My life in books

Most of these stories are from the Locus recommended reading list or other online recommendations lists.

“The Court Magician,” Sarah Pinsker; Lightspeed Magazine, January 2018
http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-court-magician/
Excellent. Concerning actions desires and their costs. Short story.

“The Last Banquet of Temporal Confections,” Tina Connolly; Tor.com, July 11 2018.
https://www.tor.com/2018/07/11/the-last-banquet-of-temporal-confections-tina-connolly/
Excellent. Novelette.

“And Yet,” A.T. Greenblatt; Uncanny Magazine, March-April 2018.
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/and-yet/
Very good. A scientist must choose between her research and her brother’s life. Short story.

“She Still Loves the Dragon,” Elizabeth Bear; Uncanny Magazine, January-February 2018.
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/still-loves-dragon/
Very good. Short story.

“A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies,” Alex E. Harrow; Apex Magazine, February 6 2018.
https://www.apex-magazine.com/a-witchs-guide-to-escape-a-practical-compendium-of-portal-fantasies/
Excellent. Heart-breaking, but with a breath of hope. Short story.

“Snake Season,” Erin Roberts; The Dark Magazine, April 2018.
http://thedarkmagazine.com/snake-season/
Very good. A horrifying tale of love and madness. Short story. CN: infanticide, murder.

“Flow,” Marissa Lingen; Fireside Magazine, March 2018.
https://firesidefiction.com/flow
Very good. About disability, nature, knowing and healing. Short story.

“Pistol Grip,” Vina Jie-Min Prasad; Uncanny Magazine, March-April 2018
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/pistol-grip/
Good. Evocative, provocative. Short story. CN: Explicit violence, sex.

“Cast Off Tight,” Hal Y. Zhang; Fireside Magazine, June 2018.
https://firesidefiction.com/cast-off-tight
Very good. Memory, grief, and knitting. Short story.

“Blessings,” Naomi Novik; Uncanny Magazine, May-June 2018.
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/blessings/
Excellent. Be careful when asking fairies for blessings on your children. Shot story.

“A Study in Oils,” Kelly Robson; Clarksworld Magazine, September 2018.
http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/robson_09_18/
Excellent. A study in remorse. Novelette.

"Tear Tracks," Malka Older, Oct 21, 2015, tor.com
http://www.tor.com/2015/10/21/tear-tracks-malka-older/

A first contact story that delves into the ways that subtle differences in cultural values can influence perceptions - and how being unaware of the differences can stymie the chances for true communication.


"Your Orisons May Be Recorded," Laurie Penny, March 15 2016, tor.com
http://www.tor.com/2016/03/15/your-orisons-may-be-recorded/

What if our prayers were answered in a heavenly call centre by supernatural beings who can only listen to the pain of the world while keeping up productivity and client retention rates? What would it be like to be an angel who longed for more?


"Descent," Carmen Maria Machado, Feb 2015, Nightmare Magazine
http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/descent/

Chilling. Traditional ghost story format in which one person recounts a horrifying or terrifying experience - in this case, dealing with survivors of a school shooting - and another person is directly affected by the tale, but brilliantly done.


"Faster Gun," Elizabeth Bear, August 8, 2012, tor.com
http://www.tor.com/2012/08/08/faster-gun/

A day in the alternate life of an alternate Doc Holliday. Or so it seems. In Elizabeth Bear's novelette Faster Gun, a somewhat unusual party of tenderfeet - a man with a gift for magic, and four women with a variety of striking attributes - hire Doc to guide them to the wreck of an alien spaceship not far form the town of Tombstone. But the reality is something rather different indeed. Beautifully written, as Bear's work always is, with just enough clues to the explanation of what's really going on to make the realisation a slow and poignant one. I'm not particularly enthralled with the mythos of the American Old West, but a cowboy fantasy story this good transcends the very genres it embodies.


"Empty Graves," by Unpretty, April 3, 2016, An Archive of Our Own
http://archiveofourown.org/works/6447187

As I've said before, fanfic counts. Now Superman is far from being my favourite fandom, but this is a brilliant piece of fic featuring a different and very captivating take on Martha and Jonathan Kent, updated from the original comics to a background as young adults in the 60s. Martha is the focal point here, and she is amazing.

I'd seen Elizabeth Bear's novel Karen Memory referred to as a "lesbian steampunk western," which made me a bit hesitant to read it because while I'm completely down with stories about lesbians, steampunk is something I can take or leave, and western may be one of the few genres I really don't much enjoy. But Bear is one of my favourite authors, and I was promised lesbians, so...

I'm glad did, because Karen Memory is a delightfully wild adventure featuring a diverse cast of outsiders foiling a plot to not only take over the fictional northwestern port town of Rapid City, but destabilise the political balance of the Pacific Rim. Western and steampunk tropes are not overwhelming, but serve as the background to the characters and their exploits.

Karen Memery, the narrator/protagonist, is an employee of Madame Damnable, who owns the Hotel Ma Cherie, a high-class house of prostitution. Madame Damnable runs her house in the fine tradition of Spider Robinson's Lady Sally, or Kage Baker's Nell Gwynne - her employees are, by the standards of the time, well paid, well treated, and happy in their profession, though Karen, like some of her associates, is saving money for a future outside the sex trade.

Madame Damnable may be a good employer, but others in the city are not, particularly Peter Bantle, who owns the dockside cribs where poorly fed, ill-treated sex workers, mostly Indigenous and Asian women, are held in captivity to service the dock trade.

The story starts off slowly, letting us get to know Karen and the other inhabitants of Hotel Ma Cherie, both the working women and the other employees necessary to keep such an enterprise functioning. But things speed up when Madame Damnable and her house give shelter to a wounded Chinese woman named Merry Lee who has rescued Priya, a young South Asian girl, from Peter Bantle's clutches - and Bantle decides to teach the women a lesson. But the women and men of Hotel Ma Cherie are more resourceful and more formidable than Bantle anticipates, and they soon discover that Bantle is up to much more than appears.

Behind the pulp-style adventure, Bear delivers a few subtle lessons in tolerance and understanding. As the plot intensifies, Karen and the other women gain allies in the form of black US Marshall Reeves and his posseman, Tomoatooah, of the Namu nation ("but you would say Comanche"). The interactions of the white characters, including Karen, and the characters of colour illustrate a range of ways to behave that signal respect and a desire to learn without appropriation or race-based assumptions.

I am very glad I decided to take the plunge and read this.

Range of Ghosts is the first book in Elizabeth Bear's epic fantasy trilogy The Eternal Sky. Drawing on a wide range of Asian cultures as the starting point for her intensive world building, Bear has created a rich tapestry in which to embed the story of two heroes - Re Temur and Sardukar-la - both displaced royals, from very different cultures, who join together to fight a hidden power that seeks to destroy all that they know.

The blurb on Bear's website says of this novel:

Temur, grandson of the Great Khan, is walking away from a battlefield where he was left for dead. All around lie the fallen armies of his cousin and his brother, who made war to rule the Khaganate. Temur is now the legitimate heir by blood to his grandfather’s throne, but he is not the strongest. Going into exile is the only way to survive the machinations of his ruthless uncle.

Once-Princess Samarkar is climbing the thousand steps of the Citadel of the Wizards of Tsarepheth. She was heir to the Rasan Empire until her father got a son on a new wife. Then she was sent to be the wife of a Prince in Song, but that marriage ended in battle and blood. Now she has renounced her worldly power to seek the magical power of the wizards.

These two will come together to stand against the hidden cult that has so carefully brought all the empires of the Celadon Highway to strife and civil war through guile and deceit and sorcerous power.

Much of this novel is essentially an introduction to this wonderfully detailed and diverse world and the characters that will play a role in the events to come. Bear takes her time in setting up her narrative, and I'm very glad she does this, because this world is well worth getting to know. But there is nothing wasted here - every element is necessary to enable the reader to fully engage with the vastness of the setting - which, were it set on our Earth, would span the entire Asian continent, from the Middle East to Japan - and the depth of the characters - each of whom arrives with a full and complex backstory, unique individuals from the moment we meet them.

In Range of Ghosts, Bear demonstrates her mastery of yet another subgenre of speculative fiction, and further cements her position as one of the best writers operating in that field today. Yeah, I'm a fangirl. Deal.

I did a lot of catching up with various series in 2013. The Completed series:

David Anthony Durham, the Acacia series
Acacia: The Other Lands
Acacia: The Sacred Band

N. K. Jemisin, the Inheritance series
The Broken Kingdoms
Kingdom of the Gods

Christopher Paolini, the Inheritance series
Brisingr
Inheritance

Glenda Larke, the Mirage Makers series
The Shadow of Tyr
The Song of the Shiver Barrens

Charles Saunders, the Imaro series
Imaro: The Naama War

C. J. Cherryh, the Chanur Saga
Chanur's Homecoming
Chanur's Legacy

Elizabeth Bear, Jacob's Ladder series
Chill
Grail

Kage Baker, The Company series
Not Less Than Gods
(Probably the last, given Baker's untimely death)

Michael Thomas Ford, Jane Austen, Vampire series
Jane Goes Batty
Jane Vows Vengeance

Some interesting anthologies and collections of short stories came my way last year. The anthologies included two nicely edited theme anthologies by John Joseph Adams (dystopias and homages to Barsoom), a vamipre themed antholgy edited by Nancy Kilpatrick, a survey of urban fantasy edited by Peter Beagle and a dragon-themed anthology edited by Jack Dann.

Of particular interest were two volumes edited or co-edited by Connie Wilkins: the second volume in a new annual series of anthologies featuring short stories with lesbian protagonists; and an uneven but engaging selection of alternate history short stories with a focus on queer protagonists as nexi of change.

I was also delighted to be able to obtain a copy of an anthology edited by Nisi Shawl of short stories written by authors of colour who attended Clarion as Octavia E. Butler Scholars. The anthology was offered by the Carl Brandon Society for a limited time as a fund-raising project and is no longer available.

Peter Beagle (ed.), The Urban Fantasy Anthology
John Joseph Adams (ed.), Under the Moons of Mars
John Joseph Adams (ed.), Brave New Worlds
Nancy Kilpatrick (ed.), Evolve: Vampire Stories of the New Undead
Jack Dann (ed.), The Dragon Book: Magical Tales from the Masters of Modern Fantasy
Nisi Shawl (ed.), Bloodchildren: Stories by the Octavia E. Butler Scholars
Connie Wilkins & Steve Berman (eds.), Heiresses of Russ 2012
Connie Wilkins (ed.), Time Well-Bent: Queer Alternative Histories


I also read several collections this year, including two more volunes from PM Press's Outspoken Authors series, featuring work by and interviews with Nalo Hopkinson and Kim Stanley Robinson.

Other collections of works by SFF writers included: a set of novellas from Mercedes Lackey featuring two familiar characters, Jennifer Talldeer and Diana Tregarde, and a new heroine, techno-shaman Ellen McBride; a collection of short stories by Elizabeth Bear featuring forensic sorcerer Abigail Irene Garrett; short stories by Maureen McHugh; and forays ibto the fantasy realm of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander.

In honour of Alice Munro, this year's recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature, I read a collection of her more recent short stories (and plan on reading several more in the coming months - I've always loved her work and am delighted that she has been so deservedly recognised). Also worthy of note was Drew Hayden Taylor's collection of stories set among the residents of the fictional Otter Lake First Nations reserve, and Margaret Laurence's short stories set in Ghana. In the realm of historical fiction, There were stories by Margaret Frazer featuring medieval nun and master sleuth Dame Frevisse; I discovered and devoured Frazer's novels last year, and will speak of them in a later post.

Kim Stanley Robinson, The Lucky Strike 
Nalo Hopkinson, Report from Planet Midnight
Mercedes Lackey, Trio of Sorcery
Elizabeth Bear, Garrett Investigates
Maureen McHugh, After the Apocalypse
Lloyd Alexander, The Foundling and Other Tales of Prydain

Margaret Laurence, The Tomorrow-Tamer
Margaret Frazer, Sins of the Blood
Drew Hayden Taylor, Fearless Warriors
Alice Munro, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

All in all, I found a wide range of short fiction to enjoy this year.

Dust, Elizabeth Bear

Start with a traditional science fictional setting: the multi-generational space ship (The Jacob's Ladder) stalling in its journey whose passengers, long years after the original catastrophe, have forgotten their goal and begin to evolve their own society, feudal/medieval in structure, with strict lines of caste/national identity based on the ship's duties of their ancestors. Add in some nifty new science fiction concepts, like artificial intelligences and bio-engineered nanoorganisms. Now toss in a big dose of Biblical and Arthurian legends and archetypes, from the grail story to the Garden of Eden, and give the recipe to one of the most original minds writing speculative fiction today, Elizabeth Bear.

What you get is not easy to describe, but very rewarding to read. And it’s the first in a trilogy, so there’s much more to come. This makes me happy.

Companion to Wolves, Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear.

Some fantasy writers love to have humans and animals “bonding” together in some mysterious telepathic or empathic connection of mind, spirit and body – Lackey’s white, equine Companions and Tayledras bond birds, Gayle Greeno’s cat-like Ghatti, McCaffery’s dragons and fire lizards and watchwhers, Andre Norton’s kinkajous, meerkats and the like, to name just a few examples among many. It’s a sub-genre of fantasy unto itself, the companion animal fantasy. It’s certainly an appealing notion when you think about it, at a superficial level – never having to be alone again, but rather being accepted with the unconditional love and devotion we tend to associate with animals, plus all the imagined bonuses that come with having the option of seeing the world through an animal’s keener senses and commanding or at least negotiating access to the special or enhanced abilities the special “bond animals” often have. It surely sounds wonderful when you think of the relationship in terms of what the human wants from his or her companion animal, and how the human would choose to affect the companion animal.

In Companion to Wolves - as is suggested by the title, Monette and Bear have looked long and hard at the other half of the bond – what the animal wants to give to the human, and how the animal’s experiences affect the human. In this subversion of the traditional companion animal fantasy, it is the animal’s nature that determines how the bond works, and the humans must fit into their animal companions’ way of existence in order to make effective use of the animal’s abilities through the bond.

In a novel that draws on Germanic and Nordic myth and culture, it’s not at all surprising that the companion animals are wolves – pack animals with a complex social structure regulated by sex and dominance. The men who bond with the great trellwolves – mortal enemies of the trolls who repeatedly threaten the communities of humans scattered through the forests – must learn to fit into the social patterns of their lupine brothers and sisters, and when a bitch wolf goes into heat and the males fight for the privilege of attempting to cover her, their human companions – the wolfcarls – must follow suit, not just because of the surge of emotions that they feel during the bond, but because to do otherwise risks interfering with the only social organisation the wolves know and function within. Unlike McCaffery, who was never really comfortable dealing with the logical consequences of male riders of green dragons being driven into the sexual frenzy of their dragon’s mating flights, Monette and Bear are almost ruthlessly honest about how the mating and dominance displays of the wolves affect their human brothers.

Companion to Wolves is the story of an adolescent boy, Njall Gunnarson, son of a jarl or chief, who is claimed as a tithe-boy by the werthreat, the separate society of bonded wolves and men whose duty it is to protect the people of the towns and villages from marauding trolls and their war beasts, the wyrvens. Njall’s choice to go with the wolfcarl from the nearby werheall (wolfhall) will mean leaving behind everyting he knows, and facing the general animosity that wolfless men in this society often feel toward the wolfcarls, who are by necessity bisexual if not homosexual. His father is – for reasons that we discover later on in the tale – even more violently opposed to giving up his son to the werheall, but the tithe of young men to the werthreat is part of the agreement, the only way to maintain the fighting force of the werthreat, and so Njall goes with the wolf brothers, where he slowly learns about how this society of two species operates.

Life becomes more complicated – and the challenges of adapting to life as a wolfcarl more personally discomfiting – for young Njall, now called Isolfr, when he bonds with an alpha bitch pup or konigenwolf (queenwolf), and learns that his destiny, once the young female comes to full maturity, is to found, with his sisterwolf Viradechtis, a new werheall where he will necessarily become the partner, both sexually and as co-leader of the heall, the man whose wolfbrother Viradechtis chooses as mate.

But this book is more than just an exploration of how an society of bonded men and wolves might function, or a simple coming of age story. Before Isolfr and his sister wolf Viradechtis come of age, they, along with all the other wolfcarls , are faced with a growing threat from the north that may well spell the end of werheall and village alike. The northern trolls, who for generations have come south to raid the villages of men and then withdraw to their warrens, are on the move, and it will take more than an alliance of werthreat and wolfless men to defeat them.

I can’t say enough about the sense of reality I experienced while reading this book, Monette and Bear offer carefully constructed, well thought out worldbuilding, vital and memorable characters, and the kind of story that any skald would give his shield arm to sing.

More than that, each of the four intelligent species portrayed in the book – humans, trellwolves, trolls and svartalfar – present us with different perspectives on how sex, gender, fertility, reproduction and power can function as interrelated organising principles of societies. And even more than that, there is the way in which the novel tells us how societies and individuals that follow very different patterns can learn to communicate with each other if there is enough will, respect and compassion.

Undertow, Elizabeth Bear

The more of Elizabeth Bear’s work I read, the more I want to read.

Bear has a gift for taking a handful of ideas – each one potentially the germ of an insightful novel – and weaving them together seamlessly, so that her books are not just “what if…” but “what if… and if… and if… and…”

In Undertow, Bear starts with a hard science approach to the notion that thought or will can influence reality – in the person of several characters who are or want to be professional “co-incidence engineers. Add in a system of interstellar transportation based on quantum uncertainty that can transmit non-living matter anywhere in the galaxy, while people are still required to travel in relativistic spaceships – unless they choose to transmit a copy of themselves across space, which introduces a variety of interesting legal and philosophical wrinkles into the mix – what is the nature of personal identity when one or more “copies” of a person, each branching off from the “original” and thus slowly diverging from each other over time? Establish the scene – Greene’s world, a “company planet” where the supposedly primitive aboriginal inhabitants, an amphibious species known as ranids, or more commonly, “froggies,” are employed – or, depending on how you look at it, enslaved – in the mining of a rare mineral with unusual properties that enable the co-incidence engineers to manipulate probabilities. Introduce the extreme callousness to human and other forms of life and blindness to long-term consequences of cut-throat industrial practices and reliance on non-renewable resources that is common to many a mega-corporation operating in an area where there is minimal oversight.

Against this backdrop, play out the story of André Deschênes, an assassin who wants to get out of his present profession and become a co-incidence engineer, preferably by apprenticing with one of the great practitioners of the art, Jean Gris, who has professional connections with André’s girlfriend, data miner Cricket Murphy. Cricket is also a friend of Gris's lover, Lucienne Spivak – who André has just learned is the target of the contract he’s just accepted from the folks who run the tanglestone mines and the planet. What André doesn’t know is that Jean, Lucienne and Cricket are secretly working with the ranid to bring about a rebellion against the company.

The story is tightly plotted, and as full of suspense and surprises as the latest summer block-buster spy thriller. It is, as I’ve come to expect from Bear, well-written, with solid characters, consistent action, and lots to think about.

Some brief comments on several collections of short stories I’ve read this year, but some very talents authors – some of whom I’ve been reading for years, and some of whom I have only discovered this year but have come to appreciate greatly.

Dangerous Space, Kelley Eskridge

This was my introduction to Eskridge’s work, and I was very impressed. Her explorations of the fluidity of identity, gender and sexuality are powerful and harken back, for me, to some of the best of Samuel Delany’s work. There has been much mention by reviewers of the three stories that feature the ungendered character Mars, but while Mars is perhaps the flashpoint of discussion about these issues for many, most of the stories in this collection place their characters in the “dangerous space” that lies outside, or perhaps in between, the safe definitions society would force upon us all. In some stories, the use of settings where social roles and personal actions are highly regulated (an asylum, a fascist state) highlight the sense that anyone can find themselves in a dangerous state when we move away from any imposed norm.


Bloodchild and Other Stories, Octavia Butler

It still seems unreal to me to think that we shall read no more from Octavia Butler. I’ve long been an admirer of her novels, but only this year did I finally read this collection of her few short stories. Most science fiction readers will be acquainted, with the three strongest stories here – “Bloodchild,” “Speech sounds,” and “The Evening and the Morning and the Night.” In addition, there are two lesser known stories and two essays on her craft by Butler. It is a good thing to have all of her published stories together in one place on my shelf. It is a sad thing that there are so few. It is a great loss that there will be no more.


The Chains that You Refuse, Elizabeth Bear

It is difficult from me to think that before this year I had never read anything by Elizabeth Bear. In just a few months, she has become one of my (admittedly many) favourite writers, someone whose latest offering I would buy unhesitatingly without even reading a review or a blurb to see what it was about. This collection was the second book I read by her, and the diversity of ideas, combined with her sure sense of the right style for each, made a strong impression. If there was an underlying theme to the collection, it was making choices that challenge boundaries, subvert expectations, resist demands – as the title says, refusing chains.


Mother Aegypt and Other Stories, Kage Baker

I acquired this book specifically because I had run into a great deal of positive comment about Kage Baker, and decided to introduce myself to her work through a collection of her short stories. The title story of this collection, which captured my imagination immediately, is an original novella set in Baker’s Company series, which I am currently devouring with great joy. Several other stories are apparently set in the universe of another of her novels, The Anvil of the World, which I have not yet read, although I intend to remedy that as soon as I may. I also enjoyed the stand-alone stories in the collection. Baker has a gift for telling what seems to be a simple tale, about something not all that earth-shattering, which turns out to be far more significant than one would at first have believed. The delayed punch effect. I like it.


What Ho, Magic! and Relative Magic, Tanya Huff

Why yes, I am trying to acquire every collection of Huff’s stories. How clever of you to notice how many of them have been on this year’s reading list. Why? Because Huff writes stories that run the gamut of styles and emotions, from laugh-out-loud pun-laden comedy to the most serious and heroic of epic fantasy with everything in between. Reading her work makes me feel good. Do I need another reason?