My life in books

Justina Ireland’s Dread Nation may be labeled as young adult fiction, but this is no light and easy read. IT’s just after the Civil War in America, and the dead have begun to rise. The shamblers are variously blamed on Emancipation, the wrath of God, or a strange new infectious agent. In America, black and indigenous people have been designated as shock troops, and from the age of 12, young girls and boys of colour are taught how to fight zombies and keep the white folks of America safe.

Dread Nation is the story of one such girl, mixed race Jane McKeene, daughter of a white southern woman of means to an unspecified black man, certainly not her absent husband. She’s being taught to be an Attendant - a lady’s bodyguard - at one of the best schools for Negro girls, but Jane is not exactly a devoted scholar or dutiful pupil, though she does excel at marksmanship and hand to hand combat.

In the course of her somewhat unapproved extracurricular activities, Jane, her ‘bad boy’ friend Jackson, and her fellow student, Katherine, a black girl light enough to easily pass, discover some nefarious plots, of course, and are sent off to languish in the coils of one of them - Summerland, a western colony patrolled day and night by black and indigenous folk kidnapped into service to keep the community safe for white settlers.

But even Summerland hides dangers and secrets still unknown to Jane and Katherine. As the situation grows ever worse Jane needs al her intelligence, ingenuity, and battle skills to survive.

First in a series.

Malaysian author Zen Cho made an impressive debut with her fantasy novel The Sorcerer and the Crown, which I found delightful and engaging, and hope will have a sequel one of these days. In the meantime, I have widened my experience of Cho’s writing with her short fiction collection, Spirits Abroad.

These stories are rich with the history and traditions of Cho’s homeland, but make enough reference to Western sensibilities to be wholly relevant and meaningful to the ignorant reader such as myself, in large part because the themes, though they may be clothed in different cultural realities, are universal human experiences - love, family, a need to belong.

As the title suggests, the stories in this collection are mostly what one might class as fantasy, with some more sciencefictional settings, drawing on Malaysian traditions of supernatural beings and forces - but they are often situated in what seems to be perfectly normal situations. The collection is divided into four sections, titled Here, meaning Malaysia, There, meaning the West, Elsewhere, and Going Back.

The first story of the collection, “The First Witch of Damansara,” is a darkly humorous story about a family preparing for the funeral of their matriarch, fondly referred to as Nai Nai - who is continuing to communicate with one of her granddaughters through dreams. Nai Nai does not want to be buried where her daughters now lives, but next to her long dead husband - not because she loved him, but because it’s the proper thing to do. The task of persuading Nai Nai to be happily buried where her family lives falls to the Americanised Vivian, who is more concerned with finding the right wedding dress - traditional Malaysian, or Western white? It’s funny, and it’s heart-warming, and it’s about family and traditions and legacies that go beyond material things.

“First National Forum on the Position of Minorities in Malaysia” begins as an account of an NGO organising and opening a conference, and in the process gives the reader unfamiliar with Malaysia a sense of the diversity of peoples and religions in the country, but then it morphs into a recollection of a bittersweet interspecies love story, as the two lovers meet again for a last farewell.

“The House of Aunts” features a young girl who is also a pontianak, an undead woman similar to the western vampire. Having become a pontianak while still an adolescent, Ah Lee lives much like other young girls - she goes to school, has crushes on handsome boys, and struggles over her homework. She lives in a house of women, all pontianak, all her relatives - her grandmother, great-grandmother, and several aunts - who watch over her, give her endless advice on staying in school, going to university, maybe becoming a doctor. And they distinctly disapprove when she falls in love with a boy from school - but are ready to stand by her when she reveals her secret to him, and is rejected. This is another story that centres on the primacy and importance of family, and particularly the love and support that women can give each other. I also suspect that Cho is telling us something about what it means to be a woman of reproductive age in Malaysian society, as traditionally pontianak are created when a woman dies while pregnant or in childbirth - for one family over the course of several generations to produce so many pontianak suggests a social issue with maternal morbidity.

“One-day Travelcard for Fairyland” takes place in England, at a private college prep school in the countryside that caters to international, largely Asian, students. Hui An wanders outside the school gates one day, and accidentally stumbles, stepping into a hole in the ground and killing a sleeping fairy. The next day, the fairies arrive in full force, angry and violent, and the teachers have vanished, leaving the students with only a few words of advice on dealing with fairies.

In “Rising Lion — The Lion Bows” we meet a troupe of lion dancers living in Britain who offer a special sideline to their regular performances - they also exterminate ghosts. But on this particular occasion, they just can’t bring themselves to terminate the ghost in question - a young African boy brought to England a century or more ago to be a servant. “Seven Star Drum” is also set among the members if this lion dance troupe, and tells the story of Boris, the troupe’s founder, who was born with the ability to see ghosts and other supernatural creatures.

“The Mystery of the Suet Swain” features Sham, a tall, hawk-nosed, brilliant but socially awkward lesbian, and her only friend Belinda, both university students. Belinda has a problem - she attracts stalkers, men who mistake her friendliness for something more. But there’s something different, scary, even dangerous about her latest mystery stalker, and Sham sets out to find out who - or what - he is. And to protect Belinda from him. And yes, Sham and Belinda remind me very much of another famous literary duo, and I hope to see more stories about them.

In “Prudence and the Dragon,” medical student Prudence Ong has to deal with a besotted dragon named Zheng Yi, who wants nothing more than to take her back with him to his own dimension to be his consort. Prudence, however, isn’t really interested, especially not now, while she’s still in med school. And not when his attentions seem to be casing trouble between Prudence snd her best friend Angela. Although even when the friends become reconciled, Zheng Yi’s presence is a problem for Angela as we read in “The Perseverance of Angela’s Past Life.” But, as Angela says, “Angela wasn't going to stop hanging out with her best friend just because doing so literally split her in two.” Friendship between women means something in Cho’s stories, which is a wonderful thing to see.

“The Earth Spirit’s Favorite Anecdote” is a charming little story about the beginning of a rather unusual partnership between an earth spirit and a forest spirit - funny, but with Cho’s familiar focus on the importance of relationships, and on understanding tradition, when to observe it, and when to break it.

“Liyana” is a tragic story, one in which a great evil is done for the good of others. I suppose in a way, it reminds me of Le Guin’s “Those Who Walk Away from Omelas” - a child, in this case non-human, but precious and loved, sacrificed because there is no other way to honor a previous, willing sacrifice, or keep a family alive.

“The Four Generations of Chang E” is a story about change, about leaving the past behind and moving forward, but still being tied to what has been before, at least for a time. In this story, the first Chang E flees a desolate future, escaping to the Moon, only to find herself out of place among the Moonites. Her daughter and granddaughter are, like her, between two worlds, still tainted by their immigrant past, nit quite a part of the future. But when the fourth Chang E fulfils her mother’s dying request to be buried on Earth, she discovers that she, the fourth generation, is finally of the Moon.

“The Many Deaths of Hang Jebat” is just what it says... a series of vignettes, each of which involves a character named Hang Jebat, being killed, blocked on social media, fired... experiencing some form of physical or social annihilation. Each vignette also involves his childhood friend, Tuah - who sometimes is killed by him, and sometimes kills him. In the background, a shadowy authority figure, Mansur. The permutations of events and settings, though, show some kind of connection, and some kind of slow change in the relationship of Tuah and Hang Jebat. It’s a story to contemplate.

“The Fish Bowl” is a dark story, about a girl living in a culture of achievement, expected to do well in so many things, to be excellent, until the pressure if it drives her to erase herself to escape. It hit me very hard, partly because a friend of mine, back in school, was in the same place, and erased herself completely, finally, irrevocably. But it’s an excellent story, and at the same time a caution about demanding more of a person than they have the resources to give.

In Malaysia, they hold a festival of the Hungry Ghost. Ghosts who have died violently, or with unfulfilled longings, or otherwise still hungry for life, can return to the earth for this one month, experience old things, or new ones. In “Balik Kampung,” Lydia is a newly deceased ghost, who does not remember how she died. But she is a hungry ghost - she thinks it is because her parents were always quarreling, more focused on their own pain than her happiness. She want to go back to the place where she lived with her husband, the only time she believes she was truly happy. But even the dead must face the truth in order to move on.

There’s not one weak story in the collection, in my opinion, and Cho provides notes for each story at the end of the book to provide context and help readers with some of the more specific cultural references. The ebook version contains an excerpt from the author’s novella, “The Dangerous Life of Jade Yeo,” which quite caught my interest and is now on my “must get very soon” list.

More Retro Hugo reading - this time, it’s Best Novel finalist The Uninvited, by Irish novelist, playwright, journalist and historian Dorothy MacArdle. MacArdle herself was an Irish nationalist, feminist, labour organiser, and revolutionary colleague of Eamon de Valera.

The novel was originally published in Ireland in 1941 under the title Uneasy Freehold, and was released a year later in the United States as The Uninvited; in 1944 it was made into a Hollywood movie.

The Uninvited is a ghost story somewhat in the Gothic style, but its messages are modern - the silencing of women’s voices, women’s stories, and the ways in which women are turned into symbols to be revered - or despised - while being ignored as real, autonomous beings with both virtues and flaws. There is considerable psychological depth in MacArdle’s telling of the story, and much that delights even as it creates a slow mounting unease.

MacArdle takes her time in introducing her characters, setting the scene, suggesting the outlines of the secrets that must be brought into the open. The immediate action of the story begins with half-Irish siblings, Pamela and Roderick Fitzgerald. Roddy, the older sibling, is an established London journalist focusing on cultural issues, particularly drama. He’s dealing with the end of a difficult relationship, and writing a book on the history of English censorship (it’s worth noting that his career todate revolves around symbolism and silence). Pamela is recovering from the loneliness and isolation of several years spent caring fir their dying father (again, note the situation of a woman trapped in a position of idealised self-sacrifice).

They decide to buy a house in the country, where Pamela can restore her energy and Roddy can have quiet for writing. The place they settle on has been vacant for most of the past 15 years. The owner, Stella, a young woman of 18 living with her grandfather, has not set foot in the house since she was taken from it as a child, shortly after the death of her mother. The grandfather, with whom the Fitzgeralds negotiate, warns them that the house was sold before, to a couple who deserted it due to “disturbances.”

Warned but not concerned, Roddy and Pamela move in, begin renovating and making the house their own. And there are indeed disturbances - starting with lonely sighs in the night and developing slowly into a full haunting. Rooms in which one becomes unaccountably depressed, strange lights, a recurring scent of mimosa, sudden sensations of extreme cold, and eventually apparitions of a pale, blonde woman who resembles Stella’s dead mother.

Pamela convinces Roddy that they must try to discover the secrets of the house and the haunting, convinced that there must be a way to free whatever spirits are trapped there. They begin asking questions of neighbours, people who knew the family before tragedy struck. Slowly, the story emerges, but only in outline. The house was at the end home to three people - Meredith Llewellyn, Stella’s father, an artist, much disliked by most who recalled him; Mary, remembered by sll as a saintly, gentle woman with enormous patience and generosity toward her husband; and Carmel, a Spanish girl brought into the household by Meredith, his model and, most believed, his lover. Mary died in a fall from a cliff on a stormy night, with Carmel near and suspected of possibly causing her death; Carmel died not long after from pneumonia caught on that night, exacerbated by exposure after she fled the house. Pamela and Roddy, hearing these accounts, begin to think there are two spirits in the house, Carmel, filled with hatred, seeking revenge, and Mary, trying to protect her daughter Stella from Carmel’s rage.

Meanwhile, Stella and Roddy have fallen in love, but Stella’s sense of self - already damaged by her grandfather, who idolised his daughter and has tried to mould his granddaughter into her image, is collapsing under the pressure of the haunting. All too soon she seems to be racing toward madness, in a way which only further convinces Pamela and Roddy that the two dead women are somehow battling for Stella’s soul - the doctor treating her describes her condition as bordering on schizophrenia, saying “she has been a stained-glass saint and a crazy little gypsy in turns,” evoking the images that have been forming of Mary and Carmel in their minds, the archetypal contrast between virgin and whore.

In addition to exploring the consequences of this classic idealisation/demonisation trope, MacArdle also looks at, though less markedly, the ways in which race and class intersect with gender, and uses the vehicle of the ghost story as a way of suggesting the intergenerational trauma resulting from the silencing of marginalised voices.

MacArdle tells the tale with great skill, moving slowly at first, giving us a Roshomon-like perspective of the central events that led to the haunting, each observer giving a slightly different tale, each tale carrying its own weight of preconceptions and bias. As the intensity of the ghostly manifestations, and the severity of Stella’s mental anguish, increase, so does the pace of the narrative, and the urgency of the siblings to discover the truth and save Stella, until the final events, and the long-concealed truths, come rushing out. A deeply moving story, well-told.

In Monstrous Beauty, Marie Brennan’s collection of retellings of fairy tales, the happy endings of the classic stories of princes and princesses, queens and little girls visiting their grandmothers transmuted into horror. The title is an apt one - just as most of the fairy tales feature women so beautiful they inspire acts of the greatest cruelty and courage, these retellings give us monsters disguised in beauty, and the cruelest of fates.

It’s a slim volume, seven short stories - one of them very short indeed - and where the source materials, at least in the sanitised versions we now read to children, are about things like the power of love to conquer all, these are more about the evil that lies beneath the glamour. These are worlds where darkness waits for the bold, where mysterious women alone in the wilderness are best ignored, where love cannot conquer death. Brennan is scholar of folklore, and she knows that many of the stories we tell our children in picture books and animated films have much darker roots. In these stories, she reaches for the depths underneath the pretty stories, and gives them to is, unvarnished and untamed.

More novelettes from 1942 pulp magazines.

Isaac Asimov’s “Runaround” is one of the Mike Donovan Robot stories, in which a robot acts strangely and Donovan has to figure out why, and how to fix the problem. Both error and solution usually involve some bizarre circumstances that impacts on the way the robot resolves the tensions between the famous Three Laws of Robotics, and this story falls perfectly into the pattern. A robot with a deliberately heightened sense of self preservation is given a casually worded order to do something that would endanger him. In this case, the two a mathematically balanced, causing the robot to run in circles around the location he was ordered to, while singing Gilbert and Sullivan songs. Kind of amusing, standard Asimov robot story.

1942 was the year in which Isaac Asimov published the first of the stories that would eventually become his iconic Foundation series. “Foundation” is the origin story, which gives us the basic background to the series, and covers the first “Seldon crisis” - how will Terminus, the remote and relatively isolated home of the First Foundation and the Encyclopedists, hold into its independence as the Empire crumbles? It really was one of the most ambitious concepts of its time, even granting that lots of writers were creating lengthy and complex histories for their fictional universes, from Heinlein to “Doc” Smith. Just one month after “Foundation” appeared in print, the second story dealing with the next Seldon crisis, was published as “Bridle and Saddle.”

1942 also saw the publication of Asimov’s “Friar of the Black Flame,” in which an Earth ruled by the reptilian Llhasinu from Vega are driven from Earth and destroyed by a battle force drawn from all the human worlds. It’s fairly standard milsf, but what makes the story interesting is that it mentions Trantor as one of the human worlds, establishing it as part of the backhistory of the Foundation series.

Alfred Bester’s “The Push of a Finger” is a story of the sort we now associate with the “butterfly effect” - the idea that a butterfly’s wings flapping could a tornado on the other side of the world - though of course it predates that formulation. In a future society where the prime principle is stability, a machine is developed capable of calculating the future - and it predicts the end of the universe in a catastrophic scientific experiment in only a thousand years. The pronosticators use the machine to track back to the one moment that, if changed, can prevent the disaster. There’s a surprise plot twist, of course, which the modern reader will immediately deduce because we’ve seen it too many times, but the story is well told and, I expect, was fairly new and original back in 1942.

Lester del Rey’s novelette “My Name Is Legion” is an example of the “time loop” story, in which the subject is caught in the same sequence of time, looping through the same events. In this story, it’s a defeated Hitler trapped in the loop by a scientist bent on revenge for the deaths if his Jewish wife and children, and it is a particularly nasty loop with an all-too-appropriate end built into it. Quite an effective story.

“Though Poppies Grow,” also by del Rey, is the most powerful of all the war-themed anti-fascism stories I’ve read in the past few weeks, and there have been quite a few of those, what with the US being at war in 1942. In this story, the ghost of the Unknown Soldier from WWI is called forth from his tomb, acting out the promise from the famous poem - “If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields.” The writing in this novelette is so evocative, so well-honed, as del Rey follows the young soldier, confused, knowing only that he has a mission, wandering through the streets of Washington, touching people as he passes in various ways. At first he does not know he is dead, a ghost, but slowly as it dawns on him, he is overwhelmed, until at last, he is led to understand his role is to remind these who waver, or are complacent, that there can be no compromise with fascism, with tyranny, with hatred. The story is exquisitely told, the character made so real you can feel his struggle to understand, the message as important today as it was in 1942.

A story in a completely different vein, del Rey’s Lunar Landing s about a mission to the moon, sent in the (faint) hope of rescuing three men from the first lunar voyage. The crew of the Moth - five men and two women - encounter serious problems in landing themselves, and their search for the first ship becomes even more important because they hope to cannibalise it for parts they’ll need to get home themselves. But very little goes as planned in this mission, beginning with the first surprise, plant and animal life adapted for survival on the moon. As I’ve noted elsewhere, del Rey’s style, like Heinlein’s, has aged well. His characters are quite fully and realistically developed, and the two women in the story are intelligent, brave and have lived lives of their own - they have relationships with men, but are not defined solely by them.

Ross Rocklynne’s “Jackdaw” portrays the bewilderment of an alien species on discovering a world where only one living being remains, alone on a planet whose cities, roads and farms have been destroyed by massive bombardment. When the lone survivor dies in a suicide attack on their craft, they are bewildered, but despite their best attempts, the end of the species and the actions of its last member remain incomprehensible to a species that cannot envision war.

“QRM—Interplanetary” by George O. Smith is a cautionary tale of what can happen when you put a businessman whose only focus, and area of expertise, is cost-cutting, in charge of a facility that depends on scientific and engineering excellence to function. QRM, we are told, is the shortwave code for man-made interference in radio transmission. The story takes place in a communications relay station on an asteroid whose orbit is positioned such as to ensure radio transmission between Earth and Mars at all points of both planets’ orbits. The man-made interference is a new Director who knows nothing about either the technical aspects of communication, nor the intricacies of life in an artificially sustained environment. The consequences of his policies, while humorously described, are disastrous. Eventually, the proper order is restored, but not before his decisions come close to killing everyone on the station.

1942 was the date of E. Mayne Hull’s first published work, a haunting novelette called “The Flight That Failed.” Set during the war, it’s the story of a time traveller who tries to avert the destruction of a plane crossing the Atlantic with a secret cargo that will change the course of the history he knows if it gets through.

Fredric Brown’s “The Star Mouse” is a rather poignant tale about a mouse who is shot into space in a small experimental rocket built by your standard eccentric tinkering scientist. Mitkey, as he’s been called by the professor, and his rocket come to the attention of a civilisation of very small people living on an asteroid that happens to be passing near earth. Concerned about potential threats from humans, they explore Mitkey’s memories to find our what they can about human civilisation - but doing this involves giving Mitkey intelligence equal to that of humans. Mitkey goes home again, but alas, the boost in IQ doesn’t last. Still, he survives, is reunited with his mate, and the professor provides him with lots of cheese.

In Jane Rice’ “Pobby” a writer of horror starts a new story - his idea is to tell a gruesome tale of a poor farmer named Pobby who finds a strange seed, plants and waters it, hoping that it might grow into a rare flower that will make him some money, only to be eaten by it once it flowers. As he starts to write his installments for magazine publication, however, someone named Pobby, who looks and talks like the character he’s writing about, appears to various of his friends, saying he needs to find the writer and get him to stop making him grow the flower, because he doesn’t want to die. Finally, Pobby and the writer meet face to face, but the writer persists in following his story - until he finds himself in a writers block just before the final scene. Frustrated, he travels to the lace where he has set Pobby’s farm, finding the town much as he’s written it, with characters he’s mentioned, and Pobby’s farm, where he discovers the cause of his block - Pobby, out of desperation, has written his own ending to the story. An interesting exploration of the conceit that characters can take on a life of their own.

“The Magicians’ Dinner,” also by Jane Rice, is a comic ghost story about a young bride, married to a magician, who tries to handle a dinner for forty in their first home, when she’s never cooked before. Fortunately for her, her family’s long-dead cook decides to return from the other side to save her firmer employers’ daughter’s bacon, so to speak. The tale is told in first person, the narrator is rather self-depreciating and quite engaging and likable, so that the story comes across as light-hearted and sweet. We will pass over the class issues and the trope of the help who care more for the families of their employers than they can for their own, and some if the annoyingly sexist assumptions about how marriages between men and women should work.

In Rice’s “The Elixir,” the narrative voice is again a somewhat unconventional woman, a out-spoken, accident-prone, unmarried writer of mystery novels. In this light-hearted time travel yarn, Amy Parrish’s equally unconventional neighbour, Clare Holloway, throws a Halloween party and Amy decides to attend as a witch. While waiting for the party to get started, Amy mixes up a batch of punch, tossing in liquor, ice cream, and halloween candy, while reciting some off-the-cuff doggerel, and ends up in Salem during the witch hunts. Much strangeness ensues, but all ends well, with Amy back in her own time, wondering if everything happened as she recalls it, or if she was just drunk silly and hallucinating. Having read several of Rice’s stories now, I must say that I am quite delighted with her descriptive style, which is both unique and very apt, and her mastery of tone. It’s a pity that her work is not remembered nearly as well as that of other writers of this era.

Victor LaValle’s novel The Changeling begins as a piece of realistic fiction about a family in New York. It begins with the courtship of Lilian Kagwa, a Ugandan immigrant, secretary, refugee from a horrific regime, and Brian West, American-born, parole officer, child of alcoholics. The sorts of everyday people one finds in a great multi-ethnic city like New York. The marry, and have a son they name Apollo, and four happy years. Then Brian West disappears without a trace.

Some thirty years later, Apollo Kagwa, a successful though not prosperous used and rare book dealer marries Emma Valentine, a librarian from Boons Mill, Virginia. They have a son, and call him Brian. For the first few months, things are normal. Stressful, often sleepless, but normal for two people who have just had a baby. But then Emma does the unthinkable, and disappears.

And suddenly Apollo is in a world of fairy tales and monsters, both as old as time, and as young as the internet they foul. And to restore his family, he must question everything he thinks is true, except his love for his son and his determination to be the father his own father could not be.

The Changeling is a story about family above all, about how it can go so very wrong, but also how it can be made right. It is about the worst fears of parents, and the worst that parents can do. About abducted and murdered children, and parents who destroy what they cannot have, or who they cannot leave behind. It is about the stories that families construct, whether to hide the truth, or to give their existence meaning. LaValle has taken a hard look at the dysfunctions of the family - and he does not back away from how many of them can be traced to warped ideas about masculinity and fatherhood - and given us a horror story that leaves us thinking about how we can do family right.

Some characters take on a life of their own, and demand that other authors tell stories about them, or about the other characters that inhabit their universes, long after their original creators have stopped writing about them. Sherlock Holmes and his faithful companion Watson are among those characters, as are a number of other literary creations from the same time period.

Sometimes writers are tempted to bring together such characters from different literary universes. Imagine Mina Harker, Captain Nemo, Allan Quartermain, Dr. Jekyll and Hawley Griffin as a Victorian League of superheroes - as Alan Moore did.

In her debut novel The Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter! Theodora Goss has taken this one step further, in bringing together two groups of characters derived from 19th century literature - the mad scientists whose researches pushed multiple boundaries of human knowledge and experience, and the female monsters they created.

The story begins with Mary Jekyll, the daughter of long-deceased Doctor Jekyll. Left without any income after the death of her mother, Mary is looking for any legitimate way to make enough money to support herself and her loyal housekeeper and cook. After receiving a strange notification concerting her mother’s continuing support of “Hyde” she assumes this is a clue to the whereabouts of the long missing Mr. Hyde, believed to have been involved in an unsolved murder. Remembering that the famous detective Sherlock Holmes was also involved with the case, she goes to him to see if there is still a reward for the capture of Hyde. With Watson assisting her, she discovers not the man Hyde, but his daughter Diana, who claims to be her sister. No longer welcome at the Magdalen Society where she has been cared for, Diana becomes, in essence, Mary’s ward, as the two seek to unravel the mystery of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Their investigation dovetails with Holmes’ newest case, a consultation with the police over several deaths of prostitutes in the Whitechapel area, women whose bodies were found with body parts missing. (These seem to be purely fictional, although inspired by other cases of Victorian serial murders - the names of the victims do not correspond with the 11 names in the historical Whitechapel file, several of which are attributed to Jack the Ripper.) A seal used on some surviving correspondence received by Dr. Jekyll is identical with the design found on a watch fob clutched in the hand of one of the murder victims. With this, the game is afoot, and will eventually involve some of the most famous ‘mad scientists’ and other creatures of Victorian fiction - Moreau, Rappaccini, Renfield, Van Helsing - and the legacy of the first of the mad scientists, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Goss has chosen to tell the story in an interesting manner. Ostensibly being written by a woman identified as Catherine, the text incorporates comments by Mary, Diana, Mary’s housekeeper Mrs. Poole, the scullery maid Alice, and two other women not initially identified, Beatrice and Justine. From the nature of their comments, the reader is made aware that these women are friends and colleagues who have travelled and worked together on at least one venture, and that the narrative - mostly written by Catherine - is also a means of introducing each woman and allowing her to tell her story, and recast the reader’s knowledge of her through the lens of her father’s work.

Being a Holmes enthusiast, and fairly familiar with the Victorian literature of the fantastic that is referenced in this narrative, made the reading of it a particularly enjoyable experience. I found myself double checking the names of just about every character mentioned, whether they seemed to be involved in the mystery of the murdered women or not. (I was rather vexed not to find any obvious link between Mrs. Poole and Bertha Mason Rochester’s nurse Grace Poole.)

The frequent asides of the main characters make it clear that Goss plans more adventures for the women of her book, and I am most eager to find out what comes next.

Last year, on International Women's Day, Tor.com published a series of short stories on a theme drawn from the silencing of American Senator Elizabeth Warren during the confirmation hearings for Jeff Sessions as Attorney General. Commenting on the silencing, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said:

"She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted."

The phrase has quickly become a feminist slogan, a cry of resistance against the worst injustices of the new American administration.

I read most of these last year, but wanted to bundle all the comments on them together in one post, so here, very late indeed, is that post. Links to all the stories can be found here: https://www.tor.com/series/nevertheless-she-persisted/


Kameron Hurley, "Our Faces, Radiant Sisters, Our Faces Full of Light"

The title is, of course, a direct reference to a short story by James Tiptree Jr (Alice Sheldon) writing as Racoona Sheldon - a woman who certainly persisted, writing about a woman driven mad by warnings and explanations, who resisted to the end. And the story is a grim, but somehow glorious fable of women’s persistence across the years, the centuries.


Alyssa Wong, “God Product”

This is not a happy story. It’s a story about a woman led to believe she is nothing, that she must destroy the thing she values in order to gain the respect she craves.


Carrie Vaughn, “Alchemy”

A paean to every woman who has ever labored, thankless, hindered, belittled, mocked, in a field designated as being “for men” and who has succeeded against all odds.


Seanan McGuire, “Persephone”

A bitter tale that touches powerfully on many painful things - poverty, desperation, the futility of hope in a capitalist dystopia, the delegitimising of non-standard relationships, the traffic in human flesh and blood, the dehumanising of the underclass by the powerful, and the anger that grows from all these and more.


Charlie Jane Anders, “Margot and Rosalind”

A slightly comic, slightly snarky, quite delightful story about a female “mad scientist” who’s building a brain in her basement, despite the efforts of everyone trying to stop her.


Maria Dahvana Headley, “Astronaut”

Reimagining the story of the first primate to survive a flight in space. It’s an all-too-familiar story with a sweetly triumohant ending.


Nisi Shawl, “More than Nothing”

Cora knows what’s expected of her, the sister if a pastor’s wife, a member of a black community, but Cora feels the call of other ways, and even more dangerously, she dares to hope.


Brooke Bolander, “The Last of the Minotaur Wives”

This story speaks of an inheritance of hope, generations of quiet resistance that build to the culmination, the moment when all is ready for the last in the chain to stand, to run, to leave the prison behind.


Jo Walton, “The Jump Rope Rhyme”

Important lessons are often encoded in children’s games and rhymes. Walton, an accomplished poet as well as writer of fiction, has built a skipping rhyme for future generations on the theme of persistence. A poem of hope.

“Persisting, in bad times, with only hope,
For you, in space, for the dream we share
Of a better future everywhere.”


Amal El Mohtar, “Anabasis”

Fir those who do not recognise the reference, Anabasis, which means, in the Greek, journey/expedition up from below, is the title of a book written by Xenophon describing the experiences of an army of Greek mercenaries fighting for the Persian would-be emperor Cyrus the Younger. After Cyrus was killed in battle, the Greeks faced a long and dangerous journey home, and it is this journey out of civil war that occupies most of the account.

El Mohtar writes in this powerful short story about a woman struggling to bring her child to safety, to a new home, and about her own identity as an Arab, a Muslim, a Canadian immigrant, a writer, a voice crying for justice. It’s a story about being a refugee, about borders and documents and human lives. It calls up the specific memories of Muslims trying to cross out of a suddenly far less welcoming US and into Canada during the winter of 2017 and Donald Trump.

Ironically, several months after this story was published, El Mohtar, a Canadian citizen traveling on a Canadian passport, was detained by American Customs agents while on her way to a writers’ retreat in the US. As a result of the interrogation, she missed her flight and was traumatised. (http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/ottawa-author-calls-out-canadian-government-border-questioning-1.4430916)


Catherynne M. Valente, “The Ordinary Woman and the Unquiet Emperor”

In a world where everything that is not required is forbidden, an ordinary woman has the chance to change everything. She is warned. She is given an explanation. She persisted, and the world changed.

Catherynne Valente, "Down and Out in R'lyeh"; Uncanny Magazine, September/October 2017
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/down-and-out-in-rlyeh/

This is not your average Cthulhu mythos story. In a style reminiscent of its other literary inspirations - Orwell's Down and out in Paris and London, Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - it's a travelogue, a drug-fueled expletive-filled exploration of the fetid underbelly of a city where that most fetid of all things, dead, lies dreaming. The narrator is an inconsequential 'eerie' named Moloch - not "the" Moloch, of course, just one of the thousand children of Shub-Niggurath, out for a night of tripping on the fumes of Cthulhu's farts. It's one wild ride, and it's worth it.


Allison Mills, "If a Bird Can Be a Ghost"; Apex Magazine, August 1, 2017
https://www.apex-magazine.com/if-a-bird-can-be-a-ghost/

Shelly's Grandmother is a Ghostbuster. Shelly has the gift as well, to see and communicate with ghosts, to send them on. Her grandmother has a lot to teach her, about when to send a ghost on, and when to let them be. About treating them like the people they were. But when Shelly's mother dies, she has to learn the hardest lessons on her own. Very strong story, it starts out sweet and turns powerful and full of meaning. By the end I was near tears.


Cassandra Khaw, "Don't Turn On the Lights"; Nightmare Magazine, October 2017
http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/dont-turn-lights/

Oh, this is a dark little piece of horror indeed. Or, considering that it consists of multiple variations on a simple horror trope, a series of dark little pieces, each one successively darker and taking its motivations from deeper in the human psyche. Khaw turns the screws sublimely.


Mary Robinette Kowal, "The Worshipful Society of Glovers"; Uncanny Magazine, July/August 2017
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/worshipful-society-glovers/

Kowal's novelette, a historical fantasy set in Tudor times, features a journeyman glovemaker in a world where the crafting guilds have arrangements with the queen of fairies to produce enchanted goods - all properly licensed, of course, and the penalties for making unlicensed ensorcelled goods can be grave indeed. But laws intended to protect can also trap a good but desperate person in a maze of deceit and worse, with no way out. A story that is, ultimately, about the cruelty of class, the desperation of poverty, and the callousness of a system that makes no allowances for circumstance or simple human necessity.


Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali, "Concessions"; Strange Horizons, published in two parts, March 6 and 13, 2017
http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/concessions-part-1-of-2/

In a world where religious strife has led to wars and a suppression of faiths of all kinds, where religious exiles live in small communities in barren lands becoming increasingly less habitable, a muslimah doctor and scientist struggles to balance both her callings, and find a way to atone for her part in the devastation. A thoughtful, moving story about healing, responsibility, science and faith.


Vina Jie-Min Prasad, "A Series of Steaks"; Clarkesworld, January 2017
http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/prasad_01_17/

A delightful sf caper about a prime beef forger and her assistant threatened by a nasty client with blackmail on his mind. The details of the forged food business - and its cousin, the printed replacement organ business - are actually fascinating, and the way the women turn the tables and ride off into the sunset is delightful.


Kathleen Kayembe, "The Faerie Tree"; Lightspeed Magazine, November 2017
http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-faerie-tree/

Striking a bargain with the faeries is never something done lightly, but when the need is great enough, some are willing to pay the price. But the sacrifice can be even worse than you thought it would be. A well-told tale with a bitter lesson.


Rachel Swirsky, "The Day The Wizards Came"; Lightspeed Magazine, November 2017
http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/day-wizards-came/

A short but many-layered story. What if wizards - mere schoolchildren, on brooms, not unlike the wizards everyone has been reading about - suddenly appeared and stopped a terrible thing from happening. And what if the mundanes, who the young wizards didn't have much respect for anyway, instead if being suitable grateful, wondered why now, why, if they had such power, they hadn't stopped other terrible things before then. And what if... But as I said, there are many levels to this unsettling tale, having to do with responsibility, and power, and expectations, and wanting things to be better without having to do it yourself, and other tricky questions.


Theodora Goss, "Come See the Living Dryad"; tor.com, March 9, 2017

Goss' novelette deals with an issue that I feel rather strongly about - the treatment of people who have visible differences and disabilities, by society, by those close to them, by institutions and media. Set in 19th century England (and thus evoking echoes of the life of a similar medical curiosity, Joseph Merrick, the famous Elephant Man), this is the story of the life and murder of Daphne Merwin, the Living Dryad. There is a real, and very rare, genetic condition known as Lewandowsky-Lutz dysplasia, in which damaged skin develops into hardened tissue and forms papules that resemble treebark, and branches. It is this condition that the fictional Daphne suffers from, and the reason that her husband - the man who found her alone and starving in the streets of London - exhibits her under the name of the Living Dryad.

The story is told through Daphne's journals, the internal narrative of her great-great-granddaughter, also named Daphne, who has inherited her condition, and various documents - handbills, news reports, excerpts from the younger Daphne's book on Victorian Freak Shows. The younger Daphne, reading the journal for her research, becomes suspicious about the official version of the murder, and seeks to resolve the questions she has. Daphne's journals provide clues. But what lies beneath the murder mystery - which is interesting in itself - is the tragedy of two woman turned into objects for display, for the financial benefit of the man who wooed and used them both, and the voyeuristic pleasure of others.


Carlie St. George, “If We Survive the Night”; The Dark Magazine, March 2017
http://thedarkmagazine.com/if-we-survive-the-night/

There’s a house in the woods where the girls who die in horror films go. Every day there’s an angel who calls on them to repent their sins, and every night they are murdered again. Because everyone knows it’s the bad girls who die. But who decides what’s good and what’s bad? And who determined that the appropriate punishment for any sin that a teenaged girl could commit is to be horrifically murdered?

In an interesting literary coincidence, shortly after reading this story, I encountered the following passage in Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life: “You can be made responsible whether or not you have modified your behavior in accordance, because gender fatalism has already explained the violence directed against you as forgivable and inevitable.”


Kirsten Valdez Quade, “Christina the Astonishing (1150 - 1224); The New Yorker, July 31, 2017
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/31/christina-the-astonishing-1150-1224

More mainstream/literary fiction. A thought-provoking story recounting the life of a late Medieval female saint from the perspective of her sister. Reading with a modern eye, one is unable to discern sanctity from madness. Did Christina really return from death, or from a paralytic fit that seemed like death to the uneducated villagers and barely educated priest? Her sisters suffer greatly from her ranting, accusations and erratic, sometimes violent behaviour - is it the wrath of God or schizophrenia? What tears at the heart is the anguish of a sister torn between love, resentment, anger and reverence.

John Chu, "Making the Magic Lightning Strike Me"; Uncanny Magazine, May/June 2017
http://uncannymagazine.com/article/making-magic-lightning-strike/

What prices are we prepared to pay to become what we most want to be - or think we want to be? This science-fictional story of the proverbial 98-pound weakling who wants to be a muscle man explores this question with sensitivity and compassion. The protagonist has made a heavy bargain - taking a dangerous underground job in return fir extensive alterations that turn his body into the muscular machine he longs to be, but even with all the external changes, it isn't quite enough.


Nicole Kornher-Stace, "Last Chance"; Clarkesworld, July 2017
http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kornher-stace_07_17/

A post-apocalyptic story about a young girl who is captured by scavengers and used as a labourer to search for 'Before' treasures in a dangerous ruin. The protagonist's voice is well-developed and consistent, the story interesting, and the ending holds out some hope that taking the proverbial last chance nay bring something good. A good read.


Vina Jie-Min Prasad, "Fandom for Robots"; Uncanny Magazine, September/October 2017
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/fandom-for-robots/

Computron is the only sentient robot ever created, by accident, by a scientist who was never able to recreate his achievement. Computron 'lives' in a museum devoted to the history of robotics; it displays its sentience to museum visitors by answering their random questions. One day, a young visitor asks Computron if it has ever watched a particular anime series about a human and a sentient robot seeking revenge for the destruction of the human's family. Computron watches the anime, and discovers fandom. It's a charming story with sone spot-on observations about fandom, shipping, and fanfic. It's also a bit of a parable, about the way that the most unlikely of outsiders can find acceptance and friendship in the online world of fandom.


Rebecca Roanhorse, "Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience (TM)"; Apex Magazine, August 8, 2017
https://www.apex-magazine.com/welcome-to-your-authentic-indian-experience/

Jesse Turnblatt, like most of his co-workers at Sedona Sweats, is a 'real Indian' who sells VR fantasy experiences to white tourists who "don’t want a real Indian experience. They want what they see in the movies." So he gives them fantasies about Indians who never were, until one day he meets a client who wants so much more.

This is half science fiction, half horror, and all about the real Indian experiences of cultural appropriation, the intersection of racism and sexism, theft of land, culture and even identity, and ultimately, genocide. The ending floored me with its parallels to the history of white appropriation of everything Indigenous. Read it.


Malinda Lo, "Ghost Town"; Uncanny Magazine, September/October, 2017 (originally published in Defy the Dark, ed. Saundra Mitchell, 2013)
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/ghost-town/

It's Halloween in Pinnacle, a small town in Colorado with a history of mining prosperity during the 'Old West' and a tradition of celebrating its ghosts. Ty is a young butch transplanted from San Francisco with her family to a place where she doesn't fit in, where there's no real place for a young lesbian among all the Beckys and Chads. When popular girl at school McKenzie invites her to go ghost hunting on Halloween, Ty accepts.

This is a ghost story. A good one. It's also a story about bullying and anti-queer bigotry and the history of violence against transgressive women - and a sisterhood that transcends the grave. It's told in layers, peeling back the events of the evening until the reader finally understands everything, and the impact is all the more because of this. I liked it a lot.


Lavie Tidhar, "The Old Dispensation"; Tor.com, February 8, 2017
https://www.tor.com/2017/02/08/the-old-dispensation/

The short story is framed as the observations of a telepathic ruler (or rulers, or some intermediate being with multiple consciousness) known as the Exilarch torturing one of its trained assassins to determine just what happened on his latest mission, from which he returned somehow changed. It is set in an interstellar theocratic empire based on Jewish tradition and culture, but it's a nasty place indeed, where heresy merits death and the Treif - races outside the rules of acceptability - are freely warred on to the point of extermination. Lavie leaves quite a lot to the reader to work out, including the nature of the Exilarch, the origin of the Empire, and the consequences of what happened to the assassin during his mission. Interesting reading, but I found it unsatisfying despite the suggestion at the end that the Exilarch's reign of terror might be nearing its end.


Yoon Ha Lee, "Extracurricular Activities"; Tor.com, February 15, 2017
https://www.tor.com/2017/02/15/extracurricular-activities/

Lee's novelette is set in the same universe as his novels Ninefox Gambit and Raven Stratagem, and features one of the protagonists from that series, but is more accessible to the casual reader. It is set early in Shuos Jedao's career, and demonstrates the combination of skill, daring and foresight that will make Jedao legendary. The narrative has a light, at tines almost comedic tone, but there are hints of what is to come, particularly in Jedao's consciousness of the number of kills he makes. Yet at the sane time it's clear that he is dangerous, and thinks in terms of threat and violence. For readers of the novels, it's an interesting glimpse into one of Lee's most interesting characters. For those who don't already know Shuos Jedao, it's a finely crafted sf spy story.