Author: Cheryl Morgan

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

Upright Women Wanted

035, Book Review, Sarah Gailey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The BristolCon Art Show

035, Art, Con Running

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LosCon 47 in VR

035, Con Running

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Editorial – November 2021

035, Editorial

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

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

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

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

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

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

Issue #34

Issues

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


Cover: The Green Man’s Challenge

034, Art, Ben Baldwin

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

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


Here’s the unadorned version.

Light From Uncommon Stars

034, Book Review, Ryka Aoki

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

Look, see what you think.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please read it.

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

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

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

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

The Ministry for the Future

034, Book Review, Kim Stanley Robinson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Past is Red

034, Book Review, Catherynne M Valente

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Spindle Splintered

034, Alix E Harrow, Book Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Fledgling Abiba

034, Book Review, Dilman Dila

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Octocon 2021

034, Convention Report

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marvel: What If?

034, TV Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BristolCon 2021

034, Convention Report

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

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

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

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

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

Editorial – October 2021

034, Editorial

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

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

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

Issue #33

Issues

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Witness for the Dead

033, Book Review, Katherine Addison

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chilling Effect

033, Book Review, Valerie Valdes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the Watchful City

033, Book Review, S. Qiouyi Lu

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ife-Iyoku

033, Book Review, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, Zelda Knight

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Light Chaser

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Occasional Views

033, Book Review, Samuel R Delany

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

book cover
Title: Occasional Views
By: Samuel R Delany
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

FantasyCon 2021

033, Convention Report

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

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

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

SatNav: Turn left here.

Me: I can’t, the road is blocked.

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

Me: I’m following the diversion signs.

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

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

SatNav: Turn left here.

Me: SHUT UP!!! I’m trying my best.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He-Man Wars

033, TV Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Editorial – September 2021

033, Editorial

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

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

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

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

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

Issue #32

Issues

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


Cover: The Ancient of Days

032, Art

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


Here’s the image without the text.

Loki – Season 1

032, TV Review

SPOILER ALERT

Do not read this if you haven’t seen the series, or have seen it and don’t want things that go on in it explained.

Thank you for sticking with me. What I’m going to do here is look at the series and its connection to the Marvel Comics Universe. As you will see, the Cinematic Universe team have not followed the comics slavishly (not should they, the comics continuity is a mess). Nevertheless, it is interesting to see what has been done.

Let’s start with the Time Variance Authority. Somewhat to my surprise (because I have never followed Thor much), they are not new. They first appeared in Thor #372 in 1986. However, this incarnation of the TVA was a homage to an earlier version of a timeline monitoring organisation originally used in the Alan Moore and Alan Davis run on Captain Britain in the early 1980s. It is perhaps not surprising that a couple of British writers came up with something quite so close to a Doctor Who plot, and in fact the stories first began publication in Doctor Who Monthly. This particular storyline also features one of my favourite superhero groups, The Special Executive.

The original TVA was created by Walt Simonson and Sal Buscema and was also an homage to their friend and colleague, Mark Gruenwald, who was Marvel’s continuity expert. He literally was the Guardian of Marvel’s Sacred Timeline, and all the TVA staff, including Mobius, were drawn as Gruenwald clones.

Where the TV series begins to deviate from the comics original is in the character of Ravonna Renslayer. That’s a name that is well known to Avengers fans. Originally she was the love interest, and single weakness, of one of the Avengers’ greatest foes, Kang the Conqueror. Introducing her to the TV series was a clear indication that Kang would be the primary villain, though how they manage that relationship has clearly been put back to Season 2. The original Ravonna was a princess of a world that Kang had conquered, not a teacher from Earth, so there are definitely changes in store.

So “He Who Remains” is Kang, right? Yes, obviously, if only because it had already been trailed that Kang would be the villain in the next Wasp (and Ant Man) movie, and that he would be played by Jonathan Majors. QED.

However, Kang has come a long way since his first appearance in Avengers #8 in 1964. As a time-traveling megalomaniac (and possibly a descendant of Victor von Doom), he has had many lives. The whole story about a war in the multiverse between rival versions of Kang was taken from the comics. It is likely that He Who Remains is only one version of Kang that Majors will get to play. Personally I want to see him as Rama-Tut.

Alioth too is a character from the comics, and closely associated with the Kang/Ravonna storyline.

Which just leaves us with Sylvie. She’s a Loki variant, right? Well, not exactly.

You will remember that Sylvie keeps talking about enchanting things. It is what she does. Well, back in the day, Thor had a lot of trouble with an Asgardian magician called Amora and known as The Enchantress. She and another Asgardian villain, The Executioner, became part of Baron Zemo’s Masters of Evil, and were therefore regular Avengers enemies. In the comics she’s still up to her tricks, but if she existed in the MCU then she presumably died in Ragnarök.

Meanwhile, a teenager on Earth got given Amora’s powers by Loki. She is called Sylvie Lushton, and she later becomes a member of the Young Avengers alongside characters such as Wiccan & Speed – Billy & Tommy Maximoff (whom we met in Wanda/Vision), Patriot – Elijah Bradly (whom we met in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier); Hulkling – Teddy Altman (a skrull whom I expect us to meet in the Nick Fury & the Skrulls movie) and the new Hawkeye – Kate Bishop, who we will meet in the forthcoming Hawkeye TV series. The team also includes Kid Loki, who featured in the multi-Loki cast at the end of time. As you can see, there’s a lot of forward planning being done.

Incidentally, Sylvie Lushton was created by Paul Cornell, who has written Doctor Who TV episodes, so there’s another nod to the Time Lord in the Loki series.

Not knowing all of this is not going to spoil your enjoyment of the Loki TV series. Indeed, I have been fascinated by the way in which people who are obviously entirely unfamiliar with Avengers lore have approached the series and enjoyed it. Then again, not knowing that the reason Kang is eating an apple in the season finale is because he claims to have knowledge of everything, and is tempting Loki and Sylvie with that knowledge, won’t spoil your enjoyment either. But you can be sure that it wasn’t an accident.

That, however, is another story.

A Strange and Brilliant Light

032, Book Review, Eli Lee

I don’t get many review copies these days, but every so often Jo Fletcher sends me something that she thinks might be of interest. A Strange and Brilliant Light is one such book. It is a debut novel by Eli Lee, and Jo was quite right to think I would find it interesting.

Probably the most important thing to say about the book is that the author (in her Twitter feed) describes it as “speculative literary fiction”. What that means is that it is a book about characters rather than a more traditional, plot-based science fiction novel. However, the speculative element is still very much there.

The narrative centres on three women: Lal, Janetta and Rose. They happen to be living at a time when an AI revolution is taking place and robot workers called “auts” are taking everyone’s jobs. Lal has subscribed to the idea that hard work is everything and, if only she devotes her entire life to her employer, then happiness will ensue. Her sister, Janetta, does not need to work hard because she’s a genius. Her PhD on AI programming is sure to land her a top job somewhere. But Janetta is much less good at life, and girlfriend trouble is messing with her ability to complete her studies. Rose is Lal’s best friend from school. They start off working together at a franchise café, but while Lal wants to climb the corporate ladder, Rose, whose father was a famous trade unionist, can see how they are being exploited, and will soon be replaced.

The main speculative element is the usual one of robot revolution. Here one of the characters sets out the dilemma:

We both know that sooner or later, somehow or other, AI is going to become conscious. It’s inevitable, isn’t it? And when it does, unless it is programmed to be docile, obedient, essentially not alive, it’s going to rise up and kill us.

Ah yes, the robot version of Great Replacement Theory. We must keep the immigrants from the colonies in their place, or they will rise up and do to us what we have done to them.

Lal thinks that is this all good for corporate profits. Janetta thinks that if she can somehow program the right sort of emotions into the AIs they will be better people than us. Rose knows that the auts will take her job, and those of all her friends and family, unless someone stops them.

So much, so traditional. Where the book gets interesting is that Rose gets involved in a political organisation advocating for something called “source gain”, which is essentially a made-up name for Universal Basic Income. Lee is asking, if the robots take all our jobs, what will that mean for us? Will we have huge amounts of leisure, and a guaranteed income from the government, or will we starve?

I should note, by the way, that the characters live in a made-up world. That is, the world of the book feels like Earth, but the action takes place in a country that does not exist. There are times when the great city of Mejira, where Lal goes to work, reminds me of Singapore. There is also a section where Janetta goes on vacation to somewhere that might be Nepal. But these are only suggestions, and the book should not be taken as being set in those places. It is an interesting approach by Lee, which allows her to set the book in what is presumably a non-white community, while not having to worry about correctly representing the culture.

This being a book by a woman, about three women, there is inevitably a little feminism in there too. I was especially pleased to see Lee skewer left wing men who fancy themselves as intellectuals, because that is one serious real-world trope.

As someone with several decades of IT experience, I have to say that the resolution of the plot is pure Handwavium. Then again, so is the ending of many cyberpunk movies, and Independence Day, so we can hardly complain. This is not a book about programming AI, it is a book about the social issues that will result if AI becomes more all-pervasive than it is already. That’s certainly one of the sorts of science fiction book that needs to be written right now. Not that I think AI will become conscious, but “AI” that is not conscious, or remotely intelligent, but has a heap of in-built biases, is actually taking our jobs and affecting our lives.

book cover
Title: A Strange and Brilliant Light
By: Eli Lee
Publisher: Jo Flecther Books
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

William Blake vs The World

032, Book Review, John Higgs

Why, exactly, is Cheryl reviewing a book about William Blake in a magazine about science fiction and fantasy? Well, because alongside Tolkien, Blake is Britain’s greatest mythographer. One could make a case for Geoffrey of Monmouth as well, but it seems likely that he stitched together his history of Britain from folk tales already extant at the time, whereas Blake and Tolkien were both engaged in substantial creative activities.

Blake himself probably wouldn’t have seen it that way. He is more likely to have said that he was just explaining the world the way that it was, and that everyone else’s understanding of Christianity and the Bible was wrong. He was idiosyncratic and stubborn like that. But one of the interesting claims made in John Higgs’ book, William Blake vs The World, is that Blake benefited from a something similar the synaesthesia, and actually did see the visions that he claimed he saw, without any aid from mushrooms and the like.

Of course, my own interest in the book was also historical. Having had to do a deep dive into 18th Century ideas about gender for a talk on Charlotte de Beaumont, I was hoping that a book about Blake might further enlighten me. Sadly Higgs is not overly interested in Blake’s ideas about gender. He does indicate that is aware of the issue, noting:

Blake appears to have been cisgendered and heterosexual, but there may have been a transgender aspect to his sense of self when it was let free in his imagination.

So Higgs is familiar with the terminology of trans issues. Also he later lumps Mumsnet in with 4chan and the Mail Online as examples of places people who want to live in Hell might choose to frequent. However, he doesn’t really follow up on Blake’s interest in androgyny. Higgs has also left me wanting to know a lot more about an 18th Century Christian sect known as the Moravians, of which he writes:

The Moravians preached that union with Christ could be achieved through both marital and extramarital sex and gender transgression. Each individual Christian was considered to be the bride of Christ, and therefore female in terms of spiritual sexuality. They practiced visualisation exercises, which focused on the wound in Jesus’s side, in order to better understand the spiritual nature of being penetrated by the male Christ.

Apparently modern-day Moravians have deviated sharply from these teachings.

Of course Higgs’s book isn’t really a history book, it is a book about Blake. Fortunately for him, it is not his job to explain the 18th Century to us. Explaining Blake is quite a big enough job for anyone. When he does get into history he’s liable to mess up, such as here:

Many early Christian thinkers saw the material body as the prison of the immaterial soul, and henceforth something to be despised. The practice of self-flagellation which runs throughout Christian history is a product of ideas such as this, although thankfully few took it to the lengths of the third-century Christian theologian Origen of Alexandria, who is said to have castrated himself for God.

Higgs seems unaware that, while there is no proof that Origen was castrated, becoming a eunuch to demonstrate one’s piety was very popular in the Byzantine empire and hundreds, if not thousands of Christian monks did so.

But let’s get back to mythography. The world that Blake created was very different from Tolkien’s in many ways, because Blake was trying to understand the real world as he saw it, whereas Tolkien was very clear that he was practicing subcreation. Nevertheless, comparisons can be drawn and Higgs does not shirk from the challenge. He writes:

If we were to compare his writings to that of the later English mythmaker J.R.R. Tolkien, then Songs of Innocence and of Experience was Blake’s Hobbit, the Bible of Hell was his Lord of the Rings, and his nineteenth-century works were his Silmarilion.

I am not sufficiently well versed in either the works of Blake or of Tolkien to comment on the veracity of that comparison, but it is interesting that it has been made.

The other obvious connection between Tolkien and Blake is that both make use of the name “orc” for a violent adversary. In Tolkien orcs are a species of violent creatures bred by Melkor in mockery of the elves. In Blake Orc is a spirit of violence and destruction and an enemy of Urizen, the embodiment of authority.

The connection between the two orcs is somewhat nebulous. For example, here Matthew David Surridge is adamant that Tolkien’s orcs have no etymological connection to Blake. The accepted wisdom is that Tolkien took “orc” from the word “orcneas” which comes from a line in Beowulf listing “eotenas ond ylfe ond orcneas” as various enemies of God. Tolkien says as much in a letter to Naomi Mitchison. But he also says that he chose the word for its sound as much anything else.

As a professor of English at Oxford, Tolkien must have been aware of Blake. He was probably also aware that Blake created the character of Orc as a spirit of violent revolution, not in response to events in France, which were then still in his future, but following his witnessing of the Gordon Riots in London. In these riots, an anti-Catholic mob stormed the city’s prisons, ostensibly to free their colleagues held within. Catholic churches and the homes of Catholic notables were also attacked and looted. Over the space of a week, 850 people were killed in the rioting. Tolkien, being a devout Catholic, may have taken note of this.

Incidentally, the Gordon Riots were named after a populist politician whose intemperate ranting had inspired them. Higgs notes:

George Gordon was sent away as a child and bullied at Eton, then entered the Navy where he was considered ‘a damned nuisance wholly unsuitable for promotion.’ A seat in parliament was subsequently bought for him, where he was considered something of a joke. Privileged, narcissistic and generally mediocre, personalities like Gordon are sadly familiar in this history of populist violence.

Like Higgs, I will leave it to the reader to discern which contemporary politician might be being referenced here.

The key element of Blake’s mythmaking, and something that sharply distinguishes him from the many Tolkien imitators in epic fantasy, if not entirely from Tolkien himself, is his belief in the inappropriateness of demarcation. Blake lived at a time when a rush of new discoveries in science was encouraging intellectuals to sort the world into boxes. Categorisation was the fashion. And with it came a passion for abandoning nuance and concentrating on difference. We are still living with the effects of that today.

This application of reason to sort everything into its place was seen by Blake as the triumph of Urizen, the authoritarian god of rationality, whom Blake characterised in ways very similar to the god of the Old Testament (most famously in the artwork on this issue’s cover). But Urizen was only one of four related deities, the “four zoas”. The others – Urthona (creativity), Luvah (emotion) and Tharmas (physical senses) – were, in Blake’s view, lessened by the triumph of Urizen, and the world was poorer for their being side-lined.

Blake lived to see and be horrified by the Napoleonic Wars, which touched much of the known world at the time. He would have seen Urizen very much at work in the Nazi focus on eliminating people they deemed inferior but would probably have despaired at the need for the likes of Churchill and Stalin to lead the resistance against Hitler. If he were alive today, he would probably be railing against the far right and its quest to set everyone against everyone else.

The greatest irony of Blake’s legacy is that a hymn he wrote calling for the tearing down of the establishment, and poking fun at places such as Eton, is now seen as the embodiment of the myth of English superiority. If anyone out there is writing epic fantasy, what the world needs now, and England needs in particular, is a little more William Blake in its mythology, and a little less focus on Good v Evil.

book cover
Title: William Blake vs The World
By: John Higgs
Publisher: Orion
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Riot Baby

032, Book Review, Tochi Onyebuchi

It is a good job that Worldcon is later in the year this year, because I have only just made a start on my Hugo reading. Then again, three of the Novella finalists are works I had nominated (and I have read five of the Novels), so I’m in a pretty good position.

I hadn’t read Riot Baby before I got to fill in my ballot, but had I done so it may well have made its way onto my list. It is an incredibly powerful book. The baby of the title is Kevin, who is born at the same time as Los Angeles is being torn apart by riots following the death of Rodney King in 1991. The supernatural element comes from Kev’s elder sister, Ella, who has “a Thing”; that is, supernatural powers.

Following the riots, Kev and Ella’s mother decides to leave LA and move to New York. It is an understandable reaction, but makes no difference. Institutional racism pervades all the USA. As a young Black boy, Kev’s future is predictable. He might be very smart, with a hard-working and respected nurse for a mother, but he’s caught between the gangs who want to recruit him, and the police who want to put him jail. The police win. Kev ends up in Rikers Island.

Riot Baby is a very angry book. In this interview for Salon, Tochi Onyebuchi makes it clear that the book is not for white people. He wrote it for his fellow Black people, who have every right to be as angry as he is. Mostly the book is about the prison-industrial complex in the USA. There is a conveyor belt which takes young black men off the street, on the slightest pretence, into prison, where everything conspires to keep them there for the rest of their lives. They are slaves in all but name.

Interestingly, parts of the book are set a few years into the future. Here Onyebuchi looks at how technology will change policing. With the Internet able to keep tabs on people at all times, and algorithms used by the criminal justice system packed with anti-Black bias, the results seem inevitable. You don’t need a crystal ball to make these predictions.

The other aspect of the book is the supernatural one. Ella has powers. It is not always clear exactly what she can do. She can see the future, she can travel out-of-body, and she can cause damage. Is she able to burn down Rikers and take Kevin to freedom? Perhaps. And what would be the consequences if she did? Could she liberate all Black people? And what would be the consequences if she did.

As Onyebuchi suggests in the Salon interview, if Ella uses her powers to help anyone, she will always be Magneto, never Black Panther. Does that mean that her powers are useless? Or does she have to go full on Killmonger to have any chance of success?

In the interview, Onyebuchi is asked why any white person would read Riot Baby. Isn’t that just self-flagellation? Well perhaps. But clearly there are still many white people out there who don’t know how America really works when you are Black. Or if they know it doesn’t seem important to them. And then they wonder why all those Black people are suddenly so angry. Elsewhere people like Lewis Hamilton are trying their best to remain calm, educate people, and change the world. That’s great, more power to them. But racism is a bit like climate change. If we ignore it for too long, one day it will be too late.

book cover
Title: Riot Baby
By: Tochi Onyebuchi
Publisher: Tor.com
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Worlds Apart

032, Book Review, Francesca T. Barbini

This is less of a review and more of an advertorial, because I have an essay in this book. Worlds Apart: Worldbuilding in Fantasy and Science Fiction (to give it its full title) is the latest volume in the Academia Lunare series from Luna Press Publishing, edited by Francesca T Barbini. My essay is titled, “Worldbuilding with Sex and Gender”, and it full of good ideas for making your aliens queer. That’s enough of that. What else is in the book?

Of immediate interest is the essay by Claire Burgess on the work of William Blake. As I have said elsewhere in this issue, I don’t think Blake would have seen himself as doing worldbuilding. He was just explaining the real world as he saw it, to people who lacked his insight. But to the rest of us Blake is very clearly practicing mythography and I’m pleased to see him in a collection such as this.

Tangentially related to this issue is an essay by my Finnish friend, Jyrki Korpua. He has taken a sabbatical from writing about Tolkien, and is instead explaining the Nordic roots of Disney’s Frozen franchise. We probably all know that the original film was based on The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Anderson, but Disney’s team has put a lot of work into reflecting aspects of Nordic culture in the films.

There is, of course, an article about Tolkien in the book. There’s also one about Le Guin, and delightfully one about Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Those all join the Blake in focussing on a particular author. Other essays, such as mine, focus on general techniques. I was particularly interested in “No Elf is an Island” by Ricardo Victoria-Uribe and Martha Elba González-Alcaraz. This uses something called System Theory to examine the practice of worldbuilding – what works and what doesn’t – by examining a number of well known fantasy worlds. Along the way the authors note:

However, when the author adds details upon details without reason, or to justify post facto things that were left out or are inconsequential to the larger plot, they feel like add-ons, patches to the story, in detriment to its organic growth, as had happened to the Wizarding World by JK Rowling in recent years.

The essay that I was particularly keen to read was, “Town Planning in Viriconium: M John Harrison and Worldbuilding,” by Peter Garrett. As Garrett well knows, Harrison is allergic to the very idea of worldbuilding. The Viriconium project is, at least in part, an exercise in undermining the concept. I was particularly interested to see Garrett invoke reader-response theory, because part of the nature of Viriconium is that everyone who discovers it perceives it in a different way. I don’t have time to re-read the books, and then go back and re-read Garrett’s essay, but I have a feeling that this could be the start of a much larger conversation.

There are several other essays in the book that I haven’t had time to look at yet, but the bottom line is that I really appreciate what Barbini is doing with this series. Occasionally I wish she would encourage contributors to tone down the academic stiltedness of their contributions, but overall I am delighted that someone is publishing a regular series of interesting discussions of our genre(s).

book cover
Title: Worlds Apart
By: Francesca T. Barbini
Publisher: Luna Press Publishing
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Raya and the Last Dragon

032, Movie Review

Well, that was very Disney. Then again, what should I expect?

For those who haven’t seen it, Raya and the Last Dragon is a sort of Disney Princess fairy tale animation. It is set in a county that is presumably somewhere in South-East Asia, and it features water dragons, which I am now fairly familiar with from Aliette de Bodard’s writing. The basic plot is about how humans have warred among themselves, which causes all sorts of evil to happen, and we have to learn to be friends with each other again. All of which is seen through the eyes of a young princess who befriends the only dragon left alive. It is exactly as soppy as you would expect.

I try to remember that these things are intended mostly for kids, and we should not expect any realpolitik in them.

The film is beautifully animated and a lot of fun along the way. I don’t expect anything less from Disney. But I have reservations.

Firstly the core dynamic of the plot is the rivalry between Raya and Princess Namaari of the Claw Tribe (who ride giant cats). Namaari has been brought up to believe that her people have been kept in poverty by the Heart Tribe, Raya’s people. It is the young Namaari who tricks Raya into betraying Heart secrets and causes the disaster at the start of the film, which Raya must put right. Before that can happen, Namaari must repent, and Raya must learn to trust her. All well and good, except that Namaari is given a very obvious lesbian haircut and is portrayed in a very Amazon warrior way, and this is entirely queer-baiting because it is a film for kids and nothing is going to happen between her and Raya. I am assuming that a lot of fan fic is getting written, but it would be nice if Disney did more than just hint.

My other concern is with the cast. It is headed by Kelly Marie Tran, which is wonderful. If ever there was an actress who deserves a starring role in a successful movie, she’s it. All of the rest of the cast are people of colour too. But they are also all American, and this is a cartoon. So although all of the characters that we see are non-white, they mostly have American accents. On the one hand, this is a great piece of representation by Disney. Asian Americans in particular will doubtless be pleased by that. But I found myself wondering whether people outside the USA (and maybe Canada) would see it as representation, or whether they’d assume that the actors were all white people. Because I did until I looked them up.

Obviously I’m not in a position to judge here. I’d welcome feedback from Asian friends.

Editorial – July 2021

032, Editorial

OK, so this issue is a day late (it is now August) and a little thin on the book reviews. Sorry about that, folks, life happens. Sometimes I need to read a lot of things that are not reviewable. And sometimes I need to sort out things in my life.

The good news is that August is one of the two months per year that I plan to take off. Ostensibly this is because I’m busy with Worldcon, but of course this year I am not. I hope to use the extra month to read lots and get ahead of the game for the rest of the year.

Talking of Worldcon, things have moved on quite a bit from last month. My very best wishes to Mary Robinette for taking on the crazy task of chairing the convention. We now seem to be getting actual progress. There was a Zoom meeting for potential programme participants a couple of weeks ago, which I got an invitation to on the strength of being a Hugo Finalist. The head of programming assured me that she wanted to make use of the hybrid nature of the event to bring in programme participants from all around the world, and on the strength of that I have signed up as a Virtual Member.

Finally for this month you may remember me muttering back in June about Google retiring Feedburner. A small number of you were subscribed to this site by email through feedburner. You should continue to get emails through a service called Follow.It. If you think you should have been getting emails and did not get one this month, please let me know.

And don’t forget, there will be no new issue in August. See you all in September, by which time I may have actually attended FantasyCon.

Issue #31

Issues

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


  • Cover: Clown Woman: This issue's cover is Clown Woman by Molly Rose Lee

  • Shards of Earth: A look at the new Adrian Tchaikovsky novel, Shards of Earth

  • The Album of Dr. Moreau: Hey, hey, we're a Monkee! Well, chimp actually, plus an elephant, an ocelot, an armadillo and a bat. With help from Daryl Gregory, the world's latest hot boy band has produced The Album of Dr Moreau

  • QualityLand: In the near future, Germany will be the Best of All Possible Countries: QualityLand by Marc-Uwe Kling

  • Worldcon Drama Again: What? It's only a couple of months since the last Worldcon fiasco. Of course we were due another one.

  • Blackheart Knights: Laure Eve's debut urban fantasy, Blackheart Knights, re-invents King Arthur in a near-future London

  • Birds of Prey: Cheryl explains why the Birds of Prey movie does not appeal to leopards

  • Red Dust: From Yoss, a star of Cuban science fiction, comes Red Dust, a mystery featuring a robot detective who is a fan of noir fiction

  • Editorial – June 2021: Cheryl is tired and cannot brain today

Shards of Earth

031, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Book Review

I have been meaning to catch up with Adrian Tchaikovsky’s work for some time. He’s clearly on the cutting edge of modern SF, and I’ve really enjoyed the readings I have heard him do. All I needed was a suitable entry point; a new series that I could make a start on. Shards of Earth fits the bill nicely.

I should note at this point that the new series does not (as yet) involve any giant spiders. There is a species that looks a bit like giant crabs, and another that looks very much like giant clams. There is also a very nasty species that looks like moon-sized sea urchins. But nothing arachnoid. Yet.

Moon-sized sea urchins? Yes, you heard right the first time. They are called Architects, though they don’t seem to actually build anything. More typically they will take existing things and re-shape them according to their rather eccentric artistic whims. This usually involves shredding things into bizarre shapes and putting things that were on the inside onto the outside. Items of space real estate likely to be re-shaped in this manner include spacecraft, orbitals and planets.

(As an aside, I have this odd feeling that the idea for the book might have come, in part, from Season 5 of Agents of SHIELD with its startling images of Earth after its destruction by Quake.)

Given that the Architects proved invulnerable, implacable, and entirely uninterested in communicating with the subjects of their artistic endeavours, this constituted a major crisis in which all intelligent life joined together as one to oppose them. Or at least to provide evacuation fleets and new homes for the refugees.

Still the Architects would have won easily, had humankind not accidently discovered how to talk to them, or at least get their attention. The Intermediary Program involved the identification and training of humans with a rare biological aptitude for interfacing with the fabric of the universe and thereby being able to make a loud enough noise on the right communication channels for the Architects to notice them.

Most Intermediaries died in the training program, but a few survived long enough to be sent into combat. They made contact. The Architects went back to wherever it was they had come from. The galaxy heaved a collective sigh of relief.

Fifty years later we have a book. Yes, this is an After the War novel. Idris Telemmier, the hero of the Battle of Berlenhof, the man who made the Architects go away, is in retirement. Well, more accurately he is in hiding. The Council of Human Interests, colloquially known as “Hugh”) would love to have him back in their service, which is why he is hiding out as the pilot of an elderly salvage vessel with a rag-tag, dysfunctional-but-lovable crew. Intermediaries, it turns out, make superb hyperspace pilots, so he earns his keep.

The crew of the Vulture God fits neatly into a standard SF trope that is quite popular right now and probably owes a lot to Firefly. There are several of them, but I want to highlight two. Firstly there is Kris, who is a disgraced elite lawyer. Her job is to make sure that the contracts the crew enters into are watertight, and to keep Idris out of the clutches of Hugh. Secondly there is Olli. In our time she would doubtless be described as having “birth defects”, but she turns out to be an absolute genius at interfacing with waldos of all sorts, which is really useful in space.

Is there a plot here, Cheryl? Yes, of course. Remember that we are 50 years after the war. What happens when memories of shared peril fade? Correct, former allies start fighting among themselves. In particular there is growing antagonism between Hugh and The Parthenon.

Is this something to do with Athena? Well yes, because Athena was born without a mother, hence the term “parthenogenesis”, which should be familiar to readers of feminist SF and my essays on interesting biology. The Parthenon is a community of genetically engineered, vat-grown women warriors. They are an elite fighting force, physically perfect, and trained from birth for that purpose. They see themselves as guardians of the galaxy. Everyone else sees them as a dangerous military dictatorship. Most importantly for our purposes, The Parthenon does not possess the knowledge of how to make Intermediaries. And Hugh is terrified of what they will be capable of if they acquire that technology.

So, a plan. Myrmidon Solace has been kept in cryo-sleep for most of the past 50 years, just in case her experience might be needed again. Thanks to being in the right place at the right time, Solace ended up as the personal bodyguard of Idris Telemmier at the Battle of Berlenhof, and continued in that role for the remainder of the war. Any two young persons thrown together in circumstances of mortal peril are bound to develop some sort of bond. The Parthenon’s High Command thinks that Solace might be able to persuade Idris to defect.

That’s mostly your set-up. Solace wants to persuade Idris to help her people. Idris just wants to disappear. The crew of the Vulture God mostly just want to get on with their next contract in peace, except for Olli who wants to get rid of the vile, eugenicist Parthenon woman as quickly as possible, and with extreme prejudice. And don’t forget the giant clams – sorry, the Essiel – because they do have an empire, and they do want the rest of the galaxy to submit to their rule, because everyone will be so much better off being taken care of by superior beings.

It is a common nostrum that science fiction books are not about the future, they are about the now of when they are written. That is absolutely true of Shards of Earth. A key element of the story is the inability of human politicians to unite against an existential threat until it is way too late. The Essiel have clearly been taking a leaf out of the Vladimir Putin playbook, fostering the growth of populist, far-right movements in Hugh territory to distract and weaken human government. On a personal level, Solace struggles with being seen as an agent of an Evil Empire when all her recent memories are of saving the galaxy from destruction, while Olli’s understandable distrust of eugenics, and therefore hatred of Solace, causes fractures among the crew of the Vulture God. It is all very spot on.

Finally, we have that core feature of space opera, the mysterious ancient civilisation. Who were the Architects? Where did they come from? Why did they leave so suddenly? And most importantly, will they be back. You know the answer to the last of those. The other questions are what will keep you reading eagerly to the end of the trilogy.

book cover
Title: Shards of Earth
By: Adrian Tchaikovsky
Publisher: Tor
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The Album of Dr. Moreau

031, Book Review, Daryl Gregory

What if the creatures from The Island of Dr Moreau escaped, moved to the USA, and started a boy band?

No, I’m serious, that is exactly the premise of Daryl Gregory’s latest book, which I think is a novella (the Kindle app says it has 141 pages, but does not give a word count even though it very easily could). Of course that’s not all there is to the story. It is also a murder mystery, a meditation on the phenomenon of boy bands and the awful music industry practices that allow them to be created and exploited. There’s also stuff about eugenics, and the USA’s obsession with immigration, and a whole lot more stuff. Stick with me here, it will be worth it.

The WyldBoyZ have just played a hugely successful gig in Las Vegas. However, the following morning their manager, Maurice Bendix, known as Dr M, is found brutally murdered. Bobby O, who is part ocelot and very well endowed in the claw department, swears that he didn’t do it, even though he woke up next to Bendix’s eviscerated body and was covered in the dead man’s blood.

This is clearly case for Detective Lucia Delgado, primarily because she has a good track record in dealing with celebrity crime. She used to be a stage magician, so she has some understanding of the show biz mindset. Luce has only two problems. The first is that her teenage daughter, Melanie, is the WyldBoyZ’s biggest fan. And the second is her partner, Mickey Banks, who has a penchant for truly terrible puns.

Oh, and there’s finding out who actually killed Dr M, so I guess that’s three problems.

It’s not like there is any shortage of suspects. Dr M is an amalgam of everything bad about pop industry impresarios. He’s very clearly cheating on his charges, right down to giving himself writing and production credits on all of the songs even though he has no part in creating them. All of the band have good reasons to hate him. Well, all except Bobby, but that’s only because Bobby is so sweet that he couldn’t hate anyone for more than a few seconds. Then there’s Mrs M, who also hates her husband and is having an affair with Devin, the chimp member of the band.

Naturally, solving the murder also requires digging into the mystery of the WyldBoyZ’s origins in a secret maritime research lab, how they came to escape, and how Maurice Bendix found and enslaved them.

For 141 pages, there is one heck of a lot packed into this book. I was very impressed. I figured out some of how the murder was done before the end, but that was only because Detective Delgado is very good and occasionally has Banks do things do check out her suspicions. I did not see the big reveal coming, but I will note that The Album of Dr Moreau is also a science fiction story, as it should be given its ancestry. It is also obvious that Gregory knows a lot about music, from how pop songs are actually put together to the history of boy bands from the Beatles to BTS.

Oh, and the whole thing is packaged as a concept album, with each chapter being a distinct track. Of course it is. Doubtless available on Island Records.

book cover
Title: The Album of Dr. Moreau
By: Daryl Gregory
Publisher: Tor.com
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

QualityLand

031, Book Review, Marc-Uwe Kling

In the near future, Germany, or possibly the EU, has taken the sensible step of declaring itself to be the Best Possible Country. Welcome to QualityLand, where life has never been better, and everyone has exactly what they want.

That is the premise of a novel by Marc-Uwe Kling, which was apparently a huge hit in Germany, and is now available in English translation. If I were doing an elevator pitch for it, I would describe it as the love child of Cory Doctorow and Douglas Adams. Kling has all of Doctrow’s fascination with the effect of the internet on society, but approaches it with the surreal, acerbic comedy of Adams.

The first thing that you will notice about QualityLand is that a new naming convention has been adopted. Boys are given a family name according to their fathers’ occupations; girls are given a family name according to their mothers’ occupations. Thus, of course, we have names like Henryk Engineer, and Hans Lorry Driver, coupled with names like Hannah Hairdresser and Melissa Sex Worker. If you have started to see a problem, I can add that Tony Party Leader is in fact the leader of the Progress Party, just as his father was.

Doctorow, when he was younger and less cynical, once wrote a novel extolling the virtues of a social ranking system called wuffie. Kling knows exactly how this will turn out. Every citizen has a Level rating, and the higher your level the more social privileges you have.

Of course everyone is happy, because they are sold everything they want by TheShop, a monopoly online retailer. You don’t even have to browse. TheShop knows exactly what products to send you, based on your Level, your interactions on the Everybody social network, and its infallible algorithms. QualityPartner will recommend romantic interests for you in the same way.

Our hero is a chap called Peter Jobless. He’s not actually jobless because he has inherited a scrap metal business from his grandfather. Peter actually wanted to be an AI psychologist, but it turned out that helping AI’s with mental problems is classed as a form of repair, and repairing anything has been made illegal as it is a threat to TheShop’s business model.

So people give Peter dysfunctional machines to dispose of. But he’s a soft-hearted chap, and once he’s been given something to destroy he becomes its owner. He can’t bear to actually put a thinking machine in a scrap metal press, so he keeps them all. Thus he shares his home with a LawBot who has developed a conscience, a CombatBot with PTSD, a tablet that has read too much Marx and Lenin and wants a robot revolution, a male SexBot who has fallen madly in love with a client and can’t get it up for anyone else, and an AuthorBot who wants to write science fiction. It is all very reminiscent of Doom Patrol.

All of this would be fairly irrelevant to life in QualityLand, were it not for the fact that Peter is sent a product from TheShop that he does not want: a pink, dolphin-shaped vibrator. His attempts to return it gradually escalate until they become a matter of national significance.

Meanwhile there is an election going on. The President for Life is dying, and a new one has to be elected. (It is a woman president, doubtless this has specific meaning for German readers.) The far-right QualityParty is putting up a loud-mouthed TV chef turned politician, Conrad Cook. Cook’s face is on the wrapping of half the food sold in TheShop so he has plenty of voter recognition. In desperation Tony and his colleagues decide to take the unusual step of putting up a candidate who is an android.

So politics jokes, Amazon jokes, sex jokes, and some serious discussion of where modern society is going. It is a heady mix. There is a definite male gaze to the text which some female readers may find tiresome, but the female characters do get a fair amount of agency and some of them come out on top, so I’m prepared to forgive Kling. It isn’t often that I enjoy a comedy novel, but this one had me laughing out loud in places.

QualityLand is translated from German by Jamie Lee Searle, who does a fine job of keeping just enough German references to keep the sense of setting while making the text eminently readable.

book cover
Title: QualityLand
By: Marc-Uwe Kling
Translator: Jamie Lee Searle
Publisher: Orion
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura
1 … 10 11 12 13 14 … 23