Author: Cheryl Morgan

Cheryl Morgan is the editor of Salon Futura and owner of its publisher, Wizard's Tower Press. She is also non-fiction editor for Clarkesworld Magazine. Cheryl has won three Hugo Awards: Best Fanzine in 2004 for Emerald City, Best Fan Writer in 2009 and Best Semiprozine for Clarkesworld in 2010. She is a director of San Francisco Science Fiction Conventions and of Association for the Recognition of Excellence in SF & F Translation. She lives near Bath in the UK.

Hawkeye

036, TV Review

Caveat time first. The TV series, Hawkeye, is based on a 2012 comic run written by Matt Fraction and illustrated by David Aja. The artwork for the credits sequences and publicity has been based very obviously on Aja’s work, but apparently he has not been compensated, or even credited, at all for this by Disney. This is yet another example of Disney stealing work from creative people. Hopefully some creative lawyers will catch up with them sooner rather than later.

As to the show, well it is a lot of fun. Clint Barton is desperately trying to get home to Laura and the kids in time for Christmas, but someone has got hold of his old Ronin suit from during the Blip. The person who originally stole the suit wants Ronin dead, and Clint needs to sort that issue urgently. However, the suit has found its way into the possession of a teenager called Kate Bishop who has idolised Hawkeye since seeing him in the Battle of New York when she was a little girl. Kate has dedicated her life to becoming as good as Hawkeye, because one day Clint will retire and she wants his job.

In line with Marvel’s ambition to produce a wide variety of different shows, Hawkeye is a combination of Christmas Movie and Teenage Comedy. Kate is enthusiastic and talented, and brilliantly played by Hailee Steinfeld. But she has no idea quite how dangerous the life of an Avenger is, or how much it can cost you personally. She also doesn’t know that her hero spent the five years of the Blip as a psychopathic murderer. All of this she will learn though the course of the show.

There’s a lot of comedy involved. That includes a dog who loves pizza, trick arrows, and a group of New York LARPers with whom our heroes get involved. The bad guys are mainly a group of thugs known as the Tracksuits, but smarter predators lurk in the deeper waters of New York’s criminal underworld. I should have seen that coming.

Another interesting feature of the show is a focus on disability. By this time Clint is deaf in one ear, thanks to getting too close to an explosion. He needs a hearing aid. Maya Lopez, the leader of the Tracksuits, is both deaf and has a prosthetic foot. In the comics Maya becomes a hero known as Echo. She has connections to both Daredevil and Moon Knight. Hopefully she will be back.

A sure sign that Marvel doesn’t always take itself too seriously is what is happening on Broadway. The hit show of the Christmas season is Rogers: The Musical, dedicated to the life of Captain America. Clint takes the kids to see it, but can’t take the nonsense, especially the fact that Ant Man has been written into the part about the Battle of New York. There’s a whole dance number based around a song called “I can do this all day”, which we get glimpses of early on, and is present in its full glory in the final titles. The whole thing is very clearly a tribute to New York’s resilience after 9/11 and I expect a whole bunch of academic papers to be written about it.

I suspect that if you know anything about archery you will want to avoid this show like the plague, especially the final episode. But other than that it is very enjoyable.

The bits and pieces of the Young Avengers team are slowly but surely falling into place, and if the rest of the team end up as personable as Kate Bishop we’ve got a treat in store.

However, the star of the show is undoubtedly Florence Pugh as Yelena Belova. I don’t know how Marvel are planning to use her in future, but use her they must because she has stolen the limelight in both productions she has been in thus far.

Oh, and remember, no one in Marvel is dead unless they are really, most sincerely dead. If you didn’t see someone die then they are very obviously not dead.

The Necropolis Empire

036, Book Review, Tim Pratt

It is, I suspect, a fairly rare thing to find that you have read the middle book of a trilogy and had no idea that there was a preceding volume. Then again, Tim Pratt keeps surprising me.

The Necropolis Empire is the second book in his Twilight Imperium series. It being an Aconyte book, it is a product tie-in, in this case with the successful space opera strategy boardgame, also called Twilight Imperium. I know nothing about the game save what I can Google, and knew zero about it when I read the book. That did not affect my reading.

The main reason that I didn’t twig that this was a book 2 is that almost all the characters are new. In particular, the focus of the story is on Bianca Xing whom Pratt uses to take pot shots at the classic Chosen One narrative.

Bianca is, as far as she knows, the child of a poor, farming family on a backwater planet called Darit that was once part of a galactic empire but has long since lost contact with spacefaring civilisation. However, she is incredibly smart, and has always had the feeling that she was meant for something greater.

Then the aliens arrive on Darit, welcome Bianca and her people back under their protective wing and introduce them to the strange foreign notion of “taxes”. They also take an interest in Bianca. It turns out that she is actually a lost princess.

Given that the aliens in question are the gloomy, duty-obsessed, Barony of Letnev, on whose home planet people live entirely underground in sterilised burrows, and whose ship is called the Grim Countenance, it seems likely that plucky young Bianca is not one of them. But if she isn’t, what do they want her for? And what does this have to do with the mad archaeologist who is pretending to be their ship’s doctor so that she can examine Bianca?

Meanwhile the second branch of the narrative introduces us to Heuvelt Angriff, a young man of wealthy parentage whose sole ambition is to grow up to be Indiana Jones (or whoever the equivalent is in the movies of the Twilight Imperium world). Sadly for him, Heuvelt is very bad at being an adventurer, and even worse with money. He is keeping himself and his ship afloat, and half a step ahead of his creditors, mainly thanks to the competency of his alien crewmates and having a side-line in smuggling.

Naturally we can expect these two storylines to interest at some point, and it isn’t giving much away to suggest that this might involve a Temple of Doom of some sort, and the true secret of Bianca’s ancestry.

All this is fine and good, but the thing that makes the book spark is the main carry-over character from book 1, The Fractured Void. She is Severyne Dampierre, the highly competent captain of the Grim Countenance. Unique among the Letnev, she appears to be possessed of imagination, initiative and even traces of a sense of humour. Book 1 is mainly about her and I now very much want to read it. She is the villain of The Necropolis Empire, but something tells me that she and Bianca will end up working together in book 3 because she is far too good a character to waste.

Like most of Pratt’s novels, I don’t expect this book to win any awards. He seems to save that for his short fiction. But it is a fun and easy read, and we surely need plenty of those these days.

book cover
Title: The Necropolis Empire
By: Tim Pratt
Publisher: Aconyte
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Titans – Season 3

036, TV Review

This season of Titans premiered way back in August on HBO, where I could not watch it. However, they finally made it available on Netflix in December and I binged my way through it in rapid time.

Titans is, I think, the DC show that comes closest to doing for their universe what Kevin Feige & co have done for Marvel. It has taken a group of existing characters, found interesting things in their existing storylines, and then done their own thing. It very clearly lives in a very different universe from much of the rest of DC’s output. It is so not part of the Arrowverse, and equally has little to do with what goes on in the movies. The only other show that it appears to have any connection to is Doom Patrol, which is fine by me.

The season starts with Jason Todd, who is a class act as far as being a total fuck-up goes, getting himself killed by The Joker. Bruce does not react well. He goes out and kills The Joker. Then…

Wait, yes, you did hear that right. In episode one they have The Joker kill Robin, and Batman kill The Joker. I am astonished that they got away with that. And maybe one day we’ll find that The Joker isn’t really dead. But Bruce certainly thinks that he’s done the deed, because he promptly retires and flees the country.

Dick Grayson arrives in Gotham to see if there’s anything he can do, and to attend Jason’s funeral, only to find Jason already buried and Bruce vanished. With Batman gone, the city is in danger of slipping into chaos. Barbara Gordon has succeeded her father as Police Commissioner, and for old times sake Dick offers the help of Nightwing and the Titans to keep things from getting out of hand.

Of course they do. Most of the season is set in Gotham, and it is very much a Batman story, revolving around a villain who loves leaving obscure clues to his actions and psychologically manipulating the heroes. I won’t tell you who the villain is, because that would be a spoiler, but he ends up almost destroying Gotham.

Setting the season in Gotham does very much suit the dark and gloomy lighting that the production team prefers. It felt wrong in San Francisco, but it is very, very Gotham.

Naturally the story is mostly about Dick. The rest of the team are visitors to Gotham and are a bit star-struck to be hanging out in Wayne Manor, with the Batcave as a base of operations. The other team members do get some screen time. In particular Cory gets to meet her sister, Blackfire, who is a lot of fun.

We don’t get to see much of Rachel in this series. Donna Troy supposedly died at the end of Season 2, but she is a half-immortal Amazon princess so there was every chance of her coming back. Rachel spends much of the season on Themiscyra trying to make that happen. And it is probably just as well, because once Donna is back she dominates the screen. You can’t have a story that is about Dick when everyone is watching Donna.

I’ve not said much about the plot because it would be too spoilery, but the season did keep me wanting the next episode NOW. There are parts of it that don’t quite make sense, and some of it is very weird, particularly the episode in which Donna is getting herself back into the world of the living. Overall it was good. And it was nice to see Tim Drake being introduced to the cast. I gather that there will be a season 4, though where it will go it anyone’s guess, given how unconnected season 3 was to season 2.

In the meantime I am way behind on Doom Patrol.

Editorial – December 2021

036, Editorial

You would have thought, with the long winter holiday, that I would have had plenty of time to catch up on my reading. That was certainly the plan. Circumstances dictated otherwise. Apparently I can’t read much when I am upset and angry. And boy was I upset and angry for much of December. Friends don’t let friends get involved with Worldcon.

On the other hand, I did find that I was able to zone out in front of the TV. That helped a lot. Consequently you have reviews of three TV series and a movie in this issue. I feel like I have only scratched the surface too. I have finally started watching The Witcher. Everyone is telling me that The Wheel of Time is very good. I’m behind on a whole lot of stuff. Truly it is a golden age of SF&F TV.

Anyway, here’s to 2022. It is the year in which the film, Soylent Green, is set. So I guess we can expect that we’ll all be eating recycled human in the near future. Frankly, give the government we have in the UK, that would not surprise me. But at least we have a whole lot of good books, films and TV series to look forward to.

Issue #35

Issues

This is the November 2021 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.


Deep Wheel Orcadia

035, Book Review, Harry Josephine Giles

Last issue I reviewed a novel by the highly respected Japanese-American trans woman poet, Ryka Aoki. This issue it is time to come back across the Atlantic to meet another excellent trans poet, Scotland’s Harry Josephine Giles.

Actually I’m not sure if “Scotland” is the right geographic term here. Giles does currently live in Scotland, but they hail from Orkney, which is an entirely different kettle of herring. Its flag very clearly references those of other Nordic countries. Its people have their own dialect, distinct from Scots. And Deep Wheel Orcadia is written in that language.

Don’t panic, folks. There is an English translation of the text alongside the Orcadian. More on that later. First, we need to look at the story.

As you might have guessed, the Orcadia of the book is a space station. It is in orbit around a gas giant planet, and many of the people who live there spend much of their time fishing for something called Lights. Like the Earthly region from which it takes its name, Orcadia is an island nation.

If you have spent any length of time on islands, which I have, then the culture is instantly recognisable. Scilly might be at the other end of the country from Orkney, but I can see many of the concerns of islanders there reflected in the people or Orcadia. The same is true of Skye in Ken MacLeod’s Selkie Summer. Islands are small communities and are often quite conservative (with a small c) as a result. Some people take to them naturally. Others chafe at the lack of opportunity. Some revel in the isolation, others abhor it.

The book has two primary characters. Astrid is Orcadian. She has been to art school on Mars and has come home looking for inspiration in her native surroundings. Darling is fleeing a stultified life of a different sort. Her wealthy family had a life all planned out for her, but she wanted something very different from it. As we watch the two of them come together as lovers, and their very different backgrounds collide, we also see life from the view of those Orcadians who have never left.

The Light harvest is failing. Catches have become smaller and smaller each year. No one knows why. Orcadia has no other significant source of income. Worse, meddling outsiders are suggesting that the Lights might actually be intelligent, and that hunting them should be banned. Meanwhile a xeno-archaeologist called Noor is investigating the strange phenomena knows as “wrecks” – ghost-like abandoned spacecraft that appear and disappear at random.

If you are expecting a neat and tidy conclusion to the book, then you will be disappointed. The story is about characters, not plot. This is a book that will appeal more to fans of M John Harrison than, say, Mary Robinette Kowal. You have been warned. But you still may want to read Deep Wheel Orcadia to marvel at what it does with translation.

To start with, Orcadian is not wholly inscrutable to English speakers. Unlike Iain Banks’s Feersum Endjinn, written in Scots, which you can actually read without a translation, Deep Wheel Orcadia does contain a number of words that are not English sound-alikes. Some of them have Nordic origins. For example the Orcadian word for a Council is Ting, reminiscent of the Althing, the Icelandic parliament.

So Giles provides a translation. But they don’t do the usual thing of finding a selection of English words that more or less convey the meaning of the original, or at least provide pleasing English prose. Instead they represent the more complex Orcadian words by mashed-together selections of English words that, each individually, would lose some element of meaning, but together represent the entire word to be translated.

If that sounds, confusing, try an example. Here’s the original Orcadian. Astrid has received what amounts to an email message from a college friend back on Mars.

The cast sheu gits by slow packet is pangit
wi sarcasm. Whit like is sheu noo i’the inner
wyrlds? Is sheu been reprogrammed yet
by the spacers? Deus sheu mynd whit like is the taste
o a gress-fed staek? Whit like is the yird o Mars?

And here is the translation.

The message she receives by slow packet is fullbursting with sarcasm. How is she doing now in the inner wilds? Has she been reprogrammed yet by the spacers? Does she rememberknowreflectwill how a grass-fed steak tastes? How Mars’s groundworldsoil feels?

As you’ll see, some of the words need no translation. Some are easy to work out. But words like pangit, mynd and yird have no direct analogue in English and are rendered in a more rich and complex way.

I’ll be fascinated to see what professional translators make of this technique. I’m not sure it would work as well with translation from a language such as Chinese which is far more removed from English, but here I think it adds a lot to the meaning.

By the way, did you notice that the passage in Orcadian is in poetry. All of it is like that. Deep Wheel Orcadia is an epic poem. Which is yet another hugely impressive thing about it.

Trans people are producing some of the best SF&F around these days.

book cover
Title: Deep Wheel Orcadia
By: Harry Josephine Giles
Publisher: Picador
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Spear

035, Book Review, Nicola Griffith

One of the ways in which you can tell that a writer is supremely talented is if they can turn their hand to any genre and excel at it. Nicola Griffith made her name in science fiction, with award winning books such as Ammonite and Slow River. Then she switched to crime for the splendid Aud Torvingen series. She’s written a memoir, And Now We Are Going to Have a Party, which won a Lammy. Her foray into historical fiction, Hild, has been a huge hit. And now she’s shown that she’s equally talented with fantasy. She has already won the World Fantasy Award for co-editing the anthology, Bending the Landscape (with Stephen Pagel). Spear, however, is fiction. To be precise, it is Arthuriana.

All Arthuriana is fanfic, of course. The original is lost in the mists of time, and most modern works are based heavily on mediaeval fanfic (Geoffrey of Monmouth & Crétien de Troyes, Thomas Malory). Occasionally someone goes back to the Mabinogion, or tries to reconstruct what they think the original Celtic legends were. I suspect that in Brittany they have their own Arthuriana that looks nothing like ours. Griffith, being Griffith, has looked at all of it and done her own thing. So let’s take a look at how she has put the pieces together.

Historically speaking, Spear is set in early Mediaeval Wales. Arthur rules over a small kingdom in the south of the country, and dreams of restoring the glory days when legions of red-crested soldiers were based at Caer Leon and could easily beat back the hordes of invaders who have overrun what will soon become known as the land of the Eingel. Further west, the land is plagued by bandits, and Arthur’s knights spend as much time keeping them in check as they do protecting their eastern border.

In the hills towards the head of the Ystrad Twyi (that’s the valley of the river Twyi to you anglophones) there is a cave. It is home to two women. The older is the mother of the younger. She’s aging, and not entirely in her right mind. She’s also a witch. The younger has run in the woods all of her life. She dreams of becoming famed for her skill at arms, and winning the hearts of beautiful maids. And one day, through the valley, come men in armour on horseback.

Mythologically Spear is a re-telling of the legend of Percival, who according to Crétien de Troyes was raised by his mother in the wilds of Wales. It also owes a lot or Irish legend, and if you are now thinking that there is a Spear alongside the Grail and Excalibur then I have already said too much.

From an Arthurian point of view, the book skips over the whole sword in the stone thing (oh, there’s a stone too!) and starts with Arthur already king and Lancelot already at court. Myrddyn is missing, and Nimuë, the Lady of the Lake, has taken his place as Arthur’s chief advisor. Naturally all of this will be very significant.

Geographically the Afon Twyi flows south-west through Carmarthenshire, meeting the sea at Abertawe (Swansea). Carmarthen is Caer Myrddyn, and one possible etymology links the town to the legendary wizard. The town itself is Roman, the western-most outpost of the Empire, but there is a hill fort just to the east on a place called Merlin’s Hill.

Personally I know the area a little. Jo Hall and Roz Clarke now live in Rhydaman (Ammanford) one river east from the Ystrad Twyi. Also Griffith kindly asked my advice on some of the Welsh words she was using. Obviously I am biased towards the book.

I think that covers everything except the story itself. This being Griffith, the prose is magnificent. I think you can trust me on that. As for the story, I am in awe of how Griffith managed to take the whole Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot story, the whole Merlin-Nimuë story, and the Grail quest, and wrap the whole thing up in the space of a novella. And all without a single mention of Hank Pym or the Quantum Realm. It is sorcery, it must be.

Are you convinced yet? Do I need to mention that the book has some fabulous Rovina Cai art?

Frankly, the only thing wrong with Spear is that you won’t be able to get a copy until April. For that I am truly sorry.

book cover
Title: Spear
By: Nicola Griffith
Publisher: Tor.com
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

035, Movie Review

Back in the 1970s the world went a little kung fu crazy. The likes of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan were huge movie stars, and in 1974 Carl Douglas had a massive international hit with his disco song, “Kung Fu Fighting”. Not wanting to miss out on the craze, Marvel created the character of Shang-Chi, the “Master of Kung Fu”. He first appeared in Special Marvel Edition #15 (December 1973), written by Steve Engleheart and drawn by Jim Starlin.

The character was a bit embarrassing, not in the least part because the Marvel management insisted on making the main villain for the stories be Fu Manchu. So not only were a couple of white guys trying to do a Chinese character, but they were doing so within the context of an existing deeply racist setting.

Fortunately for us, Marvel later lost the comic book rights to the Sax Rohmer properties, and Shang-Chi’s backstory had to be adapted to something more original. The new background reveals that “Fu Manchu” was only an alias for Shang-Chi’s villainous father. The movie takes that idea and runs with it.

Before I get to that, though, I want to note that some of the fight sequences in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings are extraordinarily beautiful. The Black Widow movie based a lot of the fighting moves of the Widows on Russian ballet, because of course you would. But the Shang-Chi movie out-does this magnificently. The early fight sequence between Shang-Chi’s father, Xu Wenwu, and his mother, Li, where they start as enemies and end up falling in love, is extraordinary. Li’s fighting style, also used by her sister, Ying Nan (Michelle Yeoh), is apparently based on Tai Chi.

Meanwhile, back to the plot, and another piece of orientalist garbage that Marvel is trying hard to erase. If you are at all familiar with Iron Man you will know that one of Tony Stark’s main enemies from the comics is a thinly-disguised version of Fu Manchu called The Mandarin. In Iron Man #1 we see references to a mysterious terrorist group called the Ten Rings. Iron Man #3 finally introduces us to The Mandarin, but in a brilliant twist we discover that he is actually a British actor called Trevor Slattery who has been hired by the terrorists to play a Fu Manchu like villain to confuse and terrify the Westerners.

If you can see the connection between that and Shang-Chi’s father playing the role of Fu Manchu, you would be spot on. Xu Wenwu is the secret leader of the Ten Rings, and is a thousand-year-old supervillain. He has trained young Shang-Chi to succeed him, but when the teenager is sent to the USA on his first assassination mission he instead goes undercover and tries to live as an ordinary Asian-American man. Inevitably, his father will catch up with him.

Shang-Chi, calling himself Shaun, lives in San Francisco, where he works as a valet parker for the Fairmont Hotel (the one right at the top Nob Hill in the centre of the city). His best friend, Katy, also parks cars, but is a bit of a speed demon. Her driving skills will be key later in the movie. One day, while on a bus on the way to work, Shaun and Katy are attacked by a gang led by Razor Fist which has been sent to bring Shang-Chi back under the control of his father. This leads to a magnificent extended fight sequence on board a typical San Francisco bendy bus as it races, often somewhat out of control, through the city. This very much references the legendary Steve McQueen car chase from Bullit, including the hopping from one landmark to another despite many miles being between them.

As the action moves to China we discover that Shang-Chi has a sister, Xialing, whom he abandoned to his father’s care. Although officially banned from training due to being a girl, she has taught herself to fight and is every bit as good as her brother. She’s also a lot more streetwise. Xialing’s story is the one false note in the movie. It is clear that she’s been very badly treated by both her father and brother, and the movie doesn’t give her much opportunity for justice because it is all about Shang-Chi. Indeed, despite her fighting with the good guys here, there is some suggestion that she will take her father’s place as Shang-Chi’s principal antagonist in the future.

Having said that, the script does something that I’m keen to see feminist film critics talk about. A key element of the plot is that Shang-Chi’s mum gets fridged. But it is father who takes the motivation from this. Of course Xu Wenwu vows bloody revenge, but while his mother’s murder is clearly a pivotal moment in Shang-Chi’s life, it is not his primary source of motiviation. I think there’s an attempt to do something interesting here, but I need to think it through more.

I should also make mention of Tony Leung, who plays Xu Wenwu. I understand that he’s one of the best-known actors in China. He’s also won Best Actor at Cannes. I’d not really noticed him before, but he’s amazing. I’m in love.

Shang-Chi is played by Simu Liu, a Canadian actor and martial arts specialist. He has a tough job, because the original character was drawn to look like Bruce Lee and Liu doesn’t. However, he has just the right cheeky comedy style that the film needs, and he works brilliantly together with Awkwafina as Katy.

Is that everything? No, because I haven’t mentioned the CGI dragon battle that is the high point of the film. Nor have I mentioned the return of Ben Kingsley as the clueless but charming Liverpudlian thespian, Trevor Slattery. And then there is Michelle Yeoh as Shang-Chi’s aunt. Everything is better with Michelle Yeoh.

In short, I really loved this film. As far as I’m concerned, it is right up there with Thor: Ragnarok and Black Panther as one of the best things that Marvel has done. I believe that Chinese diaspora audiences have also taken to it. I do hope that we see more of Shang-Chi (and Katy) in the future.

Far From the Light of Heaven

035, Book Review, Tade Thompson

When you have a very busy life, and plenty of available distractions, but still want to get lots of reading one each month, it is blessing to find a book that you tear through in a couple of days. Such a book is the latest offering from Tade Thompson, and for that I am duly grateful. It is always good to find a science fiction book that keeps you reading because you want to find out what the hell is going on.

At root, Far From the Light of Heaven is a locked room mystery novel. A colony ship, the Ragtime, with passengers in not-quite-cryosleep, arrives at its destination. The human pilot wakes up and finds that several passengers have been murdered during the voyage. That should be impossible. Everyone on board has been asleep. But ten years is a long time. Who knows what might have happened during the flight?

Of course, when someone like Tade writes this sort of book, there are things you should expect. He’s a psychiatrist by profession. The way in which humans behave in space is of professional interest to him. He’s also not the sort of guy to have a good-and-evil solution to a murder mystery novel. Hence there is some fairly sophisticated treatment of the characters, and a book that will go on for some time after we discover who the killer is, and just as importantly who the intended victim is. So far so good.

There’s more to the book that that, though. Ostensibly our her is Michelle Campion, super-competent daughter of a famous space-faring family who is commanding her first mission. But there are several other viewpoint characters. One of the most interesting is Rasheed Fin, the investigator sent up by the colony world to find out what happened on the Ragtime. He’s a man with a redemption arc to work out.

Fin’s main job on his home world is as a Repatriator. That is, he is tasked with finding misbehaving aliens who have wormed their way into the human population of Bloodroot and fucked shit up in the weird way that only they can. The aliens, the Lambers, are the most off-the-wall aspect of the book. I suspect that some hard-SF dudebros will be deeply offended by them, but there’s a lot of promise there too.

So there’s a lot in the book. Possibly too much. The whole Node E thing (you’ll know it when you get there), for example, seems like a thin excuse for adding drama. Given that it exists, it should have been Campion’s primary suspect for where the murderer is hiding. As it is, we only find out about it half-way through the book.

There are a few other things like that in the book, and had I been the editor I would have wanted to raise red flags over them. The plot isn’t as tight as the pacing. However, that doesn’t stop Far From the Light of Heaven being a hugely enjoyable novel. It is just one that seems to have been a little rushed in places. If you prefer your fiction morally simple and straightforward you probably won’t like it much, but we try to do better than that these days, don’t we?

book cover
Title: Far from the Light of Heaven
By: Tade Thompson
Publisher: Orbit
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

World Fantasy 2021

035, Convention Report

So, I did it. I travelled by air to a convention in another country and I am still alive.

Of course I don’t think I would have done that if it had not involved Canada. Yes, the regulations for travel were somewhat opaque and scary, but at least Canada seemed to be taking the pandemic seriously. So did their national airline. The UK is, of course, notoriously lax. No way was I going to risk the trains, but Heathrow wasn’t too bad. And Canada let me in. Once there, most people were masked most of the time, even outside. It felt very safe.

The convention was very small. Typically, Word Fantasy attracts around 800 people, maybe 1000 in a good year. In Montréal my guess is that there were around 200. But, because the venue had been hired on the expectation of a typical attendance, we rattled around like peas in a rain barrel. The dealers’ room and art show were very sparse, and the panel attendance allowed plenty of room for social distancing. I understand that the convention lost money, though not a disastrous amount.

In view of this, the con made a serious attempt to open up programming to those members who could not attend in person. Many program items were live streamed, and some were genuinely hybrid. That sentence requires a little unpacking.

A wholly virtual convention exists purely online and takes place entirely through technology such as Zoom. The audience can watch, either directly through the conferencing software, or in many cases because the panel is streamed via something like YouTube.

In person conventions can live-stream events, also via something like YouTube. Worldcon has been doing this with the Hugo Awards ceremony for many years. Doing it with programming simply requires more tech, and more people to operate the tech. Bristol live-streamed on room this year (and you can watch it here).

On the subject of live streaming, the convention was supposed to be streaming a ceremony for the SF&F Rosetta Awards (for SF&F in Translation). When I got there, I discovered that they were expecting me to host this. And then there were problems accessing the recorded acceptance speeches. I ended up recording a bunch of words that I hope were eventually spliced with those speeches to form a ceremony, but I haven’t seen it. If anyone has, I’d love to know if it turned out OK.

Back with the matter in hand, the exact meaning of a “hybrid” convention is a little unclear. Some people claim that for a convention to be truly hybrid then virtual attendees have to have exactly the same access to the convention as in-person attendees. However, such statements are generally followed by, “and that’s impossible so we shouldn’t bother to try.” Hybrid program is possible to some extent. Here’s what WFC did.

One program room was set aside for the hybrid panels. In it there was a Very Large TV, and the usual head table. In person panellists sat at the table as usual. Virtual panellists attended via Zoom and were visible to the in-person audience on the Very Large TV. One of the jobs of the moderator was to ensue that the virtual panellists got a fair share of speaking time.

I was on one hybrid panel. Derek Kunsken, who was a last-minute stand-in moderator, did a fine job of making sure we all got to speak, including our virtual attendee, Eugenia Triantafyllou, who I believe was in Sweden.

One of the benefits of hybrid panels is that it puts a stop to the idiots who insist that they can be heard asking a question from their seat rather than coming to the audience mic. No matter how good your voice projection is, the virtual audience will not hear you unless you come to the mic. We did get a number of audience questions, but they were all in person. I do not know if virtual attendees were able to ask questions. Or indeed how well they could see Eugenia. However, it all worked much better than I’d expected. My congratulation to Deanna Sjolander and the tech team for making it happen.

It would be nice to say that this bold experiment in hybrid programming had opened up a new era of diversity and inclusion for World Fantasy, but I had reason to attend the World Fantasy Board Meeting and I’m sorry to report that nothing of the sort is likely to happen. Indeed, one of the fist things I noted was one of the Board saying that virtual and hybrid conventions were too much work and World Fantasy should get back to being in person only as soon as possible. Which, of course, means almost always being in the USA. No one challenged this.

If you are thinking of bidding to run a World Fantasy, I also note that the Board seems to have learned nothing in the last decade and is as keen as ever on micro-managing the conventions that it sponsors. It is entirely possible that if you have a tough enough leadership then you can stand up to their bullying, and protect your staff from it, but it won’t be fun.

Aside from my panels and the award banquet, I attended very little of the convention. It was in Montréal, after all. We ate very well. Also Kevin and I both had work commitments because now that everyone can work from home you get expected to work from holiday too. Montréal is a lovely city, and I’d love an opportunity to go back. (There’s a major trans health conference there next September.) But I think first I need to see what is involved in going to Finland.

Black Widow

035, Movie Review

I’ve had this film on disk for some time but haven’t had the time to watch it. Hooray for long distance plane flights. Air Canada had an excellent selection of movies available.

I really can’t understand why it took so long for Natasha Romanoff to get her own movie. Given that Marvel/Disney waited until after the character was canonically dead, and also the huge public row over Scarlet Johansson’s share of the proceeds, I don’t suppose we’ll get another one. Which is a shame because Black Widow was a lot of fun.

One of the things I like about the Marvel Cinematic Universe is their determination to try every other genre of movie rather than simply recycle endless superhero narratives. Black Widow, fittingly, is a spy caper of sorts. It begins with two Russian agents undercover in the USA in the 1990s. It ends with Nat taking down the notorious Russian spymaster, General Dreykov, and liberating his network of female assassins. In between there is much James Bond type action involving helicopters and motorbikes.

Black Widow is also a comedy film featuring a dysfunctional Russian family that was thrown together by their government. The father is Alexei Shostakov, also known as the Red Guardian, a Russian super soldier created as a Cold War rival to Captain America. The mother is Melina Vostokoff, a member of the notorious Black Widow network created by Dreykov. The daughters are two young girls who have been tapped as future Widows. Their names Yelena Belova and Natasha Romanoff.

Years later, Nat has become a key member of the Avengers, while Yelena has remained a Widow. Since Nat’s day, Dreykov has tightened his control over his proteges using a form of mind control. Yelena is liberated while on a mission, and immediately goes undercover. She contacts Nat, but her “sister” is on the run from the US government having taken Cap’s side in the Avengers Civil War. High jinks ensue, including a spectacular rescue of Red Guardian from prison in Siberia.

An example of the creativeness of the MCU team is that the early scenes, and a key element of the plot, were all derived from an off-hand conversation during the Battle of New York in the first Avengers movie in which Nat and Clint Barton reminisce about a mission they were involved in together in Budapest. This turns out to have been Nat’s final test for admission to SHIELD, and also a hit on Dreykov, which we now know failed. Loki is aware of this when he taunts Nat over her murder of Dreykov’s daughter (in the scene on the SHIELD helicarrier). That murder is also a key element in the Black Widow movie.

Something else that the MCU team does well is re-use bits of the comics continuity in new and interesting ways. Red Guardian and Melina Vostokoff are both characters from the comics, but the idea of them posing as a family with the young Nat and Yelena is new. The film also needs a means for Nat, who is on the run, to acquire the high-tech equipment she’ll need. They did that by bringing in the obscure character of Rick Mason (“The Agent”) who is associated with SHIELD but has not been used with Nat in the comics. It is all very impressive.

Nat and Yelena (Florence Pugh) make a fabulous team, and it looks like we will be seeing more of Yelena in future Marvel productions. I hope she gets treated better than Nat did. I was also delighted to see Rachel Weisz in action as Melina. Hollywood is not kind to 50-year-old actresses, and certainly doesn’t see them in action hero roles. And yet here is Weisz in a Widow suit kicking ass alongside her supposed daughters. Glorious.

One other thing that struck me as significant about the film is the Widow network itself. At one point, Dreykov tells Nat that his success has come from his being smart enough to use the one resource that Earth has aplenty, but no one else wants: young girls. The rationale of the Widow network is that Drevkov picked up the most talented girls from all over the world and put them through his training programme. Now the Widows are free of his control, and that has given Marvel a multi-racial cadre of fighting women to rival the Amazons in DC’s Wonder Woman films. They have a somewhat less silly backstory too. Clever.

All in all, Black Widow was a very enjoyable film. I’m pleased that Marvel did finally make it, but I shall miss Nat. Being old, I remember when she and Clint first appeared in The Avengers (the comic), as villains. It has been a long road, and Nat has been very badly used along the way.

Upright Women Wanted

035, Book Review, Sarah Gailey

Finishing up my Hugo reading required taking a look at this fine novella from Sarah Gailey. It deserves its place in a very strong field.

The basic setting of Upright Women Wanted is a post-apocalyptic America that has reverted to a sort of Wild West Gilead. People live in small towns very reminiscent of cowboy movies, but there is the sort of emphasis on religion that you’d expect from the Puritans of New England, and somewhere far away there is a government that still has sophisticated technology such as cars, and is waging endless war on Eastasia or some other such allegedly villainous part of the world.

Our heroine, Esther, is a young lesbian who has just seen her girlfriend hanged for possession of Unauthorised Materials. Desperate to cure herself of her Unnatural Impulses, Esther flees to the most Upright and Morally Abiding people that she knows of; the travelling Librarians whose job it is to go from town to town, distributing government propaganda and any other such Improving Materials as might benefit the townsfolk.

However, the Librarians are not what they seem. Lyda and Bet seem suspiciously close. Their apprentice, Cye, insists on using they/them pronouns when they are away from town. And the job of a travelling purveyor of written materials can be turned to purposes other those that the government intended.

Galiey, having previously done the gay wild west thing with American Hippo, is very much at home in this setting. There’s a story arc for Esther, and a fair amount of fun with gunfights against stupid men along the way. We also get to meet Amity, who is perhaps what James Bond would be like if he was black and female: competent, flirtatious, ruthless, and single-mindedly focused on the mission in hand.

There’s nothing particularly unexpected in the story. There are hints dropped that Bet is a trans woman, but it isn’t overt, and anyway the story isn’t about that. Having librarians as heroes will endear the book to many women readers. What’s more, the book will irritate the heck out of the “no gays ‘n’ wimmin in my SF” crowd, and that’s a very fine thing.

book cover
Title: Upright Women Wanted
By: Sarah Gailey
Publisher: Tor.com
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The BristolCon Art Show

035, Art, Con Running

What with the impending trip to Canada and being stuck behind my dealer table most of the time, I didn’t pay a lot of attention to what was going on elsewhere in BristolCon. That proved to be a mistake, because what they did with the art show is very interesting.

I should note that BristolCon was not the first convention to use this system. This year’s Eastercon also used it, but I wasn’t there and missed finding out about it then.

So, what’s so special? Well, although BristolCon did take place in person, they knew a lot of people would be reluctant to attend, so much of the art show was put online using a system called Kunstmatrix. This is a virtual environment that allows you to “hang” art in a virtual space, and to have people walk around that space to view the art. As Kunstmatrix is a professional tool developed specifically for artists, it is rather better than the VR art show put together for CoNZealand.

If you are very quick you can access the BristolCon art show here. However, I understand that it is closing on December 1st. You may have better luck here, which is Jim Burns’ personal galley, originally created for Eastercon and still available as now. If it has vanished, here’s a screen shot.

The things that impressed me about Kunstmatrix include the ease of navigation, and the clear display quality. Crucially it is affordable. And the galleries can include a link to a catalogue from which the artists can sell prints, and even original works.

Obviously I’m not an artist, or an art show person, but to me this system does show a lot of promise. Setting up your own gallery seems quite easy, and conventions could charge a small fee for including a link to an artist’s personal galley in their art show, on the assumption that this would lead to extra sales. Of course you won’t know how much they sell. Meatspace art shows are financed through a levy on sales at the event, whereas here you have to guess how much a place in your show is worth to people. But hopefully this is a workable solution to the virtual art show problem.

The main problem I foresee is international sales. The VAT nightmare will doubtless raise its ugly head again. But maybe the Kunstmatrix folks will be able to do something about it.

LosCon 47 in VR

035, Con Running

All sorts of experimentation is going on in the world of online conventions these days. The report from World Fantasy talks about how they managed hybrid panels. This year’s LosCon did something similar, but using very different technology.

This won’t be a report on LosCon. I only attended a couple of panels virtually, and most of the convention took place in Meatspace. What I’ll be talking about here is solely the experience of attending a convention in Virtual Reality.

VR, it seems, is going to be a big thing in the not too distant future. Farcebook is clearly betting a lot of money on it, having even re-named the company to emphasise their move into a Metaverse. In comparison, Microsoft’s launch of AltSpace has been very low key, but that is where Loscon chose to hold its virtual programming.

Although AltSpace is doubtless best experienced through a VR headset of some sort, one of the things that makes it attractive is that you don’t actually need one. The whole environment can be experienced in 2D provided that you have a computer with a decent graphics card. If your machine is gaming-capable, you should be fine with AltSpace. As I have one gaming machine, and no headset, that’s how I participated.

The way we experienced LosCon from within AltSpace was in a simulation of the hotel lobby (complete with a pool that we could walk across without getting our feet wet). The Meatspace panel was projected onto a big screen at one end of the lobby. The lobby also contained a big notice board with the program schedule on it, and a few portals, of which more later.

The virtual attendees all had avatars within AltSpace, and it was a bit like being in a Zoom panel except that we could also walk around, and potentially talk to each other. Obviously you ought to keep you mic off while a program item is running. I’m not convinced that everyone did, and I can see the value of some sort of sound bubble feature that people could put themselves into if they wanted to whisper between themselves during the panel. Without that I recommend not standing too close to groups of people, because the sound does taper off with distance, just like in the real world.

Talking of sound, LosCon gave me some idea of what it is like watching hybrid programming that is not well resourced. I’m not blaming them for this. I’m sure they did the best they could with the tech they could afford, but that wasn’t always sufficient, and the virtual con was free to attend.

Rule 1 is that everyone on the panel needs a microphone. There’s also some clever stuff involved in routing the sound from the panel mics through to the virtual environment so that it is broadcast throughout the virtual room. Microphone technique is important. You can’t do that thing where you turn your head to talk to someone else on the Meatspace panel, because the mic will lose you. And there needs to be at least one mic for Meatspace audience questions. Clever tech is also required to make sure that any panellists who are in VR can have their sound broadcast to both the VR room and the Meatspace room.

When you are doing a hybrid panel, with some panellists present in person and some virtually, you need good moderation to make sure that all the panellists get a fair turn at speaking, and that people don’t talk over each other. World Fantasy had that, LosCon didn’t. Resources again.

These are, of course, all solvable problems. They need money for the right tech, people to do the work, and enough time to get everything set up and tested in advance. It is also worth noting that you should still be able to stream the panel to YouTube as well, though the panellists in VR will doubtless appear only as disembodied voices.

I mentioned portals earlier on. These are doorways through which you can pass to other spaces in the VR environment. There was a door to the Green Room, which very sensibly did not let me pass. There was also a door to the LosCon hub which was a separate room with portals to other parts of the convention. Some of these were parties, which were at the wrong time of day for me. There was also a dealers’ room.

Well, to be precise, there was a comic book shop. As I understand it, the way a dealers’ room in AltSpace would work is that you need dealers who have their own stores in the virtual world. They pay the convention to have a connection from the con to their stores. No additional work needs to be done. But of course you are limited to dealers who actually have stores in AltSpace.

There was no art show in AltSpace, though it seems to be that linking to exhibition galleries in an AltSpace version of Kunstmatrix would work well. (See the article on the BristolCon art show for details).

What they had instead, as a present for long-time LosCon regular Larry Niven, was a portal to an AltSpace version of RingWorld that someone has created. It isn’t as big as the “real” thing, but I’m told that it is so big that it would take you an entire day to walk around it in AltSpace.

Is VR the future of online conventions? I think that the tech has a bit of a way to go. Right now it is probably fine for VR afficionados who are happy to put up with the occasional glitches and the somewhat clunky graphics. But the technology is only going to get better from here on, so it is definitely something that conventions should be exploring.

Editorial – November 2021

035, Editorial

We are almost at December, and weirdly almost at Worldcon. I will be attending virtually, and somewhat to my surprise I have three panels. Here they are:

  • Wednesday 15th 16:00, Kress Room: Fanzines and Meta Fandom
  • Thursday 16th 10:00, Kress Room: Planning and Running a Virtual Fan Event
  • Saturday 18th 10:00, Calvert Room: What Do We Look for in a Fanzine?

Those time are for Washington DC. For UK times add 5 hours.

If anyone thinks that it is odd having me on that Saturday panel, don’t worry, I’m moderating it. I promise not to kill anyone who has firm opinions about what a fanzine should and should not contain and seeks to impose that on others. It is, after all, a virtual panel. My claws won’t reach.

The one I am most interested in is the Thursday panel on virtual conventions, which I am also moderating. I am very much hoping that we can distill out some suggestions for best practice. There are two articles about running virtual cons in this issue, and I am expecting that my report on DC3 will also major on the virtual side (given that’s all I can be part of). How to do the virtual side well has to be the most important issue facing con-runners today.

Out of interest I checked the SMOFcon programme for next weekend. It has one programme item on how to run an in-person con during the pandemic, and one on hybrid conventions, the description for which begins, “We all got dragged kicking and screaming into the online convention running world.” There’s nothing on virtual cons. I despair, I really do.

Issue #34

Issues

This is the October 2021 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.


Cover: The Green Man’s Challenge

034, Art, Ben Baldwin

This issue’s cover is the art from the new Juliet McKenna novel, The Green Man’s Challenge. As always with this series, the cover is by the very wonderful Ben Baldwin. We are enormously lucky to have him. At conventions these days people come up to my stall and say they’ve seen The Green Man’s Heir everywhere. It isn’t in bookstores, but Amazon loves it, and Ben’s covers are unforgettable.

By the way, we are looking at selling art cards and prints of the Green Man art through the Wizard’s Tower shop. Watch this space.


Here’s the unadorned version.

Light From Uncommon Stars

034, Book Review, Ryka Aoki

The first thing to say about the debut SF&F novel from acclaimed poet, Ryka Aoki, is that if you were to pitch the idea in just about any writing class you would be shot down in no uncertain terms. This is not just a book that accepted wisdom would say cannot sell, it is one you’d be told quite categorically cannot work. And yet…

Look, see what you think.

Katrina Nguyen is a trans girl from Oakland who has run away from an abusive home and is now in LA with nothing but some clothes and makeup, a few weeks supply of hormones, and her beloved violin.

Shizuka Satomi is a legendary violin teacher who has sold her soul to the Devil. In order to earn it back, she has to provide the souls of seven ambitious and extremely talented students. Six have been delivered. She just needs one more to save herself.

Lucy Matía owns a violin repair shop in LA. The Matía family was once lauded as amongst the greatest violin makers in the world. But, as her father and grandfather kept telling her, the job of a master craftsman is not suited to a mere woman, so Lucy must make do under the crushing weight of massive imposter syndrome.

Lan Tran is a space alien fleeing a galactic war. She has taken her ship and family to a backwater planet that has no stargate where they hope to hide out for a while. They are currently running a donut shop in LA. They don’t know much about donuts, but they have replicators.

Wait, what? It was almost making sense there, and then Aoki threw in a bunch of refugees from Galaxy Quest.

Trust me though, it all works. To start with, Aoki needs someone with a bit of power to balance out the demon, Tremon Philippe, who is determined to collect his seventh soul, be it Katrina’s or Shizuka’s. She clearly doesn’t want to go all good-v-evil on us, so she does science-v-magic instead.

Second, what’s a popular SF&F book these days without a lesbian romance?

And perhaps most importantly, there’s the question of making donuts with Star Trek replicators. Which just happens to be part of the central theme of the novel.

It should work. The replicators were programmed using the donuts made by the people from whom Lan and her family bought the shop. The ones they make are perfect copies. And yet, slowly but surely, the customers are drifting away. Human beings, you see, are not good with perfection. They crave variety and novelty. Getting exactly the same donuts every time gets boring.

A similar argument can be made about violins. Anyone can make a violin. You can probably 3D print them these days. But a truly great violin is the product of a particular selection of wood, put together by a master craftsman who will carve it in such a way as to make the absolute best of that wood.

Then there is the music. While a violin can play some wonderful, simple dance tunes, it can also go very much off the beaten track. Paganini is the first violinist who is said to have sold his soul to the Devil, and he did not play simple music. This being a book about violins and their humans, there are inevitably music contests. And the piece that Shizuka and Katrina like to play is Bartók’s Sonata for Solo Violin.

Bartók is best known for his piano music, but he did write other works as well. This piece was commissioned from him by the great violinist, Yehudi Menuhin. At the time, Bartók was impoverished and dying of leukaemia, but he wasn’t going to let the great man down. In the end, Menuhin asked for a few changes to the piece because it was just too complex. In particular, he objected to Bartók’s use of quarter tones, which are pitched half-way between the notes of the standard chromatic scale that you get on a piano. To Western ears, quarter tones can sound quite dissonant.

Not being a musician, I was having trouble understanding what Aoki was getting at here. But then I listened to this podcast, which is part of a new series by Cerys Matthews and Jeffrey Boakye. The episode starts out with “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X and then wanders off through discussion of Rap, Country and Classical music. The bit that gave me a lightbulb moment is where Cerys and pals are discussing the “Perfect 5th”.

What’s that? Well it is a particularly nice-sounding pairing of notes that is used a lot in bugle music and has since found its way into other types of heroic narrative. It is found, for example, in Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man”, which is often used as music for TV shows about space.

John Williams used it in his theme for the Christopher Reeve Superman movie, and even more famously in Star Wars.

Then Cerys noted that the Perfect 5th is the music of the American Establishment, and that anti-establishment music is anything but clean-cut and perfect. Jazz and Blues tinker about all over the place.

Then everything fell into place. Aoki is using the Perfect 5th as a metaphor for the gender binary. And in the perfect, white supremacist, world of 1950s America that’s all that is allowed to exist. Trans people, however, live in the spaces in between genders. We are not perfect. We are, to many people’s eyes, dissonant. And yet, as any donut shop customer can tell you, perfection is sterile. As any violin maker can tell you, beauty is individual and unique to each instrument, or person.

That, of course, is perfect in a way, because Light from Uncommon Stars is a story about the trans condition. Katrina is a musical genius, but she has been shaped in a very particular way because of her trans history. I can’t know whether this book will speak to you the same way that it spoke to me, because you don’t have the same life experiences. But I can tell you that it is Beautiful and True in the way that we often talk of poetry having those qualities. And despite the space aliens, I will insist that it is a Fairy Tale, because that is how it works.

Please read it.

Shizuka had thought that she knew all about being damned. Still, she had always assumed that damnation required some sort of exchange.

Yet this student, this human being, had been forsaken not for ambition, nor revenge, nor even love, but for merely existing?

Who needs the Devil when people can create a hell like this themselves?

book cover
Title: Light from Uncommon Stars
By: Ryka Aoki
Publisher: St Martin's Press
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The Ministry for the Future

034, Book Review, Kim Stanley Robinson

COP26 will be held in Glasgow in November. That it is being hosted by a UK government whose attitude towards climate change is almost entirely performative, and only not so when there is an opportunity for grift on the part of ministers, will doubtless overshadow proceedings to a large extent. But one of the invited speakers at the event will be someone who is very much concerned with saving the planet.

Prior to his arrival in Glasgow, Kim Stanley Robinson has done a couple of online events for UK organisations. One was co-hosted by the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic at the University of Glasgow. The other was part of the Festival of the Future City hosted by Bristol Ideas. The latter has an introduction by me, and is available to view on YouTube (see below for embedded video).

Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future begins, chronologically, at the COP29 meeting in Bogotá, Colombia, at which the eponymous ministry is created. The diplomats who created it doubtless saw it as another impressive-sounding delaying tactic. But shortly after COP29 we come to the events of the first chapter of the book. A great heatwave strikes India. It is so hot that human beings cook to death. Twenty million people die.

Of course that is a fine, dramatic, opening, but Robinson appears to believe that only something that dramatic could get sufficient people concerned about climate change for effective attempts to combat it to happen. He’s probably right. Here he is explaining where we are right now.

But early in the twenty-first century it became clear that the planet was incapable of sustaining everyone at Western levels, and at that point the richest pulled away into their fortress mansions, bought the governments or disabled them from action against them, and bolted down their doors to wait it out until some poorly theorized better time, which really came down to just the remainder of their lives, and perhaps the lives of their children if they were feeling optimistic—beyond that, après moi le deluge.

There’s another, more worrying side to it as well:

The Götterdämmerung Syndrome, as with most violent pathologies, is more often seen in men than women. It is often interpreted as an example of narcissistic rage. Those who feel it are usually privileged and entitled, and they become extremely angry when their privileges and sense of entitlement are being taken away. If then their choice gets reduced to admitting they are in error or destroying the world, a reduction they often feel to be the case, the obvious choice for them is to destroy the world; for they cannot admit they have ever erred.

I suspect that this might also explain why supposedly feminist white women are happy to embrace fascism rather than admit that the greatest threat to their safety is from cisgender men, not from women like me.

Still, the point of The Ministry for the Future is not to wallow in doom and gloom, but rather to suggest ways in which the planet might be saved. Robinson, being a relentless optimist, has ideas. Indeed, he has quite a mixed bag of them. There’s geoengineering in the form of pumping water from beneath Antarctic glaciers. There’s economics in the form of a Carbon Coin that allows people to earn money for sequestering carbon. There’s politics in the form of a new, community-owned social media network that wrests control of the global narrative away from self-interested tech billionaires. And there’s terrorism.

That latter point needs some elaboration. The Indian heat wave disaster gives rise to an organisation known as the Children of Kali. They commit a number of highly effective atrocities aimed specifically against things such as private air travel, and against anyone who profits from the fossil fuel industry. Nothing in the book specifically connects the Ministry with this organisation, and like most terrorist groups the Children have a very amorphous structure. However, early on in the book, the Chief of Staff at the Ministry, Badim Bahadur, suggests setting up a “black ops” team whose activities could be easily denied. We are never told what it is that they do.

There is another event that the Ministry is accused of engineering, and it gives rise to the most amusing sections of the book. A group of climate activists kidnaps the attendees at Davos and subjects them to “consciousness raising” education. It is very much middle class violence. Most of the wealthy victims treat the whole thing as a jolly jape.

Whether you think that Robinson’s proposed solutions will work or not is a matter of opinion. Indeed, one of the reasons why he has proposed a basket of solutions is that some of the things he suggests might not work. The point is not that we must take certain actions, but that we must do some things, lots of things, until we find something that works. Because doing nothing is guaranteed to lead to disaster.

However, before we can do anything, we have to care, we have to stop discounting the future. Here Robinson is spot on. When governments and corporations do cost-benefit analysis, they much prefer a small benefit soon to a possible larger benefit later. The stock market, which is now driven by inhumanly fast trading conducted by computer algorithms, can’t even manage to look at next month, let alone next year. These days, the idea that the future matters is revolutionary. Which is why this book matters.

Something else that is revolutionary is the structure of the book. It is composed of 106 very short chapters. Many of them are told from the point of view of characters who are not named, and who never again feature in the narrative. Some are short riddles. One is simply a list of representatives of different countries saying what they are doing to combat climate change. It is a very non-traditional approach to fiction. I don’t object to such experimentation, but I did find it hard to get into the book because there wasn’t much to carry you through.

Incidentally, looking at that list of countries, Robinson appears to believe that by 2038 the British Isles will be divided into three countries: Ireland, Scotland and England. Must have a word with him about that.

Robinson does try to provide a narrative thread to the book. This comes in the form of the developing relationship between the head of the Ministry, Mary Murphy, and Frank May, the sole survivor of the Indian Heat Wave. Frank has massive PTSD and in part acts a moral compass for Mary, while at the same time doing some pretty awful things.

I’m by no means surprised that The Ministry for the Future has caught the popular imagination, despite its difficult and unusual structure. We are living in Interesting Times, and such times demand unconventional thinking. Robinson’s ideas may not work, but his optimism is the only hope we have. As I said to the audience in Bristol, few other science fiction writers have spent so much time thinking about the problems the world faces in the near future, and trying to find practical ways to overcome them. For that alone, Robinson deserves our praise.

book cover
Title: The Ministry for the Future
By: Kim Stanley Robinson
Publisher: Orbit
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The Past is Red

034, Book Review, Catherynne M Valente

Tetley Abednego has to be one of the most fascinating characters in the history of science fiction. Those of you familiar with the Sturgeon Award winning story, “The Future is Blue”, will already be aware of this. For those who don’t have that story, don’t worry, it is included as a prequel with The Past is Red.

Tetley’s future is blue because climate change has happened. The whole of Earth is under water. A few small groups of humans still survive on boats, or on Brighton Pier which has somehow been made seaworthy, but there is only one large settlement on the planet. Tetley lives in Garbagetown, an upgraded version of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch which has been stitched together to form a floating island on which people can live. There are fish, and there is rain, so they can survive. Everything else they have to scavenge from the garbage that the Fuckwits threw away.

The Fuckwits are, of course, us: the people who had everything, and who ruined it for ourselves, and for all our descendants, by destroying the planetary ecosystem. Tetley and her neighbours will occasionally get glimpses of what life was like in the past, if they get hold of a functioning video player, but for the most part all they have is mountains of unwanted junk.

“The Future is Blue” tells the story of how Tetley grew up, how she fell in love with a boy called Goodnight Moon, and how she came to commit a Great and Terrible Crime which made her the most despised person in Garbagetown. The Past is Red is set many years in the future. Tetley tells us about how her life is different now, how she has a mysterious friend called Big Red Mars, and how she was once married to King Xanax of Pill Hill.

I should note, by the way, that I love the way Cat Valente has named the various parts of Garbagetown according to the types of garbage stored there. As well as Pill Hill we have Electricity City, Candle Hole, Periodically Circus and my favourite, Winditch, which contains thrown away trophies for everything from sports competitions to kids with the best smile to Gretchen Barnes who, according to her rather modest trophy, was the World’s Best Wife.

The thing about Tetley, the aspect of her personality that makes her unique among the people of Garbagetown, is that she has hope. She is living in what we might see as the worst of all possible worlds. Literally, she lives on a garbage heap, because it is the only place left to live. But to Tetley it is the best of all possible worlds, because it is the only world that she has. Alone amongst her people, Tetley understands that the only way forward is into the future. The past is gone, and nothing they do in their lifetimes, or of those of hundreds of generations after them, can ever bring it back.

Tetley, then, is a beacon of hope in a world that has none. And Valente, very cleverly, makes it clear to us readers, that there really is no hope. Humanity is doomed. Yet Tetley refuses to accept this. She has fish. She has her friends, the seals and the gannets. She takes joy where she can, because to do otherwise is to submit to despair.

The Past is Red is a story about how to live in a world that is well and truly fucked. It is, perhaps, a story for our times.

book cover
Title: The Past is Red
By: Catherynne M Valente
Publisher: St Martin's Press
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

A Spindle Splintered

034, Alix E Harrow, Book Review

In her Afterword, Alix Harrow describes this novella as that she has Spider-Versed a fairy tale. This does not mean that she’s race-flipped it and set it in modern day New York. Rather it means that she understands that fairy tales exist in many forms in many different realities. Each world in the multiverse has its own Sleeping Beauty, and every so often those doomed girls get to come together to fight against their fate.

Zinnia Gray is one of the least fortunate girls in Ohio. Her parents love her dearly, but she was born with something called Generalized Roseville Malady, a mysterious illness that has afflicted the children of her town thanks to industrial pollution. No child with this condition has made it past their 22nd birthday.

For a Goth-inclined teenager like Zin, this inevitably leads to an obsession with the tragic heroines of fairy tales. In particular, she becomes obsessed with the legend of Sleeping Beauty. Academically there is a plus side, in that she graduates high school early and gets a degree in folklore. Harrow needs this accelerated career for her heroine because the story has to take place when Zin turns 21, and by that time she needs to be an expert in every form of the legend.

For Zin’s 21st birthday, her best friend, a butch lesbian called Charmaine (get it?) throws her a massive party and buys her an actual spinning wheel. But, when Zin dramatically pricks her finger, magic happens, and she finds herself in the realm of the beautiful Princess Primrose of Perceforest, an unfortunate girl who was cursed at birth by a wicked fairy to fall into an enchanted sleep when she comes of age and who, if she survives the curse, will have an arranged marriage to the odious Prince Harold. It is not clear which fate is worse.

Naturally the two girls become friends, and vow to aid each other in avoiding their dreadful fates. Along the way they enlist the help of a few other avatars of the Sleeping Beauty story. It is all great fun, and very lovely, and a bit tear-jerky, and I suspect we’ll see A Spindle Splintered on more than one award short list next year.

I should note as well that the story has a few serious things to say about parenting, and in particular about parenting a child with an incurable illness. It isn’t all fodder for teenage girls of all ages. But I did love it, and I suspect that many of you will too.

book cover
Title: A Spindle Splinter
By: Alix E Harrow
Publisher: St Martin's Press
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

A Fledgling Abiba

034, Book Review, Dilman Dila

At FanyasyCon I was on a panel about small presses with David Stokes of Guardbridge Books. I didn’t know much about the company, but was impressed when David said he had been doing a lot of work with African authors. A book he particularly recommended as it is a Nommo finalist was A Fledgling Abiba by Dilman Dila. So I bought a copy.

Then I noticed that Dila was on a panel at Octocon, so I figured I would find out a bit more about him and his book. It turns out that he is also and artist and a film maker, so he’s an impressive guy. As for the book, an Abiba is a type of African witch from the region we now call Uganda. They can fly, hence the word “fledgling” in the title, and their means of propulsion is by farting flames. Naturally the book went straight to the top of my TBR list.

Kuri, the heroine of the story, is an orphan teenage girl. Her mother has recently died in mysterious circumstances (which for a witch probably means she was murdered), and she never knew her father. Kuri knows that she has inherited powers. She can look into the eyes of anyone and steal their memories, so she knows everything about them, including how to speak their language. Also, when she gets agitated, little flames erupt from her anus. She doesn’t know much about that, but it is a real nuisance as it ruins her clothes and might set buildings on fire.

Kuri badly needs training, but her aunt, with whom she has been sent to live, is deeply religious and would cast her out if Kuri revealed her powers. Unfortnately, Kuri’s existence is known to powerful people and she’s not going to be able to hide safely for long. Whether these enemies are the people who killed her mother, or agents of her mysterious father, or just random bad guys, is a mystery that Kuri will have to solve.

Dila’s prose is clear and simple. If he wrote in a more Western style the book would probably be much longer, because the plot is absolutely packed with incident. Possibly he’s thinking of a film script. I think it would make a great animation, because it has a lot of comedy potential alongside the action sequences.

Whether it will win the Nommo, given that it is up against Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki’s Ife-Iyoku, the Otherwise winner that I reviewed last month, is open to question, but I think it has a very good chance.

Kudos also to Dila for being kind to us readers and explaining a few things about how the languages used by the people in the book work. I had no idea that many African languages indicate plurals by prefixes rather than suffixes. Now I know what Wakanda means.

book cover
Title: A Fledgling Abiba
By: Dilman Dila
Publisher: Guardbridge Books
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Octocon 2021

034, Convention Report

Online conventions are very common these days, so to stand out you have to do something good. There are various ways in which you can do that. FIYAHCon, I understand, had some top quality programming. They paid people for it, and therefore they charged people to attend. FutureCon is free, and has program participants from a range of countries that you would not find represented at other conventions. What can Irish fandom bring to this?

Well to start with Octocon 2021 was free to attend. Many of the panels and talks were recorded and will be available on the convention’s YouTube channel in due course. I don’t blame them for not having the material available yet. The weeks after a convention are always a period of exhaustion for those involved in running it. In the meantime you can enjoy the panels from last year.

The programming was very varied. There are panels on comics, TV and film, and gaming as well as book and fandom-related panels. Also they had the legendary Shelly Bond as one of their Guests of Honour. If you know anything about comics, you should know how exciting that is.

I’ve run a Discord server for an academic conference once, and it was very clear to me that the folks running the Octocon Discord knew far more about the platform than I do. I’d love to pick their brains before I have to run one again.

I’m not convinced about Discord as a platform for virtual dealers’ rooms. I had one. A small number of people did pop by to say hello. Two said that they had bought books. But the experience was nothing like having an actual table, and I had no way of knowing how much I actually sold as a result.

I did two panels, one about how to avoid making your aliens stereotyped stand-ins for human minorities, and one about “treasures of the past”. The latter I was well wound up for because it had been one of those weeks on Twitter when twenty-something fans were bitterly complaining about the total lack of various types of fiction in “the past”, by which they meant before they started paying attention. I’ve come to the conclusion that anything more than 20 years old is “the past” now because it is before a lot of younger fans learned to read.

Anyway Samuel R Delany exists, and indeed is still alive. Check out what he was publishing in the 1970s.

Back to Octocon, though. It was a lot of fun, and I didn’t need to leave home to attend. Next year will be different. They are going back to in-person events, and they have booked conference space at Croke Park. If you don’t know what this means in terms of Irish culture and Anglo-Irish relations, Google is your friend. I would love to go. But, thanks to Brexit, it seems highly unlikely that I will be able to sell books there.

There’s one more thing I’d like to mention. Some conventions like to raise money for charities. Octocon is one of them. This year their charity was BelongTo, an organisation that supports LGBT+ youth. I was so very impressed.

Marvel: What If?

034, TV Review

Well, the MCU had to mess up at some point, and I guess it is better that they did so in a cartoon series than in a live action movie. Having said that, it rather suggests that less care and attention was paid to What If? Because it is only a cartoon.

The core idea of the series is that in the multiverse many different versions of the MCU exist, in which the characters we know and love can have very different lives. The Watcher, because he exists across all universes, sees all, and can bring us some of these stories.

So far so good. This gives the opportunity to do a bit of fan service, such as a story in which Peggy Carter becomes the Super Soldier (but not Captain Britain, obviously, because that title is taken). There’s also one in which the young T’Challa is abducted by the Ravagers and becomes Star Lord. It was great to get to hear Chad Boseman again, but that story is exceptionally silly in that it portrays T’Challa as so irresistibly good that he converts Thanos to his side.

In fact, most of the stories are pretty silly. Many of them also go for the soft option of killing off the heroes because they aren’t the heroes of Our Universe so their deaths don’t matter. Humbug.

Talking of Boseman, many of the characters are voiced by the people who play them in the live action shows. It is notable that those who are not are characters whose actors seem to have opted out of the MCU: Black Widow, Iron Man, Cap. Quite why Natalie Portman agreed to come back given what they did the Jane Foster is a bit of a mystery, but at least that episode was funny.

The Watcher is voiced by Jeffrey Wright, and is notable for being the first example of utterly disastrous casting in the MCU project.

The one saving grace of the series is episode #4 featuring a version of Doctor Strange who becomes obsessed with seeking power so that he can save the life of Christine Palmer. This is the only episode with a decent script. This may be significant because we know that the next Doctor Strange movie will be titled, The Multiverse of Madness. So it is likely that the vision of the multiverse presented here will have some connection to the one in the movie. There may have been hints dropped. And the MCU management may have paid more attention to this episode than the others.

Ah well, roll on the Hawkeye TV series, which promises to be rather good.

BristolCon 2021

034, Convention Report

BristolCon has just happened. That it did is something of a minor miracle because COVID is raging out of control here on Plague Island. However, most of us are now double-vaccinated. A reasonable proportion of us are aware that the virus is airborne, and that precautions can be taken. Many of us are just fed up of the isolation.

So, wise or not, there has been a convention. The ConCom did take precautions. The number of attendees was severely limited compared to previous years. It was possible to keep your distance. Some of the programme was also streamed live, which was nice. I know that we had at least one person in France following along. The ConCom are learning to do conventions in a hybrid way, which is good, because it means that BristolCon can be shared with the wider world.

I didn’t see much of the con, partially because I had a dealer table, and partially because I am isolating as much as I can. I have a trip to Canada planned for next Wednesday and I do not want to fail my fit-to-fly test. Dealer rooms are BristolCon are always a bit quiet because the programming is good, but people do come in during the breaks and I sold almost as much here as I did in the two days (including a book launch) of FantasyCon. I am very pleased.

I also did two panels. One was about ret-conning, which turned out to be a very serious discussion about how we deal with the work of creators whom we have come to view with distaste. The other was about democracy in epic fantasy. I think both went very well.

What I liked most about this BristolCon is that it felt like a proper convention. FantasyCon felt weird. Not only was it much smaller than a typical FantasyCon, but many of the people there didn’t seem to be usual attendees. They certainly were not book buyers. This BristolCon was smaller than it has been in recent years, but much bigger than it was when it started. And the people there were very definitely book readers and buyers. Maybe nature is healing after all.

Editorial – October 2021

034, Editorial

Well this is an interesting issue. We’ve got Kim Stanley Robinson and Cat Valente with very different, but in some ways complimentary, takes on climate change. We’ve got Alix Harrow who is fast establishing a reputation to match those two giants of the field. (Yes Cat, I did just describe you as a giant of the field. It’s true.) And yet my top pick for this issue is a debut novel for which my review delves into music theory. Fiction can take us to all sorts of interesting places.

This issue also sees a report from another in person convention. And if all goes well the November issue will report from World Fantasy in Montréal.

Today is Halloween. I’m afraid I don’t have anything suitably witchy for you, but I can recommend Alix Harrow’s The Once and Future Witches which I reviewed at the end of last year. Given that Ben Baldwin’s cover image for The Green Man’s Challenge has hair very like mine, I can see that I need to work on a Hamadryad costume for next time we get to do Halloween in person.

Issue #33

Issues

This is the September 2021 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.


  • Cover: Fantasy Forest Girl: This issue's cover is "Fantasy Forest Girl" by Molly Rose Lee

  • The Witness for the Dead: At last a new book set in the world of Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor

  • Chilling Effect: Chilling Effect by Valerie Valdes is one of the finalists for this year's Arthur C Clarke Award

  • In the Watchful City: A strange and lyrical novella from S. Qiouyi Lu

  • Ife-Iyoku: A look at the winner of this year's Otherwise Award

  • Light Chaser: Two science fiction greats, one novella of epic scope

  • Occasional Views: The latest issue of Samuel R Delany's collected non-fiction has quite a bit to say about racism in the field

  • FantasyCon 2021: An in-person convention! Cheryl was there.

  • He-Man Wars: We have not one, but two reboots of He-Man. What is going on? Cheryl investigates.

  • Editorial – September 2021: Much news about in-person and virtual conventions, and new books from Wizard's Tower

The Witness for the Dead

033, Book Review, Katherine Addison

For reasons that I can no longer remember, I did not write a review of Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor. It certainly wasn’t because I didn’t like the book. It was excellent. But it was also a stand-alone, and since 2014 a lot of people have been hoping for another story in the same world. The book was a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy Awards, and won the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel. A sequel would have been an easy sell.

A sequel, however, is not what we have got. Instead there is what is best described as a spin-off. The Emperor Maia does not feature in The Witness for the Dead, except by reputation. Instead, the book stars Thara Celehar, a minor character from the first book who, rather like Mike Carey’s Felix Castor, is able to speak to the dead.

Unlike Castor, Celehar is not a detective. Technically he is a clergyman. His job is to ensure that the recently departed are able to rest in peace. However, in cases where death has been unpeaceful in some ways, Celehar’s abilities can be very useful to the authorities. The central story of the novel concerns a beautiful opera singer whose corpse is found in the harbour of the city where Celehar lives, and from the state of her skull it is clear that she did not drown. An investigation needs to be opened.

So much for the set-up, but there is much more of interest in this book than a murder mystery. To start with there is the world of the book. Maia’s story is typical of high fantasy, being about the struggle for a throne, but while the world is peopled by elves and goblins, they don’t have fantasy technology. Airships are commonplace, and mediaeval fantasy worlds rarely feature opera singers.

More importantly, these are books about race. The elves are fair skinned and often arrogant. The goblins have darker skin and face all sorts of racial prejudice. Maia, you may recall, was of mixed heritage, and therefore a deeply controversial person to be crowned emperor, even if his right to the throne was unimpeachable. Celehar too faces all sorts of prejudice where he is now living, and the fact that he performed a major service for the emperor counts for little.

The Witness for the Dead is a book about a fundamentally decent person who happens to have some small magical talent. Yes, he gets involved in some crimes. He also gets called upon to dispose of an undead at one point. These things are part of his life. But mostly this book is about people. In fact I think it is something of a masterclass in how to write a fantasy book that is centred on people. Sure there are elves and goblins, and Celehar does do a little magic, but what is really important to the story is how he relates to other characters. And frankly, that’s mostly how detectives solve crimes.

book cover
Title: The Witness for the Dead
By: Katherine Addison
Publisher: Rebellion
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Chilling Effect

033, Book Review, Valerie Valdes

The lovely people at Mr B’s in Bath had a display up of Clarke Award finalists. I hadn’t read all of them, and decided to take a look. I did not manage to pick the winner, which was The Animals in that Country by Laura Jean McKay. I’ll get to that one eventually. But I was going off covers and blurbs, so the book that caught my eye was Chilling Effect by Valerie Valdes. It promised space opera and psychic cats. Now admittedly that’s not the sort of sophisticated literary novel that usually attracts the Clarke judges, but how could I go wrong?

The book follows the adventures of one Captain Eva Innocente, notorious smuggler and all-round badass. Having quit her father’s criminal business and tried to find work that weighs less heavily on the conscience, she has put together her own ship with the expected group of talented misfits. But, of course, her old life won’t let her go. A very much bigger criminal empire has kidnapped her sister and wants both her and Dad to work for them to earn Mari’s release.

So much, so like a cartoon. Eva and her friends get sent on shady missions, which go horribly wrong, and they have to shoot their way out of trouble. If that’s all that there was to this book, I don’t think it would have got on the short list.

Therefore there must be more, and of course there is. To start with, the book features that staple of space opera, the mysterious artefact from a long-lost high-tech civilization that no one can now understand. Given that the people who built this stuff also built the perfectly functioning but wholly mysterious stargate system on which the entire galaxy depends for commerce, this is a big money caper.

In addition, Valdes has a story arc in mind for her heroine. At the start of the book, Eva is very much self-absorbed and in business purely for the fun of it. Which might be how she came to turn her pretty nose up at the advances of a fantastically wealthy alien emperor and cause him to vow to hunt her down and add her to his harem by force rather than by seduction.

Eva, meanwhile, is enamoured of Vakar, her engineer, who is a type of alien that communicates by smell. But she is well aware that a romance with a member of her crew is terrible for discipline and morale. As the story unfolds, she has to learn to treat her crew as family, rather than people to manipulate into helping her get what she wants.

Talking of the crew, the most sensible among them is Dr. Rebecca Jones, a.k.a. Pink, the ship’s medic. It is her job to patch Eva up after each mission. She’s also a Black trans woman. The trans thing is very much a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, but it is there. Other than that, Pink is an ordinary, or rather an exceptional, member of the crew. She is rather high femme, and some trans readers might see her as a bit of a stereotype, but I’m absolutely cool with trans characters in books being able to have any identity that suits them.

It is worthy of note that Eva is Cuban by ancestry. The book is peppered with phrases in Spanish, including many chapter titles. I haven’t tried to translate them. Knowing Eva, many of them will be colourful insults that Google will pretend not to understand. Also Cuban Spanish may be quite different from the Spanish that online translators understand. My enjoyment of the book wasn’t marred by my lack of translations.

I should also note that, while the story in the book comes to a satisfying conclusion, some of the story arcs do not. The truth behind the alien artefacts remains obscure, as are the motives of the evil criminal empire. There will be a sequel. Which is just as well.

Do you remember that I mentioned psychic cats? Well, obviously they get in the way in the cutest way possible at various points during the narrative, but they don’t have a huge role in the story. I spent the entire book expecting them to be a furry version of Chekov’s Gun, and that they would become an integral part of the plot eventually. That never happened, and therefore they are still awaiting their starring moment. I guess I will have to keep reading to see what the sneaky little furballs eventually get up to.

book cover
Title: Chilling Effect
By: Valerie Valdes
Publisher: Orbit
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

In the Watchful City

033, Book Review, S. Qiouyi Lu

Somewhere in the far future there is a city called Ora that takes good care of its citizens. It watches them, very carefully, for any sign of discontent. It would not do for any of them to be unhappy, or doing anything illegal, would it?

Anima is a Node in the central hub of the city. Ae spends much of aer life in a tub of amniotic fluid, plugged in to the central systems of the city. Ae is able to hop bodies between the various forms of (artificial?) wildlife that inhabit the city. Aer job is to watch for anything untoward, and to prevent it if ae can.

Into Anima’s life comes a person whose name is Vessel. Se is able to come and go in the city without detection — something that should be impossible. Yet se does not appear to be committing any crimes. Se carries with ser a large chest full of odd mementos. Each one, se says, has a story attached. If Anima would like to hear the stories, ae can. The only price is that ae must donate an item of aer own, and an associated story, to the collection.

Watching people is Anima’s job. Of course ae is intrigued.

This, of course, is a well used story structure. We are familiar with it from The 1001 Nights, and from Cat Valente’s The Orphan’s Tales. In The Watchful City, S Qiouyi Lu uses it as a means of wakening Anima from aer from aer unquestioning acceptance of Ora and its rules.

I note in passing that both The Watchful City and Light Chaser, reviewed elsewhere in this issue, tell the story of someone who unthinkingly partakes in a highly oppressive society, as an agent of that oppression. In both cases the central character comes to learn the error of their ways. There’s a theme going on here.

Back with The Watchful City, one of the things you will have noticed is that both Anima and Vessel use neopronouns. We do not know what genders these refer to. It does not matter. We might not even understand them if we were told. It is probably also the case that no one in the story is white, though some of the characters have Western-style names. Again this does not matter much to the story. Both of these things will presumably infuriate those readers who see themselves as great thinkers but cannot cope with fiction that challenges their perceived reality in any way.

That said, The Watchful City is a challenging read in many ways. It does not hold the reader’s hand along the way. Parts of it are told in verse. The stories that Vessel tells, and the glimpses we see of Anima working at aer job, are not happy tales. What we can say is that the people in Vessel’s stories are all alive in a way that the people of Ora are not. They dream, they want more for themselves, they are able to make choices. Often they make very bad choices, but at least they were free to make them. No one was watching over them to ensure that they did not do anything foolish.

book cover
Title: In the Watchful City
By: S Qiouyi Lu
Publisher: Tor.com
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Ife-Iyoku

033, Book Review, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, Zelda Knight

This year’s Otherwise Award (formerly the Tiptree) has gone to a novella published in the anthology, Dominion: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction from Africa and the African Diaspora. The story is by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki who also co-edited the anthology with Zelda Knight. I’ve not had a chance to read the whole anthology yet, but I have read the winning story, and I can see why it won.

The story is set in the village of Ife-Iyoku in an un-named African country. We learn that there has been a devastating nuclear war, and Ife-Iyoku is now cut off from the rest of the world. On the plus side, the villagers appear to have developed mutant powers. But the village seems to be too small to become a self-sustaining population. Every life is precious.

The main characters are Morako, the son of the chief, and his girlfriend, Imade. They are clearly very fond of each other, but Imade is not yet ready for marriage and children. Morako, being a decent young man, is happy to let her take her time. The village elders, including Morako’s father, take a very different view. The village needs children.

Meanwhile there is the wider question of the survival of the village. Much of the land around it is a devastated wilderness, but how far does it extend? Could there be other people on the far side? Could they be contacted, and would it be safe to do so?

The jury, in their comments, made much of how Ekpeki had crammed so many ideas into the story (did I mention the lava-breathing dinosaur?) and yet makes the whole thing work within the confines of a novella. However, the aspect of the story that will have won it the award is the way in which it simultaneously tackles issues of colonialism (bad outsiders) and a regressive social structure (bad insiders). To quote the jury, “What does it look like to have gender roles enlisted in the pursuit of a community’s survival against larger, aggressive, unreasoning entities?” The conflict between wanting to be free of colonialism, yet not falling into aggressive patriarchy, is very real in much of Africa today.

The Otherwise Honour List also includes some fine works. The Four Profound Weaves and City of a Thousand Feelings have been reviewed here, and I’m delighted to see Isabel Fall’s “Helicopter Story” get some recognition. The full result of this year’s award can be found here.

book cover
Title: Dominion
By: Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki & Zelda Knight
Publisher: Aurelia Leo
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Light Chaser

033, Book Review, Gareth L Powell, Peter F Hamilton

A few years back a mystery object given the name, ’Oumuamua, visited our solar system. The consensus of opinion amongst astronomers was that it was a large lump of rock. Others speculated that it might be a well camouflaged space craft.

On the album, 50 Words for Snow, Kate Bush has a song called “Snowed in at Wheeler Street”. It is a duet with Elton John about two time travellers who keep meeting up at different moments in history, and then getting pulled apart again.

These two things come immediately to mind on reading Gareth Powell and Peter Hamilton’s novella, Light Chaser. The story centres on Amahle, a long-lived star-ship pilot whose job is to travel the galaxy collecting valuable goods. She visits each world on her route once every thousand years. On each one she trades technology for memory collars which have recorded the lives of members of specific families since her last visit. She leaves new collars behind when she leaves, with instructions for them to be passed on from one generation to the next until she returns.

The alert reader will soon notice something odd about all this. The worlds that Amahle visits are all unique, and at different levels of technology. None of them have much in the way of space flight, and some don’t have it at all, yet they all welcome this visitor who clearly has far superior flight technology. None of the societies on these worlds evolves in any way in between Amahle’s visits.

The memory collars, then, are a much-prized form of entertainment for a long-lived and powerful civilisation that is keeping the rest of the galaxy as pets, producing endless streams of reality TV for their consumption. Amahle seems oblivious to all this, but into her life comes Carloman, someone who claims to have lived multiple lives, and in one of them to have been her husband.

It is an interesting conceit, and very well executed as you might expect from two fine science fiction writers. If I have a complaint, it is that Powell and Hamilton didn’t manage to find a way to make more of the idea. Amahle’s adventures on each planet that she visits are very skimpily told. Mind you, there is a little bit of male gaze going on here, so perhaps that’s just as well.

Anyway, this book has got me thinking about how novellas work, and about how you include multiple lines of narrative without making them seem skimped. This is probably a job for someone with far better fiction writing skills than me, but given the recent popularity of the form it is rather important.

book cover
Title: Light Chaser
By: Peter F Hamilton & Gareth L Powell
Publisher: Tor.com
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Occasional Views

033, Book Review, Samuel R Delany

Slowly but surely, Wesleyan University Press has been bringing out a number of volumes collecting the non-fiction work of Samuel R Delany. Occasional Views: Volume 1 – “More About Writing” and Other Essays is the latest in that series. There are quite a few essays in the book, on a wide variety of topics. I’m still working my way through them. But I wanted to write a review now because some of the essays touch on issues of racism and homophobia. Delany has been part of the industry for a very long time, and his experiences are thus instructive. I’m going to pick just one example, from 1977.

In that year, Delany went to the cinema to see a brand new film called Star Wars. He loved it, and wrote a rave review of it for Cosmos magazine. But he did spot the lack of diversity in the cast. He noted, “When you travel across three whole worlds and all the humans you see are so scrupulously Caucasian and male, Lucas’s future begins to seem a little dull.”

Remember that Star Trek debuted on American TV in 1966, and Gene Roddenberry had made a point of having both gender and racial diversity amongst the crew of the Enterprise. He might not have done the world’s greatest job of it, but he tried. Eleven years later, Lucas made rather less of an effort.

Delany’s review of Star Wars is one of the essays reproduced in Occasional Views. But, in preparing the book for publication, Delany opted to add a footnote. Here’s how it starts.

Shortly after my review of Star Wars was published in the November 1977 edition of Cosmos, I came into the office, where I had been working as David Hartwell’s assistant on the magazine. On the desk was a large pile of mail, which apparently was responses to my review. Indeed, I had never published a piece of non-fiction before or since that so quickly received that much.

I began to open them and read them one after the other and realized, to my astonishment, I had a pile of hate mail in front of me. The only part of my review that anybody chose to respond to were the five paragraphs, out of twenty-nine, that talked about the lack of diversity in the film. By and large, the young, clearly white, mostly male readers had been infuriated.

This is 44 years ago, but the reaction that Delany was getting here is still very familiar today. White people, and particularly white men, still see the presence of anyone not like them in what they see as “their” stories to be a threat of some sort. Isn’t it time they grew up?

By the way, John W Campbell and Isaac Asimov do not come off well in Delany’s essay on “Racism in Science Fiction.”

I’ve had some pretty unpleasant experiences in the SF&F community in my time, but they are nothing to what Delany has experienced, and I’m assuming that the same is true of most, if not all, non-white authors. We may well have been better than the wider society of the time, but we should still be ashamed of ourselves.

book cover
Title: Occasional Views
By: Samuel R Delany
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
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FantasyCon 2021

033, Convention Report

Dear Goddess, an in-person convention! How did that happen?

Yes, last weekend I drove up to Birmingham with a boot full of books, mainly copies of Juliet McKenna’s The Green Man’s Challenge, which was being launched at FantasyCon. I spent an entire two days in the physical company of other SF&F people, something I had not done since BristolCon 2019.

The biggest problem with FantasyCon turned out to be finding it. Central Birmingham is in the process of being completely dug up and re-vamped to make way for a tram network. Naturally no one’s SatNav had any idea this was happening, and getting to the hotel proved every bit as difficult as finding one’s way into a mythical labyrinth. The process went a bit like this.

SatNav: Turn left here.

Me: I can’t, the road is blocked.

SatNav: You are going the wrong way up a one-way street.

Me: I’m following the diversion signs.

SatNav: As soon as possible, make a u-turn.

Me: Then I would be going the wrong way on a one-way street.

SatNav: Turn left here.

Me: SHUT UP!!! I’m trying my best.

Eventually I put my car in a public car park and walked to the hotel. Thankfully the convention staff were very helpful. They not only managed to explain which small and well-hidden back street I needed to turn up in order to get to the hotel, they also helped me unload the books. Top class service.

There was a fair bit of talk on Twitter in the preceding week about the Con not having a COVID policy. Having been there, I don’t see how they could have enforced one. The hotel had given up on social distancing and none of the staff wore masks. There were lots of other people in the hotel, and most of them were maskless too. Most of the restaurants in central Birmingham had also given up on social distancing, and many of them were rammed to the rafters with customers. The entire city centre was a spreader event waiting to happen. But I don’t seem to have caught anything, which is a massive relief.

I did three panels and two book launches. One of the panels I only found out about when I was checking my phone while stuck in a traffic jam on the M5 on the Friday afternoon. But that was a panel on gender which was great fun and I’m pleased I did it. The other panels went well too.

My first book launch was for Luna Press Publishing’s Worlds Apart, a collection of academic essays on worldbuilding. My own contribution is on “Worldbuilding with Sex and Gender”. I was pleased that Adrian Tchaikovsky was in the audience so I would tell him I’d cited his thoughts on the mating habits of intelligent spiders. (Yes, the females do still eat their mates.)

The other book launch was for The Green Man’s Challenge. We had rather fewer people than I’d hoped, but my guess at attendance was based on the assumption that most FantasyCon attendees would already own the first three books in the series. As it turned out, we sold more copies of The Green Man’s Heir than of the new book. Which is excellent news because all those people will hopefully go on to buy the other three volumes.

Being a dealer at a convention is a relatively new experience for me, and that means I am getting a fresh appreciation of the difficulties they face. People have been telling me this over the years (hello Rina and Jacob!), but it is inevitably different experiencing it for yourself.

For the benefit of future FantasyCons, here are a few requests from the Dealers’ Room.

Firstly, if you don’t open until 10:00am on Saturday, there’s no point in opening at 9:00am on Sunday. I don’t think a single sale was made by anyone in that first hour of Sunday morning, and I could have had a more relaxed breakfast.

Second, some of us do want to go to the banquet and awards, so please don’t schedule it so that we have to close down the stall, load up our cars, and change into our awards finery, in precisely zero time. Ideally, don’t have the banquet and awards on Sunday afternoon at all. Have them on Saturday evening when everyone has plenty of time, and when it doesn’t matter if we celebrate because we don’t have to drive home until the next day.

All of that said, I think I did reasonably well. I didn’t cover the cost of the dealer table, but I did sell a lot of books and hopefully I have found Juliet some new readers. I certainly did better than several of the dealers, some of whom gave up and went home on Saturday.

There were awards, of course. I was delighted that Luna Press Publishing won Best Independent Press. There were a lot of other good results too. The full list of winners is here.

FantasyCon 2022 will be at Heathrow, so perhaps we shall get a few foreign visitors, and a lot more Brits. I’ve already booked up.

Finally a small personal note. I discovered in Birmingham that my hearing has deteriorated somewhat over the past two years. I’m fine in small groups, and in online meetings, but in a large room with a lot of ambient chatter I have great difficulty hearing people. This inevitably means that I will be spending less time in bars at conventions. People going to World Fantasy please note. I’m not being deliberately rude.

He-Man Wars

033, TV Review

There’s nothing like success to prompt Hollywood into doing more of the same. Therefore, off the back of Noelle Stevenson’s brilliant reboot of She-Ra, we have not one, but two new reboots of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. Both are available on Netflix, but they are very different.

First up is Masters of the Universe: Revelation. This is created by Kevin Smith, and it is rather more aimed at adults than at children. The story begins with Skeletor finally managing to kill He-Man, whose secret identity is thereby revealed. The forces of good immediately fall to squabbling, with Prince Adam’s parents blaming He-Man’s companions for their son’s death, and Teela absolutely furious that everyone seemed to know who He-Man was except her.

Years later, Teela finds herself teaming up with Evil-Lyn to solve the mystery of what happened in the final battle. That is not the sort of thing that a kid’s show would do.

You can also tell the adult focus because the show spends a lot of time trying to explain aspects of the He-Man universe that are frankly silly, such as why the good guys’ castle is in the shape of a giant skull, and whether Evil-Lyn’s parents actually named her Evil-Lyn.

The best thing about this series is the cast. Mark Hamill has a whale of a time playing Skeletor, and Lena Heady (Cersei Lannister) has equal fun as Evil-Lyn. Sarah Michelle Gellar plays Teela, who is the focal character for most of Season 1.

However, whereas Stevenson’s She-Ra could be equally enjoyed by both adults and children, I suspect that this incarnation of He-Man will mostly go over the heads of any young kids who watch it. For us adults, it is very watchable.

The other series, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe 2021, is created by Rob David, previously best known for writing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon. This series is very much for kids, with themes of teenagers rebelling against stupid adults being a major part of the plot.

Another major difference between the two series is the style of the animation. Kevin Smith has gone for a look that very much evokes the original series. Rob David, on the other hand, has gone for a manga-inspired look. The characters have giant eyes, and all of the heroes have transformation sequences. He-Man also has a power use sequence that gets into most episodes. There is much posing of the characters in ways that are probably exact copies of the action figures made for the show.

I hadn’t quite realised before looking at these two series just how many versions of He-Man were out there. The Kevin Smith series appears to be based mostly on the original stories, whereas Rob David has mined the He-Man comics for a storyline in which Skeletor is actually Prince Adam’s evil uncle.

I guess that if you are some sort of He-Man purist all these variant storylines will be infuriating. Personally I found the fact that the two series were so different to be refreshing and interesting. If they had both tried to do the same thing one would have inevitably eclipsed the other. As it is, we have two new series that we can enjoy for what each is trying to do, with little in the way of competition.

Of course neither series holds a candle to She-Ra, but I did enjoy watching them and will pick up season 2 of both when they arrive.

Editorial – September 2021

033, Editorial

You would have thought that with a month off I would have a bumper issue for you. No such luck. Life, as they say, has happened. I’ve talked a bit about the sort of issues I’m dealing with on my blog. It is not fun, and it takes time away from important stuff such as making books.

Having said that, I have been to my first in-person convention in what seems like forever. There’s a report on FantasyCon in this issue. We launched The Green Man’s Challenge there, and the book is already well on the way to 1000 copies sold, which I never would have believed if you had told me about it back when I started Wizard’s Tower. I’m also delighted that we will be bringing back Chaz Brenchley’s Outremer series over the next couple of years.

There’s a fair amount of book-related activity in my near future as well, starting with Octocon this weekend, at which I am doing two panels and experimenting with their virtual dealers’ room.

On Tuesday Oct. 19th you can see an interview with Kim Stanley Robinson about The Ministry for the Future. That’s part of the Bristol Ideas Festival of the Future City. I had the honour of introducing Stan and, having heard the interview be recorded, I can warmly recommend it.

Following that will be BristolCon on Saturday Oct. 30th. Again that’s an in-person event, and I will have a dealer table. A few days after that I will be jetting off to Montréal for World Fantasy, and I will be getting to see Kevin in person for the first time since the Dublin Worldcon. Hopefully I will have some more books read and made before then.

Issue #32

Issues

This is the July 2021 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.


Cover: The Ancient of Days

032, Art

This issue’s cover should be instantly recognisable. Yes, that is “The Ancient of Days” by William Blake. Blake did several versions of this image, including the last work he made before his death. This is apparently a version from 33 years earlier. A lot of Blake’s work is under copyright, but I found this one thanks to the very useful CC Search.


Here’s the image without the text.

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