bibliogramma | Entries tagged with g: speculative fiction

Jill Lepore’s The Secret Life of Wonder Woman isn’t about Wonder Woman, so much as it is about the way that she became not just the perfect realisation of the lives and passions of the incredible group of people who were involved in the lives of her creators, but the crystalisation of the early suffragist, feminist, and to some degree socialist views of a generation of women and men who fought for women’s rights. Where Wonder Woman is Amazonian royalty, her creators were influenced by some of the fiercest voices for women,’s equality, suffrage, reproductive rights, and sexual freedom that existed during the early years of the 1900s. Where Wonder Woman fought for truth, one of her creators spent much of his professional life studying how to determine truth from deception in criminal cases, and determine the reliability of testimony in court.

Four people may be said to have taken a hand in creating the crucible in which Wonder Woman, the symbol of female power - who wears bracelets of iron to remind her and all Amazons that giving oneself into the power of a man means giving oneself into slavery - was shaped.

These four people, three women and one man, lived their own secret lives, and it was from their common experiences, beliefs, and philosophies that the idea of Wonder Woman took form. The feminist hero was a collaborative effort between William Moulton Marston and his three partners, Elizabeth Holloway, Olive Byrne, and Marjorie Huntley, all feminists, suffragists and free love radicals like himself - a polyamorous family collective.

Marsdon was a professor of philosophy and psychology, the two fields not being seen as particularly different at the time, who focused on the psychology and physiology of emotion, observation, and deception in his research. He was, with much input from his long-time partner and colleague, the inventor of the lie detector machine.

Something else he shared with his partner Elizabeth Holloway was a lifelong commitment to feminism, whom he met when they were both in grade school. Neither seems to have ever thought seriously about a future without the other, though both were often to be found in circles that approved of female emancipation and free love. Holloway, like Marsden, spent much of her early adult life in study, beginning her university education at Mount Holyoke, a hotbed of feminism and suffragette agitation, and earning both an MA from Radcyffe and a law degree.

Olive Byrne, who lived with the family in the role of nanny to the Marsdon children - hers and Holloway’s - was the one with the strongest ties to radical feminism. Her mother, Ethyl Byrne, sister of Margaret Sanger, was a suffragist, birth control advocate and socialist, who nearly died in prison in a well publicised hunger strike. Even when Sanger compromised with eugenicists and conservatives to get her arguments for birth control mainstreamed, Byrne remained a free love radical socialist, and Olive had much of her uncompromising spirit. Olive met Marsdon, several years her senior, when she took a course in experimental psychology with him at Tutfs, where she was majoring in English. She later became his research assistant and at some point his lover.

Marjorie Huntley was perhaps the most open-minded of the household, and more of an intermittent member of the household, the eccentric aunt who wanders off but keeps her home base with the rest of the family. Through Huntley’s radical and mystical ideas and connections, Marsdon, Holoway and Byrne became involved in a new age mix of feminism, bondage, free love and theosophy, a cult of female superiority through submission, that is frankly not particularly coherent in its principles and may have been a way for the four people involved to give themselves justification for the kind of relationships and family they wanted despite its extreme variance from not just convention, but some of the more established radical ways of organising sexual relationships currently being explored.

Marston wanted his wife and his lovers - all of them strong, intelligent women not easily manipulated - without having to work hard at it, and he wanted relationships where he could explore his interest in domination and submission. Holloway wanted Marston, but she also wanted to be both professional woman and mother in a world where one woman doing both was hard to imagine. Byrne wanted Marston, and after a childhood of insecurity, with mothers and aunts protesting and organising, being in prison, politically active, and dropping Olive off wherever someone could take care of her, wanted a committed family, and Huntley wanted lovers she could live out her unusual beliefs and bondage fantasies with. Some evidence from the letters and personal remembrances of surviving family members suggests that most if not all of them were at least open to the idea of bisexuality. With Marsdon as the nexus, they created an intentional family.

Despite his credentials, intelligence and charisma, Marsdon was the sort of person who was constantly getting involved in situations that seemed at best not well thought-out or unreasonably self-promoting and at worst vaguely unethical. Instead of rising in the ranks of academia, he slowly dropped, and soon was unable to keep a professional appointment. He tried and failed in a number of business ventures. Ultimately, he proved utterly incapable of supporting his family in any normal occupation. The household of three, sometimes four adults, and four children, was primarily supported by Holloway, with occasional lecturing fees from Marston and some money from Byrne’s writing as a regular contributor to Family Circle. The family made up its own amusements, many of which involved writing and drawing of comics - then in their infancy - by the children.

As Lepore describes the household at this point, “The kids read the comics. Holloway earned the money. Huntley burned incense in the attic. Olive took care of everyone, stealing time to write for Family Circle. And William Moulton Marston, the last of the Moultons of Moulton Castle, the lie detector who declared feminine rule a fact, was petted and indulged. He’d fume and he’d storm and he’d holler, and the women would whisper to the children, ‘It’s best to ignore him.’ “

In 1938, Olive Byrne’s brother, Jack Burns, who had been working in pulp publishing (and tried but failed to get Marsden an ‘in’ to pulp fiction writing), started a comics line that featured strong women like Sheena, Queen of the Jungle and Amazonia of the North in his new product, Fiction House’s Jumbo Comics. Superman and Batman had become icons for Maxwell Charles Gaines’ comic lines, but no one else was writing female heroes. As comics became more popular, the also received criticism for their violence and sexuality and its effect on children. After Olive Byrne wrote one of her ‘ask the psychiatrist’ articles for Family Circle in which Marsden was strongly approving of comics as long as they never showed successful murder or torture - trust bondage enthusiast Marsden to approve of stories of women tied up but rescued before anything bad can happen - Gaines hired him as a consultant. And Marsden convinced Gaines to introduce a new superhero - and thus, after development work in the Marsden household and the DC comics offices, Wonder Woman was born. Marsden wrote the story, and handed it over with the warning that none of the feminism was to be altered. It wasn’t, though there was opposition from many corners during the comic’s early years. Wonder Woman was a popular success, but its enemies were powerful, and there were many people, including some of those who later worked for Gaines at DC Comics after Marston contracted polio and became less able to be involved in the production of the comic, who rejected not just the comics in general, with their violence and crime, but Wonder Woman’s obvious feminism and rejection of traditional female roles.

And what about the bondage? At one level, they were using a visual language of woman in chains familiar to anyone who had lived through the era of women’s suffrage and extending it to include all women’s struggles. They were also putting into images their own family mythologies about the need for women to submit in order to gain full superiority. And they were playing out their family dynamics in public.

The Marsden family was a unique environment from which a genre-changing comic emerged, but there’s no hiding the strange dynamics and ethical choices here - and I’m not talking about either polyamory or bondage. First, there’s the obsession with lie detection, which strikes me as a consequence of the hidden lives and connections among these four people. Then, there’s the overwhelming focus on self promotion, and promotion of Marsden’s projects. And the utter lack of professional ethics. Holloway advances Marsden’s chances to write for the Encyclopedia Britannica without disclosing their relationship; Olive praises his psychiatric gifts and his projects without disclosure either, and even - before it’s known that he created Wonder Woman - solicits his advice to concerned parents about comic for their kids. Their authorial interrelationships are intricate, covert, and unethical.

And, yet, for all their flaws, these four people encapsulated a generation’s need for change, for freedom, for women’s independence and created a feminist icon that still resonates today, despite all attempts to diminish it.

Johanna Sinisalo’s The Core of the Sun is a strange dystopia, presenting a Finland in which government control over all facets of life has brought about both the monstrous - a rigid eugenics program that aims to produce virile, masterful men and bubble-headed submissive women - and the bizarre - a ban on anything consumable that offers a strong sensory experience, from tobacco and alcohol to chili peppers.

The narrator, Vanna, is an aberrant woman - she looks like, and can pass as, an eloi, one of the pretty, incurious, domestically and sexually focused women who are preferred as wives, consorts, and sex workers. But her mind is that of a morlock - she is intelligent, curious, restless. The novel is partly epistolatory, in that much of Vanna’s account of events is told in the form of letters to her missing sister Manna, a true eloi. The letters talk to Manna about Vanna’s present, but also about their shared past, giving the reader insight into how Finnish society was transformed into the world in which
Vanna lives.

As Vanna remembers their upbringing, how both sisters were taught the rigid sex roles demanded of the eloi, we learn how Vanna has managed to reach adulthood undetected. The sisters were homeschooled by their grandmother, who lived in a rural area, free from the degree of observation they would have faced in a city, or even a town. Aulikki, who came of age before the adoption of the eugenics program, realised that Vanna was too intelligent to be an eloi, but physically able to pass as one. She carefully taught Vanna to hide her differences, to seem to be like Manna.

Vanna and Manna’s relationship, once close, is eventually damaged by Manna’s eloi conditioning and responses. Their grandmother had hired Jare, a young man from the city as a hired hand to help out on the farm. Jare accidentally discovered Vanna’s secret, but was willing to keep quiet; this shared secret, and the isolation in which they lived, resulted in something unthinkable to an eloi - a friendship. Manna became jealous, competitive for Jare’s affections as elois are conditioned to do, and resented what she saw as the love affair between Jare and Vanna. When the two girls come of age and move to the city, to enter the marriage market - quite literally - Vanna and Jare become partners in an illegal enterprise, dealing in chiles, the pretense of a relationship an ideal cover for their partnership. Manna, still wounded, quickly becomes engaged.

As the narrative progresses, alternating betwen Vanna’s letters to her sister, Jare’s recollections and thoughts, and excerpts from documents detailing this alternative history of Finland, and the nature of the social expectations of men and women - mascos and minuses, eloi and morlocks - we learn the story behind Manns’s disappearance, and follow Vanna’s desperate search for the truth.

The novel is not just a picture of secret resistance to an oppressive, rigidly gendered and controlled society, however. It is also an examination of loss, addiction and mental illness. Vanna is a capsaicin addict. She craves the heat of chilis, seeking anything with a high scoville rating, the higher the better. Her addiction helps her to control what she calls the Cellar, a space within her mind, a metaphor for anxiety, depression, panic. A place where she can feel as though she’s trapped, with water rising all around her. A depression caused by Vanna’s sense that it is her fault that Manna is missing, presumed dead - though Vanna cannot bring herself to think it.

In the second half of the book, Jare and Vanna become involved with the Gaians, a religious cult that seeks to breed the purest, most potent possible chili, believing capsaicin in its natural form to be a spiritual awakening agent, that the effects of capsaicin on the brain can induce trance experiences - it’s their quest for this plant, which they call the Core of the Sun, that gives the novel its title. Jare and Vanna move back to the country, to the farm where Vanna grew up, inviting the Gaians to come with them and, under the cover of growing hyper-organic vegetables, complete their breeding program to produce the Core of the .sun. Meanwhile, they produce lesser breeds of chili, which Vanna and Jare sell, using the funds to support the group, and to save money for Jare’s goal, which is to defect from Finland and make a life for himself in the outside world. The parallels between the breeding of the plants, and the eugenics-based breeding program that has produced eloi and morlocks, in which only the offspring with the desired characteristics are allowed to breed, raise serious ethical questions - which in some ways, Sinisalo leaves hanging - about when and where selective breeding, attempts to improve a species, are legitimate. If breeding chilis to a point unknown in nature is a spiritual quest, but breeding humans to create a subrace of infantilised women a horror, where does the dividing line lie? In some ways, the fire of the chilis is also a metaphor fir the fire of resistance - the Gaians reject the social order in Finland, and at one point, Vanna, in a capsaicin-induced trace, sees the power of her visions as powers that can also bring down the repressive system. I must admit, as a devote of the chili myself, I was rather taken with the idea of chili peppers as the path to enlightenment and social justice. If only it were so.

The way the novel is structured gives Sinisalo the freedom to make many trenchant comments on the social construction of gender and other stereotypes. At one point, talking about television programming for elois, Vanna says:

“I sat with you and watched one television show after another that ended in marriage. “Elois” flouncing around in beautiful gowns, heavily made up, wigs on their heads, padded in the right places. They couldn’t use real elois—that would have been a real job, would have required memorizing lines, concentration, perseverance. The mascos dressed as elois on the TV shows tittered and giggled and fluttered and swung their hips and stuck out their lips and used an exaggerated caricature to show how an eloi should look and sound. I had read in one of Aulikki’s books that in old American movies, white people painted their skin black to portray Negroes. I wonder if some dark-skinned people who watched those movies thought that they were supposed to speak in simple sentences and roll their eyes and be childish and superstitious.”

I couldn’t help thinking, as I read the passages about the establishment of this rigidly gendered society, of other feminist works that have imagined a ‘return’ to an imagined natural or God-prescribed order where all men are powerful and all women submissive. And of what’s happening now in the US, and other parts of the world, as hard won freedoms for women and other marginalised people are being swept away by people with an ideology of repression and control. Once I thought it would be difficult for such things to happen, once a momentum was established. Now I’m terrified by hiw easy it seems.

Books like this have become vital warnings, to resist before it’s too late.

Sisters of the Revolution, edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer, is a reprint anthology that brings together work from some of the most important feminist voices in science fiction. This is not hyperbole. Among the works collected in this PM Press publication are Joanna Russ’s When It Changed, James Tiptree Jr’s The Screwfly Solution, Octavia Butler’s The Evening and the Morning and the Night, and Ursula Le Guin’s Sur, as well as several other stories I’ve read and loved before from authors Eleanor Arnason, Vandana Singh, Nalo Hopkinson and Elisabeth Vonarburg. There were also a fair number of stories new to me, by authors both familiar and new. It’s an outstanding collection of writing by remarkable women.

In their introduction, Ann Vandemeer and Jeff Vandemeer write of this anthology as part of an ongoing conversation around feminist speculative fiction, neither a defining nor a definitive work. “We think of this anthology—the research, the thought behind it, and the actual publication—as a journey of discovery not complete within these pages. Every reader, we hope, will find some writer or story with which they were not previously familiar—and feel deeply some lack that needs to be remedied in the future, by some other anthology.”

As such, it is both deeply enjoyable in its right, and an encouragement to seek out further examples of the feminist vision in speculative fiction.

The stories contained in this collection examine many aspects of women’s lives and struggles. Woman as mother, woman as daughter, woman as leader, woman as revolutionary, woman as healer, woman as explorer, woman as hero. Women who defy the expectations of their society, women who choose to escape, women who try to do the right thing, women who rebel, women who kill, women alone, women betrayed, women who survive. I recommend it highly.

Martin Delany, author of Blake, or The Huts of America, was a free black man, associate of Frederick Douglas, an abolitionist, journalist, physician, soldier and writer, and an early advocate of black nationalism. He wrote his two-part novel, the first part of which was serialised in the The Anglo-African Magazine in 1859, in response to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Where Stowe’s book urged patience and resignation for enslaved black people, and valorised Christian piety among slaves, Delany tells a story of planning for an armed insurrection of black people in North America, and Cuba and labels Christianity as the religion of the oppressor. It should be noted, although, that by this he means a white-led Christian church which preaches patience and acceptance of one’s fate. His main character espouses instead a form of liberation Christianity in which black Christians will interpret scripture directly and in revolutionary terms.

Delany explains his concept of religion most clearly in this speech by his main character, Blake (known throughout the first part of the book as Henry Holland): “No religion but that which brings us liberty will we know; no God but He who owns us as his children will we serve. The whites accept of nothing but that which promotes their interests and happiness, socially, politically and religiously. They would discard a religion, tear down a church, overthrow a government, or desert a country, which did not enhance their freedom. In God’s great and righteous name, are we not willing to do the same?” .... “Our ceremonies, then,” continued Blake, “are borrowed from no denomination, creed, nor church: no existing organization, secret, secular, nor religious; but originated by ourselves, adopted to our own condition, circumstances, and wants, founded upon the eternal word of God our Creator, as impressed upon the tablet of each of our hearts.”

The full text of the novel has been lost, but Part One and a large part of Part Two survive. [1] It is a fascinating read, being of interest both as a work of African-American nationalist literature, and as an early work of black speculative fiction.

The novel begins with the heart-rending account of the break-up of a black family through the sale of a young slave woman. Colonel Franks, a Southern landowner, is persuaded by Arabella Ballard, a relative of his wife’s, and the wife of a business associate, to sell her Maggie, a house servant trained as a lady’s maid, to accompany her on a trip to Cuba. It is strongly suggested that his decision to sell Maggie - his biological daughter - is motivated by her refusal of his sexual advances toward her. By this sale she is separated from her young son Joe, her husband, known as Henry Holland, an educated black man from the West Indies tricked into slavery when young, and from her mother, Mammy Judy, the cook, and Mammy Judy’s husband Daddy Joe, who are also devastated by the loss.

But where Judy and Daddy Joe try to accept the loss of Maggie with Christian platitudes about suffering and being together again in Heaven, Henry is outraged at the callous destruction of his family and rejects the advice of the others to accept the loss and trust in God. He confronts the Colonel over the sale of his wife, and in turn is sold himself. But before his new master can take possession, he runs away. After arranging for his son to be carried to safety in Canada, he contacts two trusted friends, Andy and Charles, and shares with them his plan, not only to never be enslaved again, but to organise a country-wide slave revolution, a goal that they eagerly agree to support him in.

Delany makes the reader look at all aspects of slavery, from the philosophical arguments used to justify the ownership of human beings, to the economics of plantation culture, to the casual everyday cruelty exhibited toward enslaved blacks. He also examines the range of survival strategies used by black people under slavery, showing the ways in which the myths of the slave who is eager to please, happy amusing, slow-witted, childlike, or a comforting ‘mammy’ are all, to some degree or other, masks adopted as means of surviving interactions with whites - with varied results, depending on the skill of the actor and the mood and whim of the target. The real hearts and minds of black people appear only when they speak together, or act out of the sight of whites, in the black-occupied ‘huts of America’ where they can congregate away from the gaze of the master. Even the very real faith of some blacks is exaggerated into a performance of confused and frenzied religiosity - for example, when Mammy Judy uses this strategy as a way of avoiding uncomfortable questions about the whereabouts of Henry and his son Joe. There are no happy plantation stories here.

As Henry travels through the South, spreading the idea of an organised rebellion, his encounters with the workers on different plantations provide a sense of the scope of slavery as a means of cheap labour - the sheer numbers of blacks working to produce the cash crops that drove the economic growth of not only the plantation south but the industrial north - and the ways in which this commodified labour force was treated.

Henry’s travels through the Southern states, rousing the black populace to prepare for a coming insurrection, occupy much of the book; having made this circuit, he returns to the Franks plantation, gathers these closest to him, and leads them to Canada, where he buys land and sets up a community of escaped slaves. Then, his family and friends taken care of, he heads toward Cuba in search of his wife. Thus ends Part One of Blake.

Where Part One was largely an exploration of the life of blacks under slavery, with some detailed advice on the dangers facing escaping slaves due to the Fugitive Slave Act and directions on how to reach Canada - complete with warnings not to expect much beyond freedom on arrival in what was still a very racially stratified society - the early chapters of Part Two examine first the conditions of slavery in Cuba, and then the conditions of the slave trade itself, as Henry’s adventures continue. It is in this section of the novel that Delany’s African nationalism is most strongly elucidated, in passage such as this:

“Heretofore that country [Africa] has been regarded as desolate-unadapted to useful cultivation or domestic animals, and consequently, the inhabitants savage, lazy, idle, and incapable of the higher civilization and only fit for bondmen, contributing nothing to the civilized world but that which is extorted from them as slaves. Instead of this, let us prove, not only that the African race is now the principal producer of the greater part of the luxuries of enlightened countries, as various fruits, rice, sugar, coffee, chocolate, cocoa, spices, and tobacco; but that in Africa their native land, they are among the most industrious people in the world, highly cultivating the lands, and that ere long they and their country must hold the balance of commercial power by supplying as they now do as foreign bondmen in strange lands, the greatest staple commodities in demand, as rice, coffee, sugar, and especially cotton, from their own native shores, the most extensive native territory, climate, soil, and greatest number of (almost the only natural producers) inhabitants in the universe; and that race and country will at once rise to the first magnitude of importance in the estimation of the greatest nations on earth, from their dependence upon them for the great staples from which is derived their national wealth.”

In Part Two, Henry, now using the name Gilbert, travels to Cuba in the service of a party of three young white men - Captain Richard Paul, Lieutenant Augustus Seely, and Midshipman Lawrence Spencer - desirous of entering the slave trade, and Cordelia Woodward, a young woman who later becomes Seely’s wife.

Once in Cuba, Henry leaves the party to search for his wife; finding Maggie at last, he gives her the money to purchase her freedom, and arranges for Joe to be brought to Cuba by some of his friends in Canada. We now learn that Henry, who speaks both Spanish and Creole fluently, is originally from Cuba, and that his name is actually Henrico Blacus - Henry Blake. He visits his cousin, Placido, a revolutionary poet, and they agree on working toward an uprising in Cuba. Henry then takes a position as a sailing master on a slave ship carrying arms - the Vulture, commanded by Captain Paul and his associates.

Blake’s journey to Africa, where the Vulture takes on two thousand kidnapped and branded Africans, gives Delany the opportunity to enumerate the horrors of the Middle Passage, the physical and mental torture endured by the transportees, the callousness toward the health and lives of their human cargo.

On his return, Blake discovers that he has been appointed the General of the Cuban Army of Emancipation; the revolutionaries, comprising many of the free blacks and people of mixed race in Cuba as well as soaves, plan for action. The last preserved chapter offers a picture of heightened political tensions between the Spanish administrators, the American platers who seek to have Cuba annexed by the US, and the black and mixed race general population, free and slave. Conditions are ripe for a revolution; but the conclusion of the book is lost to us.

Those looking for a cohesive personal narrative in Blake will be disappointed. This is not that kind of novel. Henry’s travels and exploits are governed, not by the desire to tell a story, but to impart information and promote a cause. Its shape is also affected by the length of time taken to write the work. Delany began publishing the chapters in 1959, before the outbreak of civil war. By the time he finished writing, it was 1862, and the possibility existed that a Union victory might end the rule of slavery in the South, rendering moot his main character’s arguments for a black insurrection. The value of Blake lies in its articulation of a nationalist vision of diasporic Africans, and its contemporary account of the conditions of black people under slavery.

[1] Part One has been published online (http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/africam/blakehp.html)

Lara Elena Donelly’s Amberlough is a secondary world spy novel, a mashup of cold war intelligence narratives and Weimar Republic society, sources which Donelly explicitly acknowledged by taking chapter epigrams from John Le Carré novels and the musical Cabaret. There’s no other fantasy or science fictional elements, just an imaginary world with pre-WWII technology and a complicated political history, not unlike Europe of our own timeline and space.

The novel’s main character, Cyril DePaul, is an agent in the Amberlough intelligence service. He’s been out of the field for a year, following a traumatic mission which resulted in serious injury; his nerves are still shot, but a mission has come up that he’s uniquely suited to.

Amberlough is one of four loosely federated states that make up the nation of Gedda. Up until recently, this has suited everyone fairly well. However, a new political power, the One State Party (colloquially referred to as the Ospies) is on the rise and threatens to take power in the upcoming elections in the state of Farborough. The OSP is quite clearly a fascist-trending political movement, and with Amberlough being a place of rather profound liberal tendencies (sexual freedom, some degree of racial integration, along with a fair amount of smuggling and corruption, all politely conducted with an eye to tradition and balance), the powers that be in Amberlough are concerned. They’ve found hints that the OSP is planning to interfere with the election, and DePaul’s mission is to pose as a wealthy potential moneyman while he tries to uncover exactly what their plans are.

The mission goes wrong, and DePaul finds himself in a deadly game, forced to become a double agent for the OSP. Survival also means giving up the man he loves, Aristide - a cabaret drag queen and underground smuggler and drug dealer, at least until he can find some way to get out of the trap he’s caught in, and take Aristide with him.

But nothing works out as hoped. Unable to be open with each other, DePaul and Aristide end up working at cross purposes, tangling even more of their respective colleagues and contacts in the web of deceptions, the most vulnerable of whom is Cordelia, a burlesque artist and sometime drug runner, who Aristide persuades to act as DePaul’s beard. And through it all, the OSP moves inexorably toward power in Amberlough.

It’s a good thing this is the first book in a trilogy, because if the story were over at the end of this volume, I would be a very unhappy person. As it stands, I’m a very impatient person, waiting for volume two.

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.

Claire North’s The End of the Day is a novel about a youngish man named Charlie with a vey odd job - he is the Harbinger of Death. He does not come to everyone who is to die, no mere human could handle that, but Death does send him ahead to certain select individuals. Charlie doesn’t know why he is sent to some and not to others; the best explanation he can offer is that he is sent, sometimes as a warning, and sometimes to honour the person about to die. He often comes bearing a gift.

Charlie isn’t the only Harbinger, of course, and Death nit the only avatar of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. This is a world that knows that the four horsemen are real, and that they have human harbingers who come before them.
Charlie knows his colleagues, the Harbingers of Famine, Pestilence and War. Sometimes they run into each other as they travel around the world on their respective missions, and talk shop about life as a Harbinger. Although this is Charlie’s story, we catch glimpses of the paths being travelled by War, Famine, Pestilence and their Harbingers through places we know too well from the news in our world.

The novel is structured episodically; accounts of Charlie’s missions, present and past, are interwoven with scenes if Charlie’s day-to-day life as he tries to maintain a reality outside if his work for Death, and to maintain a relationship with his girlfriend Emmi - who herself struggles with the demands and dangers of loving someone with a job like Charlie’s.

The sections that follow Charlie on his missions and in his life are interspersed with snippets of conversation about current events, most of them shallow, or cruel, or both, some if them heartbreaking. It’s an effect not unlike turning the dial on a radio tuned to every conversation in the world, and clicking methodically through them all. Reading through these buts and pieces, it’s difficult not to feel a growing sense of anger, even despair, at the state of the world, at the inhumanity of man.

Fragments of conversations, fragments of Charlie’s life, fragments of the vast mosaic human experience, of which Charlie normally sees only the penultimate moments - the novel reads like a travelogue of disjointed places, a catalogue of disconnected lives, with Charlie serving as an observer of the best and worse in the human soul.

And yet. Charlie is so human, and humane. He can honestly say he enjoys his job, despite on occasion being beaten, tortured, imprisoned, despite seeing the depths of evil that co-exist with the good. He manages to find joy, to continue to care for people. He honours life. In all its messiness. When he can, he offers comfort, companionship. On some occasions, where he is sent as a warning, or sent to honour courage in the face of horror, he finds a way to help. He offers his home to a dying man whose home has been seized to make way for a new development. He helps two lovers, Nigerian lesbians, escape from a vindictive man who wants to make both this lives agony because they refuse his advances. Charlie is a good man.

On one mission to Greenland, he meets Patrick, a rich businessman, Patrick, who is there because Death himself invited him to witness “the end of a world.” But the only end to be witnessed is that of an old professor and environmentalist who Charlie follows out onto a glacier to deliver his gift of tea. His path and Patrick’s continue to interact at odd moments throughout the novel. Sometimes by chance. Sometimes because Patrick wants to see Charlie. Sometimes, again, because Patrick has once more been invited to “the end of a world” and neither Patrick nor Charlie can figure out why him, why these particular deaths. But Patrick is confident that even if an old world is dying, there is a new world on its way, and he is one of those who creates it.

Charlie keeps on meeting his appointments, but something is changing. He still feels that he honours the lives that have come before the end, but he is growing tired. His head pounds, sometimes. Patrick meets him again, and thinks he looks like hell. He’s kidnapped, again. Afterwards, he sits in a hotel room and counts the painkillers he’s bought. But though Death comes, it’s not Charlie’s time.

I’m not entirely sure what message to take from this book. And North so clearly has a message she wants us to hear. But what comes to me, beyond this fascinating character study of a man with a most difficult and peculiar job, is a list of platitudes. Life goes on. The world keeps turning. Even the worst of humans have something good in them. All things must come to an end. Everything changes. No one is a villain in his own eyes. Love makes the world go ‘round. It’ll be all right in the end.

Maybe that is the message, that all these things are platitudes because they are true.

In 1942, Vita Sackville-West published Grand Canyon, a speculative novel - a future history with a strong element of the fantastic - in which Germany has overrun all of Europe, and established a sort of truce with America. The time period is vague; it’s far enough in the future for a means if extracting electricity from the air to have been discovered, for new dance crazes to have developed. European emigres wander through the American landscape, detached and lost, while life goes on around them.

The novel is set in a tourist hotel by the Grand Canyon. Among its guests are the serene and enigmatic Englishwoman, Helen Temple, the cynical Lester Dale, the exotic and emotional Madame de Retz, the blind Czech refugee with his silent German attendant, the deaf Englishman who carries a skate around his neck to enable communication, and a gaggle of young American college students, co-eds, on holiday, one of whom, Lorraine Driscoll, is worried about something. Most of the staff are nameless, save for the consumptive maid Sadie. A band of black musicians perform “whizz music” on the dance patio. Next to the hotel is a village of deliberately picturesque Hopi, who sell overpriced souvenirs and perform “Indian dances” as part of the evening entertainment.

Nearby is a camp of military personal preparing for “manoeuvres,” not much further as the crow flies is an airbase; some of the soldiers and airmen frequent the hotel for dinner and evening entertainment.

Living secretly in a long-abandoned cave dwelling is an English author and professor, his presence apparently known only to Mrs. Temple and the local Hopi people, who is referred to only as the hermt.

And finally there is Mr. Royer, the Hotel Manager, an obnoxious man who also happens to be a German agent, waiting for orders to set fire to the hotel.

All these things we learn in the first few pages, as Sackville-West slides the perspective from one character to another as they interact in the course of an early evening, preparing for dinner at the hotel, setting the scene and characters.

At the core of the novel is the developing relationship between Mrs. Temple and Mr. Dale. Too detached, in their own ways, to be actively romantic, nonetheless a kind of intimacy develops between them, contrasted against the flirtatious social lives of the young college students and energetic servicemen who fill the dining room and dance floor of the Grand Canyon Hotel. This unfolding takes place in the midst of the up-to-now unthinkable - a blackout order in the vicinity of the canyon, intended to protect the nearby airbases and army camps from anticipated bombing runs by long-range German planes based in Hawaii, Mexico, and perhaps Brazil. Both Mrs. Temple and Mr. Dale know war, know the nature if the enemy; in their conversations over the course of the novel’s action is the larger debate over the great irony of having to meet the violence of evil with violence for good.

Sackville-West wrote of her choices in writing this novel:

“In Grand Canyon I have invented a cautionary tale. In it I have contemplated the dangers of a world in which Germany, by the use of an unspecified method of attack, is assumed to have defeated Great Britain in the present war. […] The terrible consequences of an incomplete conclusion or indeed of any peace signed by the Allies with an undefeated Germany are shown.”

Written in the midst of the war, and the daily bombing of England, it’s not difficult to see this novel as a warning to an isolationist America that there can be no peace with Nazi Germany, that they must engage before Britain falls, or risk eventually fighting a more powerful enemy on their own soil. But it’s a timely message today as well, as the hateful rhetoric of Hitler’s Nazi Party spreads across Europe and North America, and white supremacists take to the streets and to the parliaments of the West. It reminds us that some things must not be tolerated, cannot be politely contained, and have no place whatsoever in a civil and just society. And it contains a plea, that someday, humans will learn to exercise “the one faculty that mattered, the faculty of being able to arrange his life in accordance with his fellows” - the ability to live in harmony and peace.

I read this in part because it will please and amuse me to nominate it for a 1942 Retro Hugo award; I’m glad I did, because it speaks to some things that, it seems, we must learn over and over again. War and violence are not glorious, but they may be a part of the price of eternal vigilance.

Cynthia Ward’s delightful novella, The Adventure of the Incognita Contessa, is an adventure in exploring the realms of speculative fiction from the late Victorian era, a spy story set in an alternate universe where the British government is working to understand Martian technology following the failed invasion of the British Isles by inhabitants of that planet, and Lucy, the daughter of Mina Harker, works for the head of the British secret service, known as M - short for Mycroft.

Lucy’s mission is to provide unseen protection for Major Butt, an American military officer travelling home, carrying secret engineering specifications concerning the submarine Nautilus, recently recovered by German scientists. Among the other passengers on the newly commissioned oceanliner The Titanic are the vampire Millarca, also known as Carmilla, here cslled Clarimal, a mysterious English Viscount, Lord Greyborough, and his American wife (one must remember that the works of Edgar Rice Bourroughs remain under copyright, unlike many other works of a similar era which have entered the public domain), and assorted wealthy persons with names like Astor and Guggenheim.

Lucy, as we quickly learn, is not herself human, but a dhampir, the child of a vampire - in her case, Dracula himself - and a human. As a British spy, she is obliged to protect the British Empire. As the child of vampire hunters, she has an additional mission, to kill monster. Unless, of course, they are in the service of the Crown themselves. Lucy has justified her killings with the secure knowledge that vampires are soulless creatures who can only mime the emotions and conscience of humans, to lull them into a sense if security so they can feed. But as she becomes close to Clarimal, she begins to wonder if everything she has been taught is true.

Constant Reader has likely noticed that I enjoy speculative ventures of this nature, works that take a canonical source and stretch it, expand it, play with its conceits and give its characters new and interesting things to do. This is a splendid example of the genre.

Karin Tidbeck’s debut novel Amatka is a complex and challenging fiction of social criticism - calling it satire, or dystopia, is far too inadequate, though it certainly performs the functions of both genres.

We are in a nominally future world, on a colony planet, but at the same time, Amatka is, like Erewhon, set nowhere in time or space. Amatka is one of several cities on this planet, settled in a cold and harsh region. Like the other cities, it is somewhat of a socialist/syndicalist managed economy. People live communally in small groups, children are raised in a separate children’s house, personal property is limited to one’s own necessary effects.

But there are some very odd things happening. Everything in this world is labelled, and people say the names of things over and over again. At first, there’s no obvious explanation for this behaviour, and the reader wonders why everyone is repeating the names of things, writing them on everything. I was speculating that some plague had damaged humans’ cognitive abilities, weakening object permanence. But the reason, when it’s revealed, is stranger still. Reality is fragile, and the existence of material objects must be frequently supported by bring named, or they dissolve into a kind of featureless paste.

As one reads, one becomes aware that there are two general classes of things. One, identified by the adjective “good” consists of things made from materials that the colonists brought with them. These things, it seems, are far less prone to dissolving, they hold their shape and firm without constant naming and labelling, they are resistant to other subtle dangers suggested but never spoken of or defined. Things not identified as good, things made from materials on the planet, are things without permanence. And the material from which these impermanent things are made is, of course, the same stuff they dissolve into when they are not named often enough.

And there’s a mystery, about a lost colony no one talks about. Once, when humans first settled this place, there were five colony cities founded. Then one was no longer there.

The protagonist, Vanja, lives in one of the four remaining colony cities, Essre. She has been asked by the company/collective she works in to travel to Amatka on a kind of market research jaunt. Her collective makes personal hygiene products, and it is her assignment to find out what the people in Amatka need, use, and want, for things like soap and tooth powder.

It doesn’t take long for her to learn that the people of Amatka are not all that interested in the idea of new things, things that might come from other colonies. At the same time, she discovers that the people of Amatka suffer from frequent skin problems, rashes, eczema, cracked skin.

As Vanja goes about her research, while living in a communal household and getting to know her housemates, she learns about other strange things that have been happening in Amatka. Things that are not talked about. Some years ago, there was an incident, and a hundred people died. This may, or may not, be the reason that the city seems too empty, too quiet. And the nearby lake has started freezing over, every night, and thawing in the morning, even though the temperature does not change that much. There’s a serious shortage of “good paper” such that even important things like medical records are being written on paper that will decay, and the books in the library are being seized and recycled for the use of the city’s central committee.

Vanja has never really been content with life as it is lived. As one of her new housemates notes, she forgets to name and mark things too often, it suggests that she wants to know more. And she does. Much of the novel is about her slow and frustrating search for answers - not so much to the question of why things are the way they are, but to what if anything could be better.

In Amatka, Tidbeck has written is a complex and powerful parable about hw we sustain the nature of our world, our reality, our interpretation of our selves, and of the necessity of change to create a way of living that is more free, and more in harmony.

The second volume of Majorie Liu and Sana Takeda’s graphic narrative, Monstress: The Blood, continues with the orphaned refugee Maika Halfwolf’s search to uncover the secrets of her long-dead mother. Maika, with her Arcanic companions, the foxchild Kippa and the feline nekomancer, Master Ren, have persuaded an old comrades of her mother’s to take her on a voyage that follows her mother’s journey to a dangerous and mysterious island known as the Isle of Bones. Meanwhile, the various great powers are searching for her, because they suspect she has the weapon her mother used to end the last great war between them - though they have no idea of what that weapon might be. And others are trying to stop her from reaching her intended destination.

The story remains complex and interesting, with Maika as a most unusual protagonist. Her position as a survivor of multiple abuses, including being made the host of a vast and violent intelligence that drives her to seek blood, makes her a walking contradiction, victim and predator. The multiple quests - her seeking to understand her mother’s actions and the thing inside her, while the great powers of her world seek her, fir the thing she carries, offer further conflicts.

The artwork continues to be breathtaking in its complexity, beauty and impact. When I read the first volume, I had not done a lot of reading of graphic novels. I’m still not a big fan of them, but some, like this one, have definitely captured my imagination. This is compelling storytelling, in a visually stunning form.

Naomi Alderman’s novel, The Power, is the story of what happened to the world when something happened, and all the girls who have had to endure the harassment, the touches, the rapes, are suddenly able to strike out, to stop their attackers in their tracks.

To a woman who has experienced sexual assault, this is like a massive wish fulfillment narrative. Just to have the idea that no man would ever dare to impose without consent is to imagine a different world. As Margaret Atwood once said (and I paraphrase here), when you ask men what scares them about women, they say it’s that women might laugh at them. When you ask women, they say it’s that men might kill them. Whole different orders of consequence. But if women develop a power to strike back, to defend, to kill, then we are on an equal footing. Women becoming truly dangerous means women can be as free as men. These are the first thoughts that come to me as I read The Power.

Then come other thoughts. About being dangerous women who have swallowed a lifetime of insult and insolence from men, who have bowed under the pressure and the fear, who have learned to smile, and smile, and never let them know how much it hurts, how much you hate what has been done to you, your mothers, your sisters, your daughters. About being dangerous women who no longer have to be afraid, who can turn the tables and make men feel fear for a change. Who can bring down the powerful men and destroy whole systems of male privilege. Who can seek revenge. Who can make men suffer for what they have done. These are uncomfortable thoughts. But they are also part of the picture Alderman paints.

And then there’s the curiosity factor. Suddenly you have a superpower. What can you do with it? How can you use it? Does it do more than hurt people? You want to explore what you can do, test it out. See who you are now that you have this strange new ability. This is a story about girls and women doing that, too.

The story of what happens when women gain this new and frightening power, of generating and directing bio-electricity, is told through a several viewpoints. There’s Tunde, a freelance journalist from Nigeria who was one of the first men to experience the shock of a woman who can say no to a suitor who’s just a little too eager, and back it up with power. Fascinated, possibly even fetishistically, Tunde is chronicling the actions of women around the world who are gathering together to take down misogynist systems and assume leadership. His apparent desire to give these women a platform to speak has so far saved him from further backlash at the hands of women liberating themselves.

And there’s Roxy, the daughter of a British gangster whose power emerged when a rival gang leader arranged to have her mother killed, but wasn’t strong enough to save her mother’s life. In the end she kills the man who gave that order, and her remaining family smuggle her out of the country to America.

And there’s Margot, the mayor of New York City, whose power is awakened by her teenaged daughter Jos. Margot is keeping her ability secret, because she can’t risk suspicion in the high-stakes game she’s playing to wrest political power from her long-time adversary, the state governor.

And strangest of all the stories, there’s Allie, now calling herself Eve. Allie has vague memories of being taken from her mother and moved from place to place, finally ending up as the foster daughter of a man who abuses her sexually while his wife turns up the sound on the TV to drown out her screams. Allie has a voice in her head, and that voice guides her to kill her rapist and make her way to a nunnery where other cast out girls have been taken in, and where Allie begins to start a new religion.

And of course there’s the framing story, about a daring “man writer” named Neil Adam Armon who has written a historical novel drawing on the best available archaeological research to tell a story about how his world came to be. He has sent his manuscript to a well-established writer, Naomi Alderman, for her opinion - and her “guidance.”

It’s a interesting look at how a new society, one where the power dynamic between the sexes has turned, could be formed - or imposed. Alderman tells the story from the perspective of three women who come to hold three very distinct forms of power - Margot has political power and connections to military power, Allie has religious power, and Roxy the power if the underworld, the illegal power networks of the world. Tunde has power, too, a power that serves them, the power of the media.

The Power is certainly well-written, and tells an interesting and emotionally powerful story. It speaks to me, as a woman, about very specific experiences, fears, nightmares and fantasies. I find myself wondering how it speaks to men. And I also think that, cathartic as it is, it is a rather old-fashioned entry in the very long history of speculative fiction centred on gender relations. Science fiction writers were producing these kinds of turn-the-tables stories a hundred years ago, depicting societies where women dominate men - sometimes with benevolence, sometimes with the same unthinking cruelty that has marked so many male-led societies. Within the genre, the most interesting work on gender has moved well beyond that kind of story, to look at ways of living without having one gender dominate another. We don’t need more revenge fantasies, but rather workable solutions, societies where equality is the key and no one holds the power over another.

Alderman has tapped into the current mindset, particularly now, in the year of #MeToo and #Time’sUp, and her book crackles with the anger of abused women everywhere saying “no more,” and it’s this that can lull the reader into a sense of approval for the changes we see, as women claim and use their new power. But before too long, it’s clear that Alderman’s novel is actually a cautionary takes about the way that power corrupts any group that holds it, that reminds us that when we engage in revolution without radical and structural change, what we get is a situation of “meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

In some ways, this can be seen as a profoundly anti-feminist work, taking as it does the position that we need such a cautionary tale to warn us that a society where a great power imbalance exists is a society that is dysfunctional. Certain men - particularly those who fear that without the ability to be stronger than women, they would have no power at all - have always framed feminism as a movement designed to place social supremacy in the hands of women. The Power suggests that their fears are realistic, that giving up power over means accepting subservience to.

In the end, I remain unsettled about the message of The Power. The point it makes is a valid one, that there is no good that comes from replacing one hegemony with another. But is it also saying that it’s something we can’t avoid? Can equality exist when one group has the real, measurable ability to do harm, to instill fear, to a greater degree? Is the ability of men to do so to women an insurmountable barrier to a truly just society? Can power exist and not be used?

I've long been meaning to read Katharine Burdekin's classic dystopia, Swastika Night, and given the political climate of the day, now seemed an appropriate time to finally get around to it. What makes Swastika Night stand out among the other anti-fascist dystopias of its era is the explicit connection that Burdekin makes between fascist ideology and what we would now call 'toxic masculinity.' As Daphne Patai notes in the Introduction to this Feminist Press edition:

"Though Burdekin’s feminist critique appears in her realistic fiction and even in her children’s book, she excelled above all in the creation of utopian fiction, and the special vantage point afforded by the imaginative leap into other ‘societies’ resulted in her two most important books: Swastika Night (1937) and Proud Man (1934). When these novels first appeared, contemporary reviewers tended to miss Burdekin’s important critique of what we today call gender ideology and sexual politics, though on occasion they noted her feminist sympathies, which, indeed, led some to guess that ‘Murray Constantine’ was a woman. With this reprint of Swastika Night, Burdekin’s works may finally begin to find their audience.

Like fictional utopias (‘good places’), dystopias (‘bad places’) provide a framework for levelling criticisms at the writer’s own historical moment. But in imagining in Swastika Night a Europe after seven centuries of Nazi domination, Burdekin was doing something more than sounding a warning about the dangers of fascism. Burdekin’s novel is important for us today because her analysis of fascism is formulated in terms that go beyond Hitler and the specifics of his time. Arguing that fascism is not qualitatively but only quantitatively different from the everyday reality of male dominance, a reality that polarises males and females in terms of gender roles, Burdekin satirises ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ modes of behaviour. Nazi ideology, from this point of view, is the culmination of what Burdekin calls the ‘cult of masculinity’. It is this connection, along with the strong argument against the cult of masculinity, that set Burdekin’s novel apart from the many other anti-fascist dystopias produced in the 1930s and 40s."

In Burdekin's vision of a Fascist future, Teutonic myth, warped medievalism, and the history of a Hitlerian victory in WW2 merge into a religious cult of masculinity, where God the Thunderer and his holy son Hitler preside in heaven over a hierarchy that begins with the German political elite - the Fuehrer and the Ring of Ten - and then widens out to include the Knights, the rank and file Nazis, and then foreign 'Hitlerians' (the 'converts' from other, conquered and occupied countries), all of whom are men. At the bottom of the social order are women - deemed barely more than dumb animals - and Christian men and other 'heathens.' Men are seen as heroic, beautiful, noble, women as ugly, weak, fit only for bearing sons for the glory of Hitler. But in the first pages, the reader is let in on a dire secret that has greatly concerned the upper echelons of this society - fewer and fewer female children are being born to Hitlerian women, a trend which if continued will mean an end to the Hitlerian edifice and possibly to all of humanity.

The novel focuses on three men, of different stations in life: Hermann, a young German of the Nazi class, content to work on the land as his ancestors have, and a devout believer in Hitler; Alfred, an Englishman with whom he became friends (and possibly lovers, there is much homoeroticism in the relationships between men in the novel) during a period of military service in England, a sceptic who believes that if the mystery cult of Hitlerism can be broken, the German Empire can be destroyed; and the old Knight Von Hess, who has seen too much and knows too many secrets - even the secret of history - to believe in anything.

It's a dark dystopia, and much like Orwell's 1984, a dystopia in which even the occasional candlelight of understanding and rebellion against the oppression flickers only for a few minutes, and then is blown out. At the end of the novel, there's no breaking of the bonds, only the faintest hope that some knowledge of the past, of the idea that things could be different, will survive, and someday be found by someone who can use that knowledge to begin a change.

Ta-Nehisi Coates' re-imagining of the black comic hero the Black Panther, is thoughtful, exciting, deeply political.

Vol 1 of Black Panther, titled A Nation Under Our Feet, delivers us into a country in great turmoil. Previous writers - as I learn from various summaries on the Internet - have left the series a legacy of contradictions and tragedies. The country of Wakanda, a technologically advanced African society largely hidden from the rest of the world, ruled by a long line of absolute monarchs with mystical powers able to become the Black Panther. An orphaned king who left his people to be a superhero to the outside world, bringing the destructive wrath of evil supervillains down on the country he left in the hands of others.

Coates begins with a Wakanda in chaos. Unrest, rebellion, revolution threaten. The king, T'Challa, is here no wise and benevolent king, but a confused and conflicted man, not understanding why his people are at war with each other, and with him. The first novel casts T'Challa as, in fact, the 'bad guy' by default, because of his lack of comprehension, his lack of connection to his people. The various rebels seem on the side of good - especially the two renegade warriors Ayo and Aneka. Formerly members of the king's elite, all-female bodyguard (shades of the Dahomey warrior-wives of the king), they have become vigilantes fighting against a brutal leader in northern Wakanda whose regime is one of enslavement and rape of women. It is in this subplot that we most clearly see that T'Challa - and his advisors and military leaders and others of the royal faction - are completely out of touch with the situation of the people, and trapped in an out-moded mythos in which the king's word is unquestioned law, and tradition outweighs true justice. If T'Challa is to learn to become both leader and hero, he has a long way to go.

The artwork, by Brian Stelfreeze, is strong and powerful, with appropriate touches of a softer and more mystical style when the subject matter demands it.

I keep meaning to read more graphic novels, but somehow it's mostly during the Hugo season that I actually do, and that's because of the Best Graphic Story category. I've enjoyed several of the specific volumes I've read for the Hugos, but somehow I rarely follow up on the multi-part stories.

Monstress Volume 1: The Awakening, written by Marjorie Liu and illustrated by Sana Takeda, is another of those graphic novels that was enjoyable while reading - though also deeply disturbing - but I'm not at all certain I'll be continuing to read it (unless more volumes are nominated for Hugos in future years). Not because it isn't a good story, because it is. But after lots if attempts, I've come to understand that I shy away from reading graphic novels because it is physically difficult fir me, and few stories are compelling enough to override that.

Some of those who read these reviews know that I have severe multiple chemical sensitivities and am bedbound due to multiple disabilities. What this means is that I can't read anything printed on paper - it's too toxic for me, especially paper with lots of ink, like graphic novels. So everything I read must be electronic. But because I spend all my tine lying in bed, everything I read, I read on an iPad. Any other device is too heavy. And I have arthritis and poor eyesight. There's no reader out there that allows me to read graphic novels without a lot of pinching and swiping around each page to get all the important dialogue and visual detail. And by the time I've read a few pages, my fingers and my eyes hurt. So.... I tend to shy away from graphic novels. Nonetheless, I will do my best to read those nominated and not let my circumstances bias me against the medium. So.... On with my thoughts on Monstress.

Visually, Monstress is a stunning piece of work - intricately drawn, dense but never 'busy,' a feast for the eyes. Takeda blends artistic traditions to create marvellous images, though she is at her best with inanimate subjects - architectural designs and atmospheric backgrounds, clothing, machines, furniture, and so on. Her living characters seem curiously unfinished, rather like dolls.

The narrative is complex and disturbing, set in a post-war, almost post-apocalyptic world where two enemy civilisations, still opposed but not actively at war, appear to be recovering from a cataclysmic event. On one side, the human federation in which considerable power lies with the all-female sorcerer-scientist order of the Cumaea; on the other, the non-human Arcanes, rumoured to have access to powers or beings known as the monstrum.

The story focuses on Maika, an Arcanic, a former slave of the Federation, living with other escapees and dispossessed arcanics in a sort of demilitarised zone between the two nations. She possesses powers she cannot use at will or control, though they appear when she is in great distress. She is connected in some way to the catastrophic event that ended open warfare between humans and arcanics. And she is seeking the truth about her mother and herself, a truth that she believes can only be found among the Cumaea.

At the beginning of the story, Maika has allowed herself to be captured and enslaved by humans. She and several other Arcanics, all children, have been claimed by the Cumaea as slaves, but from almost the beginning it is clear that the Cumaea - like other humans - see the Arcanes as animals and so fit subjects both for torture by those who seek pleasure in the children's pain, and scientific experimentation by those who seek to know more about the Arcanes and their power.

The story is hard to read, even harder to look at. Takeda's brilliant artwork is often used to portray scenes of humiliation, torture, vivisection, and violence. In an afterword to the first issue, Liu talks about the genesis of the story in her grandparents' memories of war and xenophobic hatred and violence - based on timing, I'm guessing her grandparents would have been survivors of the invasion of China by Imperial Japan, or both. Malka is a refugee, an orphan, an escaped slave, an amputee, a victim of war and violence and racial hatred, and she carries within her the power to wreak vengeance, or to simply spread violence indiscriminately as survivors of trauma often do. She has the capacity to be a monster, and it stems from her suffering and pain. It's one hell of a story, relevant in all times of violence and war, about what these all too common pursuits of humanity can do to our souls.

China Mièville's novella This Census-Taker is a collection of mysteries, memories half-remembered, truths half-told, stories layered one on the other that may or may not be about the same thing, by the same person.

There was a boy, who lived with his mother and father on the side of a mountain, just above the main part of a town that spread across two hills. The boy learned to read from his mother, and learned to fear his father. A boy who saw something so terrible his mind could not encompass it, his tongue could not communicate it, his fellow townspeople could not believe him when he tried to explain it.

Later there was a man who was either a prisoner or a guest, who had three books to write, one in figures, one in words, one in secret.

There was a census taker, who came to the boy's house, and spoke to his father, and then took the boy away to become a trainee. And before him, there was another trainee, who disappeared leaving only a warning for the boy who came after her, who became the man writing the books.

There are no answers to any if the questions, the mysteries, the disappearances. There is only memory of what was seen and heard, but never known and understood.

It is an unsettling story, full of implied violence and without anything that feels like an end. But it stays with you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In her novel All the Birds in the Sky, Charlie Jane Anders defies conventions and overthrows dichotomies with a joyous aplomb. A story that is both science fiction and fantasy, about a boy who dreams of rockets and time machines and a girl who can talk to the birds and the trees, about the war between those who value technology over nature and those who value nature over technology, about those who think man can be outside of, control and manipulate the natural world and those who think man is a part of and must live within and be guided by it.

As children, Patricia and Laurence are both outcasts - misunderstood, bullied, gaslighted, rejected by parents, schoolmates and the educational system itself. They form a fragile alliance, which even as it grows is being undermined by Theodolphus Rose, an assassin turned guidance counselor who has had a mystical vision that they will grow up to start an apocalyptic war between science and magic. Together they create a true AI, using Laurence's code and Patricia's non-linear conversations with the nascent intelligence - an AI that Laurence names Peregrine and sets free to evolve. Eventually their friendship, frayed by Rose's manipulations and lies, shatters when Patricia allows Laurence to see her doing magic.

Seven years later, Laurence is working with a semi-underground group of scientific geniuses trying to find a way to save at least part of the human race from the coming global upheaval being triggered by climate change. Their plan is to find a way to move large numbers of people to another planet, leaving the earth behind to face its destruction. Meanwhile, Patricia has been taken into the fellowship of witches, and trained in the two branches of magic, Healing and Trickery. The witches are devoting their energies to an attempt to balance the energies of the planet, serving nature through small acts of healing or prevention, developing their own solution, one that will preserve the earth at the cost of humanity.

When Laurence and Patricia meet each other once more, the path is set for a dramatic and violent confrontation, but beyond that, a chance for reconciliation of man and nature, science and magic, and for a future where empathy and understanding can open the door to the survival of all.

I've never been fond of Cartesian divides, and the skill with which Anders exposes the humanity vs. nature, intuition vs logic axes as barren and ultimately destructive was quite gratifying. I also appreciated the focus on ethical decisions - everyone in the novel is trying to do the ethical thing, based on their partial understanding - and the ease with which ethical reasoning can be subverted to questionable ends when it is not tempered with empathy and compassion.

But this is much more than a novel of ideas. The characters are appealing despite their flaws, the writing is crisp, and the style engaging. The story flows smoothly, and it isn't until you get to the end that you realise just how much there is to think about. Well worth the critical praise it has received.

I'm still mulling over Scott Hawkins' debut novel, The Library at Mount Char, some time after finishing it. It's a compelling read, if you can handle the extreme blood-letting and sometimes calculated, sometimes thoughtless, cruelty, despite being thrown into the middle of things without any guidebook and an extremely unreliable narrator.

It's the story of a community of godlings, formerly ordinary children, raised by a cold, cruel, and demanding father - a being 60,000 years old who can alter time, raise the dead (useful if you decide the best way to discipline your adopted child is to burn him alive inside a hollow metal bull), and do a great many other incredible things, all before teatime. When the novel opens, Father is missing, and some unknown power has forced the godlings - librarians, as they call themselves, from the fact that their Father has required each of them to become expert in one of 12 "catalogs" of knowledge that he has written - out of their home, The Library. It slowly becomes clear that this is, intentionally or not, the trigger for a power struggle between the librarians, or at least those who believe they are capable of talking up the reins of Father's power.

The two main candidates are David, the master of the catalogue of war, and Carolyn, the master of the catalogue of languages. Yet despite their rivalry, they are at the same time co-operating, along with their brothers and sisters, each one a master of some catalogue of knowledge, in trying to find out what has happened to Father, and what is keeping them from the Library. Bearing in mind, always, that it might actually be one of them, or another of the librarians, behind everything.

It's also the story of two somewhat unusual men who are drawn into the apparent chaos - Steve and Erwin. Both are men with ambiguous pasts, one chosen - perhaps at random, perhaps not - by Carolyn, and the other a special government investigator who has noticed some of Carolyn's activities in the world beyond the Library and is on her trail.

Hawkins has done some fascinating worldbuilding here, drawing on theological and cosmological theory imagery from many cultures to create a unique view of time, the universe, and godhead. It's also an examination of the ethos of divinity, and as such, leaves many questions unanswered.

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Jill Lepore: The Secret History of Wonder Woman
Johanna Sinisalo: The Core of the Sun
Anthology: Sisters of the Revolution
Martin Delany: Blake, or the Huts of America
Lara Elena Donelly: Amberlough
Sam J. Miller: The Art of Starving
Lesley Nneka Arimah: What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky
Claire North: The End of the Day
Vita Sackville-West: Grand Canyon
Cynthia Ward: The Adventure of the Incognita Contessa
Karin Tidbeck: Amatka
Marjorie Lou and Sana Takeda: Monstress Vol 2 - The Blood
Naomi Alderman: The Power
Katharine Burdekin: Swastika Night
Ta-Nehisi Coates: Black Panther Vol. 1
Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda: Monstress Vol 1 - The Awakening
China Mièville: This Census-Taker
Short Fiction: February 3, 2017
Charlie Jane Anders: All the Birds in the Sky
Scott Hawkins: The Library at Mount Char

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My life in books

Books in my life

Entries tagged with g: speculative fiction

Jill Lepore: The Secret History of Wonder Woman

Johanna Sinisalo: The Core of the Sun

Anthology: Sisters of the Revolution

Martin Delany: Blake, or the Huts of America

Lara Elena Donelly: Amberlough

Sam J. Miller: The Art of Starving

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

Claire North: The End of the Day

Vita Sackville-West: Grand Canyon

Cynthia Ward: The Adventure of the Incognita Contessa

Karin Tidbeck: Amatka

Marjorie Lou and Sana Takeda: Monstress Vol 2 - The Blood

Naomi Alderman: The Power

Katharine Burdekin: Swastika Night

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Black Panther Vol. 1

Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda: Monstress Vol 1 - The Awakening

China Mièville: This Census-Taker

Short Fiction: February 3, 2017

Charlie Jane Anders: All the Birds in the Sky

Scott Hawkins: The Library at Mount Char