The Wizard and the Warlord by Elizabeth Boyer
279 pages
Published 1983
Read from February 14 to February 27
Rating: 1.5 out of 5
I bought this book at a sad little used book shop that an old man had established in the book-stuffed emptiness of his own home. He only accepted cash, and I only had enough cash for one purchase. It was between this and an old edition of Samuel R. Delany's Babel-17. I chose this one because you can buy Babel-17 pretty much any time you want, but I'd never even heard of this book, so you might as well go with the one you don't know, right?
What a slog this turned out to be.
A generic sword-and-sorcery hack-and-slash centered on an orphaned young man's search for the father he never knew, the best that can be said for The Wizard and the Warlord is its setting, an elven land based on Scandinavia and its folklore. Boyer's Alfar are indistinguishable from her human characters in temperament and behavior, and their realm is pretty much identical to the human realm our Sigurd must leave behind, but I enjoyed the rocky fells, the winters of darkness and the summers of midnight sun, the trolls and three-headed horse-bears.
The rest of the book, by contrast... oof.
Sigurd is perhaps the stupidest character I have ever encountered in a work of fiction. I'm not referring to the myriad cliches surrounding his origin or his quest, though those cringe-inducing enough. I'm referring to his capacity for decision-making and navigating the world around him. Every protagonist in this type of story seemingly must begin in a position of naive ignorance and boneheadedness, but Sigurd is MAGA-hat-wearing levels of stupid. And while other chosen-one lost sons eventually wise up with experience and take a more thoughtful approach to their predicaments, Sigurd doubles and triples down on his bad choices. The first Alfar he meets is so obviously Sigurd's father that I could only read on in wry disbelief as Sigurd swore everlasting enmity against him; the unctuous wizard, by contrast, wins Sigurd's undying trust despite repeatedly betraying him and cursing him with magic and trying to wrest Sigurd's own powers away from him. It isn't until page 260 (out of 279) that Sigurd himself realizes, "It seemed to him as he lay helplessly bleeding to death... that he [Sigurd] had betrayed every person he ought to have trusted and he had allowed his enemies to flatter and deceive him with ridiculous ease."
Yeah, no shit, honey.
Sadly, Sigurd does not helplessly bleed to death, which would have been a suitable fate for him. He gets rescued, and having learned and grown at last, goes off with his true friends to reunite with his father. Along the way our heroes casually commit genocide against the entire population of dark elves for the crimes of one warlord. So yay! Job well done, guys. Way to be a bunch of murderhobos.
Actually, that's a good way to describe this book: Imagine that That Guy in your D&D group (every D&D group has one!) who wants to have a secret, dark, gritty backstory that only the DM knows, and who loudly objects when anyone else in the party does anything silly or fun or enjoyable with their characters, got to write down their character's life story exactly as they imagined it. That's this book.
And apparently there are two other books set in this same world. Life's too short to read more than one book like this, alas.
Wednesday, February 27, 2019
Wednesday, February 13, 2019
2019 read #5: Dunleary by Monica Heath.
Dunleary by Monica Heath
143 pages
Published 1967
Read from February 8 to February 13
Rating: 1 out of 5
The other day I found this in a random thrift store in rural Ohio and picked it up because it sounded like some tawdry, trashy fun. A Gothic romance set on a remote Irish island haunted by a curse, where not even the heroine's husband is what he seems! Romance as a genre is ridiculed and devalued in our culture out of pure misogyny; having internalized that misogyny myself, I've read fewer romance novels than I have mysteries, and I despise mysteries. I've been meaning to remedy that deficit for a while now, and when I found this book, I followed an impulse to begin making up for that lack here and now.
This was a mistake.
Dunleary is a document shaped and fashioned out of misogyny. The lurid curse hinted at on the back cover dooms the women of Inish Laoghaire to "wantonness," which is the 1967 word for "having control over their own sexuality." Our heroine, "Deirdre the virgin" (as her future husband the Count O'Leary insists on calling her), meekly submits to her husband and holds fast to her "virtue," while the "curse" of the island is revealed to be the mad machinations of a "whore" who has been murdering women for decades in her frustrated desire to marry the Count O'Leary's father. On multiple occasions, the Count casually threatens to murder Deirdre with his bare hands if she proves unfaithful—and she goes and marries him anyway. It's a horrifying vision rendered yet more appalling by the realization that substantial numbers of people in our culture still view the world this way.
As a work of fiction, Dunleary feels like reading with training wheels on. Every twist and question and revelation is underlined repeatedly in the text. At one point a character sneers at a born-out-of-wedlock boy that Maeve, the aforementioned "whore" at the center of the web of murder and disgrace, is his mother; on the very next page our narrator Deirdre wonders, "Could Maeve be the boy's mother?" It reminds me a lot of pulp fantasy from the 1970s, or pulp sci-fi from the 1940s.
Next time I try to read some romance, I shall learn from this error and find me some more recent books that aren't so appallingly regressive.
143 pages
Published 1967
Read from February 8 to February 13
Rating: 1 out of 5
The other day I found this in a random thrift store in rural Ohio and picked it up because it sounded like some tawdry, trashy fun. A Gothic romance set on a remote Irish island haunted by a curse, where not even the heroine's husband is what he seems! Romance as a genre is ridiculed and devalued in our culture out of pure misogyny; having internalized that misogyny myself, I've read fewer romance novels than I have mysteries, and I despise mysteries. I've been meaning to remedy that deficit for a while now, and when I found this book, I followed an impulse to begin making up for that lack here and now.
This was a mistake.
Dunleary is a document shaped and fashioned out of misogyny. The lurid curse hinted at on the back cover dooms the women of Inish Laoghaire to "wantonness," which is the 1967 word for "having control over their own sexuality." Our heroine, "Deirdre the virgin" (as her future husband the Count O'Leary insists on calling her), meekly submits to her husband and holds fast to her "virtue," while the "curse" of the island is revealed to be the mad machinations of a "whore" who has been murdering women for decades in her frustrated desire to marry the Count O'Leary's father. On multiple occasions, the Count casually threatens to murder Deirdre with his bare hands if she proves unfaithful—and she goes and marries him anyway. It's a horrifying vision rendered yet more appalling by the realization that substantial numbers of people in our culture still view the world this way.
As a work of fiction, Dunleary feels like reading with training wheels on. Every twist and question and revelation is underlined repeatedly in the text. At one point a character sneers at a born-out-of-wedlock boy that Maeve, the aforementioned "whore" at the center of the web of murder and disgrace, is his mother; on the very next page our narrator Deirdre wonders, "Could Maeve be the boy's mother?" It reminds me a lot of pulp fantasy from the 1970s, or pulp sci-fi from the 1940s.
Next time I try to read some romance, I shall learn from this error and find me some more recent books that aren't so appallingly regressive.
Thursday, February 7, 2019
2019 read #4: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January/February 2019.
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January/February 2019 issue (136:1-2)
Edited by C. C. Finlay
258 pages
Published 2018
Read from January 16 to February 7
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
I'm trying something different here: reviewing an issue of a fiction magazine as if it were a book. I've been collecting speculative fiction magazines for a number of years, all the while intending to read and review their contents here, but through the magic of procrastination and inertia, I just haven't managed to do so before now.
So what prompted me to sit down and start reading my collection? In the last few months I've written a handful of short stories and sent them like beautiful ducklings out into the world, accumulating rejection after rejection from the likes of Asimov's, Clarkesworld, and this very magazine I'm reading today. Getting a story accepted by and published in Fantasy & Science Fiction has been one of my life's goals ever since 1999, when I got a personalized rejection letter from then-editor Gordon Van Gelder for a meandering and not especially interesting novella about a contract architect building a house in the Late Cretaceous. "The time for this sort of thing is past, alas," he wrote, and my teenage ego clung to that "alas." I'd leap to publish this if dinosaur stories still sold magazines like in '93 is how I chose to read that "alas."
Over the intervening years, that imaginary bandaid for a fragile ego has evolved into a genuine appreciation for F&SF as a publication. Its two "Very Best of" anthologies (1, 2) are perhaps my favorite SF short fiction collections; the tales I like best from various yearly anthologies often turn out to be sourced from F&SF. The aesthetic of its fiction—small moments, delicate beauty, character-based storytelling, often a quiet note of melancholy—is what I aspire to in my own work. Getting so many stories rejected by F&SF in such a short period of time these last few months, while not all that surprising, has been a disappointment. I had been so certain that my stories had become worthy of the magazine I loved.
But I hadn't exactly read an issue of the magazine, had I? Anthologies, best-ofs, collections, sure—but no current issues, nothing cover-to-cover fresh off the newsstand. I'm hoping to change that now—and just maybe get a better sense of the storytelling currently sought by F&SF's current editor. It's been quite some time since I read any short SF whatsoever, so reading more stories can only help my craft, regardless.
"To the Beautiful Shining Twilight" by Carrie Vaughn. All in all, I liked this story. The opening hook compacts a wealth of setting and character detail into a brief couple of paragraphs and immediately sets the mood and feel of the entire piece. Once past that opening, however, I felt that the remainder of the story—while charming—was more workmanlike than innovative. The tale of Abby and her former bandmates receiving a visit from a Knight of Faerie, thirty years after they came to the aid of the Queen of Faerie with their music, could have been a product of the 1980s urban fantasy boom; it could easily have been a direct sequel to War for the Oaks. Airen the fae knight was a cardboard standee of an equally dated genre cliche. The theme of "what happens after the adventure" is a rather more modern preoccupation, as exemplified by Among Others and Every Heart a Doorway, but had you told me this story had been published in 1988, I wouldn't have guessed otherwise. I'm a fan of 1980s faerie fantasy, so the lack of originality didn't diminish my enjoyment, but I was a little surprised to find it here.
"The Province of Saints" by Robert Reed. This one, by contrast, seems straight out of 1998. In the near future, a new prescription drug floods the human mind with empathy—which here is framed as the human animal's best tool to manipulate others. A shocking mass death unfolds on the estate of a family of wealthy rural sociopaths. The ensuing mystery investigation Makes a Statement and Makes You Think about the human condition. I think I would have been blown away by this story around the time that I received that personal rejection letter from Gordon Van Gelder. But now, having seen more of the world, I'm far from convinced of the central conceit that empathy is just another way for humans to be selfish; without buying into that idea, the rest of the story falls apart. I'm not a fan of mysteries and murders, so that works against the story as well, at least for me. Robert Reed is an excellent craftsman of short stories, but that's almost a drawback for this particular tale—it feels, well, crafted. The artifice shows.
"Joe Diablo's Farewell" by Andy Duncan. I'm not sure how I feel about this piece, a historical slice-of-life set in 1920s Manhattan served with a garnish of ghost story. The prose quality was only average, and while I appreciated (in principle) the scene where men drawn from the various under-privileged ethnic and racial groups of interwar New York City, dressed like movie Indians for a Broadway premiere, ate chickpeas and talked about how their cultures used chickpeas, it didn't really say anything new. Overall the story felt incomplete, or perhaps pressed and shaped together from scraps of several stories (or fragments of a larger one).
"The City of Lost Desire" by Phyllis Eisenstein. I've loved the stories of Alaric the minstrel since I first encountered him like a sweet, sensitive flower while slogging through the grim mire of Lin Carter's Year's Best Fantasy. In that review I wrote, "This story showed me I've long held an unconscious desire to see high fantasy written for the aesthetic standards of F&SF." Further, reading those Lin Carter compilations, awful as they were, helped cultivate a taste for the style, mood, and rhythms of 1970s-style fantasy serials. This story ably satisfied on both counts. It's comforting to slip into a lived-in setting like Alaric's world, full of references to other adventures that may or may not have made it to print, none of which are required to understand the story at hand but make everything feel larger than one mere novella. It packs in all the rewards of an extensive epic fantasy series with none of the time investment. I enjoyed this entry quite a lot, though I will say that none of the characters aside from Alaric felt developed in any way, and the story itself went on maybe a smidgeon too long.
"The Right Number of Cats" by Jenn Reese. A tame cosmic horror microfic about learning to accept grief. Pretty good.
"Survey" by Adam-Troy Castro. My best guess about this one is that it's a third-rate retread of Ursula K. Le Guin's classic "Those Who Walk Away from Omelas," leaning hard into the shock value but offering little new to say regarding each individual's complicity in the horrors of capitalism. If the moral of the story was not "We're all complicit in the horrors of capitalism," then I'm even more lost. Did not care for this one.
"Blue as Blood" by Leah Cypress. This novelette is my favorite story in the issue so far, but it's hard to put into words why. It's an excellent example of science fiction as an avenue to explore social ideas, to examine prejudice and in-vs.-outgroup behavior from a fictional but relatable angle. "Inscrutable insectoid aliens inspire human prejudice" isn't exactly a new idea, but I loved how the social conflict was between a human girl (who absorbed the aliens' revulsion toward the color blue) and every human around her, parent and peer, which both grounded the story and provided it an extra dimension beyond the stale old trope. An engaging and effective tale.
"The Washer from the Ford" by Sean McMullen. "I should have said something sensitive and caring, but just then I was feeling like the only person on Earth who had the right to be a victim." There's just something so privileged white male about this story, and that sentence encapsulates it quite well. The narrator-hero does high-level IT support and has been cursed to be ignored by everyone around him, so despite his achievements and his PhD, he never gets the success and recognition he deserves: "...you have great talent and achieve a lot but get nowhere." The curse was inflicted upon him at the behest of a "mousy tart" he ignored in his college stud days. In the end, he wins out over the fey being who wants to take back his gift of second sight—fifteen years of involuntary celibacy have given him the fortitude to resist her sexual temptations. I liked this Melbourne-set tale of murders and supernatural bargains and counterbargains just fine—it was competently constructed, and I'm always a sucker for fey urban fantasy—but oh my lord, you couldn't write a story more tailored for the self-pitying middle-aged middle-class privileged white male demographic if you tried. There's so much to unpack here.
Being a fantasy story set in Australia, "Washer" presents a problem related but perpendicular to the one raised by Patricia Wrightson's The Ice Is Coming. Rather than appropriating local Aboriginal folklore, McMullen populates his Melbourne with creatures of European legend, erasing local beliefs altogether.
"Tactical Infantry Bot 37 Dreams of Trochees" by Marie Vibbert. A brutal yet beautiful rumination on how profitability stimulates permanent states of warfare. "War robot learns poetry and refuses to fight again" sounds like some 1960s concept-based sci-fi, but this story is effective, even though it's far from new.
"Fifteen Minutes from Now" by Erin Cashier. Akin to "Survey," this is another all-verbal piece about bloodshed and torture and techno-beaurocrats being cavalier with human lives, this time from a time-travel angle. A bit of a yawn, especially with another story so structurally and thematically similar earlier in this same issue.
"The Fall from Griffin's Peak" by Pip Coen. An amusing, unexpectedly moving, thoroughly enjoyable romp with an archetypal rogue who gets in over her head. Spoilers: I want to recycle the "glue the rogue to the chair" bit for a future D&D campaign. I think it might be tied with "Blue as Blood" as my favorite piece in this issue.
And that's it! While I know that not every story can be a winner, I was somewhat flabbergasted to read so many that just didn't do it for me. Apparently my mental picture of F&SF as the best match for my personal style was mistaken. Or maybe this was just an off issue. Either way, I have stacks of back issues I plan to read in the months and years to come.
Edited by C. C. Finlay
258 pages
Published 2018
Read from January 16 to February 7
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
I'm trying something different here: reviewing an issue of a fiction magazine as if it were a book. I've been collecting speculative fiction magazines for a number of years, all the while intending to read and review their contents here, but through the magic of procrastination and inertia, I just haven't managed to do so before now.
So what prompted me to sit down and start reading my collection? In the last few months I've written a handful of short stories and sent them like beautiful ducklings out into the world, accumulating rejection after rejection from the likes of Asimov's, Clarkesworld, and this very magazine I'm reading today. Getting a story accepted by and published in Fantasy & Science Fiction has been one of my life's goals ever since 1999, when I got a personalized rejection letter from then-editor Gordon Van Gelder for a meandering and not especially interesting novella about a contract architect building a house in the Late Cretaceous. "The time for this sort of thing is past, alas," he wrote, and my teenage ego clung to that "alas." I'd leap to publish this if dinosaur stories still sold magazines like in '93 is how I chose to read that "alas."
Over the intervening years, that imaginary bandaid for a fragile ego has evolved into a genuine appreciation for F&SF as a publication. Its two "Very Best of" anthologies (1, 2) are perhaps my favorite SF short fiction collections; the tales I like best from various yearly anthologies often turn out to be sourced from F&SF. The aesthetic of its fiction—small moments, delicate beauty, character-based storytelling, often a quiet note of melancholy—is what I aspire to in my own work. Getting so many stories rejected by F&SF in such a short period of time these last few months, while not all that surprising, has been a disappointment. I had been so certain that my stories had become worthy of the magazine I loved.
But I hadn't exactly read an issue of the magazine, had I? Anthologies, best-ofs, collections, sure—but no current issues, nothing cover-to-cover fresh off the newsstand. I'm hoping to change that now—and just maybe get a better sense of the storytelling currently sought by F&SF's current editor. It's been quite some time since I read any short SF whatsoever, so reading more stories can only help my craft, regardless.
"To the Beautiful Shining Twilight" by Carrie Vaughn. All in all, I liked this story. The opening hook compacts a wealth of setting and character detail into a brief couple of paragraphs and immediately sets the mood and feel of the entire piece. Once past that opening, however, I felt that the remainder of the story—while charming—was more workmanlike than innovative. The tale of Abby and her former bandmates receiving a visit from a Knight of Faerie, thirty years after they came to the aid of the Queen of Faerie with their music, could have been a product of the 1980s urban fantasy boom; it could easily have been a direct sequel to War for the Oaks. Airen the fae knight was a cardboard standee of an equally dated genre cliche. The theme of "what happens after the adventure" is a rather more modern preoccupation, as exemplified by Among Others and Every Heart a Doorway, but had you told me this story had been published in 1988, I wouldn't have guessed otherwise. I'm a fan of 1980s faerie fantasy, so the lack of originality didn't diminish my enjoyment, but I was a little surprised to find it here.
"The Province of Saints" by Robert Reed. This one, by contrast, seems straight out of 1998. In the near future, a new prescription drug floods the human mind with empathy—which here is framed as the human animal's best tool to manipulate others. A shocking mass death unfolds on the estate of a family of wealthy rural sociopaths. The ensuing mystery investigation Makes a Statement and Makes You Think about the human condition. I think I would have been blown away by this story around the time that I received that personal rejection letter from Gordon Van Gelder. But now, having seen more of the world, I'm far from convinced of the central conceit that empathy is just another way for humans to be selfish; without buying into that idea, the rest of the story falls apart. I'm not a fan of mysteries and murders, so that works against the story as well, at least for me. Robert Reed is an excellent craftsman of short stories, but that's almost a drawback for this particular tale—it feels, well, crafted. The artifice shows.
"Joe Diablo's Farewell" by Andy Duncan. I'm not sure how I feel about this piece, a historical slice-of-life set in 1920s Manhattan served with a garnish of ghost story. The prose quality was only average, and while I appreciated (in principle) the scene where men drawn from the various under-privileged ethnic and racial groups of interwar New York City, dressed like movie Indians for a Broadway premiere, ate chickpeas and talked about how their cultures used chickpeas, it didn't really say anything new. Overall the story felt incomplete, or perhaps pressed and shaped together from scraps of several stories (or fragments of a larger one).
"The City of Lost Desire" by Phyllis Eisenstein. I've loved the stories of Alaric the minstrel since I first encountered him like a sweet, sensitive flower while slogging through the grim mire of Lin Carter's Year's Best Fantasy. In that review I wrote, "This story showed me I've long held an unconscious desire to see high fantasy written for the aesthetic standards of F&SF." Further, reading those Lin Carter compilations, awful as they were, helped cultivate a taste for the style, mood, and rhythms of 1970s-style fantasy serials. This story ably satisfied on both counts. It's comforting to slip into a lived-in setting like Alaric's world, full of references to other adventures that may or may not have made it to print, none of which are required to understand the story at hand but make everything feel larger than one mere novella. It packs in all the rewards of an extensive epic fantasy series with none of the time investment. I enjoyed this entry quite a lot, though I will say that none of the characters aside from Alaric felt developed in any way, and the story itself went on maybe a smidgeon too long.
"The Right Number of Cats" by Jenn Reese. A tame cosmic horror microfic about learning to accept grief. Pretty good.
"Survey" by Adam-Troy Castro. My best guess about this one is that it's a third-rate retread of Ursula K. Le Guin's classic "Those Who Walk Away from Omelas," leaning hard into the shock value but offering little new to say regarding each individual's complicity in the horrors of capitalism. If the moral of the story was not "We're all complicit in the horrors of capitalism," then I'm even more lost. Did not care for this one.
"Blue as Blood" by Leah Cypress. This novelette is my favorite story in the issue so far, but it's hard to put into words why. It's an excellent example of science fiction as an avenue to explore social ideas, to examine prejudice and in-vs.-outgroup behavior from a fictional but relatable angle. "Inscrutable insectoid aliens inspire human prejudice" isn't exactly a new idea, but I loved how the social conflict was between a human girl (who absorbed the aliens' revulsion toward the color blue) and every human around her, parent and peer, which both grounded the story and provided it an extra dimension beyond the stale old trope. An engaging and effective tale.
"The Washer from the Ford" by Sean McMullen. "I should have said something sensitive and caring, but just then I was feeling like the only person on Earth who had the right to be a victim." There's just something so privileged white male about this story, and that sentence encapsulates it quite well. The narrator-hero does high-level IT support and has been cursed to be ignored by everyone around him, so despite his achievements and his PhD, he never gets the success and recognition he deserves: "...you have great talent and achieve a lot but get nowhere." The curse was inflicted upon him at the behest of a "mousy tart" he ignored in his college stud days. In the end, he wins out over the fey being who wants to take back his gift of second sight—fifteen years of involuntary celibacy have given him the fortitude to resist her sexual temptations. I liked this Melbourne-set tale of murders and supernatural bargains and counterbargains just fine—it was competently constructed, and I'm always a sucker for fey urban fantasy—but oh my lord, you couldn't write a story more tailored for the self-pitying middle-aged middle-class privileged white male demographic if you tried. There's so much to unpack here.
Being a fantasy story set in Australia, "Washer" presents a problem related but perpendicular to the one raised by Patricia Wrightson's The Ice Is Coming. Rather than appropriating local Aboriginal folklore, McMullen populates his Melbourne with creatures of European legend, erasing local beliefs altogether.
"Tactical Infantry Bot 37 Dreams of Trochees" by Marie Vibbert. A brutal yet beautiful rumination on how profitability stimulates permanent states of warfare. "War robot learns poetry and refuses to fight again" sounds like some 1960s concept-based sci-fi, but this story is effective, even though it's far from new.
"Fifteen Minutes from Now" by Erin Cashier. Akin to "Survey," this is another all-verbal piece about bloodshed and torture and techno-beaurocrats being cavalier with human lives, this time from a time-travel angle. A bit of a yawn, especially with another story so structurally and thematically similar earlier in this same issue.
"The Fall from Griffin's Peak" by Pip Coen. An amusing, unexpectedly moving, thoroughly enjoyable romp with an archetypal rogue who gets in over her head. Spoilers: I want to recycle the "glue the rogue to the chair" bit for a future D&D campaign. I think it might be tied with "Blue as Blood" as my favorite piece in this issue.
And that's it! While I know that not every story can be a winner, I was somewhat flabbergasted to read so many that just didn't do it for me. Apparently my mental picture of F&SF as the best match for my personal style was mistaken. Or maybe this was just an off issue. Either way, I have stacks of back issues I plan to read in the months and years to come.
Friday, February 1, 2019
2019 read #3: The Ice Is Coming by Patricia Wrightson.
The Ice Is Coming by Patricia Wrightson
196 pages
Published 1977
Read from January 20 to January 31
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
Cultural appropriation is a complicated topic. Writers of privilege should not use the culture, experiences, or heritage of less-privileged groups in order to enrich themselves—that's straightforward enough, as an ideal. But no culture exists in isolation, and a white writer rejecting cultural interchange in order to write some Western European fantasy about a kingdom that has only ever known blue-eyed blonds is going in exactly the wrong direction. The better ideal would be to enjoy cultural exchange only on terms set by the less-privileged group. (A further suggestion, that white and male authors should just shut up and let other folks have the floor for a while, is hard to refute on philosophical grounds, other than a vague sense that silencing an entire group based on their demographics is probably not the best idea in the long run, and is probably something to be avoided.)
On its surface, The Ice Is Coming appears to be an example of cultural appropriation done with every intent of treating those it steals from respectfully. It is told largely from the perspective of Australian Aborigines, or the People; the monsters, heroes, songs, and cultures that enter the story are treated seriously. Especially considering when it was published, Ice seems to be a remarkably forward-thinking novel. When you read deeper, of course, cracks begin to appear. Not a single member of the People is thanked, credited, or acknowledged in the author's note; no indication is given of how Wrightson obtained her information, or who (if anyone) told her it would be okay. Wirrun, the main character, is repeatedly described as "heavy-browed"—exactly the sort of thing that Eurocentric eyes might dwell on, rather than a distinguishing feature a young man of the People might himself fixate upon. Monsters and spirits from a broad geographical transect of eastern Australia are thrown into the narrative as if on a zoo tour, a selection of curiosities to spice up Wirrun's journey before its ultimate confrontation. A random white "Inlander" shows up to help in the climax, much like Martin Freeman's character in Black Panther.
And all the while I was reading it, I kept thinking, "Is a white person really the one to be writing this tale?"
Come to think of it, I don't know of a single Aborigine author. Not one. (Wrightson certainly doesn't list any for her readers to check out.) I need to Google and educate myself; it's a pretty glaring area of ignorance.
As a work of fiction, Ice falls closer to the 1970s exotic thriller than to the fantasy examples Wrightson cites in her author's note. It has more in common with Jaws or this one thriller I read that had to do with these people stranded in a cave because of an avalanche (I forget the title) than with Earthsea or Middle-earth. Wirrun makes major plot decisions based on newspapers; there are random asides to show how local store owners and tourists are handling the encroaching return of the Ice Age. The reveal of the Eldest Nargun at the end was a nice bit of storytelling magic, but otherwise, Ice is an odd document, ahead of its time in some ways but wholly of its era in terms of narrative conventions.
196 pages
Published 1977
Read from January 20 to January 31
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
Cultural appropriation is a complicated topic. Writers of privilege should not use the culture, experiences, or heritage of less-privileged groups in order to enrich themselves—that's straightforward enough, as an ideal. But no culture exists in isolation, and a white writer rejecting cultural interchange in order to write some Western European fantasy about a kingdom that has only ever known blue-eyed blonds is going in exactly the wrong direction. The better ideal would be to enjoy cultural exchange only on terms set by the less-privileged group. (A further suggestion, that white and male authors should just shut up and let other folks have the floor for a while, is hard to refute on philosophical grounds, other than a vague sense that silencing an entire group based on their demographics is probably not the best idea in the long run, and is probably something to be avoided.)
On its surface, The Ice Is Coming appears to be an example of cultural appropriation done with every intent of treating those it steals from respectfully. It is told largely from the perspective of Australian Aborigines, or the People; the monsters, heroes, songs, and cultures that enter the story are treated seriously. Especially considering when it was published, Ice seems to be a remarkably forward-thinking novel. When you read deeper, of course, cracks begin to appear. Not a single member of the People is thanked, credited, or acknowledged in the author's note; no indication is given of how Wrightson obtained her information, or who (if anyone) told her it would be okay. Wirrun, the main character, is repeatedly described as "heavy-browed"—exactly the sort of thing that Eurocentric eyes might dwell on, rather than a distinguishing feature a young man of the People might himself fixate upon. Monsters and spirits from a broad geographical transect of eastern Australia are thrown into the narrative as if on a zoo tour, a selection of curiosities to spice up Wirrun's journey before its ultimate confrontation. A random white "Inlander" shows up to help in the climax, much like Martin Freeman's character in Black Panther.
And all the while I was reading it, I kept thinking, "Is a white person really the one to be writing this tale?"
Come to think of it, I don't know of a single Aborigine author. Not one. (Wrightson certainly doesn't list any for her readers to check out.) I need to Google and educate myself; it's a pretty glaring area of ignorance.
As a work of fiction, Ice falls closer to the 1970s exotic thriller than to the fantasy examples Wrightson cites in her author's note. It has more in common with Jaws or this one thriller I read that had to do with these people stranded in a cave because of an avalanche (I forget the title) than with Earthsea or Middle-earth. Wirrun makes major plot decisions based on newspapers; there are random asides to show how local store owners and tourists are handling the encroaching return of the Ice Age. The reveal of the Eldest Nargun at the end was a nice bit of storytelling magic, but otherwise, Ice is an odd document, ahead of its time in some ways but wholly of its era in terms of narrative conventions.
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