Queen Victoria's Book of Spells: An Anthology of Gaslamp Fantasy, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling
350 pages
Published 2013
Read from November 27 to November 29
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
An anthology of original stories recruited from contemporary top names in the subgenre -- I haven't read this sort of thing since After the King, almost two years ago. I haven't read a Datlow and Windling anthology since 1988's Year's Best Fantasy, just about one year ago. Both books were disappointing. But I'm cautiously optimistic about this one. The theme has promise: gaslamp fantasy is a catch-all term for fantasy derived from the 19th century and all things British-y, a classification that includes but isn't necessarily defined by steampunk. If even a third of these stories have the charm and verve of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, we're in for good times. Though given the inconsistent quality of stories delivered to themed anthologies, and Datlow and Windling's questionable tastes way back in the '80s, we'll just have to see. The names I recognize on the contents page rarely disappoint, at least so far, so that's something.
"Queen Victoria's Book of Spells" by Delia Sherman. Which came first: The name of this story or the title of the anthology? This entry almost reads as if Sherman were tasked with constructing a story around the title. Which is not to say it's bad or even unenthusiastic. The story is brisk and competent. But it's a bit on the simple side, following a very basic stock story format: Magical grad student unlocks the spells concealing secret passages in the young Queen Victoria's titular commonplace book, while grumbling about the parallels in his own life, viz. a tyrannical doctoral advisor and a struggle for self-determination. His crisis of conscience provoked by Victoria's secret and shady past helps him resolve the academic conflict entangling him, and gets him a date with the unexpectedly sweet and perceptive magical archivist to boot. It's unsurprising stuff that just about any fantasy author could write in their sleep. But still, it has charm.
"The Fairy Enterprise" by Jeffrey Ford. Interesting but half-cooked satire on Victorian industrialism. There are a couple images and incidents that tantalize with possibility, but the bulk of the narrative feels hastily assembled, scribbled down without the delicate magic I expect from Ford (and far more potty humor than I associate with him, including the immortal line "I shat a populace"). This, I fear, may be the risk of original anthologies -- everything is written to order and hurried to meet deadlines, rather than cultivated organically.
"From the Catalogue of the Pavilion of the Uncanny and Marvellous, Scheduled for Premiere at the Great Exhibition (Before the Fire)" by Genevieve Valentine. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the title, this is an epistolary story, heavy on catalog entries and scholarly notes, light on personal letters or affect. If there had been a strong tradition of faery fantasy in the 1950s or early '60s, I could well imagine this sort of story appearing then -- it has that same businesslike tone, recording the "facts" of the case from various snippets but not fleshing out story and character per se. It's okay, I guess, so far as it goes, but it's a disappointing use of a terrific title.
"The Memory Book" by Maureen McHugh. Another middling effort, dusting off the usual set dressings -- a governess, a tawdry family, fashion as a competition for status, a vacation at the seaside -- to sketch a tale of sympathetic magic. Nothing special, and in fact its denouement is a bit too similar to "Queen Victoria's Book of Spells" -- it felt like an inferior repeat.
"La Reine d'Enfer" by Kathe Koja. The first story in this collection with a bang-up opening and a distinctive, urgent narrative voice, and the first excellent story overall. Easily the best story so far, a superb and sensual joining of style, incident, and character, giddy with vengeance.
"For the Briar Rose" by Elizabeth Wein. Another which-came-first problem: Did I have trouble getting into this story because the narrative doesn't flow well, or did I feel the narrative didn't flow well because I couldn't get into the story? A fictionalized snoozer on the life of Margaret Burne-Jones (daughter of the artist Sir Edward Burne-Jones, who did a famous series of paintings on the subject of Briar Rose), which inevitably (and artlessly, I thought) mingles in a touch of Briar Rose folklore before concluding that childbirth can suddenly make everything in life clear and that motherhood is "a great act of creation" equal to poetry or art. The message is a bit too breeder-chic for my tastes, but my real issue with the story is how boring and unremarkable it is.
"The Governess" by Elizabeth Bear. In execution this is a workmanlike and too-predictable gothic piece of domestic and sexual tyranny, but the thematic linkage between the captivity of a selkie and the complex social traps of gender and class subjugation is inspired. I always appreciate a story that employs its genre conceit to illustrate a social injustice.
"Smithfield" by James P. Blaylock. This story is almost the reverse of "The Governess," in that it's an atmospheric and boldly-penned piece built around a corny premise: a young Arthur Conan Doyle taking photographs in Smithfield at the end of the gaslight era and discovering supernatural orbs caught on his plates (which, of course, vanish as soon as the electric lamps get switched on). It's been a while since I read anything by Doyle (aside from The White Company, which is in an archaic style and doesn't count), but I've read more books by him than by anyone else (except Stephen King, who also doesn't count). I don't think Blaylock quite catches Doyle's cadence. I appreciate that he made the effort, though -- it's only the second story in this collection that tries to do anything interesting with the narrative voice. I also appreciate the Ackroydian image of Doyle's plates "developing" into consecutive layers of Smithfield, accumulating backward through the ages until they become completely blackened and impenetrable. It's too bad the story itself is nothing much.
"The Unwanted Women of Surrey" by Kaaron Warren. Not a bad story, but one suffused with 1980s-style nihilism, in which a group of "hysterics" maintained in a home for the convenience of their husbands and families become the agents of a cholera plague, believing their actions will please the Grey Women and reward the "hysterics" with free will. It reads at times like earnest, Russ-esque venom and vengeance fantasy, but the ending -- in which the Grey Women greedily slurp up the blackened, shriveled soul of the plague-spreading ringleader, and all the other women utter a collective "Oopsie" -- complicates any allegorical reading. I should note that it isn't a great story, either.
"Charged" by Leanna Renee Hieber. This brief character study has enthusiasm but clatters along in amateurish prose: "My gift urged me to live by reinvented terms" has a certain lack of polish more consonant with the unpaying underbelly of online publication, and this sort of "arrogant antihero grasps at what he believes is rightfully his" boilerplate is a yawn.
"Mr. Splitfoot" by Dale Bailey. A solid entry, nicely chilling horror playing with the "reality" behind the sham of the Fox sisters. This sort of horror has a limited palette, but Bailey employs it to good effect. Though the "stinger" at the end (the devil was loosed upon the world just in time for the 20th century!) is eye-rollingly unoriginal.
"Phosphorus" by Veronica Schanoes. This is exactly the sort of story I want to write: A remorseless look at working conditions during the height of capital's power -- when workers were replaceable parts and could be worked to death without a second thought, poisoned into walking corpses, all the more gruesome because it's based on historical fact -- and the early, all-too-often forgotten working heroes who began the struggle against it. That said, something about this particular story leaves me cold. Much of the blame is on the second person narration, which sacrifices character and depth in favor of a false sense of immediacy. Then there's the plotline hinging on the magical Irish grandmother, a cheap and easy storytelling device that leaves me unsatisfied. The subject matter here is worth digging into (and it enriched me with the knowledge of phossy jaw as well as the London matchgirls strike itself -- who says fantasy can't be didactic?), but Schanoes' execution is only average. Schanoes' afterword (each of the stories here is followed by an afterword in which the authors explain their inspiration) is almost more moving than the story itself.
"We Without Us Were Shadows" by Catherynne M. Valente. Almost as good as "La Reine d'Enfer," this a charming piece on the Brontë siblings done in full The Girl Who... mode. It could be a lost chapter from that series; that sense of familiarity undercuts the effect, just a little bit, with the feeling that Valente has brought us here before and shown us identical wonders. Nonetheless a satisfying effort.
"The Vital Importance of the Superficial" by Ellen Kushner and Caroline Stevermer. Charming and hilarious. An epistolary story, again, but this time composed of unfailingly polite correspondence between contending wizards as well as their long-suffering family members. This one is definitely up there with "La Reine d'Enfer" and "We Without Us Were Shadows" as the best stories so far.
"The Jewel in the Toad Queen's Crown" by Jane Yolen. You'd never guess a story in which Prime Minister Disraeli uses kabbalistic magic to turn Queen Victoria into a toad (twice) would be boring, but this one is. Rather than demonstrating their working relationship in any way, Yolen has them thinking daggers at each other, Dune style, but without the dense political intrigue and interest factor of Dune. The internal monologues dammed any sense of impetus or flow, leaving me flipping pages to see how much more of this I was expected to read. I'm not sure what would suggest the connection between Disraeli and kabbalah in the first place, aside from, you know, the fact that he was born into a Jewish family. That creeps a little close to Magical Negro territory, so to speak, for my tastes. It's a shame -- a title like that, penned by Yolen, had led me to expect a charming fairy tale of a toad monarch in a mighty pond.
"A Few Twigs He Left Behind" by Gregory Maguire. Ah yes, another Maguire fanfiction -- I mean, another Maguire reinterpretation of/addendum to a beloved classic, this time A Christmas Carol. It's adequate enough, not as good as "Scarecrow" (reviewed here), not as godawful as Wicked, which I couldn't even finish (and so never reviewed). Maguire tries too hard, I think, to be Dickensian and picturesque, but with only indifferent success.
"Their Monstrous Minds" by Tanith Lee. A steampunk yawn centered on a cold, indifferent, megalomaniacal genius-inventor hurling lightnings and giving life to a Frankenstein superman on a remote island. Mechanical, omniscient prose, emulating the less enjoyable aspects of early Victorian storytelling, contributes to the reheated feeling of the piece.
"Estella Saves the Village" by Theodora Goss. Estella Havisham (I thought the name sounded familiar, but I had to look it up; I haven't, alas, read much Dickens yet) races to save a village populated by various other Victorian characters (from Lady D'Urberville to one Mr. Holmes) from a plague of nothingness -- which turns out to be memory loss in the brain of the modern woman in whose imagination the village exists. This sort of thing is corny in an inoffensive way, and kind of sweet. I'd hoped for a more bang-up closer, but hey, this story was palatable, and at least the book is done.
While I'm happy to have had the chance to read "La Reine d'Enfer," "We Without Us Were Shadows," and "The Vital Importance of the Superficial," most of the stories here were slapdash affairs, middling at best, tedious at worst. I'm beginning to suspect that original anthologies represent a easy cash-in for authors able to meet deadlines, not a promising field for all-time great works.
Saturday, November 29, 2014
Thursday, November 27, 2014
2014 read #112: The Island at the End of the World by Sam Taylor.
The Island at the End of the World by Sam Taylor
215 pages
Published 2009
Read from November 26 to November 27
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
I have, in many ways, conventional tastes. This came up in a spat once some years ago on a message board where I'd volunteered to judge a short story contest. One of the entrants submitted a dull, derivative would-be shocker tale of an amoral photographer sleazing around Italy, taking nude shots of teens after providing them with drugs -- basically the sort of "aren't I so transgressive" stuff that was all the rage in the 1980s. In my naiveté, I admitted I often couldn't get into stories with wholly unappealing main characters; the writer went on some sort of lit-crit rant, name-dropping niche authors and philosophers and reviving Dostoevsky vs. Tolstoy (he, modestly, cast himself as Dostoevsky), before it dawned on him, to his dismay, that I was a philistine who liked pew-pew sci-fi. He retained his sense of superiority, I gave my vote to a far more entertaining story, and that was the end of it.
It's true, though, that I really don't get into completely unappealing central characters, with few exceptions. Which makes my reaction to The Island at the End of the World kind of funny. I most enjoyed the chapters narrated by the paranoid, psychotic, abusive, religious whack-job father, while wishing I could skim past the portions narrated by his isolated, confused, lonely, aching, presumably more sympathetic son. The difference is in the narration. The father's chapters were exceptionally well-written, conveying the cadence and the impatient "Why can't you fools see this, it's all there in front of you" emphasis of paranoia so faithfully that I felt uneasy at times, recalling all too clearly my own paranoid, psychotic, abusive, religious whack-job father. Finn's chapters, however, which should have appealed to memories of growing up in total isolation under the oppressive rule of my father, struck me as wonky. The boy appears to be almost nine years old -- raised without formal schooling, it's true, but from an early age reading from a book of fairy tales and the King James Bible. I'd expect some eccentricity in his spelling, but I didn't go to school either, and by that age (one of the last years I believed my own father's delusions) I would never be spelling know as "no," I'm as "ahm," icy as "I-see," and so on. I would mix up, say, "wear" and "where"; I would have bungled out phonetic spellings of complicated words (and likely misuse some); but nothing at all like this. I have an affinity for faux-naive narration, as I mentioned in a previous review, but with Finn, it was just too much, too implausible. His voice is closer to Charlie Gordon than to grade-schooler. Taylor should have toned it down considerably -- or at least, I think so.
Finn's older sister Alice has p.o.v. chapters in the second half of the book; her voice is less original, a more typical literary prose voice, mingling hesitance and defiance as she attempts to cut loose from her father and attach herself to the stranger newly arrived to the island -- an excellent enough voice, but not as bold as the first two styles. I did, however, enjoy the consistent tics of language shared by the whole family, a clever touch given their isolation and the father's religious delusions. I could picture the children soaking up their father's speech patterns during their years on the island. That was a neat touch.
Voices and moods are the strength of this book, because the plot, such as it is, kind of fizzles toward the end, taking a weak M. Night Shyamalan twist from the rarefied airs of myth and Shakespeare to a somewhat silly and hard-to-visualize mundane explanation.
215 pages
Published 2009
Read from November 26 to November 27
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
I have, in many ways, conventional tastes. This came up in a spat once some years ago on a message board where I'd volunteered to judge a short story contest. One of the entrants submitted a dull, derivative would-be shocker tale of an amoral photographer sleazing around Italy, taking nude shots of teens after providing them with drugs -- basically the sort of "aren't I so transgressive" stuff that was all the rage in the 1980s. In my naiveté, I admitted I often couldn't get into stories with wholly unappealing main characters; the writer went on some sort of lit-crit rant, name-dropping niche authors and philosophers and reviving Dostoevsky vs. Tolstoy (he, modestly, cast himself as Dostoevsky), before it dawned on him, to his dismay, that I was a philistine who liked pew-pew sci-fi. He retained his sense of superiority, I gave my vote to a far more entertaining story, and that was the end of it.
It's true, though, that I really don't get into completely unappealing central characters, with few exceptions. Which makes my reaction to The Island at the End of the World kind of funny. I most enjoyed the chapters narrated by the paranoid, psychotic, abusive, religious whack-job father, while wishing I could skim past the portions narrated by his isolated, confused, lonely, aching, presumably more sympathetic son. The difference is in the narration. The father's chapters were exceptionally well-written, conveying the cadence and the impatient "Why can't you fools see this, it's all there in front of you" emphasis of paranoia so faithfully that I felt uneasy at times, recalling all too clearly my own paranoid, psychotic, abusive, religious whack-job father. Finn's chapters, however, which should have appealed to memories of growing up in total isolation under the oppressive rule of my father, struck me as wonky. The boy appears to be almost nine years old -- raised without formal schooling, it's true, but from an early age reading from a book of fairy tales and the King James Bible. I'd expect some eccentricity in his spelling, but I didn't go to school either, and by that age (one of the last years I believed my own father's delusions) I would never be spelling know as "no," I'm as "ahm," icy as "I-see," and so on. I would mix up, say, "wear" and "where"; I would have bungled out phonetic spellings of complicated words (and likely misuse some); but nothing at all like this. I have an affinity for faux-naive narration, as I mentioned in a previous review, but with Finn, it was just too much, too implausible. His voice is closer to Charlie Gordon than to grade-schooler. Taylor should have toned it down considerably -- or at least, I think so.
Finn's older sister Alice has p.o.v. chapters in the second half of the book; her voice is less original, a more typical literary prose voice, mingling hesitance and defiance as she attempts to cut loose from her father and attach herself to the stranger newly arrived to the island -- an excellent enough voice, but not as bold as the first two styles. I did, however, enjoy the consistent tics of language shared by the whole family, a clever touch given their isolation and the father's religious delusions. I could picture the children soaking up their father's speech patterns during their years on the island. That was a neat touch.
Voices and moods are the strength of this book, because the plot, such as it is, kind of fizzles toward the end, taking a weak M. Night Shyamalan twist from the rarefied airs of myth and Shakespeare to a somewhat silly and hard-to-visualize mundane explanation.
Tuesday, November 25, 2014
2014 read #111: The Lambs of London by Peter Ackroyd.
The Lambs of London by Peter Ackroyd
213 pages
Published 2004
Read November 25
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
The other day I was looking through Ursula K. Le Guin's Wikipedia page to pick out which of her books I should read next. Some editor noted that The Eye of the Heron was one of her "minor novels." For whatever reason I've become taken with that phrase. I can't resist thinking The Lambs of London qualifies as a "minor novel" for Ackroyd. It lacks the thematic elegance of Chatterton's layers of forgery and illusion, offering only a single nod in that direction during an enigmatic encounter with a handbill hawker who, after the climactic performance of Vortigern, declares, "Ah, sir, it may be real and yet unreal" -- a summation, if I've ever seen one, of Ackroyd's enduring preoccupation. It differs from Chatterton again in its simplicity, downplaying Ackroyd's penchant for minutely observed eccentrics, resulting in a slim volume that, if anything, errs in the other direction, toward efficiency and lack of affect. It's disappointingly straightforward, in fact. In some ways Lambs reads like Ackroyd going through the motions, presenting a dramatization of a historical curiosity without the gusto of his major efforts. Even First Light, in my opinion Ackroyd's most disappointing novel, tells its tale with more verve and ambition.
While enjoyable on its own terms, Lambs is by no means an essential addition to Ackroyd's tapestry of London.
213 pages
Published 2004
Read November 25
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
The other day I was looking through Ursula K. Le Guin's Wikipedia page to pick out which of her books I should read next. Some editor noted that The Eye of the Heron was one of her "minor novels." For whatever reason I've become taken with that phrase. I can't resist thinking The Lambs of London qualifies as a "minor novel" for Ackroyd. It lacks the thematic elegance of Chatterton's layers of forgery and illusion, offering only a single nod in that direction during an enigmatic encounter with a handbill hawker who, after the climactic performance of Vortigern, declares, "Ah, sir, it may be real and yet unreal" -- a summation, if I've ever seen one, of Ackroyd's enduring preoccupation. It differs from Chatterton again in its simplicity, downplaying Ackroyd's penchant for minutely observed eccentrics, resulting in a slim volume that, if anything, errs in the other direction, toward efficiency and lack of affect. It's disappointingly straightforward, in fact. In some ways Lambs reads like Ackroyd going through the motions, presenting a dramatization of a historical curiosity without the gusto of his major efforts. Even First Light, in my opinion Ackroyd's most disappointing novel, tells its tale with more verve and ambition.
While enjoyable on its own terms, Lambs is by no means an essential addition to Ackroyd's tapestry of London.
2014 read #110: Sarah Canary by Karen Joy Fowler.
Sarah Canary by Karen Joy Fowler
291 pages
Published 1991
Read from November 23 to November 25
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
As with a number of books I picked up this year, I was inspired to read Sarah Canary by (and in fact I only heard of Sarah Canary in the first place because of) this Buzzfeed list of 99 alleged "classic" science fiction novels. What fantastic element exists within Sarah Canary is so attenuated, however, I for one would hesitate to ascribe any fantastic intent to it at all. Which is kind of neat, in that it ties into one of the book's through-lines: the titular character is perceived by those around her according to what they want her to be. The Chinese laborer at first believes her to be a ghost lover, come to enchant him or to bring him good fortune in return for his consideration and protection. The female suffragist believes her to be a woman wanted for murder, and thinks only she can return Sarah Canary safely and vindicate her supposed crime. The biologist sees her as a feral child. The drunken showman who believes he's cursed with immortality concludes she's a vampire loose in the West, and only he can track her down and kill her. The storylines form circles within and around each other, and underneath, on "the level of what is," Sarah Canary moves through the world and her identity and her purpose are never explained.
On one level, then, Sarah Canary is a work of esthetics, lingering on sharply observed (and quietly lovely) descriptions of rain and moon and reflections; on another, more structural level it is a social, didactic novel, put together almost like a doctoral thesis on social conditions in Washington and San Francisco in 1873. Each chapter introduces a topic related to life in the post-Civil War era -- Chinese labor, the conquest of the Native Americans, Mesmerism and life in asylums, Darwinian biology, freakshows and sensations, women's suffrage, just about everything, in fact, except black life in the aftermath of failed Reconstruction -- and tallies it toward the thrust of the central theme. It is also a novel of comic misadventure, though told with such grunge-era seriousness, such attention to the cold and the rain, that I'd hesitate to say it becomes funny beyond one or two clever bits of dialogue and certain ironic callbacks.
Sarah Canary is beautiful, and it works its way into you, but I think it works better as an incisive lecture and teachable moment than as a novel.
291 pages
Published 1991
Read from November 23 to November 25
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
As with a number of books I picked up this year, I was inspired to read Sarah Canary by (and in fact I only heard of Sarah Canary in the first place because of) this Buzzfeed list of 99 alleged "classic" science fiction novels. What fantastic element exists within Sarah Canary is so attenuated, however, I for one would hesitate to ascribe any fantastic intent to it at all. Which is kind of neat, in that it ties into one of the book's through-lines: the titular character is perceived by those around her according to what they want her to be. The Chinese laborer at first believes her to be a ghost lover, come to enchant him or to bring him good fortune in return for his consideration and protection. The female suffragist believes her to be a woman wanted for murder, and thinks only she can return Sarah Canary safely and vindicate her supposed crime. The biologist sees her as a feral child. The drunken showman who believes he's cursed with immortality concludes she's a vampire loose in the West, and only he can track her down and kill her. The storylines form circles within and around each other, and underneath, on "the level of what is," Sarah Canary moves through the world and her identity and her purpose are never explained.
On one level, then, Sarah Canary is a work of esthetics, lingering on sharply observed (and quietly lovely) descriptions of rain and moon and reflections; on another, more structural level it is a social, didactic novel, put together almost like a doctoral thesis on social conditions in Washington and San Francisco in 1873. Each chapter introduces a topic related to life in the post-Civil War era -- Chinese labor, the conquest of the Native Americans, Mesmerism and life in asylums, Darwinian biology, freakshows and sensations, women's suffrage, just about everything, in fact, except black life in the aftermath of failed Reconstruction -- and tallies it toward the thrust of the central theme. It is also a novel of comic misadventure, though told with such grunge-era seriousness, such attention to the cold and the rain, that I'd hesitate to say it becomes funny beyond one or two clever bits of dialogue and certain ironic callbacks.
Sarah Canary is beautiful, and it works its way into you, but I think it works better as an incisive lecture and teachable moment than as a novel.
Sunday, November 23, 2014
2014 read #109: Territory by Emma Bull.
Territory by Emma Bull
318 pages
Published 2007
Read from November 21 to November 23
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
The other day I looked through some of my early reviews, something I haven't done in a while. Two things struck me about those bygone days: my seeming miraculous ability to finish a book every forty-eight hours, and my inexhaustible enthusiasm for writing a rambling, wordy review for each and every one of them. This entire year I've struggled to maintain a ten books a month average, and especially in recent months I've been unable to scrounge up more than a paragraph for any given review, even if the book was 600 pages long and presumably full of all sorts of ideas and critical interest to unpack. Which is not to say I was incapable of brevity when I began this blog; the first one-paragraph review dropped as early as that February. The problem is I seem incapable of writing more than one paragraph nowadays, not even when it's an intricate book that should leave me with much to talk about. (The one exception is when I dislike a book enough to rant about it at length, but even The Hanging Stones wrung out a review that would barely be considered average length back in the old days.)
The root of this evil, I think, is how blasé I've become, glutted with wonders. I don't know how many books I read before I began this blogging project -- I always considered myself a reader, but during college I went through a Dark Age, reading at best half a dozen books beyond what I was assigned each year, and being a parent sapped much of my attention afterward, so my pretensions to literacy derive more from my teen years and early adulthood, and I know I read at best two or three dozen new books each year in those days. The math is disheartening but unmistakable: it won't take much more than a year or two at even my ten books a month pace to read more books during this project than in my entire life before Memory by Linda Nagata. Slowly, I'm becoming (in fantasy nerd terms, at least) almost sophisticated. Which means each book I read, even the terrific ones, stands out less and less from the rest of the pile. I have less and less to say because, most of the time, it feels like I've thought or said it all before.
Which brings me to Territory. It is, shall we say, an unchallenging book. The jacket summary claims that in "Bull's unique take on an American legend... absolutely nothing is as it seems," which is a stretcher -- anyone could tell in the very first chapter that the charismatic stranger in the green spectacles would turn out to wield supernatural powers (my money was on Faery, but sorcerer is just as good), and once the story's magic gets explicated, it turns out to be bog-standard elemental stuff, complete with a sarcastic Chinese mentor figure and the hero learning his skills at the exact moment they're needed. And of course there's a spunky Wild West newspaperwoman who writes adventure fiction on the sly and inevitably develops romantic tension with the man in the green spectacles, before getting shoved into an observer's role while the men do their thing. (Surprisingly, no love triangle develops.) It's entertaining enough as fantasy novels go, and it goes down easy, but what else is there to say about it?
318 pages
Published 2007
Read from November 21 to November 23
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
The other day I looked through some of my early reviews, something I haven't done in a while. Two things struck me about those bygone days: my seeming miraculous ability to finish a book every forty-eight hours, and my inexhaustible enthusiasm for writing a rambling, wordy review for each and every one of them. This entire year I've struggled to maintain a ten books a month average, and especially in recent months I've been unable to scrounge up more than a paragraph for any given review, even if the book was 600 pages long and presumably full of all sorts of ideas and critical interest to unpack. Which is not to say I was incapable of brevity when I began this blog; the first one-paragraph review dropped as early as that February. The problem is I seem incapable of writing more than one paragraph nowadays, not even when it's an intricate book that should leave me with much to talk about. (The one exception is when I dislike a book enough to rant about it at length, but even The Hanging Stones wrung out a review that would barely be considered average length back in the old days.)
The root of this evil, I think, is how blasé I've become, glutted with wonders. I don't know how many books I read before I began this blogging project -- I always considered myself a reader, but during college I went through a Dark Age, reading at best half a dozen books beyond what I was assigned each year, and being a parent sapped much of my attention afterward, so my pretensions to literacy derive more from my teen years and early adulthood, and I know I read at best two or three dozen new books each year in those days. The math is disheartening but unmistakable: it won't take much more than a year or two at even my ten books a month pace to read more books during this project than in my entire life before Memory by Linda Nagata. Slowly, I'm becoming (in fantasy nerd terms, at least) almost sophisticated. Which means each book I read, even the terrific ones, stands out less and less from the rest of the pile. I have less and less to say because, most of the time, it feels like I've thought or said it all before.
Which brings me to Territory. It is, shall we say, an unchallenging book. The jacket summary claims that in "Bull's unique take on an American legend... absolutely nothing is as it seems," which is a stretcher -- anyone could tell in the very first chapter that the charismatic stranger in the green spectacles would turn out to wield supernatural powers (my money was on Faery, but sorcerer is just as good), and once the story's magic gets explicated, it turns out to be bog-standard elemental stuff, complete with a sarcastic Chinese mentor figure and the hero learning his skills at the exact moment they're needed. And of course there's a spunky Wild West newspaperwoman who writes adventure fiction on the sly and inevitably develops romantic tension with the man in the green spectacles, before getting shoved into an observer's role while the men do their thing. (Surprisingly, no love triangle develops.) It's entertaining enough as fantasy novels go, and it goes down easy, but what else is there to say about it?
Thursday, November 20, 2014
2014 read #108: The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2010 Edition, edited by Rich Horton.
The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2010 Edition, edited by Rich Horton
533 pages
Published 2010
Read from January 26 to November 20
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
When I first picked this one up back in January, I was still trying to recapture the short story mania I'd so enjoyed in the final third of 2013. I got up to "As Women Fight" before sputtering out and, eventually, returning the book for the ensuing nine months. Since I'd read so much in the book (much more than I remembered reading), I decided I should make an effort to finish it this year; my organized side detests the thought of carrying a partially read book over from year to year.
Just a general warning with short story anthologies: It helps me remember each story later if I describe the plot in spoiler-y detail, so if you care about such things, maybe skip this review. I don't know if anyone actually reads these things, so that's probably not worth saying.
For reference purposes, these stories were originally published in 2009.
"A Story, with Beans" by Steven Gould. Genre fiction (or at least post-1950s SF) has a tendency toward bloat. Unnecessary worldbuilding and descriptive detail pile up, and a straightforward tale becomes a meandering, indulgent multivolume epic if the sales numbers support it. This story takes the opposite route, sketching out a post-collapse American Southwest, with suggestions of strange cults, strange cultures, strange tech, metal-eating "bugs," and unseen history, in just seven pages. I appreciate the light touch with worldbuilding -- I crave more but don't feel cheated. When it comes to the story itself, however, it's a letdown, abbreviated to an anecdote a ranger tells to some college kids over a pot of beans. There's no emotional weight to it at all. As an exercise in brevity, "A Story" is impressive, but it lacks depth. (Discovering, some months later, that Gould expanded this setting into a novel makes it somewhat less impressive, retroactively making it seem more like a teaser trailer for the upcoming book rather than a standalone story with a lot going on behind it. Oh well.)
"Child-Empress of Mars" by Theodora Goss. Another exercise in brevity, a pastiche of "Old Mars" stories parodying genre terminology and complicated worldbuilding in eight crisp, efficient pages. The point is a rather banal observation about the value of tragic hero stories, the sort of metafictional vein SF mines to exhaustion. Nonetheless a sweet and engaging little tale.
"The Island" by Peter Watts. Where "Child-Empress of Mars" used the cliche of fantasy terminology to efficiently (and with tongue in cheek) set the Old Mars scene, "The Island" belongs to a subset of hard sci-fi that uses a sleek and stylized argot to achieve an effect impenetrable to anyone without lifetime subscriptions to Analog and Scientific American. I find this style tiresome and silly. The story itself isn't that bad, though it is crammed with the usual list of hard sci-fi requirements: a high concept meant to be mind-blowing but is merely implausible, tension between humans and an AI on a space journey that lasts millions of years, an attempt at philosophical insight, incest. My interest curve climbed slowly from almost nil at the start to pretty interested toward the end, before asymptoting to nil again at the end.
"The Logic of the World" by Robert Kelly. This one would not have felt out of place in that After the King anthology. It is a consummately '90s fantasy story, smugly didactic, wherein a sensitive, thoughtful knight learns of a dragon and goes to slay it, only to get lectured with certain cliches about wisdom and how you take in a little bit of everything you slay, and then the knight is sorry and he leaves. All we need are some dated pop culture references and "irreverent" humor, and it could be 1992 all over again!
"The Long, Cold Goodbye" by Holly Phillips. Not an all-time classic, but a dazzling exercise in worldbuilding and viewing a high fantasy cliche from a fresh angle. This story mixes together colonialism, steampunk, ice zombies, a city freezing to death in a masquerade of forced jollity pasted over bone-deep despair. The tone never quite gelled with me -- too close to melodrama -- and the prose was solid but unmemorable. Still, this is the first really really good story in this collection.
"The Endangered Camp" by Ann Leckie. There's something ineffably '90s about intelligent dinosaurs managing to invent space flight just before an asteroid plows into the Yucatan. There was a trilogy of novels by Robert J. Sawyer that built on the idea, plus (I'm told) an episode of Star Trek: Voyager. Here it's dated but cute, a winsome but pointless little fantasy that doesn't overstay its welcome.
"Dragon's Teeth" by Alex Irvine. Perfectly adequate swords 'n' sorcery number, satisfying if not especially memorable. (Nine months later, in fact, I have zero idea what this story was about, and little memory of reading it, which makes the one-line review I wrote at the time less than helpful. For posterity, then, I shall specify that it appears to be a pseudo-Roman swords 'n' sorcery number, with a humble no-nonsense soldier or something going to hunt a MacGuffin among fantasy-world Inuit or something. I don't really know, I merely skimmed a few sentences to get a sense of the piece again.)
"As Women Fight" by Sara Genge. This one defeated me back in February (or whenever it was that I shelved this collection). Psyching myself up to once again wade through it took weeks, even if I didn't quite remember why I'd given up in the first place. Conceptually it's an interesting tale -- the two partners in a breeding pair must Fight each year to win the role of female, with the loser consigned to maleness until the next Fight (which is just a variation on The Left Hand of Darkness, but still has some potential juice in it). Yet, frustratingly, "Women" relies on essentialist conceits of what it "means" to be female or male. Five years of losses have left the p.o.v. character "imprinted" with the ways of male "flesh": "Silence comes easy these days," Genge writes, as if laconic affectlessness is an essential trait of manhood rather than a mutable quality specified by culture. A reasonable grounding in history and anthropology is not much to ask, especially if one wishes to spin tales of gender identity in the style of Le Guin, but we live in an era when it's fashionable once more, even among supposedly feminist authors, to ascribe all the sitcom gender norms to biology. But... overlooking all that, with a supreme effort of resignation... I must admit this isn't a bad story. In fact, the story qua story is well-constructed, fitting the concept and storyline together seamlessly, barely wasting a single noun of worldbuilding. And if I strain my (admittedly undeveloped) critical faculties, maybe I can sort of see how Genge might not have been so essentialist all along: in one bit of dialog, after the point where I'd given up all those months ago, a mouthpiece character offers, "We've learned since childhood that women do this or that and we never dare to break free of that mold. We're as pitiful as the men and women... who only know one way of living, except that we don't have the excuse of ignorance." Authorial intent here is a tough nut (for me) to crack. Let's just say that I feel this story is too gender-essentialist for my tastes, but maybe its heart is in the right place, and it really wasn't worth all the fuss I put up about it, so let's move on.
"Sylgarmo's Proclamation" by Lucius Shepard. I don't know what to expect of Shepard. He wrote "The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule," which remains one of my all-time favorite pieces, but everything else I've read from him has been retreading Vietnam War ground, a sure way to bore me. Editor Horton, in his poorly proofread introduction, calls this story an "hommage" to Jack Vance; the publication history confirms it was originally printed in a Dying Earth anthology. The only Dying Earth story I've read before this was "The Overworld," in Modern Classics of Fantasy; like "The Overworld," "Sylgarmo" is purple stuff, full of imaginative imagery but expressed with a pugnacious lack of subtlety, eventually finding its way to a stock evil cousin who affects to have forgotten "that blond poppet" who got fridged all those years ago to give the hero his motivation. Perhaps the effect is meant to be tongue in cheek, or perhaps merely a pastiche of '70s spaceships 'n' sorcery. A junk food kind of story.
"Three Twilight Tales" by Jo Walton. Characters in fables who are aware they're characters in fables have become, for me at least, almost as commonplace as the archetypal storylines they comment upon. So this string of vignettes is nothing new. That said, these interconnected tales are as delicately worked and beautiful as you'd expect from Walton.
"Necroflux Day" by John Meaney. This kind of scene-setting, where people are just like us with their Parent-Teacher nights and birthday dinners at restaurants, except everything is suffused with magic and the nuns are in the Order of Thanatos and chocolate is blue, can easily capsize into a cloying mess. This story takes its time to spool out a workmanlike domestic drama, with a widowed father, a boy figuring out his own powers (and responsibilities), and a young teacher with a past she's fleeing. It's almost like a '90s kiddie flick where the kid sets his dad up with a new mom, except with, you know, the boy's eyes weeping blood-spiders and with lifetimes of pain stored in the bones and nerves of the dead to be unleashed as magical fuel for ships and cities. "It is impossible to know where the power comes from," writes the boy, in the essay he's so proud of, "if you can't imagine how the bones hurt and scream." It is a strange ensemble, but it mostly hangs together.
"The Persistence of Memory; or, This Space for Sale" by Paul Park. I have mixed feelings about this one. It's a clever little piece, all metafictional and such, but the ending is the cheap "unreliable narrator was talking about his life and ex-girlfriend all along" trick we've all seen a hundred times, which gets less satisfying each time.
"This Peaceable Land; or, The Unbearable Vision of Harriet Beecher Stowe" by Robert Charles Wilson. A title like that deserves -- demands -- a story of uncommon excellence. Like "The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees" or "Bears Discover Fire," or "The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew" later in this volume, it's a title that leaps off the contents page and effervesces in my brain, filling me with anticipation and speculation. Further, I have positive memories of the two Wilson novels I read a decade or more ago (Darwinia and The Chronoliths), so it's fair to say I had heightened expectations for this story. It turns out to be heavy material, a look at the horrors and entrepreneur-run concentration camps that could have resulted had America not gone into Civil War. My one objection is a sense that Wilson is inadvertently minimizing the real horrors of the black experience after the Civil War, a scene in American history generally swept out of sight as it is, but on its own this story is excellent and unsettling. Probably the third best in the book.
"On the Human Plan" by Jay Lake. More Dying Earth-esque business, but substituting latter day archetypes of crusty nanotech information brokers for the old brew of decadent wizards and sly heroes. I'm not sure it's an improvement. Neither bad nor good.
"Technicolor" by John Langan. You can kind of guess where this one is going on the first page, but there's a sort of delicious anticipation to watching the pieces of the story form a remorseless chain toward the denouement. "Classic story gets reinterpreted through a lit-crit lens" is babby's first postmodernism, but this is really well done.
"Catalog" by Eugene Mirabelli. A lightweight fancy in what I think of as a Valente-esque vein, in which a blank slate sort of guy finds himself in a reality pieced together from books and magazines, hanging out with a trio of Poe characters who've formed a rock band, before he goes off to Maine in search of a woman from the L. L. Bean catalog. Cute but something of a trifle.
"Crimes and Glory" by Paul McAuley. I can't point to any particular stories off the top of my head (aside from "Nahiku West" by Linda Nagata, from another Year's Best volume I abandoned early this year, and consequently never reviewed), but I have the impression that hard, grimy sci-fi and noirish detective procedurals get combined much too frequently. It is a go-to stylistic shorthand that yields diminishing returns each time I see it. And this is a 45 page novelette originally published in Subterranean, the late and bafflingly overrated magazine that rivaled Analog for the title of least enjoyable pro market. "Crimes and Glory," in other words, is a slog. Characters in this story proclaim their motivations to each other in clumsy exposition straight out of a creative writing elective; tiresome technobabble dribbles along with few surprises and no zest; the set-dressings and descriptions are as familiar and unappealing as Tuesday's leftovers. "You see," the escaping criminal tells the pursuing detective, "you aren't very different from me after all," and the ending is obvious. If I weren't so determined to finish this collection sometime this year, I might have washed my hands of it once again partway through this story.
"Eros, Philia, Agape" by Rachel Swirsky. Emotionally manipulative but mostly effective piece. Any story with a four year old in emotional disarray will hit me hard, of course, but this story is well-written, even if its heroine is much too leisure class for my tastes.
"A Painter, a Sheep, and a Boa Constrictor" by Nir Yaniv (translated from the Hebrew by Lavie Tidhar). A brief but charmingly strange fable straddling fairy tale and high technology, breathing life into the cliches of both.
"Glister" by Dominic Green. A rollickingly old-fashioned roister-doister tale of space miners on a hellish planet rife with gold and an explosive biochemistry based on heavy metals. Not an amazing story, but a fun antidote to the usual 21st century grim and grime.
"The Qualia Engine" by Damien Broderick. This reads like one of those forced, painfully dated stories from the '80s or early '90s, except updated to include fresher cliches and fumbling pop culture references to Survivor and Beauty and the Geek and Second Life, stereotype jocks "porking" cheerleaders while stereotype power-nerds sweat through "I know eight silent ways to kill a man" fantasies, all narrated in a snide voice just two steps down from excruciating. Ten years from now, someone will read this and snark at how quaintly '00s it was. It's a shame, given that imagination-stirring title. The story itself is workmanlike stuff, bravely attempting to Say Things About the Human Condition but mostly just getting lost in its own brimming-with-attitude narration.
"The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew" by Catherynne M. Valente. This, thankfully, lives up to its title. Valente has a tendency to use cardboard standees as props -- here the central figure is a Generic Badass Woman in a More Commonly Male Role, a stock Valente creation. But you don't read Valente for nuanced characterization. You read Valente for lush, baffling, seductive imagery, the turns and depths of dreams you never dared to have, places as insidious as myth, clocks that flow rather than tick along their own necessary geometries. I'll be the first to say I have no idea what's going on here, and that's okay -- I am dazzled and left wordless. Valente in prime form; by a long shot the best story in this collection.
"Wife-Stealing Time" by R. Garcia y Robertson. The only Garcia y Robertson book I've read, Firebird, was like stuffing my face with a pizza from Domino's. For the first little while it was tasty, a novel treat mixing Russian mythology with sexy fun adventures. As I kept gorging, though, I realized it really wasn't that good, and in fact it was gross and threatening to go out the way it came in. I've shied away from anything bearing his name ever since, in much the same way one's stomach might cringe at the thought of repeating a particularly unpleasant junk food. This story seems to confirm Garcia y Robertson's inclination to leer, yuk-yukking it up in a parody of oversexed pulp lotharios and "teenaged" seductresses (though Barsoomian years are twice as long as Earth's, so you're the one with the dirty mind, pal). The result is almost -- almost -- Piers Anthony levels of unfunny, and at least ten pages too long. I cannot believe this got published in Asimov's. I always expected better from that market.
"Images of Anna" by Nancy Kress. Competent but uninspired magical realism piece. Online dating a wizard or something, and photographs that show thoughts and worries, or something.
"Mongoose" by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear. Interdimensional creature feature colored by Alice in Wonderland, playful and enjoyable without treading new ground or digging in deep.
"Living Curiousities" by Margo Lanagan. Dense-packed scene-setting that tosses you in near the middle and demands you keep up, a stylistic accomplishment that ends up being a brief character study, closing abruptly once its mood is made clear. Expanding this out to give it room to breathe may have been an improvement, or maybe the slim statement here benefits from the compressed presentation.
"The Death of Sugar Daddy" by Toiya Kristen Finley. A strange and vertiginous tale of erasure and urban neglect, vivid and marvelous and sad, the second best story in this anthology after "The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew."
"Secret Identity" by Kelly Link. I wound up liking this more than I thought it would. Integrating online gaming into science fiction stories is generally hokey, and often embarrassing, as is the exploration of long distance relationships and online dating (which was the focus of "Images of Anna," as well, so it must have been A Thing in 2009), all of which made for a rocky start. But the narration is so earnest and believable, a voice familiar to anyone who read their share of emotionally inexperienced introverts pouring their hearts into LiveJournal entries way back when (or was one such introvert) -- that disarming and quietly frantic reaction to life, the antithesis to the snarky swagger of, say, the narrator of "The Qualia Engine" (and any number of stories I rejected from my own short-lived magazine). The backdrop of deliberately banal superheroes is more entertaining than the similar device in Jonathan Lethem's "Super Goat Man" five years earlier (reviewed here). The sum total is really good, one of the very few really good stories in this collection. Though I had one reservation: Is it overlong, or is that just me growing impatient to finally finish this book and move on to something else?
"Bespoke" by Genevieve Valentine. I don't like the word "bespoke," partly because it seems to have become an it-word in recent years, partly because it feels jammed together and awkward on my tongue. Of course, that's neither here nor there. This is an airy character study mingling the delicate imagery of current intimate fantasy with the melancholy of current post-collapse speculation, garnished with some old-school (ca. early '60s) time travel goofiness. Interesting but too brief and reserved.
"Events Preceding the Helvetican Renaissance" by John Kessel. A cracking good time, this one. The sort of fun and imaginative far-future space adventure I get to read so seldom, and always enjoy when done well. Not nearly as ambitious as, say, Gene Wolfe's "The Fifth Head of Cerberus" (reviewed here), but that's the general sort of thing Kessel was aiming for, I think. At least it isn't the sort of dreary, grimy pessimism de rigueur in this grimy and pessimistic century.
Whew. There. From January to November, it took me, but finally I can put this book back on the shelf. I think the 2012 edition of Year's Best deceived me. This book simply did not have the same ratio of outstanding stories to filler that made that anthology (the first of Horton's I read) so rewarding. Perhaps Horton had yet to develop the curatorial skills or reprint rights budget he would have in 2012, or (unlikely, but possible) perhaps the short fiction of 2009 just wasn't as happening as it would be in 2011. One of these months I need to look into the other annuals, the Hartwell/Cramer fantasy series and the Strahan SF one, even if it involves much overlap; I desire a different perspective on what might be considered the "best" stories of any given year.
533 pages
Published 2010
Read from January 26 to November 20
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
When I first picked this one up back in January, I was still trying to recapture the short story mania I'd so enjoyed in the final third of 2013. I got up to "As Women Fight" before sputtering out and, eventually, returning the book for the ensuing nine months. Since I'd read so much in the book (much more than I remembered reading), I decided I should make an effort to finish it this year; my organized side detests the thought of carrying a partially read book over from year to year.
Just a general warning with short story anthologies: It helps me remember each story later if I describe the plot in spoiler-y detail, so if you care about such things, maybe skip this review. I don't know if anyone actually reads these things, so that's probably not worth saying.
For reference purposes, these stories were originally published in 2009.
"A Story, with Beans" by Steven Gould. Genre fiction (or at least post-1950s SF) has a tendency toward bloat. Unnecessary worldbuilding and descriptive detail pile up, and a straightforward tale becomes a meandering, indulgent multivolume epic if the sales numbers support it. This story takes the opposite route, sketching out a post-collapse American Southwest, with suggestions of strange cults, strange cultures, strange tech, metal-eating "bugs," and unseen history, in just seven pages. I appreciate the light touch with worldbuilding -- I crave more but don't feel cheated. When it comes to the story itself, however, it's a letdown, abbreviated to an anecdote a ranger tells to some college kids over a pot of beans. There's no emotional weight to it at all. As an exercise in brevity, "A Story" is impressive, but it lacks depth. (Discovering, some months later, that Gould expanded this setting into a novel makes it somewhat less impressive, retroactively making it seem more like a teaser trailer for the upcoming book rather than a standalone story with a lot going on behind it. Oh well.)
"Child-Empress of Mars" by Theodora Goss. Another exercise in brevity, a pastiche of "Old Mars" stories parodying genre terminology and complicated worldbuilding in eight crisp, efficient pages. The point is a rather banal observation about the value of tragic hero stories, the sort of metafictional vein SF mines to exhaustion. Nonetheless a sweet and engaging little tale.
"The Island" by Peter Watts. Where "Child-Empress of Mars" used the cliche of fantasy terminology to efficiently (and with tongue in cheek) set the Old Mars scene, "The Island" belongs to a subset of hard sci-fi that uses a sleek and stylized argot to achieve an effect impenetrable to anyone without lifetime subscriptions to Analog and Scientific American. I find this style tiresome and silly. The story itself isn't that bad, though it is crammed with the usual list of hard sci-fi requirements: a high concept meant to be mind-blowing but is merely implausible, tension between humans and an AI on a space journey that lasts millions of years, an attempt at philosophical insight, incest. My interest curve climbed slowly from almost nil at the start to pretty interested toward the end, before asymptoting to nil again at the end.
"The Logic of the World" by Robert Kelly. This one would not have felt out of place in that After the King anthology. It is a consummately '90s fantasy story, smugly didactic, wherein a sensitive, thoughtful knight learns of a dragon and goes to slay it, only to get lectured with certain cliches about wisdom and how you take in a little bit of everything you slay, and then the knight is sorry and he leaves. All we need are some dated pop culture references and "irreverent" humor, and it could be 1992 all over again!
"The Long, Cold Goodbye" by Holly Phillips. Not an all-time classic, but a dazzling exercise in worldbuilding and viewing a high fantasy cliche from a fresh angle. This story mixes together colonialism, steampunk, ice zombies, a city freezing to death in a masquerade of forced jollity pasted over bone-deep despair. The tone never quite gelled with me -- too close to melodrama -- and the prose was solid but unmemorable. Still, this is the first really really good story in this collection.
"The Endangered Camp" by Ann Leckie. There's something ineffably '90s about intelligent dinosaurs managing to invent space flight just before an asteroid plows into the Yucatan. There was a trilogy of novels by Robert J. Sawyer that built on the idea, plus (I'm told) an episode of Star Trek: Voyager. Here it's dated but cute, a winsome but pointless little fantasy that doesn't overstay its welcome.
"Dragon's Teeth" by Alex Irvine. Perfectly adequate swords 'n' sorcery number, satisfying if not especially memorable. (Nine months later, in fact, I have zero idea what this story was about, and little memory of reading it, which makes the one-line review I wrote at the time less than helpful. For posterity, then, I shall specify that it appears to be a pseudo-Roman swords 'n' sorcery number, with a humble no-nonsense soldier or something going to hunt a MacGuffin among fantasy-world Inuit or something. I don't really know, I merely skimmed a few sentences to get a sense of the piece again.)
"As Women Fight" by Sara Genge. This one defeated me back in February (or whenever it was that I shelved this collection). Psyching myself up to once again wade through it took weeks, even if I didn't quite remember why I'd given up in the first place. Conceptually it's an interesting tale -- the two partners in a breeding pair must Fight each year to win the role of female, with the loser consigned to maleness until the next Fight (which is just a variation on The Left Hand of Darkness, but still has some potential juice in it). Yet, frustratingly, "Women" relies on essentialist conceits of what it "means" to be female or male. Five years of losses have left the p.o.v. character "imprinted" with the ways of male "flesh": "Silence comes easy these days," Genge writes, as if laconic affectlessness is an essential trait of manhood rather than a mutable quality specified by culture. A reasonable grounding in history and anthropology is not much to ask, especially if one wishes to spin tales of gender identity in the style of Le Guin, but we live in an era when it's fashionable once more, even among supposedly feminist authors, to ascribe all the sitcom gender norms to biology. But... overlooking all that, with a supreme effort of resignation... I must admit this isn't a bad story. In fact, the story qua story is well-constructed, fitting the concept and storyline together seamlessly, barely wasting a single noun of worldbuilding. And if I strain my (admittedly undeveloped) critical faculties, maybe I can sort of see how Genge might not have been so essentialist all along: in one bit of dialog, after the point where I'd given up all those months ago, a mouthpiece character offers, "We've learned since childhood that women do this or that and we never dare to break free of that mold. We're as pitiful as the men and women... who only know one way of living, except that we don't have the excuse of ignorance." Authorial intent here is a tough nut (for me) to crack. Let's just say that I feel this story is too gender-essentialist for my tastes, but maybe its heart is in the right place, and it really wasn't worth all the fuss I put up about it, so let's move on.
"Sylgarmo's Proclamation" by Lucius Shepard. I don't know what to expect of Shepard. He wrote "The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule," which remains one of my all-time favorite pieces, but everything else I've read from him has been retreading Vietnam War ground, a sure way to bore me. Editor Horton, in his poorly proofread introduction, calls this story an "hommage" to Jack Vance; the publication history confirms it was originally printed in a Dying Earth anthology. The only Dying Earth story I've read before this was "The Overworld," in Modern Classics of Fantasy; like "The Overworld," "Sylgarmo" is purple stuff, full of imaginative imagery but expressed with a pugnacious lack of subtlety, eventually finding its way to a stock evil cousin who affects to have forgotten "that blond poppet" who got fridged all those years ago to give the hero his motivation. Perhaps the effect is meant to be tongue in cheek, or perhaps merely a pastiche of '70s spaceships 'n' sorcery. A junk food kind of story.
"Three Twilight Tales" by Jo Walton. Characters in fables who are aware they're characters in fables have become, for me at least, almost as commonplace as the archetypal storylines they comment upon. So this string of vignettes is nothing new. That said, these interconnected tales are as delicately worked and beautiful as you'd expect from Walton.
"Necroflux Day" by John Meaney. This kind of scene-setting, where people are just like us with their Parent-Teacher nights and birthday dinners at restaurants, except everything is suffused with magic and the nuns are in the Order of Thanatos and chocolate is blue, can easily capsize into a cloying mess. This story takes its time to spool out a workmanlike domestic drama, with a widowed father, a boy figuring out his own powers (and responsibilities), and a young teacher with a past she's fleeing. It's almost like a '90s kiddie flick where the kid sets his dad up with a new mom, except with, you know, the boy's eyes weeping blood-spiders and with lifetimes of pain stored in the bones and nerves of the dead to be unleashed as magical fuel for ships and cities. "It is impossible to know where the power comes from," writes the boy, in the essay he's so proud of, "if you can't imagine how the bones hurt and scream." It is a strange ensemble, but it mostly hangs together.
"The Persistence of Memory; or, This Space for Sale" by Paul Park. I have mixed feelings about this one. It's a clever little piece, all metafictional and such, but the ending is the cheap "unreliable narrator was talking about his life and ex-girlfriend all along" trick we've all seen a hundred times, which gets less satisfying each time.
"This Peaceable Land; or, The Unbearable Vision of Harriet Beecher Stowe" by Robert Charles Wilson. A title like that deserves -- demands -- a story of uncommon excellence. Like "The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees" or "Bears Discover Fire," or "The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew" later in this volume, it's a title that leaps off the contents page and effervesces in my brain, filling me with anticipation and speculation. Further, I have positive memories of the two Wilson novels I read a decade or more ago (Darwinia and The Chronoliths), so it's fair to say I had heightened expectations for this story. It turns out to be heavy material, a look at the horrors and entrepreneur-run concentration camps that could have resulted had America not gone into Civil War. My one objection is a sense that Wilson is inadvertently minimizing the real horrors of the black experience after the Civil War, a scene in American history generally swept out of sight as it is, but on its own this story is excellent and unsettling. Probably the third best in the book.
"On the Human Plan" by Jay Lake. More Dying Earth-esque business, but substituting latter day archetypes of crusty nanotech information brokers for the old brew of decadent wizards and sly heroes. I'm not sure it's an improvement. Neither bad nor good.
"Technicolor" by John Langan. You can kind of guess where this one is going on the first page, but there's a sort of delicious anticipation to watching the pieces of the story form a remorseless chain toward the denouement. "Classic story gets reinterpreted through a lit-crit lens" is babby's first postmodernism, but this is really well done.
"Catalog" by Eugene Mirabelli. A lightweight fancy in what I think of as a Valente-esque vein, in which a blank slate sort of guy finds himself in a reality pieced together from books and magazines, hanging out with a trio of Poe characters who've formed a rock band, before he goes off to Maine in search of a woman from the L. L. Bean catalog. Cute but something of a trifle.
"Crimes and Glory" by Paul McAuley. I can't point to any particular stories off the top of my head (aside from "Nahiku West" by Linda Nagata, from another Year's Best volume I abandoned early this year, and consequently never reviewed), but I have the impression that hard, grimy sci-fi and noirish detective procedurals get combined much too frequently. It is a go-to stylistic shorthand that yields diminishing returns each time I see it. And this is a 45 page novelette originally published in Subterranean, the late and bafflingly overrated magazine that rivaled Analog for the title of least enjoyable pro market. "Crimes and Glory," in other words, is a slog. Characters in this story proclaim their motivations to each other in clumsy exposition straight out of a creative writing elective; tiresome technobabble dribbles along with few surprises and no zest; the set-dressings and descriptions are as familiar and unappealing as Tuesday's leftovers. "You see," the escaping criminal tells the pursuing detective, "you aren't very different from me after all," and the ending is obvious. If I weren't so determined to finish this collection sometime this year, I might have washed my hands of it once again partway through this story.
"Eros, Philia, Agape" by Rachel Swirsky. Emotionally manipulative but mostly effective piece. Any story with a four year old in emotional disarray will hit me hard, of course, but this story is well-written, even if its heroine is much too leisure class for my tastes.
"A Painter, a Sheep, and a Boa Constrictor" by Nir Yaniv (translated from the Hebrew by Lavie Tidhar). A brief but charmingly strange fable straddling fairy tale and high technology, breathing life into the cliches of both.
"Glister" by Dominic Green. A rollickingly old-fashioned roister-doister tale of space miners on a hellish planet rife with gold and an explosive biochemistry based on heavy metals. Not an amazing story, but a fun antidote to the usual 21st century grim and grime.
"The Qualia Engine" by Damien Broderick. This reads like one of those forced, painfully dated stories from the '80s or early '90s, except updated to include fresher cliches and fumbling pop culture references to Survivor and Beauty and the Geek and Second Life, stereotype jocks "porking" cheerleaders while stereotype power-nerds sweat through "I know eight silent ways to kill a man" fantasies, all narrated in a snide voice just two steps down from excruciating. Ten years from now, someone will read this and snark at how quaintly '00s it was. It's a shame, given that imagination-stirring title. The story itself is workmanlike stuff, bravely attempting to Say Things About the Human Condition but mostly just getting lost in its own brimming-with-attitude narration.
"The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew" by Catherynne M. Valente. This, thankfully, lives up to its title. Valente has a tendency to use cardboard standees as props -- here the central figure is a Generic Badass Woman in a More Commonly Male Role, a stock Valente creation. But you don't read Valente for nuanced characterization. You read Valente for lush, baffling, seductive imagery, the turns and depths of dreams you never dared to have, places as insidious as myth, clocks that flow rather than tick along their own necessary geometries. I'll be the first to say I have no idea what's going on here, and that's okay -- I am dazzled and left wordless. Valente in prime form; by a long shot the best story in this collection.
"Wife-Stealing Time" by R. Garcia y Robertson. The only Garcia y Robertson book I've read, Firebird, was like stuffing my face with a pizza from Domino's. For the first little while it was tasty, a novel treat mixing Russian mythology with sexy fun adventures. As I kept gorging, though, I realized it really wasn't that good, and in fact it was gross and threatening to go out the way it came in. I've shied away from anything bearing his name ever since, in much the same way one's stomach might cringe at the thought of repeating a particularly unpleasant junk food. This story seems to confirm Garcia y Robertson's inclination to leer, yuk-yukking it up in a parody of oversexed pulp lotharios and "teenaged" seductresses (though Barsoomian years are twice as long as Earth's, so you're the one with the dirty mind, pal). The result is almost -- almost -- Piers Anthony levels of unfunny, and at least ten pages too long. I cannot believe this got published in Asimov's. I always expected better from that market.
"Images of Anna" by Nancy Kress. Competent but uninspired magical realism piece. Online dating a wizard or something, and photographs that show thoughts and worries, or something.
"Mongoose" by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear. Interdimensional creature feature colored by Alice in Wonderland, playful and enjoyable without treading new ground or digging in deep.
"Living Curiousities" by Margo Lanagan. Dense-packed scene-setting that tosses you in near the middle and demands you keep up, a stylistic accomplishment that ends up being a brief character study, closing abruptly once its mood is made clear. Expanding this out to give it room to breathe may have been an improvement, or maybe the slim statement here benefits from the compressed presentation.
"The Death of Sugar Daddy" by Toiya Kristen Finley. A strange and vertiginous tale of erasure and urban neglect, vivid and marvelous and sad, the second best story in this anthology after "The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew."
"Secret Identity" by Kelly Link. I wound up liking this more than I thought it would. Integrating online gaming into science fiction stories is generally hokey, and often embarrassing, as is the exploration of long distance relationships and online dating (which was the focus of "Images of Anna," as well, so it must have been A Thing in 2009), all of which made for a rocky start. But the narration is so earnest and believable, a voice familiar to anyone who read their share of emotionally inexperienced introverts pouring their hearts into LiveJournal entries way back when (or was one such introvert) -- that disarming and quietly frantic reaction to life, the antithesis to the snarky swagger of, say, the narrator of "The Qualia Engine" (and any number of stories I rejected from my own short-lived magazine). The backdrop of deliberately banal superheroes is more entertaining than the similar device in Jonathan Lethem's "Super Goat Man" five years earlier (reviewed here). The sum total is really good, one of the very few really good stories in this collection. Though I had one reservation: Is it overlong, or is that just me growing impatient to finally finish this book and move on to something else?
"Bespoke" by Genevieve Valentine. I don't like the word "bespoke," partly because it seems to have become an it-word in recent years, partly because it feels jammed together and awkward on my tongue. Of course, that's neither here nor there. This is an airy character study mingling the delicate imagery of current intimate fantasy with the melancholy of current post-collapse speculation, garnished with some old-school (ca. early '60s) time travel goofiness. Interesting but too brief and reserved.
"Events Preceding the Helvetican Renaissance" by John Kessel. A cracking good time, this one. The sort of fun and imaginative far-future space adventure I get to read so seldom, and always enjoy when done well. Not nearly as ambitious as, say, Gene Wolfe's "The Fifth Head of Cerberus" (reviewed here), but that's the general sort of thing Kessel was aiming for, I think. At least it isn't the sort of dreary, grimy pessimism de rigueur in this grimy and pessimistic century.
Whew. There. From January to November, it took me, but finally I can put this book back on the shelf. I think the 2012 edition of Year's Best deceived me. This book simply did not have the same ratio of outstanding stories to filler that made that anthology (the first of Horton's I read) so rewarding. Perhaps Horton had yet to develop the curatorial skills or reprint rights budget he would have in 2012, or (unlikely, but possible) perhaps the short fiction of 2009 just wasn't as happening as it would be in 2011. One of these months I need to look into the other annuals, the Hartwell/Cramer fantasy series and the Strahan SF one, even if it involves much overlap; I desire a different perspective on what might be considered the "best" stories of any given year.
Wednesday, November 19, 2014
2014 read #107: To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis.
To Say Nothing of the Dog: or, How We Found the Bishop's Bird Stump at Last by Connie Willis
434 pages
Published 1998
Read from November 16 to November 19
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
Time travel and the comedy of manners are made for each other. I never realized it until this book. Willis avoids the tonal problems that made Doomsday Book so uneven, skipping the melodrama and Meaningful Sentiments and emphasizing the wry humor of misunderstandings and harried heroes questing across time and space to locate a hideous Victorian objet d'art. Complication piles upon humorous complication, interweaving Agatha Christie-esque detective work with Victorian courtship, reminding me once more of Peter Ackroyd's thesis on the English taste for surface complexity and elaboration. Thoroughly satisfying.
434 pages
Published 1998
Read from November 16 to November 19
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
Time travel and the comedy of manners are made for each other. I never realized it until this book. Willis avoids the tonal problems that made Doomsday Book so uneven, skipping the melodrama and Meaningful Sentiments and emphasizing the wry humor of misunderstandings and harried heroes questing across time and space to locate a hideous Victorian objet d'art. Complication piles upon humorous complication, interweaving Agatha Christie-esque detective work with Victorian courtship, reminding me once more of Peter Ackroyd's thesis on the English taste for surface complexity and elaboration. Thoroughly satisfying.
Sunday, November 16, 2014
2014 read #106: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
Translated and adapted by Jay Rubin with the participation of the author
611 pages
Published in three volumes in 1994 and 1995; English translation published 1997
Read from November 10 to November 16
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
A tremendous collage of subject and scene, part metaphysical mystery, part locked-room horror, part war story, part gulag story, part metatextual satire on the needs of the novel and its main character dragging ancillary characters along in their wake. Recurring motifs on an old life cut short and a new life taking its place; repeated phrasing and overlapping incidents highlighting artifice as a stylistic statement. Murakami boldly grabs fistfuls of threads and twists them in interesting ways, but leaves some dangling short and doesn't tie everything together into a tidy knot at the end, I felt. Not that that's necessary or even desirable in such a convoluted and postmodern storyline, but the ending lacked the fizz and pop of the body of the book. Murakami's one of those authors I constantly hear name-checked, atop all sorts of favorite-authors lists, and this book is certainly ambitious, strange, and absorbing. But the narrator's quest, to save a woman who left him despite her definite assertions of finality and independence, was a bit hokey and dated, much like a pivotal hacking scene in which, adorably, the password is three letters long. I'm intrigued to read more of his books in the future, even if I'm in no hurry to read another 600 page literary novel.
Translated and adapted by Jay Rubin with the participation of the author
611 pages
Published in three volumes in 1994 and 1995; English translation published 1997
Read from November 10 to November 16
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
A tremendous collage of subject and scene, part metaphysical mystery, part locked-room horror, part war story, part gulag story, part metatextual satire on the needs of the novel and its main character dragging ancillary characters along in their wake. Recurring motifs on an old life cut short and a new life taking its place; repeated phrasing and overlapping incidents highlighting artifice as a stylistic statement. Murakami boldly grabs fistfuls of threads and twists them in interesting ways, but leaves some dangling short and doesn't tie everything together into a tidy knot at the end, I felt. Not that that's necessary or even desirable in such a convoluted and postmodern storyline, but the ending lacked the fizz and pop of the body of the book. Murakami's one of those authors I constantly hear name-checked, atop all sorts of favorite-authors lists, and this book is certainly ambitious, strange, and absorbing. But the narrator's quest, to save a woman who left him despite her definite assertions of finality and independence, was a bit hokey and dated, much like a pivotal hacking scene in which, adorably, the password is three letters long. I'm intrigued to read more of his books in the future, even if I'm in no hurry to read another 600 page literary novel.
Saturday, November 8, 2014
2014 read #105: Rebellion by Peter Ackroyd.
Rebellion: The History of England from James I to the Glorious Revolution by Peter Ackroyd
470 pages
Published 2014
Read from November 3 to November 8
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
Structurally, this is the best of Ackroyd's histories I've read to date. He manages to tell a cohesive and directed story of the central political events of the day, as he does in Tudors, but without abandoning the colorful anecdotes and glimpses into the lives of everyday people that made his older histories so engaging. One could hope for more asides on the important thoughts and authors of the day, but all in all Ackroyd finds a successful equilibrium here between rich detail and easy readability. In terms of interest factor, this book explores a period of English history rarely treated, at least in histories I find stateside. In these days when hardline religious movements conflate "freedom" with forcing their own specific ideology upon the body politic, the escalation and prosecution of the Civil War and the career of the Protectorate make for enlightening reading.
Three volumes into Ackroyd's expansive treatment of English history, the strains of meeting deadlines are just starting to show, mainly in recycled phrasings: I lost count of how many times a politician or a religious movement "raised the temperature" of a public debate or political situation; it was colorful the first time Ackroyd employed the phrase, but rapidly grew distracting. That tendency aside, Ackroyd's dry and concise style grows if anything more charming.
470 pages
Published 2014
Read from November 3 to November 8
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
Structurally, this is the best of Ackroyd's histories I've read to date. He manages to tell a cohesive and directed story of the central political events of the day, as he does in Tudors, but without abandoning the colorful anecdotes and glimpses into the lives of everyday people that made his older histories so engaging. One could hope for more asides on the important thoughts and authors of the day, but all in all Ackroyd finds a successful equilibrium here between rich detail and easy readability. In terms of interest factor, this book explores a period of English history rarely treated, at least in histories I find stateside. In these days when hardline religious movements conflate "freedom" with forcing their own specific ideology upon the body politic, the escalation and prosecution of the Civil War and the career of the Protectorate make for enlightening reading.
Three volumes into Ackroyd's expansive treatment of English history, the strains of meeting deadlines are just starting to show, mainly in recycled phrasings: I lost count of how many times a politician or a religious movement "raised the temperature" of a public debate or political situation; it was colorful the first time Ackroyd employed the phrase, but rapidly grew distracting. That tendency aside, Ackroyd's dry and concise style grows if anything more charming.
Tuesday, November 4, 2014
2014 read #104: The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume Two, edited by Gordon Van Gelder.
The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume Two, edited by Gordon Van Gelder
419 pages
Published 2014
Read from November 1 to November 4
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
"The Third Level" by Jack Finney (1950). A slight, cute time travel fantasy. Something I keep noticing when I read Golden and Silver Age SF is how frequently these old stories prefigure later plots, settings, even subgenres. In this sense, little has changed in genre plotting except bulk and elaboration. In the Edenic olden days, when every plot was still fresh, when original ideas could be plucked unbruised from the tree, it was enough to write five or so pages setting up a conceptual situation and delivering the punchline. Carry this story's situation into the 1980s, and you could have a novel-length treatment by Connie Willis. Carry it forward into the '90s or '00s, and the single line "Sometimes I think Grand Central is growing like a tree, pushing out new corridors and staircases like roots" could be transmogrified into a series of urban fantasy books. Which is why a story like this can leave someone of my generation not fully sated. I've been conditioned to expect, not necessarily better, but more.
"The Cosmic Expense Account" by C. M. Kornbluth (1956). I haven't read much science fiction from the 1950s -- just enough to know that some of it could be surprisingly good (even if much of the rest was undistinguished pulp). Nevertheless, I was struck by how unpredictable, how fresh, how recent this story seems. Even the cartoon satire of hippy-dippy self-help liberalism wouldn't be wholly out of place in a modern publication (though there's a somewhat stronger flavor of misogyny in the satire than one usually finds now, bad as our own cultural misogyny tends to be). Structurally, this story is superb, beginning strange and spacing out the explication of the situation to keep the reader's interest, ending with a hilarious (and, to me, not totally expected) one-two punch of revelations (and precocious postmodern genre-awareness).
"The Country of the Kind" by Damon Knight (1956). Read and reviewed in Modern Classics of Science Fiction. There I puzzled over the authorial intent of the "uncomfortable parable," with little success.
"The Anything Box" by Zenna Henderson (1956). Another satisfying and seemingly timeless tale, a quiet mood piece that could have been penned by Le Guin in the '80s or one of the up-and-comers in the '00s. It tiptoes up to the brink of corniness, but what the hell -- I had a couple tears in my eyes at the end. I'm not ashamed.
"The Prize of Peril" by Robert Sheckley (1958). The tired old manhunt gameshow storyline -- in the 1950s? I should stop being so surprised by how far back genre staples go, but it's startling to find that the ancestry of The Hunger Games and The Running Man dates at least as far back as I Love Lucy and Howdy Doody. Startling, and impressive. It's sufficiently thrilling and bleakly funny, and if the points "Prize" preaches against the audience (and whom it's truly rooting for) have become stale truisms, that's the fault of its imitators. A solid entry.
"'—All You Zombies—'" by Robert A. Heinlein (1959). Given the limited set of variations possible in the "time travel paradoxes" theme, it isn't surprising that peak paradox (so to speak) was reached so early. This is a well-constructed story, looser and freer than the more formal time-paradox stories of the early '50s, concealing its working parts beneath typically Heinleinian pulp sexuality. It's that overlay of Heinleinisms that sours me on this story. I used to love the guy's novels, but I got burnt out sometime around To Sail Beyond the Sunset; in Heinlein's hands, a story about a man who is his own father and mother is less apt to stir marvel at the central paradox, and more apt to raise questions about whether Heinlein just wanted to have sex with himself. Interpreting incident and character at face value as the desires of the author -- this is the most naive (puerile, even) level of textual criticism. With Heinlein, however, there's always the chance that it could be accurate.
"A Kind of Artistry" by Brian W. Aldiss (1962). An overbearing mother-wife and a "sinister matriarchy" are the only off-notes in an otherwise excellent piece of far-future rococo, a style that arose early and has never quite gone out of fashion, for obvious reasons. It doesn't reach the heights of what-the-fuck transcendence found in Aldiss' later "The Worm That Flies," but to repeat what I said in that review, "Artistry" feels "more fantastic and exotic than even the most out-there fantasy novel ever dares to be."
"Green Magic" by Jack Vance (1963). Gently wry humor breathes life into a mechanics of magic piece, prefiguring the likes of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. Brief but satisfying.
"Narrow Valley" by R. A. Lafferty (1966). Read and reviewed in Modern Classics of Science Fiction, where I acerbically remarked "This one's just silly. Worth a couple chuckles, but not my kind of thing." I keep seeing it picked up in various anthologies, so I guess I'm stuck with the minority view.
"Sundance" by Robert Silverberg (1969). An interesting stylistic piece that didn't entirely click with me. At a fundamental level, I appreciated the shifting narrative perspectives as a crude but effective means of conveying the "search for realities," but I wasn't blown away by the story as a whole.
"The Attack of the Giant Baby" by Kit Reed (1976). This one's just silly, too, but in a charming and legitimately funny way.
"The Hundredth Dove" by Jane Yolen (1977). Rarely do "new fairy tales" rouse the sense of magic and elegance of the best of the old, but this is one of those few. Exquisite.
"Jeffty Is Five" by Harlan Ellison® (1977). My cynicism toward sappy nostalgia and "good ol' days" mythology wasn't armor enough. Tears flowed freely at the end of this one, it must be said. I rag on Harlan Ellison® because of how puffed up and self-important he can be, but damned if the old cock doesn't have flashes of brilliance that (almost) justify his attitude.
"Salvador" by Lucius Shepard (1984). Read and reviewed in Modern Classics of Science Fiction. There I mused at length on "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," and said "This story is on the wrong end of that sophistication curve when it comes to warfare and its horrors."
"The Aliens Who Knew, I Mean, Everything" by George Alec Effinger (1984). A delightful and funny tale of aliens as annoying know-it-all neighbors. A necessary antidote to the post-"Jeffty" blues.
"Rat" by James Patrick Kelly (1986). Proto-crustpunk, serviceable but not my bag. I am reminded of Victorian and Edwardian "sensation" stories.
"The Friendship Light" by Gene Wolfe (1989). An interestingly ambiguous tale of murder and pacts with supernatural evil. It took some time for the hints in the coda (basically, the narrator's sister was institutionalized for murdering one or more young children, presumably in connection with occult activities, if my reading is anywhere in the ballpark) to click in my brain, and that only after rereading a few passages. Solid; enjoyable but not mindblowing.
"The Bone Woman" by Charles de Lint (1993). Urban fantasy revolving around a mentally ill homeless woman: yep, we've reached the early '90s -- the "Even Flow" years, as I like to call them. (Okay, so the fixation on Magical Homeless began in earnest in the mid-'80s, but really avalanched between '90 and '93, at least in my limited reading.) This particular story is quaint and quietly earnest, alighting on what I've already come to think of as de Lint's usual concerns of how urban life deadens our spirits and makes us all "desert" creatures, our lives more underground than on the surface. It's a slight story that goes down easy.
"The Lincoln Train" by Maureen F. McHugh (1995). Vivid and cleverly conceived alternate history, with "recalcitrant" slave owners getting rounded up and shipped west after Lincoln survives an assassination attempt, and Quaker abolitionists running an underground railroad to rescue some few and return them to families down South. Despite the brutal press of a train platform stampede, and its aftermath, the emotional effect of the story is more numbing than crushing, but it's an excellent installment nonetheless.
"Maneki Neko" by Bruce Sterling (1998). "Word of Tsuyoshi's skills had gotten out on the network." "Friends he didn't even know were working every day to help him." "'Well, your network gift economy is undermining the lawful, government approved, regulated economy!'" Early visions of the webbed future were adorably gawky and naive, and did not age well (kind of like contemporary electronic music). The democratic, noncommercial network and gift-exchange economy depicted here are at aphelion from the current reality of paysites and malicious doxxing and big business purchasing the end of net neutrality from corporatist government. I suppose some tightly-knit user clusters at, I don't know, Pinterest or a private P2P or something might do each other small favors and send timely gifts, but this "friendly strangers on the network" business is as quaint a future vision as anything printed in the 1950s. The story itself is a pleasant comedy of errors, with a happily networked young family man getting collared by a harassed federal agent.
"Winemaster" by Robert Reed (1999). For the most part I'm bored of transhumanist stories, but Robert Reed is usually a treat. Not as ornately bizarre as more recent transhumanist works ("Widows in the World" by Gavin J. Grant comes to mind, reviewed here), "Winemaster" nonetheless manages to mix in a dystopian Christian America and a Stapledonian "huge and cold, and slow" interstellar race, wishing to upgrade to organic forms and snap up terrestrial real estate once everybody earthside goes micromachine. It's a satisfactory tale; if it isn't as superb as what I've come to expect from Reed, at least it's more involving than other transhumanist stories I could name.
"Suicide Coast" by M. John Harrison (1999). This is a dull one, a dreary ennui of modern life piece stringing together cliches of adventure sports and VR gaming into an unconvincing, unappealing mash (though it's a well-written mash). Stories like this helped push me away from sci-fi, which these days is rote regurgitation of nanotech or transhumanism when it isn't despondent, too-plausible visions of future scarcity and rising sea levels, and toward fantasy, which at least preserves some remnant of vitality.
"Have Not Have" by Geoff Ryman (2001). An absorbing and unexpectedly moving window into a near-future culture on the verge of vanishing into an allegory of globalization. Maybe I'm just a sucker for stories set in a vaguely Central Asian milieu.
"The People of Sand and Slag" by Paolo Bacigalupi (2004). In a grimdark nanotech future, a world of mountain-devouring machines, regenerating limbs, flammable oceans, and acidic tailing pits across the surface of the globe, a gang of modified soldiers finds a living, fully biological dog eking out its existence in the toxic wastes of Montana. It turns out that pairing a standard bleak military-nanotech setting with the world's last "the dog dies at the end" story produces a solid entry. Not an all-time classic, but pretty good.
"Echo" by Elizabeth Hand (2005). A prime example of 21st century melancholia, exquisite and haunting, a dislocating drift across years as the world warms, towers collapse, and civilization, unseen, goes silent and satellites wink out one by one.
"The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates" by Stephen King (2008). A decade or so into this century, the hot new idea seemed to be stories that made death mundane, bureaucratic, a place of waiting rooms and broken escalators and waiting, lots of waiting. This story taps into that vibe, turning out a weeper that doesn't overstay its welcome.
"The Paper Menagerie" by Ken Liu (2011). I forgot how I found out about Ken Liu. I certainly wasn't encountering his fiction in the magazines -- I can't afford the subscription rates, and my library only has copies of Analog, my least favorite of all the pro rags still in print. Maybe I came across his name on Twitter while setting up my short-lived online magazine a few years ago. However it happened, I remember going to Liu's website and despairing at how prolific and consistently excellent his stories were, this wunderkind just barely older than me bursting upon the scene with exquisite, perfectly crafted delicacies and marvels. This story is, naturally, one such delicacy, folding together two generations of sorrow and identity and displacement, loss and love and the quiet magic between parent and child. It deserves every award it won.
Of all the stories in this collection, only "The Paper Menagerie," "Jeffty Is Five," and perhaps (at a stretch) "Echo" can match the excellence of "All Summer in a Day," "Flowers for Algernon," "Solitude," "The Women Men Don't See," and the other all-time classics reprinted in the first Very Best anthology. And unlike the first volume, Volume Two includes a few stories I just don't care for, such as "Suicide Coast," "Narrow Valley," and "Rat." But the general quality of the other stories remains high, so I won't knock the grade down too harshly.
419 pages
Published 2014
Read from November 1 to November 4
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
"The Third Level" by Jack Finney (1950). A slight, cute time travel fantasy. Something I keep noticing when I read Golden and Silver Age SF is how frequently these old stories prefigure later plots, settings, even subgenres. In this sense, little has changed in genre plotting except bulk and elaboration. In the Edenic olden days, when every plot was still fresh, when original ideas could be plucked unbruised from the tree, it was enough to write five or so pages setting up a conceptual situation and delivering the punchline. Carry this story's situation into the 1980s, and you could have a novel-length treatment by Connie Willis. Carry it forward into the '90s or '00s, and the single line "Sometimes I think Grand Central is growing like a tree, pushing out new corridors and staircases like roots" could be transmogrified into a series of urban fantasy books. Which is why a story like this can leave someone of my generation not fully sated. I've been conditioned to expect, not necessarily better, but more.
"The Cosmic Expense Account" by C. M. Kornbluth (1956). I haven't read much science fiction from the 1950s -- just enough to know that some of it could be surprisingly good (even if much of the rest was undistinguished pulp). Nevertheless, I was struck by how unpredictable, how fresh, how recent this story seems. Even the cartoon satire of hippy-dippy self-help liberalism wouldn't be wholly out of place in a modern publication (though there's a somewhat stronger flavor of misogyny in the satire than one usually finds now, bad as our own cultural misogyny tends to be). Structurally, this story is superb, beginning strange and spacing out the explication of the situation to keep the reader's interest, ending with a hilarious (and, to me, not totally expected) one-two punch of revelations (and precocious postmodern genre-awareness).
"The Country of the Kind" by Damon Knight (1956). Read and reviewed in Modern Classics of Science Fiction. There I puzzled over the authorial intent of the "uncomfortable parable," with little success.
"The Anything Box" by Zenna Henderson (1956). Another satisfying and seemingly timeless tale, a quiet mood piece that could have been penned by Le Guin in the '80s or one of the up-and-comers in the '00s. It tiptoes up to the brink of corniness, but what the hell -- I had a couple tears in my eyes at the end. I'm not ashamed.
"The Prize of Peril" by Robert Sheckley (1958). The tired old manhunt gameshow storyline -- in the 1950s? I should stop being so surprised by how far back genre staples go, but it's startling to find that the ancestry of The Hunger Games and The Running Man dates at least as far back as I Love Lucy and Howdy Doody. Startling, and impressive. It's sufficiently thrilling and bleakly funny, and if the points "Prize" preaches against the audience (and whom it's truly rooting for) have become stale truisms, that's the fault of its imitators. A solid entry.
"'—All You Zombies—'" by Robert A. Heinlein (1959). Given the limited set of variations possible in the "time travel paradoxes" theme, it isn't surprising that peak paradox (so to speak) was reached so early. This is a well-constructed story, looser and freer than the more formal time-paradox stories of the early '50s, concealing its working parts beneath typically Heinleinian pulp sexuality. It's that overlay of Heinleinisms that sours me on this story. I used to love the guy's novels, but I got burnt out sometime around To Sail Beyond the Sunset; in Heinlein's hands, a story about a man who is his own father and mother is less apt to stir marvel at the central paradox, and more apt to raise questions about whether Heinlein just wanted to have sex with himself. Interpreting incident and character at face value as the desires of the author -- this is the most naive (puerile, even) level of textual criticism. With Heinlein, however, there's always the chance that it could be accurate.
"A Kind of Artistry" by Brian W. Aldiss (1962). An overbearing mother-wife and a "sinister matriarchy" are the only off-notes in an otherwise excellent piece of far-future rococo, a style that arose early and has never quite gone out of fashion, for obvious reasons. It doesn't reach the heights of what-the-fuck transcendence found in Aldiss' later "The Worm That Flies," but to repeat what I said in that review, "Artistry" feels "more fantastic and exotic than even the most out-there fantasy novel ever dares to be."
"Green Magic" by Jack Vance (1963). Gently wry humor breathes life into a mechanics of magic piece, prefiguring the likes of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. Brief but satisfying.
"Narrow Valley" by R. A. Lafferty (1966). Read and reviewed in Modern Classics of Science Fiction, where I acerbically remarked "This one's just silly. Worth a couple chuckles, but not my kind of thing." I keep seeing it picked up in various anthologies, so I guess I'm stuck with the minority view.
"Sundance" by Robert Silverberg (1969). An interesting stylistic piece that didn't entirely click with me. At a fundamental level, I appreciated the shifting narrative perspectives as a crude but effective means of conveying the "search for realities," but I wasn't blown away by the story as a whole.
"The Attack of the Giant Baby" by Kit Reed (1976). This one's just silly, too, but in a charming and legitimately funny way.
"The Hundredth Dove" by Jane Yolen (1977). Rarely do "new fairy tales" rouse the sense of magic and elegance of the best of the old, but this is one of those few. Exquisite.
"Jeffty Is Five" by Harlan Ellison® (1977). My cynicism toward sappy nostalgia and "good ol' days" mythology wasn't armor enough. Tears flowed freely at the end of this one, it must be said. I rag on Harlan Ellison® because of how puffed up and self-important he can be, but damned if the old cock doesn't have flashes of brilliance that (almost) justify his attitude.
"Salvador" by Lucius Shepard (1984). Read and reviewed in Modern Classics of Science Fiction. There I mused at length on "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," and said "This story is on the wrong end of that sophistication curve when it comes to warfare and its horrors."
"The Aliens Who Knew, I Mean, Everything" by George Alec Effinger (1984). A delightful and funny tale of aliens as annoying know-it-all neighbors. A necessary antidote to the post-"Jeffty" blues.
"Rat" by James Patrick Kelly (1986). Proto-crustpunk, serviceable but not my bag. I am reminded of Victorian and Edwardian "sensation" stories.
"The Friendship Light" by Gene Wolfe (1989). An interestingly ambiguous tale of murder and pacts with supernatural evil. It took some time for the hints in the coda (basically, the narrator's sister was institutionalized for murdering one or more young children, presumably in connection with occult activities, if my reading is anywhere in the ballpark) to click in my brain, and that only after rereading a few passages. Solid; enjoyable but not mindblowing.
"The Bone Woman" by Charles de Lint (1993). Urban fantasy revolving around a mentally ill homeless woman: yep, we've reached the early '90s -- the "Even Flow" years, as I like to call them. (Okay, so the fixation on Magical Homeless began in earnest in the mid-'80s, but really avalanched between '90 and '93, at least in my limited reading.) This particular story is quaint and quietly earnest, alighting on what I've already come to think of as de Lint's usual concerns of how urban life deadens our spirits and makes us all "desert" creatures, our lives more underground than on the surface. It's a slight story that goes down easy.
"The Lincoln Train" by Maureen F. McHugh (1995). Vivid and cleverly conceived alternate history, with "recalcitrant" slave owners getting rounded up and shipped west after Lincoln survives an assassination attempt, and Quaker abolitionists running an underground railroad to rescue some few and return them to families down South. Despite the brutal press of a train platform stampede, and its aftermath, the emotional effect of the story is more numbing than crushing, but it's an excellent installment nonetheless.
"Maneki Neko" by Bruce Sterling (1998). "Word of Tsuyoshi's skills had gotten out on the network." "Friends he didn't even know were working every day to help him." "'Well, your network gift economy is undermining the lawful, government approved, regulated economy!'" Early visions of the webbed future were adorably gawky and naive, and did not age well (kind of like contemporary electronic music). The democratic, noncommercial network and gift-exchange economy depicted here are at aphelion from the current reality of paysites and malicious doxxing and big business purchasing the end of net neutrality from corporatist government. I suppose some tightly-knit user clusters at, I don't know, Pinterest or a private P2P or something might do each other small favors and send timely gifts, but this "friendly strangers on the network" business is as quaint a future vision as anything printed in the 1950s. The story itself is a pleasant comedy of errors, with a happily networked young family man getting collared by a harassed federal agent.
"Winemaster" by Robert Reed (1999). For the most part I'm bored of transhumanist stories, but Robert Reed is usually a treat. Not as ornately bizarre as more recent transhumanist works ("Widows in the World" by Gavin J. Grant comes to mind, reviewed here), "Winemaster" nonetheless manages to mix in a dystopian Christian America and a Stapledonian "huge and cold, and slow" interstellar race, wishing to upgrade to organic forms and snap up terrestrial real estate once everybody earthside goes micromachine. It's a satisfactory tale; if it isn't as superb as what I've come to expect from Reed, at least it's more involving than other transhumanist stories I could name.
"Suicide Coast" by M. John Harrison (1999). This is a dull one, a dreary ennui of modern life piece stringing together cliches of adventure sports and VR gaming into an unconvincing, unappealing mash (though it's a well-written mash). Stories like this helped push me away from sci-fi, which these days is rote regurgitation of nanotech or transhumanism when it isn't despondent, too-plausible visions of future scarcity and rising sea levels, and toward fantasy, which at least preserves some remnant of vitality.
"Have Not Have" by Geoff Ryman (2001). An absorbing and unexpectedly moving window into a near-future culture on the verge of vanishing into an allegory of globalization. Maybe I'm just a sucker for stories set in a vaguely Central Asian milieu.
"The People of Sand and Slag" by Paolo Bacigalupi (2004). In a grimdark nanotech future, a world of mountain-devouring machines, regenerating limbs, flammable oceans, and acidic tailing pits across the surface of the globe, a gang of modified soldiers finds a living, fully biological dog eking out its existence in the toxic wastes of Montana. It turns out that pairing a standard bleak military-nanotech setting with the world's last "the dog dies at the end" story produces a solid entry. Not an all-time classic, but pretty good.
"Echo" by Elizabeth Hand (2005). A prime example of 21st century melancholia, exquisite and haunting, a dislocating drift across years as the world warms, towers collapse, and civilization, unseen, goes silent and satellites wink out one by one.
"The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates" by Stephen King (2008). A decade or so into this century, the hot new idea seemed to be stories that made death mundane, bureaucratic, a place of waiting rooms and broken escalators and waiting, lots of waiting. This story taps into that vibe, turning out a weeper that doesn't overstay its welcome.
"The Paper Menagerie" by Ken Liu (2011). I forgot how I found out about Ken Liu. I certainly wasn't encountering his fiction in the magazines -- I can't afford the subscription rates, and my library only has copies of Analog, my least favorite of all the pro rags still in print. Maybe I came across his name on Twitter while setting up my short-lived online magazine a few years ago. However it happened, I remember going to Liu's website and despairing at how prolific and consistently excellent his stories were, this wunderkind just barely older than me bursting upon the scene with exquisite, perfectly crafted delicacies and marvels. This story is, naturally, one such delicacy, folding together two generations of sorrow and identity and displacement, loss and love and the quiet magic between parent and child. It deserves every award it won.
Of all the stories in this collection, only "The Paper Menagerie," "Jeffty Is Five," and perhaps (at a stretch) "Echo" can match the excellence of "All Summer in a Day," "Flowers for Algernon," "Solitude," "The Women Men Don't See," and the other all-time classics reprinted in the first Very Best anthology. And unlike the first volume, Volume Two includes a few stories I just don't care for, such as "Suicide Coast," "Narrow Valley," and "Rat." But the general quality of the other stories remains high, so I won't knock the grade down too harshly.
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