Why You Should Read Ekaterina Sedia's House of Discarded Dreams

I had started writing something else for the Blog Carnival, but then there was a mighty Blogger Fail, and I lost the post, and could not get on until earlier today. That'll learn me. But I did want to close this week by saying a bit more about why this novel is not just a good book, but an encounter that is well worth a reader's time.

It's a portal fantasy where the protagonist not only says "YES!" to her entry, but has actually created the world in which she journeys. It is a quest fantasy where the goal is something more profound than getting a magical artifact back or even some sort of kingdom-recovering or world-saving. It is epic in the more classical sense of the world, a sometimes poetic rendering of a person's life story; it is an odyssey of the mind and imagination. And all of these elements culminate in one tale, about a woman discovering her life by dealing with the fragments of her past, both "real" and oneirocritical.

What makes the book so engaging is its combination of excess and subtlety, mythological and prosaic concerns, animated by characters that are surprising and human in an exaggerated milieu. It is a book of unexpected moments that refuses to brutalize its protagonists, that does not go to cliched extremes, and whose focal personalities do not fall prey to the reactions that often constrain and marginalize women in fantasy literature. The two main characters are both strong young women still finding their way but increasingly open to taking this bizarre path that has opened before them, this endless queendom of dreams and stories. They do not always make the right decisions, they are not always certain of their actions, but they do not respond like stereotypes, and they accept and actively interact with the world that is constantly expanding and changing around them.

In fact, there is a gentleness and a permissiveness in this novel that is a welcome counter to gritty, campy, ironic, and/or over-the-top fantasy. Early on I felt that not much was happening in this novel, and I soon realized that I had some particular expectations for what such a fantasy novel should do. It was a bit embarrassing as the novel unfolded and I realized that something very different was going on in this book. And yet, it is not "literary fantasy" (a horrible category), it is not a modernized fairytale, and it is not some Campbellian archetypal apologia. It is, on a profound level, simple, nestled in the psyche but not psychological, a story but not a saga, a tale in which you can experience all of the different tastes of words but that refuses to repulse or scourge you. Instead, it invites you into the characters' strange new lives and encourages reflection: what dreams have affected your life? What stories from the past still unfold in quiet or hidden places in your head? If you could let them all out, walk around in them, retell them, what would be different? What can all the dreams and memories you contain tell you about what is possible for you?

Deftly written, thoughtful, and evocative, House of Discarded Dreams can be approached in many ways; it asks you to bring something of yourself to the tale, to be as open as Vimbai and Maya to chance and contemplation, and to not be afraid of the stuff in your head, or to ignore it, but to understand how it contributes to who you are and what it has left to teach you.

Fete du Mirage: Ekaterina Sedia's House of Discarded Dreams

In-between catching up on my 30 Days of Genre posts, there will be what Paul Jessup has described as a "blog carnival" next Monday for Ekaterina Sedia's latest book House of Discarded Dreams. It has gotten reviews that are not just glowing, but that are themselves colonized by the spirit of the novel itself. We're encouraging other bloggers to join in with reviews, appreciations, perhaps even fanfic if you're brave enough! If you have read the book, write about it in whatever way moves you. If you haven't read it, come enjoy our little show and see why you should read it. Leave comments, link stuff, chat about it; let's have a big old celebration about this fantastic book!

30 Days of Genre, Day Seven: A Very Special Couple

Day 7: "Favorite couple in a genre novel:"

My initial thought: I have no idea.

This seems like a rather romancey question, and since I rarely read books for the romance, or think in terms of couples, I don't have a good response to this one. Weirdly, I can think of a few from other media, such as Derek Wildstar & Nova, Kitty & Peter, or Deckard & Rachel. But in genre literature, a favorite does not come easily.

My first response? Jaxom and Ruth, the focus couple of Anne McCaffrey's The White Dragon. Both put-upon by life (Jaxom an orphan, Ruth a runt), they end up being the outsiders who win the day. They love each other, go to great lengths for one another, work well together, and their bond is strong enough to see them through some rough times and gives them the sand to be heroes. They are not trusted, sometimes overprotected, and few seem to understand their connection at first. But they overcome social convention and long odds to contribute significantly to the wellbeing of their world.

I read the series in high school my sophomore year, and then re-read the third book several times, because I loved the two of them together. Whelan's cover, with all the little fire lizards hanging around, is as clear in my mind as the day I first set eyes on the book. Those fire lizards were for me an odd validation of Jaxom and Ruth's love, of the projection of it to others who were often ignored and disparaged. And their relationship was very straightforward; as Ruth put it: I am the white dragon. You are my rider. We are together. But they were not just for each other; their relationship was crucial to Pern. It made more sense to me then, and still does now, than a lot of the romantic unions people cite as their favorite.

30 Days of Genre, Day Six: Stoopid Eye. . . .

Day Six: "Most annoying character:"

This one was easy too: it's Sauron, from The Lord of the Rings series.

The reason is as straightforward as the character's motivation: Sauron is a one-dimensional non-character, a plot device. His ring is more interesting than he is. He has spent ages trying to do this one thing, to rule everyone, with apparently no good plan for doing so and no reason to do so other than "I'm Sauron." From being a servant of Morgoth until the end of the series, all he does is try and try and try to be a jerk of the highest order.

We never really find out why; the fact that he is thwarted constantly is about all the motivation he is given. He tries to conquer the will of all, his overly-elaborate plan fails because of his apparent arrogance and misunderstanding of human (and elven and dwarven) nature, he fades and then starts revving up to do it all over again. He is the meanest, most thick-headed one-trick pony of all time.

He is there to power the central conflict of the series, true, but one of the failings of Tolkien's saga is that there is a fairly rich cast of characters on one side, and on the other are teeming hordes, a sniveler, a guy who can't commit, and a mustachio-twirling mega-villain that for unfathomable reasons the rest follow. I resent Sauron because I want there to be more complexity and motivation on the other side. The contrast is too stark, too essentialized, and most of that comes from the figure of Sauron, who is evil incarnate, but a very stereotyped, unexplicated evil that has nothing to substantiate it but the biggest chip on one's shoulder in the history of the Universe.

(Pardon the lateness; laid down with child last night and dozed off)

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.

30 Days of Genre, Days Two and Three

I am apparently behind, so I will catch up with a double dose today!

Day Two: "Your Favorite Character"

Characters are particularly important to me, and because of this, there are a lot of them that I love. The Spike, from Delany's Triton, and Mouse from his book Nova both had a big impact on me in high school. Severian and Thecla from Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun series were characters who surprised me but kept me engrossed in the world they moved through. I have a soft spot for Samwise Gamgee, for sure, and I think he and Eowyn are the best characters in Tolkein's saga. Jirel of Joiry and the Dowager Royina Ista from Bujold's Paladin of Souls were two incredibly strong characters that taught me about persistence. The scoundrel Aiken Drum from Julian May's Saga of Pliocene Exile was a character whom I could never pin down, whom I both admired and reviled. Most recently, I fell for Eliss, the young woman struggling to make a life for herself in Kage Baker's fine novel The Bird of the River.

But the one I return to again and again is Haviland Tuf, from George R. R. Martin's Tuf Voyaging. Watching his transformation from merchant into semi-divine power, and the moral quandries of his actions, is always both a delight and a sobering thing. His quirkiness slowly gives way to something weightier, and he turns out to be a very provocative, deep character. Martin does a great job making us sympathetic towards Tuf, while also realizing the burden that his accidentally-acquired power puts on him.

Day Three: A Genre Novel That is Underrated:

I'm struggling with this one. I think a lot of novels are underrated, because the criteria used to evaluate some of them are often not how well-written they are, or what concerns underlie the story, or other considerations of the novel as a novel. I find that when I recommend books to patrons or friends they often come up with reasons to not take the recommendation based on other criterion, like the Jim Butcher fan who thought that the Stainless Steel Rat would be "too sciency" or the Marion Zimmer Bradley admirer who thought the Kushiel books would not be "mythic" enough. Or, conversely, the Dom DeLillo reader who wanted something a little lighter and scoffed at Chabon and Lethem for their geekishness. we all approach stories with different idea and expectations in our heads.

So here are four works to consider. The first is P.C. Hodgell's God Stalk, a fantasy novel from the early 1980s that is fun, well-written, and has some bite to it. Next is R. A. MacAvoy's Tea with the Black Dragon, which is lovely in every respect, gently magical and very character-driven. C. J. Cherryh's Faded Sun Trilogy is a set of novels that combine powerful themes, from belonging to genocide, with excellent writing. Finally, Michael Moorcock's Oswald Bastable books (starting with The Warlord of the Air) are both crackling good stories and riffs on some classical romantic motifs by skewering imperial dystopias, the notion of progress, and even the heroic memory.

It is easy to forget how many great stories are in fantastika's past, and I think that we need to appreciate more of these books to more fully enjoy the genre.

"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.

Angles of Vision

A quick post as I work and take little breaks to flesh out the new SFSignal column:

My new post is up at Apex. I did tack back towards a response to the whole morality argument (which is not really about morality, methinks). I tried to write something critical, but thoughtful, and I think it works.

As several friends have noted, ::headdesk:: inducing opinions bout fantastic literature continue to proliferate. Steve Davidson over at Grasping for the Wind discusses "Why I Don't Like Fantasy," and concludes:

"Where I see Science Fiction as pointing the way forwards to possible (better) futures, I see Fantasy as the true escapist literature. Escapist in the sense of not being willing to engage in the here and now. Hiding in more pleasant make-believe worlds rather than looking for solutions."

While I appreciate that he (unlike Grin and "Theo") makes it clear that this is a personal opinion, and not some attempt to impose his own perspective on others, this summation really bugged the shit out of me. Not because there is no truth to it, but because it once again paints an enormous range of creative endeavors with one sullying hue. As several commenters pointed out, SF is also fantastic literature, and all fictions are just that, fictions. Some aspire to more realism, or naturalism, or try to follow certain rules more closely, but at the end of the day they are all fantasies, and quite honestly, all of them provide some form of distraction from the world around us. They may teach us things, and may try to ground the story in "the real world," but all of them are figments of our imagination.

What really grinds my gears is this sudden wave of people jumping on fantastic literature for being either socially deviant or decadent, or being too "unreal." There seems to be a need to either impose rules upon fantasy or argue that it's, essentially, too imaginative. Both perspectives imply that there is some flaw or deficiency in "fantasy" as a category that opens it up to corruption or excessive fancifulness. Because exercising creativity is dangerous, leading to moral decline and diverting mystification.

In both indictments, there is a poverty of evidence and an extravagance of oversimplification. These broad indictments rely on generalized hyperbole and stereotypification of the genre category. And they seem to stem, moreso from the morality argument, from an anxiety or concern about the potential boundlessness of vision in fantasy fiction. as if getting too far away from "reality" unmoors the reader from it. There is a disquiet about the power of imagination, as if the reading of a book will result in contamination or some sort of perverse enchantment that takes the reader away from the real and the moral.

Again, I think the arguments of folks like Grin and "Theo" are much worse, but both arguments also rile me because they think that this enticing malignancy is not just within fantasy, but an effect of society that fantasy helps us fall prey to with its alluring excesses. Is fantasy literature really that powerful, that it can send souls spinning away from the physical and social actualities that the reader is part of as a human being? Is it really simultaneously a blasphemous attraction and an inseparable reflection of society?

The truth is, there is not an "it." The breadth and variety (and definitional instability) of fantastic literature makes such a reduction dubious. What writers intend, what they produce, and how it is received cannot be handily condensed like that, unless you consciously ignore the vastness (in several senses of the word) of the field. Reduction is only possible with the most egregious abstraction of the idea of fantasy from the teeming literatures associated with it. That condensation not only unhelpful, it is unwise.

The Invisible Movement of the Sun

Today is a snowy day, gray but bright. The amount of light coming into my desk window is just right. I love the luminous weight of winter outside, how it defines things with its burdens. It's a good day to stay in and rest, think, and write.

A cold is building in my head and the resulting sinus headache is making the tasks for today difficult to accomplish. Lots of writing: a short review for SFSignal, my Apex post, and stories. I've decided to alternate in one-hour blocks between resting and writing; we'll see what I can produce in that manner.

I did manage to write a poem, inspired partly by the title of Jay Lake's Link Salad today, and partly by this ridiculous holiday:

I dreamt that the President of Mars

had asked us to stop driving cars

because the glint from our planet afar

made it look like a chunk of feldspar

and for him that was much too bizarre

he preferred that we shine like a star

but we cursed him in flippant Magyar

and said "You ain't our (káromkodás) tsar!"

and as we drove we all lit up cigars

'til we drowned on this drenched world of ours

making us, not him, our bête noire.

I wrote it in 20 minutes. It was fun to write.

I've been thinking about a topic for Apex, and I was leaning towards a response to this piece over at Black Gate, but I think that it is not worth my time to engage it directly. I feel that doing so just validates an incredibly subjective, pointless debate that really comes down to ideology. So, instead, I think I shall be inspired by this quotation from Jeff VanderMeer, pointed out earlier today by Paul Jessup:

"Fantasy doesn’t have to serve a purpose, really, any more than any kind of fiction. It’s often “just” deep exploration of what it means to be human, what our world is like, to try to capture some kind of truth about the world, I guess. And to entertain, which is often the same thing. Art and entertainment aren’t actually in opposition to one another."

We could do with having more barriers like these eliminated.

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.

The Magic of the Update

1) Still NaNoWriMoing, still behind. But I am at about 34K, so I may not make the magic 50, but I have been more consistent and inspired in the past month than, well, almost ever. Making the time is difficult, but the experience has been rewarding and heartening. The trick will be to keep at it after November 30.

Once it's over, I am going to put the novel aside and take a hard look at my short fiction. I have one story that needs editing, one that needs finishing, and three that are in the foetal stage and are screaming to be born. I would like to start submitting pieces (finally!) after the holidays, and start racking up the piles of rejection slips. I am, weirdly, looking forward to it.

2) I did my usual Apex and Forces of Geek posts. I really like the former, and want to get more into it. The latter was a bit rushed, but I would love to expand it.

3) I just finished re-reading Jo Walton's Farthing, which is a fine piece of literature and one of the best alternate-history novels I have ever read. I recommended it in my "Diabolical Dozen" guest post over at Culinary Carnivale and just had to go read it again. It's so well done that I forget that I don't like the sort of novels it is based upon, the dreaded "country-house mystery."

I am nearly done with Haunted Legends, the new anthology edited by Ellen Datlow & Nick Mamatas. Holy carp it's good! This is for me the best anthology of the year, because it fulfills the promise of the title in unexpected ways, and the authors write stories that are soulful, visceral, and that find the truths of life in the legends they use as their inspiration. Even the few stories that I did not like I still admire for their writing. I will definitely be putting up a longer review once I finish the last few stories.

My brain hurts. . .

. . . after finishing my latest column at Forces of Geek. I had no idea when I decided to talk about some writers that it would be so hard to describe thirteen different artists' unique capabilities in a way that (hopefully) would appeal to a more pop-culture readership. My thesaurus will never forgive me.

I went completely lit-geek on Cat Valente's entry. I did that entry last because I was struggling to articulate what her writing is like, and why it is important and enjoyable to read her work. I found it easier to wax rhapsodic on her writing after dealing with the rest. I think there's sufficient contrast between the entries; it was difficult to not just say "OMG so good! Read read read!"

There is so much good fiction out there that gets buried under the pedestrian epic fantasy and urban paranormal and Star Wars novels. It would be great if just a few people tried something new after reading the column.