Creating Black Americans: African-American History and Its Meanings, 1619 to the Present by Nell Irvin Painter
366 pages
Published 2006
Read from December 26 to December 31
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
The phrase "white guilt" is commonly used to mock social progressives by the more regressive elements of society. It is also employed by activists of color to deflate the self-aggrandizing tendencies of white "allies" who mouth progressive phrases but crowd black (or Native, or Latino, or Asian) commentators out of the spotlight. Yet on a more basic level, "white guilt" describes something that all white Americans should seek out, an antidote (however limited and feeble) to our entitled ignorance and privileged worldview.
This book isn't perfect. It's written as an undergraduate textbook (or possibly even high school textbook, if high schools bothered with such things as actual history), presenting easily digestible facts and figures, repeating them as necessary, and summing up key points at the conclusion of each chapter, as if coaching the reader for a multiple choice midterm. The sardonic humor and understatement of Painter's The History of White People is sadly lacking here, though it peeps through in one or two spots. The broad scope of Painter's history here necessitates a greatest-hits approach, barely skimming the broad motions of any given era; deeper understanding, inevitably, means seeking out more detailed and specific works, with Creating Black Americans as only the starting point. But this is a necessary book. The general story of African American history we absorb in this country -- captive Africans made into a slave labor force, the horrors of plantation life, Lincoln setting everyone free, then total invisibility until Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King fixed everything in the 1960s -- is as glib as it is inaccurate and incomplete. The fuller story told here fills in important gaps in American history: the brief, precocious rise of black civil rights during Reconstruction, including a black senator and six black congressmen; the white terrorism that defeated Reconstruction and essentially re-enslaved the Southern black population; the anger and violence of the 1970s; the endless ways the white power structure undercut black opportunity, from poll taxes to discriminatory lending practices, and how these contributed to the decay of black urban centers and prefigured the more ubiquitous financial inequalities of the present day. These are essential parts of American history, the vital context that makes the current racial tensions and abuses of (white) power part of an ongoing (and sadly obvious) story.
This book joins The History of White People, Chang's The Chinese in America, and Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee in my embryonic (but growing) "white guilt" reading list. It would be easy to say something like, "The people who really need to read these books are the white regressives who think 'white guilt' is a derogatory term." But that would be denying my own ignorance and privilege. Every American should learn this generally forgotten or ignored history. Goodness knows I'm still ignorant as hell, and need ever more histories from non-white and non-privileged perspectives going forward.
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
Thursday, December 25, 2014
2014 read #123: The Iron Dragon's Daughter by Michael Swanwick.
The Iron Dragon's Daughter by Michael Swanwick
424 pages
Published 1994
Read from December 19 to December 25
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
Here's a curious reaction: I feel this could have been the best fantasy book I'd ever read -- if I had been someone else.
This book has power. It has ambition. It has a young woman riding a dragon into the center of creation, screaming rage and defiance at existence and fate, to destroy the universe. It leers in uncomfortable ways and then unfolds a delicate trick of imagery and wording to leave you stunned.
It also, for an unfortunate amount of its length, left me utterly bored.
I just don't get into "young and dissipated protagonist snorts drugs and fights with friends and goes to parties and snorts drugs" storylines, no matter how dressed up with magic and creatures from folklore. I had the same problem with the middle passage of Lev Grossman's The Magicians: wizards having sex and getting trashed in loft apartments is no more interesting to me than any other white yuppies doing the same thing in any number of numbingly identical literary novels. Long stretches of The Iron Dragon's Daughter are reskinned transcriptions of some platonic ideal of the disaffected-yet-affluent '90s joint, substituting a magical or fantastical word for the appurtenances of dreary realism, a point-for-point allegory so thorough it tends to lose any sense of magic or fantasy altogether. If I were a different person, the sort of person who might adore dreary realism and find pleasure in finding it so archly recast, I could enjoy those segments as well as the rest of the novel. But I'm not that person, and Jane's college adventures left me cold.
There is so much terrific stuff here, I'm almost tempted to bump my rating up despite all that, but whatever, ratings are meaningless, and my brain is wheezing along barely able to put a sentence together, so I'll stop.
424 pages
Published 1994
Read from December 19 to December 25
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
Here's a curious reaction: I feel this could have been the best fantasy book I'd ever read -- if I had been someone else.
This book has power. It has ambition. It has a young woman riding a dragon into the center of creation, screaming rage and defiance at existence and fate, to destroy the universe. It leers in uncomfortable ways and then unfolds a delicate trick of imagery and wording to leave you stunned.
It also, for an unfortunate amount of its length, left me utterly bored.
I just don't get into "young and dissipated protagonist snorts drugs and fights with friends and goes to parties and snorts drugs" storylines, no matter how dressed up with magic and creatures from folklore. I had the same problem with the middle passage of Lev Grossman's The Magicians: wizards having sex and getting trashed in loft apartments is no more interesting to me than any other white yuppies doing the same thing in any number of numbingly identical literary novels. Long stretches of The Iron Dragon's Daughter are reskinned transcriptions of some platonic ideal of the disaffected-yet-affluent '90s joint, substituting a magical or fantastical word for the appurtenances of dreary realism, a point-for-point allegory so thorough it tends to lose any sense of magic or fantasy altogether. If I were a different person, the sort of person who might adore dreary realism and find pleasure in finding it so archly recast, I could enjoy those segments as well as the rest of the novel. But I'm not that person, and Jane's college adventures left me cold.
There is so much terrific stuff here, I'm almost tempted to bump my rating up despite all that, but whatever, ratings are meaningless, and my brain is wheezing along barely able to put a sentence together, so I'll stop.
Friday, December 19, 2014
2014 read #122: Dr. Bloodmoney by Philip K. Dick.
Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb by Philip K. Dick
222 pages
Published 1965
Read from December 14 to December 19
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
I like Philip K. Dick, kinda. I like postapocalyptic fiction, kinda. I never thought I'd be this bored when the two came together.
Dick, as I've said somewhere before, had his thematic fixations: What is reality? How do we perceive reality? How do we know what's real and what isn't -- and how does it matter? It's all very interesting in small doses, I suppose, but seemingly every one of his novels is like PHI 101, watered down with an extra helping of reductive psychology and Jungian analysis. I like him for the imaginative touches and twists he builds up from that thematic substratum, such as Walt Dangerfield, stranded in an orbiting capsule after World War III, a DJ marooned in space and humanity's last radio-broadcast link to civilization and each other, but in this case, the clever furnishings of the story were overshadowed by the reductive elephant in the room.
I didn't mind so much about the titular character -- Dick churns out paranoid schizophrenics like it's his job or something, and gifting Dr. Bluthgeld with the psychocreative and telekinetic faculties to amplify his own delusional worldview (and instigate nuclear warfare), while kind of a retread of Eye in the Sky, was not actively off-putting. No, what pulled and shoved and kicked me out of the story was Hoppy Harrington: villainous cliche, evil cripple, psychologically simplistic overcompensator with the psychic wherewithal to make real his need for recognition and power. And that was before we met Bill Keller, absorbed parasitic twin with powerful psychic abilities and a direct line to the hereafter. The novel has an overcrowded and undercooked feel, as if Dick scraped together leavings that weren't enough by themselves to make a cohesive story and threw them all in the pot to simmer for a few minutes. Which is a shame -- I gladly would have read two hundred pages of Walt Dangerfield passing on the news and horticulture tips between different parts of the post-nuclear wasteland.
222 pages
Published 1965
Read from December 14 to December 19
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
I like Philip K. Dick, kinda. I like postapocalyptic fiction, kinda. I never thought I'd be this bored when the two came together.
Dick, as I've said somewhere before, had his thematic fixations: What is reality? How do we perceive reality? How do we know what's real and what isn't -- and how does it matter? It's all very interesting in small doses, I suppose, but seemingly every one of his novels is like PHI 101, watered down with an extra helping of reductive psychology and Jungian analysis. I like him for the imaginative touches and twists he builds up from that thematic substratum, such as Walt Dangerfield, stranded in an orbiting capsule after World War III, a DJ marooned in space and humanity's last radio-broadcast link to civilization and each other, but in this case, the clever furnishings of the story were overshadowed by the reductive elephant in the room.
I didn't mind so much about the titular character -- Dick churns out paranoid schizophrenics like it's his job or something, and gifting Dr. Bluthgeld with the psychocreative and telekinetic faculties to amplify his own delusional worldview (and instigate nuclear warfare), while kind of a retread of Eye in the Sky, was not actively off-putting. No, what pulled and shoved and kicked me out of the story was Hoppy Harrington: villainous cliche, evil cripple, psychologically simplistic overcompensator with the psychic wherewithal to make real his need for recognition and power. And that was before we met Bill Keller, absorbed parasitic twin with powerful psychic abilities and a direct line to the hereafter. The novel has an overcrowded and undercooked feel, as if Dick scraped together leavings that weren't enough by themselves to make a cohesive story and threw them all in the pot to simmer for a few minutes. Which is a shame -- I gladly would have read two hundred pages of Walt Dangerfield passing on the news and horticulture tips between different parts of the post-nuclear wasteland.
Wednesday, December 17, 2014
2014 read #121: The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 4, edited by Lin Carter.
The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 4, edited by Lin Carter
208 pages
Published 1978
Read from December 14 to December 17
Rating: ★½ out of 5
There's been a gradual but definite sense of improvement since the first YBFS -- better-written, less ham-fisted stories have been stealing space from the grognard Elder Horrors and Swollen Thews entries, likely reflecting a reluctant shift in Lin Carter's editorial policies rather than any observable shift in the genre. I'm hoping this trend continues -- though I'm trying not to get my heart set on it. This is Lin Carter, after all.
Same bookkeeping note from the last YBFS: at least three of the eleven stories here are previously unpublished, appearing in print for the first time in these pages. Those stories are noted in my review with the 1978 publication date; the rest, published elsewhere, are from 1977.
"The Tale of Hauk" by Poul Anderson (1977). Read and reviewed in Modern Classics of Fantasy, where I called it an "Unremarkable, non-essential bit of supernatural Nordic fluffery." Unsurprising to find it here.
"A Farmer on the Clyde" by Grail Undwin (1978). Lin Carter goes into raptures describing this new author: "Miss Undwin I may modestly claim as my own discovery," he says here, while in YBFS:5 (I peeked ahead), he adds, "I am enormously fond of Grail Undwin, because I discovered her all by myself.... [F]rom the first page of [her] first story I was hooked. Nobody ever wrote fairy tales like these before: they break all the rules and get away with the trick superbly." The kicker, naturally, is that "Grail Undwin" is Lin Carter. Back in the day, when I ran a minor SF zine, I was guilty of occasionally padding out issues with stories I wrote under assumed names, but not once did I praise my alter-egos as rule-breaking, genre-shaking titans. And I only edited an online amateur market. Carter is curating the only (so far as I know) "year's best fantasy" series of its time, and choosing to put his own previously unpublished manuscripts in them under assumed names while fulsomely praising himself for originality, rule-breaking, and mastery of the form. So yeah, Lin Carter was a complete tool, Gorm rest his soul. That prejudices me against this story -- I've been waiting to rip into it for the past two weeks, in fact, after reading Lin Carter's wiki page. After all that buildup, however, I find I can muster no strong feelings one way or the other about this story. It's a whole lot of scene-setting about the monarchical ambitions of a particular elf-lord, and then a single page detailing the elf-lord catching sight of an aged, long-defeated, but ultimately joyful Bonnie Prince Charlie, and deciding that, if a mortal can be content without a crown, he can be content as well. It is by far the least unpleasant of Lin Carter's works (that I've read so far), but it's just kind of... there.
"Prince Alcouz and the Magician" by Clark Ashton Smith (1977). Apparently an early, unpublished manuscript, untampered-with by Carter or any other carrion bird. Not a Hyperborean tale, or any other morbid Cosmicist stuff; this is a straightforward Orientalist fable about a dissipated prince and the wandering Hindustani magician who tells his fortune. Forgettable.
"Nekht Semerkeht" by Robert E. Howard and Andrew J. Offutt (1977). Howard's final story, left unfinished when he suicided, this is a conquistador western reminiscent of the early works of Scott O'Dell, only pulpier and more intrinsically racist and misogynistic (and with more ancient Egyptian necromancers). This story belabors the conquistador's cynicism and low opinion for human nature, his every-man-is-out-for-himself worldview -- a pulpy, man's man philosophy that could be the subject of an interesting sociological thesis or two (how, for instance, might pulp ideas of manhood relate to today's culture of toxic masculinity?). As far as racist, misogynistic old hyper-masculine pulp adventure goes, this was at least adequately entertaining -- up until the denouement, in which our bold hero, now ruler of the city of gold, gives his new queen a split lip to keep her in her place.
"The Pillars of Hell" by Lin Carter (1978). Examining the copyright page, I have concluded that this is a second previously unpublished story of Lin Carter's that he found necessary to include in the year's best fantasy stories. What a self-regarding tool. Our mighty narrator takes the time to acquaint us with his "swelling thews and rippling muscles, the square cut of my jaw and the fearless glint of my blue eyes," as well as the "oily" and "hunched and flabby and ill-favored" cliche that is his rival. Standard Aryan manhood fantasy. Nothing interesting.
"Lok the Depressor" by Philip Coakley (1978). Google reveals nothing whatsoever about this "new author" beyond this single story -- seriously, not a single word. I'm tempted to assume that, once again, Lin Carter wrote a pastiche of someone else's style (claiming, in his introduction to this story, that this so-called Coakley "comes as close to writing like Jack Vance as anyone I have ever read") and shoved it, previously unpublished, into the year's best fantasy stories, under another assumed name. In fact, that's exactly what this reads like -- even admitting my personal bias, I insist that this reads nothing at all like Vance and wholly like Carter. There's the fixation on the young tomb raider's physiognomy, the cartoonish menace of the demons of the Wastes, the turgid dialogue, the abuse of exclamation marks: all signs of Carter's hand. Wikipedia doesn't list Philip Coakley as one of Carter's "known" aliases, but if my hunch is correct -- god, what a tool. Also, this story sucks a lot and is worse by far than even a mediocre Dying Earth tale.
"Hark! Was That the Squeal of an Angry Throat?" by Avram Davidson (1977). I've never been disappointed by an Avram Davidson story -- but can he salvage this hundred-page slide into ignominy and self-regarding twaddle? I dunno. This entry certainly is some kind of thing. I couldn't even begin to categorize it, so I'll (reluctantly) accede to Carter's charge that this is "a mere anecdote, and second cousin to a shaggy dog story." It has an antique New York City pulp feel to it (reminiscent of certain 1960s sci-fi shorts I've read), mixed with a sort of Jewish comic yarn, swerving without warning among the narrator's neighbors in a picturesque tenement district, populated by no end of mid-century caricatures and types, all flung together in a breathless rush. It's entertaining, yes; and then John Carter of Mars shows up, and it's all po-mo and I'm lost but enjoying it. A little baffling, but good.
"The Cloak of Dreams" by Pat McIntosh (1978). The copyright page lists this as "The Girl in the Leather Cloak"; I sense some Lin Carter-y meddling afoot. This is only so-so for a Thula tale -- though even a so-so Thula tale is bounds and bounds better than everything else featured so far in this collection, with the exception of the Davidson yarn. The story hinges on a magical mystery -- where is the missing boyfriend? -- though so much is left unsaid that the denouement, though its outline was obvious almost from the start, doesn't seem to follow any traceable line of reasoning from the clues we're given. McIntosh's light touch ordinarily enhances her stories, but here I think I would have preferred just a shade more exposition for once. (Maybe the problem is I'm running low on sleep lately.)
"The Land of Sorrow" by Phyllis Eisenstein (1977). This story showed me that I've long held an unconscious desire to see high fantasy written for the esthetic and standards of F&SF. This is an understated, thoughtful piece that takes its time establishing a place and a mood, elevating an otherwise unremarkable pseudomedieval setting, developing a gothic mystery in a hidden valley that held my interest until, sadly, it turned out to be a fairly generic magical sadist ruler. Even that disappointment doesn't linger, as Alaric the minstrel's escape from the Red Lord is complicated in an unexpectedly moving fashion. I can say, without reservations, that I would read many more stories of this cautious and sensitive adventurer.
"Odds Against the Gods" by Tanith Lee (1977). Picaresque silliness mingling early hints of 1980s fantasy (our first coy instance of lesbianism! BDSM "brides" for a god of pain!) with the stale leftovers of the '70s (technicolored landscape, easily hoodwinked stooges, a dying sun), all played for broad comedy. I chuckled once, it must be admitted, but this story is overlong for the minimal effect it produces.
"The Changer of Names" by Ramsey Campbell (1977). Lin Carter calls this one a "very unorthodox" sword 'n' sorcery tale; I call it moderately original. The central conceit, that a hero's name and deeds are a form of magic built up during adventures and liable to injury by defamation or theft by sorcery, is rather amusing; it wouldn't be out of place in the taverns and streets of Ankh-Morpork, nor would the huge crowd of hooded thieves that suddenly materializes at the end. Yet Campbell plays the story completely straight, making for an odd tonal dissonance between delightfully satirical premise and serious execution. It's an entertaining story on its own terms -- hardly a forgotten classic, but certainly passable.
Well, it seems I overestimated the trajectory of these collections. This was a definite step down after the last two YBFS editions, not least because Lin Carter took at least two (and most likely three) of eleven slots to foist his tiresome and self-indulgent claptrap on us. Even leaving his leavings aside, this collection just wasn't that good, with a mediocre Thula installment and nothing whatsoever on par with "The Dark King," "The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr," or "The Lamp." I mean, everything from the Avram Davidson story all the way to the end -- the second half, almost, if you go by page count -- was at least tolerable. But without standouts, it's hard to muster enthusiasm for the contents of this volume.
208 pages
Published 1978
Read from December 14 to December 17
Rating: ★½ out of 5
There's been a gradual but definite sense of improvement since the first YBFS -- better-written, less ham-fisted stories have been stealing space from the grognard Elder Horrors and Swollen Thews entries, likely reflecting a reluctant shift in Lin Carter's editorial policies rather than any observable shift in the genre. I'm hoping this trend continues -- though I'm trying not to get my heart set on it. This is Lin Carter, after all.
Same bookkeeping note from the last YBFS: at least three of the eleven stories here are previously unpublished, appearing in print for the first time in these pages. Those stories are noted in my review with the 1978 publication date; the rest, published elsewhere, are from 1977.
"The Tale of Hauk" by Poul Anderson (1977). Read and reviewed in Modern Classics of Fantasy, where I called it an "Unremarkable, non-essential bit of supernatural Nordic fluffery." Unsurprising to find it here.
"A Farmer on the Clyde" by Grail Undwin (1978). Lin Carter goes into raptures describing this new author: "Miss Undwin I may modestly claim as my own discovery," he says here, while in YBFS:5 (I peeked ahead), he adds, "I am enormously fond of Grail Undwin, because I discovered her all by myself.... [F]rom the first page of [her] first story I was hooked. Nobody ever wrote fairy tales like these before: they break all the rules and get away with the trick superbly." The kicker, naturally, is that "Grail Undwin" is Lin Carter. Back in the day, when I ran a minor SF zine, I was guilty of occasionally padding out issues with stories I wrote under assumed names, but not once did I praise my alter-egos as rule-breaking, genre-shaking titans. And I only edited an online amateur market. Carter is curating the only (so far as I know) "year's best fantasy" series of its time, and choosing to put his own previously unpublished manuscripts in them under assumed names while fulsomely praising himself for originality, rule-breaking, and mastery of the form. So yeah, Lin Carter was a complete tool, Gorm rest his soul. That prejudices me against this story -- I've been waiting to rip into it for the past two weeks, in fact, after reading Lin Carter's wiki page. After all that buildup, however, I find I can muster no strong feelings one way or the other about this story. It's a whole lot of scene-setting about the monarchical ambitions of a particular elf-lord, and then a single page detailing the elf-lord catching sight of an aged, long-defeated, but ultimately joyful Bonnie Prince Charlie, and deciding that, if a mortal can be content without a crown, he can be content as well. It is by far the least unpleasant of Lin Carter's works (that I've read so far), but it's just kind of... there.
"Prince Alcouz and the Magician" by Clark Ashton Smith (1977). Apparently an early, unpublished manuscript, untampered-with by Carter or any other carrion bird. Not a Hyperborean tale, or any other morbid Cosmicist stuff; this is a straightforward Orientalist fable about a dissipated prince and the wandering Hindustani magician who tells his fortune. Forgettable.
"Nekht Semerkeht" by Robert E. Howard and Andrew J. Offutt (1977). Howard's final story, left unfinished when he suicided, this is a conquistador western reminiscent of the early works of Scott O'Dell, only pulpier and more intrinsically racist and misogynistic (and with more ancient Egyptian necromancers). This story belabors the conquistador's cynicism and low opinion for human nature, his every-man-is-out-for-himself worldview -- a pulpy, man's man philosophy that could be the subject of an interesting sociological thesis or two (how, for instance, might pulp ideas of manhood relate to today's culture of toxic masculinity?). As far as racist, misogynistic old hyper-masculine pulp adventure goes, this was at least adequately entertaining -- up until the denouement, in which our bold hero, now ruler of the city of gold, gives his new queen a split lip to keep her in her place.
"The Pillars of Hell" by Lin Carter (1978). Examining the copyright page, I have concluded that this is a second previously unpublished story of Lin Carter's that he found necessary to include in the year's best fantasy stories. What a self-regarding tool. Our mighty narrator takes the time to acquaint us with his "swelling thews and rippling muscles, the square cut of my jaw and the fearless glint of my blue eyes," as well as the "oily" and "hunched and flabby and ill-favored" cliche that is his rival. Standard Aryan manhood fantasy. Nothing interesting.
"Lok the Depressor" by Philip Coakley (1978). Google reveals nothing whatsoever about this "new author" beyond this single story -- seriously, not a single word. I'm tempted to assume that, once again, Lin Carter wrote a pastiche of someone else's style (claiming, in his introduction to this story, that this so-called Coakley "comes as close to writing like Jack Vance as anyone I have ever read") and shoved it, previously unpublished, into the year's best fantasy stories, under another assumed name. In fact, that's exactly what this reads like -- even admitting my personal bias, I insist that this reads nothing at all like Vance and wholly like Carter. There's the fixation on the young tomb raider's physiognomy, the cartoonish menace of the demons of the Wastes, the turgid dialogue, the abuse of exclamation marks: all signs of Carter's hand. Wikipedia doesn't list Philip Coakley as one of Carter's "known" aliases, but if my hunch is correct -- god, what a tool. Also, this story sucks a lot and is worse by far than even a mediocre Dying Earth tale.
"Hark! Was That the Squeal of an Angry Throat?" by Avram Davidson (1977). I've never been disappointed by an Avram Davidson story -- but can he salvage this hundred-page slide into ignominy and self-regarding twaddle? I dunno. This entry certainly is some kind of thing. I couldn't even begin to categorize it, so I'll (reluctantly) accede to Carter's charge that this is "a mere anecdote, and second cousin to a shaggy dog story." It has an antique New York City pulp feel to it (reminiscent of certain 1960s sci-fi shorts I've read), mixed with a sort of Jewish comic yarn, swerving without warning among the narrator's neighbors in a picturesque tenement district, populated by no end of mid-century caricatures and types, all flung together in a breathless rush. It's entertaining, yes; and then John Carter of Mars shows up, and it's all po-mo and I'm lost but enjoying it. A little baffling, but good.
"The Cloak of Dreams" by Pat McIntosh (1978). The copyright page lists this as "The Girl in the Leather Cloak"; I sense some Lin Carter-y meddling afoot. This is only so-so for a Thula tale -- though even a so-so Thula tale is bounds and bounds better than everything else featured so far in this collection, with the exception of the Davidson yarn. The story hinges on a magical mystery -- where is the missing boyfriend? -- though so much is left unsaid that the denouement, though its outline was obvious almost from the start, doesn't seem to follow any traceable line of reasoning from the clues we're given. McIntosh's light touch ordinarily enhances her stories, but here I think I would have preferred just a shade more exposition for once. (Maybe the problem is I'm running low on sleep lately.)
"The Land of Sorrow" by Phyllis Eisenstein (1977). This story showed me that I've long held an unconscious desire to see high fantasy written for the esthetic and standards of F&SF. This is an understated, thoughtful piece that takes its time establishing a place and a mood, elevating an otherwise unremarkable pseudomedieval setting, developing a gothic mystery in a hidden valley that held my interest until, sadly, it turned out to be a fairly generic magical sadist ruler. Even that disappointment doesn't linger, as Alaric the minstrel's escape from the Red Lord is complicated in an unexpectedly moving fashion. I can say, without reservations, that I would read many more stories of this cautious and sensitive adventurer.
"Odds Against the Gods" by Tanith Lee (1977). Picaresque silliness mingling early hints of 1980s fantasy (our first coy instance of lesbianism! BDSM "brides" for a god of pain!) with the stale leftovers of the '70s (technicolored landscape, easily hoodwinked stooges, a dying sun), all played for broad comedy. I chuckled once, it must be admitted, but this story is overlong for the minimal effect it produces.
"The Changer of Names" by Ramsey Campbell (1977). Lin Carter calls this one a "very unorthodox" sword 'n' sorcery tale; I call it moderately original. The central conceit, that a hero's name and deeds are a form of magic built up during adventures and liable to injury by defamation or theft by sorcery, is rather amusing; it wouldn't be out of place in the taverns and streets of Ankh-Morpork, nor would the huge crowd of hooded thieves that suddenly materializes at the end. Yet Campbell plays the story completely straight, making for an odd tonal dissonance between delightfully satirical premise and serious execution. It's an entertaining story on its own terms -- hardly a forgotten classic, but certainly passable.
Well, it seems I overestimated the trajectory of these collections. This was a definite step down after the last two YBFS editions, not least because Lin Carter took at least two (and most likely three) of eleven slots to foist his tiresome and self-indulgent claptrap on us. Even leaving his leavings aside, this collection just wasn't that good, with a mediocre Thula installment and nothing whatsoever on par with "The Dark King," "The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr," or "The Lamp." I mean, everything from the Avram Davidson story all the way to the end -- the second half, almost, if you go by page count -- was at least tolerable. But without standouts, it's hard to muster enthusiasm for the contents of this volume.
Sunday, December 14, 2014
2014 read #120: The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 3, edited by Lin Carter.
The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 3, edited by Lin Carter
237 pages
Published 1977
Read from December 12 to December 14
Rating: ★★ out of 5
Furthering a trend begun in the second YBFS, four of the eleven stories included in this ostensible retrospective were originally published here. I'll skip repeating my thoughts on how silly that is, and merely note that the first-time-in-print stories are labeled 1977, and everything else is labeled 1976, because I get persnickety about such details.
"Eudoric's Unicorn" by L. Sprague de Camp (1977). The cleverest detail in this piece is the conceit that unicorns are the last surviving species of the Entelodontidae. It makes me wish de Camp had gone whole hog (heh) and set a secondary world fantasy in the Miocene, because the rest of this story isn't especially memorable. It's broad comic fantasy built around one joke (girls these days don't stay virgins for long!), although perhaps the hapless and distinctly venal merchant "hero" is ahead of his time here, as unremarkable as he would be today.
"Shadow of a Demon" by Gardner F. Fox (1976). The key to reading stories like this, I've decided, is to shut off your brain to the best of your ability, to ignore the cliches and stock props coming at you as thick as the arrows at Thermopylae, to not even blink at the Xeroxed barbarian swordsman or at the requisite scanty costume of the seeming young woman in distress (or at the many repetitions the author makes to insist that, dude, her tattered tunic barely conceals the curve of her breast or the supple length of her leg). Even adopting this strategy, however, I couldn't keep my mind from wandering away from the words in front me at least once each page. At one point I caught myself literally watching kitten videos instead of reading another word of our hero scouting his way into the palace of the standard-issue evil sorcerer (who, not content with holding demons in thrall, was on the verge of summoning "megademons" to do his bidding!). Even with my brain switched off, I can't find this sort of thing anything but boring. How is it that so many people were so eager to consume this for so many years?
"Ring of Black Stone" by Pat McIntosh (1976). The odd thing is, it takes such a small tweak in the formula to make sword 'n' sorcery wholly palatable to me. McIntosh's light, sensitive touch is a breath of spring air after the jock-strap fantasy of "Shadow of a Demon." The idea of a witch's Power being a thing so strong that, should she fail to pass it on before she dies, it animates her bones after death until it finds someone "with the courage to take it from the dead," is stranger, more exotic, more unsettling, more creative than whole volumes of standard sword 'n' sorcery fare -- and McIntosh develops the idea in scarcely half a page of dialogue. The landslide-elemental creature, granting a wish once it's tasted blood, reminds me variously of the Dying Earth, the myth-fantasy of Valente, and the Demon Doors of Fable. This story as a whole feels oddly modern, as if, aside from the simplicity of the climax, it could have been written in the mid-'00s (if anyone worth reading were writing sword 'n' sorcery serials at that point). I'm happy to see the disappointing "Cry Wolf" in the last YBFS was an anomaly; this ably lives up to the promise of "Falcon's Mate."
"The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr" by George R. R. Martin (1976). A nice time-capsule oddity for you from Lin Carter's introduction to this story: "Chances are, if you know Martin's work at all, you know him as a science fiction novelist of the gritty realism school...." I thought that was funny. Anyway, I'll get right to the point: I dig this story. Not to get effusive or anything, but I think this story may be the apotheosis of what could be fashioned with the vocabulary of 1970s high fantasy. There's more than a hint of science fiction in the infinite universes and the gates Sharra traverses between them, there's a flavor of the Dying Earth in Laren Dorr's world and its sputtering sun, there are stray props and set-dressings from heroic fantasy here and there in Sharra's crown and Laren's castle -- all recognizably '70s. But Martin (younger than I am now when he published this) fits this vocabulary to a precocious new framework that hints at the artsier, more finely crafted story structures of the decades to come. Rather than stalling the story right at the beginning to dish out background detail on who the Seven are or how Sharra obtained her crown, Martin takes the more recent approach, opening with an evocative line and drawing out the explanations, enlivening the early pages with crumbs and background details but saving the worldbuilding dumps for (relatively) organic conversations between the two leads. It's not wholly modern -- there's a mustiness to the prose, not enough to really detract from the tale but sufficient to date it. And, since this is GRRM, the story does dawdle to describe meals and the juiciness of meat. But all in all, this is an unexpectedly excellent contribution.
"Two Suns Setting" by Karl Edward Wagner (1976). After two great tales, we're back to trudging across an archetypal desert with yet another generic "brooding, doom-fraught adventurer," in a world mixing the two thesaurus-busting styles of heroic fantasy and prehuman elder lore. And the hero is named Kane. I mean, seriously, Kane. He's a dispossessed hero-wizard-swordsman cast out from his city and wandering the deserts of the "eastern continent." Of fucking course he's named Kane. At 30 pages, this story is way overlong, but (I must grudgingly admit) it isn't as bad as it could be. It's actually passably entertaining. In part this is due to some unexpected story beats -- in a genre where you can predict almost every plot turn from page one, I was not expecting a giant to go on a fireside rant about the evils of technology and mankind's fatal inability to live within his natural environment, before reminiscing about the "heroic age" when his kind grappled with sabre-tooths and mammoths and cave bears. "Two Suns" isn't good -- there are just too many eyes "blazing feral hatred" for my tastes -- but it's surprisingly painless. I almost -- almost -- wouldn't mind reading more of this Kane's adventures, if they're consistently in this vein.
"The Stairs in the Crypt" by Clark Ashton Smith (1976). Yet another posthumous completion by Lin Carter, who's gone from merely adding a few hundred words to cap a mostly finished tale to "weaving bits and pieces" of Smith's "unpolished prose, outlines, lists of unused titles and invented names, sketches of story-ideas and plots" together "in as close a style to Smith's as I can create." At this rate, by the next YBFS Carter will be totting up Smith's old cleaner bills and grocery lists just to keep making a profit off the guy's byline. I haven't read much Clark Ashton Smith, obviously, but I can't help but feel Lin Carter did a poor job of imitating his voice after all. This lacks the doleful rhythm and morbid inevitability of "The Scroll of Morloc" and "The Double Tower." Maybe this is because "Crypt" is an attempt at comic incident -- a deceased necromancer reanimates in his tomb and delivers wry soliloquies, then craves a snack -- but honestly this doesn't seem to fit with those other two stories. It reads more like Carter threw the thesaurus at his typewriter and said "Close enough."
"The Goblin Blade" by Raul Garcia Capella (1977). A guy who cut his teeth writing imitations of Robert E. Howard set in Conan's universe here goes boldly into a world of his own devising -- and it's a sword 'n' sorcery pastiche as uninteresting and unoriginal as you could imagine. The standard mismatched warlock and warrior, bickering at first, exchanging awkward globs of backstory and scene-setting, gradually coming to an understanding and working well as a team to defeat a guy who is totally not blue-eyed Genghis Khan, and who turns out to be a djinn. Yawn. I think it's meant to be comic to some degree -- at least, I'm pretty sure the words that the main pair pronounce to each other are meant to be some form of banter -- but it's just not doing it for me.
"The Dark King" by C. J. Cherryh (1977). Half of Lin Carter's introduction to this story is him perving over how Cherryh is a "young and very attractive woman" -- a statement repeated, with less emphasis, before seemingly every story written by an up-and-coming female author in these books. Oh, traditional gender values.... Anyway, this is a slight but sweet mythological fairy tale, with Sisyphos manipulating the pity and compassion of Death in order to return to the world, then with further trickery binding Death and thereby discovering the usual moral of this sort of thing, viz. that Death is necessary for life to flourish. An unsurprising tale but a lovely one.
"Black Moonlight" by Lin Carter (1976). Time to gird up my loins and slog through another protracted interlude with What's-His-Face the Not-Viking from Lemuria. This time he's a pirate or something, but the beats of the tale are the same: seeking riches, Thongor runs afoul of degenerate beast men and a priest on loan from Clark Ashton Smith. An eldritch abomination gets summoned, there's some easy fighting, everyone has a good laugh afterward, the end. What bugs me about Lin Carter, aside from his questionable taste in stories and his relentless self-regard and so on, is how he's labeled "Master of Adult Fantasy" (by himself or by his publisher, no doubt, but it gets plastered all over these books just the same), yet his prose springs from the boys' adventure school of the 1930s. The only difference between them is Carter's heroes get their way with "Red Steel!" rather than good, clean American fists. How an adult could enjoy this pap is beyond me.
"The Snout in the Alcove" by Gary Myers (1977). Never having read Clark Ashton Smith undiluted, and never having read Lovecraft in any form, I must make a comparison with a parallel figure: Olaf Stapledon, who produced a lot of ideas and set-dressings science fiction still employs, but couched them in dry, treatise-like summations that aren't much fun to read. Along those lines, this story takes a potentially intriguing incident (drawn from a commingling of Smith's Hyperborea and Lovecraft's Dreamlands, and maybe stuff from Lord Dunsany I'm not yet acquainted with) and squashes it flat. A Zelazny-esque narrator (über-competent and quick-witted but essentially a blank slate) gets summoned into the Dreamlands by mistake by priests of the Elder Ones; a daemon, the intended object of the summoning, is on the loose; a red-robed stranger drifts from city to city in a rotting vessel, and all who hear him flee screaming, their cities melting under the moon behind them; in the de rigueur final twist, the narrator turns out to be the demon, thwarting the last hope of the Dreamlands. The ingredients are there for something juicy and spectacular, but this compressed and lifeless presentation just doesn't work for me. (The part about the red stranger, especially, put me in mind of Stephen King in his prime: that's what the Crimson King should have been like.)
"The Pool of the Moon" by Charles R. Saunders (1976). The novelty of the first Imaro story (in the first YBFS) has dulled somewhat; this feels much more like a generic heroic fantasy, sad to say, featuring what I believe is a completely serious use of the term "hot barbarian embrace."
To sum up: "Ring of Black Stone" and "The Dark King" were excellent, and "The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr" was the best story in the YBFS series to date, but disappointing entries from Saunders and de Camp added to the usual assortment of dull and/or terrible stories so beloved by Lin Carter. While there is noticeable improvement in individual stories, then, the series as a whole continues to labor under the "particular enthusiasms" of its editor. I eagerly await the Saha-edited years, if only for a change of direction.
237 pages
Published 1977
Read from December 12 to December 14
Rating: ★★ out of 5
Furthering a trend begun in the second YBFS, four of the eleven stories included in this ostensible retrospective were originally published here. I'll skip repeating my thoughts on how silly that is, and merely note that the first-time-in-print stories are labeled 1977, and everything else is labeled 1976, because I get persnickety about such details.
"Eudoric's Unicorn" by L. Sprague de Camp (1977). The cleverest detail in this piece is the conceit that unicorns are the last surviving species of the Entelodontidae. It makes me wish de Camp had gone whole hog (heh) and set a secondary world fantasy in the Miocene, because the rest of this story isn't especially memorable. It's broad comic fantasy built around one joke (girls these days don't stay virgins for long!), although perhaps the hapless and distinctly venal merchant "hero" is ahead of his time here, as unremarkable as he would be today.
"Shadow of a Demon" by Gardner F. Fox (1976). The key to reading stories like this, I've decided, is to shut off your brain to the best of your ability, to ignore the cliches and stock props coming at you as thick as the arrows at Thermopylae, to not even blink at the Xeroxed barbarian swordsman or at the requisite scanty costume of the seeming young woman in distress (or at the many repetitions the author makes to insist that, dude, her tattered tunic barely conceals the curve of her breast or the supple length of her leg). Even adopting this strategy, however, I couldn't keep my mind from wandering away from the words in front me at least once each page. At one point I caught myself literally watching kitten videos instead of reading another word of our hero scouting his way into the palace of the standard-issue evil sorcerer (who, not content with holding demons in thrall, was on the verge of summoning "megademons" to do his bidding!). Even with my brain switched off, I can't find this sort of thing anything but boring. How is it that so many people were so eager to consume this for so many years?
"Ring of Black Stone" by Pat McIntosh (1976). The odd thing is, it takes such a small tweak in the formula to make sword 'n' sorcery wholly palatable to me. McIntosh's light, sensitive touch is a breath of spring air after the jock-strap fantasy of "Shadow of a Demon." The idea of a witch's Power being a thing so strong that, should she fail to pass it on before she dies, it animates her bones after death until it finds someone "with the courage to take it from the dead," is stranger, more exotic, more unsettling, more creative than whole volumes of standard sword 'n' sorcery fare -- and McIntosh develops the idea in scarcely half a page of dialogue. The landslide-elemental creature, granting a wish once it's tasted blood, reminds me variously of the Dying Earth, the myth-fantasy of Valente, and the Demon Doors of Fable. This story as a whole feels oddly modern, as if, aside from the simplicity of the climax, it could have been written in the mid-'00s (if anyone worth reading were writing sword 'n' sorcery serials at that point). I'm happy to see the disappointing "Cry Wolf" in the last YBFS was an anomaly; this ably lives up to the promise of "Falcon's Mate."
"The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr" by George R. R. Martin (1976). A nice time-capsule oddity for you from Lin Carter's introduction to this story: "Chances are, if you know Martin's work at all, you know him as a science fiction novelist of the gritty realism school...." I thought that was funny. Anyway, I'll get right to the point: I dig this story. Not to get effusive or anything, but I think this story may be the apotheosis of what could be fashioned with the vocabulary of 1970s high fantasy. There's more than a hint of science fiction in the infinite universes and the gates Sharra traverses between them, there's a flavor of the Dying Earth in Laren Dorr's world and its sputtering sun, there are stray props and set-dressings from heroic fantasy here and there in Sharra's crown and Laren's castle -- all recognizably '70s. But Martin (younger than I am now when he published this) fits this vocabulary to a precocious new framework that hints at the artsier, more finely crafted story structures of the decades to come. Rather than stalling the story right at the beginning to dish out background detail on who the Seven are or how Sharra obtained her crown, Martin takes the more recent approach, opening with an evocative line and drawing out the explanations, enlivening the early pages with crumbs and background details but saving the worldbuilding dumps for (relatively) organic conversations between the two leads. It's not wholly modern -- there's a mustiness to the prose, not enough to really detract from the tale but sufficient to date it. And, since this is GRRM, the story does dawdle to describe meals and the juiciness of meat. But all in all, this is an unexpectedly excellent contribution.
"Two Suns Setting" by Karl Edward Wagner (1976). After two great tales, we're back to trudging across an archetypal desert with yet another generic "brooding, doom-fraught adventurer," in a world mixing the two thesaurus-busting styles of heroic fantasy and prehuman elder lore. And the hero is named Kane. I mean, seriously, Kane. He's a dispossessed hero-wizard-swordsman cast out from his city and wandering the deserts of the "eastern continent." Of fucking course he's named Kane. At 30 pages, this story is way overlong, but (I must grudgingly admit) it isn't as bad as it could be. It's actually passably entertaining. In part this is due to some unexpected story beats -- in a genre where you can predict almost every plot turn from page one, I was not expecting a giant to go on a fireside rant about the evils of technology and mankind's fatal inability to live within his natural environment, before reminiscing about the "heroic age" when his kind grappled with sabre-tooths and mammoths and cave bears. "Two Suns" isn't good -- there are just too many eyes "blazing feral hatred" for my tastes -- but it's surprisingly painless. I almost -- almost -- wouldn't mind reading more of this Kane's adventures, if they're consistently in this vein.
"The Stairs in the Crypt" by Clark Ashton Smith (1976). Yet another posthumous completion by Lin Carter, who's gone from merely adding a few hundred words to cap a mostly finished tale to "weaving bits and pieces" of Smith's "unpolished prose, outlines, lists of unused titles and invented names, sketches of story-ideas and plots" together "in as close a style to Smith's as I can create." At this rate, by the next YBFS Carter will be totting up Smith's old cleaner bills and grocery lists just to keep making a profit off the guy's byline. I haven't read much Clark Ashton Smith, obviously, but I can't help but feel Lin Carter did a poor job of imitating his voice after all. This lacks the doleful rhythm and morbid inevitability of "The Scroll of Morloc" and "The Double Tower." Maybe this is because "Crypt" is an attempt at comic incident -- a deceased necromancer reanimates in his tomb and delivers wry soliloquies, then craves a snack -- but honestly this doesn't seem to fit with those other two stories. It reads more like Carter threw the thesaurus at his typewriter and said "Close enough."
"The Goblin Blade" by Raul Garcia Capella (1977). A guy who cut his teeth writing imitations of Robert E. Howard set in Conan's universe here goes boldly into a world of his own devising -- and it's a sword 'n' sorcery pastiche as uninteresting and unoriginal as you could imagine. The standard mismatched warlock and warrior, bickering at first, exchanging awkward globs of backstory and scene-setting, gradually coming to an understanding and working well as a team to defeat a guy who is totally not blue-eyed Genghis Khan, and who turns out to be a djinn. Yawn. I think it's meant to be comic to some degree -- at least, I'm pretty sure the words that the main pair pronounce to each other are meant to be some form of banter -- but it's just not doing it for me.
"The Dark King" by C. J. Cherryh (1977). Half of Lin Carter's introduction to this story is him perving over how Cherryh is a "young and very attractive woman" -- a statement repeated, with less emphasis, before seemingly every story written by an up-and-coming female author in these books. Oh, traditional gender values.... Anyway, this is a slight but sweet mythological fairy tale, with Sisyphos manipulating the pity and compassion of Death in order to return to the world, then with further trickery binding Death and thereby discovering the usual moral of this sort of thing, viz. that Death is necessary for life to flourish. An unsurprising tale but a lovely one.
"Black Moonlight" by Lin Carter (1976). Time to gird up my loins and slog through another protracted interlude with What's-His-Face the Not-Viking from Lemuria. This time he's a pirate or something, but the beats of the tale are the same: seeking riches, Thongor runs afoul of degenerate beast men and a priest on loan from Clark Ashton Smith. An eldritch abomination gets summoned, there's some easy fighting, everyone has a good laugh afterward, the end. What bugs me about Lin Carter, aside from his questionable taste in stories and his relentless self-regard and so on, is how he's labeled "Master of Adult Fantasy" (by himself or by his publisher, no doubt, but it gets plastered all over these books just the same), yet his prose springs from the boys' adventure school of the 1930s. The only difference between them is Carter's heroes get their way with "Red Steel!" rather than good, clean American fists. How an adult could enjoy this pap is beyond me.
"The Snout in the Alcove" by Gary Myers (1977). Never having read Clark Ashton Smith undiluted, and never having read Lovecraft in any form, I must make a comparison with a parallel figure: Olaf Stapledon, who produced a lot of ideas and set-dressings science fiction still employs, but couched them in dry, treatise-like summations that aren't much fun to read. Along those lines, this story takes a potentially intriguing incident (drawn from a commingling of Smith's Hyperborea and Lovecraft's Dreamlands, and maybe stuff from Lord Dunsany I'm not yet acquainted with) and squashes it flat. A Zelazny-esque narrator (über-competent and quick-witted but essentially a blank slate) gets summoned into the Dreamlands by mistake by priests of the Elder Ones; a daemon, the intended object of the summoning, is on the loose; a red-robed stranger drifts from city to city in a rotting vessel, and all who hear him flee screaming, their cities melting under the moon behind them; in the de rigueur final twist, the narrator turns out to be the demon, thwarting the last hope of the Dreamlands. The ingredients are there for something juicy and spectacular, but this compressed and lifeless presentation just doesn't work for me. (The part about the red stranger, especially, put me in mind of Stephen King in his prime: that's what the Crimson King should have been like.)
"The Pool of the Moon" by Charles R. Saunders (1976). The novelty of the first Imaro story (in the first YBFS) has dulled somewhat; this feels much more like a generic heroic fantasy, sad to say, featuring what I believe is a completely serious use of the term "hot barbarian embrace."
To sum up: "Ring of Black Stone" and "The Dark King" were excellent, and "The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr" was the best story in the YBFS series to date, but disappointing entries from Saunders and de Camp added to the usual assortment of dull and/or terrible stories so beloved by Lin Carter. While there is noticeable improvement in individual stories, then, the series as a whole continues to labor under the "particular enthusiasms" of its editor. I eagerly await the Saha-edited years, if only for a change of direction.
Thursday, December 11, 2014
2014 read #119: Tailchaser's Song by Tad Williams.
Tailchaser's Song by Tad Williams
387 pages
Published 1985
Read from December 8 to December 11
Rating: ★★ out of 5
Tad Williams, not so long ago, was among my favorite authors. I sped through his Otherland series in '05, read The War of the Flowers first thing in '06, got hooked on the Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy in '07. Williams had a distinct problem with finishing his epic narratives in a satisfactory way, but before that point, the meat of his novels was inventive, colorful, and absorbing, gadding about rich and detailed worlds full of memorable imagery, more than enough in those less-cultivated days to make a fan of me. That warm fuzzy fondness persisted until early last year, when I had the misfortune of picking up The Dirty Streets of Heaven. It's the first volume in a "noir fantasy thriller" series centering on a sleazy angel named Bobby Dollar. As can be expected, I made it halfway down the second page before I couldn't take it anymore and (figuratively) threw it across the room. Not to put too fine a point on it, but that book (the first page, at any rate, not that I expect it improved with prolonged exposure) was shit. And for some unknowable reason, my library kept buying up each new volume as it appeared, souring my opinion of Williams every time I was reminded of their existence.
But a couple months back, Williams or his agent or somebody released word that Williams was working on a follow-up to Memory, Sorrow and Thorn. With my expectations so battered, I couldn't muster more than cautious pessimism about the prospect of the new storyline. But the thought of returning to the world of Osten Ard -- now that's tempting. And so Tad Williams has been lurking in the back of my mind lately. Which led to ordering this book from ILL.
The inevitable comparisons are to Watership Down -- and indeed, the first half or so of Tailchaser's Song gamely builds up the world, culture, and lore of the feline Folk in a manner not especially dissimilar to Richard Adams' go-to classic. It's not at the same level as Watership Down, even at its best, but there's an earnest charm that helps smooth over Williams' novice prose and languorous pacing. The second half of Tailchaser's Song, alas, is less Watership Down and more watered-down Tolkien imitation, descending into dreary sword 'n' sorcery guff and endless, endless dungeons in the dank earth -- because apparently the fallen feline demigod can breathe life into super-size orc-cats and blind snake-cats and spooky mummy-cats, but can't breed digging-cats with useful burrowing paws to further his nefarious evil schemes of evil, so he has to round up surface cats to slave in his tunnels with their ineffectual paws. But don't worry, the forest friends our hero won during his journey owe him a favor and carry the message to summon the bluff and hearty cat-prince who comes to the rescue, and the crazed wandering old cat turns out to be another cat demigod and our hero saves the day by reminding him who he is by fortuitously remembering a rhyme to say when he's in a tight spot. The second half of Tailchaser is, in a word, awful. It's no wonder the most prominent blurb on the cover is from Cat Fancy: only people who've never had cause to pick up a fantasy book before this could give it heartfelt praise.
But hey, this was Williams' first novel -- and it was the mid-'80s, which was a simpler time (especially in fantasy publishing). The cats' folklore was a nice running thread, and I liked the little glimpses into the cosmology and language of other animal folk, especially the brief (and honestly superfluous) encounter with Mother Rebum, eldest of the frogs.
387 pages
Published 1985
Read from December 8 to December 11
Rating: ★★ out of 5
Tad Williams, not so long ago, was among my favorite authors. I sped through his Otherland series in '05, read The War of the Flowers first thing in '06, got hooked on the Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy in '07. Williams had a distinct problem with finishing his epic narratives in a satisfactory way, but before that point, the meat of his novels was inventive, colorful, and absorbing, gadding about rich and detailed worlds full of memorable imagery, more than enough in those less-cultivated days to make a fan of me. That warm fuzzy fondness persisted until early last year, when I had the misfortune of picking up The Dirty Streets of Heaven. It's the first volume in a "noir fantasy thriller" series centering on a sleazy angel named Bobby Dollar. As can be expected, I made it halfway down the second page before I couldn't take it anymore and (figuratively) threw it across the room. Not to put too fine a point on it, but that book (the first page, at any rate, not that I expect it improved with prolonged exposure) was shit. And for some unknowable reason, my library kept buying up each new volume as it appeared, souring my opinion of Williams every time I was reminded of their existence.
But a couple months back, Williams or his agent or somebody released word that Williams was working on a follow-up to Memory, Sorrow and Thorn. With my expectations so battered, I couldn't muster more than cautious pessimism about the prospect of the new storyline. But the thought of returning to the world of Osten Ard -- now that's tempting. And so Tad Williams has been lurking in the back of my mind lately. Which led to ordering this book from ILL.
The inevitable comparisons are to Watership Down -- and indeed, the first half or so of Tailchaser's Song gamely builds up the world, culture, and lore of the feline Folk in a manner not especially dissimilar to Richard Adams' go-to classic. It's not at the same level as Watership Down, even at its best, but there's an earnest charm that helps smooth over Williams' novice prose and languorous pacing. The second half of Tailchaser's Song, alas, is less Watership Down and more watered-down Tolkien imitation, descending into dreary sword 'n' sorcery guff and endless, endless dungeons in the dank earth -- because apparently the fallen feline demigod can breathe life into super-size orc-cats and blind snake-cats and spooky mummy-cats, but can't breed digging-cats with useful burrowing paws to further his nefarious evil schemes of evil, so he has to round up surface cats to slave in his tunnels with their ineffectual paws. But don't worry, the forest friends our hero won during his journey owe him a favor and carry the message to summon the bluff and hearty cat-prince who comes to the rescue, and the crazed wandering old cat turns out to be another cat demigod and our hero saves the day by reminding him who he is by fortuitously remembering a rhyme to say when he's in a tight spot. The second half of Tailchaser is, in a word, awful. It's no wonder the most prominent blurb on the cover is from Cat Fancy: only people who've never had cause to pick up a fantasy book before this could give it heartfelt praise.
But hey, this was Williams' first novel -- and it was the mid-'80s, which was a simpler time (especially in fantasy publishing). The cats' folklore was a nice running thread, and I liked the little glimpses into the cosmology and language of other animal folk, especially the brief (and honestly superfluous) encounter with Mother Rebum, eldest of the frogs.
Sunday, December 7, 2014
2014 read #118: The Eye of the Heron by Ursula K. Le Guin.
The Eye of the Heron by Ursula K. Le Guin
179 pages
Published 1978
Read December 7
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
A small but beautiful book on the importance as well as the limits of nonviolent resistance. Through much of its length I mused on the naiveté of the dream of nonviolent triumph and nonparticipation; in a culture and a world squeezed by late-stage capitalism, with cops trained to bust up passive resistance and nowhere left to run off to, the thought that the tactics of Gandhi and King could flourish into a science fiction future was a sweet but sad and futile fantasy. I should have known Le Guin better than that, of course. Out of all the authors who have attempted utopian visions, Le Guin seems to have the best grasp of human failings, our cultural blinders, our sheer propensity to fuck everything up. Which makes the ending especially bittersweet and poignant, described as it is with Le Guin's gentle, deft beauty. We must all of us keep marching -- but on this planet, we've nowhere left to go.
179 pages
Published 1978
Read December 7
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
A small but beautiful book on the importance as well as the limits of nonviolent resistance. Through much of its length I mused on the naiveté of the dream of nonviolent triumph and nonparticipation; in a culture and a world squeezed by late-stage capitalism, with cops trained to bust up passive resistance and nowhere left to run off to, the thought that the tactics of Gandhi and King could flourish into a science fiction future was a sweet but sad and futile fantasy. I should have known Le Guin better than that, of course. Out of all the authors who have attempted utopian visions, Le Guin seems to have the best grasp of human failings, our cultural blinders, our sheer propensity to fuck everything up. Which makes the ending especially bittersweet and poignant, described as it is with Le Guin's gentle, deft beauty. We must all of us keep marching -- but on this planet, we've nowhere left to go.
Saturday, December 6, 2014
2014 read #117: The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 2, edited by Lin Carter.
The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 2, edited by Lin Carter
192 pages
Published 1976
Read from December 4 to December 6
Rating: ★★ out of 5
Here we are again, already. With chastened expectations (not that my expectations had been stratospheric for the first YBFS volume), I set out once more into what Wikipedia mildly calls Carter's "idiosyncratic" picks and "particular enthusiasms." In addition, Carter already seems confused about what "Year's Best" implies: much like a fading band releasing a couple new songs on a greatest hits compilation, two stories in this volume -- Tanith Lee's and Paul Spencer's -- appear in print for the first time here. Every story aside from those two, I should note, was published in 1975.
"The Demoness" by Tanith Lee. I know I've read a couple stories (or more) by Tanith Lee, but they've never left much of an impression. The first part of this story read like something I'd read somewhere before: an alabaster-pale vampire woman waiting at the top of a white tower, draining male adventurers of their minds and their lives by means of her magical vagina. Then one man escapes from her, so of course she falls in love with him, in a ravenous sort of way. This next part of the story reads more like a fairy tale, with the vampire woman drawn after the man fleeing before her, past helpful demon-women and into a Good Kingdom with a Good King and Noble Warriors and suchlike furniture. Slap a Thomas Canty painting on the cover and you could likely fool me into thinking it was from the '80s. Which, despite the growth and improvement of the genre during that decade, is not necessarily a good thing. I'd say this is an adequate example of its type, this New Gothic sexual horror fantasy whatever, but it isn't my kind of thing.
"The Night of the Unicorn" by Thomas Burnett Swann. I've only read one prior story by Swann ("The Manor of Roses," reviewed here), and it, by contrast, has lingered in my memory. I don't want to expect too much of this piece -- goodness knows I've been disappointed by every Howard Waldrop story after his sensational "God's Hooks!" -- so I tried to put that connection way back in my mind. I needn't have worried so much. This is a charming bit of exotica, a too-brief fable that, while nowhere near as excellent as "Manor of Roses," is better than any story in the first YBFS (except, possibly, "Falcon's Mate"). (Incidentally, SF set in modern-day Mayan country seems to have been a bit of a fad in the mid-'70s. There's this story in 1975, "The Women Men Don't See" in 1976, and "Manatee Girl Ain't You Coming Out Tonight" in 1977. A distinct trend, given how little short SF I've read from this period.)
"Cry Wolf" by Pat McIntosh. Speaking of "Falcon's Mate," this is the second installment of the adventures of Thula, spunky young war-maid evidently fated to break all the rules of her order (doubtless only to discover her order had the rules wrong all along). I don't have much experience with serialized short stories; I like the ones that tell complete, discrete adventures within a larger continuity, but this, sad to say, is the other kind, the sort that read like travel chapters in longer narratives and serve merely to move our hero into position for the next exploit. This entry introduces a possible Love Interest character -- a suave but presumably dangerous werewolf, pursued by his cousin who happens to be an Evil King -- whom Thula aids in a minor scuffle at an inn, before he rides off on the summons of a wizard, and that's it everybody, be sure to tune in next time. I wanted a good, meaty story, so I'm dissatisfied with what appears to be a salad course before the meal. I'm oddly taken with Thula and her world, though, so I'll just hope the next episode is more fulfilling.
"Under the Thumbs of the Gods" by Fritz Leiber. Speaking of lesser installments of serialized adventures, this is a bit of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser fluff, almost as bad as "Trapped in the Shadowland" in the previous volume. There's a definite Pratchett vibe to the three gods roused to displeasure by the boastings of the Twain -- more properly, one should say Pratchett has been known to exhibit a definite Fritz Leiber vibe, I suppose -- but there's a disquieting whiff of Piers Anthony to the Twain's current adventures, belt-unbuckling rather than swashbuckling. "Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser can't get laid because some gods are peeved" is hardly the sort of action I pictured. I'm no prude, but this sort of leering PG-13 titillation is neither sexy nor entertaining, especially when it gets unhinged and goes into a nightmare gallery of all the man-hating cliches of some Archie Bunker's idea of feminism -- climaxing with one "Alyx the Pick-lock," Joanna Russ' feminist adventurer, intoning "All men are enemies..." Yikes.
"The Guardian of the Vault" by Paul Spencer. Stale, rote stuff about a titanic evil summoned by one Atlantean wizard and sealed away by another, and the guard left to maintain the seal getting predictably tricked into relaxing his vigilance. I still don't know what the broader fantasy world was like in the mid-'70s, but Lin Carter sure loved him some titanic evils summoned by wizards (driven by evil or hubris, they're interchangeable really). Lin Carter, I should remind you, selected this previously unpublished tale for his Year's Best compilation, he thought it was that amazing.
"The Lamp from Atlantis" by L. Sprague de Camp. Perhaps it's merely the contrast with the previous two stories, but I really like this one. There's a whiff of Beagle's quiet humanity to this piece, that lingering sense of mood and dignified determination Beagle does so well, yet the characters have that ineffable de Camp quality to them, a sort of foolish scrappiness, faintly comedic figures bunching their fists at a world that wants to laugh at them. This may be the first explicitly Lovecraftian story I've ever enjoyed. Not surprisingly, it was first published in F&SF; perhaps even less of a surprise, it originally had the more fitting and dignified title of "The Lamp" before Lin Carter got his hands on it for this collection.
"Xiurhn" by Gary Myers. This little blip of a thing so condenses pulp fantasy that it almost -- almost -- metamorphoses into a kind of poetry, or at least something that takes time to disentangle. Stylistically it's odd, and creaky at times, but overall a good effect.
"The City in the Jewel" by Lin Carter. One interesting thing about reading old forgotten stories from this era is discovering trends and fads long since forgotten. These YBFS books have introduced me to what appears to be a now-defunct subgenre: the lost continent fantasy. In all my reading, I've never once come across a story set in Atlantis or Lemuria or Mu, yet if these collections are to be believed, they were frigging everywhere in mid-'70s fantasy. Most likely, of course, this represents selection bias -- one of Lin Carter's "particular enthusiasms," given that his tales are set in Lemuria. It's just striking that three of the last four stories have involved Atlantis or Lemuria in some capacity, while not one short story I've read after this period so much as hints at this sunken subgenre. This bit of historical trivia is more interesting by far than this story, a self-indulgent epic that takes up more pages than any other tale in this book yet remains utterly inessential. I was churning out superior prose by the time I was 15 -- and my prose has never been good, so that's saying something.
"In 'Ygiroth" by Walter C. DeBill, Jr. The concept of Neandertal-esque "beast men" learning to hunt from an ancient interdimensional horror intrigues me -- I'd like to read Lovecraft's Dreamlands cycle if it has more of this sort of thing. But I'm bored of Lovecraft's imitators packing this book with pastiches of dense Cosmicist pulp. De Camp's story, above, demonstrates a way to tell actual stories and do original things within a Lovecraftian context; mood pieces, like this and "Xiurhn," seem by contrast stilted imitations and belated copycats of a setting some five decades old at this point. I mean, I guess I can't say "In 'Ygiroth" is a bad story; rather, I just don't understand the continuing fixation, not only on the setting but also on the antiquated voice and unvarying esthetic that blurs together each of these entries, not to mention the repetition of the same damn plotline (ambitious adept hopes to gain power by meddling with unspeakable cosmic entities, gets owned by his own hubris) in this story, in "Xiurhn," in "The Double Tower" in the first YBFS, even (albeit in a somewhat disguised form) in "The Lamp."
"The Scroll of Morloc" by Clark Ashton Smith. Ah yes, a posthumous completion, with Lin Carter pawing through a dead author's papers and dealing them around. I should be thankful this is the only such carrion bird story in this collection; there were only three in the first YBFS, but there seemed to be more. Clinking together the rustier components of the thesaurus to tell a tale of -- you guessed it -- a disgruntled shaman permitting himself the hubris of violating the sacred "adytum" of his vile and unfathomable deity, and paying the usual price for his transgression, this story isn't technically Lovecraftian, but inhabits the same general idiom and offers the same lack of novelty.
"Payment in Kind" by C. A. Cador. Originally published in an "occult newspaper" -- that seems so damn '70s to me, a glimpse into the heyday of zines and early sci-fi conventions and the underground press. This is a straightforward fairy tale with an interesting magical concept supporting it, and the prose is comparatively vigorous and modern after the last several tales. Not a classic by any means, but it's tolerable, and a welcome change after the last several stories.
"Milord Sir Smiht, the English Wizard" by Avram Davidson. As much as I hate to look forward to any given story in one of these Lin Carter-curated anthologies, good ol' Avram Davidson has never let me down (though, admittedly, I've only read two of his stories before now). Lin Carter's intro to this story extols at length its setting, claiming that, heretofore, the majority of secondary world fantasies had been set in "prehistoric or legendary" milieus, the "only major exception" being The Blue Star by Fletcher Pratt -- a glimpse of how creatively impoverished fantasy had been up to this point. (The diverse literature of alternate history, I suppose, Carter shoehorns into science fiction, not fantasy.) Davidson's Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania is a pleasantly podunk kingdom (fourth largest in Europe) that serves well as the scene for a sly and charming drawing room comedy. The character of Doctor Eszterhazy is something of a cipher, but the rest of the cast is vividly caricatured and the story itself moves briskly toward a satisfactory wrap-up.
While this edition of YBFS was rough going for a while, "Milord Sir Smiht," "The Lamp," and "The Night of the Unicorn" were all worthwhile readings, and "Cry Wolf," while unsatisfactory on its own, was a fragment of a storyline I'm eager to continue. I don't know if the book as a whole deserves the generous rating of two entire stars, but I want to acknowledge a slight improvement -- very slight -- over the first volume.
192 pages
Published 1976
Read from December 4 to December 6
Rating: ★★ out of 5
Here we are again, already. With chastened expectations (not that my expectations had been stratospheric for the first YBFS volume), I set out once more into what Wikipedia mildly calls Carter's "idiosyncratic" picks and "particular enthusiasms." In addition, Carter already seems confused about what "Year's Best" implies: much like a fading band releasing a couple new songs on a greatest hits compilation, two stories in this volume -- Tanith Lee's and Paul Spencer's -- appear in print for the first time here. Every story aside from those two, I should note, was published in 1975.
"The Demoness" by Tanith Lee. I know I've read a couple stories (or more) by Tanith Lee, but they've never left much of an impression. The first part of this story read like something I'd read somewhere before: an alabaster-pale vampire woman waiting at the top of a white tower, draining male adventurers of their minds and their lives by means of her magical vagina. Then one man escapes from her, so of course she falls in love with him, in a ravenous sort of way. This next part of the story reads more like a fairy tale, with the vampire woman drawn after the man fleeing before her, past helpful demon-women and into a Good Kingdom with a Good King and Noble Warriors and suchlike furniture. Slap a Thomas Canty painting on the cover and you could likely fool me into thinking it was from the '80s. Which, despite the growth and improvement of the genre during that decade, is not necessarily a good thing. I'd say this is an adequate example of its type, this New Gothic sexual horror fantasy whatever, but it isn't my kind of thing.
"The Night of the Unicorn" by Thomas Burnett Swann. I've only read one prior story by Swann ("The Manor of Roses," reviewed here), and it, by contrast, has lingered in my memory. I don't want to expect too much of this piece -- goodness knows I've been disappointed by every Howard Waldrop story after his sensational "God's Hooks!" -- so I tried to put that connection way back in my mind. I needn't have worried so much. This is a charming bit of exotica, a too-brief fable that, while nowhere near as excellent as "Manor of Roses," is better than any story in the first YBFS (except, possibly, "Falcon's Mate"). (Incidentally, SF set in modern-day Mayan country seems to have been a bit of a fad in the mid-'70s. There's this story in 1975, "The Women Men Don't See" in 1976, and "Manatee Girl Ain't You Coming Out Tonight" in 1977. A distinct trend, given how little short SF I've read from this period.)
"Cry Wolf" by Pat McIntosh. Speaking of "Falcon's Mate," this is the second installment of the adventures of Thula, spunky young war-maid evidently fated to break all the rules of her order (doubtless only to discover her order had the rules wrong all along). I don't have much experience with serialized short stories; I like the ones that tell complete, discrete adventures within a larger continuity, but this, sad to say, is the other kind, the sort that read like travel chapters in longer narratives and serve merely to move our hero into position for the next exploit. This entry introduces a possible Love Interest character -- a suave but presumably dangerous werewolf, pursued by his cousin who happens to be an Evil King -- whom Thula aids in a minor scuffle at an inn, before he rides off on the summons of a wizard, and that's it everybody, be sure to tune in next time. I wanted a good, meaty story, so I'm dissatisfied with what appears to be a salad course before the meal. I'm oddly taken with Thula and her world, though, so I'll just hope the next episode is more fulfilling.
"Under the Thumbs of the Gods" by Fritz Leiber. Speaking of lesser installments of serialized adventures, this is a bit of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser fluff, almost as bad as "Trapped in the Shadowland" in the previous volume. There's a definite Pratchett vibe to the three gods roused to displeasure by the boastings of the Twain -- more properly, one should say Pratchett has been known to exhibit a definite Fritz Leiber vibe, I suppose -- but there's a disquieting whiff of Piers Anthony to the Twain's current adventures, belt-unbuckling rather than swashbuckling. "Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser can't get laid because some gods are peeved" is hardly the sort of action I pictured. I'm no prude, but this sort of leering PG-13 titillation is neither sexy nor entertaining, especially when it gets unhinged and goes into a nightmare gallery of all the man-hating cliches of some Archie Bunker's idea of feminism -- climaxing with one "Alyx the Pick-lock," Joanna Russ' feminist adventurer, intoning "All men are enemies..." Yikes.
"The Guardian of the Vault" by Paul Spencer. Stale, rote stuff about a titanic evil summoned by one Atlantean wizard and sealed away by another, and the guard left to maintain the seal getting predictably tricked into relaxing his vigilance. I still don't know what the broader fantasy world was like in the mid-'70s, but Lin Carter sure loved him some titanic evils summoned by wizards (driven by evil or hubris, they're interchangeable really). Lin Carter, I should remind you, selected this previously unpublished tale for his Year's Best compilation, he thought it was that amazing.
"The Lamp from Atlantis" by L. Sprague de Camp. Perhaps it's merely the contrast with the previous two stories, but I really like this one. There's a whiff of Beagle's quiet humanity to this piece, that lingering sense of mood and dignified determination Beagle does so well, yet the characters have that ineffable de Camp quality to them, a sort of foolish scrappiness, faintly comedic figures bunching their fists at a world that wants to laugh at them. This may be the first explicitly Lovecraftian story I've ever enjoyed. Not surprisingly, it was first published in F&SF; perhaps even less of a surprise, it originally had the more fitting and dignified title of "The Lamp" before Lin Carter got his hands on it for this collection.
"Xiurhn" by Gary Myers. This little blip of a thing so condenses pulp fantasy that it almost -- almost -- metamorphoses into a kind of poetry, or at least something that takes time to disentangle. Stylistically it's odd, and creaky at times, but overall a good effect.
"The City in the Jewel" by Lin Carter. One interesting thing about reading old forgotten stories from this era is discovering trends and fads long since forgotten. These YBFS books have introduced me to what appears to be a now-defunct subgenre: the lost continent fantasy. In all my reading, I've never once come across a story set in Atlantis or Lemuria or Mu, yet if these collections are to be believed, they were frigging everywhere in mid-'70s fantasy. Most likely, of course, this represents selection bias -- one of Lin Carter's "particular enthusiasms," given that his tales are set in Lemuria. It's just striking that three of the last four stories have involved Atlantis or Lemuria in some capacity, while not one short story I've read after this period so much as hints at this sunken subgenre. This bit of historical trivia is more interesting by far than this story, a self-indulgent epic that takes up more pages than any other tale in this book yet remains utterly inessential. I was churning out superior prose by the time I was 15 -- and my prose has never been good, so that's saying something.
"In 'Ygiroth" by Walter C. DeBill, Jr. The concept of Neandertal-esque "beast men" learning to hunt from an ancient interdimensional horror intrigues me -- I'd like to read Lovecraft's Dreamlands cycle if it has more of this sort of thing. But I'm bored of Lovecraft's imitators packing this book with pastiches of dense Cosmicist pulp. De Camp's story, above, demonstrates a way to tell actual stories and do original things within a Lovecraftian context; mood pieces, like this and "Xiurhn," seem by contrast stilted imitations and belated copycats of a setting some five decades old at this point. I mean, I guess I can't say "In 'Ygiroth" is a bad story; rather, I just don't understand the continuing fixation, not only on the setting but also on the antiquated voice and unvarying esthetic that blurs together each of these entries, not to mention the repetition of the same damn plotline (ambitious adept hopes to gain power by meddling with unspeakable cosmic entities, gets owned by his own hubris) in this story, in "Xiurhn," in "The Double Tower" in the first YBFS, even (albeit in a somewhat disguised form) in "The Lamp."
"The Scroll of Morloc" by Clark Ashton Smith. Ah yes, a posthumous completion, with Lin Carter pawing through a dead author's papers and dealing them around. I should be thankful this is the only such carrion bird story in this collection; there were only three in the first YBFS, but there seemed to be more. Clinking together the rustier components of the thesaurus to tell a tale of -- you guessed it -- a disgruntled shaman permitting himself the hubris of violating the sacred "adytum" of his vile and unfathomable deity, and paying the usual price for his transgression, this story isn't technically Lovecraftian, but inhabits the same general idiom and offers the same lack of novelty.
"Payment in Kind" by C. A. Cador. Originally published in an "occult newspaper" -- that seems so damn '70s to me, a glimpse into the heyday of zines and early sci-fi conventions and the underground press. This is a straightforward fairy tale with an interesting magical concept supporting it, and the prose is comparatively vigorous and modern after the last several tales. Not a classic by any means, but it's tolerable, and a welcome change after the last several stories.
"Milord Sir Smiht, the English Wizard" by Avram Davidson. As much as I hate to look forward to any given story in one of these Lin Carter-curated anthologies, good ol' Avram Davidson has never let me down (though, admittedly, I've only read two of his stories before now). Lin Carter's intro to this story extols at length its setting, claiming that, heretofore, the majority of secondary world fantasies had been set in "prehistoric or legendary" milieus, the "only major exception" being The Blue Star by Fletcher Pratt -- a glimpse of how creatively impoverished fantasy had been up to this point. (The diverse literature of alternate history, I suppose, Carter shoehorns into science fiction, not fantasy.) Davidson's Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania is a pleasantly podunk kingdom (fourth largest in Europe) that serves well as the scene for a sly and charming drawing room comedy. The character of Doctor Eszterhazy is something of a cipher, but the rest of the cast is vividly caricatured and the story itself moves briskly toward a satisfactory wrap-up.
While this edition of YBFS was rough going for a while, "Milord Sir Smiht," "The Lamp," and "The Night of the Unicorn" were all worthwhile readings, and "Cry Wolf," while unsatisfactory on its own, was a fragment of a storyline I'm eager to continue. I don't know if the book as a whole deserves the generous rating of two entire stars, but I want to acknowledge a slight improvement -- very slight -- over the first volume.
Friday, December 5, 2014
2014 read #116: Eye in the Sky by Philip K. Dick.
Eye in the Sky by Philip K. Dick
243 pages
Published 1957
Read from December 4 to December 5
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
An early, minor outing by Dick, exploring the usual PKD territory by hand-waving a group of eight survivors of a particle accelerator accident through a series of realities constructed from their perceptions and fantasies. It's at turns hilarious (especially in the reality constructed by the brain of the hard-line religious conservative) and unsettling (in the reality constructed by the brain of the paranoid schizophrenic). Unsurprisingly, given that this is PKD in the late '50s, there's an awful lot of misogyny, but that's offset somewhat by an unexpectedly enlightened attitude toward racial prejudice, including a description of white privilege, making this an interesting document of a time when white male authors were beginning to suspect that black people might be people, but still harbored few such suspicions toward women. Sealing the late '50s time capsule, the book ends with a warning about the dangers of international Communism.
243 pages
Published 1957
Read from December 4 to December 5
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
An early, minor outing by Dick, exploring the usual PKD territory by hand-waving a group of eight survivors of a particle accelerator accident through a series of realities constructed from their perceptions and fantasies. It's at turns hilarious (especially in the reality constructed by the brain of the hard-line religious conservative) and unsettling (in the reality constructed by the brain of the paranoid schizophrenic). Unsurprisingly, given that this is PKD in the late '50s, there's an awful lot of misogyny, but that's offset somewhat by an unexpectedly enlightened attitude toward racial prejudice, including a description of white privilege, making this an interesting document of a time when white male authors were beginning to suspect that black people might be people, but still harbored few such suspicions toward women. Sealing the late '50s time capsule, the book ends with a warning about the dangers of international Communism.
Thursday, December 4, 2014
2014 read #115: The Year's Best Fantasy Stories, edited by Lin Carter.
The Year's Best Fantasy Stories, edited by Lin Carter
175 pages
Published 1975
Read from December 2 to December 4
Rating: ★½ out of 5
My love of fantasy fiction cross-fertilizes with my love of history and antecedent to birth a fascination with the evolution of the genre. Collections like The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Modern Classics of Fantasy provide that crucial dimension of time-depth, but can't offer more than a cursory skim of any given period, and there are so few of them around. Yearly anthologies are less immediately satisfying, but become more interesting when stacked one atop the last. Until recently the oldest fantasy anthology series I knew was the one that began with the fantasy (and horror, ugh) of 1987, and no one I asked seemed to have any idea what I was talking about, let alone leads on finding anything earlier. Browsing Amazon, of all things, introduced me to the Lin Carter/Arthur W. Saha curated Year's Best Fantasy Stories series. A bunch of $4 purchases later, I now possess the first four annuals of the series (and, handily, the 13th, which brings the series to 1986 and the beginning of the Fantasy & Horror years).
The fantasy of the 1970s is more interesting in theory than in practice. I say this before having read word one of this book -- though, admittedly, my opinion is colored by a look at the contents page. (Our humble editor and guide includes one of his own stories as well as a second story he "completed" on behalf of an author who croaked over ten years previously.) Modern fantasy was still very much entangled in the afterbirth of Tolkien and Robert E. Howard; to mix the metaphor, '70s fantasy was a fragile thread (Carter's introduction seems to imply that the "adult fantasy" press consisted of a single publishing house by the end of 1974, namely DAW, the publishers of this series) without any hint of the '80s resurgence and revitalization at its nether end. My intent is to explore the evolution of fantasy from these dim times to the more familiar environs of the late '80s, at which point I'll resume my read of the Datlow-Windling Fantasy & Horror series, which, with patience, will bring me to the start of Hartwell's Year's Best Fantasy (in 2001) and the modern fantasy renaissance. In sum, grim as this starting point may seem, by the time I'm done I'll have a nearly complete record of annual fantasy anthologies from 1974-ish to the present, forty years of evolutionary trajectory. Biased, obviously, by the tastes of the editors -- which is why, eventually, I'd love to get my hands on bulk back issues of the likes of F&SF, Weird Tales, Asimov's, and whatever short-lived '80s and '90s fantasy 'zines I might find. But that's a far more expensive hobby.
Enough of that. One bit of bookkeeping: Carter's definition of "year" seems fanciful, so I'll include the copyright dates and assume they fall close to the original publication.
"The Jewel of Arwen" by Marion Zimmer Bradley (no copyright date). It all begins with this, then. Literal Tolkien fan-fiction. Not even the wink-wink type of fanfic, with your myrddraals and your Swords of Shannara -- actual, unapologetic Tolkien fanfic, originally published as a limited-print-run pamphlet, and written by a child molester at that. Does it get any more '70s? An unpromising start, no matter how painless the story itself is (though I must use "story" loosely). Aping the stilted briskness of The Lord of the Rings' appendices, Bradley sketches the history of the Phial of Galadriel from when a Boromir (not the Boromir, just a Boromir) remembers his family holds it as an heirloom to when it finds its way into the hands of Arwen Evenstar. Bradley apes Tolkien's voice well, and the "story" is over with quickly enough; that's all that can be said about this -- except that, again, this is literally fanfic written by a child molester.
"The Sword Dyrnwyn" by Lloyd Alexander (1973). A simple moralistic fable of a king's slide into evildoing and the enchanted sword that does what it says on the label. Painless but oh so familiar and predictable.
"The Temple of Abomination" by Robert E. Howard (1974). I don't know the precise dates of fantasy's dark ages. They dissolved into the '80s resurgence with the likes of Mythago Wood and the Fionavar Tapestry, but the decline from the Golden Age of Lovecraft, Burroughs, Howard, Weird Tales, and Unknown is trickier to pin down, largely because of the anomalous success of Tolkien and the persistent efforts of survivors like de Camp and Leiber. Whenever the dark ages began, during this period fantasy publishers seemed to operate on one directive: Give 'em more of the same old shit. The exhumation of Tolkien's minor works continues to this day, but during the decades of the dark ages, editors dug into the unfinished, unpublished papers of the Golden Age greats, spackling together "complete" stories and throwing them out there to see what stuck. "The Temple of Abomination" is one such posthumously unearthed tale, finished by one Richard L. Tierney; further, it is set in the world of the Cthulhu Mythos, so what we're dealing with is someone in 1974 finalizing an unpublished tale written by a dead guy and set in the story universe of a second dead guy, in an attempt to coast on the popularity of an intellectual property made popular fifty years prior. This, then, is the "best" 1974's fantasy literature had to offer. The story itself is red-blooded pulp, hyper-masculine and racist as shit, with bloodthirsty but still (somehow) noble Celts and Norsemen easily vanquishing an unholy temple brought to post-Roman Britain from the perfidious Orient, and learning that all white men are brothers when it comes to standing against Elder horrors (and people from the Orient, apparently). If you like that sort of thing, this story is adequate, a businesslike adventure that lays out its characters with bold, single strokes and never bothers with subtlety.
"The Double Tower" by Clark Ashton Smith (1973). Another posthumous completion (this time finished by Lin Carter, Master of Adult Fantasy, himself) of a deceased author's papers, once again set in the world of the Cthulhu Mythos. So far in this book we've had one original but derivative fable, one piece of brand new fan-fiction, and two exhumed stories written decades previously and set in the world of another dead guy -- and after this, there are only seven more stories to go. The best of the year, ladies and gentlemen. This tale is as dry as Olaf Stapledon filtered through an especially purple thesaurus; the texture of prose is, in essence, all there is to this vignette, which lacks any other form of substance. Moderately entertaining once you get into its rhythm, but as soon as you reach that point, it ends.
"Trapped in the Shadowland" by Fritz Leiber (1973). The only other Fafhrd and Grey Mouser story I've read so far was "Scylla's Daughter" (reviewed here), which at the time I found "entertaining in a corny way"; since then I've grown fonder of the Twain, even seeking out and purchasing the complete books of Lankhmar, which I plan to read next year. This, then, was one of two stories I looked forward to after a glance at the contents page (Jack Vance's Dying Earth entry at the end is the other). Sadly, even Lin Carter, Master of Adult Fantasy, admitted this story was "a minor effort." I'll go a step further and say "Trapped in the Shadowland" is half-assed. It's as if Leiber were experimenting to see how little effort he could put into a story and still see it snapped up for publication, stringing words together without concern over sense or flow or tension or anything writers might want to care about. Some alcohol and two whole hours seem to have sufficed for its completion. A minor effort; a major disappointment.
"Black Hawk of Valkarth" by Lin Carter (1974). I looked ahead in the years of this series to come, and saw that our humble editor, Master of Adult Fantasy, makes sure to include one of his own stories in every volume I bought so far. Carter's prose here resembles that of a modestly successful self-published ebook writer -- or rather, it's the other way around; far too much of today's amateur and indie fantasy prose still harks back to this primitive stage of the genre's development. Some might call the style pulp; I call it pap. This is a Northern barbarian's origin tale, as cliched as they come, and as dull as that implies.
"Jewel Quest" by Hannes Bok (1974). Another dead author, though this one was dead for merely one decade before 1974, and Carter makes no mention of any carrion birds "completing" the newly discovered manuscript (though he does own the copyright on the story, I observe). Carter calls this story "sly drollery"; I call it Orientalist fluffery, uninspired and lazy in its satire. It isn't as painful as, say, Piers Anthony (always the nadir of my personal metric), but at times it comes close, and overall it gave me scant enjoyment. Perhaps the preceding stories have set me against enjoying anything in this book. More likely, none of these stories have been very good.
"The Emperor's Fan" by L. Sprague de Camp (1973). Slightly more clever (and slightly less broad) Orientalist fantasy, essentially a fairy tale (of two hapless rulers and one magical item) delivered in an expanded, more naturalistic narrative. An indifferent piece, really, except for the memorable detail of court figures zipping about on roller skates -- deliberately goofy, yes, but undeniably practical.
"Falcon's Mate" by Pat McIntosh (1974). Carter's introduction to this piece notes that this is McIntosh's first published story, and gushes that she's "bound to go places in the years to come!" Naturally I had to look her up and see what became of her career; a modestly successful series of medieval mystery novels aside, all that Wikipedia lists is "a string of fantasy short stories published in the series of The Year's Best Fantasy Stories anthologies in the late 1970s." So much for the rise of a new voice in heroic fantasy, I guess; Lin Carter, Master of Adult Fantasy, got it wrong this time. And yet I... I like this? I like this! After all the tales told by dead men, this brisk and naturalistic low fantasy and its quiet, sturdy feminism feels fresh, invigorating. (That's a lot of paired adjectives but I don't care.) This story hints at the more literate fantasy to come in the next few years, while retaining some DNA from the pulp fantasy before it -- the characters' fates are decided by strategic board game, for example. A solid story, easily the best thing in the book.
"The City of Madness" by Charles R. Saunders (1974). In the introduction to this story, Lin Carter, Master of Adult Fantasy, makes a revealing statement: "Charles Saunders does something so original and so ingenious and yet so obvious, that it surprises me that no one ever thought of it before" -- namely, writing a sword 'n' sorcery fantasy set in a non-Eurasian milieu. It's almost as if a bunch of white guys regurgitating the same Conan mythos for decades suffered a lack of imagination and diversity of perspective, and never once thought to make their heroes anything other than Nordic demigods. This story suffers from its purple pulp style, but from the moment our hero Imaro happens upon three seeming conquistadors (actually dissipated white Atlanteans) tormenting a Bambuti pygmy in the jungle and proceeds to cut them down without breaking a sweat, I knew I was in for a rip-roaring fun time. It's kind of funny how the only two good stories in this collection so far were by brand new authors who weren't aging white men. This is the sort of genre evolution I was hoping to see in these books, the changeover from the stuck-in-past-glories old guard to the new voices of coming decades (and the ever so gradual progress toward diversity and new perspectives).
"The Seventeen Virgins" by Jack Vance (1974). Here we are at last, the second story I had looked forward to from the beginning. Expecting a disappointment similar to the half-assed Fritz Leiber piece, I was mollified to find this one mildly amusing, a Bugs Bunny-esque escapade in which charming rogue Cugel, beset by a belligerent bureaucrat in a strange town, performs a series of schemes to gain advantage, pay his tavern bill, and escape on the next caravan out of town, in the company of said seventeen virgins -- whose fate on the caravan is, of course, unsurprising. This story is adequate enough, I suppose. I'm just happy to be done with this collection.
Halfway through the book I visited the Wikipedia page for the series and found confirmation of something I'd already begun to suspect: "Carter's picks [in his years as the series' editor] tended to be idiosyncratic, concentrating on long-established authors in the field and reflecting his own particular enthusiasms. He also habitually padded out the volumes he edited with his own works, whether written singly, in collaboration, or under pseudonyms." I didn't suspect the pseudonym part, but the rest was clear after just a few stories (though "his own particular enthusiasms" is putting it more gently than I would). I already own the next three Carter volumes, so I feel obligated to power my way through those, but I'm tempted now to skip ahead to the first Saha year, 1981. Tempting, tempting -- but what other sources for late '70s fantasy might I find?
175 pages
Published 1975
Read from December 2 to December 4
Rating: ★½ out of 5
My love of fantasy fiction cross-fertilizes with my love of history and antecedent to birth a fascination with the evolution of the genre. Collections like The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Modern Classics of Fantasy provide that crucial dimension of time-depth, but can't offer more than a cursory skim of any given period, and there are so few of them around. Yearly anthologies are less immediately satisfying, but become more interesting when stacked one atop the last. Until recently the oldest fantasy anthology series I knew was the one that began with the fantasy (and horror, ugh) of 1987, and no one I asked seemed to have any idea what I was talking about, let alone leads on finding anything earlier. Browsing Amazon, of all things, introduced me to the Lin Carter/Arthur W. Saha curated Year's Best Fantasy Stories series. A bunch of $4 purchases later, I now possess the first four annuals of the series (and, handily, the 13th, which brings the series to 1986 and the beginning of the Fantasy & Horror years).
The fantasy of the 1970s is more interesting in theory than in practice. I say this before having read word one of this book -- though, admittedly, my opinion is colored by a look at the contents page. (Our humble editor and guide includes one of his own stories as well as a second story he "completed" on behalf of an author who croaked over ten years previously.) Modern fantasy was still very much entangled in the afterbirth of Tolkien and Robert E. Howard; to mix the metaphor, '70s fantasy was a fragile thread (Carter's introduction seems to imply that the "adult fantasy" press consisted of a single publishing house by the end of 1974, namely DAW, the publishers of this series) without any hint of the '80s resurgence and revitalization at its nether end. My intent is to explore the evolution of fantasy from these dim times to the more familiar environs of the late '80s, at which point I'll resume my read of the Datlow-Windling Fantasy & Horror series, which, with patience, will bring me to the start of Hartwell's Year's Best Fantasy (in 2001) and the modern fantasy renaissance. In sum, grim as this starting point may seem, by the time I'm done I'll have a nearly complete record of annual fantasy anthologies from 1974-ish to the present, forty years of evolutionary trajectory. Biased, obviously, by the tastes of the editors -- which is why, eventually, I'd love to get my hands on bulk back issues of the likes of F&SF, Weird Tales, Asimov's, and whatever short-lived '80s and '90s fantasy 'zines I might find. But that's a far more expensive hobby.
Enough of that. One bit of bookkeeping: Carter's definition of "year" seems fanciful, so I'll include the copyright dates and assume they fall close to the original publication.
"The Jewel of Arwen" by Marion Zimmer Bradley (no copyright date). It all begins with this, then. Literal Tolkien fan-fiction. Not even the wink-wink type of fanfic, with your myrddraals and your Swords of Shannara -- actual, unapologetic Tolkien fanfic, originally published as a limited-print-run pamphlet, and written by a child molester at that. Does it get any more '70s? An unpromising start, no matter how painless the story itself is (though I must use "story" loosely). Aping the stilted briskness of The Lord of the Rings' appendices, Bradley sketches the history of the Phial of Galadriel from when a Boromir (not the Boromir, just a Boromir) remembers his family holds it as an heirloom to when it finds its way into the hands of Arwen Evenstar. Bradley apes Tolkien's voice well, and the "story" is over with quickly enough; that's all that can be said about this -- except that, again, this is literally fanfic written by a child molester.
"The Sword Dyrnwyn" by Lloyd Alexander (1973). A simple moralistic fable of a king's slide into evildoing and the enchanted sword that does what it says on the label. Painless but oh so familiar and predictable.
"The Temple of Abomination" by Robert E. Howard (1974). I don't know the precise dates of fantasy's dark ages. They dissolved into the '80s resurgence with the likes of Mythago Wood and the Fionavar Tapestry, but the decline from the Golden Age of Lovecraft, Burroughs, Howard, Weird Tales, and Unknown is trickier to pin down, largely because of the anomalous success of Tolkien and the persistent efforts of survivors like de Camp and Leiber. Whenever the dark ages began, during this period fantasy publishers seemed to operate on one directive: Give 'em more of the same old shit. The exhumation of Tolkien's minor works continues to this day, but during the decades of the dark ages, editors dug into the unfinished, unpublished papers of the Golden Age greats, spackling together "complete" stories and throwing them out there to see what stuck. "The Temple of Abomination" is one such posthumously unearthed tale, finished by one Richard L. Tierney; further, it is set in the world of the Cthulhu Mythos, so what we're dealing with is someone in 1974 finalizing an unpublished tale written by a dead guy and set in the story universe of a second dead guy, in an attempt to coast on the popularity of an intellectual property made popular fifty years prior. This, then, is the "best" 1974's fantasy literature had to offer. The story itself is red-blooded pulp, hyper-masculine and racist as shit, with bloodthirsty but still (somehow) noble Celts and Norsemen easily vanquishing an unholy temple brought to post-Roman Britain from the perfidious Orient, and learning that all white men are brothers when it comes to standing against Elder horrors (and people from the Orient, apparently). If you like that sort of thing, this story is adequate, a businesslike adventure that lays out its characters with bold, single strokes and never bothers with subtlety.
"The Double Tower" by Clark Ashton Smith (1973). Another posthumous completion (this time finished by Lin Carter, Master of Adult Fantasy, himself) of a deceased author's papers, once again set in the world of the Cthulhu Mythos. So far in this book we've had one original but derivative fable, one piece of brand new fan-fiction, and two exhumed stories written decades previously and set in the world of another dead guy -- and after this, there are only seven more stories to go. The best of the year, ladies and gentlemen. This tale is as dry as Olaf Stapledon filtered through an especially purple thesaurus; the texture of prose is, in essence, all there is to this vignette, which lacks any other form of substance. Moderately entertaining once you get into its rhythm, but as soon as you reach that point, it ends.
"Trapped in the Shadowland" by Fritz Leiber (1973). The only other Fafhrd and Grey Mouser story I've read so far was "Scylla's Daughter" (reviewed here), which at the time I found "entertaining in a corny way"; since then I've grown fonder of the Twain, even seeking out and purchasing the complete books of Lankhmar, which I plan to read next year. This, then, was one of two stories I looked forward to after a glance at the contents page (Jack Vance's Dying Earth entry at the end is the other). Sadly, even Lin Carter, Master of Adult Fantasy, admitted this story was "a minor effort." I'll go a step further and say "Trapped in the Shadowland" is half-assed. It's as if Leiber were experimenting to see how little effort he could put into a story and still see it snapped up for publication, stringing words together without concern over sense or flow or tension or anything writers might want to care about. Some alcohol and two whole hours seem to have sufficed for its completion. A minor effort; a major disappointment.
"Black Hawk of Valkarth" by Lin Carter (1974). I looked ahead in the years of this series to come, and saw that our humble editor, Master of Adult Fantasy, makes sure to include one of his own stories in every volume I bought so far. Carter's prose here resembles that of a modestly successful self-published ebook writer -- or rather, it's the other way around; far too much of today's amateur and indie fantasy prose still harks back to this primitive stage of the genre's development. Some might call the style pulp; I call it pap. This is a Northern barbarian's origin tale, as cliched as they come, and as dull as that implies.
"Jewel Quest" by Hannes Bok (1974). Another dead author, though this one was dead for merely one decade before 1974, and Carter makes no mention of any carrion birds "completing" the newly discovered manuscript (though he does own the copyright on the story, I observe). Carter calls this story "sly drollery"; I call it Orientalist fluffery, uninspired and lazy in its satire. It isn't as painful as, say, Piers Anthony (always the nadir of my personal metric), but at times it comes close, and overall it gave me scant enjoyment. Perhaps the preceding stories have set me against enjoying anything in this book. More likely, none of these stories have been very good.
"The Emperor's Fan" by L. Sprague de Camp (1973). Slightly more clever (and slightly less broad) Orientalist fantasy, essentially a fairy tale (of two hapless rulers and one magical item) delivered in an expanded, more naturalistic narrative. An indifferent piece, really, except for the memorable detail of court figures zipping about on roller skates -- deliberately goofy, yes, but undeniably practical.
"Falcon's Mate" by Pat McIntosh (1974). Carter's introduction to this piece notes that this is McIntosh's first published story, and gushes that she's "bound to go places in the years to come!" Naturally I had to look her up and see what became of her career; a modestly successful series of medieval mystery novels aside, all that Wikipedia lists is "a string of fantasy short stories published in the series of The Year's Best Fantasy Stories anthologies in the late 1970s." So much for the rise of a new voice in heroic fantasy, I guess; Lin Carter, Master of Adult Fantasy, got it wrong this time. And yet I... I like this? I like this! After all the tales told by dead men, this brisk and naturalistic low fantasy and its quiet, sturdy feminism feels fresh, invigorating. (That's a lot of paired adjectives but I don't care.) This story hints at the more literate fantasy to come in the next few years, while retaining some DNA from the pulp fantasy before it -- the characters' fates are decided by strategic board game, for example. A solid story, easily the best thing in the book.
"The City of Madness" by Charles R. Saunders (1974). In the introduction to this story, Lin Carter, Master of Adult Fantasy, makes a revealing statement: "Charles Saunders does something so original and so ingenious and yet so obvious, that it surprises me that no one ever thought of it before" -- namely, writing a sword 'n' sorcery fantasy set in a non-Eurasian milieu. It's almost as if a bunch of white guys regurgitating the same Conan mythos for decades suffered a lack of imagination and diversity of perspective, and never once thought to make their heroes anything other than Nordic demigods. This story suffers from its purple pulp style, but from the moment our hero Imaro happens upon three seeming conquistadors (actually dissipated white Atlanteans) tormenting a Bambuti pygmy in the jungle and proceeds to cut them down without breaking a sweat, I knew I was in for a rip-roaring fun time. It's kind of funny how the only two good stories in this collection so far were by brand new authors who weren't aging white men. This is the sort of genre evolution I was hoping to see in these books, the changeover from the stuck-in-past-glories old guard to the new voices of coming decades (and the ever so gradual progress toward diversity and new perspectives).
"The Seventeen Virgins" by Jack Vance (1974). Here we are at last, the second story I had looked forward to from the beginning. Expecting a disappointment similar to the half-assed Fritz Leiber piece, I was mollified to find this one mildly amusing, a Bugs Bunny-esque escapade in which charming rogue Cugel, beset by a belligerent bureaucrat in a strange town, performs a series of schemes to gain advantage, pay his tavern bill, and escape on the next caravan out of town, in the company of said seventeen virgins -- whose fate on the caravan is, of course, unsurprising. This story is adequate enough, I suppose. I'm just happy to be done with this collection.
Halfway through the book I visited the Wikipedia page for the series and found confirmation of something I'd already begun to suspect: "Carter's picks [in his years as the series' editor] tended to be idiosyncratic, concentrating on long-established authors in the field and reflecting his own particular enthusiasms. He also habitually padded out the volumes he edited with his own works, whether written singly, in collaboration, or under pseudonyms." I didn't suspect the pseudonym part, but the rest was clear after just a few stories (though "his own particular enthusiasms" is putting it more gently than I would). I already own the next three Carter volumes, so I feel obligated to power my way through those, but I'm tempted now to skip ahead to the first Saha year, 1981. Tempting, tempting -- but what other sources for late '70s fantasy might I find?
Tuesday, December 2, 2014
2014 read #114: City of Illusions by Ursula K. Le Guin.
City of Illusions by Ursula K. Le Guin
203 pages
Published 1967
Read from December 1 to December 2
Rating: ★★ out of 5
Not a good sign: Le Guin, in an introduction to a reprint edition ten years after the original publication, muses about the differences between "the book one imagines and the book one writes." "When the discrepancy is particularly huge," she elaborates, "it is comforting to think Platonically that that subjective or visionary book is itself a mere shadow of the ideal BOOK, which nobody can ever get to...." Le Guin doesn't come out and say it in as many words, but she's all but warning away any potential reader: This book stinks. Don't bother. Her opinion of City of Illusions is sufficiently low that she takes the time to list the handful of things in it she's grateful she got to write.
Two of those items were my favorite bits of City of Illusions: "The chance to imagine my country, America, without cities, almost without towns, as sparsely populated by our species as it was five hundred years ago," as well as "The chance to give the country between Wichita and Pueblo a ruler worthy of it." The Prince of Kansas was great. And Le Guin's depictions of depopulated and reclaimed-by-wilderness North America were seductive, flirting with that well-after-the-apocalypse esthetic so rarely done right. (Le Guin's depopulated America, to be exact, is far emptier than it was before the Great Columbian Exchange began, a haunting landscape of humans huddled in small family clusters, obliterated by their alien overlords should they grow too populous or try to resurrect lost technologies.) The first half of the book, really, is a harmless, diverting adventure, a fun romp populated by "Thurro-Dowists" (Thoreau-Taoists) quoting On Walden Pond to alien wanderers, pathways snaking along the lines of ancient highways, and the anthropological touches that almost always enliven Le Guin's work.
It's when our hero arrives at the titular city that the book falls apart. In the introduction, Le Guin notes, "This book has Villain trouble," referring to the nefarious Shing race; and again, "Herds of Bad Guys are the death of a novel." Le Guin, writing this out in 1978, realizes the central failing of much popular, morally binary fantasy literature decades before most of its fans (many of whom still snap up reheated claptrap about dark elves and whatnot to this day). Despite its post-civilization, post-alien-conquest setting, City of Illusions is a fantasy quest novel to its core, a lightweight effort whose structural weaknesses become evident as soon as Falk leaves the wilderness. Like Le Guin, though, I'm grateful for the good bits.
203 pages
Published 1967
Read from December 1 to December 2
Rating: ★★ out of 5
Not a good sign: Le Guin, in an introduction to a reprint edition ten years after the original publication, muses about the differences between "the book one imagines and the book one writes." "When the discrepancy is particularly huge," she elaborates, "it is comforting to think Platonically that that subjective or visionary book is itself a mere shadow of the ideal BOOK, which nobody can ever get to...." Le Guin doesn't come out and say it in as many words, but she's all but warning away any potential reader: This book stinks. Don't bother. Her opinion of City of Illusions is sufficiently low that she takes the time to list the handful of things in it she's grateful she got to write.
Two of those items were my favorite bits of City of Illusions: "The chance to imagine my country, America, without cities, almost without towns, as sparsely populated by our species as it was five hundred years ago," as well as "The chance to give the country between Wichita and Pueblo a ruler worthy of it." The Prince of Kansas was great. And Le Guin's depictions of depopulated and reclaimed-by-wilderness North America were seductive, flirting with that well-after-the-apocalypse esthetic so rarely done right. (Le Guin's depopulated America, to be exact, is far emptier than it was before the Great Columbian Exchange began, a haunting landscape of humans huddled in small family clusters, obliterated by their alien overlords should they grow too populous or try to resurrect lost technologies.) The first half of the book, really, is a harmless, diverting adventure, a fun romp populated by "Thurro-Dowists" (Thoreau-Taoists) quoting On Walden Pond to alien wanderers, pathways snaking along the lines of ancient highways, and the anthropological touches that almost always enliven Le Guin's work.
It's when our hero arrives at the titular city that the book falls apart. In the introduction, Le Guin notes, "This book has Villain trouble," referring to the nefarious Shing race; and again, "Herds of Bad Guys are the death of a novel." Le Guin, writing this out in 1978, realizes the central failing of much popular, morally binary fantasy literature decades before most of its fans (many of whom still snap up reheated claptrap about dark elves and whatnot to this day). Despite its post-civilization, post-alien-conquest setting, City of Illusions is a fantasy quest novel to its core, a lightweight effort whose structural weaknesses become evident as soon as Falk leaves the wilderness. Like Le Guin, though, I'm grateful for the good bits.
Saturday, November 29, 2014
2014 read #113: Queen Victoria's Book of Spells, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling.
Queen Victoria's Book of Spells: An Anthology of Gaslamp Fantasy, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling
350 pages
Published 2013
Read from November 27 to November 29
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
An anthology of original stories recruited from contemporary top names in the subgenre -- I haven't read this sort of thing since After the King, almost two years ago. I haven't read a Datlow and Windling anthology since 1988's Year's Best Fantasy, just about one year ago. Both books were disappointing. But I'm cautiously optimistic about this one. The theme has promise: gaslamp fantasy is a catch-all term for fantasy derived from the 19th century and all things British-y, a classification that includes but isn't necessarily defined by steampunk. If even a third of these stories have the charm and verve of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, we're in for good times. Though given the inconsistent quality of stories delivered to themed anthologies, and Datlow and Windling's questionable tastes way back in the '80s, we'll just have to see. The names I recognize on the contents page rarely disappoint, at least so far, so that's something.
"Queen Victoria's Book of Spells" by Delia Sherman. Which came first: The name of this story or the title of the anthology? This entry almost reads as if Sherman were tasked with constructing a story around the title. Which is not to say it's bad or even unenthusiastic. The story is brisk and competent. But it's a bit on the simple side, following a very basic stock story format: Magical grad student unlocks the spells concealing secret passages in the young Queen Victoria's titular commonplace book, while grumbling about the parallels in his own life, viz. a tyrannical doctoral advisor and a struggle for self-determination. His crisis of conscience provoked by Victoria's secret and shady past helps him resolve the academic conflict entangling him, and gets him a date with the unexpectedly sweet and perceptive magical archivist to boot. It's unsurprising stuff that just about any fantasy author could write in their sleep. But still, it has charm.
"The Fairy Enterprise" by Jeffrey Ford. Interesting but half-cooked satire on Victorian industrialism. There are a couple images and incidents that tantalize with possibility, but the bulk of the narrative feels hastily assembled, scribbled down without the delicate magic I expect from Ford (and far more potty humor than I associate with him, including the immortal line "I shat a populace"). This, I fear, may be the risk of original anthologies -- everything is written to order and hurried to meet deadlines, rather than cultivated organically.
"From the Catalogue of the Pavilion of the Uncanny and Marvellous, Scheduled for Premiere at the Great Exhibition (Before the Fire)" by Genevieve Valentine. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the title, this is an epistolary story, heavy on catalog entries and scholarly notes, light on personal letters or affect. If there had been a strong tradition of faery fantasy in the 1950s or early '60s, I could well imagine this sort of story appearing then -- it has that same businesslike tone, recording the "facts" of the case from various snippets but not fleshing out story and character per se. It's okay, I guess, so far as it goes, but it's a disappointing use of a terrific title.
"The Memory Book" by Maureen McHugh. Another middling effort, dusting off the usual set dressings -- a governess, a tawdry family, fashion as a competition for status, a vacation at the seaside -- to sketch a tale of sympathetic magic. Nothing special, and in fact its denouement is a bit too similar to "Queen Victoria's Book of Spells" -- it felt like an inferior repeat.
"La Reine d'Enfer" by Kathe Koja. The first story in this collection with a bang-up opening and a distinctive, urgent narrative voice, and the first excellent story overall. Easily the best story so far, a superb and sensual joining of style, incident, and character, giddy with vengeance.
"For the Briar Rose" by Elizabeth Wein. Another which-came-first problem: Did I have trouble getting into this story because the narrative doesn't flow well, or did I feel the narrative didn't flow well because I couldn't get into the story? A fictionalized snoozer on the life of Margaret Burne-Jones (daughter of the artist Sir Edward Burne-Jones, who did a famous series of paintings on the subject of Briar Rose), which inevitably (and artlessly, I thought) mingles in a touch of Briar Rose folklore before concluding that childbirth can suddenly make everything in life clear and that motherhood is "a great act of creation" equal to poetry or art. The message is a bit too breeder-chic for my tastes, but my real issue with the story is how boring and unremarkable it is.
"The Governess" by Elizabeth Bear. In execution this is a workmanlike and too-predictable gothic piece of domestic and sexual tyranny, but the thematic linkage between the captivity of a selkie and the complex social traps of gender and class subjugation is inspired. I always appreciate a story that employs its genre conceit to illustrate a social injustice.
"Smithfield" by James P. Blaylock. This story is almost the reverse of "The Governess," in that it's an atmospheric and boldly-penned piece built around a corny premise: a young Arthur Conan Doyle taking photographs in Smithfield at the end of the gaslight era and discovering supernatural orbs caught on his plates (which, of course, vanish as soon as the electric lamps get switched on). It's been a while since I read anything by Doyle (aside from The White Company, which is in an archaic style and doesn't count), but I've read more books by him than by anyone else (except Stephen King, who also doesn't count). I don't think Blaylock quite catches Doyle's cadence. I appreciate that he made the effort, though -- it's only the second story in this collection that tries to do anything interesting with the narrative voice. I also appreciate the Ackroydian image of Doyle's plates "developing" into consecutive layers of Smithfield, accumulating backward through the ages until they become completely blackened and impenetrable. It's too bad the story itself is nothing much.
"The Unwanted Women of Surrey" by Kaaron Warren. Not a bad story, but one suffused with 1980s-style nihilism, in which a group of "hysterics" maintained in a home for the convenience of their husbands and families become the agents of a cholera plague, believing their actions will please the Grey Women and reward the "hysterics" with free will. It reads at times like earnest, Russ-esque venom and vengeance fantasy, but the ending -- in which the Grey Women greedily slurp up the blackened, shriveled soul of the plague-spreading ringleader, and all the other women utter a collective "Oopsie" -- complicates any allegorical reading. I should note that it isn't a great story, either.
"Charged" by Leanna Renee Hieber. This brief character study has enthusiasm but clatters along in amateurish prose: "My gift urged me to live by reinvented terms" has a certain lack of polish more consonant with the unpaying underbelly of online publication, and this sort of "arrogant antihero grasps at what he believes is rightfully his" boilerplate is a yawn.
"Mr. Splitfoot" by Dale Bailey. A solid entry, nicely chilling horror playing with the "reality" behind the sham of the Fox sisters. This sort of horror has a limited palette, but Bailey employs it to good effect. Though the "stinger" at the end (the devil was loosed upon the world just in time for the 20th century!) is eye-rollingly unoriginal.
"Phosphorus" by Veronica Schanoes. This is exactly the sort of story I want to write: A remorseless look at working conditions during the height of capital's power -- when workers were replaceable parts and could be worked to death without a second thought, poisoned into walking corpses, all the more gruesome because it's based on historical fact -- and the early, all-too-often forgotten working heroes who began the struggle against it. That said, something about this particular story leaves me cold. Much of the blame is on the second person narration, which sacrifices character and depth in favor of a false sense of immediacy. Then there's the plotline hinging on the magical Irish grandmother, a cheap and easy storytelling device that leaves me unsatisfied. The subject matter here is worth digging into (and it enriched me with the knowledge of phossy jaw as well as the London matchgirls strike itself -- who says fantasy can't be didactic?), but Schanoes' execution is only average. Schanoes' afterword (each of the stories here is followed by an afterword in which the authors explain their inspiration) is almost more moving than the story itself.
"We Without Us Were Shadows" by Catherynne M. Valente. Almost as good as "La Reine d'Enfer," this a charming piece on the Brontë siblings done in full The Girl Who... mode. It could be a lost chapter from that series; that sense of familiarity undercuts the effect, just a little bit, with the feeling that Valente has brought us here before and shown us identical wonders. Nonetheless a satisfying effort.
"The Vital Importance of the Superficial" by Ellen Kushner and Caroline Stevermer. Charming and hilarious. An epistolary story, again, but this time composed of unfailingly polite correspondence between contending wizards as well as their long-suffering family members. This one is definitely up there with "La Reine d'Enfer" and "We Without Us Were Shadows" as the best stories so far.
"The Jewel in the Toad Queen's Crown" by Jane Yolen. You'd never guess a story in which Prime Minister Disraeli uses kabbalistic magic to turn Queen Victoria into a toad (twice) would be boring, but this one is. Rather than demonstrating their working relationship in any way, Yolen has them thinking daggers at each other, Dune style, but without the dense political intrigue and interest factor of Dune. The internal monologues dammed any sense of impetus or flow, leaving me flipping pages to see how much more of this I was expected to read. I'm not sure what would suggest the connection between Disraeli and kabbalah in the first place, aside from, you know, the fact that he was born into a Jewish family. That creeps a little close to Magical Negro territory, so to speak, for my tastes. It's a shame -- a title like that, penned by Yolen, had led me to expect a charming fairy tale of a toad monarch in a mighty pond.
"A Few Twigs He Left Behind" by Gregory Maguire. Ah yes, another Maguire fanfiction -- I mean, another Maguire reinterpretation of/addendum to a beloved classic, this time A Christmas Carol. It's adequate enough, not as good as "Scarecrow" (reviewed here), not as godawful as Wicked, which I couldn't even finish (and so never reviewed). Maguire tries too hard, I think, to be Dickensian and picturesque, but with only indifferent success.
"Their Monstrous Minds" by Tanith Lee. A steampunk yawn centered on a cold, indifferent, megalomaniacal genius-inventor hurling lightnings and giving life to a Frankenstein superman on a remote island. Mechanical, omniscient prose, emulating the less enjoyable aspects of early Victorian storytelling, contributes to the reheated feeling of the piece.
"Estella Saves the Village" by Theodora Goss. Estella Havisham (I thought the name sounded familiar, but I had to look it up; I haven't, alas, read much Dickens yet) races to save a village populated by various other Victorian characters (from Lady D'Urberville to one Mr. Holmes) from a plague of nothingness -- which turns out to be memory loss in the brain of the modern woman in whose imagination the village exists. This sort of thing is corny in an inoffensive way, and kind of sweet. I'd hoped for a more bang-up closer, but hey, this story was palatable, and at least the book is done.
While I'm happy to have had the chance to read "La Reine d'Enfer," "We Without Us Were Shadows," and "The Vital Importance of the Superficial," most of the stories here were slapdash affairs, middling at best, tedious at worst. I'm beginning to suspect that original anthologies represent a easy cash-in for authors able to meet deadlines, not a promising field for all-time great works.
350 pages
Published 2013
Read from November 27 to November 29
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
An anthology of original stories recruited from contemporary top names in the subgenre -- I haven't read this sort of thing since After the King, almost two years ago. I haven't read a Datlow and Windling anthology since 1988's Year's Best Fantasy, just about one year ago. Both books were disappointing. But I'm cautiously optimistic about this one. The theme has promise: gaslamp fantasy is a catch-all term for fantasy derived from the 19th century and all things British-y, a classification that includes but isn't necessarily defined by steampunk. If even a third of these stories have the charm and verve of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, we're in for good times. Though given the inconsistent quality of stories delivered to themed anthologies, and Datlow and Windling's questionable tastes way back in the '80s, we'll just have to see. The names I recognize on the contents page rarely disappoint, at least so far, so that's something.
"Queen Victoria's Book of Spells" by Delia Sherman. Which came first: The name of this story or the title of the anthology? This entry almost reads as if Sherman were tasked with constructing a story around the title. Which is not to say it's bad or even unenthusiastic. The story is brisk and competent. But it's a bit on the simple side, following a very basic stock story format: Magical grad student unlocks the spells concealing secret passages in the young Queen Victoria's titular commonplace book, while grumbling about the parallels in his own life, viz. a tyrannical doctoral advisor and a struggle for self-determination. His crisis of conscience provoked by Victoria's secret and shady past helps him resolve the academic conflict entangling him, and gets him a date with the unexpectedly sweet and perceptive magical archivist to boot. It's unsurprising stuff that just about any fantasy author could write in their sleep. But still, it has charm.
"The Fairy Enterprise" by Jeffrey Ford. Interesting but half-cooked satire on Victorian industrialism. There are a couple images and incidents that tantalize with possibility, but the bulk of the narrative feels hastily assembled, scribbled down without the delicate magic I expect from Ford (and far more potty humor than I associate with him, including the immortal line "I shat a populace"). This, I fear, may be the risk of original anthologies -- everything is written to order and hurried to meet deadlines, rather than cultivated organically.
"From the Catalogue of the Pavilion of the Uncanny and Marvellous, Scheduled for Premiere at the Great Exhibition (Before the Fire)" by Genevieve Valentine. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the title, this is an epistolary story, heavy on catalog entries and scholarly notes, light on personal letters or affect. If there had been a strong tradition of faery fantasy in the 1950s or early '60s, I could well imagine this sort of story appearing then -- it has that same businesslike tone, recording the "facts" of the case from various snippets but not fleshing out story and character per se. It's okay, I guess, so far as it goes, but it's a disappointing use of a terrific title.
"The Memory Book" by Maureen McHugh. Another middling effort, dusting off the usual set dressings -- a governess, a tawdry family, fashion as a competition for status, a vacation at the seaside -- to sketch a tale of sympathetic magic. Nothing special, and in fact its denouement is a bit too similar to "Queen Victoria's Book of Spells" -- it felt like an inferior repeat.
"La Reine d'Enfer" by Kathe Koja. The first story in this collection with a bang-up opening and a distinctive, urgent narrative voice, and the first excellent story overall. Easily the best story so far, a superb and sensual joining of style, incident, and character, giddy with vengeance.
"For the Briar Rose" by Elizabeth Wein. Another which-came-first problem: Did I have trouble getting into this story because the narrative doesn't flow well, or did I feel the narrative didn't flow well because I couldn't get into the story? A fictionalized snoozer on the life of Margaret Burne-Jones (daughter of the artist Sir Edward Burne-Jones, who did a famous series of paintings on the subject of Briar Rose), which inevitably (and artlessly, I thought) mingles in a touch of Briar Rose folklore before concluding that childbirth can suddenly make everything in life clear and that motherhood is "a great act of creation" equal to poetry or art. The message is a bit too breeder-chic for my tastes, but my real issue with the story is how boring and unremarkable it is.
"The Governess" by Elizabeth Bear. In execution this is a workmanlike and too-predictable gothic piece of domestic and sexual tyranny, but the thematic linkage between the captivity of a selkie and the complex social traps of gender and class subjugation is inspired. I always appreciate a story that employs its genre conceit to illustrate a social injustice.
"Smithfield" by James P. Blaylock. This story is almost the reverse of "The Governess," in that it's an atmospheric and boldly-penned piece built around a corny premise: a young Arthur Conan Doyle taking photographs in Smithfield at the end of the gaslight era and discovering supernatural orbs caught on his plates (which, of course, vanish as soon as the electric lamps get switched on). It's been a while since I read anything by Doyle (aside from The White Company, which is in an archaic style and doesn't count), but I've read more books by him than by anyone else (except Stephen King, who also doesn't count). I don't think Blaylock quite catches Doyle's cadence. I appreciate that he made the effort, though -- it's only the second story in this collection that tries to do anything interesting with the narrative voice. I also appreciate the Ackroydian image of Doyle's plates "developing" into consecutive layers of Smithfield, accumulating backward through the ages until they become completely blackened and impenetrable. It's too bad the story itself is nothing much.
"The Unwanted Women of Surrey" by Kaaron Warren. Not a bad story, but one suffused with 1980s-style nihilism, in which a group of "hysterics" maintained in a home for the convenience of their husbands and families become the agents of a cholera plague, believing their actions will please the Grey Women and reward the "hysterics" with free will. It reads at times like earnest, Russ-esque venom and vengeance fantasy, but the ending -- in which the Grey Women greedily slurp up the blackened, shriveled soul of the plague-spreading ringleader, and all the other women utter a collective "Oopsie" -- complicates any allegorical reading. I should note that it isn't a great story, either.
"Charged" by Leanna Renee Hieber. This brief character study has enthusiasm but clatters along in amateurish prose: "My gift urged me to live by reinvented terms" has a certain lack of polish more consonant with the unpaying underbelly of online publication, and this sort of "arrogant antihero grasps at what he believes is rightfully his" boilerplate is a yawn.
"Mr. Splitfoot" by Dale Bailey. A solid entry, nicely chilling horror playing with the "reality" behind the sham of the Fox sisters. This sort of horror has a limited palette, but Bailey employs it to good effect. Though the "stinger" at the end (the devil was loosed upon the world just in time for the 20th century!) is eye-rollingly unoriginal.
"Phosphorus" by Veronica Schanoes. This is exactly the sort of story I want to write: A remorseless look at working conditions during the height of capital's power -- when workers were replaceable parts and could be worked to death without a second thought, poisoned into walking corpses, all the more gruesome because it's based on historical fact -- and the early, all-too-often forgotten working heroes who began the struggle against it. That said, something about this particular story leaves me cold. Much of the blame is on the second person narration, which sacrifices character and depth in favor of a false sense of immediacy. Then there's the plotline hinging on the magical Irish grandmother, a cheap and easy storytelling device that leaves me unsatisfied. The subject matter here is worth digging into (and it enriched me with the knowledge of phossy jaw as well as the London matchgirls strike itself -- who says fantasy can't be didactic?), but Schanoes' execution is only average. Schanoes' afterword (each of the stories here is followed by an afterword in which the authors explain their inspiration) is almost more moving than the story itself.
"We Without Us Were Shadows" by Catherynne M. Valente. Almost as good as "La Reine d'Enfer," this a charming piece on the Brontë siblings done in full The Girl Who... mode. It could be a lost chapter from that series; that sense of familiarity undercuts the effect, just a little bit, with the feeling that Valente has brought us here before and shown us identical wonders. Nonetheless a satisfying effort.
"The Vital Importance of the Superficial" by Ellen Kushner and Caroline Stevermer. Charming and hilarious. An epistolary story, again, but this time composed of unfailingly polite correspondence between contending wizards as well as their long-suffering family members. This one is definitely up there with "La Reine d'Enfer" and "We Without Us Were Shadows" as the best stories so far.
"The Jewel in the Toad Queen's Crown" by Jane Yolen. You'd never guess a story in which Prime Minister Disraeli uses kabbalistic magic to turn Queen Victoria into a toad (twice) would be boring, but this one is. Rather than demonstrating their working relationship in any way, Yolen has them thinking daggers at each other, Dune style, but without the dense political intrigue and interest factor of Dune. The internal monologues dammed any sense of impetus or flow, leaving me flipping pages to see how much more of this I was expected to read. I'm not sure what would suggest the connection between Disraeli and kabbalah in the first place, aside from, you know, the fact that he was born into a Jewish family. That creeps a little close to Magical Negro territory, so to speak, for my tastes. It's a shame -- a title like that, penned by Yolen, had led me to expect a charming fairy tale of a toad monarch in a mighty pond.
"A Few Twigs He Left Behind" by Gregory Maguire. Ah yes, another Maguire fanfiction -- I mean, another Maguire reinterpretation of/addendum to a beloved classic, this time A Christmas Carol. It's adequate enough, not as good as "Scarecrow" (reviewed here), not as godawful as Wicked, which I couldn't even finish (and so never reviewed). Maguire tries too hard, I think, to be Dickensian and picturesque, but with only indifferent success.
"Their Monstrous Minds" by Tanith Lee. A steampunk yawn centered on a cold, indifferent, megalomaniacal genius-inventor hurling lightnings and giving life to a Frankenstein superman on a remote island. Mechanical, omniscient prose, emulating the less enjoyable aspects of early Victorian storytelling, contributes to the reheated feeling of the piece.
"Estella Saves the Village" by Theodora Goss. Estella Havisham (I thought the name sounded familiar, but I had to look it up; I haven't, alas, read much Dickens yet) races to save a village populated by various other Victorian characters (from Lady D'Urberville to one Mr. Holmes) from a plague of nothingness -- which turns out to be memory loss in the brain of the modern woman in whose imagination the village exists. This sort of thing is corny in an inoffensive way, and kind of sweet. I'd hoped for a more bang-up closer, but hey, this story was palatable, and at least the book is done.
While I'm happy to have had the chance to read "La Reine d'Enfer," "We Without Us Were Shadows," and "The Vital Importance of the Superficial," most of the stories here were slapdash affairs, middling at best, tedious at worst. I'm beginning to suspect that original anthologies represent a easy cash-in for authors able to meet deadlines, not a promising field for all-time great works.
Thursday, November 27, 2014
2014 read #112: The Island at the End of the World by Sam Taylor.
The Island at the End of the World by Sam Taylor
215 pages
Published 2009
Read from November 26 to November 27
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
I have, in many ways, conventional tastes. This came up in a spat once some years ago on a message board where I'd volunteered to judge a short story contest. One of the entrants submitted a dull, derivative would-be shocker tale of an amoral photographer sleazing around Italy, taking nude shots of teens after providing them with drugs -- basically the sort of "aren't I so transgressive" stuff that was all the rage in the 1980s. In my naiveté, I admitted I often couldn't get into stories with wholly unappealing main characters; the writer went on some sort of lit-crit rant, name-dropping niche authors and philosophers and reviving Dostoevsky vs. Tolstoy (he, modestly, cast himself as Dostoevsky), before it dawned on him, to his dismay, that I was a philistine who liked pew-pew sci-fi. He retained his sense of superiority, I gave my vote to a far more entertaining story, and that was the end of it.
It's true, though, that I really don't get into completely unappealing central characters, with few exceptions. Which makes my reaction to The Island at the End of the World kind of funny. I most enjoyed the chapters narrated by the paranoid, psychotic, abusive, religious whack-job father, while wishing I could skim past the portions narrated by his isolated, confused, lonely, aching, presumably more sympathetic son. The difference is in the narration. The father's chapters were exceptionally well-written, conveying the cadence and the impatient "Why can't you fools see this, it's all there in front of you" emphasis of paranoia so faithfully that I felt uneasy at times, recalling all too clearly my own paranoid, psychotic, abusive, religious whack-job father. Finn's chapters, however, which should have appealed to memories of growing up in total isolation under the oppressive rule of my father, struck me as wonky. The boy appears to be almost nine years old -- raised without formal schooling, it's true, but from an early age reading from a book of fairy tales and the King James Bible. I'd expect some eccentricity in his spelling, but I didn't go to school either, and by that age (one of the last years I believed my own father's delusions) I would never be spelling know as "no," I'm as "ahm," icy as "I-see," and so on. I would mix up, say, "wear" and "where"; I would have bungled out phonetic spellings of complicated words (and likely misuse some); but nothing at all like this. I have an affinity for faux-naive narration, as I mentioned in a previous review, but with Finn, it was just too much, too implausible. His voice is closer to Charlie Gordon than to grade-schooler. Taylor should have toned it down considerably -- or at least, I think so.
Finn's older sister Alice has p.o.v. chapters in the second half of the book; her voice is less original, a more typical literary prose voice, mingling hesitance and defiance as she attempts to cut loose from her father and attach herself to the stranger newly arrived to the island -- an excellent enough voice, but not as bold as the first two styles. I did, however, enjoy the consistent tics of language shared by the whole family, a clever touch given their isolation and the father's religious delusions. I could picture the children soaking up their father's speech patterns during their years on the island. That was a neat touch.
Voices and moods are the strength of this book, because the plot, such as it is, kind of fizzles toward the end, taking a weak M. Night Shyamalan twist from the rarefied airs of myth and Shakespeare to a somewhat silly and hard-to-visualize mundane explanation.
215 pages
Published 2009
Read from November 26 to November 27
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
I have, in many ways, conventional tastes. This came up in a spat once some years ago on a message board where I'd volunteered to judge a short story contest. One of the entrants submitted a dull, derivative would-be shocker tale of an amoral photographer sleazing around Italy, taking nude shots of teens after providing them with drugs -- basically the sort of "aren't I so transgressive" stuff that was all the rage in the 1980s. In my naiveté, I admitted I often couldn't get into stories with wholly unappealing main characters; the writer went on some sort of lit-crit rant, name-dropping niche authors and philosophers and reviving Dostoevsky vs. Tolstoy (he, modestly, cast himself as Dostoevsky), before it dawned on him, to his dismay, that I was a philistine who liked pew-pew sci-fi. He retained his sense of superiority, I gave my vote to a far more entertaining story, and that was the end of it.
It's true, though, that I really don't get into completely unappealing central characters, with few exceptions. Which makes my reaction to The Island at the End of the World kind of funny. I most enjoyed the chapters narrated by the paranoid, psychotic, abusive, religious whack-job father, while wishing I could skim past the portions narrated by his isolated, confused, lonely, aching, presumably more sympathetic son. The difference is in the narration. The father's chapters were exceptionally well-written, conveying the cadence and the impatient "Why can't you fools see this, it's all there in front of you" emphasis of paranoia so faithfully that I felt uneasy at times, recalling all too clearly my own paranoid, psychotic, abusive, religious whack-job father. Finn's chapters, however, which should have appealed to memories of growing up in total isolation under the oppressive rule of my father, struck me as wonky. The boy appears to be almost nine years old -- raised without formal schooling, it's true, but from an early age reading from a book of fairy tales and the King James Bible. I'd expect some eccentricity in his spelling, but I didn't go to school either, and by that age (one of the last years I believed my own father's delusions) I would never be spelling know as "no," I'm as "ahm," icy as "I-see," and so on. I would mix up, say, "wear" and "where"; I would have bungled out phonetic spellings of complicated words (and likely misuse some); but nothing at all like this. I have an affinity for faux-naive narration, as I mentioned in a previous review, but with Finn, it was just too much, too implausible. His voice is closer to Charlie Gordon than to grade-schooler. Taylor should have toned it down considerably -- or at least, I think so.
Finn's older sister Alice has p.o.v. chapters in the second half of the book; her voice is less original, a more typical literary prose voice, mingling hesitance and defiance as she attempts to cut loose from her father and attach herself to the stranger newly arrived to the island -- an excellent enough voice, but not as bold as the first two styles. I did, however, enjoy the consistent tics of language shared by the whole family, a clever touch given their isolation and the father's religious delusions. I could picture the children soaking up their father's speech patterns during their years on the island. That was a neat touch.
Voices and moods are the strength of this book, because the plot, such as it is, kind of fizzles toward the end, taking a weak M. Night Shyamalan twist from the rarefied airs of myth and Shakespeare to a somewhat silly and hard-to-visualize mundane explanation.
Tuesday, November 25, 2014
2014 read #111: The Lambs of London by Peter Ackroyd.
The Lambs of London by Peter Ackroyd
213 pages
Published 2004
Read November 25
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
The other day I was looking through Ursula K. Le Guin's Wikipedia page to pick out which of her books I should read next. Some editor noted that The Eye of the Heron was one of her "minor novels." For whatever reason I've become taken with that phrase. I can't resist thinking The Lambs of London qualifies as a "minor novel" for Ackroyd. It lacks the thematic elegance of Chatterton's layers of forgery and illusion, offering only a single nod in that direction during an enigmatic encounter with a handbill hawker who, after the climactic performance of Vortigern, declares, "Ah, sir, it may be real and yet unreal" -- a summation, if I've ever seen one, of Ackroyd's enduring preoccupation. It differs from Chatterton again in its simplicity, downplaying Ackroyd's penchant for minutely observed eccentrics, resulting in a slim volume that, if anything, errs in the other direction, toward efficiency and lack of affect. It's disappointingly straightforward, in fact. In some ways Lambs reads like Ackroyd going through the motions, presenting a dramatization of a historical curiosity without the gusto of his major efforts. Even First Light, in my opinion Ackroyd's most disappointing novel, tells its tale with more verve and ambition.
While enjoyable on its own terms, Lambs is by no means an essential addition to Ackroyd's tapestry of London.
213 pages
Published 2004
Read November 25
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
The other day I was looking through Ursula K. Le Guin's Wikipedia page to pick out which of her books I should read next. Some editor noted that The Eye of the Heron was one of her "minor novels." For whatever reason I've become taken with that phrase. I can't resist thinking The Lambs of London qualifies as a "minor novel" for Ackroyd. It lacks the thematic elegance of Chatterton's layers of forgery and illusion, offering only a single nod in that direction during an enigmatic encounter with a handbill hawker who, after the climactic performance of Vortigern, declares, "Ah, sir, it may be real and yet unreal" -- a summation, if I've ever seen one, of Ackroyd's enduring preoccupation. It differs from Chatterton again in its simplicity, downplaying Ackroyd's penchant for minutely observed eccentrics, resulting in a slim volume that, if anything, errs in the other direction, toward efficiency and lack of affect. It's disappointingly straightforward, in fact. In some ways Lambs reads like Ackroyd going through the motions, presenting a dramatization of a historical curiosity without the gusto of his major efforts. Even First Light, in my opinion Ackroyd's most disappointing novel, tells its tale with more verve and ambition.
While enjoyable on its own terms, Lambs is by no means an essential addition to Ackroyd's tapestry of London.
2014 read #110: Sarah Canary by Karen Joy Fowler.
Sarah Canary by Karen Joy Fowler
291 pages
Published 1991
Read from November 23 to November 25
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
As with a number of books I picked up this year, I was inspired to read Sarah Canary by (and in fact I only heard of Sarah Canary in the first place because of) this Buzzfeed list of 99 alleged "classic" science fiction novels. What fantastic element exists within Sarah Canary is so attenuated, however, I for one would hesitate to ascribe any fantastic intent to it at all. Which is kind of neat, in that it ties into one of the book's through-lines: the titular character is perceived by those around her according to what they want her to be. The Chinese laborer at first believes her to be a ghost lover, come to enchant him or to bring him good fortune in return for his consideration and protection. The female suffragist believes her to be a woman wanted for murder, and thinks only she can return Sarah Canary safely and vindicate her supposed crime. The biologist sees her as a feral child. The drunken showman who believes he's cursed with immortality concludes she's a vampire loose in the West, and only he can track her down and kill her. The storylines form circles within and around each other, and underneath, on "the level of what is," Sarah Canary moves through the world and her identity and her purpose are never explained.
On one level, then, Sarah Canary is a work of esthetics, lingering on sharply observed (and quietly lovely) descriptions of rain and moon and reflections; on another, more structural level it is a social, didactic novel, put together almost like a doctoral thesis on social conditions in Washington and San Francisco in 1873. Each chapter introduces a topic related to life in the post-Civil War era -- Chinese labor, the conquest of the Native Americans, Mesmerism and life in asylums, Darwinian biology, freakshows and sensations, women's suffrage, just about everything, in fact, except black life in the aftermath of failed Reconstruction -- and tallies it toward the thrust of the central theme. It is also a novel of comic misadventure, though told with such grunge-era seriousness, such attention to the cold and the rain, that I'd hesitate to say it becomes funny beyond one or two clever bits of dialogue and certain ironic callbacks.
Sarah Canary is beautiful, and it works its way into you, but I think it works better as an incisive lecture and teachable moment than as a novel.
291 pages
Published 1991
Read from November 23 to November 25
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
As with a number of books I picked up this year, I was inspired to read Sarah Canary by (and in fact I only heard of Sarah Canary in the first place because of) this Buzzfeed list of 99 alleged "classic" science fiction novels. What fantastic element exists within Sarah Canary is so attenuated, however, I for one would hesitate to ascribe any fantastic intent to it at all. Which is kind of neat, in that it ties into one of the book's through-lines: the titular character is perceived by those around her according to what they want her to be. The Chinese laborer at first believes her to be a ghost lover, come to enchant him or to bring him good fortune in return for his consideration and protection. The female suffragist believes her to be a woman wanted for murder, and thinks only she can return Sarah Canary safely and vindicate her supposed crime. The biologist sees her as a feral child. The drunken showman who believes he's cursed with immortality concludes she's a vampire loose in the West, and only he can track her down and kill her. The storylines form circles within and around each other, and underneath, on "the level of what is," Sarah Canary moves through the world and her identity and her purpose are never explained.
On one level, then, Sarah Canary is a work of esthetics, lingering on sharply observed (and quietly lovely) descriptions of rain and moon and reflections; on another, more structural level it is a social, didactic novel, put together almost like a doctoral thesis on social conditions in Washington and San Francisco in 1873. Each chapter introduces a topic related to life in the post-Civil War era -- Chinese labor, the conquest of the Native Americans, Mesmerism and life in asylums, Darwinian biology, freakshows and sensations, women's suffrage, just about everything, in fact, except black life in the aftermath of failed Reconstruction -- and tallies it toward the thrust of the central theme. It is also a novel of comic misadventure, though told with such grunge-era seriousness, such attention to the cold and the rain, that I'd hesitate to say it becomes funny beyond one or two clever bits of dialogue and certain ironic callbacks.
Sarah Canary is beautiful, and it works its way into you, but I think it works better as an incisive lecture and teachable moment than as a novel.
Sunday, November 23, 2014
2014 read #109: Territory by Emma Bull.
Territory by Emma Bull
318 pages
Published 2007
Read from November 21 to November 23
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
The other day I looked through some of my early reviews, something I haven't done in a while. Two things struck me about those bygone days: my seeming miraculous ability to finish a book every forty-eight hours, and my inexhaustible enthusiasm for writing a rambling, wordy review for each and every one of them. This entire year I've struggled to maintain a ten books a month average, and especially in recent months I've been unable to scrounge up more than a paragraph for any given review, even if the book was 600 pages long and presumably full of all sorts of ideas and critical interest to unpack. Which is not to say I was incapable of brevity when I began this blog; the first one-paragraph review dropped as early as that February. The problem is I seem incapable of writing more than one paragraph nowadays, not even when it's an intricate book that should leave me with much to talk about. (The one exception is when I dislike a book enough to rant about it at length, but even The Hanging Stones wrung out a review that would barely be considered average length back in the old days.)
The root of this evil, I think, is how blasé I've become, glutted with wonders. I don't know how many books I read before I began this blogging project -- I always considered myself a reader, but during college I went through a Dark Age, reading at best half a dozen books beyond what I was assigned each year, and being a parent sapped much of my attention afterward, so my pretensions to literacy derive more from my teen years and early adulthood, and I know I read at best two or three dozen new books each year in those days. The math is disheartening but unmistakable: it won't take much more than a year or two at even my ten books a month pace to read more books during this project than in my entire life before Memory by Linda Nagata. Slowly, I'm becoming (in fantasy nerd terms, at least) almost sophisticated. Which means each book I read, even the terrific ones, stands out less and less from the rest of the pile. I have less and less to say because, most of the time, it feels like I've thought or said it all before.
Which brings me to Territory. It is, shall we say, an unchallenging book. The jacket summary claims that in "Bull's unique take on an American legend... absolutely nothing is as it seems," which is a stretcher -- anyone could tell in the very first chapter that the charismatic stranger in the green spectacles would turn out to wield supernatural powers (my money was on Faery, but sorcerer is just as good), and once the story's magic gets explicated, it turns out to be bog-standard elemental stuff, complete with a sarcastic Chinese mentor figure and the hero learning his skills at the exact moment they're needed. And of course there's a spunky Wild West newspaperwoman who writes adventure fiction on the sly and inevitably develops romantic tension with the man in the green spectacles, before getting shoved into an observer's role while the men do their thing. (Surprisingly, no love triangle develops.) It's entertaining enough as fantasy novels go, and it goes down easy, but what else is there to say about it?
318 pages
Published 2007
Read from November 21 to November 23
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
The other day I looked through some of my early reviews, something I haven't done in a while. Two things struck me about those bygone days: my seeming miraculous ability to finish a book every forty-eight hours, and my inexhaustible enthusiasm for writing a rambling, wordy review for each and every one of them. This entire year I've struggled to maintain a ten books a month average, and especially in recent months I've been unable to scrounge up more than a paragraph for any given review, even if the book was 600 pages long and presumably full of all sorts of ideas and critical interest to unpack. Which is not to say I was incapable of brevity when I began this blog; the first one-paragraph review dropped as early as that February. The problem is I seem incapable of writing more than one paragraph nowadays, not even when it's an intricate book that should leave me with much to talk about. (The one exception is when I dislike a book enough to rant about it at length, but even The Hanging Stones wrung out a review that would barely be considered average length back in the old days.)
The root of this evil, I think, is how blasé I've become, glutted with wonders. I don't know how many books I read before I began this blogging project -- I always considered myself a reader, but during college I went through a Dark Age, reading at best half a dozen books beyond what I was assigned each year, and being a parent sapped much of my attention afterward, so my pretensions to literacy derive more from my teen years and early adulthood, and I know I read at best two or three dozen new books each year in those days. The math is disheartening but unmistakable: it won't take much more than a year or two at even my ten books a month pace to read more books during this project than in my entire life before Memory by Linda Nagata. Slowly, I'm becoming (in fantasy nerd terms, at least) almost sophisticated. Which means each book I read, even the terrific ones, stands out less and less from the rest of the pile. I have less and less to say because, most of the time, it feels like I've thought or said it all before.
Which brings me to Territory. It is, shall we say, an unchallenging book. The jacket summary claims that in "Bull's unique take on an American legend... absolutely nothing is as it seems," which is a stretcher -- anyone could tell in the very first chapter that the charismatic stranger in the green spectacles would turn out to wield supernatural powers (my money was on Faery, but sorcerer is just as good), and once the story's magic gets explicated, it turns out to be bog-standard elemental stuff, complete with a sarcastic Chinese mentor figure and the hero learning his skills at the exact moment they're needed. And of course there's a spunky Wild West newspaperwoman who writes adventure fiction on the sly and inevitably develops romantic tension with the man in the green spectacles, before getting shoved into an observer's role while the men do their thing. (Surprisingly, no love triangle develops.) It's entertaining enough as fantasy novels go, and it goes down easy, but what else is there to say about it?
Thursday, November 20, 2014
2014 read #108: The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2010 Edition, edited by Rich Horton.
The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2010 Edition, edited by Rich Horton
533 pages
Published 2010
Read from January 26 to November 20
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
When I first picked this one up back in January, I was still trying to recapture the short story mania I'd so enjoyed in the final third of 2013. I got up to "As Women Fight" before sputtering out and, eventually, returning the book for the ensuing nine months. Since I'd read so much in the book (much more than I remembered reading), I decided I should make an effort to finish it this year; my organized side detests the thought of carrying a partially read book over from year to year.
Just a general warning with short story anthologies: It helps me remember each story later if I describe the plot in spoiler-y detail, so if you care about such things, maybe skip this review. I don't know if anyone actually reads these things, so that's probably not worth saying.
For reference purposes, these stories were originally published in 2009.
"A Story, with Beans" by Steven Gould. Genre fiction (or at least post-1950s SF) has a tendency toward bloat. Unnecessary worldbuilding and descriptive detail pile up, and a straightforward tale becomes a meandering, indulgent multivolume epic if the sales numbers support it. This story takes the opposite route, sketching out a post-collapse American Southwest, with suggestions of strange cults, strange cultures, strange tech, metal-eating "bugs," and unseen history, in just seven pages. I appreciate the light touch with worldbuilding -- I crave more but don't feel cheated. When it comes to the story itself, however, it's a letdown, abbreviated to an anecdote a ranger tells to some college kids over a pot of beans. There's no emotional weight to it at all. As an exercise in brevity, "A Story" is impressive, but it lacks depth. (Discovering, some months later, that Gould expanded this setting into a novel makes it somewhat less impressive, retroactively making it seem more like a teaser trailer for the upcoming book rather than a standalone story with a lot going on behind it. Oh well.)
"Child-Empress of Mars" by Theodora Goss. Another exercise in brevity, a pastiche of "Old Mars" stories parodying genre terminology and complicated worldbuilding in eight crisp, efficient pages. The point is a rather banal observation about the value of tragic hero stories, the sort of metafictional vein SF mines to exhaustion. Nonetheless a sweet and engaging little tale.
"The Island" by Peter Watts. Where "Child-Empress of Mars" used the cliche of fantasy terminology to efficiently (and with tongue in cheek) set the Old Mars scene, "The Island" belongs to a subset of hard sci-fi that uses a sleek and stylized argot to achieve an effect impenetrable to anyone without lifetime subscriptions to Analog and Scientific American. I find this style tiresome and silly. The story itself isn't that bad, though it is crammed with the usual list of hard sci-fi requirements: a high concept meant to be mind-blowing but is merely implausible, tension between humans and an AI on a space journey that lasts millions of years, an attempt at philosophical insight, incest. My interest curve climbed slowly from almost nil at the start to pretty interested toward the end, before asymptoting to nil again at the end.
"The Logic of the World" by Robert Kelly. This one would not have felt out of place in that After the King anthology. It is a consummately '90s fantasy story, smugly didactic, wherein a sensitive, thoughtful knight learns of a dragon and goes to slay it, only to get lectured with certain cliches about wisdom and how you take in a little bit of everything you slay, and then the knight is sorry and he leaves. All we need are some dated pop culture references and "irreverent" humor, and it could be 1992 all over again!
"The Long, Cold Goodbye" by Holly Phillips. Not an all-time classic, but a dazzling exercise in worldbuilding and viewing a high fantasy cliche from a fresh angle. This story mixes together colonialism, steampunk, ice zombies, a city freezing to death in a masquerade of forced jollity pasted over bone-deep despair. The tone never quite gelled with me -- too close to melodrama -- and the prose was solid but unmemorable. Still, this is the first really really good story in this collection.
"The Endangered Camp" by Ann Leckie. There's something ineffably '90s about intelligent dinosaurs managing to invent space flight just before an asteroid plows into the Yucatan. There was a trilogy of novels by Robert J. Sawyer that built on the idea, plus (I'm told) an episode of Star Trek: Voyager. Here it's dated but cute, a winsome but pointless little fantasy that doesn't overstay its welcome.
"Dragon's Teeth" by Alex Irvine. Perfectly adequate swords 'n' sorcery number, satisfying if not especially memorable. (Nine months later, in fact, I have zero idea what this story was about, and little memory of reading it, which makes the one-line review I wrote at the time less than helpful. For posterity, then, I shall specify that it appears to be a pseudo-Roman swords 'n' sorcery number, with a humble no-nonsense soldier or something going to hunt a MacGuffin among fantasy-world Inuit or something. I don't really know, I merely skimmed a few sentences to get a sense of the piece again.)
"As Women Fight" by Sara Genge. This one defeated me back in February (or whenever it was that I shelved this collection). Psyching myself up to once again wade through it took weeks, even if I didn't quite remember why I'd given up in the first place. Conceptually it's an interesting tale -- the two partners in a breeding pair must Fight each year to win the role of female, with the loser consigned to maleness until the next Fight (which is just a variation on The Left Hand of Darkness, but still has some potential juice in it). Yet, frustratingly, "Women" relies on essentialist conceits of what it "means" to be female or male. Five years of losses have left the p.o.v. character "imprinted" with the ways of male "flesh": "Silence comes easy these days," Genge writes, as if laconic affectlessness is an essential trait of manhood rather than a mutable quality specified by culture. A reasonable grounding in history and anthropology is not much to ask, especially if one wishes to spin tales of gender identity in the style of Le Guin, but we live in an era when it's fashionable once more, even among supposedly feminist authors, to ascribe all the sitcom gender norms to biology. But... overlooking all that, with a supreme effort of resignation... I must admit this isn't a bad story. In fact, the story qua story is well-constructed, fitting the concept and storyline together seamlessly, barely wasting a single noun of worldbuilding. And if I strain my (admittedly undeveloped) critical faculties, maybe I can sort of see how Genge might not have been so essentialist all along: in one bit of dialog, after the point where I'd given up all those months ago, a mouthpiece character offers, "We've learned since childhood that women do this or that and we never dare to break free of that mold. We're as pitiful as the men and women... who only know one way of living, except that we don't have the excuse of ignorance." Authorial intent here is a tough nut (for me) to crack. Let's just say that I feel this story is too gender-essentialist for my tastes, but maybe its heart is in the right place, and it really wasn't worth all the fuss I put up about it, so let's move on.
"Sylgarmo's Proclamation" by Lucius Shepard. I don't know what to expect of Shepard. He wrote "The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule," which remains one of my all-time favorite pieces, but everything else I've read from him has been retreading Vietnam War ground, a sure way to bore me. Editor Horton, in his poorly proofread introduction, calls this story an "hommage" to Jack Vance; the publication history confirms it was originally printed in a Dying Earth anthology. The only Dying Earth story I've read before this was "The Overworld," in Modern Classics of Fantasy; like "The Overworld," "Sylgarmo" is purple stuff, full of imaginative imagery but expressed with a pugnacious lack of subtlety, eventually finding its way to a stock evil cousin who affects to have forgotten "that blond poppet" who got fridged all those years ago to give the hero his motivation. Perhaps the effect is meant to be tongue in cheek, or perhaps merely a pastiche of '70s spaceships 'n' sorcery. A junk food kind of story.
"Three Twilight Tales" by Jo Walton. Characters in fables who are aware they're characters in fables have become, for me at least, almost as commonplace as the archetypal storylines they comment upon. So this string of vignettes is nothing new. That said, these interconnected tales are as delicately worked and beautiful as you'd expect from Walton.
"Necroflux Day" by John Meaney. This kind of scene-setting, where people are just like us with their Parent-Teacher nights and birthday dinners at restaurants, except everything is suffused with magic and the nuns are in the Order of Thanatos and chocolate is blue, can easily capsize into a cloying mess. This story takes its time to spool out a workmanlike domestic drama, with a widowed father, a boy figuring out his own powers (and responsibilities), and a young teacher with a past she's fleeing. It's almost like a '90s kiddie flick where the kid sets his dad up with a new mom, except with, you know, the boy's eyes weeping blood-spiders and with lifetimes of pain stored in the bones and nerves of the dead to be unleashed as magical fuel for ships and cities. "It is impossible to know where the power comes from," writes the boy, in the essay he's so proud of, "if you can't imagine how the bones hurt and scream." It is a strange ensemble, but it mostly hangs together.
"The Persistence of Memory; or, This Space for Sale" by Paul Park. I have mixed feelings about this one. It's a clever little piece, all metafictional and such, but the ending is the cheap "unreliable narrator was talking about his life and ex-girlfriend all along" trick we've all seen a hundred times, which gets less satisfying each time.
"This Peaceable Land; or, The Unbearable Vision of Harriet Beecher Stowe" by Robert Charles Wilson. A title like that deserves -- demands -- a story of uncommon excellence. Like "The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees" or "Bears Discover Fire," or "The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew" later in this volume, it's a title that leaps off the contents page and effervesces in my brain, filling me with anticipation and speculation. Further, I have positive memories of the two Wilson novels I read a decade or more ago (Darwinia and The Chronoliths), so it's fair to say I had heightened expectations for this story. It turns out to be heavy material, a look at the horrors and entrepreneur-run concentration camps that could have resulted had America not gone into Civil War. My one objection is a sense that Wilson is inadvertently minimizing the real horrors of the black experience after the Civil War, a scene in American history generally swept out of sight as it is, but on its own this story is excellent and unsettling. Probably the third best in the book.
"On the Human Plan" by Jay Lake. More Dying Earth-esque business, but substituting latter day archetypes of crusty nanotech information brokers for the old brew of decadent wizards and sly heroes. I'm not sure it's an improvement. Neither bad nor good.
"Technicolor" by John Langan. You can kind of guess where this one is going on the first page, but there's a sort of delicious anticipation to watching the pieces of the story form a remorseless chain toward the denouement. "Classic story gets reinterpreted through a lit-crit lens" is babby's first postmodernism, but this is really well done.
"Catalog" by Eugene Mirabelli. A lightweight fancy in what I think of as a Valente-esque vein, in which a blank slate sort of guy finds himself in a reality pieced together from books and magazines, hanging out with a trio of Poe characters who've formed a rock band, before he goes off to Maine in search of a woman from the L. L. Bean catalog. Cute but something of a trifle.
"Crimes and Glory" by Paul McAuley. I can't point to any particular stories off the top of my head (aside from "Nahiku West" by Linda Nagata, from another Year's Best volume I abandoned early this year, and consequently never reviewed), but I have the impression that hard, grimy sci-fi and noirish detective procedurals get combined much too frequently. It is a go-to stylistic shorthand that yields diminishing returns each time I see it. And this is a 45 page novelette originally published in Subterranean, the late and bafflingly overrated magazine that rivaled Analog for the title of least enjoyable pro market. "Crimes and Glory," in other words, is a slog. Characters in this story proclaim their motivations to each other in clumsy exposition straight out of a creative writing elective; tiresome technobabble dribbles along with few surprises and no zest; the set-dressings and descriptions are as familiar and unappealing as Tuesday's leftovers. "You see," the escaping criminal tells the pursuing detective, "you aren't very different from me after all," and the ending is obvious. If I weren't so determined to finish this collection sometime this year, I might have washed my hands of it once again partway through this story.
"Eros, Philia, Agape" by Rachel Swirsky. Emotionally manipulative but mostly effective piece. Any story with a four year old in emotional disarray will hit me hard, of course, but this story is well-written, even if its heroine is much too leisure class for my tastes.
"A Painter, a Sheep, and a Boa Constrictor" by Nir Yaniv (translated from the Hebrew by Lavie Tidhar). A brief but charmingly strange fable straddling fairy tale and high technology, breathing life into the cliches of both.
"Glister" by Dominic Green. A rollickingly old-fashioned roister-doister tale of space miners on a hellish planet rife with gold and an explosive biochemistry based on heavy metals. Not an amazing story, but a fun antidote to the usual 21st century grim and grime.
"The Qualia Engine" by Damien Broderick. This reads like one of those forced, painfully dated stories from the '80s or early '90s, except updated to include fresher cliches and fumbling pop culture references to Survivor and Beauty and the Geek and Second Life, stereotype jocks "porking" cheerleaders while stereotype power-nerds sweat through "I know eight silent ways to kill a man" fantasies, all narrated in a snide voice just two steps down from excruciating. Ten years from now, someone will read this and snark at how quaintly '00s it was. It's a shame, given that imagination-stirring title. The story itself is workmanlike stuff, bravely attempting to Say Things About the Human Condition but mostly just getting lost in its own brimming-with-attitude narration.
"The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew" by Catherynne M. Valente. This, thankfully, lives up to its title. Valente has a tendency to use cardboard standees as props -- here the central figure is a Generic Badass Woman in a More Commonly Male Role, a stock Valente creation. But you don't read Valente for nuanced characterization. You read Valente for lush, baffling, seductive imagery, the turns and depths of dreams you never dared to have, places as insidious as myth, clocks that flow rather than tick along their own necessary geometries. I'll be the first to say I have no idea what's going on here, and that's okay -- I am dazzled and left wordless. Valente in prime form; by a long shot the best story in this collection.
"Wife-Stealing Time" by R. Garcia y Robertson. The only Garcia y Robertson book I've read, Firebird, was like stuffing my face with a pizza from Domino's. For the first little while it was tasty, a novel treat mixing Russian mythology with sexy fun adventures. As I kept gorging, though, I realized it really wasn't that good, and in fact it was gross and threatening to go out the way it came in. I've shied away from anything bearing his name ever since, in much the same way one's stomach might cringe at the thought of repeating a particularly unpleasant junk food. This story seems to confirm Garcia y Robertson's inclination to leer, yuk-yukking it up in a parody of oversexed pulp lotharios and "teenaged" seductresses (though Barsoomian years are twice as long as Earth's, so you're the one with the dirty mind, pal). The result is almost -- almost -- Piers Anthony levels of unfunny, and at least ten pages too long. I cannot believe this got published in Asimov's. I always expected better from that market.
"Images of Anna" by Nancy Kress. Competent but uninspired magical realism piece. Online dating a wizard or something, and photographs that show thoughts and worries, or something.
"Mongoose" by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear. Interdimensional creature feature colored by Alice in Wonderland, playful and enjoyable without treading new ground or digging in deep.
"Living Curiousities" by Margo Lanagan. Dense-packed scene-setting that tosses you in near the middle and demands you keep up, a stylistic accomplishment that ends up being a brief character study, closing abruptly once its mood is made clear. Expanding this out to give it room to breathe may have been an improvement, or maybe the slim statement here benefits from the compressed presentation.
"The Death of Sugar Daddy" by Toiya Kristen Finley. A strange and vertiginous tale of erasure and urban neglect, vivid and marvelous and sad, the second best story in this anthology after "The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew."
"Secret Identity" by Kelly Link. I wound up liking this more than I thought it would. Integrating online gaming into science fiction stories is generally hokey, and often embarrassing, as is the exploration of long distance relationships and online dating (which was the focus of "Images of Anna," as well, so it must have been A Thing in 2009), all of which made for a rocky start. But the narration is so earnest and believable, a voice familiar to anyone who read their share of emotionally inexperienced introverts pouring their hearts into LiveJournal entries way back when (or was one such introvert) -- that disarming and quietly frantic reaction to life, the antithesis to the snarky swagger of, say, the narrator of "The Qualia Engine" (and any number of stories I rejected from my own short-lived magazine). The backdrop of deliberately banal superheroes is more entertaining than the similar device in Jonathan Lethem's "Super Goat Man" five years earlier (reviewed here). The sum total is really good, one of the very few really good stories in this collection. Though I had one reservation: Is it overlong, or is that just me growing impatient to finally finish this book and move on to something else?
"Bespoke" by Genevieve Valentine. I don't like the word "bespoke," partly because it seems to have become an it-word in recent years, partly because it feels jammed together and awkward on my tongue. Of course, that's neither here nor there. This is an airy character study mingling the delicate imagery of current intimate fantasy with the melancholy of current post-collapse speculation, garnished with some old-school (ca. early '60s) time travel goofiness. Interesting but too brief and reserved.
"Events Preceding the Helvetican Renaissance" by John Kessel. A cracking good time, this one. The sort of fun and imaginative far-future space adventure I get to read so seldom, and always enjoy when done well. Not nearly as ambitious as, say, Gene Wolfe's "The Fifth Head of Cerberus" (reviewed here), but that's the general sort of thing Kessel was aiming for, I think. At least it isn't the sort of dreary, grimy pessimism de rigueur in this grimy and pessimistic century.
Whew. There. From January to November, it took me, but finally I can put this book back on the shelf. I think the 2012 edition of Year's Best deceived me. This book simply did not have the same ratio of outstanding stories to filler that made that anthology (the first of Horton's I read) so rewarding. Perhaps Horton had yet to develop the curatorial skills or reprint rights budget he would have in 2012, or (unlikely, but possible) perhaps the short fiction of 2009 just wasn't as happening as it would be in 2011. One of these months I need to look into the other annuals, the Hartwell/Cramer fantasy series and the Strahan SF one, even if it involves much overlap; I desire a different perspective on what might be considered the "best" stories of any given year.
533 pages
Published 2010
Read from January 26 to November 20
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
When I first picked this one up back in January, I was still trying to recapture the short story mania I'd so enjoyed in the final third of 2013. I got up to "As Women Fight" before sputtering out and, eventually, returning the book for the ensuing nine months. Since I'd read so much in the book (much more than I remembered reading), I decided I should make an effort to finish it this year; my organized side detests the thought of carrying a partially read book over from year to year.
Just a general warning with short story anthologies: It helps me remember each story later if I describe the plot in spoiler-y detail, so if you care about such things, maybe skip this review. I don't know if anyone actually reads these things, so that's probably not worth saying.
For reference purposes, these stories were originally published in 2009.
"A Story, with Beans" by Steven Gould. Genre fiction (or at least post-1950s SF) has a tendency toward bloat. Unnecessary worldbuilding and descriptive detail pile up, and a straightforward tale becomes a meandering, indulgent multivolume epic if the sales numbers support it. This story takes the opposite route, sketching out a post-collapse American Southwest, with suggestions of strange cults, strange cultures, strange tech, metal-eating "bugs," and unseen history, in just seven pages. I appreciate the light touch with worldbuilding -- I crave more but don't feel cheated. When it comes to the story itself, however, it's a letdown, abbreviated to an anecdote a ranger tells to some college kids over a pot of beans. There's no emotional weight to it at all. As an exercise in brevity, "A Story" is impressive, but it lacks depth. (Discovering, some months later, that Gould expanded this setting into a novel makes it somewhat less impressive, retroactively making it seem more like a teaser trailer for the upcoming book rather than a standalone story with a lot going on behind it. Oh well.)
"Child-Empress of Mars" by Theodora Goss. Another exercise in brevity, a pastiche of "Old Mars" stories parodying genre terminology and complicated worldbuilding in eight crisp, efficient pages. The point is a rather banal observation about the value of tragic hero stories, the sort of metafictional vein SF mines to exhaustion. Nonetheless a sweet and engaging little tale.
"The Island" by Peter Watts. Where "Child-Empress of Mars" used the cliche of fantasy terminology to efficiently (and with tongue in cheek) set the Old Mars scene, "The Island" belongs to a subset of hard sci-fi that uses a sleek and stylized argot to achieve an effect impenetrable to anyone without lifetime subscriptions to Analog and Scientific American. I find this style tiresome and silly. The story itself isn't that bad, though it is crammed with the usual list of hard sci-fi requirements: a high concept meant to be mind-blowing but is merely implausible, tension between humans and an AI on a space journey that lasts millions of years, an attempt at philosophical insight, incest. My interest curve climbed slowly from almost nil at the start to pretty interested toward the end, before asymptoting to nil again at the end.
"The Logic of the World" by Robert Kelly. This one would not have felt out of place in that After the King anthology. It is a consummately '90s fantasy story, smugly didactic, wherein a sensitive, thoughtful knight learns of a dragon and goes to slay it, only to get lectured with certain cliches about wisdom and how you take in a little bit of everything you slay, and then the knight is sorry and he leaves. All we need are some dated pop culture references and "irreverent" humor, and it could be 1992 all over again!
"The Long, Cold Goodbye" by Holly Phillips. Not an all-time classic, but a dazzling exercise in worldbuilding and viewing a high fantasy cliche from a fresh angle. This story mixes together colonialism, steampunk, ice zombies, a city freezing to death in a masquerade of forced jollity pasted over bone-deep despair. The tone never quite gelled with me -- too close to melodrama -- and the prose was solid but unmemorable. Still, this is the first really really good story in this collection.
"The Endangered Camp" by Ann Leckie. There's something ineffably '90s about intelligent dinosaurs managing to invent space flight just before an asteroid plows into the Yucatan. There was a trilogy of novels by Robert J. Sawyer that built on the idea, plus (I'm told) an episode of Star Trek: Voyager. Here it's dated but cute, a winsome but pointless little fantasy that doesn't overstay its welcome.
"Dragon's Teeth" by Alex Irvine. Perfectly adequate swords 'n' sorcery number, satisfying if not especially memorable. (Nine months later, in fact, I have zero idea what this story was about, and little memory of reading it, which makes the one-line review I wrote at the time less than helpful. For posterity, then, I shall specify that it appears to be a pseudo-Roman swords 'n' sorcery number, with a humble no-nonsense soldier or something going to hunt a MacGuffin among fantasy-world Inuit or something. I don't really know, I merely skimmed a few sentences to get a sense of the piece again.)
"As Women Fight" by Sara Genge. This one defeated me back in February (or whenever it was that I shelved this collection). Psyching myself up to once again wade through it took weeks, even if I didn't quite remember why I'd given up in the first place. Conceptually it's an interesting tale -- the two partners in a breeding pair must Fight each year to win the role of female, with the loser consigned to maleness until the next Fight (which is just a variation on The Left Hand of Darkness, but still has some potential juice in it). Yet, frustratingly, "Women" relies on essentialist conceits of what it "means" to be female or male. Five years of losses have left the p.o.v. character "imprinted" with the ways of male "flesh": "Silence comes easy these days," Genge writes, as if laconic affectlessness is an essential trait of manhood rather than a mutable quality specified by culture. A reasonable grounding in history and anthropology is not much to ask, especially if one wishes to spin tales of gender identity in the style of Le Guin, but we live in an era when it's fashionable once more, even among supposedly feminist authors, to ascribe all the sitcom gender norms to biology. But... overlooking all that, with a supreme effort of resignation... I must admit this isn't a bad story. In fact, the story qua story is well-constructed, fitting the concept and storyline together seamlessly, barely wasting a single noun of worldbuilding. And if I strain my (admittedly undeveloped) critical faculties, maybe I can sort of see how Genge might not have been so essentialist all along: in one bit of dialog, after the point where I'd given up all those months ago, a mouthpiece character offers, "We've learned since childhood that women do this or that and we never dare to break free of that mold. We're as pitiful as the men and women... who only know one way of living, except that we don't have the excuse of ignorance." Authorial intent here is a tough nut (for me) to crack. Let's just say that I feel this story is too gender-essentialist for my tastes, but maybe its heart is in the right place, and it really wasn't worth all the fuss I put up about it, so let's move on.
"Sylgarmo's Proclamation" by Lucius Shepard. I don't know what to expect of Shepard. He wrote "The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule," which remains one of my all-time favorite pieces, but everything else I've read from him has been retreading Vietnam War ground, a sure way to bore me. Editor Horton, in his poorly proofread introduction, calls this story an "hommage" to Jack Vance; the publication history confirms it was originally printed in a Dying Earth anthology. The only Dying Earth story I've read before this was "The Overworld," in Modern Classics of Fantasy; like "The Overworld," "Sylgarmo" is purple stuff, full of imaginative imagery but expressed with a pugnacious lack of subtlety, eventually finding its way to a stock evil cousin who affects to have forgotten "that blond poppet" who got fridged all those years ago to give the hero his motivation. Perhaps the effect is meant to be tongue in cheek, or perhaps merely a pastiche of '70s spaceships 'n' sorcery. A junk food kind of story.
"Three Twilight Tales" by Jo Walton. Characters in fables who are aware they're characters in fables have become, for me at least, almost as commonplace as the archetypal storylines they comment upon. So this string of vignettes is nothing new. That said, these interconnected tales are as delicately worked and beautiful as you'd expect from Walton.
"Necroflux Day" by John Meaney. This kind of scene-setting, where people are just like us with their Parent-Teacher nights and birthday dinners at restaurants, except everything is suffused with magic and the nuns are in the Order of Thanatos and chocolate is blue, can easily capsize into a cloying mess. This story takes its time to spool out a workmanlike domestic drama, with a widowed father, a boy figuring out his own powers (and responsibilities), and a young teacher with a past she's fleeing. It's almost like a '90s kiddie flick where the kid sets his dad up with a new mom, except with, you know, the boy's eyes weeping blood-spiders and with lifetimes of pain stored in the bones and nerves of the dead to be unleashed as magical fuel for ships and cities. "It is impossible to know where the power comes from," writes the boy, in the essay he's so proud of, "if you can't imagine how the bones hurt and scream." It is a strange ensemble, but it mostly hangs together.
"The Persistence of Memory; or, This Space for Sale" by Paul Park. I have mixed feelings about this one. It's a clever little piece, all metafictional and such, but the ending is the cheap "unreliable narrator was talking about his life and ex-girlfriend all along" trick we've all seen a hundred times, which gets less satisfying each time.
"This Peaceable Land; or, The Unbearable Vision of Harriet Beecher Stowe" by Robert Charles Wilson. A title like that deserves -- demands -- a story of uncommon excellence. Like "The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees" or "Bears Discover Fire," or "The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew" later in this volume, it's a title that leaps off the contents page and effervesces in my brain, filling me with anticipation and speculation. Further, I have positive memories of the two Wilson novels I read a decade or more ago (Darwinia and The Chronoliths), so it's fair to say I had heightened expectations for this story. It turns out to be heavy material, a look at the horrors and entrepreneur-run concentration camps that could have resulted had America not gone into Civil War. My one objection is a sense that Wilson is inadvertently minimizing the real horrors of the black experience after the Civil War, a scene in American history generally swept out of sight as it is, but on its own this story is excellent and unsettling. Probably the third best in the book.
"On the Human Plan" by Jay Lake. More Dying Earth-esque business, but substituting latter day archetypes of crusty nanotech information brokers for the old brew of decadent wizards and sly heroes. I'm not sure it's an improvement. Neither bad nor good.
"Technicolor" by John Langan. You can kind of guess where this one is going on the first page, but there's a sort of delicious anticipation to watching the pieces of the story form a remorseless chain toward the denouement. "Classic story gets reinterpreted through a lit-crit lens" is babby's first postmodernism, but this is really well done.
"Catalog" by Eugene Mirabelli. A lightweight fancy in what I think of as a Valente-esque vein, in which a blank slate sort of guy finds himself in a reality pieced together from books and magazines, hanging out with a trio of Poe characters who've formed a rock band, before he goes off to Maine in search of a woman from the L. L. Bean catalog. Cute but something of a trifle.
"Crimes and Glory" by Paul McAuley. I can't point to any particular stories off the top of my head (aside from "Nahiku West" by Linda Nagata, from another Year's Best volume I abandoned early this year, and consequently never reviewed), but I have the impression that hard, grimy sci-fi and noirish detective procedurals get combined much too frequently. It is a go-to stylistic shorthand that yields diminishing returns each time I see it. And this is a 45 page novelette originally published in Subterranean, the late and bafflingly overrated magazine that rivaled Analog for the title of least enjoyable pro market. "Crimes and Glory," in other words, is a slog. Characters in this story proclaim their motivations to each other in clumsy exposition straight out of a creative writing elective; tiresome technobabble dribbles along with few surprises and no zest; the set-dressings and descriptions are as familiar and unappealing as Tuesday's leftovers. "You see," the escaping criminal tells the pursuing detective, "you aren't very different from me after all," and the ending is obvious. If I weren't so determined to finish this collection sometime this year, I might have washed my hands of it once again partway through this story.
"Eros, Philia, Agape" by Rachel Swirsky. Emotionally manipulative but mostly effective piece. Any story with a four year old in emotional disarray will hit me hard, of course, but this story is well-written, even if its heroine is much too leisure class for my tastes.
"A Painter, a Sheep, and a Boa Constrictor" by Nir Yaniv (translated from the Hebrew by Lavie Tidhar). A brief but charmingly strange fable straddling fairy tale and high technology, breathing life into the cliches of both.
"Glister" by Dominic Green. A rollickingly old-fashioned roister-doister tale of space miners on a hellish planet rife with gold and an explosive biochemistry based on heavy metals. Not an amazing story, but a fun antidote to the usual 21st century grim and grime.
"The Qualia Engine" by Damien Broderick. This reads like one of those forced, painfully dated stories from the '80s or early '90s, except updated to include fresher cliches and fumbling pop culture references to Survivor and Beauty and the Geek and Second Life, stereotype jocks "porking" cheerleaders while stereotype power-nerds sweat through "I know eight silent ways to kill a man" fantasies, all narrated in a snide voice just two steps down from excruciating. Ten years from now, someone will read this and snark at how quaintly '00s it was. It's a shame, given that imagination-stirring title. The story itself is workmanlike stuff, bravely attempting to Say Things About the Human Condition but mostly just getting lost in its own brimming-with-attitude narration.
"The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew" by Catherynne M. Valente. This, thankfully, lives up to its title. Valente has a tendency to use cardboard standees as props -- here the central figure is a Generic Badass Woman in a More Commonly Male Role, a stock Valente creation. But you don't read Valente for nuanced characterization. You read Valente for lush, baffling, seductive imagery, the turns and depths of dreams you never dared to have, places as insidious as myth, clocks that flow rather than tick along their own necessary geometries. I'll be the first to say I have no idea what's going on here, and that's okay -- I am dazzled and left wordless. Valente in prime form; by a long shot the best story in this collection.
"Wife-Stealing Time" by R. Garcia y Robertson. The only Garcia y Robertson book I've read, Firebird, was like stuffing my face with a pizza from Domino's. For the first little while it was tasty, a novel treat mixing Russian mythology with sexy fun adventures. As I kept gorging, though, I realized it really wasn't that good, and in fact it was gross and threatening to go out the way it came in. I've shied away from anything bearing his name ever since, in much the same way one's stomach might cringe at the thought of repeating a particularly unpleasant junk food. This story seems to confirm Garcia y Robertson's inclination to leer, yuk-yukking it up in a parody of oversexed pulp lotharios and "teenaged" seductresses (though Barsoomian years are twice as long as Earth's, so you're the one with the dirty mind, pal). The result is almost -- almost -- Piers Anthony levels of unfunny, and at least ten pages too long. I cannot believe this got published in Asimov's. I always expected better from that market.
"Images of Anna" by Nancy Kress. Competent but uninspired magical realism piece. Online dating a wizard or something, and photographs that show thoughts and worries, or something.
"Mongoose" by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear. Interdimensional creature feature colored by Alice in Wonderland, playful and enjoyable without treading new ground or digging in deep.
"Living Curiousities" by Margo Lanagan. Dense-packed scene-setting that tosses you in near the middle and demands you keep up, a stylistic accomplishment that ends up being a brief character study, closing abruptly once its mood is made clear. Expanding this out to give it room to breathe may have been an improvement, or maybe the slim statement here benefits from the compressed presentation.
"The Death of Sugar Daddy" by Toiya Kristen Finley. A strange and vertiginous tale of erasure and urban neglect, vivid and marvelous and sad, the second best story in this anthology after "The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew."
"Secret Identity" by Kelly Link. I wound up liking this more than I thought it would. Integrating online gaming into science fiction stories is generally hokey, and often embarrassing, as is the exploration of long distance relationships and online dating (which was the focus of "Images of Anna," as well, so it must have been A Thing in 2009), all of which made for a rocky start. But the narration is so earnest and believable, a voice familiar to anyone who read their share of emotionally inexperienced introverts pouring their hearts into LiveJournal entries way back when (or was one such introvert) -- that disarming and quietly frantic reaction to life, the antithesis to the snarky swagger of, say, the narrator of "The Qualia Engine" (and any number of stories I rejected from my own short-lived magazine). The backdrop of deliberately banal superheroes is more entertaining than the similar device in Jonathan Lethem's "Super Goat Man" five years earlier (reviewed here). The sum total is really good, one of the very few really good stories in this collection. Though I had one reservation: Is it overlong, or is that just me growing impatient to finally finish this book and move on to something else?
"Bespoke" by Genevieve Valentine. I don't like the word "bespoke," partly because it seems to have become an it-word in recent years, partly because it feels jammed together and awkward on my tongue. Of course, that's neither here nor there. This is an airy character study mingling the delicate imagery of current intimate fantasy with the melancholy of current post-collapse speculation, garnished with some old-school (ca. early '60s) time travel goofiness. Interesting but too brief and reserved.
"Events Preceding the Helvetican Renaissance" by John Kessel. A cracking good time, this one. The sort of fun and imaginative far-future space adventure I get to read so seldom, and always enjoy when done well. Not nearly as ambitious as, say, Gene Wolfe's "The Fifth Head of Cerberus" (reviewed here), but that's the general sort of thing Kessel was aiming for, I think. At least it isn't the sort of dreary, grimy pessimism de rigueur in this grimy and pessimistic century.
Whew. There. From January to November, it took me, but finally I can put this book back on the shelf. I think the 2012 edition of Year's Best deceived me. This book simply did not have the same ratio of outstanding stories to filler that made that anthology (the first of Horton's I read) so rewarding. Perhaps Horton had yet to develop the curatorial skills or reprint rights budget he would have in 2012, or (unlikely, but possible) perhaps the short fiction of 2009 just wasn't as happening as it would be in 2011. One of these months I need to look into the other annuals, the Hartwell/Cramer fantasy series and the Strahan SF one, even if it involves much overlap; I desire a different perspective on what might be considered the "best" stories of any given year.
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