing food resources. Given the big questions asked in this brief narrative, they are too tidily answered, or not at all.

Other stories avoid tidiness altogether, and revel in it by playing with narrative conventions. ‘Breaking News!’ by Romeu Martins is presented largely as a transcript of online radio programming during one long night of protests and riots at a genetically modified organism greenhouse/factory plant. ‘Once Upon a Time in a World’ by Antonio Luiz M. C. Costa plays on similar themes, in which the politics and violence of the digital world crossover into the real one during an act of terrorism. Both stories are so near-future (per 2012) as to have elements that are familiar at this point. Gabriel Cantareira’s ‘Escape’ is a brief action tale in which the daughter of a tech conglomerate’s president is willing to join with “terrorists” to limit access to a manipulative new technology. The story told in the media is at odds with the reality, presenting the narrative as a “secret history” of someone at the right (or wrong) place at the right time.

André S. Silva’s ‘Xibalba Dreams of the West’ is another story that plays with time, this one by reimagining the rise and fall of the Mayan nation as a tale of the future rather than of the past. Religious mysticism combines with the modern security state to create a culture in which political dissidents are executed as sacrifices, but the problems of unsustainable resource and overpopulation remain. For a short story, it packs a lot of world-building and deft reasoning into its pages, and was my favorite of the bunch by far. ‘Gary Johnson’ by Daniel I. Dutra doesn’t go quite as far in its exploration of religious themes, but it is just as fascinating. It is also the most overtly fantastical of the collection, concerning efforts to prove the existence of the human soul—and how those efforts culminate in attempted genocide and murder as told through the letters of a former priest.

‘Cobalt Blue and the Enigma’ by Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro is the final as well as the longest entry in the collection, a novella told in nine short chapters. It plays with a number of elements familiar to genre fans, from high-tech armored exoskeletons created by the military-industrial complex for quadriplegic soldiers, to a space-faring culture with outposts on Jupiter and planned missions to Alpha Centauri, to a hunt for a seemingly supernatural creature. In many ways it is the most conventional story in the book, but in invoking so many of familiar, even beloved, tropes of genre, it brings us full circle, engaging with and highlighting the contributions of all the authors to this book.

Solarpunk is a wide-ranging collection of new Brazilian writing in translation, and for that by itself it would be a worthwhile read. That it tackles numerous aspects of and speculations on sustainable energy, renewable resources (or the lack thereof), and digital culture make it an incredibly pertinent volume for our world right now. Read it right this minute if you can; if you miss it, you might already be living in it…

Current Mood: awake

Crossposted at The Future Fire.

David Thomas Moore (ed.), Dracula: Rise of the Beast. Abaddon Books, 2018. Pp. 308. ISBN 978-1-78108-666-7. $15.99.

Dracula: Rise of the Beast is an interesting and almost undefinable book. It is not a conventional fiction anthology, as all of the stories presented are held together through a joint framing device, but neither is it a mosaic novel, as the stories do not altogether cohere. That said, it’s a fascinating collection that talks back—not just speaks, but explicitly talks back—to Bram Stoker’s classic 1897 novel. Stoker’s Dracula was a figure as exoticized as he was threatening, playing on a number of English cultural anxieties ranging from immigration and anti-semitism to homosexuality and women’s roles in the new industrialist age. Moore and his stable of writers here—Adrian Tchaikovsky, Milena Benini, Bogi Takács, Emil Minchev, and Caren Gussoff Sumption—respond not just to the fictional figure and his historical counterpart, but to the cultural conversations around him as well.

The stories are framed through a series of “interludes” that take the form of email correspondence written by Jonathan Holmwood, the great-great-grandson of Jonathan and Mina Harker as well as a respected historian, to a correspondent named Dani Vӑduvӑ. The stories that follow each of these sections are presented as scanned files uploaded as part of the email, which are themselves letters from previous periods of time. Bogi Takács’ “The Souls of Those Gone Astray from the Path” is made up of letters between two rabbis, with a few notes from the nephew of one of them, from the fifteenth century, just prior to and after the death of Vlad Tepes. In addition to providing voices for medieval Jewish characters, who are all too often removed from historical narratives, the story creates a “secret history” in which the historical figure is a vampire who fakes his own death and continues the masquerade as his own son. (This last is a fairly common trope in vampire fiction, perhaps most notably used in Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s St. Germain series.)

The second story, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Noblesse Oblige”, takes place a century later and includes excerpts from the journals of Erzsébet Bathory. Bathory is sometimes known as “the Bloody Countess” in real life and if historical accounts are true, she was one of the most prolific serial-killers in history; most famously, although this story was concocted years after her death, she enjoyed bathing in the blood of beautiful young virgins in order to stay forever young and beautiful herself. In Tchaikovsky’s version, a young Bathory falls in love with Dracula and takes awful measures to become like him. In some ways this is the most conventional story in the book; given the efforts by historians in recent years to revise and reclaim Bathory’s story—surviving manuscript evidence suggests that the Hungarian Palatine Thurzó was scheming for a transparent land-grab of the Countess’s property—a feminist revision of the story would have been welcome.

Milena Benini’s “A Stake Too Far” consists of a mix of letters, receipts, and accounts from the late eighteenth century. The story in the background here is the rivalry between Vlad, the heroic and elegant vampire beloved of his entourage, and his brother Radu, a stinking and starving remnant terrorizing the countryside. Significant parts of the story are told from the point of view of Magdalena Hranić, a widow with skill in healing as well as identifying the supernatural, since her husband was killed by Radu. Excerpts from the letters of unidentified authors argue that accusing her of witchcraft would lead to her loss of property and the accompanying growth of wealth for others, in the sort of cynical abuse of women that history is increasingly trying to reckon with, and reconcile. Working with the local priest, Vlad and Magdalena kill Radu, providing one of the only happy endings in this collection.

Emil Minchev’s “Children of the Night” marks a turn in the book, the point at which it became clear that this isn’t, after all, a mosaic novel. This story is told as a single long letter from Dracula to an unknown “Bogdan” who resides in London as Dracula makes plans to move there, implying that the story takes place in the late nineteenth century. What follows is a tale of horror, with some vividly gory scenes, in which Dracula meets Yaga, a supernaturally malevolent and beautiful woman. Their love spawns the three eponymous children of the night, daughters who are equally beautiful and evil, and whose needs for education befitting proper young ladies sets the stage for Dracula’s move to England. Attentive readers will identify these girls as the “Weird Sisters” from Stoker’s novel; on film they are often identified instead as Dracula’s “Brides.” (For additional fun trivia, the famous line regarding the children of the night is not present in the original British edition of Stoker’s novel, but appears rather mysteriously in the American edition, possibly added for unknown reasons by the American editor.)

The final story, Caren Gussoff Sumption’s “The Women”, takes place from the perspectives of three different women. Olivia Fogg Cruthers writes letters tracing the search for her missing father and his research into Matthias Corvinus, “The Raven King,” in 1899, in the course of which she befriends a young Romany woman named Mera Szgany. Lolo is a young Romany woman at university who writes long letters home from London to Bucharest and engages in a brief affair with Matthew Corbin, one that goes horribly wrong. Dani is a young transwoman, and her story is told through blog entries meant to chronicle her transition before it starts as a chronicle for her search for The Raven King, the sire of Dracula who has menaced her family for generations. These three stories are meant to reckon with the problematic portrayal of the Romany in both Stoker’s novel and its adaptations (though it could be argued it reckons as well with their broader portrayal in contemporary popular culture). In many ways, it also reckons with the misogynist culture of the Romany, in which forced marriages and purity laws heap personal abuse onto social abuse. Adding further intersections through Dani’s transition and her search for her own truth speaks to contemporary concerns as well as playing with the “chosen one” trope: What happens when the girl who is meant to save your people isn’t a cis-girl?

Dracula: Rise of the Beast may not work as a whole, necessarily, but each of the pieces that make it up play with the popular figure in interesting and revealing ways. While the authors’ willingness (or not) to push back against established narratives and characterizations varies, they all bring thoughtful engagement to both Stoker and Vlad Tepes. I particularly recommend this book to aficionados of vampire literature, who will likely get more out of it than other readers.

Crossposted to The Future Fire.

Margrét Helgadóttir (ed.), Pacific Monsters. Fox Spirit Books, 2017. Pp. 182. ISBN 978-1-91046-212-6. £10.00/$15.00.

Pacific Monsters is the fourth volume in Fox Spirit Books’ Books of Monsters series; previous volumes include African Monsters (2015) and Asian Monsters (2016), and projected volumes will include American Monsters and Eurasian Monsters. The goal of these books (all edited by the capable and prolific Margrét Helgadóttir, sometimes with Jo Thomas as co-editor) is to effectively decolonize the monstrous of the popular imagination and pop culture from the familiar parade of western-inspired demons, werewolves, vampires, and zombies. Instead, Helgadóttir’s anthologies showcase fiction across the spectrum of speculative fiction genres that feature creatures drawn from the localized myth and folklore of other cultures, almost all of which are written by writers and artists from, or with strong connections to, those countries. Each volume is a softcover coffee table book, oversized and illustrated in black and white; several of the entries include stories told through comics rather than prose. Ultimately this series is a needed intervention into Anglo-American-centric monster stories, and Pacific Monstersparticularly stands out as it encompasses nations and populations that are too often neglected altogether.

The book includes fourteen works that span across the nations of Australia and New Zealand, the Pacific Islands which include Hawaii and Guam, and Antarctica. In her introduction, Helgadóttir notes the paucity of writers and stories from the latter locations, and as such the bulk of the material is made up of writers from Australia and New Zealand; nonetheless, what the islanders may lack in representation they make up for in vivid presence. Helgadóttir also observes that the themes in each collection vary because of the regional emphasis or preoccupation with various issues. With African Monsters the stories and monsters were connected with magic, with themes of immigration and of coming home. With Pacific Monsters, the preoccupation is with solitude which can be healing or harmful, with the liminal states of water and land, body and mind. There is a palpable sense in each story of being at the end of what is known, and the danger that can come from going where humans were not meant to be.

Each of the stories was striking, but I’ll only discuss a few of the stand-outs as representative. They aren’t organized by geography or nationality; one can turn a page and travel from New Zealand to Hawaii, or from Australia to the Antarctic. This was at times a little confusing for me as a reader as I wasn’t always able to mentally “reset” to a new context, but it does have the effect of demonstrating that the varying nations and writers have more in common culturally than one might think at first blush. They also share an emphasis on healing: in one way or another making peace with one’s self and the land in a way that is ecological as well as spiritual.

‘From the Womb of the Land, Our Bones Entwined’ by AJ Fitzwater comes the closest to science fiction of the collection, which is otherwise largely a mix of fantasy and horror. It features a heroine who ends up bridging the divide between her native spiritual heritage with the earth and her scientific study of earthquakes to tap into magic and prevent a destructive event. It reminded me of non-dystopic version of N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy in so many good ways. Another story, ‘Grind’ by Michael Grey, utilizes the dichotomy between the mystic and the scientific to tell a nineteenth century story about Australian whalers who are caught in the ice of the Antarctic as they are hunted by eldritch and human horrors. Grey plays on the familiar tropes of men going mad at the end of civilization, and he touches on Moby Dick to emphasize the story as a moral fable, albeit in a different direction than Melville. (He also makes queerness a particular point in the story, one that plays with certain subtexts of the more familiar whaling story as well.) Both stories are about the crux of what is knowable in science and in spirit, and how it is up to the protagonists—and ultimately, ourselves—to make sense of it.

Two stories are told as graphic narratives with artwork supplied by Dave Johnson. ‘Dinornis’ by Octavia Gade takes place in New Zealand, making use of the moa—a giant, flightless bird from our real world—as a symbol for death and grief. Though extinct, there are persistent rumors of surviving specimens in the backcountry. Gade’s unnamed heroine finds an abused moa that she has to put out of its misery, and contrasts it with the memory of watching her grandmother dying in the hospital in great pain until she uses a pillow to end her pain as well; it is perhaps one of the darkest stories in the collection, as hope and healing seem just out of reach. In contrast, Michael Lujan Bevacqua’s ‘Isindålu The Soldier’ is about the restoration of hope amid PTSD. The story is told through the point of view of Jose Taitåno, a military veteran who has returned home to Guam and is trying to readjust to civilian life. Guam is an American colony with over a quarter of its land given over to American military bases, and many of its residents are members of the military who have to struggle with the knowledge that mainland Americans don’t see them as real citizens even with their service. Bevacqua tells his story in English with translations of dialogue alongside the Chamorro tongue, as Jose’s days blend with nightmarish nights in which he dreams of a demonic figure and a taotaomo’na. A taotaomo’na is ancestral spirit that can punish or protect, and Jose fears that it has come for the former rather than the latter. Johnson’s artwork reinforces the magical realism of the story itself, blending the real and the imaginary until they are one and the same.

Finally, my favorite story in the collection is ‘Mudgerwokee’ by Kirstie Olley. It revolves around teenage Audrey’s move from Sydney to rural Australia for unspecified reasons. She quickly makes friends with a local group of other teenagers, and they go on a trip into the bush country on a “monster hunt” for the mudgerwokee, a dangerous creature that can grant wishes in exchange for a sacrifice. Anyone who has ever watched a horror movie can take a guess as to how this plays out in the end. Olley, however, plays with overused tropes, allowing her heroine to escape with her life at a price, but with the life that “she” always wanted…

When I reviewed the previous volume African Monsters, I said that it was something of an exploratory volume: readers will get the most out of it if they go in wanting something different, rather than just a preconceived idea of genre or of monsters themselves. The same holds true for Pacific Monsters; it is a wide-ranging, eclectic collection, and one that I highly recommend for anyone wanting to explore unfamiliar mythic terrain.

Current Mood: awake

Crossposted from The Future Fire:

Joyce Chng, Water Into Wine. Annorlunda Books, 2017. Pp 138. ISBN 978-1-944354-30-5. $8.99.

I wonder how the wine will taste. Will people taste the fear—the terror and anxiety—when they drink? A tart wine with hints of berry and blood? A spicy wine with cinnamon and gunpowder, great for a summer evening? (46)

Space opera is usually defined by its great battles for great causes, and the adventures of a small group of characters who become a family. Joyce Chng’s Water Into Wine is space opera writ dirtside, where the great battles are all overhead, daily, nightly, and the small group of characters are an actual family trying to survive.

Ping Xin inherits a vineyard on the planet Tertullian VI from his grandfather, and uproots his children and aging mother to start over after a divorce; his husband left when Xin decided to transition to male. (N.B. I’m using the pronouns “he/his” to discuss the character here; told from Xin’s point of view, no pronouns used to describe the character appear in the book until the end, but more on that momentarily.) Shortly after the move, the Secessionist War, a conflict between the Loyalists to an interplanetary Alliance and the Traitors who wish to leave, starts, and the sky is lit up by space battles far above the surface on a regular basis, while on the ground, life largely continues. Xin hires the mysterious and handsome Galliano, an experienced vintner to assist in the work of cultivation, harvesting, pressing, and bottling. Chng’s prose in these scenes is particularly strong, evoking both the heavy work required and the beauty that is working with living things. After a start and stop budding romance, Xin and Galliano become lovers, just as their world starts to come to pieces.

The “war” scenes of the book will be strikingly familiar to anyone who has watched the news of the last five years. Xin and his family try to maintain as normal a routine as possible, amid closed schools, alarm sirens and bomb shelters, and military on both sides that don’t hesitate to put landmines on country roads, shoot down civilian craft, or harass farmers for food or loot. Xin is repeatedly encouraged to leave but refuses: the vineyard, and Tertullian VI, is his home and all that he has. But through all this there are periods of normalcy, too, which are stressful in their own right, like bottling and selling the new wine, worrying over vine blight, or dealing with a rebellious teenage son who wants to join the fight.

Most of the time the war is a distant, unreal thing, even when its victims are dying in your arms. “We were not captains in heartless metal starships ordered to fire into the atmosphere of planets. We were not politicians who postured and spouted hot air. We were only civilians, trying to survive, trying to have decent lives,” Xin says at the end (133-34). Xin and his family survive, but at a cost: twice they have to kill soldiers who threaten their lives. The scenes of sudden and shocking violence are brief, but remain a shadow throughout the rest of the book, as one can never choose to kill—even in self-defense—and remain unchanged.

Xin’s transition comes up several times, especially when he is unable to get the hormone pills he needs as access to the town and to supplies are cut off. His periods restart; several times he is addressed as “ma’am,” though it’s unclear if this is direct insult or only ignorance. When a peace is declared at the end (which may well be only a temporary one), he declines to start taking the pills again, choosing to embrace a gender identity that is neither male nor female. “I give myself my own pronoun. I am qar. I am me. I am Ping Xin,” Xin says (138).

Water Into Wine is one of the most enjoyable reads I’ve had in a while; for all the seriousness of the subject matter, Chng has a light touch throughout. Xin’s point of view also credibly rewrites the common tropes of space opera: wars are very different on the ground and for minorities. But above all the story is suffused with hope and optimism, that the wars will conclude, and that the spaces we make for ourselves and for our families will continue.

Current Mood: thoughtful

Crossposted at The Future Fire:

Kathryn Evans, More of Me. Amulet Books, 2017. Pp. 312. ISBN 978-1-4197-2372-8. $17.95.

In my experience of reading YA, many authors adopt just enough SFF elements (whether climate catastrophe, vampires and werewolves, or spaceships) to provide a decorative veneer for the romance they’re actually telling. Kathryn Evans’s More of Medoes the exact opposite, adopting a teenage girl protagonist and her messy high school life as cover for a story about genetic engineering and cloning. It’s not a particularly deep story: the science is hand-wavey, the plot twists are predictable, the characters are teenagers, but for all that it is compulsively readable.

Teva is a sixteen year old Everygirl, middle-class but not popular, and self-absorbed with her family drama, her best friend Madeeha, and her boyfriend Ollie. There’s something like the near-obligatory love triangle, complicated by the fact that it’s really a love quadrangle. You see, Teva harbors a secret: she unwillingly clones herself each year, cells multiplying and splitting off until a second, mirror self detaches. That self will become the “new” Teva and take over a public life of school and friends, while her previous incarnations from Fifteen to Six stay hidden away at home, unaging. Their mother, an overweight and depressive dowd who makes ends meet by rotely producing romance novels, wants to keep her children safe by limiting their exposure to the outside world, and thus her own; we are told the only person she ever sees is the grocery man, though it’s unclear if she goes out for shopping or if everything is delivered, though in the vague present day of the story we can assume the latter. Teva’s relationship with Ollie is complicated because Fifteen is still in love with him, while Teva only goes through the motions. In this stultifying atmosphere, Teva dreads the moment when she must inevitably disappear and her own clone take over, and she begins an unlikely search for answers that lead her to her long-lost father.

Teva’s predicament is painfully highlighted when her Textiles teacher wants her to take part in a school fashion show with invited company representatives who can provide college scholarships and work internships—the sort of coveted prizes that are of no use to Teva herself, who will never be able to attend school or have a career, but which will be passed down to her future clones. Like Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s constant apocalypses, Teva’s clones are a metaphor for most teenagers’ inability to imagine or plan for a future, or rather, a future that doesn’t threaten her being. When the split begins early, starting with the development of a second fingernail and then a second finger, she goes to the Internet for help: creating a blog and a Facebook account under pseudonyms, and begging for help this way. This is perhaps the most realistic part of the book, as… nothing happens. The only responses are Viagra spammers, and a handful of anonymous, encouraging comments. The net is neither a panacea nor a threat to a random teenager, and for once this is reflected (in contrast to another YA book I read this summer, Zan Romanoff’s Grace and the Fever, in which a lot happens because of social media). Like perhaps too many teenagers, Teva doesn’t have a handy “trusted adult” to confide in, or ask for help; she has to solve things for herself as best she can.

The final act of the book is the messiest, with a lot happening in a short period of time. There are several vivid scenes of body horror that may leave some readers queasy, though at the same time they provide some of Evan’s finest writing. The descriptions are sharp and visceral, and in high contrast to the emotional anxiety of the rest of the novel. There is also an epilogue that provides something like a happy ending, but leaves the story the weaker for it; the reader by this point has earned the right to see how things have changed organically. As it is, the epilogue ties up almost as many loose ends as the infamous conclusion to the Harry Potter series, though only in a space of months rather than years.

More of Me comes incredibly close to being a true departure in genre and form because of its emphasis on the logic of cloning (a logic that in some ways recalls that of Flowers for Algernon), but in the end Evans chooses to play it safe, repeating those steps that have worked for other YA efforts. Robert Heinlein had the old saw that to write a juvenile novel, you made the protagonist seventeen and told the rest of the story the way you would have done anyway. Evans’s novel draws upon this dictum, but ultimately discards it for the familiar YA story beats we have come to expect.

Current Mood: awake

Crossposted from The Future Fire:

Judy Juanita, De Facto Feminism: Essays Straight Outta Oakland.EquiDistance Press, 2016. Pp 226. ISBN 978-0-9716352-1-0. $19.95.

Judy Juanita’s collection of essays De Facto Feminism: Essays Straight Outta Oakland is a mixture of previously published material from her long career in activism, including poetry, and more recent autobiographical reminiscences that relate to her 2013 novel Virgin Soul. This work does not relate to genre per se (unless we think of being Black in America today as being a dystopian experience, which, to be honest, we might well do). The sixteen essays, half dozen poems, and a collection of digital correspondence span from 1967 to 2015, much of which is drawn from the online magazine The Weeklings, cover expansive territory on Juanita’s career as an activist and an artist: she has been a member of the Black Panther Party, has taught in the first Black Studies program in the US, and is a playwright, poet, novelist and professor. She reminds us that creative work is activism too.

The earliest pieces in the volume, like ‘My California Childhood—a freedom childhood,’ ‘White Out,’ ‘Five Comrades in The Black Panther Party, 1967-1970,’ and ‘Black Womanhood #1’ revolve around Juanita’s coming of age in Oakland in the 1950s and 1960s, her time as a student and then teacher and activist, and how each identity informs the other. In ‘Black Womanhood #1’ she writes, “The black woman has her own turbulent and dialectical process of self-transforming. I know because I’m living it every day” (51). Though those words were originally written in 1967, they are still true now, for the author and millions of other women today. The following essay, ‘Tough Luck,’ focuses on another form of identity, with the author as poet. Juanita incorporates the text of several of her poems published during the period into the body of the memoir, demonstrating how she used her poetry and art to come to grips with her divorce and motherhood, and how these topics both bridged and separated her from the community of poets she was a part of.

‘Cleaning Other People’s Houses’ also utilizes a poem written during the period, when Juanita joins a friend’s cleaning business for a brief period. She does the work for extra cash and for the experience of having done so, to the horror of friends and colleagues. Cleaning other people’s homes is a voyeuristic experience: she sees a book about AIDS on a nightstand, followed by other books, followed by the revelation that one of the men she’s working for has been diagnosed with the disease. Another time she is semi-forced into another kind of labor when the matron of the house finishes reading Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and wants to discuss it with Juanita; she dryly notes that Walker championed Zora Neale Hurston, another Black novelist who worked in domestic labor to make ends meet. ‘A Playwright-in-progress’ describes her experiences in a series of writing workshops, trying to nail down exactly what she does want to write even as she faces the often unrelenting whiteness of most workshop and fellowship programs (a topic that author Junot Diaz has also written about, rather scathingly), while ‘Putting the Funny in the Novel’ recounts an ironic encounter with an editor who wants more humor in her experiences as a black woman and a Black Panther.

Juanita turns to literary criticism as well as reminiscence in ‘The N-word: Let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater.’ She discusses the multivariated uses the word takes on in August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Fences (1987), cruel and affectionate, abusive and matter-of-fact. She also discusses the discomfort her students feel when they discuss the word, and the play, in class, and the discomfort she herself feels when the word is inflected differently by Black, white, and Asian students. She feels a discomfort about the divide between literary and genre fiction in ‘All the Women in My Family Read Terry Macmillan.’ Macmillan’s most famous novel is Waiting to Exhale (1992), a book that heralded a phenomenon of “black chick lit” that Juanita thinks has overtaken African-American literary fiction, and thus complicating the struggles of Black women writers like herself.

‘The Gun as Ultimate Performance Poem,’ nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2015, is a stand-out essay ruminating on the aftermath of the murder of Trayvon Martin and on the author’s own previous love affair with ‘the Gun’:

The Gun was the shatterer of the boundary between the personal and the political. I liked guns. They were talismanic and palm-friendly… The Gun is a revolt of the mind, an expulsion of hatred and thus a cleansing agent. Once it is fired, the act done, the two opposites are united forever, the killer and the killed written into history, memorialized or castigated.

To shun The Gun is to fear recklessness, to abhor chaos. Yet activists, oft called anarchistic, despise artists who don’t overtly join them. (107-8)

Taking up literal arms was how the Black Panther Party stood in opposition to the Black Arts Movement, but over time those guns became increasingly metaphorical instead. The “performance” of The Gun, Juanita argues, has taken over America in schools, theaters, and on the street. She concludes, “I liked guns. I hate The Gun” (115).

The final entry in the book is entitled ‘Acknowledge Me’ and consists of a series of emails with a colleague regarding the death of their mutual friend Peter Thorpe, a fellow playwright and mentor. The correspondence includes poems, imagined dialogues with Peter, discussions on works-in-progress, and ultimately coming to terms with grief. Most of the emails are dated from 2007, with a single entry in 2008, and then a rhapsodic conclusion in 2011 when the author’s novel is sold to Viking: “I’M A NOVELIST, I’M A NOVELIST, I’M A NOVELIST.” That shift from the literary form of writing—essays to fiction—reiterates a shift in identity as well, one that closes the book and, seemingly, provides a sense of closure for its author.

De Facto Feminism: Essays Straight Outta Oakland is a thought-provoking collection, one that should be read and taught alongside such classics as Bulkin, Pratt, and Smith’s 1984 Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism, Alice Walker’s 1998 Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer’s Activism, and Patricia Hill Collins’s 2008 Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Though the book was prepared for print and published prior to Trump’s election in the US and the Resistance movement that has followed, its appearance when so many American readers and writers are struggling with how to incorporate political activism into their work makes the book incredibly timely and necessary. Art is survival, too.

Current Mood: awake

Crossposted from The Future Fire:

Cassandra Khaw, Food of the Gods. Abaddon Books, 2017. pp 238. ISBN 978-1-78108-519-6. $15.00.

I finished reading Food of the Gods shortly after seeing the season finale of American Gods, and while some of the entries in Khaw’s collection were previously published, it’s hard not to think about what’s in the air that draws genre writers to recast myth in terms of the daily grind. (And I do know this isn’t exactly a novel idea, but these are the two texts that are on my mind immediately right now, so please bear with me.) Neil Gaiman’s original novel focused on gods-as-immigrants to America, with all the challenges that entails, as well as being a paean to steadily vanishing roadside kitsch; the TV series keeps the immigration story, but adds the violent intersection of race in contemporary America to the story that is, frankly, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it element of the novel. Khaw is, like the younger Gaiman, a London-based writer, but unlike him she has her roots in Southeast Asia, and unlike American Gods, Food of the Gods goes back and forth between London and Kuala Lumpur. Her hero/not-hero (but not anti-hero) is Rupert Wong, a former gangster who has become a chef to the literal underworld to save his karma, such as it is.

The book is made up of three novellas, all of which take place in swift chronological order. ‘Rupert Wong, Cannibal Chef’ is perhaps the most straightforward story; it’s a murder mystery in which Wong is hired to investigate the death of the daughter of Ao Qin, better known as the Chinese Dragon God (who is also the patron saint of the South China Sea, a small detail of increasingly global relevance). The second story, ‘Rupert Wong and the Ends of the Earth,’ takes place shortly afterwards in the aftermath of that story, and sees Wong being hastily paid off to London to take up a new position as chef for a restaurant run by Orpheus and frequented by the Greek pantheon. This story is perhaps the weakest because it fills in the space between the previous and the final entries; there isn’t an overriding plot and the best moments are Wong’s interactions while traveling on a fourteen hour flight and his arrival at customs. The final story, ‘Meat, Bone, Tea,’ has a minor mystery plot and concerns what is functionally a gang war between the Greek and Chinese pantheons that Wong is determined to survive, one way or another. The book closes with a series of epilogues and endings that simultaneously tie-up loose threads and offer possibilities for future sequels.

Khaw’s sharp writing more than makes up for the occasional deficits in plot; Rupert Wong is an engaging smartass of a character you can’t help rooting for, and the sensory details of his cooking are incredibly vivid (and indeed, mouthwatering, at least until you’re reminded that he’s usually cooking that other white meat, human pork). His best moments are when interacting with his undead girlfriend Minah (who is, in case you are wondering, much more interesting and sympathetic than Gaiman’s “dead wife Laura”) and her demonic dead fetus, an ectoplasmic vampire that Wong nicknames George and regularly feeds from a cut on his wrist. Unfortunately, Minah and George are removed from the series early on, though thankfully not to fuel Wong’s arc, and the stories are weaker for it, I think. Wong is at his best when he has someone to riff off of, and it’s only in ‘Meat, Bone, Tea’ when two new characters emerge for this purpose: Fariz, a fellow human in this metaphysical underworld, and Nyarlathotep, a fictional creation of H.P. Lovecraft rendered real through the popularity of the Chthulhu mythos. This is a fascinating idea, and one I wish bumped more against our ideas of mythology: (some of) the Chinese and Greek gods appear with their family dramas more or less intact, and yet somehow still diminished. Would certain other members, like, say, Nike, not be more empowered in our capitalist and overly branded world? What about other fictional characters? Surely Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy would at least be demigods by now?

Ultimately, Food of the Gods is a fast and light read. I feel like the talk-back of Southeast Asian culture never did the work it set out to do, either in London or in Kuala Lumpur, but it nonetheless appears as a counter to the omnipresent Western narratives that tend to dominate Anglo-American genre writing like Gaiman, or more recently, Jo Walton in her Thessaly series, and that’s nonetheless incredibly useful in the ongoing conversations around representation and diversity in genre writing. Khaw’s voice is needed in our discussions of genre and myth, and I look forward to what she comes up with next.

Crossposted at The Future Fire

Frances Hardinge, A Face Like Glass. Amulet Books, 2017. Pp 487. ISBN.978-1-4197-2484-8. $19.95.

Frances Hardinge’s A Face Like Glass first appeared in the UK in 2012 and has only just arrived in the US this spring. It straddles the gap between children’s literature and the young adult genre uneasily; the protagonist is a preteen girl named Neverfell, who is too young to be interested in the romance or nascent sexuality that is usually a hallmark of YA, and yet she is witness to the aftermath of numerous murders, and the threat of violence is often just off-page. And yet Hardinge loves playing with language in a way that recalls some of (what I think, anyway) is the finest children’s lit like The Phantom Tollbooth, The Neverending Story, or Alice in Wonderland—the latter of which the author has a small homage to when Neverfell follows a rabbit up rather than down, discovering a wider and scarier world in the process.

Neverfell lives in Caverna, an underground world whose extensive caste-based society ranges from lowly Drudges to the highest members of Court. The central focus on Faces, or the ability make facial expressions, an art form which must be extensively practiced and which is limited by caste, with Drudges limited to only a small number (and none of them ever angry or dissatisfied) and members of Court with access to hundreds. Neverfell, as a girl from the world above, has ready access to numerous faces naturally, all of which ripple across her face and betray immediately whatever she really thinks. When she is discovered as a child by the Cheesemaker Grandible, he is horrified by this and has a mask made for her, convincing her that she must be astonishingly ugly. When a Master Facesmith visits the Cheesemaker, Neverfell hopes that she will help her make a Face of her own… and from there follows Neverfell’s adventures and misadventures in and out of Court, numerous mysteries around both Neverfell’s unknown origins and a series of murders, and finally, something like a revolution at the end.

A Face Like Glass is incredibly complex and sprawling as Neverfell climbs up and falls down the social ladder on several occasions. Unfortunately, Neverfell is both incredibly naive—which means that the other characters have to repeatedly explain what’s “really” going on to her, each situation’s dangers and benefits, and so on—and strangely without her own agency. She gets adopted by Grandible in the beginning; she is adopted literally or metaphorically throughout the rest of the book by other families, friends, and enemies for their own purposes, and so plot keeps happening with Neverfell usually a bystander. When she does take control in the final pages of the book, it is just before she takes an amnesia-inducing potion, so she only gets to see the effects of the successful plan, and so is rendered passive even by herself.

I had mixed feelings about this book—though I suspect they have more to do with an adult reading a children’s book than anything else. The plot is incredibly unhurried in a way that will likely work for a young reader who is reading slowly and with absorption, the better to enjoy the minutiae of description and detail that permeate the text. Unfortunately, I rather wished the characters would just get on with it, rather than telling one another their plans, explaining how the plans would work, then carrying out the plans, etc. The sprawling length of the story also meant that minor characters would be introduced briefly and only reappear a hundred or more pages later, by which time I had forgotten who they were and what they were meant to be doing; I wish a Dramatis Personae could have been provided, as it would have been helpful. On the other hand, I immensely respect the amount of thought that Hardinge put into her world, especially with its use of language and some truly memorable turns of phrase. As a side-effect of living underground, the time of day is delineated through counted hours; to be “out of clock” is to not match the schedule of hours, while to always be “on clock” is to maintain an unusually steady sleep and activity period. Other inventive elements include the True Crafts, in which True Wine, True Cheese, and so on, have properties beyond taste and smell, including the abilities to alter memories or provide hallucinogenic sensory experiences, among others.

I think young readers will get the most out of this book, but adults with sensitive children may want to peruse the volume first because of the violent scenes—which are admittedly far and few between—haunt the characters throughout. Adults will enjoy a well-told and absorbing adventure story, one without the seemingly omnipresent love triangles that have become cliche to so much of the YA genre. Neverfell is, if not altogether endearing, at least far from a cliche.

***

And a quick rec for Women in Noir Week:

Jacqueline Carey's novels Santa Olivia (2009) and Saints Astray (2011) are unlikely to be read as noir, but I would argue that they are closer to that genre than to conventional dystopia, as noir is characterized through its ethical ambiguity and fatalism, and dystopia through omnipresent degradation. In Carey's world, there is a valid escape to be had from the shitty not-too-distant future southwest US, where a queer Hispanic teen named Loup is torn between revenge for her dead brother and escaping to a better life for herself and her girlfriend Pilar. The outer world, including Mexico and Europe, has rebounded after a devastating pandemic in a way that the isolationist US has not. Loup's and Pilar's journey evolves beyond a quest for survival to one of discovery of this outside world, from tourist beaches to fashion and pop music.

Their saga concludes with their search for social justice for their home, still under martial law, and for equal rights for genetically modified humans, both of which are impeded by the complex oligarchy of the US government and military, as in this case being born, for Loup, is a crime of itself.

Current Mood: awake

Crossposted at The Future Fire:

Norman Spinrad, The People’s Police. Tor Books, 2017. Pp 284. ISBN 978-0-7653-8427-0. $27.99.

The very best satires have enough truth at the core of their fiction to make them uncomfortable reading, and so is the case with Norman Spinrad’s The People’s Police. Spinrad is perhaps best known for his self-proclaimed anarchic ideals in his fiction, which fully come into play here: the central question asked is “Suppose the people and the police, who are so often on opposing sides in the US, actually came together for the benefit of all?” In this world, the order of government authority (and business world corruption) is at odds with everyday people and with the chaotic loa spirits, with the soul of New Orleans itself at stake: does the city belong to its everyday inhabitants or to the distant politicians and visiting tourists?

The novel takes place in a post-Katrina and post-2008 housing bubble-burst New Orleans, where the most pressing problem the police have is the unending numbers of eviction notices to be served, even among themselves. There are three main characters for the bulk of the action: Martin Luther “Luke” Martin, a former gang member who sees the police force as the biggest and best-armed gang of all; J.B. Lafitte, bar and brothel owner; and MaryLou Boudreau or Mama Legba, first mockingly and then accurately called “White Girl Who Dances With Loas” and “Voodoo Queen.” A fourth character, Colonel Terrence Hathaway, appears in the final act as a Christian and Army officer who sees a chance to do good in the world, and actually takes it. Along the way, a reality tv star is elected to political office, hurricane damage is mitigated by magic, and cooperative anarchism is a more reliable tool for governance than anyone would have expected. Things take a darker turn in the final pages of the book, which I don’t want to spoil too badly, but suffice to say that it’s an attempt to bring a little more realism into the story regarding localized American politics, especially in Louisiana, and that it works even if the romping tone that had proceeded it was more fun for the reader.

The insertion of the loas, mystical Voodoo spirits who can possess and speak through human bodies if they choose to do so, into the story introduces a fantastical element into the satire that does unsettle it a bit. Loas and Voodoo are a part of life in New Orleans and parts of the Deep South. Erzuli is the Haitian spirit of love, dancing, and luxury; she appears in the book as one of the entities that periodically possess Mama Legba. Mama Legba is a white woman, the child of hippies who live and perform in New Orleans: she’s the epitome of outsider and yet in the book she is never considered as such. When she is possessed by the loas, the African-American practitioners are surprised, but then disappear from the story in a way that made me uncomfortable as a reader: it does not make sense to bring up the fraught topic of race in America, in the South, and then immediately drop it. Indeed, engaging with it head-on would have been a service to the story, as would have been some additional scenes with Voodoo culture generally. It is clear that Spinrad did his research impeccably, and it would have been nice to see more of that, especially in contrast to the Christian character.

The People’s Police is a fast-paced, funny novel; almost a magical-realism counterpart to A Confederacy of Dunces. Nonetheless, there is a disconnect between its author and its content that troubles me: Spinrad is a white American writer currently residing in Paris, it is disconcerting therefore to read about black characters in New Orleans, whether as cops, pimps, or gangbangers (a term that is used in the text). While the writing itself is incredibly enjoyable and thought-provoking, it nonetheless performs acts of ventriloquism with a white man’s words coming out of black men’s mouths, ventriloquism I find troubling given our current discussions around both diversity in publishing and cultural appropriation. Coming from a mainstream genre publisher with a wide reach, in hardback no less, would it not have been better to instead publish a story of New Orleans by an actual resident of New Orleans, to signalboost new black writers rather than old white ones? (Lest anyone write and say “but there aren’t any!” let me point again to Kiini Ibura Salaam’s When the World Wounds (2016), which I reviewed here in February.) Further, the public is genuinely hungry for diverse texts by diverse authors, as witnessed by the furors that have erupted around the whitewashing aspects of Marvel’s Doctor Strange and Iron Fist. In 2017, we do not need or want cultural appropriation; as part of a global society, if we want kung fu dramas, we can legally download and watch the latest shows from China mere hours after their home release, and if we want to read about African-American stories and concerns, we can read books in their own words; last year, Ta-Nehisi Coates became a writer for Marvel’s Black Panther series and it was one of their most popular titles of last year. The old adage that works by diverse authors “won’t sell” is thus manifestly false. Readers can make up their own minds about how they feel about this aspect of reading and watching, but it is a topic that should at least be considered when deciding whether or not to pick up a new book.

Crossposted at The Future Fire:

Kiini Ibura Salaam, When the World Wounds. Third Man Books, 2016. Pp. 184. ISBN 978-0-9913361-5-9. $15.95.

Kiini Ibura Salaam is an American writer of speculative fiction that directly engages with women and race in ways that are both thoughtful and disturbing. This is her second collection of short fiction; the first, Ancient, Ancient (2012) won the James Tiptree Jr. Award for that year. Salaam is a writer of short pieces that have largely previously appeared in collections; When the World Wounds consists of three short stories, two novelettes and a novella, only one of which is reprinted (and has been edited from the previous version). As such this collection will be of emphatic interest to her fans, and provide much food for thought for new readers.

‘The Malady of Need’ is an incredibly evocative, even erotic read. Told in the second person in an increasingly near-obligatory near-future dystopia, the pair of nameless characters, both men, engage in emotionally destructive romance and sexual encounters. Written in a series of vignettes that are increasingly frenetic and explicit, the narrator dissolves from wishful thinking to pained regret; it is something like Nine and a Half Weeks against a science fictional backdrop.

‘The Pull of the Wing’ takes place in the same universe as several of the stories from Ancient, Ancient. The protagonists are all alien, and convincingly so as Salaam deftly describes both their bodies (winged, with lenses and feelers) and the very different perceptions those bodies process; it reminded me of Martha Wells’s Raksura race from that eponymous series, exactly different and exactly similar enough to humans to be exotic but comprehensible. Unfortunately, having not read Salaam’s other book, I’m not sure how well this story illuminates the worldbuilding she has done before; the story itself concerns a group of friends who try to understand more about their world and, having reached a new comprehension of their lives and their species, seemingly wish that they hadn’t. It’s an odd story, and I’m still not sure how I feel about it.

‘The Taming’ is the story that stuck with me the longest; it’s about the domestication of wolves, from the point of view of a wolf. Like the rest of her writing, it is incredibly sensual and incredibly disturbing. Unlike the rest of the stories in the collection, it is accompanied by a small illustration of a wolf’s head in between each segment, unique to this version (the earlier version of this story in Interfictions is slightly different textually, and does not have the illustration). As a reader, part of me kept wondering if the wolf was indeed actually a wolf for reasons I can’t actually articulate— perhaps something in the specificity of the writing, perhaps only that I was reading in a time of incredible anxiety in the real world. Spoiler alert, the wolf is a wolf, but that does not make its encounter with domestication/civilization any less violent, nor its fate less worrisome. After all, it is the twenty-first century; we are sadly all too aware of what happens to wolves and the wild.

‘Hemmie’s Calenture’ straddles the space between magical realism and a more straightforwardly supernatural tale, told in titled vignettes that start as a fever dream and become something else. Hemmie is a slave in early nineteenth century Louisiana who is injured while trying to escape to freedom. An unnamed woman, who can sometimes speak to her directly through her mind, helps to heal her, and shows her another battle that is being fought in the forest and swamps alongside the more conventional battle between the British, French, and Americans. The woman charges Hemmie with gathering an army, and so she journeys to New Orleans to find (real historical figure) Joseph Savary and his battalion of Free Men of Color… who are not interested in her fight, and indeed, think her mad. At the end she finds a single soldier willing to accompany her, and the woman assures her that she does have an army after all. This is a resistance fable, and if it is rather different than the other stories, it is all the stronger for that: Freedom and change start in the spirit before they become true action.

‘Volcano Woman’ is a short story that is about the power of a woman’s anger. When the protagonist is threatened by escalating street abuse—the kind that shifts from words to physical pursuit in an eyeblink—she escapes and finds a strange old woman who feeds her a comforting bowl of soup and applies a series of unguents that remake her into something else. When she faces her attacker again, she is the active cleansing fire of rage. The story’s prose is spare, but the message of the importance of purposeful anger is one that speaks to a multitude of political movements in the United States right now, but especially that of black women.

‘Because of the Bone Man’ is the final piece in this collection, a novella that takes on the 2005 Katrina flood of New Orleans along with the physical and emotional devastation that catastrophe wrought. The story takes place six months after the flood, just before Mardi Gras. Like ‘Hemmie’s Calenture,’ the story mixes the magical with the supernatural; it’s unclear if the Bone Man is a human or not, a personification of the celebratory ghoulish costumes of some of the parades, or not—nor does it matter. Either way, he makes paper mȃché masks culled from the storm’s debris, waterlogged photographs, and gives them to the ghosts of children killed in the storm. Salaam’s anger at the disaster’s aftermath—she is from New Orleans—bluntly confronts the harsh reality within the story; there are white dancers at the parades who are “thrilled to take the space black bodies usually occupied” (164) and the ghost of a Baby Doll dancer states that “Yeah, it was just a coincidence the levees broke where they did. It’s just a coincidence people like us is homeless and them with dry houses don’t look nothing like us” (174). Like several of the other stories, it concludes with hope, as the Bone Man finds a nun and together they make a miracle, using the masks to restore what children they can to life. This story speaks not just to psychological and emotional healing from trauma and adversity, but to the preservation of culture—and few things are as central to New Orleans culture as the Mardi Gras krewe culture.

When the World Wounds is not an easy book to read, but it is one that is well worth the time spent both for the stories told and for the absorbing, poetic prose of Salaam. While the stories in this collection share certain themes and modes of writing, they are all singular experiences that can’t be repeated, something that can’t be said for several single-author collections. Most especially, despite the darkness of much of the stories’ content, there is the prospect of hope and healing to be found—traits that many readers will need right now.

Current Mood: awake

Crossposted at The Future Fire:

Cherie Priest, The Family Plot. Tor Books, 2016. Pp. 365. ISBN 978-0-7653-7824-8. $25.99.

I spent this past Halloween carefully reading Cherie Priest’s new novel, The Family Plot, in the daylight hours. Confession: I love ghost stories, but I also have a hyperactive imagination and am kind of a wimp, so I do my best to choose wisely when the season demands spookiness. Priest delivers the perfect kind of spookiness, familiar to everyone who has been in an old house (or any other building, for that matter) and felt sure that its past inhabitants have left something of themselves behind that is extraphysical. The action glides along smoothly, and I only ever put it down when the sunlight faded.

The Family Plot concerns two families: The Duttons, who run a family business in salvaging and make their living rescuing architectural decor and fixtures from houses prior to their demolition, and the Winthrops, an aristocratic Southern line whose final descendant is more than happy to see her expansive family estate reduced to its base parts and dispersed. Our heroine is Dahlia Dutton, whose father Chuck owns and runs Music City Salvage. Dahlia is an unconventional heroine: pushing forty, recently divorced but notably not subsumed by doubts or insecurities about it. When Augusta Winthrop comes to Chuck to sell him salvage rights to her family’s home, it looks like it will be the financial answer to a number of business problems, and Chuck doesn’t hesitate to put Dahlia, or Dahl as she is sometimes called, in charge of the job. One of the elements I particularly appreciated is that Dahl’s competence at her job is absolute, and though her crew is all-male she never once has to “prove” herself to them, nor are her abilities ever questioned. This is a small thing, but unusual in fiction (and unfortunately, in real life as well).

When they get to the Winthrop property to examine the house and its contents, there are hints that all is not as it should be, but the characters take note of them—hand and footprints that mysteriously appear and that don’t belong to any of them, odd apparitions, and so forth. Dahl and the others spend comparatively very little time trying to make sense of or justifying these incidents; eventually they all reveal to one another the odds things they have seen or experienced, and try to make sense of things. The ghosts that appear include the angry spirit of Abigail Winthrop, who may have had an illegitimate child and who disappeared mysteriously before her wedding; Hazel Winthrop, her sister, who is a benevolent spirit who more than once protects Dahl from Abigail; and the child Buddy Winthrop, who was Augusta’s father. As Dahl and her crew investigate while trying to do their work on time and on budget, they find a photo album that reveals the spirits’ identities, and a small cemetery that Augusta insists was a family Halloween joke (the Winthrops’ own family business was in monuments and stone cutting). On a hunch one of the crewmen digs into the fake cemetery, and exhumes a very real—and very old—body. At that point, Dahl accepts they have several mysteries to solve, and very little time to do it in before the ghosts physically harm one of them or the demolition crew comes in to take down the house, and its bits and pieces that could make or break the family business. Even in the face of the supernatural, one has to make a living, and Dahl is determined to do that much, at least.

In the Acknowledgement Priest credits the television show Salvage Dawgs as the inspiration for the novel; it’s a reality program that follows the company Black Dog Salvage as its crew goes to buildings slated for demolition and rescues marble fireplaces, stained glass windows, decorative old wooden doors, and other materials to be reused—the very job Dahl and her father are in. While the show never features ghosts as a practical issue to be overcome (to my knowledge), it is something that Priest’s characters recognize as a rarity, but just another part of the job. “Ghosts shouldn’t be news to you,” she tells her new crewmember, Brad, “All of us down here, we’re not just living on battlefields. We’re living on graveyards” (284). This is true not just of the American South, but everywhere humans have lived; too often fictional ghost stories overlook that until very recently, the norm was for everyone to die in their own home rather than antiseptic hospitals. And as something of a nod to the source material, at one point a character suggests they discourage the ghosts by using their phones and a camera to record their doings; after all, ghosts seldom do anything when television crews show up, and the moment adds a nice element of humor, too.

The Family Plot is a perfect ghost story, both for people who love ghost stories and for those who may be more reluctant to try the genre. It may be worthwhile to think of it as being similar to Guillermo del Toro’s 2015 film Crimson Peak, which was also about a house falling apart and filled with ghosts both helpful and harmful. It’s creepy rather than horrific (something that the marketing team for Crimson Peak at least did not understand, to the film’s box office detriment), and the emphasis is thoroughly on character and atmosphere rather than scares that startle at the first read but seem predictable and dull ever after. Though Priest has a sterling reputation as a world-builder, she’s underrated as a prose stylist; in her 2014/2015 novels Maplecroft and Chapelwood she married Lovecraftian mythos with credible historical voices, which is no mean feat, and in The Family Plot she expertly blends the American Deep South’s Gothic sensibility with the contemporary “shitty job” story beloved of television. While this is Priest’s first standalone novel in a while, I wouldn’t mind a sequel to it, whether with Dahl or the other characters.

Crossposted at The Future Fire:

Karen Vaughn, A Kiss for a Dead Film Star and Other Stories. Brain Mill Press, 2016. Pp. 111. ISBN 978-1-94208-338-2. $12.95.

The seeming inextricability of the forces of love and death, of eros and thanatos, are ones that have haunted the human condition since before stylus was put to clay. They are almost cliché at this point, but Karen Vaughn takes these ideas, pulling them this way and that, until she has this book—a collection of short stories that, each in their own way, confront the possibilities of the ineffable.

The collection starts with the titular story, ‘A Kiss for a Dead Film Star.’ The protagonist is teenage Isaac Rubenstein, and it is the day that Rudolph Valentino, ‘The Great Lover’ of silent cinema, has died. New York is swept by a wave of grief-stricken fan suicides, and Isaac is determined to be among them. The world splits: in one reality, he succeeds in slitting his wrists, while in another he is interrupted before he can complete the deed and has to spend another day at his job at the movie theater, pining for his best friend Asher, and mock-flirting with Asher’s younger sister Oralee. As his shift ends, it belatedly occurs to him that he can jump off the roof of the building where he works, but he is interrupted again, this time by Oralee who has been possessed of a peculiar feeling—as if she heard his ghost calling for help. This is a slipstream story about possibilities, one that is anchored by the specific possibilities of love and hope in a world that tends to insist that love and hope are things that should be denied to queer people. It is thoughtful and beautiful and stand-out.

The second story, however, ‘Still Life with Fossils,’ may well be my favorite. It concerns the bewildered point of view of a tyrannosaurus rex skeleton in a museum, trying to make sense of the small, odd creatures that carry boxes and occasionally flash lights. His only companion is the slightly more wiser, neighboring skeleton of a herbivore, who speculates that these must be the newly dominant lifeforms of their world. In this peculiar afterlife, they have only each other, until one day she is gone, replaced by the silent skeleton of a Triceratops. And so the Tyrannosaur waits, as his friend once did, for the new arrival to come to consciousness as well. There’s something bittersweet about the notion of change even in the afterlife, and as I’ve always been an enthusiast about visiting dinosaur bones in any museum that happens to have them, I very much enjoyed this take.

‘The Piscine Age’ and ‘The Angel Appearing to Corrine’ both flirt with something like magical realism. ‘The Piscine Age’ concerns a married couple whose lives are challenged when one of them develops a mysterious skin condition—a condition that consists of developing scales below the waist and, slowly, the fusion of legs into a tale. The process is incurable and painful, and they tearfully agree that this has to end. I was preparing myself for a messy, ableist conclusion, but thankfully Vaughn sidesteps expectations and has the character retreat to the sea instead. ‘The Angel Appearing to Corrine,’ in contrast, has one of the most uniquely happy endings I’ve seen in ages. Corrine immaculately conceives a child of sound waves, despite her doctor’s insistence that she’s really bearing a tumor; she gives birth to brilliant, redeeming song. This is the sort of story for anyone who has heard a particular piece of music and been struck dumb by its beauty; we talk a lot about the redemptive power of art, but here the metaphor is made literal, and it really works as a piece of fiction.

‘Limbs’ is an evocative story about migrant workers in the US, and it too has elements of magical realism to it. Marquita is a small child with a gift; much like a starfish, her limbs can be removed, and then grown back. This is a gift that she has to hide, but again, she’s a small child; sometimes things just happen. One afternoon a playmate dares her to do something stupid, she does, and it sets in motion an ugly chain of events that ultimately cost her family their home. The story is told through the perspective of her mother, Alejandra, who has hidden the same secret as her daughter for most of her life, and the events take place during one long, hot afternoon, in which emotions of fear, hate, hope, anger, and fear again play out across their community. This story too offers the possibility of hope, but at a dark remove, with the future left in doubt.

The final story, ‘Edna, Filled with Light,’ is also concerned with an uncertain future, one that grapples with the end, both in terms of human and terrestrial mortality. Edna is an elderly scientist who has been fascinated by meteors and meteorites all her life. On what may be her last day on Earth, the world is bombarded by increasing numbers of meteorites as she relives her memories: as a young girl fascinated by science and movie stars, as a young woman embarking on a love affair, caught in a world-changing car accident and then a hospital stay, another love affair just as important as her marriage, and a lifetime devoted to her calling. Sic transit gloria mundi, whether in the individual or the infinite.

The weight of these stories is much heavier than this slight volume should allow, and each of them packs an emotional punch. They are also compellingly readable. I tried to ration myself to one a day and failed; I had to go back and reread to make sure that each one got the attention it deserves. While enjoyable, they are not easy stories, as there is a wealth of description and emotion in each piece. Each story also feeds into the next in a way that is thematic and tells a journey of its own; this is a very different reading experience than many short story collections, which are almost haphazard in how they present various tales back-to-back. This isn’t a light read, but it’s a great one, and I highly recommend this collection to anyone looking for a thoughtful way to end their summer.

Crossposted at The Future Fire.

Vanessa Fogg, The Lilies of Dawn. Annorlunda Books, 2016. Pp 71. ISBN 978-1-94435-412-1. $7.99.

The novella is an underappreciated form; too often a reader can look up from a novel’s “soggy middle” and wish that some content had been streamlined, or finish a short story and wish that there had only been more. Vanessa Fogg’s The Lilies of Dawn is exactly the right size for the story that it wants to tell, a deliciously atmospheric tale that blends fairy tale and fantasy. I read it through in one sitting and you should consider doing the same.

The eponymous lilies of dawn grow in splendid isolation in the countryside, treasured for their use in medicines, and watched over by the Dawn Priestess. Kai is the latest in the long line of such priestesses, but she is preoccupied with a flock of destructive, mystical cranes that are slowly destroying each year’s crop, and the failing health of her mother. Without the medicine distilled from the lilies’ nectar, her mother, and many others, will die.

Into this grim scenario comes Kevak, a handsome doctor from the city who has come to study the lilies himself, and perhaps offer a solution to the problem of the cranes. Kai is attracted to him, but not altogether enamored; his coming is too mysterious, and some things just don’t add up. Eventually she confronts him, and he reveals the truth: He is the leader of the cranes, a daino or demigod transformed by his enemies, and trying to do the best for his people that he can under the circumstances. Because it is the Year of the Crane, he has been able to transform into a human, briefly, and try to effect a cure—if Kai will help him. But to save Kevek and his people, the price will be that year’s nectar harvest and so, possibly, her mother’s life.

I hesitate to say more about the actual plot of Lilies because reading it was such a treat. Fogg’s writing is incredibly vivid and at times poetic; it makes me wish that one day it will reappear in a heavily illustrated edition, especially given the lovely cover art by Likhain that already graces the slender paperback. Fogg is also incredibly skilled with detail and world-building; Kai’s relationships with her mother and her sister, and her own ambivalence with her calling, all rang true, as did her interest (I hate to reduce it to “fledgling romance”) in Kevak. A Dawn Priestess cannot marry; rather, it is her lot to, in her own time and choosing, discretely take a lover, and of the children that she will bear a daughter will eventually be her successor. Kevak offers an alternative, a lifetime of love and luxury rather than just duty and isolation, and it is incredibly tempting.

That this seems like a genuine crisis of choice and conscience rather than a plot point speaks to Fogg’s skill in sketching a new world within the margins of her story. And at their heart, many fairy tales and fantasies are about making a choice with full knowledge of what it entails, not just for one’s self but for one’s broader world. In Kai’s case, her choice can make or break the lives of Kevak’s people, or her own, made the more difficult because neither of them is in any way at fault, but only at the mercy of misfortune. And yet, Fogg is able to take this dire question, and submit it to the reader without rendering it utterly bleak, and indeed, with something like hope. This is no small feat; far from it. Fogg is an incredible writer, and I look forward to more of her work.

Crossposted at The Future Fire.

Brian Hastings, Song of the Deep. Sterling Children’s Books, 2016. Pp 170. ISBN 978-1-4549-2096-0. $12.95.

Song of the Deep by Brian Hastings is an illustrated chapter book for younger readers and a tie-in to the video game of the same name. Impressively, it absolutely stands on its own, with none of the awkward gimmickiness that can afflict tie-in material to other formats. Illustrated throughout and with accompanying maps on the endpapers, as well as sturdy hardback covers and a sewn binding, this is a book that can be read by youngsters over and over again and survive the rereading (and I do not say this lightly, having several nephews). It is also a surprisingly deep fairy tale about family, the lingering effects of war, and ecology—all written with a light hand such that children reading it now will still appreciate it in decades to come.

Song tells the story of Merryn, a young girl who lives alone with her father after the death of her mother. Merryn wants to go sailing with him but is deemed to young, and so spends most of her days with domestic chores and reading library books. One day her father is lost at sea, and she embarks on a mission to find him. In the best fairy tale tradition, she meets various friends along the way, including a clockwork seahorse, a baby sea serpent she names Swish, and a merrow, or mermaid, named Cara; she also finds out more about her lost mother. The locations on the map in the book are all visited, including the Glowkelp Forest, the Skeleton Reef, the Merrow Ruins, and the Forbidden City. Each of these locations is assuredly the setting from the video game, but they all feel organic to the story told here. Eventually Merryn finds her father and they return safely home, having made peace not only with her mother’s death, but with one another.

This could easily have been just a story of fathers and daughters, but it’s more than that. The book opens with a brief “Letter from the Author” explaining how the story came to be, starting with Hastings’s own daughter:

I wanted to create a hero for my daughter to look up to. I had noticed that when she told about the female characters she liked in movies, she would almost always start by saying how pretty they were. Being pretty had even become a big part of her own identity. She tended to receive more compliments on her appearance than for being artistic, kind, funny, smart, or hardworking. I wanted to make a story for her where the main character was heroic and memorable only because of her inner qualities. (n.p.)

This is the sort of information that generally appears in interviews about a book, rather than the book itself; that Hastings made a point of its inclusion underlines not just a pushback towards how girls—and women—are treated in media generally, but in genre and in video games as well. We need look back only at the recent (and still ongoing) Gamergate fracas to see the hostility displayed towards women in the video game industry. By making Merryn, a young, intelligent girl the hero of the journey, Hastings pushes back from within, and it’s a really wonderful change to the usual narrative of things.

The worldbuilding of the story is also interesting, with some particular elements of note. The unnamed world here is not ours; Cara the merrow explains how human explorers came long ago, and were at first friendly with the natives, before they became greedy and destructive. The aftermath of war is revealed in the ruins of cities, the ecological destruction of the sea and its inhabitants (Merryn’s father only sometimes returns home with a catch), and the remaining war machinery that poses a danger to Merryn and her friends. It is also revealed that Merryn’s mother, Meara, once knew Cara and that they were likely separated because of the war. Cara may well be one of the last of her kind, though there is hope to be found in the eggs that she shows Merryn towards the end. Likewise hope can be found when Swish’s mother, a magnificent queen leviathan, appears and aids in the final rescue and return home. A healthy respect for the environment and all creatures is the way to survival, rather than destructive greed; this is a good moral and general, and one that seems more relevant to the real world everyday.

Ultimately, this is a great book for young readers, whether or not they are girls, and is quite a bit of fun for older readers too. It is surprisingly thoughtful, and much of it will resonate long after the first reading.

Current Mood: thoughtful

Crossposted to The Future Fire.

Margrét Helgadóttir and Jo Thomas (eds.), African Monsters. Fox Spirit Books, 2015. Pp. 198. ISBN 9781909348844. $15.00.

African Monsters is the second volume of Fox Spirit’s monster anthologies; the first, European Monsters, was released in 2014. All of the contributing authors (and many of the artists) of African Monsters are from or have lived on that continent, and so the anthology draws on authentic and widely varying experiences of the countries represented rather than on a purely exotified collection. The book has also been nominated for Best Anthology in the 2016 British Fantasy Awards, a powerful acknowledgement of its quality as a collection in general. Most interestingly to me, in their introduction Helgadóttir and Thomas write that one of their goals with this series is to ‘rescue monsters’ and to return them to the ‘work for which they were originally designed: putting terror into people’s hearts’ (7). I find this striking in comparison to the current trend to “rescue” monsters by revising them, perhaps most notably in the guise of romantic and sexy vampires. While the transformational approach is one that has often been used to explore cultural anxieties, the engagement used here is to contrast folkloric tradition with contemporary experiences. As such, and in combination with the striking visual art integrated throughout the text, African Monsters provides a very different approach to content and to voices.

Most of the stories collected here share genre and format, the tales told through the dual lenses of horror and dark fantasy. They are also largely literal in their interpretation of the monstrous: all of the monsters contained in the book are very real both in the folklore and in their roles within the story, rather than being symbolic or metaphorical. The volume has black and white illustrations throughout, and most of its sixteen contributions are short stories, with no poems and only two entries that are fully graphic in form: ‘The Death of One’ by Su Opperman and ‘A Divided Sun’, written by James Bennett and the artist,Dave Johnson. Opperman’s story is characterized by its use of ink, here suggesting watery blurs for rainstorms, there economical brushstrokes for birds and other animals. Barring the use of written sound effects (‘Tok! Tok!’ ‘Slap!’), it contains only a single complete line of dialogue scattered across the panels of a violent struggle: ‘The death of one is… life to the other’ (59). It is telling that only when representing humanoid figures do the images become rough and violent, replaying a struggle between a ‘man’ and a ‘monster’ that ends with a ‘To be continued’ despite being a clear ending: it’s an immortal, primordial battle. In contrast, Bennett and Johnson’s narrative concerns a young English boy named Bobby who moves to South Africa with his father in the 1980s. The clashes of Apartheid contrast with the casual violence of bullying schoolboys, and in a happenstance encounter with a shaman, Bobby has a crucial realization: ‘He sees a divided sun. He knows it shines differently on him than the other people here. He stands in its light while people who dream and breathe just like him stand in the dark’ (194). This is the volume’s conclusion, but it hints at a thesis, which is that humans can be as monstrous as, well, our traditional monsters. This is not new territory, but by transparently connecting it to race and diaspora, it does push the issue forwards more aptly.

The short story contributions are all thoughtful, though some more thought-provoking than others. My particular favorite is ‘A Whisper in the Reeds’ by Nerine Dorman, which makes use of the Zambezi river spirits as a seductive threat similar to Greek sirens or English mermaids. When he sees a beautiful young woman bathing, the narrator, Karl, remarks that it would be a turn-on… if he were a straight guy. His older lover, Gareth, gives him a Nyami Nyami pendant for protection, both from the spirits, and the suggestion of a ghost from the dead lover of his youth. Jealous of the past, resentful of the present, Karl discards the Nyami Nyami by the river, and it goes about as well as one might expect.‘That Woman’ by S Lotz is more of a mystery, in which a visiting police officer tries to make sense of both a series of murders and accusations of witchcraft. This one plays against expectations: when it is revealed that the witchcraft is real, but the men murdered attempted to rape a child, the police officer concedes that justice has been done. Nnedi Okorafor’s story ‘On the Road’ particularly struck me as it relates the story of a young woman returning from Chicago to visit her family in Nigeria. On this particular visit she encounters mmuo spirits who leave their mark on her, but that,

was like being the victim of an unsolved hit and run. No one knew the motive. No real answers. No revelation. No “aha” moment. So all I knew was pain, mystification, terror, and the eerie feeling of having my face seductively licked by death… I never return home from Nigeria the same person I was before. But this time takes the cake. (21)

Humans can’t make sense of the monstrous, or the supernatural. Perhaps that is the key to monstrosity itself.

This is a very strong collection, and I enjoyed its contributions. However, if the book has a weakness then it is the concrete cultural sensibility of the monstrous in this specific context: Going in with no prior knowledge of African monsters myself, I felt that a lot of the subtleties of the texts went right by me, and were only partially remedied by some internet research after the fact. As such, there was a kind of sameness to many of the stories: A monster would appear, bad things would happen. I felt like this could have been mitigated with just a couple of lines introducing the stories’ content and giving them a sense of place. While several stories directly referenced specific cities like Johannesburg, most did not, and the notes on the contributors at the end similarly only sometimes mentioned where they live or came from. As such there is an element of disconnection to the texts for the unfamiliar reader; ‘Africa’ remains rather abstract. This could have been easily mitigated with only a couple of words, or even section headings between sets of stories. I hope this is something that might be taken into account for future volumes to aid the reader.

I would consider African Monsters to be something of an exploratory volume: readers will get the most out of it if they go in wanting something different, rather than just a preconceived idea of genre or of monsters themselves; it is definitely not material that will be found commonly while casually reading through other collections or magazines. And while some of the stories wrangle with issues of colonialism, most of the stories take place in the present day, showing a contemporary, lived-in space that is seldom seen by most of the West. Reading it was a treat, and I look forward to future entries in the series.

Crossposted at The Future Fire.

Anna Kyle, Omega Rising. World Weaver Press, 2016. Pp. 270. ISBN 978-0-69266-950-1. $13.95.

Paranormal Romance is a hybrid genre that has flirted with oversaturating the market in recent years, largely because of the Young Adult vampire romance craze that peaked with the Twilight franchise. It then edged into the adult market with the Sookie Stackhouse Southern Vampire series that was popularized through True Blood (though that particular series of books and shows bear less resemblance to one another than one might think), as well as with J.R. Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood novels, which surprisingly have notbeen adapted to screen. While the popularity of vampires has waned in recent years, the genre still flourishes with a multitude of other supernatural creatures that vary from angels to werewolves. Werewolves make up several of the main characters in Omega Rising, Anna Kyle’s debut novel and the first of a series called Wolf King; though this book was released just this past June, the second volume, Skye Falling, is already slated for publication in August. That’s quick turnaround, and I imagine her growing fan-base will be pleased. Omega Rising didn’t feel like the first of a series to me, as Kyle’s worldbuilding is incredibly advanced and a lot was happening; the quick pace, especially in the second half of the volume, made it feel like it should be the third or fourth in a series, not the first. But let me back up, and tell you about the story itself.

Cass Nolan runs a ranch with an assortment of quirky characters, her own found family after a life on the run from an abusive aunt. She sometimes talks to the ghost of her twin sister, a twin she has convinced herself must surely be imaginary, and she suffers from burns when she is touched—at least until she meets the mysterious Nathan Rivers, who shows up at her ranch looking for work. Nathan is secretly a werewolf and an Enforcer for the shadowy Enforcement Agency fighting an Endless War against magic-users like the Omegas. The Omegas themselves are a hybrid race who combine the traits of shapeshifters, known as the Joined, with that of the mages, and are considered deadly threats to the natural (as well as the paranormal) order of things. Nathan is patrolling the area looking for the murderer of a shifter; he is also hunting for his brother’s murderer. His brother was also killed by magic, and so Nathan carries a personal vendetta against mages, as well as a professional one. His life is complicated both by his immediate attraction to Cass and the fact that pretty much every member of her ranch staff is, unbeknownst to her, a shifter as well.

If this seems like a lot to take in (and a lot of capitals, which is perhaps one of the hallmarks of the genre), this is actually only the first few chapters of the book; lots happens, and very quickly, too. Kyle also has a gift for creating snappy dialogue, and if one of the weaknesses of her text is some less-drawn characterizations for the minor characters, the blank spaces are filled in with wit and panache. In a way, Omega Risingreminded me a lot of Andy Weir’s novel The Martian; if that novel was like a very detailed screenplay, Kyle’s novel is a lot more like the prospectus for a television serial—and believe it or not, I do mean that in a positive way. There is a definite sense of seriality to it, though there is a thrilling conclusion and enough dangling plot threads that promise still more adventures, rather than the cliffhanger approach that has been favored by other writers of late. One of the things that also surprised me about the novel was that it bucked the trend in the genre with the sex scenes, which are few and brief (and belied by the near-obligatory naked male torso on the cover) rather than lengthy and explicit affairs (as it were). Kyle also did without the equally near-obligatory trope of the couple coming apart because of a misunderstanding or secrets and then getting back together: Nathan reveals his true nature to Cass, as do the other shifters, with surprisingly little drama, and she likewise accepts this aspect of her friends and would-be lover with aplomb, though with fewer pop culture references than I half-expected given some of the other dialogues.

Ultimately, this is a fun sort of beach or popcorn read, entertaining and light. I do think that because it is Paranormal Romance, this will make or break the deal for prospective readers: if you like the genre you will probably like it, if you don’t then you probably won’t. Kyle conforms to most aspects of the genre, and that has its pleasures too. And if you aren’t sure, then Omega Rising may well be worth checking out for all of the reasons mentioned above.

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Book Review: Sinopticon
Book Review: The Angel of the Crows
Review: Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse
Book Review: New Suns, ed. Nisi Shawl
Book Review: Solarpunk
Book Review: Dracula: Rise of the Beast
Book Review: Pacific Monsters
Book Review: Chng, Water Into Wine
Book Review: More of Me
Book Review: De Facto Feminism: Essays Straight Outta Oakland by Judi Juanita
Book Review: Food of the Gods by Cassandra Khaw
Two Reviews at TFF
Book Review: The People's Police by Norman Spinrad
Review: When the World Wounds by Kiini Ibura Salaam
Book Review: The Family Plot by Cherie Priest
Book Review: Kiss for a Dead Film Star and Other Stories by Karen Vaughn
Book Review: Lilies of the Dawn by Vanessa Fogg
Book Review: Song of the Deep by Brian Hastings
Book Review: African Monsters by Margrét Helgadóttir and Jo Thomas
Book Review: Omega Rising by Anna Kyle

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Katherine Addison, The Angel of the Crows. Tor Books, 2020. Pp. 448. ISBN 978-0-7653-8739-4. $24.99.

Rebecca Roanhorse, Black Sun. Solaris Press (UK edition), 2021. Pp 436. ISBN 978-1-78108-947-7. £8.99.

Nisi Shawl (ed.), New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Colour. Rebellion Publishing, 2019. Pp. 308. ISBN 978-1-78108-638-4. £8.99.

Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro (ed.) & Fábio Fernandes (trans.), Solarpunk: Ecological and Fantastical Stories in a Sustainable World. World Weaver Press, 2018. Pp. 271. ISBN 978-0-9987022-9-2. $14.95.

David Thomas Moore (ed.), Dracula: Rise of the Beast. Abaddon Books, 2018. Pp. 308. ISBN 978-1-78108-666-7. $15.99.

Margrét Helgadóttir (ed.), Pacific Monsters. Fox Spirit Books, 2017. Pp. 182. ISBN 978-1-91046-212-6. £10.00/$15.00.

Joyce Chng, Water Into Wine. Annorlunda Books, 2017. Pp 138. ISBN 978-1-944354-30-5. $8.99.

Kathryn Evans, More of Me. Amulet Books, 2017. Pp. 312. ISBN 978-1-4197-2372-8. $17.95.

Judy Juanita, De Facto Feminism: Essays Straight Outta Oakland.EquiDistance Press, 2016. Pp 226. ISBN 978-0-9716352-1-0. $19.95.

Cassandra Khaw, Food of the Gods. Abaddon Books, 2017. pp 238. ISBN 978-1-78108-519-6. $15.00.

Frances Hardinge, A Face Like Glass. Amulet Books, 2017. Pp 487. ISBN.978-1-4197-2484-8. $19.95.

Norman Spinrad, The People’s Police. Tor Books, 2017. Pp 284. ISBN 978-0-7653-8427-0. $27.99.

Kiini Ibura Salaam, When the World Wounds. Third Man Books, 2016. Pp. 184. ISBN 978-0-9913361-5-9. $15.95.

Cherie Priest, The Family Plot. Tor Books, 2016. Pp. 365. ISBN 978-0-7653-7824-8. $25.99.

Karen Vaughn, A Kiss for a Dead Film Star and Other Stories. Brain Mill Press, 2016. Pp. 111. ISBN 978-1-94208-338-2. $12.95.

Vanessa Fogg, The Lilies of Dawn. Annorlunda Books, 2016. Pp 71. ISBN 978-1-94435-412-1. $7.99.

Brian Hastings, Song of the Deep. Sterling Children’s Books, 2016. Pp 170. ISBN 978-1-4549-2096-0. $12.95.

Margrét Helgadóttir and Jo Thomas (eds.), African Monsters. Fox Spirit Books, 2015. Pp. 198. ISBN 9781909348844. $15.00.

Anna Kyle, Omega Rising. World Weaver Press, 2016. Pp. 270. ISBN 978-0-69266-950-1. $13.95.

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