Tag: fantasy

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.

White is for Witching

White is for Witching coverIf there is any disappointment associated with this book, it’s that I read it too late in the year to buy it for anyone for Christmas. Oyeyemi’s third novel is, like The Opposite House, a fierce, fluid and economical tale, more explicit about its fantastic content but still laced with sufficient uncertainties that after one quick read I don’t feel able to speak authoritatively about “what happened”. I tend more to Jane Shilling‘s view of the book than Carrie O’Grady‘s, however. So, to describe its three narrators: Eliot, whose twin Miranda is at the heart of the book, and who appears to be sincerely conscientious about her worsening health; Ore, who falls into a relationship with Miranda when the two of them meet in their first year at Cambridge, and comes to visit her at home during the Christmas vacation; and 29 Barton Road, the house where Eliot and Miranda and their father Luc live in Dover, whose voice is (mostly) the voice of Miranda’s mother, and grandmother, and great-grandmother (as Dan Hartland notes, the voice of history), speaking in chorus, fearful of and prejudiced towards anyone not of the family, anyone different. Their hold over Miranda only grows. A darkly self-aware ghost story, then, with an uncommon freshness that springs from its acuity of insight into character and circumstance; a book in which the scariest thing is what the fear of other people can become, and do.

The Girl With Glass Feet

The Girl With Glass Feet coverA brief break from Interzone to say that I agree with everything Kari Sperring has already said about this book in her review for Strange Horizons, except that I gulped it down in a couple of days. An intense, entropic, ugly-beautiful fable; heavy with the cold, crisp details of remote St Hauda’s Land, tangled in the quasi-incestuous closeness of the community that lives there, people both exquisitely and exasperatingly broken. A book about ways of seeing, about what we don’t see of other people, or choose not to see, or are incapable of seeing, and what we lose in consequence; and therefore about the power of glimpses, where the fantastic lies in how something is seen as much as in the images breaking through a convincing quotidian skin: “Those few inches of transition astonished him even more than her solid glass toes. Bones materialized faintly inside the ball of her foot, then became lily-white and precise nearer her unaltered ankle … In the curve of her instep wisps of blood hung trapped like twirls of paint in marbles” (62). And a cruel story that chooses, uncomfortably, to pay more attention to its men and its landscape than its women; a story that does address this uncomfortableness and this cruelty, but doesn’t escape either. Somewhat in spite of myself, I am transported.

“Ys” by Aliette de Bodard

IZ222 coverAfter the precision of Allan, this inevitably feels baggy, and the first half of the story is routine: woman impregnated by goddess; husband doesn’t understand, blames her; she turns to a friend (that she knows has feelings for her); he agrees to help her visit the goddess. There is a novel note in this — the unborn baby is diagnosed with a congenital heart defect — which is nicely paid off later, symptomatic of the story’s generally more interesting final third. The characters reach Ys, the city of the goddess:

Ys is a dead city. No, worse than that: the husk of a city, long since deserted by both the dead and the living. But it hums with power, with an insistent beat that seeps through the soles of Francoise’s shoes, with a rhythm that is the roar of the waves and the voice of the storm — and also a lament for all the lives lost to the ocean. As she walks, the rhythm penetrates deeper into her body, insinuating itself into her womb until it mingles with her baby’s heartbeat.

This dredging of the story’s subtext to the surface, and the image of a barren goddess — driven to create life, but unable to sustain it — does linger, beyond a final confrontation that starts to surrender potency to long-windedness. But I don’t think it’s enough.

Strahan’s Year’s Best SFF 4

Jonathan Strahan has posted the table of contents for The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Vol 4. For my own reference, I’ve gone through and annotated the stories with their original publication venue:

1. “It Takes Two”, Nicola Griffith (Eclipse 3, ed Jonathan Strahan)
2. “Three Twilight Tales”, Jo Walton (Firebirds Soaring, ed Sharyn November)
3. ???
4. “The Island”, Peter Watts (The New Space Opera 2, ed. Jonathan Strahan/Gardner Dozois [read online, “chapter two”])
5. “Ferryman”, Margo Lanagan (Firebirds Soaring)
6. “A Wild and Wicked Youth”, Ellen Kushner (F&SF, April/Mary 2009)
7. “The Pelican Bar”, Karen Joy Fowler (Eclipse 3)
8. “Spar“, Kij Johnson (Clarkesworld)
9. “Going Deep”, James Patrick Kelly (Asimov’s, June 2009)
10. “The Coldest Girl in Coldtown”, Holly Black (The Eternal Kiss ed. Trisha Telep)
11. “Zeppelin City“, Michael Swanwick & Eileen Gunn (Tor.com)
12. “Dragon’s Teeth”, Alex Irvine (F&SF, December 2009)
13. “This Wind Blowing, and This Tide”, Damien Broderick (Asimov’s, April/May 2009)
14. “By Moonlight”, Peter S. Beagle (We Never Talk About My Brother, Peter S Beagle)
15. “Black Swan”, Bruce Sterling (Interzone)
16. “As Women Fight”, Sara Genge (Asimov’s, December 2009)
17. “The Cinderella Game”, Kelly Link (Troll’s Eye View ed. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling)
18. “Formidable Caress”, Stephen Baxter (Analog, December 2009)
19. “Blocked”, Geoff Ryman (F&SF, October/November 2009)
20. “Truth and Bone”, Pat Cadigan (Poe, ed. Ellen Datlow)
21. “Eros, Philia, Agape“, Rachel Swirsky (Tor.com)
22. “The Motorman’s Coat”, John Kessel (F&SF, June/July 2009)
23. “Mongoose”, Sarah Monette & Elizabeth Bear (Lovecraft Unbound, ed. Ellen Datlow)
24. “Echoes of Aurora”, Ellen Klages (What Remains, Aqueduct Press)
25. “Before My Last Breath”, Robert Reed (Asimov’s, October/November 2009)
26. “Jo Boy”, Diana Wynne Jones (The Dragon Book, ed Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois)
27. “Utriusque Cosmi”, Robert Charles Wilson (The New Space Opera 2 [read online, “chapter one”])
28. “A Delicate Architecture”, Catherynne Valente (Troll’s Eye View)
29. “The Cat Who Walked a Thousand Miles, Kij Johnson (Tor.com)

The obligatory observations: I have read precisely two of the stories, the Sterling and the Swirsky, both of which I’m quite happy to see included. I suspect I’ll be reading a few more over Christmas, but discounting the mystery story (“I’ve agreed not to publicise one of the stories until the book comes out, so that publication here doesn’t step too badly on the toes of its original publisher”), by my count 14 of 28 tales come from 10 different books; this would be a very expensive list of stories to try to recreate yourself. Among magazines, the winners are F&SF and Asimov’s, with four stories apiece, and — interestingly — Tor.com, with three, the lion’s share of the online fiction. I think that the stories split pretty much half-and-half between sf and fantasy — I’ve made a few guesses to get that figure, and assumed sight unseen that, e.g., the Baxter story is sf, so I could easily be out by a bit. And, of course, at least 59% of the stories in the final book are by women, assuming you count the Swanwick/Gunn collaboration; the lowest the percentage could be, if you don’t count it and if the mystery story is by a man, is 57% — which is still the highest proportion of women I can recall seeing in a Year’s Best anthology.

EDIT: And here’s Rich Horton’s anthology:

1. “A Story, with Beans” by Steven Gould (Analog May)
2. “Child-Empress of Mars” by Theodora Goss (Interfictions 2, ed. Christopher Barzak and Delia Sherman)
3. “The Island” by Peter Watts (The New Space Opera 2)
4. “Events Preceding the Helvetican Renaissance” by John Kessel (The New Space Opera 2 [read online, “chapter three”])
5. “The Logic of the World” by Robert Kelly (Conjunctions 52)
6. “The Endangered Camp” by Ann Leckie (Clockwork Phoenix, ed. Mike Allen)
7. “Sylgarmo’s Proclamation” by Lucius Shepard (Songs of the Dying Earth, ed. Gardner Dozois and George RR Martin)
8. “Three Twilight Tales” by Jo Walton (Firebirds Soaring)
9. “Necroflux Day” by John Meaney (The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction 3, ed. George Mann)
10. “This Peaceable Land; or, The Unbearable Vision of Harriet Beecher Stowe” by Robert Charles Wilson (Other Earths, ed. Nick Gevers and Jay Lake)
11. “Technicolor” by John Langan (Poe)
12. “Eros, Philia, Agape” by Rachel Swirksy (Tor.com)
13. “A Painter, a Sheep, and a Boa Constrictor” by Nir Yaniv (Shimmer 10)
14. “Catalog” by Eugene Mirabelli (F&SF, February)
15. “Glister” by Dominic Green (Interzone, August)
16. “On the Human Plan” by Jay Lake (Lone Star Stories, February)
17 .“Dragon’s Teeth” by Alex Irvine (F&SF, December)
18. “The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew” by Catherynne M. Valente (Clarkesworld)
19. “The Qualia Engine” by Damien Broderick (Asimov’s, April-May)
20. “The Long Cold Goodbye” by Holly Phillips (Asimov’s, March)
21. “Wife-Stealing Time” by R. Garcia y Robertson (Asimov’s, November)
22. “As Women Fight” by Sara Genge (Asimov’s, October-November)
23. “Images of Anna” by Nancy Kress (Fantasy)
24. “Mongoose” by Sarah Monette & Elizabeth Bear (Lovecraft Unbound)
25. “Crimes and Glory” by Paul McAuley (Subterranean)
26. “Living Curiousities” by Margo Lanagan (Sideshow, ed. Deborah Noyes)
27. “The Death of Sugar Daddy” by Toiya Kristen Finlay (Electric Velocipede)
28. “Bespoke” by Genevieve Valentine (Strange Horizons)
29. “The Persistence of Memory; or, This Space for Sale” by Paul Park (Postscripts #20/21)
30. “Secret Identity” by Kelly Link (Geektastic, ed. Holly Black and Cecil Castalluci)

With, again, one more story to come. Note that this list is not in final TOC order. In the meantime: overlap of six stories with Strahan (Watts, Walton, Swirsky, Irvine, Genge, Monette/Bear); two that I’ve read again (Swirsky and Valente, this time); 47% from books; Asimov’s the magazine winner, with four stories, but in general a wider range of magazines; 43% women; and I think about 55% sf, though I’m less confident here than with Strahan, and have made more guesses. 53% sf according to the editor.

EDIT: Dozois contents here.

“Johnny and Emmie-Lou Get Married” by Kim Lakin-Smith

IZ222 coverStylised, sexist, steampunk-y, superficial and (this is why it gets away with it) short. [UPDATE: And online.] The Dragsville gangs don’t mix, so it’s a problem that Johnny the Fly and Emmie-Lou the Rocketeer have fallen for each other; now, to win Emmie-Lou, Johnny has to beat Billy Rocketeer in a race to the church. A death race.

Billy dove left then right. I aimed dead ahead. Billy’s Dart had the pretty face of a pro street dragster but my Chevy had lungs on it. The black shell hunkered down on an open-wheel chassis, 34-inch skins bolted on either side while the rear wheels tucked in at the tail where the fibreglass had been tubbed to accomodate them. Downshifting, I yanked a steel handle in the roof, stoked the engine then floored it. We streaked past Billy’s Daimler in an explosion of blue-black flames.

“Far & Deep” by Alaya Dawn Johnson

IZ221 coverThis is how you trail a novel. “Far & Deep” shares a setting with, but is not extracted from (or is sufficiently well-adapted to stand apart from), Johnson’s Spirit Binders novels: an archipelago whose landscape and culture are seemingly extrapolated from those of various Pacific islands. Leilani’s mother, Pineki — once an elder and a diver, but an “infuriating, unheeding, raw, wild spirit” and stripped of both roles — has been murdered. Leilani is left to solve her mother, as much as her mother’s murder; and in the process to show us their home.

“Far & Deep” is not as firmly controlled as I wanted it to be; the stabs of emotion that punctuate the predominantly cool narrative tilt, a little too often, a little too close to melodrama for my taste. I don’t think the revelation of the world and the mystery are quite geared correctly; we don’t always learn about the possibility of a thing and the significance of a thing in the smoothest progression. And some of the description is curious:

The water slid around her body like the finest cloth from the inner islands — cool and supple. The water was not very deep here, and the sunlight penetrated straight to the coral floor. The mandagah were nowhere to be found at this time of day, but for sheer physical beauty nothing could match their island’s natural coral. It rose like a castle from the deep, built by some mad designer with a fetish for bright colours and retractable parts. A massive purple fan waved lazily beneath her until covered by her shadow. It vanished in a blink, leaving nothing but an unremarkable piece of porous grey stone behind.

“Retractable parts” doesn’t seem like a reference that would fall within Leilana’s experience, based on what we see of her island. That said, there is the suggestion, elsewhere in the story, that the “inner islands” are affecting Leilana’s home; the clearest example is cultural, but this could be a hint towards a higher technological level as well, though it still seems a little oddly placed to me.

All this is to carp, however. They are little criticisms. The busyness of the story — the many details of setting, the deft character portraits, a sense of events with forward momentum — the basic shape of it all — carries you over such details, on a first reading, and leaves you looking forward to Johnson’s next tale.

“Fishermen” by Al Robertson

IZ221 coverAnd then there are the stories which seem as though they should strike some chord, but don’t, and instead just lie there, inert, unwilling to co-operate. This is one such. The narrator — Interzone does seem fonder of the first person than any other sf short fiction venue I can think of — is an artist in an alternate (?) Renaissance-ish (?) Europe. He is captured by pirates, taken to their home base, and ends up painting their church:

I showed the storm that blew up. I scraped lines in the wall, jagged and terrible, creating a violence that could not be withstood. I showed the fishermen afraid in their little boat, men who knew the sea too well to pretend that they could be saved.

So there is Stuff about Art, and Stuff about Religion, and Stuff about Story, and the lightest breath of the fantastic, and Robertson even finds room for some Stuff about his narrator (fear not!). It’s on the self-concious side (I don’t really believe for a second that the voice is authentic, in the sense of really being how this sort of person would narrate this situation), but I’ve enjoyed my share of this sort of thing; just not this share of it, it seems.

“Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast” by Eugie Foster

IZ220 coverA more polished offering, about masks and made of masks, all the way down. How much to unmask here? Let’s say that structure – numbered sections, from one point of view – masks the real story, and trappings – Queen and court, available trades – mask the real setting. Masks themselves define the narrator each day, job and personality and gender. Every aspect of identity. They’re elaborate things, painted dressed-up colours: sable or ebony black, saffron yellow, jasper red, sapphire blue. Fun! Except when your job is to be tortured to death, perhaps.

One by one the masks are stripped away. “Imprint” isn’t the first clue, but may be the moment the story fully reconfigures itself in the mind. It’s a criminal offence to be in a position to hear that meaning of that word, of course, an illicit thrill: learning who’s running this dollhouse and how is forbidden. Suffice to say that there isn’t necessarily salvation in taking off the mask, in the certainty of “I”. That would be too easy. I liked the story for that, and for toying with me. It’s also available online, here.

Interzone 2009

I have been assiduously buying Interzone all year, and not finding the time to read it. It’s not a complete lie to say I bought the last couple of issues in part because I’m impressed that they finally got their act together on the cover art front, and I wanted a complete set. Still, now that I’ve got them, it seems silly to just have them sitting there. Since Interzone published just over thirty stories this year, I should be able to get through them in a month: time for a December reading project. Taking a leaf out of Martin’s book, I will be posting about each story individually. I’m unlikely to manage a strict regime of one a day — I forsee fallow periods during the week, and catch-up at the weekends — but we’ll see how it goes. And I’ll update this post with links to the posts on each story.

Interzone 220

Interzone 221

Interzone 222

Interzone 223

Interzone 224

Interzone 225