Creating Black Americans: African-American History and Its Meanings, 1619 to the Present by Nell Irvin Painter
366 pages
Published 2006
Read from December 26 to December 31
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
The phrase "white guilt" is commonly used to mock social progressives by the more regressive elements of society. It is also employed by activists of color to deflate the self-aggrandizing tendencies of white "allies" who mouth progressive phrases but crowd black (or Native, or Latino, or Asian) commentators out of the spotlight. Yet on a more basic level, "white guilt" describes something that all white Americans should seek out, an antidote (however limited and feeble) to our entitled ignorance and privileged worldview.
This book isn't perfect. It's written as an undergraduate textbook (or possibly even high school textbook, if high schools bothered with such things as actual history), presenting easily digestible facts and figures, repeating them as necessary, and summing up key points at the conclusion of each chapter, as if coaching the reader for a multiple choice midterm. The sardonic humor and understatement of Painter's The History of White People is sadly lacking here, though it peeps through in one or two spots. The broad scope of Painter's history here necessitates a greatest-hits approach, barely skimming the broad motions of any given era; deeper understanding, inevitably, means seeking out more detailed and specific works, with Creating Black Americans as only the starting point. But this is a necessary book. The general story of African American history we absorb in this country -- captive Africans made into a slave labor force, the horrors of plantation life, Lincoln setting everyone free, then total invisibility until Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King fixed everything in the 1960s -- is as glib as it is inaccurate and incomplete. The fuller story told here fills in important gaps in American history: the brief, precocious rise of black civil rights during Reconstruction, including a black senator and six black congressmen; the white terrorism that defeated Reconstruction and essentially re-enslaved the Southern black population; the anger and violence of the 1970s; the endless ways the white power structure undercut black opportunity, from poll taxes to discriminatory lending practices, and how these contributed to the decay of black urban centers and prefigured the more ubiquitous financial inequalities of the present day. These are essential parts of American history, the vital context that makes the current racial tensions and abuses of (white) power part of an ongoing (and sadly obvious) story.
This book joins The History of White People, Chang's The Chinese in America, and Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee in my embryonic (but growing) "white guilt" reading list. It would be easy to say something like, "The people who really need to read these books are the white regressives who think 'white guilt' is a derogatory term." But that would be denying my own ignorance and privilege. Every American should learn this generally forgotten or ignored history. Goodness knows I'm still ignorant as hell, and need ever more histories from non-white and non-privileged perspectives going forward.
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
Thursday, December 25, 2014
2014 read #123: The Iron Dragon's Daughter by Michael Swanwick.
The Iron Dragon's Daughter by Michael Swanwick
424 pages
Published 1994
Read from December 19 to December 25
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
Here's a curious reaction: I feel this could have been the best fantasy book I'd ever read -- if I had been someone else.
This book has power. It has ambition. It has a young woman riding a dragon into the center of creation, screaming rage and defiance at existence and fate, to destroy the universe. It leers in uncomfortable ways and then unfolds a delicate trick of imagery and wording to leave you stunned.
It also, for an unfortunate amount of its length, left me utterly bored.
I just don't get into "young and dissipated protagonist snorts drugs and fights with friends and goes to parties and snorts drugs" storylines, no matter how dressed up with magic and creatures from folklore. I had the same problem with the middle passage of Lev Grossman's The Magicians: wizards having sex and getting trashed in loft apartments is no more interesting to me than any other white yuppies doing the same thing in any number of numbingly identical literary novels. Long stretches of The Iron Dragon's Daughter are reskinned transcriptions of some platonic ideal of the disaffected-yet-affluent '90s joint, substituting a magical or fantastical word for the appurtenances of dreary realism, a point-for-point allegory so thorough it tends to lose any sense of magic or fantasy altogether. If I were a different person, the sort of person who might adore dreary realism and find pleasure in finding it so archly recast, I could enjoy those segments as well as the rest of the novel. But I'm not that person, and Jane's college adventures left me cold.
There is so much terrific stuff here, I'm almost tempted to bump my rating up despite all that, but whatever, ratings are meaningless, and my brain is wheezing along barely able to put a sentence together, so I'll stop.
424 pages
Published 1994
Read from December 19 to December 25
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
Here's a curious reaction: I feel this could have been the best fantasy book I'd ever read -- if I had been someone else.
This book has power. It has ambition. It has a young woman riding a dragon into the center of creation, screaming rage and defiance at existence and fate, to destroy the universe. It leers in uncomfortable ways and then unfolds a delicate trick of imagery and wording to leave you stunned.
It also, for an unfortunate amount of its length, left me utterly bored.
I just don't get into "young and dissipated protagonist snorts drugs and fights with friends and goes to parties and snorts drugs" storylines, no matter how dressed up with magic and creatures from folklore. I had the same problem with the middle passage of Lev Grossman's The Magicians: wizards having sex and getting trashed in loft apartments is no more interesting to me than any other white yuppies doing the same thing in any number of numbingly identical literary novels. Long stretches of The Iron Dragon's Daughter are reskinned transcriptions of some platonic ideal of the disaffected-yet-affluent '90s joint, substituting a magical or fantastical word for the appurtenances of dreary realism, a point-for-point allegory so thorough it tends to lose any sense of magic or fantasy altogether. If I were a different person, the sort of person who might adore dreary realism and find pleasure in finding it so archly recast, I could enjoy those segments as well as the rest of the novel. But I'm not that person, and Jane's college adventures left me cold.
There is so much terrific stuff here, I'm almost tempted to bump my rating up despite all that, but whatever, ratings are meaningless, and my brain is wheezing along barely able to put a sentence together, so I'll stop.
Friday, December 19, 2014
2014 read #122: Dr. Bloodmoney by Philip K. Dick.
Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb by Philip K. Dick
222 pages
Published 1965
Read from December 14 to December 19
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
I like Philip K. Dick, kinda. I like postapocalyptic fiction, kinda. I never thought I'd be this bored when the two came together.
Dick, as I've said somewhere before, had his thematic fixations: What is reality? How do we perceive reality? How do we know what's real and what isn't -- and how does it matter? It's all very interesting in small doses, I suppose, but seemingly every one of his novels is like PHI 101, watered down with an extra helping of reductive psychology and Jungian analysis. I like him for the imaginative touches and twists he builds up from that thematic substratum, such as Walt Dangerfield, stranded in an orbiting capsule after World War III, a DJ marooned in space and humanity's last radio-broadcast link to civilization and each other, but in this case, the clever furnishings of the story were overshadowed by the reductive elephant in the room.
I didn't mind so much about the titular character -- Dick churns out paranoid schizophrenics like it's his job or something, and gifting Dr. Bluthgeld with the psychocreative and telekinetic faculties to amplify his own delusional worldview (and instigate nuclear warfare), while kind of a retread of Eye in the Sky, was not actively off-putting. No, what pulled and shoved and kicked me out of the story was Hoppy Harrington: villainous cliche, evil cripple, psychologically simplistic overcompensator with the psychic wherewithal to make real his need for recognition and power. And that was before we met Bill Keller, absorbed parasitic twin with powerful psychic abilities and a direct line to the hereafter. The novel has an overcrowded and undercooked feel, as if Dick scraped together leavings that weren't enough by themselves to make a cohesive story and threw them all in the pot to simmer for a few minutes. Which is a shame -- I gladly would have read two hundred pages of Walt Dangerfield passing on the news and horticulture tips between different parts of the post-nuclear wasteland.
222 pages
Published 1965
Read from December 14 to December 19
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
I like Philip K. Dick, kinda. I like postapocalyptic fiction, kinda. I never thought I'd be this bored when the two came together.
Dick, as I've said somewhere before, had his thematic fixations: What is reality? How do we perceive reality? How do we know what's real and what isn't -- and how does it matter? It's all very interesting in small doses, I suppose, but seemingly every one of his novels is like PHI 101, watered down with an extra helping of reductive psychology and Jungian analysis. I like him for the imaginative touches and twists he builds up from that thematic substratum, such as Walt Dangerfield, stranded in an orbiting capsule after World War III, a DJ marooned in space and humanity's last radio-broadcast link to civilization and each other, but in this case, the clever furnishings of the story were overshadowed by the reductive elephant in the room.
I didn't mind so much about the titular character -- Dick churns out paranoid schizophrenics like it's his job or something, and gifting Dr. Bluthgeld with the psychocreative and telekinetic faculties to amplify his own delusional worldview (and instigate nuclear warfare), while kind of a retread of Eye in the Sky, was not actively off-putting. No, what pulled and shoved and kicked me out of the story was Hoppy Harrington: villainous cliche, evil cripple, psychologically simplistic overcompensator with the psychic wherewithal to make real his need for recognition and power. And that was before we met Bill Keller, absorbed parasitic twin with powerful psychic abilities and a direct line to the hereafter. The novel has an overcrowded and undercooked feel, as if Dick scraped together leavings that weren't enough by themselves to make a cohesive story and threw them all in the pot to simmer for a few minutes. Which is a shame -- I gladly would have read two hundred pages of Walt Dangerfield passing on the news and horticulture tips between different parts of the post-nuclear wasteland.
Wednesday, December 17, 2014
2014 read #121: The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 4, edited by Lin Carter.
The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 4, edited by Lin Carter
208 pages
Published 1978
Read from December 14 to December 17
Rating: ★½ out of 5
There's been a gradual but definite sense of improvement since the first YBFS -- better-written, less ham-fisted stories have been stealing space from the grognard Elder Horrors and Swollen Thews entries, likely reflecting a reluctant shift in Lin Carter's editorial policies rather than any observable shift in the genre. I'm hoping this trend continues -- though I'm trying not to get my heart set on it. This is Lin Carter, after all.
Same bookkeeping note from the last YBFS: at least three of the eleven stories here are previously unpublished, appearing in print for the first time in these pages. Those stories are noted in my review with the 1978 publication date; the rest, published elsewhere, are from 1977.
"The Tale of Hauk" by Poul Anderson (1977). Read and reviewed in Modern Classics of Fantasy, where I called it an "Unremarkable, non-essential bit of supernatural Nordic fluffery." Unsurprising to find it here.
"A Farmer on the Clyde" by Grail Undwin (1978). Lin Carter goes into raptures describing this new author: "Miss Undwin I may modestly claim as my own discovery," he says here, while in YBFS:5 (I peeked ahead), he adds, "I am enormously fond of Grail Undwin, because I discovered her all by myself.... [F]rom the first page of [her] first story I was hooked. Nobody ever wrote fairy tales like these before: they break all the rules and get away with the trick superbly." The kicker, naturally, is that "Grail Undwin" is Lin Carter. Back in the day, when I ran a minor SF zine, I was guilty of occasionally padding out issues with stories I wrote under assumed names, but not once did I praise my alter-egos as rule-breaking, genre-shaking titans. And I only edited an online amateur market. Carter is curating the only (so far as I know) "year's best fantasy" series of its time, and choosing to put his own previously unpublished manuscripts in them under assumed names while fulsomely praising himself for originality, rule-breaking, and mastery of the form. So yeah, Lin Carter was a complete tool, Gorm rest his soul. That prejudices me against this story -- I've been waiting to rip into it for the past two weeks, in fact, after reading Lin Carter's wiki page. After all that buildup, however, I find I can muster no strong feelings one way or the other about this story. It's a whole lot of scene-setting about the monarchical ambitions of a particular elf-lord, and then a single page detailing the elf-lord catching sight of an aged, long-defeated, but ultimately joyful Bonnie Prince Charlie, and deciding that, if a mortal can be content without a crown, he can be content as well. It is by far the least unpleasant of Lin Carter's works (that I've read so far), but it's just kind of... there.
"Prince Alcouz and the Magician" by Clark Ashton Smith (1977). Apparently an early, unpublished manuscript, untampered-with by Carter or any other carrion bird. Not a Hyperborean tale, or any other morbid Cosmicist stuff; this is a straightforward Orientalist fable about a dissipated prince and the wandering Hindustani magician who tells his fortune. Forgettable.
"Nekht Semerkeht" by Robert E. Howard and Andrew J. Offutt (1977). Howard's final story, left unfinished when he suicided, this is a conquistador western reminiscent of the early works of Scott O'Dell, only pulpier and more intrinsically racist and misogynistic (and with more ancient Egyptian necromancers). This story belabors the conquistador's cynicism and low opinion for human nature, his every-man-is-out-for-himself worldview -- a pulpy, man's man philosophy that could be the subject of an interesting sociological thesis or two (how, for instance, might pulp ideas of manhood relate to today's culture of toxic masculinity?). As far as racist, misogynistic old hyper-masculine pulp adventure goes, this was at least adequately entertaining -- up until the denouement, in which our bold hero, now ruler of the city of gold, gives his new queen a split lip to keep her in her place.
"The Pillars of Hell" by Lin Carter (1978). Examining the copyright page, I have concluded that this is a second previously unpublished story of Lin Carter's that he found necessary to include in the year's best fantasy stories. What a self-regarding tool. Our mighty narrator takes the time to acquaint us with his "swelling thews and rippling muscles, the square cut of my jaw and the fearless glint of my blue eyes," as well as the "oily" and "hunched and flabby and ill-favored" cliche that is his rival. Standard Aryan manhood fantasy. Nothing interesting.
"Lok the Depressor" by Philip Coakley (1978). Google reveals nothing whatsoever about this "new author" beyond this single story -- seriously, not a single word. I'm tempted to assume that, once again, Lin Carter wrote a pastiche of someone else's style (claiming, in his introduction to this story, that this so-called Coakley "comes as close to writing like Jack Vance as anyone I have ever read") and shoved it, previously unpublished, into the year's best fantasy stories, under another assumed name. In fact, that's exactly what this reads like -- even admitting my personal bias, I insist that this reads nothing at all like Vance and wholly like Carter. There's the fixation on the young tomb raider's physiognomy, the cartoonish menace of the demons of the Wastes, the turgid dialogue, the abuse of exclamation marks: all signs of Carter's hand. Wikipedia doesn't list Philip Coakley as one of Carter's "known" aliases, but if my hunch is correct -- god, what a tool. Also, this story sucks a lot and is worse by far than even a mediocre Dying Earth tale.
"Hark! Was That the Squeal of an Angry Throat?" by Avram Davidson (1977). I've never been disappointed by an Avram Davidson story -- but can he salvage this hundred-page slide into ignominy and self-regarding twaddle? I dunno. This entry certainly is some kind of thing. I couldn't even begin to categorize it, so I'll (reluctantly) accede to Carter's charge that this is "a mere anecdote, and second cousin to a shaggy dog story." It has an antique New York City pulp feel to it (reminiscent of certain 1960s sci-fi shorts I've read), mixed with a sort of Jewish comic yarn, swerving without warning among the narrator's neighbors in a picturesque tenement district, populated by no end of mid-century caricatures and types, all flung together in a breathless rush. It's entertaining, yes; and then John Carter of Mars shows up, and it's all po-mo and I'm lost but enjoying it. A little baffling, but good.
"The Cloak of Dreams" by Pat McIntosh (1978). The copyright page lists this as "The Girl in the Leather Cloak"; I sense some Lin Carter-y meddling afoot. This is only so-so for a Thula tale -- though even a so-so Thula tale is bounds and bounds better than everything else featured so far in this collection, with the exception of the Davidson yarn. The story hinges on a magical mystery -- where is the missing boyfriend? -- though so much is left unsaid that the denouement, though its outline was obvious almost from the start, doesn't seem to follow any traceable line of reasoning from the clues we're given. McIntosh's light touch ordinarily enhances her stories, but here I think I would have preferred just a shade more exposition for once. (Maybe the problem is I'm running low on sleep lately.)
"The Land of Sorrow" by Phyllis Eisenstein (1977). This story showed me that I've long held an unconscious desire to see high fantasy written for the esthetic and standards of F&SF. This is an understated, thoughtful piece that takes its time establishing a place and a mood, elevating an otherwise unremarkable pseudomedieval setting, developing a gothic mystery in a hidden valley that held my interest until, sadly, it turned out to be a fairly generic magical sadist ruler. Even that disappointment doesn't linger, as Alaric the minstrel's escape from the Red Lord is complicated in an unexpectedly moving fashion. I can say, without reservations, that I would read many more stories of this cautious and sensitive adventurer.
"Odds Against the Gods" by Tanith Lee (1977). Picaresque silliness mingling early hints of 1980s fantasy (our first coy instance of lesbianism! BDSM "brides" for a god of pain!) with the stale leftovers of the '70s (technicolored landscape, easily hoodwinked stooges, a dying sun), all played for broad comedy. I chuckled once, it must be admitted, but this story is overlong for the minimal effect it produces.
"The Changer of Names" by Ramsey Campbell (1977). Lin Carter calls this one a "very unorthodox" sword 'n' sorcery tale; I call it moderately original. The central conceit, that a hero's name and deeds are a form of magic built up during adventures and liable to injury by defamation or theft by sorcery, is rather amusing; it wouldn't be out of place in the taverns and streets of Ankh-Morpork, nor would the huge crowd of hooded thieves that suddenly materializes at the end. Yet Campbell plays the story completely straight, making for an odd tonal dissonance between delightfully satirical premise and serious execution. It's an entertaining story on its own terms -- hardly a forgotten classic, but certainly passable.
Well, it seems I overestimated the trajectory of these collections. This was a definite step down after the last two YBFS editions, not least because Lin Carter took at least two (and most likely three) of eleven slots to foist his tiresome and self-indulgent claptrap on us. Even leaving his leavings aside, this collection just wasn't that good, with a mediocre Thula installment and nothing whatsoever on par with "The Dark King," "The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr," or "The Lamp." I mean, everything from the Avram Davidson story all the way to the end -- the second half, almost, if you go by page count -- was at least tolerable. But without standouts, it's hard to muster enthusiasm for the contents of this volume.
208 pages
Published 1978
Read from December 14 to December 17
Rating: ★½ out of 5
There's been a gradual but definite sense of improvement since the first YBFS -- better-written, less ham-fisted stories have been stealing space from the grognard Elder Horrors and Swollen Thews entries, likely reflecting a reluctant shift in Lin Carter's editorial policies rather than any observable shift in the genre. I'm hoping this trend continues -- though I'm trying not to get my heart set on it. This is Lin Carter, after all.
Same bookkeeping note from the last YBFS: at least three of the eleven stories here are previously unpublished, appearing in print for the first time in these pages. Those stories are noted in my review with the 1978 publication date; the rest, published elsewhere, are from 1977.
"The Tale of Hauk" by Poul Anderson (1977). Read and reviewed in Modern Classics of Fantasy, where I called it an "Unremarkable, non-essential bit of supernatural Nordic fluffery." Unsurprising to find it here.
"A Farmer on the Clyde" by Grail Undwin (1978). Lin Carter goes into raptures describing this new author: "Miss Undwin I may modestly claim as my own discovery," he says here, while in YBFS:5 (I peeked ahead), he adds, "I am enormously fond of Grail Undwin, because I discovered her all by myself.... [F]rom the first page of [her] first story I was hooked. Nobody ever wrote fairy tales like these before: they break all the rules and get away with the trick superbly." The kicker, naturally, is that "Grail Undwin" is Lin Carter. Back in the day, when I ran a minor SF zine, I was guilty of occasionally padding out issues with stories I wrote under assumed names, but not once did I praise my alter-egos as rule-breaking, genre-shaking titans. And I only edited an online amateur market. Carter is curating the only (so far as I know) "year's best fantasy" series of its time, and choosing to put his own previously unpublished manuscripts in them under assumed names while fulsomely praising himself for originality, rule-breaking, and mastery of the form. So yeah, Lin Carter was a complete tool, Gorm rest his soul. That prejudices me against this story -- I've been waiting to rip into it for the past two weeks, in fact, after reading Lin Carter's wiki page. After all that buildup, however, I find I can muster no strong feelings one way or the other about this story. It's a whole lot of scene-setting about the monarchical ambitions of a particular elf-lord, and then a single page detailing the elf-lord catching sight of an aged, long-defeated, but ultimately joyful Bonnie Prince Charlie, and deciding that, if a mortal can be content without a crown, he can be content as well. It is by far the least unpleasant of Lin Carter's works (that I've read so far), but it's just kind of... there.
"Prince Alcouz and the Magician" by Clark Ashton Smith (1977). Apparently an early, unpublished manuscript, untampered-with by Carter or any other carrion bird. Not a Hyperborean tale, or any other morbid Cosmicist stuff; this is a straightforward Orientalist fable about a dissipated prince and the wandering Hindustani magician who tells his fortune. Forgettable.
"Nekht Semerkeht" by Robert E. Howard and Andrew J. Offutt (1977). Howard's final story, left unfinished when he suicided, this is a conquistador western reminiscent of the early works of Scott O'Dell, only pulpier and more intrinsically racist and misogynistic (and with more ancient Egyptian necromancers). This story belabors the conquistador's cynicism and low opinion for human nature, his every-man-is-out-for-himself worldview -- a pulpy, man's man philosophy that could be the subject of an interesting sociological thesis or two (how, for instance, might pulp ideas of manhood relate to today's culture of toxic masculinity?). As far as racist, misogynistic old hyper-masculine pulp adventure goes, this was at least adequately entertaining -- up until the denouement, in which our bold hero, now ruler of the city of gold, gives his new queen a split lip to keep her in her place.
"The Pillars of Hell" by Lin Carter (1978). Examining the copyright page, I have concluded that this is a second previously unpublished story of Lin Carter's that he found necessary to include in the year's best fantasy stories. What a self-regarding tool. Our mighty narrator takes the time to acquaint us with his "swelling thews and rippling muscles, the square cut of my jaw and the fearless glint of my blue eyes," as well as the "oily" and "hunched and flabby and ill-favored" cliche that is his rival. Standard Aryan manhood fantasy. Nothing interesting.
"Lok the Depressor" by Philip Coakley (1978). Google reveals nothing whatsoever about this "new author" beyond this single story -- seriously, not a single word. I'm tempted to assume that, once again, Lin Carter wrote a pastiche of someone else's style (claiming, in his introduction to this story, that this so-called Coakley "comes as close to writing like Jack Vance as anyone I have ever read") and shoved it, previously unpublished, into the year's best fantasy stories, under another assumed name. In fact, that's exactly what this reads like -- even admitting my personal bias, I insist that this reads nothing at all like Vance and wholly like Carter. There's the fixation on the young tomb raider's physiognomy, the cartoonish menace of the demons of the Wastes, the turgid dialogue, the abuse of exclamation marks: all signs of Carter's hand. Wikipedia doesn't list Philip Coakley as one of Carter's "known" aliases, but if my hunch is correct -- god, what a tool. Also, this story sucks a lot and is worse by far than even a mediocre Dying Earth tale.
"Hark! Was That the Squeal of an Angry Throat?" by Avram Davidson (1977). I've never been disappointed by an Avram Davidson story -- but can he salvage this hundred-page slide into ignominy and self-regarding twaddle? I dunno. This entry certainly is some kind of thing. I couldn't even begin to categorize it, so I'll (reluctantly) accede to Carter's charge that this is "a mere anecdote, and second cousin to a shaggy dog story." It has an antique New York City pulp feel to it (reminiscent of certain 1960s sci-fi shorts I've read), mixed with a sort of Jewish comic yarn, swerving without warning among the narrator's neighbors in a picturesque tenement district, populated by no end of mid-century caricatures and types, all flung together in a breathless rush. It's entertaining, yes; and then John Carter of Mars shows up, and it's all po-mo and I'm lost but enjoying it. A little baffling, but good.
"The Cloak of Dreams" by Pat McIntosh (1978). The copyright page lists this as "The Girl in the Leather Cloak"; I sense some Lin Carter-y meddling afoot. This is only so-so for a Thula tale -- though even a so-so Thula tale is bounds and bounds better than everything else featured so far in this collection, with the exception of the Davidson yarn. The story hinges on a magical mystery -- where is the missing boyfriend? -- though so much is left unsaid that the denouement, though its outline was obvious almost from the start, doesn't seem to follow any traceable line of reasoning from the clues we're given. McIntosh's light touch ordinarily enhances her stories, but here I think I would have preferred just a shade more exposition for once. (Maybe the problem is I'm running low on sleep lately.)
"The Land of Sorrow" by Phyllis Eisenstein (1977). This story showed me that I've long held an unconscious desire to see high fantasy written for the esthetic and standards of F&SF. This is an understated, thoughtful piece that takes its time establishing a place and a mood, elevating an otherwise unremarkable pseudomedieval setting, developing a gothic mystery in a hidden valley that held my interest until, sadly, it turned out to be a fairly generic magical sadist ruler. Even that disappointment doesn't linger, as Alaric the minstrel's escape from the Red Lord is complicated in an unexpectedly moving fashion. I can say, without reservations, that I would read many more stories of this cautious and sensitive adventurer.
"Odds Against the Gods" by Tanith Lee (1977). Picaresque silliness mingling early hints of 1980s fantasy (our first coy instance of lesbianism! BDSM "brides" for a god of pain!) with the stale leftovers of the '70s (technicolored landscape, easily hoodwinked stooges, a dying sun), all played for broad comedy. I chuckled once, it must be admitted, but this story is overlong for the minimal effect it produces.
"The Changer of Names" by Ramsey Campbell (1977). Lin Carter calls this one a "very unorthodox" sword 'n' sorcery tale; I call it moderately original. The central conceit, that a hero's name and deeds are a form of magic built up during adventures and liable to injury by defamation or theft by sorcery, is rather amusing; it wouldn't be out of place in the taverns and streets of Ankh-Morpork, nor would the huge crowd of hooded thieves that suddenly materializes at the end. Yet Campbell plays the story completely straight, making for an odd tonal dissonance between delightfully satirical premise and serious execution. It's an entertaining story on its own terms -- hardly a forgotten classic, but certainly passable.
Well, it seems I overestimated the trajectory of these collections. This was a definite step down after the last two YBFS editions, not least because Lin Carter took at least two (and most likely three) of eleven slots to foist his tiresome and self-indulgent claptrap on us. Even leaving his leavings aside, this collection just wasn't that good, with a mediocre Thula installment and nothing whatsoever on par with "The Dark King," "The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr," or "The Lamp." I mean, everything from the Avram Davidson story all the way to the end -- the second half, almost, if you go by page count -- was at least tolerable. But without standouts, it's hard to muster enthusiasm for the contents of this volume.
Sunday, December 14, 2014
2014 read #120: The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 3, edited by Lin Carter.
The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 3, edited by Lin Carter
237 pages
Published 1977
Read from December 12 to December 14
Rating: ★★ out of 5
Furthering a trend begun in the second YBFS, four of the eleven stories included in this ostensible retrospective were originally published here. I'll skip repeating my thoughts on how silly that is, and merely note that the first-time-in-print stories are labeled 1977, and everything else is labeled 1976, because I get persnickety about such details.
"Eudoric's Unicorn" by L. Sprague de Camp (1977). The cleverest detail in this piece is the conceit that unicorns are the last surviving species of the Entelodontidae. It makes me wish de Camp had gone whole hog (heh) and set a secondary world fantasy in the Miocene, because the rest of this story isn't especially memorable. It's broad comic fantasy built around one joke (girls these days don't stay virgins for long!), although perhaps the hapless and distinctly venal merchant "hero" is ahead of his time here, as unremarkable as he would be today.
"Shadow of a Demon" by Gardner F. Fox (1976). The key to reading stories like this, I've decided, is to shut off your brain to the best of your ability, to ignore the cliches and stock props coming at you as thick as the arrows at Thermopylae, to not even blink at the Xeroxed barbarian swordsman or at the requisite scanty costume of the seeming young woman in distress (or at the many repetitions the author makes to insist that, dude, her tattered tunic barely conceals the curve of her breast or the supple length of her leg). Even adopting this strategy, however, I couldn't keep my mind from wandering away from the words in front me at least once each page. At one point I caught myself literally watching kitten videos instead of reading another word of our hero scouting his way into the palace of the standard-issue evil sorcerer (who, not content with holding demons in thrall, was on the verge of summoning "megademons" to do his bidding!). Even with my brain switched off, I can't find this sort of thing anything but boring. How is it that so many people were so eager to consume this for so many years?
"Ring of Black Stone" by Pat McIntosh (1976). The odd thing is, it takes such a small tweak in the formula to make sword 'n' sorcery wholly palatable to me. McIntosh's light, sensitive touch is a breath of spring air after the jock-strap fantasy of "Shadow of a Demon." The idea of a witch's Power being a thing so strong that, should she fail to pass it on before she dies, it animates her bones after death until it finds someone "with the courage to take it from the dead," is stranger, more exotic, more unsettling, more creative than whole volumes of standard sword 'n' sorcery fare -- and McIntosh develops the idea in scarcely half a page of dialogue. The landslide-elemental creature, granting a wish once it's tasted blood, reminds me variously of the Dying Earth, the myth-fantasy of Valente, and the Demon Doors of Fable. This story as a whole feels oddly modern, as if, aside from the simplicity of the climax, it could have been written in the mid-'00s (if anyone worth reading were writing sword 'n' sorcery serials at that point). I'm happy to see the disappointing "Cry Wolf" in the last YBFS was an anomaly; this ably lives up to the promise of "Falcon's Mate."
"The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr" by George R. R. Martin (1976). A nice time-capsule oddity for you from Lin Carter's introduction to this story: "Chances are, if you know Martin's work at all, you know him as a science fiction novelist of the gritty realism school...." I thought that was funny. Anyway, I'll get right to the point: I dig this story. Not to get effusive or anything, but I think this story may be the apotheosis of what could be fashioned with the vocabulary of 1970s high fantasy. There's more than a hint of science fiction in the infinite universes and the gates Sharra traverses between them, there's a flavor of the Dying Earth in Laren Dorr's world and its sputtering sun, there are stray props and set-dressings from heroic fantasy here and there in Sharra's crown and Laren's castle -- all recognizably '70s. But Martin (younger than I am now when he published this) fits this vocabulary to a precocious new framework that hints at the artsier, more finely crafted story structures of the decades to come. Rather than stalling the story right at the beginning to dish out background detail on who the Seven are or how Sharra obtained her crown, Martin takes the more recent approach, opening with an evocative line and drawing out the explanations, enlivening the early pages with crumbs and background details but saving the worldbuilding dumps for (relatively) organic conversations between the two leads. It's not wholly modern -- there's a mustiness to the prose, not enough to really detract from the tale but sufficient to date it. And, since this is GRRM, the story does dawdle to describe meals and the juiciness of meat. But all in all, this is an unexpectedly excellent contribution.
"Two Suns Setting" by Karl Edward Wagner (1976). After two great tales, we're back to trudging across an archetypal desert with yet another generic "brooding, doom-fraught adventurer," in a world mixing the two thesaurus-busting styles of heroic fantasy and prehuman elder lore. And the hero is named Kane. I mean, seriously, Kane. He's a dispossessed hero-wizard-swordsman cast out from his city and wandering the deserts of the "eastern continent." Of fucking course he's named Kane. At 30 pages, this story is way overlong, but (I must grudgingly admit) it isn't as bad as it could be. It's actually passably entertaining. In part this is due to some unexpected story beats -- in a genre where you can predict almost every plot turn from page one, I was not expecting a giant to go on a fireside rant about the evils of technology and mankind's fatal inability to live within his natural environment, before reminiscing about the "heroic age" when his kind grappled with sabre-tooths and mammoths and cave bears. "Two Suns" isn't good -- there are just too many eyes "blazing feral hatred" for my tastes -- but it's surprisingly painless. I almost -- almost -- wouldn't mind reading more of this Kane's adventures, if they're consistently in this vein.
"The Stairs in the Crypt" by Clark Ashton Smith (1976). Yet another posthumous completion by Lin Carter, who's gone from merely adding a few hundred words to cap a mostly finished tale to "weaving bits and pieces" of Smith's "unpolished prose, outlines, lists of unused titles and invented names, sketches of story-ideas and plots" together "in as close a style to Smith's as I can create." At this rate, by the next YBFS Carter will be totting up Smith's old cleaner bills and grocery lists just to keep making a profit off the guy's byline. I haven't read much Clark Ashton Smith, obviously, but I can't help but feel Lin Carter did a poor job of imitating his voice after all. This lacks the doleful rhythm and morbid inevitability of "The Scroll of Morloc" and "The Double Tower." Maybe this is because "Crypt" is an attempt at comic incident -- a deceased necromancer reanimates in his tomb and delivers wry soliloquies, then craves a snack -- but honestly this doesn't seem to fit with those other two stories. It reads more like Carter threw the thesaurus at his typewriter and said "Close enough."
"The Goblin Blade" by Raul Garcia Capella (1977). A guy who cut his teeth writing imitations of Robert E. Howard set in Conan's universe here goes boldly into a world of his own devising -- and it's a sword 'n' sorcery pastiche as uninteresting and unoriginal as you could imagine. The standard mismatched warlock and warrior, bickering at first, exchanging awkward globs of backstory and scene-setting, gradually coming to an understanding and working well as a team to defeat a guy who is totally not blue-eyed Genghis Khan, and who turns out to be a djinn. Yawn. I think it's meant to be comic to some degree -- at least, I'm pretty sure the words that the main pair pronounce to each other are meant to be some form of banter -- but it's just not doing it for me.
"The Dark King" by C. J. Cherryh (1977). Half of Lin Carter's introduction to this story is him perving over how Cherryh is a "young and very attractive woman" -- a statement repeated, with less emphasis, before seemingly every story written by an up-and-coming female author in these books. Oh, traditional gender values.... Anyway, this is a slight but sweet mythological fairy tale, with Sisyphos manipulating the pity and compassion of Death in order to return to the world, then with further trickery binding Death and thereby discovering the usual moral of this sort of thing, viz. that Death is necessary for life to flourish. An unsurprising tale but a lovely one.
"Black Moonlight" by Lin Carter (1976). Time to gird up my loins and slog through another protracted interlude with What's-His-Face the Not-Viking from Lemuria. This time he's a pirate or something, but the beats of the tale are the same: seeking riches, Thongor runs afoul of degenerate beast men and a priest on loan from Clark Ashton Smith. An eldritch abomination gets summoned, there's some easy fighting, everyone has a good laugh afterward, the end. What bugs me about Lin Carter, aside from his questionable taste in stories and his relentless self-regard and so on, is how he's labeled "Master of Adult Fantasy" (by himself or by his publisher, no doubt, but it gets plastered all over these books just the same), yet his prose springs from the boys' adventure school of the 1930s. The only difference between them is Carter's heroes get their way with "Red Steel!" rather than good, clean American fists. How an adult could enjoy this pap is beyond me.
"The Snout in the Alcove" by Gary Myers (1977). Never having read Clark Ashton Smith undiluted, and never having read Lovecraft in any form, I must make a comparison with a parallel figure: Olaf Stapledon, who produced a lot of ideas and set-dressings science fiction still employs, but couched them in dry, treatise-like summations that aren't much fun to read. Along those lines, this story takes a potentially intriguing incident (drawn from a commingling of Smith's Hyperborea and Lovecraft's Dreamlands, and maybe stuff from Lord Dunsany I'm not yet acquainted with) and squashes it flat. A Zelazny-esque narrator (über-competent and quick-witted but essentially a blank slate) gets summoned into the Dreamlands by mistake by priests of the Elder Ones; a daemon, the intended object of the summoning, is on the loose; a red-robed stranger drifts from city to city in a rotting vessel, and all who hear him flee screaming, their cities melting under the moon behind them; in the de rigueur final twist, the narrator turns out to be the demon, thwarting the last hope of the Dreamlands. The ingredients are there for something juicy and spectacular, but this compressed and lifeless presentation just doesn't work for me. (The part about the red stranger, especially, put me in mind of Stephen King in his prime: that's what the Crimson King should have been like.)
"The Pool of the Moon" by Charles R. Saunders (1976). The novelty of the first Imaro story (in the first YBFS) has dulled somewhat; this feels much more like a generic heroic fantasy, sad to say, featuring what I believe is a completely serious use of the term "hot barbarian embrace."
To sum up: "Ring of Black Stone" and "The Dark King" were excellent, and "The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr" was the best story in the YBFS series to date, but disappointing entries from Saunders and de Camp added to the usual assortment of dull and/or terrible stories so beloved by Lin Carter. While there is noticeable improvement in individual stories, then, the series as a whole continues to labor under the "particular enthusiasms" of its editor. I eagerly await the Saha-edited years, if only for a change of direction.
237 pages
Published 1977
Read from December 12 to December 14
Rating: ★★ out of 5
Furthering a trend begun in the second YBFS, four of the eleven stories included in this ostensible retrospective were originally published here. I'll skip repeating my thoughts on how silly that is, and merely note that the first-time-in-print stories are labeled 1977, and everything else is labeled 1976, because I get persnickety about such details.
"Eudoric's Unicorn" by L. Sprague de Camp (1977). The cleverest detail in this piece is the conceit that unicorns are the last surviving species of the Entelodontidae. It makes me wish de Camp had gone whole hog (heh) and set a secondary world fantasy in the Miocene, because the rest of this story isn't especially memorable. It's broad comic fantasy built around one joke (girls these days don't stay virgins for long!), although perhaps the hapless and distinctly venal merchant "hero" is ahead of his time here, as unremarkable as he would be today.
"Shadow of a Demon" by Gardner F. Fox (1976). The key to reading stories like this, I've decided, is to shut off your brain to the best of your ability, to ignore the cliches and stock props coming at you as thick as the arrows at Thermopylae, to not even blink at the Xeroxed barbarian swordsman or at the requisite scanty costume of the seeming young woman in distress (or at the many repetitions the author makes to insist that, dude, her tattered tunic barely conceals the curve of her breast or the supple length of her leg). Even adopting this strategy, however, I couldn't keep my mind from wandering away from the words in front me at least once each page. At one point I caught myself literally watching kitten videos instead of reading another word of our hero scouting his way into the palace of the standard-issue evil sorcerer (who, not content with holding demons in thrall, was on the verge of summoning "megademons" to do his bidding!). Even with my brain switched off, I can't find this sort of thing anything but boring. How is it that so many people were so eager to consume this for so many years?
"Ring of Black Stone" by Pat McIntosh (1976). The odd thing is, it takes such a small tweak in the formula to make sword 'n' sorcery wholly palatable to me. McIntosh's light, sensitive touch is a breath of spring air after the jock-strap fantasy of "Shadow of a Demon." The idea of a witch's Power being a thing so strong that, should she fail to pass it on before she dies, it animates her bones after death until it finds someone "with the courage to take it from the dead," is stranger, more exotic, more unsettling, more creative than whole volumes of standard sword 'n' sorcery fare -- and McIntosh develops the idea in scarcely half a page of dialogue. The landslide-elemental creature, granting a wish once it's tasted blood, reminds me variously of the Dying Earth, the myth-fantasy of Valente, and the Demon Doors of Fable. This story as a whole feels oddly modern, as if, aside from the simplicity of the climax, it could have been written in the mid-'00s (if anyone worth reading were writing sword 'n' sorcery serials at that point). I'm happy to see the disappointing "Cry Wolf" in the last YBFS was an anomaly; this ably lives up to the promise of "Falcon's Mate."
"The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr" by George R. R. Martin (1976). A nice time-capsule oddity for you from Lin Carter's introduction to this story: "Chances are, if you know Martin's work at all, you know him as a science fiction novelist of the gritty realism school...." I thought that was funny. Anyway, I'll get right to the point: I dig this story. Not to get effusive or anything, but I think this story may be the apotheosis of what could be fashioned with the vocabulary of 1970s high fantasy. There's more than a hint of science fiction in the infinite universes and the gates Sharra traverses between them, there's a flavor of the Dying Earth in Laren Dorr's world and its sputtering sun, there are stray props and set-dressings from heroic fantasy here and there in Sharra's crown and Laren's castle -- all recognizably '70s. But Martin (younger than I am now when he published this) fits this vocabulary to a precocious new framework that hints at the artsier, more finely crafted story structures of the decades to come. Rather than stalling the story right at the beginning to dish out background detail on who the Seven are or how Sharra obtained her crown, Martin takes the more recent approach, opening with an evocative line and drawing out the explanations, enlivening the early pages with crumbs and background details but saving the worldbuilding dumps for (relatively) organic conversations between the two leads. It's not wholly modern -- there's a mustiness to the prose, not enough to really detract from the tale but sufficient to date it. And, since this is GRRM, the story does dawdle to describe meals and the juiciness of meat. But all in all, this is an unexpectedly excellent contribution.
"Two Suns Setting" by Karl Edward Wagner (1976). After two great tales, we're back to trudging across an archetypal desert with yet another generic "brooding, doom-fraught adventurer," in a world mixing the two thesaurus-busting styles of heroic fantasy and prehuman elder lore. And the hero is named Kane. I mean, seriously, Kane. He's a dispossessed hero-wizard-swordsman cast out from his city and wandering the deserts of the "eastern continent." Of fucking course he's named Kane. At 30 pages, this story is way overlong, but (I must grudgingly admit) it isn't as bad as it could be. It's actually passably entertaining. In part this is due to some unexpected story beats -- in a genre where you can predict almost every plot turn from page one, I was not expecting a giant to go on a fireside rant about the evils of technology and mankind's fatal inability to live within his natural environment, before reminiscing about the "heroic age" when his kind grappled with sabre-tooths and mammoths and cave bears. "Two Suns" isn't good -- there are just too many eyes "blazing feral hatred" for my tastes -- but it's surprisingly painless. I almost -- almost -- wouldn't mind reading more of this Kane's adventures, if they're consistently in this vein.
"The Stairs in the Crypt" by Clark Ashton Smith (1976). Yet another posthumous completion by Lin Carter, who's gone from merely adding a few hundred words to cap a mostly finished tale to "weaving bits and pieces" of Smith's "unpolished prose, outlines, lists of unused titles and invented names, sketches of story-ideas and plots" together "in as close a style to Smith's as I can create." At this rate, by the next YBFS Carter will be totting up Smith's old cleaner bills and grocery lists just to keep making a profit off the guy's byline. I haven't read much Clark Ashton Smith, obviously, but I can't help but feel Lin Carter did a poor job of imitating his voice after all. This lacks the doleful rhythm and morbid inevitability of "The Scroll of Morloc" and "The Double Tower." Maybe this is because "Crypt" is an attempt at comic incident -- a deceased necromancer reanimates in his tomb and delivers wry soliloquies, then craves a snack -- but honestly this doesn't seem to fit with those other two stories. It reads more like Carter threw the thesaurus at his typewriter and said "Close enough."
"The Goblin Blade" by Raul Garcia Capella (1977). A guy who cut his teeth writing imitations of Robert E. Howard set in Conan's universe here goes boldly into a world of his own devising -- and it's a sword 'n' sorcery pastiche as uninteresting and unoriginal as you could imagine. The standard mismatched warlock and warrior, bickering at first, exchanging awkward globs of backstory and scene-setting, gradually coming to an understanding and working well as a team to defeat a guy who is totally not blue-eyed Genghis Khan, and who turns out to be a djinn. Yawn. I think it's meant to be comic to some degree -- at least, I'm pretty sure the words that the main pair pronounce to each other are meant to be some form of banter -- but it's just not doing it for me.
"The Dark King" by C. J. Cherryh (1977). Half of Lin Carter's introduction to this story is him perving over how Cherryh is a "young and very attractive woman" -- a statement repeated, with less emphasis, before seemingly every story written by an up-and-coming female author in these books. Oh, traditional gender values.... Anyway, this is a slight but sweet mythological fairy tale, with Sisyphos manipulating the pity and compassion of Death in order to return to the world, then with further trickery binding Death and thereby discovering the usual moral of this sort of thing, viz. that Death is necessary for life to flourish. An unsurprising tale but a lovely one.
"Black Moonlight" by Lin Carter (1976). Time to gird up my loins and slog through another protracted interlude with What's-His-Face the Not-Viking from Lemuria. This time he's a pirate or something, but the beats of the tale are the same: seeking riches, Thongor runs afoul of degenerate beast men and a priest on loan from Clark Ashton Smith. An eldritch abomination gets summoned, there's some easy fighting, everyone has a good laugh afterward, the end. What bugs me about Lin Carter, aside from his questionable taste in stories and his relentless self-regard and so on, is how he's labeled "Master of Adult Fantasy" (by himself or by his publisher, no doubt, but it gets plastered all over these books just the same), yet his prose springs from the boys' adventure school of the 1930s. The only difference between them is Carter's heroes get their way with "Red Steel!" rather than good, clean American fists. How an adult could enjoy this pap is beyond me.
"The Snout in the Alcove" by Gary Myers (1977). Never having read Clark Ashton Smith undiluted, and never having read Lovecraft in any form, I must make a comparison with a parallel figure: Olaf Stapledon, who produced a lot of ideas and set-dressings science fiction still employs, but couched them in dry, treatise-like summations that aren't much fun to read. Along those lines, this story takes a potentially intriguing incident (drawn from a commingling of Smith's Hyperborea and Lovecraft's Dreamlands, and maybe stuff from Lord Dunsany I'm not yet acquainted with) and squashes it flat. A Zelazny-esque narrator (über-competent and quick-witted but essentially a blank slate) gets summoned into the Dreamlands by mistake by priests of the Elder Ones; a daemon, the intended object of the summoning, is on the loose; a red-robed stranger drifts from city to city in a rotting vessel, and all who hear him flee screaming, their cities melting under the moon behind them; in the de rigueur final twist, the narrator turns out to be the demon, thwarting the last hope of the Dreamlands. The ingredients are there for something juicy and spectacular, but this compressed and lifeless presentation just doesn't work for me. (The part about the red stranger, especially, put me in mind of Stephen King in his prime: that's what the Crimson King should have been like.)
"The Pool of the Moon" by Charles R. Saunders (1976). The novelty of the first Imaro story (in the first YBFS) has dulled somewhat; this feels much more like a generic heroic fantasy, sad to say, featuring what I believe is a completely serious use of the term "hot barbarian embrace."
To sum up: "Ring of Black Stone" and "The Dark King" were excellent, and "The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr" was the best story in the YBFS series to date, but disappointing entries from Saunders and de Camp added to the usual assortment of dull and/or terrible stories so beloved by Lin Carter. While there is noticeable improvement in individual stories, then, the series as a whole continues to labor under the "particular enthusiasms" of its editor. I eagerly await the Saha-edited years, if only for a change of direction.
Thursday, December 11, 2014
2014 read #119: Tailchaser's Song by Tad Williams.
Tailchaser's Song by Tad Williams
387 pages
Published 1985
Read from December 8 to December 11
Rating: ★★ out of 5
Tad Williams, not so long ago, was among my favorite authors. I sped through his Otherland series in '05, read The War of the Flowers first thing in '06, got hooked on the Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy in '07. Williams had a distinct problem with finishing his epic narratives in a satisfactory way, but before that point, the meat of his novels was inventive, colorful, and absorbing, gadding about rich and detailed worlds full of memorable imagery, more than enough in those less-cultivated days to make a fan of me. That warm fuzzy fondness persisted until early last year, when I had the misfortune of picking up The Dirty Streets of Heaven. It's the first volume in a "noir fantasy thriller" series centering on a sleazy angel named Bobby Dollar. As can be expected, I made it halfway down the second page before I couldn't take it anymore and (figuratively) threw it across the room. Not to put too fine a point on it, but that book (the first page, at any rate, not that I expect it improved with prolonged exposure) was shit. And for some unknowable reason, my library kept buying up each new volume as it appeared, souring my opinion of Williams every time I was reminded of their existence.
But a couple months back, Williams or his agent or somebody released word that Williams was working on a follow-up to Memory, Sorrow and Thorn. With my expectations so battered, I couldn't muster more than cautious pessimism about the prospect of the new storyline. But the thought of returning to the world of Osten Ard -- now that's tempting. And so Tad Williams has been lurking in the back of my mind lately. Which led to ordering this book from ILL.
The inevitable comparisons are to Watership Down -- and indeed, the first half or so of Tailchaser's Song gamely builds up the world, culture, and lore of the feline Folk in a manner not especially dissimilar to Richard Adams' go-to classic. It's not at the same level as Watership Down, even at its best, but there's an earnest charm that helps smooth over Williams' novice prose and languorous pacing. The second half of Tailchaser's Song, alas, is less Watership Down and more watered-down Tolkien imitation, descending into dreary sword 'n' sorcery guff and endless, endless dungeons in the dank earth -- because apparently the fallen feline demigod can breathe life into super-size orc-cats and blind snake-cats and spooky mummy-cats, but can't breed digging-cats with useful burrowing paws to further his nefarious evil schemes of evil, so he has to round up surface cats to slave in his tunnels with their ineffectual paws. But don't worry, the forest friends our hero won during his journey owe him a favor and carry the message to summon the bluff and hearty cat-prince who comes to the rescue, and the crazed wandering old cat turns out to be another cat demigod and our hero saves the day by reminding him who he is by fortuitously remembering a rhyme to say when he's in a tight spot. The second half of Tailchaser is, in a word, awful. It's no wonder the most prominent blurb on the cover is from Cat Fancy: only people who've never had cause to pick up a fantasy book before this could give it heartfelt praise.
But hey, this was Williams' first novel -- and it was the mid-'80s, which was a simpler time (especially in fantasy publishing). The cats' folklore was a nice running thread, and I liked the little glimpses into the cosmology and language of other animal folk, especially the brief (and honestly superfluous) encounter with Mother Rebum, eldest of the frogs.
387 pages
Published 1985
Read from December 8 to December 11
Rating: ★★ out of 5
Tad Williams, not so long ago, was among my favorite authors. I sped through his Otherland series in '05, read The War of the Flowers first thing in '06, got hooked on the Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy in '07. Williams had a distinct problem with finishing his epic narratives in a satisfactory way, but before that point, the meat of his novels was inventive, colorful, and absorbing, gadding about rich and detailed worlds full of memorable imagery, more than enough in those less-cultivated days to make a fan of me. That warm fuzzy fondness persisted until early last year, when I had the misfortune of picking up The Dirty Streets of Heaven. It's the first volume in a "noir fantasy thriller" series centering on a sleazy angel named Bobby Dollar. As can be expected, I made it halfway down the second page before I couldn't take it anymore and (figuratively) threw it across the room. Not to put too fine a point on it, but that book (the first page, at any rate, not that I expect it improved with prolonged exposure) was shit. And for some unknowable reason, my library kept buying up each new volume as it appeared, souring my opinion of Williams every time I was reminded of their existence.
But a couple months back, Williams or his agent or somebody released word that Williams was working on a follow-up to Memory, Sorrow and Thorn. With my expectations so battered, I couldn't muster more than cautious pessimism about the prospect of the new storyline. But the thought of returning to the world of Osten Ard -- now that's tempting. And so Tad Williams has been lurking in the back of my mind lately. Which led to ordering this book from ILL.
The inevitable comparisons are to Watership Down -- and indeed, the first half or so of Tailchaser's Song gamely builds up the world, culture, and lore of the feline Folk in a manner not especially dissimilar to Richard Adams' go-to classic. It's not at the same level as Watership Down, even at its best, but there's an earnest charm that helps smooth over Williams' novice prose and languorous pacing. The second half of Tailchaser's Song, alas, is less Watership Down and more watered-down Tolkien imitation, descending into dreary sword 'n' sorcery guff and endless, endless dungeons in the dank earth -- because apparently the fallen feline demigod can breathe life into super-size orc-cats and blind snake-cats and spooky mummy-cats, but can't breed digging-cats with useful burrowing paws to further his nefarious evil schemes of evil, so he has to round up surface cats to slave in his tunnels with their ineffectual paws. But don't worry, the forest friends our hero won during his journey owe him a favor and carry the message to summon the bluff and hearty cat-prince who comes to the rescue, and the crazed wandering old cat turns out to be another cat demigod and our hero saves the day by reminding him who he is by fortuitously remembering a rhyme to say when he's in a tight spot. The second half of Tailchaser is, in a word, awful. It's no wonder the most prominent blurb on the cover is from Cat Fancy: only people who've never had cause to pick up a fantasy book before this could give it heartfelt praise.
But hey, this was Williams' first novel -- and it was the mid-'80s, which was a simpler time (especially in fantasy publishing). The cats' folklore was a nice running thread, and I liked the little glimpses into the cosmology and language of other animal folk, especially the brief (and honestly superfluous) encounter with Mother Rebum, eldest of the frogs.
Sunday, December 7, 2014
2014 read #118: The Eye of the Heron by Ursula K. Le Guin.
The Eye of the Heron by Ursula K. Le Guin
179 pages
Published 1978
Read December 7
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
A small but beautiful book on the importance as well as the limits of nonviolent resistance. Through much of its length I mused on the naiveté of the dream of nonviolent triumph and nonparticipation; in a culture and a world squeezed by late-stage capitalism, with cops trained to bust up passive resistance and nowhere left to run off to, the thought that the tactics of Gandhi and King could flourish into a science fiction future was a sweet but sad and futile fantasy. I should have known Le Guin better than that, of course. Out of all the authors who have attempted utopian visions, Le Guin seems to have the best grasp of human failings, our cultural blinders, our sheer propensity to fuck everything up. Which makes the ending especially bittersweet and poignant, described as it is with Le Guin's gentle, deft beauty. We must all of us keep marching -- but on this planet, we've nowhere left to go.
179 pages
Published 1978
Read December 7
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
A small but beautiful book on the importance as well as the limits of nonviolent resistance. Through much of its length I mused on the naiveté of the dream of nonviolent triumph and nonparticipation; in a culture and a world squeezed by late-stage capitalism, with cops trained to bust up passive resistance and nowhere left to run off to, the thought that the tactics of Gandhi and King could flourish into a science fiction future was a sweet but sad and futile fantasy. I should have known Le Guin better than that, of course. Out of all the authors who have attempted utopian visions, Le Guin seems to have the best grasp of human failings, our cultural blinders, our sheer propensity to fuck everything up. Which makes the ending especially bittersweet and poignant, described as it is with Le Guin's gentle, deft beauty. We must all of us keep marching -- but on this planet, we've nowhere left to go.
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