My life in books

Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver is a fascinating meld of a number of myths and fairy tales, all clustered around the themes of sacrifice and salvation, bargains and negotiations, and the balance between winter, the bringer of cold and death, and spring, the time of rebirth and growth. These themes are explored through the lives of three very different women - Irina, the unloved daughter of a duke, Miryem, the industrious daughter of a hapless moneylender, and Wanda, a peasant girl with a brutal father. All three women are outsiders, Irina and Wanda because of the dynamics of their dysfunctional families, Miryem because she takes over her father’s business - and because she is a Jew.

The novel is set in a secondary world that draws deeply on Russian history, culture and folklore, and Novik makes this into a rich setting for her characters.

I admit to a bit of difficulty getting into the novel, because in general, Russian myth and culture does not stir me the way some other source cultures do, but once I was committed to the story of these three women, I was hooked. Another marvelous tale from Novik.

I enjoyed Becky Chambers’ first two books, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet and A Closed and Common Orbit, even though, as some have noted, the novels are light on linear narrative and long on character development and interaction. I enjoyed watching the characters grow and interact - together. Each of these novels focused on a small group of people doing things together, an that was what made them work for me.

Unfortunately, Record of a Spaceborn Few, though like her other novels, almost entirely character driven, doesn’t do the same for me, and I think it’s because here, the characters are not, for the most part, in conversation (in the broadest sense of that phrase) with each other. They are all connected through their presence on one particular ship in the Exodan Fleet - the collection of ships that carried almost all of what remained of the human racd away from the ravaged planet they had once called home, in which they had lived and died, creating a culture of ecological self-sufficiency to replace the rapacious and unsustainable culture of humanity on Earth.

Though the human race is not part of the galactic community, it has been given a home planet, where some have settled, and is free to travel, work and live among all the planets and peoples in that community. However, many have remained in the Fleet, holding onto the culture and ship-based way of life that evolved out of the near-death of the Earth. Even though the Fleet no longer wanders, but remains in formation around their new sun.

But, now that humanity has options, and change is inevitable due to new contacts and new technologies, what effect will this ultimately have on the Fleet. Chambers examines that question through her characters, most of whom are natives of the Fleet, one of whom is a human whose grandmother left the Fleet to live planetside, but who is curious about the ways his ancestors developed before they bound themselves to a world again.

The novel thus consists of a number of independent stories, each one focused on a different individual, linked primarily by a commonality of place and circumstance, but not initially interacting with each other. And I think that’s why this novel has not worked for me as her earlier books did, though over the course of the novel I did become invested in the stories of some of the characters, and enjoyed reading about their lives and experiences. The consequences of alien influence on a massive convoy of human refugees isn’t quite a tightly enough focused story for me to open to all of the characters because of their role in the story.

However, when a significant event takes place about two-thirds of the way into the book, and all the characters begin to respond in at least some degree to that, it seems to pull the narrative together, tightening the focus and making the story more engaging, at least for my tastes. It’s safe to say that the book grew on me, rather than capturing me at once.

And in the long run, the examination of what keeps a society together, and what causes some to abandon it, when there are such options, was an interesting meditation, and raised some issues I’ll be thinking about for a while.

The Titanic Tragedy by William Seil is one of a series of “Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” published by Titan Books. As Gentle Reader is probably aware, I find it hard to resist books that purports to offer us more of the doings of the Great Detective, so happening upon this volume was sufficient reason to acquire it.

This adventure places Watson, and Holmes in disguise as a senior naval officer, on the maiden voyage of the Titanic. They are there to assist a young British agent, Miss Norton, who is carrying secret documents to be delivered to the Empire’s American allies. Miss Norton is the daughter of Holmes’ old friend, Irene Adler.

There are, of course, a number if suspicious characters on board, including the vengeful brother of James Moriarty, an inquisitive young American woman that Watson takes a bit if a fancy to, a German baron and his wife who seek Watson’s help with a series of curious blackmail notes, a professional gambler, and some oddly behaved crewmen.

Naturally, the documents are stolen, and Holmes, Watson and Norton must find them before the ship arrives in America - only, of course, the reader knows that the deadline is somewhat sooner, before the ship sinks.

Woven into the search for the documents is a detailed, and to the best of my knowledge, accurate, description of the ship, its construction, and the reasons it was thought to be unsinkable. The various officers Holmes and Watson rely on for assistance bear the names of the real men who held those positions on the Titanic, and some of the passengers they encounter were real passengers who lived, or died, much as they do in the novel. Our heroes, of course, survived the tragedy, being picked up by the nearby liner Carpathia, as were most of the survivors of that night.

I found the actual Holmes plotline a little bit overly convoluted, with multiple sideplots and red herrings, but nonetheless I enjoyed it quite a bit.

Another year, another Valdemarian anthology from Mercedes Lackey. These books are like catnip for me. The collections are sometimes uneven, but Valdemar is a wonderful invention, a rich secondary word with so many different cultures and potential stories, and there’s something about Lackey’s world that I find irresistible.

As usual, there are some stories from longtime contributors, many of them featuring characters we’ve met before and come to appreciate, and some from new writers who’ve never written for Valdemar before. And of course a brand new story by Lackey herself, which answers one of the questions many of us have had about Need - and also makes a strong statement about trans inclusivity. But then, Lackey has always been an LGBT ally, which is probably one of the reasons I feel comfortable with her work.

In fact, Lackey’s story, “Woman’s Need Calls Me,” is my favourite from this collection, which is in fact one of the stronger collections of recent years - there really wasn’t one story that I didn’t enjoy, although some were slight in terms of action and adventure.

Good comfort reading when I needed it.




Note: This anthology contains 18 stories, 16 written by women and two written by men.

Martha Wells’ fourth Murderbot novella, Exit Strategy, brings Murderbot back into the world of corporations it was seeking to avoid. Murderbot’s last client as a corporate SecUnit, Dr. Mensah, is being held against her will by GreyCris, the corporation that’s been behind so much of the violence and skullduggery that Murderbot has been dealing with in its quest to discover what enabled it to become self-governing, and what nearly destroyed Dr. Mensah’s expedition.

Murderbot deduces that GreyCris has captured Mensah because they believe that Mensah has been co-ordinating Murderbot’s activities, which have been highly detrimental to GreyCris’ plans. A logical assumption, perhaps, since by Corporation space law, Mensah is Murderbot’s owner.

Murderbot decides to make the attempt to free Mensah from GreyCris’ clutches, and to bring GreyCris down with the evidence of their actions it has gathered.

What follows is another tightly plotted adventure story, which serves as the background for further development of Murderbot’s ethical and emotional understanding of its own self, and of its social interactions with human who have at least some small understanding of what it is.

The novella ends with Murderbot in a temporary state of safety, contemplating its future, having for the first time a choice of options and the freedom to choose openly.

I hear that Wells is working on a Murderbot novel. That’s very exciting news.

If You Could Be Mine, the debut novel by Iranian-American writer Sara Farizan, is that very important thing, a story for young adults about queer and trans characters in non-Western cultures. Set in modern Iran, the novel explores a variety of aspects of queer and trans life under the ayatollahs, where same-sex attraction can lead to death, but being transgender is considered a medical problem and gender confirmation surgery is paid for by the state - though trans folk do experience discrimination in many areas of life.

The main character is Sahar, a young woman from an impoverished branch of a wealthy family. She is serious, studious, takes care of her father who is emotionally adrift after the death of his wife, is studying hard for the entrance exams to get into the best university in Tehran so she can become a doctor. She is also in love with Nazrin, who’s been her best friend since childhood. Nazrin the pretty, somewhat vain, and to my mind rather selfish and shallow daughter of a wealthy family. She says she loves Sahar, and they share modest physical intimacies, but she has accepted the marriage proposal of Reza, a young and ambitious doctor favoured by her family, and she expects that Sabar will continue being her devoted lover even after she marries Reza - in short, she wants the best of both worlds without thinking about Sabar’s feelings or future.

Sabar in determined to prevent the marriage snd find a way that she and Nazrin can be together. After meeting Parveen, a trans woman who is a friend of her wealthy cousin Ali, who is gay and, thanks to his wealth and ability to bribe the police, able to live almost openly as gay, Sabar hits upon the idea of transitioning to male in order to marry Nazrin herself.

As Sahar explores the options for transgender people in Iran, all the while knowing that, unlike Parveen and the other trans men and women she meets, she is not really transgender, the day for Nazrin’s wedding grows closer and Sahar becomes more desperate to find a way to be with Nazrin. Yet at the same time, she begins to see that while Nazrin may love her, she also wants the security and conventionality of a family, a professional, financially well-off husband, and children, things that Sahar cannot give her now.

This is no fairy-tale romance. It ends honestly, with no one getting everything they want, but everyone a little wiser and more self-aware. The story drags at times, but is strong enough to hold the reader’s interest. The writing has many of the flaws of an inexperienced writer, but that is something that time will rectify. And the light it casts on queer and trans issues in Iran is truly interesting.

In How Sex Changed: A History of Transexuality in the United States, Joanne Meyerowitz defines transexuality as well as a once used but now outdated term, transexualism, as “conditions in which people hope to change the bodily characteristics of sex. (The terms apply whether or not the individual has undergone surgery.)” She goes on to say that, in modern usage, “transsexuals are a subset of ‘transgendered’ people, an umbrella term used for those with various forms and degrees of crossgender practices and identiacations. ‘Transgendered’ includes, among others, some people who identify as ‘butch’ or masculine lesbians, as ‘fairies,’ ‘queens,’ or feminine gay men, and as heterosexual crossdressers as well as those who identify as transsexual. The categories are not hermetically sealed, and to a certain extent the boundaries are permeable.” (This book was published in 2002; since then, the term ‘transgendered’ has fallen out of usage, to be replaced by transgender, or simply, trans. In discussing the book, I will use some of the terms that Meyerowitz uses, such as transsexual defined specifically as a trans person who has had, or is seeking, medical intervention toward gender confirmation. I will avoid other terms which in my opinion are now too outdated to be respectful of trans experience, or which define a trans person solely by their type of transition, which Meyerowitz does throughout the book. Readers are therefore cautioned that they may find the terminology is this book to be reductive, outdated, or even traumatic.)

Thus, the book focuses on a particular subset of trans individuals, specifically, those who feel that some degree of medical intervention or body modification is part of satisfying their personal sense of their gender identity. It looks at the history of expression and fulfillment of this desire in the North American context - those who have sought to ‘change their sex,’ and those who have provided, or sometimes withheld, that process.

There have always been people who did not feel that the gender assigned to them based on their physical sexual anatomy was who they really were; in some cultures, there have been acceptable social avenues for them to take on the gender they identified as, in others, some have simply lived in discomfort, or found individual ways to ‘pass’ as their true gender. But it has only been in the past hundred years that the idea of devising surgical procedures that could give a person at least a semblance of functioning sexual organs that matched their gender identity has been part of the conversation, and only in the past 50 or so that the techniques have become relatively available to most of those seeking a physical change.

Meyerowitz notes: “ ‘transsexualism,’ defined in part by the request for surgical sex change, did not appear as a medical category until the late 1940s and early 1950s, when doctors David O. Cauldwell and Harry Benjamin first coined and publicized the English term transsexual and when Christine Jorgensen first appeared in the press.

But the concepts of ‘sex change’ and ‘sex-change surgery’ existed well before the word transsexual entered the medical parlance. In the early twentieth century European scientists began to undertake experiments on ‘sex transformation,’ first on animals and then on humans.”

Much of the early European research and experimentation into what is now referred to as gender confirmation surgery took place in Germany, home of such leading researchers into the psychology and physiology of sex as Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, but this research was abruptly halted when the Nazi party came into power. Still, many individuals had by this time received various kinds of surgical treatment intended to remove unwanted sexual organs and in some cases, create functional vaginas for transexual women.

Many of these techniques had already existed for some time - it was the use of these techniques to help transgender individuals that was new. “Sex-change surgery, then, did not take root when and where it did because of new or unusual medical technology. It took root in part because Germany had a vocal campaign for sexual emancipation. In Berlin, Hirschfeld and others worked to remove the legal and medical obstacles to sexual and gender variance, to enable homosexuals, crossdressers, and those who hoped to change their sex to live their lives as they chose.”

However, while the awareness of surgical possibilities became part of the American sexological landscape, beginning in the early 1930s, most American physicians did not offer the procedures, despite a large number of individuals seeking such surgery. In a few cases, sympathetic surgeons were warned that surgery to remove healthy organs was illegal and could result in serious ramifications if they attempted such procedures.

Meyerowitz devotes several chapters to accounts of early transsexuals whose stories were extensively covered in the media - such women as Christine Jorgensen, Charlotte MacLeod, and Tamara Rees - noting how these stories made the public - including other transgender people who might otherwise have thought themselves alone, the only person with such feelings - aware of trans people and the possibilities of gender confirmation surgery. Unfortunately, publicity did little to distinguish between transvestites and transexuals, or transsexuals and intersex persons seeking surgery to establish their chosen biological sex, nor did it affect the prevailing notion that transsexual women were more akin to gay men than cisgender women. And curiously, there was little interest in the stories of trans men. In fact, most physicians who provided care for trans people believed that trans men were rare, perhaps as few as 10 percent of trans individuals, and some questioned “whether there should be such a diagnosis as ‘transsexualism’ for females.”

Meyerowitz also discusses the development of better surgical techniques over time. Since surgeons mostly saw trans women in their practices, techniques in vaginal construction were a major point of concern. Trans women, however first had to find doctors willing to remove the penis and testicles. This was a major roadblock for some time. Some trans women were so determined to receive confirmation surgery that they attempted to remove their own penes and testicles, leaving doctors with no choice but to complete the desired surgeries. Trans men were less likely to seek out surgery in the early years, perhaps because hormone treatments were sufficient to help most achieve a body they could feel somewhat comfortable in, and phalloplasty techniques at the time were notoriously unsatisfactory. Trans men did seek out mastectomies and hysterectomies, but the reluctance to remove healthy, but unwanted, organs made these surgeries difficult to obtain.

The media focus on transsexuals also brought about a debate, in both the public and professional spheres, over the nature of sex and gender. Among the European sexologists who pioneered gender confirmation surgery, the predominant concept of biological sex was of a universal bisexuality, with individuals located on a spectrum. The transsexual person simply moved along the spectrum, bringing out more if the characteristics associated with the other end of the spectrum. This concept, however, was not common in America, nor did it find much acceptance when proposed.

What came to predominate, and to influence future thinking about sexual identity, was the idea of a psychological sex that was distinct from, though usually in accord with, biological sex. This was the ‘invention’ of gender as a concept.

“In the first half of the twentieth century the theory of human bisexuality had, for some doctors and scientists, redefined sex and legitimated sex-reassignment surgery; in the second half of the century a theory of immutable gender identity came to replace it. In the 1940s and afterward, scientists who studied intersexuality adopted the concept of a deeply rooted sense of “psychological sex.” Some of them suggested that hormones or genes created psychological sex, but others considered it conditioned, imprinted, or learned. In any case, they claimed that no one could change an adult’s psychological sex. Once established, they asserted, the sense of being a man or a woman remained armly entrenched, immune to both psychotherapeutic and medical interventions. They applied this conception of psychological sex—which they later labeled “gender role and orientation” and “gender identity”—first to people with intersexed conditions and then to transsexuals. In this view, the mind—the sense of self—was less malleable than the body.”

However, instead of bringing about an acceptance of surgical intervention to match biological sex to gender, the overall response was to promote the enforcement of rigid standards of gendered behaviour in childhood and support psychotherapy to correct apparent gender non-conforming begaviour, to ensure that the child developed the ‘right’ psychological sex by adulthood. Interestingly enough, the same attitudes prevailed among those who thought that human were to some degree bisexual, in that everyone had some characteristics of the “other” sex - firm education in appropriate gender roles was necessary to minimise the consequences of this bisexuality. Few questioned the necessity of a clear demarkation between male and female. The result was the pathologising of transsexuality as a psychiatric disorder.

Physicians were already gatekeepers, due to their power to offer or withhold available surgical procedures. Pathologising trans people further added to the adversarial relationship developing between doctors who had the technical knowledge to do the surgeries desired, and trans people who sought surgical interventions. Many doctors tried to ‘cure’ their trans clients first. Trans people tried to figure out what they had to say and do to obtain surgery. Many trans women sought to appear hyperfeminine to persuade doctors that there was no way they could live as men. Discussing sex was a dangerous topic - acknowledging desire for men, while appropriate behaviour for a straight trans woman, ran the risk of being diagnosed instead as a gay man, ineligible for surgery. For trans lesbians, the problems were even more difficult, as their sexual orientation could be read as male heterosexuality, and cause for attempting treatment rather than surgery. Many insisted they felt no sexual desire. The need to tailor their life experiences and presentation to convince doctors to approve surgery led to an assumption among doctors that trans people were inherently deceitful. And so the gatekeeping became a major obstacle in the quest of trans people to reshape their bodies to match their identities.

Adding to the problems faced by trans people seeking surgery was the confusion of the medical establishment between transsexuality, transvestitism, and homosexuality. Some felt that trans women were gay men so horrified by their homosexuality that they needed to erase it by becoming women. The debated how to distinguish true trans people from gay people or cross-dressers. Similar discussions developed in the queer community, with various groups - gay men, lesbians, drag queens, heterosexual transvestites - arguing over how trans people should be viewed. One of the difficulties her was that some people who had identified as gay men, drag queens, or butch lesbians, eventually realised that they were in fact trans women and men. Meanwhile, trans peoples’ attempts to define themselves simply as people assigned a gender that was not congruent with their identity were often ignored.

In the 1960s, one consequence of the general ‘sexual revolution’ was a relaxation of defined gender roles, and an openness toward sexual experimentation, that on the one hand, gave many young people the chance to explore androgyny and even living as another gender, and on the other, made it easier for distinct subcultures to emerge, drawing distinctions between those who were gay or lesbian with marked preferences to adopting behaviours associated with another gender, and transexuals who identified as a gender other than the one socially assigned them. Lines of demarkation grew up between those who sought gender confirmation surgeries, and those who identified as ‘fairies’ or ‘butches’. Transsexuality was at least for some distinguished from homosexuality.

Unfortunately, the medical profession was making distinctions based on the path patients had followed to an awareness of their gender identity. They tended to favour the person who had tried to live a conventional life, followed the heterosexual rules for their assigned gender, and lived lives of quiet desperation. Those who came to a desire for gender confirmation surgery through experiences as living as gay men and drag queens, who had been sexually adventurous, were often seen as poor candidates for surgery.

Another consequence of sexual freedom was the eroticisation of trans people. Pornographic images of the feminised bodies of post-surgery trans women began appearing. This was accompanied by erotic images of ‘half-men, half-women’ - trans women who had received hormone treatments and thus had both breasts and a penis. “The sexualization of MTFs went hand in hand with the legalization and commercialization of sexual expression. In this changing sexual climate, the tabloids and pulps presented their stories as less concerned with what the main-stream press dubbed ‘desperately unhappy lives’ and more concerned with titillating adventures.”

Meyerowitz records the low changes in the mainstream medical profession’s attitudes toward gender confirmation surgery, and the work of transgender activists in bringing about greater awareness and acceptance for their situation. Slowly, hospitals began to open gender identity clinics where surgeries were performed on trans men and women, starting with Johns Hopkins in 1965: “By the end of the 1970s more than a thousand transsexuals had undergone surgery at the hands of doctors based at American universities, and fifteen to twenty “major centers” conducted transsexual surgery in the United States.”

Unfortunately, demand far exceeded supply, and the doctors running these clinics set up strict conditions. Again, professional gatekeeping came between the transgender individual and their right to control their own body: “By the end of the 1960s the doctors required psychological evaluation to ascertain that patients had longstanding crossgender identiacation and no severe mental illness. The doctors also wanted patients to live as the other sex and take hormones for a number of months or years before undergoing irreversible surgery. They looked for patients with the intelligence to understand what the surgery could and could not do, and with what they considered realistic plans for the future, especially employment.” Preference was given to those whom doctors felt could most easily ‘pass’ and who presented as ‘quiet’ and highly conventional in their gender expression. Trans lesbians and gay men were unlikely to be approved.

As the availability of surgery grew, legal issues became more important, and courts were increasingly asked to rule on whether a trans person could change their birth certificates and other key documentation from their assigned gender to their true gender. Thanks to the supportive testimony of a number of doctor-advocates, a series of precedents were established where the courts did order the official change of sex on birth certificates, which was the first step to obtaining new documentation of other kinds, and offered a trans individual the ability to provide legal proof of their gender when required. However, where the courts were tending to define gender by reference to genital appearance, governments held onto older ideas and defined gender by (presumed) chromosomal composition. And even the courts provided no hope fir trans people who had not, or could not, have surgery. This was particularly onerous for trans men, for whom phalloplasty remained an unsatisfactory option lacking in both sensation and function.

As the era of liberal sexual freedom that marked the 60s and 70s began to change, Meyerowitz documents shifts in acceptance among both gays and lesbians, and feminists, toward transgender men and women. The prevailing gay culture had adopted the “cult of the macho” and rejected the drag and fairy culture that had supported trans women in transition. At the same time, lesbian culture began to see trans men as butches who were deserting the fold for a safer, moe privileged life. Feminists critiqued trans men and women as reactionaries who reinforced gender stereotypes that the women’s movement was fighting to change, and distrusted trans women who, they believed, had grown up with male privilege and could never be, culturally or psychologically, women, thus establishing the trans-exclusionary (TERF) streak in feminism which remains a problem to this day.

As the conservative 80s set in, the few legal victories trans activists had achieved were rolled back, and existing surgical clinics came under attack from both the right, with a renewed insistence that surgery enabled mental illness and that trans individuals required treatment to restore the ‘proper’ gender identity, and from the left, with a strong critique of the rigid gender roles doctors required of prospective surgical patients. But as their rights were being denied and the few gains made eroded, trans people fought back, forming advocacy organisations, building communities and working to educate both the public and the medical profession on the realities of being transgender.

As Meyerowitz says, “The rise of the transgender movement capped the century in which sex change arst became a medical specialty and transsexuals arst emerged as a visible social group. From the early twentieth-century ex- periments on changing the sex of animals to the liberationist move- ment of the 1990s, the topic of sex change had served as a key site for the deanition and redeanition of sex in popular culture, science, medi- cine, law, and daily life. In a century when others had challenged the social categories and hierarchies of class, race, and gender, the people who hoped to change their sex had brought into question another fundamental category—biological sex itself—commonly understood as obvious and unchangeable. In the modern push for self-expression, they had taken the meanings of self-transformation and social mobility to a new level, and from the margins of society, they had grappled with the everyday ways in which unconventional individuals confounded and provoked the mainstream. In the process, they had engaged with doctors, scientists, reporters, lawyers, judges, feminists, and gay libera- tionists, among others. Together, these various groups had debated big questions of medical ethics, nature and nurture, self and society, and the scope of human rights. None of them could ax the deanition of sex, which remains a topic of debate in medical journals, courtrooms, and television talk shows, and none of them could settle the question of the interconnections among sex, gender, and sexuality. Still, by the end of the twentieth century, the transgender activists could hope at least for a future in which the variations of sex and gender might no longer elicit stigma, ridicule, harassment, or assault.”

Take Us to Your Chief is a collection of science fiction short stories by Ojibwe novelist and playwright Drew Hayden Taylor. While I don’t see any reason why the thought of an indigenous writer working in the science fiction genre should raise any eyebrows, Taylor felt his choice deserved some explanation, because he says in his Introduction: “Part of my journey in this life both as a First Nations individual and as a writer is to expand the boundaries of what is considered Native literature. I have always believed that literature should reflect all the different aspects and facets of life. There is more to the Indigenous existence than negative social issues and victim narratives. Thomas King has a collection of Aboriginal murder mysteries. Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm has published an assortment of Indigenous erotica, and Daniel Heath Justice has written a trilogy of adventure novels featuring elves and other fantastic characters. Out of sheer interest and a growing sense of excitement, I wanted to go where no other (well, very few) Native writers had gone before. Collectively, we have such broad experiences and diverse interests. Let’s explore that in our literature. Driving home my point, we have many fabulous and incredibly talented writers in our community, but some critics might argue our literary perspective is a little too predictable—of a certain limited perspective. For example, a lot of Indigenous novels and plays tend to walk a narrow path specifically restricted to stories of bygone days. Or angry/dysfunctional aspects of contemporary First Nations life. Or the hangover problems resulting from centuries of colonization. All worthwhile and necessary reflections of Aboriginal life for sure. But I wonder why it can’t be more?”

Whether these story push the envelop of Indigenous writing is not for me to say. What I will say is that I’m very happy Taylor decided to write them, because they are good reading, and provide a different, and welcome, perspective to the sometimes unbearable whiteness of science fiction.

These stories run the gamut of moods, from uplifting to terrifying, as science fiction does. In “A Culturally Inappropriate Apocalypse,” a community radio station on a Kanienké’hà:ka reserve plays a found-by-chance collection of recordings of traditional songs, some so old no one remembers what their purpose was - such as the strange and eerie “Calling Song,” which calls something that was best left forgotten. In “I Am” an artificial intelligence comes to identify with indigenous peoples around the world - and their fates at the hands of white colonialists. In “Dreams of Doom,” a young Ojibway reporter accidentally stumbles on a government plot far worse than assimilation or title extinction. “Petropaths” is a fascinating cautionary tale about exploring powers you do not understand. “Superdisillusioned” tells the story of an Ojibway man mutated by the environmental conditions in his home on the reserve.

But not all is sorrow and loss, although the theme of the traumas of Indigenous people are woven into all of these stories to some degree - as indeed they are inevitably a part of Indigenous life. In “Lost in Space” a part Anishinaabe astronaut finds a way to reconnect with his people despite his being far from Turtle Island. “Mr. Gizmo” addresses the epidemic of suicides among Indigenous youth with a miraculous - and incongruous - spirit intervention. “Stars” links a chain of young men who have looked up at the skies in wonder. In “Take Us to Your Chief,” aliens land on a reserve, only to meet three older men who are known for doing little other than sitting in the porch and enjoying beer in the sunlight - but the encounter works out surprisingly well.

Many of these stories are set in the fictional Ojibway community of Otter Lake, where Taylor has set many of his works of varied genres. For those familiar with his other writings, that will give these stories an extra sense of coming back to someplace familiar, yet altered by the subject matter. I heartily recommend this collection - it’s good science fiction with a strong and much needed injection of Indigenous experience.

Mercedes Lackey’s Elemental Masters series is not one of my favourites. I’ve read a few of the books in the series, and enjoyed them, and bounced rather hard off some others. And there have been some that, based on the brief publisher’s descriptions, just didn’t interest me. However, the 11th novel in the series, A Study in Sable, caught my attention because it involves Sherlock Holmes, and John and Mary Watson, both of whom, in this universe, are Elemental magicians - and have had to keep their activities more or less secret from Holmes, who is, of course, a sceptic. It’s rather fun watching Holmes becoming slowly convinced that there are, in fact,some powers and abilities he knows nothing of, and slowly come to see how they may be useful to his investigations.

A Study in Sable also involves three other main characters, Sarah, a gifted medium, her friend and partner Nan, a telepath and psychometrician, and their ward, the child Suki who is a former street urchin, and, like Nan, a telepath.

In this tale, a case that intrigues Holmes, one that involves a young woman who apparently ran off to Canada with her lover, intersects with a case that Sarah is hired to deal with, the haunting of a melodramatic opera singer who, coincidentally, is the sister of the missing girl who is the focus of Holmes’ attention.

The main plot is quite interesting, and offers some surprising twists on its way to a satisfying conclusion. However, I found the novel somewhat marred by a few self-contained incidents that added nothing to the unravelling of the main plot, and seemed to serve solely to show Watson and his wife working in concert with Sarah, Nan, other magic holders - and other creatures not human.

The 12th installment of the series, A Scandal in Battersea, brings Sarah and Nan together with Holmes again. This time, the threat to England is first revealed in the terrifying dreams of a young woman of good family being cared for in a genteel home for the insane. When John and Mary Watson, along with Nan and Sarah, do their standard Christmas duty of visiting the madhouses to see if any of the poor souls are actually psychics or potential magicians put away because of the strangeness of their perceptions, they discover that young Amelia is a clairvoyant, and that her visions are of a horrendous being from another universe that is preparing to break through into our own. Though they cannot discover who is the human magician working to bring the monster through the gate, they soon realise that he is kidnapping other young women as sacrifices - some disappear altogether, others are found, with their minds empty and their souls beyond even the reach of Sarah’s mediumistic talents. Calling on all their allies, they race against time to prepare for the breakthrough of the creature before all is lost.

There are very strong Lovecraftian overtones to this story, from the somewhat mediocre magician lured into following the rituals in a mysterious book, to the other-dimensional nature of the monster and its mostly glimpsed, never fully described nature.

These are not my most favourite enlargement to the vast corpus of Holmes-insired work, but they are still quite enjoyable on their own merits - indeed, they would work as well with some other intelligent but otherwise ordinary human being in the roles that Holmes portrays. But it wouldn’t be quite as much fun, I suppose.

In the Company of Sherlock Holmes, edited by Laurie King, is a rather entertaining anthology of short fiction inspired by the Conan Doyle stories. There us, of course, a wide range of approaches, some of which feature Holmes and Watson themselves, others which reveal the exploits of characters based on Holmes and his venerable associate, or other key characters from the stories.

Some are very closely inspired indeed - such as “The Memoirs of Silver Blaze,” by Michael Sims, a close retelling of “The Adventure of Silver Blaze” from the point of view of the horse in question - while others draw on the spirit of deduction to create a completely new set of characters and situations. Some I found less than inspiring, such as “Doctor Watson’s Casebook,” by Andrew Grant, a reworking of Hound of the Baskervilles as a series of entries in a social media app. And for me, one story - “The Adventure of the Laughing Fisherman” by Jeffery Deaver - delivered the brilliance and unexpected twist - though without the supernatural elements - of Neil Gaiman’s brilliant “A Study in Emerald.”

Some were profoundly moving, including John Lescroart’s “Dunkirk,” a taught narrative of one of the many small boats that took part in the evacuation of Dunkirk, this one with a volunteer crewman, an old but still hale civilian named Sigerson, of Sussex Downs. And then there’s the heart-breaking “Lost Boys,” by Cordelia Funke, that imagines an all-too-likely reason behind so many of the peculiarities, and defenses, of Holmes.

All in all, a decent collection, with, I expect, something for everyone who loves Holmes.


*This anthology contains 15 stories, five written by women, nine written by men, and one written by a woman and a man.