Cheryl Morgan's Fanzine
This issue’s cover is once again from PixaBay. The artist account for this one is deactivated so I’m not sure who created it. Anyway, it was suitably science fictional.
Once again, this is only part of a much bigger image. The full thing is shown below, and you can see it in all its glory here.
Remember that thing about The Mandalorian being a Western in space? Now imagine what it would be like if an actual writer of Westerns were to do science fiction. That writer is, of course, Stark Holborn. Ten Low is her first foray into science fiction.
The story is set on the moon of Factus. It is small, poor, irrelevant in political terms. There has been a war. There have been atrocities on both sides. The Accord has fought off the rebellion by the Free Limits. But on Factus such considerations are unimportant compared to the daily struggle to stay alive.
Ten Low is a doctor. She travels across the deserts of Factus on a mule, though this being science fiction a “mule” is a single-person utility vehicle. Genuine doctors are in considerable demand, because people do get sick and most people can’t tell real medicine from snake oil. Well, perhaps not actual snake oil, because snakes are among the few animals hardy enough to farm on Factus so actual snake oil would probably be expensive. You get the idea.
I swallow, the noise is loud in my ears. Beyond the tiny fire there’s nothing. Just the wind. Some folk say the wind is alive, that it coils between the stars like a snake. Who am I to say they are wrong?
Into Ten’s life falls The General, and I mean falls quite literally. A spacecraft crashes in the desert. The General is the only survivor. She’s a teenager, but a deadly one. Gabriella Ortiz is a senior officer in the Minority Force, the elite group of heavily augmented child soldiers that were a key part of The Accord’s war effort. Gabi is about as privileged that you can get in Accord society, and very used to command, but she is going to discover that the war is over, and elite supersoldiers are not needed in peace time.
That’s the basic set-up, but the plot is basically a series of escalating encounters in which Ten and Gabi get into worse and worse scrapes with more and more dangerous inhabitants of Factus. There’s a certain lack of agency here, but the story drags you along at such a lick that you don’t notice it. Along the way we get to learn a lot more about Ten, including why she has a number for a name, and what she did in the war. We also learn a lot more about the Ifs, the mysterious aliens who seem to be native to Factus.
There are some great characters in the book besides Ten and Gabi. For example, there’s Malady Falco, the one-eyed “businesswoman” who runs a Benzenery in one of the larger towns and specialises in the movement of goods outside of official channels. There’s also Ma Esterházy who runs a saloon and brothel in the remote town of Angel Share, but was once the most notorious smuggler on Factus. Oh, and there’s Marshall Joliffe who sees his job as ridding Factus of perverts and degenerates.
Ten Low is the sort of story that The Mandalorian could have been, were it not tied to the Star Wars universe and happy to deliver fan service rather than work on the script.
Stark sent me a review copy of this book. It isn’t out until June, but you can pre-order it now. Alternatively, you can look for Advanced Triggernometry, which is available on April 8th. I know I want a copy.
So many thoughts. So many complicated thoughts.
Let’s start at the beginning. When I saw the first trailers and it looked like the show was going to be a Bewitched spoof I was delighted. I’d grown up on Samantha Stephens and her goofy family. It sounded great.
Then it slowly dawned on me which Marvel story the series was being based on. This was going to be a story about a grief-stricken woman suffering a nervous breakdown, and using her powers in abominable ways in the process.
While my childhood TV might have comprised shows like Betwitched and Batman, my childhood reading was full of Marvel comics. The (Original) X-Men were my friends. Jean Grey was my big sister, and we all knew that Wanda was a good kid at heart, even when she was a member of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. And on behalf of both Jean and Wanda, I would like to say that we are heartily sick of the trope of powerful women being unable to control their powers or their emotions and being a threat to the universe as a result. Enough is enough.
Unfortunately, the story is kind of necessary to the MCU. Because without it we don’t get Tommy and Billy. And without them Billy can’t fall in love with his Skrull Prince, Teddy, and become part of the cutest gay couple in the universe. You see my problem?
As a result, I headed into WandaVision with some trepidation, and was immediately enthralled by the audacity of the concept and the excellence of its execution. For those who haven’t seen the show (and are presumably sufficiently spoiler averse to read in-depth reviews), each episode plays tribute to the US sit-coms of a different decade.
The first show is set in the 1950s and is based around The Dick Van Dyke Show. It is shot in black and white. The main set mimics the set of the original show. Feige and co. even got Van Dyke himself to come and talk to them about how his show was made. They got a live audience in for the sit-com elements of the show so that the actors could get the feel of how the original worked. The entire crew were in 1950s costume for that. They even made spoof adverts.
The 1960s is, of course, Bewitched. The head of special effects on the show had actually started his career working with the team that had made Bewitched, and all of the special effects were done in the same way as the original. From there we move through the 70s, 80s and so on. The costume department had an absolute ball recreating some of the more outlandish fashions of each period (though I am still lusting after the pink and grey batwing sweater than Wanda wears in the 1980s episode). The theme tune changes for each episode to match the time period.
Wait a minute! Didn’t Marvel pull exactly this stunt for the final season of Agents of SHIELD? Yes, they did. But far fewer people saw that show. It deserves a bit of credit for pioneering the ideas.
The challenge for us viewers was to try to work out what the hell was going on. Wanda and Vision are in this mysterious sit-com world where time seems to leap ahead by a decade with each new episode. Meanwhile, outside the sleepy little New Jersey town of Westview, a team from the government agency known as SWORD is trying to work out what is going on inside, and why the town won’t let them in. Jimmy Woo, fresh in from the West Coast, is there on behalf of the FBI. And an all grown up Darcy Lewis is the resident scientific genius, a role that she learned from Jane Foster in the first two Thor movies.
For those of us familiar with the comics, the basic idea is fairly obvious. We know that this is Wanda’s doing, because she can’t accept that Vision is dead. We can also easily recognise that Agnes the Nosy Neighbour is actually the witch, Agatha Harkness. And can I say that the absolute genius of the MCU casting has been at work once again here. Kathryn Hahn is just perfect in the role (and has a far better wicked witch cackle than I have ever been able to manage). We can roll with it, waiting on the fine detail.
For those not familiar with the comics, the task was probably more difficult, because they will have been trying to work it all out, and they will have expected it to all make sense in the send. I don’t think that it quite managed that.
To start with there was the whole subplot of Monica Rambeau. I’ve been looking forward to her appearance ever since she appeared as a young girl in Captain Marvel. WandaVision promises an important role for her in the story, but what it delivers instead is her origin story. We see her get her powers, and we see that she will be heading off into space to join Nick Fury and the Skrull (and presumably Carol). She’s only a bit-player in the WandaVision story.
In addition the series gets a little too cute in places. A classic example of this is when Pietro turns up. We all know he’s dead, and even Wanda seems surprised to see him. But then Darcy, watching the show from the SWORD base, exclaims, “She recast Pietro!” That makes no sense, unless Darcy, who is a character in the MCU, also knows that the MCU is fiction, and possibly that Evan Peters, who plays Pietro in WandaVision, also played Pietro in the non-MCU X-Men films. It is a joke for the fans, but it also totally breaks the fourth wall.
There is plenty of fan service in the show. One of the funniest episodes is the one set at Hallowe’en when Wanda and Vision dress up in (home made versions of) their original costumes from the comics. They both look utterly ridiculous, but at the same time very familiar. And then the show doubles down in the final episode by giving Wanda an actual costume for the first time, and making it a fabulous MCU version of the original Scarlet Witch get-up. There is so much love for the comics in the show.
I ended up really enjoying it. The decision to mix a heart-rending tragedy with a tribute to TV sit-coms and high-powered superhero battle was a brave one and I think the show mostly pulled it off. Or at least it did for people who are not allergic to superheroes as a concept, and who didn’t expect the show to be complete in itself and make perfect sense. I suspect that it will be taught in film school for decades to come.
And now, we wait, because as usual there were scenes after the credits. We know that Wanda’s boys are somehow still alive. If the MCU follows the comics they’ll be prisoners of Mephisto, who doubtless covets Wanda’s chaos magic. There may be a second series planned, or just possibly this will all be resolved in the second Doctor Strange movie. Either way, I am looking forward to it, because I can’t wait to meet teenage Billy and hear him refer to Wanda as “the Scarlet Mom”.
I also want more of Agatha, because Kathryn Hahn is brilliant in the role.
This year’s short list for the Crawford Award (for debut fantasy books) included a number of interesting books that I didn’t read. The Crawford doesn’t have a jury as such, it has a recommendation team who are not obliged to read everything that is eligible, but try to cover it all between them. Unfortunately for me, many of the recommendations tend to come in during January and February when I have little time to read due to LGBT History Month, and time is short because the Award has to be presented at ICFA. However, anything that turns up on the short list tends to be interesting, so I’m trying to get to the rest of it now.
In Veritas, by CJ Lavigne, is a book that I would not normally know anything about because it was published by a small press based in Edmonton, Canada. But it was brought to the attention of the Crawford Award, and I’m delighted that it was. I don’t know about you, but I can’t resist a book that introduces its main character as follows:
Verity is the drab sort of bleached that comes only with fading and time. She is wiry but solid. Her eyes are a grey like sunlit fog, simultaneously bright and opaque, but she seldom meets anyone’s gaze. She has a habit of twitching at nothing, and her lips move as she walks. Though she is lean and nondescript—her black coat well made, her white sneakers unmarred—people sometimes give her spare change.
Verity, it turns out, is aptly named because she can sense truth. That’s because she perceives the world with a peculiar sort of synaesthesia that involves taste as well as colour. If someone says something untrue, she can tell by the taste of the words. Navigating the world with this sort of ability is not easy, but it is possible. Fortunately for Verity, she lives with Jacob, who is independently wealthy (this will be explained) but who has no idea what to do with his life. They try different jobs each day, and fail at most of them.
Their quiet, if somewhat bizarre, existence is destabilised when Verity meets a street magician whom she can tell performs actual magic. He has a dog, who is also a snake, who is also a shadow that might properly belong to the man. This leads her to meet a whole lot of other unusual people, including an angel with black wings, an unkillable sorceress, and a man who can control snowstorms. She also discovers a rock band called The Between whose albums are legendary, if unobtainable, and whose gigs are always cancelled.
Slowly but surely, the narrative, while never quite relinquishing its weird, liminal affect, resolves into an X-Men story. There are the good mutants, led by Colin, the angel; and there are the evil mutants, led by Privya, the sorceress. Verity is powerful, newly discovered mutant who must chose which side to support.
Except of course it isn’t that simple. The mutants, or rather magic wielders, are not hated and feared by ordinary people, they are under direct assault. The mundanes, if one most call them that, (Lavigne calls them “outsiders” for reasons you’ll need to read the book to find out) do not believe in magic. And we all know what happens to Tinkerbell when no one believes in magic.
These people—their way of knowing the world is more powerful than ours. There’s no room left for us to exist, the moment anyone notices us trying.
So yes, like the original X-Men, In Veritas is something of a queer allegory.
But it is worse, because the electrical devices in the outsider world actually cause magical people pain. For Verity’s people, the world is becoming uninhabitable. They must find a way to escape, or to tip the state of the world back in their favour.
One might suggest that they need to immanentize the eschaton through a massive act of human sacrifice coordinated via a rock concert, but Lavigne is probably too young to have read Illuminatus!
I totally understand that many people are bemused, if not annoyed, by the proliferation of awards in the speculative fiction world. But if an award can bring attention to books like this then it is doing a useful thing. Also, hooray for small presses.
Did I mention that Aliette de Bodard keeps getting better with each new book? I’m pretty sure I said that in my review of Seven of Infinities. And now we have Fireheart Tiger. Guess what?
This is a short book, but beautifully formed. The basic plot is very simple. Thanh is a princess of Bìn Hải, a small country that is under the influence of a much more powerful country called Ephteria. She has spent some time at that country’s court (as a hostage) but is now back home and failing dismally to live up to her mother’s expectations of her. Now a trade delegation from Ephteria has arrived. Thanh is expected to help with the negotiations. But there is a problem. The Ephterian delegation includes the Princess Eldris, with whom Thanh had an affair while she was a hostage.
Oh, and there is the small matter that things keep spontaneously catching fire when Thanh is around.
That, basically, is all there is to it. Everything else is woven from the relationships between the characters. Thanh desperately wants to impress her mother, but doesn’t know how. The Empress of Bìn Hải despairs of her youngest daughter ever becoming proper princess material. The Ephterian trade delegation is annoyed that their demands are not being immediately met, with profuse apologies for them ever having had to make them in the first place. They are also annoyed that their future Queen has seen fit to tag along on a mission that she clearly has no interest in. Eldris expects the entire world to be arranged according to her whims, as it always has been, and always will be.
And the fire? The fire just wants to burn. It is what it does, with passion.
Primarily the story is a meditation on colonialism, though it could also be said that the Empress treats her daughter in much the same way that Ephteria treats Bìn Hải. The story also contains a certain amount of girls kissing (I wave at El Lam here, they will know why). There is only one man in the story, and he is a eunuch. All of these things are likely to irritate a certain type of reader. Which makes me even happier that this story is so beautifully written.
Those of us who have been involved with Worldcon for many years are used to the constant drama that surrounds the convention. There is always some sort of meltdown that is going on. But recently it seems to me that the meltdowns are threatening the very future of the convention. Afterall, lockdown has shown us that things can be done differently. New international conventions such as FIYAHCon and FutureCon can and have been started. There is no need to stick with the old ways if they are no longer providing what fandom wants. Worldcon is no longer the only game in town, and the way that it is run seems to be what is holding it back.
The reasons for this are many and various, but the most obvious one is that Worldcon is strongly resistant to change. The maxim of, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” has a lot of value. But what if it is broke? “If it is broke it can’t be fixed, so we have to keep on the way things are,” is a lot less attractive.
Worldcon was founded primarily by Americans, and it derived many of its organising principles from US political theory. Chief amongst those was the idea that too much government is bad. The USA was born in revolution against an autocratic monarchy, at a time when such things were the fashion in other countries too. No one wanted a new King, so procedures were put in place to ensure that no one could declare himself one. And that even an elected government was seriously restricted in what it could do. Those principles have been tested to the limit in the past year, and will probably be tested again before President Biden’s first term is over. But do the same considerations apply to fandom?
Fans have always been rightly suspicious of anyone who looks like they want to make a commercial empire out of our hobby. Thankfully that’s a ridiculously difficult proposition, so very few people have tried it, and most of those who have came badly unstuck. Nevertheless, the threat of “WSFS Inc” is still enough to stir many older fans into action to defend fandom from would be autocrats.
The problem is that WSFS suffers from what we in the Diversity & Inclusion business called “Status Quo Bias”. When the existing system happens to favour one particular segment of a population over others, that system will be seen as grossly unfair. There will be pressure for change. And if change is impossible within the system, the aggrieved parties will look to leave that system for an alternative, or to destroy it.
The accepted wisdom is that if you want to change WSFS then you have to do so through the Business Meeting. But the way that works, with the time commitment and necessity of understanding Parliamentary Procedure, is itself a form of Status Quo Bias. Kevin can help people who want to create a new Hugo Award category, but I suspect that no amount of help will be enough for people who want to recraft the entire governance process of the Society.
Furthermore, mollifying upset fans is not the only reason why this should be done. We live in an increasingly corporate world. WSFS is not a corporate animal, and other corporations simply don’t know how to deal with it. Relatively simple things such as selling advertising in the souvenir book, or soliciting sponsorship, become much more complicated than they need to be because WSFS itself has no corporate existence, and external organisations have to deal with a different company each year. Being proudly unincorporated is all very well, but it makes it hard to do business.
As a side note, the vast majority of the genuine inquiries that come into the WSFS websites are questions from people who assume that of course WSFS is an organisation with full time staff, from whom it is possible to buy Worldcon memberships, and with whom it is possible to strike a business deal. Many of them are gobsmacked when they learn the truth.
Worldcon having a corporate existence would also make it easier for the convention to move around the world. There are numerous convention centres out there that are keen for business. We tend to get one or two inquiries a year from people in other counties who would like us to hold our convention in their facilities. But we can’t, because WSFS does not have a core team that runs the event from year to year. Instead it is required to wait for individual countries to grow a fandom capable of doing the job for itself.
Needless to say, this results in continual reinvention of the wheel.
However, the main reasons that I am concerned for the future of Worldcon is that I fear the system no longer serves the interests of the people who want to run the event. That’s partly because the event has become too big, in this viciously commercial world, to be run by a bunch of willing amateurs. You are not just risking a loss of reputation from foolish decisions that upset fandom. Things can go belly-up in much more serious ways.
The 2018 Worldcon is still mired in a lawsuit brought against it by an unhappy member. I can’t talk about that as I’m a director of that convention’s parent organisation, but you can read about the latest developments here and there is plenty of talk on File 770. This year’s Worldcon is lawyering up because one of its main hotels has declared bankruptcy, creating all sorts of problems for the event.
Quite frankly, I don’t know why anyone would want to run a Worldcon these days. At the last SMOFcon there was a CoNZealand retrospective panel in which both of the co-chairs of that event admitted to having to take time out for mental health reasons after the event. I’m pretty sure that Bill Lawhorn will need something similar this year. There’s a long-running Worldcon community joke that friends don’t let friends run Worldcon. That’s not funny anymore.
I don’t pretend that I have any easy answers to this. But I am looking with some envy at how SFWA has turned the Nebula Conference into a slick, professional event that has made exactly the sort of adjustments that fandom has been asking for from Worldcon. Of course SFWA is a US-based organisation, so it doesn’t have to cope with the international dimension, but seeing how well they have coped with everything else I’m pretty sure that they could.
The sad thing is that even if I had a bunch of ideas for fixing things, I don’t think I’d have any chance of implementing them, because WSFS is so resistant to change.
One of the things I greatly admire about Francesca and the crew at Luna Press Publishing is their commitment to non-fiction. Obviously I benefit from that in terms of being published in their Academia Lunare series, but they also do serious academic work.
The good thing about that is that young academics can get work published is a format that doesn’t require readers to sell a kidney or two in order to purchase the book. The downside is that academic writing isn’t always very readable. A problem with a lot of Humanities work is that academics are expected to work within theoretical frameworks laid down by their illustrious predecessors. Literary theories like to think that they are like scientific theories, but they are not, they are just a lens through which works can be viewed, and with which arguments can be made.
A potentially serious issue with such theories is that they often rely on invented terms, the meaning of which may not be clear to a casual reader. Or worse, they redefine familiar terms in completely unfamiliar ways. It is possible to develop literary theories in a way that is easily understandable by the casual reader. Farah Mendlesohn’s Rhetorics of Fantasy is an excellent example, and I have seen it used a lot by reviewers. Not all such theories are so accessible.
All of this preamble is there to say that we shouldn’t hold it against young academics if their work sounds a bit like gobbledigook at times. They may well have wanted to have written something more accessible, but in order to have their work accepted by their supervisors they need to write in a way that is approved by the academic establishment.
The thing that kept tripping me up reading Gendering Time, Timing Gender, by PM Biswas, was the question of what it meant by “time”. I felt that the book was constantly confusing physical time, in which the past is followed by the present is followed by the future, and stereotypical linear narratives, in which stories are expected to unfold in a certain way.
This isn’t Biswas’s fault. I think she got the idea from Jack Halberstam’s concept of Queer Time. Halberstam talks about how in Straight Time a child’s life story is deemed to be set at birth, and is critically dependent on the gender that was assigned to them, and on assumptions of cisheteronoramtivity, whereas in Queer Time life stories can be very different. Nevertheless, in both Straight and Queer Time, time itself continues inexorably forward. This doesn’t matter when you are talking about people’s lives, but it becomes much more important when you are discussing the science fictional concept of time travel.
Further complicating matters is the fact that the book starts with a consideration of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. In the story, Orlando does travel through time in a sense, in that they undergo periods of extended sleep while time continues past them. But they never go backwards in time. The other two subjects, Heinlein’s “All You Zombies” and Everett Maroon’s The Unintentional Time Traveler, do involve backwards time travel. Both of them therefore queer physical time’s arrow as well as the linear narrative of the characters’ lives.
Once I got this all straight in my head I enjoyed the book much more. It does have interesting things to say about all three books. I was also particularly struck by this comment in the introduction:
There is a need for more scholarly engagement with this trope, because there are now enough works of speculative fiction exploring gender through time travel that it has become an identifiable subgenre of its own.
I can remember when there were so few science fiction books about trans people that it was possible to know and have read them all. I’m delighted that this is no longer the case.
Biswas has some very interesting things to say about Orlando. It’s a book that I have not paid much attention to, partly because Orlando’s transformation is magical rather than medical, and partly because I find Woolf’s prose unreadable. Biswas, however, has found some elements which show Woolf had some understanding of the trans condition:
While Orlando is always quintessentially Orlando, there are certain new behavioural and functional traits that are associated with the gender performance of her newly acquired womanhood. These traits are slowly accrued by Orlando through an automatic, unselfconscious social mimesis, but they are acquired habits and are by no means innate.
One of the axioms of the so-called “Gender Critical” movement is that gender socialisation is acquired from the moment that gender is assigned, and cannot then be altered. Therefore anyone assigned male at birth will always behave as a man, and will always be a danger to women. Woolf calls bullshit on this idea.
Heinlein, on the other hand, makes the same mistake that John Varley makes in Steel Beach. He assumes that gendered behaviour is intimately connected to gendered biology and will change immediately on the occurrence of biological changes:
…the newly minted male version of Jane finds himself ‘staring down nurses’ necklines’
Everett Maroon’s book is unfamiliar to me, but it sounds very interesting from what Biswas has to say about it. I suspect that, like Torrey Peters’ Detransition Baby, it will be easily misrepresented by anti-trans extremists, especially those who happen to hold a philosophical belief that allows them to claim that they, and they only, know the True Meaning of each book that they read. (And you can see how this might appeal to an author who hates fans reading things she doesn’t like into her books.) But books which explore the trans experience through fiction are important and necessary. I guess I should get myself a copy of Maroon’s book.
Which brings me back to Biswas’s book. Any academic text that leads me to want to read the works that it discusses has clearly done its job.
Sometimes I am hoist by my own petard. When Farah Mendlesohn suggested a theme of “Catastrophe” for this year’s Historical Fictions Research Network conference, I immediately wondered what novels there were about Pompeii. When I remembered that Edward Bulwer-Lytton had written a very famous one, I knew I had a perfect topic for a paper. Unfortunately, that meant that I had to read the book.
In my defence, I have read another one of Bulwer-Lytton’s novels. I reviewed The Coming Race in Emerald City back in 2005. It wasn’t that bad. However, it was a science fiction novel with a contemporary setting (well, contemporary for when it was written). The Last Days of Pompeii is a very different beast. It is an historical novel with a Guy Gavriel Kay-like mere hint of fantasy. By Pollux, Bulwer-Lytton takes every opportunity to play up Ye Olde Worlde setting! Your average Roman, it seems, can barely utter a sentence without prefacing it with an oath to some god or other. Pollux gets 15 mentions, compared to a mere 3 for his more boringly-named twin.
At one point, one of the characters exclaims, “Thou liest, base slave!” Reader, I confess that I actually laughed out loud.
The awfulness of the prose, however, is not the worst thing about The Last Days of Pompeii. It was written at a time when racist and sexist stereotypes were widely believed to be scientific fact, and assumptions based on these ideas pepper the narrative. Bulwer-Lytton even uses the term, “physiognomy”, at one point. The hero is noble, blonde, Athenian. The Romans are decadent, greedy and selfish. The villain is Egyptian, so that he can have swarthy skin. Fortunately, Bulwer-Lytton doesn’t seem to have known much about the Queendom of Kush.
The plot isn’t much better, being a melodramatic love polygon involving all of the major characters. Glaucus (the hero) and Arbaces (the villain) are both in love with Ione (who is Greek). Ione, Julia (a rich Roman girl) and Nydia (a blind slave) are all in love with Glaucus. There is a murder, and a love potion, and Glaucus is wrongly condemned to death in the arena. He is saved from this awful fate by an Act of God.
No, dear reader, not Hephaestus, whom one might assume would be responsible for the unfortunate goings on with Vesuvius. The Last Days of Pompeii is, at its core, a book about the dawn of Christianity. Arbaces is a priest of Isis, and a worker of magics, which compounds his villainy. Glaucus and Ione, though sceptical at first, are converted by the end of the book.
All of this is a bit of a shame, because most of Bulwer-Lytton’s research is spot on, or at least as spot-on as it was possible to be in 1834. He had clearly consulted the latest research on the relatively recently re-discovered city. No less a person than Mary Beard was unable to find much wrong with his portrayal of a site she knows well. Even Mary Shelley, while visiting Pompeii for herself, wrote in her diary of how impressed she was with the way that Bulwer-Lytton had brought the ancient city to life. There is actually much to admire in the book.
There is even a little bit of science fiction. Bulwer-Lytton seems to be aware that animals are more sensitive to volcanic activity that humans. When the lion is loosed into the arena to eat Glaucus and one of the Christians, it immediately senses that something is wrong, and with a whimper heads back into its cage. To the watching Romans, this is obviously A Sign, but we, and the author, know that God moves in mysterious ways.
And then the volcano erupts, and chaos ensues, in a fabulously melodramatic fashion.
So perhaps we should cut Bulwer-Lytton a bit of slack. As a writer of thrilling adventure stories, he clearly knew what he was doing. The ancient world was a very fashionable subject at the time, with Britain seeing itself as an empire to rival Rome itself. Bulwer-Lytton picked the name of his villain from Byron’s play, Sardanapalus, which was being staged for the first time in 1934. He picked the character of the Witch of the Volcano from another play of that title that was hugely popular in London in the early 1930s. Even the references to early Christianity where a direct response to Edward Gibbon’s legendary The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. (Gibbon, bless him, suggested that the religious intolerance of the Christians might have damaged to happy multi-cultural nature of Rome, an idea that was anathema to a British MP such as Bulwer-Lytton). It worked too. The book has sold over a million copies and has been adapted into 9 movies, 2 TV serials and a musical.
Anyway, the paper went down well, and know you know most of what was in it. I honestly can’t recommend reading the book unless you are into Victorian melodrama, but I feel it important to know that it exists, and to have learned a bit about how Victorians saw the ancient world.
We have reached the third and final volume of Mike Carey’s Rampart Trilogy. It is a long time since I read this book, but it is very memorable.
From my point of view, The Trials of Koli was the key book in the sequence. That was the one in which Ursala and Cup needed to come to an agreement regarding Cup’s medical gender transition, so that was the book where I was providing Mike with a lot of background data. The Fall of Koli was the book when all of that set-up got put into action. I just got to sit back and watch Mike in action.
I don’t know about you folks, but my jaw hit the ground when I found out what was going on aboard the Sword of Albion. There’s a lot of British politics going on in this bit of the story. I hope that readers in other countries got some idea of what Mike was talking about.
Of course there was also Spinner’s character arc to resolve. While the three books are all named after Koli, Spinner’s character arc is in many ways the more interesting and important one. I certainly wouldn’t have predicted that from the first book, but that’s the skill of the author hiding things in plain sight.
I must admit that the scene where Spinner and Cup finally meet each other is one of my favourite parts in the whole series. The bit where Elaine gives Spinner tips on breastfeeding is pretty spectacular too. (Elaine is the uploaded mind of a long-dead woman soldier.)
Of course, as this is the final book, there have to be endings. Some of them are happier than others. Some are more obvious than others. I was pleased that Veso got a resolution as well.
Looking back on the series, my main feeling is that it was an absolute honour to have had a small part in its creation. Watching Mike in action was fascinating, and I should note that he always took my suggestions with respect and interest, even if not all of them were useful.
There’s a blog tour going on at the moment. Most of the reviews I have seen have studiously avoided mentioning the trans elements of the books. That’s OK. What’s important to me is that people have been reading a series of excellent books which happen to feature two young trans people whose stories are about much more than simply being trans. Thank you, Mike, that is a fine thing that you have done there.
Here’s another book that I had a very small part in creating. Lucy Holland is better known as Lucy Hounsom, one of the co-hosts of the Breaking the Glass Slipper podcast. She has a fantasy trilogy out under her own name, but the silliness of modern publishing is such that she has to adopt a new name for this new venture, even though most people know exactly what is going on.
Whereas the Starborn series is epic fantasy, SisterSong is historical fantasy with strong roots in folk tales. The central conceit of the book is based around “The Twa Sisters”, one of the Scottish folk ballads collected by Francis Child. It is a story of sibling jealousy in which the elder sister causes the death of the younger sister, and the younger sister’s bones are made into a harp so that she can sing her story and obtain justice.
I got interested in the book when I saw Lucy say that she was basing it in the ancient cultures of Devon and Cornwall, what these days we call Celtic peoples. Then I got email from Lucy saying that she wanted to include some gender diversity in the story and, with my knowledge of trans history, could I help?
If you’ve been following my work during LGBT History Month this year you will know that finding evidence of trans people in Celtic society is not easy. I wrote about it here. What you can say is that tribal societies around the world have typically found space for gender variant people, and that such people were often involved in shamanic roles. Lucy knew that, hence her genderfluid version of Merlin. All that I needed to do was help her situate that character within the context of post-Roman Britain.
What people tend to forget about the Roman empire is that it stretched from Wales in the west to Pakistan in the east, and that it traded with civilisations in Africa, Russia and India. People could travel the length and breadth of the empire, and soak up influences from all of the cultures they encountered. It is therefore entirely reasonable for Merlin to have knowledge of people half a world away.
So that was my bit. The other thing, which I am not going to talk about because you need to read the book and get the experience of feeling it for yourself, the other thing was very much Lucy, and I am so very impressed.
Having a month off for LGBT History Month proved to be an excellent idea. I got very little read in February, save for history books. Of course if you would like me to review history books here then I’d be happy to do so. This is, after all, a fanzine. I can put whatever I want in it. Let me know.
Now we are in spring, and with unusual synchronicity two books that I had a small hand in creating are becoming available. Mike Carey’s The Fall of Koli is already on the shelves, and Lucy Holland’s SisterSong will be on April 1st. Obvously I can’t review either of them objectvely, but I have included a few comments about them because I think they are both well worth your time.
Easter is traditionally the start of the convention season, but there probably won’t be much in the way of con reports next issue because I have been selected for jury service, starting this week. One of the things about being self-employed is that you can’t just stop. So I’ll probably be spending the Easter weekend doing things I ought to have been doing during the week.
On the other hand, thanks to the magic of the Internet, I will be paying a brief visit to Brazil. I will be on a panel for Relampeio. It was so kind of them to invite me that I had to make it work somehow.
I guess that the Hugo finalists will be announced sometime soon as well. That will be something else to talk about next issue.
This is the January 2021 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.
Cover: Flying Unicorn: This issue's cover mixes mythic horses
Legendborn: A review of Tracy Deonn's debut YA fantasy novel, Legendborn
The Four Profound Weaves: A review of the novella, The Four Profound Weaves, by R B Lemberg
Queen of the Conquered: A review of the World Fantasy Award winning novel by Kacen Callender, Queen of the Conquered
Seven of Infinities: A review of the latest novella in Aliette de Bodard's Xuya universe, Seven of Infinities
Remote Control: A review of Nnedi Okorfor's new novells, Remote Control
SHIELD – Season Seven: A review of the seventh and final season of Marvel's Agents of SHIELD TV series
Star Trek: Discovery – Season Three: A review of season three of Star Trek: Discovery
His Dark Materials – Season Two: A review of the second season of the BBC's adaptation of Philip Pullman's fantasy trilogy, His Dark Materials
Star Trek: Lower Decks – Season One: A review of the first season of the animated TV series, Star Trek: Lower Decks
Editorial – January 2021: A reminder that there will be no issue in February
This issue’s cover is once again by Steffan Keller, so clearly I have an attraction to his work. The image I have chosen caught my eye as I was browsing Pixabay because I have been researching Medusa for something I’m doing with Dan Vo next week. I can’t say anything much about that yet, but doubtless it will all appear in due course.
If you are into Greek mythology, you will know that Pegasus was born from Medusa after she was killed by Perseus. Quite why fantasy artists keep insisting on giving him a unicorn horn, I don’t know, but I’ll live with it.
As is generally the case when I get cover material from Pixabay, this is only part of a much bigger image. The full thing is shown below, and you can see it in all its glory here.
Arthuriana is something of a Vegemite subgenre. I know lots of people who absolutely loathe it. I, however, have Welsh parents, and was born just a few miles from Glastonbury. Arthur is in my blood, and I am a total sucker for new attempts to reinvent the genre.
Legendborn had the potential to be a complete disaster. It is an American college kids story, with a Black lead. Given how badly Americans often do British history, I was nervous. I might not have tried it at all had it not been for an enthusiastic recommendation from Charlie Jane Anders and Annalee Newitz on Our Opinions are Correct. Charlie Jane and Annalee are pretty good judges of fiction, and I am here to tell you that they were not wrong.
The story begins with two high school girls, Brianna and Alice, applying for something called Early College, which apparently means going to university early. I don’t know much about American high schools, apart from the fact that they are supposed to be the worst days of your life, and that if you go to one you are liable to eaten by zombies, or werewolves, or vampires, or cannibal serial killers. I can see why people want to get out of going to them. Early College may be something that Tracy Deonn made up, and I’m not quite sure why it was necessary to the plot for Bree and Alice to go to college younger than everyone else, but there we are.
By way of introduction, Alice is Asian-American and has the sort of parents who get you up at 6:00am on Sunday morning and put you through hours of extra homework because you are going to succeed in life or die trying. Bree is naturally clever and hasn’t had to study for an exam in her life. Also her mom went to the same college, which counts for a lot just as it would in the UK. They both get in easily.
While Alice’s parents are intensely proud of their daughter, Bree’s mom is furious. And then, before mother and daughter can make up, mom gets fridged. To be precise, Bree’s mother dies in a car accident. Bree and her father come to pay their respects at the hospital, and Bree becomes convinced that the police officer who tells them about the accident has somehow messed with her mind to cover something up.
There is a lot of mom-fridging in this book. Deonn explains why in an afterword. I totally understand. Legendborn is, in many ways, a book about grief and how one deals with it.
I don’t know much about American universities either, except that some people get paid absurd sums of money for playing sport, and everyone else joins secret societies with silly names and bizarre, humiliating initiation rituals. And yes, Legendborn did remind me a bit of Waking the Moon, which got it off to an excellent start.
In their first week in college, Bree and Alice get involved with some fairly wild kids and attend an illegal party in a local park. They get caught and put on report. Alice immediately buries herself in her work, but Bree, ever the rebel, does her best to avoid the older student that she has been assigned as a mentor. When he finally catches up with her, she discovers that he’s a tall, handsome and really rather cool white boy. Maybe being on report won’t be so bad after all.
Except that this Nick Davis is a member of a secret society called The Round Table, and they have some very odd rituals indeed. They even claim that their traditions date all the way back to 6th Century Wales, with bloodlines to match.
And that they fight demons.
All of this happens in the first couple of chapters, so the first thing you should know about Legendborn is that it is incredibly fast-paced. I really didn’t want to put it down, and tore through the book in a very small number of days.
From now on the main question is how well Deonn will adapt the Arthur mythos to modern day America. There are plenty of potential pitfalls. I’m pleased to say that she very clearly loves the source material (and blames Susan Cooper for this). Deonn does far better with the Matter of Prydain than any number of red-haired, white American women who parade their “Celtic” heritage.
The Charybdis to this Scylla is the risk of betraying her own people. The Arthurian legends are, after all, the property of the colonisers. To have Bree simply embrace them would be to ignore much of what has happened in world politics in the 15 centuries or so since Arthur’s supposed reign.
Deonn gets around this by rooting her story firmly in modern American politics. The young students who join the Round Table are mostly typical of their generation. Several are gay and lesbian, one is non-binary, and a couple are passing white. They don’t see why Nick hooking up with a young Black girl should be a problem. Their parents, on the other hand, and bearing in mind that the story is set in North Carolina, have probably voted Rethuglican with pride all their lives, including in the most recent election, and would happily pledge their swords to King Donald. The generational divide gives Bree a means of embracing the myth, without embracing the legacy.
There is, of course, also the question of how Bree fits into a very ancestry-driven society. Deonn finds a brilliant solution to this.
I have two other things that I’d like to mention that I particularly enjoyed. The first is that Deonn took the time to understand the Welsh language, including how it is pronounced. The other is that her characters are charming: they seem like a great bunch of kids that I’d love to hang out with were I not old enough to be their grandmother.
As is the way of things, in Arthuriana more than most, there will be sequels. It looks like there will be a properly Arthurian love triangle. I’m certainly looking forward to more books. But please don’t let the partial nature of the story stop you from putting this book on your Lodestar ballot. It is very much worth it. (Well, unless you hate Arthuriana, of course, in which case broadswords at dawn.)
I’m always a little nervous approaching books centring trans characters that everyone else raves about. Of course I shouldn’t have been worried about RB Lemberg. They know what they are doing. But I was pleasantly surprised that there was so much more to The Four Profound Weaves than the trans elements.
One of the first things that strikes you about the book is that the two main protagonists, as well as both being trans, are both in their sixties. This in itself is rare enough but, as Gary Wolfe notes in his review for Locus, these are not the elderly but sprightly wizards who populate much of fantasy fiction, they are people who feel their age. Indeed, one of them, Uiziya, is ready to die.
More on that later, but first we need to understand a little of the world that Lemberg calls the Birdverse.
The action begins among the Surun’ people who live in a great desert. For the Surun’, changing gender is a routine business. They are also very comfortable with people being what they call “in-betweens”, and we would term “non-binary”. The Surun’ are also master weavers, and they practice the titular four profound weaves. The first of these, the weave of wind, is also the weave of change. Gender transition is accomplished with the aid of a magic carpet created using the wind weave.
The next weave in the sequence is the weave of sand, which is the weave of wanderlust. Uiziya has mastered this weave and created a flying carpet, a useful thing to have for elderly adventurers. Beyond that is the weave of song, which is the weave of hope. Uiziya seems to have missed that, because as the story starts she is sitting alone in her tent, hoping for the return of her aunt, Benesret, who can teach her the secret of the fourth weave, the weave of bones, the weave of death. Benesret has mastered this weave, and has been banished by the tribe for their safety. There seems to be no hope that Uiziya will gain what she seeks.
In the same tent village lives a man who will have multiple names, but I shall call him nen-sasaïr as that is the name he has for most of the book. He is of the Khana people who live in a ghetto in the city of Iyar. Iyar society is structed along gender lines, transition is frowned upon, and women are not allowed to practice magic. The Khana are worse. Their society is full segregated, and the men live in a walled compound inside the ghetto, forbidden to interact with the outside world. Khana women have more freedom to travel, and this eventually allowed nen-sasaïr to live among the Surun’ and become the man he is now.
Uiziya, as is the Surun’ custom, transitioned in childhood and has mostly forgotten what it was like to live as a boy. Nen-sasaïr, on the other hand, is wracked with doubt and guilt, feeling himself an outsider everywhere. Later in the story he finally returns to Iyar and an elderly woman called Sulikhah gives him a chance to enter the Khana male compound, but to do so would mean he had to abandon Uiziya, who is wounded.
I snatched my hand away from the lock.
“The lock recognized you as a man, I saw. But you could not solve it?” asked Sulikhah.
“No, no, it was easy. I solved it. I just did not turn it all the way.” I took a breath. “But I need to go back. I cannot leave my companion, for she is sick and helpless.”
Sulikhah looked at me, her eyes shrouded. “And this is the nature of women. Always given too much to those in our care.”
“I am not a woman.”
She shrugged. “You were brought up to be one. These things are hard to erase, much as you change otherwise.”
This is not the nature of women, but rather the nature of all people who care. Uiziya had told me this once. “You can choose to care or not, and that is what people do.”
As I said, Lemberg understands the trans condition very well.
However, I get ahead of myself. There is another character that we must meet, our antagonist. The Ruler of Iyar, also known as The Collector, is a tyrannical despot whose goals in life include collecting powerful magical artefacts. Forty years ago he tricked nen-sasaïr into brining him Benesret’s finest work, her carpet of hope. Naturally that has not satisfied him. But he has reason for all this collecting. He sees himself as a protector of the world.
“Change is the world’s greatest danger. Around the world you and others, old woman, chafe at my rule, forever desiring a change, yet change destroys all. If not for that power of change, we would not need to die. But you people do not understand. You rebel, you wander from place to place, you chafe at my rule, thinking that something else, somewhere else, would be better. It isn’t. But I save you.”
At this point I remind you that the first of the four profound weaves is the weave of wind, which means change, and the Surun’ use that weave very specifically for gender transition. There is a reason why conservatives of all stripes hate trans people, because the change that we effect strikes deep at their ideas of the way the world should be, and they cannot countenance that.
I should note also that Lemberg is first and foremost a poet. They are, Wolfe thinks, the only person to be on the Crawford Award shortlist with a book of poetry. Now poetry isn’t really my thing, but prose written by people who are poets very much is. The Four Profound Weaves is a wonderfully lyrical book. It also has some marvellous fantasy imagery. I particularly loved the Ruler’s birdcage throne, and the Torturer’s iron rod.
On the subject of change, some of you may remember that argument from elsewhere:
All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.The only lasting truth
Is Change.God
is Change.Earthseed: The Books of the Living
That’s from Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower, which makes very similar points. Lemberg adds the fact that without hope there cannot be change.
“Hope will never be silent” – Harvey Milk
“The dawn is never far away” – RB Lemberg, The Four Profound Weaves
As for the weave of death, that too has a role to play. Uiziya explains:
To weave from death, you had to listen to the dead. To know them deeply, to attend to what had been silenced, to care enough to help the dead speak again through every thread that made up the great work.
Which is why I spend so much time working on queer history.
The quality of the novellas published in 2020 is amazing. This book is right up there with the best of them.
Among many remarkable things that happened in 2020, the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel was won by a YA book written by a non-binary person. That book was Queen of the Conquered, by Kacen Callender. It is a book I have been meaning to get to for some time, and it is indeed excellent. Callender looks like they will have a fine career ahead of them. I’d like you to take that as a given, dear reader, because I’m going to be slightly critical and I don’t want you to think that I didn’t like the book.
First up, I do sometimes despair of the publishing industry. Queen of the Conquered is marketed as YA. In the prologue there is a brutal massacre of a wealthy family and their servants, not to mention guests at a party they are throwing. The only survivors are a young girl who grows up to be our central character, Sigourney Rose, and her maid, Marieke. In the first chapter Sigourney, now a young woman with her own domain to rule, thinks about how much fun it is to have sex with her bodyguard. There’s little coming of age tale here, and most of what there is happens in backstory.
Sometimes I think that the only thing that distinguishes YA from the rest of the market is that YA editors are allowed much more free rein in the nature of the books that they commission. The suits and bean counters don’t care what gets published as YA because it is “for children”.
The setting for Queen of the Conquered is a fantasy version of the Caribbean which appears to have been colonised by something like the Danish or Dutch. Each island is ruled by a noble family, and each has an agricultural economy dependent on slavery. For complex historical reasons, one island is ruled by a Black family, the Roses. This, of course, is the reason for the massacre. But now Sigourney is back. She has already manipulated her way into being adopted as heir by one of the other white families, and has become fiancée to the heir of another. Now her ambition is to persuade the childless King to make her his heir.
How can she do this? Well, there is magic. Not many people have it, but Sigourney happens to have a very useful power. She can read and manipulate the minds of others. That’s how she has got where she is this far. The royalty thing will be a bit harder.
Every year the King invites the other families to stay with him on his island during Storm Season. This year he has promised to name an heir. Each of the nobles has a magical power of some sort, and many of them want the crown. So the book in effect becomes a country house murder mystery in which Sigourney has to find a way to defeat the powers of her rivals, and work out who is killing them off, in order to achieve her objective.
However, Queen of the Conquered is much more than that. It is a deep meditation on questions of privilege. Sigourney might be Black, but she also owns slaves. She has no hesitation in condemning them to death if they misbehave. She likes to think that she wants to become Queen in order to free her people, but they have no faith in her willingness to do so.
Without getting too spoilery, Callender has an excellent solution to this dilemma, but they don’t quite carry it off. For a country house murder mystery with a twist ending to work, the reader has to believe that at least one of the obvious suspects must be the murderer. This is where Queen of the Conquered falls down for me. It isn’t a serious fault, and if I hadn’t read as many novels as I have then I might not even have noticed it. Thankfully Callender looks to have a long and very successful career ahead of them. I’m sure they’ll get better at their craft. And I’m looking forward to the sequel to this book.
One of the things I enjoy most about reviewing books is seeing writers grow and blossom as their career develops. I have always enjoyed Aliette de Bodard’s work, but I have also seen her craft improve, year by year. As far as I’m concerned, Seven of Infinities is her best work to date.
I must admit that I had expected – perhaps even wanted – this novella to be a sequel to The Tea Master and the Detective, which I had very much enjoyed. It is not. Instead it is de Bodard revisiting the idea, and making an even better job of it. So once again we have a detective team involving a starship and a human woman. In this case our starship is Wild Orchid in the Sunless Woods, a mindship with a shady past who is finding retirement a little too boring for her tastes. Her plucky human companion is Vân, a poor scholar just about surviving as a teacher to the children of reach folks thanks to an artificial ancestor implant that she created when a student.
An artificial what? Here I must explain that this story is set in de Bodard’s Xuya universe, which is essentially Vietnamese empire in space. De Bodard has gone to a great deal of effort to make this a real Vietnamese culture, albeit one subtly adapted for a space opera setting. For Western readers, that makes aspects of the worldbuilding seem quite alien. And anyone who is upset by that has a very odd idea of what science fiction is all about.
Anyway, Vietnamese culture means reverence for one’s ancestors, and what better way to revere them than to upload their minds into silicon so that they can keep on advising you after their death? It sounds pretty horrific to me, but then I didn’t grow up in Vietnamese culture. The point is, however, that this has to be a real ancestor, not some AI cobbled together by an incredibly brilliant and desperately poor student. Faking an ancestor would be something like faking that you were descended from a Norman baron with a hereditary title, or for Australians faking that you had an ancestor who was transported from England for some minor crime.
So, the plot. One day Vân’s student receives a mysterious visitor. Uyên, the student, goes to make a pot of tea, and when she returns the visitor is dead. In another room, Vân is chatting with her friend, Sunless Woods, whom she knows through a poetry club. The pair answer Uyên’s cry for help, and the investigation begins. Through her underworld contacts, Sunless Woods soon realises that the dead woman was a criminal on a hunt for a missing treasure, but she doesn’t want her cute and innocent human friend caught up in all this nefarious activity. Meanwhile Vân is terrified of any publicity and involvement with the authorities that might expose her scandalous secret. When the criminals turn out to have a connection to some of Vân’s friends from her student days, things get very awkward indeed.
There are two things I love about this book. The first is the characters. Works of fiction often rely heavily on characters doing stupid things, and not talking to each other. Often when reading such works you end up shaking your head at how daft everyone has been. In Seven of Infinites de Bodard crafts her two principle characters so beautifully that there is never any doubt that they would do the daft things that they do. It is absolutely in their nature to do them.
The other thing is that the entire plot is deeply rooted in the nature of the Xuya universe. The twist ending, which is quite brilliant, would not work in a Western setting. In fact it would probably be laughable. But in Xuya it makes perfect sense and is exactly the right thing to have happened. That de Bodard has presented her world in such a way that we foreign interlopers understand that, and accept it, is a magnificent achievement.
Lagoon is my favourite book by Nnedi Okorafor, so I was excited to find that her latest work is also set in Africa. Remote Control isn’t nearly as funny, but it is fascinating all the same.
The story concerns a young Muslim girl called Fatima who lives in a small town in Ghana. One day she witnesses a meteor storm, and soon after she finds a box containing a seed hidden beneath a tree. The tree appears to give the box to her. Previously Fatima had been a sickly child, but the box appears to do wonders for her health. Then one day a wealthy politician, a man with golden shoes, comes to visit her family. Fatima’s father sells him the box and he takes it away. Soon after, Fatima is almost run down in a traffic accident. Terrified, she lashes out with her mind. When she wakes up, everyone in the town is dead.
Distraught, Fatima takes to wandering the countryside, avoiding people as she learns to control the abilities her panic has unleashed. She takes the name of Sankofa, which is clearly significant. It is a word in the language of the Akan people of Ghana and literally it means “go back and get it”. More significantly it is associated with a proverb that goes something like, “It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten.” The English version of that is, “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
Sankofa, at least as much as I can learn from the internet, is a concept popular amongst the Ghanaian diaspora which encourages learning about their history. There’s a lot to learn. The Akan people were responsible for two of the great empires of Africa. The Ghana Empire dominated much of central west Africa for several hundred years in the first millennium CE. The Ashanti Empire controlled what is now modern Ghana from the 18th Century onwards and was only finally subdued by the British, after five wars, in 1902.
It isn’t entirely clear to me why Okorafor has chosen this piece of symbolism for the story, because the Sankofa of the story is very much a science fiction presence. There are fantasy-like elements to the story. She has a fox companion called Movenpick who follows her around and seems impervious to her powers. If you are wondering why he’s named after a Swiss brand of luxury ice cream, it is apparently because the ice cream company was bought up by Accor Hotels, and they have used the name for a luxury hotel chain, which is where Sankofa gets the name. But mostly this is a science fiction story.
The setting is the near future. We can tell that from the fact that Sankofa arrives in a place called Robotown that has a giant, AI-controlled robot as its police force. There Sankofa is befriended by a woman called Alhaja who has a business selling “jelli tellis” – TV sets that come in the form of a transparent film.
So Remote Control is about the past of Africa, but also about its future, and the deeply divided society that results from vast wealth pouring into the country from overseas. The text seems particularly dismissive of people who have acquired wealth and qualifications in America and have come home to lord it over those who have never left.
None of this tells us why the book is called Remote Control. That I will have to leave you to find out for yourselves and Okorafor slowly unravels the mystery of what happened to Fatima as a child. There’s a lot to think about in this book, and I’m not sure that I have understood it all yet, but that’s the mark of an excellent book.
It was announced in advance that this would be the last season of Agents of SHIELD. Maybe the creative team wanted to try new things. Maybe there are so many new Marvel TV series lined up that they needed to re-deploy staff. Or maybe they had run out of ideas for bringing Phil Coulson back from the dead.
Anyway, this season revolves around a plot by the Chromicoms to take over Earth, their own world having been destroyed in Season Six. Knowing that SHIELD is a formidable enemy, they elect to go back in time to prevent the organisation from ever being formed. Fitz and Simmons, with the help of Enoch the Chronicom, devise a counter strategy. But Sibyl, the Chronicom leader, is able to read the timestream, so their plan has to be heavily disguised. This involves Fitz being hidden away from Sibyl’s gaze, and Simmons having parts of her memory excised.
The bulk of the series involves the team chasing the Chronicoms through time. They start in 1931 and gradually move forward, stopping off at key moments in SHIELD and Earth history. That’s a brilliant idea for a farewell season, because it provides opportunities for vast amounts of nostalgia.
The creative team has run with the idea, in that the opening credits for each episode are designed to fit in with a spy thriller from the period in question. And the wardrobe department gets to go to town on silly, 20th Century fashions.
So yes, it is fan service. But unlike, say, The Mandalorian, there is a real TV series underpinning everything. With six seasons behind them, all of the characters have their own story arcs, and these get built on during the season. I’ve already covered Fitz and Simmons. Mac and Yoyo have their relationship to rebuild. May suffers consequences from her sort-of-death at the end of season six, and Yoyo also has to recover from injuries received. Daisy has more family drama, and Deke is trying to find a role for himself far in his past.
Then there is Coulson. It wouldn’t be SHIELD without him. Given the bad guys in the season, they bring him back in a Chronicom body. That means he’s an un-aging android with super strength. He even understands science. Not bad for an old guy. Of course being in silicon can be a problem when you are back in pre-internet days. I loved the episode where Coulson spent the entire time as [REDACTED].
The bit where Simmons gets to cosplay Peggy Carter, and Dan Sousa says her accent is terrible, is also brilliant.
The season gets to revisit a number of key events from previous seasons as the team travels through time. Eventually, however, they must confront the Chronicoms. The final episode seemed a little rushed. Much of the detail of the plan is explained very quickly. It was almost as if someone had decided the plot bit had to be cut short in order to make room for a soppy “what happened next” segment to round everything off. But it was worth it, because after seven years you do care about the characters and want them to have a chance at happiness.
Thank you, Agents of SHIELD. That was a wild ride and times, but you did a great job.
I think that Discovery may have found its feet at last. I have enjoyed the previous two seasons, but the idea of setting it prior to The Original Series was wildly risky and the Young Spock thing didn’t work as well as they had hoped it would. As part of Star Trek, the series didn’t make much sense. Sending Burnham and the crew into the 32nd Century gives them freedom to tell new stories without being too much beholden to What Has Gone Before.
Of course, there were still lose ends to tidy up. It became clear that the scriptwriters did not know how to make good use of Empress Georgiou, so they had to concoct a means of shuffling her offstage without causing too much upset to fans. Much as I love Michelle Yeoh, and Captain Killy, I hope that’s the last we shall see of the Mirror Universe. Georgiou will apparently be a major feature of the forthcoming Section 31 series, and that will be a much better use of the character. But if that series wants to be taken seriously as Star Trek Noir it will need to be less silly and more morally grey than a Mirror Universe story.
A new recurring character for this series is Cleveland Booker, an “independent trader” who befriends Burnham when she arrives in the 32nd Century some months ahead of Discovery. Book, as he’s known, provides the essential service of being a native guide to the new world in which the Discovery crew find themselves. He also provides a new love interest for Burnham, is an environmental activist on the side, and has a beautiful pet cat, Grudge. And if that wasn’t enough, he’s played by David Ajala (swoon). That’s a win all around.
That leaves us with the overarching theme of the current series: The Burn. This was a galaxy-wide event that caused the dilithium cores of starships everywhere to explode with massive loss of life and a significant reduction in interstellar travel. The Federation is a desperate fraction of its former self, trying to hang on to shreds of authority in a galaxy increasingly given over to every-planet-for-itself. The Discovery, with its unique spore drive, is clearly a significant asset.
The main thrusts of the plot have therefore been to re-integrate Discovery into the Federation, and to find out what caused The Burn. The former is complicated by Michael Burnham’s conviction that she always knows better than her superior officers, and by the presence of Book who is very much not a Starfleet officer. Inevitably, because this is a Star Trek tradition, we have an admiral as a potential adversary. I was never quite convinced by Charles Vance as he seemed to have a somewhat different character in each episode, but we got there in the end. I particularly liked his explanation to the main series villain, Osyraa, that you can’t forge a peace unless evil actions have consequences. That was remarkably perceptive of the scriptwriters.
The three-part season finale also provided an explanation for The Burn, and while it depended on more Star Trek hand-wavy physics, it was a remarkably imaginative move. It looks like it also paves the way for retirement for Captain Saru. The finale showed how hard it is for actors to express emotion in all that Kelpien make-up, and I suspect that Doug Jones may have asked for the opportunity to appear as Saru without it for his swansong.
Like in His Dark Materials, the setting for that season finale owed a lot to Piranesi. I’m pleased to see that so many people in the TV business are reading Suzanna Clarke (because I don’t think they discovered an obscure Italian artist by accident).
All of which leaves series 4 clear to go back to simple stories of space exploration and the Federation acting as the kindly galactic police. That’s very traditional Star Trek.
The other thing I need to mention is the queer core of the cast. The gay couple of Stamets and Culber have been joined by the lesbian engineer, Jett Reno, and by Adira Tal, a human Trill host who is non-binary, and their transmasculine lover and predecessor as host, Gray, who is not quite as dead as a former host ought to be. This group forms a charming queer community in engineering and medical. In addition, the actors playing Adira and Gray are themselves non-binary and transmasculine. This is a huge leap forward for trans representation in television. I’m not entirely comfortable with the idea of using Trill to introduce trans characters, because it provides a non-human excuse for them being trans rather than it being a simple fact. However, thus far the series has managed to not make any awful missteps. The way that Stamets and Culber have adopted Adira and Gray is really quite charming.
As I understand it, one of Gene Roddenberry’s objectives for Star Trek was that it would provide a beacon of hope for a better future, one in which all of mankind would work together to explore the galaxy. Season #3 of Discovery looks to have put the show in exactly the position that it needs to be able to fulfil that role for a modern audience.
I saved the second season of His Dark Materials to watch over the holiday period and am glad I did. I would have got very itchy having to wait a week for each new episode. I’m pleased to say that it continues to hold my attention.
As with the first season, some of the casting is superb. Ruth Wilson and Lin-Manuel Miranda continue to do great jobs, and Simone Kirby makes a great addition as Mary Malone. I also loved the set dressing for Cittàgazze. There is a definite air of Piranesi influence about those staircases.
Plot-wise, on the other hand, it is very much a middle book of the series. There is a great deal of wandering around aimlessly in the mountains near Cittàgazze in the final couple of episodes and you get the impression that time runs differently for different groups of characters. The only really important development is that Will finds the Knife and learns how to use it.
When I wrote my review of season #1 I wondered how audiences would react when the books descend into theological ranting, which they inevitably must. This season is mostly free of this, but the final couple of episodes set things up for the war between Lord Asriel and The Authority. Lyra is revealed to be the new Eve, and Mrs Coulter vows to avert The Fall. It is all Deeply Ominous.
Possibly the most interesting scene in the entire season is the one in which the angels start talking to Mary through her computers. She asks them why they have been helping humans evolve, and their answer is, “Revenge!” Given that Mary is an ex-nun, that must come as a bit of a shock, but she never revisits the question, and happily accepts a commission from the angels later in the series.
Mary uses the I Ching to communicate with Dust, but watching her walk wide-eyed through the world of Cittàgazze, protected from the spectres by angels, though she doesn’t know that, I can’t help thinking of the Fool card from the Tarot. I should probably look to see if there is a full deck of Major Arcana in the cast list.
There was also a scene from episode 5 that stuck with me. Carlo Boreal has brought Mrs Coulter to Will’s Oxford (i.e. our world) and is explaining to her how this new world works. He notes that the government there is even more corrupt than the Magisterium. I can’t remember if he says that in the books, but it works magnificently well for the UK right now.
Thankfully season #3 has been greenlit, so we should get to see the end of the story. I hope that the TV scriptwriters manage to do as well as Pullman did with the book and make it a powerful piece of fiction. Otherwise we’ll be left with another old man from Oxford lecturing us about religion.
Those of you in the USA will already have had plenty of time to enjoy this animated Star Trek spinoff. For us in the UK it has only just arrived, being available on Amazon Prime. Having heard a lot of hype about the series, I binged on it immediately.
Lower Decks is set after the Next Generation era, because Will Ryker has his own ship. But he and Deanna Troi only turn up in the final episode. The series is mainly about the USS Cerritos, “one of Starfleet’s least important ships”. She is named after a small town in the Los Angeles area, and the captain’s office has a California flag on the wall. Someone was having a bit of regional rebellion there.
The Cerritos is commanded by Captain Carol Freeman, who is very competent but seems to be suffering from the strain of being the first Black woman to captain a starship in a TV series. (Michael Burnham is now captain of the Discovery, but she wasn’t when Lower Decks first aired.)
The ship has the usual complement of quirky bridge characters. The first officer, Jack Ransom, is a bit of a Kirk wannabe, only happy when he’s chatting up girls (badly) or punching aliens. Shaxs, the Bajoran head of Security, is always keen to start a fight, and the ship’s doctor is a grumpy lady feline called T’Ana.
The bridge crew, however, are not the stars of the show. That honour goes to a team of ensigns, the sort of people who have to do the grunt work to make the bridge crew look good. Chief among them is Beckett Mariner. She graduated top of her class from Starfleet Academy and was expected to be a high flyer, but she has a strong anti-authoritarian streak that has made her persona non grata on most ships. The only reason that she is on the Cerritos is that Captain Freeman is her mother. But for obvious reasons that has to be kept top secret.
Presumably all this is supposed to be playing off the characters of Michael Burham and Philippa Georgiou. Though there’s no way that Georgiou would have put up with Mariner’s nonsense.
Mariner’s best friend is Ensign Brad Boimler, a nerdy white boy with an obsessive devotion to Starfleet regulations and a deep and pathetic desire for promotion. Naturally he and Mariner are at odds most of the time. They are joined by two other ensigns: Sam Rutherford, an engineer with a new and sometimes malfunctioning cyborg implant; and D’Vana Tendi, an Orion medic who can’t stop going SQUEEEE! at the mere thought of having made it into Starfleet.
The basic plot of each episode is that the Cerritos gets into trouble in some typically Star Trek way, but is rescued thanks to Mariner’s extreme competence and the enthusiastic bumbling of her friends. Credit for their work tends to go to members of the bridge crew. Sooner or later, however, the simmering conflict between Mariner and her mother must come to a head. And secrets cannot be kept forever.
Most of the point of the series is to poke fun at standard Star Trek tropes. It does this very well. We can all have a wry smile when someone says, “if this was an important mission they would have sent the Enterprise.” The quality of their technobabble is superb. But it has also created a fun bunch of dysfunctional but likeable characters in Mariner and her friends. I really enjoyed the series. And it seems like there will be a second season. I hope us UK viewers don’t have to wait so long for that one.
Welcome to the New Year, same as the old year but with an added attempted right wing coup in the USA. We are living in interesting times, alright.
Not that I have too much time to worry. February is LGBT History Month in the UK and I have a whole heap of speaking engagements lined up. This is a good time to remind you that there will be no issue of Salon Futura in February because I will be way too busy. We’ll be back in March.
I note also that Hugo Nominations are now open. I very much hope that we get more interest in the fanzine category this year. You don’t have to vote for Salon Futura, there are plenty of other great candidates being profiled in Cora Buhlert’s Fanzine Spotlight project.
I was thinking of commenting on the utter mess that DisCon III made of trying to do something about the sheer volume of finalists, but I don’t have time and they seem to have fixed the problem. While it is great that Nicholas Whyte, Kevin and a bunch of other old-timers have come to the rescue, it is a tragedy that a bunch of young fans who wanted to get involved in running WSFS functions were forced out before the convention got a grip on things. The less said about Colette Fozzard’s “It’s all about poor, pitiful me” flounce in File 770 the better.
This is the December 2020 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.
Cover: Crow in Winter: This issue's cover is by Stefan Keller.
Blackthorn Winter: A review of the new Liz Williams novel, Blackthorn Winter, the sequel to the critically acclaimed Comet Weather.
The Once and Future Witches: A review of the new novel from Alix E Harrow, The Once and Future Witches.
When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain: A review of the new Nghi Vo novella, When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain.
The Left-Handed Booksellers of London: A review of the new novel by Garth Nix, The Left-Handed Booksellers of London.
The Doors of Sleep: A reviw of Tim Pratt's latest novel, The Doors of Sleep.
Last Stand in Lychford: A review of the final part of Paul Cornell's Witches of Lychford series: Last Stand in Lychford.
Miracles of Our Own Making: A review of Liz Williams' history of paganism in the UK, Miracles of Our Own Making.
Merry Happy Valkyrie: A review of a Christmas-themed fantasy novella set in Australia: Tansy Rayner Roberts' Merry Happy Valkyrie.
The Mandalorian – Season #2: A review of season #2 of the Star Wars TV series, The Mandalorian.
SMOFcon 37¼: A review of 2020's virtual mini-SMOFcon.Editorial – December 2020: Cheryl looks forward, with some trepidation, to the new year.
Given that this issue covers the winter holiday period in the Northern Hemisphere, I figured I should have something suitably wintry and fantastical for the cover. This is another image from pixabay and is by Stefan Keller. It doesn’t seem to have a proper title. I just wanted the crow, but there is a lot more to the picture than that.
Comet Weather is one of my absolute favourite books of 2020, so when I discovered that NewCon Press was making the sequel available early I jumped at the opportunity to get hold of a copy. Officially the book isn’t out until next spring, but as it is set around the Christmas / New Year period, and he had copies available, Ian Whates decided to put it on sale.
Blackthorn Winter once again features the four Fallow sisters: Bee, Serena, Stella and Luna. Serena, you may remember, is a successful fashion designer. She’s also the toast of the tabloids, having just dumped rock star Ben Amberley for top Shakespearean actor, Ward Garner. As the story opens, someone breaks into Serena’s London home and trashes all the clothes she had made for her latest collection. That someone probably isn’t human.
As a popular DJ, Stella is always busy over New Year. This time she’s been booked for a mysterious gig, the location of which is being kept secret. She assumes it is some sort of rave. Then she gets a warning from a talking magpie.
Meanwhile Bee is back at the family home in Somerset. She’s hoping that the family will all get together for Christmas. She’s fairly confident about her sisters, but their mother has gone off who knows where again with only a vague promise to be home for the holidays. Then Bee finds a teenage girl sheltering in the local church yard. She’s probably a run-away, but she doesn’t speak English, and her skin is green.
Luna is still pregnant, so she and Sam are not planning to go very far. Unfortunately the world has other ideas. If she’s not traveling physically, well she’ll just get pushed off to some other world, or other time. On one of these trips she narrowly escapes something that looks rather like the Wild Hunt. And one of the hunters appears to be her mother.
As you can see, there is plenty of plot. And I haven’t even mentioned that Ben has gone missing, or that a hot-shot financier wants to invest in Serena’s business, or that Stella makes a new friend with a passion for feeding stray cats.
Suffice it to say that Blackthorn Winter does not disappoint. There are some lovely real-world touches in it too. The church of All Hallows by the Tower is a real place and does have Roman remains in the crypt. The story of the Green Children of Woolpit is a real folk tale. And there’s other stuff too, which I can’t talk about. The ancient history bits I could see coming a mile off, because I am that sort of person. The more recent historical elements blindsided me completely, but would not have done so if I had read Williams’ history of paganism first.
I understand that there will be two more books in the series. I am very much looking forward to them. I’m also hoping to see Williams getting some proper recognition at last. Gary Wolfe reviewed Comet Weather, which should help, but the award-voting public is very fickle.
This one shouldn’t need any introduction. Alix Harrow’s follow-up to The Ten Thousand Doors of January has already been praised to the skies by many other critics. I can see why too. The Once and Future Witches is an engaging tale that mixes feminism, fairy tales and American history in an imaginative way. I expect to see this book on some award shortlists next year.
The book centres on the three Eastwood sisters: Bella, Agnes and June. They have survived an abusive father, though this has cost them their trust in each other. Part of the plot of the book revolves around how they learn to be sisters again.
The girls live in an alternate version of our world in which many famous figures from the past are gender-flipped, and in which magic works. Witches are greatly feared, at least by men. The city of Old Salem was burned to the ground because of its witchery. The Eastwood girls live in New Salem, the City Without Sin, that has risen to replace the old. But “without sin” seems to mean “women do what they are told by men”. Even some of the most law-abiding Christian ladies don’t see how being without sin means that they should be deprived of the vote. Thus women have become unhappy with their lot. Some, inevitably, will turn to witchcraft, and this in turn brings out the White Feminist tendency.
“I’m afraid you have entirely misunderstood our position. The Association has battled for decades to afford women the same respect and legal rights enjoyed by men. It is a battle we are losing; the American public still sees women as housewives at best and witches at worst. We may be either beloved or burned, but never trusted with any degree of power. […] I don’t know who was responsible for the abnormality at St. George’s, but I would turn her in myself before I let such activities destroy everything we’ve worked for.”
Bella is the oldest of the three. She’s a librarian by profession, unmarried and seemingly unmarriable. She appears old before her time. Agnes has work in a mill, which pays badly and is dangerous but is better than being on the street. She is pregnant, from a failed love affair, and considering abortion, which is of course illegal. June is the youngest. She’s new in town, freshly escaped from their father, thanks to his untimely death. She’s wild and passionate, though about feminism, not about men. You can see where this is going, can’t you?
Researching fairy tales in the library (she loves the work of the Sisters Grimm), Bella chances upon what appears to be a fragment of a spell to bring back the Lost Way of Avalon, the witching tradition for which Old Salem was burned. Avalon. Once and Future. It is a bit of a stretch, but I’ll forgive Harrow.
Meanwhile, all is not well in New Salem. A weaselly councilman called Gideon Hill is making a run for mayor. The basis of his campaign is that the city is in danger of falling into sin. I mean, suffragism, whatever next? Mr Hill, however, is not what he seems. There is something odd about his shadow.
While the core of the book is its feminist message, it makes a decent attempt to be intersectional. Bella strikes up a friendship with Miss Cleopatra Quinn, a journalist from the newspaper that caters to the city’s Black population. Agnes becomes friendly with Mr. August Lee, a champion of workers’ rights and a former comrade of the legendary Eugene Debs.
I have a sneaking suspicion that some Black critics may be less enthusiastic about the book. Cleo Quinn quickly becomes the calm, sensible heart of the narrative. The Eastwood girls all have their own personal demons to deal with before they can confront the real threat. They are also hopelessly naïve. Cleo and her community have had decades of experience of fighting white supremacy and are much better at the job. And yet Cleo is not the hero of the narrative. That honour goes to the white girls.
I’m also a little uneasy about some of the engine of the plot. In a truly great novel, plot twists seem inevitable as the narrative unfolds. In this book they seemed mostly sprung on us out of the blue in order to keep the narrative moving forward. I don’t think it detracts too much from the book, but if you have read as much as I have then it is something you tend to notice.
From my point of view, however, the main problem I had with the novel, which is not a bad thing, is that it was too personal. It is a story of a group of women struggling against seemingly overwhelming odds. The political system is stacked against them. Potential allies turn on them for fear of losing respectability, while others simply refuse to believe that a system that works fairly for them might not work fairly for others. Eventually a populist politician welds all of this into a mob, determined to seek and out and destroy those that he deems Other.
And of course I have no tradition of magic to fall back on.
“This fight.” […] “To just—live, to be—is one that I was signed up for before I was even born. I don’t get to walk away.”
Thanks Alix. I can’t offer bow or axe, or indeed spells, but you have my pen.
I loved The Empress of Salt and Fortune so much that on finishing it I immediately put Nghi Vo’s next book on pre-order. When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain is another book about the monk Chih from the Singing Hills monastery. It takes a very different approach to the first book, but is no less loveable.
As you may recall, Chih and their colleagues are experts in collecting oral histories and folktales. The Empress of Salt and Fortune was a complex tale of political intrigue, told by someone who witnessed the events first-hand. When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain is a more simple folk tale, presumably based on real events, but whose details are disputed depending on who is telling the tale. The new book also sees Chih without their faithful companion, the talking hoopoe, Almost Brilliant. She’s busy with a clutch of eggs and is unable to accompany Chih on this trip. I miss her snark, but it is just as well that she’s not there because her mouth would have got her eaten.
Chih is traveling in a mountainous region to the south of Anh, so think the Himalayas. Because travel is difficult, they have teamed up with a young woman who is part of the mammoth-riding corps. Piluk is only a small mammoth, nothing like the huge war beasts of the imperial army, but she’s more than useful in snowy, mountainous terrain, and perfect for Si-yu and Chih.
Or at least she would be in normal circumstances. Approaching the way station where they expect to spend the night, Piluk and her passengers are ambushed by three tigers. Tigers, of course, do not hunt in packs. Therefore these must be were tigers. Piluk gets the party to safety, but the tigers lay siege to them and Chih realises that their only hope is to try to charm the tigers with a story.
Thus we learn of the story of Ho Thi Thao, mighty queen of were tigers, and her love for the human scholar, Dieu. Chih is well versed in the version of the tale told among humans, but they correctly guess that among were tigers the story is told very differently.
Something that this book has in common with its predecessor is the beauty of language. Here Vo is describing Dieu’s childhood:
So in the end, there was only Dieu left, living in a tiny house in Hue County, being raised by a series of diligent tutors and compassionate maids. There was a hawthorn tree in the front, a tiny garden in the back, and a wind from the north that seemed to blow as much good as bad. The house was rented, so she truly possessed only a few treasured books, a face that was long and oval like a grain of rice, a mouth that smiled rather too little, and a little jade chip that guaranteed the bearer entry to the imperial examinations.
What’s new is, of course, the tigers. They are delightfully cat-like: at times sleepy, at times playful, always deadly.
The main question for me is, which of these two novellas I should put on my Hugo ballot? Or should I just do both of them?
I don’t think any more Singing Hills books are immediately forthcoming, but Vo has sold a couple of novels to Tor.com. The first one, The Chosen and the Beautiful, will be out next year. It is set in 1920s America, and is described as a decolonisation of The Great Gatsby. That sounds really interesting.
I first reviewed Garth Nix back in 1996 after Sabriel won the Aurealis award for Best Fantasy Novel in both the Children and Adult categories. It quickly became clear that Nix did not really need me, and I would be better off reviewing those Aussie writers who had not yet broken out to an international audience. Also he was writing a lot of books in the same world, and that makes it hard to keep up. However, he has remained a friend and I try to catch up with him when he’s in the UK. When I saw that he’d produced a new book in an entirely different world, with a rather intriguing title, I decided to give it a go.
The Left-Handed Booksellers of London features a sort of magical secret service whose job it is to protect the realm from supernatural enemies. Their cover is that they run bookshops. Well, the HQ of UNCLE was under a barber’s shop, so why not? The booksellers of the left-handed persuasion tend to be the action-hero types. Those of the right-handed persuasion are more intellectually inclined.
Nix has chosen to set the book in the 1980s. Partly that’s because he spent some time in the UK during that period, but of course it also means he doesn’t have to worry about things like mobile phones. But this is not our 1980s. Following the election of Clementina Atlee’s government in 1945, Britain has become a world-leader in gender equality. This doesn’t have much impact on the book, but it does allow Nix to have a lot more women characters than he might have had. It also makes space for jokes such as a gender-swapped version of The Professionals. I’m assuming that it starred Diana Rigg and Joanna Lumley.
I note in passing that one of the things I praised Sabriel for (and I had forgotten this because it is a long time since I read the book) is that it contains mention of childbirth and menstruation. That’s way ahead of its time.
However, back with the book, you’ll be wanting to know about the plot. The main character is Susan Arkshaw who has come up to London from the West Country (not Darkest Somerset, somewhere between Bath and Chippenham, so Corsham or Box I guess) to study at art school. While she’s in the big city she hopes to track down clues to the identity of her father, whom her mother Never Talks About.
Susan’s first point of contact, Frank Thingley, an old man whom she knows only from regular Christmas cards, turns out to be involved in organised crime. But then he gets murdered by a young man called Merlin who appears to be able to do magic.
Merlin is an interesting character. He is left-handed, but he’s no Jane Bond, or even Josephine Solo. He’s elegant, fashion-conscious, and prone to wearing dresses, which causes him to be mistaken for a woman on a regular basis. So more like Jason King without the ridiculous moustache. Paired with Susan’s resolutely dyke-ish dress sense, the two make an interesting couple. I’m not sure that Nix really knows what to do with this, and if there are sequels (of which hints have been dropped) I’d like to see him make more of Merlin’s non-binary nature.
Where was I? Oh yes, the plot. It soon turns out that powerful magical forces are stirring. Some of them have strong connections to the criminal underworld. There are bent coppers. (Of course there are, this is the 1980s.) And Susan’s having just passed her 18th birthday turns out to be intimately connected to all of this.
I have to say that if you want a fantasy story that is intimately rooted in the landscape and magical traditions of the British Isles then you should be reading Liz Williams, not Garth Nix. That’s not to say that the Nix book is bad, it is just that Williams knows the subject intimately whereas Nix has to work at it. But that aside, and Nix’s strange antipathy to stargazy pie and David Essex, this is a fun book written by someone with two and a half decades of experience of writing best selling fantasy. You can’t go far wrong with that.
Angry Robot sent me an eARC of this one because I loved Tim Pratt’s Axiom series so much. I guess I should start by saying that The Doors of Sleep is nothing like the Axiom series. It is, however, fascinating. Let me explain.
Our main protagonist is Zaxony Dyad Euphony Delatree — Zax to his friends — and he’s a pretty ordinary bloke. On his home world he’s a social worker; his job is conflict mediation. So basically he gets paid for persuading people to be nice to each other. Then one day he gains a mysterious power. Each time he goes to sleep he wakes up on a different world, possibly in a different universe.
When we first meet Zax he has already been travelling the multiverse for several years. He has visited hundreds of worlds. He’s had a lot of narrow escapes, but thanks to his having acquired something called a ‘linguistic virus’ he’s able to survive on most of the worlds he visits without having to flee in panic. Sleeping pills are an important part of his travel kit.
I’d like to pause a moment to think about practical issues of novel writing here. First of all, there is worldbuilding to be done. In the course of the novel Zax visits over 100 different worlds, all of which have to be different and described in some way. Some of them only get a paragraph each. A few only get a sentence. But they all need to be imagined. That’s a tall order.
Then there is the question of plot. How can you build a coherent narrative when your hero only gets to spend a day in each world before moving on?
The answer appears to be to look to another fiction hero who has similar issues. I’m talking, of course, about Doctor Who. The Doctor does get a few episodes in each setting, but then she gets to move on to an entirely different one. Narrative coherency is provided in a number of ways.
Firstly there are companions. Zax has them too. He has discovered that if he falls asleep holding someone, that person travels with him. The only caveat is that they must be asleep too. Anyone who travels awake goes insane thanks to having seen Things That Man Was Never Meant To Know. By the time we meet Zax he has had several companions and is just about to say goodbye to one and pick up someone new.
The difference between Zax and The Doctor is that The Doctor is superbly competent, whereas Zax’s only skill is conflict mediation. The Doctor’s companions are often much less competent. Some have spent much of their time on the show screaming in fear. Zax is fortunate enough to pick up some very competent friends.
The first, the one he is about to meet, is called Minna, and she’s absolutely fascinating. Zax finds her on a farm world. She’s employed to tend crops by mysterious masters who make your average Victorian factory owner seem amazingly benevolent by comparison. Minna has been genetically engineered to make her better at her job, which gives her all sorts of plant-based superpowers. She’s basically a walking pharmacopoeia. Pratt does a wonderful job finding new ways for her to use her powers to get Zax out of sticky situations.
The other main companion doesn’t join the team until later. Victory-Three — Vicki to their friends — is a military AI from a world on which living beings seem to have exterminated each other. Being miraculous far-future tech, Vicki is able to travel in a crystal set in a ring. Why does Zax need a military AI? Well, that would be a spoiler.
The other thing that Doctor Who teaches us is that Zax needs a recurring antagonist, a version of The Master. So he has one. The Lector started out as a companion, but he’s a ruthless and fiendishly intelligent scientist who is determined to figure out the secrets of Zax’s multiverse hopping power and use that power to his advantage.
It took me a while to get into this book, because each chapter seemed to be a different story. But around half-way through we get the full backstory of Zax’s time with The Lector, and from them on I couldn’t put it down. Literally, I finished it in an evening, unable to go to sleep until I had got to the end.
I’m really impressed with what Tim Pratt has done here. He’s taken a totally off-the-wall concept that makes for all sorts of narrative problems and has made it work beautifully. The book doesn’t have the entertaining supporting cast of the Axiom books, and there’s nothing much in the way of relationship drama except between Zax and The Lector. But I think most of you will warm to Minna the way I did, and The Doors of Sleep is a very enjoyable book.
One of the few silver linings to the whole dreadful drift of the UK into a far-right dystopia has been the attempts by creative people to try to understand how it happened. Mike Harrison’s The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again is one such attempt, but another that has received rather less critical attention is Paul Cornell’s Witches of Lychford novellas.
Of course with one instalment coming out each year, just before Christmas, seeing the series as a whole is somewhat challenging, but it very much deserves to be seen as a single work (and I’m wondering if there is enough of it to qualify for the Best Series Hugo). Last Stand in Lychford is the final volume in the series. It follows on from the traumatic events of The Lights Go Out in Lychford, and sees the return of a villain from the first book in the series, the smarmy demon who calls himself D. Cummings.
David, that is. And he’s much better dressed that the other Cummings fellow. No self-respecting servant of Lucifer would ever be seen looking so slovenly.
If you have been following the series, you will know that Lizzie and Autumn will be pretty much on their own here. However, Cornell does introduce a new character. Entirely in keeping with the spirit of the rest of the series, Zoya Boyko is a single mother and a recent immigrant from the Ukraine. She’s someone who will not find life easy in a small English town. Net curtains will twitch. But she’s hard working and determined to do the best she can for her young daughter. If only it were possible to earn a decent living.
Very soon, however, earning a living will be the very last thing on the minds of the people of Lychford. Thanks to the thing with the rain in the previous book, most of them are now well aware that magic exists, which is just as well because someone is coming to town, and he’s not Santa Claus.
At the end of the previous book, Finn, the Prince of Faerie, exploded all over Lizzie’s kitchen. Neither she nor Autumn has any idea how to put him back together again. But clearly something is very wrong in the magical realms. There is a power grab in process, and Lychford is where it will all go down.
While the series does take a very hard look at England, in a very vicar-like “you need to think about your behaviour” sort of way, it is also notable for the way that Cornell allows perfectly ordinary people to be heroes. OK, so Judith and Autumn can actually do a small amount of magic, but Lizzie mainly has her faith to draw on, and none of them are what you might call athletic. That doesn’t matter. They get to save the world because they care about it, not because they can punch out the bad guys. Given that Cornell is most famous for writing comics, this is particularly pleasing.
I’m very fond of this series, and I am delighted to report that Cornell has done a fine job with the ending. The final few paragraphs brought a broad smile to my face. I had totally missed all the hints that Cornell had dropped through the book.
If you have been putting off trying these books until the whole story arc was available, now is a good time to buy. There is an omnibus edition available on Kindle for only £7. I very much hope that Tor.com will follow up with a paper edition sometime soon.
Having read Blackthorn Winter and been completely blindsided by bits of occult history I was unaware of, I figured that it was time to finally get on with reading Liz Williams’ history of British paganism. Miracles of Our Own Making is an ambitious project, tracing the history of pagan belief in these isles from pre-Roman times to the present day. Fortunately Williams has plenty of good previous research to draw on, in particular the excellent work of Ronald Hutton.
I have a few minor quibbles with the first chapter, but they don’t affect the subject of the book at all and I don’t expect many readers to know as much about Roman Britain as I do. Carolyne Larrington has blurbed the book, so I’m assuming that the second chapter, on Saxons and Vikings, is fine. From there we go quickly through the Middle Ages, where witch panics and sorcery don’t seem to have obsessed people much, and arrive in the Early Modern.
It is no accident, I suspect, that the rise of belief in things like alchemy and sorcery have paralleled the rise of science. These are all attempts to control the world through experiment. Some of it worked and has come down to us as True Knowledge; and some of it did not. At the time, those making the experiments gave equal weight to all unproven theories, and would undoubtedly deem electricity and wi-fi to be forms of magic. Heck, as late as Victorian times many people believed that Spiritualism was a valid science.
Alongside the practice of magic by the upper classes, we have the burgeoning belief in witchcraft, which Williams sensibly explains as being as much a social phenomenon as actual survival of ancient beliefs. In particular it is worth noting that in some parts of the world the majority of people executed for witchcraft were men.
Where the book really comes into its own is in the discussion of modern pagan practices. Williams’ survey of the field is peppered with comments such as, “I attended a ceremony of this type…”. Also, living in Glastonbury, she has easy access to a whole heap of pagan history, both written and oral.
The focus on Britain is probably necessary to constrain the scope, though I can’t be the only British person who read Margot Adler’s superb Drawing Down the Moon when it was first published. There is brief mention of the Illuminatus trilogy in the section on chaos magic, but a little more discussion of the links between the UK and USA might have been interesting. I was also slightly surprised not to see any mention of Colin Wilson’s The Occult, which was practically required reading in certain circles when I was a student.
Overall, however, Miracles of Our Own Making is a fascinating overview of pagan beliefs and practices in Britain, and would, I think be a useful starting reference work for anyone wishing to write historical fantasy set in this country.
As I have two Christmas-related books in this issue already, I figured that I could go the whole hog and add a third. This isn’t a new book. It is two years old, and my apologies to Tansy Rayner Roberts for taking so long to get round to it. My excuse is that you can only read it at Christmas.
As most of you will know. Tansy Rayner Roberts is Australian. But she does live in Hobart, the most southerly city in the country. Tasmanian weather is a law unto itself, and that provided the inspiration for this book.
Christmas in Australia is a strange event. One the one hand you have Santa and his reindeer in shop windows, and Northern Hemisphere Christmas movies on TV. There is fake snow everywhere. But outside it is blisteringly hot and everyone in their right minds is off down the beach with a slab of tinnies.
Except, dear reader, for the small, isolated town of Matilda in the mountains of central Tasmania. Here, regular as clockwork, it snows every Christmas. As Tasmanian weather goes, this is actually weird. No one quite understands it.
Lief Fraser is the weather anchor for Hobart Mornings, the local breakfast TV show. She has tried to keep the fact that she’s from Matilda secret, but now her bosses have found out and they are determined to have her broadcast from the snowbound town on Christmas morning. So Lief has set off for home, accompanied only by her trusty car, War Horse, and her camera girl. Piper is the sort of young woman who bounces everywhere, dresses in candy pink, and says O.M.G. out loud, but that OK because it means Lief can handle her. She’d better, because protecting the town of Matilda is literally her job.
Unfortunately, when Lief and Piper arrive, they find another film crew rolling into town. Audrey Astor has made a successful business out of Australian Christmas movies. Whereas Hallmark produces cheesy tales of snowbound American small towns, Merry Happy, Audrey’s company, does Christmas on the Beach stories. Audrey has long been obsessed with Matilda, and she’s finally got permission to film there.
Of course there is a reason why it always snows in Matilda at Christmas, and it has nothing to do with Tasmanian weather. Lief has to make sure that Audrey never finds out the truth, because if she does then the nosey movie producer and her crew could end up very dead.
With a title like Merry Happy Valkyrie, you could be forgiven for assuming that this book contains a lot of Norse mythology. You would be sort of right. But the Norse mythology here has moved a long way from the original. There are Valkyries, yes, but much is different. Not so different, however, that I didn’t recognise the saga of Thrym’s Wedding underlying the whole thing, which makes me very happy.
The book is marketed as a romance, so you should have a good idea of what to expect. Indeed, if you are unsure, Audrey kindly explains the principle for you:
“A good romance is about figuring out exactly what the audience wants, and feeding it to them by the tasty, tasty spoonful.”
So yeah, there will be a happy ending, as there should be. It is how you get there that is important, and this is certainly a different and interesting way of doing that.
Oh, and there is good trans representation too. All in all, a fine little book.
Well, that was a thing. On the one hand it was enjoyable mind candy. It clearly made an awful lot of Star Wars fans very happy. But as science fiction TV? Meh.
This will contain spoilers, but then Twitter was full of them on the day the final episode dropped, long before I got a chance to watch it. Besides, if you couldn’t predict the ending, I have a large conical hat with a D on it that I’d like you to wear.
There are many things to admire in The Mandalorian. They’ve done some great scenery and monsters. The giant sandworm episode was particularly impressive. Also Baby Yoda has been a great hit with viewers. If you are a serious Star Wars fan you will probably have been in ecstasy much of the time given the number of familiar names that turn up. This is all good, as fan candy goes. It is a product; it fills a market niche.
From a TV series, however, I expect better. The plots have been very thin; and bulked out by action sequences. The characterisation is also fairly thin. Even Mando himself is pretty one-dimensional. There’s an argument that the show is basically a Western in space, and Westerns themselves are fairy predictable, but I’m sure that John Ford or Sergio Leone would have done better than this.
There were occasional hints of what might have made a much better series. The show is set mainly on backwater planets. Ruling the galaxy is hard, which is how Imperial holdouts still exist and Moff Gideon can get away with having a star cruiser and a small army of stormtroopers. I would have liked to have seen more of the idea that for many people it doesn’t matter who is in charge. I would also have liked to see more about why people still support the Empire, despite them being clownish villains.
Unfortunately, this is Star Wars. The goodies are Good, even when they behave appallingly (which sometimes they do). The baddies are Bad, and also incompetent. Imperial stormtroopers can’t hit a target with their blasters when it is stood in front of them, and their armour might as well be made of papier-mâché for all the good it does them. Also Imperial computer security is woeful. The occasional bad guy will be good with weapons, but that’s about the most threat they pose.
This season also gave us the Dark Trooper battle droids. They at least gave our heroes a run for their money. Then Luke turns up and goes through an entire platoon of them like a hot knife through butter.
Seriously, if you weren’t expecting Luke from the moment that little Grogu makes contact with The Force and is then immediately kidnapped by Dark Troopers then I worry about you.
Maybe that was the point, though. Perhaps it is supposed to be safe and predictable. Goddess knows, people need that sort of thing these days. But I want better. And Star Wars can do better because it produced Rogue One. It can do it again, if the will is there. Sadly I am reminded of this quote from Ursula K Le Guin’s foreword to her 2001 collection, Tales from Earthsea.
Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their action to violence, their actors to dolls, and their truth-telling to sentimental platitude. Heroes brandish their swords, lasers, wands, as mechanically as combine harvesters, reaping profits. Profoundly disturbing moral choices are sanitized, made cute, made safe. The passionately conceived ideas of the great story-tellers are copied, stereotyped, reduced to toys, molded in bright-colored plastic, advertised, sold, broken, junked, replaceable, interchangeable.
Quite.
Like everything else this year, SMOFcon got hit by COVID-19 and went virtual. And because SMOFcon is very much about getting people together, it had to re-invent itself somewhat. The result was a cut down version known as SMOFcon 37¼ to its friends, and 37.25 to Microsoft Windows.
I had to miss most of the convention as I was scheduled to speak at an LGBT History event in London (virtually, obviously) on the same day, but I did get there in time for the final two panels and the post-con party.
The stuff I missed was all Fannish Inquisition type material. In particular people are likely to be interested in the questions for seated Worldcons, which you can find here.
The first session I saw was a retrospective on CoNZealand featuring the co-chairs, Kelly Buehler and Norm Cates. Obviously this year was even more traumatic than usual, but being a Worldcon chair is hard. There’s a reason why the “Friends Don’t Let Friends Run Worldcon” badge exists. There are lots of things that a Worldcon chair can do to help ensure a successful event, but when the thing is actually happening there are only two main things that the chair can do. One is authorising the spending of money to solve problems, because you will have budgeted carefully and will you finally have some idea of how much surplus you are likely to have. The other is to stand up and take it on the chin when things go wrong and angry fans are looking for someone to blame. One of these things is far more fun than the other.
Anyway, if you have any interest in what it is like being a Worldcon chair, I do encourage you to listen to what Kelly and Norm have to say. I’d also like to thank Kelly for the kind words, especially about Fringe. I hope you were listening, Mike Glyer.
The final session was also a retrospective and featured the chairs of several other conventions that also had to go virtual. The idea here, I assume, was to help people in similar situations. However, this being SMOFcon, much of the discussion was about staff and PR issues, not about the actual tech. It is still worth a listen as there are things going on in the tech sphere that I wasn’t familiar with, and which bode well for the future, but I was disappointed that it was so backward looking, and that there was no representation from the new, virtual-only events such as FIYAHCON and FutureCon. Apparently those two cons were approached so SMOFcon did try.
SMOFcon is, for the most part, a gathering for people who run Worldcons, and like any community that group of people has internal disagreements. One way you can subdivide Worldcon fandom is between those who see the event as a global celebration of science fiction, and those who see it as their annual holiday with friends they have known for decades. The former group is, I think, largely pleased with the extra reach that virtual conventions have given us. The latter group tends to complain about how virtual conventions are not the same, and hybrid conventions are impossible, and how we need to get back to in-person-only events as soon as possible.
One of the things that SMOFdom does when faced by radical change is to come up with a worst-case scenario and use that as an excuse as to why the change can’t be allowed to happen. So the argument about hybrid conventions is generally that it is impossible to have both in-person attendees and virtual attendees participating on an equal footing in every part of the convention, and that therefore we should not have hybrid conventions.
But in fact we have had hybrid conventions for some years now, because we have webcast the Hugo Award ceremony. The question we should be asking is not how to make in-person and virtual experiences the same, but what additional parts of the convention can be opened up to virtual attendees, and how much they should have to pay for that. These are questions we are looking at for the Tonopah Westercon.
SMOFcon failed to address those issues, but they will have to be answered at some point. My fear is that the answer will be, “none, we don’t want them, Worldcon is an in-person event.” And that will eventually kill Worldcon.
Last issue was a bit thin, but hopefully I have made up for it this time. There’s nothing quite like an extended holiday for getting some reading done.
This is the last issue of 2020, and obviously we are all looking forward to better times in the New Year. As far as the UK goes, I’m not very confident. We still have a malevolent, incompetent government, and we have the effects of Brexit to cope with too. Hopefully there will be plenty of good books to keep me distracted.
A new year also means a new awards season, so I should remind you that Salon Futura is eligible in the Best Fanzine category of the Hugo Awards. If you don’t think we are good enough, please nominate something else. Fanzines have been the lifeblood of fandom for a very long time, and it would be a shame to see the category disappear because no one reads them anymore.
And on the subject of awards, if you haven’t seen the announcement, there is a new set of translation awards in town. The Science Fiction & Fantasy Rosetta Awards are being run by the Future Affairs Administration folks in China. There will be awards for long form, short form, and for services to translation. Someone to my surprise, I have been asked to chair the jury for the long form award, so that’s more reading that I need to do and can’t review. Oops.
This is the November 2020 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.
Cover: As the Distant Bells Toll: This issue's cover, As the Distant Bells Toll by Ben Baldwin
Black Sun: A review of the start of a new epic fantasy series from Rebecca Roanhorse, Black Sun
Freshwater: A review of Akwaeke Emezi's Otherwise Award winning debut novel, Freshwater
Hav: A reprint of Cheryl's review of the brilliant Jan Morris novel, Hav, from Emerald City #133
World Fantasy 2020: A report on this year's (virtual) World Fantasy Convention in Salt Lake City
DALEKS: In which Cheryl remembers loving the Daleks as a kid, and how a new generation has an opportunity to have the same thrill.
FIYAHcon Revisited: Cheryl takes a second look at FIYAHCON now that they have published details of how the online convention was run
SHIELD – Season Six: A review of season 6 of the Agents of SHIELD TV seriesEditorial – November 2020: In which Cheryl talks about her plans for the future schedule
Better late than never, this issue’s cover is from the Aleksandar Žiljak fantasy collection, As the Distant Bells Toll. The art is by the fabulous Ben Baldwin. The full version is available below.
It is epic fantasy, Jim, but not as we know it.
I have been looking forward to this book for some time. I really enjoyed Rebecca Roanhorse’s Sixth World books, and was looking forward to seeing what she could do with a more traditional fantasy form. I say “form” and not “setting”, because while Black Sun is absolutely epic fantasy, it has nothing to do with mediaeval Europe. Instead is makes use of the history of North and Central America. Unlike Aliette de Bodard’s Obsidian and Blood series, there is no attempt to reproduce an actual historical setting. Rather the book is more like CT Rwizi’s Scarlet Odyssey in that it creates a fantasy world from non-European inspiration.
The book is centred on the city of Tova which is ruled over by four competing clans: Golden Eagle, Carrion Crow, Winged Serpent and Water Strider. Supposedly holding everything together is a Temple of the Sun and its priestly orders. However, a couple of generations ago the Temple launched an attack on the Crow clan, known as the Night of Knives. Large numbers of Crow people were killed.
The current High Priestess of the Sun, Naranpa, firmly believes that her duty is to keep peace in Tova, and to heal the wounds caused by this massacre. However, she rose to her position due to being a genius astronomer rather than because of her social class, and this causes many people in the Temple whose expectations of privilege have been thwarted to resent her.
Meanwhile, the devotees of the Carrion Crow have not forgotten the massacre. One extreme sect has concocted a plan for revenge by forging a weapon, an avatar of the Crow God. When we first meet him, Serapio is a young boy suffering an incredibly abusive childhood, but his mother’s mad plan succeeds and in the main narrative of the book he is everything she hoped for.
To protect him, Serapio was hidden away in the Obregi Mountains far to the south. He must take ship from the merchant city of Cuecola and reach Tova in time for a major eclipse, at which point the power of the Sun Priests will be at its lowest ebb. Because he is running late, he ends up taking passage on a ship captained by Xiala, a wild and enthusiastically bisexual woman of the Teek people, who live far out in the Crescent Sea.
That gives you the three main characters of the narrative. There are a few others. There’s Abah, the young Golden Eagle noblewoman who constantly schemes against Narapan. There’s Iktan, the High Priest of Knives, who is non-binary and the closest thing Narapan has to an ally. And there’s Okoa, the warrior son of the head of the Crow Clan, who rides a giant battle crow. It is all solid epic fantasy stuff.
Roanhorse knows exactly what she is doing with the form, though if her Acknowledgements are to be believed she had to learn a lot of it from her editor, Joe Monti. Fantasy fans should lap it up, and be clamouring for book two. It does, of course, end on something of a cliffhanger, and there’s plenty of the world left to explore, so I’m looking forward to subsequent books. As is the way of such things, being merely a part of a much longer story will hamper Black Sun come awards season, but shouldn’t hold it back sales-wise. I’m delighted to see that a UK edition will finally appear in January (and despair at the fact that Simon and Schuster initially thought that UK readers would not be interested in it).
Of course with such things readers will be interested in the inspiration for the fantasy world. Black Sun is set in the lands surrounding the Crescent Sea, or the Gulf of Mexico as we know it. The Obregi Mountains are the uplands of central Mexico, and Cuecola is Chichen Itza. The Teek live far out in the Caribbean, though they have some Polynesian influences. The most audacious adaption is Tova itself, which is based on Cahokia, a large city on the Mississippi near St. Louis which, in the 11th Century, boasted a population of up to 30,000 people. I think that’s bigger than any European city of the time, and bigger than Timbuktu at the height of the Mali Empire. Constantinople was much bigger, of course. There’s an article about Cahokia and the people who built it, written by Annalee Newitz, here. The city will also feature in Newitz’s non-fiction book, Four Lost Cities, forthcoming in March next year.
Back with Black Sun, however, it is a fine piece of epic fantasy, with a stunning John Picacio cover. It is already getting rave reviews, so my voice isn’t going to add much, but I did love it, and I hope you will too.
Let’s get the headlines out of the way first. Freshwater was the winner of the Otherwise (formerly Tiptree) Award this year. It was also longlisted for a couple of UK-based literary awards: the Wellcome Book Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction. The latter may have been rescinded now that the people running that prize have gone full-on transphobic. So this is a book that is accepted by both genre and literary communities, and is being praised by both.
For almost half the book I was somewhat surprised by this, in that despite the use of fantastical themes the book appeared to be that tiresome trope of literary fiction: awful people doing awful things to other awful people for no reason other than it is all awful. But the fantastical background itself was interesting, and eventually the book became so as well.
The central character of the book is Ada, a young Nigerian woman who, from birth, has been plagued by ọgbanje. These are spirits from Igbo religion who are believed to get into a child at birth and cause bad behaviour and misfortune for the family. The Wikipedia entry for ọgbanje draws a parallel to the Celtic concept of a faerie changeling. That’s obviously not accurate because a changeling is an entirely different being, whereas ọgbanje simply inhabit the original child, but the effect on the family is presumably similar.
There are, I am sure, many litfic readers who see this book simply as a clever metaphor for mental illness, in particular for multiple personalities. And to be fair Akwaeke Emezi gives plenty of excuse for that reading via the descriptions of Ada’s dysfunctional and occasionally abusive family. However, Freshwater is much more than that. If you want a book about multiple personalities, Matt Ruff’s Set This House in Order (also an Otherwise, then Tiptree, winner) fits the bill very well.
In the Acknowledgements, Emezi mentions a friend describing Freshwater as “the spiritual book”. Odiani is a living religion, and Emezi has as much right to believe in ọgbanje as Christians have to believe in angels and demons.
There’s more. As this essay makes clear, Freshwater is very much a book about Emezi’s personal journey. They are non-binary, and the book is heavily informed by personal experiences. The second half of the book, when Ada is an adult, features two specific ọgbanje called Ashụgara and Saint Vincent. The former might best be described to Westerners as a succubus, while the latter is defiantly, if not aggressively, masculine.
It is clear from the book and the essay that Emezi uses the concept of ọgbanje as a way to come to terms with their non-binary nature. It is fashionable these days, at least in the UK, for trans people to decry the idea of being “trapped in the wrong body”, claiming that it is a narrative that was created for us by cisgender medics. In part, of course, that’s true. Certainly by no means all trans people feel extreme body dysphoria. But it is also necessary because the phrase has been weaponised by the anti-trans lobby who claim that it obviously can’t be true, and that it is proof that trans people are mentally ill.
Nevertheless, if you are a spiritual sort of person, the idea that your soul is a different gender to your body is a very persuasive explanation as to why you might be trans. I’d not seen such a clear spiritual explanation of gender fluidity before Emezi’s book, but it makes sense in exactly the same way.
I’m sure that here in the Land of Transphobia there are people jumping up and down with glee at Freshwater because they see it as an excuse to have all trans people put in straightjackets and solitary confinement. Equally there will be trans people who are uneasy about the book because they can see that coming. Personally I believe that trans people need to find their own truth in whatever way works for them, and provided that they do not misuse that truth, by insisting that it must apply to every other trans person as well, then I’m happy to let them have it.
I should add as well that Freshwater is beautifully written, albeit deeply painful at times. I am not in the least bit surprised that it gained so much recognition. There are also a bunch of themes in the book dealing with issues of mixed-ethnicity families, migration, and conflict between Christianity and traditional religion. Those are things that I am much less competent to talk about, but which add even greater depth to the book. It is a very impressive achievement.