My life in books

I have been very ill, and the prognosis for recovery is not good. If I must choose in my limited time whether to read more, or write reviews if what I read, I choose to read more. While I’m still going to write about most books, for short fiction, I’m just going to give you my opinions as simple ratings unless there us something I really need to say. Short fiction will be rated excellent, very good, good, no comment or not my cup of tea. Interpret these as you will.

“No Flight without the Shatter,” Brooke Bolander; Tor.com, August 15 2019.
https://www.tor.com/2018/08/15/no-flight-without-the-shatter-brooke-bolander/
Excellent. A bittersweet requiem. Novelette.

“Firelight,” Ursula Le Guin; Paris Review, Summer 2018. Paywall; subscription required.
https://www.theparisreview.org/fiction/7176/firelight-ursula-k-le-guin
Excellent. Le Guin bids a final farewell to Ged, and to us. Short story.

“The Starship and the Temple Cat,” Yoon Ha Lee; Beneath Ceaseless Skies, February 1 2018.
http://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/the-starship-and-the-temple-cat/
Very good. Short story.

“The Starfish Girl,” Maureen McHugh; Slate, July 23, 2018.
https://slate.com/technology/2018/07/the-starfish-girl-a-new-sci-fi-short-story-about-gymnastics.html
Very good. Short story.

“A Brief and Fearful Star,” Carmen Maria Machado; Slate, June 27, 2018.
https://slate.com/technology/2018/06/a-brief-and-fearful-star-a-new-short-story-from-carmen-maria-machado-author-of-her-body-and-other-parties.html
Good. Short story.

“Asphalt, River, Mother, Child,” Isabel Yap; Strange Horizons, October 8 2018.
http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/asphalt-river-mother-child/
Excellent. Powerful use of traditional Philippine religious figures to tell a modern, and all too widespread, story. Short story.

“Music for the Underworld,” E. Lily Yu; Motherboard, March 29, 2018.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/8xkxqx/music-for-the-underworld
Excellent. Powerful and disturbing. Short story.

“Ruby, Singing,” Fran Wilde; Beneath Ceaseless Skies, September 27 2018.
http://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/ruby-singing/
Very good. Eerie, like a folktale. Short story.

"The Jewel and Her Lapidary," Fran Wilde; Tor.com, not available online.

Fran Wilde's novelette "The Jewel and Her Lapidary" is a seductive piece of worldbuilding that tells an otherwise straightforward (though inspiring) story about betrayal, invasion and resistance. What marks the story as something different is the setting. Ironically, just as an intricate and captivating setting can heighten the beauty of a relatively ordinary gem, the world that Wilde creates - one of rulers known as Jewels bound to, sustained and protected by Lapidaries, people with the gift of manipulating the magical energies of gems - enhances the narrative of two courageous young women, one of whom sacrifices everything to enable the other to survive and help their people resist a conquering enemy.


"A Burden Shared," Jo Walton; Tor.com, April 19, 2017
https://www.tor.com/2017/04/19/a-burden-shared/

The premise: in the future, technology will allow one person to take the pain felt by another, leaving the other without pain - though still with the underlying condition causing it. The story focuses on a mother and father, now divorced but still co-operating in bearing the pain of their adult daughter, born with a chronic degenerative disease. There are a great many levels and approaches to the story. As a person living with chronic pain, my first response was "this is so seductive, the thought of being able to spend even some of my time pain-free - but how could I ask another to take this pain, even if they wanted to?" In a way, it's a literalisation of the way that the burden of care for disabled family members is negotiated, even down to an exploration of the ways in which even a man devoted to helping with his daughter's care can't help but manipulate his ex-wife into accepting short-notice changes to the pain-sharing schedule that will help his career but make it difficult for her to manage commitments she's made in her professional life.

At first, one thinks there is something noble about the ways in which people in this society take on the burden of pain that others they care about would otherwise face. However, the more one dwells on this, the more it seems to be making obvious the potentials for dysfunctional and damaging interpersonal relations around the issue of care, especially privatised care where the disabled person must depend on love, loyalty, guilt, and sometimes the kindness - or financial need - of strangers in order to have any semblance of a life. And I wonder, where's the app that takes the pain and sends it instead to /dev/null?

I found this story very thought-provoking, but ultimately unsatisfying.


Peter S. Beagle, "The Story of Kao Yu," Tor.com, December 7, 2016
https://www.tor.com/2016/12/07/the-story-of-kao-yu/

Peter S. Beagle is a master craftsman when it comes to short fiction, and his metier is fantasy. It's hard to imagine sitting down to read a Beagle short story and not feel moved in sine way, if not always satisfied, at the end. This is a story set in medieval China, and tells the story of a travelling judge, a supernatural chi-rin, or unicorn, who is the essence of justice, and the unrepentant thief who changes his destiny. It is not a happy story, and it is not a comfortable story, because it looks closely at temptation and corruption as much as it does justice and honour. But it is a very moving story, and a thoughtful one.


Kelly Robson, "A Human Stain," Tor.com, January 4, 2017
https://www.tor.com/2017/01/04/a-human-stain/

Robson's novelette is a beautifully written Gothic horror story, set in a remote castle with all the requisite mysteries, from the taciturn servants and unnatural child to the crypt in the cellar and the curious creatures in the lake. The protagonist, an Englishwoman adrift in Europe - is a young woman of unconventional desires. She drinks, smokes, and chases pretty girls, and she has accumulated debts that she would prefer to avoid, being unable to pay. Her salvation would appear to lie in her friend's need for a governess to teach his orphaned nephew, but once Helen is left alone with the child, Peter, and the servants, the mysteries prove too much for Helen to ignore, and too dangerous for her to resist.

Well written, and it left me with a distinct feeling of dread at the end. My only criticism is that it's another one of those stories where the 'bad' girl - she smokes and drinks too much, and is a lesbian - is punished for her desires.


K. M. Szpara, "Small Changes over Long Periods of Time," Uncanny Magazine, May/June 2017
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/small-changes-long-periods-time/

I'm a sucker for vampire stories. So this novelette started out several points up on the 'do I like it' scale. It's well-written and entertaining. It also explores some things that are not often explored in vampire literature, such as the idea that being turned regenerates the body and what that might mean to a trans person whose body has been deliberately changed through surgery and hormones. The author is a trans man, and the story touches very realistically on multiple issues related to being trans, from dysphoria to transphobia to denial of medical service.

It also looks at issues of consent and the strange human connection between danger and lust which are fairly standard in a vampire story. As this is a society in which vampirism is acknowledged and vampiric behaviour strictly codified, it's also a story about assimilation, and regulating dangerous behaviours - i found myself wondering if the laws that exist in this novelette about registering as a vampire and only taking blood from a blood bank or from a known consenting donor were in some way a commentary on safer sex in this time of AIDS where HIV positive people have been charged with attempted manslaughter for having sex without informing their partners of the risk. Lots to think about as well as enjoy.