The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane
330 pages
Published 2007
Read from March 16 to March 18
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
It was Roger Deakin who inspired my interest in books of eccentric (and, seemingly, ineluctably British) adventures in the proverbial backyard. His Waterlog documented his project to swim throughout the British Isles, "dipping into ponds and
estuaries, lochs and ocean littoral, trout streams, fens, abandoned
moats, canals, flooded quarries, harbors, industrial rivers, hidden
becks, a cave, even heated swimming pools," as I put it in that review, while his Wildwood lingered in coppices and took delight in nuts and berries and sunbeams. Knowing nothing of Robert Macfarlane when Amazon recommended this book to me, I seized upon The Wild Places to fill a hunger for domestic exploration that had been maturing ever since I finished Waterlog, a craving Three Men on a Boat and Three Men on the Bummel had failed to assuage. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Macfarlane and Deakin had become good friends in the last years of Deakin's life, and much of The Wild Places is imbued with Deakin's presence, his actions directly on the page or his example and inspiration like a warm light through eyelids. I only "know" Deakin through his own two books, and now through Macfarlane's depiction, but the chapters dealing with Deakin's death and Macfarlane's mourning have left me glum and heavy all day today.
Less eccentric, perhaps, than Deakin's quest in Waterlog, Macfarlane's project here is to discover any remnants of wildness left on the long-inhabited, recently-monocultured British archipelago. Beginning with the obvious wildernesses of the remote north, Macfarlane works his way toward more populated areas and a more intimate conception of what wildness might mean, finding (with Deakin) the wild in the limestone gryke microenvironments of the Burren and the forgotten holloways of the chalklands. Macfarlane's narration is also more conventional than what I recall of Deakin's sumptuous digressions, sticking close to his theme with beautiful but efficient prose, making for a faster but, perhaps, less beguiling and lingering read. Macfarlane's text also carries an undercurrent of melancholy, never approaching the gentle delight of Deakin's abbreviated career.
If his other books are like this one (and I've already ordered one more from ILL and one from Amazon), though, I can already tell Macfarlane will quickly become one of my favorite authors.
Wednesday, March 18, 2015
Monday, March 16, 2015
2015 read #13: The Boy Who Lost Fairyland by Catherynne M. Valente.
The Boy Who Lost Fairyland by Catherynne M. Valente
235 pages
Published 2015
Read from March 13 to March 16
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
A book-length narrative detour that, as far as I can tell, serves no real purpose to the ongoing story of September, the girl who did quite a lot of things in and around Fairyland. We enter the story with the early childhood of Hawthorn, an ordinary troll boy, shortly before he gets swapped as a Changeling with Thomas Rood, a baby in Chicago. After a rough start, as if Valente herself wasn't quite convinced the series would go in this direction on its own momentum, the book finally gains some traction with some precious scenes of Hawthorn (now Thomas the Un-Normal) attempting to understand mid-century American toddlerhood and grade school from a Fairyland-ish perspective, and meeting with a Fetch or matchstick girl also left behind in a Changeling exchange. This is relatively unexplored territory, as unexplored as any corner of faery lore can be these days, so for a while I was engrossed with a sense of possibility and newness -- there was no telling where the story might go! Alas, even this portion of the tale feels weightless, lacking a certain depth or enthusiasm that Valente ordinarily brings to her work.
The Boy Who Lost Fairyland feels to me like little more than a protracted bout of writer's block nosing head-first into a publisher's deadline.
About halfway through the book, Hawthorn and Tamburlaine and their magically animated friends get kidnapped into Fairyland by a baseball that had been a troll king all along. Not that long ago, I found Valente's Fairyland "charming" and "whimsical" and "fuckin' precious" (from my review of "The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland, For a Little While," anthologized here). The first two books of this series maintained a nice balance of "Grim and Whimsy" (as I put it here), though even by book two I was noticing a creeping tendency for the narrative voice to shift into "Aunty Cathy tells a spooky yarn before bedtime." That finds full flower here, with a heap of Whimsy and a dearth of Grim, which wouldn't be so bad if Valente's heretofore reliable inventive fancy were also at its peak. The outlines of a creative, whimsical story are there -- the aforementioned baseball-troll-king, the matchstick girl designed to destroy but channeling her impulses into creativity, Blunderbuss the yarn wombat -- but for me, at least, the spark feels damped. Valente's descriptions of Fairyland, formerly evocative, have been stripped down to constant reminders of how edible everything looks. Far from fuckin' precious, the net effect is merely a case of the munchies.
And in the end, despite populating a book-length side trip with a whole new collection of characters, Hawthorn and his friends have essentially no effect that I can discern upon the situation of September and the balance of Fairyland. Two hundred pages of buildup and this new gang blunders into contact with September and her pals through sheer happenstance, have a game of brownie backgammon, and then Aubergine the Dodo peeks out over September's shoulder to admit that she's had a deus ex machina in the form of a dodo egg this whole time -- and it's not at all clear how, exactly, the actions of our new band of heroes prompted this belated (and flimsy) resolution. There's enough residual charm to carry the novel, but we seem to be reaching the Land of Diminishing Returns with this series.
235 pages
Published 2015
Read from March 13 to March 16
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
A book-length narrative detour that, as far as I can tell, serves no real purpose to the ongoing story of September, the girl who did quite a lot of things in and around Fairyland. We enter the story with the early childhood of Hawthorn, an ordinary troll boy, shortly before he gets swapped as a Changeling with Thomas Rood, a baby in Chicago. After a rough start, as if Valente herself wasn't quite convinced the series would go in this direction on its own momentum, the book finally gains some traction with some precious scenes of Hawthorn (now Thomas the Un-Normal) attempting to understand mid-century American toddlerhood and grade school from a Fairyland-ish perspective, and meeting with a Fetch or matchstick girl also left behind in a Changeling exchange. This is relatively unexplored territory, as unexplored as any corner of faery lore can be these days, so for a while I was engrossed with a sense of possibility and newness -- there was no telling where the story might go! Alas, even this portion of the tale feels weightless, lacking a certain depth or enthusiasm that Valente ordinarily brings to her work.
The Boy Who Lost Fairyland feels to me like little more than a protracted bout of writer's block nosing head-first into a publisher's deadline.
About halfway through the book, Hawthorn and Tamburlaine and their magically animated friends get kidnapped into Fairyland by a baseball that had been a troll king all along. Not that long ago, I found Valente's Fairyland "charming" and "whimsical" and "fuckin' precious" (from my review of "The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland, For a Little While," anthologized here). The first two books of this series maintained a nice balance of "Grim and Whimsy" (as I put it here), though even by book two I was noticing a creeping tendency for the narrative voice to shift into "Aunty Cathy tells a spooky yarn before bedtime." That finds full flower here, with a heap of Whimsy and a dearth of Grim, which wouldn't be so bad if Valente's heretofore reliable inventive fancy were also at its peak. The outlines of a creative, whimsical story are there -- the aforementioned baseball-troll-king, the matchstick girl designed to destroy but channeling her impulses into creativity, Blunderbuss the yarn wombat -- but for me, at least, the spark feels damped. Valente's descriptions of Fairyland, formerly evocative, have been stripped down to constant reminders of how edible everything looks. Far from fuckin' precious, the net effect is merely a case of the munchies.
And in the end, despite populating a book-length side trip with a whole new collection of characters, Hawthorn and his friends have essentially no effect that I can discern upon the situation of September and the balance of Fairyland. Two hundred pages of buildup and this new gang blunders into contact with September and her pals through sheer happenstance, have a game of brownie backgammon, and then Aubergine the Dodo peeks out over September's shoulder to admit that she's had a deus ex machina in the form of a dodo egg this whole time -- and it's not at all clear how, exactly, the actions of our new band of heroes prompted this belated (and flimsy) resolution. There's enough residual charm to carry the novel, but we seem to be reaching the Land of Diminishing Returns with this series.
Friday, March 13, 2015
2015 read #12: The Innkeeper's Song by Peter S. Beagle.
The Innkeeper's Song by Peter S. Beagle
348 pages
Published 1993
Read from March 4 to March 13
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
After reading all those Year's Best Fantasy Stories anthologies from the 1970s, perhaps it's inevitable that I would pick up on the idea that The Innkeeper's Song is, essentially, a classic sword-and-sorcery tale seen through an intelligent, literate, humane lens. Or in other words, exactly what you'd expect if Peter S. Beagle tried his hand at it. There are battling wizards, extradimensional horrors, wandering heroes with tragic backstories and assassins hot on their heels, a perilous venture into the stronghold of the evil wizard, and much of the story takes place in and around the sort of crossroads inn found primarily in adventurers-on-a-quest fantasy (and hardly ever in history). But the characters feel distinct and well-rounded, fundamentally human in the best Beagle tradition, motivated by their emotional states, growing and changing through interaction. The emotional core of each character feels vivid and real.
The narration is excellent overall, after a forbidding start -- each the first eight or so chapters have a different narrator, relating overlapping sections of story from their own point of view, which felt a bit overwhelming at first, possibly because my brain is still muddy with whatever has been mucking up my reading abilities of late. But once each character established herself or himself in my head, this structure paid off with differing insights and complications, rather than merely spreading the story too thin, as multiple perspectives and main characters sometimes do (as in the later Song of Ice and Fire books). Multiple p.o.v.'s crowding for attention also made for perhaps one of the most memorable and unusual group sex scenes I've read to date, a thirty page opus (or derailment, depending on how you feel about it) bouncing between all four participants, as well as a shapeshifting fox (who, spoilers, turns out to be some kind of ancient extradimensional being later on). Beagle takes great pains to establish the emotional landscape leading to the foursome, and spends the protracted scene exploring ideas of comfort and intimacy and need, so I can't say it felt exploitative, but it was an unexpected tangent, at the very least.
348 pages
Published 1993
Read from March 4 to March 13
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
After reading all those Year's Best Fantasy Stories anthologies from the 1970s, perhaps it's inevitable that I would pick up on the idea that The Innkeeper's Song is, essentially, a classic sword-and-sorcery tale seen through an intelligent, literate, humane lens. Or in other words, exactly what you'd expect if Peter S. Beagle tried his hand at it. There are battling wizards, extradimensional horrors, wandering heroes with tragic backstories and assassins hot on their heels, a perilous venture into the stronghold of the evil wizard, and much of the story takes place in and around the sort of crossroads inn found primarily in adventurers-on-a-quest fantasy (and hardly ever in history). But the characters feel distinct and well-rounded, fundamentally human in the best Beagle tradition, motivated by their emotional states, growing and changing through interaction. The emotional core of each character feels vivid and real.
The narration is excellent overall, after a forbidding start -- each the first eight or so chapters have a different narrator, relating overlapping sections of story from their own point of view, which felt a bit overwhelming at first, possibly because my brain is still muddy with whatever has been mucking up my reading abilities of late. But once each character established herself or himself in my head, this structure paid off with differing insights and complications, rather than merely spreading the story too thin, as multiple perspectives and main characters sometimes do (as in the later Song of Ice and Fire books). Multiple p.o.v.'s crowding for attention also made for perhaps one of the most memorable and unusual group sex scenes I've read to date, a thirty page opus (or derailment, depending on how you feel about it) bouncing between all four participants, as well as a shapeshifting fox (who, spoilers, turns out to be some kind of ancient extradimensional being later on). Beagle takes great pains to establish the emotional landscape leading to the foursome, and spends the protracted scene exploring ideas of comfort and intimacy and need, so I can't say it felt exploitative, but it was an unexpected tangent, at the very least.
Tuesday, March 3, 2015
2015 read #11: The Coast: A Journey Down the Atlantic Shore by Joseph J. Thorndike.
The Coast: A Journey Down the Atlantic Shore by Joseph J. Thorndike
234 pages
Published 1993
Read from March 2 to March 3
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
I don't know what I was hoping to find in this book, exactly. I didn't dare hope for ecological eloquence on the scale of Steve Nicholls' Paradise Found, but I did have in mind something of the quixotically domestic adventuring of Roger Deakin's Wildwood and Waterlog. With those examples in mind, I could only be disappointed by Thorndike's tame journalism, which reminded me of nothing so much as a softball profile piece you could find in any issue of National Geographic from the 1960s to the mid-1990s (back when National Geographic put some effort into text-based articles, before it devolved into a monthly picture book for readers with newsstand attention spans), stretched into the size of a small novel. Thorndike's text even follows the pattern of those bygone articles, framing his journey with brisk background description and asides into historical poetry, stopping to get flavor commentary from fishermen, wildlife refuge managers, local conservation leaders, local weekly editors, and the like, without ever examining any particular issue in detail. Add some Sam Abell photographs, and any regional cluster of chapters could be a cover article. I like old National Geographic articles -- I quit my subscription once I divined that the picture-book format was here to stay, a regrettable reality of the new print economy -- but in book form it's merely a pleasant diversion, a quick but not especially memorable read that makes me wish Roger Deakin had written more books.
234 pages
Published 1993
Read from March 2 to March 3
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
I don't know what I was hoping to find in this book, exactly. I didn't dare hope for ecological eloquence on the scale of Steve Nicholls' Paradise Found, but I did have in mind something of the quixotically domestic adventuring of Roger Deakin's Wildwood and Waterlog. With those examples in mind, I could only be disappointed by Thorndike's tame journalism, which reminded me of nothing so much as a softball profile piece you could find in any issue of National Geographic from the 1960s to the mid-1990s (back when National Geographic put some effort into text-based articles, before it devolved into a monthly picture book for readers with newsstand attention spans), stretched into the size of a small novel. Thorndike's text even follows the pattern of those bygone articles, framing his journey with brisk background description and asides into historical poetry, stopping to get flavor commentary from fishermen, wildlife refuge managers, local conservation leaders, local weekly editors, and the like, without ever examining any particular issue in detail. Add some Sam Abell photographs, and any regional cluster of chapters could be a cover article. I like old National Geographic articles -- I quit my subscription once I divined that the picture-book format was here to stay, a regrettable reality of the new print economy -- but in book form it's merely a pleasant diversion, a quick but not especially memorable read that makes me wish Roger Deakin had written more books.
Saturday, February 28, 2015
2015 read #10: Zoo City by Lauren Beukes.
Zoo City by Lauren Beukes
374 pages
Published 2010
Read from February 18 to February 28
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
A promising and at times evocative novel bristling with the quills of strange magic, Zoo City is dragged down by an excess of cyberpunk (or is it crustpunk?) prose stylings. Living as we do in the dystopian cyberpunk future, I think we can safely discard the now-antique mash of slang and awkwardly futuristic acronyms first pieced together back in the '80s. Perhaps elsewhere it's different, but I've certainly never heard anyone use the term "SMS" in casual conversation -- we just call it "texting," here in this future age. More embarrassing is the tendency for this self-consciously "fresh" and "with it" narrative voice to drop instantly dated pop culture references: "If Huron's grooves were an LP, they would be playing the Johnny Cash cover of Nine Inch Nails' 'Hurt'." I wince just quoting it.
Much of the novel is spent on what I would consider a thoroughly rote and uninteresting noir plot, tracking down a missing pop starlet, which turns out to be mostly a segue into a more interesting but rather rushed plot of magical murders and body part harvesting. The detailed setting and the exotic-to-me fantastical worldbuilding sustain Zoo City at a level well above what its stereotypical prose and initially formulaic plotting would ordinarily support.
374 pages
Published 2010
Read from February 18 to February 28
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
A promising and at times evocative novel bristling with the quills of strange magic, Zoo City is dragged down by an excess of cyberpunk (or is it crustpunk?) prose stylings. Living as we do in the dystopian cyberpunk future, I think we can safely discard the now-antique mash of slang and awkwardly futuristic acronyms first pieced together back in the '80s. Perhaps elsewhere it's different, but I've certainly never heard anyone use the term "SMS" in casual conversation -- we just call it "texting," here in this future age. More embarrassing is the tendency for this self-consciously "fresh" and "with it" narrative voice to drop instantly dated pop culture references: "If Huron's grooves were an LP, they would be playing the Johnny Cash cover of Nine Inch Nails' 'Hurt'." I wince just quoting it.
Much of the novel is spent on what I would consider a thoroughly rote and uninteresting noir plot, tracking down a missing pop starlet, which turns out to be mostly a segue into a more interesting but rather rushed plot of magical murders and body part harvesting. The detailed setting and the exotic-to-me fantastical worldbuilding sustain Zoo City at a level well above what its stereotypical prose and initially formulaic plotting would ordinarily support.
Monday, February 23, 2015
2015 read #9: The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 6, edited by Lin Carter.
The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 6, edited by Lin Carter
191 pages
Published 1980
Read from February 10 to February 23
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
Here we are, at last, marking not one but two transitions: this is the last YBFS curated by Lin Carter, master of self-promotion, and it's also the last YBFS covering the 1970s. I don't feel nostalgia for the exit of Carter -- his "particular enthusiasms" introduced me to a heap of grognard testosterone fantasy I otherwise would never have encountered, but I hated or at best endured nearly every page of it. I do feel sadness for the end of the '70s, however, because I did like a good handful of stories from these books, most notably George R. R. Martin's "The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr," but also "Astral Stray" by Adrian Cole, "The Land of Sorrow" by Phyllis Eisenstein, "Falcon's Mate" and "Ring of Black Stone" by Pat McIntosh, "The Dark King" by C. J. Cherryh, "The Lamp from Atlantis" by L. Sprague de Camp, and "Milord Sir Smiht, the English Wizard" by Avram Davidson, most of which are hard to imagine in the context of any other decade. There's a rough-hewn texture to most of these stories, quite removed from the dark and gritty (and often preposterous) nihilism of the 1980s, mingling the precocious urban fantasy of Unknown with the blood and thunder of the pulp tradition and yielding something distinct and memorable.
The end of the '70s YBFS books means the end, so far as I can tell, of easy-to-locate collections of fantasy fiction from the era. There might be occasional '70s fantasy stories in various F&SF retrospectives, though the collection The Best Fantasy Stories from the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction has, at most, a handful of entries from this decade. I have a book called Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment that includes one -- one! -- story originally published in the '70s. Once this YBFS is done, there will be slim pickings from here on out.
The two stories marked with a 1980 publication date -- both penned by Lin Carter, naturally -- were originally published in this volume.
"Garden of Blood" by Roger Zelazny (1979). Red-blooded hack-and-slash number that, while enjoyable in a sanguinary way, left me feeling at a disadvantage. This story on its own is intriguing but frustratingly incomplete -- one of the problems of serial fantasy adventure, when your first exposure to a character and a story universe comes toward the end of a long and built-up canon. I want to know more about this Dilvish and his beast/devil/robot/horse thing Black, and why Dilvish was revisiting a village 200 years after he'd last seen it, so it looks like I'll have to buy Dilvish, the Damned off Amazon one of these days.
"The Character Assassin" by Paul H. Cook (1979). Outstanding bit of metafiction prefiguring the 1980s cliche of "The author's creation is a psychotic force with a mind of its own." Like most new things in the days before they become cliche, Cook's tale has a freshness and clarity to it often lacking in the formulaic horror it augurs. Here, a character or a man (the distinction, fittingly, is left blurry) named Faraday slips into the various continuities of fiction to dispense "justice" to villainous or unpunished characters in classic novels. Cook's writer protagonist retains some pulp-age innocence, and Faraday meets literary justice of his own inside the writer's stalled novel, an ending the more nihilistic boundary-pushers of the coming decade would avoid in favor of, I don't know, the writer carrying Faraday's "justice" into the real world or something. Two stories in, and this YBFS already feels like the turning point I built it up to be, a crease between two vastly different decades and schools of fantasy.
"The Things That Are Gods" by John Brunner (1979). An epic narrative so densely concentrated, I found it hard to read at times. A tale of enormous scope and ambition, though the basic narrative -- a Gandalfian demiurge or godling, constrained to grant wishes to the extent permitted by the fabric of past actions across time, finds his work and his world nearly undone by his own power -- is comparatively simple. Brunner, author of Stand at Zanzibar (a novel so dense and avant garde that I took one look at the first page and gave up), has his demiurge keep all the insights and revelations close to his chest, not letting the reader in on what's going on until near the very end, which led to both frustration in the early going as well as a sense of anticlimax when all was revealed. I don't need every detail spelled out to me, but I felt this novelette was hindered by trying so hard to be sly. Nonetheless, this was an evocative tale that lingers in the imagination.
"Zurvan's Saint" by Grail Undwin (1980). The very last of Lin Carter's pseudonymous elf anecdotes, which despite his fulsome self-promotion, and praise for his own verve and originality, never amounted to more than a brief "Meh." This parting installment actually has the germ of an interesting idea -- I know, I'm as surprised as you are! -- with a medieval Irish priest taking a boat to Faerie and, without perceiving it, slowly altering his faith to suit the local conception of deity. But Carter does nothing and goes nowhere with it, concluding, "[Perhaps] it matters little which god you worship, or whether you worship any god at all, so long as you worship" -- which had to have been a stale old chestnut even in 1980.
"Perfidious Amber" by Tanith Lee (1979). A clever little tale of a poison ring, though somewhat musty in the telling. Diverting but, like most Lee stories, ultimately forgettable.
"The Mer She" by Fritz Leiber (1979). After the last two Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories in these YBFS volumes, my formerly high expectations have eroded into a species of dismay whenever I see Leiber's byline in the contents. This entry is, at least, better written than the Xanth-esque foolery of the previous two, but Leiber doubles down on the leering and exploitation, with our hero the Mouser tying up a seeming 13 year old girl "spread-eagled" in his cabin for his own sexual gratification, then playing the inevitable "She was actually a demon preying upon his poor defenseless masculine nature the whole time" trick, so obvious and predictable I had the general direction sussed out the moment a girl with green eyes and silver hair showed up at the wharf. A grognard masculist fantasy if ever there was one; even if it isn't as abysmal as the previous two Leiber stories in this series, it wasn't my kind of thing.
"Demon of the Snows" by Lin Carter (1980). What do you do if the magazine that was going to print your story folds and leaves your manuscript unpublished? If you're Lin Carter, why, you stick the story into your anthology of the "Year's Best" fantasy fiction! Not that Carter would have scrupled to include it here regardless, but such is the history of this, our final Lin Carter story -- hopefully, in my case, the last one ever. Braced for the worst, I found this story to be... not the absolute worst. It was still bland, predictable, banal fare, tracking Carter's Lemurian barbarian methodically from a mangled garrison (whose only survivor, naturally, is a young and supple barbarian girl who jumps Thongor's furs within a few days) to the rather prosaic lair of a dead wizard, whose ice worm, freed from its pit, has been hungrily crushing folks. But for whatever reason, I didn't recoil from Carter's prose as strongly as I do normally. Maybe it was because I was expecting worse, or maybe it's because the reading part of my brain is truly broken -- it has been ages, after all, since my reading progress was this sluggish.
"The Pavilion Where All Times Meet" by Jayge Carr (1979). A promising story struggling mightily to extricate itself from the stale morass of '70s sword 'n' sorcery. Like a lesser version of "The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr," this story pushes the imagery and language of '70s fantasy -- a haughty woman of power chewing her "perfumed lip" and inflicting arbitrary cruelty upon those who serve her; "bought brawn" and bandits; timeless magic contained within a cold, pestilential Waste -- into the shape of something new and bold, something bigger and subtler than the petty and monotonous battles of barbarians and warlocks, but unlike "Laren Dorr," "Pavilion" doesn't quite complete the transmutation. For one thing, the "woman without a future" doesn't transcend her tiresome "haughty woman of power" archetype, and the "man without a past," while an audacious and intriguing creation from the start, has an all-too-prosaic explanation for his plight. Still, this is a fine and absorbing entry, good if not necessarily great.
"Cryptically Yours" by Brian Lumley (1979). Lin Carter calls this "a wacky little yarn," set in a Lovecraft/Clark Ashton Smith mold of dueling sorcerers on "the Primal Continent at the Dawn of Time." I found it passably entertaining, a quaint and enjoyable trifle, though fairly predictable from the start.
"Red as Blood" by Tanith Lee (1979). Reading this, I was amazed (well, not that amazed, for I've read enough now to know how this works) at how thoroughly this prefigures Neil Gaiman's "Snow, Glass, Apples" (reviewed here). Gaiman's retelling of Snow White is more languorous, told in first person by the doomed stepmother; as can be expected, Lee's take, written during a less vigorous era of fantasy fiction, lacks polish, its faux-antique style stilted and occasionally rickety. Yet while Gaiman's version (in my words) "reads like a hot mess of cliches to me now," Lee's feels grander somehow, less bound to the cliches and expectations of its era. It also has a beautiful moment (only a moment) in which Satan is revealed to be the compassionate, eternally suffering son of God, "the left hand, the sinister hand of God's design," which trumps Gaiman's weird-but-trendy incest angle. I might sniff at its Christological ending, but Lee's story is flat-out excellent -- the first truly excellent story of hers I've ever encountered. I'd have to reread "Snow, Glass, Apples" to decide which is better, but for now, let's say I'm leaning in Lee's favor.
"Sandmagic" by Orson Scott Card (1979). Even leaving aside the recent assholery of Card, because this story was published long before he became quite so vocal about his vile ideas, I'm surprised to find I really like this entry. I didn't think I would at first, but the story grew as it progressed, attaining a scale and a sense of loss and humanity one wouldn't suspect from its unpromising opening. Captured on paper here is a true transitional animal, a sword 'n' sorcery tale halfway between the Howard-derived thews-and-sinews species and the more Tolkien-influenced epics of the coming decade. Maybe a little over halfway, actually. Many of the hallmarks of 1980s fantasy are here: the morally suspect antihero, the first crude and simplistic attempts at psychological realism, the "realistic" and "gritty" (but honestly just gratuitous) gore and violence, magic based on love and hate rather than arcane runes and elder gods. The clearest vestige of the '70s is a certain clunkiness of prose style, but if we're honest with ourselves, much fantasy retains clunky prose to this day.
At last, some thirteen days since I last finished a book, we arrive at the end. At least Lin Carter went out on a high note (though my cynical side questions whether this was Carter's organic choice, and not pressure from the publisher to leave out all that grognard shit Carter loved so much in favor of something the new fantasy audiences might want to read). I might have been reading this book with a narrative of transition in mind, but there was definitely something different going on in this volume. I might miss some aspects of '70s fantasy, but I'm looking forward to the sleek and dazzling veneer of the 1980s.
191 pages
Published 1980
Read from February 10 to February 23
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
Here we are, at last, marking not one but two transitions: this is the last YBFS curated by Lin Carter, master of self-promotion, and it's also the last YBFS covering the 1970s. I don't feel nostalgia for the exit of Carter -- his "particular enthusiasms" introduced me to a heap of grognard testosterone fantasy I otherwise would never have encountered, but I hated or at best endured nearly every page of it. I do feel sadness for the end of the '70s, however, because I did like a good handful of stories from these books, most notably George R. R. Martin's "The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr," but also "Astral Stray" by Adrian Cole, "The Land of Sorrow" by Phyllis Eisenstein, "Falcon's Mate" and "Ring of Black Stone" by Pat McIntosh, "The Dark King" by C. J. Cherryh, "The Lamp from Atlantis" by L. Sprague de Camp, and "Milord Sir Smiht, the English Wizard" by Avram Davidson, most of which are hard to imagine in the context of any other decade. There's a rough-hewn texture to most of these stories, quite removed from the dark and gritty (and often preposterous) nihilism of the 1980s, mingling the precocious urban fantasy of Unknown with the blood and thunder of the pulp tradition and yielding something distinct and memorable.
The end of the '70s YBFS books means the end, so far as I can tell, of easy-to-locate collections of fantasy fiction from the era. There might be occasional '70s fantasy stories in various F&SF retrospectives, though the collection The Best Fantasy Stories from the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction has, at most, a handful of entries from this decade. I have a book called Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment that includes one -- one! -- story originally published in the '70s. Once this YBFS is done, there will be slim pickings from here on out.
The two stories marked with a 1980 publication date -- both penned by Lin Carter, naturally -- were originally published in this volume.
"Garden of Blood" by Roger Zelazny (1979). Red-blooded hack-and-slash number that, while enjoyable in a sanguinary way, left me feeling at a disadvantage. This story on its own is intriguing but frustratingly incomplete -- one of the problems of serial fantasy adventure, when your first exposure to a character and a story universe comes toward the end of a long and built-up canon. I want to know more about this Dilvish and his beast/devil/robot/horse thing Black, and why Dilvish was revisiting a village 200 years after he'd last seen it, so it looks like I'll have to buy Dilvish, the Damned off Amazon one of these days.
"The Character Assassin" by Paul H. Cook (1979). Outstanding bit of metafiction prefiguring the 1980s cliche of "The author's creation is a psychotic force with a mind of its own." Like most new things in the days before they become cliche, Cook's tale has a freshness and clarity to it often lacking in the formulaic horror it augurs. Here, a character or a man (the distinction, fittingly, is left blurry) named Faraday slips into the various continuities of fiction to dispense "justice" to villainous or unpunished characters in classic novels. Cook's writer protagonist retains some pulp-age innocence, and Faraday meets literary justice of his own inside the writer's stalled novel, an ending the more nihilistic boundary-pushers of the coming decade would avoid in favor of, I don't know, the writer carrying Faraday's "justice" into the real world or something. Two stories in, and this YBFS already feels like the turning point I built it up to be, a crease between two vastly different decades and schools of fantasy.
"The Things That Are Gods" by John Brunner (1979). An epic narrative so densely concentrated, I found it hard to read at times. A tale of enormous scope and ambition, though the basic narrative -- a Gandalfian demiurge or godling, constrained to grant wishes to the extent permitted by the fabric of past actions across time, finds his work and his world nearly undone by his own power -- is comparatively simple. Brunner, author of Stand at Zanzibar (a novel so dense and avant garde that I took one look at the first page and gave up), has his demiurge keep all the insights and revelations close to his chest, not letting the reader in on what's going on until near the very end, which led to both frustration in the early going as well as a sense of anticlimax when all was revealed. I don't need every detail spelled out to me, but I felt this novelette was hindered by trying so hard to be sly. Nonetheless, this was an evocative tale that lingers in the imagination.
"Zurvan's Saint" by Grail Undwin (1980). The very last of Lin Carter's pseudonymous elf anecdotes, which despite his fulsome self-promotion, and praise for his own verve and originality, never amounted to more than a brief "Meh." This parting installment actually has the germ of an interesting idea -- I know, I'm as surprised as you are! -- with a medieval Irish priest taking a boat to Faerie and, without perceiving it, slowly altering his faith to suit the local conception of deity. But Carter does nothing and goes nowhere with it, concluding, "[Perhaps] it matters little which god you worship, or whether you worship any god at all, so long as you worship" -- which had to have been a stale old chestnut even in 1980.
"Perfidious Amber" by Tanith Lee (1979). A clever little tale of a poison ring, though somewhat musty in the telling. Diverting but, like most Lee stories, ultimately forgettable.
"The Mer She" by Fritz Leiber (1979). After the last two Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories in these YBFS volumes, my formerly high expectations have eroded into a species of dismay whenever I see Leiber's byline in the contents. This entry is, at least, better written than the Xanth-esque foolery of the previous two, but Leiber doubles down on the leering and exploitation, with our hero the Mouser tying up a seeming 13 year old girl "spread-eagled" in his cabin for his own sexual gratification, then playing the inevitable "She was actually a demon preying upon his poor defenseless masculine nature the whole time" trick, so obvious and predictable I had the general direction sussed out the moment a girl with green eyes and silver hair showed up at the wharf. A grognard masculist fantasy if ever there was one; even if it isn't as abysmal as the previous two Leiber stories in this series, it wasn't my kind of thing.
"Demon of the Snows" by Lin Carter (1980). What do you do if the magazine that was going to print your story folds and leaves your manuscript unpublished? If you're Lin Carter, why, you stick the story into your anthology of the "Year's Best" fantasy fiction! Not that Carter would have scrupled to include it here regardless, but such is the history of this, our final Lin Carter story -- hopefully, in my case, the last one ever. Braced for the worst, I found this story to be... not the absolute worst. It was still bland, predictable, banal fare, tracking Carter's Lemurian barbarian methodically from a mangled garrison (whose only survivor, naturally, is a young and supple barbarian girl who jumps Thongor's furs within a few days) to the rather prosaic lair of a dead wizard, whose ice worm, freed from its pit, has been hungrily crushing folks. But for whatever reason, I didn't recoil from Carter's prose as strongly as I do normally. Maybe it was because I was expecting worse, or maybe it's because the reading part of my brain is truly broken -- it has been ages, after all, since my reading progress was this sluggish.
"The Pavilion Where All Times Meet" by Jayge Carr (1979). A promising story struggling mightily to extricate itself from the stale morass of '70s sword 'n' sorcery. Like a lesser version of "The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr," this story pushes the imagery and language of '70s fantasy -- a haughty woman of power chewing her "perfumed lip" and inflicting arbitrary cruelty upon those who serve her; "bought brawn" and bandits; timeless magic contained within a cold, pestilential Waste -- into the shape of something new and bold, something bigger and subtler than the petty and monotonous battles of barbarians and warlocks, but unlike "Laren Dorr," "Pavilion" doesn't quite complete the transmutation. For one thing, the "woman without a future" doesn't transcend her tiresome "haughty woman of power" archetype, and the "man without a past," while an audacious and intriguing creation from the start, has an all-too-prosaic explanation for his plight. Still, this is a fine and absorbing entry, good if not necessarily great.
"Cryptically Yours" by Brian Lumley (1979). Lin Carter calls this "a wacky little yarn," set in a Lovecraft/Clark Ashton Smith mold of dueling sorcerers on "the Primal Continent at the Dawn of Time." I found it passably entertaining, a quaint and enjoyable trifle, though fairly predictable from the start.
"Red as Blood" by Tanith Lee (1979). Reading this, I was amazed (well, not that amazed, for I've read enough now to know how this works) at how thoroughly this prefigures Neil Gaiman's "Snow, Glass, Apples" (reviewed here). Gaiman's retelling of Snow White is more languorous, told in first person by the doomed stepmother; as can be expected, Lee's take, written during a less vigorous era of fantasy fiction, lacks polish, its faux-antique style stilted and occasionally rickety. Yet while Gaiman's version (in my words) "reads like a hot mess of cliches to me now," Lee's feels grander somehow, less bound to the cliches and expectations of its era. It also has a beautiful moment (only a moment) in which Satan is revealed to be the compassionate, eternally suffering son of God, "the left hand, the sinister hand of God's design," which trumps Gaiman's weird-but-trendy incest angle. I might sniff at its Christological ending, but Lee's story is flat-out excellent -- the first truly excellent story of hers I've ever encountered. I'd have to reread "Snow, Glass, Apples" to decide which is better, but for now, let's say I'm leaning in Lee's favor.
"Sandmagic" by Orson Scott Card (1979). Even leaving aside the recent assholery of Card, because this story was published long before he became quite so vocal about his vile ideas, I'm surprised to find I really like this entry. I didn't think I would at first, but the story grew as it progressed, attaining a scale and a sense of loss and humanity one wouldn't suspect from its unpromising opening. Captured on paper here is a true transitional animal, a sword 'n' sorcery tale halfway between the Howard-derived thews-and-sinews species and the more Tolkien-influenced epics of the coming decade. Maybe a little over halfway, actually. Many of the hallmarks of 1980s fantasy are here: the morally suspect antihero, the first crude and simplistic attempts at psychological realism, the "realistic" and "gritty" (but honestly just gratuitous) gore and violence, magic based on love and hate rather than arcane runes and elder gods. The clearest vestige of the '70s is a certain clunkiness of prose style, but if we're honest with ourselves, much fantasy retains clunky prose to this day.
At last, some thirteen days since I last finished a book, we arrive at the end. At least Lin Carter went out on a high note (though my cynical side questions whether this was Carter's organic choice, and not pressure from the publisher to leave out all that grognard shit Carter loved so much in favor of something the new fantasy audiences might want to read). I might have been reading this book with a narrative of transition in mind, but there was definitely something different going on in this volume. I might miss some aspects of '70s fantasy, but I'm looking forward to the sleek and dazzling veneer of the 1980s.
Tuesday, February 10, 2015
2015 read #8: Three Men on the Bummel by Jerome K. Jerome.
Three Men on the Bummel by Jerome K. Jerome
Endnotes by Jeremy Lewis
181 pages
Published 1900
Read from February 8 to February 10
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Two stages in the evolution of the leisure classes are of particular interest to me (three if you count backpacking): the "flivver" age, and the mania for bicycle touring immediately before it. I learned about this book not from a Connie Willis time travel novel (which got me into Three Men in a Boat), but through researching "new" H. G. Wells novels to read. It seems Wells wrote a comic novel called The Wheels of Chance, drawing from the experience of a cycling holiday. Amazon reviewers compared Wells' effort unfavorably to Three Men on the Bummel, a tendency I noted but largely forgot about until I ILL'd a copy of Three Men in a Boat that came bundled with Bummel.
On the whole, Boat is the stronger (and funnier) novel, but Bummel is more consistent in tone, eschewing the Romantic and morbid interludes of Jerome's fictionalized river journey. Sadly, little cycling is actually described; Jerome from the outset devotes most of his space to comic digressions and ethnological observations, tossing out a couple bicycling anecdotes for flavor early on but thereafter concentrating on a satirical look at the German in his native land. Two things, apparently, have changed little in 115 years: jokes about bicycle seats, and jokes about the rigid, robotic, obedient German. The back cover blurb notes the "with hindsight, prophetic" insights into the German state of mind, an inadvertent prophecy that really only occupies a couple lines: "Hitherto, the German has had the blessed fortune to be exceptionally well governed; if this continues, all will go well with him. When his troubles will begin will be when by any chance something goes wrong with the governing machine."
Endnotes by Jeremy Lewis
181 pages
Published 1900
Read from February 8 to February 10
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Two stages in the evolution of the leisure classes are of particular interest to me (three if you count backpacking): the "flivver" age, and the mania for bicycle touring immediately before it. I learned about this book not from a Connie Willis time travel novel (which got me into Three Men in a Boat), but through researching "new" H. G. Wells novels to read. It seems Wells wrote a comic novel called The Wheels of Chance, drawing from the experience of a cycling holiday. Amazon reviewers compared Wells' effort unfavorably to Three Men on the Bummel, a tendency I noted but largely forgot about until I ILL'd a copy of Three Men in a Boat that came bundled with Bummel.
On the whole, Boat is the stronger (and funnier) novel, but Bummel is more consistent in tone, eschewing the Romantic and morbid interludes of Jerome's fictionalized river journey. Sadly, little cycling is actually described; Jerome from the outset devotes most of his space to comic digressions and ethnological observations, tossing out a couple bicycling anecdotes for flavor early on but thereafter concentrating on a satirical look at the German in his native land. Two things, apparently, have changed little in 115 years: jokes about bicycle seats, and jokes about the rigid, robotic, obedient German. The back cover blurb notes the "with hindsight, prophetic" insights into the German state of mind, an inadvertent prophecy that really only occupies a couple lines: "Hitherto, the German has had the blessed fortune to be exceptionally well governed; if this continues, all will go well with him. When his troubles will begin will be when by any chance something goes wrong with the governing machine."
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