My life in books

Lately, I've been reading with an eye to making Hugo nominations, so this batch of short fiction reads is mostly selected from various lists of recommendations.


"The City Born Great," N. K. Jemisin; Tor.com, September 9, 2016
http://www.tor.com/2016/09/28/the-city-born-great/

An urban fantasy - though not the kind we're used to - about the gritty birth and life of the great cities, set in New York. Evocative and filled with a sense of urgency that pulls the reader toward its conclusion.


"This Is Not a Wardobe Door," A. Merc Rustad; Fireside Magazine Issue #29, January 2016
http://www.firesidefiction.com/issue29/chapter/this-is-not-a-wardrobe-door/

A story about imagination and hope and holding on to the magic of childhood when you believed you could change the world. At the end, I was crying.


"Checkerboard Planet," Eleanor Arnason; ClarkesWorld, December 2016
http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/arnason_12_16/

A new Lydia DuLuth talr from Arnason is always a treat. In this novelette, the AIs who control the interstellar stargates have asked Lydia to investigate conditions on a planet with a most peculiar ecology - the entire land mass and parts of the oceans are organised into giant squares, all of similar size, with all the life forms in each square the same colour. The planet has been colonised by a biogenetics corporation which, the AIs fear, is not acting in the best interests of the planet or humanity. An anti-imperialist first contact story with a gentle and at times even whimsical touch.


"Fifty Shades of Grays," Steven Barnes; Lightspeed Magazine, June 2016
http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/fifty-shades-grays/

Carver Kofax is a master at marketing and sales. But when he and his colleague (and romantic interest) Rhonda, land the corporation they work for a lucrative and highly secretive contract, the nature of the campaign demands all their skills - and leads to unexpected and dire consequences for all of humanity. Barnes handles the revelations in the narrative and the protagonist's growing unease with a sure hand. Content warning: this novelette contains sexually explicit kink.


"A Dead Djinn in Cairo," P. Djeli Clark; tor.com, May 18, 2016
http://www.tor.com/2016/05/18/a-dead-djinn-in-cairo/

In an alternate pre-WWI Cairo, where djinn and angels from other dimensions mingle with humans, Special Inspector Fatma el-Sha’arawi of the Egyptian Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities investigates the apparent suicide of a djinn, only to discover a mad plot to destroy humanity. Will the dapper young inspector solve the mystery in time? Clark's novelette is a delighful genre-bending fantasy thriller with a touch of steampunk. Cairo comes to life in complex and sensual detail, and Fatma is a character I'd love to see again.


"The Witch of Orion Waste and the Boy Knight," E. Lily Yu, Uncanny Magazine, Sept-Oct 2016
http://uncannymagazine.com/article/witch-orion-waste-boy-knight/

A relatively young and inexperienced witch decides to accompany a young knight errant seeking dragons to kill, and learns a few bitter lessons about honor, trust and pride.


"The Green Knight’s Wife," Kat Howard; Uncanny Magazine, November 2016
http://uncannymagazine.com/article/green-knights-wife/

A compelling riff on the Arthurian tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, told from the perspective of the Green Knight's wife, in which one of those women who is always on the sidelines in such hero tales, treated as merely part of the mythic machinery, takes up agency and acts for herself.


"Foxfire, Foxfire," Yoon Ha Lee; Beneath Ceaseless Skies, March 3, 2016
http://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/foxfire-foxfire/

A novelette blending fantasy and sf, set in a Asian- derived alternate universe where loyalists and rebels do battle with giant powered mechas. A young spirit fox with a great desire to become human - which he can only achieve by killing and eating 100 humans - is faced with difficult choices when captured by a mecha pilot. A story about transformations, and finding one's self.


"Unauthorized Access," An Owomoyela; Lightspeed Magazine, September 2016
http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/unauthorized-access/

You would think a high profile hacker who's already spent time in prison for releasing government information that there was no reason to hide would be seriously radicalised - but for Aedo Leung, getting out of jail is only the beginning. A cautionary tale about the sequestration of public information that has suddenly become even more timely and appropriate.

As gentle reader surely knows by now, there are certain things that generally delight me when I encounter them in books. Among these things are takes which draw on the Arthurian mythos, tales of female heroes, stories of women who love women, and novels that challenge or subvert traditional female roles. So one would expect that a novel set in a more-or-less historical Camelot, where the eternal triangle is between King Arthur, his competent and intelligent Queen Guinevere, and his best knight Lancelot - a passing woman - would be perfect for me. And indeed, I expected it to be so.

But...

I really wanted to love this book. For the wonderful idea of a female Lancelot, the best knight in the world as a passing woman, and the doomed love between Lancelot and Guinevere as a passion between two women. And I pushed through it, waiting patiently for it to 'click' for me. But it never quite did - though it came close at times.

I enjoyed Lancelot's voice, her innocence about the ways of the world turning to confusion, sorrow and pain as she sees at every turn the treatment of women and the brutality of war in Arthur's Britain. The telling of her descent into what can only be described as post-traumatic stress during the long sequence of battles against the Saxons.

Douglas clearly intends this book to be a critique that covers a range of feminist issues - from sexual abuse and domestic violence to paternalistic attitudes that limit women's opportunities and options. These issues are, in fact, present in the experience of virtually every female character who is even mentioned in the book. Unfortunately, the author falls into the trap of dismissing women's work, both physical and emotional, and women's concerns about relationships with men, family and children, as being something to be escaped, rather than accepted as a part of life that needs to be valued and embraced by society and all its members.

Instead of a story that validates all the possible choices women can make about their lives, what we get is a story in which women like Lancelot and Guinevere are able to transcend cultural limitations because they are different, and don't like "girl's things." Douglas also falls into the habit of giving most of the other women in the novel traditional roles - spurned lover, manipulative bitch, subservient wife, wise old crone, victim of violence or the dead woman in the fridge.

There are other problems. I found it overly slow and meandering, especially at the beginning. The author has incorporated elements of all the Arthurian stories she can possibly fit in, all together into one text, and it often seems that they are there just to add yet another instance of male indifference or brutality to women and their concerns, as many do not add significantly to the story of Guinevere and Lancelot. Even Malory, whose classic work is more a compendium of tales than a unified story, was selective about his choices, and kept one thread, that of the king whose greatness carries the seeds of his downfall, at the core of his narrative.

Moreover, there is something overly simplistic about the way key decisions that will literally change the course of lives are made. The choices that lead to Lancelot being raised as a boy in the first place, Gawaine's choice to follow Arthur, Morgan's decision to betray him, Guinevere's sudden acceptance of her lesbianism.... These things all happen almost without thought, like the flipping of a switch. The motivations are hollow, we barely see inside the characters enough to understand how or why such drastic choices are made and justified. We are told, but we do not see.

As well, the style of writing is rather pedestrian. At times it reads like a YA novel - and one for the younger end of that audience - but the themes of sexuality and violence rather run counter to that.

The story also relies upon one of my own pet peeves - failure to communicate. I was rather annoyed with the long keeping of secrets that prevented Guinevere and Lancelot from realising that their love was mutual. Particularly when there were so many times that Guinevere could have made it clear that she had seen through Lancelot's masculine facade. And it didn't stop with that. Certainly, a passing woman in such a time would need to keep her sex a secret, but there were so many other secrets kept by so many people.

On the other hand, it was quite satisfying to see some of the less-frequently adapted Arthurian tales brought into play, and to have so much of the story told from female perspectives, so I can't say there was no pleasure here for me. It's just that there could have been so much more. For those who want to explore the idea of a female Lancelot, in my opinion the gold standard remains Jo Walton's duology, The King's Name and The King's Peace.

For over a thousand years, people have been creating stories about King Arthur and his companions. For most of that time, the stories have centred on the deeds of the men of The Arthurian mythos (not that there haven't been women in these stories, but with a few exceptions, such as Arthur's sisters Morgana and Morgause, the main function of women in these tales has been to be the reason that the men go off and do things). In the last few decades, this has changed, as more and more writers have begun to tell stories of the women in Arthur's world, from the women's perspective. One emerging group of stories, of which Dawnflight is a fairly early example, focuses on Arthur's wife Guinevere, reimaging her as a warrior queen in her own right.

Dawnflight is the first book of a projected multi-volume series; the author, Kim Headlee, published this first volume in 1999 and has only recently brought out its first sequel. Now newly released and revised, Dawnflight follows Guinevere - here named Gyanhumara - from her upbringing to her marriage to Arthur. Gyan, as she is known, is a Pictish chieftainess, raised in a matrilineal society where power is shared between male and female; Arthur is Romano-British, from a culture in which women are rarely warriors or leaders. As the novel follows their inexorable coming together, we met many of the familiar characters of Arthurian legends, their traditional natures fleshed out and fitted into Headlee's vision of Arthur and Guinevere's world. A mixture of history, mythos and myth (the Irish hero Cuchulainn makes an appearance), it's an interesting take on the old stories and I'm looking forward to reading further volumes.

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.

The Follies of Sir Harald, Phyllis Ann Karr.

In The Follies of Sir Harold, Karr has crafted that most rare of works, the Arthurian farce. This is the quite wonderfully whimsical tale of a knight sinister (in truth, for our villain knight is left-handed) who, through many misadventures that play most fast and loose with chivalric tales and traditions, eventually ends up to be... not such a bad fellow after all. If that weren’t enough, the text is chock-full of in-jokes, which refer both to the long tradition of Arthurian and fantastical literature and to a few most suitable popular culture icons, all cleverly woven into the tale.

A gem for Arthurian aficionados.

Yes, I've been galloping through a few more Arthurian novels in recent months.

Percival and the Presence of God, Jim Hunter

In this short novel, Hunter works with the essense of the story of Percival, his dual quest for King Arthur and the Holy Grail, as told by Chretien de Troyes and later writers. Percival begins his quest with the naïvité and enthusiasm of youth, believing that he can have it all - love, glory and God - that he can complete his quests and return to his belived Whiteflower/Blanchefleur. But instead, he discovers that life is fraught with mischance and danger, and that not all quests can be fulfilled, not all desires can be attained. Through it all runs the theme of Percival's desire to witness the Grail, as a symbol of his spiritual call; but not even that is give to him fully. As Hunter said in an interview with Arthurian scholar Raymond Thompson:

"The Grail ceremony that is not understood or recognized, and is bewildering; then the need to go back and find it again, and possibly never succeed. That to me was the core. It provides the whole sense of the hero's destiny. He is trapped by his destiny in a way that I imagine people like Lancelot and Galahad aren't. He's a bit like a Flying Dutchman or an Ancient Mariner. He's got to go on searching and looking, and he may or may not find the lord of the Grail."

Legends of the Pendragon, ed. James Lowder

James Lowder has collected an anthology of fascinating variations on the theme of the days before the coming of Arthur the High King - tales of Vortigern and the coming of the Saxons, of the young Merlin, of Uther Pendragon, and of the adventurs of the knights of legend, before there was a Round Table. A well-edited collection with some real gems; my favourites include Nancy Varian BerBerick's "Hel's Daughter," Beth anderson's "The Time in Between," Keith Taylor's "A Spear in the Night," and Aaron rosenberg's "six for the Sword."

The Life of Sir Aglovale de Galis

Clemence Houseman's book, originally written in 1905, is an interesting (although not always easy to engage with) study of the psychology of tempatation, moral failure, despair and the struggle for redemption, told through an examination of the life of one of the minor knights of the Arthurian cast of characters, Sir Aglovale de Galis.

There are few extensive references to Sir Aglovale in the body of Arthurian literature; for this novel, Houseman collected each refernce from Malory, created a logical timeline (not always easy when dealing with Malory) and fleshed out the interior life of her protagonist. Sir Aglovale is a man with grave character flaws, who at times gives in to his impusles toward envy, greed, violence, anger, lust and all the other sins of the material world, sometimes wallows despairingly in his capacity for doing wrong and his sense of damnation, and sometimes fights heroically to find redemption - but never deceives himself or others about his nature. In this he is shown to be in some ways more worthy of redeption than many others at Arthur's court, who commit sins of equal measure, but conceal them or disguise them beneath a veneer of noble contention to be the best knight of the realm.

Houseman copies Malory's style with great art and precision, with the consequence that this is not exactly the most accessible text - but it is worth the while for the serious Arthurian enthusiast.

The Pagan King, Edison Marshall

Edison Marshall is perhaps best known for his historical novel The Viking, which was made into a movie starring Kirk Douglas. The Pagan King is Marshall’s foray into another era where history and legend mingle, Britain after the departure of the Romans but before the invasion of the Saxons is complete – the time of Arthur.

In The Pagan King, Marshall starts with Arthurian material drawn from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, William of Malmsbury’s Gesta Regum Anglorum, and various Welsh sources to produce his tale of Arthur, the protegé of Merlin, who battles and defeats Vortigern to become a king and war leader of several of the tribes of southern Britain fighting a long war against the Saxons. Readers steeped in the Arthurian romances may find the re-working of the roles and relationships of Arthur, Guinevere (Wander), Merlin, Mordred, Vivain, Elian (Elaine) and Llewelan (Lancelot) of the Lake and others somewhat surprising, and wonder at the absences of some of Arthur’s traditional companions.

The novel is well-written, well-researched and quite realistic in tone, and has an ending that is not only unusual in the lists of Arthurian novels, but perfectly fitting in its realistic way with the later legendary “rex quondam rexque futurus.”

Exiled From Camelot, Cherith Baldry

This novel, like Dorothy Roberts’ Kinsmen of the Grail, draws much of its source material from the Perlesvaus and thus contains a number of characters not familiar to reader more accustomed to the tale as compiled by Malory.

Baldry’s protagonist is one of the less well-known knights of the Round Table, Sir Kay – Seneschal and Arthur’s foster brother, who is often portrayed as sharp-tongued or rude, even sarcastic, as both a braggart and a coward, and not, shall we say, the best-loved knight of the realm.

In the Perlesvaus, Kay is one of the bad guys. He is jealous of Arthur’s son Loholt, and after his murder of the young knight (who in this version is a good knight and the legitimate son on Arthur and Guinevere) is discovered, flees Arthur’s court and allies himself with Arthur’s enemies, Brian of the Isles and Meliant. In other early version of the tale, Loholt is illegitimate, and treacherous, while Kay remains a respected knight of Arthur’s court despite killing the king’s son.

Baldry, for whom Kay is clearly a favourite among all the knights mentioned in Arthurian literature, reconciles these two versions of the conflict between Kay and Loholt in her novel and at the same time presents a deeply moving portrait of an intensely loyal but socially inept man who loves his foster brother as both man and king, and who is misunderstood, and even mocked, because he is only an average knight whose service to the king and realm lies in his extraordinary abilities as a manager and administrator, in a time where heroes are defined as men who win glory in battles.

I loved this take on Kay, who is so often ignored or maligned in the legends. Brava to Baldry for re-inventing the heroic knight – for there’s no doubt about it, in this novel, Kay’s courage, loyalty and self-sacrifice save the day in ways that are more heroic than anything Lancelot or Gawain can do with all their fighting prowess.

The Warlord Chronicle, by Bernard Cornwell
The Winter Kingl
The Enemy of God
Excalibur

There are many variants of the modern Arthurian novel – the medieval fantasy, the Romano-Celtic fantasy, the more-or-less historical novel, the modern retelling, the translation of key themes to original modern fantasy or science fiction novel, and so on.

Cornwell’s Warlord Chronicle novels are mostly historical in nature, with a very serious attempt to recreate the era in which someone who might have been Arthur most probably lived – although of course, historians themselves vary to some degree in their interpretation of what’s known about that time period, so you can have two authors committed to their own sense of historical accuracy producing works as different as Cornwell's novel and those of Jack Whyte, even though both are quite clear about being set in a post-Roman Britain that retains strong Celtic elements, during the spread of Christianity, which faces the Saxon invasions.

Cornwell gives us some supernatural content, through the choice of a narrator who begins life as a Saxon child who survives being sacrificed by British druids, only to grow up in the household of Merlin, Druid to the Dumnonian king Uther, and ends his life as a Christian monk, writing the “truth” of the story of Arthur for a young queen whose lord rules in the days after Arthur has departed from human ken. Cornwell’s narrator, Derfel, was Arthur’s companion and sworn man and now, in his later years, at the prompting of a royal patron, is setting down his recollections of what happened from his perspective as a man close to, but not always in the middle of, the action.

The books are loosely structured around Nennius’ list of Arthur’s battles, but because there is such a wealth of detail of the daily lives of the main characters – quite a large cast – as well as the politics and religious debates of the time, the battles do not overwhelm the human story.

Cornwell makes use of some less common sources, and presents a set of interactions between characters that is rather different from the standard set familiar to most readers of works from Mallory onward. Here, Arthur is Uther’s bastard son, while Mordred is Uther’s legitimate grandson and heir, and Arthur is sworn on Uther’s death to hold the throne of Dumnonia for Mordred. Arthur must first fight against other kings to preserve his nephew's lands, and later try to forge them into one political unit under his leadership as warlord - Dux bellorum - to fold back the Saxons. In the end, after defending himself against repeated treachery from many quarters, he decides that Mordred does not deserve the throne and his loyalty, a decision which leads to the final battle of Camlann.

Competing religious beliefs have a great deal of influence on the unwinding of this version of the tale. Arthur is a follower of Mithras, but tries to balance pagan and Christian factions; he listens both to the advice of the Druid Merlin and of a moderate Christian bishop. Arthur’s sister Morgan begins as a student of Merlin and ends as the wife of one of the more fervent proponents of Christianity. Arthur’s wife, Guenevere, is a worshipper of Isis. Derfel, the story’s narrator, is raised by Merlin (and Morgan), becomes an initiate of Mithras, follows Merlin and his protégé Nimue in a quest for the 13 treasures of Britain, the most potent of which is a sacred cauldron, and finally becomes a Christian recluse under the authority of none other than Morgan’s Christian husband.

I enjoyed this telling of the tale – particularly because Cornwell, while bringing the latter-day interloper Lancelot into the story, makes of him a boastful, deceitful and manipulative coward who gains his glorious posthumous stature only through good press and being on the side that ultimately conquered – the Christians. In this way, and through Derfel’s comments in the frame about how the account he writes will no doubt be prettied up by his patron queen’s scribes because it’s not romantic and heroic enough, Cornwell reminds us that there are indeed many ways of viewing the tale of Arthur and acknowledges the ambiguity inherent in declaring any version as the historical truth.

Since I've started the day on an Arthurian note, I shall continue in that vein. One of my Christmas gift books was the first volume in a series called The Descendants of Merlin by Irene Radford. I have since then acquired and read the entire series - at least as far as it goes to date, I don't know if the author considers the series finished. The five books are:

Guardian of the Balance
Guardian of the Trust
Guardian of the Vision
Guardian of the Promise
Guardian Of The Freedom

The premise of the series is that Merlin sired a daughter as a result of a magical Great Marriage-style rite with his priestess counterpart, and that this daughter, once grown, bore a child sired by Arthur himself. The resulting lineage is that of the true Pendragons of Britain, and they have acted throughout time, either openly or secretly, to preserve the island against threats, both magical and mundane.

The premise of a secret society or lineage that watches over the fate of Britain is not a new one, nor is the notion that Britain has at times required supernatural help of the pagan variety to survive. A case in point would be the lingering belief that Sir Francis Drake sought help in defeating the Spanish Armada from a coven of sea witches who conjured the great storm that scattered the invading fleet. And then there are the traditions concerning the Templars and the Scottish Rite Freemasons, the notion that early Norman kings of England followed some variation on the ritual king-sacrifice, and so on. In particular, the idea of Merlin, Arthur, or both somehow continuing to guard Great Britain is a reasonably common one in Arthurian literature and in fiction dealing with alternative history fantasies of Britain in general. There's a lot of material to play with in the genre, and Radford has certainly drawn of a fair amount of what's available, even going so far as to bring the Illuminati into her final volume, set at the time of the American revolution.

On whole, I must say that while I read and enjoyed the books, I'm not sure that I thought well enough of the entire series to recommend it. The first volume, which is a retelling of the core story of Merlin and Arthur, and hence sets up the means by which the lines of both can continue throughout history, is in my opinion the most interesting book of the series. The next two, set in the England of King John and the early part of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, are good - in fact, the second book, with its very memorable protagonist, the powerful sorceress Resmiranda, is possibly the best of the series. The series begins to unravel somewhat in the fourth volume, which deals with the second half of Elizabeth's reign and the religious discord between Catholics and Huguenots in France, and it has become a little tedious in the fifth volume, in which the Pendragon legacy divides and some of Merlin's descendants head off to protect America instead.

There are a number of reasons why the series doesn't quite work well enough for me. Some of it may well be that I've been spoiled by writers such as Judith Tarr and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro in the realm of alternative historical fantasy. Very few authors meet the standards they have set for exhaustive historical research seamlessly blended into the story. Also, it seemed to me that in focusing more and more over time on division and corruption within the Pendragon line itself, the later books became somewhat overly complicated as the author tries to link the factional discords and plots within the Pendragon line to the already complex political intrigues of the Elizabethan and Georgian eras.

While the protagonists are strong in all five volumes (indeed, the protagonist of the fifth and otherwise weakest book has a very strong and enjoyable hero, a young woman named Georgie who spends much of the novel passing as an elite mercenary soldier), the characterizations of the supporting characters are sometimes weak and inconsistent - they are whatever the story needs them to be at the time instead of reacting organically as themselves. Again, this is most obvious in the fifth volume, where Georgie's brother Drake is heroic and weak by turns, without much to justify his changes, while Georgie's niece and the likely future Pendragon Emily is alternately horrified and adoring of her aunt's unconventionality, depending on whether the plot requires her to be susceptible or resistant to the blandishments of one of the villains within the Pendragon clan who seeks to marry her and turn her to the Dark Side.

So, in all, an interesting premise, moderately enjoyable to read, but on the weak side in several rather important areas.