Tag: catherynne m valente

Vector #269

Vector #269Download

This issue of Vector is dedicated, in part, to revisiting the subject of women writers of science fiction. Few female UK-based science fiction authors currently have contracts, but worldwide, there’s a great deal going on, a geographic, cultural, and linguistic diversity which Cheryl Morgan surveys in this issue. I came away from reading it with a massively expanded to-read list, and I hope it inspires you similarly. Tony Keen examines the roles of death and transformation in Justina Robson’s books Natural History (one of the books on last year’s list of the previous decades best science fiction by women) and Living Next Door to the God of Love. In contrast, Niall Harrison examines a very different author, Glasgow-based Julie Bertagna. Her post-apocalyptic trilogy, which begins with Exodus, provides an intriguing comparison with Stephen Baxter’s current series of prehistoric climate change novels which began with Stone Spring.

The second part of Victor Grech’s three-part series on gender in science fiction doesn’t focus on women science fiction authors, but does deal with quite a few of them in the process of discussing the variety of single-gendered world in science fiction. In particular, he examines the in-story reasons, the biological explanations for their existence, and the degrees to which those mechanisms are found in the ecologies of our own world.

Shana Worthen

Palimpsest

Palimpsest coverOh, this is a cold book. Its main characters, our four guides who contract the passport to the fantastical city of Palimpsest, are broken individuals all; there is almost no warmth in the very frequent sex they all engage in; and the closer they get to achieving their dream of permanently moving to Palimpsest, the clearer it becomes that for all its wonders, it is like everywhere else a place to live, not an answer. Reviews — Matt Denault, Dan Hartland, Deborah J Brannon, Annalee Newitz — rightly talk about how penetrating the novel is on the relationship between the real and the fantastic. I’m a little surprised that words like possessiveness and selfishness don’t crop up more often; they seem to me necessary to capture the full desolation of the desire that the Palimpsest virus induces, an addictive need to make a place ours, to make it us, to fill ourselves up with it: an need familiar to readers of fantasy that the novel at first mocks, with its absurdly imaginative glimpses of a city that refuse to become a whole, and then, towards the close, seems to concede. The great weakness of Palimpsest, as Dan is most forceful in articulating, is that to this end its characters are tools, not players, and they can feel a little thin, not to mention hapless (perhaps particularly the two men; the two women felt more sharply defined to me throughout). All four are victims of the story, not shapers of it — a feeling reinforced by the highly structured, highly stylised nature of the book, which clinically cycles between the characters, forcing more direction onto them than their individual lives ever seem to contain. But perhaps this is a final chill irony: an unresolvable struggle between the irresistable artifices of stories and something more fluid, less satisfying, that we have to try to recognise as life.

Short Story Club: “The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew”

So, here we are, for the last time this run. Here’s the story. I can’t find much comment on this one — I’m sure we’ll rectify that! — but Lois really liked it:

Steampunk is generally regarded as an alternate genre, usually alternate history. This, I believe, must be an alternate steampunk, one further step removed from the mundane reality with which we are familiar. Strange—wondrous strange—poetic, fantastic, mythic, visionary cosmology.

For those of you who enjoy such things, Valente also made a post about writing sf. (This may be of particular interest to James…)

Anyway. The floor is open; what did you think?

Salon Fantastique: A Gray and Soundless Tide

Is there a canonical selkie story? I don’t just mean a list of common characteristics of selkies and selkie stories — human/seal shapeshifting, shedding of skin, seduction, general air of romantic tragedy, yadda yadda — I mean a single, archetypal, root story. A couple of moments in Catherynne M. Valente’s tale make me think that there is — “This is the only story selkies have”, her selkie tells her narrator, “it is all they know: how to be kept, how to be found, how to escape” — but if that’s the case, I’m not familiar with it. I was left feeling much the same way I feel about some of Sonya Taaffe’s stories (such as 2004’s “A Maid on the Shore”, another selkie story featuring a redhead), that I was missing a level, that I didn’t quite get it.

But I can tell you what I thought of the story’s naked self. It is, I think, the shortest piece of prose I’ve read by Valente — although since (a) the longer pieces of prose I’ve read have tended to be broken up into multiple short segments, often telling their own stories, and (b) this story, too, contains another story within itself, it is perhaps not a departure for her. It also happens to be the shortest story in Salon Fantastique (the next shortest, if I’ve counted pages correctly, is “My Travels with Al-Qaeda”), and that does make a noticeable difference. Of the stories I’ve read from this book, Valente’s is the least elaborate, the most focused on one central situation. The story’s narrator, Dyveke, encounters a selkie in the form of a woman, carrying her skin on the street; she takes the skin, which “stuck to [her] hands in a moment, mottled and rubbery, sliding over [her] wrists as though looking for a way in”; she takes the selkie home with her (Dyveke’s unnamed husband sighs, and asks his wife, “Didn’t you ever read a book?”); the selkie sleeps between them, and eventually tells Dyveke her name, Silja, and her story; and that done, she leaves.

“A Gray and Soundless Tide” is not as stuffed with imagery as some of Valente’s other work, but it’s still told in language that you notice. Silja’s stride is “like a prayer”; the selkie “was beautiful, like a scrubbed length of sun-bleached wood”; the moon is “like a wound in the sky”; and so on. Every detail is a bit brighter, a bit more intense than in the real world. It works for the story in some ways, and against it in others. On the plus side, it is easy to believe that a mythical creature would speak in such a register — when Silja tells her story to Dyveke, she does so with a sort of exhausted lyricism, as though the words are just tumbling out of her. Similarly, the story’s world feels like a world in which magical things are possible.

On the minus side, Silja’s voice is perhaps not adequately differentiated from Dyveke’s framing narrative. The first two of the three examples I gave above are spoken by Dyveke, for instance, and such language doesn’t feel as natural in her mouth as it does in Silja’s. Moreover, the two speakers share the same verbal tics, most notably a penchant for dramatic repetition: “in the night, in the sweat-ridden night,” says Silja, “I felt sick, so sick, somewhere deep in the center of me”; “She leaned her head against the walls,” Dyveke tells us, “as if listening, always listening.” It is a sufficiently distinctive pattern, and crops up frequently enough in the story’s ten pages, that it starts to grate; and every so often, you notice that a story which aspires to be folkloric, an iteration of an old, old truth, is instead modern, carefully beautiful artifice.