Editorial – November 2019

Issue #13, eh? Presumably unlucky for someone, somewhere, simply by the law of averages. I took a look back at Emerald City #13 and discovered that it had been written shortly after I had come out as trans to my family. That did not go well. Fortunately Kevin was there to pick up the pieces. This time around I’m just scared stupid of what will happen to the UK if Boris Johnson is returned as Prime Minister. Fortunately I’m a lot older and more sanguine about things, but I worry dreadfully about those who still have plenty of life ahead of them.

Getting this issue out means that I have now done the requisite four issues in the year, and am therefore eligible for next year’s Hugo Awards in Best Fanzine. Technically I’m eligible in Best Fan Writer as well, but it is the fanzine category that I’m hoping to revive by tossing my hat back in the ring. I don’t need to win any more rockets, but hopefully having me involved will increase voter interest in the category.

Both of the interviews in this issue are a little old. I was going to have one with Lucy Hounsom, but I screwed up the recording. We’ll fix that next year. In the meantime profuse apologies to Lucy. Also the two interview I have included both have a direct connection to reviews in this issue. Next issue my chat with Kate MacDonald of Handheld Press will have disappeared off the Ujima Radio Listen Again system, so I can run that here.

Apologies are also due to Kate Heartfield because I didn’t get around to the second Alice Payne book as I’d hoped. We’re deep into end of the year list season now and I have much to read. Hopefully by this time next year the discipline of having this ‘zine to fill will have left me in a much better state. Next issue, Kate, promise.

Over the holiday season I hope to do some work on the website to provide some decent indexation of the reviews. I’m also planning to transfer some of my older reviews to this site so that everything is in the same place. You’ll see some of that starting with this issue.

There will be a December issue, but it won’t be out before the Solstice so I should wish you all a very happy holiday season, in whichever way you choose to celebrate it.

The Ten Thousand Doors of January

Alix E Harrow is not a necromancer from the Ninth House, though she may sound like it from her name. Nor does she appear to have a thing about bones. She does, however, appear to have a thing about doors. This year she won the Short Story Hugo for something called, “A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies”. Her debut novel is called The Ten Thousand Doors of January.

If I tell you that the January in question is a young girl who acquires the ability to travel through magical portals to other worlds you might think there is something of Seanan McGuire’s Every Heart a Doorway going on here. But this is not that book.

You might think, when Miss Jane Irimu sweeps into January’s life like some Bantu Mary Poppins to save her from the grim governess, Miss Wilda, that you were in a different book entirely. Mary did, after all, have the ability to conjure magical portals to other worlds. But this is not that book.

The Ten Thousand Doors of January is, as the back cover blurbs suggest, a love story. It is a story of people whose love endures even though they are literally worlds apart. But it is much more than that.

If you want your book to appeal to a literary audience, one of the best ways to win them over is to make your book about stories. Ideally it should contain nested stories, after the fashion of Scheherazade, or Cat Valente’s The Orphan’s Tales. For a long time The Ten Thousand Doors of January seems like it might be that book. There is certainly a book within in a book.

We are first introduced to Miss January Scaller whose father is an archaeologist, forever off on expeditions on behalf of his employer, Cornelius Locke. As her mother is dead, January lives as a ward of Mr Locke in his rambling Vemont mansion around the start of the 20th Century. He tries hard to make a proper young lady of her, but he is working with entirely the wrong materials.

January, meanwhile, has come into possession of a book called The Ten Thousand Doors, produced by an academic in the city of Nin in the year 6908. Nin is not in our world, so it is no surprise that their calendar is different. That book tells the story of a young farm girl from Kentucky who finds a door to another world. (She is not from Kansas, and she does not travel there on a whirlwind; this is not that book.)

It is not clear to begin with what these stories have to do with each other. But then, on page 164 to be exact, or much earlier if you spotted the clue that Harrow leaves lying in plain sight, everything falls into place. Yes, this is a love story. But it is also a story about Doors.

If we address stories as archaeological sites, and dust through their layers with meticulous care, we find at some level there is always a doorway. A dividing point between here and there, us and them, mundane and magical. It is at the moments when the doors open, when things flow between the worlds, that stories happen.

It is no accident that a story about Doors contains a character called Mr Locke. Nor is the prestigious New England Archaeological Society quite what it claims.

Like all good books, this one is not just concerned with its own story, but also with the Now. January’s father is black and so, inevitably, despite taking strongly after her mother, is she. Both of them get to experience the least pleasant side of the USA. The scholar, being from another world, is well placed to observe:

One of the most difficult elements of this world is the way its social rules are simultaneously rigid and arbitrary. It is impermissible to engage in physical love before binding legal marriage, unless one is a young man of means. Men most be bold and assertive, but only if they are light skinned. Any persons may fall in love regardless of station, but only if one is a woman and the other a man.

January, at one point, is committed to an asylum, which is exactly the sort of “cure” that was recommended for wilful young women in that time. She takes stock of her fellow inmates at bath time:

I shivered beside the fish-pale nakedness of two dozen other women, all of us made ugly and unsecret, like snails pulled from their shells. I watched them furtively—twitching or weeping or silent as tombstones—and wanted to scream: I’m not like them. I’m not mad, I don’t belong here. And then I thought: Maybe they didn’t belong here, either, at first.

And finally, January’s father is under no illusions that his work for Mr Locke is scientific:

…my papers at the border identify my occupation as an exploratory archaeological researcher, but they might more accurately say well-dressed grave robber. I once overheard the Uyghurs of China refer to me by a long and complicated name filled with fricatives and unpronounceable combinations of consonants—it means the story-eater.

I am reminded of the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford. So many Things.

There is a point to all this. Doors are agents of change. Who knows what might come through them? Mr Locke and his colleagues, as agents of the Kyriarchy, wish all Doors to be closed. It may be that in a world like ours, wishing for Doors (Borders?) to be open might be seen as mere escapism. But there can be no revolution without hope of escape. In any case, love is an agent of chaos. Cupid strikes where he will. And when he does, no mere Door can keep the lovers apart.

The Ten Thousand Doors of January is a book about Doors, but every book needs an antagonist. In this case the enemy is Walls.

Cue Pink Floyd and Gerard Scarfe, repurposed for the age of Trump and Bozo.

book cover
Title: The Ten Thousand Doors of January
By: Alix E Harrow
Publisher: Orbit
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The Future of Another Timeline

Well, here we go again, this is yet another time war story.

It is, however, rather more than that. Most of what we’ve seen in such stories this year has shied away from any specific political issue. Analee Newitz has no such scruples. Perhaps thanks to the renewed popularity of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Newitz has gone full on gender war. Though they don’t quite say as much, their time war is one whose objective is more or less to create or prevent Gilead. I also suspect that this is their attempt to write a Joanna Russ novel, because there are no holds barred at times and a lot of discussion on the appropriate tactics for feminist revolutionaries.

If you go into this book looking for a novel about time travel I think you will be mostly disappointed. There are five time machines hidden away in various locations around the planet. No one knows who built them, or even how to operate them properly, but they’ve been in use for at least 2000 years and a lot of time travel gets done, but the secret never gets out and no one starts a time war until the 20th Century. Yeah, right. If you are going to power your science with handwavium, it is wise to use as little of the stuff as possible. The more you try to explain things, the more like a puppet show it all looks.

If, on the other hand, you are looking for a book about feminism, you won’t be disappointed. (Well, unless you happen to be a Roman history geek and goddess worshipper, but I’m assuming that none of you are actually me.)

There are two main strands to the book. One of them starts off looking like it will be a high school drama story along the lines of I Know What You Did Last Summer, but ends up being more of a meditation on the awful things that get done to teenage girls in California. It is there mainly to show why the other characters are so angry about men.

The other involves a group of time-traveling feminists known as the Daughters of Harriet (Tubman, of course) who are waging an edit are against a group of pro-Patriarchy fellows who want to prevent women from ever getting civil rights. The story centres on Tess, who happens to be a white Californian woman, but the group as a whole is quite diverse, including at least one black woman, a trans woman, and a non-binary person.

Much of the action takes place at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893. We learn a lot about early American feminists such as Lucy Parsons and Emma Goldman, and about the history of belly dancing in America. The villain of the piece is a chap called Anthony Comstock who was an early moral crusader. Newitz has grounded all of this in extensive historical research which made it very enjoyable to me.

There are a couple of well-worn feminist debates being given a run out here. The first is whether it is permissible to use what one might call feminine wiles as a tactic. Belly dancing, or hoochie coochie as they called it back then, is a form of erotic dance therefore likely to be condemned alongside stripping, pole dancing and so on by many modern feminists. There’s an argument to be made that women in 1893 had so little political power that any tactic that worked was worth using, but that won’t wash with the hardline anti-sex-work lobby whom I suspect will see Comstock as a potential ally.

The other issue, and this is where the Russ connection comes to the fore, is who much violence is permissible. Given that men have pretty much total control over society, should women take the law into their own hands and kill bad men? If you think that’s a little extreme, remember that rape is effectively legal in the UK because convictions are so difficult to obtain that the Crown Prosecution Service is very reluctant to bring any case to court. Not to mention the fact that certain people are immune from prosecution due to being things like President of the USA or a member of the British Royal Family.

There is, therefore, lots of meaty stuff to think about in this book. It isn’t going to go down well with a lot of men, but then neither do Russ or Atwood. Hopefully lots of people will read it and think about the issues raised.

From my point of view, while the end of the 19th Century is clearly a key period in the fight for women’s rights, I’m slightly bemused by the lack of mention of contraception. I’m of the opinion that it is the availability of cheap, simple and easily obtained means of preventing pregnancy that has made the path towards gender equality inevitable. If I were a time traveling Men’s Right’s Activist, that’s the thing I would be looking to prevent. But the World’s fair story is interesting, and I quite understand that Newitz needs to make sure that their story is simple enough to be told effectively. I can’t always have everything I want out of a book.

book cover
Title: The Future of Another Timeline
By: Analee Newitz
Publisher: Orbit
Purchase links:
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Infinite Detail

One of the things I love about the current internationalisation of science fiction is the fact that we can read books by people who understand others places far better than we white Westerners do. I still love Ian McDonald’s books set in Kenya, India, Brazil and Turkey, and I think that they were a necessary step on the journey that our community has undertaken over the past couple of decades, but now we can have the real thing. We can read Silvia Morena Garcia writing about Mexico, Aliette de Bodard exploring Vietnamese culture, Tasha Shuri introducing us to India, and many fine writers from China and Nigeria. What distinguishes them all is their in-depth understanding of their settings.

That can also be true about what we do, though, because there are pockets of difference even in Anglo-American culture. You can read a book set in the American South, or in Glasgow, or even London, and know whether the author has lived experience of the setting. One such book is Infinite Detail, the debut novel from Tim Maughan. Parts of it are set in New York, where Maughan has spent time, but the majority of the novel is set in a place called The People’s Republic of Stokes Croft. It is somewhere that I visit often, and which Maughan knew far better than I do before he lit out for North America to seek fame and fortune.

Stokes Croft is a region of Bristol which stretches from the Bearpit roundabout on the edge of the main shopping district up to the more middle-class area of Gloucester Road where the more affluent ex-hippies of Bristol live. The Croft is home to vegans, anarchists, animal rights activists, radical feminists who are actually both radical and feminist, and just about every other counter-culture movement that you can think of. But it also borders on St. Pauls, the district most famous for its Afro-Caribbean residents, though these days there’s encroachment from both gentrification and new immigrants from Somalia. Stokes Croft is a melting pot of cultures and ideas; and is thus a perfect setting for Maughan’s novel.

The New York content has some good social commentary too. We see the city from the point of view of Rush, the Pakistani-British programmer as the centre of the story. He is in New York to meet the boyfriend he found online, and Scott moves in social circles far above anything Rush could previously imagined. Nevertheless, Rush drags Scott out to see a Black Lives Matter protest. Scott is gobsmacked.

“There’s just so…” He pauses to pick his works carefully. “So much urgency, you know? And focus. I’ve been on Pride, and I went on the Women’s March … but this … They were different, right? Like it felt people were there to have fun. Like the signs all had jokes on them, people were partying, taking selfies. This, this feels like its about something. Like I said, focussed. Urgent. Angry. But with good reason. You know what I mean?”

I sure do, Scott. It is also like the difference between Pride and Trans Pride, though we are on a much smaller scale as we are not actually getting shot by the police.

As we might expect from Maughan, who has made his reputation writing about the internet and its influence on our culture, Infinite Detail is a novel about how we live now. Cory Doctorow is probably the writer closest in themes to what Maughan does. The book is set partly in the near future when our reliance on machines and the algorithms that drive them has increased significantly, and not necessarily to our benefit.

So much of what we do today is ruled by data and algorithms. Right now, most of those algorithms are pretty crappy. We’ve all had experiences of Amazon recommending books to us that we already own, that we have published, or even that we have written. Some of them, however, are much more sophisticated, especially when big money is involved. I used to work in derivatives valuation. I only did support and end-user training, and I struggled to understand some of the things that the programmers (all of whom had PhDs in things like quantum physics) were telling me. Our sales people understood them even less. As for the users, far too many of them didn’t care. As long as the software helped them make buckets of money in the short term they were happy. They very specifically didn’t care about risk management. Few people were less surprised than me when the crash of 2008 was blamed on credit derivatives.

Tim Maughan knows this stuff. In fact we probably talked about it at some point. He has a stock market trader in the book. He gets it right.

So there are algorithms, and they will only get better. There is data, which we have to keep giving to the likes of Google and Amazon because they have become indispensable to our lives. Heather Child’s novel, Everything About You, asks what happens when your personal assistant knows you so well that it can indulge in major psychological manipulation. Emma Newman’s After Atlas asks what it will be like when your employer can spy on everything you do. Maughan knows this stuff too.

What’s different is that the massive inhuman artificial intelligence wasn’t enslaving us with nuclear bombs or turning us into batteries (how WOUD that work?) or crushing our feeble human skulls with its metal feet, but by finding the best ways to sell us stuff. SkyNet is real, and it wants to sell you shoes made by child slaves.

But in Stokes Croft things can be different, because despite the fact that it is in the centre of one of the UK’s larger cities, a city that prides itself on being home to all sorts of cutting edge technology, people in the Croft think seriously about being off-grid. You don’t have to go and live on a farm in Orkney to do that. It is just harder here.

So while part of the book is set in the near future, much of it is set years later after the Crash. After the internet. Most of the UK is under the heel of the Land Army. The government has to keep order, and make sure everyone can be fed, right? But the Croft is still there, and still trying its best to be independent.

Much of the book is the story of the Crash: how it came to happen, and what part a bunch of anarchists in an obscure part of a lesser-known British city might have played in that. But the book also interrogates the central question: is technology always bad, and if not how can we ensure that it is used for good. There are, of course, no easy answers. But asking such questions is what science fiction is often all about. Like Child and Newman, Tim Maughan is writing science fiction that is very much about today and about what technology is doing to our society. We should be paying more attention to what they are saying.

“It’s not enough to just take power away from those in charge. If we don’t use it ourselves, they just take it back.”

Which is a lesson than every revolutionary needs to learn.

Hello, Ken MacLeod, I think you would enjoy this book.

book cover
Title: Infinite Detail
By: Tim Maughan
Publisher: FSG Originals
Purchase links:
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The Rosewater Insurrection

I need to start this review by saying that it will inevitably contain spoilers for Rosewater. It is pretty much impossible to talk about the new book without explaining what Rosewater is. There will also be mention of some of the major characters of the first book. So if you haven’t read Rosewater, go out and do that now. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Rosewater Insurrection, then, picks up the story fairly soon after the first book. The city of Rosewater, which has grown up around the alien incursion, has an uneasy relationship with the rest of Nigeria. Politicians inevitably want to control both the futuristic city and the alien that makes it possible. But the people of Rosewater also have ambitions for the future. And we should never forget the alien. Wormwood has come to Earth. It didn’t do so by accident.

While Kaaro does feature in the new book, he is not the principle character. That honor falls to his girlfriend, Aminat. As kick-ass heroines go, she’s pretty damn impressive. Her work for the secret service organisation, S45, puts her right at the center of the action, and most of the time she’s more than capable of doing the job, even though she’s technically a scientist, not a secret agent.

My favorite character in the book is Aminat’s boss, Femi Alaagomeiji. She’s smart, determined, ruthless, devious, and utterly untrustworthy. She’s everything that Colonel Hayley in Supergirl wants to be but isn’t. Thank goodness she’s not Nick Fury, or the Marvel Universe would be in dreadful trouble.

The plot of the book is a three-way power struggle for control of Rosewater. On one side we have the charismatic Jack Jacques, mayor of the city and its defender against the outside world. Ranged against him is the President of Nigeria who wants to keep control of a valuable resource. But we should never forget Wormwood. The alien has its own mission. The people who sent it to Earth expect it to carry out that mission. The Earthlings are largely incidental to its task.

As is necessary for an entertaining story, all sorts of things go wrong. Rosewater descends into chaos. Our heroes must struggle to survive and make alliances where they can. Tade Thompson handles this very well. But the book isn’t entirely a near-future thriller. There are definitely points being made. There are probably more than I, with my limited knowledge of Nigerian culture and history, am going to notice.

One of the unavoidable references is to Biafra. Most of you reading this will be too young to have lived through the terrible civil war that wracked Nigeria at the end of the 1960s. I was a kid then, and the TV coverage of the conflict has stayed with me. The war and its aftermath gave rise to the relief organisation, Médecins Sans Frontières. I don’t suppose I have fully understood the references that Tade is making, but the echoes are clearly there.

Another fairly obvious reference comes in the nature of Wormwood’s mission to Earth. I don’t want to give too much away here, but Wormwood is an alien and it has invaded Earth. There is an inevitable colonisation narrative here.

There is one other very interesting character in the book. Her name is Lora Asiko and she is Jack Jacques’ loyal assistant. I can’t tell you too much about her as that would definitely be major spoiler territory, but do keep an eye on her. She’s special.

We all know by now that there is a third book in the series. Rosewater Redemption will appear in due course, presumably next year. So don’t expect much in the way of resolution at the end of Rosewater Insurrection. What’s more you know that not everyone is going to die, no matter how bad things seem. But in terms of set-up for the final volume Tade has done a fine job. I’m very much looking forward to the next book. And I’m trusting Femi to save the world. She might double-cross everyone else, but she has humanity’s interests at heart. She’s the last person on Earth any alien would want to tangle with.

book cover
Title: The Rosewater Insurrection
By: Tade Thompson
Publisher: Orbit
Purchase links:
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The Rosewater Redemption

“It was always going to come down to humans versus aliens,” says Femi. “That’s all it ever was.”

Fair enough. Femi Alaagomeji is my favourite character from the Rosewater series, and she generally talks sense. I’d expected this ever since reading The Rosewater Insurrection. Look, Rosewater is a story of alien invasion set in Nigeria. How can it not be a story about colonisation? So while Wormwood and the Homians have brought all sorts of interesting technology to Nigeria, and Jack Jacques is trying hard to build a new world were aliens and humans can live side-by-side, we can’t escape the weight of history.

I hate to bring the British into this, but it’s unavoidable. To understand the future we need to understand the past, not just as context, but as the seeds of catastrophe.

That was Oyin Da, otherwise known as The Bicycle Girl. Now as far as I can make out John and Richard Lander did not discover a book of prophecies far more accurate than Nostradamus in the wilds of Nigeria. Not did they fall into the hands of Viscount Goderich, the man whose record for the shortest tenure of a Prime Minister who did not die in office Boris Johnson will hopefully soon eclipse. But the influence of British colonialism on Nigeria runs deep and we really can’t expect Nigerian writers to let us off by writing fluffy technofuturism when they could be writing about us instead.

Colonisation is not just a matter of geography. We didn’t just take their land. We crushed their culture and tried to supplant it with our own. So year, a bunch of aliens from a far off and with massively advanced technology who want to implant their minds into the zombie bodies of the dead locals is totally an appropriate metaphor.

That said, there is still a lot of other stuff in Rosewater Redemption for readers, even British readers, to enjoy comfortably. We have, after all, had two books full of these characters already. War is coming to Rosewater once again. We’d like to see what happens to them. Plus there’s the question of how the heck you manage to fight the Homians when their technology is so massively superior to anything humans might have.

Having read David Mogo, Godhunter, I now understand Taiwo and Kehinde, the crime bosses of Rosewater, much better, and therefore not at all. Are they actually orisha, or just human avatars? Is there presence in this obviously science-fictional work turning into fantasy of some sort? Who cares, white girl? Yours is not to understand, yours is just to read and enjoy.

Personally I have never quite understood the relationship between Jack and Hannah Jacques. Then again, I have never understood the relationship between Bill and Hilary Clinton either. Politicians are a breed apart, and Tade Thompson has had rather more contact with such people at a high level than I have, so I’ll defer to his judgement on this one.

I’m pleased to see that Lora Asiko is back in this novel, and I also very much like the new boy in town, Blessing Boderin. Boderin is Jack Jacques’s lawyer, and the disagreement that he and Lora have over Hannah’s court case on whether reanimates are alive is one of the most fascinating aspects of the book. They are both right: Boderin from a legal point of view, and Lora from a political point of view. There’s a subtlety of understanding here that is often lacking from fiction.

Then there’s time travel. Yes, it is the theme of 2019. Can we change the future by changing the past? Should we even try to? Or can we just go back in time to find the information we need to win a war in the present? Oyin Da thinks that she can. That may be the key to defeating the Homians. The fact is that we can’t, but I so understand the temptation for people to want to write about it now.

Is this something of a scattergun review? Yes. Sorry about that, but trying to find things to say when some of you might not have read the first two books, and for everyone else the only question is who lives and who dies, is not that easy.

So let’s wrap it up here. Rosewater Redemption is a fitting end to a very fine trilogy. Tade Thompson has definitely arrived on the world stage. I’m very much looking forward to seeing what he does next. (As long as it isn’t more blood-spattered horror. You know that about me, don’t you Tade. Sorry mate.)

book cover
Title: The Rosewater Redemption
By: Tade Thompson
Publisher: Orbit
Purchase links:
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Amazon US
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The Deep

Many of you will recall that Rivers Solomon’s new novella, The Deep, is based on the Hugo-finalist clipping song of the same name. It is a story about a race of marine creatures who are descended from pregnant African women thrown overboard from slave ships. I interviewed Solomon about the book last year and have included that interview in the issue. I’m delighted to see that the book is finally out. Here’s the song as a reminder.

Before I start, a couple of quick words about the copyright page. There is no mention in the credits of the editor, Navah Wolfe. She is thanked profusely by both clipping and Solomon in their afterwords. Saga Press fired her recently, despite her having done some amazing work for them. Publishing is a rough business. Also the copyright note only lists the names of the members of clipping. That means that, although Solomon’s name is listed first on the cover, this book is work for hire. Presumably clipping’s lawyers insisted on that as part of the deal. Hopefully the book will garner Solomon an award or two to sweeten that particular pill. They deserve more than just a fee.

On now to the book, which is interesting and complicated because, as Solomon notes in the interview, it is hard to write something from the perspective of creatures that live underwater. The wajinru, as they have chosen to call them, are very alien. Their communication methods are very different to ours, though they have retained the power of human speech too.

The central character of the book is Yetu who is the Historian of the wajinru. That capital H is there with purpose. The entire history of the wajinru is steeped in trauma. Remembering where and how they came to be is deeply painful for them. Mostly they just want to forget, and live in the moment like the other creatures of the sea. But to do so would also be violence to their ancestors. So one wajinru out of all their people is selected to Remember. This is not a fun job.

The basic thrust of the plot is how Yetu comes to terms with both her job and the history that she has been selected to preserve. Along the way Solomon also fill us in on some of the gaps in wajinru history that are not found in the clipping song. As the band say in their afterword, this is not creating canon, it is creating story. There may be other versions of that story in the future. It is interesting that this parallels how Marlon James is approaching his fantasy story, but is very different from the (predominantly white) fannish obsession with canon.

There is another factor that comes into play with the story as well. The US edition (which I have) was published in November. I got my copy around the time of the annual Trans Day of Remembrance. Reading a book about remembering traumatic history written by a trans person of colour, at the time when I was having to lead a remembrance ceremony for trans people (mainly trans women of colour) who have been murdered, was a unique and disturbing experience.

Solomon does play with gender a bit in the book. We discover that the wajinru are truly hermaphroditic, being blessed with both “male” and “female” genitals. And yet we know that Yetu is definitely “she”. Other wajinru that we meet use “he” as their pronoun. This is never explained. Yetu probably doesn’t understand why humans would find it odd.

I think there are some readers who will find this book too dreamlike. Others may want something that is more angry. I will be interested to see other responses come in. For my part I definitely enjoyed it. Books narrated by characters who are decidedly alien are comparatively rare, and I’d like to see more SF writers attempt this form.

book cover
Title: The Deep
By: Rivers Solomon
Publisher: Saga
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Interview – Rivers Solomon

This interview with Rivers Solomon dates from August 2018. They were just heading off to San José where they were a finalist for the Astounding Award (then the Campbell). The interview is mainly about Solomon’s projected work on a book based on the clipping song, “The Deep”, which had been a Hugo finalist in Helsinki.

The photo of Rivers Solomon is by Martha Levine.


The Exile Waiting

One of the themes of Analee Newitz’s The Future of Another Timeline is how much feminist history has been forgotten. Brave women do amazing things to advance the cause, but then nothing seems to change and we forget that they ever did anything. This is very much true of the science fiction community. Whenever I see an article that claims that there were no women in science fiction until recently, I wonder what happened to the glory days of the late 1970s. If you listen to Ellen Datlow’s interview from last issue you will hear her talking about how exciting those times were because suddenly women were appearing on award ballots.

Then there was cyberpunk, and women vanished from the scene. Even Pat Cadigan, despite the fact that she was one of the best of the new breed, was somehow deemed to have never existed. Only Le Guin has survived the purge of the popular imagination.

But Le Guin was not alone. There was Joanna Russ and Suzy McKee Charnas; there was Octavia Butler; there were feminist allies such as Samuel Delany and James Tiptree; and (among many others) there was Vonda McIntyre.

Despite winning the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards for her second novel, Dreamsnake, McIntyre largely faded from the popular imagination soon thereafter. She got into writing Star Trek books. I’m told by those who know that her novelisations of some of the early films are much better than the films themselves, thought that may be a fairly low bar. She also did a lot of work behind the scenes, including being instrumental in setting up Book View Cafe. Handheld Press, which specialises in publishing work by unfairly overlooked women writers, has just released a new edition of McIntyre’s debut novel, The Exile Waiting.

In some ways this book is a prequel to Dreamsnake, in that it is set in the same world. In the far future, mankind has spread far from Earth. The Sphere is a rich and expanding region of human influence in the galaxy. Meanwhile the home planet is a dying ruin, almost forgotten. Jan Hikaru, a rich young man at a loss for purpose in life, has befriended an ancient starship navigator whose one remaining ambition is to see Earth one more time before she dies. This gives Jan the opportunity to find out what the homeworld is really like.

What he finds is not pleasant. Earth is mainly a forbidding world wrecked by war and wracked by storms that stir up the black sand covering the planet. Human life, such as it is, appears confined to Center, a small settlement based in an ancient fallout shelter and associated missile silos. Center is ruled through an uneasy truce between Lord Blaisse in his Palace, and the middle-class Families of Center. Most of the population seems to scrape by as beggars, slaves, or workers who might as well be slaves.

Center has a particular obsession with racial purity, not in the contemporary sense of white supremacy, but rather freedom from mutation. This is, remember, the 1970s. The idea that humans might mutate when exposed to radiation as very popular, and McIntyre was working on a postgraduate degree in genetics when she decided to quit academia and become a writer. Any child with an obvious mutation is exiled to the underground cave system where an entirely separate society is being formed, but some mutations are invisible.

The hero of the novel, Mischa, is a young girl who in another world might be a Prince in Waiting. She’s a genius, and has a telepathic relationship with her siblings. But in Center intellectual ability counts for nothing. Mischa’s only practical skills are physical, and she’s forged a career as a thief. She has to make money somehow because her cruel uncle is using her telepathic relationship with her siblings, in particular her disabled sister Gemini, to blackmail her into supporting him. Mischa would like nothing more than to get away from Center, but doing so would condemn her siblings to death.

The other key character of the story is the pilot of Jan’s ship, known only as Subtwo. He is part of a bizarre child rearing experiment detailed in the short story, “Cages”, also published in this volume. Subone and Subtwo are “pseudosibs”, young men reared in complete isolation from human society as an experiment by an arrogant psychologist. Both of them are deeply damaged by the experience, and Subtwo in particular has great difficulty with human relationships.

Inevitably the story is one of how Jan discovers Mischa and together they help Subtwo on his journey to becoming a functional human being. Along the way there are consequences for the people of Center as well. But more importantly the story is one of a triumph of human ability and spirit against social expectation. This passage stood out for me:

Mischa had never heard of any Families abandoning their children; she had assumed, like everyone else, that they were somehow immune to changes. “You don’t act like them.”

“I used to.” She touched the bright, fine hair on the top of her shoulders; it grew down her arms, across her back, and tapered to a point at the base of her spine. “When this started to grow I was frightened, but I thought I could hide it. I pulled out the hair, but it always grew back. That’s when I began to understand what it was like to be powerless.”

Today we might see that as an allegory for a trans kid. In 1975, when this book was published, trans people were barely known, and trans kids were certainly not an issue. But the story is the same. People should be valued for who they are, not for whether they fit into some rigid idea of social acceptability.

So what is McIntyre writing about? In her afterword in this volume, Una McCormack makes the point that most of the characters in the book are disabled in some way. The mutants, particularly Gemini, have obvious physical differences. Mischa and some of her friends have injuries as a result of punishments inflicted by the Center authorities. Subone and Subtwo are psychologically damaged, as are some of the children raised as slaves in the Palace. Mischa’s brother, Chris, has become a drug addict. Mischa, obviously, will escape to a new life of possibility in the Sphere, but this is not a story about how people’s disabilities are magically cured by science, it is a book about how people are valuable despite being seen as different.

Given the subject matter, I have put a link in this issue to my 2014 interview with Kathryn Allan about her work on disability in science fiction.

It should note also that McIntyre has gender-flipped the traditional teenage hero, which is relatively unusual for science fiction in the 1970s. However, the world of Center is still mostly Patriarchal, and it seems like the Sphere is too.

The Exile Waiting is a first novel. I think some of the pacing was a bit off, and I’m pretty sure that if McIntyre were still around she’d acknowledge that she’d become a much better writer over the years. However, it is a very interesting book, and one that touches on themes that we are still talking about in science fiction today. We shouldn’t be forgetting books like this.

book cover
Title: The Exile Waiting
By: Vonda N McIntyre
Publisher: Handheld Press
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Interview – Kathryn Allan

This interview dates from August 2014, when the anthology, Accessing the Future was due out. I have reproduced it here because the themes of disability in science fiction are very relevant to Vonda McIntyre’s The Exile Waiting. Una McCormack cites Allan heavily in her afterward of that book.

Accessign the Future was an anthology intended to showcase how disabled characters could be used well in fiction, but the work that McCormack cites is Disability in Science Fiction, an academic book edited by Allan which, if you read this early enough, you might be able to pick up for a mere £9.99 in the Palgrave sale. I have a copy on order.

Although these books are several years old, the issues that they raise are still very relevant.

What Can WSFS Do?

Rumbling aftershocks from this year’s Worldcon continue to surface occasionally, and there was a very interesting blog post recently on a Canadian website about future venues for Worldcon. This is all good. I like to see people discussion the future of the convention. But I also see a lot of misunderstanding out there as to what WSFS is and what it can do. Much of this comes in the way of inquiries to the various WSFS websites, and it comes from outside the community, but there is still a lot of misinformation in fannish circles as well so I thought it would be useful to see what WSFS can actually do.

Much of the problem is in the name. If something is called the World Science Fiction Society then people assume that it must be a rich, multi-national organisation with posh offices in New York or Los Angeles, a board of directors, a large full-time staff, and of course an army of lawyers at its disposal. Nothing could be further from the truth.

WSFS bills itself as an “unincorporated literary society”. The “unincorporated” is the important bit. It might have a constitution, but it has no paid staff, and the bare minimum in terms of legal existence. Indeed, one of the reasons why the Hugo trademarks are not registered in Canada is that Canadian law cannot understand how an organisation like WSFS can exist.

But, I hear you say, WSFS must at least be rich. Look at the huge profits that Worldcon makes! Well, no, actually. The rules of Worldcon financial management are very clear. Any surplus cannot be kept, either by the organisation that ran the event, or by WSFS. Money can be donated to the successor Worldcons, and this is invaluable in keeping the convention afloat. It may also be donated to fannish good causes provided that they are not too closely associated with the organisation that ran the convention.

The only income that WSFS has is a levy of $1 per member. It is a suggested donation that Worldcons are asked to make, but and not required. If a Worldcon is in financial difficulties it will be one of the first things dropped. The money goes to the Mark Protection Committee, and it is spent mostly on attempting to register the trademarks in new parts of the World, on occasional bits of legal advice, and on paying a lawyer to exchange letters with people like Hugo Boss, and anyone trying to call their convention “Worldcon”, or present a “Hugo Award”.

This brings me to an important point. WSFS cannot sue anyone, because it has no money to do so. The most that it can do is write letters asking people to cease and desist misusing its trademarks.

Because WSFS has no permanent staff, it cannot do anything that involves the running of Worldcon. It cannot decide where Worldcon is to be held, no matter how much of a subsidy your local tourism authorities are prepared to offer. It cannot revoke a site selection decision, no matter how angry you are with the current committee. It cannot force a Worldcon committee to do something, either before during or after the event.

The most that WSFS can actually do, aside from grant the right to run a Worldcon to the group that wins a Site Selection ballot, is pass a motion at the Business Meeting condemning something that a Worldcon has done, and which people disapproved of.

Of course WSFS could change the Constitution to require future Worldcons to do specific things. But those have to be things that Worldcons are likely to be happy to do anyway. It would be foolish of WSFS to require future Worldcons to do something that they would probably not want to do, because that would encourage them to disobey that rule. And frankly, if they do, there’s nothing that WSFS can do to prevent it.

It is also the case that, beyond changes to the Constitution voted on at two successive Worldcons, there is nothing that WSFS can do to affect the Hugo Awards. WSFS cannot introduce a new category just because you petition them to, nor change the rules because you think they ought to. WSFS cannot remove someone from the ballot, prevent someone from winning, or change the results after they have been announced.

So the answer to the question, “What can WSFS do?” is, “Almost nothing.” The next obvious question is, “Why is it like that?”

In the early days of WSFS there were people who thought that the organisation should have an official structure, complete with officers, and maybe offices and staff. That concept is known in fannish history as “WSFS Inc.”, and there are few phrases more likely to get old time fans to flock to the Business Meeting to vote something down than mention of this shibboleth.

That too requires explanation, and the reason is that back in the day fans did not trust other fans to be in charge. British and Australian fans did not want the organisation to end up being run by Americans. East Coast US fans did not want the organisation being run by people from the West Coast and vice versa. No one wanted WSFS being run by people who wanted to run WSFS, because people who desire power have probably got ulterior motives. And of course no one wanted anyone making a profit out of running a fannish organisation.

Yes, I know that there are people out there who think that there are “upper class fans” who have made a fortune out of Worldcon. I laugh.

So WSFS is the way it is primarily because no one wanted the Wrong People to be in charge. However, these days there is an increasing pressure for there to be Someone in charge. The modern world driven by social media moves very quickly, and if an organisation cannot respond in good time then it will be seen to have failed.

Furthermore there is actually Someone in charge. To that the extent that there is any control, it is in the hands of people who attend Worldcon regularly and have the time and patience to attend the Business Meeting. If you happen to live in Melbourne and can only afford to attend Worldcon once every 10 years when it is in your part of the world, you have little say in the governance of WSFS. If you are a Dealer who attends Worldcon every year, but are stuck behind a table all five days, you have little say in the governance of WSFS. If you are part of a minority group and find that the regular attendants of the Business Meeting have views that rarely line up with your own interests, you have little say in the governance of WSFS.

So the question is, can anything be done to change the way in which WSFS works, so as to make it more responsive to challenges, and to make it more representative of all of the people who wish to be part of the Worldcon community, without significantly increasing the risk that the Wrong People will get to be in charge?

That isn’t an easy question to answer. Kevin and I spent some time thrashing through possibilities at our Kaffeklatsch at Titancon this year. When we get time (or more accurately when Kevin gets time) we’ll present some ideas for discussion.

The Forbidden Stars

I have very much enjoyed Tim Pratt’s Books of the Axiom series. You can find my thoughts on The Wrong Stars and The Dreaming Stars here. This is a review of the final part of the trilogy, The Forbidden Stars.

I’m not going to say a huge amount about the story and characters because you’ll want to read the earlier books, and the earlier review, for that. What I will say is that this is very much a final book. Pratt makes a conscious effort to wrap up, not just the danger of The Axiom, but also the personal journeys of several of the main characters. There is a sense in which the book is more about that than it is about the plot of the book.

In addition, there is a clear sense of massively escalating stakes here. In the previous two books Callie Machedo and the crew of the White Raven were merely plucky adventurers going up against an isolated outpost of a much more powerful foe and hoping to get away with it. Here they take on that foe much more directly, with the real possibility of the fate of the galaxy, perhaps even the universe, being at stake.

The basic plot is that a mysterious Benefactor (he calls himself that, with a Capital B) tips off our heroes that they can find an Axiom outpost in a long-lost human colony system where the wormhole gate has ceased to operate leaving the colonists stranded. The story quickly turns into a mission to liberate the colony, which has been conquered by agents of the Axiom, and the stakes keep going up from there.

So in some ways The Forbidden Stars is not like the two previous books in the series. However, it is still a thoughtful piece of science fiction, and an exciting space opera romp. We still get to hang out with Callie and her crew, who are a great bunch of characters. As I expected, I whizzed through the book in a couple of days, eager to find out what happened next.

If I sound a little disappointed it is mainly because I would have loved to spend more time with these characters. This was a great series, and now it is done. Pratt could presumably write other stories in the same world, even about the same people, but all of them will have been irrevocably changed by the events of this book.

That, I suspect, is the way of things in publishing these days. It used to be that a long-running series was a thing to aim for, but in our newly data-driven world authors are at the mercy of their sales figures. If you want to keep working with the same publisher, you have to keep improving your sales. With a long-running series it is almost always the case that sales drop slightly with each successive volume. Seanan McGuire seems to be able to churn out one October Daye book after another and still get great sales, but she’s something of an exception.

So I guess that Pratt will be looking to write something new, possibly for a new publisher, maybe even under a new name, thought that’s less of an issue for men than it is for women. Whatever it is that he does next, I will be looking out for it, because the Axiom books were a lot of fun.

book cover
Title: The Forbidden Stars
By: Tim Pratt
Publisher: Angry Robot
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Silver in the Wood

So, stories about the Green Man and dryads are a thing now? Cool!

It amuses me that the author of Silver in the Wood, Emily Tesh, has a Classics degree from Cambridge to match the one that Juliet McKenna has from Oxford. There, however, the resemblance ends. McKenna’s Green Man books are very much set in the modern era, are effectively crime fiction, and have a lead character who is merely the mortal assistant of supernatural forces. Silver in the Wood is something else entirely.

To start with the book is set in what appears to be the mid 19th Century. Henry Silver, he of the title, has recently come into possession of Greenhallow Hall, and being an amateur antiquarian he’s keen to investigate the legends surrounding the associated woodland. He, however, is not the protagonist of out story. That honour falls to Tobias Finch, a woodsman who lives in an ancient cottage deep in the forest and has done so for, well, quite some time.

At once slow deep green rolled over him. He took a breath, and another smelling old rotting leaves and healthy growth and autumn light. He felt almost as though he could have planted his feet and become a tree himself, a strong oak reaching up to the sky, brother of the old oak who ruled the wood. Ah, he thought, and nothing else.

Along the way we get a sprinkling of Robin Hood style legend, and a fair amount of being off with the faeries. So this is very much traditional British folk fantasy. I’m not entirely convinced by Tesh’s decision to meld that with some monster hunting as you might find in Theodora Goss’s Athena Club novels (or indeed in Juliet McKenna’s Challoner, Murray & Balfour stories). There’s a whole lot of story development that happens off screen towards the end of the book. It rather feels like there was an intention to expand this into something much more like a steampunk adventure novel, but that some editor (either external or in the author’s head) said, “No, this is much better as traditional fairy tale material.” Whoever it was, they were right.

There’s not a huge amount more I can say because this is a novella and therefore relatively short on content. I should, however, note that there is gay stuff in it, which I am sure will please many readers.

book cover
Title: Silver in the Wood
By: Emily Tesh
Publisher: Tor.com
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

BristolCon 2019

My final convention of the year was my local event, BristolCon. This year marked the 10th anniversary of something that I helped to start, and which has gone from strength to strength over the years. It is now a regular fixture on the UK convention circuit; and is attracting visitors from well outside the local area.

One of the things that makes BristolCon work is that it has a clear sense of its own limitations. There have been regular suggestions that it should grow to be a weekend event, as tends to be traditional for such things. However, the committee has consistently resisted the temptation, insisting that they are only going to do what they have the capacity to do, and not get over ambitious.

Part of that means not having to worry overmuch about hotel rooms. Quite a few people do now stay over on the Friday before the convention. Some stay Saturday night as well. But Bristol is superbly connected by rail (thank you, Mr. Brunel) and it is perfectly possible to do the convention as a day trip from places as far away as Birmingham, London, Southampton, Plymouth and Swansea. There are also good air links to Dublin, Belfast, Glasgow and Edinburgh.

Another element is the capacity of the venue. BristolCon has been at the DoubleTree for most of its life. The hotel is very convenient for Temple Meads station. There are a number of other hotels not that far away, but this one has good function space, an excellent bar, a good restaurant, and staff that seem to be happy to work with us weirdos.

In the middle years the con seemed quite cramped as attendance had climbed rapidly and appeared to be stretching the ability of the venue to cope. However, the hotel has added more function space recently and that has eased a lot of the pressure. If you remember the con from the days when there seemed to be no room to move in the main foyer, you’ll be pleasantly surprised if you make a return visit.

A downside is that the fact that the new space is on a different floor. Registration, Programme Room 2, and the free tea & coffee service (one of the con’s best features) are now downstairs. I spent most of the day in the Dealers’ Room and didn’t see as many people as I expected. From the few programme items that I was on, I got the impression that the downstairs programme room was busier than the upstairs one, and that if people weren’t attending programme they were either drinking coffee or in the bar. I can’t complain, however. I sold a lot of books.

The main reason for that is that we were launching Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion II. The convention kindly allowed us to be the main book launch event and provided space and time for a few speeches and signing. They event supplied a lovely cake in the shape of the SS Great Britain, and helped pay for the wine. They did us proud, for which Jo, Roz and I are very grateful.

During the day I got wind of a small amount of frantic paddling beneath the smooth surface of the event, but another advantage of the small size of the convention is that it is hard for anything to go too badly wrong. There is a temptation, with a long-running event, to assume that everything will be OK because it was all OK last year, and that can lead to people forgetting to be paranoid about checking arrangements, but the committee know what they are doing and can recover from most slip-ups.

The only thing that didn’t really go according to plan was the Open Mic on the Friday evening. It looked like the tech crew had been told to run the thing while they were doing tech set-up in the main programme room, and they didn’t really know how it worked. Guys, you could have just asked me. You knew I would be there.

Plans for next year’s convention are already underway. The Author Guests of Honour will be Anna Smith Spark and Adrian Tchaikovsky. I’m assuming that an Artist guest will be announced in due course. The date is a week later than usual: October 31st. In the past the convention has avoided Halloween weekend because some authors wanted to be free to attend World Fantasy. However, that is now less of an issue than publishers insisting that authors go to the MCM ComicCon in London rather than to BristolCon. A later date will hopefully avoid a clash, and might also encourage more costuming. I might stay over on Saturday night for that. I’m certainly sad to have missed this year’s Saturday evening programming which appears to have been quite spectacular.

Of course it does mean that I’m likely to miss 2021, because I do miss my North American friends and I’m always up for a trip to Montréal, but that’s sufficiently far in the future in our crazy current timeline that anything could of happened by them.

What I will say is that I won’t be doing a book launch at BristolCon next year. If I do one it will be at the Eurocon in Croatia. But I do expect to be at BristolCon, and I hope to see some of you there.

The Dreaming Stars

The people who complain that science fiction has been taken over by Social Justice Warriors often say that there is a lack of fun adventure stories. Obviously those people have not been reading Tim Pratt.

Of course they wouldn’t. Tim’s Axiom series does feature a plucky crew of misfits who happen to be in possession of some cutting-edge weaponry and who are trying to save the galaxy from a terrifying ancient race of aliens. There are some great characters, a lot of entertaining byplay between them, and just enough heart-stopping danger to keep us all reading. The problem is that some of the crew are women. Worse, some of them are lesbians; and some are disabled. There’s even a minor character who is trans. So despite the books having almost all of the features the whingers ask for, they won’t read them because they won’t read anything that has SJW cooties.

The rest of us, however, are in for a treat. This is comfort reading, but it is fun, clever comfort reading. Let’s meet some of the crew.

The captain of the White Raven is Callie Machedo. She used to be a freelance security consultant, but for reasons explained in the first book in the series, The Wrong Stars, she’s now the leader of the only group of people who know just how much danger the galaxy is in.

Callie’s life is made much easier by the presence of Elena Oh, a biologist who, in The Wrong Stars, was rescued from a lost colony ship. Elena and her fellow crew members had been in cryo-sleep for hundreds of years, so there are plenty of opportunities for “old people” jokes. Callie and Elena flirt regularly through book two, The Dreaming Stars.

We also have the engineer, Ashok, who is an enthusiastic early adopter of body modification technologies. If there is something he can plug into himself, he wants it. The ship’s doctor, Stephen, is a member of an obscure religious cult that believes it can find god through taking psychotropic drugs. The pilot and navigator, Janice and Drake, are literally inseparable, and they hate it.

Finally there is Lantern. She’s a Liar, a member of the only alien race that most humans know they have encountered. They are called Liars because they appear to be incapable of telling the truth about anything important. Ask five Liars the same question, and you will get five different answers, none of them correct. Liars have tentacles and rotational symmetry. One of the reasons they won’t level with humanity is that the truth about the universe is far too terrifying for us to handle. We wouldn’t believe it. We would poke our curious monkey noses in places where they should not be poked. And we would die. Horribly.

The other alien species in the galaxy are the Axiom. You’ll need to read The Wrong Stars to get up to date on who they are, and why they are so dangerous, but it is safe to say that there are no other intelligent species in the galaxy because the Axiom have wiped them all out.

The Axiom series is great fun space opera. I have really enjoyed the first two books and I’m very much looking forward to book three later this year.

book cover
Title: The Dreaming Stars
By: Tim Pratt
Publisher: Angry Robot
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Issue #12

This is the October 2019 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.


Cover: The Green Man’s Heir

This is the artwork done by Ben Baldwin for Juliet E McKenna’s The Green Man’s Heir. I am using it for this issue in honour of that book being a finalist for the Robert Holdstock Award for Best Fantasy Novel this year. It didn’t win, but I’m still very proud of Juliet and that book.

You can see what it looks like on the book below.

Editorial – October 2019

Well, here we are again. I’ve managed three issues of the new incarnation of this thing, and the UK has had another stay of execution. I do wish I was living in less interesting times.

Still, we have books. I have reviewed a bunch of them. There’s also an interview with Ellen Datlow that I recorded at the Eurocon. You may have heard some of it on my radio show, but this version includes all of the insider stuff that I had to cut out for a general audience.

Also I have an article by Kevin in this issue. It has always been our intention to run articles about conrunning here. Earlier this month John D. Berry wrote blog post about convention badges that got widely shared on social media. It is a great post, because John is an expert on typography and can talk authoritatively about how to design a readable badge. But there’s a lot more to convention badges than readability, so I thought this would be a good time to update Kevin’s article on that topic which he first wrote for Steven Silver’s Argentus many years ago.

I should also say a little bit about schedule. Right now I am doing one issue a month. With Emerald City I did ten a year, with deliberate extended breaks for Worldcon and midwinter. Both of those things are less of an issue for me now, so I might be able to manage a 12-issue year, but I need to see how things go for a while. My life is way more hectic than it was when I was doing Emerald City.

The Warrior Moon

This book is the third and final instalment in what has become one of my favourite fantasy series of recent times. It began with The Tiger’s Daughter and continued in The Phoenix Empress. In these books K Arsenault Rivera has constructed a fascinating fantasy world based loosely on Japanese, Chinese and Mongolian cultures. She has also given us the most adorable pair of lesbian demon hunters in literature. Barsalai Shefali and Minami Shizuka are beautifully drawn, far from perfect, and passionately in love. As the series has been neatly wrapped up I don’t see how we’ll get more stories about them, and this makes me rather sad.

I didn’t do proper review of the other two books, and it is hard to review the third part of a trilogy without giving any spoilers for the first two volumes. I will do my best, but if you are highly spoiler-averse you might want to stop reading now.

Rivera has chosen a very interesting structure for the books. Both The Tiger’s Daughter and The Phoenix Empress are told in flashback as Shefali and Shizuka tell each other how their lives have gone over the past few years since they have been separated. This sets us up for the climactic conclusion in The Warrior Moon.

The story more or less begins with two other remarkable women: the Hokkaran Empress, Minami Shizuru, and the Qorin clan leader, Burqila Alshara. Their friendship puts an end to a long enmity between the Hokkarans and the Qorin. Their daughters are of a similar age and are raised together. Both of them prove to have extraordinary abilities, and they become inseparable.

The true story, however, begins generations ago with the arrival of The Traitor, a powerful demon with mysterious ties to the Minami royal family. The Traitor now controls much of the north of the country. His ability to infect mortals with blackblood, and thereby possess them, gives him massive armies. He preys particularly on the Qorin as their steppe-lands are adjacent to his territory, but his ambition is always directed towards the Hokkaran Empire whose throne he covets.

As The Warrior Moon opens, Shefali and Shizuka are finally in position to launch an assault on the north. Shefali has persuaded her mother to bring the Qorin clans to war, and Shizuka, now Empress, has the Phoenix Guard at her command. They aim to march on the Lost City of Iwa and put an end to the threat of The Traitor once and for all.

Time, however, is of the essence. Shefali is very sick, and a prophecy tells that she will not live past her next birthday. That is now mere weeks away. It is by no means certain that they will even reach Iwa in time. The two women had vowed to go into battle together, and now it seems that opportunity may be ripped away from them.

There are many things that I love about this series. The characters of Shefali and Shizuka are but a start. There is also a great supporting cast. I’m disappointed not to have any more of Ren in the final book, but we have a fine replacement in Minami Sakura, Shizuka’s long-long cousin who was abandoned at birth, raised in a brothel, and has become the Imperial Historian. I’m also very fond of Shefali’s cousin, Dorbentei Otgar, who gets her own moments of glory in the final book. These two represent the mortal people of the Hokkarans and Qorin, bearing witness to events that rapidly escalate far beyond mortal ken.

I also love the way Rivera has used her demon adversaries. They are cunning, duplicitous, and very snarky. Once beyond the Wall of Flowers, the combined army is trapped in a world where the weather and terrain can change rapidly and unexpectedly. Even time itself flows differently in The Traitor’s domain. To defeat him, Shefali and Shizuka must become as gods.

Finally, I love the ending. War is brutal. The Hokkaran Empire values beauty over all else. The Qorin value family. Both will be ripped apart in the final conflict. There is no happy ending that can erase the pain. Unlike many fantasy writers, Rivera understands this and is prepared to face up to it. In any case, what place is there for gods among mortals? Once their legend is written, all that they have is each other.

The golden Sun burns.
The Moon shines silver. Lovers,
Like two pine needles.

book cover
Title: The Warrior Moon
By: K. Arsenault Rivera
Publisher: Tor
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Interview – Ellen Datlow

This interview was recorded at the 2019 Eurocon, TitanCon, in Belfast. Cheryl talks to Ellen about a range of topics including how she got her start in the business, how the industry has changed since she started, what “best of the year” anthologies mean, and who is the only horror writer ever to have scared her.

Parts of the interview were broadcast on Cheryl’s radio show earlier this month, but this is the full version with all of the industry gossip that wasn’t comprehensible to a general audience.

FranKissStein

Jeanette Winterson’s latest book is a pastiche on Frankenstein, and also very much a science fiction novel. Even if it didn’t have a trans main character, it would deserve a review here. Given that additional fact, I really can’t ignore it.

Once upon a time a group of young friends rented a house on the shores of Lake Geneva. The weather was awful and, being mostly writers, they set themselves a challenge of producing a story each. John Polidori, Lord Byron’s physician, wrote a short story called The Vampyre which kickstarted our passion for toothy bloodsuckers. And 19-year-old Mary Shelley invented science fiction.

Well, if you ignore Margaret Cavendish, and the more bizarre satires of Lucian of Samosata. Whatever your views on the origins of science fiction, Mary Shelley wrote a book that to this day is one of the best-known works of English literature. Despite not sucking anyone’s blood, Victor Frankenstein’s monster seems to be able to live forever. And so, by extension, does his creator.

Fast forward now to the 21st Century and FranKissStein. Britain is in the grip of Brexit fever, but that can’t stop the march of science. Ron Lord (Lord, Ron, get it?), the Alan Sugar of sex dolls, is establishing himself as a player on the world stage. His little business founded in a Welsh village now has factories in China and customers all over the globe. He’s in the USA at a technology fair hoping to pick up tips on the latest developments in AI.

As an aside, there is indeed a village in Wales called Three Cocks. It is just north of the Brecon Beacons, and not far from Hay-on-Wye, which is doubtless how Winterson came to hear of it.

Professor Victor Stein is a technology guru of similar stature to Ray Kurzweil. He is the king of AI, the man who will bring us the Coming Race (I’m disappointed that Winterson didn’t use that pun) of artificial beings. He also has a strong interest in cryogenics.

Polly D is a journalist for Vanity Fair (journalists, bloodsuckers, yes they do have something in common). She’s an outspoken feminist and she’s sure that Stein is up to no good. She finds Lord repugnant. If the two of them end up working together (and you know they must) it will set off all sorts of alarm bells in her conspiracy-detector mind.

Into this mess walks Dr Ry Shelley. Everyone assumes that Ry is short for Ryan, and most people call him that, but it is actually short for Mary. Ry is an assigned-female-at-birth (afab) trans person who has undergone top surgery, but nothing down below. Though he lives as a man, and uses he/him pronouns, he identifies as non-binary. He is both the poet and the novelist in one body, the perfect married couple.

With this set-up, Winterson takes us on a tour of the current state of transhumanism and robotics. The book came out too soon after Kate Devlin’s Turned On for Winterson to have used that as a source, so I guess the two of them were reading the same research material at around the same time. Devlin’s book is a factual survey of the field. Winterson’s is an hilarious romp.

Well, it is hilarious as long as you are not a man. If you are you may well have an attack of the man-feels on reading it; and have to send a bunch of dick pics to random queer women on Twitter in order to reassert your masculinity. But this is Jeanette Winterson. What did you expect?

Also it gets a bit serious and woo-woo towards the end, which is all well and good from my point of view.

Being neither afab nor non-binary, I can’t give any opinion on whether Ry is a good portrait of such a person. I would love to see reviews of the book by such people. What I can say is that it isn’t a bad portrait. Winterson is clearly sympathetic to trans people, and that’s despite being a lesbian and a member of the British literary establishment, which is pretty much the definition of a transphobe these days. She makes a point of illustrating the constant microaggression that people like Ry are subjected to (in Ry’s case mainly from Lord, who thinks he’s being clever). There is one point (Content Warning!) where Ry is the victim of sexual assault. And frankly his relationship with Stein is deeply dysfunctional and exploitative. Stein, of course, exploits everyone, but he makes a special case of Ry.

There are a couple of points where Winterson’s research on trans people is a little behind the times. (If you ever read this, Jeanette, it turns out that the whole thing about trans women’s vaginas being wounds that will never heal is yet another lie made up by doctors to discourage us from transitioning. Bodies are remarkably adaptable.) I’m sure there will be trans people who like the book less than I do, especially if they are people who will immediately identify closely with Ry. But it could have been so much worse, and it isn’t.

I’m also fairly pleased with the book as science fiction. Winterson is definitely not slumming it. She doesn’t make any grandiose predictions about the future of humanity, but she has done her research on the current state of the technology. She also appears to have left a little Easter Egg for us.

Later in the book we are introduced to a character called Jack Good, who was once a friend of Victor Stein’s. He’s a gay man, who fled England in fear after the Turing disaster, who lived on into his nineties, and who was involved in the making of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Sir Arthur C Clarke was not Jewish; he worked in radar rather than at Bletchley Park with Turing; and he wasn’t a pioneer of cryogenics; but his life history is otherwise remarkably similar to Good’s. I don’t think this was an accident.

The book is a piece of literary fiction, so don’t expect a neatly resolved adventure story. As long as you are OK with that (and not troubled by jokes at the expense of men) there’s a good chance you’ll enjoy it. I was a little disappointed that Winterson didn’t manage to work in Mary Shelley’s friendship with the trans man, Walter Douglas (who wrote as David Lyndsay), but you can’t have everything. These days I’m very relieved simply to read a book by a cis woman about a trans character that isn’t horrible.

book cover
Title: FranKissStein
By: Jeanette Winterson
Publisher: Jonathan Cape
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The Pleasant Profession of Robert A Heinlein

In my time I have read rather a lot of academic studies of science fiction, but I don’t think I have read anything that comes close in depth and breadth of analysis as Farah Mendlesohn’s study of Heinlein. I’m by no means an expert on Heinlein myself, but I am seriously impressed with how exhaustive this book is. That does of course make it rather exhausting as well. It is very long, and I can see why Mendlesohn opted for crowdfunded publication rather than cut it down substantially as had been requested by the original publishers. Heinlein had a long career, had a huge influence on the field, and was a very complex person. You need a book like this to do him justice.

I am of course somewhat biased. I have known Mendlesohn for many years. When I read The Pleasant Profession of Robert A Heinlein I can hear her saying the words. I’m having to concentrate to stay professional and refer to her as Mendlesohn here rather than as Farah. However, the book has been favourably received by many other people, so I don’t think my estimation of it can be too far off base.

Because I know Mendlesohn, I happen to think that she’s an ideal person to write this book. Although she is best known as a scholar of science fiction, her original training was as an historian and her specialty was American history. That gives her a head start in understanding the political background against which Heinlein’s life and opinions need to be understood. She has also very successfully navigated the patriarchal world of academia while remaining staunchly feminist which is something I think that Heinlein would have admired, even if the two of them might have disagreed significantly over other issues.

The structure of the book is relatively straightforward. Mendlesohn begins with an overview of Heinlein’s life, concentrating on key experiences that shaped his career and political opinions, and preparing the reader for the fact that those opinions will not stay static through his long career as a writer. She then has a chapter covering his entire output at a fairly high level, and two chapters examining how Heinlein constructs his fiction. The rest of the book looks in depth at a variety of themes that are common to Heinlein’s writing, all but one of which are political in some way. There are sections on how Heinlein thinks that society should be organised, on how the individual should behave within society, on racism, on sexuality and on gender. The only non-political section is one on how Heinlein uses characters’ relations to cats as an indicator as to whether they are to be seen as good or bad people.

One of the things that shines very clearly out of Mendlesohn’s analysis is that Heinlein’s actual politics were very different from those of the people who have since fetishized his work. He is very much a believer in community (but not Communism), and that is strongly at odds with the extreme individualist ideas of many American Libertarians.

Heinlein is also very clearly liberal in his views on sexuality, albeit with a bit of ick factor when it comes to male-male encounters. There is a lot of queerness in his work, and a great deal of polyamory. He’s a huge advocate of the importance of consent in sexual relations, which is very different to the dominance narrative of the Alt-Right.

Against that Mendlesohn illustrates where Heinlein’s attitudes are coloured by the times in which he lived, and would be seen as much less liberal today. Part of this, it seems to me, is that he is strongly influenced by Protestant ideas of individual responsibility which conflicts with our modern understanding that people can be victims of oppressive social structures and cannot simply haul themselves up by their own bootstraps. Also Heinlein’s feminism seems to me to be rooted in the idea that Patriarchy is a given and that the right course of action for a woman is therefore to navigate it to her advantage, rather than to kick against it. Mendlesohn doesn’t state either of these two points as conclusions, so I may be mis-reading here her, but they are clear messages that I took from the book.

Where there is a clear message is when Mendlesohn is discussion Heinlein’s attitudes to race. There are times when he very clearly makes an effort to include a racially diverse cast of characters (Mendlesohn provides a list of the names of characters in Starship Troopers as an example). There are also examples where black characters are portrayed as clearly more moral than the white characters in the books. These are things which, if an author does them today, will have the reactionary fanboy crowd screaming “Political Correctness!”. However, Mendlesohn also shows that Heinlein is largely unaware of racist cultural assumptions that he grew up with, and which creep into his work even though he is trying to present himself as liberal.

The one area where I am not entirely agreement with Mendlesohn is her discussion of gender, and in particular trans issues. I Will Fear No Evil and Friday are both books that I know fairly well, having read both more than once. I also have a fair amount of lived experience on trans issues, and have to be fairly expert on the diversity of the trans community in order to do the training work I do.

On the other hand, I can see that I got off on the wrong foot with this section. Though I try very hard to avoid policing language with regard to trans issues because it is so much in flux, I still find that the use of “transgender” as a noun or verb sets my teeth on edge. Also Mendlesohn cites Alice Dreger on several occasions, and while I haven’t read the book she’s using I’m immediately on the defensive given what I know of Dreger’s views on trans people.

Unfortunately I don’t have the time right now to make an in depth critique of this section, nor would it be appropriate here as it would be a lot longer than the rest of the review. Hopefully I can get that done in the near future.

In the meantime I warmly recommend this book, both to anyone with an interest in the work of Heinlein, and to anyone who wants to see just how comprehensive a work of literary criticism can be.

book cover
Title: The Plesant Profession of Robert A Heinlein
By: Farah Mendlesohn
Publisher: Unbound
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Alice Payne Arrives

I think I first met Kate Heartfield at the Montréal Worldcon in 2009, but we’d been corresponding before that. She was still working as a journalist and I was delighted to find someone of that ilk who was both a feminist and interested in science fiction. Since then she has become a published author. Her novel, Armed in Her Fashion, was one of the most imaginative and daring fantasy debuts I have seen in a long time. It is set in a version of mediaeval Europe that could come right out of the mind of Hieronymous Bosch, and it features an excellent portrayal of a mediaeval trans man. I am delighted to see that it won the 2019 Prix Aurora for the best SF&F novel from Canada.

This current review is of something very different. Alice Payne Arrives is a steampunk time war novella. Yes, time war stories are a thing right now. But first, a little introduction.

It is 1788. Colonel Payne has returned from the war in the Americas “much changed”, for which read, “not entirely in his right mind.” He also has serious debts. His daughter, Alice, is at her wits’ end trying to make ends meet. Some of the servants have had to be laid off, but there are really only two ways out: marriage, or a life of crime.

Marriage is unlikely to be an option, because Alice was born in Jamaica and takes after her mother in skin colour. What’s more, she has recently embarked on a passionate affair with her companion, Jane Hodgson. Jane is an ingenious maker of automata, and this proves rather useful in Alice’s new career as a highwayman.

Meanwhile, in the 22nd Century, war is raging. It is known as The History War, and at stake is control of time itself. Yes, I know, we’ve been here before this year. There was Kameron Hurley’s The Light Brigade, and This is How You Lose the Time War from Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. There must be something in the water. Either that or agents of the various factions involved in a real Time War are softening us up by seeding ideas into our timeline. Look, 2016 was a clusterfuck. Everyone knows that. It isn’t surprising that time travellers are here trying to undo the mess.

In Heartfield’s story, however, 2016 is really only a symptom of a much larger problem. Rapid social change began long before that. Which is why Major Prudence Zuniga of the faction known as The Farmers has taken an interest in events in 1788.

This being a novella, there isn’t a huge amount of plot. However, there is a sequel (well, at least one) so the various threads have been left nicely dangling. On the way there we get some interesting musing on the difficulties of actually changing history, and a fair amount of feminism. Alice and Jane make an interesting couple: the one headstrong and fearless, the other calculating and cautious. There is an added complication in that Alice is bisexual and seems to have a strong interest in her father’s friend, Captain Auden, who inconveniently happens to be what passes for the law enforcement agencies in their little part of rural Hampshire.

Fortunately I already have the second book. I shall be reporting back on that one next issue.

book cover
Title: Alice Payne Arrives
By: Kate Heartfield
Publisher: Tor.com
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Shadows of Athens

Those of you who follow such developments closely will know that Juliet E. McKenna now has an alter-ego, a seemingly genderless person known as JM Alvey who writes murder mysteries set in Ancient Greece. Juliet has written a bit on her own blog as to why this happened, and why she has now unmasked Mx Alvey. I don’t want to add to that save to note that Juliet has a degree in Classics from Oxford and knows far more about Ancient Greece than most people (especially male politicians who fetishize the Spartans).

There are two books under the Alvey pen name: Shadows of Athens and Scorpions in Corinth. I don’t publish them. Of course Juliet is a dear friend so you may think that my views are somewhat biased, but here goes with a review of the first one anyway.

One thing that struck me about the book is that it reads quite similarly to the Green Man books. They are all mystery novels, and both series star a male protagonist who is a decent fellow rather than a tortured loner. Daniel Mackmain does have to keep himself to himself much of the time, but he’s still a very sociable bloke. In contrast Philocles, the star of the Alvey books, is very sociable indeed because he’s a playwright and has to be.

McKenna hasn’t adopted a new voice for these books. When reading them, if you are familiar with her past work, you will know that you are reading a McKenna novel. I think this is probably wise. Trying to maintain a Greek voice throughout would have been quite challenging, and almost certain to attract accusations of pastiche. Besides, who knows what ancient Athenians really spoke like?

There are related issues as well. At one point in the book McKenna mentions the Etruscans, and notes that they live in a place called “Italy”. Now of course no one in the Athens of 443 BCE would use that term. However, none of the terms that they would use would be familiar to a modern audience. So the choice is either use an anachronistic term, or turn the book into a history lesson. McKenna has opted for the former, and I think that is a wise choice.

Besides, there are other areas where the casual reader is far more liable to yell “unrealistic!”, and be utterly wrong. To start with many of the Athenian men have sex with other men, and in particular young boys. Yes, this was entirely common. McKenna doesn’t make much of it, but it is a very real part of the culture of that place and time.

What McKenna does emphasise is the multi-cultural nature of Athenian society. The books are set between the Persian and Peloponnesian wars. Athens is becoming a hugely important trading nation, and people from all over the known world visit. Philocles himself is an Athenian citizen. However, his girlfriend, Zosime, is Cretan, and her father, Menkaure, is Egyptian. Philocles owns a slave, Kadous, who is from Phrygia, a state in the centre of what is modern Turkey. The city of Athens employs a group of Scythians, horsemen from the steppes of Asia, as a sort of police force. And Aristarchos, Philocles’ patron, owns a slave/bodyguard from “some mountainous land far beyond the Black Sea” (what we now call Georgia). All of this is perfectly reasonable, as is the fact that the villains of the story are probably being paid by the Persians to stir up trouble.

I have mentioned slaves. Yes, Athens was a slave-owning society. The social position of slaves was rather different to that of people of colour in Antebellum American, but they were still slaves. Athens was also one of the most misogynist ancient cultures I know of, and part of this comes through in the story as well. One of the probable reasons why McKenna has made Zosime a Cretan is precisely to allow her more agency than any respectable Athenian woman would dare to claim.

And yes, childbirth is deadly.

I mentioned earlier that Philocles is a playwright. To be precise, he writes comedies. McKenna studied the works of Aristophanes and the like at Oxford. Shadows of Athens is set against the background of the Dionysia Festival, part of which is a number of play-writing contests. Philocles and his troop of actors have an entry in the comedy section and are looking for their first big break.

McKenna brings all of her knowledge of Athenian theatre to this. She knows the sorts of plays that they would stage, the types of actors and musicians required, and the often political nature of the subject matter. This has allowed her to draft an outline of the play that Philocles has written for the contest. We don’t get to see the whole thing, but we do get the general idea and it sounds very like the real thing.

I have not said much about the plot because this is a murder mystery and I don’t want to risk dropping clues. What I will say is that, like most of McKenna’s fiction, this book has a political subtext. It is the best book about fake news that I have read this year. And yes, it is set in Ancient Athens, but the machinations of politicians and greedy businessmen don’t change much down the millennia.

So, if you like a good murder mystery, and could like to learn a lot about Classical Athens along the way, do check out these books. This is Juliet McKenna, you know they are going to be very readable.

book cover
Title: Shadows of Athens
By: Juliet E McKenna writing as JM Alvey
Publisher: Orion
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David Mogo, Godhunter

We are in Lagos in the near future, and the gods have fallen to Earth.

That may bring to mind Aliette de Bodard’s Dominion of the Fallen series, but the gods who have arrived in Lagos are very different from the Biblical demons that haunt Paris. They are Orisha, the gods of West Africa. You may be familiar with some of their incarnations from North American Vodun, but these are the originals. This is a new thing in Western-published fantasy. This is David Mogo, Godhunter.

Your immediate question should be to ask what the author knows about West African religion. Well, his bio says that Suyi Davies Okungbowa lives in Lagos, so I’m guessing that he knows a damn sight more about it than I do. This also means that he knows the territory. The book has an awareness of local geography and politics that you would not get from a carpetbagging Western author.

So who is David Mogo? Well, he’s an orphan, and a demigod. He was raised by a wizard whom he calls Papa Udi, though the man is clearly not his father. His mother, he has been told, is a goddess. He’s inclined to believe that because he has abilities far beyond those of mortal men. He makes use of those abilities to earn a living. Many of the minor orisha are harmless and rather foolish. They get lost, or wander way from the part of Lagos in which they live, causing problems for their human neighbours. The police are useless, so David has a consultancy business rounding up stray godlings and taking them back where they belong. He is the orisha ‘daji, the god hunter.

That, in a city whose economy has been wrecked by the arrival of a bunch of vagrant supernatural beings, is probably the best he can hope for. He’s well paid when he has work, but it is intermittent, and he has to deal with the corrupt police. Then a powerful wizard offers him a massive fee to kidnap two of the higher gods: the Ibeji twins, Taiwo and Kehinde. David knows this is a mistake, but he can’t afford to turn the job down.

The plot develops from there. The book has something of the feel of a fix-up. David conquers one opponent, only to discover that he now has to fight someone even more powerful, and so on. There is an overall story arc of his hero’s journey, but the structure does feel a little repetitive and predictable. There’s an interesting contrast to be drawn between David’s story and that of Thor in the Marvel movies. Thor begins as a powerful warrior and slowly adapts to being an ordinary guy. David goes in the other direction, eventually meeting up with his mother as anyone who has read a few fantasy novels knows that he must.

The most interesting thing about this book is the handling of the orisha. They are a pantheon that will be unfamiliar to most readers, and the cultural attitude towards gods in West Africa seems somewhat different from what we are used to in the West. Yes, they are worthy of worship, but also they live alongside us. I did at one point think that Okungbowa was going to reveal that his gods were some sort of alien species who have recently arrived on Earth, but no, they really are gods. It is more like they have arrived from a different dimension.

There are many ethnic groups making up Nigeria, let alone the whole of West Africa. The specific pantheon that Okungbowa is working with is Yoruba, but some of the gods he mentions are worshipped elsewhere too. This causes interesting problems. As we know, gods acquire power from being worshipped. But what happens to a god when two rival groups of worshippers both claim him? It gets complicated.

It is entirely possible that Okungbowa has played fast and loose with some of the mythology. I was pleased to see him naturally use non-binary pronouns for the sea god, Olókun, who is canonically multi-gendered. One of the other gods may have been given a gender swap.

One thing that does work very well is Okungbowa’s use of what I assume are traditional Nigerian witchcraft rituals. These are how the orisha have always been dealt with by humans, and those methods work just as well now that the gods are living next door. The techniques are a little reminiscent of how characters in a Tim Powers novel might deal with ghosts, but there are references to actual herbs that I assume are from traditional recipes.

The book works well as a traditional male-centred urban fantasy. One of the blurbs characterises it as “A Nigerian Harry Dresden”. But personally I found the orisha much more interesting than David and his hero’s journey. I’d like to see more of them, get insights into their characters and so on. There must be plenty of stories about them.

Of course there may be issues with that. I remember from my time in Australia how badly the Aboriginal community reacted to white people wanting to use their religion as a basis for fiction. Worship of the orisha may well be a living religion in Nigeria, and if it is some people might be deeply offended by fiction using their gods. I will have to leave that to Nigerian people to comment on.

The other thing that struck me about the book is that, although it is essentially a story about a war in heaven, and of a young hero playing a crucial role in that war, it is not a book that glorifies combat. There are occasional references to the Nigerian Civil War, and to Boko Haram. Nigeria is a country that has first-hand experience of being fought over. It knows what war is really about. That’s a lesson that we in the West badly need to re-learn.

book cover
Title: David Mogo, Godhunter
By: Suyi Davies Okungbowa
Publisher: REBCA
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Brightfall

By the end of the first chapter I was totally hooked on this book and knew that I would whiz through it is a day or two. And I did. However, by the time I got to the end I had, not exactly fallen out of love with it, but rather ceased to love it quite as much as I did initially. Explaining why will require this review to be slightly more spoilerly that what I would normally write. You have been warned.

First, however, I should set the scene. Brightfall by Jamie Lee Moyer is a novel of Sherwood, but a very different take than we are used to. It is 12 years since Robin Hood and his band of Merry Men terrorised the Sheriff of Nottingham. King Richard is dead and John Lackland sits upon the throne of England. Little John has got married and started a farm. Midge has gone home to run his father’s mill. Tuck has become an abbot. Marian lives in a small cottage in the forest, bringing up the twin children that she had with Robin. And as for the Earl of Locksley, he has retreated to Tuck’s monastery to devote himself to God and atone for his sins.

We see the story through Marian’s eyes. In chapter one she is visited by a monk from Tuck’s Abbey. He bears bad news. Will Scarlet is dead. So is John’s son, Ethan. So is Midge. Other former members of the band have also died, all in mysterious circumstances. So mysterious that Tuck suspects magic was used to kill them. Marian, being something of a witch, is the only member of the band with the skill to track down the killer.

It is at this point also that we discover that Robin has put Marian aside, even had a bishop annul their marriage. Marian has found solace in the arms of Will, here cast as Robin’s younger brother. Clearly something has gone very wrong with the Merry Men, and perhaps that wrongness will lead us to the murderer.

I think you’ll agree that’s a pretty explosive beginning to a book. I can understand why many people love it. Juliet did, and it was her review that encouraged me to buy it in the first place. The problems I had with it are subtle, and probably a result of my reading it with my editor hat on. If you haven’t stopped reading yet, here’s where you might want to.

The first thing that occurred to me as I read through the book is that we were missing Robin’s voice. He was clearly going to be a key character in the story. Marian might be the viewpoint character, but she doesn’t really go on a journey. She just goes there and back again. It is Robin who has to come to terms with what he has done in his life; to finally stop hiding behind God and take responsibility for putting things right. And yet all we see of him in the book is a brooding, selfish, angry man who spouts religious nonsense whenever challenged.

Had I had this book submitted to me, I might have asked that it be re-written to have some chapters written from Robin’s viewpoint. It would have been hard. He would have been a very unreliable narrator, if only because he clearly lying to himself as much as he is lying to his former friends and lover. But I think we would have got a much better book as a result.

The other issue that slowly bubbled up in my mind as I read is that the book does not concern itself with the Matter of Sherwood. King John is mentioned in passing every so often. The Sheriff of Nottingham is presumably disgraced or dead; and replaced with someone less rapacious. There is no mention of Saxons and Normans. The Merry Men are in this book to provide a familiar cast of characters, nothing more.

Instead what we have is a story about intrigue in the Fae Court that blows apart a human marriage and threatens to unleash all sorts of chaos in its wake. It is a story of (mostly) good Paganism against (mostly) bad Christianity; a story of a good woman and her woefully inadequate run-away husband. While I might be naturally sympathetic to the Pagan viewpoint I would have liked to hear more from Tuck because I have a lot of Christian friends, some of whom are perfectly OK with Paganism, and who have just as much problem with Hellfire punishment narratives as Marian does.

There are a couple of other things that bothered me about the book as well. This description of one of the villains, for example:

A bend in Mikal’s spine cocked one shoulder above the other, perhaps explaining something of why the Lady had passed him over in favour of his brother. He might have won top ranking, but in the Fae a twisted body was a sign of mixed blood, most often true goblin or greenmen.”

I can see how the Fae court might be rather more prejudiced against disability than human society, and this might turn someone bad, but there was no need for it at all. Another explanation could have been given. And there’s that mention of mixed blood. If you look at the story from the right angle, it is fundamentally one of the dangers of mixed marriages.

It bothered me throughout that the main villain was referred to constantly as “the Demisang” (the Halfblood). I understand that with the Fae you cannot use anyone’s real name because names have power, but words have power too and some hurt more than others. By the time you get to the end of the book the narrative has become one of how the child of a mixed-race union can have problems growing up because of the difficulty of adapting to two different cultures. Of course it doesn’t help if the father is an irresponsible shitbag who runs away at the slightest sign of child-rearing difficulty, and the mother doesn’t exactly win any prizes for sensitivity and compassion either, but the entire narrative turns on the cross-cultural issue. It is, at least to my eyes, the moral of the story.

All of which is desperately sad because the book is beautifully written and has a superb premise. I very much wanted to love it, and I still enjoyed reading it. Had it been written 50 years ago I might have understood that it was written within a prevailing social context that was heavily prejudiced against mixed marriages. These days I can’t give it that much leeway.

I’m fairly sure that Moyer didn’t intend the book to be taken in this way. I think it is much more likely that she intended it be to be a Pagans v Christians narrative. But this is one of those things that, once you have seen it, you can’t un-see. And I have read enough of Aliette de Bodard’s complaints about the treatment of mixed-race characters not to fail to spot this one.

book cover
Title: Brightfall
By: Jamie Lee Moyer
Publisher: Jo Fletcher Books
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FantasyCon 2019

October is a busy time for conventions. There’s Octocon in Dublin, FantasyCon, BristolCon and World Fantasy to contend with. But that’s not all. Publishers will be off to Frankfurt for the book fair, and with FantasyCon in Scotland many English and Welsh fans chose instead to head for GollanczFest in London. There’s also the MGM ComicCon at the Excel in London which is now drawing high profile authors away from Bristol. It’s great that the scene is so vibrant, but we aren’t at a con a week yet so it would be nice to have less actual competition.

FantasyCon was in Glasgow, or at least that’s what the advertising said. Dalmuir, where the hotel was located, is “in Glasgow” in much the same way as Heathrow is “in London”. You can get there by public transport, but having arrived you feel like you are in the middle of nowhere and are stuck there for the duration.

Having said that, the hotel was mostly lovely. It was large and spacious. I had a lovely room. The restaurant served great food at prices so reasonable as to make us southerners weep in despair. There was a large, comfy and very reasonably priced bar. The only real issue was the wifi, which was dreadful. Even that would not have mattered had Three, my mobile phone provider, not chosen that weekend to have a major national outage. Thankfully I wasn’t relying on the internet for transaction processing.

With Kevin’s article in mind I should note that the badges failed in most respects. The lanyards were single-point attached, although the badge holders allowed for the more sensible double-point. The badges were easily copied, and there was no art at all so very little memorabilia value. Thankfully the names were big enough to read. Several people seemed to be using badges from other conventions.

The main reason I was at the convention was to support Juliet McKenna, whose The Green Man’s Heir, was a finalist for Best Fantasy Novel in the awards. That meant taking dealer space. Fortunately for me, the lovely people at Luna Press allowed me to rent part of their space, and looked after my books while I was away doing panels or watching rugby.

Yes, there was a small matter of religious observances. I spent two hours on Sunday watching Wales do just enough to beat France and advance to the semi-finals of the World Cup. It was a masterpiece of keeping calm in adversity and doing just enough to win. Profuse apologies to all my French friends. Your boys did pretty well for most of the game.

Because I was in the Dealers’ Room much of the time, I didn’t see much programming beyond my own panels. These were sparsely attended, but both good fun to do. Special thanks to Jeannette Ng for live-tweeting the Fantasy in Translation panel. The non-fiction panel was also fun, and gave me the opportunity to talk about all sorts of things from Dave Langford’s sometimes brutally funny reviews to fan studies and reception studies.

In addition I ran a workshop on Writing Queer Characters from History. This seemed to go down quite well, so apparently I’m now a creative writing teacher, at least in my own little area of expertise. If anyone wants me to do that for their convention, I’d be delighted to run it again.

Overall the programme went very well considering the circumstances. When you hear nothing for ages and then get programme emails from the Chair of the British Fantasy Society you know that something has gone badly wrong. I tried to be as reasonable and accommodating as possible so as not to add to the problems. My congratulations to Helen Armfield for the rescue job.

The Dealers’ Room was well populated. There were the usual suspect such as PS Publishing, good friends from down south such as Handheld Books, and a bunch of people I didn’t know. Chief among those was Lee from The Portal Bookshop in York. The store specialises in queer and feminist SF&F. It has been operating online for a while, but has since opened a physical store. It proved an ideal place to offload most of the remaining Twelfth Planet Press books that I had been looking after since Worldcon. If you happen to be in York, please pop in any buy something.

Another discovery in the Dealers’ Room was Jenni Gudgeon. She’s an artist who makes pictures of the hidden world by etching photographs. It is an ingenious technique that allows her to create pictures of fairies and the like in a natural setting so that they appear to have been photographed. She explains the technique on her website. Check out her book, Folkland Fables, which I think would make a marvellous holiday season gift for a young relative.

There were several book launches through the weekend, and thus quite a bit of free wine. The one that caught my eye was Handheld Books promoting a re-issue of Vonda McIntyre’s The Exile Waiting. This was her debut novel, and it is set in the same world as the Hugo, Nebula and Locus Award winning Dreamsnake. Kate Macdonald tells me that she is currently negotiating the rights to Vonda’s unpublished final novel, which is set in Minoan Crete. I am very much looking forward to that.

For me one of the interesting aspects of the weekend was getting to connect with Scottish fandom. Things are going very well up there. They have their own magazine, Shoreline of Infinity, whose owners also run the very successful Event Horizon readings series. They have their own podcast, Speculative Spaces, and of course Luna Press as a local publisher. They have the long-running Glasgow convention, Satellite, which next year has Aliette de Bodard as Guest of Honour (sadly I will be in Mariehamn that weekend), and they now have Cymera in Edinburgh as well. All of this stands them in very good stead for welcoming back Worldcon in 2024.

I caught a brief glimpse of the dear old Starship Armadillo on my way out on the train. She looks like she’s still in good shape and I hope to see her fly again with a new, younger crew. Maybe Kevin can finally retire his captain’s uniform. But there has been a lot happening in and around Spaceport Glasgow since 2005. It is now a much better site, with more function space and hotel rooms. There are probably more restaurants too. I’ll try to make a trip up there at some point to report, but I think you’d have to be a bit mad to run against them.

The award ceremony went well. Lee Harris had run off to Canada, so we ended up with Muriel Grey as the MC. She did struggle a bit with the running order, but otherwise she did a fine job as one might expect from a hotshot TV presenter. Juliet didn’t win, but we hadn’t really expected that she would. As it turned out the South West did pretty well. Lucy Hounsom won as part of the Breaking the Glass Slipper podcast team, and GV Anderson took the Short Story prize with “Down Where Sound Comes Blunt” in the face of stiff opposition. I was delighted for Tasha Shuri and Priya Sharma, both of whom turned out to be lovely people, and of course for Aliette. And yes, all the fiction writing award winners were women, though the winning anthology was edited by men. A full list of the award winners can be found here.

And that was it for another year. Next year FantasyCon will be in Sheffield, which is much more accessible from down here. I will probably go again, though for 2021 I have my eyes on World Fantasy in Montréal.

Issue #11

Here we are with our second issue of the year. This is what you can find in it.


Gideon the Ninth

You have probably heard of this book. It is, undoubtedly, the most talked about book of the year. Indeed, it is the most talked about debut novel that I can remember. Admittedly they didn’t have social media marketing campaigns back when Neuromancer came out, or Perdido Street Station (which I know wasn’t a debut, but King Rat was barely noticed). But even Ancillary Justice didn’t get this level of promotion.

The buzz is justified as well. Gideon the Ninth is a very good book. It would not surprise me to see it on the Hugo Award ballot next year. Worldcon will, of course, be in Wellington. Tamsyn Muir might live in the UK these days, but she’s a Kiwi by birth and has lived in Wellington. No New Zealander has ever won Best Novel. Indeed, I’m not sure one has ever won a fiction Hugo, though they have been conspicuously successful with their movies. No pressure, then.

I got to talk to Muir briefly while I was in Dublin for Worldcon. She seems to be coping very well with the fame thus far. But of course the book wasn’t published then. I do hope that her publishers are taking good care of her.

But what about the book?

Imagine, if you will, the Warhammer 40k Spiky Death Metal universe, when all of their enemies have been killed. That would include internal enemies, because once you have perfected the arts of necromancy you have little need for living humans. The dead can do all the physical work for you.

Now, ten thousand years into the future, things are a little slow and cobwebbed. The powerful are very old. Nothing much has changed for a very long time. Yet now the Emperor, Necrolord Prime, King of the Nine Renewals, Giver of Resurrection, His Celestial Kindness, King Undying and so on and so forth, has issued an invitation. He wishes to find new recruits for his elite corps of Lyctors. The heirs of the Nine Great Houses have been invited to apply for elevation. Eight ambitious young necromancers, each accompanied by a loyal cavalier, arrive at the First House eager to be tested, only to find that the Imperial Palace has more in common with Gormenghast than a glittering centre of empire.

Let’s back up a little here. The world of Warhammer 40k has faster-than-light travel. The world of this book seems system-bound. There are nine Houses, each based on its own planet. You can guess where this might be. First House is clearly based on Earth. Second House, home of Cohort, the Imperial army, is Mars. Seventh House is presumably Venus as their logo has a rose in the skull. Sixth House, home of the Imperial Library, is Mercury, as the text eventually reveals. The origin of the numbering isn’t obvious – perhaps it is order of settlement. What is clear that our heroes from Ninth House live far out on dark, tiny Pluto. Yes, it is still a planet. And in a civilisation ruled by necromancers it is Ninth House, in their cold and lonely isolation, who are the Guardians of the Locked Tomb.

Cue ominous bass line.

In some ways this reminds me of Cat Valente’s Radiance, which also plays with the personalities of the nine planets. But it also reminds me of the planetary associations in Sailor Moon because there are so many young women involved. And because a book full of lesbian necromancer sailor scouts is too delicious an idea not to hold on to.

There are very few young people in Ninth House. One is Ortus, the Cavalier Primary. He’s a sickly lad, far happier writing melancholy poems than training with a sword. Worse, he is totally under the thumb of his widowed mother who doesn’t want him doing anything dangerous. He is clearly not his father’s son.

Gideon is an orphan and therefore an indentured servant of the House. Her mother arrived at Ninth House already dead, and her shade refused to do any more than name the child. Gideon hates her life in Ninth. She has only two pleasures in life: pornographic magazines, and sword fighting. If she wasn’t a servant, she would probably be the best Cavalier that Ninth House has ever had. But she is a servant, and a badly-behaved one at that. If young people were not so rare in Ninth she would undoubtedly have been executed years ago.

Finally we have Harrowhark. She is the Reverend Daughter, Heir to the house of the Ninth, and a superbly accomplished necromancer. Harrow is Wednesday Addams on steroids. Or perhaps more accurately Wednesday Addams on whatever drugs would make her more Goth, more cunning, more ambitious, more ruthless and more deadly.

Naturally Gideon and Harrow hate each other. Harrow hates Gideon because there is no weight of responsibility on Gideon’s shoulders. Gideon hates Harrow because Harrow owns her, body and presumably soul as well.

That, then, is your set-up. Gideon the Ninth is a book about comedy lesbian necromancers. Necromancy isn’t inherently funny, but the tradition of things like the Addams Family, not to mention Jonathan L Howard’s Johannes Cabal series, shows that death can be hilarious. I now live in hope of seeing Muir and Howard on a convention panel together talking about deathly jokes. And I hope that the success of Muir will lead to an increased interest in the Cabal books because Howard is a great writer.

The thing about death, though, is that no matter how funny you make it, it is still deadly. What we have here is effectively a country house murder mystery. As the necromancers and their cavaliers start the elevation process it becomes clear that they may not all survive to become Lyctors. Nor are they quite as alone as they seem. All of the Houses have their secrets, Ninth not the least of them. The further we get into the brilliantly designed plot, the more deadly things get.

Eventually we find out what it means to become a Lyctor, and then there will be tears. Thankfully there will be Book 2. I can’t wait.

book cover
Title: Gideon the Ninth
By: Tamsyn Muir
Publisher: Tor.com
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Tracking Classical Monsters

I know Liz Gloyn through the Women’s Classical Committee, a support group for women who study the Classics, of which I am a member. Before I actually met her in person, however, I saw her on a documentary series called Myths & Monsters which is available on Netflix. When I heard that she was writing a book on monsters I knew I needed to read it.

I should point out that Gloyn is not an expert on fantastic literature (or indeed any other media in which fantastical beasts appear). She is, however, an avid consumer of popular culture, as this review should make clear. In addition, she is an expert on the ancient world. That gives her an inside track on the origins of Classical monsters, and how they were seen at the time.

Of course, the way in which a Mycenaean Greek thought of Medusa or the Minotaur is very different from the way in which an Imperial Roman would see the same creature. And, as Gloyn notes, her book falls within the remit of Reception Studies which is all about how the subject is seen in the period under discussion. Nevertheless, the Classical insight is valuable in tracing the development of the careers of the various monsters. It also turns up some lovely little gems. I had no idea that archaeologists have found several shrines in Greece apparently erected by victims of nympholepsy: that is, they were erected by people who believed that they had been abducted by nymphs.

Tracking Classical Monsters in Popular Culture can be divided into three main parts. The first is theoretical, the second comprises case studies of particular films and TV series mostly set in the Classical world, and the third comprises case studies of two monsters who are common sights in media set in the modern world.

The theory section sets out Gloyn’s plan for the book and provides a basic introduction to the creatures under study. It includes a chapter titled, “Classical Monsters and Where to Find Them”. Gloyn is well aware that she cannot hope to cover the whole field. Monsters run amok in modern media, everywhere from books and comics to film and TV to video games and table-top role-playing. All that she can hope to do is draw a map. Here Be Monsters. And there will be many more to be found.

To me one of the most interesting aspects of the book is the agency that it gives to the monsters themselves. One might expect an expert Classicist to first set out the nature of each monster, as defined in Classical myth, and then get all curmudgeonly about how inauthentically they are represented by Hollywood, or in the D&D Monster Manual. Gloyn does nothing of the sort. Instead she regards each monster as an independent cultural meme that keeps popping up in new guises, adapting itself to whatever environment it finds itself in. Classical monsters, it turns out, are particularly resilient and adaptable, at least for now. That is in part due to the fact that most of them have no definitive source text.

The film and TV case studies cover a range of productions including the works of Harry Harryhausen, the Hercules and Xena TV series, and Doctor Who. Sadly monsters are not a major part of the Xena storyline. Much more time has to be spent on Hercules whose career is basically that of a monster slayer. Unexpectedly this section has left me with a desire to watch Dwayne Johnson’s 2014 film of the Hercules legend which sounds far more intelligent that I would have expected from something designed to allow The Rock to show off his muscles.

Gloyn makes some interesting observations on the effect of film on monsters, in particular freezing their appearance as if we partake of Medusa’s power when watching them. Giving Medusa a snake body from the waist down was Harryhausen’s idea, but almost every version of her since has followed his lead. Gloyn is also sceptical of the value of CGI, seeing is at focussing on the technical wizardry of the image at the expense of the monster’s character. (I’d be interested to know her view of Benedict Cumberbatch’s portrayal of Smaug, which I felt was one of the few bright spots in the otherwise execrable Hobbit movies.)

The two monster case studies are on Medusa and the Minotaur. The latter includes Sara Douglass’s Troy Game series which I really should have read back when I was doing Emerald City. It also, rather strangely, includes Neverwhere. The description of the Beast of London in the book is very clear: it is a pig-like beast with razor-sharp tusks. I’m pretty sure I remember Neil telling me that it was inspired by Twrch Trwyth, the giant boar from the Mabinogion that is hunted by Arthur in Culhwch and Olwen. However, the Beast does live in a labyrinth, which is very much a Minotaur thing to do. And of course in the BBC television series it was infamously played by a rather placid highland cow.

Those of you who have seen my Amazons talk will have heard me talk about how the legend of Medusa may have been inspired by African women warriors who wore their hair in dreads. Diodorus Siculus talks of the Gorgons as a tribe of women warriors who lived in Libya, and Ovid also notes that Perseus flew over Libya on his way home after killing Medusa. You only have to look at the more ancient Greek depictions of the Gorgons to see that they are black. The beautiful white woman with actual snakes on her head as opposed to dreads is mostly a Roman invention, though as I recall Classical Greece started it. Much to my delight, Gloyn cites Dorothea Smartt as having come to the same conclusion; and having written a performance piece about Medusa based on this.

I think this book will appeal to anyone with an interest in monsters and their place in popular culture. It is possible that experienced fantasy scholars will find some of it a little obvious, but most readers should learn a lot. What’s more, unusually for an academic text, the paperback and Kindle versions are reasonably priced.

I accepted a review copy of this book from Bloomsbury’s academic division because they still believe that a reviewer is an independent expert, not a paid employee of the publisher.

book cover
Title: Tracking Classical Monsters in Popular Culture
By: Liz Gloyn
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The House of Sundering Flames

The House of Sundering Flames is the third and final part of Aliette de Bodard’s Dominion of the Fallen series. The books tell the tale of life in a post-apocalyptic Paris in which fallen angels have returned to Earth and set up their own mini-kingdoms in the city. Book 1, The House of Shattered Wings, tells of House Silverspires, ruled over by Morningstar himself and headquartered in Notre Dame (where else?). But old Lucifer is not the power that he once was, nor do his schemes and dreams have much currency in this strange new world. Book 2, The House of Binding Thorns, takes us to House Hawthorn, centred around the Eiffel Tower and ruled over by the seemingly sadistic Asmodeus. But the old demon proves more adaptable than his former master, ending up sharing his rule with Thaun, a young dragon prince from a kingdom under the Seine.

Here we must backtrack a moment. Why are there dragons living under the Seine? Well, because this series is in part about the clash between Vietnamese and Western cultures. Vietnam was part of French Indo-China, and consequently creatures from Vietnamese mythology have found their way to France. Water dragons are among them. Like the Fallen, they are much diminished, and they mostly hide away underwater. But Thaun seeks to find a way in the world, and ends up in an unlikely but very passionate affair (I hesitate to call it a love affair) with Asmodeus. The Lord of Hawthorn only wants is best for his House and his people, and sees in Thaun an opportunity for advancing his cause, as well as a source of great sex.

Book 3 takes us briefly across the river to the Trocadero, but only briefly because right at the start of the book House Harrier is consumed in a massive explosion and burned to the ground. Truly it is a House of sundering flames. The rest of the story tell of various characters’ attempts to escape from the ruined House, of the attempts find out what happened, and of the consequences of this attack for the city as a whole.

The book introduces two new major characters, both rooted in Vietnamese mythology. Hua Phong is a magical being made, apparently, of flower petals, who has come to Paris seeking aid for her masters back home. The other, well, you will have to read the book for yourself, but he’s more than a match for the Fallen.

De Bodard is moving into post-colonial fiction here. The Vietnamese are rightly angry at what was done to their country by the French. But how restitution should be made, and who is responsible for paying it, are not easy questions to answer.

Meanwhile Thaun is walking a tightrope trying to keep his own people and those of Asmodeus from fighting each other. Both sides, inevitably, behave badly, as both believe that only they know what is best for House Hawthorn in this time of danger.

We also get a look at the survivors of House Harrier and how the Fallen amongst them adapt to their much reduced status. Guy, the head of the House, retreats into typical Fallen cruelty, whereas others learn that in times of disaster they might find common cause with their mortal servants and dependents.

Much of the focus of the book is on Philippe, a dragon who was exiled from Vietnam and now works as a physician amongst the poor of Paris. He and his friends seek only to survive, because it is all that they can hope for. Yet they are a lesson for the city as a whole. When disaster threatens, people have two choices. They can seek to become the mightiest cockroach on whatever charred heap remains of their world, or they can work together to preserve what they can.

It is, I think, a masterful conclusion to the series, and takes the story in a direction that most readers will not expect. De Bodard is not interested in perpetuating traditional (Western) fantasy tropes, she wants to blow them up. Morningstar, in particular, whom readers might expect to be central to the story, becomes so only as a result of his own hubris. When the world is on fire, no one will care who is King of Paris.

book cover
Title: The House of Sundering Flames
By: Aliette de Bodard
Publisher: Gollancz
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Eurocon in Belfast

Titancon was a convention that probably shouldn’t have worked, but actually did very well.

To start with there were three very distinct groups of members. There were those (mainly Americans) who had been to Worldcon in Dublin, wanted to see more of Ireland, and signed up for Titancon without much intention of attending the convention. Being in the con hotel was a bonus because all of their friends were there too. Then there were those Eurocon regulars who didn’t go to Dublin and were trying to have a proper convention. And finally, there were those like myself who were trying to do both conventions but were pretty much dead on our feet by the time we got to Belfast.

The con was held in the Belfast Hilton which is over in the west of the city just south of the Titanic Quarter. It is very convenient for the Lanyon Place railway station, which would have been great had the Enterprise line from Dublin not been afflicted with engineering works just when we needed it. I came up by bus, stayed in the Hampton Inn near Great Victoria Street station, and commuted into Lanyon Place by train every day. It was very quick and cheap, and the trains were very frequent except on the Sunday. I also had a lot more food options in the evening.

Having arrived a few days early, because the Belfast hotel was cheaper than staying in Dublin, I went to see the Game of Thrones exhibition. This was at an exhibition centre in the Titanic Quarter. Belfast has done some amazingly good work rebuilding the harbour and docklands, but it has all been designed for cars. My feet were very sore by the end of the day. The exhibition itself was great if you are into costuming, which I am, but might have been a disappointment otherwise. I loved the fact that all of the costumes were displayed on headless mannequins, making it look like Alice’s Red Queen had paid them a visit and deprived the entire cast of their heads.

Back now to the Hilton, which had plenty of space for all of the programming scheduled for it. This was a blessed relief after Dublin. There was also a good-sized Dealers’ Room. However, for some inexplicable reason Francesco Verso and I, who were the only new book dealers in the room, were hidden away in a far corner. There was no art show.

As I said earlier, the convention should not have worked. Around a year or so ago there was some sort of major committee meltdown. A lot of work was put in behind the scenes by the Eurocon Board, in particular by Carolina Gómez Lagerlöf, to rescue it. However, as one person told me, it seemed like the convention was cursed. Even a few weeks before the event disasters were still adding up. Martin Hoare had been the Treasurer for the new committee, and his untimely death provided yet another problem for Carolina to solve.

Miraculously the convention mostly worked. The signings and kaffeklatsches were not fully scheduled before Worldcon and were a bit of a black hole, and at least one really interesting programme item materialised at the last minute so that I missed it. But everything I was scheduled for or knew in advance that I wanted to see ran fine.

I was on three programme items, and asked to moderate all of them. The small press one was a bit thin, but I livened it up by telling the story of The Green Man’s Heir. The panel on Writing Vulnerable Men was OK though it did get a bit feisty at one point. Ian McDonald had to miss it due to domestic issues, and I was left with two panellists who did not see eye-to-eye on one issue. As moderator it was my duty to move things on. However, outside the panel I am free to express an opinion. It is never “unrealistic” to write about certain types of people if people of that type exist in the real world. It doesn’t matter if they are a small minority, they are still real. And complaining that something is “unrealistic” when you are writing speculative fiction is frankly laughable.

The panel that I was most looking forward to was the one on The Matrix. I had some film studies experts on the panel so I knew I would not be short of good input. My role, beyond moderating, was to address the issue of the film(s) being a trans allegory.

I hadn’t watched the sequels before the convention because everyone keeps complaining about how bad they are. I was pleasantly surprised. The second film wasn’t really my cup of tea as I’m not into car chases or kung fu, but I could appreciate the technical wizardry. The third film is now my favourite Star Wars movie. Given that the three films are so different, it doesn’t surprise me that the trilogy as a whole found it hard to attract a fan base.

The trans allegory aspect of the first film is pretty obvious if you happen to be trans yourself. Also the whole idea that taking the red pill means taking cross-sex hormones is very funny given how alt-right conspiracy theorists have adopted the red pill for themselves. But I think that we should be wary of taking the allegory too far.

In one of the extras on the Jupiter Ascending disc Lana Wachowski talks about how many people, including herself, have unhappy lives that are suddenly transformed, and can therefore relate to the story of Cinderella (because Jupiter Ascending is totally a Cinderella reboot). She’s right, and it isn’t just that story either. As a kid I became obsessed with the story of the Ugly Duckling and half-convinced myself that I would turn into a beautiful girl as I grew up. The trans experience is a fairy story for those who survive.

So firstly, The Matrix is a trans allegory because many fairy stories are trans allegories. And secondly, once we move beyond Neo, the correspondences drop away. It is particularly dangerous to see Cypher as someone who can’t hack being trans and wants to de-transition. Many people do find post-transition life difficult, and some people do de-transition. However, those are not overlapping circles on the Venn Diagram, and most people who de-transition do so for very understandable reasons. It would worry me a lot if I felt that Lana and Lily were using Cypher to say that de-transitioners were traitors to the trans community. I can’t see them taking that position.

We spent quite a bit of time talking about the proposed Matrix 4 film. I don’t think any of us understood the need for it, beyond Hollywood wanting endless sequels, but we all hoped that it would be good.

Kevin and I had offered to do a kaffeklatsch on translation and awards, but it didn’t get scheduled in time and only two people turned up, both of whom just wanted to talk to us. It turned into a discussion on WSFS governance and Kevin is hoping to write an article for me based on the ideas we tossed around.

Sales in the Dealers’ Room were not great, but both Francesco and I had done very well in Dublin and many people told us that they had no more room in their luggage.

The ESFS Awards were handed out at Closing Ceremonies, with Carolina and her team doing amazingly well to get through the whole thing in 20 minutes. The full list of winners is available here. I’d like to repeat my congratulations to Ian McDonald, Charlie Stross, Francesco Verso and Petra Bulić, all of whom thoroughly deserve their awards.

Weirdly Closing Ceremonies was not on the last day of the convention. The Sunday was given over entirely to tourism. Most of the attendees headed off on the coach trip around Game of Thornes filming venues. I stayed at my hotel catching up on work, but did join the others for the evening’s mediaeval banquet. I was disappointed at how few people bothered to make any sort of attempt at costuming for the evening (well done, Philippa!). On the other hand, the banquet was not bad for a hotel.

One of my personal highlights of the convention was St. George’s market, which was just a few minutes walk away from the Hilton. I bought lunch there twice, the second time dragging Kevin along with me. If I lived in Belfast I’m sure I would shop there regularly, especially for cheese, bread and fish.

Next year’s Eurocon will be in Rijeka, Croatia. Site selection for 2021 was won by Fiuggi, Italy. We had been expecting a close vote between Italian and Romanian sites, but sadly fan politics in Romania caused them to withdraw their bid at the last minute. I’m looking forward to both events. Wizard’s Tower may have a surprise or two for people in Rijeka.

Dragon Pearl

The latest novel by Yoon Ha Lee is part of the Rick Riordan Presents series and comes under a Disney imprint. Dragon Pearl is what is generally called a Middle Grade novel, aimed at younger teenagers. It is a child’s adventure rather than a coming of age narrative, and there’s no teenage romance drama. That’s quite a change from the clever and sophisticated military SF of the Machineries of Empire series. Yoon, however, is very much up for the challenge.

Middle Grade fiction, unlike YA, is very clearly not intended for adults. The level of suspension of disbelief required to accept the ability of its teenage protagonists to run rings around everyone else in the book is fairly substantial. Once you relax into that, however, you are left with a fast-paced, plot-centred story that is quick to read and very entertaining.

Our heroine, Min, comes from a poor, backward planet in a galaxy-spanning civilisation. For various reasons Jinju was never properly terraformed, and the inhabitants eke out a miserable existence. Min’s one hope in life is to follow her elder brother, Jun, into the Space Force so that she too can leave home and see the galaxy. Just 13 years old, she has two years to wait until she can take the entrance exams.

Then a visitor arrives at Min’s family home. He is an investigator of some sort, and he claims that Jun has deserted his post. Min’s brother is believed to have joined up with pirates seeking the legendary Dragon Pearl, a powerful artefact that can be used to terraform planets. The man has a letter for Min from Jun, which he thinks may contain a secret message. She knows that it does, and she knows that her brother is in trouble. She is not about the turn him in to the authorities, so she has to head off to rescue him herself.

Ordinarily a 13-year-old girl would not stand a chance at such mission, but Min’s family are Fox Spirits. They have excellent shape-shifting abilities, and can also charm others into seeing or believing things. Thus Min ends up on an adventure into space to find the Dragon Pearl and clear her brother’s name.

Along the way we discover that the world of the book is full of creatures from Korean mythology. Min befriends two young Space Force cadets: a dokkaebi (goblin) and a dragon. There is a vengeful ghost she must deal with. And the captain of Jun’s ship turns out to be a Tiger Spirit.

As we should probably expect from Yoon, there is some playing with gender. Fox Spirits get to choose what gender to be, and most choose female though Jun is an exception. Min spends much of the book disguised as a young boy, but that doesn’t shake her own identity. Sujin, the dokkaebi, is non-binary, and this is unremarkable in the world of the book. Earlier on we met a security guard whose name badge noted that they used non-binary pronouns.

Eventually Yoon manages to bring the book to a very satisfying conclusion in which Min, thanks to being modest and selfless, triumphs over a bunch of greedy adults, which is exactly what you would expect. Nevertheless, exactly how this obvious conclusion is to be made to happen remains in doubt until the final chapters.

I suspect that many of you will find this book a little too lightweight, but I loved the worldbuilding which is thoroughly infused with Korean mythology. I’m also delighted that Riordan is continuing his championing of the trans community by asking Yoon to write for him and allowing him to put gender narratives into the story.

book cover
Title: Dragon Pearl
By: Yoon Ha Lee
Publisher: Rick Riordan Presents
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
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The Heart of the Circle

When I was looking for new people to meet at Worldcon, my Israeli friends were adamant that I should make the acquaintance of Keren Landsman. She has a novel out in translation from Angry Robot, and it has queer content, so it was a no-brainer for me. I’m pleased to say that it was also an excellent decision. Keren was clearly the life and soul of the Israeli delegation in Dublin. I warmed to her immediately. But I still had to read the book. Here are some thoughts.

The first thing to note is that, while this is Landsman’s first book in English, she is no novice. She is a three-time winner of the Geffen Award, Israel’s national award for speculative fiction. That included an award for the novel, Broken Skies, in 2015. The translator is Daniela Zamir who, according to her LinkedIn profile, has 9 years’ experience as a freelance translator and an academic career in areas such as gender studies and political science, which would certainly have stood her in good stead with regard to this book.

In an interview for Civilian Reader, Landsman states that The Heart of the Circle was inspired in part by the news that a 16-year-old girl was murdered during Jerusalem Pride. She states, “We live in a country where religion and inequality influence every waking hour, and you can’t dismiss it.” The book therefore falls pretty squarely into allegory territory.

The Heart of the Circle is set in Tel Aviv which, my Israeli friends tell me, is the most liberal city in the country. Several of the main characters are queer, including the hero, Reed. However, it is not their queerness that sets them apart. Rather their difference is a result of them having magical powers. In another universe they might have been called Mutants, but in Landsman’s world sorcerers have always existed. Many of them have elemental powers of either air, earth, water or fire, but some are empaths and others precogs.

A slight diversion into worldbuilding here. Landsman takes a cue from modern queer culture and has the sorcerer community adopt nicknames for the various subcategories. Empaths are “moodies” and precogs ae “damuses” (a contraction of Nostradamuses). Cleverly she has young sorcerers adopt a completely different set of nicknames, and also has the American visitors in the novel have their own terminology. This tells me that she has spent some time mixing with trans people.

Back with the book, however, we have to address the issue that real queer people do not have superpowers. We certainly can’t defend ourselves from attack by casting spells. There’s a common criticism of the X-Men as queer allegory that goes along exactly these lines. Nevertheless, queer people, and these days in particular trans people, are claimed to have magical powers by the media. Trans people are, if you choose to believe what is written about us, incredibly powerful politically, able to immediately shut down any voice raised against us, and to force government to do our bidding. We also have the magical power of turning anyone we meet trans. Young people are, allegedly, particularly susceptible to catching Trans Cooties. Landsman also makes good use of the religious conflicts in her own country, taking Old Testament condemnations of sorcery as actual ancient reactions to the existence of sorcerers. That, of course, parallels the common appeals to Biblical (or other religious) authority by people wishing to attack queer folk.

So the allegory works. Or at least it works as well as the X-Men, and they have been accepted as queer allegory for a long time. What about the science fiction? This aspect of the book is dependent critically on the existence of precognition.

If you have people in your story who can see the future, that creates particular issues for the plot. We have understood this at least since the days of the all-knowing Hari Seldon, whose psychohistory could unerringly predict the future course of galactic history. Before long Asimov realised the trap he had created for himself, and he introduced The Mule, a character born with the ability to foil psychohistory’s predictions.

Landsman has the benefit of learning from Asimov, and many other writers who have tackled the same themes. In her world damuses from rival groups plot to influence multiple potential timelines so that they coalesce into a desired actual future. If a particular person is destined to become an important political leader, that person’s enemies will have their damuses try to arrange an assassination. Groups of damuses working in opposition can be kept busy playing chess against each other with future timelines as their boards and living humans as their pieces.

In the case of the book the enemies are the Sons of Simeon. I’m no Biblical scholar, but I’m assuming this is a reference to the second son of Jacob who was notoriously zealous in his desire to cleanse the world of sinners and unbelievers. He was also one of the ringleaders when Joseph’s brothers decided to gang up on him for being too flamboyant in his clothing (something that some of my queer Jewish friends have taken to be an implication that Joseph was gay, because clearly only a gay man would wear a rainbow coat).

Anyway, the Sons of Simeon are a group dedicated to the eradication of sorcerers. They are the ones who turn up at Sorcerer Pride rallies and try to murder the attendees. Interestingly they are sorcerers themselves, which provides parallels to the small group of trans women who have aligned themselves with the anti-trans movement.

The basic plot of the book is that Reed is a pro-sorcerer activist who can’t stop himself from volunteering, standing up for the cause, going on demonstrations and so on. His parents and his non-sorcerer brother, Matthew, are beside themselves with worry. Reed doesn’t share their concern. His flatmate and best buddy, Daphne, is one of the best damuses around, and if she hasn’t foreseen him getting killed then he’ll be OK.

Which is fine up until the point when the future timelines shift and Daphne informs Reed that his time is up. He could save himself, but what she sees is him giving his life to protect someone else. Being Reed, he’s not going to prevent himself from doing that.

The plot then boils down to finding a way to cheat this new future. It is a difficult thing for a writer to pull off. How can you change the future when a whole lot of people who are your enemies can foresee your every move? Landsman goes for a fairly obvious answer, but to many readers this type of story may be new. In any case the plot resolution is by no means the only important aspect of the book. There’s plenty of great characterisation, a fair amount of gay sex, and a solid understanding of queer culture. Landsman also puts her day job in medicine and public health advocacy to work in the worldbuilding.

Finally, I should note that, because this book is written by an Israeli living in Israel, there are aspects to it that reflect Israeli culture. Things that you would not find in a typical American novel. For example, all the characters talk about military service. It is a fact of life for them. Something that they assume everyone does. I also had to keep reminding myself that none of the Biblical references would be to the New Testament. One of the reasons I love translated fiction is the glimpse into another world that you get from it.

book cover
Title: The Heart of the Circle
By: Keren Landsman
Publisher: Angry Robot
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
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About Writing

Confession time: I haven’t read many writing guides. For someone who does as much writing as I do, you would have thought that I might have tried to improve my craft, right? But I am generally allergic to self-help books, and I have the distinct impression that more people are making money from teaching writing than are making money from writing. I mean, teaching writing is a job. Being a writer is something that people tend to do in their spare time.

Publishing, it is a crazy business.

However, Gareth Powell is a mate. And the folks at Luna Press are good pals too. So I definitely wanted to pick up a copy of this book at Worldcon. And of course I am glad that I did.

About Writing is a very short book. It is by no means a detailed instruction manual for being a writer. If you want detail I warmly recommend Reading Like A Writer by Francine Prose. Powell’s book is as much a book about being a writer as it is about writing. There are, after all, a lot of people who want to be writers. There’s a reason why Powell subtitled the book, A Field Guide for Aspiring Authors. There’s a whole lot of aspiring going on out there, probably not enough doing, and certainly not enough submitting.

For some time now Powell has been using his Twitter feed to dispense help and encouragement to fellow writers. This book is essentially a collection of the sort of thing he says in those discussions. It has a bunch of practical tips to get you going, and more tips to help turn your great ideas into something that works. Powell shares a lot of his own techniques, but he’s also wise enough to understand that what works for him isn’t going to work for everyone. The focus is not on telling you how to write, but on helping you find a writing technique that works for you.

The book covers the entire lifecycle of writing, all the way from “where do you get your ideas from?” to getting an agent, getting published, and promoting your book. It includes some sage advice on how to deal with the anxiety that can result from this very solitary occupation, and on how not to be an arse on social media.

In short, this is a great little book. It probably won’t contain a huge amount new for people already started on their careers (though some successful writers could certainly have done with learning about the pitfalls of social media). It will, however, be a great source of ideas and comfort to people who are just setting out on what they hope will be a career. And when you have read it, you should follow Powell on Twitter. There’s lots more that you can learn from him there.

book cover
Title: About Writing
By: Gareth L Powell
Publisher: Luna Press Publishing
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Interview – Anne Corlett

This is an interview that I did on my radio show back in September 2018. I never got around to putting it on the podcast feed until now.

In the interview, Anne and I talk about Anne’s debut novel, The Space Between the Stars. The story addresses themes of reproductive justice and disability rights in a post-apocalypse universe.

Editorial – September 2019

Hey, I’ve managed another issue! Only another 100 or so to go to match Emerald City. Not that I’m particularly worrying about that at this stage.

I was hoping that this issue would have more on the fallout from Worldcon, but the past couple of weeks have been a bit crazy and I’ve not had time to write much. It is good that I wrote a pile of book reviews earlier in the month.

Of course one of the reasons I have been busy recently has been that I have been working on Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion II, the latest book from Wizard’s Tower. The ebook should be available on pre-order from Amazon, Kobo and B&N by the time you read this. And the paper edition should be available at BristolCon. My thanks to Roz Clarke & Jo Hall for the editing, and to Andy Bigwood whose cover art also adorns this issue. A special shout out to for Charlotte Bond who came in to do some last minute copyediting when the timescales were getting a bit frantic.

Oh yeah, and the book has some great stories. And one by me.

Later this month I will be at FantasyCon in Glasgow, where I am crossing my fingers that Juliet McKenna will come home with an award for The Green Man’s Heir. I’m hoping to do some interviews while I am there. And of course there will be BristolCon at the end of October (just when I need to be putting issue #12 together).

Next month there should be reviews of books by JM Alvey, K Arsenault Rivera and Kate Heartfield, among others. And I have an interview with Ellen Datlow from Titancon to run.

Issue #10

Well, we’re back, sort of. Welcome to Salon Futura, the fanzine. There is a full explanation in the editorial. In the meantime, here is the contents list.


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