Wednesday, December 31, 2014

2014 read #124: Creating Black Americans by Nell Irvin Painter.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.