The Finns achieved independence on December 6, 1917  – 100 years ago. To celebrate with Finland, we republish a review of a beautiful novel Not Before Sundown by Johanna Sinisalo.

Reviewed by Geneva Melzack

Peter Owen Publishers, London, 2003, 236pp, £12.50, t/p, ISBN 0720611717

Not Before Sundown has also been published under the title Troll: A Love Story. The alternative title is, in some ways, a literal description of the book. The first chapter opens with photographer Angel stumbling across a sick creature near his home. It is a troll, and Angel takes it back to his flat and nurses it back to health. The rest of the book explores the consequences of having a wild troll living in close proximity to and interacting with human beings (and whether or not some of those interactions constitute a love story is perhaps a matter of interpretation).

The two prizes Not Before Sundown has found favour with reflect two major aspects of the novel. The Finlandia Prize reflects the book’s roots in Finnish culture and folklore, while the James Tiptree Jnr Award reflects the way it explores issues of identity and sexuality. The best way into both aspects of the novel is through its structure. Not Before Sundown utilises a very unusual narrative technique. The story unfolds through a series of relatively short (a couple of pages or less, and sometimes no more than one or two lines) first person narratives, as well as ‘extracts’ from texts on Finnish folklore, newspaper reports, and various other sources dealing with the history, biology and mythology of trolls, some real (most of the folklore extracts are genuine), some not. Thinking about these extracts and the role they play in the story is a route into understanding the book’s Finnishness, as well as the place it inhabits in the field of fantastic literature. Continue reading “From Our Archive: On Falling in Love” →

The Hidden Oracle, Book One of The Trials of Apollo series by Rick Riordan (Disney Hyperion, 2016)

The Dark Prophecy, Book Two of The Trials of Apollo series by Rick Riordan (Disney Hyperion, 2017)

Reviewed by Christopher Owen

Winner of the 2016 Goodreads Choice Awards: Middle Grade and Children’s, The Hidden Oracle begins the next adventures in the Camp Half-Blood Chronicles. The Hidden Oracle and The Dark Prophecy are the first two books in The Trials of Apollo pentalogy by New York Times #1 Best-Selling Author, Rick Riordan. The Camp Half-Blood Chronicles is primarily made up of three five-book series. The first two, Percy Jackson and the Olympians and The Heroes of Olympus respectively, follow the adventures of twenty-first century demi-gods, teenage children of mortals and either Greek or Roman gods/goddesses. In this third series, Riordan does something different, focusing instead on the adventures of the god Apollo.

At the end of The Heroes of Olympus, Apollo is blamed for the problems the heroes have had to resolve. This third series picks up a few months following the events of the second series with Apollo’s punishment beginning with him falling from the sky and crashing in an alleyway dumpster. At first Apollo’s punishment appears to be one simply designed to humble him: he is transformed from a beautiful, powerful god to an awkward, acne-covered teenaged human. He is then further humbled when a couple thugs beat him up, when he is forced into the servitude of a young girl named Meg, and when he realizes that he is exceptionally less talented at music and archery than when he was a god. His inner-struggles throughout the narrative consist of a conflict between his over-zealous ego and his melodramatic horror at his newfound limitations. But Apollo also faces exterior struggles, and it is in these conflicts that he learns that his punishment is not just to be humbled, but also to right previous wrongs. Apollo must save five missing oracles and stop a secret organization called the Triumvirate. The Triumvirate is made up of three re-born Ancient Roman Emperors who have been pulling the strings in the background all along, causing all of the problems of the Camp Half-Blood Chronicles.

In The Hidden Oracle, children at Camp Half-Blood, a secret camp for demi-gods, are going missing. One by one they head into the forest as if hypnotized and are never seen again. While previous heroes in the Chronicles have travelled far in an American road trip-style adventure, in The Hidden Oracle Apollo does not need to travel farther than the forest neighboring the campgrounds. This changes the structure of the narrative from the previous books. Apollo is able to head back and forth between the forest as site of adventure and the campgrounds as site of respite, healing and communicating with aids. Furthermore, while previous books touch on the other campers only briefly, this book spends a great deal more time getting to know the people who live at camp year-round. This includes three of Apollo’s children, adding another interesting dynamic to this book, a greater focus on the relationships between demigods and their godly parents, something that is only touched on briefly in the first two series.

The sequel, The Dark Prophecy, follows Apollo’s quest to save both his friend and all of Indianapolis from the control of the Triumvirate. This book follows a similar structure as The Hidden Oracle. While the characters travel from Long Island Sound to Indianapolis for this novel, and thus there is the potential for a road trip-style structure that the original two series of the Chronicles use, this book begins at the end of the journey, as the characters are arriving in Indianapolis. Within the first few chapters, the heroes are lead to a magical hideout called the Waystation, which functions in the same way as Camp Half-Blood in The Hidden Oracle. The heroes go back and forth between fighting their enemies in Indianapolis, and re-grouping and healing at the Waystation. During these adventures, Apollo and his friends team up with a variety of different species, adding interesting new group dynamics unexplored in previous novels of the Chronicles.

Both The Hidden Oracle and The Dark Prophecy feature intense final battles that take place in Apollo’s space of respite and safety, Camp Half-Blood and the Waystation respectively. Unable to go home on Mount Olympus, every home that Apollo tries to make for himself on his adventures is attacked, almost completely destroyed and becomes the site from which he must leave to continue his important mission to stop the Triumvirate. It is also from here that he meets and joins forces with previous heroes from the Chronicles, including Leo Valdez and Grover Underwood, suggesting, perhaps, that what is truly valuable is not the place called home, but rather the people we call family.

On the topic of family, one of Apollo’s sons, Will Solace, is dating a boy named Nico Di Angelo, a central character from the previous two series of the Chronicles. There are very few LGBTQ+ characters in middle-grade children’s fiction; three of them are in The Hidden Oracle. In The Dark Prophecy, a lesbian couple runs the Waystation, and the main villain is Apollo’s ex-boyfriend. The book uses frequent flashbacks to focus on the relationship between Apollo and his ex-boyfriend. Apollo is bisexual, making him very much a rarity as a same-sex attracted first-person narrator in a children’s fantasy novel. With six central LGBTQ+ characters, a wide range of ethnicities represented, and explicit feminist ideals, these books work very well to present progressive ideologies and a diverse representation of characters.

While reading the other ten novels in the Chronicles allows for a greater appreciation of The Trials of Apollo, this is not entirely necessary in order to follow the story. These books work well to begin a new, exciting series in Riordan’s universe. The adventure continues in The Burning Maze, which will be released in May 2018.

 

That Bastard Wonderland by Lee Harrison (Wrecking Ball Press, 2016)

Reviewed by Arike Oke

You can take the lads out of Hull, but you can’t take Hull out of the lads. That’s okay, I’m a daughter of Hull myself. That means I appreciate the dourness, sarcasm and bittersweet melancholy of my home, all of which come through beautifully in this love letter of a fantasy debut from Lee Harrison. I mean: mushy peas get an origin story.

There’s a backlash right now against maps in fantasy books. Utter tosh say I. A novel with this geographic ambition, outlining a startlingly well realised alternative world, could only benefit from a map. I kept flicking to the frontmatter and the endpapers to find only blank pages, beautiful blank pages though. Wrecking Ball Press, a small press operating out of Hull (see, some kind of theme emerging!), has made a gorgeous edition of this book, cover, paper and font all working together to make a quality volume. Is the image chosen for the cover a small spoiler of a one of the story’s treats? Perhaps, but it looks well on’t.

The protagonist, and main point of view character, is Warboys. No relation to the tragic lost boys of Mad Max Fury Road, this Warboys is as laddish and uncouth as they come. He reluctantly teams up with his dad on a begrudging journey across their world. They are caught up in the expansionist ambitions of a Napoleon–like figure, but soon come up against the old belief systems of the territories they are forced to invade. It seems that there might be some truth in the old myths, but who can Warboys and his dad trust? Is anyone looking out for the underdogs in this war that on the surface is about a conflict of cultures, but underneath is as much about broken dreams and sickening ego as any real-world conflict throughout our own history.

Harrison shows us the other side of the conflict through the eyes of Nouzi Aaranya, a young man groomed from childhood in more ways than one to be a soldier and martyr for a cause he barely grasps. Whereas Warboys is solidly placed within the world of pubs, back streets, sailors, drinking and swearing, Nouzi is altogether more delicate. He’s led a life of direct indoctrination, rather than the societal conditioning of Warboys’ context. Nouzi’s own identity gradually surfaces as the plot unfolds. This forms an enlightening counterpoint to Warboys’ growing sense of responsibility to others. By the end of the book both men find themselves changed.

Harrison handles the dual point-of-view third person narration deftly. Each character is well drawn and distinctive. The plot, once past an avoidably slow and dialogue heavy first act, trips along happily building towards a satisfying, touching and cinematic denouement that still somehow manages to retain the ‘call a spade a spade’ Northern tone. Female characters are few and far between in this boys’ own tale, but as this story can be read as intrinsically about male relationships this paucity of female representation is hardly unexpected.

The world that Harrison has created for this story is startling in its clarity and depth. The technology, the big reveal, the language, religion, even the descriptions of landscape, sea and street are deft and convincing. It is a nice touch that Harrison prefaces sections of the book with quotations from archival texts from within the universe he’s created. Harrison has set up a world that could contain many more stories. We are not left with a cliff hanger so much as an open window looking out across a vista of real humans living real lives in which Harrison will find rich pickings for many more stories. I’ll be in line to read them, pattie buttie and chips in hand and wearing my ‘It’s Never Dull in Hull’ t-shirt. One request though, forget what the internet forums say: next time let’s have a map, eh lad?

 

Tade Thompson, whose novel Rosewater was reviewed in Vector earlier this year (see below), has just published a new work of fiction. The Murders of Molly Southbourne is set to appear on screen as well, which is not surprising given the beautifully harrowing images that the novel fosters. It is a work of science fiction which reads like a thriller. It might be bloodier than Cormac McCarthy, yet it has the sweetness of a coming-of-age romance. The emotional confrontation with one’s reading self that ensues (‘should I be enjoying this scene?’), as well as all other inner conflicts, are put into perspective by the novel’s narrative of self-destruction. The science-fictional world of Molly Southbourne is a combination of Cold War past and a low-fertility future. The latter is particularly refreshing given the dominance of overpopulation scenarios in both science fiction and everyday conversations. Tade Thompson’s medical and psychiatric knowledge is always put to good use in his novels, the characters are entirely plausible in their contradictions, and the science is internally consistent and evidently very carefully thought through.

Continue reading “Book Reviews: ‘The Murders of Molly Southbourne’ and ‘Rosewater’ by Tade Thompson” →

Lagos_2060 curated by Ayodele Arigbadu (DADA books, 2013)

Reviewed by Polina Levontin

Writing about present day Lagos, Rem Koolhaas warns that already ‘the city itself has mutated into something’ quite unrecognizable to Westerners who think of cities in terms of European or North American models.  ‘What will the city be like in 2060?’  This was the question posed to 8 Nigerian science fiction writers during a workshop that yielded an anthology: Lagos_2060. The resulting eight stories, three of which are written by women, represent a diverse range of imaginaries all set in Lagos, the year 2060.  These stories engage with science and governance, city infrastructure and climate change, co-evolution of technology and social norms, urbanization and the future of global capitalism. Yet these scholarly themes emerge from stories that are first and foremost exciting, often romance-filled adventures.  There are man-eating frogs and time-travel inducing herbs, girls with luminous tattoos and zero-gravity bedrooms, albeit in separate stories…

Individual writers approached the remit to imagine the future of one of the world’s greatest cities each with their own genre pallette and a remix of intellectual priorities.  But what these stories share is a sense of dynamic liveliness that can only be a feature of a work in progress, their various literary forms reflective of the chaotic process by which the city itself is shaped. Their gift is the recklessness of trying out new things. These are pioneering works, regardless of how one decides to date science fiction in Nigeria.

What interested me in particular were the discourses on science.  The first story of the anthology, ‘Amphibian Attack’ by Afolabi Muheez Ashiru presents the dangers of leaving the sciences in the hands of the private sector.  The private company ‘Bright Life Group’ is so efficient in curing diseases and supplying energy that it has to use science also to undo the progress, secretly engineering catastrophes, so that it can keep itself profitable and powerful by fixing its own ‘accidents’.   The discourse in the second story ‘Animals on the Run’ by Okey Egboluche is that of conflict between technological progress on one hand and society and environment on the other.  The value of robotics in particular is questioned because it reduces employment in conditions where large numbers of people need jobs.  Robotics is critiqued on an intimately personal scale in another story in the collection, ‘Metal Feet’ by Temitayo Olofinlua.

Technological advances such as land reclamation to expand Lagos are questioned as risky and as a violation of ‘natural order.’  In ‘Mango Republic’ by Terh Agbedeh scientific rationalism is instituted in Lagos, making it ‘the most beautiful prison in the world ever conceived by man’ (p. 197).  But even supreme scientific achievements are shown to be powerless against the forces of nature unhinged by climate change. Floods and rising sea levels threaten Lagos, while environmental destruction elsewhere in Nigeria swells the city’s population beyond capacity. In ‘Mango Republic’ the discourse of science is survivalist – science is our last hope to adapt to a perilous future.  Yet, exemplifying the complexity of the narratives in Lagos_2060, other stories demonstrate the political danger of seemingly desirable scientific solutions.  On the extreme opposite spectrum from ‘Amphibian Attack’, scientific knowledge becomes highly guarded government property in ‘Cold Fusion’.  A new way to produce cheap renewable electricity reinforces the government’s control over the people of Lagos and stirs political ambitions to secede from the rest of Nigeria.   Science promising energy independence actually does enable the politicians who rule Lagos to secede from Nigeria in another story – ‘Coming Home’ by Rayo Falade.

The collection is full of ideas pertinent not only to the future of Lagos but the future of humanity in general. The writers don’t envision Lagos in isolation but as an integral part of the global economic and natural system. Their visions and hopes for Lagos, their individual philosophies and fears are expressed with humor and showmanship. Their ability to ask urgent questions about the direction we are heading is made invaluable by their skills to entertain.