I often think fondly of anthologies, and these two were no different – I’m blogging about them here mainly as a matter of record, but I located several authors from each who I have subsequently enjoyed.
Genre fiction
The Jessie Shimmer series by Lucy A. Snyder features a protagonist who seems to actively work to be unlikable. In Spellbent, the first of the series, Jessie needs to retrieve her boyfriend from hell, all while the forces of magic that prevent it from overstepping the boundaries of mundane city.
Thoughts:
- She and her boyfriend use magic for their own greater glory, which is a sin in this world. As often happens in this genre, the sin is then overwhelmed by greater sins of power-seeking by the establishment.
- Jessie does not become more likeable through this, however.
- The hell is interesting – there are scary demons of course, but it seems to mostly recreate common family scenes that trigger both Jessie and her boyfriend in emotional trauma.
I haven’t read any of the rest of the series yet…
As so often happens, I stumbled upon Kiernan’s work in an anthology of ghost stories. While the Tinfoil Dossier isn’t a trilogy, I plowed through the first two books in a couple of sittings, and I’m excited for the third.
Agents of Dreamland sets up a world in which FBI agents are noir-ish navigators of multiple worlds, and the psychopaths are capable of manipulating the material of which individuals are made. There are at least three separate plotlines, and two of them take place outside of our current space-time bubble.
Thoughts:
- Kiernan demands a lot of her readers, especially considering the genre. She doesn’t offer a lot of clues as to what’s going on, and the novel jumps into very strange characters’ heads in an almost Vandermeerian fashion.
- She also does what so many novels do now (and still revolutionary to me in some ways) – assumes that global warming is a thing and doesn’t even call attention to it.
On to the next one…
I enjoyed Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (and admittedly have never watched the film), so when Slade House came up on a list of great ghost stories I decided to check it out.
I’m happy I did. Slade House tells the story of two soul carnivores, members of a sect of Anchorites, who lure people into their house (which exists in a time bubble, having been destroyed in the Blitz in 1942). They, of course, consume their souls in order to live forever.
Thoughts:
- The two Anchorites are brother and sister, and have learned some pretty interesting tricks.
- Having your soul consumed is not pleasant.
- They are eventually defeated (sort of) by a cop who has had his soul consumed but who managed to get a hairpin into the hands of the next victim, who uses it.
- This act also alerts an Horologist to the presence of the twins. The consequences for the Anchorites are not good.
- The scenes in which the twins bend time in order to lure victims are particularly interesting – the sense of surrealism and lack of connection with reality are well-described, and come complete with the types of irreconcilable details that seem insignificant at the time but that as good fans of horror we know we should be aware of.
I’m looking forward to the rest of Mitchell’s works.
Anthologies can be tricky, but Seize the Night was consistent in having solid, interesting stories throughout. The editor gets credit for that, and I think it also points to an interesting phenomenon of the intertoobz – it can be hard to make a living as a writer on it, mostly because of the sheer mass of interesting writing out there, but the Web in particular facilitates the ease of development of communities for genres that feel sort of splintered but encompass real passionate fan bases. The potential to produce schlock is out here – rigid adherence to generic conventions after all – but a well-edited anthology offers new looks at those conventions and offers interesting, novel directions.
For me the problem with blogging about anthologies is that in the interest of keeping post-lengths manageable I don’t have space to write about multiple stories. I could write about multiple stories in here, especially the ones by John Lindvquist and Rio Youers, but perhaps the most messed-up was a Lolita-meets-The Hunger story by Robert Shearman about a teacher and his very Mannesque-justification of his own pedophilia, only to find out that the tween he is attracted to has other plans in mind. Shearman eerily duplicates Humbert Humbert’s odd faux innocent tone. A revenge fantasy for victims of sexual predators isn’t an idea I’ve ever had for a story, but damn it felt okay when my guess about his fate was proven correct.
I added several names to my to-read list from this anthology – here’s hoping they approach the quality of what I read in Seize the Night.
This sounds trite, but Becky Chambers has managed to write the most human science fiction I’ve ever read. It has all of the world-building that good science fiction is supposed to have, but somehow Chambers has build a universe full of non-humans that is empathetic and tragic and romantic and, well, all of that.
A Closed and Common Orbit features two intersecting stories that I was pretty sure would connect, but I don’t think that Chambers intends that connection as a gotcha. Instead, we get a before-and-after of a broken person who, through the help of an AI and her own resilience, has managed to escape a horrific upbringing and can feel the type of empathy that helps her help others (and thus seek her own liberation).
The novel also features lots of AIs, and one even develops the ability to sacrifice itself (or at least its desire for a body). What Chambers does for the conversation about AIs may not be completely healthy in the short-term, but if SF is a way to envision the future, then hopefully we can envision a future with AIs where they don’t become terminators but instead become fully human in ways that the best of us imagine…
The period of U.S. history that covers post-Civil War to the Great Depression fascinates me, and Harrow’s The Once and Future Witches, set in 1893, hits many of the big issues of the time – women’s suffrage, race, the rise of the labor movement – while adding a look at the fear of female power that drove the original Salem witch trials.
Harrow hits on all the usual suspects and provides a lens through which we as readers can look at the 1890s. She acknowledges the whiteness of the original suffragette movement, the isolation of various groups within the labor movement, and the fierceness of the reaction from the forces of capital and authority. More interestingly, she looks for connections between those movements, and while her alliances feel like ones we would expect, they are welcome nonetheless, as they describe historical moments from the perspective of power and agency.
The lines that Harrow draws between what happened at Salem and the ways that women were (and continue to be) oppressed are coherent and well-described. Moreover, they provide the type of qualitative look that makes movements of resistance resonate, even if the stories that appear are set in a fantastical landscape. Magic as a metaphor for cultural power is a useful literary device, and Harrow’s utilization is a fun read as well.
Who knew that you could read science fiction for the characters? Becky Chambers’s The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is a delight, with interesting characters and a well-thought-out universe.
Thoughts:
- The only character who dies is the AI, and Chambers uses that death to make a point about AIs and citizenship.
- The crew of the Wayfarer is quirky as heck, and multi-species. They also engage in both mysticism (having an alien who, because they are infected with a virus, can see folds in space) and hard-core physics (they tunnel between loops in the space-time continuum).
I’m very much looking forward to reading more of Chambers. This novel was way more than I could have imagined, especially since it follows a ship that is essentially a contractor. Who knew that the future would favor the eclectic?
I’m often embarrassed by the books I haven’t heard of. Just when I want to think of myself as at least a well-read aficionado in a genre I find mentions of a text that seems fundamental to that genre, and the fact that I haven’t read those books makes me sort of feel like an imposter.
Hyperion is one of those novels. I stumbled across a mention of it somewhere, and I realized that maybe I’m not reading as much scifi as I should be. So thanks to my local library I got my hands on a digital copy, and, well, the hype is real.
Hyperion lovingly riffs on multiple other texts. It borrows its format from The Canterbury Tales, with travelers telling each other tales of how they came to be on this mission. The fact that their trip is mission-based is Simmons’s update of Chaucer, as he adds eminent world destruction to a story of pilgrimage.
As if that’s not enough, each separate story comes from either a scifi sub-genre or a specific author – there’s Heinlein, Asimov, LeGuin, and Bradbury at a minimum, and genres such as cyberpunk, showcasing Simmons’s ability to work in each of those genres and/or styles.
In each case Simmons does what good authors do – he engages in conversation with the original, either author or genre, and extends that conversation in brilliant and thought-provoking ways. As a reader, it’s fun to both recognize the original and marvel at the extension, and I definitely did both.
Holistically, much of the narrative of the novel is driven by the Shrike, an entity that may or may not exist. It’s earned a place in the cosmology of space, however, as it appears to be able to bend the space-time continuum, causing some to worship it and some to want to destroy it. Simmons neatly encapsulates the ways in which scifi narratives are often driven by seemingly inevitable confrontations with alien Others, and his use of the Shrike as this other is layered and multi-faceted.
In my mind, Hyperion lives up to the hype, and I’m glad I added it to my have-read list. This quick post doesn’t do it justice – the individual stories are fascinating as narratives in and of themselves and could serve as enjoyable short stories. Simmons’s ability to engage other texts in conversations while simultaneously challenge legions of scifi narratives helps Hyperion earn its place in the canon.
The second novel in the Shipbreaker series is The Drowned Cities. This one takes place entirely in what’s left of the southern US, with cities like New Orleans and Pensacola entirely underwater, and the remnants of the original inhabitants in a series of militia wars against each other for control of what’s left.
The most interesting character to emerge is Tool, the hybrid humanoid created with jaguar, tiger, hyena, and dog DNA. We will find out more about him in the final novel of the trilogy, but in this one we start to see why he and his kind are so feared. He helps a bunch of what are essentially child soldiers successfully hold off a couple of other, more powerful militias in what becomes clear is his search for his new pack.
The extent to which we and other animals are hard-wired is a key to this series, and it takes interesting paths in Bacigalupi’s created world. As Mary Shelley tried to tell us hundreds of years ago, messing with something as complicated as DNA-driven behaviors is impossible to predict, and Tool proves this point – he retains his incredible fighting powers but he is both starting to become capable of overriding his instincts *and* he proves to have deep-seated needs based entirely on his lizard brain. This approach is an interesting one, and Bacigalupi works it out in plausible ways, as we will find out in the final novel.