Warring wizards and other entertaining things

Battle Magic, Martin H Greenberg and Larry Segriff (eds.)

I bought this anthology because it contains Michelle West’s short story “Warlord” set in the same universe as her Sacred Hunt duology and Broken Crown series, and being the story of how a key character in that series ends up in the crucial place in which he is found, I wanted to read it becasue, well, I can be obsessive like that.

There are other cool stories about magic as a method of combat or a weapon in warfare here, too, from Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s unique take on the Sleeping Beauty fairytale, “The Strangeness of the Day,” to John DeChancie’s truly funny “BattleMagic(TM) for Morons,” to Elizabeth Ann Scarborough’s retelling of the cursing of the men of Ulster, “the Fatal Wager,” to Charles De Lint’s intriguing variation on the theme of the infernal musical contest, “Ten for the Devil” – with lots of other interesting tales in between.

Carry On, Camelot

The Follies of Sir Harald, Phyllis Ann Karr.

In The Follies of Sir Harold, Karr has crafted that most rare of works, the Arthurian farce. This is the quite wonderfully whimsical tale of a knight sinister (in truth, for our villain knight is left-handed) who, through many misadventures that play most fast and loose with chivalric tales and traditions, eventually ends up to be... not such a bad fellow after all. If that weren’t enough, the text is chock-full of in-jokes, which refer both to the long tradition of Arthurian and fantastical literature and to a few most suitable popular culture icons, all cleverly woven into the tale.

A gem for Arthurian aficionados.

When utopia goes wrong

Solution Three, Naomi Mitchison.

Naomi Mitchison was never reluctant to challenge anything – the sexual mores and gender assumptions of the times she lived in, the political regime and class structure of her homeland, or any tradition or system of ideas that seemed to need a bit of shaking up and airing out.

In the early 1960s, after a long and distinguished career writing contemporary and historical fiction, and socially and politically progressive non-fiction, Mitchison wrote her first science fiction novel, Memoirs of a Spacewoman, in which she presented an image of a future in which women had transcended the limited roles prescribed to them by the social and economic conventions of the time.

By the mid 70s, the world of ideas was full of theories about how to change the future, to remake it nearer to an ideal world, free of such evils as aggression, sexism, racism, poverty and hunger. Some feminists were advocating the use of genetic techniques to change the biology of reproduction in the hopes of eliminating sexism, and modifying desire to remake the concept of pair bonding, and the family. Some argued that it was the heterosexual family dynamics that created violence and greed in human beings, that the very nature of heterosexual sex distorted power relations between men and women. Scientists advocated the use of genetic manipulation to relieve world hunger. The air was full of radical ideas of using technologies of science and social change to remake the human experience into a kind of paradise.

In Solution Three, Mitchison takes a hard look at the kind of society that might come about given the adoption of such ideas and technologies, and delivers a serious critique of a world that, in sacrificing both social and genetic diversity, has created yet another set of limitations to be challenged. Yet at the sam time, she insists that the solution to such problems is not a return to previous, unacceptable ways of organising human existence, but to move forward, finding new paths that build on past lessons.

Jazz time

Mumbo Jumbo, Ishmael Reed

In Mumbo Jumbo, Reed presents a kaleidoscopic vision of race relations between black and white in America, through the device of two competing strands of secret history – one line that runs through Crusaders and Knights Templar and a host of other European secret societies all the way up to the Klu Klux Klan, and another line that represents a vital and life-affirming spirit that moves through African, Caribbean and Black American culture. In Reed’s novel, the two forces collide – not for the first time, and not for the last - in New York where the rise of Harlem culture and jazz music faces off against white control and oppression, set off by the backdrop of political corruption and the American invasion and occupation of Haiti, and threatens to overwhelm staid, white America with the vitality of the roaring Twenties, Ragtime, free thought and speech and even sex among the young and the forward-looking of all ages.

The book is a stylistic experiment, a non-fiction novel as some have called it, a fiction with over a hundred footnotes referencing real people, places, events. It’s most definitely a book that requires thought, careful reading and a fairly broad knowledge of the elements of history, myth and legend, both European and African, that make up the two secret histories, and more than a passing familiarity with US history of the 1920s. As it happens, I know at least a little bit about a fair number of these things, and nonetheless did a fair bit of Googling while I was reading this.

But it was worth it to be sure. It’s a complex, powerful, and most illuminating book.

The Faerie queens

Midnight Never Come, Marie Brennan.

It’s 1554 and Mary Tudor wears the English crown. Her sister Elizabeth lies in the Tower, expecting at any moment to hear the news that her death warrant has been signed. To preserve her life and gain her throne, Elizabeth makes an alliance with another would-be queen, Invidiana, who seeks rulership over all the faerie of England. They swear to help each other to their respective thrones – but where Elizabeth is the true queen of England, Invidiana is at heart a usurper. Though affairs may appear to go well in Elizabeth's court, Invidiana's Onyx court becomes a place of fear and corruption, and the pact between the two queens, which now keeps an unfit queen on her throne just as surely as it originally brought a fit queen to hers, will be challenged by a young courtier from Elizabeth’s world, and a secret agent with mixed loyalties from Invidiana’s court.

As I’ve mentioned before, there’s something that’s just so thematically right about bringing Faerie to Elizabeth’s court, and Marie Brennan has written a new and interesting variation on a theme that’s as old as Spenser and Shakespeare.

Tapestries

The Orphan’s Tales: In the Cities of Coin and Spice, Catherynne M. Valente

Valente continues her tour de force of storytelling in this, the second volume of Orphan’s tales. Similar in structure to the first volume, with its nested tales and interwoven strands, the focus of the tales shifts in the second volume, as the threads of the characters' lives become more tightly woven and the quests change slowly from searches for what is past, for origins and beginnings, from “how it happened” stories, to questions of identity, of who the characters are, and what do they need to fulfil their futures.

The division between story-teller and audience is blurred in this volume as well, for the tales that remain to be told are written on the eyelids of the orphan girl in the garden, and so, the more completely she embodies her text, the more deeply the young prince, formerly a passive listener, is drawn into the storytelling as he now must read to them both the tales that are still written on the body, but in places that the teller can not see by herself.

Valente's subtle imaginings speak on so many levels- if the eyes are the windows to the soul, then can the secrets within only be read by another?

As with the first volume, this book is mesmerising to read and almost impossible to describe. What Valente does in this book is nothing short of magic.