Cheryl Morgan's Fanzine
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
This is the October 2019 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.
Cover: The Green Man’s Heir: This month's cover features Ben Baldwin's artwork for Juliet E McKenna's award-nominated The Green Man's Heir.
Editorial – October 2019: In which there is mention of a first guest article, and some thoughts on the future publication schedule.
The Warrior Moon: A review of The Warrior Moon by K. Arsenault Rivera
Interview – Ellen Datlow: An interview with the multi-award-winning horror editor, Ellen Datlow.
FranKissStein: A Review of FranKissStein by Jeanette Winterson
The Pleasant Profession of Robert A Heinlein: A review of The Plesant Profession of Robert A Heinlein by Farah Mendlesohn
Feeling Badgered?: Kevin Standlee goes deep in the question of what makes a good convention badge.
Alice Payne Arrives: A Review of Alice Payne Arrives by Kate Heartfield
Shadows of Athens: A review of Shadows of Athens by JM Alvey
David Mogo, Godhunter: A review of David Mogo, Godhunter by Suyi Davies Okungbowa
Brightfall: A review of Brightfall by Jamie Lee Moyer
FantasyCon 2019: Cheryl reports on the 2019 Fantasycon which took place in Glasgow
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here we are with our second issue of the year. This is what you can find in it.
Cover: Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion II: The artwork that Andy Bigwood produced for the cover of Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion II.
Gideon the Ninth: A review of Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
Tracking Classical Monsters: A review of Tracking Classical Monsters in Popular Culture by Liz Gloyn 
The House of Sundering Flames: A review of The House of Sundering Flames by Aliette de Bodard
Eurocon in Belfast: A report of Titancon, the 2019 Eurocon in Belfast
Dragon Pearl: A review of Dragon Pearl by Yoon Ha Lee
Interview – Heather Child: An interview with Heather Child about her book, The Undoing of Arlo Knott.
The Heart of the Circle: A review of The Heart of the Circle by Keren Landsman
About Writing: A review of About Writing by Gareth L Powell
Interview – Anne Corlett: An interview with Anne Corlett about her book, The Space Between the Stars.Editorial – September 2019: A brief update on what is going on in Cheryl's life, which seems to get more busy by the day.
This is the artwork that Andy Bigwood produced for Wizard’s Tower’s new steampunk anthology, Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion II.
You can see what it looks like on the book below.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is an interview with Heather Child that I did on my radio show. It is mainly about Heather’s book, The Undoing of Arlo Knott, which I reviewed last issue.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Cover: The Green Man’s Foe: The artwork that Ben Baldwin produced for Juliet E. McKenna's latest novel, The Green Man's Foe.Editorial – August 2019: Cheryl explains why she is bringing back Salon Futura as a fanzine.
Worldcon #77 in Dublin: A report on the 2019 World Science Fiction Convention held in Dublin, Ireland.
The Calculating Stars: A review of The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal
Gods of Jade and Shadow: A review of Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia.
Interview – Regina Wang: An interview with Chinese science fiction writer and promoter, Regina Wang, made at the Åcon X convention in Finland.The Undoing of Arlo Knott: A review of The Undoing of Arlo Knott by Heather Child.
Finncon 2019: A report on the 2019 Finncon, at which Cheryl was a Guest of Honour.
Interview – Farah Mendlesohn & Cathy Butler: An interview with Professor Farah Mendlesohn and Dr. Cathy Butler about their plans for a conference devoted to the work of Diana Wynne Jones.
This is the artwork that Ben Baldwin produced for Juliet E. McKenna’s latest novel, The Green Man’s Foe.
You can see what it looks like on the book below.
OK, what’s all this then?
It goes like this. The stats issued after the 2019 Hugo Award ceremony showed a distinct lack of interest in the fanzine category. As a former fanzine editor, I found that sad. Nicholas Whyte felt that we were on the verge of having to drop the category for lack of interest. Aidan Moher opined on Twitter that all of the cool kids are booktubers these days, and perhaps they are. I certainly look forward to seeing one of them win a Hugo. But I also believe that different people have different skills. I know that I can’t do video. I’m terrible on camera. I think there should be room for people who want to just write.
Now obviously I have quite enough Hugos. I’m not looking to win another one. But perhaps by getting back in the game I will encourage more people to think about the fanzine category, and to vote in it. My vote would go to Rachel Cordasco’s wonderful Speculative Fiction in Translation.
As I had the Salon Futura website, and there seemed to be no possibility of re-launching it as a semiprozine, I decided to reinvent it as a fanzine. Its not that I haven’t been generating suitable material. I have put this issue together primarily by using material that I put on my blog, Cheryl’s Mewsings, during August. The only new material is the Worldcon report. In future any book reviews, con reports and audio that I produce will appear here rather than on the Mewsings.
It my intention to consolidate all of my reviews and interviews here, even when they aren’t part of official issues of the ‘zine. That will obviously take a little while.
I also need to do a bit of clean-up of the old material as it hasn’t always fitted well into the new look of the site. Sorry about that, but I did want to get this issue out in August.
Next issue will include fiction reviews of books by Aliette de Bodard, Yoon Ha Lee, and hopefully Tamsyn Muir. There will also be non-fiction reviews of books by Gareth L. Powell and Liz Gloyn. I will run the interview that I did with Heather Child on my radio show as that will be gone from the Ujima Listen Again service by then. And I will have a report on this year’s Eurocon, TitanCon in Belfast.
Looking forward I plan to feature articles on the future of Worldcon. I have some thoughts on improving the international nature of the convention, and Kevin has some views on how the governance of WSFS might evolve.
I’m not actively looking for other contributors, but if people do have ideas please get in touch. I’m particularly interested in material about fandom and fiction from outside of the English-speaking world.
It is a long time since I did one of these, but Worldcon has changed a lot in that time. There are many new people becoming part of the Worldcon community, and inevitably they don’t have much idea of how Worldcon works. Worldcons definitely do get things wrong, sometimes disastrously so, but if we want them to get better we need practical solutions that stand a chance of working. So I figured I should do a bit of explaining. Hopefully this will help.
Also, as I have been out of the loop for some time, I may have got stuff wrong. If I have, please tell me.
The Venue
Dublin is a lovely city, and the Convention Centre Dublin (CCD) is a beautiful building with gorgeous views over the city from the escalators (unless you have a phobia about heights, which people I know do—thank goodness for the elevators). A great setting can make an uncomfortable experience feel a lot better. Nevertheless, Dublin was right on the edge of the number of people it could handle, which is why they took the unusual decision to close membership purchase prior to the convention.
When they were bidding I heard people complaining that the convention would be a disaster because the venue only held 2000 people. That’s nonsense. Sharon Sbarsky told me that she and some other fans had been on a bus tour of the city after the 2014 Eurocon and the tour guide had quoted this figure. Perhaps that’s where the story came from.
The actual theoretical capacity is somewhere between 5000 and 6000, which is a typical Worldcon size. But close to capacity it becomes difficult to manage. Helsinki, which had similar capacity issues, had the option of simply renting more space in their huge convention centre. Dublin didn’t, hence the decision to take space in The Point, a newly built facility one stop down the Luas line from the convention centre.
Having two venues that are 10-15 minutes apart creates scheduling problems. The convention did a smart thing in staggering the schedules. Program items in the CCD started on the hour, and those in The Point started on the half hour. That way you had time to get from, say, an 11:00 item in the CCD (finishing at 11:50) to a 12:30 item in The Point. Even so, I think a lot of people took a decision to stay at one venue or the other. No matter how well you prepare, that’s inevitable.
Even with the split sites, queuing for program items became a problem. It took several days before the CCD had something that worked. I understand that a lot of volunteer time was spent on corralling and entertaining the crowds. Huge thanks are due to the people who did that difficult job.
The CCD staff were less good at crowd control. Some of them were lovely. Some were unnecessarily officious. The same was true of staff at The Point. At one point I tried to leave my jacket and (very heavy) rucksack at the cloakroom in the CCD. I was told that it was full, despite the fact that there was very obviously lots of room; and loads of unused coat hangers. I’m afraid I had a sobbing fit. It was a Very Heavy rucksack. Thankfully they relented, but that just proved the point that there was plenty of room. On the other hand, when I arrived with two heavy suitcases on the Monday, a CCD security guard helped me carry them into the building, despite the fact that I didn’t have my badge on at the time.
I found the Luas very simple to use and very frequent. Fortunately, my AirBnB was fairly close to a Luas stop. However, the Dublin experience reminded me of how essential it is for people doing a lot of work on the convention to have a convenient nearby hotel room. I had to carry a laptop around with me for 3 of the 5 days; and had my suitcases with me for a 4th because AirBnBs don’t have luggage storage facilities. Kevin had an even worse experience, having to be at the Business Meeting with a pile of equipment for 9:00am on 4 of the 5 days.
The other minor complaint that I have about the CCD is that there was a distinct lack of public seating space. That again seems to have been a building capacity issue, in that I could not see where you could have put more.
Martin’s
The one big area of public seating was the con bar, Martin’s. This was named after Martin Hoare, a British fan who died suddenly a couple of weeks before the convention. Martin was one of my oldest friends in fandom, and indeed the person who encouraged me to start attending conventions. I still can’t quite believe he’s gone. Naming the convention bar after him was exactly the sort of tribute he would have wanted.
Registration
My first and primary experience of queuing chaos was on Thursday when I went to register. I was told that I had to enter the building by a side door, but when I got there it was not obvious were the registration queue was. It looked like there were no queues. My apologies if anyone thought I was queue jumping.
Eventually I found out where to stand, and everything proceeded very smoothly. I think I spent more time trying to find the queue than actually queuing.
The best thing about Registration was the badges. Names were clearly visible, and there was a little round space for a pronoun sticker. Those were available on tables around the foyer, and the Dublin folks had even thought to provide blank ones for folks who use neo-pronouns. I was very impressed.
Opening Ceremonies
I have to say that Dublin got off to an unimpressive start. Opening Ceremonies had a bunch of problems, including in the part that Kevin and I were responsible for. Thankfully, if you screw up this part of the convention, you have time to fix the issues before the really important stuff.
As with the last couple of years, Kevin and I, with the assistance of Susan de Guardiola, were planning to do live coverage of the Hugo Award ceremony via a text-based system. The one that we had been using, CoverItLive, has gone out of business, so we had to find an alternative. We elected to cover the Retro-Hugo ceremony, which was part of Opening Ceremonies, to give us a chance to get used to the new software. I’m so glad we did.
In Helsinki the issue we had was that no one was expecting us. I spent much of the convention tracking down Josh Beatty, the Hugo Ceremony Director, and negotiating a place for us to sit. An internet connection was no problem. I just had a quiet word with Otto Mäkelä and a connection was provided.
In San José Kevin was in a senior management position and able to secure everything we needed in advance, but in Dublin he wasn’t. Josh, bless him, remembered us and made sure we had a place to sit. In fact, he got us a booth at the back of the auditorium. It was a little cramped, but we had peace and quiet and did not need to worry about people seeing the results of the awards over our shoulders as we were working. However, the only Internet connection we had was the general CCD wifi, and it was painfully slow.
Thankfully we didn’t have many people online during the Retro-Hugo Ceremony, and those that were there were very understanding of the issues we were having. But we absolutely had to get something better for Sunday. More of that later.
Our own problems were matched by those of the ceremony itself. There were mix-ups with the order in which awards were announced, leading to the wrong slides being shown, and at one point the wrong presenter was announced. In addition the envelopes with the winners’ names in them were so tightly sealed that it took a minute or so to break into one. Thankfully the presenters soon took to making a joke of it, and Diane Duane produced a useful Swiss Army Knife. Order slips for the plaques on the trophies had been left in the envelopes, and this further confused the poor presenters. I sent up multiple prayers to the fannish ghods that things would not go so badly on Sunday.
I’m also a little concerned about the tone of the Opening Ceremonies. I know there are not many places to put a Retro-Hugo ceremony, or the Big Heart Award, or the First Fandom Awards (of which there are now several). But the end result is that Opening Ceremonies is almost entirely about old people and dead people. That doesn’t really get the convention off on the right footing. I don’t, as yet, have any solutions, but I think we need to find one.
Program
I missed most of the program because early on I took a policy decision not to go to anything that I wasn’t on panel for. The queues looked bad and there were lots of people at their first Worldcon. I wanted to give them a chance to have the Worldcon experience.
There were, however, plenty of interesting panels, many of which I wanted to see. My panels went well. Only one person said, “I don’t know why I’m on this panel”, and that was because they were a bit overawed by the credentials of the other panellists. They made some very valuable points during the panel.
I heard very few reports of panels going bad. Apparently, the CCD staff were rather heavy-handed with the LGBT meet-up session because it was over-subscribed. I also heard complaints from one panel that a male panellist repeatedly interrupted the women on the panel; and tried to make the whole thing his own personal comedy show. That one I was in a position to do something about. I had a quiet word with someone in programming, and the moderator of the otherwise-all-female panel he was scheduled for that day. As a result, the women on the first panel got an apology from the convention, and the second panel went smoothly. I can’t always make magic happen, but sometimes knowing a lot of people can be very useful.
I think, however, that a few things went awry prior to the convention. My friend Virginia Bergin was told that she wasn’t required for programming, despite being a recent winner of the Tiptree and there being several YA and gender panels scheduled. I understand that other authors were also turned down. And yet a few days before the con I got an email from Programming asking for volunteers to be on a bunch of program items that had insufficient members. That was weird.
One of the big changes since I was last a Worldcon regular is the use of the Grenadine software to schedule programming. This isn’t just a cool tool. I understand that Programming was keeping tabs on sign-ups through Grenadine and using the data to move program items to appropriately-sized rooms each morning. That’s a very useful thing to be able to do. Later in the convention they also got Grenadine to display room capacities, so attendees could make judgements as to what items they stood a chance of getting into. It is nice to see technology being well used.
One thing that was rather annoying was that access to the Green Rooms (one at each venue) was restricted to people with an upcoming panel. I’m assuming that this was due to lack of space, but I could have done with somewhere to sit quietly for a while. I did blag my way into the Green Room at The Point on Saturday because it was empty and all I wanted was a chair.
Dealers’ Room
This was my first Worldcon where I had significant numbers of books to sell. In Helsinki I went through my good friends at Rosebud as I only had Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion to sell. I think we sold 3 or 4. For Dublin I had Juliet McKenna’s Green Man books. One of them is an award finalist, the other was new at the convention, and Juliet is part-Irish. Francesco Verso of Future Fiction very kindly gave me some space on his table. I sold 50 books; and could probably have sold more if I’d had them. I was very pleased.
Francesco also did very well. His new anthology of translations sold out before I could buy one. Twelfth Planet only had 15 books left, which I know because Francesco and I took them to Belfast to sell at TitanCon. Other dealers seemed very happy as well.
There was plenty of room, and what seemed to be a good mix of different types of dealer. There was also a De Lorean parked at the entrance. All in all, it went very well.
Art Show
This was at The Point. If you didn’t head down there to look, you missed a treat. The space it was given was massive, and there was a lot of natural light which is just what an art show needs. Dublin had paid particular attention to artists and had got a lot of good people involved, including Jim FitzPatrick whose work I love. A bunch of UK artists had come over to exhibit, and even John Picacio managed a small entry despite the difficult of shipping art across the Atlantic.
In addition to the main art show, there was also a large Lego exhibition which was very impressive.
I have one small request for future art shows. Could you please have some carboard tubes for sale for the benefit of idiots like me who keep forgetting to bring one?
Masquerade
I missed this. I was just too tired by Saturday night and went back to my apartment to get some sleep. Kevin Roche and Andy Trembley were running it, so it should have gone very smoothly. They told me that they were full, which I think meant 40 entries. I’ve not heard any complaints.
Newsletter
This came out regularly and seemed to have good information in it. Attempts to provide information in Gaelic either didn’t go well, or there was a running joke about them not going well, I couldn’t work out which. It was called The Salmon of Knowledge, which is a smart reference to Irish mythology.
There was also a one-off hoax newsletter called The Trout of Doubt which appeared on Monday afternoon. I thought it was pretty funny.
Business Meeting
Despite having so much business that they had to run into a fourth meeting on Monday, this year’s Business Meeting actually did very little. For detailed reports of what happened, please see Alex Acks, or the videos of the meeting which are now available on the WSFS YouTube channel.
Jesi Lipp presided over the meeting. It was their first time, and I’m delighted to see new people getting involved. Kevin tells me that there are a number of young, keen fans that he’s been working with. This is very good news. The comment in the hoax newsletter about Business Meeting attendees under the age of 50 having to be accompanied by an adult was funny for a good reason.
I’m told that Jesi did very well, but if there’s one thing they messed up on it was the order of the motions (which the BM staff gets to set). You should always try to get the controversial items early on the agenda. That gives the attendees plenty of opportunity to debate something important. If you don’t do that, they will start to debate things that should be non-controversial. So leave the non-controversial stuff to the end when hopefully the smart-asses are tired.
The result of this was that the BM spent an inordinate amount of time debating what should have been a simple change to bring the Constitution into line with GDPR requirements. Instead of it being nodded through, this got aggressively amended and, as I understand it, ended up making us even less GDPR-compliant.
Much of the business before the meeting got referred to committees. I know this is irritating to people who want to see change happen. Unfortunately, people who bring motions before the BM often don’t think them through very well, or discuss them in advance with people they will affect. It is much better to take the time to pass good legislation than to pass bad legislation in a hurry.
The one motion I was concerned about was the proposal to create a Best Translated Novel Hugo. Pretty much everyone I know in the translation business was against this, including Neil Clarke and Francesco Verso. We don’t want translated works to be shoved into a ghetto where there is only one Hugo available. We want them to keep competing, and winning, in the main fiction categories.
I am aware that many people are upset about the level of commitment required to participate in the governance of WSFS. I’m pretty sure that Kevin doesn’t want to be spending 4 mornings of the convention in meetings and 4 afternoons uploading video either. But this is much too big a subject for a con report. We’ll be addressing the issue in more detail in a future issue.
The Hugos – Getting Online
After the problems that we had during Closing Ceremonies, Kevin and I spent quite a bit of time over the next few days trying to ensure that we would have a better internet connection for Sunday night. We got there in the end, but it wasn’t easy.
After it was all over I discovered that part of the problem was split responsibility for IT. The main IT department was under facilities. Those people had access to a much better connection, but they refused to let us use it. (I’m guessing those responsible were Keith Smith and/or James Turner.) Fortunately, there was also an at-con IT group under Logistics, which was run by Rick Kovalcik. Rick knows us well, and so does the head of Logistics, Brian Nisbet. Much to our relief, Rick managed to secure a portable wifi router with a decent connection that we could use for the evening. We are very grateful to him.
This highlights a wider issue with the text-based coverage. It only works because of personal contacts. We got a room because I had made friends with Josh in Helsinki. We got a connection thanks to Otto in Helsinki and Rick in Dublin. If we don’t have those networks, we can’t do the job.
We get into these situations because Worldcons do not value what we do. There is an assumption that, because they have the live video streaming, what we do is not necessary. But the live streaming sometimes fails. There are people who don’t have the necessary bandwidth to watch it. And we provide an additional service in that we give commentary. We had over 450 people online on Sunday. Some of them were in the convention bar watching the streaming on the big screen, which I know because they told me.
Susan in particular has been a huge asset to us. While Kevin and I do the set-up, she goes around the pre-ceremony reception snapping photos of the finalists in their finery. She then does color commentary alongside Kevin’s factual reporting of what’s going on. It makes a huge difference, and it is the only chance most people get to see the unsuccessful finalists because they don’t get to appear on stage.
My job is moderating the chat window. The new software separates chat from the main flow of commentary, which is not ideal but it was the best we could find at the time. We will be looking for alternatives. Susan tells me that some of her friends were trying to participate in the chat but never saw their comments come up. I only deleted two comments: both for making unflattering comments about the physical appearance of finalists. So if comments did go missing that’s another issue with the software that we need to address before next year. Unfortunately there are not many such services, and even fewer that will let you try the software out to see if it does what you need before you have to pay lots of money for an account.
I know I am blowing my own trumpet here, but I think this is a valuable service and I think that future Worldcons should take it seriously. Despite all of the time and effort I have put in over the years, I have never once been recognised as staff, or even as a volunteer, and yet I am doing something that appears on the official Hugo Awards website. If it is me that is the problem I wish someone would tell me and put someone else in place to do the job, because it needs to be done.
The Hugos – The Ceremony
Much to my relief, the main Hugo Ceremony went mostly flawlessly. There were two main issues: the speech-to-text system, and pronunciation of names.
The failure of the speech-to-text system is entirely on the con committee’s senior management, and the one major mistake that they made. They were told beforehand that the cheap system they wanted to use was useless, and they went ahead anyway. A better system has been in use at the Business Meeting for some years. When Jesi Lipp heard that they were being forced to use the cheap system they refused to use it at all because they knew how bad it was. That should have rung alarm bells for the Hugos, though by then it might have been too late to change.
Future Worldcons should take note of this.
Pronunciation of finalist names is also a solved problem. When Neil Gaiman was toastmaster in 2004 he spent much of the pre-ceremony party checking with each finalist. I’m told that John Picacio did the same last year. When I was a presenter I did the same checks for the category I had been assigned. It is part of the job. There may be names that people can’t get right because the language is too unfamiliar, but you should at least make an effort.
The Hugos – Winners
I’m well aware that my tastes and those of the Hugo voters don’t massively overlap. This year I was astonished that I had read 4 of the 6 Novel finalists and 5 of the 6 Novellas. I’m delighted for Martha Wells and Murderbot. I am deeply disappointed for both Cat Valente and Janelle Monáe, but not surprised that neither of them won.
Nicholas Whyte has done an excellent post digging into the numbers. I don’t have much to add to it. Like him I am particularly sad for Dirty Computer, but it is really hard to win BDP: Short with anything other than a TV episode because all of the TV fans will give their preferences to other TV episodes.
I do want to give a mention to a number of friends who appeared on the long lists. I have hopes that we will see them as finalists one day. Emma Newman’s Before Mars made the Novel list and Planetfall was listed in Series. There were several great novellas that didn’t make the final ballot. GV Anderson’s “Waterbirds” did very well in Short Story. Anna Smith Spark was longlisted for the Campbell.
I understand that special congratulations are due to Simone Heller for being the first German-born person to be a Hugo finalist.
The Campbell Thing
One of the two major talking points of the convention was Jeannette Ng’s acceptance speech for the Campbell. Much outrage has been expressed by right-wing parts of the community, but given that Michael Moorcock described Campbell as a fascist back in 1971 I don’t think anyone can complain much about Jeannette doing so now. He was, by most accounts, a particularly nasty piece of work.
However, as I have pointed out elsewhere, the Campbell Award is not owned by WSFS. If we want it changed, the correct thing to do is to write to the management of Dell Magazines (who publish Asimov’s and Analog) and ask them to change it. Presumably some of you did so, because they have already announced that the name of the award will be changed. That should be an end to this issue, but I understand that a bunch of clowns are trying to insist that, because the award is called the Campbell in the WSFS Constitution, Dell has no right to change it; or if they do change it then the award must be excluded from the Hugos. The Business Meeting in Wellington could get quite interesting.
After the Hugos
The other major talking point of the convention was the chaos surrounding the Hugo Losers’ Party. Again I have written about this elsewhere. I don’t have much to add. I had hoped to get to talk to George or Parris at TitanCon, but Parris is recovering from surgery and George wasn’t around much.
To recap, it is only recently that George took over running the Loser’s Party. He did so in order to give awards to all of the people who had missed out because of the Puppies. Before that the party was a damp squib that no one who knew how bad it was would mind missing. Worldcon runners were doubtless delighted that George took the thing off their hands. However, the main lesson from this is that letting other people run your events is a hostage to fortune because they might do so badly and then you will be blamed for the disaster.
Of course, going back to having the Losers’ Party run by the upcoming Worldcon will go back to it being a poorly resourced event in a hotel room that is much too small. It will also mean going back to having entry controlled by SMOFs who may have an axe to grind. I think the best thing that Worldcon can do is allow George to carry on running the party but not take any part in organising or promoting it. It can become George Martin’s After-the-Hugos Party. Those of us who are not invited or, in the case of Kevin and I, can’t go because we have to update the Hugos website, can channel Groucho Marx and be happy we are not part of that club.
One thing I will say is that I don’t think there was anything personal in what happened. Some people were unlucky with timing, and the party organisers messed up on how many people they could take. Mary Robinette got in, not because of who she was, but because she was very late and lots of people had left. I say this because I have been deliberately and personally disrespected as a Hugo finalist at least twice. On the other hand, I just had people be rude to me (which I countered by winning the Hugo in both cases). I totally understand that having to stand outside in the rain in your party gear is a whole different level of pain.
I should note that Mary Robinette was very late because she stuck around at the CCG talking to fans and showing off her trophy rather than disappearing off to the swank party. I remember that she did this in London in 2014 as well. This, people, is how you build your legion of fans.
By the way, both the pre-ceremony reception and the Losers’ Party are being affected by the burgeoning number of Hugo categories. Both are hugely expensive to run, and both require a very large space that will be difficult for the convention to find. I think most people will agree that we don’t want the Hugos to be sponsored. If you think you have seen drama, I’m assured it was nothing compared to 1987 when the convention committee allowed the Scientologists to sponsor the Hugos. But if they are not sponsored then we can’t have flashy parties for the finalists, except by charging people more for memberships which would be bad.
The Verdict
So how did it go? Pretty much everyone I spoke to said that they had a great time in Dublin. I’m sure that there will have been individual issues, but the overall impression is of a job well done.
I certainly had a good time, despite not seeing much of the event and being exhausted for most of the time. My biggest complaint, apart from the weight I had to carry around, is that I didn’t get to see many of the people I knew were there, and wanted to see, but never ran across. All things considered, that is a very minor complaint.
So well done James, and Irish fandom in general. You have done us proud.
Where Next?
Next year Worldcon will be in Wellington, New Zealand. It will be much smaller, because many people will not be able to afford to go; or will have concerns about the environmental cost of flying. I have been saving up QANTAS points for 10 years in the expectation of needing to go to Wellington, so I’m OK on the cost and very much hope to be there.
Washington DC has won the right to stage the 2021 Worldcon. I am unlikely to be there because I see no possibility of my being allowed to travel to the USA ever again. Other people have different concerns about US travel. We have had a couple of great European Worldcons, and there is a Glasgow bid for 2024 that stands an excellent chance of winning, but the USA is still the country with the most experienced con-runners and the best facilities. It is going to host a lot more Worldcons in future because there will be no viable alternatives. It is my view that if we want to maintain the international nature of the convention we must find more ways for people to participate online. And that’s something I plan to write about in the next issue.
I read this one as part of my Hugo voting research (unusually I had read 4 of the 6 finalists before the ballot was announced, which I think makes this a Very Good Year). However, I held off reviewing it until voting closed because it seemed unfair to do just one, and because I have a particular take on the book.
The Calculating Stars tells the story of Elma York, who was a WASP pilot during WWII but is now having to adjust to a world in which little ladies are supposed to stay at home and keep house while their menfolk do all of the fun and money-making stuff. Fortunately for Elma, she is a genius mathematician, so job openings do exist.
Those openings suddenly get a lot more commonplace in 1952 when a Bigger-than-Chicxulub meteorite destroys most of the Eastern USA and ushers in what looks like being extinction-level climate change. It seems that humanity’s only hope is to escape Earth and make our home elsewhere. As a consequence, the space programme suddenly becomes an international top priority.
Elma’s husband, Nathaniel, being a genius engineer, gets one of the top jobs at the space agency and is soon in charge of the space flight programme. Elma wants to be an astronaut, but such jobs are reserved for men. Instead she has to content herself with working as a Computer, one of the many human mathematicians whose job it is do all the calculations that the engineers need doing, because the calculating machines that IBM have produced are frankly not up to the job. If you have seen or read Hidden Figures you’ll know what this is all about.
From there on the plot is very predictable. Elma keeps wanting to do astronaut stuff. The men, primarily the misogynist chief astronaut, Colonel Stetson Parker, keep getting in her way, but they cannot thwart the needs of the programme, nor the arc of history, forever. While the exact means of Elma’s triumph isn’t easily predicted, the fact that she will triumph is obvious.
There are things that Mary Robinette does extremely well. She captures the misogyny, antisemitism and racism of 1950s America. She has conflict between those women who are happy to play the role of sex object, those who prefer to work behind the scenes, and those who are the public face of feminism. She has Elma confront her white privilege. She has black women who are prepared to trust her attempts to help, and those who unable to do so. There’s a lot of admirable politics in the book.
Another aspect to the book is a venture into Emma Newman territory. As the wife of the chief engineer, a pretty young woman, and a good communicator, Elma quickly becomes the public face of the space programme. But she is terrified of public speaking and suffers massive anxiety attacks. Her struggles with this, and the inevitable point at which it gets used against her, are a significant plot strand.
Finally, Mary Robinette has spent a lot of time hanging out with actual astronauts and NASA people. I have no actual idea whether there are any holes or short-cuts in her portrayal of the technical issues, but the science sure sounds very convincing. For all its intersectional feminist politics, this is a hard science fiction novel.
I should also add, from a personal point of view, that it is a pleasure to find a book that features a husband and wife team who are both very competent in their own fields, who love each other very much, and who work well together. It is kind of like how the MCU has been portraying Hank and Janet, although us long-time Marvel fans all know that Hank Pym couldn’t tie his shoelaces without Janet to show him where his feet are.
The Calculating Stars has already walked off with the Nebula, and with the Locus Award for Science Fiction Novel. I expect it to win the Hugo as well. Perhaps, in this year when we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first Moon Landing, and Carol Danvers is everyone’s favorite superhero, this is appropriate. But…
I’m not an engineer, I’m an environmental scientist, and an economist. When I see a scenario in which life on our planet is faced with extinction my immediate thought is, “How can we fix this?”, not “Let’s go live on the Moon”. The environmentalist in me thinks that it can be fixed, and the economist knows that any extra-terrestrial colonies will provide sanctuary only for the wealthy few, not the vast mass of humanity.
Obviously the point of the novel is to showcase Elma’s battle against misogyny, and to a lesser extent against antisemitism and racism. But in doing so it fixates almost entirely on the space programme and largely ignores debates that must be happening in world politics over whether this is the right thing for humanity to be pouring all our resources into. I know that the sequel is already out, and that Mary Robinette read from book 3 in London recently. I’ll be getting the sequels because this one was good, but I very much hope that they take a look at the wider issues.
One of the many reasons why it is good to have books written by people from different cultures is that they provide very different reading experiences. I loved Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Signal to Noise because it was, on the one hand, a great story about teenagers and love of music, and on the other set in Mexico City, a place that the author knew well. Reading about other worlds is what us speculative fiction readers are supposed to enjoy, right?
Gods of Jade and Shadow is also set in Mexico, but it goes back in time to the Roaring Twenties. Mexico is in the process of recovering from La Revolución. Meanwhile the USA is suffering under Prohibition, which is proving a big money earner for Mexico because hordes of rich Americans are coming south of a weekend for a beer or two. The book, however, is not about Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa, nor is it about Al Capone and Eliot Ness. The story is both much more domestic, and much more epic in scale.
Casiopea Tun lives in a small town in Yucatán. When her beloved father — a keen amateur astronomer who named her — died young, she and her mother were thrown on the mercy of their rich relatives, the Leyvas. Grandpa Leyva is a selfish tyrant, and the rest of the family has learned from him. Casiopea and her mother are given a home, but are treated like servants. It is no life for an intelligent young girl, especially as Casiopea must share her new home with her cruel, stupid and arrogant cousin, Martín.
However, Grandpa Leyva has a secret. His source of wealth is not hard work, or good luck. Instead it is a consequence of a deal that he did in his youth; a deal with the God of Death.
We move now into the realm of the Mayan holy book, the Popol Vuh. This is a collection of mythological tales from the Kʼicheʼ people, one of the ethnic groups that made up the Mayan Empire. One of the greatest myths of the Kʼicheʼ is the tale of the Hero Twins, Hunahpú and Xbalanqué, who travel to the Mayan underworld, Xibalba, and take on its rulers, Hun-Kamé and Vucub-Kamé. It appears, to my admittedly untrained eye, to be a tale about how the people rebelled against the human sacrifice of Ballcourt players.
This story is, of course, not about the Hero Twins. It is about Casiopea and Martín. Moreno-Garcia creates a new story using the materials from the Popul Vuh. It is a story about a revolution in hell. Vucub-Kamé has grown fed up of having to play second fiddle to his elder brother, Hun-Kamé. Also he has ambitions to restore the Mayan Empire to its former glory, whereas Hun-Kamé is content to let history take its course. So Vucub-Kamé, through a bit of divine trickery, manages to cut off the head of his brother and usurp the throne. However, he can’t kill Hun-Kamé, so he has the god’s bones locked in a casket and given to a convenient human for safekeeping.
What are young girls for, if not opening forbidden caskets?
The bulk of the book, therefore, is about how Casiopea and Hun-Kamé go on a quest to reclaim the throne of Xibalba. Along the way they must deal with demons and sorcerers, against a beautifully drawn backdrop of 1920s Mexico. The inevitable conclusion takes place in Xibalba itself, and features characters such as the great Death Bat, Kamazotz.
The mythological shape of the story is predictable. What is different about this story is what it brings to Mayan mythology. The denizens of Xibalba are terrifying beings who revel in human sacrifice. However, during their quest the human girl and the death god must learn to work together. They cannot be unchanged by that experience.
You don’t get many fantasy novels that use the Popul Vuh as a setting. There are even fewer written by actual Mexicans. Gods of Jade and Shadow is a fascinating book simply for that reason. But what I love most about it is the myth-making that Moreno-Garcia engages in. This is a new story using characters from Mayan mythology, and one that changes the nature of the Mayan gods. It looks very much like neo-paganism in action. I’d love to know whether the author saw it that way.
This is an interview that I made at Åcon X. Regina and I had a chat about her work promoting Chinese SF around the world. Here are links to some of the things we talked about.
One of the hardest things for a new writer to do is carve a niche for herself. There’s nothing new under the sun, right? How do you mark yourself out as someone different and interesting? Heather Child is, I think, making a good job of this by writing character-driven science fiction that is very much about how we live now.
Her first book, Everything About You, was a psychological thriller whose central premise was that “personal assistant” software on your phone would come to know you far better than you know yourself, and thereby learn to manipulate you. Her third book, she tells me, will be about narcissism and selfie culture. But we are here to talk about book two, The Undoing of Arlo Knott. The premise of this one is, “What if your life had an ‘undo’ button.”
Early in his life, Arlo Knott is involved in a very unfortunate accident. It is, to a large extent, his fault. The guilt will haunt him for the rest of his life. However, shortly after this happens he discovers that he has the ability to turn back time, to undo events and re-do them in a different way. He can’t change The Thing That Happened, of course. That’s now a long way in the past. But any recent action is fair game.
Now imagine that you got this power when you were 14. What might you have done with it? Kick the school bully in the nuts and undo it? Talk back to a teacher and undo it? Kiss a girl you fancy and undo it? All these things that you want to do, but suspect the consequences of doing them will be very bad, you can try out and then erase.
Power, as they say, corrupts. As he grows older, Arlo discovers that his powers are useful in other ways. At the casino, put all your money on black, and if red comes up undo it and try again. If a chat-up line doesn’t work on a girl you fancy, undo it and try something else until you have found what works with her.
As the novel progresses, Arlo discovers that unearned success doesn’t bring happiness. He tries to grow up, but how can he when he need never face the consequences of his actions? He throws himself into more and more dangerous situations, desperate to be seen as a hero, but knowing all the while that he’s cheating.
As to where that leads him, well, you will have to read the book to find out. Suffice it to say that I found this book more polished than Everything About You, and quite griping towards the end as Arlo finally finds himself in a position that tests his abilities to the utmost.
Heather and I have had a couple of interesting conversations about this book. She very kindly asked me to interview her for the book launch, and I had her on my radio show a few days later. Our most interesting discussions have focused on the issue of regret.
Regret is certainly an obsession of the modern world. There was no difficulty finding music choices to go with the interview. Popular music is full of songs, the story of which is basically, “I done wrong and my girl has left me.” Arlo, of course, need never regret anything, at least not anything simple. But why are we obsessed with regret, and should we be? I know I’m not.
I, of course, happen to be a member of a group of people who are constantly being told that we should regret our life choices. How could we possibly not do so, given the awful things we have done to ourselves? And yet, the overwhelming majority of trans people do not regret transitioning. If we can avoid the social opprobrium that comes with it, we are almost always much happier afterwards. Maybe I’m an unusual case. Maybe most cis people are consumed with regret.
Maybe it is because I’m old. After a life full of choices, many of which don’t go well, and some of which turn sour even though they seemed absolutely right at the time, perhaps we know that you can’t predict what will happen and should just chill.
Maybe it is a cultural thing. Perhaps, because society is becoming more and more focused on ideas of personal choice, we are becoming more and more obsessed with making the right choices. Maybe the fact that I’m older simply means that I grew up in a time when making the correct life choices was less of a critical issue than it is to young people today.
I’m not sure that this has much to do with Heather’s book. However, the fact that is has sparked such conversations, and meditations, is surely evidence that it touches on some deep and important issues. If you like a book that gets you thinking, The Undoing of Arlo Knott is probably for you.
