Some Writing, and Some Writing-To-Be

Several writings have recently come out on different sites. Over at Functional Nerds I have a review of Sam Sykes vigorous, engaging Black Halo. At Aidan Moher's A Dribble of Ink I talk about "mind-blowing" fantastika. And in my regular column at SF Signal I talk about ecstasy and vision in the genre. A new column will be out tomorrow and I have a review in process, and books for two more in queue.

There's a lot going on behind the scenes. I have two assignments in the works that if successful will result in publication. I am very excited about this, although it is odd that my first "real" publication will likely be a non-fiction piece. Part of that is a result of my writing online, but another part is my own reluctance to put my fiction out there. I've written two stories that I have set aside, and the current one is at the "this sucks. . . PANIC!" stage. The novel is a different creature, because while the end of the initial draft is in sight there is more comfort in the sheer deluge of words and ideas.

Caitlin Kittredge issued a challenge on her blog a few days ago, and I took her up on it. To that end, I made the following to-do list that I vow to fulfill by 1 September:

1) finish the first draft of A CROWN OF CRUSTED BLOOD (am at 77K, looks to be about 110K for some sense of drafty completeness)

2) Finish current short story, then go back and finish the two I bumped because I had an attack of the “I sucks.”

3) non-fiction book proposal.

4) finish up some assorted legal documents and obligations.

5) do all this while writing a weekly column, a monthly column, and two reviews a month, while also reading a book a week.

6) oh yeah, not get fired at Day Jobbe.

And I have to add a 7) take care of my daughter and give her the proper love and attention. It was implicit but I think it needs to be said.

I've been looking at the calendar and re-figuring my commitments, and as always it comes down to sticking to a schedule, putting my ass in a chair and writing. Although with my hip getting worse, sitting is increasingly painful. I should probably add an 8) continue to improve my health, eh?

Adrift in a Sea of Digested Souls: A Fantasy Review of Ekaterina Sedia'sHouse of Discarded Dreams

I read this book in the shadow of a pots-and-pans mountain surrounded by crumbling keeps, where propped-up skeletons kept an unmoving watch on the frequent clanging avalanches caused by a grogoch trying to make a little cave for himself in the clefts cleared out by the rivers of spoons that used to erupt from the top. Despite the ghostly farms to the "south" there is little cream to give them, for of course they have few cows and many horses, and the grogochs will dump the jug on your head if it is not delicious spirit-cream from the insubstantial udder of a dream-cow.

I read this book in two long afternoons, under an umbrella tree, just to be safe. The mountain has not erupted in some time but spoons hurt when propelled through the air. Unlike the farm animals they are quite real and there is now an economy of sorts surrounding them here in the valley. The bigfoots and cartoon characters make uneasy exchanges with them, and the faeries keep stealing them to give to the chrome-wheeled dragon that lives within The Cave, that flickering video mirage between the Green Mountain and the slowly eroding duplicate of Croagh Patrick, where the spirits of my dead Irish relatives slowly wear away at it as they walk endlessly up and down it in their bare feet. You wouldn't think that ghosts could do that, but I see the constant spits of dust and the gathering detritus at the base of the gradually-shrinking mount. For there is no rain here; when one looks over the edge of the world, you see the great turtle it rides upon, swimming on the surface of a sea much like the one in House of Discarded Dreams, full of mingled souls and supporting the capacity to see everything you have tried to keep hidden, or taken for granted, or hoped was an illusion. But there is no rain here, only sudden bursts of candy from the sky, some of it doped. The only source of water is a single well, guarded by all the frogs I saved from spearing as a child, drawn from that sea. It is bitter, not salty, and contains little crackles and memories that are sometimes sour, sometimes spicy, on the tongue.

Now, nestled in my hovel for the night, the thatched cottage that is my nest for now, I can talk about this book. Tapping away at my little steampunk typing computer, hoping to send this out to whatever world is on the other end of the Outernet, which seem to mostly be patronized by sentient cats posting pictures of fish and mice, and some shadowy commenters who say they "know where to find" me and that if I "talk" I'm dead. I am hopeful that someone else is reading. Thankfully, as best I can tell they are even less real than everything else here, although, as I learned from reading this book, there is a reality here, built on fears, wishes, and everything that I tried to discard from my "real life." Terrors unconfronted, stories left behind despite their lessons and solace, and even those things merely forgotten in the rush to embrace something else.

Vimbai's story disappointed me at first; I thought that she was too passive, to willing to just go along with things. My experience is different; I was dragged here, unwilling, made to confront and examine legends, missteps, enigmas. It was not until I realized that Vimbai is actively creating this new reality that I saw her as the protagonist, not only responsible for her direct actions, but for everything within her. The weaving of one's life is not just in the doors opened or paths taken, but in all of the locked doors, all of the dead ends and forks in the road. The neighboring provinces of the mind exist in a sort of detente, because they are not resolved, only abandoned, set aside, or shoved down into a blackness that always remains at the edge of vision.

As her world unfolds, as her journey unwinds, I see reflections that illuminate the corners of my own psyche: Irish folklore and stories, a deep rooting in an ancient place, disrupted and mutated by growing up amongst monsters clad in the hanging skin of humans. Taking refuge in the realms of pop culture and my own imagination, I never experienced the coming-of-age that Vimbai undergoes, not the clarity she is able to create. Awash in childhood traumas, social dysfunction, and too much intelligence for my own good, I struggled not to make sense of things, but to escape them, to fill that darkness with them, even though flashes of movement and the din of caged furies and griefs were clearly echoing in my mind.

And now here I am, finally trying to make a new direction, a new life, repairing body and mind, releasing my prisoners from their forced obscurity. Fleeing to the big city did not assuage them, a college education could only partly reveal and reintegrate them. More college education in a new place only made them retreat. I had to abandon many dreams, and find a few new ones, but you cannot turn your back on the ones left behind. Some sort of resolution is needed.

So now I sit in flickering candlelight, listening the wind, which is the sound of crying, and hearing sitcom theme songs in the drums far away. This is a unquiet place. Brownies and plastic toy soldiers brawl in the street outside at all hours, spilling out from every pub I have ever visited, but which in the daylight are closed and at night are dangerous to me. I have surrounded this flimsy cottage with sandbags full of books, thick encyclopedias as a base, limited-edition hardcovers on the ends, and cheap, tattered paperbacks atop, held together by the bindings of poetry chapbooks and infinite staples from fanzines and coffeehouse digests. That keeps the fights out, but also the sudden deluges of horse tack and dog collars, bursting forth from a gully between a mountain of rotting fast food and the Mountain of Stables, a terraced peak with more of those ghost-farms and shadow-ranches, where my rural pasts and futures all reside. The fortifications also keep out my dead American relatives, zombies who hunger for the only human in this confabulated world., who want to drag me back to the life I should have lived.

Like Vimbai's world, there are wonders here, and seemingly random elements too. But as time goes by, as the story unfolds, it all makes more sense. This is the truth that Vimbai taught me: that trying to ignore the pasts, all of them, is to fail to see life fully, and thus see where you can go in it. We should no more cling to the past than fear it, no more dismiss the stories and happenings than we should wear them around our necks and let me wear our throats raw and slowly bleed us out. In some way, everything matters, and we cannot proceed until we know how much. We each live in a fantasy world, often carefully chosen, but everything that we try to abandon or excise is still with us. The trick is to realize how it all fits together, why rockstar dreams and fairy-stories may distract, but also teach something about your mind. The trick is to see, accept, learn, and move forward. Even when adrift on a sea of souls.

The World Is Abiding and Ever-Strange: The Carnival of Dreams in Ekaterina Sedia's House of Discarded Dreams

"The carnival offers the chance to have a new outlook on the world, to realize the relative nature of all that exists, and to enter a completely new order of things" - Mikhail Bakhtin

And so it begins, the House of Discarded Dreams Blog Carnival! Over the course of this week there will be celebrations and reflections on this book and what it has to offer,which you can find at the Blog Carnival link. It is a work that deserves attention for its strong writing, its challenge of boundaries, and its ability to stimulate the imagination. During this week I will write about this book in different ways to give readers a taste of what it has to offer, not just as a novel, but as a vivid text that inspires all sorts of thinking and dreaming.

When Paul Jessup proposed a "carnival," two images came to mind immediately: a festive midway of games and delights, and Mikhail Bakhtin. An odd juxtaposition, I suppose, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the former idea is merely the lead-in to the latter. To fete House of Discarded Dreams is not properly done as some sort of distracting array of flashing lights and hucksters; we have to go back to older ideas, to older stories, not just to the folklore that saturates the narrative of the book, but to the power of dreams and imagining.

The carnivalesque tales and practices that Bakhtin wrote about are not the same as Sedia's novel, but her book deftly exemplifies Bakhtin's idea that the novel is a sort of cultural heir to the carnival . Dialogism; the upending of certainties; the production, reproduction, and deconstruction of hierarchies and relationships; all of these things are present in her work. The sublime and the grotesque work hand-in-hand; images and ideas tumble forth and make the reader dizzy, sometimes confused, sometimes ecstatic. It lacks the vulgarity of Bakhtin's classic subject (and is, in fact, rather well-mannered), but anchors itself in the messy rapids of life by finding purchase in dialogism, the rocky shoals of hybridities, and in the mind of the readers themselves.

Before expanding these impressions, however, a quick review is in order. House of Discarded Dreams is a fantasy, a sort of feverish bildungsroman lodged firmly in dreams, longings, and mythlife. Vimbai is a college student living with her exiled parents in New Jersey who dreams of moving out. When a local beach-house is advertised she visits and meets Maya and Felix, and also meets the house. Intrigued, she moves in, and soon bizarre things begin to happen. As the novel progresses two things happen: Vimbai's world becomes more surreal, and she takes a journey from being a passive element of her own life to embracing responsibility for herself and others around her. The house itself becomes a world of dreams and regrets and sorrows, but also becomes a place that tests the lessons and burdens of history, that forces the characters and the readers to think about the story of their life.

It is an unsettling novel, but not because of the weirdness. It unmoors your perspective with the reactions of the characters, which defy the convention responses we often see in fantasy novels. The imagery is relentless, seemingly random, yet the novel ends up building a new world that forces the characters to examine themselves and their preconceptions, and challenges the reader to do the same. It seems to wander, yet is very direct in its effects on the readers as the weight of symbols and associations accumulate in the mind.

There's a lot to talk about in this work; I and other readers will suggest some ways to think about it over the course of this week. Enjoy the carnival!

Some Reviews: Growing Up and Keeping Your Mind From Leaking Out of Your Ears

I've been so caught up with reading, column writing, and chipping away at fiction that I have fallen a bit behind writing reviews. I have one in progress for SF Signal and another for Functional Nerds, but here are two that have no home:

1) The Bird of The River, by Kage Baker: I feel bad about this one. I received this book as part of the Ranting Dragon Locus Challenge, but did not finish the book in time. But I did both vote in the Locus Poll and now, present the review! The book itself is a nice hardback edition but the cover is a bit irritating, since it portrays a scene that does not actually occur in the novel, and shows the title river ship as being some little pleasure craft or something, when in truth it is a huge vessel and a community unto itself. Do not let the cover fool you: there are no orc-like creatures in this book, and no heroines with their. . . capes?. . . blowing in the wind as they look heedlessly forward. Eliss would never miss someone boarding her home like that!

The novel is a combination of secondary-world fantasy and a mystery within a gently-tweaked bildungsroman. The central character is Eliss, a teenage woman who is trying to keep her drug-addicted mother alive and care for her younger brother, Alder, who is of mixed heritage. She helps secure her mother a job on one of the large trading ships that sail the river, but tragically her mother dies soon after that, and Eliss is forced to find a way to make herself useful on the ship. She quickly finds out that her talent for perception and her sharp mind make her a valuable asset for The Bird of the River as it makes its way up the perilous river. As the ship journeys to river's end, she helps a shipmate investigate a suspicious death and struggles to adapt and thrive as she enters adulthood.

The plot of the novel is nothing new, and while the prose is very clean and straightforward it is not especially evocative. The world that Baker has created has some interesting flourishes but is neither of epic scale nor of great ethnographic depth. The humans, known as the Children of the Sun, live and sometimes fight with the Yendri, the green-skinned folk who live in the wilderness and are merchants and healers,, and the "demons," feral humanoids who seem to primarily be bandits. The god known only as the Blacksmith is the "father" of the Children of the Sun, who have surnames such as Ingot and Riveter, but religion is a peripheral concern in the novel. The world is not particularly rich, and the story not of great complexity.

But Baker uses these as a backdrop for excellent characters and for situations that test them. What is distinctive here is that Baker creates a story of a young woman's maturation that you empathize with, frequently surprising you by not going for the melodramatic or grim outcome. Eliss does not have an easy life, but she is no Chosen One, no victim, and an active participant in her own future. Eliss' choices matter, and she makes many of those choices with intelligence and discernment. She is still a child in some ways, but her keen eyes and mind serve her well as she navigates the hazards of the river and of life. Tragic things happen, but she is never devastated by them, and learns how to move on and continue making a life for herself. The Bird of the River is heartening without platitudes, engrossing not because of flashy magic (which there is very little of in the book) or epic conflicts, but because you come to care for Eliss and her world and thus feel some empathy for her situation, reveling in her triumphs and wincing at her missteps, but feeling that she, and you, are two humans on a journey together.

This is not a novel of high adventure, of vast philosophical discourses, or of searing emotional trauma. People go about their lives quite normally for the most part, and while this is a fantasy world, and there is a mystery, what grabs you is the lived feeling of the story, small details of people's lives, their quirks and satisfactions. Beside Eliss my favorite character was the boy Wolkin, who is one of the most believable and spirited young boys I have encountered in a fantasy novel. He is funny, dorky, sometimes a bit dim, and full of life. Although few of the characters are fully developed, even those in supporting roles feel like people, with quirks and histories. Baker deftly creates a lived-in world without a lot of marvels, but with a lot of ambiance and earthiness.

The novel's progress is slow and easy, although also brief. The prose brings you along at a leisurely pace, slowly adding details and rhythms to the life of the characters that provides more weight to the world than long discourses or descriptions could. You understand how things work with subdued aplomb, and that allows the reader to engage the characters more fully. While not a character study, it is a novel that is about people, and about how the little choices in life can eventually create a major shift, or open up a new path. Eliss' development from desperate opportunist to reliable ship hand and friend is a pleasure to watch, and you feel emotionally rewarded in the process. Although the ending is a little forced and involves a form of deus ex machina, what matters in the end is that Eliss has grown up and changed her future. The ending perturbed me somewhat, but I greatly enjoyed the journey that I took with Eliss and her shipmates.

2) Open Your Eyes, by Paul Jessup (Full disclosure: Paul and I exchange ideas and bon mots frequently online, and he sent me a copy of his book to read). Let me disclosure something further: Open Your Eyes is a careening, lunatic carousel of space opera, surrealism, and ontological instability. Alternately sublime, ghastly, astonishing, and occasionally awkward, this is a bold short novel with heaps of inventiveness and lots of risk-taking. Jessup's embellishments and contortions of story and image don't always work, but there are no dull moments in this work and it constantly strives to surprise and provoke the reader.

This is also a book whose story is not elaborate but, unlike Baker's plain prose Jessup's writing intentionally disturbs our perspective, play with our minds, and disassembles anything we might take for granted. But this is not just textual acrobatics or trickery; Jessup's novel plays with ideas of identity, action, and desire by both interfering with reality and upending our expectations. From the ecstatic opening scene to the surprising sudden ending, the reader must navigate a dizzying world of starships made of bone and duty, wax-fingered doll constructs, infectious languages, and conniving AIs, a startling milieu that is absurd and sensual, delirious and harsh; a world where every character has secret longings and feelings of disconnection, and is in a constant struggle to not be overwhelmed or destroyed by the forces around them or their fellow-travelers.

Open Your Eyes is not a story about connection; it is a story about dissonance, about how trust, expectations, and longing can undo us. It is about how our yearnings can blind us, trip us up, and open us up to a message of lethal conformity. When the alien language (represented by a nonsensical mantra) overtakes a character, it annihilates them, not bodily, but intellectually, emotionally. Submission to the language, which seduces with its repetitiveness, removes everything a person is from their body. And characters do not become infected accidentally; they open themselves to it, often unwittingly, in their myopic pursuit of some petty or unattainable goal. For all of the strangeness and bewilderment in the novel, it has an underlying substance to it, a point that arises again and again as the characters betray themselves.

It has overtones of despair and echoes of nihilism, but the story is propelled along not just by the characters fumbling after their desires, but by sheer human tenacity, which is set in constant struggle with both the viral language and the inevitable failure that death will bring to all of their quests for fulfillment. The characters struggle to live, to not just achieve some goal or dream but to arrive at a moment of completion, of reunion with something that they cherish, that they hope will restore them. All of them fail except one, who only transforms when she gives up her desires and allows something new to take hold and illuminate the world. This transformation ends up setting the world right in some sense, but only by allowing the unexpected to flourish.

There are some uncertain moments in the novel, partly due to vagaries in the prose, but more often due to the flaws and inconsistencies of the characters. They are unreliable actors, as we all are, and their shortsightedness, their obsessive focus on what they cannot have, creates most of the conflict in the novel. Sometimes it is unclear what is happening, and there are a few moments that I wish were more clearly presented, but what emerges in this novel is a profound message: that regardless of how unlimited technology, possibility, and potential may be, unless people are willing to expand their vision, to appreciate and understand the wonders around them, they will only succeed in facilitating their obliteration. When you refuse to engage the world around you, see circumstances for what they are, or appreciate that your desires do not trump all other contingencies, you ontologically keep your eyes closed, and miss what your life can truly be.

A little ephemera and a bit of vociferation

1) My new column at SFSignal turned out well, and has gotten some good comments. I really did try to be lighter, but Foucault got in the mix.

2) My first review for the gentlefolk at Functional Nerds is up, covering Ben Aaronovitch's Midnight Riot. Which I liked enough that I will try to read Moon Over Soho when I can. They're fun and have good writing, not wooden and rote like the Dresden books nor squick-inducing like Laurell Hamilton. I'm hoping the second book improves on Aaronovitch's strengths, particularly his flair for good characters and his capacity for deftly presenting a scene with concision (although I thought that fell away in towards the end of the novel).

3) I've read a number of posts and opinions on these here interwebs that have put more gears spinning and clurichauns dancing in my head. Paul Jessup has been writing about epic fantasy on his blog and we have had a few twitter and email exchanges about the subject. These were set off by Daniel Abraham's discussion over at Orbit. Paul is curious about the need for war to often be the instigation for a given epic's plot arc, and he makes some compelling observations about the idea of what an epic can be.

I have talked about the idea of epic fantasy before, but Paul's hypothesis brings up some fresh issues for debate. I have maintained that power is a big part of the epic fantasy, and that the assumption is that "epic fantasy" is about world-shaking conflicts and consequences. As Paul pointed out (and I mentioned as well), the way that the word "epic" if often applied in the genre does not reflect its roots or even many of the classic works that stand as exemplars of the term. The word "epic" is often used, honestly, more in a Hollywood way, to denote huge, overwhelming, vast, sweeping, and thus has more to do with the effect of war movies than the literary echoes of the word. It is also an adjectival modifier that accentuates the significance or awesomeness of a work, or casts it in the mold of a conventional large-scale secondary world saga.

Epics can be much more than that, especially if they hearken back to the idea not of the quest, but of the journey. There is a point where the vast epic becomes comfortable, and lacks the emotional power of a classical epic. The potential for poetry gets lost in the blood and intrigue; the potential for magic is lost, as magic becomes a weapon or a rationalized system, instead of moments of wonder. There are not only depths that epics can plumb, but stories of different sorts of bravery and cunning, dealing with foes that are just villains, but the we recognize from our own travels through life.

Aetheric Ephemera: The Edifice of the Self Edition

No blogging this past week because I have been writing my ass off elsewhere:

1) My new Apex blog post, which did not get much attention, although my editor loved it. I like the idea of the Paradox Continuum as a metaphor for how fantastika is looked at as a genre with both adoration and scorn. I hope to write more about it in the future.

2) I get my lit dork on in my latest SF Signal column. Hal Duncan responded with some good observations and pointed me to his work on the subject, which is intriguing and productive (I also liked this piece by him quite a lot). I'm going to explore the novum idea more in next week's column and see if I can either wring some utility out of it for fantasy or figure out more of its problems.

3) I also posted a long review of Jeff VanderMeer's Monstrous Creatures. I highly recommend the book for its combination of insight and evocative observations.

4) I have a few things in process. I just submitted a guest blog to Bryan Thomas Schmidt which should be up on Monday. I am finishing a review that should be up at Functional Nerds in the next several days, and reading two more books for review. And I added another thousand words to what is becoming a novella. Little fox child has a bigger story to tell than I thought!

5) In other news, Diana Wynne Jones has died. If anyone demonstrates the effect of children's fantastika on creative folk, it is her. Many writers fondly remember escaping into her books. I never thought of her as an influence, but as more people talk about her work her effect on the collective imagination is obvious. It underscores for me the importance of good children's literature for our own children.

"I am forcing meaning on their ghosts:" A Review of J. M. McDermott's Last Dragon

I am an admirer of difficult fictions. Not the sort that are intentionally obtuse or so intricate that a manual is required to understand them, so dense and esoteric that you need a sharpened stick of literary theory to penetrate them. Thought-experiments are sometimes enjoyable to read, but for fiction I need more than that; I need to be pulled into the story, not left outside of it scratching my head. I need a reason to engage and enter a piece of fiction, and work that is obtuse, chaotic, or bereft of recognizable, involving characters might as well be a homework assignment.

J. M. McDermott's Last Dragon starts off by making you worried. After the first several pages you wonder if you have entered into a metafictional puzzle, some sort of stereotypically-postmodern labyrinth that wants you to feel lost, worried, and perplexed. You are drawn into parallel stories of a dying, bitter empress writing to her lost lover and of the woman she was in her youth, tackling a quest that seems simultaneously foolish and impossible to fulfill. Names of characters and scenes from her past life are written in her letters out of sequence, mixed in with longing and regret and guilt. While there are two stories that emerge here, they are not the point of the novel. This is an ambitious work that wants us to reflect on how we make sense out of our lives and constantly strive to bring all of its disparate elements into a whole that inevitably slips away from us, regardless of desire or intent.

The web metaphor at the beginning is deceptive; you might think that this means a pattern will emerge, an easy narratology that guides you through the morass of memories and contrition. But that idea quickly fades and is replaced by ants, who appear not just in the words of the novel but crawl over the pages as scene breaks, and scramble over a neat grid of squares at the start of each section. Ants feasting on corpses, crawling in odd places, scattering here and there, infesting, escaping, being caught in webs, overflowing from cracks and mouths. This novel is not a web, not a latticework of supports and linkages; it is a colony of ants running about gathering all what they can find and bringing it back to the queen, who then chooses what to consume, what to leave scattered around her. By the time the narrator invokes the web again towards the end of the book, you see the metaphor as the trap that it is.

It is a quest novel, but that quest is immediately dropped on the ground like a platter of food, and the rest of the novel is an attempt to not re-assemble it, but to find choice bits and let the ants bring them back for the narrator's mnemonic digestion. The novel does not reconstruct either the narrative of the quest or of the empress' bitterness, it is an attempt to use them to make the reader ponder the process of understanding the past. It is a subjective exploration of how our attempts to impose meaning and reason are often transformed by distance and longing and guilt, how the story never ends up being straight even if we know the progression. Who we are when the story is told, who we are when we witness it, what we hope to gain from it; all of these factors shape the story, and that is as true for the reader of Last Dragon as it is for the dying narrator.

The book is intentionally disorienting and bewildering. We come to know Zhan, the narrator, both by her admonitions of her long-fled lover and by the slow assemblage of the story of the journey that unintentionally birthed an empire. As she pleads with Esumi to write back she tells him a tale that, after awhile, you realize must already be known by him. The tale is told through a gathering of recollections about Zhan's hunt for her murderous grandfather with her Uncle Seth (who is only a few year her senior) and a mustering of companions who seem both fated and doomed to be a part of the story. As the story aggregates (I would not call it moving forward) many significant moments come to light, but the view of them is hazy when seen from so far away in the future they helped to create. It is up to the reader to discern not just the order of things, but what clarity is even possible.

As the reader you are never permitted to relax or just coast through the story. You must actively attend to the words, and constantly work to make sense of what they tell you, of what the narrator tells you, of what the very form and presence of her memories tell you. It is fragmented, sometimes overly much. It is a novel that requires a lot of work from the reader, because it is disconcerting by design. Which is part of the point; the novel's narrative is broken up into a series of impressions which the narrator is trying to make sense of even as her emotions and desires and regrets keep getting in the way and making the task of strict re-assembly impossible. The depth and richness of the novel comes from the reader interacting with the effects of that task, with these disarrayed vignettes and reflections.

As we gradually learn the outlines of the story, we see the future solidify, gain clues from the quest that tell us why the empress is deteriorating in spirit as well as body. To make the story more understandable to herself and Esumi she uses "masks" and talks from the perspectives of some of her companions. But what we come to realize is that the entire work is a masque itself, an artifice of wishes and disappointments. McDermott has, to paraphrase Catherynne Valente, broken the fantasy quest novel and made it beautiful. The beauty is not in its content, for Zhan's world is merciless and filthy, built with the remains of corpses and betrayals, with no happy endings, or even bearable ones. As Zhan herself puts it:

"And when we sleep we see inside ourselves at the web of memories. The smells, and the sights, and the tastes and textures. And afterlife, this is all we have. This is all I have left. I reach for the ghosts that melt together. I try to rattle the truth of my life."

One could take away from this novel the conclusion that life sucks, that memory is fickle, that love and will and purpose all fade, that everyone is already a ghost in the minds of all around them. The novel is saturated with the roughness of life, with all of the ways that people use each other yet cannot escape the decay of existence. And it has its flaws, moments that don't feel right, some artificiality of explanation to keep the reader from feeling completely adrift or an exchange between characters that feels forced. It feels so elemental that these stand out, but are then put behind you, like a mistake in one's own life. The human truths that suffuse the novel are unimpeded by these small moments.

But none of these things are the point; we are all well aware of these conclusions. Who needs a novel to tell them that life is difficult and memory is more than a repository of facts and events? There is no pretension here that we are being acquainted with something new, from the shattered contours of a quest novel to the saudade that assails us throughout the novel. We are being reminded that we are human, we are being forced to remember that, as we try to comprehend the metaphors and dialogue and descriptions. McDermott uses us, our very ability to read and interpret and ponder, to make his point. It is not an easy point to assimilate, but that too is part of our humanity and the stories we tell.

REVIEW: BRAVE NEW WORLDS (ed. by John Joseph Adams)

Today is the last day of Dystopian February, so I must post my review! I had thought to re-read a classic, but in the end I chose an anthology, and have already discussed a few of its stories in my latest SF Signal column. The book I selected was John Joseph Adams' Brave New Worlds, a large, somewhat imposing anthology of dystopian tales that draws deep from the well of 20th-century short fiction. The book is full of excellent stories, old and new, and while seem only slightly inspired by the dystopian spirit, the collection demonstrates the breadth of approaches that are informed by it.

The anthology opens with an introduction by the editor, who frames the collected tales as not just about politics: "the best dystopias speak to the deeper meanings of what it is to be one small part of a teeming civilization. . . and of what it is to be human." While I prefer a more politically-conscious and engaged idea of dystopia, this collection does exhibit a range of insights into the human response to the social effects of dysfunctional or oppressive systems.

Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" enhances this idea as the lead story. As Lenore pointed out in her review of the story, its power lies in the combination of normalcy and acquiescence that infuses the writing itself. We get none of the common dystopic tropes: there is not alienated member rebelling against the society, the power dynamics are buried under layers of banality and any sense of politics is kept far in the background. What we do get is a chilling tale with a fatalistic sense of closure and an implied lesson on accepting evil as an everyday need.

The stories that follow tend to be less subtle, although the themes of assimilation via obedience to oppression, and of embracing violence as a norm, appears in a number of ways. S. L. Gilbow's "The Red Card" normalizes vengeance as an act that government and society can control. Geoff Ryman's wrenching "O Happy Day" humanizes the effects of a genocidal revolution on those who are a part of the system and those who are its victims, and demonstrates that the line between those distinctions is artificial. Caitlin R. Kiernan's "The Pearl Diver" demonstrates the trauma that complete surveillance can have on a person's psyche, a violence that tears at the mind and spirit directly.

It is edifying to compare these stories to some of the more classic tales, such as Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron" and Ursula Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" (which is one of my favorite stories). The power of dystopian ideas to shape style comes out strongly throughout the anthology. Sometimes that power directly fuels the progress of the story, as in Paolo Bacigalupi's harrowingly disjunctive "Pop Squad" with its direct utopian/dystopian contrast and the brutal effects of that contrast's dissonance on the central character. Sometimes it sends the story a bit off-track, which I found in Cory Doctorow's "The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away." Despite a fantastic title, that story was not as affecting as many of the others, clever in some of its ideas but with neither the shock nor the empathy that engaged me in most of the collection. The stories that I found most compelling were not just built on interesting ideas, but got the characters to inhabit them.

In most of the stories presented, this is what makes them effective: there are profound disconnects in the world the characters dwell in, and significant consequences that saturate their thoughts and actions. A few stories fell short of fulfilling that goal, while others found innovative ways to attain it; this was especially true in Carrie Vaughn's story "Amaryllis," which feels unlike any dystopian story I have read, and imparts its tale with a shrewd, quotidian style that surprises you in the end. The strength of this collection is that, despite an initial sensation of similarity, the stories are not just examples of dystopian literature, but active employers of that spirit to tell us many different things about what makes us human.

Since Everyone Else is Doing a Fraggin' Top Ten List. . .

. . . allow me to jump onto the bandwagon!

I've been meaning to do some reviews for a bit, but NaNoWriMo and illness delayed them. So, I can banish two daemons with one incantation via a Top Ten List. These are the ten creative works (not all released in 2010) that I most enjoyed and admired this year.

The List, in no particular order:

---The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms: A rich and provocative book that takes the fantasy tale and brings out new features for us to marvel at. I love the world-building and the care with which Jemisin put this book together. It is wonderfully written, enjoyable, and thoughtful all at the same time. I am looking forward to The Broken Kingdoms, which I just received, to see what happens next.

---Blood of Ambrose/This Crooked Way: I discovered James Enge through his story in the Swords & Dark Magic anthology, and I am so glad that I did. His work has rekindled my love for sword & sorcery through its combination of vigorous action, depth of character, and crisp prose. People who call his prose "slick" are missing some of its deeper pleasures, such as his economy of description, his deft characterizations, and a cavalcade of fascinating ideas that are woven together unassumingly into a cultural fabric that makes his work both warm and visceral. He takes the basic heroic mode of sword & sorcery and expands upon it even as he plays with it. His books have a classical heft to them, but are neither stiff nor dated. He refreshes the genre by taking old roads and then suddenly going off into the misty woods beyond, making new paths that wind in and out of our expectations. Really top-notch stuff!

---Haunted Legends (Tor, edited by Ellen Datlow and Nick Mamatas): This is the best anthology of the year in my book. It is a collection of literate, evocative, well-crafted stories; even the few stories that did not appeal to me were well-done, just not my cup of oolong. What makes this collection so great is that many of the stories are not what you would expect; this is not a compendium of spooky ghost stories or tales of bloodcurdling horror. Most anthologies have a thematic that you expect will be directly reflected in the story. In this anthology, the theme is far more inspirational than that, and is taken in many different directions by the contributors.

The great pleasure of this anthology is that you find so much that is unexpected; stories that are not just about spooky monsters or strange folklore but about people, about regret and loss and wonder expressed and explained through parables and yarns of the unconventional and the painful. In many of these stories legends integrate anguish, the unnerving, and the inexplicable into our lives. Our trespasses against each other and the world, or those of others, becomes the stuff of chagrined, sad tales. Our feelings of suffering and powerlessness are explained by forces outside our control: our loneliness both revealed and, sometimes, combated by strange fables that integrate the cryptic and peculiar aspects of the world around us into something culturally manageable and socially connective.

---Agents of Atlas/Agents of Atlas: Turf Wars/Agents of Atlas: Dark Reign: These three volumes contain some of the best comics I have read in a decade. Writer Jeff Parker takes a group of forgotten characters and makes something fresh and lively out of reuniting them to help their erstwhile leader become reborn and deal with a family legacy that would make the Corleones flee in terror. It's consistently quirky, almost campy at times, but leavened with fast pacing, delightful twists, and genuinely likable characters. Comic-book soap opera is left by the wayside, as are most of the more tired cliches of the superhero genre. Parker instead goes for smart, punchy stories mixed with intrigue and humor. Leonard Kirk, Gabriel Hardman, and Carlo Pagulayan all do excellent work on the art, although Kirk is my favorite artist for the Agents.

---Farthing: Jo Walton is a treasure. She writes great books and perceptive criticism, and her love and critical appreciation for speculative fiction comes through in all of her writing. Farthing demonstrates this in a curious way: by reproducing an entirely different genre (the English country-house mystery) packed with speculative twists that are so well blended into the narrative that you feel transported into that other world. Her deep understanding of the genre comes out in the careful crafting of this novel, which is note-perfect in tone and consistently subversive. I don't like mysteries, but this book is much, much more than "just a mystery." It is an astute, engrossing novel that makes you think hard about what we take for granted.

---Who Fears Death: Nnedi Okorafor's book was a revelation for me, in ways that I am still pondering. As I wrote in one of my FoG columns, the book "mingles destiny, brutality, and liminality in the story of a young woman's coming-of-age in a harsh, dystopian future. Despite a few missteps, the book is 'without preachiness or didactic overkill,' and demonstrates both Okorafor's gift for storytelling and her ability to create deeply grounded stories out of folkloric traditions and speculative insights." It is a very hard book to read sometimes, challenging and discomforting, but consistently engaging and often poetic.

--- Wizardry & Wild Romance: This is a re-issue of Moorcock's extended ruminations on the history and state of epic fantasy. As I said in another review "Moorcock employs detailed discussions of older, sometimes obscure works and weaves them into larger literary trends and literary-historical forces to produce a critique of fantastic literature and its niche in Western cultures. Moorcock's analysis is fun to read and persuasive, and made even a devoted Tolkien fanboy like me start to question what I find so compelling about his work. What this book does best is get under the skin of both individual works and broader ideas and engage the conundrums contained within them. Whether or not you agree with his conclusions, Moorcock makes a compelling case for viewing fantasy critically and productively that will help you read the genre with discernment and inquisitiveness." I am still chewing over this book, and will for some time.

---Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law, And Society in Saga Iceland: This book is simply fascinating. William Ian Miller takes the sagas and legal codes of old Iceland and performs a stunning act of legal and anthropological interpretation on them. He teases out assumptions, inconsistencies, and deeper meanings in both story and conduct and outlines the interrelations between law, culture, and myth. It is an intelligent analysis that is also a joy to read, and that spends most of its time on the source material instead of theory. I learned a lot from this book that I am applying to some of my fiction.

--- Apex Magazine, Issue #18: This was the Arab/Muslim issue that came out in November, and Cat Valente did a stellar job of assembling and editing this issue. The three short stories were wonderful, and the implicit themes of identity and authority heightened the intensity of the works. The poetry was gorgeous and evocative, and the inclusion of a Turkish fairy tale rounded out the offerings and gave the issue a definitive continuity and context. Certainly the best single-issue periodical I read this year.

2010 was a good year for reading, personally. I read much more than I have in several years, and I feel that I read a lot of good work. Best of all, I found a lot of inspiration in what I read; not just ideas, but creative energy as well. I'm looking forward to tackling my big stack of To-Be-Reads in 2011.

A Few Reviews

I keep meaning to write reviews of the books and films I have read and watched over the past few months, and then get bogged down in other matters, including sketching out a monstrously long review of Swords & Dark Magic that is far from done (and is rapidly becoming some geeky manifesto about sword-and-sorcery). But now the time has come! Let there be kudos and criticisms!

---Swords & Dark Magic (the brief review): While characterized as "[a] truly breathtaking new anthology," I was able to hold on to my breath for most of the stories. The introduction sounds quite promising in its attempt to reinvigorate the idea of sword-and-sorcery as a distinctive offspring of fantasika, but, like a number of the stories, there is little innovation and a lot of rehashing. This is not inherently bad, but I felt that the introduction raised hopes that were mostly unfulfilled in the volume.

The "classic" stories were the ones that I enjoyed the least. While Moorcock's Elric tale was serviceable and well-written, it trod a well-worn path in the cursed albino's saga and offered little new insight into the mythology of the character. Glen Cook's Black Company story similarly seemed like the Same Old Thing, but with a tone that made it feel more like a modern military yarn than sword-and-sorcery. Robert Silverberg's Majipoor tale was more diverting, but light on both the multi-leveled literary action and ornamentation that makes the best tales of this world shine. After an amusing start, the "fully authorized" Dying Earth offering (written not by Jack Vance, but by Michael Shea) just fell into an uninteresting rut that played out like a one-shot D&D adventure.

Some of the more original stories also felt uninspired, despite the talent of their authors. Like Moorcock, Gene Wolfe's story was not poorly written, but seemed to meander in intention and did not fire my imagination. Joe Abercrombie's offering has some good dialogue and earthy characters, but I felt that there was little at stake in the plot and not much tension in the story's progression. Bill Willingham's brief tale was too predictable, with little detail or finesse to divert you from that fact. Even the excellent Greg Keyes' Fool Wolf entry was not very original, despite an intriguing start.

More promising was Steven Erikson's gritty tale of a dead-end town and some weary soldiers. While increasingly predictable, Erikson's story drew you into the lives of the characters deftly, even as the action became increasingly unrealistic, leading to an ending that was very promising until the last few lines, which shattered all that had cared about in the story. Garth Nix's story was a pleasant diversion, and K. J. Parker's "A Rich, Full Week" was both amusing and intriguing. The story by Tim Lebbon was a nice spin on several sword-and-sorcery themes, and kept me guessing until the end. Tanith Lee's allegorical excursion was a lot of fun, even when it felt too self-absorbed.

The standout tales came from two established authors and two newer talents. C. J. Cherryh's "A Wizard in Wiscezan" was holistically satisfying, with characters rendered fully human in a few lines and a story that, while not new, was invigorated by engagement with the characters and by the way in which magic was used. James Enge presented a tale of Morlock the Maker that took the best elements of classical sword-and-sorcery and knocked them ass-over-teacups. Scott Lynch also did a lovely job of twisting some old ideas into vibrantly new shapes. Both of these stories did what I was expecting of this entire collection: inject new life into sword-and-sorcery by drawing on the essential elements of the genre and applying new sensibilities and possibilities to its conventions.

But hands-down the finest tale in the collection was Caitlín R. Kiernan's "The Sea Troll's Daughter." In it she takes one of the most well-worn conventions of sword-and-sorcery and makes it both human and mythic simultaneously. From inversions of gender and status to the upending of the facile simplicities that often plague genre stories, this narrative undermines your expectations while refreshing your vision of what sword-and-sorcery can do in the hands of skillful, sensitive writer. It balances fatalism and frailty, the earthy and the grotesque, and delivers a piece of writing that is both adventure and fable, a rollicking meditation that provokes and entertains.

(And yes, that IS the short review!)

---Lud-in-the-Mist, by Hope Mirrlees: I wasn't sure what to expect of this book, despite having read several reviews. None of them prepared me for the actual experience of reading the book: it was sublime, trippy, eccentric, droll, measured, and fabulous. The writing is sometimes too formal and stilted, but the prose pulls you into the world of Dorimare, where fairy fruit is banned and where the town of Lud-in-the-Mist is about to find out the cost of prohibition. I find it hard to say what the book is about, because there are so many ways to interpret it. It could be an absurd, subversive comedy that comments on bourgeois sensibilities or a mannered yarn about the foibles of convention and the need to acknowledge, not stifle, our inner impulses, or it could be a hallucinogenic meditation on the clash of pastoral and gentrified worldviews. . . the book goes in many directions, some of them more mystified than others. While there are few likable characters, you end up caring about the fate of this world's inhabitants, and the journey that the book takes you on is both absorbing and enchanting. I highly recommend it, and hope that I someday find enough folks who have read it to talk about the experience and make more sense of it.

--- Avatar: I knew going in that this would be a hard film for me to like, after the hype and the dissection of it in countless reviews and blogs, but I wanted to see what James Cameron was trying to accomplish. The result of all his work was a bad movie, all image and no soul. Amazing graphics? Sure. But who cares? The characters were little more than slightly-active scenery, a more complex image than the flora and fauna of Pandora. The movie was all surface and no heart, preachy with nothing to say, and sloppy in its transitions and development.

The story was a morass of cliches, with a pacing that was sublimated to the need to put amazing graphics on the screen frequently. It was hard to believe that this was the same filmmaker who made characters you cared about, who felt human, in films like Aliens and The Abyss. Those films had their problems, but they were not the utter mess of image overload that Avatar is.
I found myself wishing that it had been a faux documentary on the wonders of the planet, rather than a poorly-executed action film, because that format would have accentuated the need for the hyper-detailed visuals and removed a lot of what made the film painful to watch.

---National Geographic: Collapse: Based on the book by Jared Diamond (and featuring him prominently throughout), this documentary uses a science-fictional frame to discuss the possible fall of modern civilization. Moving between a fictional scientific expedition of 2200 CE and civilizations of the past, the film discusses a number of factors that, if not addressed, could (and likely will) result in the catastrophic dissolution of the modern world-system. The documentary looks at what made past systems fail; basically, as one archaeologist puts it, "they overshot."

This line condenses and essentializes the problem of collapse; large human systems plan poorly for the future, and as a result are unprepared when the system encounters one or more large predicaments. As Daniel Gilbert says in the film:"what's so curious about human beings is that we can look deeply into the future, foresee disaster, and still do nothing in the present to stop it." Collapse returns to this idea of looking deeply into the future as a possible solution to our ills, even as it demonstrates that every other large-scale society has failed to do so. While the looking-backwards frame does little more than provide transitions between the litany of problems, it keeps the film moving and also allows the viewer to pretend that there will be a future. Whether that is effective in getting people to think harder, and to act, is uncertain. For me, the film confirmed that without drastic action, without embracing that ability to look deeply into the past and future and access the enormous amounts of information we have to find principled, powerful solutions to our problems, we will follow those other civilizations into ruin.

Aetheric Ephemera: Sturdier Than a Kalamazoo Mudwhomper Edition

1) At last, the greatest scientific question of modern times is solved! Although, who the hell made the chicken?!?!? Or did it just pop up as some form of avian spontaneous evolution?

2) So, can I build an ansible? Please? I promise not to use it to summon an alien invasion force, or V'Ger.

3) Paul di Fillipo reviews a lost Verne novel, The Castle in Transylvania. This is a great column for those who think that Verne just wrote " ham-handed adventure novels for juveniles." I wish my French was better so that I could read his original words. (via SFSignal)

4) A striking discovery of early Christian illuminated manuscripts in Ethiopia, which pushes not just Christian history, but the history of bookmaking back much further in time. Beautiful pieces of art and some fascinating history.

5) Sticky rice makes bulldozers sad. No, really. I have to look around and see if anyone has done significant work on the history of food-based building materials. Some great ideas for detail in stories. . . .