Patternmaster by Octavia E. Butler
138 pages
Published 1976
Read from July 30 to July 31
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
I think I regret reading this series following the internal chronology. Reading them in order published would have started me off with this book; all the worldbuilding details might possibly have been intriguing in that case, and made me curious for more, instead of seeming an end product of three volumes methodically arranged to get to a certain point. What I mean is, this book felt dry and laconic, cladded with technical details of psionic attack and riposte, the checks and balances of Patternists against mutes and Clayarks against Patternists, without much heart evident beneath the superstructure. Far too much of Patternmaster felt like notes for how a larger story world would function, the sort of girders and supports that, ideally, should be shrouded with engaging character and story.
Only the character of Amber -- tough, ambitious, an unapologetic and confident bisexual -- rose above the clunky exposition and board-setting. The final confrontation of Teray and Coransee felt like a matter of procedure, a checkmark on the hero's résumé, noted with a nod from the dying authority figure. If there had been further adventures to come, a payoff for the "Clayarks are people too!" foreshadowing early on in the book, I wouldn't have minded; like Le Guin's Earthsea books, I could see the Patternist series following small, defining encounters in the life and rule of Teray, developing the world of psychic southern California, actually moving some pieces across the chessboard. Instead, Butler went backward to put all those pieces into place. I'm not complaining, exactly -- Wild Seed was terrific, and Clay's Ark was a good read -- but reading it all in the order I did, Patternmaster is a letdown.
Thursday, July 31, 2014
Wednesday, July 30, 2014
2014 read #73: In the Drift by Michael Swanwick.
In the Drift by Michael Swanwick
195 pages
Published 1985
Read from July 28 to July 30
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
I've long listed Swanwick as one of my favorite authors, but I wonder now if that declaration was a tad hasty. Much of his elevation rests on the power of his short fiction. "Scherzo with Tyrannosaur," "Riding the Giganotosaur," "The Edge of the World," "The Very Pulse of the Machine" -- all of these, when I first read them, overwhelmed me with their remorseless brilliance. His novels, those of which I've read, are markedly uneven in comparison. Stations of the Tide is one of my all-time favorite novels (though I wonder how well it would hold up to a reread now; too bad my copy departed with an ex girlfriend and is probably in a dump somewhere). Bones of the Earth, expanded from "Scherzo with Tyrannosaur," has none of that story's abrupt charm; it rambles and seems to get lost in its own hazy sense of time. And then there's In the Drift.
This is another book I bought in the Fayetteville days and hadn't read in full until now. I made an attempt many years back (2006 or so, perhaps?) and found the first "chapter" (actually an expanded version of a short story) remarkably inventive -- eerie and memorable, evolving a bit of local color into a decadent and threatening power structure in the aftermath of a full-scale nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island. I was brought up short by the very title of the next chapter. Even in 2006, I didn't think white guys should toss around racial slurs like they're nothing. I'm on the side of unrestricted free speech, but I'm also a fan of responsibility and accountability. Any white guy who casually employs the N word should be free to do so, but also earns my distaste.
This illustrates something of the problem with Swanwick. He's an author of absolute privilege. I've only read three of his novels and a handful of his short stories, but I can't recall seeing anyone but straight white men and tough, straight white women portrayed sympathetically. In the Drift may perhaps be written off as a product of its time (the early '80s were a time when white guys grew especially bold with minority themes, but before anything like sensitivity and restraint had evolved), but every single black character is gap-toothed, jive-talking, singing and capering, cackling and back-slapping. Women reek of menstrual blood, and the more confident and empowered they are, the more inevitable it is they will casually disrobe in front of the male hero and quirk an eyebrow until sex results. All sex in a Swanwick tale, seemingly, must be a power play, sealing an alliance or bringing an underling more firmly under their superior's sway. After a few repetitions of these motifs, one begins to question whether Swanwick really deserves the esteem he gets.
Swanwick's diffidence with the long form is especially evident in this, his first "novel." It consists of two excellent, highly polished novelettes -- published separately in an anthology and a magazine, respectively -- connected by a shakier, far less engaging string of vignettes sketching in the intervening years. With such a minimalist structure, making a point of, say, Keith's severe aversion to black people stands out all the more, because it's left dangling with no resolution or payoff, as if it were included, '80s style, for "shocking" verisimilitude. In a way I'm sorry this got turned into a novel; on their own, "Mummer Kiss" and "Marrow Death" would be a compelling, self-contained diptych of post-nuclear horror.
195 pages
Published 1985
Read from July 28 to July 30
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
I've long listed Swanwick as one of my favorite authors, but I wonder now if that declaration was a tad hasty. Much of his elevation rests on the power of his short fiction. "Scherzo with Tyrannosaur," "Riding the Giganotosaur," "The Edge of the World," "The Very Pulse of the Machine" -- all of these, when I first read them, overwhelmed me with their remorseless brilliance. His novels, those of which I've read, are markedly uneven in comparison. Stations of the Tide is one of my all-time favorite novels (though I wonder how well it would hold up to a reread now; too bad my copy departed with an ex girlfriend and is probably in a dump somewhere). Bones of the Earth, expanded from "Scherzo with Tyrannosaur," has none of that story's abrupt charm; it rambles and seems to get lost in its own hazy sense of time. And then there's In the Drift.
This is another book I bought in the Fayetteville days and hadn't read in full until now. I made an attempt many years back (2006 or so, perhaps?) and found the first "chapter" (actually an expanded version of a short story) remarkably inventive -- eerie and memorable, evolving a bit of local color into a decadent and threatening power structure in the aftermath of a full-scale nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island. I was brought up short by the very title of the next chapter. Even in 2006, I didn't think white guys should toss around racial slurs like they're nothing. I'm on the side of unrestricted free speech, but I'm also a fan of responsibility and accountability. Any white guy who casually employs the N word should be free to do so, but also earns my distaste.
This illustrates something of the problem with Swanwick. He's an author of absolute privilege. I've only read three of his novels and a handful of his short stories, but I can't recall seeing anyone but straight white men and tough, straight white women portrayed sympathetically. In the Drift may perhaps be written off as a product of its time (the early '80s were a time when white guys grew especially bold with minority themes, but before anything like sensitivity and restraint had evolved), but every single black character is gap-toothed, jive-talking, singing and capering, cackling and back-slapping. Women reek of menstrual blood, and the more confident and empowered they are, the more inevitable it is they will casually disrobe in front of the male hero and quirk an eyebrow until sex results. All sex in a Swanwick tale, seemingly, must be a power play, sealing an alliance or bringing an underling more firmly under their superior's sway. After a few repetitions of these motifs, one begins to question whether Swanwick really deserves the esteem he gets.
Swanwick's diffidence with the long form is especially evident in this, his first "novel." It consists of two excellent, highly polished novelettes -- published separately in an anthology and a magazine, respectively -- connected by a shakier, far less engaging string of vignettes sketching in the intervening years. With such a minimalist structure, making a point of, say, Keith's severe aversion to black people stands out all the more, because it's left dangling with no resolution or payoff, as if it were included, '80s style, for "shocking" verisimilitude. In a way I'm sorry this got turned into a novel; on their own, "Mummer Kiss" and "Marrow Death" would be a compelling, self-contained diptych of post-nuclear horror.
Monday, July 28, 2014
2014 read #72: Clay's Ark by Octavia E. Butler.*
Clay's Ark by Octavia E. Butler*
167 pages
Published 1984
Read from July 27 to July 28
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
*Denotes a reread.
I made an early, halfhearted effort to diversify my sci-fi reading back when I first became an independent adult with access to money and a bookstore, circa 2002. I'd seen the arresting mass market cover art as a teen, and it made enough of an impression on me that it was one of the first few dozen books I hauled off to my barracks room, on foot, five and a half miles away. (Not through snowstorms, perhaps, but definitely through the heat of Fayetteville summers.) Unlike Dhalgren (which I still plan to get around to) and The Mists of Avalon (which I no longer desire to read, what with the child molestation allegations against Marion Zimmer Bradley, not to mention the general boringness of the book), I actually read Clay's Ark in a timely manner. After twelve years I recalled almost nothing of it: until I read Parable of the Talents earlier this year, I thought I remembered reading that book instead. What I thought I recalled -- a Black man with mutant powers surviving the aftermath of an apocalyptic plague, hiding out from torch-wielding normies in an abandoned house far out in the desert -- turned out to be spottily accurate at best.
Once I got to reading it again, I remembered more scenes as I got to them, in that "Oh yeah, I've been here before" feeling I get for seemingly any book I read before 2003 or so. I didn't remember all the rape gangs and incest; maybe I glossed over that stuff when I was 19, who knows? Reading it in its proper sequence in the Patternist series, I found it slighter than I remembered, an entertaining but brief book that amounts to a serviceable amount of backstory for a faction in 1976's Patternmaster, which I have yet to read. The decaying American West of the 2020s reads like a prototype for the much more vivid post-collapse society of the Parable series. It isn't the great, haunting novel I seemingly remembered, but on its own it functions well, and tells a tidy little story.
167 pages
Published 1984
Read from July 27 to July 28
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
*Denotes a reread.
I made an early, halfhearted effort to diversify my sci-fi reading back when I first became an independent adult with access to money and a bookstore, circa 2002. I'd seen the arresting mass market cover art as a teen, and it made enough of an impression on me that it was one of the first few dozen books I hauled off to my barracks room, on foot, five and a half miles away. (Not through snowstorms, perhaps, but definitely through the heat of Fayetteville summers.) Unlike Dhalgren (which I still plan to get around to) and The Mists of Avalon (which I no longer desire to read, what with the child molestation allegations against Marion Zimmer Bradley, not to mention the general boringness of the book), I actually read Clay's Ark in a timely manner. After twelve years I recalled almost nothing of it: until I read Parable of the Talents earlier this year, I thought I remembered reading that book instead. What I thought I recalled -- a Black man with mutant powers surviving the aftermath of an apocalyptic plague, hiding out from torch-wielding normies in an abandoned house far out in the desert -- turned out to be spottily accurate at best.
Once I got to reading it again, I remembered more scenes as I got to them, in that "Oh yeah, I've been here before" feeling I get for seemingly any book I read before 2003 or so. I didn't remember all the rape gangs and incest; maybe I glossed over that stuff when I was 19, who knows? Reading it in its proper sequence in the Patternist series, I found it slighter than I remembered, an entertaining but brief book that amounts to a serviceable amount of backstory for a faction in 1976's Patternmaster, which I have yet to read. The decaying American West of the 2020s reads like a prototype for the much more vivid post-collapse society of the Parable series. It isn't the great, haunting novel I seemingly remembered, but on its own it functions well, and tells a tidy little story.
Sunday, July 27, 2014
2014 read #71: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë.
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Notes by Michael Mason
533 pages
Published 1847
Read from July 23 to July 27
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Several years ago I had the misfortune of trying to read Don Quixote. Don't get me wrong, I loved the portions of the book that dealt with Quixote and Sancho Panza. But maybe a little over a third of the way through the thing, Quixote and Sancho Panza disappear off the stage, their boisterous and preposterous adventures forgotten for a passel of uninteresting paragons of Christian morality, who swap tales in between ejaculations over God's goodness and mercy. The experience put me off the classics canon for quite a while.
So it was a welcome surprise that the first two-thirds or so of Jane Eyre was thoroughly, even briskly readable. The chapters of her childhood neglect and emotional abuse resonated with me; I think that part of the book would have been a favorite and fixture of my developing sensibilities had I read it at, say, age 13. The romance with Rochester was surprisingly affecting, for all its stiffness, and the Gothic touches -- while predictable and inevitably tainted with Victorian ideas of race -- were mildly entertaining. It wasn't until the final third of the book that the dreaded expostulations on God and Providence, not to mention fortuitous bequests and surprise cousins and clairvoyant encounters, sank in and made a muck of the story's momentum and readability.
There's plenty of room to write intelligent thoughts on Jane Eyre as a primordial feminist character (or not), but I'm sure that's been done to death in undergraduate English dissertations and so on.
Notes by Michael Mason
533 pages
Published 1847
Read from July 23 to July 27
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Several years ago I had the misfortune of trying to read Don Quixote. Don't get me wrong, I loved the portions of the book that dealt with Quixote and Sancho Panza. But maybe a little over a third of the way through the thing, Quixote and Sancho Panza disappear off the stage, their boisterous and preposterous adventures forgotten for a passel of uninteresting paragons of Christian morality, who swap tales in between ejaculations over God's goodness and mercy. The experience put me off the classics canon for quite a while.
So it was a welcome surprise that the first two-thirds or so of Jane Eyre was thoroughly, even briskly readable. The chapters of her childhood neglect and emotional abuse resonated with me; I think that part of the book would have been a favorite and fixture of my developing sensibilities had I read it at, say, age 13. The romance with Rochester was surprisingly affecting, for all its stiffness, and the Gothic touches -- while predictable and inevitably tainted with Victorian ideas of race -- were mildly entertaining. It wasn't until the final third of the book that the dreaded expostulations on God and Providence, not to mention fortuitous bequests and surprise cousins and clairvoyant encounters, sank in and made a muck of the story's momentum and readability.
There's plenty of room to write intelligent thoughts on Jane Eyre as a primordial feminist character (or not), but I'm sure that's been done to death in undergraduate English dissertations and so on.
Monday, July 21, 2014
2014 read #70: The Secret History of Fantasy, edited by Peter S. Beagle.
The Secret History of Fantasy, edited by Peter S. Beagle
379 pages
Published 2010
Read from July 1 to July 21
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
You ever develop a fixation on a certain kind of food, to the point where you gorge yourself on it repeatedly and can't get enough of it for a period of days or weeks or months? And then all of a sudden you can't stand the thought of it anymore, and you avoid it in the supermarket for months afterward? I'm sort of like that with short fiction anthologies right now. I was all about the fantasy and science fiction anthologies late last year, and I made plans on which compendiums I would ILL month by month all through this year, figuring surely I'd devour two a month and never ever get tired of them and my own short fiction would improve markedly thereby. And then December came, and I got sick of short fiction. I made several half-hearted attempts to plow through The Year's Best whatever, but honestly, for the last six or seven months I wanted nothing to do with it.
And yet I can't forget that some of my favorite fiction is short. I find myself thinking of James Tiptree, Jr.'s "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever" at least once a week, and I read that last October. Done well, even a nine page story can push its way into you with the weight of a continent. It's the chore of reading the others, the forgettable stories, that keeps me away from short fiction anthologies. Sadly, even a crack anthologist will gather in a lot of crap with the gold.
This collection, predicated on bringing together a diverse selection of fantasy that evades or defies the banal post-Tolkien tradition of dark lords, dark elves, and rings of power, certainly seems like it will fit my sensibilities better than, say, yet another annual Rich Horton-selected collection. And it's fairly short. We'll see how much interest I can sustain.
"Ancestor Money" by Maureen F. McHugh (2003). Conceptually, this scores high on the "I wish I'd thought of that" scale: Rachel, woman who lived and died in Appalachia in the early 20th century, spends the first seventy years of her afterlife in peace, "living" in an idealized version of her own home. Then she gets notified that her granddaughter has made an offering of money to her ancestress. Off Rachel flies to the afterlife's Hong Kong to collect the money from a temple. So far so good. But once there, she is given a choice: to progress through the seven heavens, or to go back and not progress at all. Stressed from the unfamiliarity and the bustle, she blinks and finds herself back in a less idealized, decaying version of her shack in the hollow, where she feels calm again. The end. (Um, spoilers?) I have to admit... I kinda don't grok this one. Is it purely nihilistic? Is it an eccentric take on "If you see the Buddha, kill the Buddha"? Did McHugh wring all the story's juices into the concept, leaving none for the denouement? A curiosity, but nothing truly affecting, I think.
"Scarecrow" by Gregory Maguire (2001). A charming, optimistic humanist fable shucked from the early education of the Scarecrow, before he meets Dorothy. It's a bit pat, maybe a tad didactic, but thoroughly winsome.
"Lady of the Skulls" by Patricia A. McKillip (1993). I wish I hadn't seen the copyright date for this story before I read it, because it would've been a perfect opportunity to test my hypothesis that I can date any story from the late '80s to mid '90s to within a few years. Forewarned by the publication date, I found this to be a sturdy, unsurprising example of early '90s high fantasy, twisting older fantasy cliche into a commentary on gender and How People Don't Understand Each Other (But Could if They Tried). Possibly groundbreaking at the time, now terribly dated and somewhat boring.
"We Are Norsemen" by T. C. Boyle (1977). Mediocre historical Norse fantasy made "humorous" with anachronistic irony and bathos. I'm not sure what the point is beyond wiping some of the romance off Norse fantasy, an early stirring of the "dark and gritty realism" thing so ubiquitous nowadays. I'd been meaning to check out Boyle's novels; this is not an encouraging start.
"The Barnum Museum" by Steven Millhauser (1990). Fantasy fiction about fantasy fiction -- an extended metafictional metaphor about the seductive hallways and lingering, intrinsic tawdriness of fantasy. Picturesque like a brochure, but I kept thinking it would have been improved with something like an actual story in its fabric.
"Mrs. Todd's Shortcut" by Stephen King (1984). A slow-burner that delivers. I'd heard about this story in some laudatory context (damned if I remember what -- it was years ago now), and while I wouldn't say I'd built up expectations for it, I was amply satisfied, even if it doesn't stray beyond (and in fact gives a convenient name to) King's "holes in the middle of things" metier.
"Bears Discover Fire" by Terry Bisson (1990). Read and reviewed in Modern Classics of Fantasy last October. I'll quote from that review: "I've been looking forward to this one since I first glanced over the contents page. It does not disappoint."
"Bones" by Francesca Lia Block (2001). Evocatively written little blip about being young and empty and drugged in the big city, with one of those psycho killer turns I can see a mile away. Great prose wasted on a disposable story.
"Snow, Glass, Apples" by Neil Gaiman (1994). Attempting to place where and when I'd encountered this story before unearthed a whole part of my life I hadn't thought about in ages. In the spring and summer of 2004, while I was trying to worm my way out of the army on a medical discharge, I still had to work (though I was taken off normal duties, with some silent scorn from the higher-ups, and reassigned to administrative work in the company HQ, which involved longer hours but suited me just fine). For a while I got rides from another soldier in my company, whose name I've forgotten. I remember barely anything about him, in fact, aside from his fondness for listening to books on tape during his commute. I remember now with some vividness listening to this story on one or two mornings. The fact that it was by Neil Gaiman slipped my mind (I'd never heard of Gaiman at that point, so my brain never bothered to attach any significance to the name when my friend talked up Gaiman's talents), but practically every word in this story, every dip and turn of its cadence, seemed familiar to me. Part of that familiarity may be because "Snow" reads like a hot mess of cliches to me now. I'm sure it was groundbreaking at the time, but now you can watch spooky reimagined fairy tales cranked out on network television (with greater or lesser emphasis on menstruation-as-symbolism and incestuous cock-biting). It's still an okay story, maybe even good, but it's such a yawn to me now compared to the amazing "Holy shit, I didn't know stuff like this existed!" revelation I had a decade ago. Maybe it's just better read out loud.
"Fruit and Words" by Aimee Bender (2001). Clever but almost kind of pointless composition that fizzles out without a neat, satisfying resolution to tie everything together. Unless it's one of those endings you're supposed to sort out for yourself from, like, symbols or something. I'm not sure what the point of it is, regardless.
"The Empire of Ice Cream" by Jeffrey Ford (2003). Superbly evocative, ending with a twist I probably should have seen coming but didn't. One of the most creative and stirring "love" stories I can remember reading.
"The Edge of the World" by Michael Swanwick (1989). Read and reviewed in Modern Classics of Science Fiction last November. I'll quote that review: "[A]s 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."
"Super Goat Man" by Jonathan Lethem (2004). "Superheroes in real life" and "The shifts in white middle class culture between the psychedelic '60s, coke-party '80s, and business-casual '00s" are two subjects that, in retrospect, I'm surprised I don't see paired more often. This was a mildly interesting piece that, typically, had a wobbly ending. It didn't speak to me particularly.
"John Uskglass and the Cumbrian Charcoal Burner" by Susanna Clarke (2006). A charming, funny little tale with a Brothers Grimm structure, set in the wizardy Britain where all Clarke's stories are seemingly set.
"The Book of Martha" by Octavia E. Butler (2003). What would you do to help humanity if God came to you and offered the chance to make one change to human existence? A Big Question piece that feels more appropriate to the late '60s or 1970s -- dated, in other words. Solid but not amazing.
"The Vita Æterna Mirror Company" by Yann Martel (1993). I haven't read Life of Pi yet, though it is on my immediate to-read list. So I was most interested to read this story. It turns out to be a lot of experimentation with layout and story structure wasted on a rather flimsy "lesson": Listen to your elders! Their experiences matter! A letdown.
"Sleight of Hand" by Peter S. Beagle (2009). Is it cocky to edit an anthology portentiously titled The Secret History of Fantasy, and include one of your own stories, published just the previous year? Probably. This is a damn good story regardless, moving and human in that reliable Peter S. Beagle way.
"Mythago Wood" by Robert Holdstock (1981). A story of the classic English woodland fantasy type, a place where oak glades draw mythological archetypes out of the unconscious mind -- something Peter Ackroyd would love. Slow-burning but good, overall; there's something about the idea of encountering the gods and monsters of the Neolithic, or even of the Ice Age, that will always appeal to me. I would have appreciated more character development rather than pseudo-scientific rationalizations, and more time amid the myths, but I suppose that's why this got turned into a popular series of novels, according to Wikipedia.
"26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss" by Kij Johnson (2008). A quite good, strangely moving, Bradbury-esque piece -- more tired, apathetic, and contemporary than Bradbury gets in my experience, but it ends on a terrifically sweet note.
The anthology closes out with two essays on fantasy fiction. The first is Ursula K. Le Guin waxing acerbic about the modernist disdain for "genre." Like all lit-crit essays in my experience, it only makes about half sense unless you know the works and ideas of every author casually name-checked in passing. The second is a swift, jet-window overview of fantasy literature in English, particularly its "mass market genrefication" through the second half of the twentieth century, penned by David G. Hartwell. Essays of this type (seemingly de rigueur in these anthologies) serve only two purposes for me: They depress me with tales of the realities of economics supplanting artistic expression, and they give me names and titles to add to my ever-growing to-read list. This particular recitation of the formula includes an interesting insight about the paint-by-numbers Del Rey fantasy formula: It can be seen as a revival of the Plantation Novel, a Southern genre of utopian fiction "in which life is rich and good, the lower classes are happy in their place and sing a lot, and evil resides in the technological North. The fantasy plot is the Civil War run backward: the South wins." The parallels are striking.
All in all, I found this collection to be moderately enjoyable, though my two favorite stories were ones I'd read before. The only stories I disliked were "Lady of the Skulls" and "We Are Norsemen." Not bad for such an anthology. I'm not sure if I feel like diving back into short genre fiction again, though. I mean, I kinda have an itch for one or two of the annual best-ofs, but what would really do it for me now is another collection like this one or Modern Classics of Fantasy, curating stories from a span of several decades. I can't think of another specifically fantasy title that offers what I want.
379 pages
Published 2010
Read from July 1 to July 21
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
You ever develop a fixation on a certain kind of food, to the point where you gorge yourself on it repeatedly and can't get enough of it for a period of days or weeks or months? And then all of a sudden you can't stand the thought of it anymore, and you avoid it in the supermarket for months afterward? I'm sort of like that with short fiction anthologies right now. I was all about the fantasy and science fiction anthologies late last year, and I made plans on which compendiums I would ILL month by month all through this year, figuring surely I'd devour two a month and never ever get tired of them and my own short fiction would improve markedly thereby. And then December came, and I got sick of short fiction. I made several half-hearted attempts to plow through The Year's Best whatever, but honestly, for the last six or seven months I wanted nothing to do with it.
And yet I can't forget that some of my favorite fiction is short. I find myself thinking of James Tiptree, Jr.'s "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever" at least once a week, and I read that last October. Done well, even a nine page story can push its way into you with the weight of a continent. It's the chore of reading the others, the forgettable stories, that keeps me away from short fiction anthologies. Sadly, even a crack anthologist will gather in a lot of crap with the gold.
This collection, predicated on bringing together a diverse selection of fantasy that evades or defies the banal post-Tolkien tradition of dark lords, dark elves, and rings of power, certainly seems like it will fit my sensibilities better than, say, yet another annual Rich Horton-selected collection. And it's fairly short. We'll see how much interest I can sustain.
"Ancestor Money" by Maureen F. McHugh (2003). Conceptually, this scores high on the "I wish I'd thought of that" scale: Rachel, woman who lived and died in Appalachia in the early 20th century, spends the first seventy years of her afterlife in peace, "living" in an idealized version of her own home. Then she gets notified that her granddaughter has made an offering of money to her ancestress. Off Rachel flies to the afterlife's Hong Kong to collect the money from a temple. So far so good. But once there, she is given a choice: to progress through the seven heavens, or to go back and not progress at all. Stressed from the unfamiliarity and the bustle, she blinks and finds herself back in a less idealized, decaying version of her shack in the hollow, where she feels calm again. The end. (Um, spoilers?) I have to admit... I kinda don't grok this one. Is it purely nihilistic? Is it an eccentric take on "If you see the Buddha, kill the Buddha"? Did McHugh wring all the story's juices into the concept, leaving none for the denouement? A curiosity, but nothing truly affecting, I think.
"Scarecrow" by Gregory Maguire (2001). A charming, optimistic humanist fable shucked from the early education of the Scarecrow, before he meets Dorothy. It's a bit pat, maybe a tad didactic, but thoroughly winsome.
"Lady of the Skulls" by Patricia A. McKillip (1993). I wish I hadn't seen the copyright date for this story before I read it, because it would've been a perfect opportunity to test my hypothesis that I can date any story from the late '80s to mid '90s to within a few years. Forewarned by the publication date, I found this to be a sturdy, unsurprising example of early '90s high fantasy, twisting older fantasy cliche into a commentary on gender and How People Don't Understand Each Other (But Could if They Tried). Possibly groundbreaking at the time, now terribly dated and somewhat boring.
"We Are Norsemen" by T. C. Boyle (1977). Mediocre historical Norse fantasy made "humorous" with anachronistic irony and bathos. I'm not sure what the point is beyond wiping some of the romance off Norse fantasy, an early stirring of the "dark and gritty realism" thing so ubiquitous nowadays. I'd been meaning to check out Boyle's novels; this is not an encouraging start.
"The Barnum Museum" by Steven Millhauser (1990). Fantasy fiction about fantasy fiction -- an extended metafictional metaphor about the seductive hallways and lingering, intrinsic tawdriness of fantasy. Picturesque like a brochure, but I kept thinking it would have been improved with something like an actual story in its fabric.
"Mrs. Todd's Shortcut" by Stephen King (1984). A slow-burner that delivers. I'd heard about this story in some laudatory context (damned if I remember what -- it was years ago now), and while I wouldn't say I'd built up expectations for it, I was amply satisfied, even if it doesn't stray beyond (and in fact gives a convenient name to) King's "holes in the middle of things" metier.
"Bears Discover Fire" by Terry Bisson (1990). Read and reviewed in Modern Classics of Fantasy last October. I'll quote from that review: "I've been looking forward to this one since I first glanced over the contents page. It does not disappoint."
"Bones" by Francesca Lia Block (2001). Evocatively written little blip about being young and empty and drugged in the big city, with one of those psycho killer turns I can see a mile away. Great prose wasted on a disposable story.
"Snow, Glass, Apples" by Neil Gaiman (1994). Attempting to place where and when I'd encountered this story before unearthed a whole part of my life I hadn't thought about in ages. In the spring and summer of 2004, while I was trying to worm my way out of the army on a medical discharge, I still had to work (though I was taken off normal duties, with some silent scorn from the higher-ups, and reassigned to administrative work in the company HQ, which involved longer hours but suited me just fine). For a while I got rides from another soldier in my company, whose name I've forgotten. I remember barely anything about him, in fact, aside from his fondness for listening to books on tape during his commute. I remember now with some vividness listening to this story on one or two mornings. The fact that it was by Neil Gaiman slipped my mind (I'd never heard of Gaiman at that point, so my brain never bothered to attach any significance to the name when my friend talked up Gaiman's talents), but practically every word in this story, every dip and turn of its cadence, seemed familiar to me. Part of that familiarity may be because "Snow" reads like a hot mess of cliches to me now. I'm sure it was groundbreaking at the time, but now you can watch spooky reimagined fairy tales cranked out on network television (with greater or lesser emphasis on menstruation-as-symbolism and incestuous cock-biting). It's still an okay story, maybe even good, but it's such a yawn to me now compared to the amazing "Holy shit, I didn't know stuff like this existed!" revelation I had a decade ago. Maybe it's just better read out loud.
"Fruit and Words" by Aimee Bender (2001). Clever but almost kind of pointless composition that fizzles out without a neat, satisfying resolution to tie everything together. Unless it's one of those endings you're supposed to sort out for yourself from, like, symbols or something. I'm not sure what the point of it is, regardless.
"The Empire of Ice Cream" by Jeffrey Ford (2003). Superbly evocative, ending with a twist I probably should have seen coming but didn't. One of the most creative and stirring "love" stories I can remember reading.
"The Edge of the World" by Michael Swanwick (1989). Read and reviewed in Modern Classics of Science Fiction last November. I'll quote that review: "[A]s 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."
"Super Goat Man" by Jonathan Lethem (2004). "Superheroes in real life" and "The shifts in white middle class culture between the psychedelic '60s, coke-party '80s, and business-casual '00s" are two subjects that, in retrospect, I'm surprised I don't see paired more often. This was a mildly interesting piece that, typically, had a wobbly ending. It didn't speak to me particularly.
"John Uskglass and the Cumbrian Charcoal Burner" by Susanna Clarke (2006). A charming, funny little tale with a Brothers Grimm structure, set in the wizardy Britain where all Clarke's stories are seemingly set.
"The Book of Martha" by Octavia E. Butler (2003). What would you do to help humanity if God came to you and offered the chance to make one change to human existence? A Big Question piece that feels more appropriate to the late '60s or 1970s -- dated, in other words. Solid but not amazing.
"The Vita Æterna Mirror Company" by Yann Martel (1993). I haven't read Life of Pi yet, though it is on my immediate to-read list. So I was most interested to read this story. It turns out to be a lot of experimentation with layout and story structure wasted on a rather flimsy "lesson": Listen to your elders! Their experiences matter! A letdown.
"Sleight of Hand" by Peter S. Beagle (2009). Is it cocky to edit an anthology portentiously titled The Secret History of Fantasy, and include one of your own stories, published just the previous year? Probably. This is a damn good story regardless, moving and human in that reliable Peter S. Beagle way.
"Mythago Wood" by Robert Holdstock (1981). A story of the classic English woodland fantasy type, a place where oak glades draw mythological archetypes out of the unconscious mind -- something Peter Ackroyd would love. Slow-burning but good, overall; there's something about the idea of encountering the gods and monsters of the Neolithic, or even of the Ice Age, that will always appeal to me. I would have appreciated more character development rather than pseudo-scientific rationalizations, and more time amid the myths, but I suppose that's why this got turned into a popular series of novels, according to Wikipedia.
"26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss" by Kij Johnson (2008). A quite good, strangely moving, Bradbury-esque piece -- more tired, apathetic, and contemporary than Bradbury gets in my experience, but it ends on a terrifically sweet note.
The anthology closes out with two essays on fantasy fiction. The first is Ursula K. Le Guin waxing acerbic about the modernist disdain for "genre." Like all lit-crit essays in my experience, it only makes about half sense unless you know the works and ideas of every author casually name-checked in passing. The second is a swift, jet-window overview of fantasy literature in English, particularly its "mass market genrefication" through the second half of the twentieth century, penned by David G. Hartwell. Essays of this type (seemingly de rigueur in these anthologies) serve only two purposes for me: They depress me with tales of the realities of economics supplanting artistic expression, and they give me names and titles to add to my ever-growing to-read list. This particular recitation of the formula includes an interesting insight about the paint-by-numbers Del Rey fantasy formula: It can be seen as a revival of the Plantation Novel, a Southern genre of utopian fiction "in which life is rich and good, the lower classes are happy in their place and sing a lot, and evil resides in the technological North. The fantasy plot is the Civil War run backward: the South wins." The parallels are striking.
All in all, I found this collection to be moderately enjoyable, though my two favorite stories were ones I'd read before. The only stories I disliked were "Lady of the Skulls" and "We Are Norsemen." Not bad for such an anthology. I'm not sure if I feel like diving back into short genre fiction again, though. I mean, I kinda have an itch for one or two of the annual best-ofs, but what would really do it for me now is another collection like this one or Modern Classics of Fantasy, curating stories from a span of several decades. I can't think of another specifically fantasy title that offers what I want.
Sunday, July 20, 2014
2014 read #69: Mind of My Mind by Octavia E. Butler.
Mind of My Mind by Octavia E. Butler
192 pages
Published 1977
Read from July 19 to July 20
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
A master plan for a multivolume sci-fi epic seems like it would be a good idea. You know where you're starting from and where you want to go, and in between you can plot out a mix of what needs to happen and what you want to happen. I've only read two volumes of Butler's Patternist series -- well, technically, I also read Clay's Ark back in 2002 or 2003, but that was so long ago, I thought I remembered reading Parable of the Talents instead, at least until I was several pages into that book a couple months ago. Already it seems to me that Butler wrote these books according to a prearranged plan, decreeing in advance what events were necessary in the several different time periods covered from Doro and Anyanwu's meeting in 1690 all the way up to whatever far-future business we may see in Patternmaster.
This produced an unsatisfying ending for Wild Seed, an unconvincing authorial shove to get the pieces where they needed to be. But at least Seed had been thoroughly enjoyable until that point, exploring an era of history usually forgotten by science fiction and centering on two fascinating, excellently matched characters. Mind of My Mind is unsatisfying from start to finish, existing merely to fill in a necessary but by default open-ended piece of the overall narrative. It's especially confusing given the order of publication: this would have been the reading public's first exposure to Doro and Anyanwu (or Emma, as she's known here), but those two are tossed into the mix as if we were familiar with every incident and nuance of their backstories. Anyanwu/Emma in particular pops up unceremoniously, serves essentially no purpose to the narrative other than a conversational foil to Doro, and (spoilers) is killed off at the end, "off-screen," almost as an afterthought. Which is a damn shame.
Mind also struggles with being just another '70s novel about psionic people in the contemporary world. Some of the snippets of daily life in a new telepathic commune are interesting, but for the most part these are sketches, quick two-page scenes to establish Mary's rapid progress with her Pattern. If the intent was to present a slice of life along the lines of Dying Inside, it needed a whole lot more work. Mind as a whole feels unfinished, more scaffold than story. It makes me wonder if this omnibus edition chopped out pieces of backstory rendered "unnecessary" by the inclusion of Seed in the same volume.
192 pages
Published 1977
Read from July 19 to July 20
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
A master plan for a multivolume sci-fi epic seems like it would be a good idea. You know where you're starting from and where you want to go, and in between you can plot out a mix of what needs to happen and what you want to happen. I've only read two volumes of Butler's Patternist series -- well, technically, I also read Clay's Ark back in 2002 or 2003, but that was so long ago, I thought I remembered reading Parable of the Talents instead, at least until I was several pages into that book a couple months ago. Already it seems to me that Butler wrote these books according to a prearranged plan, decreeing in advance what events were necessary in the several different time periods covered from Doro and Anyanwu's meeting in 1690 all the way up to whatever far-future business we may see in Patternmaster.
This produced an unsatisfying ending for Wild Seed, an unconvincing authorial shove to get the pieces where they needed to be. But at least Seed had been thoroughly enjoyable until that point, exploring an era of history usually forgotten by science fiction and centering on two fascinating, excellently matched characters. Mind of My Mind is unsatisfying from start to finish, existing merely to fill in a necessary but by default open-ended piece of the overall narrative. It's especially confusing given the order of publication: this would have been the reading public's first exposure to Doro and Anyanwu (or Emma, as she's known here), but those two are tossed into the mix as if we were familiar with every incident and nuance of their backstories. Anyanwu/Emma in particular pops up unceremoniously, serves essentially no purpose to the narrative other than a conversational foil to Doro, and (spoilers) is killed off at the end, "off-screen," almost as an afterthought. Which is a damn shame.
Mind also struggles with being just another '70s novel about psionic people in the contemporary world. Some of the snippets of daily life in a new telepathic commune are interesting, but for the most part these are sketches, quick two-page scenes to establish Mary's rapid progress with her Pattern. If the intent was to present a slice of life along the lines of Dying Inside, it needed a whole lot more work. Mind as a whole feels unfinished, more scaffold than story. It makes me wonder if this omnibus edition chopped out pieces of backstory rendered "unnecessary" by the inclusion of Seed in the same volume.
Friday, July 18, 2014
2014 read #68: Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson.
Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson
330 pages
Published 2000
Read from July 16 to July 18
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
While reading Brown Girl in the Ring, I found myself wishing the whole book had been written in the lovely, alluring Jamaican patois Hopkinson put in the mouth of her central characters. Here in her second book, I get my wish. Sometimes I think the most beautiful and indelible music of the English language comes from its creoles and patois; over the last couple days I find my brain trying to hitch on and emulate the singy-singy rhythms and dialect of Hopkinson's narration.
That narration is this novel's primary strength. The basic plot is workmanlike, though it provides a welcome twist on the tired old "human exile welcomed into noble savage alien village" hokum (spoilers): Rather than saving the birdlike douen, Tan-Tan merely gets their village-tree attacked, and she's left to her own devices after the douen dismantle their home and scatter, hunter-gatherer style, to other villages. And as seems to be a thing with Hopkinson, Tan-Tan's survival is complicated by pregnancy.
That pregnancy, I hate to say, was probably my main complaint about Midnight Robber. I feel uncomfortable with the idea of a child born of incestuous rape, a pregnancy the central character spends half the book desperately wishing to abort, becoming an interdimensional savior. It's a complicated topic, so I'll shift over to my main problem, how the pregnancy defined the structure of the last half of the book. Throughout the novel, the narrator weaves in charming folktales about the exploits of Tan-Tan the Robber Queen -- a corpus of legends, we learn at the end, that has sprung up in a manner of seven months, the result of a few speeches and a handful of petty criminals getting chastened in out of the way settlements. The legends suggest something, well, legendary. To have it all be so banal in the end, so ordinary and so totally not legendary, feels like a cheat. Maybe that's the idea, deconstructing the idea of legend and epic narrative in modern sci-fi, or something. Or maybe it's a case of my expectations not matching the story the author wanted to tell. I wanted to follow the tale of a young woman growing into the role of Robber Queen over the course of decades in the fierce wilds of New Half-Way Tree, not a handful of months as a young woman grows to love her rapist's baby.
I dunno. I think it's the legends that soured me on the ending. If the legends had been circulating years later, it'd be a different story, but maybe I'm putting too much thought into this.
330 pages
Published 2000
Read from July 16 to July 18
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
While reading Brown Girl in the Ring, I found myself wishing the whole book had been written in the lovely, alluring Jamaican patois Hopkinson put in the mouth of her central characters. Here in her second book, I get my wish. Sometimes I think the most beautiful and indelible music of the English language comes from its creoles and patois; over the last couple days I find my brain trying to hitch on and emulate the singy-singy rhythms and dialect of Hopkinson's narration.
That narration is this novel's primary strength. The basic plot is workmanlike, though it provides a welcome twist on the tired old "human exile welcomed into noble savage alien village" hokum (spoilers): Rather than saving the birdlike douen, Tan-Tan merely gets their village-tree attacked, and she's left to her own devices after the douen dismantle their home and scatter, hunter-gatherer style, to other villages. And as seems to be a thing with Hopkinson, Tan-Tan's survival is complicated by pregnancy.
That pregnancy, I hate to say, was probably my main complaint about Midnight Robber. I feel uncomfortable with the idea of a child born of incestuous rape, a pregnancy the central character spends half the book desperately wishing to abort, becoming an interdimensional savior. It's a complicated topic, so I'll shift over to my main problem, how the pregnancy defined the structure of the last half of the book. Throughout the novel, the narrator weaves in charming folktales about the exploits of Tan-Tan the Robber Queen -- a corpus of legends, we learn at the end, that has sprung up in a manner of seven months, the result of a few speeches and a handful of petty criminals getting chastened in out of the way settlements. The legends suggest something, well, legendary. To have it all be so banal in the end, so ordinary and so totally not legendary, feels like a cheat. Maybe that's the idea, deconstructing the idea of legend and epic narrative in modern sci-fi, or something. Or maybe it's a case of my expectations not matching the story the author wanted to tell. I wanted to follow the tale of a young woman growing into the role of Robber Queen over the course of decades in the fierce wilds of New Half-Way Tree, not a handful of months as a young woman grows to love her rapist's baby.
I dunno. I think it's the legends that soured me on the ending. If the legends had been circulating years later, it'd be a different story, but maybe I'm putting too much thought into this.
Tuesday, July 15, 2014
2014 read #67: Kindred by Octavia E. Butler.
Kindred by Octavia E. Butler
264 pages
Published 1979
Read from July 14 to July 15
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
A methodical, quietly harrowing examination of the infernal institution of slavery, and how it deadens the humanity of everyone bound to its culture. Or anyone it touches, really. At times the structure of Kindred can feel like it was built around a checklist of horrors, with situations created seemingly for little reason beyond forcing the narrator to experience a new facet of slave existence. The narrator's white husband's initial "It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be" ignorance and apologia, and the slave owner's "Why are you still upset about slavery a hundred years later?" dismissiveness, could almost be sociology course strawmen (if such viewpoints weren't so ubiquitous as to be considered "reasonable" and "centrist" positions to this day, and thus not strawman arguments at all). But Butler's matter-of-fact approach to depicting those horrors -- and the insidious disquiet of how readily one might let go of pride, dignity, and freedom itself to submit, adapt, and conform and thereby avoid punishment, how readily one might even begin to defend the indefensible -- sinks steadily into you, numbing until the lash bites or the knife sinks in.
264 pages
Published 1979
Read from July 14 to July 15
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
A methodical, quietly harrowing examination of the infernal institution of slavery, and how it deadens the humanity of everyone bound to its culture. Or anyone it touches, really. At times the structure of Kindred can feel like it was built around a checklist of horrors, with situations created seemingly for little reason beyond forcing the narrator to experience a new facet of slave existence. The narrator's white husband's initial "It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be" ignorance and apologia, and the slave owner's "Why are you still upset about slavery a hundred years later?" dismissiveness, could almost be sociology course strawmen (if such viewpoints weren't so ubiquitous as to be considered "reasonable" and "centrist" positions to this day, and thus not strawman arguments at all). But Butler's matter-of-fact approach to depicting those horrors -- and the insidious disquiet of how readily one might let go of pride, dignity, and freedom itself to submit, adapt, and conform and thereby avoid punishment, how readily one might even begin to defend the indefensible -- sinks steadily into you, numbing until the lash bites or the knife sinks in.
Sunday, July 13, 2014
2014 read #66: The Good Lord Bird by James McBride.
The Good Lord Bird by James McBride
417 pages
Published 2013
Read from July 10 to July 13
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
My first point of comparison was Twain; my book club friend compared it to "reading a Coen Brothers film in book form," which might be closer to the mark. For the hipster cred, I want to state I had this book on my reading list long before I knew it was going to be a Jaden Smith vehicle. In fact, the thought of Jaden Smith trying to take on the role of Onion kept intruding as I read, possibly the first time I have gotten disgruntled over a casting choice in a movie not yet made while still in the act of reading the source material. I just can't imagine a book like this getting reduced to that level; I refuse.
What strikes me most about this book is how extraordinarily vivid McBride's depictions of events and characters -- especially historical figures -- tended to be. Old John Brown feels immediate and real, in all his white man's zealous ignorance. I didn't know what to make of the depiction of Frederick Douglass as a lecherous girl-chaser; I suppose McBride eschewed awe and automatic hagiography by giving flesh to less savory rumors and allegations (though for all I know it could be accurate; I'm white and ignorant as hell).
417 pages
Published 2013
Read from July 10 to July 13
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
My first point of comparison was Twain; my book club friend compared it to "reading a Coen Brothers film in book form," which might be closer to the mark. For the hipster cred, I want to state I had this book on my reading list long before I knew it was going to be a Jaden Smith vehicle. In fact, the thought of Jaden Smith trying to take on the role of Onion kept intruding as I read, possibly the first time I have gotten disgruntled over a casting choice in a movie not yet made while still in the act of reading the source material. I just can't imagine a book like this getting reduced to that level; I refuse.
What strikes me most about this book is how extraordinarily vivid McBride's depictions of events and characters -- especially historical figures -- tended to be. Old John Brown feels immediate and real, in all his white man's zealous ignorance. I didn't know what to make of the depiction of Frederick Douglass as a lecherous girl-chaser; I suppose McBride eschewed awe and automatic hagiography by giving flesh to less savory rumors and allegations (though for all I know it could be accurate; I'm white and ignorant as hell).
Thursday, July 10, 2014
2014 read #65: White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi.
White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi
227 pages
Published 2009
Read from July 8 to July 10
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
After my interpretive fiasco reviewing A Pale View of Hills, I hesitate to unravel the meanings and messages of another delicate literary construction. White Is for Witching is an especially dense and experimental work, something you'd almost expect an ambitious young author to produce for her third novel: the sort of book you have to read a paragraph at a time to sort out its possible implications and unspoken through-line. If pressed, I would guess -- hesitantly -- that it's about immigration and assimilation, racism and loss of identity, both in the nationalist sense and in the melting pot sense. It's also a novel of place and genius loci, the sort of thing Peter Ackroyd could dig into and appreciate. I speak of course of the house at the heart of Witching.
I prefer to interpret fantastical happenings in literary works as literal, rather than allegorical, figurative, symbolic, whatever -- or rather, I interpret them literally first, and incorporate other readings as they percolate into my genre-numbed skull. I hate the ending of Pan's Labyrinth, for instance. So naturally I like to read the portions of Witching written from the house's perspective (yes, chunks of the book are written from the p.o.v. of a grasping, greedy, jealous house) as literal "happenings" in the book's universe, which thankfully is left just ambiguous enough that I can get away with it. Four generations of Silver women warp and weave through the house, bringing it to life in a moment of wartime extremity but bearing its weight in their stomachs. Each generation is induced to consume bits of the house in (what I think is) an obvious allegory for expectations of place, privilege, position, and heritage, and the house fulfills its idea of loving and protecting them by swallowing them in turn.
Miranda, pricked pale and wasted by pica, sort of seems to me like an overbred aristocrat, bloodless and cadaverous, all her life and moisture wicked into her eyes; perhaps this imagery is even what Oyeyemi meant, the outcome of generations consumed by an idea of place and status. It is Miranda who is seemingly crushed most thoroughly and early in her development, the "curse" perhaps sinking deeper with each generation, yet it is also Miranda who feels fleeting hope that she can dig herself out of the chalk and earth and plaster of years when she meets and develops affections for Ore, a thoroughly Anglicized West African girl -- whose color the house makes abundantly clear it does not like. It's tricky stuff to interpret, at least for my muddled abilities, obvious in some respects but expressed so obliquely that picking apart leads to a quivering mess of strange substances and forgotten clues.
It is this symbolic density that makes me hesitate to give the book higher praise. Quite frankly, I had a hard time figuring out what was going on. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I think my critical faculties aren't prepared for this sort of deep diving.
227 pages
Published 2009
Read from July 8 to July 10
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
After my interpretive fiasco reviewing A Pale View of Hills, I hesitate to unravel the meanings and messages of another delicate literary construction. White Is for Witching is an especially dense and experimental work, something you'd almost expect an ambitious young author to produce for her third novel: the sort of book you have to read a paragraph at a time to sort out its possible implications and unspoken through-line. If pressed, I would guess -- hesitantly -- that it's about immigration and assimilation, racism and loss of identity, both in the nationalist sense and in the melting pot sense. It's also a novel of place and genius loci, the sort of thing Peter Ackroyd could dig into and appreciate. I speak of course of the house at the heart of Witching.
I prefer to interpret fantastical happenings in literary works as literal, rather than allegorical, figurative, symbolic, whatever -- or rather, I interpret them literally first, and incorporate other readings as they percolate into my genre-numbed skull. I hate the ending of Pan's Labyrinth, for instance. So naturally I like to read the portions of Witching written from the house's perspective (yes, chunks of the book are written from the p.o.v. of a grasping, greedy, jealous house) as literal "happenings" in the book's universe, which thankfully is left just ambiguous enough that I can get away with it. Four generations of Silver women warp and weave through the house, bringing it to life in a moment of wartime extremity but bearing its weight in their stomachs. Each generation is induced to consume bits of the house in (what I think is) an obvious allegory for expectations of place, privilege, position, and heritage, and the house fulfills its idea of loving and protecting them by swallowing them in turn.
Miranda, pricked pale and wasted by pica, sort of seems to me like an overbred aristocrat, bloodless and cadaverous, all her life and moisture wicked into her eyes; perhaps this imagery is even what Oyeyemi meant, the outcome of generations consumed by an idea of place and status. It is Miranda who is seemingly crushed most thoroughly and early in her development, the "curse" perhaps sinking deeper with each generation, yet it is also Miranda who feels fleeting hope that she can dig herself out of the chalk and earth and plaster of years when she meets and develops affections for Ore, a thoroughly Anglicized West African girl -- whose color the house makes abundantly clear it does not like. It's tricky stuff to interpret, at least for my muddled abilities, obvious in some respects but expressed so obliquely that picking apart leads to a quivering mess of strange substances and forgotten clues.
It is this symbolic density that makes me hesitate to give the book higher praise. Quite frankly, I had a hard time figuring out what was going on. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I think my critical faculties aren't prepared for this sort of deep diving.
Tuesday, July 8, 2014
2014 read #64: Wild Seed by Octavia E. Butler.
Wild Seed by Octavia E. Butler
279 pages
Published 1980
Read from July 4 to July 8
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
Not as devastating as the Parable novels, Wild Seed is an achievement nonetheless: an intelligent, engaging, and above all entertaining sci-fi novel, equal parts X-Men and African Diaspora, touching on race, gender, mortality, what it means to be human -- all the usual Serious Science Fiction stuff, but done well. I didn't quite buy it as a love story, so the ending felt unearned to me; perhaps the fact that it was written as a prequel installment of an ongoing series limited the ways it could have ended.
279 pages
Published 1980
Read from July 4 to July 8
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
Not as devastating as the Parable novels, Wild Seed is an achievement nonetheless: an intelligent, engaging, and above all entertaining sci-fi novel, equal parts X-Men and African Diaspora, touching on race, gender, mortality, what it means to be human -- all the usual Serious Science Fiction stuff, but done well. I didn't quite buy it as a love story, so the ending felt unearned to me; perhaps the fact that it was written as a prequel installment of an ongoing series limited the ways it could have ended.
Friday, July 4, 2014
2014 read #63: Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson.
Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson
250 pages
Published 1998
Read from July 2 to July 4
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
With the idea of imposing some method on my reading selections, I've begun ILLing books from this Buzzfeed quiz purporting to list some ninety-nine "classics of science fiction." I'd read only thirty-four of them before now, obviously an unacceptable state of affairs.
It took me a while to get into this book. It was published after winning a contest run by the Warner Aspect imprint during the last hurrah of the publishing industry, and without having any other such novels to point to, nonetheless I feel safe saying it feels like a novel that won a contest. Or rather, I should say it feels like someone's first novel. The central character thinks about her past while walking through her neighborhood, establishing geography and necessary backstory with as much subtlety as a cardboard background in a high school play. The book lacks polish, and the storytelling lacks daring; perhaps I've read too much high literary work recently to see standard sci-fi narration as anything other than rigid and over-deliberate. Worst of all, the backstory laid out so carefully in the opening chapters is a mess of 1990s cliches and 1990s concerns. Toronto has become a failed city, brought low and abandoned to the poor after a First Nations lawsuit leads to international sanctions powerful enough to cripple a First World economy! There's a wicked new street drug! There's a literal underground society of street urchins! Squatters live in a mall whose generator is somehow still running twelve years after the Collapse! There's illegal organ harvesting! There's a wicked new virus entering the population! Animal rights activists somehow make up a substantial portion of the electorate! Hopkinson's post-collapse Canada never feels coherent, pieced together from then-fashionable concerns.
About a hundred pages in, though, Brown Girl abruptly becomes interesting. Two words: Orisha possession. The music of Exuma got me interested in West African religion and the syncretic beliefs of the Diaspora, and like well-done stories of Faery and Old Weird Americana, I eat it up. The problem, of course, is there's a vast wealth of Faery and a respectable amount of Old Weird Americana, but hardly any Orisha-based fantasy literature, at least that I've seen around. (I hadn't heard of Brown Girl until I took the Buzzfeed quiz, so it's evident my background was not conducive to exposing me to such stories.) However shaky the dystopian worldbuilding and however methodical the plotting, Hopkinson excels when the Orishas take a direct hand in moving the story along. Brown Girl still has its flaws, as any first novel would, but this is balanced somewhat by the delight of its later imagery.
250 pages
Published 1998
Read from July 2 to July 4
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
With the idea of imposing some method on my reading selections, I've begun ILLing books from this Buzzfeed quiz purporting to list some ninety-nine "classics of science fiction." I'd read only thirty-four of them before now, obviously an unacceptable state of affairs.
It took me a while to get into this book. It was published after winning a contest run by the Warner Aspect imprint during the last hurrah of the publishing industry, and without having any other such novels to point to, nonetheless I feel safe saying it feels like a novel that won a contest. Or rather, I should say it feels like someone's first novel. The central character thinks about her past while walking through her neighborhood, establishing geography and necessary backstory with as much subtlety as a cardboard background in a high school play. The book lacks polish, and the storytelling lacks daring; perhaps I've read too much high literary work recently to see standard sci-fi narration as anything other than rigid and over-deliberate. Worst of all, the backstory laid out so carefully in the opening chapters is a mess of 1990s cliches and 1990s concerns. Toronto has become a failed city, brought low and abandoned to the poor after a First Nations lawsuit leads to international sanctions powerful enough to cripple a First World economy! There's a wicked new street drug! There's a literal underground society of street urchins! Squatters live in a mall whose generator is somehow still running twelve years after the Collapse! There's illegal organ harvesting! There's a wicked new virus entering the population! Animal rights activists somehow make up a substantial portion of the electorate! Hopkinson's post-collapse Canada never feels coherent, pieced together from then-fashionable concerns.
About a hundred pages in, though, Brown Girl abruptly becomes interesting. Two words: Orisha possession. The music of Exuma got me interested in West African religion and the syncretic beliefs of the Diaspora, and like well-done stories of Faery and Old Weird Americana, I eat it up. The problem, of course, is there's a vast wealth of Faery and a respectable amount of Old Weird Americana, but hardly any Orisha-based fantasy literature, at least that I've seen around. (I hadn't heard of Brown Girl until I took the Buzzfeed quiz, so it's evident my background was not conducive to exposing me to such stories.) However shaky the dystopian worldbuilding and however methodical the plotting, Hopkinson excels when the Orishas take a direct hand in moving the story along. Brown Girl still has its flaws, as any first novel would, but this is balanced somewhat by the delight of its later imagery.
Wednesday, July 2, 2014
2014 read #62: The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett.
The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett
210 pages
Published 1983
Read from July 1 to July 2
Rating: ★★ out of 5
Perhaps, I thought, my lack of enthusiasm for Guards! Guards! could be traced to the central characters. I enjoyed a Rincewind short story -- my first exposure to Pratchett -- some ways back, so I figured slinging back to the start and reading the first Rincewind novel would be a spiffy idea. Alas, we seem to be going the wrong way. I was merely neutral toward Guards! Guards!; The Color of Magic I disliked. Its structure, a sequence of short stories, was more scattershot, toying with hoary fantasy cliches but rarely long enough to draw much of anything funny out of them. The sequence with imaginary dragons was briefly interesting, and I'd be interested to follow the further adventures of Hrun the Barbarian, but honestly, I think I'd rather dip into the sword and sorcery source material -- it seems like it would be more entertaining.
210 pages
Published 1983
Read from July 1 to July 2
Rating: ★★ out of 5
Perhaps, I thought, my lack of enthusiasm for Guards! Guards! could be traced to the central characters. I enjoyed a Rincewind short story -- my first exposure to Pratchett -- some ways back, so I figured slinging back to the start and reading the first Rincewind novel would be a spiffy idea. Alas, we seem to be going the wrong way. I was merely neutral toward Guards! Guards!; The Color of Magic I disliked. Its structure, a sequence of short stories, was more scattershot, toying with hoary fantasy cliches but rarely long enough to draw much of anything funny out of them. The sequence with imaginary dragons was briefly interesting, and I'd be interested to follow the further adventures of Hrun the Barbarian, but honestly, I think I'd rather dip into the sword and sorcery source material -- it seems like it would be more entertaining.
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