My life in books

Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver is a fascinating meld of a number of myths and fairy tales, all clustered around the themes of sacrifice and salvation, bargains and negotiations, and the balance between winter, the bringer of cold and death, and spring, the time of rebirth and growth. These themes are explored through the lives of three very different women - Irina, the unloved daughter of a duke, Miryem, the industrious daughter of a hapless moneylender, and Wanda, a peasant girl with a brutal father. All three women are outsiders, Irina and Wanda because of the dynamics of their dysfunctional families, Miryem because she takes over her father’s business - and because she is a Jew.

The novel is set in a secondary world that draws deeply on Russian history, culture and folklore, and Novik makes this into a rich setting for her characters.

I admit to a bit of difficulty getting into the novel, because in general, Russian myth and culture does not stir me the way some other source cultures do, but once I was committed to the story of these three women, I was hooked. Another marvelous tale from Novik.

Madeline Miler’s second novel, Circe, is the story of a legend, an iconic image of the eternal and dangerous woman, seductress, sorceress, as she might have been behind the stories men have told of her. This is Circe as she might have seen herself.

As in her first novel, The Song of Achilles, Miller takes the myths and legends of Greece as truth within the world she writes about. And so Circe introduces herself as the child of a naiad, Perse, and the Titan Helios - divine, one of a thousand lesser nature goddesses. Her childhood was not happy. She, like her siblings, and sometimes her mother, lived in the great underground palace of the sun god Helios, where he returns each night after riding across the sky. She was not, like her older full siblings, or her many half-siblings, other children of the sun, a bright and beautiful goddess, nor was she graceful and fluid like her many, many cousins, the daughters of other naiads. She was sharp faced, and asked strange questions, and was taunted by the others, despite the love her father showed her.

But as time after time wears on, Circe and her brothers and sister discover their true nature. They do not have the powers of the gods, but they are all pharmakia, witches - they have the ability to draw power from plants and use it, as the gods use the power that flows through their own bodies, to work miracles. The Olympians are concerned; they forbid Helios and Perse from having any more children.

The four witch children are contained. Pasiphaë is married off to one of Zeus’ demi-divine children, King Minos, and they torment each other bitterly, until eventually Pasiphaë gives birth to the Minotaur and the eventual fate of Minos and his kingdom at the hands of Theseus is sealed. Perses, the oldest brother, takes his exotic tastes and cruelties and settles in far-off Asia, far away from the area the Olympian gods frequent. The youngest, Aeëtes, has his own kingdom, which he rarely keaves - until his rebellious daughter Medea runs away with the hero Jason, her father’s golden fkeece, and the blood of her brother on her hands.

Because she is rebellious, and doesn’t play the game properly, because she has used her gifts, the strongest of which is transformation, to change the nymph Scylla into a monster, Circe is exiled, confined to the small island of Aiaia. Though she may not leave, except on rare occasions granted by Zeus, others may come to her. And here she slowly learns the principles of herbcraft, learning the extent of her magic.

At first the god Hermes visits, mostly from curiosity. He keeps her informed about the things that have happened in the world of gods and men, and he becomes her lover.

Later various demigods and minor immortals send their wayward daughters and other women to her island as a punishment, so that she is no longer alone, but surrounded by angry and frustrated young immortals. And sometimes, humans come to the island. The first, seeing in her only a woman among other women, alone without the protection of a man, rape her, as so many nymphs in Greek legend are raped by men and gods. But in her agony, she transforms them into swine, and thus begins the long train of sailors who cast up on her shores. Some are good men, lost on the sea - these leave unharmed, after comfort, food and rest. But most remain as the animals they are, living and dying on Circe’s island.

And then comes Odysseus, as foretold. His men transgress, but he himself, warned and protected by Hermes, avoids the traps, and wins both the freedom of his men, and the friendship of Circe. He stays for several years, becoming her lover - but he never forgets his wife and family, his beloved Penelope waiting for him.

The story of Circe as it unfolds here is woven together from many myths and sources, but it makes a satisfying whole, a take about the limitations of godhood and the triumphs of becoming human.

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.

Deep Roots is the second volume in Ruthanna Emrys’ fascinating and intensely readable series inspired by the Cthulhu Mythos. These books are told from the perspective of the last on-land members of the sea people who once lived in Innsmouth, before the US government kidnapped and interned them in a concentration camp in the desert where all but two - brother and sister Aphra and Caleb - died from lack of the ocean and the conditions required to make the change to their near immortal sea-dwelling form. Emrys begins from the assumption that everything we think we know about these people is wrong, based on twisted propaganda spread by those who hated and feared them.

In the first novel, Winter Tide, Aphra, who is a student of the ancient magics known to her people (and others), formed a confluence, or chosen family, comprised of an unlikely group of people with the ability for pursuing magic and a commitment to trying to rebuild the land community of the sea people: her brother Caleb; his lover DeeDee, a black woman recruited by the FBI as an informant, seductress and spy; Charlie, a gay man who is Aphra’s friend and student in the magical arts; Neko, the daughter of the Japanese couple who adopted and cared for Aphra and Caleb when when the internment camp they and the few other dying sea people were held in was repurposed to imprison Japanese Americans during WWII; Catherine Turnbull, a mathematician and scholar of magic who had been the host of one of the time-travelling, body-borrowing, and rather arrogant Yith; Audrey, a woman of mixed heritage, part ‘ordinary’ human (the people of the air), part descendent of a third human subgroup, subterranean dwellers called the people of the earth; and, on the periphery of this family, Ron Spector, Charlie’s lover, and an FBI agent working in a branch of the bureau established to investigate magical threats to the USA.

In Deep Roots, Aphra and her confluence have been following leads and rumours of other sea people who may have survived the genocidal actions of the government, ‘mistblooded’ descendants of he few who left the Innsmouth community and married into families of the people of the air. Having learned of a woman, Frances Laverne, and her son Freddie, who live in New York City, they travel to the big city, only to discover that Freddie - who could be Aphra’s only chance to bear a new generation of sea folk - has become involved with a community of Mi-Go and other humans.

Lovecraft’s Mi-Go are, alternatively, the origin of the Abominable snowman myth, or other-dimensional aliens, winged and clawed, technologically advanced, who take human minds and place them in cannisters which they can then transport across space. Emrys has taken the latter description as her starting point. Her Mi-Go - who are more properly referred to as the Outer Ones - see themselves as benefactors, travellers who set up communities on many worlds, recruit followers - or travel-mates, as they refer to them - from the indigenous populations, and offer them the same experiences they themselves spend their lives pursuing, the exploration of and communication with minds across the vastness of space. While the Outer Ones can travel in their own bodies, other races must be separated mind from body in order to travel, their minds placed in devices that the Outer Ones can carry with them as they travel. The process is reversible, but many who join the Outer Ones find themselves less and less inclined to return to physical form.

The Outer Ones have a long and not particularly positive relationship with Aphra’s people, not least because the mind-body separation process is more dangerous to the people of the sea and those who travel with the Outer Ones are likely to be unable to return to their bodies and remain healthy - thus, those lost to the Outer Ones are lost forever. Also, The Outer Ones and the Yith, with whom the people of the sea have a strong and positive relationship, are enemies at a deep philosophical level - the Yith are firm believers in non-interference, the Outer Ones often try to ‘save’ species they fear are on the verge of extinguishing themselves, often by interfering with the political and cultural life of the planet.

Aphra is drawn into contact with the Outer Ones because she hopes to extract Freddie Laverne from their fellowship, seeing him as a possible father for the children she must have fir her race to continue growing. At the same time, the FBI is drawn into the unstable mix because of all the disappearances reported by families of those who have joined the Outer Ones.

Aphra learns that the majority faction among Outer Ones are considering taking action to intervene in human affairs because of the tensions of the Cold War and their fear that the human race will destroy itself. Part of this manipulation involves discrediting Aphra, her confluence, and the sea people with the FBI branch involved with magic and non-human activities - a nit too difficult task, considering the extreme paranoia of the FBI and the existing distrust between the two. Yet the only chance for humanity to maintain control of its own destiny is for Aphra to convince the FBI agents that they must help her in putting the faction that favours non-intervention in charge of the Outer One’ colonies on Earth.

Emrys does a wonderful job of subverting the racist tropes of Lovecraft’s work, while keeping the real sense of potential menace - locating it in the institutions of a racist society instead. The novel ends in an uneasy truce between the surviving sea people and the government, with Innsmouth beginning to live again, though after some degree of compromise with the very people who once destroyed it. So eager for the next installment.

The finalists for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer are Rivers Solomon, Rebecca Roanhorse, and Vina Jie-Min Prasad - whose work I’ve read, and who were on my nominations list - and Katherine Arden, Sarah Kuhn, and Jeannette Ng, whose work I have not read. So, I’ve gone looking for work by the latter three.

Katherine Arden, The Bear and the Nightengale

I have a confession to make. I have to work a bit to engage with novels that are strongly flavoured with a Russian or Eastern European influence. I’m not sure why, but it’s a thing I have. So Arden’s debut fantasy, set in feudal Russia, took a little time to grow on me. It is a story about bloodlines and magic. The central character, Vasilisa Petrovna, called Vasya, is the youngest child of wealthy boyar Pyotr Vladimirovitch and his now-dead wife Marina, the daughter of a mysterious and beautiful woman who appeared out of the forest, enchanted Moscow, and claimed the heart of Ivan I, .grand Prince of Muscovy. Like her grandmother, Vasilisa has a kind of magic - she sees spirits and other strange creatures of the field and forest.

It was the sense of family and a simple, daily life with its trials and joys that Arden conveys in the early part of the book that won me over, that and the fierce and joyful wildness that is Vasya. Pyotr Vlaidimirovitch loved his wife, loves his children, and hopes, within the bounds of the society he lives in, to see them happy. His children have their flaws - one is perhaps a bit too proud, another a touch too pious, but they care for one another. Sadly, this happy family starts to unravel when Pyotr is pressured into agreeing to two dynastic marriages - his own, to Anna, the daughter of his dead wife’s half-brother, the new Grand Prince of Muscovy, and his daughter Olga’s, to the Grand Prince’s nephew. Anna is deeply unhappy at the bargain, and longs only for the comfort of a convent life, for she, like Vasilisa, sees spirits, but to her, they are devils to be feared.

Meanwhile, the threads of destiny are beginning to weave a web around Vasya. She becomes lost in the forest and encounters a strange man who seems vaguely threatening. And while Pyotr is in Moscow, he has an unpleasant experience with a man who gives him a gift for Vasya, forcing him to swear that he will tell no living soul about this exchange, on penalty of losing his oldest son.

Fairy tales are of course filled with these things, by definition - is it, after all, in fairy tales that they began. That’s why retelling such tales is tricky - to be successful, the writer must keep enough of the tale for it to be recognisable, but make it new enough not to be overladen with too-familiar tropes. The weakness in this book is that it does perhaps rely too much on well-used staples of fairy tale lore.

But what kept me reading was Vasya herself, vibrant, bold, adventurous, different. Her love of wild things, her compassion, her resilience, her stubbornness, and her utterly solid moral compass. This was the first book in a trilogy, and I do think I shall read on, just for the joy of Vasya.


Sarah Kuhn, Heroine Complex

Ok, there is something to be said about a novel that begins with a livestreamed fight between demons in the form of pastries and a narcissistic superhero. So... I’ll start by saying this is a fun book, an interesting blend of satire, chick lit and superhero fiction.The superhero in question is Aveda Jupiter, otherwise known as Annie Chang, who has serious kickass fight moves (her own personal icon is Michelle Yeoh) and a slight tekekinetic ability gained during the first, massive incursion of demons in San Francisco, some years earlier. Fir some unknown reason, the appearance of demons triggered superpowers, mist of them relatively minor and not particularly useful, in a small percentage of the population! Although subsequent demon appearances have not repeated the effect. The narrator, Evie Tanaka, is Aveda’s childhood friend and personal assistant, the person who keeps the whole superhero business functioning, a combination of Batman’s Alfred and Superman’s Jimmy Olsen. Until Annie suffers an injury fighting demons and insists that Evie take her place so that no one discovers that superheroes are vulnerable. The problem is that Evie also has a superpower, one of very few powerful and dangerous ones, and it’s triggered by strong feelings. She works very hard to control her emotions so that she doesn’t hurt anyone, having once allowed anger at a cheating boyfriend to get out of hand, resulting in the destruction of an entire building. But when she appears as Aveda (thanks to a minor glamour cast by a friend who developed magical abilities as a result of the demon appearance), things get out of hand and she manifests her power, which is of course attributed to Aveda.

Being at the centre of the stage instead of behind the scenes, and having to learn new ways of dealing with her power, results in many changes for Evie, her sense of herself and her goals, and her relationships with Annie and the other members of the Aveda Jupiter Inc demon-fighting team.

I like the way that Kuhn uses the superhero genre to create a delicious satire on celebrity divaism. Between the portrayal of Aveda herself, the inclusion of gossip columns from a local celebrity news reporter, and Evie’s observations on the various benefits and social engagements that she has to attend while pretending to be Aveda, we get some very fine puncturing of pretentiousness that I think rings true for any form of social celebrity. Kuhn also takes on internet fannishness, showing how anyone, but particularly women, in the media spotlight can be showered with adulation one moment snd with disgust the next as some fake news story, or almost imperceptible physical imperfection (such as a zit) causes fans to suddenly turn on a firmer hero. The shallowness of public assessments of celebrities in both traditional and social media is a major point in Kuhn’s satire. Add to this some serious examination of the strengths and stresses of relationships between women (there are only two significant male characters, both playing supporting/sidekick roles), and the absurd nature of many of the demonic interactions, and you have an entertaining story with rewarding depths.


Jeannette Ng, Under the Pendulum Sun

Under the Pendulum Sun, Jeanette Ng’s debut novel, is a fascinating and multilayered exploration of faith and the nature of reality. Written in the style of a Gothic romance (which has little to do with romantic goings-on as we use the term today), it is much concerned with the nature of the soul, the limits of faith, the relation of sin and redemption, and the ransom theology of the sacrifice of Christ.

Set in an alternate Victorian era, it follows the journey of Cathering Helstone to the land of Arcadia - the otherworldly home of the fae, a place of magic, mystery, shadows and dangers. Her brother Laon, a Christian missionary to Arcadia, has seemed both troubled and remote in his letters, and Catherine has gained permission from the missionary society to join him - and to carry out a quest for them, to unravel what went wrong with Laon’s predecessor, the Reverend Roche. She is conveyed to Laon’s residence, a true gothic mansion called .Gethsemane, by Miss Davenport, a changeling who grew up in human lands and describes herself as Laon’s companion. Laon himself is away on business, and Miss Davenport warns Catherine that she must remain within the walls surrounding Gethsemane until Laon returns, for her own safety. Waiting for Laon’s return, she debates points of thelogy with the only fae to have been converted, the gardener Mr. Benjamin, and pores through Reverend Riche’s papers and journals.

At first the novel moves slowly, but with an exquisite blend of suspense and strangeness. These are the fickle, treacherous, sometimes benevolent, sometimes dangerous fae of legend, and their land, like them, is full of both strange beauty and ominous shadow. Ng excels at worldbuilding, and her examination of theology and philosophy, wrapt around with a rich set of subtle literary references from Bronte to Milton, and a host of Biblical allusions, is rather delicious - if you enjoy such things, which I do.

Both pace and tone however, change once Laon returns, with Queen Mab and her court following on his arrival. Catherine is disturbed by the changes she sees in Laon, and unnerved by Mab and the inhuman creatures of her court. The visit of Mab forces to the surface the darkest secrets in both Catherine and Laon. Mab and the other high fae delight in cruelty, and in wielding both truth and deceptions as weapons of chais and destruction. The effects of her toying with Catherine and Laon leads to some difficult revelations, and some may find their actions cross lines that are uncomfortable to contemplate. But while Catherine and Laon can be broken, as were the missionaries who came before them, they find a way through the pain to become more than they were. Even when the truth is a weapon, facing it can set one free.

Ng develops an entire theological cosmogony to make room in the Christian concept of the universe for the fae, one that draws on biblical and other legends, and it’s one that I find intriguing. It’s Catherine who searches it out - echoes of the tree of knowledge and other aspects of the story of Eden reverberate throughout the novel even as Ng rewrites the story as we know it. An ambitious and, in my opinion, successful, debut.

The Hugo finalists are out, and while quite a few of the short fiction pieces were ones I’d nominated, there are a few I hadn’t read. So, I’ve gotten my hands on those (much thanks to Sarah Pinsker for making a pdf of her novelette available on her website) and corrected those gaps in my reading.

Short Story

“The Martian Obelisk,” Linda Nagata; tor.com, July 19, 2017.
https://www.tor.com/2017/07/19/the-martian-obelisk/

The Earth is dying. Slowly, from ecological breakdown and climate change and loss of infrastructure and antibiotic resistant diseases and natural disasters and sporadic violence and all the things we’ve been fearing in recent years. A series of slow apocalypses. Susannah is an architect, and with the backing of one of the world’s remaining millionaires, she has spent the last 17 years building a soaring monument to the memory of humanity - on Mars, remotely accessing the technology of a Mars colony that was prepped but never settled. And then the unthinkable happens. A message from a survivor of the last functioning Mars colony, previously thought lost, is received. A woman and her children, the only ones left alive on Mars, have battled halfway across Mars and are asking for the resources of the monument to build a place where they can survive just a little longer. Susannah must decide, what will be the final shape of the Martian monument - the obelisk she’s spent years building, or a few more years of life for a doomed family. Powerful story, both in its depiction of the end of the world - not with a bang, but a long slow series of whimpers - and in its examination of the irrational, irrepressible, persistence of hope.


Novelettes

“Wind Will Rove,” Sarah Pinsker
(Originally published in Asimov’s September/October 2017, available for download as pdf on Pinsker’s website: http://sarahpinsker.com/wind_will_rove)

In this novelette, Pinsker explores the tension between preservation of the past and creation of the future through the situation of a generation ship that, through an act of sabotage, has lost its cultural and historical databases. This results in a concerted decision by the passengers to restore and preserve as much of the lost material as possible, not just through the creation of new databases, but through continued repetition and accurate reproduction of the restored material - music, plays, art, and Earth’s history. The narrator, Rosie Clay, is a history teacher and traditional fiddle player, challenged by one of her students who rejects the emphasis on the history and creations of the past, of an Earth that means nothing to them. Forced to look beyond the truism that those who forget history are destined to repeat it - questionable in a world that is entirely different from the Earth where that history took place - Rosie finds herself examining her own assumptions. Quiet but very thought-provoking.


“Children of Thorns, Children of Water,” Aliette de Bodard; Uncanny Magazine, July/August 2017
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/children-thorns-children-water/

This novelette is set in the world of de Bodard’s Dominion of the Fallen series, and requires some familiarity with that world to be fully understood. It’s a world where Fallen angels wield magic and rule Houses, life for the houseless is bleak and often violent. The novels are set in an alternate late 19th century Paris and deal largely with relationships, politics and power - within houses, between houses, and in the larger postcolonial society. In this story, Thuan, a dragon in human form and member of the Dragon kingdom based in the waters of the Seine - the dragons, being drawn from Annamese (Vietnamese) tradition, are water beings) seeks to enter one of the Houses, House Hawthorn, as a spy, to gain information on what the tensions between houses might mean for the dragon kingdom. The day of testing, when new house dependents are chosen, is interrupted by a magical assault by creatures made of thorns, manifestations of House Hawthorne itself. Thuan proves useful to the Fallen in charge of the the tests in dealing with the crisis, and thus wins his place in the House. It’s a well-written piece, but I’m not all that fond of this secondary world. I read and enjoyed the first novel in the series and found it interesting - but not compelling enough to have pushed me to read the second volume. Good story, not quite my cup of tea.


Novellas

River of Teeth, Sarah Gailey

In her foreword, Gailey says: “In the early twentieth century, the Congress of our great nation debated a glorious plan to resolve a meat shortage in America. The idea was this: import hippos and raise them in Louisiana’s bayous. The hippos would eat the ruinously invasive water hyacinth; the American people would eat the hippos; everyone would go home happy. Well, except the hippos. They’d go home eaten.” It was this unfulfilled notion that spurred Gailey to imagine the alternate history of this novella, though she places the introduction of hippos into the American ecology and economy some decades earlier. In Gailey’s version of the American South, marshes have been encouraged to allow for the development of hippo farming. Hippos serve instead of horses for cartage and personal transport, and there are canals and pools for the animals to use as rest stops, and instead of stables. Part of the Mississippi has been dammed up, forming a marshy lake area called the Harriet where feral hippos range, interfering with water trade along the river. This lake region is controlled by a shady - and very wealthy - man named Travers, who operated gambling riverboats on the lake, and is known to feed people he dislikes to the feral hippos. The story begins when adventurer Winslow Remington Houndstooth is hired by a government agency to clean out the feral hippos. The general plan is to get them through the barrier at the downstream end of the Harriet by any means necessary, and encourage them to migrate south into the gulf, freeing the river for trade, and not quite incidentally interfering with Travers’ business. In addition to the large payment offered to him and any members if the tram he pits together, Houndstooth has a strong personal motivation for injuring Travers, who burned out his hippo farm sone years ago, leaving him penniless.

The first part of the novella is devoted to assembling the team, which could not be comprised of a more diverse group of characters: Regina “Archie” Archambault, a cross-dressing conwoman; Hero Shackleby, a nonbinary demolitions expert; Cal Hotchkiss, fast gun, card shark, and former employee if Houndstooth who may or may not have betrayed him to Travers; Adelia Reyes, a pregnant lesbian assassin; and Houndstooth himself, a mixed race Immigrant from England whose dream and passion is to rebuild his hippo farm. Gailey also spends time letting us get to know, not only the characters, but their hippos, their personalities and distinguishing traits. It’s clear in this society that people form bonds with their hippos not unlike those with other working or companion animals like dogs, cats or horses. As for the plot - everything goes wrong, of course, and there are double-crosses and hidden motivations and a tangle of cross purposes, and this is not a light-hearted caper, not everyone survives. But it is very entertaining, and I hear there’s a sequel.


Down Among the Sticks and Bones, Seanan McGuire

McGuire uses a delightfully arch and ironic tone in beginning this story - the backstory of Jaqueline and Jillian, Jack and Jill, two of the distinctly different children from the first of the Wayward Children series, Every Heart a Doorway - by introducing Chester and Serena Wolcott, two self-absorbed people who chose to have children to complete the image of their perfect nuclear family. Things go wrong, of course, from the beginning. As soon as they knew they were having twins, they assumed they would have a boy and a girl, thus efficiently creating the ideal family in one swoop. They never considered the possibility of two girls.

Parenthood does not suit the Wolcotts, being too disorderly and entirely too loud and messy. Chester’s mother is almost immediately recruited to actually raise the girls. At least until it becomes inconvenient to have her around, so at age five the twins lose the only person in their lives who saw them as people to be encouraged to grow, rather than accessories to be programmed for the benefit of their parents.

Those who have read Every Heart a Doorway already know a little of what happens to Jack and Jill. One day, they find a doorway where no doorway should have been and it takes them to a strange land where nightmares are real, but at least here they have some choice over which nightmare they will live in, where their parents gave them no choices at all. It is a strange place, a cruel place, and each child is changed in ways that do not bear much thinking about.

This is part of why, while I appreciate McGuire’s skill and invention in writing these stories, I don’t like them. I am not good with reading about abused children who don’t get to really escape their abuse - because we know that while Jack and Jill will someday find their way home, they will be damaged, perhaps permanently, perhaps beyond any hope of being ... normal, happy, able to function in a world of ordinary people. Of course, you can say that of many traumatised children, because the scars of some hurts never heal. So there is a fundamental truth underneath the fantasy here. As it happens, it’s a truth I live with, and reading about it requires accommodations that McGuire doesn’t offer, like the possibility of grace and hope.

Hidden Youth: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History, edited by Mikki Kendall and Chesya Burke, is a companion volume to the Rose Fox edited Long Hidden, also published by Crossed Genres, the sadly defunct publishing house that, in its short life, nurtured some remarkable authors and released some important volumes of speculative fiction.

The focus of this anthology is marginalised youth - narratives of children and adolescents from many settings and time periods who share the experience of being outside, oppressed, ignored, othered, and sometimes worse. They represent those who exist in the margins of history and society.

Evocative as most of these stories are, not all reach the same heights of overall craft. Some deal in familiar times and places, others unveil pieces of history not often explored in fiction, or for that matter, in factual narratives. And as always in any collection, some touched me deeply, and others, even if technically admirable, were less engaging. Among my personal favourites are:

“A Name to Ashes,” by Jayme Goh, which tells a story I was not aware of, that of Asian workers pressed into slavery in Cuba under Spanish colonial rule.

“Trenches,” by Sioban Krzywicki, about a young trans person who magically comes into her own reality after leaving home to fight in the trenches during WWI.

“The Girl, The Devil and the Coal Mine,” by Warren Bull, in which a 12-year-old black coal miner’s daughter takes on the Devil in a battle of wits to save her brother.

“How I Saved Athens from the Stone Monsters,” by Erik Jensen, is a bawdy yet heroic tale of two child prostitutes in ancient Greece, a cityful of animated phallic statues, and Isis’ interest in a new penis for Osiris. Not recommended for folks with castration anxieties.

“North,” by Imani Josey is the story of a young black woman who moves north during the Great Migration, where she is given a choice between comfort, and love.

These and other stories collected here shine a light on times, places and people that history tends not to care about, letting us see into hidden lives. There is fantasy, and magic, and strange creatures, but there is also truth and history.


*There are 22 short stories in this anthology, 11 written by women, 10 written by men, and one written by a person who chose not to indicate their gender.

Some characters take on a life of their own, and demand that other authors tell stories about them, or about the other characters that inhabit their universes, long after their original creators have stopped writing about them. Sherlock Holmes and his faithful companion Watson are among those characters, as are a number of other literary creations from the same time period.

Sometimes writers are tempted to bring together such characters from different literary universes. Imagine Mina Harker, Captain Nemo, Allan Quartermain, Dr. Jekyll and Hawley Griffin as a Victorian League of superheroes - as Alan Moore did.

In her debut novel The Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter! Theodora Goss has taken this one step further, in bringing together two groups of characters derived from 19th century literature - the mad scientists whose researches pushed multiple boundaries of human knowledge and experience, and the female monsters they created.

The story begins with Mary Jekyll, the daughter of long-deceased Doctor Jekyll. Left without any income after the death of her mother, Mary is looking for any legitimate way to make enough money to support herself and her loyal housekeeper and cook. After receiving a strange notification concerting her mother’s continuing support of “Hyde” she assumes this is a clue to the whereabouts of the long missing Mr. Hyde, believed to have been involved in an unsolved murder. Remembering that the famous detective Sherlock Holmes was also involved with the case, she goes to him to see if there is still a reward for the capture of Hyde. With Watson assisting her, she discovers not the man Hyde, but his daughter Diana, who claims to be her sister. No longer welcome at the Magdalen Society where she has been cared for, Diana becomes, in essence, Mary’s ward, as the two seek to unravel the mystery of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Their investigation dovetails with Holmes’ newest case, a consultation with the police over several deaths of prostitutes in the Whitechapel area, women whose bodies were found with body parts missing. (These seem to be purely fictional, although inspired by other cases of Victorian serial murders - the names of the victims do not correspond with the 11 names in the historical Whitechapel file, several of which are attributed to Jack the Ripper.) A seal used on some surviving correspondence received by Dr. Jekyll is identical with the design found on a watch fob clutched in the hand of one of the murder victims. With this, the game is afoot, and will eventually involve some of the most famous ‘mad scientists’ and other creatures of Victorian fiction - Moreau, Rappaccini, Renfield, Van Helsing - and the legacy of the first of the mad scientists, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Goss has chosen to tell the story in an interesting manner. Ostensibly being written by a woman identified as Catherine, the text incorporates comments by Mary, Diana, Mary’s housekeeper Mrs. Poole, the scullery maid Alice, and two other women not initially identified, Beatrice and Justine. From the nature of their comments, the reader is made aware that these women are friends and colleagues who have travelled and worked together on at least one venture, and that the narrative - mostly written by Catherine - is also a means of introducing each woman and allowing her to tell her story, and recast the reader’s knowledge of her through the lens of her father’s work.

Being a Holmes enthusiast, and fairly familiar with the Victorian literature of the fantastic that is referenced in this narrative, made the reading of it a particularly enjoyable experience. I found myself double checking the names of just about every character mentioned, whether they seemed to be involved in the mystery of the murdered women or not. (I was rather vexed not to find any obvious link between Mrs. Poole and Bertha Mason Rochester’s nurse Grace Poole.)

The frequent asides of the main characters make it clear that Goss plans more adventures for the women of her book, and I am most eager to find out what comes next.

Mary Robinette Kowal's Ghost Talkers is a book that crosses genres with impudence and verve. It's a World War I historical romance, with a spunky red-headed heroine and a dashing military officer. It's a wartime spy thriller, with traitors and murders and secret codes. And it's a historical fantasy in which the British make use of a distinctly paranormal source of intelligence - the ghosts of soldiers killed in combat.

In Kowal's slightly alternate world, mediums are real, and the war effort has recruited them to interview the souls of those lost in battle for information about enemy weapon placements, troop movements, anything the revenant remembers about the circumstances of his death. And in turn, the mediums record their final messages for those they leave behind.

Ginger Stuyvesant is one of the mediums of the "London branch" of the Spirit Corps - so named to hide its true location in Le Havre - and her fiancé, Ben Harford, is an officer in British Intelligence. She, like all the other mediums, spends her days talking to the dead, reliving their last moments with them, and then dismissing them to the next plane. And then everything changes, when one of the ghosts reporting in is an officer she knows, stationed in Le Havre, who tells her that he thinks he was murdered - and the last thing he remembers is overhearing is a discussion between two spies that could mean the Germans are planning on targeting the Spirit Corps.

What follows is a fast-paced story of spy vs. spy as Ginger hunts clues to the identity of the spies across war-torn France. There are plenty of red herrings and false leads, dead ends and desperate plots. And of course, a love story.

What gives the narrative extra depth is Kowal's focus on the women (the mediums employed by the war department are mostly women, but the war also relied on the services of nurses, female couriers and other support personnel) and people of colour who were part of the war but are so rarely seen in fictional accounts of The Great War.

Sexism abounds. When Ginger attends a staff meeting as the acting head of the Spirit Corps, she's asked to make coffee. Her reports on the murder and subsequent related events are downplayed because she is a woman. The work that the mediums do - soul-wrenching and potentially deadly should the medium fail to disengage from the departing ghost - is dismissed as "sitting around," in a way that recollects the minimalising of the value of so much women's work. Not even Ginger's beloved Ben, who has learned to acknowledge her value and strength, is completely free of overprotectiveness disguised as gallantry.

Racism abounds as well. The strongest and most experienced medium is Helen, a woman of colour - but not only is she unable to take her natural position as leader of of Spirit Corps, she and other black mediums can't even fraternise with their white colleagues. At the same time, skilled and experienced soldiers from the Indian colonies are sidelined as drivers, and are excluded from the conditioning given to all white soldiers that ensures that they will report after death - then be mercifully dismissed, rather than left to wander the fields they died in.

Kowal's narrative moves swiftly, capturing both the horrors of war (she makes effective use of Rupert Brooke's war poems) and the "whistling in the dark" kind of humour so often found side by side with death and the constant pressure of being in a war zone. In a book which deals so powerfully with darkness, separation, sacrifice and death, she reminds us that there is also love and courage, and that after the dead have passed, life goes on.

Sustenance, the latest of the Saint Germain novels by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, is in many ways a typical Saint Germain novel - we have the Count, now calling himself Ragoczy Ferenz, Grof Szent-Germain, his manservant and companion, the immortal ghoul known as Roger, an intelligent woman in some degree of distress who forms an attachment with Saint Germain, and a historical place and period of considerable conflict and sociopolitical upheaval which can present a believable threat to the wealthy and powerful but always precariously placed immortal exile.

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

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

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

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

A sobering novel for Yarbro's readers, yet bearing within it the inevitable promise of a new life rising from ashes.