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Chelsea Quinn Yarbro is perhaps best known for her remarkable series of historical supernatural novels featuring the vampire Count Saint Germain, but she’s also written a wide range of other novels in a variety of genres. Taji’s Syndrome is a solid near-future medical thriller about a freak accident in a militarily funded genetic research lab that has cascading consequences that only appear years afterwards.

The reader has all the important clues up front - Yarbro begins with the incident, and the series of co-incidental events that lead to the fetuses carried by six pregnant woman at a particular point in the pregnancies being affected. But from that point, the reader, like the medical researchers across the country some 15 years later, is caught up in the history of a bewildering epidemic. At first, it’s only a few cases in clusters, and for the isolated doctors and researchers, looks like a classic case of toxic contamination. But the epidemic spreads out from those loci like an infectious disease, and by the time the Centers for Disease Control are called in, thousands are dying from a disease no one understands.

I happen to quite enjoy this kind of medical thriller, and so for me this was a great read - suspenseful, conveying both the urgency and the frustration of medical detectives struggling to put the pieces together while people are dying all around them and each day without a solution to the puzzle and a step towards a viable cure is a day where their whole raison d’etre as doctors is chalkenged.
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Sustenance, the latest of the Saint Germain novels by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, is in many ways a typical Saint Germain novel - we have the Count, now calling himself Ragoczy Ferenz, Grof Szent-Germain, his manservant and companion, the immortal ghoul known as Roger, an intelligent woman in some degree of distress who forms an attachment with Saint Germain, and a historical place and period of considerable conflict and sociopolitical upheaval which can present a believable threat to the wealthy and powerful but always precariously placed immortal exile.

The style is familiar too, to any fan of Yarbro's invincible vampire - narrative interspersed with letters and documents which often give the reader insights that the main characters may never be aware of.

The time and place, while historical for many readers, are just barely in the past for many of Yarbro's older readers - Paris and the Northeastern US in the late 40s and early 50s, at the beginning of the Cold War and the reign of fear perpetrated by Hoover and McCarthy, among others, in the US.

The story focuses on the activities of a group of American academics forced out of their university positions and into exile due to suspicions of their being Communist sympathisers - however, even the most radical of the bunch seem simply to be left-wings free-thinkers who don't understand why Russia should suddenly be an enemy not an ally.

As academics, most have a powerful need to publish - not only for their livelihood, but also for the love of research. And Grof Szent-Germain owns publishing houses under the Eclipse imprint all around the world, with long list of academic publications under their belt. When Charis Treat, a historian who made the mistake of researching the medieval commune movement, approaches him about looking at her own manuscript - and possibly those of a few of her friends, Szent-Germain is drawn into the duplicitous and dangerous world of American intelligence, the feud between FBI and CIA, and the insanity of the Communist witch hunt. And Szent-Germain has much to hide - though nothing like what the operatives swirling around the ex-pat Americans imagine.

A sobering novel for Yarbro's readers, yet bearing within it the inevitable promise of a new life rising from ashes.
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With 20-odd books in the Saint Germain series, by now one knows what to expect - impeccable historical detail surrounding yet another of the ancient vampire's travels and adventures. I love these books, and Night Pilgrims delivers all of the trademarks of Yarbro's successful blend of the historical and the supernatural.

It's 1225, not long after the Fifth Crusade, and Saint Germain is back in Egypt, living as a secular guest in a Coptic monastery while attempting to minister to the medical needs of the community's elder. Political developments, both internal to the monastery (the ambitious monk who seeks to become the community leader and is suspicious of Saint Germain's true nature and intentions) and external (unrest stemming from the advance of Ghenghis Khan) make it necessary for the Count to leave his place of refuge. Fortunately, a party of European Christian pilgrims require a guide in their journey south along the Nile to sacred sites in Ethiopia. The Count, a well-travelled polyglot with great skill as a healer, is the perfect choice.

The novel details the world of medieval Egypt through which the group of pilgrims pass with painstaking detail, and I must admit that this for me is one of the greatest draws of the Saint Germain novels. The other draw is the idea of Saint Germain, the millennias-old being who has seen the rise and fall of civilisations, the best and worst that humans can contrive - and still moves among them with pity and compassion. The vampire healer. The peacemaker (when possible) who needs blood to survive. The eternal contradiction.

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And finally, the last few books from 2013.


Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Magnificat

What would happen if, following the death of the Pope, the Conclave met and somehow unanimously elected someone whose name they had never heard or seen before? Who was everything a Pope should never be - a middle-aged magistrate from communist China, an atheist, a woman? Yarbro imagines it, and it is quite wonderful to read.


Simon Clark, The Night of the Triffids

A quite enjoyable sequel/homage to Wyndham's classic The Day of the Triffids, which begins 30-odd years later among the human survivors on the Isle of Wight. The narrator and protagonist, David Mason (son of the narrator of the original novel) is a pilot who hopes to find evidence of other surviving colonies to unite in the face of increasing indications that the triffids are intelligent and have plans to destroy the remaining humans. In the course of his quest, Mason, like his father before him, is harshly reminded that triffids are not the only threats to the survival of humanity.


Ellen Galford, Queendom Come

Galford's satirical, feminist, woman-centred view of the world is in high form in this novel. Set in Scotland during Thatcher's Blue Reign, the narrative focuses on the sudden appearance of an ancient Caledonian war-queen, called upon, like Arthur, to return in the hour of her nation's greatest need, and the near immortal seer/sorceress who was the queen's counsellor centuries ago and has awaited her return. Funny as hell.


R. A. MacAvoy, The Third Eagle

MacAvoy is a brilliant fantasist, but this foray into space opera is, while pleasant reading, not among her masterpieces. The protagonist, Wanbli Elf Darter, a skilled member of a clan of bodyguard/assassins who traditionally serve the landed classes on the planet of Neunacht, leaves his people and culture behind to travel in space. After many picaresque adventures, he ends up on the "revivalist" ship Commitment, which is crewed by survivors of generation starships sent out centuries before. The crew of the Commitment have adopted a mission to hunt down other such sleeper ships drifting through space - whereupon they decant a few of the frozen people aboard. The rest they kill, because there is no place for them to go - the colonised planets won't accept them, and the Commitment can only take on enough to replace crew lost to injury, illness or old age. Wanbli, of course, finds an answer that allows the sleepers to live. Despite the grim situation of the sleepers, this novel is mostly light-hearted and fun.

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Three novels about the end of the world, from three authors, writing at three points in time - the 1970s, the 1990s, and the 2010s.


Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Time of the Fourth Horseman

An early Yarbro science fiction novel (from 1976) set in a (now alternative) timeline in which overpopulation due to improvements in medicine has brought about massive social problems and a burgeoning, underserviced underclass. Suddenly, in the city of Stockton, diseases thought to have been eradicated begin showing up, but no one recognises them - or at least admits to doing so. The novel focuses on the efforts of a small group of dedicated maverick health care workers who discover that the diseases have been intentionally reintroduced into the underclass population as an experiment in population control, with a side order of eugenics.

From the initial horror of one doctor's realisation that the man closest to her is responsible for running this "experiment" to the ambiguous ending which may or may not presage the spread of plague worldwide, this is an interesting read, albeit one that is in some ways dated, and that lacks the careful characterisation and attention to detail that marks Yarbo's later fiction.


Jack Womack, Random Acts of Senseless Violence

I had not heard of this book until Jo Walton reviewed it on tor.com. Then an acquaintance of mine with excellent taste in books (we like many of the same things) read it and couldn't stop raving. So I read it. It is amazing. And the last few pages chilled my soul. More people should read it.

This is what Walton said:
Random Acts is written in the form of the diary of Lola Hart, a twelve year old girl in a near-future New York City. As the book progresses she changes from being a sweet middle-class child to a robbing murdering street girl as society changes around her. Presidents are assassinated and money is devalued and martial law is declared as she worries about her sexuality and groans about being forced to read Silas Marner for school. At the start of the book she's writing in standard English with the occasional odd word choice, by the end she has progressed into a completely different dialect, and you have progressed step by step along with her and are reading it with ease. I can't think of a comparable linguistic achievement, especially as he does it without any made up words. (Random example: "Everything downcame today, the world's spinning out and I spec we finally all going to be riding raw.") I also can't think of many books that have a protagonist change so much and so smoothly and believably. What makes it such a marvelous book is the way Lola and her world and the prose all descend together, and even though it's bleak and downbeat it's never depressing.

So, why haven't you read it?
Back in the 90s when this book was written, i'm not sure I would have accepted the premise that the veneer of civilization we cling to is so fragile that it can disintegrate into chaos in just a few months. But we've come so much closer to the edge now, and that makes the events of this book that much more believable to me.

It's brilliant. I cannot recommend it highly enough. Don't be fooled by the fact that the protagonist is 12 years old. This is not a YA novel.


Alex Adams, White Horse

A novel (first in a planned trilogy) of considerable power. As it begins, The protagonist, Zoe, is living a perfectly normal life working on the cleaning staff at a pharmaceutical company, trying to save money to go to college. Then one day, she wakes up to find a mysterious jar in her apartment. The mysterious appearance of the pot, which she does not touch, seems to signal the beginning of the apocalypse, in the form of a mutagenic plague that kills most of its victims from rapid, lethal change; those who survive no longer seem human. Zoe is one of the few immunes, and the novel details most chillingly her struggle to survive and find the man she loves in a world that is filled with monstrous brutality.
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Last year was a year for historical novels of many flavours. I've already discussed the historical mysteries I enjoyed, but there were other multi-genre historical novels to be read kast year.

I finally caught up with Diana Gabaldon's twin historical-tine travel fantasy series, just in time for the upcoming release of the next Outlander novel. I'm looking forward to that, and also, I hope, to more of the Lord John books. 

Diana Gabaldon, Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade
Diana Gabaldon, The Scottish Prisoner
Diana Gabaldon, An Echo in the Bone


Another multi-genre book I happened across was Paula Brackston's now-and-then historical/paranormal fantasy novel The Witch's Daughter. Told in two different times, it's the story of a woman whose mother was hanged as a witch in 1628 and who survives into modern times by learning witchcraft herself from a powerful but vengeful warlock. Brackston seems to have written several more books in a similar vein, and this one was interesting enough that I anticipate reading more of her books.

Then there was the somewhat unclassifiable Jane: The Woman Who Loved Tarzan, by Robin Maxwell, who is known for her historical novels. Jane is a retelling of the Tarzan story from the perspective of the woman who loves and civilises him, but Maxwell makes Jane even more interesting and unconventional than Edgar Rice Burroughs managed to do (and considering his times, and his focus on Tarzan as his hero her actually did rather well at it). A cross between historical fantasy and literary hommage, Jane: The Woman Who Loved Tarzan should delight ERB fans and feminists alike.


And finally, I read two more novels in Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's marvellous historical vampire series. As ever, I enjoyed these novels greatly, both for the historical accuracy and for the chance to experience yet more chapters in the endlessly fascinating life of the Count Saint Germain. 

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, A Dangerous Climate
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Commedia della Morte


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I follow a lot of authors who write both science fiction and fantasy series. New volumes in ongoing series read in 2012:


Tanya Huff, The Wild Ways

The second novel about the Gale family, whose women are strangely gifted and powerful and whose men - rare in a family of many sisters, aunties and nieces - are the embodiment of the Horned God. The full story of what and who the Gales are is slowly unfolding as Huff tells stories about its various members, and I'm sure there is more to come.


Lois McMaster Bujold, Lord Vorpatril's Alliance

Now that Miles Vorkosigan is settled into a title, important court function and family, Bujold has turned her attention to one of the people in Miles' inner circle. An improvement on Cryoburn, largely because the new focus lets Bujold play wild games with her characters again.


Elizabeth Moon, Echoes of Betrayal

This follow-up series to Moon's Paksenarrion Dorthansdotter series just keeps developing more and more twists and taking a wider scope with each volume. I'm thinking by the end that we will know a lot more about the history and future of this world, and that's a good thing.


Charles R. Saunders, The Trail of Bohu (Revised)

The third volume of Saunders' exceptional Imaro series was first published decades ago, and revised recently now that the new era of self-publishing has finally allowed him to complete the series. Although I had read the original version when it was first published, between revisions and the passage of time, thiswas very much a new book for me. And it sets up the coming confrontation between Imaro and his life-long enemies very well.


Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Burning Shadows

Somehow I never tire of the Count Saint Germain, warrior, healer, alchemist, vampire. This one is set in 5th century Hungary and Romania, where the Count faces the coming of the Huns.


Michelle Sagara, Cast in Silence
Michelle Sagara, Cast in Chaos
Michelle Sagara, Cast in Ruin

Finally almost caught up with Sagara West's Elantra Chronicles featuring Private Keylin Neya.


Todd McCaffrey, Dragongirl
Todd and Anne McCaffrey, Dragon’s Time
Todd McCaffrey, Sky Dragons

Fare thee well to Anne McCaffrey, creator of Pern and other worlds. I've been reading her work for most of my life, it seems, and while I have issues with her gender politics, still I can't ignore what a key figure she was in science fiction. And as Todd McCaffery cones into his own as inheritor of his mother's creations, I'm hoping to see more originality and more of the greater awareness of sexual and gender diversity and equality that he has been bringing to the series.


Kevin Hearne, Hexed
Kevin Hearne, Hammered
Kevin Hearne, Tricked
Kevin Hearne, Two Ravens and One Crow (novella)
Kevin Hearne, Trapped

Atticus O'Sullivan (born Siodhachan O Suileabhain), the 2000 year-old Druid with a sharp wit and enough magical power to take on a god or two, is one of the most enjoyable new characters I've encountered in some time. The Iron Druid Chronicles are fast-paced and truly funny. I hope Hearne has quite a few more brewing in the back of his mind.
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It does not seem as though I am actually going to be able to catch up on the books I've read over the past couple of years.

So here's the new plan. I'm going to post lists of the books I read in 2009, 2010 and, once we hit December 31st, 2011, and my summaries of the best books of those years. Then I start afresh in January and try to keep up with comments on each book I read in the new year.

So, here are the remaining books I read in 2009.

Dystopic fiction

The Carhullan Army, Sarah Hall
Make Room, Make Room, Harry Harrison
Generation 14, Priya Sarukkai Chabria


Science fiction

Solitaire, Kelley Eskridge
The Mount, Carol Emshwiller
Starship & Haiku, Somtow Sucharitkul
Jovah’s Angel, Sharon Shinn
Red Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson
The Gameplayers of Zan, M. A. Foster
The Warriors of Dawn, M. A. Foster
The Day of the Klesh, M. A. Foster


Fantasy

The Silver Lake, Fiona Patton
The Shadowed Isle, Katherine Kerr
The Last Paladin, Kathleen Bryan
Children of the Blood, Michelle Sagara West
The Hidden City, Michelle West
Borne in the Blood, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
Victory of Eagles, Naomi Novik

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A Mortal Glamour, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

In A Mortal Glamour, Yarbro turns her not inconsiderable talents at researching and writing historical fantasy to a story of sexual tensions and repressed longings – for love, for freedom – and their consequences in the tightly controlled environment of a Catholic convent during a time of social and religious unrest.

It is the 14th century, the time of the Avignon popes, when Catholicism was split between two competing political factions within the Church. Plague is abroad in Europe. Groups of wandering, often violent adherents of assorted heresies have created an internal threat, while the Eastern borders of Europe are once again facing invasion, driven by the migratory pressures that have periodically pushed new populations westward out of Central Asia.

Trouble is brewing in a remote French convent, la Tres Saunte Annunciation. A young nun, Seur Angelique, child of a wealthy family, in love with an unsuitable young man, rages against the unyielding father who has given her an ultimatum – marry an older man she fears and despises for dynastic reasons, or face permanent incarceration in this community of religious women, many of whom are not themselves in possession of a true vocation. Into this unstable set of circumstances comes a new Mother Superior, who may not be exactly what she seems.

Yarbro has written a fascinating account of the consequences of mixing religious hysteria with sexual repression, and if, in this work of fantasy, she gives a supernatural flavour to the proximate cause of the events she recounts, the underlying causes are clearly delineated.

Fascinating reading.

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Saint-Germain: Memoirs – Tales of the Vampire Saint Germain by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

Saint-Germain: Memoirs is a collection of shorter fiction – two short stories, two novelettes and a novella – presenting incidents in the long life of Yarbro’s immortal hero-vampire. Like her first short story collection of featuring the vampire, The Saint-Germain Chronicles, the stories here cover a wide span of years, from ancient Greece to modern times. In fact, it is only in these two collections – at least so far – that we have any glimpse of how a 4,000 year old vampire copes in the present day, which is one of the things that make these collections particularly enjoyable. At least to me, seeing Saint-Germain in modern times brings the vampire closer to the reader and opens up the sense of wonder, the possibility of great mysteries hiding in the mundane world we all think we know.

My favourite pieces are the two short stories – both deal with encounters between Saint-Germain and women who stand up for themselves. While most of the Saint-Germain narratives involve complex relationships with interesting women, the stories that interest me the most are those in which Saint-Germain becomes involved with women who began from a position of inner strength, regardless of their circumstances and whatever situations bring them into the vampire’s path. In the first story of this collection, Saint-Germain’s path briefly crosses that of one of the most well-known “shrews” of ancient history, Xanthippe, wife of Socrates. And in the final tale, Saint-Germain matches wits with an ambitious reporter in modern-day Vancouver.

The remaining three pieces in the collection are interesting as well, giving the reader glimpses into three different times and places – one already familiar from one of the novels – in the unlife of Saint-Germain

All in all, a pleasant visit with my favourite vampire.

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Roman Dusk, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

As much as I adore Yarbro's great creation, the vampire Saint Germain, I must admit that some aspects of the novels become repetitive - Saint Germain's endless difficulties with troublesome civil servants who just don't trust him and want to extort money from him while preparing to expose him for whatever it is that they suspect him of being being a very large entry on that list. Usually, the repetitive aspects are, for me, more than cancelled out by the richness of historical detail, the twists and turns of the current chapter in Saint Germain's long life, and more often than not, the character and constraints surrounding the women who are an essential part of the vampire's life.

However, this time around, the setting - Rome during the time of the Emperor Heliobagalus - is not all that deeply explored, and we have seen both Saint Germain and Olivia in Rome before, and facing exactly the same kinds of bureaucratic persecution before. Yarbro does explore the growing presence, activism and persecution of Christians in this volume - in fact, that's a significant element of the difficulties faced by both of Saint Germain's significant female companions in this book - and the decadent fusion of sex and sadism of not just the Imperial court but much of Roman culture of the time, and her attention to detail is as always comprehensive and precise. But... I think next time I'd prefer to see Saint Germain in some place and time a bit further removed from the settings of earlier novels.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it - just not quite as much as many of her other Saint Germain books.

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Symposium: Women in Science Fiction (Khatru Issues 3 & 4), ed. Jeffrey D. Smith (1975); revision edited by Jeanne Gomoll (1993)

If you're a feminist and a science fiction reader, you've almost certainly heard of the Symposium. Published in the fan magazine Khatru in 1975, it was the record of an incredible roundtable discussion, an exchange of letters among some of the leading writers of feminist science fiction at that time (and since) - Vonda N. McIntyre, Suzy McKee Charnas, Kate Wilhelm, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, James Tiptree, Jr., Samuel Delany, Joanna Russ, Raylyn Moore, Luise White - plus agent Virginia Kidd and the editor of Khatru, Jeffrey D. Smith.

It's hard to believe, but I've never before read the complete Symposium. A landmark in the development of feminist science fiction and feminst criticism of science fiction - you'd have thought I would have read it long before now. But it hasn't always been exactly the easiest thing to get your hands on, and so I've languished for years reading only reminiscences, exererts and discussions of it.

But it is now available, in an annotated 1993 edition with additional commentary from some of the original participants and other scholars of feminist sf, from The James tiptree Jr. Literary Award Council, and if you are interested in feminism and women in science fiction, you really ought to order it.

Reading it was, for me, like going back to the late 60s and early 70s, when questions of the role of women in society were being hotly debated and challenged on all sides and being a feminist was, if you were like me, one of the most important things you could imagine doing for the future of humanity. Those were very heady times, and very scary times as well, when there seemed to be so much to think and re-think and do and change and challenge. The Symposium takes that moment in time and narrows the focus to science fiction, but you can heard the echoing clarion calls of a worldwide revolution behind it and around it, even after 30 years.
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States of Grace, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

Another Saint Germain novel is always a source of great delight for me. I freely admit that there’s a formula to the Saint Germain books, and the key plot points can be seen coming in advance, but as always, the way that Yarbro particularises her selected themes to a specific time and place delight the history buff in me.

This episode in the vampire count’s life takes place in Europe during the Reformation. Saint Germain is heavily invested in the new business of publishing, owning presses in both Venice and Germany, and must deal with issues of censorship fueled by religious intolerance on both sides of the great spiritual debate – even though the books he aims to publish are not in themselves religious books, but rather what in the time of the Reformation would be the best available scientific and cultural studies.

I can’t help thinking that this book, which addresses censorship of the press directly (censorship and religious intolerance are frequently depicted in the Saint Germain books), is Yarbro’s comment on the growing interference (at least in North America) of a particular religious view – fundamentalist Christianity – on the teaching and publishing of science, and more generally, the dangers that religious fundamentalisms of all kinds pose to true intellectual inquiry when they gain the power to dictate what is and is not acceptable in a society.

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I have a vampire fetish. Male, female, good, bad or inbetween (though I prefer the ones who are, while somewhat ambiguous, mostly good), I'll read about any of them at least once.

One of my favourite literary vampires is Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's magnificent creation, Ferencz Rakoczy Count Saint-Germain - or multitudes of variations thereon. Yarbro has written some 20 historical fantasy novels (and counting) about Saint Germain and the other vampires "of his blood" - that is, vampires he has created.

Hotel Transylvania, the first novel Yarbro wrote in the cycle (though not the first one in the life of Saint-Germain) was published in 1978, and is based very loosely on historical references to a Compte de Saint-Germain who made a certain name for himself in upper class 18th century European society as an inventor, an alchemist and a man of mystery. More than one occult organization has featured in its own writings the historical Saint-Germain's claims to be immortal or nearly so, and a mystical adept of great power and knowledge, and he often shows up in the more occult-inspired conspiracy theories.

Yarbro's fictional Saint-Germain uses some of the historical Compte's attributes - he is an alchemist and a student of some forms of occult philosophy, his manner is that of a nobleman or courtier, and he is highly literate and well travelled. He can also write independently and simultaneously with both hands - a trait that the historical Saint-Germain supposedly had, and shared with a number of legendary Chinese sages and healers. The vampire count has, of course, studied in China.

From this beginning, Yarbro has over the course of the novels developed the story of the vampire Saint-Germain. Born circa 2000 BC at the dark of the year into a proto-Etruscan royal family ruling somewhere in the mountains of Carpathia, he is initiated into a vampiric priesthood as a child. As a young man, still an initiate but not yet a vampire himself, he survives the invasion and destruction of his homeland, is taken into slavery, leads an unsuccessful revolt and is executed by disembowelment - leaving his spinal cord intact, and allowing him to rise as a vampire.

Yarbro's vampires - Saint-Germain, and the other vampires in her books, almost all women he has loved, or people they in turn have loved - survive on blood, animal if necessary but human when possible, but to thrive, they also need to "drink" powerful human emotion. In the religion of his long-vanished homeland, the vampires are the gods, and their priests nurture them with freely-given blood, love and devotion, becoming gods in turn when they die. Some vampires, including Saint Germain in his early centuries, feed themselves on the terror they can evoke in their prey. This, however, is not the Saint-Germain that Yarbro gives us. While in several of the books, Saint-Germain refers to these early centuries as a time of immaturity ruled by anger and vengeance when he fed on blood, fear and death, Yarbro's novels focus on a mature vampire who chooses to sustain himself by inducing sexual ecstasy when he feeds, usually on women, who are for the most part unaware of his actions, as he uses the hypnotic powers of his kind to approach then while they sleep, takes very little blood, and leaves them with memories of erotic dreams. Sometimes he finds people who, for any number of reasons, are willing to be a partner to him, not always with full knowledge of what he is. Always, he seeks but rarely finds the ultimate nurturance of the conscious giver of both blood and love.

Most of the novels tell the story of one of those rare times when Saint-Germain finds a remarkable woman who dares to go against the sexual, social and religious laws of their society to love a vampire.

One interesting aspect of the sexual bond he creates is that, in Yarbro's universe, male vampires are impotent - a rather logical development, seeing as they have no heartbeat and therefore no blood circulation. Sex for Saint-Germain is exclusively about creating pleasure - primarily for women, and then deriving his sustenance from that pleasure.

Because Saint-Germain prefers to create these bonds with women, the novels that Yarbro centres on him are also inevitably explorations of the lives that women lived and the limitations they faced in the various times and places throughout history in which she places her vampire count. Yarbro's novels are always extensively researched, and the reader cannot avoid being struck, over and over again, by the ways in which women's lives have been circumscribed the ways in which men have viewed women in various societies, and the great difficulties and often fatal consequences experienced by most women who stepped out of the narrow lives prescribed for them throughout history.

This theme runs even deeper in the handful of novels that Yarbro has written from the viewpoints of two of the female vampires created by Saint-Germain: Olivia Clemens, trapped wife of a sadistic but socially and politically powerful rapist, made a vampire in Nero's Rome; and Madelaine de Montalia, selected to be the victim of a Satanist cult, made a vampire in 18th century France. Where the books about Saint-Germain have a large dose of historical adventure in them, the books focused on Olivia and Madelaine, while still adventurous, are also detailed examinations of how difficult it has been for an independent and unconventional woman to manage her own life at just about every point in time in the last 2000 years.

The interesting question for me is this: while the books have strong feminist themes - as well as other equally powerful themes, such as the futility of war, the terrible consequences of xenophobia and intolerance of all kinds, the corrupting influence of power and the importance of freedom - is Saint-Germain, the vampire, himself a feminist? (there is no doubt that Madelaine, who survives into the 20th century, is a feminist, and that Olivia, who dies the True Death in 17th century France, almost certainly would have been.)

Certainly, throughout all the books, Saint-Germain is drawn to and celebrates the personal power and accomplishments of strong women. He can only create a true bond with a woman who has the courage to make her own choices, choices which often go against some of the strongest prohibition of her culture. For centuries Saint-Germain has watched the women he is dependent on for his survival struggle against the weight of every limitation imaginable - he has seen women treated as property, sold into slavery, raped and tortured, thrown into nunneries that were really prisons, set aside as unimportant, killed for being women in situations where no man would have been so treated, at the very best admonished as the weaker sex, the less competent sex, the sex more prone to error and weakness.

In earlier centuries, the reader often finds him working to restore self-esteem in women who have been treated brutally by the men of their society - and not just women he has fed on or plans to feed on. In times closer to our own, he is seen encouraging women in the process of self-emancipation. No longer human himself, he lives by codes of justice and honour that grow increasingly archaic as time marches on, but unlike so many men of history, Saint-Germain actually sees women as people. He respects them, even though he must use them to survive, for willing partners are rare; he tries to give fair return for what he takes, both with the dreams he creates and, when possible, with material recompense of some kind when it is within his circumstances.

But he does take, almost always without consent. And that taking involves sex - at least for the women he takes blood and energy from - and his use of power, even if it is the power of a non-human being. It fits the definition of rape. This more-than-human being who has chosen for at least the last 2,000 years to respect and protect women because it is the right and just thing to do, also forces women to experience sexual pleasure for his own purposes on a regular basis, and does not really think of this as the same kind of behaviour he has punished other men throughout his long journey for engaging in. And what do we say about Olivia and Madelaine, who take (mostly) men in their sleep, without their consent, giving them wet dreams while they feed on the pleasure and the blood. That fits the definition of rape as well.

But then, there is the fact that none of them are human anymore - does that make a difference? And they need to drink emotion with the blood - does the drive to survive outweigh the morality of what they must do to survive? Are they to be congratulated for choosing sexual emotion over terror, or are they simply justifying to themselves acts that can have no justification? Despite all the other things they do that are good - and they all, were they human, would be considered good, often heroic people - are they irredeemable because they survive on what they take by deceit and force from others?

I don't really have an answer, unless it is to point out that, like Yarbro's vampires, most of us would not be living the lives we do without reaping the benefits of some form of exploitation - theft and violation by force - committed somewhere in the world today. If Saint-Germain is irredeemable, what about the rest of us?

The Saint-Germain books:

Hotel Transylvania (1978) - 18th century France
The Palace (1978) - Renaissance Florence
Blood Games (1980) - 1st century Rome
Path of the Eclipse (1981) - 13th century China, Tibet and India
Tempting Fate (1982) - Russia and Germany, early 20th century
The Saint-Germain Chronicles (1983) - short story collection, dates range from 17th century to 1980, mostly set in Europe and North America
A Flame in Byzantium (1987) - Olivia Clemens - 6th century Byzantium
Crusader's Torch (1988) - Olivia Clemens - 12th century Palestine
A Candle for D'Artagnan (1989) - Olivia Clemens - 17th century Italy and France
Out of the House of Life (1990) - Madeleine de Montalia - Egypt, both 19th century, and between 1500-500 BC
Darker Jewels (1993) - 16th century Poland and Russia
Better in the Dark (1993) - 10th century northern Europe
Mansions of Darkness (1996) - 17th century Peru
Writ in Blood (1997) - early 20th century Russia and England
Blood Roses (1998) - 14th century France
Communion Blood (1999) - late 17th century Rome
Come Twilight (2000) - Spain, covering a 500-year period starting mid 7th century
A Feast in Exile (2001) - 14th century India
Night Blooming (2002) - late 8th century France and Rome
Midnight Harvest (2003) - 1930s USA
Dark of the Sun (2004) - 6th century Asia
In the Face of Death (2004) - Madeleine de Montalia - 19th century USA
States of Grace (2005) - early 16th century Italy and Netherlands
Roman Dusk (2006) - 3rd century Rome

I've been reading or re-reading the Saint-Germain books over the past few years, and I'm almost completely caught up. So far this year, I've read: Writ in Blood, Crusader's Torch, Darker Jewels, Out of the House of Life, and In the Face of Death. I'm currently reading A Feast in Exile, and then I'll have read the entire series with the exception of States of Grace and the newest book, Roman Dusk, which is due out soon in hardcover.

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