Wizard of the Crow by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
A translation from the Gĩkũyũ by the author
768 pages
Published 2006
Read from December 20 to December 31
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
I've
had this book checked out from the library for almost a third of 2013. I
first took it out sometime in September, renewed it, returned it only
to check it out again, renewed it, returned it, checked it out again a
few days later. I wanted to read it, but other books kept distracting
me, and especially since October, my reading pace has slowed
considerably, making it harder to squeeze such a huge tome (the biggest
book I read all year!) in between the others.
I don't know why it
took so long for me to finish it once I started. It's a bitterly
hilarious satire, sweeping together painful and depressing views of
neocolonial economics and globalism, racism and corruption, exploitation
and "traditional" wife-beating, the IMF and a "Global Bank" all too
happy to award loans to a dictator so long as his nation is politically
stable enough to crush the poor and working class under the terms of
repayment, told in an allegorical magical-realist mode. Like with all
satires, its characters have a tendency to feel like cartoons, and the
faux-documentary narration creates an additional level of emotional
distance, which wasn't to my taste, but this is the sort of story more
people on the "receiving" end of global capital -- which means basically
all of us in the West -- need to read.
Tuesday, December 31, 2013
Friday, December 20, 2013
2013 read #151: Kushiel's Avatar by Jacqueline Carey.
Kushiel's Avatar by Jacqueline Carey
702 pages
Published 2003
Read from December 10 to December 20
Rating: ★★ out of 5
Eleven days without finishing a book. This might be a 2013 record. Part of the blame is mine: I've largely given up on waking up early to go to the gym, using my customary evening reading time for working out instead; when I've had the time, I've used it to play Civilization or plan hiking adventures or veg out. But a lot of the blame goes to this book. I'm stubborn; Kushiel's Avatar is the conclusion of a trilogy, and I was going to see this series through no matter how rough it got. But it got pretty damn rough, and the gym and Civilization both felt like better uses of my time.
Spoilers ahead, brief mention of fictional sexual assault, etc.
My main problem with this book was structural, though thematic and prose elements contributed much to my dislike. Structurally speaking, Avatar read like assorted B-plots got scraped together to fill up the expected 700 pages of running time. For the first 200 pages or so, it looks like we're heading into a romantic fantasy Raiders of the Lost Ark -- Phèdre is off to find a lost tribe of Israel in the wilds of Ethiopia, rumored to have taken the Ark of the Covenant, through which she hopes to learn the Name of God and thereby free her friend from an angel's curse. But then for the next 200 pages we get detoured into a grimdark and not especially interesting Temple of Doom sequence, as Phèdre remands herself into sex slavery, infiltrating the seraglio of some two-bit Dark and Crazy Fantasy Villain to rescue the son of her enemy/lover. Trading in romantic fiction cliches for fantasy cliches was not a wise move, to my mind. I would rather Carey trot out yet another barbarian prince (or princess, if we need some variety), rather than a tedious evil sadistic king who leads a literal dark-worshiping cult and plans to Take Over the Wooooorrrld. That whole act of the novel was a huge misfire, and brought down an otherwise middling and unremarkable book to something below average. The potentially interesting opportunity to examine how various characters might move on from sexual degradation, assault, and slavery is resolved much too simply, and the whole thing felt problematic and ill-considered.
The rest of the book, before and after the sex dungeon, reads like an overly detailed fantasy travel guide, listing the accommodations and foodstuffs and means of transportation as if Carey's narrator was hired by a travel agency to advise potential customers. The prose was bland and standoffish, lacking affect for all but a few of those 702 pages. The opportunity to spend some time in a fantasy version of Africa, always a rare treat, was nice, but kind of spoiled by the travelogue nature of Carey's depiction, and the easy inevitability of what's supposed to be a climactic victory. (Come to think of it, Phèdre's defeat of the Evil Dark Lord and his Dark Cult of Darkness was ridiculously easy, too, as was the confrontation with Rahab. And as soon as Phèdre began musing on children and her reluctance to bring any into the world, I knew Imriel would become her surrogate son and teach her What It Really Means to Love and all that. Terribly predictable.)
So, now 2100 pages of this series are behind me -- more time than I've spent in any other fictional universe, aside from A Song of Ice and Fire and possibly The Wheel of Time. But I think I'm done with it now.
702 pages
Published 2003
Read from December 10 to December 20
Rating: ★★ out of 5
Eleven days without finishing a book. This might be a 2013 record. Part of the blame is mine: I've largely given up on waking up early to go to the gym, using my customary evening reading time for working out instead; when I've had the time, I've used it to play Civilization or plan hiking adventures or veg out. But a lot of the blame goes to this book. I'm stubborn; Kushiel's Avatar is the conclusion of a trilogy, and I was going to see this series through no matter how rough it got. But it got pretty damn rough, and the gym and Civilization both felt like better uses of my time.
Spoilers ahead, brief mention of fictional sexual assault, etc.
My main problem with this book was structural, though thematic and prose elements contributed much to my dislike. Structurally speaking, Avatar read like assorted B-plots got scraped together to fill up the expected 700 pages of running time. For the first 200 pages or so, it looks like we're heading into a romantic fantasy Raiders of the Lost Ark -- Phèdre is off to find a lost tribe of Israel in the wilds of Ethiopia, rumored to have taken the Ark of the Covenant, through which she hopes to learn the Name of God and thereby free her friend from an angel's curse. But then for the next 200 pages we get detoured into a grimdark and not especially interesting Temple of Doom sequence, as Phèdre remands herself into sex slavery, infiltrating the seraglio of some two-bit Dark and Crazy Fantasy Villain to rescue the son of her enemy/lover. Trading in romantic fiction cliches for fantasy cliches was not a wise move, to my mind. I would rather Carey trot out yet another barbarian prince (or princess, if we need some variety), rather than a tedious evil sadistic king who leads a literal dark-worshiping cult and plans to Take Over the Wooooorrrld. That whole act of the novel was a huge misfire, and brought down an otherwise middling and unremarkable book to something below average. The potentially interesting opportunity to examine how various characters might move on from sexual degradation, assault, and slavery is resolved much too simply, and the whole thing felt problematic and ill-considered.
The rest of the book, before and after the sex dungeon, reads like an overly detailed fantasy travel guide, listing the accommodations and foodstuffs and means of transportation as if Carey's narrator was hired by a travel agency to advise potential customers. The prose was bland and standoffish, lacking affect for all but a few of those 702 pages. The opportunity to spend some time in a fantasy version of Africa, always a rare treat, was nice, but kind of spoiled by the travelogue nature of Carey's depiction, and the easy inevitability of what's supposed to be a climactic victory. (Come to think of it, Phèdre's defeat of the Evil Dark Lord and his Dark Cult of Darkness was ridiculously easy, too, as was the confrontation with Rahab. And as soon as Phèdre began musing on children and her reluctance to bring any into the world, I knew Imriel would become her surrogate son and teach her What It Really Means to Love and all that. Terribly predictable.)
So, now 2100 pages of this series are behind me -- more time than I've spent in any other fictional universe, aside from A Song of Ice and Fire and possibly The Wheel of Time. But I think I'm done with it now.
Monday, December 9, 2013
2013 read #150: Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd.
Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd
217 pages
Published 1985
Read from December 8 to December 9
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
Seductive, almost gleeful evil, lustful revulsion at the stink and "corrupcion" of human existence, shadows and dust and blood -- the tale of a paranoid architect laying in a symbol and invocation to occult powers in the churches of London, with the help of a few human sacrifices, and the parallel tale of duplicates or echoes or metempsychotic rebirths of those characters, the architect now a detective in the twentieth century investigating murders mirroring the old sacrifices in the churches around London. Repulsively beautiful, filled with the fecal lust of a chaste hypochondriac, Ackroyd's descriptive powers slither and stroke and foul through the Georgian-set chapters in a wonderful evocation of period-perfect prose and exquisite characterization. The modern day chapters aren't as compelling after the first two parallel victims are dispatched; Hawksmoor the detective has potential as a character but sags under thematic expectations, shuffling inertly where his pseudo-historical doppelganger (inspired loosely by architect Nicholas Hawksmoor) twists and strangles and dominates his narrative, Ackroyd at the audacious height of his history-glutted powers. Maybe detectives and murders aren't my favorite genre staples.
The history of literary speculations around the historical Nicholas Hawksmoor, before and after this book, is pretty interesting, at least as Wikipedia sets it out. One early "promoter" of the occult geography of London (perhaps the one who originated Hawksmoor's position in the myth, though Wiki is vague about this) was Iain Sinclair, whose poem "Nicholas Hawksmoor: His Churches" inspired Ackroyd. "Both Sinclair and Ackroyd's ideas in turn were further developed by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell in their graphic novel, From Hell," says Wiki, "which speculated that Jack the Ripper used Hawksmoor's buildings as part of ritual magic, with his victims as human sacrifice." I haven't read (or seen) From Hell, but I can see how this book is part of that lineage of ideas. It's neat to see how the literary milieu of "occult London" arose and developed over time, to the point where now it (or its variations) feels like a go-to cliche in, say, steampunk.
217 pages
Published 1985
Read from December 8 to December 9
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
Seductive, almost gleeful evil, lustful revulsion at the stink and "corrupcion" of human existence, shadows and dust and blood -- the tale of a paranoid architect laying in a symbol and invocation to occult powers in the churches of London, with the help of a few human sacrifices, and the parallel tale of duplicates or echoes or metempsychotic rebirths of those characters, the architect now a detective in the twentieth century investigating murders mirroring the old sacrifices in the churches around London. Repulsively beautiful, filled with the fecal lust of a chaste hypochondriac, Ackroyd's descriptive powers slither and stroke and foul through the Georgian-set chapters in a wonderful evocation of period-perfect prose and exquisite characterization. The modern day chapters aren't as compelling after the first two parallel victims are dispatched; Hawksmoor the detective has potential as a character but sags under thematic expectations, shuffling inertly where his pseudo-historical doppelganger (inspired loosely by architect Nicholas Hawksmoor) twists and strangles and dominates his narrative, Ackroyd at the audacious height of his history-glutted powers. Maybe detectives and murders aren't my favorite genre staples.
The history of literary speculations around the historical Nicholas Hawksmoor, before and after this book, is pretty interesting, at least as Wikipedia sets it out. One early "promoter" of the occult geography of London (perhaps the one who originated Hawksmoor's position in the myth, though Wiki is vague about this) was Iain Sinclair, whose poem "Nicholas Hawksmoor: His Churches" inspired Ackroyd. "Both Sinclair and Ackroyd's ideas in turn were further developed by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell in their graphic novel, From Hell," says Wiki, "which speculated that Jack the Ripper used Hawksmoor's buildings as part of ritual magic, with his victims as human sacrifice." I haven't read (or seen) From Hell, but I can see how this book is part of that lineage of ideas. It's neat to see how the literary milieu of "occult London" arose and developed over time, to the point where now it (or its variations) feels like a go-to cliche in, say, steampunk.
Saturday, December 7, 2013
2013 read #149: Sideshow by Sheri S. Tepper.
Sideshow by Sheri S. Tepper
467 pages
Published 1992
Read from December 5 to December 7
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
I am very glad I persevered through the Arbai Trilogy.
The preceding volumes, Grass and Raising the Stones, were audacious but ultimately flawed novels, both sunk by a tendency to swarm with nonessential, scarcely defined characters and to get bogged down in the middle with dull material. Sideshow avoids those problems, maintaining a relatively streamlined cast of characters and a conventional (but effective) sci-fi quest structure. A definite note of satire is present, or at least more pronounced than in the first two books, but the occasional touch of flippancy doesn't undercut the dramatic potential or my emotional investment in the characters. In fact, Sideshow was at times quite affecting.
Some spoilers ahead.
Where Grass brought us techno-jousters battling sadistic alien stegosaur-horses, and Stones brought us a world overgrown with a fungal god, Sideshow delivers a quadripartite computer-consciousness that is also a psychotic god, manifesting through nanomachinery, that slices a pair of conjoined twins into their component parts and places them in boxes where their consciousnesses can only scream, said boxes then getting broken down and reconstituted by the Stones fungus into a humanoid bird and otter-man, respectively. Awesome as that is, of course, any time you say "psychotic computer consciousness," you start running into trouble -- cliche trouble. The four "villains" were my least favorite part of Sideshow, an indulgence of genre convention that I think weakened the whole book.
Nonetheless, this was solid overall, and the ending did not disappoint. I am left to mourn the fact, however, that I will never be able to read a series on the adventures of Marjorie Westriding and her pal Great Dragon as they warp through time and space via Arbai doors with their occasional companion Sam Girat. I picture such a series as a more inventive alternative to new Doctor Who, full of whimsy and new worlds and daring escapes as well as allegory and basic humanist philosophy. Oh well. Probably it's for the best. Regardless, I'm a little sad now to reach the end of this series, something I never expected to say as I was wading through the arid wastes in the middle of Grass all those months ago.
467 pages
Published 1992
Read from December 5 to December 7
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
I am very glad I persevered through the Arbai Trilogy.
The preceding volumes, Grass and Raising the Stones, were audacious but ultimately flawed novels, both sunk by a tendency to swarm with nonessential, scarcely defined characters and to get bogged down in the middle with dull material. Sideshow avoids those problems, maintaining a relatively streamlined cast of characters and a conventional (but effective) sci-fi quest structure. A definite note of satire is present, or at least more pronounced than in the first two books, but the occasional touch of flippancy doesn't undercut the dramatic potential or my emotional investment in the characters. In fact, Sideshow was at times quite affecting.
Some spoilers ahead.
Where Grass brought us techno-jousters battling sadistic alien stegosaur-horses, and Stones brought us a world overgrown with a fungal god, Sideshow delivers a quadripartite computer-consciousness that is also a psychotic god, manifesting through nanomachinery, that slices a pair of conjoined twins into their component parts and places them in boxes where their consciousnesses can only scream, said boxes then getting broken down and reconstituted by the Stones fungus into a humanoid bird and otter-man, respectively. Awesome as that is, of course, any time you say "psychotic computer consciousness," you start running into trouble -- cliche trouble. The four "villains" were my least favorite part of Sideshow, an indulgence of genre convention that I think weakened the whole book.
Nonetheless, this was solid overall, and the ending did not disappoint. I am left to mourn the fact, however, that I will never be able to read a series on the adventures of Marjorie Westriding and her pal Great Dragon as they warp through time and space via Arbai doors with their occasional companion Sam Girat. I picture such a series as a more inventive alternative to new Doctor Who, full of whimsy and new worlds and daring escapes as well as allegory and basic humanist philosophy. Oh well. Probably it's for the best. Regardless, I'm a little sad now to reach the end of this series, something I never expected to say as I was wading through the arid wastes in the middle of Grass all those months ago.
Thursday, December 5, 2013
2013 read #148: Traitors' Gate by Kate Elliott.
Traitors' Gate by Kate Elliott
574 pages
Published 2009
Read from November 30 to December 5
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
Spoilers for the entire Crossroads Trilogy ahead.
One thing I forgot to criticize in my review of Shadow Gate was the aimlessness of certain characters' movements. Journeys, it almost goes without saying, are the bread and butter of Tolkienist fantasy (and the Arthuriana and romantic traditions Tolkien drew from). Handled well, they can be routine but effective storytelling frameworks, providing momentum to an adventure tale, raising the stakes as the heroes near their goal or get driven back from it. Handled poorly, wanderings can be baldly obvious means of forcing awkward exposition or unneeded worldbuilding detail into the story, or -- worse -- a way for characters to kill time and remain occupied until the plot finally needs them. That last scenario was painfully obvious in this series.
For instance: A character named Keshad is introduced in Spirit Gate, the first book, in a caravan returning to the Hundred, finally able to buy himself and his sister out of debt slavery. Once they're free, Keshad prevails upon his sister to accompany him with no specific destination in mind, so long as it's away from those who have held them captive -- even though, in this case, it means wandering stupidly and stubbornly deeper into a war zone. Then a dude on an eagle catches up with them and tells them Keshad bought their freedom with something he couldn't sell because Plot Reasons, so after chapters of traveling, Keshad and his sister simply turn around and head back to the city they just left. Nothing really happened in those travelogue chapters, from a storytelling perspective. Sure, Keshad learned his sister had changed over the years (into a fearless and impossibly skilled sex assassin, because Fantasy Fiction), but that could have been revealed in one scene, maybe as he was securing her freedom, and nothing else in those chapters furthered the story. And then (I forget whether this happened in the first book or the second, but regardless), Keshad -- now stuck reluctantly with our heroes -- volunteers to go spying in a pseudo-Seljuk empire, the very place he was leaving at the beginning of Spirit Gate. Almost as soon as he's back again, he penned up with other outlander traders during some sort of dynastic commotion, his spying mission foiled as easy as that, thanks for playing, have a copy of the home game. At the start of this book, he gets turned around yet again and sent as an escort right back into the Hundred, where he proceeds to dither around in that selfsame first city, bellyaching about being in love with someone he saw for a split second. Add the fact that the character is annoying as well as useless, and you begin to see some of the deep structural problems with the Crossroads Trilogy.
Yet... I dunno, I can't bring myself to wholly dislike this book. Keshad's loop-de-loops were particularly annoying; the unimaginative "every woman looks the handsome man up and down and licks her lips" introductions could inspire a drinking game; the setting and the supernatural possibilities of ghosts and giant eagles and immortal Guardians got tapped of their potential, after a fashion, and kind of sputtered out with increased familiarity. Much of the dialogue is cluttered with forced exposition. ("Hey captain, you remember our plan, which we are currently carrying out, and we are currently doing this, right now, as I'm speaking, as part of that plan." Not an exact quote, but you get the flavor.) Almost all the characters were annoying in one way or another: Joss for being such a one-note womanizer-with-a-sad-backstory, Anji for being a controlling jerk toward his wife (though he became more interesting as he made his not entirely unexpected Genghis Khan move), Mai for being a robot most of the time, Shai for not living up to his potential as a dude who can see and hear friggin' ghosts, everyone else for being so one-dimensional and either being flirty or stoic all the time, depending on their racial background. Yet there were genuinely exciting moments sprinkled through Traitors' Gate, and maybe one or two moving scenes as well. So... part of me still kind of liked it.
This book wasn't all that much worse than Shadow Gate, except in the matter of excessively expository dialogue, but I've noticed a trend in my ratings: The final volume in a trilogy gets saddled with something of an overall grade for the series. I don't quite hate the Crossroads Trilogy, but it did not meet my expectations.
574 pages
Published 2009
Read from November 30 to December 5
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
Spoilers for the entire Crossroads Trilogy ahead.
One thing I forgot to criticize in my review of Shadow Gate was the aimlessness of certain characters' movements. Journeys, it almost goes without saying, are the bread and butter of Tolkienist fantasy (and the Arthuriana and romantic traditions Tolkien drew from). Handled well, they can be routine but effective storytelling frameworks, providing momentum to an adventure tale, raising the stakes as the heroes near their goal or get driven back from it. Handled poorly, wanderings can be baldly obvious means of forcing awkward exposition or unneeded worldbuilding detail into the story, or -- worse -- a way for characters to kill time and remain occupied until the plot finally needs them. That last scenario was painfully obvious in this series.
For instance: A character named Keshad is introduced in Spirit Gate, the first book, in a caravan returning to the Hundred, finally able to buy himself and his sister out of debt slavery. Once they're free, Keshad prevails upon his sister to accompany him with no specific destination in mind, so long as it's away from those who have held them captive -- even though, in this case, it means wandering stupidly and stubbornly deeper into a war zone. Then a dude on an eagle catches up with them and tells them Keshad bought their freedom with something he couldn't sell because Plot Reasons, so after chapters of traveling, Keshad and his sister simply turn around and head back to the city they just left. Nothing really happened in those travelogue chapters, from a storytelling perspective. Sure, Keshad learned his sister had changed over the years (into a fearless and impossibly skilled sex assassin, because Fantasy Fiction), but that could have been revealed in one scene, maybe as he was securing her freedom, and nothing else in those chapters furthered the story. And then (I forget whether this happened in the first book or the second, but regardless), Keshad -- now stuck reluctantly with our heroes -- volunteers to go spying in a pseudo-Seljuk empire, the very place he was leaving at the beginning of Spirit Gate. Almost as soon as he's back again, he penned up with other outlander traders during some sort of dynastic commotion, his spying mission foiled as easy as that, thanks for playing, have a copy of the home game. At the start of this book, he gets turned around yet again and sent as an escort right back into the Hundred, where he proceeds to dither around in that selfsame first city, bellyaching about being in love with someone he saw for a split second. Add the fact that the character is annoying as well as useless, and you begin to see some of the deep structural problems with the Crossroads Trilogy.
Yet... I dunno, I can't bring myself to wholly dislike this book. Keshad's loop-de-loops were particularly annoying; the unimaginative "every woman looks the handsome man up and down and licks her lips" introductions could inspire a drinking game; the setting and the supernatural possibilities of ghosts and giant eagles and immortal Guardians got tapped of their potential, after a fashion, and kind of sputtered out with increased familiarity. Much of the dialogue is cluttered with forced exposition. ("Hey captain, you remember our plan, which we are currently carrying out, and we are currently doing this, right now, as I'm speaking, as part of that plan." Not an exact quote, but you get the flavor.) Almost all the characters were annoying in one way or another: Joss for being such a one-note womanizer-with-a-sad-backstory, Anji for being a controlling jerk toward his wife (though he became more interesting as he made his not entirely unexpected Genghis Khan move), Mai for being a robot most of the time, Shai for not living up to his potential as a dude who can see and hear friggin' ghosts, everyone else for being so one-dimensional and either being flirty or stoic all the time, depending on their racial background. Yet there were genuinely exciting moments sprinkled through Traitors' Gate, and maybe one or two moving scenes as well. So... part of me still kind of liked it.
This book wasn't all that much worse than Shadow Gate, except in the matter of excessively expository dialogue, but I've noticed a trend in my ratings: The final volume in a trilogy gets saddled with something of an overall grade for the series. I don't quite hate the Crossroads Trilogy, but it did not meet my expectations.
Saturday, November 30, 2013
2013 read #147: The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick.
The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
229 pages
Published 1962
Read from November 28 to November 30
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
For some reason I'm struggling to communicate my thoughts in a concise manner today. The words squirt away whenever I try to squeeze them into shape. Hopefully it's just a temporary thing; I'm always paranoid I'm just gonna lose my perspicuity one day (such as it is). Bear with me.
It's no surprise that reading all these books this year has cultivated my tastes. I'm no longer so readily impressed by middling works in any genre; "pretty good" fades into a kind of steadily rising background radiation, requiring ever higher standards to blip up above the baseline. I have little patience now for anything just going through the motions, unless it appeals to some quirk or weakness of mine.
Contrarily, gaining a better historical grounding in my favored genres -- fantasy especially, but also science fiction -- contributed substantially to my appreciation for this book. I don't think I've ever known how to approach Dick. Years ago, I read Martian Time-Slip and almost immediately forgot it; I don't have any recollection of reading it, but there it is on one of my year-end book lists. Clearly it didn't leave much of an impression on me back then. Early this year I read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Ubik; I liked them a great deal, but underneath my appreciation I kind of felt that I was missing something, some ingredient to Dick's booming more-than-cult popularity. Now that I've finally gotten around to another of his books, with a whole heap of newfound worldliness to aid me, I wonder if I would appreciate Ubik and Electric Sheep more now, if somehow I could read them for the first time.
Something about this book clicked with me. It was as if I could sense the Theodore Sturgeons and Cordwainer Smiths and Jack Vances working around Dick, the vibe of his time and place tuning each page. Perhaps it helps that Dick hadn't yet gone over entirely to his New Wave obsessions, God and drugs and altered-state messiahs, true and false realities; prototypes of those themes are prominent, but High Castle rises above them all to be its own thing, tell its own kind of story. Usually I'm not keen on alternative histories -- a brief Turtledove phase in my teens inoculated me against the theme -- but in Dick's hands it feels fresh and disturbing, shivering with tension and discomfort. The characters seemed several steps above Dick's usual casts, a diverse lot that for the most part felt real -- in the case of the Nazi-sympathizing antiques dealer, unnervingly so. (The exception, of course, is the token woman character, but I don't think anyone knew how to effectively write women at the time; nonetheless, Juliana still felt more fully realized than any other Dick woman I've read.)
Is it heresy to say I maaaaaay have liked this just a bit better than Electric Sheep?
My main objection to The Man in the High Castle is, well, the Man in the High Castle. The idea of everyone -- Nazi, occupying Japanese, American civilian -- obsessing over Abendsen's alternate history novel felt forced, a premature bit of metafiction. Even though that's kind of the whole point of this book, I guess.
229 pages
Published 1962
Read from November 28 to November 30
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
For some reason I'm struggling to communicate my thoughts in a concise manner today. The words squirt away whenever I try to squeeze them into shape. Hopefully it's just a temporary thing; I'm always paranoid I'm just gonna lose my perspicuity one day (such as it is). Bear with me.
It's no surprise that reading all these books this year has cultivated my tastes. I'm no longer so readily impressed by middling works in any genre; "pretty good" fades into a kind of steadily rising background radiation, requiring ever higher standards to blip up above the baseline. I have little patience now for anything just going through the motions, unless it appeals to some quirk or weakness of mine.
Contrarily, gaining a better historical grounding in my favored genres -- fantasy especially, but also science fiction -- contributed substantially to my appreciation for this book. I don't think I've ever known how to approach Dick. Years ago, I read Martian Time-Slip and almost immediately forgot it; I don't have any recollection of reading it, but there it is on one of my year-end book lists. Clearly it didn't leave much of an impression on me back then. Early this year I read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Ubik; I liked them a great deal, but underneath my appreciation I kind of felt that I was missing something, some ingredient to Dick's booming more-than-cult popularity. Now that I've finally gotten around to another of his books, with a whole heap of newfound worldliness to aid me, I wonder if I would appreciate Ubik and Electric Sheep more now, if somehow I could read them for the first time.
Something about this book clicked with me. It was as if I could sense the Theodore Sturgeons and Cordwainer Smiths and Jack Vances working around Dick, the vibe of his time and place tuning each page. Perhaps it helps that Dick hadn't yet gone over entirely to his New Wave obsessions, God and drugs and altered-state messiahs, true and false realities; prototypes of those themes are prominent, but High Castle rises above them all to be its own thing, tell its own kind of story. Usually I'm not keen on alternative histories -- a brief Turtledove phase in my teens inoculated me against the theme -- but in Dick's hands it feels fresh and disturbing, shivering with tension and discomfort. The characters seemed several steps above Dick's usual casts, a diverse lot that for the most part felt real -- in the case of the Nazi-sympathizing antiques dealer, unnervingly so. (The exception, of course, is the token woman character, but I don't think anyone knew how to effectively write women at the time; nonetheless, Juliana still felt more fully realized than any other Dick woman I've read.)
Is it heresy to say I maaaaaay have liked this just a bit better than Electric Sheep?
My main objection to The Man in the High Castle is, well, the Man in the High Castle. The idea of everyone -- Nazi, occupying Japanese, American civilian -- obsessing over Abendsen's alternate history novel felt forced, a premature bit of metafiction. Even though that's kind of the whole point of this book, I guess.
Thursday, November 28, 2013
2013 read #146: The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two by Catherynne M. Valente.
The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two by Catherynne M. Valente
248 pages
Published 2013
Read from November 27 to November 28
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
It feels like I've been waiting half the year for this book. I put in an ILL request for it as soon as I heard it was out, sometime in the second week of October, and even though various libraries in Suffolk County have had copies available for weeks now, the order never seemed to get filled. I'd given up expecting any library to act on the request and settled in to wait for my branch to get its own copy, until, wonder of wonders, Brentwood finally acted and sent a copy along.
This book was not the most satisfying entry in Valente's Fairyland series. The plot was much too straightforward, most of the action taking place in one subjective day, lacking twists or setbacks. Much of the length was taken up with fanciful (and allegorical) digressions, which were delightful but felt less connected to the central story than usual; random whimsical characters appear long enough to tell their whimsical stories over several pages, then disappear directly after. Structurally, this felt like maybe the first act of a novel, incomplete in itself.
I kept feeling that Valente's Fairyland is beginning to suffer from a lack of in-universe rules. Valente's imagination is delightful, her imagery flowery and literate, tipping wink after wink at her readers. But a story universe without any underlying logic, with no limits on invention, paradoxically feels limiting. This book reminded me most of Carroll's Wonderland books; it had the same lack of real stakes or dramatic tension.
But I suppose, really, that isn't the point of this sort of book. In terms of emotional affect, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland might be the strongest in the series so far, heavy with adolescent confusion and the weary, disappointed longing we adults call "wisdom." It was manipulative, sure, but I found myself choking up quite a bit.
248 pages
Published 2013
Read from November 27 to November 28
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
It feels like I've been waiting half the year for this book. I put in an ILL request for it as soon as I heard it was out, sometime in the second week of October, and even though various libraries in Suffolk County have had copies available for weeks now, the order never seemed to get filled. I'd given up expecting any library to act on the request and settled in to wait for my branch to get its own copy, until, wonder of wonders, Brentwood finally acted and sent a copy along.
This book was not the most satisfying entry in Valente's Fairyland series. The plot was much too straightforward, most of the action taking place in one subjective day, lacking twists or setbacks. Much of the length was taken up with fanciful (and allegorical) digressions, which were delightful but felt less connected to the central story than usual; random whimsical characters appear long enough to tell their whimsical stories over several pages, then disappear directly after. Structurally, this felt like maybe the first act of a novel, incomplete in itself.
I kept feeling that Valente's Fairyland is beginning to suffer from a lack of in-universe rules. Valente's imagination is delightful, her imagery flowery and literate, tipping wink after wink at her readers. But a story universe without any underlying logic, with no limits on invention, paradoxically feels limiting. This book reminded me most of Carroll's Wonderland books; it had the same lack of real stakes or dramatic tension.
But I suppose, really, that isn't the point of this sort of book. In terms of emotional affect, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland might be the strongest in the series so far, heavy with adolescent confusion and the weary, disappointed longing we adults call "wisdom." It was manipulative, sure, but I found myself choking up quite a bit.
Wednesday, November 27, 2013
2013 read #145: The Doubleman by C. J. Koch.
The Doubleman by C. J. Koch
326 pages
Published 1985
Read from November 24 to November 27
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
One of the justified criticisms of fantasy as a genre is how unoriginal and formulaic it can be. However, middle of the road literary fiction, to my mind, can be every bit as repetitive and paint-by-numbers as the most egregious Campbellian hero's journey in an elf-beset kingdom. Parts of this book felt like some kind of mainstream fiction mad-lib:
Unusual, exotic setting: TASMANIA
Scarring childhood trauma: POLIO / PARALYSIS (LEFT LEG)
Scarring childhood trauma #2 (optional): STRICT, ABUSIVE CATHOLIC SCHOOL
Substitute father figure ("good"): GRANDFATHER
Substitute father figure ("bad"): VAGUELY SATANIC GUITAR TUTOR
Symbolic childhood eccentricity: TOY THEATER
"Bad influence" childhood friend who returns to narrator's life later on: COUSIN AT BOARDING SCHOOL
Unusual sexual coming of age and ongoing fixation: OLDER, MARRIED WOMAN AT BOARDING HOUSE
Frustrated artistic ambition: ACTING / DIRECTING
Ongoing allegorical motif: FAERY / GNOSTIC DUALITY / "DOUBLE WORLD"
More worthy literary authors (like, say, Peter Carey, if we're sticking with the Australian milieu) disguise such a framework with concise, bedazzling prose, but Koch's composition is merely adequate, never stirring or surprising with its beauty or economy. "Average" literary prose, of course, ranks about equal to "very good" genre prose, which is another (justified) reason fantasy tends to get knocked. Also, the observational and descriptive skills of even an average lit author obliterate those of most fantasy scribblers. But personally, I start to get bored with verisimilitude if it isn't delivered in a voice that leaves my mouth wide open.
All of this is a long way from what I expected from this book. The introduction to The Year's Best Fantasy: First Annual Collection clued me in to The Doubleman, describing it as "a Steeleye Span-type band battling magic and touring Australia." My mind went to Fairport Convention for character models -- Sandy Denny and Richard Thompson tooling around in a groovy van and solving spooky mysteries in the Outback -- but the gist was the same, and it still sounded incredible. The reality is a letdown. For one thing, the narrator is the goddamn producer, not even a member of the band. For another, "magic" here consists of some Tarot cards, some seances, and some vague Gnostic flimflam. The only "battling" is the petty emotional strife you'd find in any slice of middle class realism. And the band doesn't even go on tour. Nothing in that description proved accurate, which is a goddamn shame, because the book I invented in my head was frigging glorious.
I try not to let my expectations sink my appreciation for what I get, and really, this is a solid if unremarkable (and somewhat formulaic) bit of literary fiction, adequate but no forgotten classic. But I don't think I've been this disappointed in a book since January, when I couldn't force myself through even two pages of Tad Williams' The Dirty Streets of Heaven.
326 pages
Published 1985
Read from November 24 to November 27
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
One of the justified criticisms of fantasy as a genre is how unoriginal and formulaic it can be. However, middle of the road literary fiction, to my mind, can be every bit as repetitive and paint-by-numbers as the most egregious Campbellian hero's journey in an elf-beset kingdom. Parts of this book felt like some kind of mainstream fiction mad-lib:
Unusual, exotic setting: TASMANIA
Scarring childhood trauma: POLIO / PARALYSIS (LEFT LEG)
Scarring childhood trauma #2 (optional): STRICT, ABUSIVE CATHOLIC SCHOOL
Substitute father figure ("good"): GRANDFATHER
Substitute father figure ("bad"): VAGUELY SATANIC GUITAR TUTOR
Symbolic childhood eccentricity: TOY THEATER
"Bad influence" childhood friend who returns to narrator's life later on: COUSIN AT BOARDING SCHOOL
Unusual sexual coming of age and ongoing fixation: OLDER, MARRIED WOMAN AT BOARDING HOUSE
Frustrated artistic ambition: ACTING / DIRECTING
Ongoing allegorical motif: FAERY / GNOSTIC DUALITY / "DOUBLE WORLD"
More worthy literary authors (like, say, Peter Carey, if we're sticking with the Australian milieu) disguise such a framework with concise, bedazzling prose, but Koch's composition is merely adequate, never stirring or surprising with its beauty or economy. "Average" literary prose, of course, ranks about equal to "very good" genre prose, which is another (justified) reason fantasy tends to get knocked. Also, the observational and descriptive skills of even an average lit author obliterate those of most fantasy scribblers. But personally, I start to get bored with verisimilitude if it isn't delivered in a voice that leaves my mouth wide open.
All of this is a long way from what I expected from this book. The introduction to The Year's Best Fantasy: First Annual Collection clued me in to The Doubleman, describing it as "a Steeleye Span-type band battling magic and touring Australia." My mind went to Fairport Convention for character models -- Sandy Denny and Richard Thompson tooling around in a groovy van and solving spooky mysteries in the Outback -- but the gist was the same, and it still sounded incredible. The reality is a letdown. For one thing, the narrator is the goddamn producer, not even a member of the band. For another, "magic" here consists of some Tarot cards, some seances, and some vague Gnostic flimflam. The only "battling" is the petty emotional strife you'd find in any slice of middle class realism. And the band doesn't even go on tour. Nothing in that description proved accurate, which is a goddamn shame, because the book I invented in my head was frigging glorious.
I try not to let my expectations sink my appreciation for what I get, and really, this is a solid if unremarkable (and somewhat formulaic) bit of literary fiction, adequate but no forgotten classic. But I don't think I've been this disappointed in a book since January, when I couldn't force myself through even two pages of Tad Williams' The Dirty Streets of Heaven.
Saturday, November 23, 2013
2013 read #144: Shadow Gate by Kate Elliott.
Shadow Gate by Kate Elliott
475 pages
Published 2008
Read from November 18 to November 23
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
One thing I didn't mention in my review of Spirit Gate was something that often plagues first volumes in trilogies: it felt like setup for some kind of delayed payoff down the line. The world was established for the reader, characters and factions were put into place; there was lots of walking and travel, and a token easy victory for our heroes at the end, with the obligate "The war is just beginning" speech to round things out, but not much actually happened. Sadly, instead of moving forward with that promised momentum, Shadow Gate continued to feel like setup, in some cases stepping back years from the end of the first book in multi-chapter flashbacks. I won't say these extended stretches of backstory were entirely wasted; my favorite bit in the entire series thus far detailed Kirit's history among a well-executed matrilineal steppe society. I would love to read an entire novel set in that culture. In terms of squandered momentum, however... well, you can tell how engaging I found this book if you look how long it took me to read it, given I wasn't reading anything else concurrently.
The problems with this being a stock fantasy story, adequately good but with nothing new to say, are magnified now that the novelty of the setting is wearing off; there isn't much to sustain my interest. The characters either bore or annoy me, with few exceptions (and those exceptions, like Kirit and Shai, are either criminally underused or used in a manner that doesn't play to what I find interesting about their characters, respectively). Basically all the women of the Hundred are tough, cocky, winking flirts. I love fantasy societies that explore different gender roles and expectations, but when every single bit player or tertiary character is some kind of confident and saucy tradeswoman, indistinguishable from the last, all eying the handsome male visitor up and down, it's less a matter of how the culture is portrayed and more the author getting lazy with characterization. Similarly, every Hundred man accepts that his cock is an aphorismic "handle" to drag him around, as if every man lacks volition when sexuality is invoked; every Qin warrior is honorable and prudish; and Mai, a somewhat interesting character in the first book, devolves into a plot robot with two or three settings: I miss my husband, I wish my friend lived in a less chauvinistic culture, I like bargaining in markets.
Meanwhile, Elliott's prose, never more than adequate, sustains a sequel slump; certain stock phrases leap out from every page. (Every time someone "sketched a bow" or "sketched a gesture," I wanted to grit my teeth.)
Shadow Gate was still somewhat entertaining, and I expect to see this thing through (at least as far as the close of this trilogy; I understand there are more books in this world, but don't much care). At least it isn't as bad as L. Jagi Lamplighter's "Prospero's Children" trilogy had gotten by this point. I'm kind of sad to see the Crossroads Trilogy squander its potential, though.
475 pages
Published 2008
Read from November 18 to November 23
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
One thing I didn't mention in my review of Spirit Gate was something that often plagues first volumes in trilogies: it felt like setup for some kind of delayed payoff down the line. The world was established for the reader, characters and factions were put into place; there was lots of walking and travel, and a token easy victory for our heroes at the end, with the obligate "The war is just beginning" speech to round things out, but not much actually happened. Sadly, instead of moving forward with that promised momentum, Shadow Gate continued to feel like setup, in some cases stepping back years from the end of the first book in multi-chapter flashbacks. I won't say these extended stretches of backstory were entirely wasted; my favorite bit in the entire series thus far detailed Kirit's history among a well-executed matrilineal steppe society. I would love to read an entire novel set in that culture. In terms of squandered momentum, however... well, you can tell how engaging I found this book if you look how long it took me to read it, given I wasn't reading anything else concurrently.
The problems with this being a stock fantasy story, adequately good but with nothing new to say, are magnified now that the novelty of the setting is wearing off; there isn't much to sustain my interest. The characters either bore or annoy me, with few exceptions (and those exceptions, like Kirit and Shai, are either criminally underused or used in a manner that doesn't play to what I find interesting about their characters, respectively). Basically all the women of the Hundred are tough, cocky, winking flirts. I love fantasy societies that explore different gender roles and expectations, but when every single bit player or tertiary character is some kind of confident and saucy tradeswoman, indistinguishable from the last, all eying the handsome male visitor up and down, it's less a matter of how the culture is portrayed and more the author getting lazy with characterization. Similarly, every Hundred man accepts that his cock is an aphorismic "handle" to drag him around, as if every man lacks volition when sexuality is invoked; every Qin warrior is honorable and prudish; and Mai, a somewhat interesting character in the first book, devolves into a plot robot with two or three settings: I miss my husband, I wish my friend lived in a less chauvinistic culture, I like bargaining in markets.
Meanwhile, Elliott's prose, never more than adequate, sustains a sequel slump; certain stock phrases leap out from every page. (Every time someone "sketched a bow" or "sketched a gesture," I wanted to grit my teeth.)
Shadow Gate was still somewhat entertaining, and I expect to see this thing through (at least as far as the close of this trilogy; I understand there are more books in this world, but don't much care). At least it isn't as bad as L. Jagi Lamplighter's "Prospero's Children" trilogy had gotten by this point. I'm kind of sad to see the Crossroads Trilogy squander its potential, though.
Monday, November 18, 2013
2013 read #143: The Year's Best Fantasy: First Annual Collection, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling.
The Year's Best Fantasy: First Annual Collection, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling
510 pages
Published 1988
Read from November 8 to November 18
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
My plan, such as it is, is to work my way through this and various other anthology series in as systematic a fashion as my library's ILL resources will permit. With this series, I'm beginning with the first, and reading as many as I can stand. I like what I've seen of '80s fantasy, but the prominence of horror in this anthology gives me misgivings. While I tend to adore the occasional horrific fantasy in these collections, I've never been a fan of outright horror. I made it through two pages of an edition of The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror before giving up; the mediocrity was astounding. Let's hope the horror stories here are more enjoyable, or at least more fantastic, and less reliant on boring crap like vampires and werewolves and serial killers and children of the various grain crops.
Expanding my historical foundations in my chosen genre is perhaps prudent. Why, however, should I read introductory material for a yearly anthology series, discussing industry happenings twenty-six years out of date? With future editions I might skip my usual diligence, because learning about how expansive and profitable dead tree publishing was in days of yore -- and reading complaints about how too many fantasy works were getting printed -- is only depressing, not informative. That said, Windling's "Summation" of fantasy in 1987 offered some primo book recommendations; I couldn't resist putting in an immediate ILL request for C. J. Koch's The Doubleman, described as "a Steeleye Span-type band battling magic and touring Australia." Um, hell yes, please. Though I maaaaay have just skimmed the other two introductions, summing up 1987's horror books and fantasy and horror cinema.
It bears emphasizing, just for archival purposes, that these stories were originally published in 1987.
"Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight" by Ursula K. Le Guin. Oh hey, I know this one. Already reviewed in quite positive terms in Modern Classics of Fantasy.
"A World Without Toys" by T. M. Wright. Ah, already we hit outright horror. It isn't promising. It's a one-note little story propped up by stick-figure characters (the hard-driven, kind of nasty professional woman, the genial man-child professional man with inexplicable feelings for her) and a rote scenario (creepy house is found, stirs some buried longing for childhood and freedom in the professional woman, he goes looking for her, they both get swallowed by the house, the end). I don't even read horror and this felt so damn familiar to me. Not a joy.
"DX" by Joe Halderman. Whoa, there are poems in this collection? I'm sure I've mentioned recently how, for me, the Vietnam well is pretty much bone dry. None of the stories or hard truths taken home from that war have much hold on my imagination or my emotions. Perhaps I was a bit premature making that statement. This poem offers nothing new or surprising to me in this year 2013, but it was damned moving, and therefore earns a pass.
"Friend's Best Man" by Jonathan Carroll. Magical Sick Kid and Magical Dog team up to help a newly handicapped man adjust to and improve his life. Kind of sweet, kind of cliched, entirely manipulative, very '80s... and then it takes a left turn at the very end. What I do like about this story is that the dog's communications through the dying girl aren't ever accurate. They're close enough to give the narrator pause, but there's plenty of room for doubt, so when the dying girl warns him that "The animals are rising," it hits a nicely ambivalent note. That said, this is an average-ish story at best.
"The Snow Apples" by Gwyneth Jones. Adequate "original fairy tale," inspires no strong feelings one way or the other. I do like how the kingdom is motorized and industrial, though Catherynne M. Valente brought the motorized fairy tale close to perfection with Deathless, and this tale is shabby and forgettable compared to that book.
"Ever After" by Susan Palwick. "Telling the other side of the story" has long been a quick and easy way to fashion post-modern retellings of fairy tales and the like. "Adding vampires" was, a few short years ago, another ubiquitous method, mostly utilized for camp effect. You would think a retelling of "Cinderella" from the godmother's point of view, which revealed that the godmothers were a race of vampires who spirit away young ladies for grooming, would be a ridiculous mess of cliches. Nevertheless, I really enjoyed this entry. There is a nice balance of dramatic tension from not knowing exactly what the Godmother is, from the girl being rebellious and headstrong and getting herself into unknown dangers, from the political plots weaving around them in the castle. And, dare I say it, I thought the way Palwick made the respective mythos of godmothers and vampires dovetail so perfectly was damn clever -- something I never expected to say about a vampire story. I'm impressed.
"My Name Is Dolly" by William F. Nolan. Brief (only three pages!) shock value story, in which an abused little girl (fashionable topic at the time, from what I can gather) kills her adoptive father, or maybe a witch uses a wind-up dolly to kill him for her... in other words, was it magic or was the girl craaaaaazy? Boring, obvious, manipulative stuff.
"The Moon's Revenge" by Joan Aiken. Charming fairy tale, pretty good as such things go, capturing that authentic Brothers Grimm obsession with shoes.
"Author's Notes" by Edward Bryant. Oh boy, the author-as-twisted-psycho-killer schtick. I rolled my eyes so hard I think I'll see double for a week. It's just as trite and dumb and full of precious "dark truths about life and society that, like, no one admits to themselves" as I feared.
"Lake George in High August" by John Robert Bensink. Another brief one, pretty much a literary short-short story if you ask me, dredging up some old heart-punching standbys like the death of a child and survivor's guilt. Competent storytelling, not sure what it has to do with fantasy.
"Csucskári" by Steven Brust. Straightforward (as far as I can tell) retelling of a Hungarian folktale in the wily trickster hero mold. Why it's here and not in a book of folklore is anyone's guess. It would seem fairy tales and folktales were all the rage in 1987, or at least that's what most impressed Datlow and Windling at the time.
"The Other Side" by Ramsey Campbell. Ohhhhh boy. Preternatural clown inflicts torments on a bunch of after school special thugs and kids-these-days, while an angry cliche of an '80s conservative watches from his window, feeling a mixture of horror and approval. And naturally the clown turns out to have the man's face under its makeup. Horror, ladies and gentlemen: it just doesn't do anything for me, man. I know it's supposed to be chilling, but this is just stupid.
"Pamela's Get" by David J. Schow. The basic gist here -- Pamela dies, and Jaime discovers (or thinks she discovers) that she was only Pamela's imaginary friend, and must race to preserve her existence by whatever means necessary before it's too late -- has potential. The execution, though, is awful. Witty-tongued yuppies on the make are not appealing protagonists, and the oh so hip and urban and cynical narration is crap. Kind of a yawn.
"Voices in the Wind" by Elizabeth S. Helfman. Another "folktale," as Windling puts it. Unremarkable stuff. I don't care enough to even find out if it's an original "folktale" or a retelling.
"Once Upon a Time, She Said" by Jane Yolen. "Storytelling is magic" is a tired old genre truism. I for one would be pleased to never see it again. This is a brief poem on the theme, nothing special, kinda pointless.
"The Circular Library of Stones" by Carol Emshwiller. Gently melancholy, a lovely voice, affecting enough that I'm willing to overlook my usual embargo against "The fantasy is all in her mind" stories.
"Soft Monkey" by Harlan Ellison. My first exposure to Ellison's writing, I think. I'd seen some kind of interview or video essay he did, railing about how much money he as a writer deserved, which helped solidify my impression of him as a self-important and self-loving asshat who can't be ignored because he's so goddamn talented. This story prefigures the obsession with the homeless that I, at least, associate with the early '90s -- what I tend to think of as the "Even Flow" years. The sensory imagery is as vivid as a snapping bone, but the whole plot -- "mob enforcers chase crazy bag lady who witnessed a murder" -- feels silly and borderline exploitative. Tell a story about a woman who clings to a "soft monkey" proxy of her dead baby, if you like, but don't turn her into John McClane drowning mobsters in dumpsters. Also, this has fuck-all to do with fantasy, unless all stories about delusional ideation must get shoehorned into fantasy.
"Fat Face" by Michael Shea. Is this my first "official" Cthulhu Mythos story? There was that goofy little Old God meets steampunk thing in Subterranean 2, but "Fat Face" is the first story I've read using specifically Lovecraftian creatures. And naturally, as this is the '80s, the main character/victim is a naive prostitute with a heart of gold. I didn't like it or dislike it. While I think the Mythos is an interesting collection of ideas, there's also a certain amount of inevitability to everything that robs it of any suspense or horror.
"Uncle Dobbin's Parrot Fair" by Charles de Lint. My second de Lint story, and I like it, for the most part. His brand of magical realism feels as comfortable and familiar as an old sweater in November. I'm a little bit bored of the "magic comes to those who believe" motif, but not as bored of it as I am of some other themes (like, I dunno, "storytelling is magic" or "was it real or was she CRAZY?"). A bit predictable but sweet.
"The Pear-shaped Man" by George R. R. Martin. There is a small subculture or clique on the internet, made up of disaffected former Song of Ice and Fire fans, that gets its jollies by insisting Martin is a gross lip-smacking creep one bust away from the sex offender registry. (Maybe this subculture is limited to the book and television forums of SomethingAwful, but it was certainly loud and proud in those places last time I looked.) This story gets cited in that community by people unable to separate works of fiction from the character of the author. They even call Martin, derisively, "the Pear-shaped Man." Finally reading this story, I'm struck by how... it's actually kinda funny. And creepy. I mean, it's creepy-guy body-horror making extensive use of the creepiest food imaginable, Cheez Doodles. I almost kind of... like this? A horror story I almost kind of like? What's going on here?
"Delta Sly Honey" by Lucius Shepard. A Vietnam War ghost story. I figure, if anyone could make Vietnam interesting to me, it'd be Shepard. Still nowhere near the standard I expect from the guy who wrote "The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule," but after all the duds in this book, this is good enough.
"Small Heirlooms" by M. John Harrison. Datlow notes this is "ostensibly" a mainstream literary story. I'll go ahead and say this is a mainstream literary story, all existential and post-war world-weary, very chilly and literate and European. I can recognize the value of this sort of thing, but still find it dull.
"The Improper Princess" by Patricia C. Wrede. Yet another one in the original fairy tale vein, nothing especially new or noteworthy to my tastes. As I've said somewhere before, this sort of story -- its sole purpose to take the air out of old fantasy cliches and make the bold statement that women are people too -- might have been cutting edge back when this was published, but nowadays leaves me wondering "Was that seriously it?"
"The Fable of the Farmer and Fox" by John Brunner. Another original fable. Nothing much to say about it.
"Haunted" by Joyce Carol Oates. Is this my first exposure to Oates? I think so. Kids growing up poor in a generalized Midwest setting, where half-understood fears of the world around you blend imperceptibly into the horrors of the supernatural, vividly depicted, cutting right into the summer haze of memory. Reminds me of Bradbury. Quite good.
"Dead Possums" by Kathryn Ptacek. Okay, all these not-really-fantasy stories are getting to be too much. I guess it was fashionable at the time to keep the fantastic element so subtle that you wouldn't be able to find it inside a phone booth, but if this has any fantastic element at all, it falls under the category of poetic justice or Alanis Morissette-style irony, hardly enough to distinguish it as a genre piece. This one has a bit of emotional punch to it, but the titular possums angle doesn't contribute much at all aside from a kind of pointless shock-value ending. (The guy runs over one possum in the beginning, and feels bad about it; leaving him to be ignored and run over by multiple oblivious drivers all night long seems more "edgy" than meaningful to me.)
"Pictures Made of Stones" by Lucius Shepard. A narrative poem once again demonstrating Shepard's fixation on drug-altered consciousness during economic wars in jungle countries. Pretty good story; though I'm no judge of poetry, I found no especial reason why the form suited the narrative better than, say, stream of consciousness prose might have done.
"Splatter: A Cautionary Tale" by Douglas E. Winter. This one would only be interesting if I cared about horror films and the perennial save-our-children censorship campaigns. I don't care about the former, and I only care about the latter when it's especially hilarious, as with Dungeons & Dragons. So I don't really care for this "condensed novel," nor do I get much pleasure from what amounts to a list of bullet points.
"Gentlemen" by John Skipp and Craig Spector. Competent storytelling, an interesting allegorical twist I didn't see coming, but this gritty urban drinks, drugs, and dissolution milieu will never interest me. I'd rate it middling or so.
"Demon Luck" by Craig Shaw Gardner. A cute, insubstantial, mildly satirical high fantasy piece of the sort I had expected to dominate this book. It brought a smile.
"Words of Power" by Jane Yolen. Unremarkable animal-magic/womb-magic stuff.
"Jamie's Grave" by Lisa Tuttle. The surest way to twist and dig into my emotions is to get a kid involved. That's just something that comes with parenthood, a surefire means of manipulation, though I feel used and toyed with afterwards. This had me queasy with that deep-rooted parental oh-shit-no feeling, then squirming with revulsion and, well, horror at the end, so I guess this one was pretty effective.
"The Maid on the Shore" by Delia Sherman. I really liked this one. Selkies are one of my favorite folkloric species, and this style of retelling -- actually adding to the tale and making it something new and unique -- is something I'm greatly fond of. Not an all-time classic, but excellent nonetheless.
"Halley's Passing" by Michael McDowell. The screenwriter of Beetlejuice offers one of those tales of affectless, methodical serial killers who happen to be vampiric immortals changin' with the times. Competently done, not my kind of thing.
"White Trains" by Lucius Shepard. Jeez, this dude gets three slots in one best-of anthology? At least I can tell why this is formatted as a poem; something of the inner rhythm of the language penetrated even my poetry-numb skull. This is an excellent and hilarious piece of what-the-fuck.
"Simple Sentences" by Natalie Babbit. Mildly amusing, vaguely Twainian tale of a street-slanging pickpocket and a sesquipedalian ponce winding up in Hell together. Ends with a groaner of a pun.
"A Hypothetical Lizard" by Alan Moore. Apparently Moore's first fantasy story, written on commission from admiring editors. Windling praises it as "the best story of the year." I wouldn't go that far -- "Buffalo Gals" earned that accolade, beyond question -- but it is a damn fine piece of fiction, bloated and decadent with enough imagery to supply a dozen Heavy Metal covers, swollen with unsettling sensuality, maggoty with spoiled love, resentment, and vengeance. Easily the second best story in this anthology.
Now that I've read this collection... I'm much less eager to read through this entire series. Either the fantasy of the late'80s was much less exquisite than the likes of "Buffalo Gals" had led me to believe, or Datlow and Windling's editorial sensibilities clash irreconcilably with my tastes. In a couple months, maybe, I'll give this series another shot. Right now I'm happy to be done with it.
510 pages
Published 1988
Read from November 8 to November 18
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
My plan, such as it is, is to work my way through this and various other anthology series in as systematic a fashion as my library's ILL resources will permit. With this series, I'm beginning with the first, and reading as many as I can stand. I like what I've seen of '80s fantasy, but the prominence of horror in this anthology gives me misgivings. While I tend to adore the occasional horrific fantasy in these collections, I've never been a fan of outright horror. I made it through two pages of an edition of The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror before giving up; the mediocrity was astounding. Let's hope the horror stories here are more enjoyable, or at least more fantastic, and less reliant on boring crap like vampires and werewolves and serial killers and children of the various grain crops.
Expanding my historical foundations in my chosen genre is perhaps prudent. Why, however, should I read introductory material for a yearly anthology series, discussing industry happenings twenty-six years out of date? With future editions I might skip my usual diligence, because learning about how expansive and profitable dead tree publishing was in days of yore -- and reading complaints about how too many fantasy works were getting printed -- is only depressing, not informative. That said, Windling's "Summation" of fantasy in 1987 offered some primo book recommendations; I couldn't resist putting in an immediate ILL request for C. J. Koch's The Doubleman, described as "a Steeleye Span-type band battling magic and touring Australia." Um, hell yes, please. Though I maaaaay have just skimmed the other two introductions, summing up 1987's horror books and fantasy and horror cinema.
It bears emphasizing, just for archival purposes, that these stories were originally published in 1987.
"Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight" by Ursula K. Le Guin. Oh hey, I know this one. Already reviewed in quite positive terms in Modern Classics of Fantasy.
"A World Without Toys" by T. M. Wright. Ah, already we hit outright horror. It isn't promising. It's a one-note little story propped up by stick-figure characters (the hard-driven, kind of nasty professional woman, the genial man-child professional man with inexplicable feelings for her) and a rote scenario (creepy house is found, stirs some buried longing for childhood and freedom in the professional woman, he goes looking for her, they both get swallowed by the house, the end). I don't even read horror and this felt so damn familiar to me. Not a joy.
"DX" by Joe Halderman. Whoa, there are poems in this collection? I'm sure I've mentioned recently how, for me, the Vietnam well is pretty much bone dry. None of the stories or hard truths taken home from that war have much hold on my imagination or my emotions. Perhaps I was a bit premature making that statement. This poem offers nothing new or surprising to me in this year 2013, but it was damned moving, and therefore earns a pass.
"Friend's Best Man" by Jonathan Carroll. Magical Sick Kid and Magical Dog team up to help a newly handicapped man adjust to and improve his life. Kind of sweet, kind of cliched, entirely manipulative, very '80s... and then it takes a left turn at the very end. What I do like about this story is that the dog's communications through the dying girl aren't ever accurate. They're close enough to give the narrator pause, but there's plenty of room for doubt, so when the dying girl warns him that "The animals are rising," it hits a nicely ambivalent note. That said, this is an average-ish story at best.
"The Snow Apples" by Gwyneth Jones. Adequate "original fairy tale," inspires no strong feelings one way or the other. I do like how the kingdom is motorized and industrial, though Catherynne M. Valente brought the motorized fairy tale close to perfection with Deathless, and this tale is shabby and forgettable compared to that book.
"Ever After" by Susan Palwick. "Telling the other side of the story" has long been a quick and easy way to fashion post-modern retellings of fairy tales and the like. "Adding vampires" was, a few short years ago, another ubiquitous method, mostly utilized for camp effect. You would think a retelling of "Cinderella" from the godmother's point of view, which revealed that the godmothers were a race of vampires who spirit away young ladies for grooming, would be a ridiculous mess of cliches. Nevertheless, I really enjoyed this entry. There is a nice balance of dramatic tension from not knowing exactly what the Godmother is, from the girl being rebellious and headstrong and getting herself into unknown dangers, from the political plots weaving around them in the castle. And, dare I say it, I thought the way Palwick made the respective mythos of godmothers and vampires dovetail so perfectly was damn clever -- something I never expected to say about a vampire story. I'm impressed.
"My Name Is Dolly" by William F. Nolan. Brief (only three pages!) shock value story, in which an abused little girl (fashionable topic at the time, from what I can gather) kills her adoptive father, or maybe a witch uses a wind-up dolly to kill him for her... in other words, was it magic or was the girl craaaaaazy? Boring, obvious, manipulative stuff.
"The Moon's Revenge" by Joan Aiken. Charming fairy tale, pretty good as such things go, capturing that authentic Brothers Grimm obsession with shoes.
"Author's Notes" by Edward Bryant. Oh boy, the author-as-twisted-psycho-killer schtick. I rolled my eyes so hard I think I'll see double for a week. It's just as trite and dumb and full of precious "dark truths about life and society that, like, no one admits to themselves" as I feared.
"Lake George in High August" by John Robert Bensink. Another brief one, pretty much a literary short-short story if you ask me, dredging up some old heart-punching standbys like the death of a child and survivor's guilt. Competent storytelling, not sure what it has to do with fantasy.
"Csucskári" by Steven Brust. Straightforward (as far as I can tell) retelling of a Hungarian folktale in the wily trickster hero mold. Why it's here and not in a book of folklore is anyone's guess. It would seem fairy tales and folktales were all the rage in 1987, or at least that's what most impressed Datlow and Windling at the time.
"The Other Side" by Ramsey Campbell. Ohhhhh boy. Preternatural clown inflicts torments on a bunch of after school special thugs and kids-these-days, while an angry cliche of an '80s conservative watches from his window, feeling a mixture of horror and approval. And naturally the clown turns out to have the man's face under its makeup. Horror, ladies and gentlemen: it just doesn't do anything for me, man. I know it's supposed to be chilling, but this is just stupid.
"Pamela's Get" by David J. Schow. The basic gist here -- Pamela dies, and Jaime discovers (or thinks she discovers) that she was only Pamela's imaginary friend, and must race to preserve her existence by whatever means necessary before it's too late -- has potential. The execution, though, is awful. Witty-tongued yuppies on the make are not appealing protagonists, and the oh so hip and urban and cynical narration is crap. Kind of a yawn.
"Voices in the Wind" by Elizabeth S. Helfman. Another "folktale," as Windling puts it. Unremarkable stuff. I don't care enough to even find out if it's an original "folktale" or a retelling.
"Once Upon a Time, She Said" by Jane Yolen. "Storytelling is magic" is a tired old genre truism. I for one would be pleased to never see it again. This is a brief poem on the theme, nothing special, kinda pointless.
"The Circular Library of Stones" by Carol Emshwiller. Gently melancholy, a lovely voice, affecting enough that I'm willing to overlook my usual embargo against "The fantasy is all in her mind" stories.
"Soft Monkey" by Harlan Ellison. My first exposure to Ellison's writing, I think. I'd seen some kind of interview or video essay he did, railing about how much money he as a writer deserved, which helped solidify my impression of him as a self-important and self-loving asshat who can't be ignored because he's so goddamn talented. This story prefigures the obsession with the homeless that I, at least, associate with the early '90s -- what I tend to think of as the "Even Flow" years. The sensory imagery is as vivid as a snapping bone, but the whole plot -- "mob enforcers chase crazy bag lady who witnessed a murder" -- feels silly and borderline exploitative. Tell a story about a woman who clings to a "soft monkey" proxy of her dead baby, if you like, but don't turn her into John McClane drowning mobsters in dumpsters. Also, this has fuck-all to do with fantasy, unless all stories about delusional ideation must get shoehorned into fantasy.
"Fat Face" by Michael Shea. Is this my first "official" Cthulhu Mythos story? There was that goofy little Old God meets steampunk thing in Subterranean 2, but "Fat Face" is the first story I've read using specifically Lovecraftian creatures. And naturally, as this is the '80s, the main character/victim is a naive prostitute with a heart of gold. I didn't like it or dislike it. While I think the Mythos is an interesting collection of ideas, there's also a certain amount of inevitability to everything that robs it of any suspense or horror.
"Uncle Dobbin's Parrot Fair" by Charles de Lint. My second de Lint story, and I like it, for the most part. His brand of magical realism feels as comfortable and familiar as an old sweater in November. I'm a little bit bored of the "magic comes to those who believe" motif, but not as bored of it as I am of some other themes (like, I dunno, "storytelling is magic" or "was it real or was she CRAZY?"). A bit predictable but sweet.
"The Pear-shaped Man" by George R. R. Martin. There is a small subculture or clique on the internet, made up of disaffected former Song of Ice and Fire fans, that gets its jollies by insisting Martin is a gross lip-smacking creep one bust away from the sex offender registry. (Maybe this subculture is limited to the book and television forums of SomethingAwful, but it was certainly loud and proud in those places last time I looked.) This story gets cited in that community by people unable to separate works of fiction from the character of the author. They even call Martin, derisively, "the Pear-shaped Man." Finally reading this story, I'm struck by how... it's actually kinda funny. And creepy. I mean, it's creepy-guy body-horror making extensive use of the creepiest food imaginable, Cheez Doodles. I almost kind of... like this? A horror story I almost kind of like? What's going on here?
"Delta Sly Honey" by Lucius Shepard. A Vietnam War ghost story. I figure, if anyone could make Vietnam interesting to me, it'd be Shepard. Still nowhere near the standard I expect from the guy who wrote "The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule," but after all the duds in this book, this is good enough.
"Small Heirlooms" by M. John Harrison. Datlow notes this is "ostensibly" a mainstream literary story. I'll go ahead and say this is a mainstream literary story, all existential and post-war world-weary, very chilly and literate and European. I can recognize the value of this sort of thing, but still find it dull.
"The Improper Princess" by Patricia C. Wrede. Yet another one in the original fairy tale vein, nothing especially new or noteworthy to my tastes. As I've said somewhere before, this sort of story -- its sole purpose to take the air out of old fantasy cliches and make the bold statement that women are people too -- might have been cutting edge back when this was published, but nowadays leaves me wondering "Was that seriously it?"
"The Fable of the Farmer and Fox" by John Brunner. Another original fable. Nothing much to say about it.
"Haunted" by Joyce Carol Oates. Is this my first exposure to Oates? I think so. Kids growing up poor in a generalized Midwest setting, where half-understood fears of the world around you blend imperceptibly into the horrors of the supernatural, vividly depicted, cutting right into the summer haze of memory. Reminds me of Bradbury. Quite good.
"Dead Possums" by Kathryn Ptacek. Okay, all these not-really-fantasy stories are getting to be too much. I guess it was fashionable at the time to keep the fantastic element so subtle that you wouldn't be able to find it inside a phone booth, but if this has any fantastic element at all, it falls under the category of poetic justice or Alanis Morissette-style irony, hardly enough to distinguish it as a genre piece. This one has a bit of emotional punch to it, but the titular possums angle doesn't contribute much at all aside from a kind of pointless shock-value ending. (The guy runs over one possum in the beginning, and feels bad about it; leaving him to be ignored and run over by multiple oblivious drivers all night long seems more "edgy" than meaningful to me.)
"Pictures Made of Stones" by Lucius Shepard. A narrative poem once again demonstrating Shepard's fixation on drug-altered consciousness during economic wars in jungle countries. Pretty good story; though I'm no judge of poetry, I found no especial reason why the form suited the narrative better than, say, stream of consciousness prose might have done.
"Splatter: A Cautionary Tale" by Douglas E. Winter. This one would only be interesting if I cared about horror films and the perennial save-our-children censorship campaigns. I don't care about the former, and I only care about the latter when it's especially hilarious, as with Dungeons & Dragons. So I don't really care for this "condensed novel," nor do I get much pleasure from what amounts to a list of bullet points.
"Gentlemen" by John Skipp and Craig Spector. Competent storytelling, an interesting allegorical twist I didn't see coming, but this gritty urban drinks, drugs, and dissolution milieu will never interest me. I'd rate it middling or so.
"Demon Luck" by Craig Shaw Gardner. A cute, insubstantial, mildly satirical high fantasy piece of the sort I had expected to dominate this book. It brought a smile.
"Words of Power" by Jane Yolen. Unremarkable animal-magic/womb-magic stuff.
"Jamie's Grave" by Lisa Tuttle. The surest way to twist and dig into my emotions is to get a kid involved. That's just something that comes with parenthood, a surefire means of manipulation, though I feel used and toyed with afterwards. This had me queasy with that deep-rooted parental oh-shit-no feeling, then squirming with revulsion and, well, horror at the end, so I guess this one was pretty effective.
"The Maid on the Shore" by Delia Sherman. I really liked this one. Selkies are one of my favorite folkloric species, and this style of retelling -- actually adding to the tale and making it something new and unique -- is something I'm greatly fond of. Not an all-time classic, but excellent nonetheless.
"Halley's Passing" by Michael McDowell. The screenwriter of Beetlejuice offers one of those tales of affectless, methodical serial killers who happen to be vampiric immortals changin' with the times. Competently done, not my kind of thing.
"White Trains" by Lucius Shepard. Jeez, this dude gets three slots in one best-of anthology? At least I can tell why this is formatted as a poem; something of the inner rhythm of the language penetrated even my poetry-numb skull. This is an excellent and hilarious piece of what-the-fuck.
"Simple Sentences" by Natalie Babbit. Mildly amusing, vaguely Twainian tale of a street-slanging pickpocket and a sesquipedalian ponce winding up in Hell together. Ends with a groaner of a pun.
"A Hypothetical Lizard" by Alan Moore. Apparently Moore's first fantasy story, written on commission from admiring editors. Windling praises it as "the best story of the year." I wouldn't go that far -- "Buffalo Gals" earned that accolade, beyond question -- but it is a damn fine piece of fiction, bloated and decadent with enough imagery to supply a dozen Heavy Metal covers, swollen with unsettling sensuality, maggoty with spoiled love, resentment, and vengeance. Easily the second best story in this anthology.
Now that I've read this collection... I'm much less eager to read through this entire series. Either the fantasy of the late'80s was much less exquisite than the likes of "Buffalo Gals" had led me to believe, or Datlow and Windling's editorial sensibilities clash irreconcilably with my tastes. In a couple months, maybe, I'll give this series another shot. Right now I'm happy to be done with it.
Saturday, November 16, 2013
2013 read #142: The Beginning Place by Ursula K. Le Guin.
The Beginning Place by Ursula K. Le Guin
246 pages
Published 1980
Read November 16
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
A slight but satisfying portal fantasy, a sweet tale of fragile people told with great tenderness and compassion. I can never find much to say about Le Guin's novels, it seems. The humanity of the characters was heartbreaking, infused with all the painful joy of life and the tricky business that is other people. Breaking that down into coarse chunks for what passes for a review around here feels wrong, somehow.
246 pages
Published 1980
Read November 16
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
A slight but satisfying portal fantasy, a sweet tale of fragile people told with great tenderness and compassion. I can never find much to say about Le Guin's novels, it seems. The humanity of the characters was heartbreaking, infused with all the painful joy of life and the tricky business that is other people. Breaking that down into coarse chunks for what passes for a review around here feels wrong, somehow.
2013 read #141: Raising the Stones by Sheri S. Tepper.
Raising the Stones by Sheri S. Tepper
453 pages
Published 1990
Read from November 8 to November 16
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
Tepper's Grass was an ambitious but tremendously flawed novel, its potentially interesting characters and storylines lost in a mess of Lifetime melodrama and increasingly irrelevant and uninteresting secondary characters. I was glad I read it, but equally glad to have it behind me for good. Which was why I was a bit surprised to find myself thinking of it a lot, and with fondness, a few weeks ago. I had grown retrospectively fond of the world of Grass and its wider milieu, and I was intrigued to follow the further implied adventures (spoilers, I guess) of Marjorie Westriding and her alien companion as they portaled from world to world throughout the galaxy. Beyond that, and a general sense that I owed Tepper's oeuvre a third opportunity to impress after she came so close with Grass, I had no idea what to expect from Raising the Stones.
Raising the Stones is a mess. But in what seems to be a developing pattern, it's an ambitious mess, attempting to use the artifices of soft science fiction and space opera to articulate the role and meaning of religion and gods in human life. Nowhere is this theme handled with subtlety. Parts of it read like a 16 year old atheist gleefully mocking the excesses and prejudices of the worst elements of certain religions. One particular passage, not much longer than a page, dove to such dismissive, reductionist depths -- characters suggest, in all seriousness, that religions based in pastoralist economies evince a predisposition toward militancy and fanaticism because the stock-raising lifestyle genetically favored people for paranoia and distrust -- that I felt my appreciation for the book as a whole plummet by like half a star. It's like, religious fanatics already provide you with plenty to critique. You don't have to resort to calling them genetic scum and implicating entire populations (cough from the Middle East cough) in the results of historical accident.
Other bits of Tepper's religious forays were more interesting, or at least more entertaining. The pastoral fanatics, while obviously meant to be proxies of hard-line Islam, were mixed with Boer trappings, which suited the group's political history quite well. The one mention of Marjorie Westriding's subsequent adventures segues into one of the more genially amusing satires, as her message of bulk-rate pantheistic humanism got distorted by religious scholars over the course of a millennium, to the point where her followers can't cut their hair or eat eggs or see psychologists.
And then, of course, you have the giant underground fungal god. Complete with god spores and brainwashed cats to bring it nourishment. Which a) was fuckin' awesome, and b) was described with just enough troubling detail to leave you uneasy after (spoilers) its final "victory."
The real problem with Raising the Stones was the characters. There were too many of them, and the vast majority of them were interchangeable bureaucrats whose pivotal scenes involved meetings ripped from the opening chapters of a Crichton potboiler. I only cared about a handful of characters, and they all received criminally few pages of POV.
Yet I can't bring myself to dislike this book. And even after two flawed entries, I find myself more intent than ever on obtaining the final book of the trilogy: it is hinted, ever so briefly, that Sam from this book -- who is now, finally, somewhat interesting at the end -- will seek out Marjorie from Grass on her pantheistic mission around the galaxy. While I expect to be disappointed, for some reason I just gotta see what happens next.
453 pages
Published 1990
Read from November 8 to November 16
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
Tepper's Grass was an ambitious but tremendously flawed novel, its potentially interesting characters and storylines lost in a mess of Lifetime melodrama and increasingly irrelevant and uninteresting secondary characters. I was glad I read it, but equally glad to have it behind me for good. Which was why I was a bit surprised to find myself thinking of it a lot, and with fondness, a few weeks ago. I had grown retrospectively fond of the world of Grass and its wider milieu, and I was intrigued to follow the further implied adventures (spoilers, I guess) of Marjorie Westriding and her alien companion as they portaled from world to world throughout the galaxy. Beyond that, and a general sense that I owed Tepper's oeuvre a third opportunity to impress after she came so close with Grass, I had no idea what to expect from Raising the Stones.
Raising the Stones is a mess. But in what seems to be a developing pattern, it's an ambitious mess, attempting to use the artifices of soft science fiction and space opera to articulate the role and meaning of religion and gods in human life. Nowhere is this theme handled with subtlety. Parts of it read like a 16 year old atheist gleefully mocking the excesses and prejudices of the worst elements of certain religions. One particular passage, not much longer than a page, dove to such dismissive, reductionist depths -- characters suggest, in all seriousness, that religions based in pastoralist economies evince a predisposition toward militancy and fanaticism because the stock-raising lifestyle genetically favored people for paranoia and distrust -- that I felt my appreciation for the book as a whole plummet by like half a star. It's like, religious fanatics already provide you with plenty to critique. You don't have to resort to calling them genetic scum and implicating entire populations (cough from the Middle East cough) in the results of historical accident.
Other bits of Tepper's religious forays were more interesting, or at least more entertaining. The pastoral fanatics, while obviously meant to be proxies of hard-line Islam, were mixed with Boer trappings, which suited the group's political history quite well. The one mention of Marjorie Westriding's subsequent adventures segues into one of the more genially amusing satires, as her message of bulk-rate pantheistic humanism got distorted by religious scholars over the course of a millennium, to the point where her followers can't cut their hair or eat eggs or see psychologists.
And then, of course, you have the giant underground fungal god. Complete with god spores and brainwashed cats to bring it nourishment. Which a) was fuckin' awesome, and b) was described with just enough troubling detail to leave you uneasy after (spoilers) its final "victory."
The real problem with Raising the Stones was the characters. There were too many of them, and the vast majority of them were interchangeable bureaucrats whose pivotal scenes involved meetings ripped from the opening chapters of a Crichton potboiler. I only cared about a handful of characters, and they all received criminally few pages of POV.
Yet I can't bring myself to dislike this book. And even after two flawed entries, I find myself more intent than ever on obtaining the final book of the trilogy: it is hinted, ever so briefly, that Sam from this book -- who is now, finally, somewhat interesting at the end -- will seek out Marjorie from Grass on her pantheistic mission around the galaxy. While I expect to be disappointed, for some reason I just gotta see what happens next.
Sunday, November 10, 2013
2013 read #140: Food: A Culinary History, edited by Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari.
Food: A Culinary History, edited by Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari
English edition by Albert Sonnenfeld
557 pages
Published 1996; English edition published 1999
Read from September 13 to November 10
Rating: ★★ out of 5
This, my friends, is a textbook example of sunk cost fallacy. I should have given up on this book almost two months ago. Right from the start I could tell we were gonna have some issues, this book and I. In his preface, Sonnenfeld seems to take great pride in his editorial decisions, which involved leaving out silly stuff like data and charts and graphs and such things -- useless, really, in a compendium of scholarly papers. Without supporting data, the various essays 1) were incredibly dull, and 2) read like just-so stories. I can't even bring an example to mind, because nothing in this book stuck with me, possibly a result of academic prose filtered through translation for that twice-tedious texture, so I'll just do what this book does and expect you to accept my assertions on my say-so.
All I can really say with confidence after reading this tome in its entirety is that Greeks liked symposia, affluent Romans praised the virtues of garden vegetables, medieval cuisine was based on the idea of regulating humors (and tended to sound pretty gross), French cuisine abandoned the medieval dietetic theories in favor of tastiness in the early modern period, and one of the French Republics (the third?) boosted "local cuisines" as a component of nationalism and republican unity. I was delighted, all those months ago, when I first found this book; I love history, and I love food, and the history of food sounded like an excellent field to study to catch up on. But it turns out that this book is most definitely not where you want to start. For one thing, despite its comprehensive title, Food: A Culinary History is intensely parochial, rarely giving more than passing mention to any developments outside of France and (to a lesser extent) Italy. A better title would be Assorted Papers on the History of French Cuisine, and Also Some Italian Stuff Is in There, and Like Three Chapters on Greek Drinking Parties and One on Kashrut and One on McDonald's.
The few times the various authors stumble into a subject that might be interesting, they mention it only in passing and continue blathering on about something stupid again. An article on "The Invasion of Foreign Foods" talks briefly about the industrialization of banana cultivation, which one would think would be an opportunity for a fascinating (though grim) examination of the various abuses committed by Dole, Chiquita, et al. out of sight in tropical hinterlands. Instead, the author admires the "enterprising spirit of a handful of pioneers" of banana agribusiness, and the "efficiency" of the companies these captains of industry created. It presents a skewed perspective, to put it mildly.
So yeah. I should have abandoned this book weeks and weeks ago. But no, I just had to keep at it, because I had to have it on my book tally after putting in so much time and reading so many pages. I wonder, though -- is there a good, well-written, well-documented, far-reaching history of food out there for me to read? There has to be, right?
English edition by Albert Sonnenfeld
557 pages
Published 1996; English edition published 1999
Read from September 13 to November 10
Rating: ★★ out of 5
This, my friends, is a textbook example of sunk cost fallacy. I should have given up on this book almost two months ago. Right from the start I could tell we were gonna have some issues, this book and I. In his preface, Sonnenfeld seems to take great pride in his editorial decisions, which involved leaving out silly stuff like data and charts and graphs and such things -- useless, really, in a compendium of scholarly papers. Without supporting data, the various essays 1) were incredibly dull, and 2) read like just-so stories. I can't even bring an example to mind, because nothing in this book stuck with me, possibly a result of academic prose filtered through translation for that twice-tedious texture, so I'll just do what this book does and expect you to accept my assertions on my say-so.
All I can really say with confidence after reading this tome in its entirety is that Greeks liked symposia, affluent Romans praised the virtues of garden vegetables, medieval cuisine was based on the idea of regulating humors (and tended to sound pretty gross), French cuisine abandoned the medieval dietetic theories in favor of tastiness in the early modern period, and one of the French Republics (the third?) boosted "local cuisines" as a component of nationalism and republican unity. I was delighted, all those months ago, when I first found this book; I love history, and I love food, and the history of food sounded like an excellent field to study to catch up on. But it turns out that this book is most definitely not where you want to start. For one thing, despite its comprehensive title, Food: A Culinary History is intensely parochial, rarely giving more than passing mention to any developments outside of France and (to a lesser extent) Italy. A better title would be Assorted Papers on the History of French Cuisine, and Also Some Italian Stuff Is in There, and Like Three Chapters on Greek Drinking Parties and One on Kashrut and One on McDonald's.
The few times the various authors stumble into a subject that might be interesting, they mention it only in passing and continue blathering on about something stupid again. An article on "The Invasion of Foreign Foods" talks briefly about the industrialization of banana cultivation, which one would think would be an opportunity for a fascinating (though grim) examination of the various abuses committed by Dole, Chiquita, et al. out of sight in tropical hinterlands. Instead, the author admires the "enterprising spirit of a handful of pioneers" of banana agribusiness, and the "efficiency" of the companies these captains of industry created. It presents a skewed perspective, to put it mildly.
So yeah. I should have abandoned this book weeks and weeks ago. But no, I just had to keep at it, because I had to have it on my book tally after putting in so much time and reading so many pages. I wonder, though -- is there a good, well-written, well-documented, far-reaching history of food out there for me to read? There has to be, right?
Friday, November 8, 2013
2013 read #139: Fantasy: The Best of the Year, 2007 Edition, edited by Rich Horton.
Fantasy: The Best of the Year, 2007 Edition, edited by Rich Horton
358 pages
Published 2007
Read from October 27 to November 8
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
I wish I had Rich Horton's job. While my ideal editorial role would be primary editor of a professional fantasy magazine, I've come to fantasize about getting paid to read through existing publications and anthologizing my favorite pieces. Ideally, of course, I'd prefer to be free to pull my favorite stories from any market and any year, not just the current pro markets, but no one's gonna pay me to anthologize the book I want to read, so I have to do it on my own, mentally, in bits and pieces, by combing bygone anthologies like this one. Maybe someday I'll luck into a stash of old genre mags and have even more material at my disposal.
I should note that these stories were actually published in 2006.
"Journey into the Kingdom" by M. Rickert. A low-key and quite seductive ghost story that abruptly and violently goes places I wasn't expecting. The story within a story within a story format sure helped keep me guessing where it was all going. A disturbing allegory for the intimacy of creative writing, and how readers can invest the emotional resonance of your work with illusions of something shared and possessive and secret between the two of you. Personally, I'm not a fan of "Was it supernatural or was he CRAZY??" endings; that shit was old hat many decades ago. Otherwise pretty good.
"The Water-Poet and the Four Seasons" by David J. Schwartz. A delicate construction of economical beauty, all the more affecting for its brevity. I almost feel a little sad that I've read so much stuff this year that this kind of thing no longer feels immediately life-changing, the way it would have even a year ago. Now I can only say this was a really good little story, not even one of my all time favorites, just really really good.
"Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy)" by Geoff Ryman. Weaving a fairy tale of sorts around one of the twentieth century's most horrific dictators is a bold move. Using the medium of supernatural fantasy to process the deaths of almost a million people is ambitious beyond the aims of most writers, but carries with it the possibility of trivializing real life genocide if the result is not a consummate work of passion, genius, and sensitivity. Or at least that's my opinion. Ryman aims very high indeed with this piece, and while the elements for success are there -- evocative imagery, precise use of language, a potentially interesting central character -- somehow it falls short for me. The individual elements offer moments of brilliance but never cohere into a great story.
"The Osteomancer's Son" by Greg van Eekhout. Strong on concept, weak on story and emotion. A deliciously creepy depiction of magic led me to expect terrific things, but the thief-pulls-one-last-heist-for-the-good-of-his-family boilerplate and standard-issue dark evil wizard villain lacked bite.
"Salt Wine" by Peter S. Beagle. There aren't enough creepy merpeople stories out there. Or maybe there are, and I just haven't read them yet. This one is excellent, melancholy and moving, just as you'd expect from Beagle.
"The Original Word for Rain" by Peter Higgins. An average-ish story that builds in an adequate way toward a disappointing ending. Plenty of genre writers can fashion believable, interesting romance within the confines of short fiction -- most recently, I appreciated Connie Willis' "Chance" and James Tiptree, Jr.'s "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever" for their vivid, realistic romantic aspects -- but a lot of writers should stay far, far away from the subject. This guy falls into the second category. "Man falls in love with a woman who thinks of him as a friend, and then he does something stupid when he meets her boyfriend" is such a tiresome, unrewarding cliche -- even if "something stupid" means "trigger the End Times" as it does here.
"The Lineaments of Gratified Desire" by Ysabeau S. Wilce. There is a broad transition zone between whimsical on one end and wacky on the other. As mileposts between the two extremes, I might cite Catherynne M. Valente's Fairyland series as a mostly winsome, mostly whimsical example, and Piers Anthony's Xanth series as mostly wacky, mostly wankery garbage. After hearing about Wilce's Califa series recently (I forget where), I was looking forward to this entry, but alas, "Lineaments" skews closer to wacky than whimsical. There were moments I liked, such as the Corn Sirens scene, but on the whole, "Magickal rock-n-roller must track down his royal four-year-old betrothed in a demonic carnival on supernatural Halloween" is too Xanthian for my tastes; matters are not helped by infantilized, blog-like prose, where the child in question is named "Tiny Doom" and much transpires in the realm of "yums" and "tums," and the fluffy stuffed pig inevitably has vast interdimensional powers exceeding those of a god. That sort of thing lost its appeal when I outgrew Invader Zim. (Maybe passing through a Zim phase confers immunity from ever finding the word "Doom" funny again.)
"Journey to Gantica" by Matthew Corradi. A charming little fable of home and family and finding yourself in order to find where you belong, only to find it was where you started from in the first place. As a Statement of the Human Condition, this was pretty much wasted on me; it's hard for me to identify with abstract concepts of home and belonging, which are really cultural assumptions, illustrating only a small portion of human variation and experience. But this is becoming too abstract a criticism for such a bubble of a story, so I'll quit now.
"Irregular Verbs" by Matthew Johnson. A melancholy, conceptually beautiful fable of loss and the inexpressible shared understandings that grow between lovers and wither away after widowing or separation, couched in terms of anthropological linguistics -- the best terms of all. As a Statement of the Human Condition, I thought this was just about perfect.
"A Fish Story" by Sarah Totton. Another not particularly funny "funny" story that showed promise for a few pages before slapping you across the face with its moral as if it were a trout. Even if you read this as a send-up of courtly romance, it's still way too heavy-handed for my taste. No fishing story can ever compare to "God's Hooks!", anyway.
"The Night Whiskey" by Jeffrey Ford. Delightfully chilling body horror, reminding me, winningly, of Margo Lanagan's "Mulberry Boys," from The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2012 Edition. As is unfortunately common with short form genre fiction, Ford can't quite stick the landing; the closing "So my girlfriend and I left town and tried to put all this behind us, but sometimes I think of it still" does not do justice to what came before. Nonetheless my favorite story in this book.
"A Fine Magic" by Margo Lanagan. Speaking of Lanagan... I had high expectations for this piece, given how much I enjoyed "Mulberry Boys" earlier this year. Unfortunately, like "A Fish Story," it's another "funny" tale about obsessive amatory pursuit and its fallout. This had vivid imagery, well-described, but once the carousel appeared, it was pretty easy to guess the general direction of the fascinator's "vengeance."
"Naturally" by Daniel Handler. Ghost stories must have been all the rage in 2006. This one is weary, a ghost-shaped gauze of Weltschmerz wound around the quotidian tragedies and tiny defeats of ordinary life, told with an odd fourth-wall-breaking narrative device that insists (as if doubting the reader will care or take it to heart) that the details of the story don't matter, that all stories and loves and lives are variations on a theme. A solid entry.
"Moon Viewing at Shijo Bridge" by Richard Parks. Solid historical fantasy, nothing to complain about. A trifle workmanlike -- the characters, the narrator in particular, are uninspired archetypes -- but adequate.
"Citrine: A Fable" by Elise Moser. Horton's introduction, rather unnecessarily, comments that this is a "feminist piece" -- that much is indisputable. But what sort of feminism is being offered here? I might quibble, for instance, with Horton's reading that Citrine is "freed" by the painter's magic. The closing lines left me with an impression of a different sort of imprisonment for Citrine, what with all the strong, healthy, beautiful, smiling women coming out of the proverbial woodwork. Either Moser deliberately wove in the Stepford vibe, delivering an interesting new layer of deeper commentary, or this story is really that naive. "And all the women were happy orchard sisters forever once freed from men" is a second generation feminist fantasy; encountering it in 2006, without that extra wrinkle of meaning I want to read into it, feels more than a little anachronistic.
"A Siege of Cranes" by Benjamin Rosenbaum. This has that classic Heroic Fantasy thing going on, hardcore. There are the peaceful pseudo-Mesopotamian villages destroyed and desolated by the White Witch; there are the deliberate anachronisms, such as the mounted and armored knights, the soul-sucking blue glow in the living rooms, and the futuristic city of the djinn; and of course there's the enormous flesh-chariot made of the body parts of everyone you've ever loved or known. Lacking in emotional punch, aside from the easy authorial manipulation of dead children, but entertaining as hell.
I'm somewhat disappointed with this collection. Either 2006 was a middling-poor year for fantasy fiction, or else Horton wasn't very good at his job back then; this book is full of okay entries, but no lasting greats.
358 pages
Published 2007
Read from October 27 to November 8
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
I wish I had Rich Horton's job. While my ideal editorial role would be primary editor of a professional fantasy magazine, I've come to fantasize about getting paid to read through existing publications and anthologizing my favorite pieces. Ideally, of course, I'd prefer to be free to pull my favorite stories from any market and any year, not just the current pro markets, but no one's gonna pay me to anthologize the book I want to read, so I have to do it on my own, mentally, in bits and pieces, by combing bygone anthologies like this one. Maybe someday I'll luck into a stash of old genre mags and have even more material at my disposal.
I should note that these stories were actually published in 2006.
"Journey into the Kingdom" by M. Rickert. A low-key and quite seductive ghost story that abruptly and violently goes places I wasn't expecting. The story within a story within a story format sure helped keep me guessing where it was all going. A disturbing allegory for the intimacy of creative writing, and how readers can invest the emotional resonance of your work with illusions of something shared and possessive and secret between the two of you. Personally, I'm not a fan of "Was it supernatural or was he CRAZY??" endings; that shit was old hat many decades ago. Otherwise pretty good.
"The Water-Poet and the Four Seasons" by David J. Schwartz. A delicate construction of economical beauty, all the more affecting for its brevity. I almost feel a little sad that I've read so much stuff this year that this kind of thing no longer feels immediately life-changing, the way it would have even a year ago. Now I can only say this was a really good little story, not even one of my all time favorites, just really really good.
"Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy)" by Geoff Ryman. Weaving a fairy tale of sorts around one of the twentieth century's most horrific dictators is a bold move. Using the medium of supernatural fantasy to process the deaths of almost a million people is ambitious beyond the aims of most writers, but carries with it the possibility of trivializing real life genocide if the result is not a consummate work of passion, genius, and sensitivity. Or at least that's my opinion. Ryman aims very high indeed with this piece, and while the elements for success are there -- evocative imagery, precise use of language, a potentially interesting central character -- somehow it falls short for me. The individual elements offer moments of brilliance but never cohere into a great story.
"The Osteomancer's Son" by Greg van Eekhout. Strong on concept, weak on story and emotion. A deliciously creepy depiction of magic led me to expect terrific things, but the thief-pulls-one-last-heist-for-the-good-of-his-family boilerplate and standard-issue dark evil wizard villain lacked bite.
"Salt Wine" by Peter S. Beagle. There aren't enough creepy merpeople stories out there. Or maybe there are, and I just haven't read them yet. This one is excellent, melancholy and moving, just as you'd expect from Beagle.
"The Original Word for Rain" by Peter Higgins. An average-ish story that builds in an adequate way toward a disappointing ending. Plenty of genre writers can fashion believable, interesting romance within the confines of short fiction -- most recently, I appreciated Connie Willis' "Chance" and James Tiptree, Jr.'s "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever" for their vivid, realistic romantic aspects -- but a lot of writers should stay far, far away from the subject. This guy falls into the second category. "Man falls in love with a woman who thinks of him as a friend, and then he does something stupid when he meets her boyfriend" is such a tiresome, unrewarding cliche -- even if "something stupid" means "trigger the End Times" as it does here.
"The Lineaments of Gratified Desire" by Ysabeau S. Wilce. There is a broad transition zone between whimsical on one end and wacky on the other. As mileposts between the two extremes, I might cite Catherynne M. Valente's Fairyland series as a mostly winsome, mostly whimsical example, and Piers Anthony's Xanth series as mostly wacky, mostly wankery garbage. After hearing about Wilce's Califa series recently (I forget where), I was looking forward to this entry, but alas, "Lineaments" skews closer to wacky than whimsical. There were moments I liked, such as the Corn Sirens scene, but on the whole, "Magickal rock-n-roller must track down his royal four-year-old betrothed in a demonic carnival on supernatural Halloween" is too Xanthian for my tastes; matters are not helped by infantilized, blog-like prose, where the child in question is named "Tiny Doom" and much transpires in the realm of "yums" and "tums," and the fluffy stuffed pig inevitably has vast interdimensional powers exceeding those of a god. That sort of thing lost its appeal when I outgrew Invader Zim. (Maybe passing through a Zim phase confers immunity from ever finding the word "Doom" funny again.)
"Journey to Gantica" by Matthew Corradi. A charming little fable of home and family and finding yourself in order to find where you belong, only to find it was where you started from in the first place. As a Statement of the Human Condition, this was pretty much wasted on me; it's hard for me to identify with abstract concepts of home and belonging, which are really cultural assumptions, illustrating only a small portion of human variation and experience. But this is becoming too abstract a criticism for such a bubble of a story, so I'll quit now.
"Irregular Verbs" by Matthew Johnson. A melancholy, conceptually beautiful fable of loss and the inexpressible shared understandings that grow between lovers and wither away after widowing or separation, couched in terms of anthropological linguistics -- the best terms of all. As a Statement of the Human Condition, I thought this was just about perfect.
"A Fish Story" by Sarah Totton. Another not particularly funny "funny" story that showed promise for a few pages before slapping you across the face with its moral as if it were a trout. Even if you read this as a send-up of courtly romance, it's still way too heavy-handed for my taste. No fishing story can ever compare to "God's Hooks!", anyway.
"The Night Whiskey" by Jeffrey Ford. Delightfully chilling body horror, reminding me, winningly, of Margo Lanagan's "Mulberry Boys," from The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2012 Edition. As is unfortunately common with short form genre fiction, Ford can't quite stick the landing; the closing "So my girlfriend and I left town and tried to put all this behind us, but sometimes I think of it still" does not do justice to what came before. Nonetheless my favorite story in this book.
"A Fine Magic" by Margo Lanagan. Speaking of Lanagan... I had high expectations for this piece, given how much I enjoyed "Mulberry Boys" earlier this year. Unfortunately, like "A Fish Story," it's another "funny" tale about obsessive amatory pursuit and its fallout. This had vivid imagery, well-described, but once the carousel appeared, it was pretty easy to guess the general direction of the fascinator's "vengeance."
"Naturally" by Daniel Handler. Ghost stories must have been all the rage in 2006. This one is weary, a ghost-shaped gauze of Weltschmerz wound around the quotidian tragedies and tiny defeats of ordinary life, told with an odd fourth-wall-breaking narrative device that insists (as if doubting the reader will care or take it to heart) that the details of the story don't matter, that all stories and loves and lives are variations on a theme. A solid entry.
"Moon Viewing at Shijo Bridge" by Richard Parks. Solid historical fantasy, nothing to complain about. A trifle workmanlike -- the characters, the narrator in particular, are uninspired archetypes -- but adequate.
"Citrine: A Fable" by Elise Moser. Horton's introduction, rather unnecessarily, comments that this is a "feminist piece" -- that much is indisputable. But what sort of feminism is being offered here? I might quibble, for instance, with Horton's reading that Citrine is "freed" by the painter's magic. The closing lines left me with an impression of a different sort of imprisonment for Citrine, what with all the strong, healthy, beautiful, smiling women coming out of the proverbial woodwork. Either Moser deliberately wove in the Stepford vibe, delivering an interesting new layer of deeper commentary, or this story is really that naive. "And all the women were happy orchard sisters forever once freed from men" is a second generation feminist fantasy; encountering it in 2006, without that extra wrinkle of meaning I want to read into it, feels more than a little anachronistic.
"A Siege of Cranes" by Benjamin Rosenbaum. This has that classic Heroic Fantasy thing going on, hardcore. There are the peaceful pseudo-Mesopotamian villages destroyed and desolated by the White Witch; there are the deliberate anachronisms, such as the mounted and armored knights, the soul-sucking blue glow in the living rooms, and the futuristic city of the djinn; and of course there's the enormous flesh-chariot made of the body parts of everyone you've ever loved or known. Lacking in emotional punch, aside from the easy authorial manipulation of dead children, but entertaining as hell.
I'm somewhat disappointed with this collection. Either 2006 was a middling-poor year for fantasy fiction, or else Horton wasn't very good at his job back then; this book is full of okay entries, but no lasting greats.
Tuesday, November 5, 2013
2013 read #138: Spirit Gate by Kate Elliott.
Spirit Gate by Kate Elliott
718 pages
Published 2006
Read from October 28 to November 5
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
A pretty good boilerplate fantasy novel. The characters, prose, and plot outline didn't feel like anything particularly new or noteworthy, but the setting was wonderful, a worldbuilding nerd's fondest dream, mixing Chinese, Central Asian, Republican Roman, Japanese, and other influences into a vivid, colorful, engaging milieu. I totally dig fantasy versions of Central Asia, in part because Central Asia as a whole is, in concept anyway, one of my favorite regions of the globe. So that aspect of the book was awesome and just what I was looking for. Plus, between this and some short stories I'm reading, I'm starting to develop a fondness for fantasy versions of ghost folklore. As for everything else here, as I mentioned, the story and characters were mediocre to adequate; every male character becomes incapacitated at the sight of curves and topless women, perking them right up and leaving them tongue tied even during desperate survival situations, which got really silly after a while.
One incidental OCD note: I dislike reading volumes of a series in different formats. The next two books in Elliott's Crossroads Trilogy I have in hardcover, and they're each about 250 and 150 pages shorter than this mass market paperback. The pagecount for this book is obviously inflated by format; because it's a series and I'm keeping track of these things, this bugs me a tiny bit.
718 pages
Published 2006
Read from October 28 to November 5
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
A pretty good boilerplate fantasy novel. The characters, prose, and plot outline didn't feel like anything particularly new or noteworthy, but the setting was wonderful, a worldbuilding nerd's fondest dream, mixing Chinese, Central Asian, Republican Roman, Japanese, and other influences into a vivid, colorful, engaging milieu. I totally dig fantasy versions of Central Asia, in part because Central Asia as a whole is, in concept anyway, one of my favorite regions of the globe. So that aspect of the book was awesome and just what I was looking for. Plus, between this and some short stories I'm reading, I'm starting to develop a fondness for fantasy versions of ghost folklore. As for everything else here, as I mentioned, the story and characters were mediocre to adequate; every male character becomes incapacitated at the sight of curves and topless women, perking them right up and leaving them tongue tied even during desperate survival situations, which got really silly after a while.
One incidental OCD note: I dislike reading volumes of a series in different formats. The next two books in Elliott's Crossroads Trilogy I have in hardcover, and they're each about 250 and 150 pages shorter than this mass market paperback. The pagecount for this book is obviously inflated by format; because it's a series and I'm keeping track of these things, this bugs me a tiny bit.
Friday, November 1, 2013
2013 read #137: Modern Classics of Science Fiction, edited by Gardner Dozois.
Modern Classics of Science Fiction, edited by Gardner Dozois
672 pages
Published 1991
Read from October 28 to November 1
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
I used to love science fiction, but over the last few years I've noticed a shift in my tastes toward fantasy, a shift that over the course of this year seems to be becoming outright exclusionary. The amateur speculative fiction magazine I intermittently run has died another ignominious death (victim of my apathy), but if I were to found a new 'zine today, I would dispense with the sci-fi without so much as a pang of conscience. In this I seem to be participating in a trend -- at least, I think I remember something about sales figures for science fiction going stagnant or declining while fantasy experiences a growth spurt. Perhaps all our realistic futures are too damn depressing and dystopian, so we all distance ourselves with a selection of alternative pasts. Or something. (I just find the cliches of sci-fi to be so much more boring than the cliches of fantasy, personally.)
Anyway, after I finished Dozois' Modern Classics of Fantasy, I resisted all of a day before putting in an order for this volume on ILL. I trust Dozois' anthologizing judgment too much at this point to be wary (perhaps that will bite me in the ass and this will prove a grim slog, we'll see). Besides, I really dig this historical approach; annual "best of" anthologies are great, but I appreciate the time depth of these selections.
After the rambling, informative minutiae of Dozois' introduction to Modern Classics of Fantasy, I was surprised and disappointed to find his intro here amounted to little more than "These stories were chosen by no criteria other than my fondness for them. Enjoy." Also, it's kind of amazing how much difference six years make in typographical quality. Modern Classics of Fantasy was a clean, polished volume with an evocative cover. This book is printed in a butt-ugly font with wildly inconsistent leading and contrast, and has a boring ol' picture of Saturn on the cover.
Onward to the stories.
"The Country of the Kind" by Damon Knight (1955). In the country of the kind, the prickish man is king. And it's lonely at the top. Or something. James Blish, Dozois reports, called this story "one of the most uncomfortable parables in our language." And like any good parable, it can be unpacked any number of ways. Is Knight suggesting that society can never be entirely "kind," that it must retain some of its primitive teeth in order to restrain those who would defy the common good? Is he saying that a "kind," liberal society is doomed and ineffectual, and that a "freethinking," presumably less emasculated libertarian man, while flawed, is superior? Is he begging people to wake up from our sheep-like cultural stupor of conformity (or liberalism or comfortable living or following orders, or whatever other social ill you might read from this tale), no matter what the means or the ends of that awakening, because no matter what, that stupor is worse? I have no idea. I'm sure I would have swallowed this stuff down uncritically a few short years ago, back when I thought some of Heinlein's political ideas kind of made sense, but nowadays I hold the view that, even if society is diseased, a man alone merely suffers from a different disease. Whatever point Knight is making here, I'm pretty sure I disagree on some level.
"Aristotle and the Gun" by L. Sprague de Camp (1956). Time traveler changes the course of history, with unforeseen consequences! Yeah, this is one of the most obvious and predictable of sci-fi staples -- Geoffrey Landis' short story "Interview with an Artist" had the exact same punchline, but with Hitler, in 1999, forty-three years after this piece -- but this was a satisfying, entertaining example of the type.
"The Other Celia" by Theodore Sturgeon (1957). In my review of Modern Classics of Fantasy, I used my personal term "'punchline' story" for the fruits of this era. A better, more intuitive term might be "concept-based story." Most short speculative fiction I have read from this period is focused on communicating one neat fantastic or science-fictiony concept (the line between is often blurred, as it is here -- only Sturgeon's vague noises about a species adapted for protective mimicry separate this piece from vampiric or changeling folklore and the realm of urban fantasy). Characters exist only to further the revelation of the concept. Their traits, such as they are, are developed solely to precipitate the main event or help it to its denouement. This story is of the "Ordinary Joe finds something really weird" subtype. Think Twilight Zone/The Scary Door: "Whoa, look at that weird mirror." All this talk of classification and story taxonomy might lead you to suspect that, no matter how expertly they're crafted and how riveting their concepts may be, I tend to get frustrated with concept-based stories. Oh sure, this was an absorbing read, but I'm glad I live in an era when character-based stories are common.
"Casey Agonistes" by Richard McKenna (1958). Oh man, I've heard about this story and wanted to read it for a long time now. The title is so frigging clever that it alone was enough for me to build up ideas of the story's awesomeness. I can tell you right now, all my ideas were way off. For one thing, baseball has absolutely nothing to do with this story. For that matter, this has as much to do with science fiction as it does with baseball. Instead, we have a powerful gut-punch of a story that belongs in with the American literary tradition of the middle twentieth century. Comparisons to Norman Mailer come to mind, if only because it's set in a VA hospital and my impoverished reading history leaves me with few other authors for comparison. If I did not expect to be this moved by a genre short story this early in the century, it's only because, frankly, this shouldn't even be considered a genre piece. Quite excellent.
"Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons" by Cordwainer Smith (1961). Basically a prototype of sorts for the galactic-scale baroque whatthefuckery novels and stories of highly trained ubermensch crossing wits and matching scheme for scheme in the indeterminately far future. A planet that grows an immortality drug inside virus-ridden sheep protects its wealth and power with an amplified relay of telepathic hate broadcast by minks genetically engineered to be psychotic, and a thief from a planet of thieves mortgages his planet in a rather dumb, ill-considered ploy to steal past the littul kittons. The thief's general incompetency was disappointing; for once, I think this could have been tremendously improved if the two hundred year old superthief were more competent, as opposed to getting snuffed the second he feels the psychic hate-fuck of the massed mink minds. It kind of feels like the planet of thieves wasted its two hundred years of training on this guy, really. Impressive for its time, though (until the ending).
"The Moon Moth" by Jack Vance (1961). And here we have a tale of a man unexpectedly saved and elevated by his own incompetence. At first I found it a mildly interesting soft sci-fi procedural, an outworlder man attempting to locate a criminal in a city of mask-wearers, but the denouement took me completely by surprise and left me (literally) laughing with pleasure.
"The Golden Horn" by Edgar Pangborn (1961). Dozois' introduction to this story confused me, because he calls Pangborn's Davy -- which incorporated this story -- "the finest postholocaust novel ever written." I must have gotten two or three pages into "The Golden Horn" before all the scene-setting clued me in that what Dozois termed "postholocaust" would be known as "post-apocalyptic" fiction today, which makes much more sense, because seriously, I am sure someone, somewhere, has written a superior novel treating with Holocaust. Anyway. I loved the setting, upstate New York somewhere but with flooded seaways dividing the land along the old valleys of the Mohawk, the Hudson, the St. Lawrence. The story itself was very good, a sturdy bit of storytelling, nothing particularly amazing.
"The Lady Margaret" by Keith Roberts (1966, revised 1968). Another story from the Pavane novel, like "The Signaller" from Modern Classics of Fantasy. Here the story's world reminds me most of the brief technological apogee of the Connecticut Yankee's stint in Britain, though with the satiric edges sanded off; it's a medieval society stubbornly and painfully pulling itself into the steam age, Norman bandit routiers preying on road locomotives in the wolf-roamed winter. Like "The Signaller," this is less a story than a sketch of a way of life, almost a technical manual from an alternative history, spliced in with a slow-burn character sketch. I don't think road trains are as intrinsically interesting as semaphorists, so I would give the edge to "The Signaller," but still an adequate read.
"This Moment of the Storm" by Roger Zelazny (1966). This is the sort of story I liked to write when I first set pencil to paper, twenty years ago: a straightforward and frankly not all that interesting man against nature plot. Of course (and thankfully) there's more to this story than I would have managed back then, eliciting some emotional depth from the random cruelty of weather and beast and man, though that depth is muddied by a typically Zalaznyan remove in the narrator and his narration. This story wasn't a total wash (heh, I made a pun), but modern classic? I think not.
"Narrow Valley" by R. A. Lafferty (1966). This one's just silly. Worth a couple chuckles, but not my kind of thing.
"Driftglass" by Samuel R. Delany (1967). My first Delany read! I've had a copy of Dhalgren for almost twelve years, waiting for me to muster the will to break past the first page, but I've wanted a smaller, simpler introduction to Delany for a while. This fits the bill, and it's really, really good. The emotional beats were a bit muted, but the setting, the details, the flavor of the world were all magnificent. (Incidentally, these old optimistic stories from the '60s and '70s, when people imagined the ocean's resources would be bounteous and inexhaustible, depress the hell out me now, in this age of trophic collapse and jellyfish oceans.)
"The Worm That Flies" by Brian W. Aldiss (1968). I suppose you could make the argument that no story set billions (or even millions) of years in the future could possibly feel as alien as it really should, just because there are limits to the human imagination, and the limits to evolution and cosmology are much much vaster. Nonetheless, the few far-future stories I've read tend to feel more fantastic and exotic than even the most out-there fantasy novel ever dares to be, probably because far-future writers take their inspiration from evolution and cosmology instead of the more circumscribed bounds of human folklore. In this story there are walking trees more alien than any ent, talking stones stranger than any palantír, and a recapitulation of Original Sin in the last days of the universe. Like only the very best stories of any genre, this one left me blinking in a daze, stoned on its imagery.
"The Fifth Head of Cerberus" by Gene Wolfe (1972). Remarkable. Truly a remarkable novella, a lush, Continental setting, an Ancien Régime atmosphere of civilization and cruelty suffusing a haunting tale of midnight tortures and clones, slave markets and alien changelings and Cantonese eggrolls, its language evocative and wearied. Terrific stuff.
"Nobody's Home" by Joanna Russ (1972). Polyamorous utopian fluff, with a few chuckle-worthy touches but otherwise rather forgettable. The plot is as follows: A successful and self-actualized Woman of the Future has a brief moment of empathy toward a Boring Person, and cries about it. The end. I'm not wedded to big intricate plots by any means, but if your story is going to be so one-note, it better have other stuff going for it.
"Her Smoke Rose Up Forever" by James Tiptree, Jr. (1974). Holy shit. This... this is devastating. Like, it left me speechless devastating. An amazing, painful, horrible, beautiful story. I don't even know what to say about it, other than I cannot believe this was published in 1974. It feels like it would be cutting edge in the late '90s, and still on top of year's-best lists today. Only the "psychic energies" stuff really dates it.
"The Barrow" by Ursula K. Le Guin (1976). Light historical fantasy. (Why's it in this book, exactly?) Those Norsemen and their barrows, am I right? Not even Le Guin can redeem the pseudo-Viking historical fantasy milieu, which always feels like the same dull stuff over and over again, but at least she keeps it brief, and manages to make it feel human, at least.
"Particle Theory" by Edward Bryant (1977). Another weeper loaded with heavy stuff, loss and cancer and supernovae. Brilliant and emotionally draining.
"The Ugly Chickens" by Harold Waldrop (1980). I was hoping for (expecting, really) something as brilliant and outré as Waldrop's "God's Hooks!" This story, alas, is merely of average goodness, the sort of base level of quality one expects from the good pro-level magazines. I could see this getting picked up by Analog as filler in the late '90s, for instance. The ending got a chuckle out of me, at least.
"Going Under" by Jack Dann (1981). Another workmanlike entry, good but hardly revelatory, neither as strange nor as "elegantly kinky" as Dozois indicated in its introduction. Affectless characters lead to affectless stories, I notice.
"Salvador" by Lucius Shepard (1984). A story by the same guy who wrote "The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule," one of my all-time favorites, and published the same year too! Of course, with expectations like that hovering around it, no story could satisfy. This sort of war and mind drugs and PTSD thing doesn't interest me much, its impact blunted by repetition. I think most people (well, most people who read a lot) are well aware of the ghastliness of war. "War is bad, and if you've Seen Shit, it's hard to readjust to normal life" can't be the entirety of your story, not anymore. I'm sure there's a term in literary criticism for how every generation of stories must get ever more sophisticated, as the big revelations and hard truths of one generation become the truisms and dull cliches of the next. This story is on the wrong end of that sophistication curve when it comes to warfare and its horrors. Not that it's a substandard story by any means, it just didn't break new ground for a 21st century reader, even if it was jaw-dropping in the mid '80s or whatever.
"Pretty Boy Crossover" by Pat Cadigan (1986). I didn't expect to like this much, but I do. The ending felt formulaic ("Life is the REAL adventure!"), but the esthetics and atmosphere of what went before were beguiling. And I'm not even into this sort of cyber-club/transhumanist scene generally.
"The Pure Product" by John Kessel (1986). Immortal far-future time traveler goes on a spree of nihilistic violence in the current day Midwest. Pretty good, I guess; a bit preachy with its Socially Relevant Message, not my favorite thing overall.
"The Winter Market" by William Gibson (1986). Cybernetic transhumanism, one of the dullest of recent sci-fi cliches, feels fresh and interesting here, although the "uncannily brilliant but disadvantaged/disabled/disaffected cyber-artist seeking apotheosis" archetype still grates on me. Each subset of genre fiction seems to attract a certain body of adherents, and it's natural enough for would-be crusty cyber-art punks to enjoy seeing their ideal selves projected in fiction (cf. Tim Burton gothic). Or perhaps it was the other way around; Gibson was writing this stuff so long ago that perhaps his characters got soaked up into the cyberpunky subculture as templates. I'm talking nonsense now, so I'll just say this was a solid enough story.
"Chance" by Connie Willis (1986). Another emotional kick in the gut, brutal and beautiful and achingly sad. It's up there with "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever" as the best piece so far in this anthology.
"The Edge of the World" by Michael Swanwick (1989). I don't remember exactly how I first read this story. It was the late '90s, I was beginning to realize that my crappy teen attempts at storycrafting were pathetic, and here this guy Michael Swanwick came in riding his dinosaur into at least two powerful, baffling, gorgeous pieces in Asimov's, daring to tread all over my chosen milieu of the dinosaur story and in mere handfuls of pages doing more with it than I could probably ever hope to do in my life. I didn't know who this Swanwick guy was, but I hated him and envied him and secretly wanted to be him. And in some random bookstore somewhere, I found some kind of sci-fi anthology, maybe one with Jupiter on the cover, I no longer recall. It strikes me now that it may even have been a softcover reprint of this very book. I couldn't own it, of course; my father was broke and controlling and paranoid, so even if we could afford it, I wouldn't be able to talk him into buying such a collection, full of unvetted and possibly homosexual writers who would surely warp my good and innocent 16 year old mind. But somehow (in retrospect I'm not sure how) I found the time, over several visits to bookstores and libraries and I don't know what else, to read this story. I read it in bits and pieces, in squirts of words separated by who knows how many weeks, and its impact on me was perhaps all the more powerful because of that. More so than any other writer's, Swanwick's influence challenged teenage Rick to put away childish things, to sit down and try my damnedest to improve, to emulate even a fraction of what I perceived as his brilliance. This is my first time rereading "The Edge of the World" since those long-gone, now alien years; if any story has ever been freighted with unreasonable expectations, it's this one. I'm very, very pleased to announce that, as with the best fiction, age and knowledge and experience have improved this simple tale beyond even my treasured memories of its power. It's not as brutally emotional as "Chance" or "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever," but as a story, it is perfectly put together, and it -- all of it, not just the gunshot of an ending I had forgotten -- leaves me dizzy.
"Dori Bangs" by Bruce Sterling (1989). Bizarrely sweet and oddly affecting little "alternate history" imagining how their lives would go if Dori Seda and Lester Bangs had lived, met, and settled down. Dozois, in his 1991 innocence, claims this story is "unlike any [alternate worlds story] you've ever seen anywhere else"; here in our more debauched, crowdsourced time, it reminds me of nothing so much as the celebrity realfic clogging the muckier tubes of the internet, though "Dori Bangs" has a certain irresistible charm and sad wisdom that makes such comparisons unworthy.
And that does it for this anthology! A lot of the stories here, I thought, were average or only slightly above it, with only a handful of standouts. Modern Classics of Fantasy for sure suited my tastes better. What I want now is for some world-class editor (possibly Dozois himself) to already have taken the time to put together companion volumes for this series, bringing the range of "Modern Classics" right up through the '90s and '00s to today. In the meantime, I expect to be reading a whoooooole heap of yearly best-of anthologies. Right now I have two checked out, purporting to offer the best fantasy stories from 1987 and 2007, respectively. Wish me luck!
672 pages
Published 1991
Read from October 28 to November 1
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
I used to love science fiction, but over the last few years I've noticed a shift in my tastes toward fantasy, a shift that over the course of this year seems to be becoming outright exclusionary. The amateur speculative fiction magazine I intermittently run has died another ignominious death (victim of my apathy), but if I were to found a new 'zine today, I would dispense with the sci-fi without so much as a pang of conscience. In this I seem to be participating in a trend -- at least, I think I remember something about sales figures for science fiction going stagnant or declining while fantasy experiences a growth spurt. Perhaps all our realistic futures are too damn depressing and dystopian, so we all distance ourselves with a selection of alternative pasts. Or something. (I just find the cliches of sci-fi to be so much more boring than the cliches of fantasy, personally.)
Anyway, after I finished Dozois' Modern Classics of Fantasy, I resisted all of a day before putting in an order for this volume on ILL. I trust Dozois' anthologizing judgment too much at this point to be wary (perhaps that will bite me in the ass and this will prove a grim slog, we'll see). Besides, I really dig this historical approach; annual "best of" anthologies are great, but I appreciate the time depth of these selections.
After the rambling, informative minutiae of Dozois' introduction to Modern Classics of Fantasy, I was surprised and disappointed to find his intro here amounted to little more than "These stories were chosen by no criteria other than my fondness for them. Enjoy." Also, it's kind of amazing how much difference six years make in typographical quality. Modern Classics of Fantasy was a clean, polished volume with an evocative cover. This book is printed in a butt-ugly font with wildly inconsistent leading and contrast, and has a boring ol' picture of Saturn on the cover.
Onward to the stories.
"The Country of the Kind" by Damon Knight (1955). In the country of the kind, the prickish man is king. And it's lonely at the top. Or something. James Blish, Dozois reports, called this story "one of the most uncomfortable parables in our language." And like any good parable, it can be unpacked any number of ways. Is Knight suggesting that society can never be entirely "kind," that it must retain some of its primitive teeth in order to restrain those who would defy the common good? Is he saying that a "kind," liberal society is doomed and ineffectual, and that a "freethinking," presumably less emasculated libertarian man, while flawed, is superior? Is he begging people to wake up from our sheep-like cultural stupor of conformity (or liberalism or comfortable living or following orders, or whatever other social ill you might read from this tale), no matter what the means or the ends of that awakening, because no matter what, that stupor is worse? I have no idea. I'm sure I would have swallowed this stuff down uncritically a few short years ago, back when I thought some of Heinlein's political ideas kind of made sense, but nowadays I hold the view that, even if society is diseased, a man alone merely suffers from a different disease. Whatever point Knight is making here, I'm pretty sure I disagree on some level.
"Aristotle and the Gun" by L. Sprague de Camp (1956). Time traveler changes the course of history, with unforeseen consequences! Yeah, this is one of the most obvious and predictable of sci-fi staples -- Geoffrey Landis' short story "Interview with an Artist" had the exact same punchline, but with Hitler, in 1999, forty-three years after this piece -- but this was a satisfying, entertaining example of the type.
"The Other Celia" by Theodore Sturgeon (1957). In my review of Modern Classics of Fantasy, I used my personal term "'punchline' story" for the fruits of this era. A better, more intuitive term might be "concept-based story." Most short speculative fiction I have read from this period is focused on communicating one neat fantastic or science-fictiony concept (the line between is often blurred, as it is here -- only Sturgeon's vague noises about a species adapted for protective mimicry separate this piece from vampiric or changeling folklore and the realm of urban fantasy). Characters exist only to further the revelation of the concept. Their traits, such as they are, are developed solely to precipitate the main event or help it to its denouement. This story is of the "Ordinary Joe finds something really weird" subtype. Think Twilight Zone/The Scary Door: "Whoa, look at that weird mirror." All this talk of classification and story taxonomy might lead you to suspect that, no matter how expertly they're crafted and how riveting their concepts may be, I tend to get frustrated with concept-based stories. Oh sure, this was an absorbing read, but I'm glad I live in an era when character-based stories are common.
"Casey Agonistes" by Richard McKenna (1958). Oh man, I've heard about this story and wanted to read it for a long time now. The title is so frigging clever that it alone was enough for me to build up ideas of the story's awesomeness. I can tell you right now, all my ideas were way off. For one thing, baseball has absolutely nothing to do with this story. For that matter, this has as much to do with science fiction as it does with baseball. Instead, we have a powerful gut-punch of a story that belongs in with the American literary tradition of the middle twentieth century. Comparisons to Norman Mailer come to mind, if only because it's set in a VA hospital and my impoverished reading history leaves me with few other authors for comparison. If I did not expect to be this moved by a genre short story this early in the century, it's only because, frankly, this shouldn't even be considered a genre piece. Quite excellent.
"Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons" by Cordwainer Smith (1961). Basically a prototype of sorts for the galactic-scale baroque whatthefuckery novels and stories of highly trained ubermensch crossing wits and matching scheme for scheme in the indeterminately far future. A planet that grows an immortality drug inside virus-ridden sheep protects its wealth and power with an amplified relay of telepathic hate broadcast by minks genetically engineered to be psychotic, and a thief from a planet of thieves mortgages his planet in a rather dumb, ill-considered ploy to steal past the littul kittons. The thief's general incompetency was disappointing; for once, I think this could have been tremendously improved if the two hundred year old superthief were more competent, as opposed to getting snuffed the second he feels the psychic hate-fuck of the massed mink minds. It kind of feels like the planet of thieves wasted its two hundred years of training on this guy, really. Impressive for its time, though (until the ending).
"The Moon Moth" by Jack Vance (1961). And here we have a tale of a man unexpectedly saved and elevated by his own incompetence. At first I found it a mildly interesting soft sci-fi procedural, an outworlder man attempting to locate a criminal in a city of mask-wearers, but the denouement took me completely by surprise and left me (literally) laughing with pleasure.
"The Golden Horn" by Edgar Pangborn (1961). Dozois' introduction to this story confused me, because he calls Pangborn's Davy -- which incorporated this story -- "the finest postholocaust novel ever written." I must have gotten two or three pages into "The Golden Horn" before all the scene-setting clued me in that what Dozois termed "postholocaust" would be known as "post-apocalyptic" fiction today, which makes much more sense, because seriously, I am sure someone, somewhere, has written a superior novel treating with Holocaust. Anyway. I loved the setting, upstate New York somewhere but with flooded seaways dividing the land along the old valleys of the Mohawk, the Hudson, the St. Lawrence. The story itself was very good, a sturdy bit of storytelling, nothing particularly amazing.
"The Lady Margaret" by Keith Roberts (1966, revised 1968). Another story from the Pavane novel, like "The Signaller" from Modern Classics of Fantasy. Here the story's world reminds me most of the brief technological apogee of the Connecticut Yankee's stint in Britain, though with the satiric edges sanded off; it's a medieval society stubbornly and painfully pulling itself into the steam age, Norman bandit routiers preying on road locomotives in the wolf-roamed winter. Like "The Signaller," this is less a story than a sketch of a way of life, almost a technical manual from an alternative history, spliced in with a slow-burn character sketch. I don't think road trains are as intrinsically interesting as semaphorists, so I would give the edge to "The Signaller," but still an adequate read.
"This Moment of the Storm" by Roger Zelazny (1966). This is the sort of story I liked to write when I first set pencil to paper, twenty years ago: a straightforward and frankly not all that interesting man against nature plot. Of course (and thankfully) there's more to this story than I would have managed back then, eliciting some emotional depth from the random cruelty of weather and beast and man, though that depth is muddied by a typically Zalaznyan remove in the narrator and his narration. This story wasn't a total wash (heh, I made a pun), but modern classic? I think not.
"Narrow Valley" by R. A. Lafferty (1966). This one's just silly. Worth a couple chuckles, but not my kind of thing.
"Driftglass" by Samuel R. Delany (1967). My first Delany read! I've had a copy of Dhalgren for almost twelve years, waiting for me to muster the will to break past the first page, but I've wanted a smaller, simpler introduction to Delany for a while. This fits the bill, and it's really, really good. The emotional beats were a bit muted, but the setting, the details, the flavor of the world were all magnificent. (Incidentally, these old optimistic stories from the '60s and '70s, when people imagined the ocean's resources would be bounteous and inexhaustible, depress the hell out me now, in this age of trophic collapse and jellyfish oceans.)
"The Worm That Flies" by Brian W. Aldiss (1968). I suppose you could make the argument that no story set billions (or even millions) of years in the future could possibly feel as alien as it really should, just because there are limits to the human imagination, and the limits to evolution and cosmology are much much vaster. Nonetheless, the few far-future stories I've read tend to feel more fantastic and exotic than even the most out-there fantasy novel ever dares to be, probably because far-future writers take their inspiration from evolution and cosmology instead of the more circumscribed bounds of human folklore. In this story there are walking trees more alien than any ent, talking stones stranger than any palantír, and a recapitulation of Original Sin in the last days of the universe. Like only the very best stories of any genre, this one left me blinking in a daze, stoned on its imagery.
"The Fifth Head of Cerberus" by Gene Wolfe (1972). Remarkable. Truly a remarkable novella, a lush, Continental setting, an Ancien Régime atmosphere of civilization and cruelty suffusing a haunting tale of midnight tortures and clones, slave markets and alien changelings and Cantonese eggrolls, its language evocative and wearied. Terrific stuff.
"Nobody's Home" by Joanna Russ (1972). Polyamorous utopian fluff, with a few chuckle-worthy touches but otherwise rather forgettable. The plot is as follows: A successful and self-actualized Woman of the Future has a brief moment of empathy toward a Boring Person, and cries about it. The end. I'm not wedded to big intricate plots by any means, but if your story is going to be so one-note, it better have other stuff going for it.
"Her Smoke Rose Up Forever" by James Tiptree, Jr. (1974). Holy shit. This... this is devastating. Like, it left me speechless devastating. An amazing, painful, horrible, beautiful story. I don't even know what to say about it, other than I cannot believe this was published in 1974. It feels like it would be cutting edge in the late '90s, and still on top of year's-best lists today. Only the "psychic energies" stuff really dates it.
"The Barrow" by Ursula K. Le Guin (1976). Light historical fantasy. (Why's it in this book, exactly?) Those Norsemen and their barrows, am I right? Not even Le Guin can redeem the pseudo-Viking historical fantasy milieu, which always feels like the same dull stuff over and over again, but at least she keeps it brief, and manages to make it feel human, at least.
"Particle Theory" by Edward Bryant (1977). Another weeper loaded with heavy stuff, loss and cancer and supernovae. Brilliant and emotionally draining.
"The Ugly Chickens" by Harold Waldrop (1980). I was hoping for (expecting, really) something as brilliant and outré as Waldrop's "God's Hooks!" This story, alas, is merely of average goodness, the sort of base level of quality one expects from the good pro-level magazines. I could see this getting picked up by Analog as filler in the late '90s, for instance. The ending got a chuckle out of me, at least.
"Going Under" by Jack Dann (1981). Another workmanlike entry, good but hardly revelatory, neither as strange nor as "elegantly kinky" as Dozois indicated in its introduction. Affectless characters lead to affectless stories, I notice.
"Salvador" by Lucius Shepard (1984). A story by the same guy who wrote "The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule," one of my all-time favorites, and published the same year too! Of course, with expectations like that hovering around it, no story could satisfy. This sort of war and mind drugs and PTSD thing doesn't interest me much, its impact blunted by repetition. I think most people (well, most people who read a lot) are well aware of the ghastliness of war. "War is bad, and if you've Seen Shit, it's hard to readjust to normal life" can't be the entirety of your story, not anymore. I'm sure there's a term in literary criticism for how every generation of stories must get ever more sophisticated, as the big revelations and hard truths of one generation become the truisms and dull cliches of the next. This story is on the wrong end of that sophistication curve when it comes to warfare and its horrors. Not that it's a substandard story by any means, it just didn't break new ground for a 21st century reader, even if it was jaw-dropping in the mid '80s or whatever.
"Pretty Boy Crossover" by Pat Cadigan (1986). I didn't expect to like this much, but I do. The ending felt formulaic ("Life is the REAL adventure!"), but the esthetics and atmosphere of what went before were beguiling. And I'm not even into this sort of cyber-club/transhumanist scene generally.
"The Pure Product" by John Kessel (1986). Immortal far-future time traveler goes on a spree of nihilistic violence in the current day Midwest. Pretty good, I guess; a bit preachy with its Socially Relevant Message, not my favorite thing overall.
"The Winter Market" by William Gibson (1986). Cybernetic transhumanism, one of the dullest of recent sci-fi cliches, feels fresh and interesting here, although the "uncannily brilliant but disadvantaged/disabled/disaffected cyber-artist seeking apotheosis" archetype still grates on me. Each subset of genre fiction seems to attract a certain body of adherents, and it's natural enough for would-be crusty cyber-art punks to enjoy seeing their ideal selves projected in fiction (cf. Tim Burton gothic). Or perhaps it was the other way around; Gibson was writing this stuff so long ago that perhaps his characters got soaked up into the cyberpunky subculture as templates. I'm talking nonsense now, so I'll just say this was a solid enough story.
"Chance" by Connie Willis (1986). Another emotional kick in the gut, brutal and beautiful and achingly sad. It's up there with "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever" as the best piece so far in this anthology.
"The Edge of the World" by Michael Swanwick (1989). I don't remember exactly how I first read this story. It was the late '90s, I was beginning to realize that my crappy teen attempts at storycrafting were pathetic, and here this guy Michael Swanwick came in riding his dinosaur into at least two powerful, baffling, gorgeous pieces in Asimov's, daring to tread all over my chosen milieu of the dinosaur story and in mere handfuls of pages doing more with it than I could probably ever hope to do in my life. I didn't know who this Swanwick guy was, but I hated him and envied him and secretly wanted to be him. And in some random bookstore somewhere, I found some kind of sci-fi anthology, maybe one with Jupiter on the cover, I no longer recall. It strikes me now that it may even have been a softcover reprint of this very book. I couldn't own it, of course; my father was broke and controlling and paranoid, so even if we could afford it, I wouldn't be able to talk him into buying such a collection, full of unvetted and possibly homosexual writers who would surely warp my good and innocent 16 year old mind. But somehow (in retrospect I'm not sure how) I found the time, over several visits to bookstores and libraries and I don't know what else, to read this story. I read it in bits and pieces, in squirts of words separated by who knows how many weeks, and its impact on me was perhaps all the more powerful because of that. More so than any other writer's, Swanwick's influence challenged teenage Rick to put away childish things, to sit down and try my damnedest to improve, to emulate even a fraction of what I perceived as his brilliance. This is my first time rereading "The Edge of the World" since those long-gone, now alien years; if any story has ever been freighted with unreasonable expectations, it's this one. I'm very, very pleased to announce that, as with the best fiction, age and knowledge and experience have improved this simple tale beyond even my treasured memories of its power. It's not as brutally emotional as "Chance" or "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever," but as a story, it is perfectly put together, and it -- all of it, not just the gunshot of an ending I had forgotten -- leaves me dizzy.
"Dori Bangs" by Bruce Sterling (1989). Bizarrely sweet and oddly affecting little "alternate history" imagining how their lives would go if Dori Seda and Lester Bangs had lived, met, and settled down. Dozois, in his 1991 innocence, claims this story is "unlike any [alternate worlds story] you've ever seen anywhere else"; here in our more debauched, crowdsourced time, it reminds me of nothing so much as the celebrity realfic clogging the muckier tubes of the internet, though "Dori Bangs" has a certain irresistible charm and sad wisdom that makes such comparisons unworthy.
And that does it for this anthology! A lot of the stories here, I thought, were average or only slightly above it, with only a handful of standouts. Modern Classics of Fantasy for sure suited my tastes better. What I want now is for some world-class editor (possibly Dozois himself) to already have taken the time to put together companion volumes for this series, bringing the range of "Modern Classics" right up through the '90s and '00s to today. In the meantime, I expect to be reading a whoooooole heap of yearly best-of anthologies. Right now I have two checked out, purporting to offer the best fantasy stories from 1987 and 2007, respectively. Wish me luck!
Sunday, October 27, 2013
2013 read #136: Pym by Mat Johnson.
Pym by Mat Johnson
323 pages
Published 2009
Read from October 25 to October 27
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
"I really only read The Narrative [of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket] as homework before I read Pym by Mat Johnson. The cover and blurb of that book have intrigued me for months. I even had it checked out for a while earlier this year, but elected to hold off on it until I had the chance to read Poe's original novel." So I wrote in my review of Poe's Narrative, which I read way back in June.
I'm coming to face how very little -- how shamefully little, how appallingly little -- African American literature I have read. One book by Octavia E. Butler, which I really liked; one book by Nnedi Okorafor, which I really wanted to like. I almost bought Ellison's Invisible Man half a dozen times between my late teens and the day I got a library card last year. And... that's it, as far as I can remember. The one history I own by a Black historian is titled The History of White People. I am the worst kind of lip-service liberal, never poking my head out of my fantasy fiction comfort zone, clinging to my humanities degree as evidence of not-wholly-debased intentions without making substantive effort to inform myself of other perspectives.
What struck me most powerfully about this book, qua a book, is the mixing and mingling of what I would ordinarily classify as incongruent styles. Dry, bitterly hilarious social satire rubs elbows with the "low" humor of pratfalls and the prominence of Little Debbie snack cakes as a central plot point. Pointed social commentary commingles with the structure and plot of a Crichton-esque airport adventure novel. It resists easy compartmentalization. Given how little I've explored African American literary and critical perspectives, it's best that I don't try to impose any kind of labeling anyway, beyond affirming that I think Pym is pretty damn funny.
323 pages
Published 2009
Read from October 25 to October 27
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
"I really only read The Narrative [of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket] as homework before I read Pym by Mat Johnson. The cover and blurb of that book have intrigued me for months. I even had it checked out for a while earlier this year, but elected to hold off on it until I had the chance to read Poe's original novel." So I wrote in my review of Poe's Narrative, which I read way back in June.
I'm coming to face how very little -- how shamefully little, how appallingly little -- African American literature I have read. One book by Octavia E. Butler, which I really liked; one book by Nnedi Okorafor, which I really wanted to like. I almost bought Ellison's Invisible Man half a dozen times between my late teens and the day I got a library card last year. And... that's it, as far as I can remember. The one history I own by a Black historian is titled The History of White People. I am the worst kind of lip-service liberal, never poking my head out of my fantasy fiction comfort zone, clinging to my humanities degree as evidence of not-wholly-debased intentions without making substantive effort to inform myself of other perspectives.
What struck me most powerfully about this book, qua a book, is the mixing and mingling of what I would ordinarily classify as incongruent styles. Dry, bitterly hilarious social satire rubs elbows with the "low" humor of pratfalls and the prominence of Little Debbie snack cakes as a central plot point. Pointed social commentary commingles with the structure and plot of a Crichton-esque airport adventure novel. It resists easy compartmentalization. Given how little I've explored African American literary and critical perspectives, it's best that I don't try to impose any kind of labeling anyway, beyond affirming that I think Pym is pretty damn funny.
Friday, October 25, 2013
2013 read #135: Kushiel's Chosen by Jacqueline Carey.
Kushiel's Chosen by Jacqueline Carey
700 pages
Published 2002
Read from October 20 to October 25
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
This is a rarity: a middle volume in a fantasy trilogy that actually shows discernible improvement over the first volume. Many of Kushiel's Dart's weaknesses are still present, but they're toned down considerably. The game-of-thrones politicking still rests on a shaky grounding of vaguely defined, almost interchangeable tertiary characters, but whether through 1400 pages of exposure or some upgrade in Carey's descriptive faculties, I could tell who was who most of the time. There are still miraculous, absurd Hollywood escapes from certain doom, but there were only two or three such prodigies this time around; I lost count in the first book. There are still a number of glaring homophonic substitutions in the text, but Carey or her editors seem to have caught more of them before the book went to print.
Unfortunately (and here come some slight spoilers), this book's emphasis on Melisande as a villainous mastermind of the highest order exposes the fact that, really, Melisande doesn't have much characterization to speak of. She's exceptionally beautiful, yes, even by the standards of angelic half-breeds; she's a sexual sadist; she's brilliant and does the inevitable eleven dimensional chess thing, where she's always thinking ten thousand moves ahead of anyone else. And that's pretty much it. She has all the depth of a Goodkind second-string villain, which is to say, about as much depth as there is ketchup on a dollar menu cheeseburger. That's a flimsy basis for your series' central conflict-slash-conflicted love interest.
Chosen also has that most annoying of sequel tendencies, the exaggeration of a central character's trademark tic. In chapters that feature Joscelin, not a page goes by without him flashing and crossing his goddamn vambraces. And then when he's off-screen for the second half of the book, he has to go and teach that gesture to some poor suckers. Another sequelitis symptom: it's becoming evident, via repetition, that Carey is fixated on pushing her heroine into bed with Harlequin cover barbarians. That said, Kazan was a better character than Selig was, if only because "Balkan pirate prince" is a less exhausted racial cliche than "Germanic warlord."
700 pages
Published 2002
Read from October 20 to October 25
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
This is a rarity: a middle volume in a fantasy trilogy that actually shows discernible improvement over the first volume. Many of Kushiel's Dart's weaknesses are still present, but they're toned down considerably. The game-of-thrones politicking still rests on a shaky grounding of vaguely defined, almost interchangeable tertiary characters, but whether through 1400 pages of exposure or some upgrade in Carey's descriptive faculties, I could tell who was who most of the time. There are still miraculous, absurd Hollywood escapes from certain doom, but there were only two or three such prodigies this time around; I lost count in the first book. There are still a number of glaring homophonic substitutions in the text, but Carey or her editors seem to have caught more of them before the book went to print.
Unfortunately (and here come some slight spoilers), this book's emphasis on Melisande as a villainous mastermind of the highest order exposes the fact that, really, Melisande doesn't have much characterization to speak of. She's exceptionally beautiful, yes, even by the standards of angelic half-breeds; she's a sexual sadist; she's brilliant and does the inevitable eleven dimensional chess thing, where she's always thinking ten thousand moves ahead of anyone else. And that's pretty much it. She has all the depth of a Goodkind second-string villain, which is to say, about as much depth as there is ketchup on a dollar menu cheeseburger. That's a flimsy basis for your series' central conflict-slash-conflicted love interest.
Chosen also has that most annoying of sequel tendencies, the exaggeration of a central character's trademark tic. In chapters that feature Joscelin, not a page goes by without him flashing and crossing his goddamn vambraces. And then when he's off-screen for the second half of the book, he has to go and teach that gesture to some poor suckers. Another sequelitis symptom: it's becoming evident, via repetition, that Carey is fixated on pushing her heroine into bed with Harlequin cover barbarians. That said, Kazan was a better character than Selig was, if only because "Balkan pirate prince" is a less exhausted racial cliche than "Germanic warlord."
Sunday, October 20, 2013
2013 read #134: Modern Classics of Fantasy, edited by Gardner Dozois.
Modern Classics of Fantasy, edited by Gardner Dozois
654 pages
Published 1997
Read from September 28 to October 20
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
When I finished my 125th read of the year, a neat round milestone, I spent the rest of that morning reading the reviews I posted in January, February, and March. I may say I don't like to read my own writing, but it's easy enough for me to find myself sucked into it, because at heart, beneath my critically low self-esteem, I am a complete narcissist. But anyway. The point is, I realized it had been a while -- a long while -- since I had dug into an anthology of short fiction. Since February, in fact, and the painfully '90s stylings of After the King. I've checked out several anthologies since then, but each time I got literary cold feet and returned them unread, rejecting them in favor of more consistent and reliable reads.
But reading those reviews from eight or nine months back swelled my nostalgia glands. Short story compilations can be chores to read, what with the wildly varying quality and the psychological hurdle of having to get invested in a fresh set of characters and a new story universe every ten or twenty pages, but they can also lead to the most wonderful and unexpected marvels of setting and storytelling. I smile even now to remember Emma Bull's "Silver and Gold," E. Lily Yu's "The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees," and Kelly Link's "The Summer People." Until I have the money to subscribe to Fantasy & Science Fiction and suchlike, these anthologies are my only ticket to the wonders of truly effective short speculative fiction. With my nostalgia came a craving for more.
Fortuitously, I stopped by a rival public library later that day, and amid their depressingly bare and dilapidated shelves, I found this tome. I've wanted to get my hands on it ever since the late '90s, when its massive crocodile-dragon skull-mountain leering above a quaint village (in the best James Gurney style) made for the most evocative cover by far in the era's science fiction book club adverts. Seeing Gardner Dozois' name on the cover, a fact that meant nothing to me in the '90s, gives me high hopes for it now, as do many of the names on the contents page. I've wanted a crash course in "classic" fantasy for a while, and the bundle of pre-1970s stories in this anthology intrigues me. But enough introduction. On to the stories.
At first I rolled my eyes at Dozois' preface -- I don't think I'd ever seen "didactic" used so many times on one page before, and I have a degree in the humanities -- but before long he had me scrambling after his effortless name-dropping, me going "Wait, what was that? Slow down, who published what? What story is that? That sounds awesome, slow down!" I want to get a copy of this book so I can pore through his introductory material and reading recommendations inch by inch, piecing together my own education in the history of my preferred genre.
"Trouble with Water" by Horace L. Gold (1939). Dozois claims this is "one of the most famous modern fantasies ever written"; clearly I have some homework to do. I thought it was neat enough, in both main senses of the word: it was a cute little story (aside from the broad "Long Island Jew" stereotypes, which would not feel out of place in a network sitcom in the late 1990s), but it wrapped up a little too neatly for my worldly, cynical twenty-first century tastes. It felt a bit insubstantial for the weight of its evident legacy -- although this might be a result of the contemporary ubiquity of the "magical creatures from the Old Country settle in America" convention in fantasy, making it harder for this story (perhaps one of the progenitors of that very cliche) to stand out.
"The Gnarly Man" by L. Sprague de Camp (1939). I like the cut of L. Sprague de Camp's jib. This is only the second story of his that I've read, so I'm sure he had some horrible poisonous opinions he didn't hesitate to air in other venues. But for now, permit me the innocence of just liking the guy because he loved writing about dinosaurs and 50,000 year old Neandertal dudes working as sideshows in Coney Island. That last bit, incidentally, is all this story amounts to: a lightweight, pulpy take on what sounds like a prototypical Poe plot. Enjoyable, though ultimately (I think) forgettable. (Poe would have made it far more grotesque and gothic, I can tell you that.)
"The Golem" by Avram Davidson (1955). Introducing this story, Dozois proclaims it "a near-perfect little masterpiece." That's a heap of expectation to pile on the poor thing. But I'll admit, it was a delightful little trifle, charming but, again, a shade insubstantial.
"Walk Like a Mountain" by Manly Wade Wellman (1955). I have mentioned, in my review of Kelly Link's "The Summer People," my love for Old Weird Americana in fantasy fiction. This story is an excellent example of that theme, or inspiration, or esthetic, or milieu, whatever you want to call it. It's been a while since I read "The Summer People"; I think I like that story better, if only because I seem to recall its characters and conflicts having more development than those here. One thing that's already beginning to strike me as I read this anthology is how far back these themes (Old Weird Americana, magical beings from the Old World coming to America, ironic playfulness and genre awareness) go in the history of the genre. The only way you could distinguish these 60-75 year old classics from today's top-notch material is relative depth of character and complexity of conflict. Most of these entries, so far, have been concept-based or "punchline" stories: they hit a single beat, raise a single wrinkle, and they're done. It's possible this is merely an artifact of Dozois' selection criteria, but what little I've read of pre-1970s short genre fiction seems to confirm this tendency. Characters tend to be props in these old stories, useful merely to set up the parameters of the story, with no real sense of a life before or after the tale, no sense why we should care about them as characters. Silver John, the narrator here, is a slight exception, but he's also the central figure in a large sequence of stories, so maybe he doesn't count. Anyway, I liked this story a lot, and I've added Wellman and Silver John to my reading wishlist, but I think I'm accustomed to a bit more from my fantasy, thanks to current styles and sensibilities.
"Extempore" by Damon Knight (1956). Another "punchline" story in the late Golden Age vein -- the technicalities of time travel were a common motif in those days. Worth a wry smile but otherwise not especially distinctive.
"Space-Time for Springers" by Fritz Leiber (1958). According to Dozois' rambling introduction to this story, "Springers" invented the subgenre of cat fantasy. It's also the first story here that feels almost modern, a character study at turns hilarious and strangely affecting. Very good indeed.
"Scylla's Daughter" by Fritz Leiber (1961). Dozois cited this story in his preface as an example of how fantasy stories skulked their way into science fiction magazines of the time (fantasy was considered a dead genre, lacking the "didactic" qualities that made sci-fi seem socially acceptable) by adding a few elements to make them look more science-fictiony. In the midst of a archetypal barbarian swordsman and clever thief novella, a time traveler pops in riding a dragon, and pops out again until required for the deus ex machina ending. Aside from that, I found this story entertaining in a corny way, kind of a middling fantasy effort, really. Maybe if I read this listening to prog, it would have set the mood better. A pity; I'd been looking forward to my first Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story. Not that I disliked it by any means, I just wasn't blown away.
"The Overworld" by Jack Vance (1965). Another adequately good but not astounding story. As we move out of the first half of the century, we seem to be leaving one-note "punchline" stories behind in exchange for world-based stories, where the setting is the main character. I've been curious to read The Dying Earth, and this did nothing to damp my interest; I'm just glad I live in a time when character-based stories are the norm. Sly heroes tackling quests for laughing sorcerers work better as Harryhausen movies than stories, I think.
"The Signaller" by Keith Roberts (1966). Oh my gosh, I like this story way more than the in media res opening led me to believe. It's another story where the setting is the main character, a lovingly detailed alternate history where the Spanish Armada conquered England and an elite guild of semaphorists communicates across an otherwise backward twentieth century Europe. The main character is of only secondary importance here, his life story merely a framework for the story's real substance, an extended, leisurely examination of the workings of the semaphore network and its system of apprenticeship, an exercise in practically undiluted worldbuilding. I dig it. I do wish that the technologically stunted world of guilds and Mother Church had been better integrated into the stuff about Norse gods and Fairies; as it is, it feels like two story universes shoved into an awkward juncture, and then all of a sudden it ends. I understand that this story was later subsumed into Roberts' novel Pavane, which of course I have to add to my to-read list.
"The Manor of Roses" by Thomas Burnett Swann (1966). A lush, sentimentalist medieval fantasy, seeming to prefigure Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry in general tone. Languorous and lovely, oddly modern, given its publication date. Maybe a tad predictable, but I really enjoyed this one.
"Death and the Executioner" by Roger Zelazny (1967). "Far-future technology gives select men the power of gods" seemed a bold, mind-blowing storyline when first I encountered it, in a novella published in Asimov's Science Fiction sometime in the late '90s. It degrades with repeated exposure, however. I realize now it reproduces many of the set pieces and inherent limitations of the superhero genre, and leads to battles of equally matched, equally invulnerable titans, the victor being the one who successfully plots out every contingency (and every decision of his enemy) ten thousand moves in advance. Here, in a characteristically late '60s touch, our space-faring gods gained power not through technological singularities but by way of some kind of psionic superman flu. All of which sounds pretty dumb in retrospect, but I have to admit, this was one of those rare times when a twist revelation caught me entirely off-guard. So the first chunk of this story was middling; the reveal was outstanding; the denouement was unmistakably Zelazny. (Even Dozois admits the guy was a tad predictable with his interchangeable, super-competent heroes.) I'm still unpacking what the whole "Rild was an actual Buddha" thing meant, because his entire story was a lot of buildup for what amounts to a "figure out what it meant on your own" ending.
"The Configuration of the North Shore" by R. A. Lafferty (1969). Concept-based or "punchline" stories never entirely went away; you may find them in quantity in most SF magazines to this day, a continuing staple of genre fiction. Here we have a mildly interesting little number with a terrific fourth-wall-breaking ending. Pretty good.
"Two Sadnesses" by George Alec Effinger (1973). The first sadness: Ashdown Forest getting carpet-bombed and flamethrowered into desolation around an obliviously optimistic Winnie the Pooh. The second sadness: Rat and Mole, of The Wind in the Willows, getting on in years, return from an adventure to find their homes paved and destroyed for a factory, their friends dead, the river polluted. They drift downstream into a Cuyahoga River-style conflagration. Welp. The '70s sure were a cheerful decade, weren't they? (Good thing we're all done with warmongering, and no one stands a chance of abolishing all those environmental protection laws, I gotta tell ya.) This kind of dark, gritty, "real world issues" revisionism of innocent literature is so ubiquitous nowadays that it's hard to remember the trend actually began somewhere, and could actually pack a punch at one point. A total downer. Not my favorite story, but worth a read.
"The Tale of Hauk" by Poul Anderson (1977). Unremarkable, non-essential bit of supernatural Nordic fluffery, disappointing after everything that's come before. Possibly the first story in the collection I don't care for -- in itself a remarkable achievement, given how mixed these products tend to be. It felt more suited for that After the King anthology; here it seems worse for the contrast.
"Manatee Girl Ain't You Coming Out Tonight" by Avram Davidson (1977). Here we go, this is more like what I've grown to expect from this book. A memorable meander through a forgotten, ramshackle rum and cane-shack paradise, rich with deft description and immediately vivid characters. And were-manatees. Not a perfect story -- the plot is flimsy; the characters, though vivid, are simple stereotypes; worst of all we never see the goddamn were-manatees -- but it was right up my alley.
"The Troll" by T. H. White (1978). This story feels more suited to the late nineteenth or early twentieth century: a man identified only as Mr. Marx tells us (presumably in a warm study after a sumptuous and correct dinner party) the tale of his father meeting a troll in a Swedish hotel. Not just the quaint framing device, but the whole English gentleman abroad feel of the piece, Daddy Marx ambling the Arctic countryside to clear his brain, the abrupt and accidental denouement resulting from no deliberate action of the protagonist -- it feels like a lost Wells creature feature. Enjoyable, if terribly dated.
"The Sleep of Trees" by Jane Yolen (1980). Hey, we're in the '80s! You know how we can tell? There's the overt lesbian eroticism, there's the tinge of atheism/questioning the rightness of the gods, there's the cardboard cliche of a Hollywood Actor (who also gets his comeuppance), and it isn't very good. Okay, that last item doesn't date this definitively to the '80s (much '80s SF was quite excellent, in fact), but this story is a disappointment.
"God's Hooks!" by Howard Waldrop (1982). Izaak Walton (that Izaak Walton) forges fishhooks from meteoric iron to fish for Leviathan in a demon-haunted slough. I don't think anything I could add would be a more rousing endorsement for this story. Holy shit, this is great.
"The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule" by Lucius Shepard (1984). Oh my god yes! The cover story! See, as I mentioned before, teenage me found the cover art absolutely mindblowing, and every time I saw the ad I was consumed with curiosity and conjectures about what the story it depicted would be like. In recent years I've figured out that cover art for anthologies and pro magazines is often bought in bulk, well in advance, and only rarely ties in with a particular story. I had assumed that would be the case here, but nope! I really do get to read about the 6000 foot long dragon dwarfing the city that has grown in its shadow. And what a story it is. I'm not exaggerating when I say I'm almost dizzy with how good it is. I have to blink myself back to reality. Just... goddamn, that was good. I don't keep a list of my all-time favorite short stories, but if I did, this one would be high up. These last two stories are building up a critical mass of awesome.
"A Cabin on the Coast" by Gene Wolfe (1981). Another "punchline" story, a little one-note for my tastes, but the antagonist is nicely creepy, and the story is quite adequate overall.
"Paper Dragons" by James P. Blaylock (1985). This reads like it could have been published last year. A thing of haunting, mist-shrouded beauty, dank with unseen life, mechanical creatures that never quite quicken, San Francisco fogs and diaphanous ecologies of cloud just at the edge of sight. Gorgeous.
"Into Gold" by Tanith Lee (1987). A generation after Rome relinquished contact with its frontier legions, as the son of the former commander adopts the role of hereditary warlord prince, an Orientalist caricature of an esoteric/alchemic witch in touch with dark powers shows up and seemingly bewitches him, and his loyal friend and lieutenant thinks he must do anything he can to thwart her. Like Poul Anderson's Nordic reanimation fantasy earlier in this volume, I found this story to be kind of a yawn, even though I love the idea of lost legions going native after the collapse of Roman authority. Not an awful story, it just fell flat for me.
"Flowers of Edo" by Bruce Sterling (1987). Meiji noir. That's the most apt description I can divine for this. Well, maybe not noir, exactly, but it's an urban tale of drink and dark alleyways, brawls and fires and electric demons in the wires. Very good.
"Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight" by Ursula K. Le Guin (1987). "'You fell out of the sky,' the coyote said." I love blunt, evocative opening lines like that. This is my first exposure to Le Guin's short fiction, and I like it. A tiny bit heavy-handed with the moralizing, but whatever. It's the best story involving talking turds that I've ever read.
"A Gift of the People" by Robert Sampson (1988). This one exquisitely captures the ingrained primate horror of the dark, the shadow shapes that follow you beyond the corners of your eyes, the silence you feel tingling between your shoulderblades. Reading it at night made my skin crawl. Pretty good.
"Missolonghi 1824" by John Crowley (1990). Lord Byron tells a Greek servant boy about the time he freed a captured satyr from villagers bent on violence. A brief, bare-bones, mostly unremarkable the-gods-of-folklore-are-real tale.
"Bears Discover Fire" by Terry Bisson (1990). I've been looking forward to this one since I first glanced over the contents page. It does not disappoint. I'm amazed how much can be packed into just nine pages -- people who feel real, heart and personality, a different sense of the world. And of course bears discovering fire.
"Blunderbore" by Esther M. Friesner (1990). '90s humor ceased tickling me, well, sometime after the late '90s. The stray Seinfeld episode since then has contributed to the evidence of those "hilarious" stories and novels from that decade: none of it makes me chuckle anymore. Even classic Simpsons episodes barely managed to raise a smile, when I rented some from Netflix a couple months back. Above all, fantasy set-dressings do not pair nicely with jokes about corporate speak and jogging, oat bran and designer heels. This story wasn't as annoying and spastic as The Good Fairies of New York, but it failed to do anything for me. Woefully dated.
"Death and the Lady" by Judith Tarr (1992). Oh hey, I remember this one. It was originally published in the After the King anthology. Already read, already reviewed. Apparently I called it "quite good" in February, and that's good enough for me. Moving on.
"The Changeling's Tale" by Michael Swanwick (1994). Swanwick is one of my all-time favorite authors, based on a sample of two novels and several reliably mindblowing short stories. Stories like "The Edge of the World," "Riding the Giganatosaur," and "Scherzo with Tyrannosaur" made a huge impact on me when I was a teen. This was not long after I realized that my own stories up to that point were childish scribbledegook, devoid of character or effective plotting or anything to recommend them beyond a certain innocent enthusiasm. "Scherzo with Tyrannosaur," in fact, appeared in Asimov's at roughly the same time I had submitted what amounted to Raptor Red fan-fiction to the magazine. Swanwick's stories hit me so hard I wondered why I even bothered. And then I produced or at least formulated my own blatant imitations of those three stories. As an adult I read a couple more of his stories, "The Very Pulse of the Machine" and "Midnight Express," which reaffirmed my impression that Swanwick operates on a level of storytelling I simply cannot comprehend. This turns out to be not my favorite Swanwick story, but then, that bar is prohibitively high; it's a standard post-Tolkien elf story, so it lacks the conceptual whatthefuckery I associate with Swanwick, but it's a solid example of its type.
"Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros" by Peter S. Beagle (1995). This guy's obsessed with unicorns, ain't he? No matter. This is a sweet, charming delight, disarming and funny and beautifully melancholy.
"Beauty and the Opéra or the Phantom Beast" by Suzy McKee Charnas (1996). A pretty good eroticized revisionist-reimagining sort of story. Knowing nothing more than the sketchiest teaser trailer outline of the source material, I don't know how evocative it is as a retelling, but as a story it's perfectly adequate.
It feels odd to be done with this book. It's only been about three weeks, but it feels like I've been absorbed in it forever. Short story anthologies, even good ones (and this is the best one I've read so far), can be exhausting to read. Bad anthologies exhaust with the mediocrity of their selections; good ones exhaust the emotions, acquainting you with new people and new worlds just long enough to break your heart with them, then shoving you into the next wringer before you can recover. Still, this was a terrific experience, and now I crave more of these books.
654 pages
Published 1997
Read from September 28 to October 20
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
When I finished my 125th read of the year, a neat round milestone, I spent the rest of that morning reading the reviews I posted in January, February, and March. I may say I don't like to read my own writing, but it's easy enough for me to find myself sucked into it, because at heart, beneath my critically low self-esteem, I am a complete narcissist. But anyway. The point is, I realized it had been a while -- a long while -- since I had dug into an anthology of short fiction. Since February, in fact, and the painfully '90s stylings of After the King. I've checked out several anthologies since then, but each time I got literary cold feet and returned them unread, rejecting them in favor of more consistent and reliable reads.
But reading those reviews from eight or nine months back swelled my nostalgia glands. Short story compilations can be chores to read, what with the wildly varying quality and the psychological hurdle of having to get invested in a fresh set of characters and a new story universe every ten or twenty pages, but they can also lead to the most wonderful and unexpected marvels of setting and storytelling. I smile even now to remember Emma Bull's "Silver and Gold," E. Lily Yu's "The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees," and Kelly Link's "The Summer People." Until I have the money to subscribe to Fantasy & Science Fiction and suchlike, these anthologies are my only ticket to the wonders of truly effective short speculative fiction. With my nostalgia came a craving for more.
Fortuitously, I stopped by a rival public library later that day, and amid their depressingly bare and dilapidated shelves, I found this tome. I've wanted to get my hands on it ever since the late '90s, when its massive crocodile-dragon skull-mountain leering above a quaint village (in the best James Gurney style) made for the most evocative cover by far in the era's science fiction book club adverts. Seeing Gardner Dozois' name on the cover, a fact that meant nothing to me in the '90s, gives me high hopes for it now, as do many of the names on the contents page. I've wanted a crash course in "classic" fantasy for a while, and the bundle of pre-1970s stories in this anthology intrigues me. But enough introduction. On to the stories.
At first I rolled my eyes at Dozois' preface -- I don't think I'd ever seen "didactic" used so many times on one page before, and I have a degree in the humanities -- but before long he had me scrambling after his effortless name-dropping, me going "Wait, what was that? Slow down, who published what? What story is that? That sounds awesome, slow down!" I want to get a copy of this book so I can pore through his introductory material and reading recommendations inch by inch, piecing together my own education in the history of my preferred genre.
"Trouble with Water" by Horace L. Gold (1939). Dozois claims this is "one of the most famous modern fantasies ever written"; clearly I have some homework to do. I thought it was neat enough, in both main senses of the word: it was a cute little story (aside from the broad "Long Island Jew" stereotypes, which would not feel out of place in a network sitcom in the late 1990s), but it wrapped up a little too neatly for my worldly, cynical twenty-first century tastes. It felt a bit insubstantial for the weight of its evident legacy -- although this might be a result of the contemporary ubiquity of the "magical creatures from the Old Country settle in America" convention in fantasy, making it harder for this story (perhaps one of the progenitors of that very cliche) to stand out.
"The Gnarly Man" by L. Sprague de Camp (1939). I like the cut of L. Sprague de Camp's jib. This is only the second story of his that I've read, so I'm sure he had some horrible poisonous opinions he didn't hesitate to air in other venues. But for now, permit me the innocence of just liking the guy because he loved writing about dinosaurs and 50,000 year old Neandertal dudes working as sideshows in Coney Island. That last bit, incidentally, is all this story amounts to: a lightweight, pulpy take on what sounds like a prototypical Poe plot. Enjoyable, though ultimately (I think) forgettable. (Poe would have made it far more grotesque and gothic, I can tell you that.)
"The Golem" by Avram Davidson (1955). Introducing this story, Dozois proclaims it "a near-perfect little masterpiece." That's a heap of expectation to pile on the poor thing. But I'll admit, it was a delightful little trifle, charming but, again, a shade insubstantial.
"Walk Like a Mountain" by Manly Wade Wellman (1955). I have mentioned, in my review of Kelly Link's "The Summer People," my love for Old Weird Americana in fantasy fiction. This story is an excellent example of that theme, or inspiration, or esthetic, or milieu, whatever you want to call it. It's been a while since I read "The Summer People"; I think I like that story better, if only because I seem to recall its characters and conflicts having more development than those here. One thing that's already beginning to strike me as I read this anthology is how far back these themes (Old Weird Americana, magical beings from the Old World coming to America, ironic playfulness and genre awareness) go in the history of the genre. The only way you could distinguish these 60-75 year old classics from today's top-notch material is relative depth of character and complexity of conflict. Most of these entries, so far, have been concept-based or "punchline" stories: they hit a single beat, raise a single wrinkle, and they're done. It's possible this is merely an artifact of Dozois' selection criteria, but what little I've read of pre-1970s short genre fiction seems to confirm this tendency. Characters tend to be props in these old stories, useful merely to set up the parameters of the story, with no real sense of a life before or after the tale, no sense why we should care about them as characters. Silver John, the narrator here, is a slight exception, but he's also the central figure in a large sequence of stories, so maybe he doesn't count. Anyway, I liked this story a lot, and I've added Wellman and Silver John to my reading wishlist, but I think I'm accustomed to a bit more from my fantasy, thanks to current styles and sensibilities.
"Extempore" by Damon Knight (1956). Another "punchline" story in the late Golden Age vein -- the technicalities of time travel were a common motif in those days. Worth a wry smile but otherwise not especially distinctive.
"Space-Time for Springers" by Fritz Leiber (1958). According to Dozois' rambling introduction to this story, "Springers" invented the subgenre of cat fantasy. It's also the first story here that feels almost modern, a character study at turns hilarious and strangely affecting. Very good indeed.
"Scylla's Daughter" by Fritz Leiber (1961). Dozois cited this story in his preface as an example of how fantasy stories skulked their way into science fiction magazines of the time (fantasy was considered a dead genre, lacking the "didactic" qualities that made sci-fi seem socially acceptable) by adding a few elements to make them look more science-fictiony. In the midst of a archetypal barbarian swordsman and clever thief novella, a time traveler pops in riding a dragon, and pops out again until required for the deus ex machina ending. Aside from that, I found this story entertaining in a corny way, kind of a middling fantasy effort, really. Maybe if I read this listening to prog, it would have set the mood better. A pity; I'd been looking forward to my first Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story. Not that I disliked it by any means, I just wasn't blown away.
"The Overworld" by Jack Vance (1965). Another adequately good but not astounding story. As we move out of the first half of the century, we seem to be leaving one-note "punchline" stories behind in exchange for world-based stories, where the setting is the main character. I've been curious to read The Dying Earth, and this did nothing to damp my interest; I'm just glad I live in a time when character-based stories are the norm. Sly heroes tackling quests for laughing sorcerers work better as Harryhausen movies than stories, I think.
"The Signaller" by Keith Roberts (1966). Oh my gosh, I like this story way more than the in media res opening led me to believe. It's another story where the setting is the main character, a lovingly detailed alternate history where the Spanish Armada conquered England and an elite guild of semaphorists communicates across an otherwise backward twentieth century Europe. The main character is of only secondary importance here, his life story merely a framework for the story's real substance, an extended, leisurely examination of the workings of the semaphore network and its system of apprenticeship, an exercise in practically undiluted worldbuilding. I dig it. I do wish that the technologically stunted world of guilds and Mother Church had been better integrated into the stuff about Norse gods and Fairies; as it is, it feels like two story universes shoved into an awkward juncture, and then all of a sudden it ends. I understand that this story was later subsumed into Roberts' novel Pavane, which of course I have to add to my to-read list.
"The Manor of Roses" by Thomas Burnett Swann (1966). A lush, sentimentalist medieval fantasy, seeming to prefigure Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry in general tone. Languorous and lovely, oddly modern, given its publication date. Maybe a tad predictable, but I really enjoyed this one.
"Death and the Executioner" by Roger Zelazny (1967). "Far-future technology gives select men the power of gods" seemed a bold, mind-blowing storyline when first I encountered it, in a novella published in Asimov's Science Fiction sometime in the late '90s. It degrades with repeated exposure, however. I realize now it reproduces many of the set pieces and inherent limitations of the superhero genre, and leads to battles of equally matched, equally invulnerable titans, the victor being the one who successfully plots out every contingency (and every decision of his enemy) ten thousand moves in advance. Here, in a characteristically late '60s touch, our space-faring gods gained power not through technological singularities but by way of some kind of psionic superman flu. All of which sounds pretty dumb in retrospect, but I have to admit, this was one of those rare times when a twist revelation caught me entirely off-guard. So the first chunk of this story was middling; the reveal was outstanding; the denouement was unmistakably Zelazny. (Even Dozois admits the guy was a tad predictable with his interchangeable, super-competent heroes.) I'm still unpacking what the whole "Rild was an actual Buddha" thing meant, because his entire story was a lot of buildup for what amounts to a "figure out what it meant on your own" ending.
"The Configuration of the North Shore" by R. A. Lafferty (1969). Concept-based or "punchline" stories never entirely went away; you may find them in quantity in most SF magazines to this day, a continuing staple of genre fiction. Here we have a mildly interesting little number with a terrific fourth-wall-breaking ending. Pretty good.
"Two Sadnesses" by George Alec Effinger (1973). The first sadness: Ashdown Forest getting carpet-bombed and flamethrowered into desolation around an obliviously optimistic Winnie the Pooh. The second sadness: Rat and Mole, of The Wind in the Willows, getting on in years, return from an adventure to find their homes paved and destroyed for a factory, their friends dead, the river polluted. They drift downstream into a Cuyahoga River-style conflagration. Welp. The '70s sure were a cheerful decade, weren't they? (Good thing we're all done with warmongering, and no one stands a chance of abolishing all those environmental protection laws, I gotta tell ya.) This kind of dark, gritty, "real world issues" revisionism of innocent literature is so ubiquitous nowadays that it's hard to remember the trend actually began somewhere, and could actually pack a punch at one point. A total downer. Not my favorite story, but worth a read.
"The Tale of Hauk" by Poul Anderson (1977). Unremarkable, non-essential bit of supernatural Nordic fluffery, disappointing after everything that's come before. Possibly the first story in the collection I don't care for -- in itself a remarkable achievement, given how mixed these products tend to be. It felt more suited for that After the King anthology; here it seems worse for the contrast.
"Manatee Girl Ain't You Coming Out Tonight" by Avram Davidson (1977). Here we go, this is more like what I've grown to expect from this book. A memorable meander through a forgotten, ramshackle rum and cane-shack paradise, rich with deft description and immediately vivid characters. And were-manatees. Not a perfect story -- the plot is flimsy; the characters, though vivid, are simple stereotypes; worst of all we never see the goddamn were-manatees -- but it was right up my alley.
"The Troll" by T. H. White (1978). This story feels more suited to the late nineteenth or early twentieth century: a man identified only as Mr. Marx tells us (presumably in a warm study after a sumptuous and correct dinner party) the tale of his father meeting a troll in a Swedish hotel. Not just the quaint framing device, but the whole English gentleman abroad feel of the piece, Daddy Marx ambling the Arctic countryside to clear his brain, the abrupt and accidental denouement resulting from no deliberate action of the protagonist -- it feels like a lost Wells creature feature. Enjoyable, if terribly dated.
"The Sleep of Trees" by Jane Yolen (1980). Hey, we're in the '80s! You know how we can tell? There's the overt lesbian eroticism, there's the tinge of atheism/questioning the rightness of the gods, there's the cardboard cliche of a Hollywood Actor (who also gets his comeuppance), and it isn't very good. Okay, that last item doesn't date this definitively to the '80s (much '80s SF was quite excellent, in fact), but this story is a disappointment.
"God's Hooks!" by Howard Waldrop (1982). Izaak Walton (that Izaak Walton) forges fishhooks from meteoric iron to fish for Leviathan in a demon-haunted slough. I don't think anything I could add would be a more rousing endorsement for this story. Holy shit, this is great.
"The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule" by Lucius Shepard (1984). Oh my god yes! The cover story! See, as I mentioned before, teenage me found the cover art absolutely mindblowing, and every time I saw the ad I was consumed with curiosity and conjectures about what the story it depicted would be like. In recent years I've figured out that cover art for anthologies and pro magazines is often bought in bulk, well in advance, and only rarely ties in with a particular story. I had assumed that would be the case here, but nope! I really do get to read about the 6000 foot long dragon dwarfing the city that has grown in its shadow. And what a story it is. I'm not exaggerating when I say I'm almost dizzy with how good it is. I have to blink myself back to reality. Just... goddamn, that was good. I don't keep a list of my all-time favorite short stories, but if I did, this one would be high up. These last two stories are building up a critical mass of awesome.
"A Cabin on the Coast" by Gene Wolfe (1981). Another "punchline" story, a little one-note for my tastes, but the antagonist is nicely creepy, and the story is quite adequate overall.
"Paper Dragons" by James P. Blaylock (1985). This reads like it could have been published last year. A thing of haunting, mist-shrouded beauty, dank with unseen life, mechanical creatures that never quite quicken, San Francisco fogs and diaphanous ecologies of cloud just at the edge of sight. Gorgeous.
"Into Gold" by Tanith Lee (1987). A generation after Rome relinquished contact with its frontier legions, as the son of the former commander adopts the role of hereditary warlord prince, an Orientalist caricature of an esoteric/alchemic witch in touch with dark powers shows up and seemingly bewitches him, and his loyal friend and lieutenant thinks he must do anything he can to thwart her. Like Poul Anderson's Nordic reanimation fantasy earlier in this volume, I found this story to be kind of a yawn, even though I love the idea of lost legions going native after the collapse of Roman authority. Not an awful story, it just fell flat for me.
"Flowers of Edo" by Bruce Sterling (1987). Meiji noir. That's the most apt description I can divine for this. Well, maybe not noir, exactly, but it's an urban tale of drink and dark alleyways, brawls and fires and electric demons in the wires. Very good.
"Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight" by Ursula K. Le Guin (1987). "'You fell out of the sky,' the coyote said." I love blunt, evocative opening lines like that. This is my first exposure to Le Guin's short fiction, and I like it. A tiny bit heavy-handed with the moralizing, but whatever. It's the best story involving talking turds that I've ever read.
"A Gift of the People" by Robert Sampson (1988). This one exquisitely captures the ingrained primate horror of the dark, the shadow shapes that follow you beyond the corners of your eyes, the silence you feel tingling between your shoulderblades. Reading it at night made my skin crawl. Pretty good.
"Missolonghi 1824" by John Crowley (1990). Lord Byron tells a Greek servant boy about the time he freed a captured satyr from villagers bent on violence. A brief, bare-bones, mostly unremarkable the-gods-of-folklore-are-real tale.
"Bears Discover Fire" by Terry Bisson (1990). I've been looking forward to this one since I first glanced over the contents page. It does not disappoint. I'm amazed how much can be packed into just nine pages -- people who feel real, heart and personality, a different sense of the world. And of course bears discovering fire.
"Blunderbore" by Esther M. Friesner (1990). '90s humor ceased tickling me, well, sometime after the late '90s. The stray Seinfeld episode since then has contributed to the evidence of those "hilarious" stories and novels from that decade: none of it makes me chuckle anymore. Even classic Simpsons episodes barely managed to raise a smile, when I rented some from Netflix a couple months back. Above all, fantasy set-dressings do not pair nicely with jokes about corporate speak and jogging, oat bran and designer heels. This story wasn't as annoying and spastic as The Good Fairies of New York, but it failed to do anything for me. Woefully dated.
"Death and the Lady" by Judith Tarr (1992). Oh hey, I remember this one. It was originally published in the After the King anthology. Already read, already reviewed. Apparently I called it "quite good" in February, and that's good enough for me. Moving on.
"The Changeling's Tale" by Michael Swanwick (1994). Swanwick is one of my all-time favorite authors, based on a sample of two novels and several reliably mindblowing short stories. Stories like "The Edge of the World," "Riding the Giganatosaur," and "Scherzo with Tyrannosaur" made a huge impact on me when I was a teen. This was not long after I realized that my own stories up to that point were childish scribbledegook, devoid of character or effective plotting or anything to recommend them beyond a certain innocent enthusiasm. "Scherzo with Tyrannosaur," in fact, appeared in Asimov's at roughly the same time I had submitted what amounted to Raptor Red fan-fiction to the magazine. Swanwick's stories hit me so hard I wondered why I even bothered. And then I produced or at least formulated my own blatant imitations of those three stories. As an adult I read a couple more of his stories, "The Very Pulse of the Machine" and "Midnight Express," which reaffirmed my impression that Swanwick operates on a level of storytelling I simply cannot comprehend. This turns out to be not my favorite Swanwick story, but then, that bar is prohibitively high; it's a standard post-Tolkien elf story, so it lacks the conceptual whatthefuckery I associate with Swanwick, but it's a solid example of its type.
"Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros" by Peter S. Beagle (1995). This guy's obsessed with unicorns, ain't he? No matter. This is a sweet, charming delight, disarming and funny and beautifully melancholy.
"Beauty and the Opéra or the Phantom Beast" by Suzy McKee Charnas (1996). A pretty good eroticized revisionist-reimagining sort of story. Knowing nothing more than the sketchiest teaser trailer outline of the source material, I don't know how evocative it is as a retelling, but as a story it's perfectly adequate.
It feels odd to be done with this book. It's only been about three weeks, but it feels like I've been absorbed in it forever. Short story anthologies, even good ones (and this is the best one I've read so far), can be exhausting to read. Bad anthologies exhaust with the mediocrity of their selections; good ones exhaust the emotions, acquainting you with new people and new worlds just long enough to break your heart with them, then shoving you into the next wringer before you can recover. Still, this was a terrific experience, and now I crave more of these books.
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