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Fragile Things, Neil Gaiman

There’s a thread of sorts that runs through a lot of Neil Gaiman’s work, and that thread has a lot to do with the concept of the interaction of dual or multiple realities – dream worlds, parallel worlds, shadow worlds, otherworlds, and afterworlds. It’s the sense that no matter where you are, there is something else going on just over there, or under the hill, or through the mirror, or some other place that you are just barely aware of, that would turn your understanding of your own world upside down or inside out if you ever really noticed it.

Something else that Gaiman pays a lot of attention to is storytelling as an act, as a frame, as a way of providing context or counterpoint. When he writes stories in the first person, they are often the stories of a conscious and self-conscious narrator, who knows he or she is telling a story and is aware of how it sounds, how it is shaped. Sometimes his protagonists are storytellers, or his stories draw on the words of other storytellers for settings or images.

One of the reasons to enjoy Fragile Things is that there are lots of stories that are perfect examples of what Gaiman can do with these two themes in his work – separately or together. Stories about people telling stories about ghosts, stories about writers trying to tell fantastic stories about autocars and bank mortgages in a world where daily life is profoundly gothic in nature, wonderful stories about the art of storytelling while looking through a glass, somewhat obscurely. Many, but not all of these stories have a distinct flavour of the supernatural or of horror, and there are a good many stories that qualify as ghost tales - explicit journeys into the otherworld.

And for the reader who enjoys watching writers play with the issues, ideas, characters, themes and worlds of other writers writing otherworlds, there are some particular pleasures here, as this collection includes such stories as “A Study in Emerald” – Gaiman’s truly magnificent imagining of how certain characters from the Holmesian tales of Arthur Conan Doyle would behave were they to find themselves in a mirror world where the Elder Gods of H.P. Lovecraft held sway – and “The Problem of Susan” – a story that asks the reader to consider the situation of Susan, the young woman that C.S. Lewis barred from the higher, deeper, inner Narnia (which is to say, Heaven) because she found lipstick and boys interesting.

The End of The Company

I have now read all of Kage Baker’s Tales of The Company. Or at least, those released to date – despite the clear sense of having reached the end of the very complex story she was telling in The Sons of Heaven, ostensibly the last book of the series, I note that she is going to be writing at least one novel featuring key character Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax at some point prior to the events of the last couple of Company novels.

I should note that because this is a series with a massive cast of characters, most of whom are immortal, and many of whom are thousands of years old, who have a lot of history with each other, and because there are six previous novels in the series in which a great deal happens, I’m not going to explain much about the books. If you know the series, the following will probably make sense. If you don’t… it’s just to complicated to explain. Read the first couple of novels if you’re curious. If you keep reading, you’ll know what I mean. If you don’t, it won’t really matter.

Basics – there’s a Company called Zeus Inc. in the future that has the secret of time travel and the secret of immortality, but because travel itself is a lot harder than just communication through time, and immortality only works on children – and not all children at that – the Company set up a station very, very far in the past and selected some children to make into immortals. Since then, the Company has been sending these immortals information on what’s going to happen in their future so that they can save rare art, plants that will be going extinct, and other cool stuff and hide or bury it in places that won’t be found so that in the future, the Company can dig them up and exploit them. And all of these immortals have been living through all of human time, just doing the Company’s bidding. But there’s a mystery. No communications have ever come back in time to any Company operative from after July 8, 2355. And no one, not any of the immortals in the past, and not any of the humans who run the Company in its present, know why. There are other mysteries, too, dealing with plagues, missing immortals, strange humanoids, and other stuff, but all of that is really part of what leads up to the big mystery. So…

Black Projects, White Knights and Gods and Pawns are collections of short stories about many of the characters, both main and secondary, in the long, long tapestry of the Company. Interesting in themselves, that also contain information useful to the full understanding of how the series ends, and ought to be read somewhere in the sequence before the final volume. Seeing as all these characters move around in time, and Baker often tells us things about their later life before she gets around to their earlier life (only the central character Mendoza seems to have a storyline that mostly follows her life in the same order as she experiences it), I’m not going to suggest exactly when is the right time to read these collections, but it should be sometime after, say, the third novel and before the last one.

And then there are the novels, The Machine’s Child and The Sons of Heaven. I’m treating them together, because they really do run right into one another in terms of action.

I both enjoyed and felt a bit let down by the ending Baker gave to her series. There were lots of things I loved. The intense and multi-layered plots, plans, deceptions, betrayals, and other machinations on the part of all the various factions, groups and assorted individuals, leading up to the great mystery of what happens on July 8, 2355, are lots of fun to read and follow in a bit of a feverish daze, wondering who has the right idea and will the folks with the scenario you like best actually be the ones who take control after the mysterious moment.

I also enjoyed Baker’s rather dystopic vision of the future, in which no one knows how to read anymore, and people live very sanitised and secure lives full of fear and massive invasion of privacy. It’s not a world I’d want to live in. Interestingly, there are elements of both right-wing and left-wing perspectives of what horrors the future could hold – Bakers’ future England seems to be an extrapolation not only of “Big Brother” but also of the “nanny state.”

What annoyed me, and in the end disappointed me, was the key plotline centred around the explicitly triune nature of Mendoza’s lover/s and his/their apotheosis. By the time I’d read through all of the intra-psychic warfare and semi-mystical journeys that bring Alec-Edward-Nicholas to the final stage of his/their evolution, I was getting bored with the character/s. After all, this has been, or so I thought, Mendoza’s story, more or less. So how come it’s her boyfriend who ends up running the universe, while she just gets all goofy-eyed about having his babies? Why can't she have babies and run the universe herself?

How to hold a revolution

The Moons of Palmares, Zainab Amadahy

Amadahy's The Moons of Palmares is a relatively short and straightforward story about resisting opression. Colony planet run by imperialist capitalist forces for the benefit of the elites back home and to the detriment of the people actually doing the hard work out here in space. Civil unrest ensues. A new and naive military officer who is a basically alright person but who just doesn't believe that his government, his people could be doing unjust things is assigned and almost immediately begins to see that things are not quite as they should be.

There are more nuances than this - not all of the military and government people are bad, not all of the rebels are good, and there's plenty of thought about how to hold an ethical revolution.

What makes it particularly interesting is that the author explicitly introduces race into the the story, and is herself of mixed Black and First Nations heritage, which makes for an interesting metacommentary on how to rebel against people who want to exploit you, your land and its resources for their own ends.

I enjoyed it. Amadahy is an activist in the areas of women's and aboriginal people's issues, and appears not to have written any other fiction, speculative or not. A part of me wishes she had, because I'd like to have seen where her ideas, perspectives and talent would have taken her next.

Tales of the Otori: the beginning

Heaven's Net Is Wide, Lian Hearn

This is the prequel to the stunning Tales of the Otori - Across the Nightingale Floor. Grass for His Pillow, Brilliance of the Moon and The Harsh Cry of the Heron. The beauty, the detail, the lyricism, the sense of immersion in another place and culture - all of the things that made the earlier books things of wonder are part of this book as well.

It is the story of Otori Shigeru as a young man, and brings us from the early days of his boyhood right up to the moment where Kikuta Tomasu, who will henceforth be known as Otori Takeo, the protagonist of the Tales, enters his life.

There are no surprises in this book - we already know most of what is going to happen, because so much of the facts and relationships explored here are part of the important history of the later books. We've heard the facts already. In Heaven's Net Is Wide, we learn how they happened, the context and feel and emotional depth of the past, and why it shaped the future we have already read.

Even though I knew, in general, everything that was going to happen, I simply couldn't put the book down until I'd finished it.

Simply beautiful.