My life in books

Haven is the third volume of collected issues of Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda’s brilliant, beautiful, and disturbing graphic narrative, Monstress. Maika Halfwolf and her companions, Kippa the Arcanic fox-child and Ren the cat, are for the moment safe in Pontus, an independent city-state where refugees from all over the Known World have gathered. Pontus is protected by a magical shield, an artifact created by Maika’s ancestor, the Shaman Empress. But the shield was deactivated after the war, and it needs one strong in the Shaman Empress’ blood to reactivate it. The rulers of Pontus offer Maika a deal - permanent sanctuary if she will activate the shield for them. Maika continues to struggle against the blood and power cravings of the creature, Zinn, the Monstrum summoned - and beloved and loving in return - by her ancestor, that dwells within her.

As usual, Takeda’s art is breath-takingly beautiful, intricate, and evocative. Liu’s story continues to give us more clues into Maika’s past, the line of the Shaman Empress, and the mysterious mask, a fragment of which is in Maika’s keeping.. We also discover more about the Cumeae, and how deeply they are controlled by the Monstrum, siblings of Zinn, and their desire to bring about another war.

The complexity of the story and the worldbuilding behind it continues to wrap me up and carry me away to a fully realised other world with each installment I read. Also profoundly important to this story is the deep intention of the authors to make this a story that recognises the ones who are too often forgotten - the refugees, the damaged, the wounded, the victims of all the political games and the conflicts between the powerful who seek only more power, while the people who suffer in their battles want only to live in peace and happiness. And then, there’s the unavoidable fact that every person of importance in this story is a woman. Where so many other texts make women invisible, or limit the women who matter to the story to a rare handful, Liu and Takeda make virtually every plot point in this story turn on the actions of a woman. This in itself would make Monstress a very special text, but when there is so much more on top of this... I admit I’ve not exactly been an rabid consumer of graphic narratives, but this is easily one of the best I have seen.

Malaysian author Zen Cho made an impressive debut with her fantasy novel The Sorcerer and the Crown, which I found delightful and engaging, and hope will have a sequel one of these days. In the meantime, I have widened my experience of Cho’s writing with her short fiction collection, Spirits Abroad.

These stories are rich with the history and traditions of Cho’s homeland, but make enough reference to Western sensibilities to be wholly relevant and meaningful to the ignorant reader such as myself, in large part because the themes, though they may be clothed in different cultural realities, are universal human experiences - love, family, a need to belong.

As the title suggests, the stories in this collection are mostly what one might class as fantasy, with some more sciencefictional settings, drawing on Malaysian traditions of supernatural beings and forces - but they are often situated in what seems to be perfectly normal situations. The collection is divided into four sections, titled Here, meaning Malaysia, There, meaning the West, Elsewhere, and Going Back.

The first story of the collection, “The First Witch of Damansara,” is a darkly humorous story about a family preparing for the funeral of their matriarch, fondly referred to as Nai Nai - who is continuing to communicate with one of her granddaughters through dreams. Nai Nai does not want to be buried where her daughters now lives, but next to her long dead husband - not because she loved him, but because it’s the proper thing to do. The task of persuading Nai Nai to be happily buried where her family lives falls to the Americanised Vivian, who is more concerned with finding the right wedding dress - traditional Malaysian, or Western white? It’s funny, and it’s heart-warming, and it’s about family and traditions and legacies that go beyond material things.

“First National Forum on the Position of Minorities in Malaysia” begins as an account of an NGO organising and opening a conference, and in the process gives the reader unfamiliar with Malaysia a sense of the diversity of peoples and religions in the country, but then it morphs into a recollection of a bittersweet interspecies love story, as the two lovers meet again for a last farewell.

“The House of Aunts” features a young girl who is also a pontianak, an undead woman similar to the western vampire. Having become a pontianak while still an adolescent, Ah Lee lives much like other young girls - she goes to school, has crushes on handsome boys, and struggles over her homework. She lives in a house of women, all pontianak, all her relatives - her grandmother, great-grandmother, and several aunts - who watch over her, give her endless advice on staying in school, going to university, maybe becoming a doctor. And they distinctly disapprove when she falls in love with a boy from school - but are ready to stand by her when she reveals her secret to him, and is rejected. This is another story that centres on the primacy and importance of family, and particularly the love and support that women can give each other. I also suspect that Cho is telling us something about what it means to be a woman of reproductive age in Malaysian society, as traditionally pontianak are created when a woman dies while pregnant or in childbirth - for one family over the course of several generations to produce so many pontianak suggests a social issue with maternal morbidity.

“One-day Travelcard for Fairyland” takes place in England, at a private college prep school in the countryside that caters to international, largely Asian, students. Hui An wanders outside the school gates one day, and accidentally stumbles, stepping into a hole in the ground and killing a sleeping fairy. The next day, the fairies arrive in full force, angry and violent, and the teachers have vanished, leaving the students with only a few words of advice on dealing with fairies.

In “Rising Lion — The Lion Bows” we meet a troupe of lion dancers living in Britain who offer a special sideline to their regular performances - they also exterminate ghosts. But on this particular occasion, they just can’t bring themselves to terminate the ghost in question - a young African boy brought to England a century or more ago to be a servant. “Seven Star Drum” is also set among the members if this lion dance troupe, and tells the story of Boris, the troupe’s founder, who was born with the ability to see ghosts and other supernatural creatures.

“The Mystery of the Suet Swain” features Sham, a tall, hawk-nosed, brilliant but socially awkward lesbian, and her only friend Belinda, both university students. Belinda has a problem - she attracts stalkers, men who mistake her friendliness for something more. But there’s something different, scary, even dangerous about her latest mystery stalker, and Sham sets out to find out who - or what - he is. And to protect Belinda from him. And yes, Sham and Belinda remind me very much of another famous literary duo, and I hope to see more stories about them.

In “Prudence and the Dragon,” medical student Prudence Ong has to deal with a besotted dragon named Zheng Yi, who wants nothing more than to take her back with him to his own dimension to be his consort. Prudence, however, isn’t really interested, especially not now, while she’s still in med school. And not when his attentions seem to be casing trouble between Prudence snd her best friend Angela. Although even when the friends become reconciled, Zheng Yi’s presence is a problem for Angela as we read in “The Perseverance of Angela’s Past Life.” But, as Angela says, “Angela wasn't going to stop hanging out with her best friend just because doing so literally split her in two.” Friendship between women means something in Cho’s stories, which is a wonderful thing to see.

“The Earth Spirit’s Favorite Anecdote” is a charming little story about the beginning of a rather unusual partnership between an earth spirit and a forest spirit - funny, but with Cho’s familiar focus on the importance of relationships, and on understanding tradition, when to observe it, and when to break it.

“Liyana” is a tragic story, one in which a great evil is done for the good of others. I suppose in a way, it reminds me of Le Guin’s “Those Who Walk Away from Omelas” - a child, in this case non-human, but precious and loved, sacrificed because there is no other way to honor a previous, willing sacrifice, or keep a family alive.

“The Four Generations of Chang E” is a story about change, about leaving the past behind and moving forward, but still being tied to what has been before, at least for a time. In this story, the first Chang E flees a desolate future, escaping to the Moon, only to find herself out of place among the Moonites. Her daughter and granddaughter are, like her, between two worlds, still tainted by their immigrant past, nit quite a part of the future. But when the fourth Chang E fulfils her mother’s dying request to be buried on Earth, she discovers that she, the fourth generation, is finally of the Moon.

“The Many Deaths of Hang Jebat” is just what it says... a series of vignettes, each of which involves a character named Hang Jebat, being killed, blocked on social media, fired... experiencing some form of physical or social annihilation. Each vignette also involves his childhood friend, Tuah - who sometimes is killed by him, and sometimes kills him. In the background, a shadowy authority figure, Mansur. The permutations of events and settings, though, show some kind of connection, and some kind of slow change in the relationship of Tuah and Hang Jebat. It’s a story to contemplate.

“The Fish Bowl” is a dark story, about a girl living in a culture of achievement, expected to do well in so many things, to be excellent, until the pressure if it drives her to erase herself to escape. It hit me very hard, partly because a friend of mine, back in school, was in the same place, and erased herself completely, finally, irrevocably. But it’s an excellent story, and at the same time a caution about demanding more of a person than they have the resources to give.

In Malaysia, they hold a festival of the Hungry Ghost. Ghosts who have died violently, or with unfulfilled longings, or otherwise still hungry for life, can return to the earth for this one month, experience old things, or new ones. In “Balik Kampung,” Lydia is a newly deceased ghost, who does not remember how she died. But she is a hungry ghost - she thinks it is because her parents were always quarreling, more focused on their own pain than her happiness. She want to go back to the place where she lived with her husband, the only time she believes she was truly happy. But even the dead must face the truth in order to move on.

There’s not one weak story in the collection, in my opinion, and Cho provides notes for each story at the end of the book to provide context and help readers with some of the more specific cultural references. The ebook version contains an excerpt from the author’s novella, “The Dangerous Life of Jade Yeo,” which quite caught my interest and is now on my “must get very soon” list.

In A Torch Against the Night, Sabaa Tahir continues the story of Elias and Laia, two people with very different pasts struggling against an empire that has become corrupt, violent and cruel.

Elias and Laia, fleeing the destruction of the military complex of Blackcliff, part military training school, part imperial barracks, part prison, have embarked on a desperate mission to free Laia’s brother Darien from the feared prison of Kaur.

The ascent to power of the new Emperor Marcus, a particularly vicious former Mask - a magically augmented Imperial soldier - has brought about political instability, which Elias’s mother, Keris, the ruthless Commandant of the Imperial Academy, seeks to use for her own ambitions. The rebellion of the .scholars, a conquered servant class, has been brutally put down by Marcus and the Commandant, and Helene Aquila, Elias’ former ally, has been appointed Blood Shrike - the leader of the Emperor’s personal military force, the Black Guard - and her first task is to find, torture and execute Elias for his treason.

It’s a non-stop chase across deserts and mountains, with the political terrain as uncertain as the physical. Allies are tested, traitors uncovered, unlikely partnerships formed, and long-laid plots revealed.

Tahir takes her characters in directions I had not expected, and the twists in the story kept me quite fully engaged. Looking forward to the next volume.

Katherine Arden’s The Girl in the Tower continues the story of Vasya, rebellious and half-magical wild girl, in the very patriarchal land of feudal Muscovy. Vasilisa Petrovna, the daughter of a country boyar and his first wife, herself the child of a woman thought of as at least half witch, has always seen the spirits and ghosts that live in countryside and in households. From her childhood she has held the attention of the immortal spirit known as Morozov, the winter-king, the one who comes for the dying. Alone, cast out by her village after the death of her father and the accusations of a maddened priest who both fears and lusts after her strangeness, Morozov has gifted her with a horse out of legend and provisions and gold enough for her to travel the world - for a girl like Vasya there can never be peace in marriage or convent, the only two respectable choices for a woman of her time and place.

In her early travels, Vasya encounters the horrors of burnt-out villages and stories of girls taken by bandits to be sold. When she impulsively tracks the bandits with the help of the household spirit of one if the kidnapped girls, she stumbles into a vast plot to destroy her kin, the rulers of Muscovy. Forced to conceal her identity and pretend to be a boy, Vasya faces bandits, ghosts, Tatars, horrified priests, outraged siblings and vengeful princes, and a deathless minster who seeks in a girl of her grandmother’s bloodline the restoration of his powers.

And survives. Vasya’s spirit carries the story once more, with her courage and determination to live life in her own terms.

More Retro Hugo reading - this time, it’s Best Novel finalist The Uninvited, by Irish novelist, playwright, journalist and historian Dorothy MacArdle. MacArdle herself was an Irish nationalist, feminist, labour organiser, and revolutionary colleague of Eamon de Valera.

The novel was originally published in Ireland in 1941 under the title Uneasy Freehold, and was released a year later in the United States as The Uninvited; in 1944 it was made into a Hollywood movie.

The Uninvited is a ghost story somewhat in the Gothic style, but its messages are modern - the silencing of women’s voices, women’s stories, and the ways in which women are turned into symbols to be revered - or despised - while being ignored as real, autonomous beings with both virtues and flaws. There is considerable psychological depth in MacArdle’s telling of the story, and much that delights even as it creates a slow mounting unease.

MacArdle takes her time in introducing her characters, setting the scene, suggesting the outlines of the secrets that must be brought into the open. The immediate action of the story begins with half-Irish siblings, Pamela and Roderick Fitzgerald. Roddy, the older sibling, is an established London journalist focusing on cultural issues, particularly drama. He’s dealing with the end of a difficult relationship, and writing a book on the history of English censorship (it’s worth noting that his career todate revolves around symbolism and silence). Pamela is recovering from the loneliness and isolation of several years spent caring fir their dying father (again, note the situation of a woman trapped in a position of idealised self-sacrifice).

They decide to buy a house in the country, where Pamela can restore her energy and Roddy can have quiet for writing. The place they settle on has been vacant for most of the past 15 years. The owner, Stella, a young woman of 18 living with her grandfather, has not set foot in the house since she was taken from it as a child, shortly after the death of her mother. The grandfather, with whom the Fitzgeralds negotiate, warns them that the house was sold before, to a couple who deserted it due to “disturbances.”

Warned but not concerned, Roddy and Pamela move in, begin renovating and making the house their own. And there are indeed disturbances - starting with lonely sighs in the night and developing slowly into a full haunting. Rooms in which one becomes unaccountably depressed, strange lights, a recurring scent of mimosa, sudden sensations of extreme cold, and eventually apparitions of a pale, blonde woman who resembles Stella’s dead mother.

Pamela convinces Roddy that they must try to discover the secrets of the house and the haunting, convinced that there must be a way to free whatever spirits are trapped there. They begin asking questions of neighbours, people who knew the family before tragedy struck. Slowly, the story emerges, but only in outline. The house was at the end home to three people - Meredith Llewellyn, Stella’s father, an artist, much disliked by most who recalled him; Mary, remembered by sll as a saintly, gentle woman with enormous patience and generosity toward her husband; and Carmel, a Spanish girl brought into the household by Meredith, his model and, most believed, his lover. Mary died in a fall from a cliff on a stormy night, with Carmel near and suspected of possibly causing her death; Carmel died not long after from pneumonia caught on that night, exacerbated by exposure after she fled the house. Pamela and Roddy, hearing these accounts, begin to think there are two spirits in the house, Carmel, filled with hatred, seeking revenge, and Mary, trying to protect her daughter Stella from Carmel’s rage.

Meanwhile, Stella and Roddy have fallen in love, but Stella’s sense of self - already damaged by her grandfather, who idolised his daughter and has tried to mould his granddaughter into her image, is collapsing under the pressure of the haunting. All too soon she seems to be racing toward madness, in a way which only further convinces Pamela and Roddy that the two dead women are somehow battling for Stella’s soul - the doctor treating her describes her condition as bordering on schizophrenia, saying “she has been a stained-glass saint and a crazy little gypsy in turns,” evoking the images that have been forming of Mary and Carmel in their minds, the archetypal contrast between virgin and whore.

In addition to exploring the consequences of this classic idealisation/demonisation trope, MacArdle also looks at, though less markedly, the ways in which race and class intersect with gender, and uses the vehicle of the ghost story as a way of suggesting the intergenerational trauma resulting from the silencing of marginalised voices.

MacArdle tells the tale with great skill, moving slowly at first, giving us a Roshomon-like perspective of the central events that led to the haunting, each observer giving a slightly different tale, each tale carrying its own weight of preconceptions and bias. As the intensity of the ghostly manifestations, and the severity of Stella’s mental anguish, increase, so does the pace of the narrative, and the urgency of the siblings to discover the truth and save Stella, until the final events, and the long-concealed truths, come rushing out. A deeply moving story, well-told.

In Monstrous Beauty, Marie Brennan’s collection of retellings of fairy tales, the happy endings of the classic stories of princes and princesses, queens and little girls visiting their grandmothers transmuted into horror. The title is an apt one - just as most of the fairy tales feature women so beautiful they inspire acts of the greatest cruelty and courage, these retellings give us monsters disguised in beauty, and the cruelest of fates.

It’s a slim volume, seven short stories - one of them very short indeed - and where the source materials, at least in the sanitised versions we now read to children, are about things like the power of love to conquer all, these are more about the evil that lies beneath the glamour. These are worlds where darkness waits for the bold, where mysterious women alone in the wilderness are best ignored, where love cannot conquer death. Brennan is scholar of folklore, and she knows that many of the stories we tell our children in picture books and animated films have much darker roots. In these stories, she reaches for the depths underneath the pretty stories, and gives them to is, unvarnished and untamed.

Daniel José Older’s YA fantasy Shadowshaper is a rich fantasy drawing on contemporary urban mythologies commingled with older traditions with Hispanic and African roots. The protagonist, Sierra, is a mixed race young woman whose family came to New York from Puerto Rico. She’s a talented street artist who makes fantastic, monumental murals on abandoned buildings. And perhaps, she is something more.

Sierra helps her family care for her grandfather Lázaro, who is paralysed and not entirely coherent following a severe stroke, but who keeps trying to communicate a message to her, about a person called Lucera, about shadowshapers, and about the importance of a mural she’s working on. At his insistence, she recruits another street artist, a Haitian boy named Robbie, to help her complete her mural. It turns out he’s a shadowshaper himself, but is reluctant to talk about it.

What he does tell her, and what she manages to glean from remarks by some of her abuelo’s old friends - and in one case, the notes of one old friend gone missing who was an anthropologist studying urban mythology and magic systems - is that something is going wrong, some evil force is possessing the dead body of one of her abuelo’s friends, and Lucera, a spirit woman, may be the key if she can be found.

Sierra slowly learns that shadowshapers are people gifted with the ability to make alliances with spirits, to create shapes that spirits can inhabit. Most shadowshapers draw forms for the spirits they work with, but some, like her abuelo, could tell stories so vividly that the shadows, or spirits, could manifest in his words. For real shadowshapers, this is a cooperative thing, they invite the shadows to come into their work, and the shadows, in return, agree to help the shadowshaper. But there are shadowshapers who are corrupted by power, and these can force the spirits into doing their bidding, turn them into corrupted haints, used them to animate the dead. And it seems that one such corrupted shadowshaper is waging war against Sierra, her abuelo, and his friends.

As Sierra learns more about her family and her abilities, the dangers grow stronger, but her friends band around her for the final showdown between the evil that seeks to destroy her family and the other remaining shadowshapers, and take the gifts of shadowshaping for itself.

Sierra is a wonderfully realised character. Strong, talented, she is at once an ordinary teenaged girl dealing with body image and first boyfriend, and the inheritor of a powerful mystical tradition. She’s a warrior on many levels - she fights for her family’s mystical heritage, but she also fights as best she can against the day-to-day issues she faces as a yiung woman of mixed race - street harassment, casual racism, colourism among her own relatives, some of whom disapprove of her “nappy hair” and hanging out with a boy darker skinned than she is. Sierra’s worlds are both fantastic, and very real, and that’s a big part of what makes her such a pleasure to read about. Representation matters, and this is representation at its best.

Shadowhouse Fall, the sequel to Shadowshaper, takes place several months after the first book. Sierra, as the new Lucera, or central focus of the spiritual powers that allow her and others like her to work with the spirits, is rebuilding the shadowshaper community with a new generation of practitioners, including her own mother, finally reconciled to their family legacy.

Sierra is waiting for trouble. Back when she was first discovering her abilities and tracking down Wicks, the corrupt power-seeker who was responsible for the deaths of so many of her grandfather’s shadowshapers friends, she crossed paths with powers called the Sorrows, who were using Wicks for their own purposes, and wanted to use her, too.

Now the Sorrows have sent her a message, through one of her schoolmates, a white girl named Mina, who tries to give her a card that looks like a Tarot card, but not one from any deck she’s every heard of. All Mina can tell her is that something known as The Deck is now “in play” and that the Sorrows are trying to connect the cards of the deck with the people each card represents. And that it means trouble for those of the Shadowhouse. While she doesn’t know much about what it means, or how to use it, she does know that whoever holds the deck will have an advantage in whatever is coming. And right now, that advantage is hers - if she can figure out how to use it before the Sorrows and their allies destroy her house and her people.

In addition to the things like plot, characters, worldbuilding, use of language, description, dialogue, and all those other things that can make or break a book, and which are all good in these two books, what is wonderful about Shadowshaper and Shadowhouse Fall is the way that Older works real life issues into his created world. This is a universe that acknowledges things like police brutality, racism, colourism ablism, sexism, and shows the little everyday things that wear away at anyone who is marginalised. Dealing with the metal detectors every day at school. Learning your friend is dealing with a mental health issue and trying not to say the stupid ableist things. Coping with your aunt’s colourism. Not trusting a white teacher to get it right when they teach about slavery. Wolfwhistles and catcalls on the street when all you want is to be left to your own business in peace. This is more than a fantasy about young people gaining their powers and coming of age. It’s also a realistic story about living in an unjust world and coping with the daily assaults and microagressions. That’s a huge part of what makes these books not just good, but special.

More novelettes from 1942 pulp magazines.

Isaac Asimov’s “Runaround” is one of the Mike Donovan Robot stories, in which a robot acts strangely and Donovan has to figure out why, and how to fix the problem. Both error and solution usually involve some bizarre circumstances that impacts on the way the robot resolves the tensions between the famous Three Laws of Robotics, and this story falls perfectly into the pattern. A robot with a deliberately heightened sense of self preservation is given a casually worded order to do something that would endanger him. In this case, the two a mathematically balanced, causing the robot to run in circles around the location he was ordered to, while singing Gilbert and Sullivan songs. Kind of amusing, standard Asimov robot story.

1942 was the year in which Isaac Asimov published the first of the stories that would eventually become his iconic Foundation series. “Foundation” is the origin story, which gives us the basic background to the series, and covers the first “Seldon crisis” - how will Terminus, the remote and relatively isolated home of the First Foundation and the Encyclopedists, hold into its independence as the Empire crumbles? It really was one of the most ambitious concepts of its time, even granting that lots of writers were creating lengthy and complex histories for their fictional universes, from Heinlein to “Doc” Smith. Just one month after “Foundation” appeared in print, the second story dealing with the next Seldon crisis, was published as “Bridle and Saddle.”

1942 also saw the publication of Asimov’s “Friar of the Black Flame,” in which an Earth ruled by the reptilian Llhasinu from Vega are driven from Earth and destroyed by a battle force drawn from all the human worlds. It’s fairly standard milsf, but what makes the story interesting is that it mentions Trantor as one of the human worlds, establishing it as part of the backhistory of the Foundation series.

Alfred Bester’s “The Push of a Finger” is a story of the sort we now associate with the “butterfly effect” - the idea that a butterfly’s wings flapping could a tornado on the other side of the world - though of course it predates that formulation. In a future society where the prime principle is stability, a machine is developed capable of calculating the future - and it predicts the end of the universe in a catastrophic scientific experiment in only a thousand years. The pronosticators use the machine to track back to the one moment that, if changed, can prevent the disaster. There’s a surprise plot twist, of course, which the modern reader will immediately deduce because we’ve seen it too many times, but the story is well told and, I expect, was fairly new and original back in 1942.

Lester del Rey’s novelette “My Name Is Legion” is an example of the “time loop” story, in which the subject is caught in the same sequence of time, looping through the same events. In this story, it’s a defeated Hitler trapped in the loop by a scientist bent on revenge for the deaths if his Jewish wife and children, and it is a particularly nasty loop with an all-too-appropriate end built into it. Quite an effective story.

“Though Poppies Grow,” also by del Rey, is the most powerful of all the war-themed anti-fascism stories I’ve read in the past few weeks, and there have been quite a few of those, what with the US being at war in 1942. In this story, the ghost of the Unknown Soldier from WWI is called forth from his tomb, acting out the promise from the famous poem - “If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields.” The writing in this novelette is so evocative, so well-honed, as del Rey follows the young soldier, confused, knowing only that he has a mission, wandering through the streets of Washington, touching people as he passes in various ways. At first he does not know he is dead, a ghost, but slowly as it dawns on him, he is overwhelmed, until at last, he is led to understand his role is to remind these who waver, or are complacent, that there can be no compromise with fascism, with tyranny, with hatred. The story is exquisitely told, the character made so real you can feel his struggle to understand, the message as important today as it was in 1942.

A story in a completely different vein, del Rey’s Lunar Landing s about a mission to the moon, sent in the (faint) hope of rescuing three men from the first lunar voyage. The crew of the Moth - five men and two women - encounter serious problems in landing themselves, and their search for the first ship becomes even more important because they hope to cannibalise it for parts they’ll need to get home themselves. But very little goes as planned in this mission, beginning with the first surprise, plant and animal life adapted for survival on the moon. As I’ve noted elsewhere, del Rey’s style, like Heinlein’s, has aged well. His characters are quite fully and realistically developed, and the two women in the story are intelligent, brave and have lived lives of their own - they have relationships with men, but are not defined solely by them.

Ross Rocklynne’s “Jackdaw” portrays the bewilderment of an alien species on discovering a world where only one living being remains, alone on a planet whose cities, roads and farms have been destroyed by massive bombardment. When the lone survivor dies in a suicide attack on their craft, they are bewildered, but despite their best attempts, the end of the species and the actions of its last member remain incomprehensible to a species that cannot envision war.

“QRM—Interplanetary” by George O. Smith is a cautionary tale of what can happen when you put a businessman whose only focus, and area of expertise, is cost-cutting, in charge of a facility that depends on scientific and engineering excellence to function. QRM, we are told, is the shortwave code for man-made interference in radio transmission. The story takes place in a communications relay station on an asteroid whose orbit is positioned such as to ensure radio transmission between Earth and Mars at all points of both planets’ orbits. The man-made interference is a new Director who knows nothing about either the technical aspects of communication, nor the intricacies of life in an artificially sustained environment. The consequences of his policies, while humorously described, are disastrous. Eventually, the proper order is restored, but not before his decisions come close to killing everyone on the station.

1942 was the date of E. Mayne Hull’s first published work, a haunting novelette called “The Flight That Failed.” Set during the war, it’s the story of a time traveller who tries to avert the destruction of a plane crossing the Atlantic with a secret cargo that will change the course of the history he knows if it gets through.

Fredric Brown’s “The Star Mouse” is a rather poignant tale about a mouse who is shot into space in a small experimental rocket built by your standard eccentric tinkering scientist. Mitkey, as he’s been called by the professor, and his rocket come to the attention of a civilisation of very small people living on an asteroid that happens to be passing near earth. Concerned about potential threats from humans, they explore Mitkey’s memories to find our what they can about human civilisation - but doing this involves giving Mitkey intelligence equal to that of humans. Mitkey goes home again, but alas, the boost in IQ doesn’t last. Still, he survives, is reunited with his mate, and the professor provides him with lots of cheese.

In Jane Rice’ “Pobby” a writer of horror starts a new story - his idea is to tell a gruesome tale of a poor farmer named Pobby who finds a strange seed, plants and waters it, hoping that it might grow into a rare flower that will make him some money, only to be eaten by it once it flowers. As he starts to write his installments for magazine publication, however, someone named Pobby, who looks and talks like the character he’s writing about, appears to various of his friends, saying he needs to find the writer and get him to stop making him grow the flower, because he doesn’t want to die. Finally, Pobby and the writer meet face to face, but the writer persists in following his story - until he finds himself in a writers block just before the final scene. Frustrated, he travels to the lace where he has set Pobby’s farm, finding the town much as he’s written it, with characters he’s mentioned, and Pobby’s farm, where he discovers the cause of his block - Pobby, out of desperation, has written his own ending to the story. An interesting exploration of the conceit that characters can take on a life of their own.

“The Magicians’ Dinner,” also by Jane Rice, is a comic ghost story about a young bride, married to a magician, who tries to handle a dinner for forty in their first home, when she’s never cooked before. Fortunately for her, her family’s long-dead cook decides to return from the other side to save her firmer employers’ daughter’s bacon, so to speak. The tale is told in first person, the narrator is rather self-depreciating and quite engaging and likable, so that the story comes across as light-hearted and sweet. We will pass over the class issues and the trope of the help who care more for the families of their employers than they can for their own, and some if the annoyingly sexist assumptions about how marriages between men and women should work.

In Rice’s “The Elixir,” the narrative voice is again a somewhat unconventional woman, a out-spoken, accident-prone, unmarried writer of mystery novels. In this light-hearted time travel yarn, Amy Parrish’s equally unconventional neighbour, Clare Holloway, throws a Halloween party and Amy decides to attend as a witch. While waiting for the party to get started, Amy mixes up a batch of punch, tossing in liquor, ice cream, and halloween candy, while reciting some off-the-cuff doggerel, and ends up in Salem during the witch hunts. Much strangeness ensues, but all ends well, with Amy back in her own time, wondering if everything happened as she recalls it, or if she was just drunk silly and hallucinating. Having read several of Rice’s stories now, I must say that I am quite delighted with her descriptive style, which is both unique and very apt, and her mastery of tone. It’s a pity that her work is not remembered nearly as well as that of other writers of this era.

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.

"After We Walked Away," Erica L. Satifka; Apex Magazine, November 21, 2016
http://www.apex-magazine.com/after-we-walked-away/

A literalised response to Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," this story follows two young people, man and woman, who left "The Solved City" - clearly based on Omelas - because they could not accept the violent magic on which the city is founded, that the deliberately caused unending suffering of just one child could produce a utopia for everyone else. They find our society, where almost everyone suffers, from systematic oppression and cruelty, and in different ways regret their decision. It's a strongly written and emotionally disturbing story, but it misses one very important thing. Le Guin's story is not about rejecting a utopia based on horror for some other existing world; Omelas is our society, or at least an an allegorical reference to it. Those who walk away are the rebels who reject our acquiescence in the very real cruelty and oppression in our world, the comforting lie that the poor will always be with us, with its corollary that therefore we need do nothing for them. They are the ones who would change the paradigm, who would give up their privilege to end the horror others experience.

It's a well-crafted and moving story, but at its heart it is dishonest in setting up a straw man to refute, and disingenuous in using that straw man to argue that the suffering of one is easier to accept than the suffering of many. I would rather remain with the vision given form by Le Guin, that there are those among us who realise that as long as one of us is chained, none of us is free.


"Crocodile Tears," Jaymee Goh; Lightspeed Magazine, September 2016
http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/crocodile-tears/

Goh here reworks a traditional folk tale of revenge. In Goh's version, a crocodile brings brings news to a successful man who has abandoned his family, telling him of the fates of his mother, his lover and the unborn child he left behind.


"That Game We Played During the War," Carrie Vaughn; tor.com, March 16, 2016
http://www.tor.com/2016/03/16/that-game-we-played-during-the-war/

A sparsely written but deeply moving story about war and what happens when war is over and two sides try to make a peace, summed up in the interactions between two veterans, one from each side. Calla is a military nurse; during the was it was her duty to keep Valk - a member of a telepathic race - and other prisoners of war under sedation to dull their abilities. Later in the war, fortunes have shifted and Calla is the prisoner, Valk her keeper. Remembering the games of chess he watched her play with he other staff, he asks her to teach him, and together they find a way to enjoy playing a game of strategy between one who reads minds and one who does not. When a peace finally comes, Valk, recovering from wounds in hospital, asks Cala to visit him and bring 'the game they played during the war.'

Working together on the game creates a bond that can become a bridge, a way of understanding and building a trust that may support the fragile peace. A story of hope, a microcosm of good will between people tired of war.


"Bargain," Sarah Gailey; Mothership Zeta, December 27, 2015
http://mothershipzeta.org/2015/12/27/bargain-by-sarah-gailey/#more-289

"Bargain" is 2017 Campbell Award finalist Sarah Gailey's first professional sale, and it is a fine story indeed, in which old woman offers her soul and her life to a demon in return for health and youth for her dying wife - with such will and love that even the demon looks for a way to subvert the nature of the deal. Told with a surprisingly appropriate light, even humorous touch, it left me with tears brimming in my eyes, and a goofy smile on my face.


"Of Blood and Bronze," Sarah Gailey; Devilfish Review, Issue 17
https://devilfishreview.com/issues/issue-seventeen/of-blood-and-bronze-by-sarah-gailey/

Framed as a steampunk fairy tale, this is haunting and horrifying story of the mechanisms of corruption, and the truth that the ends cannot justify the means because they are changed and tainted by them. An alchemist works a terrible magic to save the life of the innocent and good young bride of a mad old king, so that she may rule the kingdom until the heir comes of age, with the best of intentions, and the unhappiest of consequences.


"The Art of Space Travel," Nina Allen; Tor.com, July 27, 2016
http://www.tor.com/2016/07/27/the-art-of-space-travel/

Thirty years ago, the first mission to Mars ended in tragedy. The second mission is about to be launched, and two of the astronauts are scheduled to spend a night at the Edison Star hotel, where Emily Starr is head of housekeeping. Emily's mother Moolie, formerly a physicist, is mentally impaired and slowly dying as the result of forensic work she did on a plane downed by a dirty bomb. Sometimes she hints that Emily's father had some connection with space, perhaps even with the doomed Mars mission. The only physical link Emily has to her unknown father is a book, The Art of Space Travel, that Moolie says once belonged to him.

While this novelette has a sciencefictional setting, the real story is about daughters watching mothers age and become infirm, about children seeking, finding, and losing parents, about family and secrets and love, and about aspirations followed and aspirations left fallow. The Mars mission stands as a symbol of hope and persistence, but truly there are a hundred things that could have taken its place. Still, the implications of venturing into the unknown add to the poignancy of Moolie's terminal condition. A strong story about families and finding one's place and purpose, well written, but somewhat lacking in the 'what if' one looks for in science fiction.


"Jackalope Wives," Ursula Vernon; Apex Magazine, January 7, 2014
http://www.apex-magazine.com/jackalope-wives/

I read this because I knew I was going to read Vernon's "The Tomato Thief," which takes place in the same setting and shares a key character, and I wanted to know the backstory for that character.

Vernon's writing in this story is poetic and realistic by turns, which is appropriate considering it is a story about those who cross the boundaries of the magical and the mundane. There's wonderful sense of place - the southwestern American desert becomes a fairytale landscape where all sorts of magic are possible, and creatures out of myth are as real as the sun and the dry earth and the animals and plants that make a home there.

One one level, this is a story about making choices, and accepting consequences and shouldering responsibilities, and setting things right. But it's also a commentary on the way that men see women and assume that what they want, they can take - and how the consequences of that fall only on the women.

The key character, Grandma Harken, is a woman who has suffered a great loss at the hands and through the choices of a man, but has learned to accept what came from it, and make the best of her circumstances, and to come to terms with a changed life, making it her own. When given the choice between regaining what was lost, or saving another from the fate she accepted - a loss caused by another man, one she is kin to - she takes on the responsibility for setting right her grandson's wrongs. She is willing to make whatever sacrifice must be made - but though this is presented as a kind of pragmatic heroism, at the root of it, what she is doing is choosing once more to accept the consequences of a man and his unchecked desires.

The story bothers me. Its beautifully crafted, and the characters live and breathe just as the desert cones alive in the mind. It's a really good story. But It leaves me wondering how to respond to what it's saying. In a sense, it's about women who choose to live with the things men do, to clean up their messes and live with the consequences of them, because someone has to do the right thing, and the men in their lives certainly aren't going to do it. Are we to admire Grandma Harken, or pity her, or just to hope that someday men will stop taking from women - and the world around them - without thought for the consequences?


"The Tomato Thief," Ursula Vernon; Apex Magazine, January 5, 2016
http://www.apex-magazine.com/the-tomato-thief/

This novelette is a return to the magical fairytale desert Vernon created in "Jackalope Wives" and to its central character, the shapeshifter-become-human Grandma Harken, with her sense of responsibility and duty. There's a certain similarity of theme here as well, in that Grandma Harken finds herself - grumbling about her age and mortality but still shouldering responsibility for making things right - setting out to save a woman caught in a powerful spell by a man of power.

There are some marvelous touches to the story that show the desert magic as a growing, evolving thing, adapting to the changes forced on it by the encroachment of man. The building of trains to cross and divide the desert has brought about the existence of the train-gods, and fittingly, their priests are found among the descendants of those forced to work on the railroads for the benefit of men of power living in the industrial east, the children of Asian labourers and indentured European workers.

Grandma Harken needs the intervention of the train-gods to find the hiding place of the sorcerer, who has folded the land around himself - and when she enters his domain, she will need all her wisdom and cunning, and the allies she makes along the way, to set things right again, defeat the sorcerer, and undo the damage done to people, animals and land.

Again, I find myself loving the story, the words, the imagery, the worldbuilding, the characters, the skill that went into its creation, while being unsettled by the story's implications. The underlying politics - in the sense of power relations - are clear, as they were in Vernon's earlier story. It's a reflection of the politics of our own world. Men of power, rich men, white men, men who think they can take and use and make everything they want their own, do as they will, which mostly causes distortion and harm to the land, to the creatures of nature and to the people without power. And because someone has to do it, it's the ones who have suffered who do what they can to ameliorate the damage. It's accurate, but I think what bothers me is that as Vernon writes these tales, it's just the way it is. There's no sense that it's not just the actions of the powerful, but the basic underlying dynamic that makes the powerless responsible for the work of mitigating the wrongs of other, is in itself wrong. There's just Grandma Harken, and the train-god priests, and the little girl who will be Grandma Harken's apprentice, who heroically shoulder the burdens that belong to others.