Henry Lien: Peasprout Chen, Future Legend of Skate and Sword

Peasprout Chen and her younger brother Cricket live in the land of Shin, where wu liu, the beautiful and deadly art of martial skating, was invented. Peasprout, who is fourteen and a prodigy at wu liu, and as such, she and Cricket have been selected by the Dowager Empress herself to study at the Pearl Famous Academy of Skate and Sword in a goodwill exchange - a mission that carries much responsibility, for the independant city-state of Pearl has taken preeminence in the great martial art and Peasprout is here in Pearl not just to learn all the secrets of wu liu but to do better than all the Pearlian students and restore the honour of Shin.

This is the premise behind Henry Lien’s delightful Peasprout Chen, Future Legend of Skate and Sword, a fantasy for children with the spirit of anime and the feel of one of those classic children’s books that grows organically from a special story invented to tell a beloved child to a tale that enchants children everywhere. It’s set up as a traditional boarding school novel, with the protagonist as outsider forced into competition with the school bully and persecuted by the bully’s clique, with stern teachers who never understand the difficulties facing the protagonist, and unexpected allies.

Yet underneath this surface lie some dark secrets that could spell serious danger for Peasprout and Cricket, who are both innocent of the political machinations that lie behind this ‘goodwill exchange’ but may nonetheless suffer the consequences of intrigues they had no part in.

I’m really looking forward to reading the sequel, Peasprout Chen: Battle of Champions, because she’s a character that it’s hard not to love, and I know I want to see more of her.

P. Djèli Clark: The Black God’s Drums

P. Djeli Clark’s novella, The Black God’s Drums, is a steampunk adventure with a difference. In Clark’s alternate 19th century world, the revolution in Haiti - the only successful slave rebellion in our own world’s Northern Hemisphere - was so successful that much of the Caribbean is now part of the independent Free Isles, protected from invasion by a mysterious secret weapon known as the Black God’s drums. America’s Civil War has turned into a stalemated conflict that’s exhausted both sides, and New Orleans is a proud free city where airships from around the world come to trade.

New Orleans is the home of Creeper, an orphaned street kid born during a violent storm, who sometimes has visions sent by Oya, goddess of storms. One night, Creeper overhears a group of Confederate soldiers making plans to meet a Haitian scientist who, they say, is prepared to sell them the secret of the Black God’s drums.

When Creeper decides to give this information to a pirate captain, Anne-Marie of the Midnight Robber, whom she knows to be working for Haiti and the Free Isles in return for a place on the captain’s ship, she is drawn into a matter of magic, danger, and the powers of the sister goddesses that ride her and the captain.

It’s a powerful story that blends steampunk sensibilities with ancient deities from Africa in a combination that seems just right for a tale set in New Orleans.

Brooke Bolander: The Only Harmless Great Thing

Brooke Bolander’s The Only Harmless Great Thing, a novelette published in chapbook format, is a complex, tragic, and angry cry of j’accuse to humanity for its lack of understanding, compassion, self-awareness and ability to take responsibility for its own mistakes.

The narrative is based on two historical events, both of which in their own way show humans to be cruel and thoughtless beings in aggregate. The first is the story of Topsy, an elephant taken into captivity to be exhibited to the public as a performing elephant. Topsy was involved in several violent incidents, most if not all of which seem to have ben provoked by thoughtless spectators, or careless and cruel handlers. In 1903 she was publicly executed - poisoned, strangled and electrocuted. Her execution was filmed for the edification of those eho could not attend personally.

The second historical event was the tragedy of the ‘radium girls’ - women who had been hired to paint watch dials with luminous paint containing radium. The women, who have been assured that the paint was harmless, were instructed to ‘point’ their brushes on their lips to make a smoother line, and as a result, ingested deadly amounts of radium. When some of the women, severely ill with radiation sickness, took their employers to court in the 1920s, they were alleged to have become ill, not from exposure to radium, but from syphilis contracted due to their ‘immoral’ lifestyles.

Bolander brings these two events together in an alternate Earth where elephants have long been known to be a sentient species, and a sign language developed to allow humans and elephants to communicate. There are three narrative threads in Bolander’s story. First, one on which Topsy, having too bad a reputation to exhibit, is sold to a watch manufacturer where Regan, dying from radiation sickness, is teaching her how to paint the watch dials while she waits for her court-ordered compensation comes through so she has some money to leave her family after she dies. Second, a mythical story about the sacrifices made by an elephant matriarch that enabled elephants to have a kind of group racial memory maintained by the mothers. And third, a future scenario in which humans hope to bury all the world’s nuclear waste under a mountain in Africa, and persuade a band of elephants to mind the mountain in perpetuity, warning future generations of humans against the dangers buried under the earth they protect; the humans come up with the ironic idea of altering the genetic makeup of these elephants so that they will glow, to remind humans of radioactive dangers.

The weaving of these ideas - radioactivity and poison, human cruelty and carelessness, the memory of elephants, the human urge to make others responsible for the mistakes of humanity, the implication that elephants will remember and protect better than any human agency could - is a powerful indictment of humanity and its relationship to other humans, to other life forms, and to the planet itself.