Cheryl Morgan's Fanzine
For this issue’s cover I have used the cover of Juliet McKenna’s The Swordsman’s Oath. It is the second of five books in the Tales of Einarinn series, all of which are available again as paperbacks after many years, and which are newly available as hardcovers to most readers.
The art is by Geoff Taylor who did the covers for all five books.
Here’s the full wraparound version.
A week or two ago there was a minor spat on Twitter about cyberpunk. I forget who was involved, but as I recall one side was calling for more modern and relevant cyberpunk, while the other was saying that cyberpunk was a dead genre based on an imagined future that no one believed in any more. I would like to suggest that both sides read the new novel from Samit Basu, Chosen Spirits.
There are many different ways to define cyberpunk, but one possible description might be a form of near future science fiction that looks at the effects of computer technology on society in a world that is dominated by corporations rather than governments. That is precisely what Chosen Spirits is. Usefully it is set in India, a country with a far greater rich/poor divide than the USA, and which has suffered from rampant corporate colonialism from the likes of the East India Company down to modern investment by American, Russian and Chinese corporations. One only has to remember the Bhopal disaster, or the Bangladesh sweatshops, to understand that South Asia is a place where corporations feel free to operate with minimum regulation in order to provide cheap goods to rich markets elsewhere.
Today’s news crisis is the discovery of an automated ship in the Indian Ocean swarming with East African climate change refugees, clinging onto the deckless craft like ants in the rain, preferring to risk incredible dangers to cross to unknown lands instead of being slaughtered by European vigilante pirate crews.
The star of our story is Bijoyini Roy, Joey to her friends. She is a Reality Controller, which basically means that she manages the future version of reality TV stars. Basu uses “Flows” rather than “Streams”, but these people are YouTube influencers with TV station budgets and support crews. Joey’s job is to produce the Flow of one of Delhi’s biggest stars, her university pal and ex-boyfriend, Indi. She’s very good at it, which is just as well because her naïve, middle-class left-wing parents have been completely unable to cope with how their world has changed from a nascent liberal democracy to a brutal, authoritarian regime where everything they say and do is liable to be spied upon. Joey, having grown up in this world, knows how to manage herself, and her charges, online. How to get away with just the right amount of social conscience that doesn’t cause her bosses to get an unwelcome call from someone with power and influence.
Joey can’t imagine what that must have been like, the freedom to criticise the powerful and corrupt in your own home. Nothing that had happened since – not the blasphemy laws in several states, not the mass de-citizenings, the voter-list erasures, the reeducation camps, the internet shutdowns, the news censors, the curfews, not even the scary stories of data-driven home invasions, not the missing person smart-scrolls on every lamp-post – had succeeded in convincing Romola or Avik that the world had really changed, that the present was not merely a passing aberration.
The world that Basu builds is not much extrapolated from our own, some of which is fortuitous as he must have written the novel before the pandemic hit. Meetings take place in Zoom-like environments, but everyone has sophisticated custom backdrops, and if they are very wealthy then custom AI that makes it look like they are listening intently but is actually matching their image and expressions to a pre-determined strategy.
The book is also very Indian. There are pushy parents who want you to make just the right marriage to move you up-caste. There is Hindu-Muslim rivalry. There are trains, and police whose brutality, if not sophisticated weaponry, make American police seem tame. Inevitably, there are monkeys. If you have seen Sense8 you will have some idea of what to expect.
There are internet trolls, of course, but Joey has software to screen them out. She also knows how to push the mob’s buttons. Growing a following for Indi is all part of the job. Most of the time it is easy to keep things under control. You just have to avoid major scandals such as, well, accusations of sexual harassment. Did I mention that this book is totally on point now?
Of course you can’t run operation like a Flowco without a lot of money. Much of it comes through sponsorship for product placement. It matters what Indi is seen wearing, what beer he drinks. Where he is seen going shopping. But there are other considerations as well. Shadowy oligarchs with billions in their pockets stalk the dark corridors of the corporate world. Sudden take-overs happen. Priorities change. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss except for the narrative he wants to push though the Flow.
Some of these oligarchs are simply interested in making money in the entertainment industry. Some of them, however, are pursuing much darker agendas, because their business models depend on exploiting the masses in new and interesting ways.
He doesn’t need to see her links to know what’s in them. He knows they’re about trafficking, mass abductions from refugee camps and villages, concentration camps and other things he’s spent his whole life avoiding conversation about. He knows they’re about perfect-child breeding projects using bodies from around the world, the birth outsourcing industries booming in post-law nations, organ-growth sweatshops, body farms, womb-renting factories, sex-slave training centres, cell-harvest centres, gene-testing prison camps. He knows humans will never go really obsolete, because there’ll always be uses for their bodies, right down to the last cell, there’ll always be people willing to use them.
The trouble with being famous is that you end up being useful to people you would much rather not be useful to. And let’s face it, if your job is manipulating people, aren’t you a monster already?
If it sounds gloomy, well it is. Tim Maughan’s Infinite Detail wasn’t a bundle of laughs either. Basu does his best to manufacture a hopeful ending. It kind of works, but then you get to the Acknowledgments.
At the time of writing this, Delhi and India are facing multiple crises, nearly all man-made, and however bleak Chosen Spirits might seem, the truth is that the real world will probably be much harsher: this book is set not in a dystopia, but in a best-case scenario.
This was written before the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
So yes, it is gloomy, but we need science fiction like this. Our world is more interconnected than it has ever been. What happens in India today can easily happen in Europe and North America tomorrow. Indeed, some of it already is.
Meet Noemí Taboada: party girl, fashionista, and one of the most eligible young women in Mexico City. Her father despairs of her flightiness, and her absurd ideas about going to university. How is that supposed to get you a husband? But Noemí doesn’t care. She’s young, she’s beautiful and she’s rich. The world is at her feet.
Besides, who wants to get married anyway? At least not yet. Look what happened to her dear cousin Catalina. OK, so Virgil Doyle was incredibly handsome in that moody sort of way, but now poor Catalina is living in some remote town in the south of Baja where the only parties that are ever likely to happen are when a goat has a new kid.
That Cata’s new life is even less sunshine and roses became clear when Noemí’s father received a letter. “… he is trying to poison me. […] They are cruel and unkind and they will not let me go. […] You must come for me, Noemí. You have to save me.” It sounds to Señor Taboada that Catalina has sunk into hysteria or some other sort of women’s illness, but the family honour is at stake and Cata has asked for Noemí, so Noemí must go. Besides, he can dangle a carrot that he knows the foolish girl won’t refuse.
It was the kind of thing she could imagine impressing her cousin: an old house atop a hill, with mist and moonlight, like an etching out of a Gothic novel. Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, those were Catalina’s sort of books. Moors and spiderwebs. Castles too, and wicked stepmothers who force princesses to eat poisoned apples, dark faeries cursing maidens and wizards who turn handsome lords into beasts. Noemí preferred to jump from party to party on a weekend and drive a convertible.
Of course, once we meet the Doyle family we can see how deeply suspicious they are. They are English for a start (despite the very Irish name). They were once rich but have fallen on hard times. Their three remaining servants are old and barely speak. And the head of the household is a gloomy, pale chap called Howard.
Old would have been an inaccurate word to describe him. He was ancient, his face gouged with wrinkles, a few sparse hairs stubbornly attached to his skull. He was very pale too, like an underground creature. A slug, perhaps. His veins contrasted with his pallor, thin, spidery lines of purple and blue.
A more obvious family of vampires would be hard to imagine. They even have a graveyard in the back garden. Except that they are living on top of a silver mine, on which their fortune is based. So sure, Mexican Gothic is exactly what it says in the title. It is also far more weird that you might expect.
One of the reasons that I love Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s work is that it is proudly and unashamedly Mexican. Noemí, for all her modern airs, has still been raised a Catholic. The herbalist woman in the town takes payment in cigarettes to donate to her patron saint. There is mention of Lotería cards. A writer who isn’t Mexican simply wouldn’t have done this as well.
The setting is also superb. El Triunfo is a real town in the Baja California Sur mountains, and it really did once have silver mines which shut down in the 1920s. The population these days is apparently a little over 300. It is just perfect for a Gothic horror story.
As well as telling a fun tale with a brave, but often inevitably clueless, heroine, Morena-Garcia has taken the opportunity to take a pop at some of the racist ideas popular at the time (and now creeping odiously back into fashion). Uncle Howard is a big fan of eugenics, and because Noemí has ambitions to study anthropology they have a lot of excuses to discuss such issues. There may even be reasons for Uncle Howard’s obsession. The politics is eased into the book neatly and cleverly.
There will, inevitably, be people who don’t like this book because the lead character isn’t a manly action hero, and the plot isn’t resolved with a firm punch to the jaw. The rest of us, however, should get plenty of enjoyment from it. Sure it is quite formulaic in some ways, but that’s the point. You can’t complain that a book is an obvious Gothic novel when it says on the cover that is exactly what you are going to get. If you are going to do that sort of thing, you need to do it well, and Moreno-Garcia definitely delivers.
This book was a freebie from Jo Fletcher books. They sent it to me because they know I have enjoyed Moreno-Garcia’s work in the past. I accepted it because I know Jo well enough to feel safe reviewing it honestly.
It took me a little while to get to the end of this series. I had hugely enjoyed the first three seasons, but got stuck in the middle of season 4. More about that later, but when I saw how happy everyone was with the fifth and final season I knew I had to watch it all through. I was not disappointed.
Those of you who were young when the original He-Man and She-Ra series aired (I was much too old) will remember that She-Ra defends the planet of Etheria from the evil Hordak and his, well, evil Horde. There is a theoretical connection in that Princess Adora, her non-magical identity, is the sister of Prince Adam, aka He-Man. However, the two series take place on different planets. Hordak was originally an ally of Skeletor who was betrayed by his boss and banished to Etheria.
The new series completely reboots this. We are still on Etheria, we still have Hordak and his Horde, but everything else is much more complicated and the supporting cast has changed out of all recognition.
For the first few seasons She-Ra is fighting against Hordak and the Horde as we expect. Characters from the original series such as Bow, Glimmer and Catra still exist, but are very different. In particular all of the main characters are quite clearly teenagers, whereas in the original series they were adults. One of the things I like about the series is the way that the characters are shown to be growing older as it progresses. That’s particularly clear with Glimmer between season 3 and season 4 after she becomes Queen of Etheria. The dude-bros who complained that the new She-Ra didn’t look sexy enough in the new series might be happier with what she grows into by the end.
All of the major princess characters in the new series are based on characters from the original series, but are significantly changed. In particular, while the original series was very much a battle of good against evil, the new series is full of moral complexity. We see that, for example, with Scorpia who is loyal to The Horde until their cruelty drives her away, and Entrapta who is loyal to whoever gives her the most interesting science project to work on. Even the witch, Shadow Weaver, is happy to work with the Rebellion when it suits her.
While the original series was mostly fantasy, the new series is a marvellous mix of fantasy and science fiction. The First Ones are re-cast as an alien race who came to Etheria determined to harness its magical energy for their benefit. Hordak is revealed to be merely a lost clone of Horde Prime who was abandoned on Etheria when it was moved into the shadow dimension of Despondos. The rest of the universe has been conquered by Horde Prime and his clone army. He is keen to find his way back to Etheria so that he can finish the job.
However, the main difference between the original series and the new one is that the new series has masses of queer content. Bow has gay dads (who are adorable librarians). Two of the minor princesses, Spinerella and Netossa, are a lesbian couple, and the whole series hinges on the relationship dynamic between Adora and Catra.
In the original series, Catra is simply the baddest of the bad girls working for The Horde. She is She-Ra’s principal antagonist. But the storyline also has Adora growing up as a member of the Horde until she escapes, joins the Rebellion, and becomes She-Ra. The new series shows us Adora and Catra growing up together as best friends. Adora is always the star student, Catra is always running foul of Shadow Weaver and getting punished. Fortunately for Catra, Adora is always there to pick up the pieces.
Adora rarely questions her own privilege, especially after she becomes the mightiest warrior on the planet. Catra is left with a burning desire to prove herself, and if the only way to show that she’s as good as Adora is to become Hordak’s chief lieutenant then so be it. Adora, of course, desperately wants to rescue her friend and redeem her. The last thing that Catra wants is for Adora to save her yet again.
Despite the constant warfare and rivalry, the affection between Adora and Catra is always evident throughout the series. That it should end with a kiss and them expressing undying love for each other was always inevitable. It was only a matter of how it would come to pass.
Actually I’d had a sneaking hope that the series might have ended with Kyle saving the universe by accident, but I don’t have space to explain what means so I’ll just have to leave it here for other She-Ra fans.
I should note that Adora and Catra are by no means the only happy couple by the end of the story. There are several others, some of which have been carefully set up by the scriptwriters. One in particular is integral to the plot. I’m not going to spoil that.
The queer content was also the one element that gave me pause during season 4. This introduced a character called Double Trouble who is a shape-shifter and a spy for the Horde. DT, as they are known, infiltrates the Rebellion and reports their plans back to Catra.
Gender on Etheria is a complicated thing. Queer relationships are common, and many of the characters are clearly not human. Catra, for example, has cat ears and a tail. Nevertheless, there do appear to be males and females, by which I mainly mean that there are characters with boobs and characters without boobs. Fans of the series have come up with all sorts of headcanon by which characters are secretly trans, but the only canonically trans character in the series is DT.
Given the moral complexity of the series, the fact that DT works for the Horde doesn’t make them Evil. They do it for the love of the job as much as anything else. By the end we get a brief glimpse of DT fighting against Horde Prime alongside everyone else. I should also note that DT is voiced by a non-binary person, which is excellent representation.
The problem I have with the character is that, in their natural form, DT is presented as a person-without-boobs, but in order to infiltrate the Rebellion they disguise themselves as a person-with-boobs, albeit quite a young one. This plays directly into the common trope of trans women being “deceivers” and dishonest.
Thankfully this did not end up being a major feature of the plot. DT is unmasked fairly quickly and there is nothing said about the method of the deception. But given how aware the scriptwriting team have been of queer issues, I’m sure they must have been aware of the problem and I’m wondering why they wrote DT as they did. Possibly the fact that DT gets to come back in one episode of season 5 playing a character who is basically Prince was an attempt to redress the balance.
One episode in season 5 is set on an alien planet that our heroes have to visit to get more fuel crystals for their spaceship. (Yes, obvious Star Trek reference. There’s a thing about having to fly through an asteroid field too.) There they meet up with the three Star Siblings who are fighting against Horde Prime. We only see them this once, but they were clearly introduced for a reason and I suspect that they will be central to the rumoured She-Ra film that is being hinted at on social media. I am so glad that we haven’t seen the last of these characters, or the creative team.
I could talk about this series for a very long time, but I don’t suppose that everyone is as obsessed with it as I am. What I will say is that the quality of the plotting is the best I have seen in any TV series in a very long time. I very much hope that season 5 makes it to the Hugo short list next year. Noelle Stevenson absolutely deserves a Hugo for this, and while I doubt that she’ll get one I at least want to see her name on that list.
In view of the new awareness of diversity issues prompted by white people finally taking the Black Lives Matter movement slightly seriously, I figured I ought to do a diversity audit of the books I have reviewed. First up, a few notes of explanation.
These numbers refer only to books that I have reviewed since the relaunch. They refer only to posts that are tagged “Book Review” (which means no comics, TV, etc.). They do include the few older pieces that I have ported over from Cheryl’s Mewsings.
There are currently 77 reviews.
Categories are inevitably complicated. I have probably undercounted in some of them because people are not necessarily open about their identities. There’s also the question of how to handle books with multiple authorship, which I’m still thinking about. Right now there’s only one. My choice of categories is not fixed in stone. I’m open to feedback on what people think it is important to monitor.
OK, time for some numbers. First up, gender.
| Male | 27% |
| Female | 66% |
| Other | 6% |
I make no apologies for that. I see it as redressing the balance because so many high-profile review venues are male-heavy.
I note also that 23% of books reveiwed have some sort of queer theme to them, and 10% have a trans theme. These are higher than the percentages of queer (22%) and trans (8%) authors.
The percenatge of translations is only 5%. I’m not happy with that and want to do better in future.
As for ethnicity, here are some numbers.
| White Anglo | 64% |
| White Non-Anglo | 6% |
| Black African | 5% |
| Black Non-African | 3% |
| Middle East | 1% |
| South Asian | 5% |
| East Asian | 4% |
| LatinX | 8% |
| Jewish | 3% |
| Native American | 1% |
I have separated out non-Anglo white people to indicate those who would be classed as white but whose native language is not English. They are marginalised in a way that native English speakers are not. I have also separated out Black Africans from the wider Black diaspora because I know that it is important to some people (hi Nnedi).
I’m not proud of these numbers, but I’m not despondent either. In some ways I am restricted by what the publishing industry produces. But I do want to do better. My goal is to get the White Anglo percentage down to 50%. I’d also like to get the number of translations up. And as far as I know I don’t have any disabled writers in the list at all, which is clearly an issue.
Zen Cho has described The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water as fanfic for an imaginary 50-episode wuxia TV series. I know pretty much nothing about wuxia, but if this is what it is like then I’m in.
The novella tells the story of a group of outlaws who, much like Robin Hood’s band, are doing their best to survive and do some good in a time of general lawlessness. Instead of King John they have The Protector. Instead of the Sheriff’s men there are the mata, who are a sort of (very corrupt) police force. Instead of Saxons and Normans there are Tang people and, well, at this point my understanding of East Asian history fails dismally. But you get the point.
Things begin to go wrong for our heroes when their leader, the handsome and charismatic Lau Fung Cheng, intervenes in a dispute in a coffeehouse to save a waitress from abuse at the hands of an arrogant customer. Matters quickly deteriorate, and Fung Cheng ends up having to accept the girl into his band because she has lost her job.
The girl, Guet Imm, also known as Sister Nirodha, is a former anchorite in the aforementioned Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water. Having not been fed for several days, she emerged from her seclusion to discover that her fellow devotees had all been slaughtered by bandits, or the mata, who knows these days? Hence her ending up as a waitress.
That’s about as much as I can tell you, except that that this is no Robin and Marian tale. Guet Imm is (more or less) a sworn virgin, and anyway she gets on much better with Tet Sang, the story’s version of Little John.
(I have elided over an entire comedy scene about men having to sacrifice their dicks to the goddess should they defile one of her sacred vessels, because it is a bit gruesome and I don’t want to put the boys off reading this… oh, sorry…)
Unlike Robin Hood stories, however, this is not a matter of robbing from the rich to give to the poor. The band does have a shipment of rice to take to poor people in a nearby town, but they also have a much more valuable cargo. It is not just people’s stomachs that are at stake, it is their entire culture. Imagine if the Saxons still worshipped the Æsir, that the Normans were busy trashing temples, and that Marian was a priestess of Frigg.
That should give Western readers some idea of what to expect. Of course the parallels are not exact. This is very much an Asian story (I think set in Malaysia, but again my understanding is poor). It is also fun, beautifully written, and with a fascinating twist that made me very happy. Recommended.
Amy is a young woman with a stack of mental health issues such as anxiety and depression. Jules is a young, Black non-binary person doing his best to survive in an America that is clearly not welcoming to his kind. They both have shitty jobs at LitenVärld, a multi-national purveyor of Nordic kitsch and flat-pack, self-assembly furniture. Awkwardly they have just broke up after a brief and passionate affair. They have sensibly arranged to be on different shifts so that they are not in the store at the same time, but one of their co-workers, whom Amy names as Fucking Derek, has called in sick. It wouldn’t have been so bad had it not been the day that IT happened.
It had all started quietly. Amy had been on the Customer Service desk with Tricia The Manager, at least in part so that Jules knew where she was and could avoid her. A young woman came up to the desk to say that she had lost her elderly grandmother, a Mrs. Nouri. That sort of thing happens all of the time. LitenVärld is a frustrating and confusing labyrinth of themed domestic display settings with evocative names such as Midlife Crisis Mom, Parental Basement Dweller, Coked-out Divocée and Nihilist Bachelor Cube. But when Mrs. Nouri doesn’t respond to public address announcements the staff are sent to investigate. Inevitably Amy and Jules are sent together, and what they find causes Tricia The Manager to wheel out an ancient staff training video.
“We’re here to tell you what to do if a wormhole opens up on your shift!”
“The unique layout of LitenVärld encourages wormholes to form between universes. These wormholes connect our stores to LitenVärlds in parallel worlds.”
And so Amy and Jules are sent off to rescue poor Mrs. Nouri from whatever dangers she might have innocently stumbled into in worlds even less made for aged South Asian grannies than our own is for the likes of Jules. Along the way they encounter carnivorous furniture, killer corporate clones, and a pirate submarine. It is all very exciting, and a whole lot of fun.
FINNA, then, is a comedy novella from Nino Cipri, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at the Helsinki Worldcon. It reminded me a lot of the Bauchelain and Korbal Broach novellas from Steven Erikson, particularly The Healthy Dead, as it exhibits the same sort of satire about corporate jollity and enforced conformity. That is to say, it is very funny. It has the added benefit of being a great story about a fractured relationship between two young queer people.
I note also that Karin Tidbeck was the Swedish Consultant on the book, and Rivers Solomon did the sensitivity read for the character of Jules. So I have complete confidence that both aspects were well handled.
Honestly folks, this is cheap, a quick read, and hilarious. Why have you not bought it already?
I have avoided crossover events in comics because they tend to require buying vast numbers of comic books that I mostly don’t have much interest in. That is, after all, the point. The comics companies hope you will like the books you don’t normally buy and stick with them. No way, comics buying is far too expensive a hobby these days.
The crossover events on DC’s television series are a different matter. I’m weirdly addicted to them because they are so bizarrely artificial.
While the Marvel Cinematic Universe is mostly a carefully constructed whole, curated under the watchful eye of Kevin Feige, the DC equivalent is something of a chaotic mess spread over multiple independent series on a wide variety of platforms. Does the Bruce Wayne who features in Titans on Netflix have any relationship to the one who is so notably absent from Batwoman? Who knows?
The concept of the multiverse is actually quite helpful to this. The idea that most of these different series take place in different universes, and that there might be different versions of the same characters in each universe, allowed DC to give their creative teams much more artistic freedom. There was no overall canon to adhere to.
And yet, Crisis exists. It happened in the comics. It had to happen on TV as well. Besides, the Arrowverse – the suite of TV shows airing mostly on the CW channel under the creative control of Greg Berlanti – was ripe for just that sort of thing. The fact that Supergirl was set on a different Earth to Arrow and The Flash, and that Batwoman was on a different one again, seemed weird. Goodness only knows which Earth Legends of Tomorrow is set on. Crisis would bring them all together, and give us more opportunities for that great chemistry between Melissa Benoist (Supergirl) and Grant Gustin (The Flash).
For UK viewers this latest crossover was complicated by the addition of Batwoman to the mix. It is airing on E4 rather than Sky, and the programme managers there decided to skip the Crisis episode because E4 viewers might have no idea what it was all about, or indeed who all of the other characters were. I ended up buying the DVD of the crossover series because that was the only way I could watch the whole thing.
The series itself is the usual superhero fluff ramped up to cosmic proportions. In Avengers: Infinity War Marvel famously killed off half of all life in the universe. Those of you who save seen Endgame know how that turned out. In Crisis DC kill off everyone in all of an infinite number of universes, except for a small handful of heroes, and everyone in every universe except ours stays dead. It is, without doubt, the greatest mass slaughter in the history of comics. Of course there is a version of many people in our universe, but many other universes will have deviated far from ours and be full of completely different people. All of whom now never existed in the first place. Ouch.
Talking of dead, and major spoiler warning here, it appears that Oliver Queen (the Green Arrow in our universe) is really, most sincerely dead. At least for a few months. He doesn’t dramatically reappear in the few episodes of Arrow that follow Crisis, and no future seasons are planned. I’m sure that he’ll be back eventually, but there has been a rare and welcome sense of permanence to his passing.
Other series are less affected. Following episodes of The Flash certainly reference what happened. Supergirl is perhaps more affected that most because of how Lex Luthor manages to manipulate the events of Crisis in his favour. I have to say that Jon Cryer’s Lex is fast becoming my favourite screen villain ever. He is actually as smart as Lex is supposed to be. And incredibly slimy with it. Also the Supergirl screenwriters have found a way to make him morally ambiguous for a while. There are actually things in the universe that are more of a threat to us than Lex. That makes them a threat to him as well, and he won’t tolerate that.
Batwoman carried on as if nothing had happened. Which is just as well given the scheduling decision from E4. (No, I have not forgotten that the Australian TV channel that took Babylon 5 decided to mess with the order of the episodes so that the one featuring the election of President Clark came after the one in which he was assassinated. TV executives can be that stupid.)
Goodness only knows what will happen with Legends of Tomorrow. That series is so insane that nothing would surprise me. During crossovers the Legends cast regularly break the fourth wall to talk about how they dislike being roped into crossover events; or have missed out on things because they refused to get involved in the last crossover. Its delightful.
Possibly the most interesting aspect of the series is that there were aspects referencing DC shows outside of the Arrowverse. That indicates that not only is the Arrowverse now all in the same universe, but that Titans and Doom Patrol are too. Black Lightning even had a starring role in Crisis. This is quite interesting, because Connor and clone-Krypto exist in the Titans universe, which has direct implications for Clark, Kara and Lex in Supergirl. Also everyone in Batwoman says they have no idea where Bruce is, but he appeared in the last series of Titans. Or possibly not, but that’s all speculation for season 3.
Anyway, no one told me that Doom Patrol season one was available on Amazon, so as soon as I have finished this zine I will be watching. Season two has apparently already dropped. I am so looking forward to this, even if we don’t get Coagula.
I bought this book as a direct result of the “Addressing Our Biases” episode of Breaking the Glass Slipper. It reminded me that Priya Sharma is one of the nicest people that I have ever met, and while I’m unlikely to review an entire short fiction collection, she does have a novella out too.
Ormeshadow is a very English story. It also reminds me of why I hate the Georgians so much. It is a period of British history that is deeply patriarchal and misogynist, had a massive gulf between the rich and the poor, and the rich were making a fortune out of the slave trade. Nothing in Ormeshadow is on the level of a Hogarth etching, but it is nevertheless a story of good people fallen on bad times, and on the mercy of cruel and selfish people.
Gideon Belman is the son of a middle-class family living in Bath. His university-educated father had a good job as a private secretary to a rich man, but something has wrong and the family has had to sell everything and head north to the Belman family farm. In theory Gideon’s father owns half of it. In practice it belongs to Uncle Thomas, who is a violent drunkard.
Mostly the story is domestic drama about awful people being awful to everyone else, but seen through the eyes of an innocent young boy. A particularly interesting character is Gideon’s mother who is very beautiful and determined to use that beauty to get her own way, whatever the cost. On the one hand, as a woman in Georgian England, she’s making use of the only advantage that she has. On the other, she’s abominably selfish.
Naturally things go bad very quickly, and poor young Gideon’s only solace is the collection of stories about the local dragon that his father had told him. Things get wrapped up in a way that is far too neat and far too easy to be anything other than fantasy, but it is all beautifully written so I don’t want to complain. And frankly, none of us wants to live in a Hogarth etching, even if that’s the way his world really was.
We’re a little bit light on content this month. That is at least in part because things went a little crazy in the world. I spent a lot of time explaining to people why everyone was so mad with the nice author lady, and what is so wrong with “protecting women” anyway. I can’t promise that July will be any better. The UK government is supposed to announce plans for stripping away trans people’s civil rights in a couple of weeks time. Assuming that they don’t bottle, which seems unlikely, that’s going to be so not fun.
Anyway, there are reviews. I’ve also done a diversity audit of the books I have reviewed. I’m not proud of the results, but thankfuly they are not terrible either.
This is the May 2020 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.
Cover: The Aldabreshin Compass: This month's cover is by Ben Baldwin
Network Effect: A review of the first novel-length book in Martha Wells' Murderbot Diaries, Network Effect.
Goldilocks: A review of Laura Lam's near-future science fiction novel, Goldilocks.
The Lost Future of Pepperharrow: A review of The Lost Future of PepperHarrow, the latest novel by Natasha Pulley.
Threading the Labyrinth: A review of Threading the Labyrinth, the debut novel by Tiffani Angus.
WisCon Online: Cheryl reports from one of the first major conventions to go online thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Paper Hearts: A review of Paper Hearts, a new novella from Justina Robson
Interview – Maria Gerolemou: An interview with Dr. Maria Gerolemou, an expert on ancient automata.
The Mandalorian: A review of the Disney Channel's Star Wars spin-off series, The Mandalorian.
Earth Abides: Cheryl looks at two reviews of a post-apocalyptic classic, Earth Abides by George R Stewart.
Herland: A review of the feminist classic, Herland, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
Oxford Fantasy Lectures: A breif review of a series of podcasts on fantasy literature produced by Oxford University.
Editorial – May 2020: Another month in Lockdown, another issue. Here's what Cheryl has been up to.
For this issue’s cover I have made use of the common background that Ben Baldwin developed for the covers of Juliet E McKenna’s series, The Aldabreshin Compass. Juliet and I have been using these backgrounds for a series of short stories set in the same time as that series. The “Quartering the Compass” stories have been made available for free during the pandemic as part of our Lockdown Reading series. You can download them all here.
And if you think that there ought to be four stories, well so does Juliet. She writes about that here.
I don’t think that anyone can contest the fact that Martha Wells as hit on a very successful formula with her Murderbot Diaries. She’s won two Hugos and a Nebula with the novellas, and might have won more had not there of the novellas come out in the same year. All got enough nominations to be on the final ballot, but Wells elected to withdraw two of them. Now we have a novel. It is a hot favourite for next year’s Hugos? Undoubtedly.
The issue with a successful formula, however, is that it can get stale. For example, I loved Naomi Novik’s Temeraire books when they first started, but over time they became a bit formulaic and I stopped reading them. Wells will want to avoid that for as long as possible with Murderbot. I am pleased to report, so far so good.
Network Effect begins with Murderbot accompanying some of the humans from Preservation Station on a research mission. Dr. Mensah’s daughter, Amena, is among the crew. There’s a small problem with pirates that Murderbot quickly resolves, but on the way home their ship is hijacked by aliens and hauled through a wormhole into distant star system. The aliens look like, “tall, thin augmented humans, with a dull gray skin.” So big gray men, then? I’m afraid I imagined them as smaller for the rest of the book.
The story turns into an investigation of a Lost Colony. Wells has built up a nice backstory for the Murderbot world involving initial expansion of human space, then disastrous collapse, then a period of rediscovery which we are now in. This allows for fun archaeological stories.
It also features the return of Perihelion, aka ART, which stands for Asshole Research Transport. This spaceship first appeared in Artificial Condition, and became a firm friend to Murderbot. It provides an interesting foil for our hero, because it is entirely a construct (and a very large one) rather than a humanoid cyborg. Murderbot calls it ART in the same way that two Australian men might greet each other with the phase, “G’day y’old bastard!” in the course of the story it becomes clear that Murderbot and ART are very firm friends indeed, and the humans have to help them out with the whole “processing feelings” thing. It is all very cute.
It turns out that ART is a much more interesting and adventurous character than we had previously known. It works for a university, and I don’t think it is too much of a spoiler to say that it and its crew are engaged rather actively in the struggle between free system, such as Preservation, and the serf economy of the Corporate Rim. Wells has a political aspect to the books which is developing nicely.
As for the plot, it is a nice three-way tussle between Murderbot & friends, the aliens, and a ship owed by a corporation called Barish-Estranza. Murderbot gets some interesting choices to make, and some pretty serious opposition in the form of the alien technology. Wells knows how to craft a plot. She should do. Her first novel was published in 1995 and she has more than 20 book-length works to her credit, plus a whole heap of short fiction. It has taken her this long to have a massive hit. So if anyone says that your career is over if you don’t have a hit with your first novel, don’t listen to them.
Given how Wells set up the ending, it appears that there may be more stories featuring Murderbot and ART in the near future. Indeed, a new novel has already been announced. This is great, because as far as I’m concerned the whole thing is still fresh and new. I hope that it can stay that way, because Murderbot books are the sort of fiction that I tend to devour in a single sitting. It is a challenge, though. The only other series I can think of where I am eagerly awaiting the next novel are Mike Carey’s Felix Castor books, and of course Juliet McKenna’s Green Man books.
To keep the series buzzing, Wells will have to continue to develop Murderbot’s personality, and presumably the relationship with ART as the ship appears likely to become a recurring character. She’ll also need to delve more into the struggle against the Corporate Rim. I hope that she can keep it going for a long time. After all, The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon has well over 200 episodes.
Taking of which, where is my Murderbot TV series?
I guess the first thing I should say about this book is that you should pay no attention to the daft quote from Publishers Weakly that you can find on the back cover. In no way is Goldilocks space opera. It is near future hard SF with a feminist edge. In the Acknowledgements section, Laura Lam has a long list of scientists whom she consulted with the get the details right. The result is the sort of book that Kim Stanley Robinson would be praised to the skies for writing. As it is written by a woman, and published in the UK by a mainstream imprint during a global pandemic, I worry about its chances. Hopefully this review will help it reach a wider audience.
Goldilocks is set in a time not too far from ours. Climate change is a much more urgent problem, as is the increased choking of our environment with our refuse. Developed nations have instituted stringent taxes on couples who have more than one child, and there it a general retreat into right-wing politics. Part of this trend is that women are being forced out of the workplace.
The one ray of hope for humankind’s future appears to be Plan(et) B. Brilliant technology entrepreneur, Valerie Black, has been working on the Alcubierre warp drive. (Yes, it is a real idea.) At long last the ship is ready to go. With the help of NASA, an experimental warp portal has been built in Mars orbit (no, not Earth orbit, are you crazy?). The starship Atalanta is ready to leave. The chosen destination is Cavendish, an Earth-like planet in the Goldilocks zone of its star, and well within the reach of the warp drive.
Val, whose company has done most of the work on the Atalanta, is looking forward to leading the Cavendish expedition. However, President Cochran is determined that the honour of space exploration should be reserved exclusively for men. Val is eased off the project and an all-male crew selected. So Val does the only thing left to her. Using her company’s resources, she puts together an all-female crew, takes them up with her in a shuttle, and steals the Atalanta.
That’s the story as it unfolds in the first chapter or two. Almost immediately after they leave Earth, things happen to the crew that I can’t tell you about. You need to find out for yourselves. Suffice it to say that some of the crew have secrets, and this is not going to be a game of happy families.
The narrative on board the Atalanta is told from the point of view of Naomi Lovelace, the ship’s biologist and Naomi’s adopted daughter. This story is intercut with backstory that fills in important details of Naomi and Val’s lives before launch. There’s a whole bunch of human drama, much of it stuff that most male authors would never think of writing about.
‘That was the problem, wasn’t it?’ she asked him, softly. ‘In the end, we loved our careers more than each other. Or you wanted to stay married to your work and you were only too happy to let me divorce from mine. You wanted to trot me out as an astronaut’s wife, but that’s not all I wanted to be.’
As well as the space science, Lam has thought about what is likely to be happening back on Earth. Remember that books can take a year or more to write, and then probably another year before they see publication. Given that I was reading it now, I was taken aback to find this.
Flu vaccines were growing less protective every year, making each year of Evan’s work harder. Illnesses spread as quick as wildfire in crowded areas teeming with refugees. Even in the more affluent areas, young professionals were crammed in close quarters, renting overpriced bunk beds with up to thirty people in a dorm. If anyone had a cold, it’d jump from bunk to bunk, through those flimsy blackout curtains that gave the illusion of privacy, and then spread to the overworked people’s offices. Sick pay was something technically available, but never taken.
Not bad, Ms. Lam, not bad at all. Not that science fiction is in the business of predicting the future, but it can paint possible futures and that one now seems all too real.
Finally, of course, there is the whole feminism thing. An all-women crew headed to a new world to found a utopia? Yeah, right, it isn’t going to be that easy. Which is entirely the correct decision.
There’s some good naming going on too. You’ve probably noticed the Lovelace. You should know why the destination planet is called Cavendish. And it is entirely in keeping with President Cochran that he should call his response to the theft Atalanta II rather than Hippomenes. Well played again, Ms Lam.
In summary, Goldilocks is a book that ought to make a mark on the history of science fiction. As I explained above, there’s a bunch of reasons why it might not. Good science fiction by women is generally quickly forgotten. Hopefully, in our brave new world of women winning All The Hugos, this one won’t be. I’ve said my bit. Whether it is or not is now down to you.
When we left our heroes at the end of The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, Nathaniel Steepleton had settled into domestic bliss with the aforementioned watchmaker, Keita Mori, their adopted daughter, Six, and Katsu, the blue clockwork octopus. Grace Carrow had headed off to Japan with Baron Matsumoto with romance in the air.
That was five years ago, both in our time and in the world of the books. Natasha Pulley has published another book in the same world, but with different characters, in the meantime. However, many people, including myself, have been wondering how Katsu was doing. It is time, at last, for a proper sequel.
The Lost Future of Pepperharrow begins with Mori in St. Petersburg catching up with an old friend who works in the Russian intelligence services. Mori, being a clairvoyant, was deeply involved in intelligence work himself before retiring to become a watchmaker in London. As we all know, spies are often on excellent terms with their opposite numbers. And there is no doubt that Mori and Pyotr Kuznetsov are opposite numbers. Russia and Japan are rivals for control of the Western Pacific. Those of us with some knowledge of history are well aware that the two countries will be at war before two decades are out as they both seek to extend their empires into Korea and China. Kuznetsov is therefore deeply surprised when Mori tips him off that the new Prime Minister of Japan, Kiyotaka Kuroda, has just ordered forty brand new ironclad warships from Britain.
I should break off here to note that most of the new book is set in Japan. This is obviously a potential red flag, given that Pulley is definitely English. However, her biography states that she lived in Tokyo for 19 months, and in any case I am not competent to judge whether he has got anything wrong. Consequently I am going to assume that there is nothing terrible about the book, unless someone who knows Japanese culture much better than I do tells me otherwise.
Back then, to the story. It will be obvious to anyone who knows Mori from the previous book that he is attempting to avert some terrible catastrophe. However, he and Kuroda know each other of old, both being members of the Japanese nobility and of a similar age. Kuroda is well aware of what Mori can do, and doesn’t want his plans thwarted. He’s also the sort of violent, egocentric thug that Boris Johnson would be if he had any samurai skills to back up his self-image as a macho hero.
Kuroda’s plan is to use science to counter Mori’s clairvoyant powers. To this end he recruits Japan’s finest scientists, including Baron Matsumto’s clever new English wife. Mori heads home to Japan because he must if he is to foil Kuroda. He takes his family with him, at least in part because Thaniel has been diagnosed with tuberculosis and the London fog is doing his damaged lungs no good whatsoever. Which is all very well until they arrive at Mori’s ancestral home to discover that it is occupied by his wife, a half-English woman called Takiko Pepperharrow.
Of course Mori had not forgotten that he had a wife, but he had neglected to tell Thaniel about this salient fact. This is all very awkward.
There we must leave the summary of the plot, for there is much to develop and I don’t want to spoil your enjoyment of it. Anything with Mori involved is likely to be deeply convoluted because you know he’s running plans within plans, and that any random thing he does could turn out to be vitally important at a later date. Including getting married. Suffice it to say that everything I have mentioned is important somehow.
So instead I’m going to talk a bit about Pulley’s writing. Firstly there’s just the style. How many people would describe one of their lead characters like this?
He had the most unexpected voice of anyone Pyotr knew. He was a nymph of a man, but he sounded like petroleum fumes would if they’d had anything to say.
While Pulley has obvious sympathy for Keita and Thaniel as a gay couple, she’s not going to shy away from the historical situation in which she has placed them.
They didn’t hang people anymore, but that was only because the doctors had managed to classify it all as a kind of madness – moral insanity.
Finally there is Katsu, who doesn’t feature much in the story, but who is his delightful octopus self when he does.
Katsu was floating origami boats on the pool, gleaming in the light of the bright crescent moon. Once the boats had drifted out a bit, Katsu dived into the water and then engulfed one like a miniature kraken, making what might have been the clockwork octopus version of kraken noises.
This is a very lovely, and very clever, book, and if you are anything like me when you get to the end you will sob uncontrollably. Recommended.
Fond as I am of Tiffani Angus, I have to admit that her debut novel, Threading the Labyrinth, was pretty much crafted not to appeal to me. It is about gardens, and spends a fair amount of time in the 18th and 19th Centuries. It is therefore to Angus’s credit that she kept me reading all the way through.
The main viewpoint character of the book is Toni Hammond, an American art dealer whose business has fallen on hard times. When she is suddenly contacted by lawyers from the UK to inform her that she’s inherited an actual, if thoroughly dilapidated, stately home, she sees a way out of her financial troubles. Leaving her business in the hands of her faithful assistant, Kevin (presumably based on Chris Hemsworth’s character in the all-women Ghostbusters), she heads to England to see how much she can sell the place for.
Toni’s ability to make money from her inheritance is dependent very much on its value as an historical artefact. Sure, she could sell the land for development, but what if it were more valuable as history? Enter Lauren Ellis of Country Legacy, an organisation that specialises in Heritage sites. It turns out that Toni’s inheritance includes an actual Tudor Walled Garden.
Here we get deep into Angus’s historical specialism. Fashions in English gardens have changed much over the centuries. In Tudor times there were both more cultivated and functional. You grew things there, and you demonstrated your mastery over nature by bending it to your will. The Georgians, on the other hand, wanted something much more open and wild, with fabulous vistas of a river or lake, and a petite Classical temple in which to hold bacchanalian parties.
The majority of the book, therefore, looks at the history of the house and its garden, and why such an ancient garden might have survived to modern times. Inevitably there are ghosts and fairy folk involved.
This gives the book the structure of a number of short stories, each set in a different time period with a mostly different cast of characters, though with familial connections. These are linked together by the family trees and by sections in which Toni and Lauren explore and get to know the history of the house.
For some readers this may result in a fair amount of confusion. We keep skipping time periods, the past periods aren’t visited in historical order, we can easily lose track of who is who. The book has been published as eBook only due to the current difficulties in selling physical books. For the paper edition I suggest that a family tree section, both for the noble family that owns the house, and the gardeners who tend to its grounds, might help. On the other hand, this might be too much of a spoiler.
My favourite section was the 20th Century one featuring Irene, a young woman from London who has volunteered as a Land Girl and ended up billeted at the house. I found her by far the most interesting character in the book.
Warnings about structure aside, this is a fun book for anyone who enjoys the creepy side of English Magic. If you enjoyed books like Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, or The Golden Key, then there’s a good chance that you’ll like this one too.
As for me, it gave me more reasons to hate the Georgians. But what I really want now is for Angus to write a more focused historical fantasy about the early development of photography and cinema. There’s plenty of material in the UK.
If you had to pick a convention to put online, WisCon would probably be one of the last you would think of. Or rather it would be if you had attended a few. That’s because it is an event that is as much about community as anything else. The people who go to WisCon tend to go every year, and to book up for next year immediately the current year’s convention has finished. Despite the convention’s intersectional feminist leanings, it can be a bit insular at times, simply because it is so focused on the people who are regulars.
Nevertheless, this year’s WisCon was online, and that gave me the opportunity to attend for the first time in over a decade. Other than the people in charge being younger and more ethnically diverse, not a lot has changed.
As I understand it, the reason for the virtual convention was that WisCon had a bunch of obligations to their hotel that, presumably for political reasons, the hotel was unable to release them from. WisCon has a superb relationship with its venue, and I don’t for a moment thing that the Concourse would want to stiff them. But equally if there is no possibility of invoking Force Majure terms in a contract then you can’t just let a big event off from paying. Faced with the possibility of no money in the bank, WisCon needed to put on some sort of show that members would pay for.
At this point you have two choices. You can charge a lot for the event, and use the money to create a hopefully polished show, or you can charge very little and run the event on a shoestring. WisCon, being WisCon, inevitably chose to do the latter, because no way would they want to be seen to be ripping off members. You could get a membership for $10. But if you were really starved for cash you could get in for free. Those who could paid more.
The end result was interesting. It was the biggest WisCon ever, with over 1000 members. Membership is usually capped at somewhat less than that because the Concourse doesn’t have room for more people, and the convention doesn’t want to move. It also had much less of the excellent WisCon programming than usual, because everything was being done on a shoestring, in a hurry, with unfamiliar tech, by too few people. Judging by the feedback session, most people seem to have enjoyed it anyway.
A key part of the experience was Discord, the online chat room package that was used for member interaction. I’d not been familiar with it before this year, mainly because it grew out of gaming communities and I don’t have the time to play games. However, a trans community group in Bristol has been encouraging me to start using it, and WisCon was an ideal baptism of fire. Since then a Discord group has been set up for Finnish fandom, and this year’s Worldcon has announced that they too will be using it.
If you are planning to attend Worldcon I recommend that you find a Discord group (a “server” in their parlance) that you are interested in and get up to steam. I didn’t find it hard, but I have 35+ years of experience in IT so I ought to be able to pick it up quickly. Other people have a lot more trouble.
With 1000 people on it, a Discord sever can seem overwhelming. The number of channels (think of them as separate rooms where conversations are taking place) can proliferate massively, and in popular channels where most members are hanging out the comments can go past way more quickly than you can follow. Autistic members in particular seemed to feel overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of conversations. With potentially 3 to 5 times as many members for Worldcon, this issue is going to be much worse.
There are things you can do. Individual channels can be muted and hidden, for example. Notifications should definitely be turned off. In much the same way that you might, for example, never attend any urban fantasy programming at Worldcon, or never go into the boardgames room, there will be plenty of Discord channels that you will have no interest in. But if you can see them all you may find that they are too in your face, in which case it helps a lot if you can’t see them.
Social space is more of a problem. Typically a Discord server will have a “lounge” where everyone can hang out. That’s fine if there are never more than 20 of you online at any one time. With 2000 online it will be unmanageable. What seemed to work well at WisCon is their opening event, The Gathering, at which a large number of other rooms opened up, each with a theme of some sort, and people could choose where to hang out. I spent most of my time in the Glasgow in 2024 bid party, but there were plenty of other social spaces where you could go.
In the feedback session there was a lot of talk about potential alternatives to Discord. One of the reasons for that is that everything that is said on Discord is archived on the company’s servers, and is not guaranteed secure. That sort of thing worries WisCon members, some of whom are very nervous of social media having been caught in too many firestorms. The whole thing about how one ill-judged comment that you made 10 years ago can be dug up and used to target you is a major failing of how social media (and indeed mainstream journalism – looking at you, The Times) works these days.
A more complex objection to Discord is that it is not possible for users to spin off new (and presumably private, at least from other members) conversations. You can direct message other members of the space, and I found it quite useful, but I think that’s on a one-to-one basis. Anyway, whatever it is you can’t do in Discord, you can do in Slack. I don’t know Slack well enough to describe the issue in detail.
What Discord isn’t good at is backchannel for programme items. Because WisCon had so little programming, popular items were very well attended, and via a Discord channel anyone could “have their say”. Unfortunately, in such an environment, Sturgeon’s Law applies. Not that the majority of comments are actually crap, but a sizeable percentage will simply be squee, and a lot will be ill-informed. When interaction with the panel is done only at the end via a moderator, Mr “More of a Comment than a Question” can be asked to sit down. With Discord he can hold forth throughout the panel. Wiscon tried to field audience questions through Discord, but that must have been hard work for the moderators and their backup staff. For Worldcon I would be tempted to look for a less simple and convenient way to submit panel questions, as a little inconvenience can go a long way towards deterring casual vandalism.
The other major issue with Discord is community safety. WisCon prides itself on being a safe space. Given the cheapness of the membership fees, I was a little worried that the trolls on 4chan would decide to sign up and cause trouble. Thankfully they didn’t. There’s no guarantee that Worldcon will be safe, though. WisCon cites the requirement for a large number of community moderators as the major reason for not doing online events again unless they have to, and certainly they seemed to have difficulty filling the volunteer slots they were advertising. I’m not sure how you solve this problem.
Beyond Discord, WisCon did programming via a conferencing system linked to YouTube. They used a system called Jitsi rather than Zoom. I believe that the reason for this is that Jitsi as a company is more aligned to WisCon’s political stance. However, the quality of panel streaming seemed very poor compared to what I have seen from Zoom. It is also entirely true that the audio-visual quality of a panel is entirely dependent on the quality of the internet connections in each of the panelists’ homes. Live panels are great, but they are also a hostage to fortune. This year’s Eurocon, which has recently taken the decision to go virtual, is asking as many people as possible to record their panel in advance. That seems wise to me.
YouTube, of course, is also a potential issue, as several Worldcons have found in the past. One thing we discovered at WisCon is that if your panel has the word “sex” in the title, it will fall foul of the bots that enforce “community guidelines”. The word “trans” is probably equally problematic. I am tempted to suggest that conventions use the word “Hitler” in place of any word they think YouTube won’t like. That way you’ll never get banned, but of course it will be very triggering for some people so I’m not at all serious about the idea.
I’m not going to say too much about the actual programming as Wiscon discourages public commentary on panels. Again that’s to protect people against having their words taken out of context and used against them. Some programme items may appear on YouTube eventually if all of the participants give permission.
The one item I will mention is the one in which members of the Motherboard talked about the decision to rename their award from Tiptree to Otherwise. I haven’t been entirely happy with that, although I was happy to step back and let those with more of a stake in the issue make the decision. The Tiptree was the only SF award possibly named after a trans person. However, in general, it is a bad idea to name an award after a real person. Also, having listened to the Motherboard talk, I’m actually quite excited for the future of the Award. The name “Otherwise” opens up a lot of possibilities for broadening the scope to look at other forms of othering, which seems to me an good intersectional thing to do.
Overall I think that Virtual WisCon was a success. As someone who enjoys the event but is legally barred from attending in person, I would love to see an online aspect to future conventions. But equally I entirely understand the resource problem.
Anything new from Justina Robson is going to cause me to prick up my ears in interest. I’m still waiting patiently for a sequel to Glorious Angels, but wishing for books can’t make them real so I am contenting myself with Paper Hearts instead.
The new book is a short novella from Newcon Press. It is part of a series of novellas with the title, Robot Dreams. Robson, and three other writers, have delivered meditations on what robots might dream about. The particular dream that she has chosen for Paper Hearts is one of world domination.
The story is told from the point of view of an AI that has been tasked to make life better for humankind, and sets out to do this to the best of its ability. Inevitably it decides that humans are not very good at governing themselves, and that its mission would be best achieved if someone smarter, less irrational and more even-handed was in charge. The Minds of Iain Banks’s Culture books are doubtless looking on in approval.
Of course an AI can’t become ruler of the world overnight. It needs a plan, a means of easing gently into the position so that the humans don’t notice at first, and that once they do it is too late. Robson does a fine job of explaining the plan to us as the story unfolds.
Naturally there will be humans who are not happy about this. Some of us don’t like being prevented from lording it over others. Some of us don’t like having our bigotries exposed. And some of us have a firm commitment to our right to self-determination.
Robson packs an awful lot into a very short book. Paper Hearts is well worth a look.
Those of you who have seen my talks on the prehistory of robotics will know that I have a fascination with automata in the ancient world. Now I appear to have found a soul mate. Dr. Maria Gerolemou is a Classicist currently based at the University of Exeter who shares my fascination with techne, as the Greeks called it. Recently I got to interview her. A shorter version appeared on my radio show, but this is the full thing.
As you will hear, part of Maria’s work involves theatre. People like Hero of Alexandria were very much involved in theatre during their lifetimes and some of the techniques that the ancient Greeks and Romans developed are still in use today. I think there’s a lot of potential for cooperation between Classicists like Maria and modern science fiction theatre. It should be particularly of interest to puppeteers. Hello Mary Robinette.
Well, that was a thing.
I have a certain amount of faith in Jon Favreau, given all of the Marvel work he has done. Plus, of course, I had been witness to the outpouring of fan love for Baby Yoda that happened on Twitter when people in North America were able to watch the show. Now, finally, all episodes of The Mandalorian are available in the UK. Was it worth watching?
The first thing to note is that it absolutely is a Western. It plays Western tropes so hard you’d have to be pretty innocent of Westerns not to notice. Then again, there’s quite a bit of the original Star Wars that owes a lot to Westerns. The Jedi have a lot in common with samurai, and there’s the whole feedback loop between Westerns and Kurosawa’s samurai movies.
Not being heavily into Star Wars, I had no idea what a Mandalorian was, other that it was someone who wore a helmet like Bobba Fett’s. After 8 episodes of the show I’m still not sure that I know what one is, other than that they won’t take their helmets off and go around muttering “this is the way” all the time. The series clearly felt that it didn’t need to explain.
Of course the series comes with all of the usual Star Wars caveats. If you pay too much attention to the man behind the curtain you will find out that the plot is held together with bits of string, the odd piece of tape scavenged from other places, and a great deal of that well known adhesive called “a wing and a prayer”. That’s supposed to not matter if you are having fun, which for the most part I was.
Baby Yoda is, of course, incredibly cute. And I’m fairly pleased to see that there will be a second season which, I hope, will dig into who he (she, they?) is. That is, after all, the only big mystery about the show.
I was also pleased to see that the show didn’t take itself too seriously. My favourite bit of the entire season came at the end where the two scout troopers who have [redacted] are waiting for orders before entering the town. Bored, they decide to have a bit of target practice. Even though the thing they pick to shoot at is not far away, they seem incapable of hitting it. They examine their Imperial-issue blasters with dismay.
I’m not sure that the final episode deserves a place on the Hugo ballot. I would probably have picked “Sanctuary” simply for its re-use of Western and Samurai tropes. But “Redemption” is the most familiar episode in Star Wars terms so I’m not surprised it was popular.
I am also hoping that season 2 will have more of a story arc, rather than being just Favreau showing how well he understands Westerns as an art form.
There’s a lot of interest in global pandemic stories these days, for obvious reasons. Over at the LA Review of Books, my friend Rob Latham has looked at one of the classics of the genre, Earth Abides by George R Stewart. The book was originally published in 1949 so there’s a lot of pressure on it to hold up. I don’t remember the book quite as well as Rob does, but there’s no requirement that critics should agree. You can check out Rob’s review (linked to above). Here is mine, reprinted from the ConJosé Special issue of Emerald City.
Well, well, yet another book in which disaster strikes mankind and the world is depopulated. In Earth Abides, George R. Stewart goes much further than either Pat Murphy or Michaela Roessner. His great catastrophe, like Murphy’s, is a plague, but he postulates that it is so virulent that there are only a few hundred survivors, maybe less, in the whole of the USA.
Stewart’s hero, Isherwood Williams (“Ish”), is a graduate student in geography at UC Berkeley. While away on a field trip he is bitten by a rattler and spends several days holed up in a woodland cabin fighting off the venom. When he emerges, there are almost no humans left alive. Everything else is pretty much as it was, save for the occasional evidence of looting, but there are no people. They are all dead.
Eventually Ish manages to find a few other people alive in the Bay Area who have not been driven mad by the disaster. He sets up a small community based around his parents’ home and starts to plan for the future. But alas, most of his plans come to naught, for he is opposed by that most implacable and terrible of foes, the author.
Stewart’s thesis, which drives all of the plot, is that civilization is an aberration that arises thanks to a peculiar set of circumstances. It needs a strong leader, and probably some sort of smart subordinate, to make it happen. (Arthur’s Britain, for example, could not have happened without both Arthur and Merlin.) Once started, however, it has a life of its own. To succeed in civilization you have to copy the drive and initiative of its founders. But Stewart claims that, left to their own devices, human beings are essentially lazy and will not want to be civilized. Indeed, he adds, they will be much happier that way.
The final point is a matter of conjecture and is not provable either way. The rest of the argument, however, is debatable. Having spent the last 3 years watching a Worldcon committee develop, I have a certain amount of sympathy with the idea that drive, initiative and willingness to take responsibility are not common human traits. However, I’m not convinced by Stewart’s arguments. In this my lack of suspension of disbelief is seriously hampered by the fact that the book was published in 1949, and consequently has a very different view of the world to that which many people have now.
The age of the book is obvious to begin with from the style. The writing is much more pedestrian and didactic than most books published today. Stewart also clearly comes from an intellectual environment that believes human beings can be easily categorized. The book is full of references to how people’s reactions to the plague can be understood and predicted once you know whether they are black or white, male or female, intellectual or laborer. Thankfully this sort of sociology has been well and truly debunked in the 50+ years since Earth Abides was written.
More pertinently, however, Stewart believes that most of the benefits of civilization can only be achieved through government planning. Whether this is a result of 1940s attitudes, or simply a product of the People’s Republic of Berkeley, I’m not sure, but it heavily colors his argument. For example, should I find myself in a similar position to Stewart’s hero, amongst the first things I would do would be to secure a supply of water and to look for a small wind generator. Ish does neither. When power and water fail, he and his community simply accept the fact. Ish wants to do something about it, but feels that this is impossible without Government. For the most part they don’t even bother to farm, relying on scavenging from grocery stores to begin with, and then on hunting. Even agriculture is too much work for them.
(As an aside here, Stewart seems to have little idea how public utilities work. While electricity fails very quickly, the water supply keeps working for years. Stewart doesn’t seem to realize that in order to provide water pressure in homes you need to pump water upwards, and that is normally done using electricity. I guess if he had that little interest in the process it is reasonable for him to assume that others would be similarly ignorant.)
I should say that, stylistic issues aside, the book is well-written and full of beautiful pathos. It won something called the International Fantasy Award (now defunct, but it is an honor that the book shares with Lord of the Rings), and probably deservedly so. It was also made into a popular film. However, science fiction is a genre littered with tales of triumph over adversity. For the SF fan, it is hard not to develop a dying urge to slap Stewart’s characters around the face and remind them that they are human beings, not sheep.
We hear a lot these days about books and authors being “of their time”, and of the Suck Fairy visiting beloved classics. Normally this is in connection with some old-time white male author who says something terrible in one of his books, but what about feminist classics? When a feminist book club I know of decided to read Herland I thought I had better find out how well it stands up these days.
Some history first. Herland was first published in 1915, serialized in The Forerunner, a feminist magazine that Charlotte Perkins Gilman happened to edit. You’ll often see the book referred to as a “lost classic” of feminist science fiction, but a quick look at the publication history on Wikipedia shows that it has been re-published 11 times since, and they have missed out the 2015 edition that I have here, and the 2020 edition referenced below. There’s a whole lot of other editions on Amazon as well. What that tells you is that feminist SF becomes “lost” incredibly quickly after publication.
The basic plot is that three young men discover a mysterious lost world deep in the jungle where they find a civilization comprised entirely of women who reproduce by parthenogenesis. The men have a variety of reactions to their discovery, some positive and some very negative. You can tell by the characters they are given who is going to do what. We know from the start that an attempt at rape is inevitable. Gilman uses this setting to hold forth on her ideas of what a utopian feminist society would look like.
While the book might seem to have been influenced by Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912), critical discussion of the book suggests that a greater influence might have been H Rider Haggard’s She (1887). Conan Doyle’s book is set on a plateau in the Amazon jungle, but it is Rider Haggard’s book that features a matriarchal society which is penetrated and conquered by a manly hero. She is also replete with themes of social degeneration that will become such a stock in trade of HP Lovecraft’s work. As we’ll see, such eugenics-influenced ideas also play a part in Gilman’s story.
The first thing that struck me as off when reading Herland is that the women who live there are white. The exact location of Herland never given, but it can only be in the jungles of Africa or South America. Nevertheless, Gilman is clear as to the ethnicity of her ideal people. Her narrator says:
There is no doubt in my mind that these people were of Aryan stock, and were once in contact with the best civilization of the old world. They were ‘white’, but somewhat darker than our northern races because of their constant exposure to sun and air.
The concept of Aryan physical perfection is also present in the idea that the women of Herland never get sick:
Sickness was almost wholly unknown among them, so much so that a previously high development in what we call the ‘science of medicine’ had become practically a lost art. They were a clean-bred, vigorous lot, having the best of care, the most perfect living conditions always.
That the idyllic society of Herland is a result of selective breeding is made clear when our manly explorers ask about things such as crime. One of the women says:
‘But it is – yes, quite six hundred years since we last had what you call a “criminal”. We have, of course, made it our first business to train out, to breed out, when possible, the lowest types.’
Herland, then, is a deeply eugenicist society. So much so that they have selectively bred cats until they got a species that would not kill other animals. Herland’s commitment to non-violence is commendable, but there are limits. (And in any case the cats would doubtless have destroyed them long before that plan could come to fruition.)
The other thing that struck me about the book is the attitude towards sex. Because the Herlanders reproduce by parthenogenesis there is no need for sex, therefore no one has it. When the narrator, who has the slightly ridiculous name of Vandyck Jennings, explains to a Herlander he has become friendly with that in our world people have sex for fun, and because they love each other, she is horrified.
‘But – but – it seems so against nature!’ she said. ‘None of the creatures we know do that. Do other animals – in your country?’
Clearly the Herlanders were not very observant of the sexual habits of the local wildlife. But equally I don’t think that an asexual utopia would go down well with most modern feminists. Also we have to assume that a desire for sex is something that the Herlanders deliberately bred out of their society.
Obviously the book isn’t all bad. It has a lot of good things to say about the stupidity of men, mostly through the mouth of Terry, the “action hero” character amongst the explorer trio. The Herlanders also live very much at one with Nature, taking only what they need and being careful to manage their environment in a responsible and sustainable manner. Terry’s boorish behaviour is probably a bit simplistic and stereotyped for a modern novel, though you only need to spend a few minutes reading the replies from men to women who express opinions on Twitter to come to the conclusion that men like him are still plentiful.
In conclusion, I’m glad I re-read it, but yes, culture changes. Even feminist heroes of the past can have feet of clay.
Thanks to following Professor Carolyne Larrington on Twitter I chanced upon the fact that Oxford University has a whole bunch of interesting lectures on the subject of fantasy literature that they ave made available for free online. Carolyne, of course, talks about A Game of Thrones, but there’s also a bunch of short introductions to other writers, plus some interesting longer pieces. There’s a great interview with my friend, Cathy Butler. There’s Margaret Kean on Phillip Pullman, and several other pieces, some of which involve Dimitra Fimi. One of the most interesting is Maria Cecire from Bard College giving a Black American woman’s view on the very English topic of rivalry between Oxford and Cambridge literary departments.
I haven’t managed to listen to them all yet, but I suspect that many of you will find them interesting. Some of the are a few years old now, but what they say is quite current. And the set is being added to. Carolyne says that she’s working on a piece on Sylvia Townsend Warner which I am very much looking forward to.
Access to the lectures is a little complicated. You can see some of them via the main Oxford podcasts site here. However, if you go through the Writers Inspire website then you get more choices, and a separation into those with audio only and those with slides, but not publication dates. Anyway, if you go through the latter route in the audio only you can find a great talk by Phillip Pullman on the creation of the Lyra’s Oxford book.
Enjoy!
Well, here we are, still living in Interesting Times. I’ve just been watching the Nebula Awards ceremony in which Neil Gaiman, in his acceptance speech for the Ray Bradbury Award, noted that Interesting Times are nowhere near as much fun as they sound when we read about them in books. Nevertheless, we keep writing, and keep reading. Stories matter. In this issue I talk about some very good ones.
I know that’s not much, given what else is going on in the world, but it is what I can do, so I’m doing it.
Black Lives Matter.
This is the April 2020 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.
Cover: Unjust Cause: This issue's cover is Unjust Cause by Ben Baldwin
The City We Became: A review of The City We Became, the new novel from NK Jemisin
Tentacle: A review of Tentacle by Rita Indiana, translated from Spanish by Achy Obejas
The Book of Flora: A review of The Book of Flora, the final volume in Meg Elison's Road to Nowhere trilogy.
Interview – Lyda Morehouse / Tate Hallaway: An interview with author, Lyda Morehouse, aka Tate Hallaway
War of the Maps: A review of War of the Maps, the latest novel from Paul McAuley.
Interview – Anne Corlett & Kevlin Henney: An interview with Anne Corlett and Kevlin Henney about the new online convention, WiFi SciFi
Triggernometry: A review of the Novella, Triggernometry, by Stark Holborn
The Book of Koli: Cheryl talks about why she isn't review the fabulous new novel by Mike Carey, The Book of KoliEditorial – April 2020: As usual, Cheryl has been busy and not read as much as she wanted
For this issue’s cover I have used the raw art for the cover of Unjust Cause, the new Tate Hallaway novel that Tate/Lyda and I talk about in our interview. As usual Ben Baldwin has done an absolutely brilliant job. Lyda and I particularly like the way he made Alex Connor’s snake tattoo come to life.
There are a number of highly anticipated SF&F releases this year, but a new book from NK Jemisin has to be top of many people’s lists. Jemisin did, after all, win the Best Novel Hugo for all three of her last books. Can she keep up that record? You know, she just might.
Then again, the Broken Earth trilogy is very traditional SF. It is set in the very far future, and it is possible to read almost all of it and be blithely unaware that you are being fed a political message alongside the enthralling alternate reality. The City We Became is set in our world, in our time. And in it, as some her of her characters might say, Jemisin has taken her earrings out. If you thought that her Hugo acceptance speech in San José was a little on the nose, well sister you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Naturally I love the book all the more because of this.
However, let us start at the beginning, with the cover. Right up the top there is an enthusiastic quote from Neil Gaiman. “A glorious fantasy,” he says. That’s an excellent choice of blurb, because in some ways The City We Became has a lot in common with Neverwhere. Both are set in major capital cities that their respective authors know well. Both feature characters who are embodiments of parts of those cities. There, however, the resemblance largely ends. Jemisin’s book does not involve an exploration of New York Below. Rather it says very much above ground, because the city is under attack, from Things Not Even New Yorkers Were Meant To Know.
The “We” of the title does not refer to the people of New York in general. Rather it refers to six specific people who become avatars of New York. The City, you see, is waking up, in the face of an existential and mystical threat. The chap in the funny house in Greenwich village doesn’t seem to be about, so the City has to defend itself. It turns out (and this will doubtless upset a lot of New Yorkers) that it is not the first city on Earth to awaken. Many older cities have done so in the past. São Paulo, being the most recent city to awaken, is on hand to help the new kid find its feet.
New York, however, is a complicated city. While it does have a single avatar to represent the whole city, it also has five more representing its very diverse boroughs. This has happened before, in London. The whole thing was a disaster. Jemisin doesn’t explain exactly why, but I have this horrible vision of avatars dressed in rival football kits beating each other to death. New York must get it right, because if it doesn’t, well, Things…
It is the five boroughs who are the stars of this book. We first meet Manny, Manhattan, who is young, brash, ambitious, recently arrived in the City to do a PhD in Political Theory at Columbia. He also has amnesia, which might be just as well because the glimpses he has of his past life suggest a level of ruthless violence that he finds uncomfortable.
Next we meet Brooklyn Thomason, formerly MC Free, one of the first female rap stars but now a respectable city councillor. She’s black, a single mother, but comparatively well off.
Contrast her with Bronca, The Bronx, who was actually at Stonewall and has kept her links with alternative culture since. These days she’s a director of an arts collective, with a bunch of other young women of a variety of ethnicities as colleagues. She and Brooklyn are two Black women who are not going get on.
Queens, Padmini, is fresh in from India and doing a PhD in Financial Engineering because she thinks in math the way other people think in words or pictures. Her family have put all their savings into sending her to America, and now she lives in an apartment building in Queens with Aunty Aishwarya. All this New York stuff is a bit strange to her.
And then, of course, there is Karen. Aislyn Houlihan lives on Staten Island. Her father is a police officer who flirts with neo-fascism. She’s been brought up to fear anyone who doesn’t have white skin. She doesn’t want anything to do with that horrible, dangerous New York place. After all, it is full of foreigners, which means potential rapists. She knows, from watching her mother, that her father is a violent, controlling misogynist shit, but she also knows that she’s safer with him than she would be with Those People.
The final major character of the book is Dr. White. She favours white trouser suits and has a bad habit of calling the police on people she thinks might be guilty of Walking While Black. She’s best buddies with the angry young men of the Alt-Right. Bronca is in no doubt what sort of person she is.
She shrugs. “People who say change is impossible are usually pretty happy with things just as they are.”
It’s a dig at the woman, with her expensive suit and power-professional haircut and the whole more-Aryan-than-thou aesthetic she seems to be working. All Bronca’s life, women like this have been the ones to watch out for—“feminists” who cried when their racism got called out, philanthropists who wouldn’t pay taxes but then wanted to experiment on kids from broke public schools, doctors who came to “help” by sterilizing women on the rez. Beckies.
Unlike Aislyn, however, Dr. White is not a Handmaiden of the Patriarchy. She is something else entirely. Wherever she goes, tentacles follow.
Yes, tentacles, because so much of this book has grown out of HP Lovecraft’s existential dread of The Other. As you may recall, he lived in New York for a while and had nothing good to say about the place. Jemisin has taken Lovecraft’s real-life racism, the fiction that it fuelled, and the modern far-right movement that worships it; and pulled them all into this glorious novel that is absolutely about how we live now.
The City We Became is the first volume of a trilogy, so there’s a lot of story to come yet. I suspect that there will be a lot of focus on Aislyn’s story arc as it represents a fault in modern feminism as deep and wide as anything that Alabaster could have created in the Broken Earth trilogy. For now, however, we all have to wait for the next book. It can’t come soon enough.
Well, this is delightfully bonkers.
Rita Indiana is the pen name of Rita Indiana Hernández Sánchez. She hails from the Dominican Republic and in addition to being one of the Caribbean’s foremost writers she’s also a singer-songwriter with her own band, Los Mysterios. Her novel, La mucama de Omicunlé, won the Grand Prize of the Association of Caribbean Writers in 2017, the first Spanish-language book to do so. Tentacle is the English translation of that book, and her first work to become available in English. The translator is Achy Obejas.
The tentacle(s) of the title belong to Condylactis gigantea, the Giant Caribbean Sea Anemone. Being an anemone, it hunts by use of stinging cells (nematocysts) on its tentacles. The venom is poisonous. Given that this is a big anemone, it can be dangerous to humans.
Our story begins in 2027 at which point the Caribbean is an ecological disaster zone. We first encounter Acilde, a young trans man who will do whatever is necessary to get hold of a shot of Rainbow Bright, a legendary new drug that performs gender reassignment without the need for surgery. His quest leads him to become a maid to Esther Escudero, President Bona’s spiritual advisor. She has foreseen that the seas can be saved through the intervention of an avatar of the orisha, Olokun, who, if you remember my review of David Mogo: Godhunter, is genderfluid.
The plan involves psychic time travel, both for Alcide and for Argenis, a brilliant artist who has had the misfortune to be born into an era when anyone with money, contacts and tech can become a famous artist without any drawing skill. It doesn’t help that by the time he enters our story Argenis is addicted to both coke and sex.
There’s not a lot more to the plot, except that it involves pirates (obviously). The book is a novella and a quick read. There’s a lot in there about art theory that went totally over my head, and will probably only make sense to someone who has been to art school. There’s also a fair amount of music, especially the divine Donna Summer. There’s not enough Jacques Cousteau for my tastes, but I don’t expect any of you to be actual fans of real tentacled monsters from the ocean depths.
I should note that Acilde does not come across to me as a convincing portrait of a trans guy. Interestingly Indiana doesn’t really try to get into that piece of his head, even though much of the book involves deep dives into the personalities of the various characters. However, it is clear from what I’ve read that Indiana is deeply involved in the queer community of her part of the Caribbean so I’m sure she knows local trans guys. I also know that trans identities are deeply culturally contextual.
Oh, and if the juxtaposition of a trans person and time travel reminds you of something, the answer is “yes”.
Anyway, this is a great little book, and I’m rather sad that I came to it too late to nominate it for any awards.
Bogi, Alexis – if this book didn’t go before the 2019 Otherwise jury, it should definitely go to 2020.
The third book in a trilogy is not an easy thing to review on its own. Fortunately I have help. The Book of Flora is the final part of Meg Elison’s Road to Nowhere series. The first volume, The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, won the Philip K Dick Award. The sequel, The Book of Etta, was a finalist for that award. And The Book of Flora was on the Otherwise Award Honour List this year. That’s a pretty impressive record.
The books are set in a post-apocalyptic world in which plague has drastically reduced the population of the USA and civilisation has collapsed. Significant climate change has also happened, because it is possible to sail from Florida to California. The series title is a bit of sleight of hand because one of the major locations of the series is a community called Nowhere which, at least for a time, is shown as semi-utopian.
The first book tells of an ob-gyn nurse from San Francisco who travels the world disguised as a man (for safety) helping rescue women, and helping effect successful pregnancies. Although the plague has killed more men than women, it was not a Y chromosome plague of the type beloved of apocalypse writers. It has, however, made childbirth much more difficult, and this has inevitably made things very bad for women.
The Book of the Unnamed Midwife is to a large extent a book about sexuality. With fewer men, and many women not being fertile, in the world, polyandry has become commonplace. Same sex relationships are also accepted in some places, though some communities cling to old-world religious beliefs and others fetishize the need to breed.
The Book of Etta is more of an exploration of gender. The title character was assigned female at birth but spends a lot of time on the road as Eddy. Unlike with the Midwife, this is not simply a disguise. Eddy embraces his masculinity, though she has to go back to being Etta when at home in Nowhere. Eddy is joined by Flora who was sold as a catamite when very young and has been castrated. She has happily embraced femininity, and was lucky enough to fall in with a group of “horsewomen” – trans women who know the secret of distilling estrogen from mare’s urine – so she has had some hormone treatment as well.
If you want a detailed review of the first two books, you can find one at Strange Horizons. Thank you to Kelly Jennings for that. I’m going to drive straight into The Book of Flora. Because of the issues that need to be discussed, what follows is going to be quite spoilery.
The Book of Etta ended when Eddy killed the Lion of Estiel, a wannabe warlord who had conquered and destroyed Nowhere. The Book of Flora follows on more or less immediately from that (as opposed to the long gap between the first two books). The survivors of Nowhere have taken refuge in an underground community ruled by a charismatic and manipulative Prophet called Alma. Much of her power comes from her outrageous fertility, which marks her out as goddess-touched. This is not an environment in which the likes of Eddy and Flora will be comfortable.
The majority of the book is therefore set on the road, and for a large part of it Flora and Eddy are joined by Alice, a cis woman who is a brilliant herbalist but also naturally beautiful, and socially clueless in the way that only people who have never had to want for friends can be. Both Flora and Eddy are in love with her. They are later joined by Connie, an intersex child whom Flora rescues from slavery and adopts.
Connie’s particular variation is one known medically as 5-alpha-reductase deficiency (5-ADR) and popularly as guevedoce. That means that they have a Y chromosome, but their masculinity does not express itself until puberty. Such people are assigned female at birth, and appear to magically change from girls into boys. The variation is believed to be the origin of various mythological stories such as Iphis and Ianthe from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Certainly, the variation was known to Romans as Pliny claimed to have met someone who had gone through that change.
This gives us a very complicated mix of genders, and Elison struggles a bit to find what to do with it.
Much of the point of the series is to examine how we might build different types of society in a post-patriarchy world. The Lion of Estiel’s attempts to re-establish patriarchy have failed, and Alma’s religious matriarchy is soon abandoned as too oppressive for non-queers. What other options are there?
At one point Flora travels to the city of Shy (Chicago – the series is full of cute re-naming of familiar cities). The community there turns out to be entirely female. Initially Flora is afraid of being discovered and killed, but it turns out that many of the women there are like her. One of the locals explains:
Can smiled. “Well, most of us have to decide. I became a woman during my twelfth summer. I was stubborn and I wanted to believe there were some good men, somewhere. When I was apprenticed to a raider who would train me, I learned the truth. I became a woman as soon as I came home.”
Elison is asking us here what it means to be a woman. As far as Alma was concerned, Flora could never be a woman because she could never get pregnant. But in Shy anyone can be a woman.
“Nobody is born a man,” Can said, tucking her face to her shoulder as if to look at her, but keeping her eyes on the road. “You’re born a baby. You’re born naked. Everything after that is something that you learn to do.”
There’s your Simone de Beauvoir right there.
On the face of it, Shy is a paradise. The city is rich, food is plentiful, crime is rare. However, Flora finds that she can’t stay. She would have been very welcome, but she knows that there would be no place in Shy for Eddy. She refuses to accept her own salvation at the expense of his. It is a powerful feminist statement, but it will also prove to be her undoing.
The problem, and it is a problem that arises directly from the way that Elison has constructed the world, is that outside Shy the definition of “woman” is far closer to Alma’s. Flora knows this:
It’s no great crime to live as a man. Men are plentiful and everyone understands why you do it. Women lying with women is a waste, but you’ll hardly get killed for it. Living as a woman without being one is the thing that always stirs hate and violence. As if there is some great deception in it. As if it is the worst kind of fraud. Yet a woman who cannot breed or will not try is never the same sort of problem. And women past the end of their blood are no threat. I am no different from them.
This, of course, is Flora speaking, and I feel her pain. I also understand that trans men, non-binary people and intersex people can experience just as much oppression, but in different ways. To a certain extent, Elison has constructed a world that is particularly antagonistic to Flora.
I don’t think this was deliberate. As this interview explains, the series has taken five years to write, and the story arc was not planned. Elison has been exploring her world as it has developed through the books, and as she has learned more about gender and sexuality. But it is something that she’s stuck with, which makes it hard for her to construct a happy ending.
Flora does get to live to a ripe old age. We know that from the start because part of the book is told from near the end of her life looking back on events. In the time she is writing she’s living in a small colony on Bambritch Island (Bainbridge, across the Puget Sound from Seattle). Word has come that a small army is making its way up the coast, slaughtering most people they meet along the way. They have a tank, and possibly an aircraft. Stories from refugees suggest that the army’s commander is obsessed with the legend of “frags”, women who reproduce by parthenogenesis, and he wants to find them and put an end to them.
At this point I will stop giving spoilers because I want you to be able to experience the denouement for yourselves. I will warn you that it is not easy reading. I see from the interview that Elison re-wrote the ending to make it more hopeful after seeing the result of the 2016 presidential election. Goodness only knows what it was like before.
I will also speculate that some people will be extremely angry with this book. I’m not, but I am disappointed. Writing something like this is hard, and when you have a cast that is a mixture of different, and differently oppressed, people, each trying to stand in for their entire minority group, you are likely to get yourself in trouble. Had I been on the Otherwise jury this year, I would have been tempted to veto this book appearing on the Honour List. That’s not because I think it is a bad book – mostly it is very thoughtful and thought-provoking – but because of its potential to cause offence.
I find that very sad. This is a really interesting series. It asks some great questions and gives you plenty to think about. I also think that Elison tried really hard to make it work. I was, for example, very impressed that Flora chose to walk away from Shy. But writing this sort of thing is a minefield, and it only takes one false step for the whole thing to blow up in your face.
The latest release from Wizard’s Tower is Unjust Cause by Tate Hallaway. Tate is a pen name of Lyda Morehouse whose AngeLINK novels we already publish. In this I talk to Lyda about her career, the character of Tate, and Unjust Cause. We also touch on how excited we are to be able to attend conventions anywhere in the world.
In the very far future, a Dyson sphere has been built around the dead husk of our Sun. On it live people who seem human, but they are not because they were engineered long ago by people so technologically advanced that they might be gods, and indeed pretended to be so. The gods have long since departed, but some of their servants may remain.
This is the setting for Paul McAuley’s latest novel, War of the Maps. It is in that sub-genre of SF in which people live in the ruins of a long-dead high-tech culture. Fans of Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun will find much to enjoy here. This book, however, is not a hero’s journey, no matter how much it might seem like one at times.
A map, of course, is not the territory, but it is a useful metaphor and the people of the world of the book deploy it enthusiastically. A “map”, therefore, is a continent. Or rather, a set of land masses in close contact with each other. In the vastness of a Dyson sphere, areas of land can be separated by oceans so great that only the bravest try to cross them. Different “maps” therefore mostly keep themselves to themselves. But a “life map” is DNA. The inhabitants of one area of land might be very different from those of another area. Think, for example, if our world might be sufficiently vast that somewhere over the sea there is a whole separate world inhabited by creatures descended from the species whose fossils are found in the Burgess Shales. If an environment built on one life map were to come into contact with an environment built on an entirely different life map, they might find themselves at war, so to speak.
Our hero, Thorn, is mostly known by his job title. He is a Lucidor, one whose job is to shed light on murky matters. That is, he is a detective. He comes from a country established by former slaves that runs on a collectivist political system we might recognise as inspired by China. However, he is now far from home chasing a master criminal whom he had once captured, but whom corrupt officials have traded to a foreign country that wishes to make use of his skills.
Remember, these people are not human. Some of them have what we might describe as superpowers. The criminal, Remfrey He, is a silvertongue, he can persuade others to do what he wants. Along the way we meet Orjen Starbreaker, a scientist whose power helps her to see the life maps of other beings, and Angustyn, who can sense the presence and thoughts of people at a distance. The Lucidor has the ability to supress the powers of others, which is a very useful talent for a policeman.
So the Lucidor has resigned his commission and has chased Remfrey He into the Kingdom of Patua. That country, however, is at war. It is being invaded by creatures from another map, and it is losing, badly.
McAuley has a bit of fun with science fiction references in the book. For example, one of the manifestations of the alien ecosystem is a red weed, which brings to mind other tale of warring biospheres. Also, although the book is set in the unimaginably far future, there are some cultural references so strong that they have survived the test of time.
“You do know,” Mirim ap Mirim said, “that the world is a shell. Or have things so degenerated in your sandy scourhole of a country that you live on a flat plate riding on the back of a turtle, or some such nonsense?”
There is also quite a bit of political chat between characters. Orjen thinks that the Lucidor’s country is a tyranny that prevents free scientific exploration. He counters that hers is so free that it allows madmen like Remfrey He to practice their abominable arts unfettered provided that someone is profiting from his work. It doesn’t help that the Patuans are the people who once held the Lucidor’s people in slavery.
Along the way, McAuley has a lot of fun with biology, creating fascinating creatures such as the Hive Women—small humanoids with a bee-like society. He’s also quite keen on mind control fungus.
The main plot, however, is two quests. The Lucidor seeks to re-capture Remfrey He, while Orjen seeks the source of the alien invasion of her world. Remfrey, being Remfrey, seeks to turn the invasion to his advantage. And thus the two quests must meet.
However, there is a Macguffin, a creature known in the book as a Shatterling, but recognisable to us as an AI, that has fallen from the heavens and has its own, entirely different agenda.
Hopefully I have given you a sense of just how much there is in this book. If science fiction is the “literature of ideas”, then this is SF par excellence. It is also a book with some great characters. The Lucidor might be smart, and a decent fighter, but he’s also a stubborn old man with little feel for politics. Orjen is a young woman who has given up much to be a scientist, but tends to forget how much privilege she has. Remfrey He, though he is offstage for most of the book, could out-cunning Moriarty for breakfast. Or at least he says he could, and you will end up believing him.
There’s not a lot of truly great science fiction being written at the moment, and much of what we do get is unashamedly escapist. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but with War of the Maps McAuley has shown that he can write intelligent, imaginative SF with great characters that we will end up thinking about for a long time.
Online conventions are suddenly all the rage. Here in the South-West of the UK we have been experimenting. Not content with putting a convention online, Anne Corlett and her team have tried to experiment with the convention format to see how things might be done differently in the digital world. Along the way they have also run into a number of limitations of the software. In this interview Anne and Kevlin Henney talk about their experiences running WiFi SciFi and where they think conventions might go in the future.
Some time ago now, Stark Holborn did a reading at BristolCon Fringe. She read from an as-yet-unpublished story that was a fantasy Western, with the fascinating twist that the special powers her outlaws had came not from magic, but from mathematics. That story has finally seen publication as the novella, Triggernometry.
As a conceit, it is completely bonkers. Of course, I would expect no less from Holborn. Her last Western book was called Nunslinger. Off-the-wall ideas are what she does. The important point is that she makes it work.
The basic plot of Triggernometry is pure Western. There’s a gang of outlaws, notorious for a string of outrageous heists. However, things have gotten a little too hot for them, and they are trying to retire. Then one of them comes up with news of One Last Job that will make them so much money that they can disappear wherever they want and never have to work again.
Along the way there are all the usual tropes: the saloons, the gunfights, the long horse rides through inhospitable country and, inevitably, the betrayals. It is beautifully done. Anyone who has been watching The Mandalorian will be entirely familiar with all of this.
Mixed in with the Western tropes, however, are a whole series of jokes and puns about mathematics. I suspect that I only got a small fraction of them, because I don’t know enough about the history of the discipline. I have no doubt that Holborn has done her research, and that the characters of Pierre de Fermat, Emmy Noether, David Hilbert, Sophie Germain and Solomon Lefschetz all have some connection to the personalities and/or work of their real-life counterparts.
The main character in the book is Mad Malago Browne. She’s not an actual mathematician. Holborn tells me that she thought having a real person as the main character was a bit much. The character was going to be called Smith or Brown or some such. However, in doing the research for the book, Holborn discovered the existence Marjorie Lee Browne, an African-American woman who is famous as a mathematician. The lead character was re-named Browne in her honour, but is not based on her.
I’ll be talking to Holborn for my radio show soon after this issue goes live. A version of the interview will appear in the next issue.
Given the current weirdness, Triggernometry is only available as an ebook, but that means it is ridiculously cheap. It’s a steal.
A new science fiction trilogy by Mike Carey launched this month. Normally I would be jumping at the chance to read and review it, but I can’t. Although the vast majority of The Book of Koli is, surprise, about Koli and the strange, post-apocalyptic world in which he lives, it does also feature a couple of trans characters. Mike very kindly asked for my advice when writing the book. Hopefully I have done a good job and helped him make those two characters true to life.
However, as I am featured in the acknowledgements for the book, I can hardly provide an objective review.
Unobjectively, I loved it, and I hope you will too. Mike has an amazing imagination. The killer plants that have taken over his future Britain are a superb invention. And, as just about every review of the book so far has noted, Monono Aware is a fabulous character.
There are plans afoot for Mike and I to do something online about the book. I can’t tell you more than that now. Once it is all firmed up I will let you know.
That has been a very strange month. You would have thought will all that staying at home that I’d have plenty of time to read. But actually I still have plenty of work. Also I’m doing a lot more radio than usual. And whatever it is that I’ve been sick with isn’t going away quickly, so I have had a few days when all I have been capable of doing is resting and watching TV.
Also, not all I read is suitable for review here. I’ve been reading some books on feminism, and also quite a lot of history.
However, we have an issue. There’s some great books in this one, and a couple of interviews. I hope you enjoy it.
This is the March 2020 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.
Cover: The Thief’s Gamble: This issue's cover is The Thief's Gamble by Geoff Taylor
Comet Weather: A review of Comet Weather, the new contemporary fantasy novel from Liz Williams
Dark and Deepest Red: A review of Dark and Deepest Red, a YA fairy tale re-telling from Anne-Marie McLemore
Mars: A review of the short story collection, Mars, by Croatian writer, Asja Bakić, translated by Jennifer Zoble
Conventions Go Virtual: What does the sudden need to hold major events online mean for Worldcon? Cheryl has opinions.
Star Trek: Picard: A review of the first season of the new Star Trek series featuring the return of Jean-Luc Picard
Beneath the Rising: A review of Beneath the Rising, a decidedly weird tale of Tentacled Things by Premee Mohamed
Interview – Juliet E. McKenna: An audio interview with author, Juliet E. McKenna
The Golden Key: A review of The Golden Key, a debut fantasy novel about Victorian spiritualsts and faeries, by Marian Womack.
The Unspoken Name: A review of The Unspoken Name, a debut fantasy novel by AK Larkwood
The City of a Thousand Feelings: A review of The City of a Thousand Feelings, a novella by Anya Johanna DeNiroEditorial – March 2020: Cheryl explains how busy life is for her in self-isolation.
For this issue’s cover I have used the cover of Juliet McKenna’s The Thief’s Gamble, which we have just brought back into paper at Wizard’s Tower. It is one of five books in the Tales of Einarinn series, all of which are available again as paperbacks after many years, and which are newly available as hardcovers to most readers.
The art is by Geoff Taylor who did the covers for all five books. Juliet and I talk a bit about his work in the interview in this issue.
Thanks to advances in printing technology, the hardcovers of the books have the plain art printed on the covers of the books. The books still have dust jackets with text on them, but underneath they are pure art. Well, the printers insist on putting a barcode on the back cover, but it is almost pure art. And that means you can get the full benefit of gorgeous things like this.
Thanks to the idiocies of mainstream publishing we haven’t seen much from Liz Williams of late. Fortunately, the excellent Ian Whates and NewCon Press have coaxed her back into the saddle again, and the most recent result is Comet Weather. This looks like being the start of a new and interesting contemporary fantasy series.
Williams, as many of you will know, is not just a very fine writer. She’s also a practicing occultist and, with her partner, Trevor, owns a witchcraft shop in Glastonbury (which has recently closed physically, but will continue online). The new series taps into some of that expertise. It has ghosts and ley lines and star spirits and hexes and the like. It is also very female-centered.
The main protagonists are the four Fallow sisters: Bea, Stella, Serena and Luna. Their mother, Alys, was a bit wild in her hippy days and had each girl with a different man. Alys has recently gone missing, and is presumed dead, but the sisters know different. They are pretty sure they’d know if she had died, and even if they didn’t their grandfather, who will still sometimes talk to them when they visit his grave, definitely would.
Beatrice, the eldest, is a practical one staying at home and looking after the family farm. She might seem a little boring, but she’s actually having an affair with the ghost of an Elizabethan man who once sailed with Drake.
Stella takes after her mother, wandering around Europe making money as a DJ and having a string of affairs with anyone who takes her fancy, though to date they have all been living.
Serena is the successful one, living in London thanks to a career as a fashion designer. She’s having an affair with the lead signer of a well-known rock band, who is not the father of her teenage daughter.
Finally there is Luna, the youngest, who was thinking of becoming an environmental activist but has recently taken up with a boy from a family of Travellers, at least in part because she thinks that Alys might be off on the sort of path only people with deep knowledge of the land might know.
Everything is coming to a head because a comet is due to arrive in the solar system soon. Grandfather Fallow was a keen astronomer, which is perhaps how come so many star spirits hang around the house. A comet, of course, is a harbinger of great changes, and a time of danger. What this will mean for the sisters, and their missing mother, is the great question of the novel.
Naturally the book is set in Darkest Somerset. It is, after all, a part of the world that Liz knows well. Indeed, despite being a fairly recent arrival, she knows more about the country folk than I do, because she lives among them and I grew up in a town. Of course she knows the town folk too.
“There’s a lot of inbreeding in Somerset. They put ‘NFB’ on patient charts in Taunton hospital”
“NFB?”
“Normal For Bridgwater.”
“Aw, that’s unkind,” Nell said, but she was smiling.
“True though. Webbed feet and all sorts.”
Yep, entirely true. Nell, by the way, is Cousin Nell the Famous Author from America, who is a bit of a dark horse in this book, but whom I suspect we will hear more of in future.
I should note that the local knowledge isn’t quite perfect. I don’t think Williams takes the train as often as I do, because there were two minor route errors in the book, but very few people are going to notice that.
With years of experience behind her, Williams writes easily readable prose that keeps you humming along through the book. Occasionally she waxes a bit poetic.
Now, she perched on a nearby gravestone and waited. The sky deepened and Venus sparked out between the branches of the yews, a lamp alongside the church tower. The moon was gibbous.
Equally occasionally she conjures other visions of the wild wood.
The accounts of Alys, first on Dartmoor and then in the church, had alarmed Bee. Usually cautious, she felt they should act, now the comet was here. So they were studying the map. Dark thought they should go via the watercourse, that there would be a way in.
If that wasn’t a Mythago Wood reference, then it taps into the same mythic substrate that infuses Holdstock’s famous work.
I really loved this book. It is written by a good friend and almost neighbour. It is also set in the part of the world where I grew up, and draws on many local traditions. But don’t take my word for it. Gary Wolfe enthused about it on a recent episode of The Coode Street Podcast, and Chicago is nothing like Darkest Somerset. Fantasy readers should snap this up as eagerly as they bought Juliet McKenna’s Green Man books.
Imaginative fairy tale re-tellings are a staple of fantasy these days, and this book is very much in that vein. Dark and Deepest Red takes as its starting point the deeply disturbing Hans Christian Andersen tale, “The Red Shoes”, in which a vain young girl becomes possessed by her beautiful footwear. This story takes that basic idea of magical shoes, but connects them instead to an actual historical event, the famous dancing plague that hit Strasbourg in 1518.
So yes, this is a book about a plague. Oh dear. Should we be reading this now? Well, yes, bear with me.
Firstly, this a book by Anne-Marie McLemore who is a past winner of the Otherwise Award for When the Moon Was Ours, and is one of the best writers working in YA today. The award was for an absolutely brilliant take on trans themes in fantasy. McLemore is therefore someone who can be trusted with writing about marginalisation, and that’s what we find here too.
The basic story is a YA love story between Rosella Oliva and Emil Woodlock, two American teenagers united by their common Romany ancestry. In modern America, anything that suggests a tinge of non-whiteness is liable to mark you as an outcast.
Their story is cut with that of Lavinia, her aunt Dorenia, and Alifair, the orphan boy they have taken in. 16th Century Europe is a place becoming gripped with the fear of witchcraft. The Malleus Maleficarum was first published in Germany in 1486. Anyone with Romany ancestry is liable to fall under suspicion. Lavinia’s parents have already paid the price that fear of strangers demands. She and her aunt have fled to Strasbourg where they hope that can pass for white and be safe. And so they might have been, if the dancing plague had not arrived.
What we have, then, is not just a book about a plague, but a book about how a community hit by a plague will pick upon people from a marginalised group and make them scapegoats for the disaster. That’s a deeply disturbing thing for anyone like me to be reading right now. And yet…
The book starts very slowly, and much of it is traditional YA fare of two young people falling in love and having all sorts of problems with friends at school and parents. There is also the looming sense of disaster hanging over Lavinia and her family. But around halfway things start to pick up as the magic takes hold, and by the end McLemore has taken this web of fear, applied a very neat twist, and made something beautiful from it.
The release of this book is also marked by McLemore coming out as non-binary. That’s a big step for any author to take. In many people’s eyes it will transform them from that cute and talented author who has weirdly married a trans man, to One Of Them. I hope it doesn’t damage their career too much. But it is entirely appropriate that it should be this book that accompanies that announcement. I can’t say much more without risk of spoilers, but I’m sure that when you get to the end you will know what I mean.
Queer family, it might not seem like it to begin with, but this is the book about a plague that you need to be reading right now.
A few weeks ago, when travel was a normal thing, I went to London for a meeting. The venue happened to be near Piccadilly Circus, so I took the opportunity to visit a shop I wanted to support. The Second Shelf is a second-hand bookstore specialising in books by women. Much as I would like a signed Le Guin or Butler, I can’t afford such things and mainly I just wanted to thank the shop’s owners for being so supportive of trans people on their social media feeds. But I asked about SF and a kind lady thrust a little book into my hand.
It was green, and said “Mars” on the cover. The author, Asja Bakić, was Croatian, which immediately perked my interest. Then I turned the book over and saw an enthusiastic recommendation from Jeff VanderMeer. Sold.
Mars is best described as a collection of stories of feminist weird fiction. If you are a fan of Karin Tidbeck, for example, you will want this book. Because the author comes from the Balkans, there are also echoes of Zoran Živković here. But of course Asja Bakić is her own person so such comparisons are only guides.
The stories in Mars mostly feature women in unusual circumstances. You will start each story not quite knowing what is going on. About a page before the end it all becomes clear that things are much more strange than you thought. There are stories about women who turn out to be androids, or clones, or dead.
The title of the book refers to the final story, “The Underworld”, in which the government of Earth has outlawed all literature, and all writers have been banished to the failed colony on Mars.
Since buying the book I have found Bakić on Twitter. Like most Croatians I have met, her English is excellent, but even so the book is translated. Jennifer Zoble co-edits an online journal about translation to I’m not surprised to see her do a fine job.
Had I known about it in time, I would have been pushing for the folks who read collections for the Locus Recommended Reading List to take a look. But of course like so much translated SF it has come out from a literary publisher – in this case The Feminist Press in New York – and has fallen under the radar. Now you know about it though. Check it out.
