Margaret Atwood: Moral Disorder

Margaret Atwood's short story collection Moral Disorder is something both more and other than a straightforward collection; many of the stories seem to be explicitly about a single main character and her friends and family - certainly the names and backstories of the characters are the same, one assumes they are about the same people. As for the other stories - they all feature a protagonist who very well could be the same woman as in the linked stories, all but one of the stories are arranged as if to tell the tale of a single life from one end almost to the other, for the stories that tells of the protagonist's twilight days is actually the first story in the book. But it's never made clear. Ursula Le Guin, writing about the collection in a review in The Guardian, comments on this quality of the stories:

Most collections of short stories by a single author are grab-bags, but some approach or achieve real unity; this is a different unity from that of the novel, and deserves some attention. The gaps between stories preclude the supporting structures of conventional plot. If the stories tell a story, it must be read in glimpses, and through the gaps - a risky gambit, but one that offers singular freedom of movement and ironic opportunity. In such episodic narratives, character, place or theme replace plot as unifying elements. Many collections that pretend to unity merely fake it, but we need a name for a book that is truly a story told in stories. Could we call it a story suite?

Moral Disorder is such a suite, consisting of 11 short stories. Place, perhaps the commonest cement of the story suite, is not very important, but the stories have a single protagonist, a central character- or I think they do. She is variable, elusive, even a bit slippery. This is, after all, a book by Margaret Atwood.

At first I thought, as does Le Guin, that these stories do have one continuing central figure. I even thought for a while that they were semi-autobiographical, and that the figure was Atwood herself. Then I got tangled up in realising that some of these stories could have been about me, in that disguised way that fiction inspired by real events sometimes has. But then, I am, like Atwood, a woman with roots in Nova Scotia who is now planted firmly in Toronto, I spent time in Northern Ontario as a child, and so on. But surely there must be many other people who share some experiences - not necessarily the same ones - with Atwood, or with the protagonist/s of these stories. Perhaps the deeper truth is that the stories are not about one woman's life, but Everywoman's life, particularised into sketches that have some details in common with Atwood's life, or mine, or a million other peoples'.

And then I looked again at the first story in the collection, The Bad News. It is about Nell, she of the stories that seem fully linked, and her mate of many years, Tig. They are aging, retired, contemplating the morning news .... And suddenly time shifts, and the protagonist - still an aging woman discussing the deplorable state of the world with her mate - is living in the third century Roman town of Glanum in the south of what we now call France. And I think that Atwood is indeed slippery, and these stories are indeed about one woman, and Everywoman. And that's the point.

Three Anthologies

Lately I've found myself drawn to anthologies of SFF by writers from a single country, ethnicity or geographical area. So far this year I've read three such books.


AfroSF: Science Fiction by African Writers, Ivor W. Hartmann (ed.)

In his introduction to the anthology, editor Ivor Hartmann says: "SciFi is the only genre that enables African writers to envision a future from our African perspective. Moreover, it does this in a way that is not purely academic and so provides a vision that is readily understandable through a fictional context. The value of this envisioning for any third-world country, or in our case continent, cannot be overstated nor negated. If you can’t see and relay an understandable vision of the future, your future will be co-opted by someone else’s vision, one that will not necessarily have your best interests at heart. Thus, Science Fiction by African writers is of paramount importance to the development and future of our continent."

It's just as important for those in the first-world countries from whence the co-opting generally comes to read these African futures. To read stories set in futuristic metropolises named Lagos and Tshwane, with characters named Wangari Maathai and Julius Masemola. Stories that come from other histories and perspectives than their own, stories in which white people from Europe or North America are barely present if at all, and have no role to play in the imagined futures. I can only say thank you to Ivor Hartmann for collecting these stories and making them available.



Cosmos Latinos: An Anthology of Science Fiction from Latin America and Spain, Andrea L. Bell and Yolanda Molina-Gavilan (eds.)

A very interesting and valuable survey anthology of science fiction short stories by Hispanic and Latino authors from Spain, Mexico, Cuba, and South America, from the early days of science fiction writing to modern day. The collection includes some very powerful pieces, many of which have a much stronger element of political awareness, analysis and critique than one might expect to find in a representative sampling of North American science fiction writing.



It Came from the North: An Anthology of Finnish Speculative Fiction, Desirina Boskovich (ed.)

An interesting collection of SFF stories from Finnish authors. After having recently read Johanna Sinisalo's Birdbrain (and before that After Sundown, published in English as Troll: A Love Story) I was perhaps primed to notice how strong a role that nature plays in many of these stories. Landscapes, geology, animals, organic growth, ecology - use of these elements seemed to be more prevalent than in collections that tend to be more focused on American and occasionally British writers.

Very much worth reading.

Ifedayo Adigwe Akintomide: Virus

I decided to read this because I thought it might be interesting to see the perspective of a Nigerian author on the whole zombie novel genre. After all, the zombie we can't get enough of is based on traditions associated with Haitian vodoun, which itself has roots in West African voudon.

The book was a curious mix of abysmally amateurish writing combined with decent characterisation and a fast-paced and at times even exciting story. The prose was awkward and filled with cliches - sighs and groans repeatedly burst from people's lips as they tore in this and that direction, for example. Much of the dialogue was stilted. The editing was non-existent - grammatical and punctuation errors littered the pages, footnotes, often unnecessary, were incorporated into the body of the text.... I could go on, but you probably get the idea. Despite this, the main characters were believable and clearly differentiated, and the plot was tight and interesting.

The differences between this and western versions of the classic zombie horror story were subtle, but there was, to the eyes of this western reader, more of a sense that zombies are the servants of ancient evil embedded in the land - in fact, some of the elements of this African-based zombie tale were reminiscent of the European vampire tradition.

The quality of the writing is such that I can't recommend the novel, but.... If you're a zombie fanatic and also the sort of person who can wade through really bad fanfic because it features your One True Pairing, then you might want to give it a chance.

Lesley Hauge: Nomansland

Nomansland is inspired by a casual reference to a female-only society in the classic post-apocalypse novel The Chrysalids by John Wyndham: "To the north-east they say there is a great land where the plants aren’t very deviational, and the animals and people don’t look deviational, but the women are very tall and strong. They rule the country entirely, and do all the work. They keep their men in cages until they are about twenty-four years old, and then eat them. They also eat shipwrecked sailors. But as no one ever seems to have met anyone who has actually been there and escaped, it’s difficult to see how that can be known. Still, there it is—no one has ever come back denying it either." Hauge has taken this reference as the basis for the community of Foundland.

In talking about Nomansland, I think it is important to keep its beginnings in mind because both novels feature extreme examples of societies obsessed with conformity to a rule of behaviour and indeed of ways of being, and young people who secretly challenge the strictly enforced norms and ultimately elect to leave these societies. It's also important to keep in mind that in both societies, memory of what life was really like before the apocalypse has been lost in part, supressed in part, and heavily coloured by the choices made by the founders of these post-Tribulation societies. As well, knowledge about other existing communities of survivors is repressed and mythologised - the women of Foundland are not cannibals, and as the young protagonist of Hauge's novel learns, men as not exactly as she has been told either.

Nomansland presents a society that shares some elements with other women-only dystopias, including Wyndham's Consider Her Ways, and also some elements with the medieval Christian monastic orders, both for men and for women. The women of Foundland live under a rigid caste structure, live highly regimented communal lives, obey rules of conduct that focus on a denial of individuality, sensuality, "vanity" - which includes everything from personal decoration to looking in a mirror, are enjoined to avoid "special friendships" and receive severe punishments including whippings, shunnings, solitary confinement and banishment for breaking the Rule.

However, as the teen-aged protagonist Keller learns, these rules are indeed broken at every level of Foundland's society. Its rulers dress up in fancy clothing and indulge in sensual repasts. Some adults maintain extended "special friendships" and a few maintain clandestine connections with men who visit the island from time to time, trading in tobacco and other luxuries. And some of Keller's peers have stumbled upon a cache of artifacts from the past, including clothing, jewely, cosmetics and fashion magazines. Some reviewers of the novel have fastened on the way in which Keller and her companions throw themselves into frenzies of secret beauty pageants and make-over parties as a rebuke of feminist criticism of "the beauty trap," and even a statement about the "essential" quality of decoration as part of the female psyche, but it serms to me more that these are adolescents embracing new (to them) behaviours and rejecting the severe codes of behaviour they grew up with, and human beings seeking to explore their individuality and sensuality. In any case, the novel provides much food for thought on issues of gender and individual identity.

It's also a good read.

Three more anthologies

The Starry Rift, Jonathan Strachan (ed.)

In this anthology, Strachan has assembled a roster of fine SF stories from established authors, all of the sort that older readers like myself read with wide-eyed excitement and wonder in the pulp magazines of our youth.

Strachan says of his intent in editing this anthology: "I turned to a handful of the best writers in the field, asking them to write stories that would offer today’s readers the same kind of thrill enjoyed by the pulp readers of over fifty years ago. The futures we imagine today are not the same futures that your grandfather’s generation imagined or could have imagined. But some things in science fiction remain the same: the sense of wonder, of adventure, and of fearlessly coming to grips with whatever tomorrow may bring. Some of the stories here are clearly the offspring of those grand old space adventure tales, but others imagine entirely new and unexpected ways of living in the future. The Starry Rift is not a collection of manifestos—but it is both entertainment and the sound of us talking to tomorrow."

These are stories with younger protagonists and presumably intended for a YA audience; however, it should be noted that the quality of the work herein is such that most adult readers should enjoy the anthology as well; I certainly did.



Wings of Fire, Jonathan Strachan and Marianne S. Jablon (eds.)

I am fascinated by dragons, and have ben for as long as I can remember. So how could I resist an anthology of dragon stories? And such wonderful stories, too, including some of the finest of t)the classic dragon tales, from Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea-based The Rule of Names, to Elizabeth Bear's Orm the Beautiful, to Anne McCaffrey's first tale of Pern, Weyr Search, to Lucius Shepard's haunting The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule.

Other, perhaps lesser-known, but compelling visions of dragonkind include Michael Swanwick's King Dragon (an excerpt from his novel The Dragons of Babel); Naomi Novik's In Autumn, A White Dragon Looks Over the Wide River, set in her Temeraire alternate history universe and featuring the Imperial dragon Lien; and Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg's heart-rending The Dragon on the Bookshelf. And more. A delicious diversity of dragons.



Shattered Shields, Jennifer Brozek and Bryan Thomas Schmidt (eds.)

Enjoyable anthology of fantasy stories focusing on warriors, some set in established fantasy worlds developed by writers such as Glen Cook (The Black Company novels) and Elizabeth Moon (the Paksennarion novels), others stand-alones, and all quite readable. Standouts for me were: Bonded Men by James L. Sutter, a story based on the legends of the Theban Band of warriors who were also lovers; Hoofsore and Weary by Cat Rambo, about a small group of warriors - all but one of them female centaurs - cut off from their main force and making a desperate retreat through dangerous territory; and The Fixed Stars, by Seanan McGuire, about a fateful battle between the children of the great lords of Fae, Oberon and Titania, and their own mixed blood descendants.

Fans of milsff of the fantasy variety should find something here to suit their fancies.

Lesley Adkins: Jane Austen's England

An interesting read for those fascinated by the details of life in different times and places, this look at daily life at the beginning of the 19th century is supported by extensive excerpts from contemporary sources, including references to Austen's life and works. Topics range from birth to marriage to death and burial, with many of the less significant events of life equally well covered, and Adkins does a fair job of showing the differences in manner of living due to wealth and class.

Informative and interesting - but I still don't know exactly what a "puppy" is or why Augusta Elton (nee Hawkins) should have had such a horror of them - though I have some ideas.

Margaret Atwood: The Maddaddam Trilogy

Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy - consisting of Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam - is a dystopic vision of monumental proportions.

I didn't get around to reading the first volume until after the third had been released; this perhaps meant that I was somewhat more fortunate than early readers of Oryx and Crake, who were faced with something very bleak, and did not then know that there would be more to come, that would at least explain and leave the reader with some sense of hope.

My first coherent thought about Oryx and Crake was to relate it to other science fiction works - I thought of it as Doctor Frankenstein meets Doctor Ain in the Garden of Eden (and if you don't know the Tiptree short story I'm referring to, shame on you). My second coherent thought was to reserve further thinking until I had finished the remaining volumes.

I enjoyed reading The Year of the Flood more than I did Oryx and Crake - possibly because I like the protagonists better, and because I liked the story of subversives and neo-hippies more than that of genetic scientists playing god - even though in this volume, the second of the trilogy, those two groups are shown to overlap.

It was most interesting seeing the events and the people of the first volume through different eyes, from different perspectives. So many gaps were filled in, and Snowman's solitary narrative from Oryx and Crake took on depth and complexity. I was quite caught up by the ending, and moved on to the third volume, Maddaddam, immediately.

And was rewarded. All the threads from the previous two novels are caught up and woven together in one final tapestry that shows clearly connections barely seen or hinted at before. So, too, the survivors of the Flood - and not just the humans and the experimental creations of Crake - come together to presage a new and very different future.

Through this layering and re-layering of perspectives, Atwood brings the reader slowly but powerfully to the conclusion you'd least expect (at least, if you were reading anything other than Atwood) and does it so beautifully that by the end I was crying.

For those well aware of Atwood's tendency to make sly references, I will simply add that the name of the final volume is a palindrome, which for some reason called to my mind the phrase from T. S. Elliot's Four Quartets: in my beginning is my end.

Randall Kennedy: Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word

Randall Kennedy (an African-American professor at Harvard Law School who specialises in, among other things, race relations law) has written a very interesting book about the word that no white person can say without risking denunciation as a racist of the very worst kind - even though, as Kennedy notes in the book, racism can do as much, or more harm, when clothed in polite condescension or specious arguments pretending to quote scientific or historical "fact" as it can when broadcast through an aggressively abusive epithet.

In a wide-ranging discourse (which is unfortunately limited to the use of the w9rd in the USA), Kennedy examines the range of cultural meanings of the word, depending on who is using it, and when, and to whom, and for what purpose, the legal ramifications of using it in various circumstances, and shares his own opinions on the question of whether a white person in modern America can use the word in a non-racist way.

My only complaint is that I wanted more discussion of all of these things, and a more broadly based analysis.... The book seemed too brief to adequately examine the vast impact of the word.

Christine El-Madhy: Tutankhamen: The Life and Death of the Boy-King

No author who chooses to write about Egypt in the 18th Dynasty, and in particular the Amarna period, can ignore three crucial questions: "whatever happened to Nefertiti," "just who the hell was Smenkhare," and "who were Tutankhamen's parents." Equally true, any speculations on these questions advanced prior to the 2010 announcement of the results of DNA testing on the remains of Tutankhamen and a number of other mummified remains, some previously identified (such the the mummy known as "the Older Lady, now identified as Tiye, wife of Amenhotep III) and some known only by the numbering of their burial chambres (such as KV55, often believed to have been Smenkhare) and KV35YL, also known as the Younger Lady), must be re-evaluated in light of scientific data unavailable when those speculations were originally made.

Christine El-Mahdy, writing before the DNA testing, proposes interesting, plausible, and, at least in part, still viable answers to the first two questions, and as many other Egyptologists had done, goes astray on the third. Through careful analysis of inscriptions dating back to Akhenaten's grandparents, El-Mahdy proposes a timeline consisting of a series of co-regnancies and intermarriages between the royal family and another powerful family of hereditary court officials which challenges many of the commonly-held perceptions of the politics of the Amarna period. Her elegant solution to the questions dealing with Nefertiti and Smenkhare (one also proposed by other Egyptologists) is that they are, in fact, the same person. Nefertiti disappears from inscriptions as Smenkhare, the mysterious figure chosen as co-ruler by Akhenaten himself, appears, they share many titles and epithets, and Nefertiti was a powerful queen who already shared many of the Pharoah's royal duties. Why did this change in her status, from Great Wife Nefertiti to co-ruler Smenkhare, occur, and why at just that time? El-Madhy, through analysis of regnal numbers and other time-sensitive data, concludes that Akhenaten, who was personally unsuited to kingship, a dreamer and philosopher, never actually ruled alone; that he was co-ruler with his father Amenhotep III for the first 12 years of his reign, and then co-ruler with Nefertiti/Smenkhare for the remainder of his reign, until his death. Nefertiti, having taken as a ceremonial Great Wife her own daughter Meritaten, then ruled alone for a few years following her husband's death, until both she and Meritaten disappear and Tutankhamen, now married to the last surviving daughter of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, comes to the throne, a boy king who himself will not rule long.

Nothing in the DNA findings invalidates any of this. What it does invalidate is El-Mahdy's theory that when Nefertiti became co-rulet, taking a Great Wife of her own, Akhenaten chose as his new official consort a secondary wife known as Kiya (who El-Mahdy identifies with a Mittani princess originally intended to be a secondary wife of Amenhotep III, but who arrived in Egypt after the older king's death) who gave birth in the following year to Tutankamen.

We now know that Tutankhamen's parents were the two mummies known as KV55 and KV35YL, and that the most commonly advanced interpretation of the DNA results indicates that these two individuals were full brother and sister, both children of Amenhotep III and his wife Tiye. The age at death of KV55 has been debated, sone estimates place him as young as 20, some as old as 40. Amunhotep had two known sons, Thutmose, who died in late adolescence of unknown causes, and Akhenaten. Unless there was a third unmentioned son (perhaps the mysterious Smenkhare?), KV55 is Akhenaton, as Thutmose died long before Tutankhamen could have been conceived.

It should be noted that a minority interpretation of the DNA suggests that KV35YL could have been, not Akhenaten's sister, but Nefertiti, who is thought by some Egyptologists (including El-Mahdy) to have been Akhenaten's first cousin and the daughter of a bloodline that had provided three generations of wives to the 18th Dynasty kings - a situation which could statistically have produced a commonality of genetic material in the same range as a sibling relationship.

El-Mahdy, while proven wrong in some of her conclusions by the DNA evidence, provides some interesting insights and theories about many of the other mysteries of the late 18th Dynasty. Her writing is accessible to a general readership and she explains many of the complexities associated with the questions surrounding the Amarna period with clarity. The book itself is a fascinating look at the processes historians and archeologists must go through in sorting through often conflicting theories and inconclusive evidence in an attempt to discover "what really happened" in any era.

Fions Patton: Warriors of Estavia, Vols. 2 and 3

Two by Fiona Patton (wife of Tanya Huff), competing a trilogy I started reading a long time ago.


The Golden Tower

This is the second volume of Patton's Estavia trilogy. I read the first volume quite some time ago and enjoyed it very much, but then it took a long time to get an ebook of this one, and in the meantime, I had forgotten a fair bit of the detail of the first volume. That may be why I found it so difficult to get into this volume.

Or it could be suffering from middle-volume syndrome, where most of the action, physical or psychological, is about the characters getting into position for volume three. Certainly, that's what was happening for about three-quarters of the book, while key characters equivocated all over the place. The last part of the book started moving as some decisions were finally taken and some important moves were made.



The Shining City

So, series finished. There was stuff I liked a lot, and stuff that didn't work for me. Again, I found the pacing wrong for the first two thirds of the book. Too much back-and-forthing, complete with adolescent angst. I guess this is understandable since the book is very much a coming-of-age story, with all the major protagonists under 20 and tied together by serious events from their childhoods and a web of prophecies that change dramatically depending on whether they work out their interpersonal dramas or not.

So... Basically, there's this God, one of six Gods who give their protection to the people of this particular city-state. And he thinks thinks are stagnant and wants to shake things up. And there are these four outcaste orphan kids living on the streets, three of whom have destinies - Brax, Graize and Spar - and one of whom will die young in a metaphysical maelstrom. When Brax and Graize are very young, Brax does something that leads to Graize kind of imprinting/obsessing on him, but they are separated. Later on, when they are still kids, Brax is taking care of another street kid, Spar, and Graize has hooked up with the fourth kid who will die soon. Graize hates Spar, because Brax is caring for him, and hates/desires Brax. Spar and Graize are both seers, which in this world contains a wide mix of magical goodies. So on this particularly nasty night, a swarm of hungry, mindless wild spirits break the protections on the city and wreak havoc. The four boys find themselves at the centre of it. One boy dies, Grize is teleported hundreds of miles away to be found and cared for by nomadic enemies of the city, Brax swears fealty to the god of war if she will help him fight the spirits and save Spar, and the spirits themseves are tramsformed into a proto-god who is tied both to Graize and Spar.

The whole series is about the three surviving boys and the proto-god growing up and sorting out their feelings and needs so they can eventually work together to save the city from an alliance of outside enemies intending on its destruction. In the process, everybody gets to be vacillating and selfish, though Brax, as the champion of a god, sorts things out earliest and Graize, as a jealous little bint, takes the most time getting a clue. Which causes a great deal of trouble, as he is a very powerful sorcerer/seer who is deep in the plans of all these enemies because he wants to destroy the city that Brax is sworn to protect.

It all works out in the end, and the city gets a new god out of the whole business, too.

What I liked was the worldbuilding and the natural feel to a social system that accommodates people who are male, people who are female, and people who are bi-gendered and can shift their presentation easily from male to female. Also, same-sex relationships all over the place, totally normal.

So, interesting, fun at times, a little slow at others, good but not great.