bibliogramma | Entries tagged with g: contemporary fiction

Nicola Griffith is not a writer to be pigeon-holed. She’s written science fiction, hard core detective stories, and stunningly well researched historical fiction. She is also a person with MS who has not been content to sit back and take received wisdom about her condition. She’s researched it with the same tenacity that has marked her writing, and explored new theories of the disease mechanism for herself.

In So Lucky, Griffith takes her experience in living with MS, in the entire spectrum of what living as disabled is like, and turns it into a compelling, enveloping story of Mara, a woman who is diagnosed with MS just as her wife of over twenty years decides to leave her for another woman. She loses her job, explores the increasingly depressing world of support groups and pharmaceutical interventions. She learns all the things you never know about how the world treats cripples until you are one. And eventually, she takes her experience in the non-profit sector and her rage and builds a new organisation modelled on the fierce personal advocacy of the early year of the HIV epidemic.

So Lucky is in some ways the story of anyone who has suddenly gone from category normal to category disabled, and it chronicles so many of the changes in status, energy, self-image, priorities... everything that changes for the disabled person, which is in most cases everything in your life. It’s powerful, and painful, and in its portrayal of becoming a crip, it is very, very real.

There’s a narrative here, of course, a story to follow, a build-up and a climax and a denouement, and it’s interesting in itself and a parable of the relation between society and the disabled. But it’s Mara’s coming to terms with her own changed status and life that’s the real story. And it’s one of the most compelling I’ve read in a very long time.

The Coldest City, a graphic novel by Anthony Johnston, is a complex spy thriller set in Berlin on the verge of the fall of East Germany and the Berlin Wall. It was the inspiration for the recent film Atomic Blonde, which I watched and enjoyed, so I thought I might enjoy the comic as well.

The narrative is in the form of a verbal debriefing of an agent, just returned from a mission in return. All we learn of the present is that an agent named Perceval has died. As the agent being debriefed begins to make her report, it’s easy for the mind to slip between the two framing narratives, to forget this is not a narrative of ongoing events, but of an agent who was involved in those events being debriefed. One can lose sight of the fact that we have an unreliable narrator.

The set-up as given in the agent’s report. which those who have seen the film will recognise, involves a missing list that purports to contain the names of every secret agent in Berlin. It was to be delivered to a British agent by an ‘asset’ codenamed Spyglass, but instead the British agent, James Gascoigne (Ber-2) is dead, his presumed assassin, a Russian agent named Bahktin, is in the wind, and the list is missing. The higher-ups don’t fully trust the lead British Agent in Berlin, David Perceval (Ber-1), so they are sending in someone who’s never worked in Berlin and has no previous connections with Ber-1 or Ber-2 - Lorraine Broughton, who is going in under cover as a lawyer, Gladys Lloyd, arranging for the repatriation of Gascoigne’s body. Her real mission is to find the list.

The visual style of the novel is stark, drawn in black and white, the characters mostly line drawings never fully fleshed out in detail, faces often drawn without any features, or partly or fully blacked in, shadowy figures echoing the unreality of the characters themselves, who are never what they seem and never display everything abut themselves. And in many panels, there are characters in the corners, watching the other characters, sometimes taking up whole panels themselves as they all observe each other. It’s a graphic illustration of a world where nothing can be taken for what it seems to be, and suspicion and surveillance are unspoken, eternal presences.

It is, of course, a complicated story, of agents and double agents and moles and plots, all unfolding against the imminent collapse of the Wall and the inevitable changes in the world of spycraft in Berlin, which will no longer be a place where multiple nations intersect, and people and information move back and forth.

Quite engrossing, a spy story in the classic style, worthy of Len Deighton or John LeCarré.

Kim Fu’s novel, For Today I Am a Boy, is a difficult book to read, because for most of the time, the major characters appear to be living lives of quiet desperation. It tells, simply and straightforwardly, with the openness of a child - which the protagonist is, in the beginning - about growing up in a sadly dysfunctional immigrant family. The narrator, Peter Huang, is a young Chinese boy whose family lives in a small Ontario town. His father, desperate to assimilate, to be seen as a model Canadian, to become invisible as a minority, refuses to allow Cantonese to be spoken in the home, insists the only North American foods be prepared. He spends much of his life moving from one job to another, anything that gives him a managerial title, no matter how low the pay, until he finally becomes a civil servant, able to fulfill his image of the successful middle class professional man, dressed in suit and tie, a part of the Canadian dream. He is ambitious for his children, also. The oldest two daughters must assimilate, become doctors and lawyers. And for his one son, the only boy among four children, his ambitions are that he become a man, strong and in every way the perfect model minority.

But his family, which he so desperately wants to be perfect, has deep secrets. His wife pretends to work part-time, but really goes to the local Chinese Association to gamble. He himself has an affair with one of the women in the neighbourhood, who is suffering from delusions clustered around her infertility, and eventually commits suicide.

The oldest daughter Adele resists the role of scholar laid out for her, has no interest in becoming a doctor, and eventually drops out of university to run away to Amsterdam with her boyfriend. The second daughter, Helen, in contrast works very hard to be the perfect reflection of her father’s aspirations, the textbook lawyer, but is never really acknowledged. And the youngest daughter, Bonnie, is a rebel, sexually precocious, smoking, drinking, sneaking out to bars and flirting with older men.

And then there is Peter, who has the biggest secret. He wants to be a girl. Though the story is told from Peter’s perspective, the boy hiding his tryouts with his sisters’ make-up, brushing their hair, secretly cooking dinner when it’s supposed to be his sister Bonnie’s turn, still it’s clear that Peter’s father suspects that something is not quite right. He polices his son’s behaviour, praising him for ‘manly things’ - even when, forced to join in by some neighbourhood boys, he takes part in a an assault on a young girl - and withholding love and approval when he does something too ‘girly.’

For Today I Am a Boy is about Peter’s long, tormented, journey from hidden shame to self-acceptance. Growing up, he has no idea that there is anyone else like him - I use the male pronoun because Peter does not really understand that he can be someone other than a boy, albeit a weak and tormented one, for most of the book - who feels that they are not the gender they were assigned, the gender everyone believes them to be. As soon as he finishes high school, he moves to Montreal, starts working in restaurants, slowly building hs skill towards becoming a chef. And being alone. Not understanding who he is, but knowing that something is wrong, he stumbles through several painfully abusive relationships, avoiding friendships, focusing on work.

But there is a tomorrow for Peter, a time when finally there is an understanding of what has driven the fear and isolation for so long, and in that tomorrow, Peter is Audrey and she is finally whole.

This book hurt to read, for so many reasons. All four siblings have so far to go to become themselves, though arguably it is Audrey who must come the farthest. And always in the background, the pain of the father, demanding and disappointed, the mother, oppressed and enraged. The tangled issues of sexuality that all four sisters have to work through in different ways, and the racism and fetishisation that faces them as Asian-Canadians, and as Asian women.

It’s a powerful novel, and worth reading, despite the pain that so many of the characters carry, for the insights into growing up in an atmosphere that, even without overt violence, is deeply traumatic, and ultimately, just for the joy of the last paragraph: “Four grown women sit in a pub, raising their tourist steins to the camera. The waiter who holds the camera comments on how much they look alike. ‘We’re sisters,’ Bonnie says. ‘Wir sind Schwestern. This is Adele, Helen, and Audrey.’ “

On February 8, 2017, SF author Mindy Klasky decided to edit an anthology. She was inspired to do so by the now infamous words used to silence American Senator Elizabeth Warren: “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”

The anthology that resulted from this decision, Nevertheless She Persisted, published by the Book View Cafe collective and featuring works by some of its members, is a collection of stories that aspired, as Klasky says, to show “...the power of women overcoming challenges, of women persisting against the threat of other people, of society, of their own fears.” It’s also generally enjoyable reading, with one glaring exception that I’ll get to later. I was disappointed that the contributors were, to the best of my knowledge, all white - there are many ways in which women of colour might have given us a broader picture of the persistence of women against the threats of society.

The stories are divided into four sections: the past, the present, the future, and other worlds.

I found all the stories set in the past to be interesting and engaging, from Marie Brennan’s revisiting of the story of Penelope in “Daughter of Necessity,” to Deborah Ross’s portrayal of the persistence of faith among the hidden Jews of Iberia forced to convert to Christianity in “Unmasking the Ancient Light.” “Sister,” Leah Cutter’s poignant story of a young Chinese woman’s desperate quest to find a spirit husband to care for her beloved, departed younger sister was deeply moving, as was an extract from P. G. Nagle’s novel about a passing woman during the American Civil War who decides to enlist. While “Alea Iacta Est” by Marissa Doyle was sheer fun - an Englishwoman in the early 19th century who decides to take part in a contest of table top war gaming at her brother’s club, whether it ruins her socially or not.

I was less engaged in many of the stories set in the present. Sara Stamey’s depiction of the generational harm done by male anger in the home in “Reset” is painfully real, and Brenda Clough’s “Making Love” is a charming tale about an older woman whose knitting seems to make things just a little better wherever it’s gifted. “Digger Lady” by Amy Sterling Casil is a bittersweet story of an old woman, an archeologist who has spent her life searching for evidence of a new hominid species. I rather enjoyed the themes of Irene Radford’s “Den of Iniquity” in which Lilith, the original rebellious woman, continues her ancient protest against the rigidity of the Father’s demands - though I must note some racist elements in the description and treatment of several characters named but not present.

Two of the four stories in the future section are frankly dystopian, and powerful. Mindy Klasky’s “Tumbling Blocks” tells a deeply moving story set in a world reminiscent of The Handmaid’s Tale in the way it treats women, a story about a young woman, pregnant by rape and shunned by her community, who finds an underground connection to women who are risking their lives to see that she and others still have access to reproductive choice. In “Chatauqua” Nancy Jane Moore envisions an America wracked by climate change and civil breakdown, where caravans of people with key skills travel the broken roads trying to save dying cultures, educate those who survive, and help however they can. Jennifer Stevenson’s “The Purge” focuses on a more personal trauma, an artist’s response to a visceral nightmare of war. The final story in the section, Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff’s “If It Ain’t Broke” is in a much lighter vein, telling of a serendipitous merging of artistic inspiration and technological innovation.

The final section, other worlds, contains three fantasy and one science fiction stories that mostly continue the theme, but is, I felt, the weakest of the four sections. Judith Tarr’s “Tax Season” was, In my opinion, the best story in this section, and one of the best in the anthology - a light, fantasy world look at traditions, taxes, and being a woman in some rather non-traditional, and not exactly legal, occupations. Vonda McIntyre’s “Little Faces” is a highly original look at trust, betrayal, and reproduction in a symbiotic, space-dwelling society - pushing boundaries on our notions of famiky, sex and society in some very interesting ways. Doranna Durgin’s “In Search of Laria” is a slighter piece, but also centres on a betrayal of trust, this time between a rider, seduced by power, and her horse.

And then there’s Dave Smeds’ “Bearing Shadows,” which simply did not belong in a volume of stories like this. I am, in fact, deeply saddened and angry that the editor decided this story belonged here, for reasons I will expand on at length, because I’m just that angry to have found such a story in this volume. I am going to include extensive spoilers, because if you’re going to read this story, I think you should know exactly what you are getting into.

“Bearing Shadows” is set in a standard medieval fantasy world. The protagonist, a young woman named Aerise, lives in a typical village in a fairly standard patriarchal and moralistic society. In this world, there are humans, and there are the Cursed, elf-like beings who nonetheless can pass for humans, who live for hundreds of years, use magic, and spend half their time in the physical world and the other half in the dreamworld - in fact, they become ill and eventually die if they do not move regularly between the worlds, which has an unfortunate consequence in that their women cannot sustain a pregnancy. Thus, all the Cursed are the offspring of Cursed men and human women. Because the Cursed are feared and ostracised, not many human women are interested in bearing children to Cursed men. But some do, for a fee. These are often women who cannot prosper in a patriarchal society because they are not pretty enough to get a husband, or are disabled in some way, or have run afoul of the social norms - in short, women who are considered damaged goods, not only by humans, but also by the Cursed who depend on them fir the survival of their race. In the story, the Cursed refer to these women as broodmares, speak of them with disgust, refuse to share living space with them because they are dirty. They are depicted in the story in multiple ways as inferior, undesirable, unintelligent, unwanted.

On to the story. Aerise is happily married, enjoys a reasonable social status in her community, has a good life for the most part. She’s lost two children, but she’s pregnant again, and excited about it. Then her belly starts glowing, a sign that she’s carrying a Cursed child. She’s been a faithful wife, but eventually figures out that she was raped and impregnated one night when her husband was supposed to out late, but, she thought, came home early, woke her in the dark and had sex with her. It doesn’t matter, however, to the village folk or her husband that she was raped. She’s bearing a Cursed child, so out into the cold in her shift she must go. Of course, her rapist has been waiting for this. He finds her, convinces her to come with him to a Cursed encampment, and gives her into the care of two Cursed women who will be her child’s mothers. She’s treated somewhat better than the other human women, pregnant and nursing -“broodmares” - also living in the encampment, but not much. Her rapist, Morel, explains that he wanted a child by a better class of woman than he could get by fair negotiation with a broodmare, so this somehow justifies his rape of her. She is not mollified. She gives birth to a daughter, stays with the Cursed long enough to wean her, and then demands her price - her life back. What Morel offers is that he place her in suspended animation for 60 years, and then, pretending to be her husband, take her back to the village she came from, where no one will likely be alive who remembers her, wait til she gets integrated into the community, and then fake his death so she can find a new human husband among the grown grandchildren of the people she grew up among. Pause for a moment. To get back, not her old life, the husband she loved, her friends and family, but a chance at starting over again with people she doesn’t know, she’s going to have to pretend to be the loving wife of her rapist. Think about that. Anyway, she agrees, and the story ends with her being accepted as a young widow, living in her old village, bring courted by some promising young men, with a new chance at life. And she gets to meet her now adolescent daughter by Morel, who is a charming young girl.

This steaming pile of shit purports to be about a woman who persists against rape, and the loss of everything she ever knew and loved, and is rewarded with a second chance at life. But underneath that veneer is a series of justifications for rape. It’s necessary to ensure the survival of the Cursed. It was necessary because Morel didn’t want one of those disgusting second-class broodmares as the mother of his child. It was ok in the end because the child was so lovely, and besides, she got to have another chance to get married and have a normal life. As I said, a steaming pile of crap. There is so much in this story that made me want to scream and break things. There are far too many male perspectives on rape out there, and most of them misogynist as hell. We did not need another one, especially one disguised as a celebration of the persistence of women.

I have a suggestion. I think it’s time that men stopped writing about rape of women and other femmes. The conversation on rape has been controlled by male voices for far too long. Sure, some sensitive and feminist men have gotten it right, but do we really need more men talking about the rape of women and femmes? Time’s up in more ways than one, and more male perspectives on this subject are not needed. Especially those that try to justify it, or come up with ideas of how to make it all right in the end. There’s only one way to do that - stop raping in the first place.

So.... I mostly enjoyed these stories, despite the spectre of white feminism lurking behind the editorial choices, but reading Smeds’ contribution left a distinctly bad taste in my mouth. I suggest that if you decide to read this, you just ignore that story. You’ll find much more to enjoy in some of the other selections.

*This anthology contains 19 short stories, 18 of which are written by women and one of which is written by a man.

When you start reading a book, and the first three named characters are a young lesbian, and two young gay men, one black, one Latino, who have just met and are bonding over The Force Awakens, then you kind of know you’re reading something different and good. But I had no idea just how powerful the experience if reading this would be.

It starts out as a ‘meet cute’ scenario. Moss - Morris Jeffries Jr. - and his best friend Esperanza are stuck on a stalled BART train. When the train starts moving suddenly, the passengers are jostled a bit, and Moss connects, literally and figuratively, with Javier Perez. But the light opening gets dark almost immediately, as they arrive at the station to find police confronting a demonstration against yet another police shooting of an unarmed black man. And that sets the tone for what is to come. Short notes of sweetness amidst the bitterness of life as a person of colour in a racist world.

Mark Oshiro’s debut, the young adult novel Anger Is a Gift, is a portrait of growing up in America today, the kind of America that’s multi-racial, where immigrant families from Korean and Ethiopia mingle with black and Latinx families whose roots on the land go back further than most whites. Where your friends at school are Nigerian and Muslim and trans non-binary and one of them needs a mobility device to get around.

Where there’s an armed guard at the school door and random locker searches. Where there’s no money for school supplies and they sold all the books in the school library, so your English teacher reluctantly arranges for you to get pirated epubs of Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. And you have panic attacks every time you see the cops because you saw your father killed before your eyes just because he was black and in the wrong place at the wrong time - which translated means he was just doing the same things everyone does, stopping off at the local market to do some shopping, but he was black and some cop decided he was a criminal.

This is a book about what it’s like to be young and not white in America, to be the focus of unrelenting racial profiling at school, on public transit, in the streets, in any public place. About the school to prison pipeline. About the brutality of the state toward the young and marginalised. About trying to resist and find joy in the midst if it all.

The narrative follows Moss as he navigates both traditional young adult topics like dating and figuring out what to do when you grow up, and far more difficult issues, like trying to block your school from installing metal detectors and discovering that your best friend, despite her Puerto Rican heritage, doesn’t always see past her privilege as the adopted daughter of well-off white intellectuals who send her to private school where she doesn’t face the same things you do every day. And what to do when the cops strike and your fiends are hurt and dying.

The metal detectors are installed because of a “brawl” - students reacting when one of their own, Shawna, is brutally handled by the school’s ‘resource officer’ because he found her epilepsy medication in her locker and assumed it was illegal drugs. On the first day the metal detectors are in operation, Reg Phillips, a student recovering from major surgery after a car accident that left his legs badly damaged, refuses to go through the detector because he is concerned about its effects on the metal pins and other hardware in his legs. The police officers grab him and shove him through the machine, which malfunctions, tearing the metal in his legs out of position and sending him to the hospital, where surgeons determine that not only has the damage undone the progress he’s made, but it’s made his condition worse - he is now unlikely to ever walk again.

It’s the last straw for Moss and his friends. Drawing on the help of some adults, like Moss’ mother Wanda who was an activist and organiser before the murder of her husband, they call a community meeting and decide to demonstrate as a community against the use of the detectors at school. The students plan a mass walkout to co-incide.

One of the few narrative threads that isn’t overtly filed with tension over the coming confrontation with the authorities is Moss’ budding romance with Javier, who we learn is, along with his mother, an undocumented migrant from Guatemala. Their gentle courting, getting to know each other, all the sweet high notes of falling in love for the first time, is like an island of peace in the midst of the heightened anxiety of waiting for the day of the walkout. And yet.... the very presence of this oasis of comfort and hope is a site of tension because what should be unthinkable, that this innocent awakening of love can not survive the brutality of this place and time, is all too possible.

On the day of the walkout, the students arrive to a sea of police in riot gear. When the time comes for the protest, everything you would expect from a military operation primed to view young people of colour attempting a peaceful demonstration as a gang of violent criminals takes place. There are multiple horrors, and tragedies large and small. Armed cops against children. The essence of modern America.

There’s a lot here that hits hard. I’m a middle-aged white cis woman who has none of the lived experience that kids like Moss and Javier and Shawna and their friends know, but this helps me understand as much as I’m able too - that’s the gift of art. It lets you see from other perspectives, feel what it’s like, to a degree, to be someone other than yourself, to live under other conditions. But this book does something else, too, something that white readers need to see and understand. There are white characters in this book. The cops, obviously. But there are white teachers, some white folks who live in Moss’ neighbourhood, Esperanza’s adoptive parents. Some of them even think of themselves as allies, as people trying to help. But the thing for white people reading this book to understand is that allyship is hard. Because we don’t understand. We don’t get it. And the book demonstrates that. There are no examples of good white allies here. Only white people who don’t try, or try and fail, some of them with disastrous results. And that’s the essence of modern America, too.

But one of the most important messages here is right in the title. Because what moves the story past the tragedy and horror is Moss’ anger. Anger is a gift. These days, there’s a lot of what we call tone policing going on. Marginalised people are angry, and yet when they speak up, act on their anger at the years of injustice they’ve faced, the white liberal response is far too often about being patient, engaging in dialog, being persuasive, using the ‘right’ tactics. Waiting your turn. Not antagonising people who maybe could help your case if you’re properly calm and respectful. Anger hurts the movement, they say.

I call bullshit on that. If being polite and waiting your turn could have made this world more just, we’d all be living in a social justice paradise. And as for not antagonising potential allies - if your commitment to doing the right thing is dependent on people being nice to you, your commitment isn’t worth shit and won’t last past the first rough patch anyway.

Anger is fire. It lights the way, it gives us the energy, the determination, the will, to survive and to keep fighting. It blazes against the darkness of injustice, cruelty, hatred. It burns out evil, and makes a space where we can rebuild something better, if we have the will and desire. Anger is a gift.

Best of Everything is a self-published pdf-only anthology of short stories (some very short) by sff author Ahmed Khan (the collection is available from the author, who can be contacted via his Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/ahmedkhanwrites/ - at the time I acquired the pdf, the author was asking a donation of one dollar for the compilation)

Khan has a definite gift for writing stories that challenge expectations - you think they are going somewhere, but they end up someplace quite different. His stories are, generally speaking, fun to read, but his endings - now those can be quite thought-provoking indeed.

I often feel when reading one of his short stories that his style has been heavily influenced by oral story-telling traditions. He’s not one for lush description, or complicated proses. There is a deceptive simplicity to his style, something that often makes me think of his stories as parables, or fables - and yes, his work often carries with it a moral of one kind or another, as parables and fables are wont to do. Sometimes, however, I feel that this tendency to write in parables tends to sidestep the ethical complexities of real life, and present things which are multi-hued as though they must be black or white.

There’s often a touch of dry satirical observation in Khan’s writing, which I find quite delightful. An example:

“Earth people live like animals. Our conquest will be a blessing for them in disguise," said the Commander, as is typical of so many commanders all over the universe.
"How true!" murmured his men, as is typical of commanders' men all over the universe.

Bits of writing like this make me smile, and sometimes even giggle.

Among the stories in this collection that I particularly enjoyed were:

“Close Encounter of the Preposterous Kind,” in which an attack on Earth is foiled by a most unusual saviour. The story combines the tropes of two very different genres of speculative fiction to produce an unexpected ending in a way that strikes me as quintessential Khan.

“Face It” is a science fictional in-joke - but it’s also a comment on rushing into things you know little about. A plastic surgeon convinces a man disfigured in an accident to participate in an experiment to test the premise of physiognomy - with a result that will leave every long-term science fiction fan nodding in recognition.

“Knock, Knock” is perhaps my favourite of the stories collected here. Khan notes that the piece is inspired by the work of Urdu novellist Qurratulain Hyder - and after reading this piece, and reading about her on the Net, I’m going to have to see if I can locate any of her works in translation. It is, I think, a definitely non-western story in its approach. Deeply lyrical, it places importance on the journey rather than the goal, the state of mind more than the specific achievement. It spoke to me in profound ways about the standards we use to assess the value of a life.

“Mynah for the King” is a teaching parable of leadership and governance - but though it speaks about what kinds of things should inform the policies of a ruler, it is also applicable to the ways in which we make our own decisions, reminding us that wisdom and creativity can be better guides than pragmatism.

“Veils” is a story about a young woman who learns that judging the value of others by their outward appearance and sweet words leads to disappointment, while looking behind the surface to the real feelings and actions can be a much better way to discovering the real value of a person.

Several of the stories here are very short - a paragraph or two at the most, and it is in these that Khan’s playfulness shows most strongly - most notably in “Infringement.” But inherent in the word play are ideas worth thinking about seriously.

A few stories rather missed the mark for me, though. This feeling was strongest in the story, “How To Write a Fantasy,” an otherwise clever piece of metafiction, Khan describes the sole character in the story as “A man-hater of the variety who would like to decimate all the men from the face of the earth and spend the rest of her life making love to machines.” As a feminist who has ben described so many times as a man-hater, and seen so many other feminists described the same way, this shook me right out of the necessary receptive mood. I don’t know if Khan intended this to evoke the idea of a feminist, but it’s such a common insult, and one that many men as well as women would interpret as referring to feminists, that the impact was to turn what might have been an ironic twist into a something that felt like a nasty revenge fantasy.

Two of the stories in this collection would appear to rely rather heavily on the idea that consensual sexual activity outside of marriage is intrinsically wrong - a belief that I do not share, and that made my appreciation of these two stories, “Seventeen” and “The World, The Times, and The Unicorn,” less than complete. However, in both stories, it is possible to engage in a somewhat subtextual interpretation, in which the moral failure is not so much the physical fact of having sex, as it is the reasons and choices leading to it. Read this way, both stories are, in different ways, about choosing the spirit over the world.

In “Seventeen,” a young man meets a girl who seems to him to embody innocence and hope, but after he spends an evening in a casual sexual encounter, he feels unworthy of her affection. I’m not comfortable with the idea that sexual ‘purity’ equals innocence and sexual expression is a loss of innocence. But the choice he makes, can be seen as one of greed, of wanting everything without regard for the feelings of another. In “The World, The Times, and The Unicorn,” a man is offered a choice between great wealth, and a fantastic journey to an alien land. He chooses wealth, but is stymied when, in order to achieve that wealth, he must find a virgin within a specific period of time, and he fails. Here, I choose to read the fault as a choice of materialism over the chance fir new experiences and deeper understandings. When he chooses wealth, he dooms himself to an unfulfillable condition, not because the world has no virtuous women in it to give him what he wants, but because his own greed traps him. I’d like to think that the author would not object to these readings.

Taken all in all, there’s quite a lot to enjoy in this collection, and I’m glad that the author assembled these pieces and made them available.

In Dionne Brand’s novel Love Enough, people cross paths in unlikely and tangential ways, creating and fighting for and losing relationships, finding their path through emotional tangles of past and present, obligation and expectation, all against the backdrop of the sprawling multicultural metropolis of Toronto. Indeed, the sense of place is strong enough to almost make the city one of the characters, the cycle of vignettes that illuminate the lives of the people also serving to illustrate the untidy diversity of the city itself.

The narrative swirls around its broken, struggling characters and the people who move into and out of their lives. June, a social activist who wanted to be a dancer. Bedri, one of June’s clients at the drop-in centre where she works, and his friend Ghost, petty thugs high on the aftermath of a violent carjacking. Bedri's cab-driving father, Dau'ud, a Somali immigrant who was once an economist. Lia, Ghost's sister, like him the survivor of abandonment by a drug-addicted mother, and a series of foster homes.

Characters that seek love, love enough to get by, at least. Or perhaps Brand’s title is an imperative, exhorting her characters, and by extension her readers, to love enough that the pain and rootlessness can be ameliorated, at least a little. Or a plea, a prayer, for love enough to overcome the distances between us.

The novel opens with an image of driving down Dupont Street - which is, truly, not anywhere near the prettiest street that Toronto has to offer - seeing it transformed by the vision of the sunset seen through the rear view mirror. Perhaps in that sunset, just enough beauty to alter the ugliness around it, is a parallel to the remembered touch of love, somehow just enough to keep us going through the night.

And the novel ends with these thoughts from June’s lover: “There is nothing universal or timeless about this love business, Sydney now suspects for the first time. It is hard if you really want to do it right.”

Emil Ferris’ graphic novel, My Favorite Thing is Monsters, is an incredibly complex narrative experience, both visually and thematically. The novel is presented as the personal journal of a 10-year-old girl, Karen Reyes, living with her mother, who is dying of cancer, and her older brother Deeze, in Chicago in the 1960s. Written and drawn in multiple styles, her journal is a portrait of a talented and intelligent, but ostracised and outcast young artist who is fascinated by the strange and monstrous, both in art and in life, and who portrays herself as a monster, a werewolf, in a world of otherwise human-appearing people. Her journal tells her life in graphic imagery, scenes from her everyday life interspersed with images of cover illustrations from horror comics and copies of classical art which her brother introduces her to on visits to the museum.

In between telling her own stories about her life and the lives she sees around her, Karen’s journal follows her investigation into the death of her neighbour Anka, a troubled Holocaust survivor, and one of her womanising brother’s many lovers.

In the midst of Karen’s drawings of imaginary and real life monsters, is an extended section illustrating a taped interview Anka gave to a young man not long before her death, a tape that Anka’s husband, jazz musician Sam Silverberg, plays for Karen. It is the story of Anka’s early life in Berlin. She recounts growing up in a brothel, the daughter of a sadistic prostitute who pits out cigarettes on Anka’s flesh. As a child, Anka is sold to a man who runs a child sex ring; she escapes by making herself indispensable to one particular pedophile who is willing to be her protector - until she grows too old to arouse him, when he gives her enough money to establish herself and find a job. But Anka is Jewish, and the Hitler years have begun, and it seems as though most of Germany has turned into monsters. Thanks to the patronage of her pedophile protector, Anka is saved from the camps, and manages to save a few young girls, but only through promising to set up a child sex ring herself and prostitute the girls to her protector’s circle of friends. In a world of monsters, only monstrous deeds can avert even more monstrous ones.

There is a sequence, sandwiched between two horrors, in which Karen, saved from threatened rape by a gang of school bullies by another outcast, a gay black man named Franklin, takes him to the art museum, and we see the paintings through his eyes - the ways in which the dresses, hairstyles and accessories in the portraits of women talk to him about their personality and power. But after this, they emerge into the reality of the news that Martin Luther King has been shot, and the racist responses from whites, and the rejection of Franklin as a brother by the black men around him because of his sexuality. Karen depicts Franklin as a version of Frankenstein’s monster. And slowly, we understand that one of the reasons Karen depicts herself as a monster is because of her own awareness of being a girl who likes other girls, a sexual outcast herself.

In many ways, this is a meditation on what we mean when we say something is monstrous - is it an external quality of appearance, is it a set of circumstances, or is it the mentality that enables violence and cruelty? Is a werewolf monstrous in the same way as a painting by Hieronymous Bosch, or a murderer, or a government that tramples on the rights of its citizens, abuses and kills the most vulnerable of those it should serve and protect? What is truly monstrous, the outsider, or the society that demonises and oppresses her?

At one point, Karen talks about the ‘good monsters’ and the ‘bad monsters,’ writing in her journal that “... a good monster sometimes gives somebody a fright because they’re weird looking and fangy... a fact that’s beyond their control... but bad monsters are all about control... they want the whole world to be scared so the bad monsters can call the shots.”

Reading My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is a powerful and thought-provoking experience, an exploration of the light and the dark, the best and worst of human nature, the twinning of creativity and monstrosity. It is sometimes inspiring, often harrowing, and ends with so much still unresolved - The wait fir Volume 2 is going to be a difficult one.

Matt, the protagonist of Sam J. Miller’s YA novel The Art of Starving, is not having a good life. He’s an intelligent, gay high school student who endures daily bullying from the popular jocks. His family is poor, and Jewish. He has suicidal impulses, fantasises about running away, or maybe getting his mother’s mother’s gun and taking it to school, and he struggles with anorexia and body dysphoria, which of course boys supposedly do not get. His sister has run away, and Matt thinks it has something to do with Tariq, one of the boys who torments him. His mother, a single parent who is always exhausted from her work at the slaughterhouse, is in perpetual denial about her children’s problems.

Matt doesn’t acknowledge his anorexia. Instead, he justifies not eating by saying that it makes him more alert and aware of danger, heightens his abilities to defend himself. He practices the Art of Starving, and throughout the book, he formulates the rules that govern his art.

The first person narrative is centred around two main issues. The first is Matt’s perceptions of how his body and senses change when he eats, or doesn’t eat; his belief that starvation heightens awareness, and his war with his body over hunger. The second is his obsession with Tariq, to whom he is attracted, but who he believes has somehow injured his sister so that she had to run away; he doesn’t say it directly, but it’s clear he believes his sister was sexually assaulted by Tariq, and possibly also by Tariq’s bullying friends.

It’s a scorchingly funny, bitterly heartbreaking story. Matt’s pain and desire come alive on every page, couched in trenchant observations about life, wrapped up in the grief of an adolescent who just does not see where he fits in the world. It’s a great novel - but since I’m reading it as a book that’s been heavily recommended as a potential Hugo nominee, I have to ask myself, is it speculative fiction?

The only genre element in the novel is Matt’s belief that he has powers granted to him by the art of starving. Several things happen that may be external validations of his belief. Or they may be delusions. Matt has starved himself to the point where his brain doesn’t work properly, so he is not a reliable narrator.

So... a good novel, an important novel, one that really gives an insider view of what it’s like to be a queer person growing up in a damaged home, struggling with an eating disorder, feeling like an outsider. And yes, I’ve been there. Even to the point of tripping on the sense of power that not eating gives a person who perceives themselves as otherwise powerless. The euphoria of wilful starvation.

But not necessarily a science fiction or fantasy novel. That’s a decision you’ll have to make yourself.

Lesley Nneka Arimah Is one hell of a writer.

I first encountered her work through the short story “Who Will Greet You At Home” which was such a powerful piece of speculative fiction that I nominated it for a Hugo. It is included in her collection of short fiction, What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, and it was irrefutably representative of the quality and power of Arimah’s work.

Arimah is a British-born Nigerian writer, and her work, which draws on both her experiences as a woman in modern Nigeria and an immigrant in colour in a white-centred country, is imbued with a deep consciousness of the realities of women’s lives in a world which can be violent and corrupt, in which they are rarely seen as they are and accorded their worth.

Her stories are primarily about people in relationships - how we are embedded in long chains of impact from the ways people interact, how they shape our lives. She writes with clarity and honesty about the ways people need, use, love and hurt each other. About the balance of desire and need, love and violence, sex and possession, in relationships between men and women. About the power and pain of the mother-daughter bond. About anger and grief and love and fear.

Arimah writes both realistic and speculation fiction, story and fable. Some of her stories have strong elements of the fantastic and the supernatural, others tell of events that are perfectly ordinary. Her themes are what remains constant, the elements varying to suit the specific story she wants to tell, the kind of experience she chooses to illuminate.

This is an amazing collection, full of depth, of truth, of inspiration, of pain, of hope, of life.

Lawrence Hill’s The Illegal is a complex, fast-paced novel that explores issues of race and the movement of refugees across borders, wrapped up in the form of a thriller, set in two imagined countries that stand in for the third world of the oppressed and disadvantaged people of colour who become refugees, and the privileged Western countries where white people accumulate wealth off the oppression of other nations.

“Keita had studied maps, and he knew that Zantoroland—only one hundred kilometres long and eighty wide—was but a speck in the Ortiz Sea in the Indian Ocean. Africa to the west and Australia to the east were far too distant to be seen, but Keita knew they were there. Looking down Blossom Street, Keita could see the port and the waters of the Ortiz Sea. There were fifteen hundred kilometres of open water stretching north to the nation of Freedom State. Like all schoolchildren, Keita knew that Freedom State had enslaved Zantorolanders for some two centuries but, after abolishing slavery, had deported most black people back to Zantoroland. Ever since that time, adventurous Zantorolanders had braved the Ortiz Sea in fishing boats, taking their lives into their hands as they tried to slip back into Freedom State, one of the richest nations in the world.”

Hill’s protagonist, Keita Ali, is a black man from Zontoroland, a brutal dictatorship, rife with intertribal power struggles, violence and corruption. From his childhood, he has wanted to be a distance runner. He has trained himself for it, through the violence he witnesses as a child, through the military coup, through the death of his mother, through the detainment and torture of his dissident journalist father, through the departure of his brilliant sister to be educated safely in a foreign country. He gains the attention of a second-rate sports agent from Freedom State.

When his father is killed, he uses the agent’s interest in him to get to Freedom State, and then he runs. Without passport or papers, he is an Illegal in a country that has a policy of hunting down and deporting all undocumented residents, Keita is alone, and hunted.

When he enters a marathon and wins it, not only does he draw unwanted attention to himself, he becomes embroiled in a mystery involving a young Freedom State citizen secretly deported to Zantoroland and murdered there, a mystery that also connects him to Viola, a black, disabled reporter, John Falconer, young man of mixed race who wants to become a journalist, and a number of other people from the Minister of Immigration to the woman who runs the black shantytown known as AfricTown. Worse, his sister Charity has been lured back to Zonotoroland and the government, having located him through the news stories about his race victory, are demanding money for her safe release from detention. And the agent he ran out on is threatening to have him deported unless he buys out his contract.

Every contact he makes places him in jeopardy because of his status as an illegal. The pretty runner he beds once and tries to avoid because she’s a cop. The elderly woman with the vindictive grasping son who offers him a place to stay in return for some housekeeping chores. The banker who cannot open an account for him without identification he does not have. Everything is a risk.

Hill captures the fear of the refugee, the fear of the undocumented resident in a foreign country, with precision. Through Keita, we understand why some people are so desperate to leave their homelands that they will risk everything, live in the shadows in a country not their own, where they may never gain the right to be called ‘legal.’

Kristen Roupenian, "Cat Person"; The New Yorker, December 11, 2017
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/11/cat-person

An all-too-familiar story about a woman meeting and becoming involved with a man, despite all the tiny warning signals that suggest she should be mire cautious. The scary thing is that it ended in a better way than I'd feared, although 'better' is perhaps not the right word.

Carmen Maria Machado, "The Husband Stitch"; Granta, October 28, 2014
https://granta.com/the-husband-stitch/

One reviewer of this short story has said "It’s a horror story in which the monster is heterosexual relationship", which seems to me as accurate as anything else I could say. It's a powerful story about being a woman in a world made by men, about how we fit ourselves into the spaces in their lives and try to hold onto some small thing that is our own. Until they want that too, and we give it freely because we love them, and we have nothing left.

Maureen McHugh, "Sidewalks"; Omni, November 28, 2017
http://omnimagazine.com/sidewalks/

Ros Gupta is a speech pathologist called in to examine a "Jane Doe" of indeterminate racial identity who speaks only 'gibberish' and is currently being held in an institution because the police feared she might be a danger to self or others. She manages to communicate with the woman, whose name is Malni, and what she discovers changes her entire way of relating to the world she lives in. There are some profound messages here, about the fragility of the things we know and love, about connectedness and change, about actions and consequences, and about living as a woman in the world.

Charlie Jane Anders, "Don't Press Charges and I Won't Sue"; Boston Review, October 30, 2017
http://bostonreview.net/fiction/charlie-jane-anders-dont-press-charges-and-i-wont-sue

A brutal story about a woman struggling to hold on to her identity in a world determined to eliminate it. The real horror is that this world is only a few existential tweaks away from our own, and there are people who would not read this as a terrifying and cautionary dystopic narrative. Powerful, painful.

Kelly Barnhill, "Probably Still the Chosen One"; Lightspeed, February 2017
http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/probably-still-chosen-one/

A rather different take on the portal fantasy and the whole 'chosen child hero' trope. Eleven-year-old Corrina finds a portal to a land at war and is identified as the Chosen One by the Priesthood. Her destiny - to lead the people of Nibiru to victory against the evil Zonners. But it doesn't turn out quite the way Corrina dreams it will, or the Priests expect it too. Fun.

C. S. E. Cooney, "Though She Be But Little"; Uncanny Magazine, September/October 2017
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/though-she-be-but-little/

Something strange has happened - the Argentum, the sky turning silver - and strange things have happened - people turning into mythical pirates, floating alligators and parrots that can act like cellphones - and things have arrived from somewhere else, many of them monstrous. Emily Anne was a widow in her sixties before the Argentum; now she's an eight-year-old child and a nightmare creature, The Loping Man, is coming to kill her. Where the story focuses on Emily Anne's resourcefulness, courage, and ability to adapt to this new world, it was enjoyable, but I felt as though I'd been dropped into something complex with no explanation and that aspect was not as pleasing. I'd have enjoyed it more if it were presented as straight absurdist fantasy, but presenting it as something that's happened to a real world not unlike our own makes me want at least some clues toward answers to 'how' and 'why.'

Fran Wilde, "Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand"; Uncanny Magazine, September/October 2017
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/clearly-lettered-mostly-steady-hand/

This one cut me deeply. It's a horror story about the way society and the medical profession deal with "freaks" - those of us who are visibly different - and how those freaks feel and think. The story is told as a monologue by a tour guide through a freak show, but the tone drips with rage at the 'normal' person, the voyeur come to see the horrifying strangeness of the 'different.' Intense.

N. K. Jemisin, "Henosis"; Uncanny Magazine, September/October 2017
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/henosis/

A short story about fame, fans, and legacy. An aging author nominated for a prize that it quite literally intended as the culmination of a stellar career is kidnapped by a fan. Interesting and somewhat savage commentary on what it's like to become famous and to be seen as possessing an artistic legacy.

The Internet informs me that Joy Kogawa's novel Obasan is the first piece of Canadian fiction to deal with the experience of Japanese-Canadians in the internment camps during and after WWII. It's certainly the first book I've read that deals with this dark and painful period of Canadian history.

It is necessarily a dark and painful book, about silence and loss. The protagonist is Naomi Nakane, a middle-aged Alberta schoolteacher who has, like her Uncle and his wife, whom Naomi calls Obasan, tried to put her war experiences behind them, but who, like them, is indelibly marked by those experiences. At first, Naomi's family narrative has large holes: she speaks of her Uncle, his wife, and an aunt Emily, but no one else. The reader imagines that the internment camps are somehow responsible for these lacunae, but does not know how.

But then, when Uncle dies, Naomi returns to the home where she spent her adolescence, cared for by the childless Uncle and Obasan. While she is there, she begins to unravel her family's history, uncover the truth behind long-unmentioned secrets, and break the silence. A family photograph from before the war, taken on the occasion of her brother's birth, shows us the shape of her family before the war, before confiscation, before internment, before relocation: grandparents, the Nakane and Kato families; her grandfather Nakane's older son, Uncle, and his wife Obasan; her father; her mother; her mother's sister, Emily Kato; her brother Stephen. Prosperous people, the Nakanes are shipbuilders, the sea and ships are in their souls.

Aunt Emily, the unmarried sister of Naomi's absent mother, is the only member if the family who speaks of the past. In fact, she is an agitator, an activist, who attends conferences and tries to tell the world what was done to her people. Naomi recalls Aunt Emily talking to her about the vicious racism endured by Japanese-Canadians during and after the war with Imperial Japan.

"The American Japanese were interned as we were in Canada, and sent off to concentration camps, but their property wasn’t liquidated as ours was. And look how quickly the communities reestablished themselves in Los Angeles and San Francisco. We weren’t allowed to return to the West Coast like that. We’ve never recovered from the dispersal policy. But of course that was the government’s whole idea—to make sure we’d never be visible again. Official racism was blatant in Canada. The Americans have a Bill of Rights, right? We don’t.”

And again, "...They took away the land, the stores, the businesses, the boats, the houses—everything. Broke up our families, told us who we could see, where we could live, what we could do, what time we could leave our houses, censored our letters, exiled us for no crime. They took our livelihood—”

Emily is the lightning rod, while Naomi, Uncle and Obasan are silent. The key to unraveling one part of the past, for Naomi and for the reader, lies in Emily's collection of documents, and a journal, given to Naomi to read. In the journal, begun in 1941, Emily records the path of destruction of West Coast Japanese communities from month to month, as first unnaturalised Japanese men are rounded up and sent to work camps, cars and boats and radios are confiscated, and on and on until all those of Japanese heritage, even those full citizens born in Canada, are forced to relocate away from the coast.

In flashbacks, Naomi remembers as a child remembers, her comfortable home and close-knit family taken from her step by step. Her mother travels to Japan to see her ailing mother and is caught there by the outbreak of war; she will never see her mother again, and for decades, Naomi will know nothing of her fate. Grandparents, summering on the coast, are swept up into a filthy internment camp. Cousins, uncles, fathers, family friends are taken away to work camps as far off as Ontario, leaving only women, children, and a few old men, most 'relocated' away from the coast, to camps and 'ghost towns', some lucky enough to find refuge with friends in other provinces. Naomi, her brother Stephen, and Obasan are sent to live in a decrepit shack in Slocum. After the war ends, Uncle, freed from the labour camps, and her father, debilitated by tuberculosis, join them. But then the family is torn apart once more as 'suitable' Japanese survivors of the camps and ghost towns are sent further from the coast - "eastern relocation" as agricultural workers and other labourers - while "unsuitable" survivors like her father are held where they are to await their fate. Uncle, Obasan and Naomi are relocated, forced labourers on a Alberta beet farm; she will never see her father again.

But Obasan is not just about the injustices visited on a people, and the silence that has surrounded those injustices in the national narrative. It is about trauma, both personal and institutional, and how we deal - or don't deal - with it. In Naomi's life, abuse comes in different forms, and abusers are also both personal and institutional. In the end, Obasan is a wrenching novel about a family torn apart by war, politics and racism, the terrible cost in lives, and the price paid by the survivors.

Ghanaian-American author Yaa Gyasi's novel Homecoming is both compelling and difficult to read. Its scope is vast, encompassing two centuries of the African Diaspora and multiple elements of the transAtlantic slave trade and its consequences in both America and Africa, but its focus is always personal, each chapter forming a link in a double chain of protagonists telling uniquely personal stories. The novel follows the descendants of the two daughters of Maame, a West African Asante woman in the late 18th century. Maame, who is both a slave and a secondary wife of a Fante farmer, gives birth to her first daughter during a disastrous fire. Fearing that she will be blamed for the ill fortune, Maame runs away. Her first daughter, Effia, is raised by a malicious and abusive stepmother, but grows up to become the 'bush wife' of British officer James Collins. Effia's people, the Fante, are middlemen in the slave trade, acquiring captives of other tribes, sometimes by purchase, sometimes through raiding, from inland, and then selling them to the British slavers based in the fort where Effia comes to live as a new bride.

Meanwhile, Maame has made a new life for herself, marrying a 'big man' of the Asante. Her second daughter, Esi, is raised lovingly in the heart of her extended family, but is taken from her hime and people in early adolescence by raiders, traded by the people her sister is raised by, passing to a life of slavery in America through the very fort her sister lives in.

In one narrative line, Gyasi's characters deal with colonialism and its many effects on the culture and political landscape of West Africa, while in the other, they survive slavery, Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era, segregation, and life as marginalised people left out of the American Dream.

The chapters that tell the story of Esi and her descendants are much harder to read than those featuring Effia's descendants, capturing as they do the soul-destroying experiences of slavery and racism in America. Unfortunately, if there is a weakness in the book, it lies in these very American-centred chapters. Somehow, Gyasi's American characters, particularly as the novel approaches modern times, seem to be more archetypes than living characters, representing categories of African-American experience rather than real people who live through circumstances reflective of the lives of Black Americans. Her African characters seem somehow freer to be themselves. But this is a small flaw in an ambitious, and largely successful narrative.

Laura van den Berg's debut novel Find Me is an engaging story about memory, forgetting, hope, and the search for identity, set against the sciencefictional background of a mysterious plague (which apparently only affects the United States). Joy, the narrator, is a woman who was abandoned as an infant, grew up in a series of foster and group homes, and is working retail (where she steals cough syrup which she uses as a drug). When the plague strikes, she is contacted by a dying woman who gives her some clues about her birth mother, including a photograph.

Not long afterward she is contacted by an organisation conducting research on the plague. As Joy was exposed to the plague early on but has not developed symptoms, it is possible that she is immune. She agrees to participate in the research, and is taken, with 149 other possible immunes, to an isolated hospital in rural Kansas.

There is an odd, almost dream-like quality to Joy's experiences before, during and after her time in what she refers to as "The Hospital," a quality accentuated by the non-linear narrative. Events seem fraught with symbolism, and the plague is itself a metaphoric sort of apocalypse that reflects Joy's own issues with memory and traumatic amnesia.

Interesting but ultimately unsatisfying, largely because of the author's choice to use sciencefictional tropes but not fully engage with them.

Kallocain, by Karin Boye, noted Swedish poet and author, is a dystopian narrative that fully deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Orwell's 1984, Zamyatin's We, or Huxley's Brave New World. That it is not part of the core lineage of 20th century political dystopian literature may be because it was not translated into English until 1966, or because it was written by a woman, or both. But it is unfortunate that even now, 50 years after it became accessible to English readers, it is still not better known and acknowledged.

Written eight years before Orwell's 1984, Kallocain place in a future in which the state - to be specific, the totalitarian police state - is all, and the individual nothing. Readers of 1984 will find much that is familiar; sparse living quarters, rationing, constant surveillance, the ever-present atmosphere of suspicion, politically correct expression, conformity of action and an on-going threat of war with other states about which nothing is known but that they are the enemy. There are no minutes of hate in Kallocain, but there are structured festivals that celebrate the state, weekly broadcasts in which people who have misspoken must make their apologies and corrections. The mechanisms of social control in the WorldState (so named even though it is just one of several states) are perhaps a little less dramatic, but no less all-encompassing.

But these are external manifestations of the totalitarian state. Kallocain concerns itself with the inner self under a social and political order that demands universal devotion and loyalty to the state and its ideology. As the novel's protagonist. Chemist Leo Kain, comes to realise, there are always those whose thoughts rebel, lack the singleminded purity required of them. Those who question, those who resent, those who watch and remember, those who imagine another way of being. And because he himself fears the embers of these thoughts in his own mind, he produces a drug, Kallocain, which relaxes inhibition and causes those under its influence to speak their inner truths, a drug which he offers to the state as the answer to identifying those committing these internal forms of sedition.

There is much that is chilling in the descriptions of how everything from family life to human scientific experimentation is handled in this future state, but it all follows quite logically from the basic premise of such systems, that the collective is all and the individual nothing.

I've long been fascinated by dystopian literature, and yet only recently did I learn of the existence of this novel. I'm very glad to have finally been introduced to it.

Jokes and the Unconscious, a collaborative graphic novel written by performance poet Daphne Gottlieb and graphic artist Diane DiMassa (of Hothead Paisan fame) is a brilliant, sometimes savage, sometimes heartbreaking story about coming to terms with death, sexuality, and living in a horribly imperfect world filled with pain, cruelty, callousness, lack of understanding and empathy, ironic co-incidence, and sometimes love and tenderness and just enough transcendence to make it possible to keep on living.

The narrative is framed within one summer in the life of the protagonist, Sasha, during which she works as a billing clerk in the hospital where her oncologist father, now on his deathbed, formerly practiced. However, the time frame shifts through Sasha's life, telling her story, her family's story, and the story of her father's illness and death in a mostly non-linear fashion. Along the way, it also addresses misogyny, date rape, child sexual abuse, domestic violence, patients's rights, ablism, Holocaust survivor issues, and a host of other issues, some of which may be triggering.

It's not an easy book, especially for those who may be dealing with loss of a parent or some of the other situations dealt with, but it's honest and it's worth reading and thinking about.

More short fiction from the vast corners of the Net.

"Sinners, Saints, Dragons, and Haints, in the City Beneath the Still Waters," by N. K. Jemisen (originally published 2010, The Company He Keeps, reprinted 2015 Uncanny Magazine Issue #6)
http://uncannymagazine.com/article/sinners-saints-dragons-and-haints-in-the-city-beneath-the-still-waters/

A good man and a family of miniature dragons face the evil that grows in the heart of the city drowned by hurricane Katrina. Powerful and painful.

"The Oiran's Song," by Isabel Yap, September 2015, Uncanny Magazine
http://uncannymagazine.com/article/the-oirans-song/

Akira, a former pageboy in a pleasure house is taken as a soldier, trained to fight but also used with casual brutality as a servant and sex slave. When they buy an unusual oiran (courtesan), Ayame, to serve them as well, a strange bond forms between the two victims of war. The subject matter is painful, but the story is both powerful and beautiful.

"September 1 in Tblisi," by Irakli Kobiashvili, Summer 2015, One Throne Magazine
http://www.onethrone.com/#!september-1-in-tbilisi/ccw8

A strong and discomfiting story about the often violent policing of gender norms, set in post-revolution Tblisi, Georgia. (Not sff.)

"Security Check," by Han Song (translated by Ken Liu), August 2015, Clarkesworld
http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/han_08_15/

At first, this story seems to be a typical dystopia. Louis, the protagonist, lives in New York, in a future America that has given up everything for security. People travel only by subway, and everyone must pass through a thorough security check to get to the subway system. The goal is to make everything - and everyone - completely, constantly safe. But to read further is to see each previous assumption about the country, the world, and ultimately the universe in which this is happening - and what is responsible - rendered an illusion, an experiment in reality. Thought-provoking, but ultimately not quite satisfying.

"City of Ash" by Paolo Bacigalupi, July 27, 2015, A Medium Corporation
https://medium.com/matter/city-of-ash-94255fa5d1a9

In an America devastated by climate change, where only the wealthiest have access to fresh water or greenery, a young girl dreams of a better future for herself and her father. As emotionally devastating to read as the future it describes.

"The Midnight Hour" by Mary Robinette Kowal, Uncanny Magazine Issue #5
http://uncannymagazine.com/article/midnight-hour/

A royal couple agree to pay an almost unbearable price for the wellbeing of their kingdom, and will do anything to keep their promise. The tragic elements - and they are many - are thankfully relieved by the strength of their love for each other and their people.

"In Libres" by Elizabeth Bear, Uncanny Magazine Issue #4
http://uncannymagazine.com/article/in-libres/

This is a wickedly funny story about a student of sorcery who needs just one more source citation to complete her thesis - but to get it, she must face the perils of the Special Collections Branch of the Library. To make clear the nature of the threat, the epigraph is from Borges, and the one essential thing needed to navigate the Library is a ball of twine.

At one point in Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride, the twin daughters of one of the three main point-of-view characters insist that their bedtime story - The Robber Bridegroom - be changed because they want all the characters to be women. Not just the hero, but also the villain, and the villain's victims.

This of course is Atwood pointing out to her readers that the book they are reading is in fact such a role reversal. Oh, there are male characters, but they are all secondary, all adjuncts to the lives of the women who are the real story - Tony (Antoinette), Roz (Rosalind) and Charis (formerly Karen) and (though we never see anything from her viewpoint) Zenia. They are fathers, uncles, lovers, husbands, sons, employees - and all we see of them is the role they play in the lives of women. It's a longstanding pattern in fiction - one gender has all the agency, the full lives, the rounded characters, is the centre of the story, the other exists only through their relation to one of the important characters. Of course, we're used to seeing the stories be about men, while the women are only there to move the men's story along.

The novel itself is based on the folk tale of the robber bridegroom, a tale akin to the Bluebeard tale, of a man who proposes to young women and then kidnaps and kills them. In The Robber Bride, the eponymous villain is Zenia, a manipulative femme fatale who spins tales about herself and has a penchant for seducing men in relationships with other women, devouring their souls, then leaving or betraying them. Tony, Charis and Roz are three women, college acquaintances, who are drawn together by Zenia who, at different times, has seduced a man loved by each of them. One she either betrays or corrupts (depending on how much the reader chooses to believe of what she says), one commits suicide after she casts him aside and later fakes her own death, and one survives, wounded but perhaps wiser, to return to the woman who loves him.

At the core of the story is the friendship that grows between these women as, one after another, their lives are thrown into turmoil by Zenia's manipulations and they find the only people they can turn to are other women who have been victims. The novel fills in the life stories of these three women, each in her own way wounded by her childhood experiences, making them vulnerable as adults to Zenia's schemes and lies. Yet these women are also survivors, and it is their strengths that enable them to survive.

The theme of duplicity and duality runs through the novel in many ways, not all of them malignant. Just as Zenia constantly rewrites her life stories to take advantage of others' weaknesses, so do Tony, Karen and Roz rewrite themselves, to become more who they wish to be. In childhood, each deals with secrets and mysteries, stories and lies, in their own families. Tony, left handed mirror-writer, suspects she is the surviving half of a mirror twin pair; Charis has a repressed alternate personality created as a result of childhood abuse; Roz is the mother of twins. Each of them has kept secrets and told lies in and about their relationships with the men Zenia took from them. And in various ways, Zenia is a dark mirror to each of them.

At the end of the novel, Tony asks: "Was she in any way like us? thinks Tony. Or, to put it the other way around: Are we in any way like her?" The question may be one for all of us to consider.

Carol Shields is often seen as a minaturist, as a writer who writes about the small and homely details of life, rather than a teller of sweeping sagas about great and important doings, and this choice (as is suggested by a largely male group of great literary critics who control admission to the canon) limits the greatness possible in such work. Such tales are told in women's words, set in women's worlds, and thus cannot compare. Such novels, says the literary doyen, can at best be good (while, of course, bring womanly) and never great.

Reta Winters, Shields' protagonist, is a mother whose beautiful and intelligent daughter Norah has left home, left her boyfriend, left college, left the normal rhythms of life, to spend her days sitting on a busy city street corner with a sign around her neck that reads, simply, "goodness." Among the clues Reta has that may explain why Norah has taken this frightening journey away from life is this comment from one of her professors:

Well, yes, we did have one or two altercations, you know how things go these days. Could Flaubert possibly imagine himself into a woman’s life? The class divided on that issue, it happens every year. Norah saw Madame Bovary as a woman blandly idealized by Flaubert, and then reduced to a puff of romanticism, and capable of nothing else but kneading her own soft heart. Your daughter’s view, and it is a perfectly viable view, was that Madame Bovary was forced to surrender her place as the moral centre of the novel. Others, needless to say, disagreed.

Reta is a writer working on a sequel to her first novel, about Alicia a woman whose essential quality - according to Reta's editor Arthur - is goodness. But Arthur is pressuring Reta to make this new novel more "universal" - by making it not at all about Alicia but instead about Alicia's fiance Roman, because "A reader, the serious reader that I have in mind, would never accept her as the decisive fulcrum of a serious work of art that acts as a critique of our society while, at the same time, unrolling itself like a carpet of inevitability, narrativistically speaking." Because Alicia as a character, and hence any book about Alicia, possesses "goodness but not greatness."

And on multiple levels, that is precisely what Unless, Shield's final novel, is about. The exclusion of women from greatness, and the meaning of what, in the eyes of a patriarchal society, remains to them - goodness. Shields articulates this quite clearly in the novel, in a letter she writes (but does not send) to a literary critic:

It happens that I am the mother of a nineteen-year-old daughter who has been driven from the world by the suggestion that she is doomed to miniaturism. Her strategy is self-sacrifice. I know what that feels like. She can have “goodness but not greatness,” to quote the well-known Dr. Danielle Westerman. It is, as you say, a “tricky proposition.” And she has been tricked.

As it turns out, Norah has, instinctively, automatically, in the manner of a hero, tried to do something that is not only good, but great. But it has also been traumatic, physically and psychologically. And it has ben an event involving the silencing, the erasure, of yet another woman - and, for a time, of Norah herself.

In this, which has been described as Shields' most explicitly feminist novel, all the small daily conversations and observations of Reta's life as wife, mother, friend, author and translator, add up to one overwheming conclusion:

... the world is split in two, between those who are handed power at birth, at gestation, encoded with a seemingly random chromosome determinate that says yes for ever and ever, and those like Norah, like Danielle Westerman, like my mother, like my mother-in-law, like me, like all of us who fall into the uncoded female otherness in which the power to assert ourselves and claim our lives has been displaced by a compulsion to shut down our bodies and seal our mouths and be as nothing against the fireworks and streaking stars and blinding light of the Big Bang.

Unless is many things: it is a story about real people living the kind of lives any of us could be living, and the kind of loss and personal tragedy that any of us might face; it is an iteration of the value that is placed on women's lives, thoughts, feelings, place in the world, steeped in a feminist consciousness; it is an exploration of the nature of goodness. It is also an examination of the creative life. Shields's narrator is herself a writer - and during the course of the novel is working on a comic romance novel about a woman who writes. Shields draws attention to this, in Reta's thoughts about the novel she is writing:

I too am aware of being in incestuous waters, a woman writer who is writing about a woman writer who is writing. I know perfectly well that I ought to be writing about dentists and bus drivers and manicurists and those folks who design the drainage beds for eight-lane highways. But no, I am focusing on the stirrings of the writerly impulse, or the “long littleness,” to use Frances Cornford’s phrase, of a life spent affixing small words to large, empty pages. We may pretend otherwise, but to many writers this is the richest territory we can imagine. There are novelists who go to the trouble of cloaking their heroes in loose crossover garments, turning them into painters or architects, but no one’s fooled. This matters, the remaking of an untenable world through the nib of a pen; it matters so much I can’t stop doing it.

Unless is in many ways a litany of instances of women's words and women's silences, and at the end, a celebration of women taking charge of their own voices despite a world that devalues them.

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My life in books

Books in my life

Entries tagged with g: contemporary fiction

Nicola Griffith: So Lucky

Anthony Johnston: The Coldest City

Kim Fu: For Today I Am a Boy

Anthology: Nevertheless She Persisted

Mark Oshiro: Anger Is a Gift

Ahmed Khan: Best of Everything

Dionne Brand: Love Enough

Emil Ferris: My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Volume 1

Sam J. Miller: The Art of Starving

Lesley Nneka Arimah: What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky

Lawrence Hill: The Illegal

Short Fiction: December 20, 2017

Joy Kogawa: Obasan

Yaa Gyasi: Homegoing

Laura van den Berg: Find Me

Karin Boye: Kallocain

Daphne Gottlieb and Diane DiMassa: Jokes and the Unconscious

Short Fiction #4

Margaret Atwood: The Robber Bride

Carol Shields: Unless