Tales of the Otori

Across the Nightingale Floor, Episode One: The Sword of the Warrior, Lian Hearn

Set in an alternate world that seems to have stepped out of the feudal Japan of legend and history entwined, this is a complex and fascinating story told with grace, beauty and simplicity.

A young boy survives the massacre of his family and village, to be taken into the household and family of the enemy of his family’s murderer. As he grows, he shows signs of special gifts found only among the tribe of assassins, and with the approval of his benefactor, he begins his training in the ways and skills that his own father had rejected.

A young girl, held hostage to enforce the loyalty of her family, is selected as a bride to a man she has never met in what appears to be a peace offering between warring factions, but she carries with her a history that is believed to promise death to any man she marries.

A man and a woman, secret lovers who have sworn to marry, are kept apart by war and political considerations, and face being forever separated by forced marriages to others.

And a man has built for himself a nightingale floor, so constructed that, it is said, no one can cross without making a sound.

Such are the beginnings of the Tales of Otori, and I have been captivated.

Note about editions: I am reading currently reading the Firebird editions of Hearn's Tales of the Otori, which are beautiful to the senses in all ways, but which divide each of the original books into two episodes each. This comment, then refers to the first half of the book Across the Nightingale Floor as originally published. The other available TPB editions I know of are the Riverbend editions, which contain the complete text of each book in one volume.

Witches and zombies and vampires, oh my!

Dead Sexy, Tate Hallaway

This is the second of Tate Hallaway’s supernatural romance novels, featuring the adventures of Garnet Lacey, witch on the run with a penchant for getting tangled up with vampire lovers, vengeance goddesses, and just plain wonderfully weird shit.

Garnet is trying to live quietly in Madison, Wisconsin, following the murder of all the members of her coven by a Vatican hit squad, and Garnet’s overshadowing by the goddess Lilith – who promptly took out the Vatican assassins. But it’s hard to hide that many bodies forever, and now the FBI is looking for her for questioning. And if that wasn’t bad enough, suddenly the town is just crawling with zombies – and you know that’s always bad news.

Hallaway – who is actually the alter-ego of Lyda Morehouse, author of the Archangel Protocol books – has a delightfully light touch that carries the reader through twists and turns of plot as Garnet tries to keep the FBI agent from finding out too much, deal with the zombie invasion, and keep current lover Sebastian from finding out that she’s letting former lover Parrish crash in her storage locker.

Dead Sexy is quick-paced, cleverly tongue-in-cheek (what else can you call a book that opens with a zombie buying a copy of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Voodoo - with counterfeit cash?) and a hell of a fun read.

Shades of Eleanor Arnason

Ordinary People, Eleanor Arnason

Ordinary People is a collection of six of Arnason’s short stories, one poem and a speech made as Guest of Honor at the 2004 WisCon. The collection begins with the poem “The land of Everyday People,” dedicated to John Lennon. I think he would have liked it. I know I did. An everyday hero is something to be.

And the stories in this collection are indeed about ordinary people going about their lives. They love, they work, they deal with family issues and concerns with their emotions, and hopes and discontents. Three of the stories feature stories and legends of the Hwarhath, the non-human race explored more extensively in Arnason's novel Ring of Swords, and it is, as always, a delight to learn more about this complex culture Arnason has created.

Included in this collection is the wonderful short story “The Grammarian’s Five Daughters” in which the nature and uses of the various parts of speech – nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions – illuminate some very important truths about language and life, and many fairy tale clichés are gently but firmly put in their place.

Closing the collection is the transcript of a speech, “Writing Science Fiction during the Third World War.” Arnason raises for consideration a number of observations about war, globalisation, nation states, and resistance. In the midst of her comments, she has this to say about science fiction today:

We are living in an age of revolution and a science fiction disaster novel. No, we are living in several science fiction disaster novels at once. The stakes are high. Human civilisation may be at risk. The solutions are going to require science and technology, as well as social and political struggle.

What are we – as science fiction readers and writers – doing about this? Historically, science fiction has been about big problems, use and misuse of technology, the broads sweep of history, and every kind of change. Historically, it has been a cautionary and visionary art form. Are we continuing this tradition? Are we writing books that accurately reflect our current amazing and horrifying age? Are we talking about the kind of future we want to see and how to create it?

Or are we, in the immoral words of the preacher in Blazing Saddles, just jerking off?

Arnason is, I think, one of our great science fiction writers, to be spoken of in the same breath as Ursula LeGuin. If you have not yet encountered her work, this is an excellent volume to begin with. (Available through Aqueduct Press)

Being Embodied

With Her Body, Nicola Griffith

While reading and contemplating this collection of short stories I felt a certain resonance with Nicola Griffith, even though I know little of her other than a few biographical snippets, and what any reader knows of a writer through her work. But it’s that particular area of resonance that makes the three stories in this collection speak to me so strongly.

Like Griffith, I am a woman who deals with a chronic and debilitating disability; my body – which, as a woman in this society is supposed to be the site of my power, my function, my essence – is often for me a site of limitation, frustration, and failure.

This contradiction which is most pertinent to my own situation is most clearly expressed in the second of these three stories, “Song of Bullfrogs, Cry of Geese,” but questions of the body, and most particularly the female body – her body – how it moves, what it senses, how it loves and hurts, gives birth, changes, manifests and loses power, strives to exceed its limitations – are central to all three stories.

These stories are also and very specifically, about women who love other women, her body to her body, and this is something else that is important to explore – women, embodied but not for men but for women.

These stories, written about women acting with their bodies, by a women conscious of her body, had in them many, many things that as I read them, I felt in my body. Nadia dancing with light and sound, Molly crawling through pain to survival, Cleis running wild – each one living intensely with her body.