Author: Cheryl Morgan

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

Normal Women

057, Book Review, Feminism, History, Philippa Gregory

For whose who don’t know, Phillipa Gregory is one of the most successful writers of historical fiction in the UK. She specializes mainly in mediaeval and Tudor times, but her novel about the slave trade, A Respectable Trade, is memorialized on a plaque in Bristol Docks and was, for a long time, the city’s only public memorial to that shameful part of its history. I think Marvin Rees has done something about that now, but I am a bit out of date.

Anyway, Gregory’s historical fiction is very good, and writing good historical fiction requires good research. Normal Women is her first non-fiction book. Given that it got featured on Prof. Suzannah Lipscombe’s Not Just the Tudors podcast, it comes well recommended by a top flight historian. And that’s good, because what Gregory attempts is something that most historians would blanche at.

Normal Women sets out to tell the history of women in Britain over the course of 900 years, so roughly from the Norman Conquest until now. Even for a 650 page book, that’s massively ambitious. It means that it is impossible to cover any individual story in anything like the sort of detail that a normal history book would.

What Gregory does instead is pick a bunch of themes that are important to women’s lives, and follow those through a succession of historical periods. The amount of space spent on each period tends to increase as we get closer to the present day because of the much greater amount of historical evidence available. Some of the themes covered include women’s roles in politics, religion and war. She looks at marriage and sex work; at women’s roles in the slave trade, and the fight for women’s rights. Along the way there is a magnificent amount of feminist snark.

One of my favourite themes in the book is the question of the nature of women. Most people don’t realise how radically this has changed over the centuries. In mediaeval times women were believed to be sexually insatiable, but by the end of the Victorian era we’d become timid creatures who had to be coaxed into having sex. Mediaeval people also followed the ancient Greeks in believing that women were imperfectly-formed men, and that therefore they might naturally transform into men given the right stimulus (such as overly enthusiastic physical exercise). I was particularly struck by a quotation from the apocryphal Gospel of St. Thomas in which Jesus says of his mother, Mary:

I, myself, shall lead her, in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.

Pleasingly, Gregory also spends a lot of time looking at sex and sexuality. Despite that fact that, for most of her period, men believed that sex between women was impossible because no penis was involved, Gregory has unearthed a wealth of examples of women at least being very fond of each other and providing loving companionship.

My favourite parts of the book are the various snarky comments. Here are a few examples:

The idea of ‘women’s work’ was invented to identify work so disagreeable or badly paid that men did not want it.

John Locke – one of the great thinkers of the Enlightenment – advised women that lifting heavy objects ‘belongs not to their sex’ and ‘endangered their health’, blind to the world around him filled with labouring women working alongside men.

Gregory also pokes fun at the Bayeaux Tapestry, which famously contains 93 depictions of penises and only 5 of women. To be fair, however, most of the penises belong to horses, not to humans. It is possible that the women who would have sewn the thing were just having fun putting dick pics into their work to annoy Bishop Odo.

And there is this magnificent denunciation of the Church of England’s 1966 report into the question of the ordination of women:

It’s an extraordinarily complete summary of the reasons men have given over nine centuries of English history (and longer) to keep women from authority, from wealth and from interesting work. It was the last stand of patriarchy on the last hill. Women were not the spiritual equals of men in the eyes of God nor in the view of his church. They could not be priests. They never had been priests – it was not natural. It would ruin the priest business if women were to do it. Women and men are the opposite of each other and cannot do the same work. Women could not be both priest and mother and wife – it would ruin the home, and not even women want this. And finally, women do their own feminine work so beautifully that this work should be improved and extended, and they should do nothing else.

Much of this, of course, is claimed to be fundamental feminist belief by the anti-trans lobby.

Which brings us back to the trans issue. Firstly we should note that the idea of their being only two sexes is by no means universal. Gregory cites the Elizabethan legal expert, Sir Edward Coke, as claiming that humans came in three sexes: male, female and hermaphrodite.

The idea of assigning sex at birth falls victim to the Gregory snark:

Doctors made snap decisions based on the appearance of infant genitals, almost always naming a baby with a small penis as a girl, since it was thought better to be a girl with what looked like a large clitoris than to be a boy with what looked like a small penis. On this simple male vanity, many lives were wrecked.

Gregory’s narrative is very inclusive when it comes to trans women. I was delighted to see the likes of Eleanor Rykener, Charlotte de Beaumont, Roberta Cowell and April Ashley being accepted unquestioningly as women. Even better, there is an apparent example of a trans couple. A legal case from June 1602 reports that a couple named Rose Davies and John Littlewood were arrested for both dressing as the opposite sex.

Sadly, attitudes to trans men in the book are much less inclusive. Gregory seems to have been taken in by the anti-trans narrative that trans men are ‘really’ women who think that becoming men is the only possible route to female emancipation. Including trans men as women broadens her definition of women yet further, but those she co-opts into femininity might not be very happy about it.

What worried me most about the book, however, was the errors. There’s not a lot of history that I can claim to be an expert on, but trans history is my thing. Gregory’s coverage of trans people contains a number of basic errors. Michael Dillon did not become the heir to a baronetcy on officially changing his gender: he had an older brother. Roberta Cowell was not the first person to undergo male-to-female genital surgery: Lili Elbe and others did so much earlier. And the section on de Beaumont is taken mainly from the mythology that grew up around her rather than historical fact.

This, I’m afraid, is a consequence of trying to cover far too much in one book. And if things that I know about are wrong, how many errors are there that I’m not qualified enough to spot?

Sad. But the snark is still great. And the general theme that views on the nature of women and the role of women in society have changed radically – and not always for the better – over the past nine centuries is very much valid.

book cover
Title: Normal Women
By: Philippa Gregory
Publisher: William Collins
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Mythical Creatures

057, Audio Review, Rhianna Pratchett

As far as I’m aware, most of Rhianna Pratchett’s career so far has been in video games, which I dont play because I’m completely useless at them. In her position, I’d probably run as far away from the parental profession as possible. These days, however, she seems open about claiming the label of Fantasy Writer, and part of that has been to helm a series for BBC Radio 4 called Mythical Creatures.

This is a 10-episode set of programmes of around 15 minutes in length. They were broadcast on air over the past few weeks, but were also available on the BBC Sounds podcast feed. The basic format is that each episode focuses on a particular type of creature, and Pratchett investigates the stories around it.

Sadly there was much about the format that did not work for me. To start with, each episode contains some dramatisation of a story featuring the creature of the week. I’m really not good with audio dramas. That’s probably me, because other people seem to like them, but I do wish people would not feel the need to inject dramatic episodes into factual programmes.

In addition, most episodes contain some element of psychoanalysis. That is, having presented the creature of the week, Pratchett and her guest experts go on to pontificate on the ‘real’ meaning of the stories, and why people in past times felt the need to invent such silly tales. This strikes me as a very BBC thing to be doing. Traditionally the Corporation has hated fantasy, and would only allow it in material for children, or if some supposedly rational explanation could be found for the stories. I have my suspicions that the inclusion of such material was necessary in order to get the Beeb to buy the series. There does seem to be a movement away from it as the series goes on.

There are several episodes that I enjoyed despite my reservations. The dragon one, despite not mentioning Wales at all, is quite amusing because it details the efforts of the Lambton family to cash in on their ancestor’s famous adventure with the Lambton Wyrm. The episode that does centre on Wales is the one about giants. That’s because it features Idris the Thoughtful Giant, who is a lovely chap and not at all the horrible monster of Susan Cooper’s The Grey King. He just wants to sit there on his mountain and contemplate the mysteries of the universe.

I was particularly taken by the episode on selkies. Selkie stories are often tales of gender-based violence, in that a human male forces a selkie woman to become his wife by stealing and hiding her seal skin. While such stories may have had social functions in fishing communities of the past, they are now being re-purposed by people who specialise in supporting the victims of gender-based violence, which shows that fantasy tales have modern relevance, and can be re-imagined for different purposes.

The selkie episode is number 8 in the sequence. Pratchett returns to the theme of re-writing for the final episode which is all about the wulver.

The what? No, I hadn’t heard of it either. The wulver is Shetland’s Friendly Neighbourhood Wolfman. He specialises in helping people in trouble, usually by leaving them a nice fish so that they have something to eat. That’s not traditional behaviour by folkloric monsters, and it is perhaps no surprise to learn the at the wulver is not an ancient myth, but a 20th century invention.

The folklorist responsible for the invention of the wulver, Jessie Saxby, is often portrayed as a villain who invented what is termed ‘fakelore’. But, as Pratchett points out in the show, folklore is not a static thing that belongs to the past. Nor does a mythic creature have a single, fixed meaning. Stories evolve constantly. New creatures get invented. That’s how this all works. Maybe the wulver is just the sort of mythical creature that the world needs right now. (Along with the Hob, of course. Everyone who has to do housework wants one of them.)

Thus the series ends with a defence of the story-teller’s art. I don’t know whether the BBC executives who commissioned it will have been happy about that, but I know that I am.

The Celts on Amazon Prime

057, History, TV Review

It used to be the case that there was never anything worth watching on TV over the holidays. That’s no longer true, because now we have a ton of streaming services all groaning under the weight of content more varied and potentially interesting than any Christmas dinner table. Even someone of my relatively limited tastes in TV can be guaranteed to find something worth checking out.

Scrolling through documentaries on Amazon Prime, I found a short series of history programmes titled, The Celts. My initial reaction was to expect nonsense, and that was dialed up to the max when the first episode opened with a view of Stonehenge. But then the commentary started talking about mythbusting, and things got better for a while.

It turns out that the series was made in 2000, so long before it was decided that every history documentary on mainstream TV should look and sound like it was made by The Hitler Channel. Also it was made by S4C, so actual Celtic people were involved in the show, not just English or Americans.

The first two episodes focused on what we mean by “Celts”, the origins of Celtic culture, and the wars of the Celtic-speaking peoples against the Romans. The third looked at Celtic religious beliefs. All three were better than I expected. They included interviews with the likes of Barry Cunliffe, Colin Renfrew and Miranda Aldhouse-Green, all of whom mostly said variations on “we don’t know”. There was also quite a bit of focus on sites in central Europe that we don’t normally hear much about on these islands. Despite being 20+ years old, most of the material seemed fairly up to date.

Sadly that didn’t continue. Probably the weakest episode was the one that focused on the early mediaeval period. It was badly out of date with respect to Viking culture, and contained some obvious errors. What we now know as Whitby Abbey is not the ruins of the place where Hild held her famous synod. That abbey was sacked by the Danes in the mid-9th century and the site remained abandoned for 200 years until the present, and very obviously Norman, abbey was built. Also Alfred the Great was not a contemporary of Hywel Dda.

Episode 5 looked at the fate of the Celtic nations during the early modern period when nation states were on the rise, and episode 6 looked at the at where things are now, or at least were at the turn of the millennium. These seemed OK, but are probably best viewed in conjunction with David Olusoga’s recent series, Union.

As far as TV history goes, I thought this was pretty good, especially the first three episodes. It was certainly good to see Celtic history being covered by actual Celtic people. I was pleased at the inclusion of Brittany, which you would probably not get from an English- or American-made show. There could have been more about Kernow, but hey, can’t have it all. If you fancy checking the show out, I advise doing so before Jan. 29th when Amazon is going to start interrupting all of their content with advertisements after the manner of YouTube.

Editorial – December 2023

057, Editorial, Uncategorized

This is a very unusual issue. That’s not because I have been slacking over the holidays; quite the opposite.

Firstly I have been very busy with the day job. The downside of being self-employed is that you have to take work when it comes. A contract that I have for a minimum of 40 hours a month has produced over 100 hours in December. The money will be useful.

In addition, the nature of the Crawford Award has changed. There is now an official jury, rather than just a group of people giving Gary Wolfe suggestions. This means that there are a bunch of books that I have to read, and am not allowed to review. Add in Wizard’s Tower work as well, and in December I have read 3.5 novels that I can’t review here.

So I’m very grateful to Paul Driggere for providing me with some additional SF&F content. Scavengers Reign sounds like a great series. I hope to get to watch it some day.

There’s also a lot of history content in this issue. It is something I was able to write about when I was in need of content. I know it is not usual SF&F fare, but I hope you will find it interesting.

And so to 2024. It is traditional at these times to look back over the past year. All in all, 2023 has been a bit shit. I got COVID. I crashed my car (albeit probably saving my own life and that of an idiot other driver in the process). Things could have been better. But I really enjoyed my trip to Uppsala for the Eurocon, and Juliet McKenna has continued to produce amazing books for me. Mustn’t grumble. Also I have my own house, which kind of eclipses everything else.

In terms of publication, I have essays in two volumes published in 2023. They are Follow Me: Religion in Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Imagining the Celtic Past in Modern Fantasy. The latter is now available as an affordable paperback so you can go and grab a copy. Should those books be up for awards (and I hope they will be), any glory will go to the editors, not me.

Talking of awards, next year’s Worldcon will be in Glasgow and there will be more UK voters in the Hugo voting pool than usual. I note that Juliet McKenna’s Green Man series is very much eligible in Best Series, and I encourage you all to consider it.

Looking forward to 2024, there is a new online non-fiction magazine called Speculative Insight due to debut. It is edited by Alex Pierce who is best known for the Galactic Suburbia podcast but also edited Letters to Tiptree and Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler. She now reviews for Locus. Alex kindly asked me to submit something, so I gave her the text version of the lecture about fantasy that I did for Bristol Central Library. That will be available to read on January 6th.

As to the rest of the year, well, I hope to get to Luxcon, Finncon and Worldcon. I also hope to get a new car, but that is dependent on the UK government not finding a creative new excuse to deny me a pension. I don’t think it will be long before government pensions are means-tested and only those people who can afford a creative tax accountant will get one.

There will also be major elections in the UK and USA in the coming year. The US one may turn out OK, but if it doesn’t the results will be disastrous. The UK, thankfully, can do less damage to the planet. But, regardless of which of the two major parties wins, trans people are going to get screwed. It would not surprise me to see parties competing on promises to be “tough on trans” as part of the election campaign, because the media will ask them about it incessantly. And then, whoever wins, we will end up with a government whose policies are well to the right of Margaret Thatcher. In all of my 60+ years (which includes living through the Cold War), I have never felt less optimistic about the future.

Issue #56

Issues

This is the November 2023 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.


  • Cover: Soldier: This issue's cover looks suspiciously like a picture of Murderbot.

  • The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport: Just in time for Panto season, Samit Basu produces a science fiction version of Aladdin (oh no he doesn't - discuss)

  • System Collapse: Martha Wells returns with a new Murderbot novel. What is everyone's favourite killing machine up to now?

  • A Fire Born of Exile: Aliette de Bodard's latest Xuya universe novel is inspired by The Count of Monte Cristo

  • My Brother’s Keeper: Tim Powers reveals the secret lives of the Brontë family. Yorkshire Moors, werewolves, what could possibly go wrong?

  • Fantasy at the British Library: There is a big, new exhibition. Cheryl happened to be in London and went to see it.

  • The Marvels: Captain Marvel is back, and this time she has help. Well, one pissed off adopted niece, and one obsessive fangirl (plus her very protective family).

  • Spirit: A re-print of Cheryl's review of another science fiction novel inspired by The Count of Monte Cristo. This one is by Gwyneth Jones.

  • This is Not a Grail Romance: Natalia Petrovskaia digs deep into Welsh Arthuriana. Cheryl is fascinated.

  • Silver on the Tree: Cheryl finishes her read through of Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising sequence

  • Masques of the Disappeared: Judith Clute has an art book out

  • Loki – Season #2: The God of Mischief is back. Will he finally get a redemption arc, and will anyone believe him if he does?

  • Lower Decks – Season #4: The Lower Decks crew are back in action, so no one in Starfleet is safe.

  • Editorial – November 2023: Cheryl is battening down the hatches for winter

The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport

056, Book Review, Samit Basu

The new novel from Samit Basu is billed as a science fiction version of Aladdin, which it is, but it is also so much more.

Shantiport (shanty port) is a far future city on a dying Earth that is somehow part of a galactic civilization. There are aliens, there is space travel, but for most of the citizens of Shantiport such things are a distant dream. So much, so Blade Runner.

The city is ruled over by the Tiger Clan, a mixture of royal family and corporation whose interests are much wider than one failing spaceport. Technically the ruler of the city is the Jomidar, Kumir Saptam, but he is beholden to his masters in Tiger Central. Also he has to reckon with other powers such as the oligarch, Shakun Antim, and the crime lord, Paneera.

There are those in the city who dream of revolution, of a return to a more democratic society. Some years ago, a group of such revolutionaries got hold of some alien tech, which they hoped would help them overthrow the Tigers. But they were betrayed, and their leaders made to disappear. These days few remember, but those revolutionaries had family. And they had alien tech.

Zohra was once a brilliant bot scientist. Now she is a frightened, ageing mother, trying to keep her two children safe from the Tigers, while never letting the flame of revolution die. Those children are Lina, now a beautiful young woman, and Bador, who is a monkey-bot.

Lina is a classic cyberpunk heroine. This is how Basu has another character describe her:

You’re augmented, capable of incredible physical feats. That body is a masterpiece. You owe your uncanny beauty to gene-editors, your self-healing body to bioengineers, I wouldn’t be surprised if your parents had pheromone work done to make you extra-sexy.

Bador is something very different. In appearance he is a cyborg langur, but he has enough human DNA to make him legally Lina’s brother. He has enough war-bot components to make him an impressive fighter. But he’s a bot. Zohra daren’t trust him with family secrets, because if he is ever captured he won’t be able to avoid giving them up. Also she programmed him to love his family. And he does love them, but he hates knowing that he had no choice in the matter.

So where does Aladdin come into all this? Remember that alien tech? Somewhere in the city, treasure has been concealed. If Lina and Bador can find it, anything is possible. Instead they find Moku.

Who is Moku? He is our viewpoint character. He is a bot. An alien bot, yes, but one who has been programmed to collect and tell stories. Lina and Bador seem interesting people, so he is willing to hang around with them and help out. Having a lot of ethics programming, he’s somewhat dubious about their activities, but most of the humans in Shantiport seem morally grey to him.

This being a Samit Basu novel, The Jinn-bot of Shantiport is full of his wry sense of humour. Here he is explaining why Earth is safe from aliens:

Your planet’s admin has been on leave for the last two of your centuries, and all requests pending to destroy or invade your planet would have been on hold in any case. But none have even been made.

He has a splendid description of Paneer’s lair:

As a crimelord den, it doesn’t disappoint. It looks like someone took a gigantic submarine, scooped out all the equipment, stuck it far underground, and then built a replica of an ancient cathedral in it. We walk through a central line of marble pillars, behind which lie dark alcoves suitable for dragging people into. A quick scan reveals closed circular doors lining the walls, no doubt leading to many exciting deaths, possibly involving hungry fish.

Basu also has a fine line in putting down oligarchs. Here is Zohra on Shakun Antim:

“Shakun is no genius,” Zohra says. “He just spends a lot of money convincing people he is one. He might be too powerful for any system or legal process to punish, but what oligarch isn’t? His ideas are stolen, his moves are remakes. He just invests heavily in large teams that study his opponents, prepare him for every situation, and then he presents their work in the most dramatic way possible. He isn’t even that charismatic! He just acquires that reputation though influence.”

To be fair, he sounds a lot smarter than Elon Musk.

Anyway, there is, eventually, a jinn, with a lamp and three wishes. In addition we get a magic ring, and a roc-bot. Bador has plenty of opportunities to show off his martial arts moves in fights with giant bots that have clearly been designed by anime fans. Lina gets to meet a handsome prince (who, rather delightfully, has a character reminiscent of a Bond girl), and Bador gets to meet an actual alien space hero.

As Basu admits in the Acknowledgements, the connection to the actual plot of Aladdin gets somewhat lost along the way, but that doesn’t matter. By the end of the book you’ll end up loving Lina, Bador and Moku; you’ll be thinking about the practicalities of revolutions and about bot rights; and you’ll be wondering if parents try to program their biological children as ruthlessly as they might program a bot.

book cover
Title: The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport
By: Samit Basu
Publisher: Tor.com
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

System Collapse

056, Book Review, Martha Wells

A new Murderbot book is always a delight and, even though this one was a novel, I tore through it in a day. It is, as you would expect, highly entertaining. But by now a Murderbot book has to advance the story, which is what I will be focusing on here.

One thing you should be aware of is that this book is a direct sequel to Network Effect. So Murderbot, its human friends, plus ART and his crew, are still at the distant planet whose colonists they are trying to rescue. The agents of the Barish-Estranza corporation are still hanging around causing trouble, and hoping to drag the unfortunate colonists off into indentured servitude. And of course there is now a serious risk of further interactions of the sort that happened in Network Effect. Because this planet is also home to an alien virus that can infect the minds of both bots and humans, and resulted in Murderbot having to fight what it euphemistically calls Targets, and we readers doubtless refer to as Zombies.

A consequence of this being a sequel is that everything starts very much in media res. It you are picking this book up blind you are likely to be very confused as to where Murderbot is, what has happened to it recently, and so on. You may not know that Perihelion is ART’s real name. Network Effect and System Collapse are very much two halves of a single story, and need to be read as such.

A major theme of this book is that Murderbot is suffering from considerable trauma thanks to the events of the previous book. Having to kill some humans, even if they were undead, was a deeply unpleasant experience. And Murderbot has probably seen enough horror movies to know what zombies are like. It does contain some human neural tissue, and it probably doesn’t want that eaten.

There are also problems with the colonists who, being humans, are behaving in illogical and unreasonable ways. In their defence, they have recently survived a zombie infestation, but with Barish-Estranza hanging around they need to be thinking more clearly.

What emerges from this is a story of Murderbot working under considerable stress, and discovering that having emotions is not good for your efficiency. Not having a governor module is fine when things are going well. But when you are barely recovered from serious injuries, missing a lot of your usual equipment, suffering from mental trauma, and have some of your humans in deadly danger, emotions tend to take over.

It is a good job that Murderbot has watched so much human media. At least it knows what emotions are, and can recognize them when it has them.

Rather delightfully, Murderbot’s knowledge of media also comes to the rescue in a most unexpected way in this book.

System Collapse also introduces a human called Tarik who is a former corporate mercenary. Like Murderbot, he sickened of his job and quit. The contrast between a human trained killer and a cyborg trained killer is something that I hope Martha Wells will explore in future books in the series. I suspect we will find that there isn’t much difference.

Anyway, Murderbot continues to be a delight. You knew that would be the case. You don’t need me to recommend this book.

book cover
Title: System Collapse
By: Martha Wells
Publisher: Tor
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

A Fire Born of Exile

056, Aliette de Bodard, Book Review

The latest Xuya universe novel from Aliette de Bodard is billed as inspired by The Count of Monte Cristo. It is less of a re-telling than Gwyneth Jones’s excellent Spirit (my review of which is re-printed in this issue), but the story definitely benefits from the inspiration.

The action is set in a remote part of Xuya civilization, the Scattered Pearls Belt, far from the Imperial Court. The Belt is ruled over by the Prefect, Tinh Đức, who has a reputation for ruthlessness. She is ably supported by General Tuyết. (Aliette, I hope I have got the accented characters right; my apologies if not.) Some years ago, a major rebellion broke out in the Empire, centered on the Belt. These two formidable women have made it their business to make sure such a thing never happens again, no matter how many innocents have to suffer in the process.

The book, however, is not primarily about these women. It is about the Prefect’s daughter, Minh, and her best friend, Heart’s Sorrow, a mindship who is the General’s son. Into their lives comes Sủỏng Quỳnh, known as The Alchemist of Streams and Hills, a beautiful and wealthy socialite who, perhaps bored with court life, has decided to spend some time in the Belt. Of course, as you might guess, the Alchemist has a secret history, and is bent on revenge against those who have wronged her in the past. She’s not above manipulating a couple of rich and naïve teenagers in order to get at her targets.

However, the best laid plans for revenge often founder. In this case, the primary cause of Quỳnh’s problems turns out to be Thiên Hoà, a pretty young engineer. Hoà and her sister have been employed by a group of rich kids to repair an ancient mindship, and from that simple fact much will unravel.

Mention of mindships reminds me that de Bodard’s ships are significantly different from those of other space opera writers such as Banks and Powell. As noted above, Heart’s Sorrow is a child of General Tuyết. Other mindships in the book are also family members. Mindships are born, raised and educated by humans. That’s something I hope to see de Bodard explore more in future books.

Regular readers will know that I’m not a big fan of romance as a genre, and one of the main reasons for that is the formulaic nature of the plots. In particular the need for the two main characters to have a falling out part way through the novel, and then a reconciliation at the end, leads to all sorts of convoluted and atypical behaviour. You may recall that this caused my one reservation about de Bodard’s previous book, The Red Scholar’s Wake.

I am happy to report that A Fire Born of Exile has a much more complicated plot, full of opportunities for misunderstanding and betrayal. Because of this, the falling out between Quỳnh and Hoà is entirely believable, and indeed predictable.

One of the interesting things about reading the Xuya books is the insight that they give into Vietnamese culture. The whole auntie thing is a bit of a mystery to me. So is the use of ‘big sis’, ‘little sis’ and so on, which I think is related to the profusion of pronouns that you get in Vietnamese. In this book I found something else interesting:

… she seemed to only think of being wanted in terms of usefulness. Such an odd, sad way of looking at the world.

Oh, Aliette, let me tell you about the Protestant Work Ethic. But I suspect you know, and said that deliberately.

I have something else to thank de Bodard for, but that needs to be private. In the meantime, this is a good book. But you knew that, right?

book cover
Title: A Fire Born of Exile
By: Aliette de Bodard
Publisher: Gollancz
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

My Brother’s Keeper

056, Book Review, Tim Powers

Hallowe’en has come and gone for another year, and what better way to mark the season than with a novel about terrifying supernatural goings-on on the Yorkshire Moors, staring none other than Emily Brontë?

By now most of you are doubtless familiar with the fantasy worlds that the Brontë children created when they were young. They are a major feature in the Fantasy exhibition at the British Library (thereby claiming some of Britain’s most famous and beloved writers for the fantasy genre). Possibly less is known about the Brontës themselves. Wikipedia has this to say about Emily: “Emily Brontë’s solitary and reclusive nature has made her a mysterious figure and a challenge for biographers to assess.”

Most of what we know about Emily comes from her sister, Charlotte. But modern biographers fear that the eldest Brontë sugar-coated the truth somewhat. One, “argues that Emily evidently shocked her [Charlotte], to the point where she may even have doubted her sister’s sanity.” And yet a schoolmaster remarked of Emily:

She should have been a man – a great navigator. Her powerful reason would have deduced new spheres of discovery from the knowledge of the old; and her strong imperious will would never have been daunted by opposition or difficulty, never have given way but with life. She had a head for logic, and a capability of argument unusual in a man and rarer indeed in a woman… impairing this gift was her stubborn tenacity of will which rendered her obtuse to all reasoning where her own wishes, or her own sense of right, was concerned.

And of course Emily produced Wuthering Heights, which is clearly the most bonkers part of the family output. One Victorian critic described as, “unchecked primal passions, replete with savage cruelty and outright barbarism.”

Clearly Emily deserves to have a book written about her, and who better to do it than Tim Powers?

Powers, of course, is already well-known for his interest in 19th Century British writers, most notably the reclusive poet, William Ashbless. He also produced The Stress of Her Regard, which is a great book about Byron, the Shelleys, Keats, and vampires. In My Brother’s Keeper he turns his attention to the Brontës with the not-entirely-unbelievable presumption that the family had a history of being menaced by werewolves. I mean, what else would they be doing on the Yorkshire Moors?

The brother of the title is Branwell, the artist sibling of the famous sisters. He is portrayed as a rather incompetent young man, tormented by the fact that his lack of ability has prevented him from becoming the glorious success that his position as the male heir in a household of women clearly destined him for. These days he’d be joining incel groups on the Internet, but in the 19th Century he instead falls under the influence of werewolves. Charlotte is too sensible to believe in such things, and Anne too young and timid. So it falls largely to Emily to keep the family safe, and to put an end to the terrible scourge that has followed them from Ireland to Yorkshire.

Tim Powers has been writing novels since I was at university, which is a very long time ago. Also, in his younger days, he was a close friend of the great Philip K Dick. He knows what he is doing with a book. That should be all of the recommendation that you need.

book cover
Title: My Brother's Keeper
By: Tim Powers
Publisher: Head of Zeus
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Fantasy at the British Library

056, Exhibitions

The British Library recently opened a major new exhibition titled, Fantasy: Realms of Imagination. If you can get to London, it is well worth a look. As I was in town anyway for Judith Clute’s book launch, I popped in to take a look.

The thing that stands out about the exhibition is that it does things that only the British Library can do. It has the original copy of Beowulf (there is only one in existence). It has a 14th Century copy of The Iliad. It has a copy of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, complete with an illustration showing the knight wandering around with his head in his hands. It has Charles Dodgson’s original draft of the book he was going to call Alice’s Adventures in the Underground. It has Ursula K Le Guin’s original notes for A Wizard of Earthsea. That’s just ridiculous.

However, the exhibition is by no means focused on the past. There are plenty of contemporary works there too. And interviews with contemporary authors. A reasonable attempt has been made to include works from a wide variety of cultures.

The exhibition has also avoided focusing on written literature. Comics, films and TV, and video games all have their place. So too do Dungeons & Dragons, Warhammer and Magic the Gathering. Middle Earth and Westeros as represented as much by Gandalf’s staff, and Arya Stark’s sword, Needle, as they are by books.

An exhibition can make points simply through what is chooses to include or exclude, but it can also do so through text. The label for Percy Shelley’s poem, Queen Mab, explains that Shelley used the poem as a vehicle for promoting his radical, utopian politics. Thus the idea that putting politics in fantasy is somehow a very modern thing is neatly punctured.

My Finnish readers will be happy that Tove Jansson makes an appearance in the exhibition. While the label acknowledges her creation of the Moomins, she’s mainly there because of her illustrations for the Swedish edition of The Hobbit. Tolkien was apparently sufficiently annoyed by her depiction of Gollum to actually amend the text in future editions to make his vision for the character clear.

Oh, and Irma, they have one of Mervyn Peake’s notebooks showing a rather fine drawing of the Prunesquallors.

One of the more surprising items on display is a Hugo Award trophy. It is not one for a famous book. It is Jeanette Ng’s Related Work Hugo, which she won for her speech in Helsinki when she won what was then called the Campbell Award for Best New Writer. The point is to show that fantasy can and does change when it needs to.

If there is one thing that I thought might be under-represented in the exhibition it is contemporary fantasy, in particular paranormal romance which is a huge part of the genre. The modern fashion for mythological fantasy was also missing, though of course they did have The Iliad. However, you can’t include everything, and given how hard the curators worked to be inclusive I think they can be forgiven for not being perfect.

If you can’t get to London, there are satellite exhibitions being staged at a number of city libraries around the country. I saw the one in Bristol when I was invited to give a talk there as part of the support program. I’m not sure which libraries have exhibitions, but it is worth checking your local establishments. Obviously they won’t have the spectacular items that are in London, but it would be good to support them if you can.

My talk in Bristol has been turned into an essay, and I’ve just signed a contract for it to be published elsewhere next year.

If you want a flavour of the online events, the one with Neil Gaiman and Roz Kaveney is available in full via the Living Knowledge Network. It is well worth a listen. They both have interesting things to say. They encourage everyone to read John M Ford. And I’m particularly pleased that they got to talk about A Game of You. I can defend Neil until I’m blue in the face, but it is unlikely that any of the Angry Online Trans People will believe me. They might listen to Roz.

The Marvels

056, Movie Review

Captain Marvel is one of my favorite productions from the MCU, and I loved the Ms Marvel TV series, so I have been eagerly awaiting the movie in which Carol Danvers and Kamala Khan finally get to meet. The addition of Monica Rambeau, whom we first met as a young girl in Captain Marvel, is an added bonus.

I should say right up front that you may struggle to follow some of the events of The Marvels if you have not seen certain other parts of the MCU output. The Khan family will be unknown to you if you have not seen Ms Marvel, though they very quickly establish themselves as central to the movie. Kamala’s relationship with her mother is a wonderful thing, and if you haven’t seen the TV series then you should. Also Monica acquires her powers during WandaVision. This is faintly alluded to in the film, but the explanation may be confusing if you didn’t know which witch she is referring too.

Worse still, there is a whole huge piece of the plot that Marvel managed to lose. After the events of Captain Marvel, Carol travelled to the Kree homeworld, Hala, and destroyed The Supreme Intelligence, the AI who ruled over the Kree. Her intention was to put a stop to the Kree-Skrull wars, but her actions precipitated a civil war amongst the Kree which led to an ecological disaster on Hala. This was, apparently, originally part of the first movie. Quite rightly, it got cut, but in the sequel it is told only in flashbacks and I worry that the entire motivation for the Kree is unclear.

The film also directly contradicts one of the key points from Secret Invasion. In that TV series it is asserted than Carol and Nick Fury were unable to find a sanctuary world for the Skrulls, but in this film we get to see a world that Skrulls have settled.

Anyway, our main villain is Dar-Benn, a Kree woman who has taken over the job of Ronan the Accuser (whom you may remember met a sticky end in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 1), and who blames Carol for the problems the Kree are having. She acquires a powerful weapon that allows her to steal natural resources from other worlds so that she can restore Hala to life. The fact that those other worlds are inhabited is entirely irrelevant to her.

So that’s our plot, but frankly none of this matters. Because what we have here is a gloriously silly film full of entertainment aimed largely at a female audience. We have the Kahns, of course. We have the complication that Carol promised young Monica that she’d be back soon, and then never returned to Earth (except briefly for Endgame). There is an interlude in which we discover that Carol has a whole other life as a Disney Princess on a planet of singing and dancing aliens. We have angst, we have sisterhood, and of course we have Goose, the alien squid-cat thing.

Reader, I have not laughed so much at a movie in decades. I cried quite a bit too. I can’t wait to see it again.

Thinking back on it, there are loose ends that worry me. Most importantly, I want to know what happened to the singing-dancing aliens because it seemed like our heroes failed to prevent the Kree from destroying their planet. I think that Kamala needs to go back there and do a Bollywood dance number.

Also there are the credit scenes. We are now very much heading into the creation of the Young Avengers (and l loved the reference to Fury’s original recruitment speech to Tony Stark). I very much want to see Kamala Khan, Kate Bishop and America Chavez in action together. We also got a brief view of someone special that caused me to squeal with delight.

Yep, I’m a hopeless Marvel fangirl. I’m sure there are more good movies to come.

Spirit

056, Book Review, Gwyneth Jones

This review was first published on Cheryl’s personal blog in March 2009. It is reprinted here to accompany the review of A Fire Born of Exile as both books are inspired by The Count of Monte Cristo.

My first thought on seeing the back cover blurb explain that the new Gwyneth Jones novel, Spirit, is a science fiction re-working of The Count of Monte Cristo was that this might give too much away. “Oh noez,” I could hear people say, “spoilerz!” Well yes, it is. But you know there are only so many stories in the universe, and endless ways of re-telling them. Many supposedly “new” books actually telegraph much of the plot, and in many cases that is exactly what readers want. Predictability has market value in genre fiction. I find the whole spoiler panic scene a bit ridiculous. In what follows I am going to assume that all of you are familiar with the basic plot of Dumas’ classic novel. Because, you know, you really should be by now.

Our heroine is Gwibiwr, known as Bibi. She comes from a place called White Rock, which I suspect may be Maengwyn, the place that the English called Wrexham. Her parents were rebels who made themselves such a pain that the Government eventually had to wipe them out. Bibi got adopted, and was raised by the high status family of General Yu and Lady Nef. Not in England, of course. We are in a world somewhere in the far future of the Aleutian Trilogy. The aliens have come and gone, and the dominant culture on Earth is now Chinese. There is political conflict between Reformers and Traditionalists, between those who believe in a republic and those who believe in empire. It is, you may note, a clever parallel to the world of the Dumas novel, in which France is divided between supporters of the Revolution and supporters of Napoleon.

At some point or other I expect to see academic papers that study how Jones has adapted her source work to her purpose. There is plenty to study, and that’s the main issue I want to highlight in this review. I’m currently reading a YA novel. People occasionally claim that books intended for young people are not as “good” as books intended for adults. That’s not really accurate. A book written for young people can have just as good a plot, description and characterization as a book written for adults. But books written for young people are rarely deeply sophisticated, and sophistication is something that Spirit has in spades.

I’ve now gone to check dictionary definitions of “sophisticated”, because I’m sure some people will read it as meaning “snobbish”. I was pleased to find this: “altered by education, experience, etc., so as to be worldly-wise,” which is exactly what I mean. (Literally, of course, it means “with added wisdom.”) Young people have all sorts of good qualities, but two things that they tend to be short on are education and experience. You get those by living a long time. Just as a trivial example, I can’t imagine Jones quoting from a Kinks song in a book that she writes as Ann Hallam, but she has no qualms about doing so here.

There is, of course, much more to the book than that, and one area you will all be expecting is gender. After all, the original Aleutian series was a fascinating exploration of gender issues. Actually there isn’t a lot new in Spirit, but you are doubtless expecting me to highlight what there is so let’s get it out of the way.

As I said, the story is set many years after the events of the Aleutian Trilogy. Earth is apparently still reeling from the effects of the Gender Wars. These are not explained. Possibly Jones has written some short fiction about them. If she has, I’d be grateful if someone would point me at it, because I’d love to read it. By the time of Spirit, however, things are more or less back to normal. Traditionalist families still treat young women appallingly, and Jones has a good go at them on that count. That’s something we can all agree on.

The one change to the world is the presence of the “Undecided” – people who choose not to have a gender. Here’s one of them:

Navigator T’zi, Reformer by birth and conviction, explained the validity of the undecided gender to Lady Nef – who had always thought that there must be a better term.

‘You want to call us a third sex,’ said T’zi. ‘But Undecided means what it says: fluctuation, drift, mosaic sexuality that never “settles”. It is the will of God: In time all Blues will pass beyond the either/or. A process which the Fundamentalists of your party are trying to reverse by force-‘

It is an age-old battle. Those without an attachment to any particular gender are always in conflict with those who firmly believe that there should be two, and only two, into which all humans should fit. Some Traditionalists (for example the current Iranian government) are quite happy with transsexuals, as long as they confirm to their desired gender, but Traditionalists always hate the Undecided.

What about transsexuals? Does the book have them? Of course it does. Many of them are half-castes, and as usual they end up earning a living on the wrong side of the law because they can’t get jobs in polite society. Our heroes meet some.

They moved around the square, politely accosting illegal sex-workers – presenting as women, but actually male: for some reason this was the arrangement that half-castes preferred. Bibi and honesty kept making the ‘he’ mistake, they couldn’t help it. Mahmood never did.

What is this supposed to mean? Well, it is fairly vague, but the way I read it is as follows: “men are clueless creatures who go by appearances, but real women can always tell a fake.” I may be misjudging Jones here, but this is fairly typical of the arrogant despite with which many feminists view transsexuals.

That was the gender part of the book. Those two quotes pretty much summed it up. The politics is much more interesting. I’ve already written about one passage in which Jones talks about how ineffective people who are clueless about politics can be. What she is saying is that to people who are older and perhaps wiser, rebels are an annoying pain in the butt, even if their politics are correct. This is a lesson that a lot of people could do with taking on board, especially those who are determined to continue the fight until no one is even slightly Wrong on the Internet, and they have no friends left. Jones, however, is equally wary about reformers. Here’s Lady Nef (who is a Traditionalist):

‘I believe that the Reformers are right, and that they must always be defeated, because in power they are monsters. It’s a difficult position, but one learns to put up with it.’

That could be simply a disillusioned reaction to New Labour, but I think it is more generally applicable. Remember that The Count of Monte Cristo is set in France after the fall of Napoleon.

Which brings us back to the plot: Bibi, as I said, is raised in the household of General Yu and Lady Nef. She proves bright, and has a promising career ahead of her. But there is politics, and betrayal, and a long period in prison. That part of the book moves fairly slowly, but eventually Bibi escapes, armed with a secret that will make her fabulously wealthy. Instead of the Count of Monte Cristo we have the Princess of Bois Dormant — the princess of the sleeping wood, or Sleeping Beauty. Yes, it is a fairy tale reference. And at one point in the story we get a little bit of Celtic mythology. There are almost elves. There are lots of things in this book.

Before that there is the Princess. Earth society is dazzled by her wealth and charm (Bibi learned a lot from Lady Nef during their incarceration). Oh, but where do you go to, my lovely, when you’re alone in your bed? You dream of revenge, of course. Those who put you away are currently on top of the political pile, and can’t believe that they are on the eve of destruction. But they are.

Sorry about the music references, but the book has quite a few. Think of them as Easter eggs. They are fun to spot.

Music, however, is not the only thing that the book references. We are, after all, reading a science fiction novel that is based on a classic of world literature, written by one of the cleverest science fiction writers around. Is this book part of the ongoing conversation that is science fiction? You bet it is. It touches on a whole range of issues, from the origins of intelligent life in the universe to the future of humanity, and some of the best aliens ever written (the Aleutians).

So despite a little annoyance on the gender front, I really enjoyed this book. Possibly you have to be fairly well read, especially in science fiction, to appreciate it fully, but the story works as well. The prison section is a bit slow, but the second half of the book moves along very smoothly and the ending is thoroughly satisfying. I’m hoping that someone in the US decides to publish it.

book cover
Title: Spirit
By: Gwyneth Jones
Publisher: Gollancz
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

This is Not a Grail Romance

056, Book Review, Natalia Petrovskaia

Academic books don’t come much more obscure than ones examining mediaeval literature. However, I’m assuming that you folks have at least a passing interest in Arthuriana, and in the origins of literature, so hopefully you will find the following of interest.

One of the most famous writers of Arthuriana is Chrétien de Troyes, and one of his most important works is Perceval, which forms the basis of the story of the quest for the Holy Grail. De Troyes, of course, wrote in mediaeval French, but there is also an extant parallel story in mediaeval Welsh. It is called Peredur son of Effrog, and it is of unknown authorship. A translation is usually included in books titled The Mabinogion, though Peredur is not part of that cycle. It is Peredur that is the subject of This is Not a Grail Romance, by Natalia Petrovskaia.

Perceval is not just a Grail romance, it is the ur-Grail-romance, so it is a bit surprising to see someone claim that the Welsh version is no such thing. Yet Petrovskaia makes a very good case. Traditionally (particularly by English and French scholars) it has been held that Peredur is a badly written Welsh knock-off of the French original, but that too Petrovskaia seeks to debunk.

Part of the problem with Peredur is that it comes in four (or possibly three) parts. Part 1 tells of the arrival of Peredur at Arthur’s court, and echoes much of the narrative of the French story. (It is also the basis for Nicola Griffith’s Spear). Parts 2 and 3 (sometimes called 2a and 2b) are further adventures of Peredur which do not appear in the French. They are found together in Welsh, which is why they are sometimes held to be a single story, but they have different settings. Part 4 (or 3) is separate, and contains elements of the Grail legend found in De Troyes.

Petrovskaia suggests that it is helpful to think of these stories as being similar to a modern media franchise. They are, perhaps, like a collection of Bond movies. They are about the same character, but in each film you have a different director, different script writers, different location, different love interest for the hero, and a different actor playing Bond.

The basic thesis of Petrovskaia’s book is that Part 1 is probably an original Welsh tale which found its way into France, and upon which De Troyes embellished the story of the Grail Quest. Parts 2 and 3 are separate Welsh stories which did not find their way to de Troyes (or did not interest him). Part 4 is a separate work created by someone who was aware of Perceval, and who was attempting to retcon the whole thing into a single narrative, but without the actual Grail.

Much of the evidence for this comes from the structure of the stories. The first three parts all show signs of having been constructed to a pattern. There are three stories, each of which has a discrete beginning, middle and end, and each of those is composed of three scenes. This sort of nested-threes structure is found in all mediaeval Welsh literature; not just fiction, but histories and law codes as well. Petrovskaia suggests that it is a type of aide memoire, a bit like a memory cathedral, which Welsh bards used to help them remember the text in absence of written versions. Part 4 does not follow this structure, suggesting a later composition.

Another piece of evidence is internal consistency. Each of the four stories references events elsewhere within the story, but no events outside of the story (though Part 4 does revisit locations from Part 1, and all four parts use familiar characters such as Arthur, Cai and Gwalchmai).

An old Welsh word for a storyteller is cyfarwyddwr, which literally means someone who puts signs together. These days it means a director, including a movie director.

What, then, of the Grail? The Welsh version does have the famous procession. It occurs in Part 1 before Peredur is accepted at Arthur’s court. It does have the spear dripping blood, but there is no Grail. Instead there is a salver bearing a severed head. That is a much more Celtic thing. Petrovskaia’s suggestion is that what Peredur is witnessing is not some sort of Christian ritual, but rather a funeral procession. This would also explain the hero’s refusal to ask what the heck was going on, because in mediaeval Wales it was deemed impolite to ask the name of the deceased at a funeral especially if, as in this case, they were family, because of course you should know who it was. There was an actual law stating that you could punish someone for being so rude.

Part 3 is quite interesting because the love interest for this story is a woman called the Empress of Constantinople, or rather the Empress of Cristinobyl, a place name that is usually translated as Constantinople, even though that spelling for the city is not found anywhere else in Welsh literature. Peredur marries her and lives with her for many years. The meaning of all this is unclear, but one possibility is that this is a reference to the Holy Roman Empress, Queen Matilda of England. If that is so, then Part 3 of Peredur is political fiction about the civil war in England between King Stephen and his wife, Matilda. Stephen died in 1154, and was succeeded by Matilda’s son, Henry II. Chrétien de Troyes was born in 1160, so if this interpretation is true it would suggest earlier composition of the Welsh stories.

Another fascinating element of Petrovskaia’s argument concerns the Witches of Gloucester, who are allies to Peredur in Part 1, but become his enemies in Part 4. They are very unusual witches, because they never do any actual magic. They do, however, teach the young Peredur fighting skills. Petrovskaia suggests that they may be more akin to characters such as Scáthach and Aife who appear in Irish legend and also teach warcraft to young men.

I find all of this fascinating. But what really got me to sit up and take notice is an unexpected twist at the end of Part 4. The plot of this section of the story is driven by an ugly woman called the Black-Haired Maiden who keeps turning up and sending Peredur on quests. At the end of the story, Peredur is back at the castle of the Fisher King and he is approached by a young blond lad who explains that there was no black-haired maiden. Rather it was he, a young man in disguise, who had played that part. There is no explanation for this. It is just left there hanging for the reader to try to make sense of.

Sometimes mediaeval fiction can be very weird.

book cover
Title: This is Not a Grail Romance
By: Natalia Petrovskaia
Publisher: Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Silver on the Tree

056, Book Review, Susan Cooper

And so, finally, I reach the end of The Dark is Rising sequence.

Silver on the Tree is another very Welsh episode, with a lot of the action taking place in Eryri (or Snowdonia to you, Mr Sunak, you peasant). King Arthur is involved again, and there is a quest into Cantre’r Gwaelod, the sunken land that once filled Bae Ceredigion. Interestingly, while Arthur is portrayed as an agent of the Light, both Saxons and Vikings are described as agents of the Dark. Given that Susan Cooper was born in Buckinghamshire, that’s quite a change in allegiance.

By the way, the opening online event for the British Library’s Fantasy exhibition was Natalie Haynes interviewing Susan Cooper. As I rather expected, Cooper had spent a lot of time on holiday in Eryri and Kernow as a child, which explains the use of those locations in the books.

So, we are in Eryri, and Cooper once again demonstrates her understanding of the foibles of how Welsh people speak. These are, as I’m learning, a result of their using Welsh grammatical structures while speaking English. There are also a few phrases in the book that are in Welsh, and are untranslated. Of course they are Cymraeg Gogledd, so a very different dialect to what I’m learning, but they are mostly understandable.

The section in Cantre’r Gwaelod is quite weird. It reminded me a lot of H P Lovecraft’s Dreamlands. The region is inhabited, but it isn’t clear whether the people are really alive, or of they are just animated by magic. The main characters are the Fisher King in his Glass Castle, and his bard, Gwion, who is not as bach as he was when he drank from Ceredwin’s cauldron, and is more commonly known as Taliesin.

The point of the quest is for Bran to pick up a magic sword (as shown on the cover) so he can wield it in a great confrontation with the Dark, which is about the take place. Will goes along to offer his Old One wisdom, and the Drew siblings are around to offer support.

My overall impression of the books is of how little agency the main characters have. This book is no different. Most of what happens is foretold in some way, and the characters simply have to act out the scenes of prophecies, or follow the instructions of mysterious benefactors. I’m not sure why this is. OK, so it is a book for children, but surely they should understand actions and consequences.

Because of this concern, I was very surprised to see, right at the end of the book, that agency is required after all. However, the big choice is not left to Will, to Bran, to the Drews, or even Merriman Lyon. The character on whose shoulders the fate of the world rests is a simple Welsh farmer called John Rowlands.

I’m not sure what to make of all this. If anyone knows of a good academic analysis of the books that looks into this issue, please let me know.

In the meantime, the books are wonderfully atmospheric, so I’m not surprised that children loved them, and probably still do.

book cover
Title: Silver on the Tree
By: Susan Cooper
Publisher: Puffin
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Masques of the Disappeared

056, Art, Judith Clute

I should confess from the start that I am not qualified to review an art book, let alone a book of the sort of fine art that Judith Clute produces. If you want the view of an expert in art, and the philosophy of art, read the essay by Pamela Zoline which appears at the end of this book. Hopefully it will appear, at some point, on Judith’s website at some point in the future.

What I can say is that much of Judith’s art is very familiar to me. I have visited the Clute home in London on many occasions. The spare bedroom also doubles as Judith’s studio, so I have actually slept next to several of these paintings while they were in production. That’s going to make the next paragraph sound weird.

Judith’s work is haunting. Not, I hasten to add, in a way that terrifies. Rather she produces images that stick in the mind. If they were music you might say they were good at earworming you. It is never obvious what a painting is about. I’m not entirely sure whether there are specific things that they are supposed to be about. But they always look as if they are about something. You know that the collection of images that makes up each painting have been selected for a purpose, to evoke thoughts and emotions. But, like a haunting, that meaning is often vague, unclear, transparent, leaving you grasping for substance. You don’t know what you are seeing, but equally you can’t forget it.

Masques of the Disappeared is not a book that you will find in Waterstones of Barnes & Noble. Only 100 copies have bene printed. Quite a few went at the launch event in London, which was attended by many of the well known names of the London SF&F community (plus myself). I believe that there are still copies available. Instructions for purchasing a copy are available here.

One of the questions that Zoline asks in her essay is, what does it mean to create original art in an age of image saturation. Photography, and now AI-assisted art, have made the creation of images available to everyone. Mechanical reproduction means that everyone can afford a cheap copy of the Mona Lisa to hang on their wall. Art books would have been impossible only a few hundred years ago. But I don’t think that this makes original art unnecessary. I think it makes it even more rare and wonderful. We should value and encourage the people who produce it.

Loki – Season #2

056, TV Review

Every so often, a TV series does something that is so off the wall that it is hard to discuss it without spoilers. Even if that wasn’t the case, it would be hard to discuss Season #2 of Loki without referencing the events at the end of Season #1. So please assume that this review will be somewhat spoilerific.

As those of you who have seen Season #1 will recall, it ended with Sylvie killing He Who Remains. Sylvie is a version of The Enchantress, but also an alternate world version of Loki. He Who Remains is one of many incarnations of Kang the Conqueror. The plot mostly revolves around the Time Variance Authority, which has been set up by Kang to control the multiverse, primarily so that other versions of himself can’t challenge him for control. Oh, and the TVA is run by Ravonna Renslayer, whom comics fans will recognize as Kang’s sometime girlfriend.

At the beginning of Season #2, Loki is back at the TVA where the number of time streams is multiplying rapidly thanks to the death of Kang. Loyalists at the TVA want to ‘prune’ (destroy) the branching timelines to preserve the one Sacred Timeline that they were put in place to preserve. Loki and his friends (primarily Mobius and B-15 from Season #1) want to allow the other timelines to continue to exist, because pruning them would mean the deaths of billions of people.

We now get introduced to some of the technology underpinning the TVA, and in particular to OB (short for Oroburos), the tech wizard who keeps everything running. This character is brilliantly played by Ke Huy Quan. It is worth watching the series just for him. We also learn about the Temporal Loom, a device for controlling the timelines. This is currently overloading due to the proliferation of timelines. If Loki and OB cannot fix it, the TVA, and possibly the entire universe, will be destroyed.

Got that? Good. It is a short, 6-episode season, and it packs a lot in. The season finale has a lot of work to do in order to produce a workable conclusion. To its credit, it does.

Amongst main things that happen along the way, we get a recommendation for the Velvet Underground, specifically for their final album, Loaded.

I’m not going to go into details, but what really made me happy about the denouement is that it leans heavily into Loki’s background in Norse mythology. Those of you who are familiar with such things will see the resemblance between Kang’s Scared Time line and the Threads of Fate spun by the Norns. Loki, of course, is the God of Chaos. If there is one thing he (and Sylvie) must fight against, it is the idea that destiny is pre-ordained.

We should also remember that Oroburos is another name for Jörmungandr, the World Serpent, who is one of Loki’s children .

Obviously this incarnation of Kang must be defeated by Loki. But Kang, being Kang, has many incarnations across the multiverse, so you can be sure that he will be back to trouble our heroes again soon. Pleasantly it seems that Ravonna will be involved too. And, judging from the sneak peek at the end, we will soon be meeting the incarnation of Kang known as the Pharaoh Rama-Tut.

Lower Decks – Season #4

056, TV Review

Fresh from their triumphant appearance in Strange New Worlds, our favorite ensigns are back in action, and the first thing that happens to them is that they all get promoted.

This was presumably inevitable. There are only so many jokes that you can tell about a group of people who are on the bottom rung of the officer corps of a starship. Bumping them up to junior lieutenant means you can give them more responsibility, put them in different situations, and find new jokes. Inevitably, Boimler gets put in charge of a group of ensigns and is so overcome by anxiety that he makes a total mess of being a leader. He’ll learn.

The one of our heroes who is least happy about the promotion is Mariner. The obvious assumption is that she doesn’t want the responsibility because it means she can’t goof about and be irresponsible any more. First Officer, Jack Ransom, seems to have her number, and is determined not to let her sacrifice her career. We don’t find out the truth about Mariner’s reaction until the final double-part episode.

Someone else who has a lot of story arc to get through is Tendi. We knew at the start of the episode that her family were Orion pirates. We did not know that Tendi was heir to one of the richest and most powerful families on Orion. She, of course, just wants to do science, but no one on Orion believes that, least of all her hugely competitive younger sister.

Rutherford doesn’t have quite as much to do in this season, but he’s not left out. There are return appearances for the dangerous artificial intelligences, Badgey, AGIMUS and Peanut Hamper. Oh, and he has a baby.

A new addition to the group this season is T’Lyn, a Vulcan. She makes a fine foil for the rest of the group, who are way more excitable.

This season also has an overall story arc. In each episode, a mysterious alien starship is seen attacking and destroying another vessel. It targets all the well known spacefaring species of the Star Trek universe. When we finally learn who is in command of it, and what it is up to, we fall into a rabbit hole of Trek history, and in particular the origins of Lower Decks as a series. As such it makes a fine finale for the season.

Well done, Lower Decks, keep it up.

Editorial – November 2023

056, Editorial

Well, that’s another month gone, and almost another year. The highlight of November was a trip to London to attend Judith Clute’s book launch and see the Fantasy exhibition at the British Library. On the way back I stopped in Bristol to give a talk for their contribution to the national celebration of fantastic literature.

I probably will put out an issue in December as there’s a lot of stuff I could write about, but it may be a bit short of books as I do need to do some reading for the Crawford Award and as a juror I don’t think I can review books I’m reading for that.

I don’t expect a lot to be happening over the winter. Kevin is rushing from Loscon/Westercon to SMOFcon, but there’s no tradition of winter conventions here. My next con is likely to be Luxcon in April.

In the meantime there should be books. Lyda is almost done on the lesbian space opera book, and I’m almost done on the paper editions of the AngeLINK books.

Issue #55

Issues

This is the October 2023 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.


  • Cover: Cailleach-Bheurr: This issue's cover is "Cailleach-Bheurr" by Iain J Clark

  • The Blue, Beautiful World: Karen Lord's Cygnus Beta trilogy comes to a conclusion, in the expected smart and thoughtful manner

  • Where Peace is Lost: A new novel from Valerie Valdes, and a new universe to explore to boot

  • Protecting Sensitivity Readers: Sensitivity readers are on the front lines of the Culture Wars, and we need to do what we can to prevent the spread of far-right lies

  • The Fiction Writer’s Guide to Alternate History: Jack Dann goes in depth on the art and craft of changing the past (and possibly the future) in fiction

  • Spec Fic for Newbies: In which Tiffani Angus and Val Nolan set out to do exactly what their book says it will do

  • Eating with the Tudors: A book full of recipes from Tudor times, all of which have been tested and updated for the modern kitchen? How could Cheryl resist?

  • Ahsoka – Season 1: The latest TV series from the Star Wars franchise is surprisingly fun, and absolutely fantasy

  • BristolCon 2023: Cheryl was not at Worldcon, and one of the main reasons is because it clashed with BristolCon

  • WorldCon Chengdu: There was a Worldcon in China. Not very many Westerners went, but those who did seemed to have had a wonderful time. Also the sky has not fallen.

  • The Best of all Possible Worlds: A reprint of Cheryl's review of the first book in Karen Lord's Cygnus Beta trilogy

  • The Galaxy Game: A reprint of Cheryl's review of book two in Karen Lord's Cygnus Beta trilogy

  • Editorial – October 2023: The year has turned, and Cheryl contemplates several months hiding from the cold

Cover: Cailleach-Bheurr

055, Art, Iain J Clark

It being Hallowe’en season, I needed something spooky for the cover. Thankfully I had just the thing to hand. This image by Iain J. Clark shows the ancient Scottish goddess who features in Queens of the Wild by Ronald Hutton. The cover is one of a series I will be running over the coming year. They are all pieces of art created by Iain J Clark for the Glasgow 2024 Worldcon. My thanks to Iain and to the Glasgow committee for giving me permission to use the art.

As usual, you can find a larger, unadorned version of the art below.


The Glasgow committee noted:

Glasgow 2024 has been incredibly privileged to have been supported by the donated artwork of Iain J Clark. He was a Hugo nominee in the ‘Best Fan Artist’ category for three consecutive years and he won the BFSA award for best artwork in 2020 with ‘Ship Building Over the Clyde’ and in 2021 with the ‘Glasgow Green Woman’ which are available along with his other beautiful work at https://www.etsy.com/shop/iainjclarkart

If you want to know more about the Glasgow Worldcon, their website is: https://glasgow2024.org/.

The Blue, Beautiful World

055, Book Review, Karen Lord

Imagine, for a moment, a small beautiful island yet to make contact with wider civilization. The inhabitants have a sophisticated culture, but are relatively technologically primitive. They are, of course, ripe for exploitation, and the fact that there is an embargo on contact is unlikely to deter anyone hoping to make a fast buck.

The island, of course, is Earth. The Galactic Council would love to make official contact, but the Earthlings are so very primitive in some ways. In particular they are highly averse to the idea of a planetary government, and the Galactic Council can’t be bothered dealing with a multitude of warring tribal factions. Also there is a very clear rule that, if a planet is to be admitted to galactic society, it has to provide representation for all intelligent species, not just the dominant one. So they wait, and nudge, and in the meantime others see opportunity.

This, then, is the set-up for The Blue, Beautiful World by Karen Lord. It is a sequel of sorts to The Best of All Possible Worlds and The Galaxy Game, but I read those books so long ago that I had forgotten who all of the characters were. That didn’t mar my enjoyment of the new book. I might wish that Lord produced new books a little quicker, but they are little gems when they arrive so I should not complain. I’m re-printing my review of earlier two books in this issue for those of you who want a little catch-up.

The book begins by following a pop star known only as Owen. He seems based a little on Ed Sheeran, but don’t let that put you off. The important point is that he’s busy building some sort of cultural empire, a way to influence society. He’s building a network of highly competent people, including his own security team led by a retired general. One of his key allies is Peter Hendrix, the genius CEO of ParaVee, a Dutch VR company. And one of their less-well-known products is a VR mask that allows the wearer to don a different face. That’s useful if your face is well-known all over the planet, or if your face doesn’t look entirely human.

Around a third of the way through we jump forward 11 years and change focus. Now our central characters are a bunch of gifted young people chosen for an elite diplomatic training programme. They are whisked off to a secluded base on Cuba where they are put through a bunch of exercises with a very strange premise. Earth has been infiltrated by rogue agents from an alien civilization. The galactic government will, at some point, have to intervene publicly. It will be a massive shock for Earth. How should our societies respond?

To us, as readers, the purpose of this exercise is obvious. To the young students is seems eccentric, until it becomes very real.

Like the previous two books in the series, this is a book about human society and how we manage it. Lord, having some experience of civil service work in her home nation of Barbados, has a very different view of global politics to someone who has grown up somewhere like the UK or USA. It is refreshing, and Lord is very smart. We may not be contacted by aliens in the near future, but we are facing a crisis of global proportions and the ideas put forward by people like Lord may be key to finding a way out of the mess we have got ourselves in.

Oh, and if the idea of commercial operations exploiting vulnerable foreign countries seems odd to you, read up a little on the activities of the East India Company. Or indeed check out what Meta is up to in various less wealthy parts of the globe.

book cover
Title: The Blue, Beautiful World
By: Karen Lord
Publisher: Gollancz
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Where Peace is Lost

055, Book Review, Valerie Valdes

Valerie Valdes has become one of those writers whose work I snap up as soon as it is published. The blurb on the back of Where Peace is Lost describes it as “cozy space fantasy”, but that’s just marketing. This is not cozy in the same way as a Travis Baldree novel is cozy. This is space opera with very real stakes and cozy only in that it has a happy(ish) ending.

The book is set in the aftermath of an interplanetary war. An empire known as the Prixori Anocracy, known colloquially as the Pale, has emerged triumphant. There was a peace settlement of sorts, but the Pale are well aware of their dominant position and have largely ignored its terms as they continue to consolidate their hold on the galaxy. Those who fought against them and survived have gone into hiding.

One such person is Kel Garda. She has settled on Loth, a planet so poor and remote that the Pale haven’t bothered to annex it. But they did build a military base on the planet during the war, and that base is still full of robot war machines. As the book begins, we learn that one of the largest of those war machines has become active, and is heading for a region of Loth that has significant economic importance. If it is not stopped, it could wreck the planetary economy. No one on Loth has a hope in hell of stopping it.

Well, not quite no one. But there is a bounty on Kel’s head, and if she unleashes the weaponry she has at her disposal to destroy the Pale war machine, people will notice. And then the Pale will descend on Loth in force, and not stop until Kel and everyone who helped her is dead.

So here we have a very real moral dilemma. Whatever Kel does, it seems that her new friends and neighbours are doomed. And along the way, we also have some interesting commentary about robot war machines. Unlike the machines that the Empire uses in Star Wars, the machines that the Pale uses are entirely automatic and run by not-very-intelligent AIs. Their sole purpose is to wreak as much havoc as possible. Machines like that, albeit on a much smaller scale, are being designed and built right here on Earth, right now.

Fortunately for Kel, help arrives in the shape of a pair of travelling mercenaries, Captain Savaelia Vyse and her bodyguard, Dare (a man who bears a close resemblance to Geralt of Rivia). They offer, for a reasonable price, to dispose of the war machine. The local authorities on Loth are keen to accept, but naturally wary. They insist on sending a couple of their own people along on the mission as guides. Thanks to an enthusiastic but naïve local called Lunna, Kel finds herself part of the expedition.

The rest of the book is about how the job gets done. There is much adventuring along the way, including fighting some deeply unpleasant bad guys. We also learn a lot more about Kel, and about her new traveling companions. There is some nicely complex plotting of the sort we’ve become used to in Valdes’ previous work. And, as I noted, there is a happy ending.

There is also, because this is space opera, a small amount of serious sensawunda.

Before signing off, I should make mention of the book’s title. It comes from a short prayer associated with what one might describe as an order of religious knights who fought against the Pale. It goes as follows:

Where peace is lost, may we find it.
Where peace is broken, may we mend it.
Where we go, may peace follow.
Where we fall, may peace rise.

Where Peace is Lost is a book about the dilemma of the professional soldier who wants to fight for peace, but knows that she is a violent killer. And that violence is sometimes necessary. I’ll leave you with the following quote:

Violence is always a failure. […] Fear is eager to rationalize and defend it, but make no mistake, it is always a failure. The challenge is not in avoiding failure, but in knowing which failures cannot be avoided.

So yes, punching people is always bad, But sometimes you have to punch Nazis.

book cover
Title: Where Peace is Lost
By: Valerie Valdes
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Protecting Sensitivity Readers

055, Articles

The far-right’s culture war has many fronts, but one that is very close to our community is their attacks on sensitivity readers. For example, one of the candidates in the current election for the Management Board of the Society of Authors talks about authors being “forced” to use sensitivity readers. (Edit: she’s been successfully elected.) In addition The Guardian recently ran a piece in which Ian McEwan claimed that sensitivity reading was a form of censorship, and that authors should be allowed to offend people if they want. All of this is nonsense.

Firstly, any sensible sensitivity reading contract will have in it, a clause that says that the author is under no obligation to take account of the feedback they are given. If it doesn’t, they shouldn’t sign that contract. Just like other expert the author chooses to consult, the advice given by a sensitivity reader is advice, nothing more.

Secondly, any sensible sensitivity reader will have a clause in their contract which says that their advice cannot indemnify the author against people taking offence at the final work, because people can and do take offence at anything. I was once sent a contract by a publisher that asked me to do that. I refused to sign it. Of course it had been written by the company’s lawyers, and as soon as I explained the issue to the editor in charge of the book they were very apologetic and had the clause taken out.

But the worst attack I have heard to date on sensitivity readers came at a panel at this year’s FantasyCon. I wasn’t in the audience, but several people who were there were horrified. Runalong Womble has a mention of the incident in his con report (you have typoed the year, Womble).

The gist of the accusation being made is that sensitivity reading is a scam. What sort of a scam wasn’t made clear, but presumably it is either that the advice provided is worthless (which seems unlikely, why would you hire someone whose advice is worthless), or more seriously that sensitivity readers are somehow blackmailing authors with a threat to ruin their reputation if they don’t change their books as demanded.

The first point to make here is that people on panels at genre conventions should not be going around accusing other members of the community of criminal activity without evidence, especially when there is a good chance that some of those people being so accused might be in the audience. It really doesn’t matter if you then backtrack and say, “well not all sensitivity readers,” the intention to smear an entire group is very clear.

The objectives of this sort of attack are also obvious. It will make authors reluctant to use sensitivity readers for fear of being scammed. It will make publishers reluctant to allow sensitivity readers to be acknowledged or thanked in books. (I was going to say it would make them reluctant to pay for sensitivity readers, but in my experience that’s already commonly the case.) It will make readers think that a book that has had input from sensitivity readers is less authentic rather than more so. And eventually it will lead to concerned fans of authors seeking out sensitivity readers with a view to punishing them for having somehow conned the author.

Ultimately, of course, this is not about sensitivity reading. It is about insinuating that the communities from whom sensitivity readers are likely to come — people of colour, queers, the disabled and so on – are communities whose members are likely to be criminals, whereas straight, cis, able-bodied white people, especially white women, are likely to be victims of crime.

This may seem all highly unlikely to you, and if you had put the same issues in front of me 5 years ago I would have dismissed the whole thing too. But in that 5 years I have seen the anti-trans discourse in the UK ramp up from, “we are just asking reasonable questions” to “all trans women are dangerous sexual predators who should be locked up to keep ordinary people safe.”

The main thing I have learned about outrage farming during that time, is that if you don’t push back against mild statements, then future statements will become more and more extreme until, by the time you think it is necessary to push back, doing so will make it seem like you are defending the indefensible. Nowadays you can’t be publicly pro-trans in the UK without being accused of being pro-rapist and pro-pedophile.

Obviously I don’t hold FantasyCon at fault here. This was one incident, and they were doubtless caught on the hop by it. However, if any con tries to push back against this sort of thing, they are likely to be accused of attacking “free speech”. And given that being against “free speech” is deemed the greatest crime possible by UK media culture, they’ll be reluctant to do anything.

I think the important point here is to demand proof. If someone claims on a panel that a particular group of people are criminals, pin them down. Ask them to name names, and give actual examples of this happening. If they refuse to do so, make it clear that you think they are making it up. Far right political activism relies on the theory that if you repeat a lie often enough then people will start to believe it. And if you don’t stop the lie, it will become accepted truth.

So please, if you see ideas like this being spread, push back against it. People in the minority groups being targeted may well be afraid to say anything for fear of attracting unwelcome attention. It is up to you, members of the majority, to decide what sort of world you want to live in.

The Fiction Writer’s Guide to Alternate History

055, Book Review, Jack Dann

I discovered The Fiction Writer’s Guide to Alternate History thanks to an interview with Jack Dann on The Coode Street Podcast. If you want hear Dann discussing the book and its origins with Gary Wolfe and Jonathan Strahan, you can do so here.

In terms of writing manuals, this one is very specific, unlike the far more general work by Angus and Nolan reviewed elsewhere in this issue. This allows Dann to go into a lot more depth. He starts off by defining what (he thinks) Alternate History is. He then talks more generally about history as a practice. He gives an example of an Alternate History short story. He talks about the problems that writers will face writing this sort of work and how they should be tackled. He then has a round-table discussion with a bunch of authors, in which several of them profoundly disagree with him. Finally he talks about his own journey writing an Alternate History novel, and shares some thoughts about how you, the reader, might go forward from there.

Dann’s definition of Alternate History is quite narrow. In particular he references Tom Shippey, in whose opinion a true Alternate History (or Counterfactual Fiction) should be based on a single divergence point from actual history (sometimes known as a “Jonbar Point”) which should be 1) plausible; 2) definite; 3) small in itself; and 4) massive in consequence. This is history viewed through the lens of the nursery rhyme, “For the Want of a Nail”.

I have some fairly strong disagreements with that, as did many of the authors who participated in the round table. However, I’m going to leave most matters of definition for the talk I’m giving at Bristol Central Library next month as part of their support of the British Library’s Fantasy exhibition. That talk will become an essay that you can all read sometime next year.

For this review I want to focus on the usefulness of Dann’s book as what it purports to be: not an academic examination of what Alternate History is, but a guide for practitioners. The definitional material is useful as a launch pad for discussion, but in my view the real value of the book is in the advice Dann gives, and the round table.

Two key bits of advice that Dann gives are concerned with worldbuilding, and with how to stop it taking over your book. He discusses the Dos Passos technique of inserting quote from invented media material (newspaper clippings, quotations from politicians, long lyrics and so on) which has been used to great effect by the likes of John Brunner and Lyda Morehouse. But he also cautions against getting lost in the rabbit hole of your research and allowing that to gush out onto the page.

In the round table, Dann starts off by citing Shippey’s definition, and some ideas of his own, and asks the various writers whether they think those concepts are central to creating Alternate History. Some authors enthusiastically agree, but others are much less convinced. Harry Turtledove, whom you might think knows what he’s talking about on this topic, says:

“Central? I don’t think in such terms. Nothing is central to a story except plot, characters, and style, not necessarily in that order at all.”

Janeen Webb is more specific in her criticism. She says:

“I agree that counterfactual fiction is defined by its relationship with known historical events. But I disagree about the necessity for a single divergence point.”

It isn’t mentioned in this book, but Webb is Jack Dann’s wife. They’ve been together for almost 30 years, so definitions of Alternate History are clearly not important to their relationship.

Some writers are very keen to stress the need for believability. There is massive disagreement over Howard Waldrop’s story, “Ike at the Mic”, in which Dwight D Eisenhower becomes a jazz musician and Elvis Presley becomes a politician. Some writers celebrate this as groundbreaking, while others dismiss it as wanton breaking of the sacred rules of the genre. John Kessel describes it as “completely bogus”.

Some writers think that to great a deviation from actual history will make a book mere fantasy. Charlaine Harris, on the other hand, states:

“It was relatively easy to pick the divergence point for the Sookie Stackhouse novels: vampires have decided to make their existence public.”

My favourite contributions come, rather surprisingly, from Chris Priest. His responses tend to be of the forms, “No”; “-a longer phrase meaning ‘No’-”; and “No -followed by a justification of his rejection-”. At one point he comments:

“I didn’t become a writer so that I could follow the rules of others. The moment I hear about a rule I either ignore it or look for a way to subvert it.”

And he’s right. Perhaps not in the way he wants to be, in that he might see himself as special and different, but because every writer is different. What I love about this book is that it takes a fairly small part of the speculative fiction field and demonstrates that there is massive disagreement amongst respected and successful writers as to how such works should be crafted, and even about why one should attempt them in the first place. That’s a valuable lesson for any wannabe writer.

book cover
Title: The Fiction Writer’s Guide to Alternate History
By: Jack Dann
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Spec Fic for Newbies

055, Book Review, Tiffani Angus, Val Nolan

This book from Luna Press Publishing is subtitled, “A Beginner’s Guide to Writing Subgenres of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror”. It is worth noting that the two authors, Tiffani Angus and Val Nolan, are both academics, though Angus has a novel to her name and Nolan has had a short story shortlisted for the Sturgeon. I think their experience in academia informs how they have approached the subject.

Spec Fic for Newbies is divided into three main sections: science fiction, fantasy and horror. Each section is subdivided into chapters on key themes. So the science fiction section contains chapters on aliens, robots and dystopias; fantasy has chapters on witches, sword & sorcery and paranormal romance; and horror has chapters on vampires, zombies and cosmic horror. Those lists of contents are by no means exhaustive.

Each chapter contains information on the history of the use of the concept, some famous examples, and some discussion as to different ways the concept has been deployed. There are also suggestions in each chapter as to how the concept might be taken in a different direction. These are called “activities”, which makes them sound a bit like part of a school lesson, but they are useful.

This is probably starting to sound very dry and, well, academic, and it would be were it not for the way in which it is done. I don’t know Val Nolan well, though he is at Aberystwyth so I’m sure our paths will cross soon. Tiffani Angus, on the other hand, is a friend I have known for some time since she was a student of Farah Mendlesohn’s at Anglia Ruskin. Angus has an infectious personality, and that bleeds through on every page of this book. When I read it, I can hear her voice in my head. That makes the book great fun to read.

Of course it is not a page-turner. The structure of the book makes it very much a reference work, not the sort of thing that you would read from cover to cover. It is also “for Newbies”. Given that I have been reading and reviewing speculative fiction for (ahem) many decades, there’s not a lot in this book that is new to me. There are some things, obviously, and you can always learn something from reading new material, but a lot of it is very familiar.

While the book does purport to being a guide specifically for writers, I think it is just as useful for wannabe critics who are new to the field. It is a much easier, and shorter, read that the Science Fiction Encyclopaedia. It also allows you to bone up on “the Classics” without having to read them all. This book does what it says on the tin, and it does it with style and humour. You shouldn’t ask for much more from an introductory volume.

Oh, and if you’ve read the review of the Jack Dann book on Alternate History elsewhere in this issue, I note that Angus and Nolan end their introduction with the following sentence:

“Just remember, there are no rules.”

Quite.

book cover
Title: Spec Fic for Newbies
By: Tiffani Angus & Val Nolan
Publisher: Luna Press Publishing
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Eating with the Tudors

055, Brigitte Webster, Cookery

One of the things that I find hard to resist is ancient recipe cookbooks. Most of mine are still stranded in Nevada, but recently I heard a podcast interview with the author of a new one that I had to get. The podcast in question was an episode of Not Just the Tudors with Prof. Suzannah Lipscomb. You can find the episode here. The interviewee is Brigitte Webster, author of Eating with the Tudors.

Webster is one of those lucky people who is both obsessed with ancient recipes, and wealthy enough to spend her time recreating them. She and her husband own a small Tudor manor, and they have turned the cookery passion into a business, hosting Tudor-themed events at which authentic dishes are served. That’s serious historical re-enactment.

Because of the need to recreate the recipes for customers, Webster’s book is not just a list of recipes cribbed from musty tomes in the British Library, it is both a practical manual for creating Tudor dishes with present-day supplies, and a piece of historical research in its own right.

The key thing about the Tudors is that they lived in a time before refrigeration. It is well known that they went absolutely bananas for sugar when it became easily available (to the detriment of their teeth). But they were not just addicts. Sugar meant that the wealthy could enjoy fruits (in the form of jam) in the middle of winter. Technology! It was the latest thing, and no wonder everyone who could went for it.

Nevertheless, the Tudor housewife (of whatever gender) still needed to be acutely aware of the seasons, and well-versed in various methods of food preservation. One of my reasons for snapping up the book is because I have friends who own a small-holding that has just come through the glut of autumn vegetables and is looking down the barrel of the long, fallow winter months.

I should note, however, that the book is not great for vegetarians. Not that the Tudors didn’t eat veggies, but meat was a prestige food, and most cookbooks were written by the wealthy, for the wealthy. Consequently, most of the recipes involve meat of some sort.

That said, the Tudors did eat a lot of fruit, and not just the common varieties. There are recipes in the book for things like quinces and medlars which, as it happens, I can get hold of. (Thanks, Roz & Jo!). They also ate a fair amount of fish. You might think that the old Catholic idea of eating fish on Fridays would have died a death after the Reformation. And it did, for a time. But Elizabeth I had a Navy to pay for, and one way of financing them was to have them turn to fishery when they were not out sinking Spaniards. Eating fish became a patriotic duty (and a legal requirement).

Recipes involving the likes of tomatoes, potatoes, sweetcorn and chilies are thin on the ground, because such exotic new foods were only just beginning to be imported from the New World at the end of the Tudor period. I was fascinated to discover that the oldest recipe in the book featuring one of these ‘modern’ foods was for the sweet potato. It features in a “tarte” that, so the recipe says, “will provoke courage either in man or woman”. Other ingredients include quinces, dates, lots of eggs, and “the braines of three or foure cocke Sparrowes”. Fortunately the sparrow brains are optional, though Webster does not say whether she has tested her version of the recipe for its courage-giving properties.

Which reminds me, the Tudors were still working with Galen’s theory of the Four Humors, so their ideas about what constituted healthy eating were quite bizarre at times.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to working my way through some of the recipes. It is good Hallowe’en cooking, because the Tudors loved making pies and tarts that are basically pastry filled with stuff. The empty pastry cases were known, at the time, as ‘coffins’, so the recipes frequently tell you to “fill youre coffins with…”

Spooky.

book cover
Title: Eating with the Tudors
By: Brigitte Webster
Publisher:
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Ahsoka – Season 1

055, TV Review

I should start by noting that Star Wars is not my favourite TV/movie franchise. I’ve given up on The Mandalorian. I bailed on Boba Fett about half way through. I bailed on Andor in the first episode, apparently before it got good. I did not expect to find Ahsoka quite enjoyable, but I did.

I can think of two good reasons for this. The first is Grand Admiral Thrawn. He’s the first Imperial commander I can think of who is not a complete idiot. Indeed, he seems quite smart. This is a very welcome change.

Of course he is still burdened with the endless well of incompetence that is the Imperial armed forces. I swear at one point in the series I saw an Imperial Stormtrooper hit Sabine Wren in the head with a shot from his pistol. She wasn’t wearing her Mandalorian helmet at the time, but she still shrugged off the hit. I have come to the conclusion that Imperial Stormtroopers load their guns with marshmallows.

The other main reason is that several of the main characters are quite interesting. Sabine Wren is not a super-powered Jedi, at least to begin with, and isn’t even sure she wants to be one. Hera Syndulla isn’t a Jedi at all, she’s a rebel soldier who became a general in the wars, but is also a mother with a young kid. And of course you can’t go wrong with a droid played by David Tennant. These characters were all interesting enough that I want to go back and watch the Rebels cartoon series to find out more about them.

I’m less enamoured with the lead character, though I gather she is something of a fan favourite, which why she’s got a series of her own. Rosario Dawson’s performance reminds me a lot of Hugo Weaving playing Elrond: that is, we have a very competent actor who, as Weaving said in his case, has no idea who the character is, or what their motivations are. Dawson spends a lot of time staring mysteriously into the distance.

What worries me about the series, and bear in mind that I have not watched the Prequels, is that is seems like it might be intended as a vehicle to somehow rehabilitate Anakin Skywalker.

Reaction to the series online hasn’t been great. I’ve seen complaints that it is slow, and fair enough. Most of it was. The season finale wrapped things up much too quickly, which also wasn’t great after all that build-up. But at least it did leave some threads unresolved.

The main complaint about the series, however, seems to have been that it makes Star Wars look like fantasy. It is entirely true that the alien world on which much of the action is set is rather reminiscent of parts of Middle Earth. Characters get to ride creatures that are very reminiscent of wargs. And just to rub it in, the season finale is titled, “The Jedi, the Witch and the Warlord”. Well guess what?, this is a franchise about Space Wizards, who fight with swords made of light. There are witches in this series, three of them, of course, but if they are inspired by anything it is as much the Bene Gesserit as Macbeth. I’m happy to see the folks at Disney embracing the story for what it is.

BristolCon 2023

055, Convention Report

Another year, and other small but (mostly) perfectly formed BristolCon.

This year should have been spectacular, because I’d been offered the book launch slot for the new Juliet McKenna novel, The Green Man’s Quarry. However, circumstances conspired to thwart this. Firstly the diary gremlins attacked Juliet. A family event that she absolutely had to attended turned up on the Saturday. She kindly offered to drive over to Bristol for the Friday night only, and the convention offered to put on a launch event then. The diary clashes also affected me, in that the Chengdu Worldcon moved its dates to clash with BristolCon. That meant that I spent the Saturday evening updating the Hugo Awards website. It kept me away from the karaoke, which I’m sure everyone else was very grateful for.

The gods, however, were not done with us. I was vaguely aware that terrible weather was forecast for Scotland that weekend. The drive from South Wales was largely uneventful, though it did piss it own between Port Talbot and Bridgend. I did notice signs about an M4 closure around Swindon and hoped it was minor. No such luck. There had been a major accident that closed both carriageways. Also parts of Swindon station were underwater and around 75% of trains from London to Bristol were being cancelled. Rail issues were also affecting travel from Exeter and Birmingham.

There’s nothing you can do about this sort of thing. The book launch was very sparsely attended, as was the open mic event that followed it. Shrug.

The weather was better on Saturday, but some people had clearly given up on trying to get to the convention. Footfall in the Dealers’ Room was low. So low that I had a lot of chocolate and cupcakes left at the end of the day. But, thanks to Juliet having a new book out, sales were only just below last year. BristolCon is the only con where it is remotely economic for me to have a dealer table, and I continue to be grateful for that.

I did one panel. It was about AI, and I was able to recycle a lot of what I had learned on the similar panel at Pemmicon. Programming appeared to be well attended.

Next year the guests of honour will be Peter F Hamilton and Joanne Harris. If you have not been to BristolCon before, that sounds like a perfect excuse to try it out.

WorldCon Chengdu

055, Convention Report

So, Worldcon happened, and the sky did not fall.

Prior to the event, all sorts of fannish conspiracy theories were floating around, from the Chinese packing the Business Meeting and throwing out the WSFS Constitution, to all of the Hugo winners being Chinese, and to the whole event being a vehicle for Chinese Government propaganda.

Needless to say, none of this transpired. I didn’t go, because there was little chance of my getting a visa, and because it clashed with BristolCon. Those Westerners who did go seem to have had a wonderful time. That includes Kevin, who will hopefully get around to sharing his experiences when he’s had a chance to recover from the travel and catch up with having been offline for over a week.

One person who has been blogging enthusiastically about the event is Nicholas Whyte. His report on Doctor Who fandom in China is particularly heartwarming.

The Hugo winners were duly announced. There were a few Chinese winners, which was lovely, but the majority of awards still went to Westerners. I was particularly pleased with the fan awards. Richard Man joins the stellar list of Hugo winners who are members of the Bay Area Science Fiction Association, and is a brilliant photographer. Chris Barkley has been working his socks off for Worldcon for many, many years and also thoroughly deserves the award. And Best Fanzine was won by a Chinese publication. I know nothing about the fancast winner, but they’ve joined Chris in recusing themselves from the awards in future years so they are clearly good people.

On the professional side I’m delighted that Neil Clarke has finally won Best Editor: Short Form. The Graphic Story category has attracted a lot of attention because it is a very European production. The writer, Bartosz Sztybor, is Polish, and the Hugo Awards page on Farcebook has been getting a lot of happy attention from Polish fans. Naturally everyone in the UK is delighted that Adrian Tchaikovsky won Best Series, and so are the giant spiders.

I have no idea when we will get the full voting breakdown. The few SMOFs who attended the convention were rushed off their feet. Dave McCarty will get round to it eventually. The full list of winner is available here.

The Business Meeting also happened. Attendance was fairly low, but there were some Chinese fans present and interesting things happened. Kevin has posted the videos, but I don’t have time to watch them. As far as I can gather, nothing terrible happened. And even if it did, we can deal with it in Glasgow.

The Best of all Possible Worlds

055, Book Review, Karen Lord

This review is reprinted from Cheryl’s personal blog.

Karen Lord’s second novel has been greatly anticipated by the many people, including myself, who fell in love with Redemption in Indigo. When I saw an ARC available on NetGalley I pounced on it immediately. I have, however, taken a while to produce this review. That’s partly because I don’t believe in publishing reviews long before you can buy the book — that has always seemed like bragging on the part of the reviewer, and not very helpful to the prospective reader. But it is also, rather unusually, because I wanted to talk to the author first. The reasons for that should become obvious as you read this review, but first I should introduce the book.

The Best of All Possible Worlds opens in dramatic fashion. We are introduced to Dllenahkh, apparently a busy chap with a responsible job who, every so often, has to go on a meditation retreat to help him handle the stress of his life. He’s on retreat when we meet him, but his peace is interrupted by the arrival of a spaceship pilot with bad news. Their home planet has been attacked and laid waste. The entire population is dead.

With a standard genre novel, what would follow is a revenge-based piece of military SF in which Dllenahkh tracks down and kills those responsible for this atrocity. What we get is nothing like that at all. Most of the rest of the book is told from the point of view of Grace Delarua, a minor civil servant in an outpost world where Dllenahkh and some other surviving members of his race, the Sadiri, have come in search of sanctuary and, hopefully, wives.

A digression on the world building is in order here. The galaxy is populated by a number of species of humans, all of which can interbreed, but which are genetically distinct in the same way that our own species and Neanderthals were distinct. The Sadiri have their own culture, and are quite stuffy and conservative. This, compounded by the disaster that has befallen them, has made the few (mostly male) survivors rather obsessed with breeding. Delarua’s planet, Cygnus Beta, is home to a number of settlements of taSadiri — people who couldn’t stand the strictures of traditional Sadiri culture and left to set up home elsewhere. It is therefore a prime source of eligible females.

Hopefully you can begin to see the shape of the mess that Delarua and her colleagues have to negotiate. On the one hand they desperately want to help the Sadiri (there are economic reasons for this, as well as the humanitarian ones). But on the other hand they need to prevent the sort of diplomatic incidents that might arise when a group of sex-starved misogynists go in search of wives.

That’s probably a little unfair on the Sadiri. There are worse males in the universe. Indeed, one of the reasons that Dllenahkh has been sent on this mission is that he’s assumed to be disciplined enough not to cause an upset. Nevertheless, it is a delicate situation, and if you were part of a relatively small remnant population with very little chance of getting a wife, you might be a bit eager too.

The structure of the book is somewhat unexpected as well. Most chapters are, in a way, separate stories telling of particular encounters that Dllenahkh, Delarua and their colleagues have at different settlements on Cygnus Beta. There is an overall thread to the book, but if you are brought up on fast-paced novels that end each chapter in a cliff-hanger then this slower, more disconnected structure may jar. I expect to see reviews that complain about Lord failing to use the prescribed structures you are taught in creative writing classes and, shock horror, having characters in the book who don’t serve the purposes of the plot. I guess what she’s done will be irritating to anyone who is convinced that slavish adherence to a formula is the only way to get published.

At its core, the book is a love story between, as you might have guessed, Dllenahkh and Delarua. I use the term “love story” rather than “romance” very deliberately. Romance tends to be a very adolescent genre, full of horrible misunderstandings and raging emotions. It is fiction for people still trying to understand the opposite sex, and the process of sexual attraction. The Best of All Possible Worlds is a much more adult affair in which two people thrown together by work gradually come to admire each other, and rely on each other. If there is uncertainty it is probably worry that attempting sex will jeopardize the relationship that is building.

Of course the book is, in many ways, all about sex. You have a bunch of alien males in search of wives, and several female characters who might just be interested if the cultural issues can be overcome. Occasionally this results in banter that almost makes you feel like you’ve fallen through a wormhole into a later-period Heinlein novel. Although one of the characters turns out to be asexual, this is mostly an avowedly heterosexual book with mating as a core theme. It also tackles the issue head-on in a very practical way. Personally, as an older, heterosexual female, I was perfectly happy with it. I suspect that some lesbian feminists will be outraged.

I note, by the way, that the nature of the relationships formed is important to Lord. Some of the characters have limited psychic powers, and the occasional arrogance and stuffiness of the Sadiri is contrasted with the genuinely abusive behavior of others. We should not forget where the title comes from. While there is no benevolent god in the book whose failure to address the shortcomings of the universe needs to be interrogated, we are still very much stuck with Leibniz’s central idea that we need to deal with the real world as it is. Annoying and imperfect the universe may be, but we still need to strive for the best.

The final, and most important, point I want to make about the book also deals with the way in which the real world annoyingly fails to fit our neat ideas as of how thing should be. Most modern equality theory is based on the idea that, biologically speaking, all human beings are identical. There are no different “races” of humans, just humans with different appearances. We are all the same species, in just the same way that our best friend, canis lupus familiaris, is, despite coming in a bewildering variety of shapes and sizes. Feminism holds that the same is true for the sexes: childbearing aside, there are no significant differences between males and females.

In The Best of All Possible Worlds Lord does something very brave. She populates the galaxy with a variety of different species of humans that can interbreed, but are not only culturally, but also biologically different. There are things that some species are better at than others (that is, when large populations are sampled for a characteristic, the difference in performance between species is statistically significant). There is a reason why Sadiri make good starship pilots and people from other species don’t.

Of course we have seen this many times before in 20th Century SF. Mostly we criticize it as proxy racism; attempts to show that the (mysteriously all-white) humans are somehow better people than the funny almost-humans with lumps on their brows and darker skin. That, I submit, is not a charge that one can reasonably bring against a Caribbean writer. There may still be some racial stereotyping in the book, but the central point that Lord is making here is that genuine racial differences do not excuse racism. The various human races in the book are still all human, and they still need to get along. In most cases, the differences between species don’t matter very much, and in any case cultural differences tend to be greater than biological ones. Nevertheless, we only live in the best of all possible worlds, not an ideal world defined by political theories. It is up to us to make the best of it.

book cover
Title: The Best of all Possible Worlds
By: Karen Lord
Publisher: Jo Fletcher Books
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The Galaxy Game

055, Book Review, Karen Lord

This review is reprinted from Cheryl’s personal blog.

The trouble with reviewing a Karen Lord novel is that you know you are dealing with a very smart author. This causes (at least) two problems. Firstly you have to somehow tiptoe your way around all of the subtle ideas in the book to make sure that you don’t give too much away. And second, you know that next time you see Karen she will smile knowingly at you, and you’ll know you need to go back and re-read the book to see what you missed.

Here I go, cautiously embarrassing myself.

The Galaxy Game is pretty much a direct sequel to The Best of All Possible Worlds. There’s a prologue that is set a few decades into the future, but after that we skip back to just a few years after the previous book. The central character is not Grace Delarua, though she does feature in the narrative. Rather Lord has chosen to tell us the story of Grace’s nephew, Rafi Abowen.

Those of you who have read The Best of All Possible Worlds will remember that Rafi’s father was a powerful and abusive telepath. Rafi has inherited strong psi talents, and wants to avoid misusing them. He ends up in The Lyceum, a special school for the Abnormally Gifted. This, however, is not an X-Men story, or a Harry Potter one. Rafi and his two young friends, Ntenman and Serendipity, soon find themselves out in the galaxy at a time of great political upheaval.

The book is quite a slow starter. For a long time you’ll think that this is nothing more than a story of a troubled young man finding himself through professional sport. (Yes, you did read that correctly.) But not all is as it seems, and around page 200 Lord drops a massive revelation about the sport that Rafi plays. From then on you are in the middle of a fairly fast-paced piece of space opera.

There are several themes in play here. Chief amongst them is that of a society undergoing a period of instability, with associated security paranoia. The destruction of the planet Sadira, which opens The Best of All Possible Worlds, is still a major political issue. The surviving Sadiri, who are mostly male, have started to go to extreme lengths to secure full-blood wives. This inevitably brings them into conflict with Grace, Dllenahkh and the small community of Sadiri-in-exile that they have set up on Cygnus Beta. Meanwhile the rest of the galaxy is starting to discover what life is like without the moralistic and officious Sadiri around to play policeman so that they don’t have to.

Don’t expect this to be a shoot-out with space battles, however. In a Karen Lord novel, conflict is solved by diplomacy. You look for mutually beneficial trading opportunities that might make it less attractive to go to war. Failing all else, you put together an alliance and drop a political bombshell on the enemy. Lord has been a diplomat (and a soldier). She knows her stuff. Also, coming from Barbados, she has a very different view of geopolitics than someone who has grown up in the USA or UK, which is very refreshing.

Then there is the gender stuff. Readers of The Best of All Possible Worlds may remember Lian, a character who is genderless. Well, Lian turns up again in The Galaxy Game, and the whole gender thing is mentioned just once, in passing. Most readers, I suspect, will never notice that Lian’s gender is not specified. I spotted just one use of a gendered word, and that was from Ntenman which, as it later turned out, was only to be expected. There is a trans character in the book too, and I love the way that Lord has handled Ntenman’s journey to acceptance of her.

Talking of Ntenman, one of the more unusual aspects of the book is Lord’s decision to tell his story in first person, and the rest of the book in third person. Ntenman isn’t the primary viewpoint character, though he is fairly significant to the story. I don’t think it distracts majorly from the book, but I’m not sure what it adds, or at least was intended to add. Were I to be interviewing Lord about the book, this is the first question I’d put to her.

I guess I should talk about societies too. Much of the action takes place on Punartam, which is an Ntshune planet and very different culturally to Rafi’s more Terran home on Cygnus Beta. On Punartam who you are and who you know are massively important. I have this image of people from saner parts of the globe finding themselves in England and struggling to make sense of all of the class politics.

In summary, Karen Lord novels are fascinating things. They are not fast-paced space adventures, but they are very thoughtful and will reward re-reading. Also, while there is a series being built here, the books are fairly complete in themselves. You do need to have read The Best of All Possible Worlds before reading The Galaxy Game, but you won’t be left hanging at the end of either book. Of course we do want to know what happened to Commander Nasiha, and that probably means finding out what awful things are happening on New Sadira, but that’s a tale for another book, please, Karen.

book cover
Title: The Galaxy Game
By: Karen Lord
Publisher: Jo Fletcher Books
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Editorial – October 2023

055, Editorial

The Dark has risen. Winter is approaching here in the Northern hemisphere and the clocks have gone back in the UK. You may have noticed that I have not yet got round to reviewing the final volume of Susan Cooper’s legendary fantasy series. That’s mainly due to having too many other good books clamouring for my attention, but it has turned out to be quite convenient. It will be in the next issue, alongside my thoughts on the Fantasy exhibition at the British Library, which I am booked to see early in November.

Other than that trip to London, I’m not planning to go very far for several months. Convention season is pretty much over, and SMOFcon is in Boston this year so I can’t go even if I wanted to. I think my next con trip will be to LuxCon in April (and I am not going to EasterCon so it won’t be able to prevent me from getting to Luxembourg this time).

Hopefully being stuck at home for a few months will give me time to work on some more books. We have Lyda’s lesbian space opera book to come, and there should be some new Chaz next year.

Other than that, I expect to spend several months keeping warm, trying new recipes, and reading books.

Issue #54

Issues

This is the September 2023 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.


Cover: The Green Man’s Quarry

054, Art, Ben Baldwin

It is that time of year again. Juliet McKenna has produced a new Green Man book. Pre-orders are open (links here), and there will be a launch on the Friday night of BristolCon. Also there is new cover art from the brilliant Ben Baldwin. I think this is my favourite cover since the first one. While the character in the book is absolutely not T’Challa, the cover does remind me of him. We did pick up on some of the colour choices from the Black Panther movies in designing the cover. The purple is there for another reason too, which will become obvious when you read the book.

The unadulterated art is shown below.

Mammoths at the Gates

054, Book Review, Nghi Vo

No matter how much of a funk I am in about reading, nothing gets me rushing to my Kindle app faster than a new Nghi Vo Singing Hills novella. Nope, not even Murderbot. By the way, I say “Kindle” because getting hold of Tor.com novellas in the UK is expensive. I do want paper versions of these books eventually. And I am trying to remember to buy on Kobo or Weightless Books instead because that’s a good thing to do. The point is that when Mammoths at the Gates arrived, I dived straight in.

So, what is happening with Cleric Chin? Well, as the story begins, Chin has just arrived back at the Singing Hills monastery. Yes, at last we are going to get to see something of that famous repository of memories, and the other monks who inhabit it. Or at least we would, except for two things.

Firstly, most of the monks have gone. Royal engineers have drained a reservoir called Snakehead Lake. The town of Houshi, which the creation of the reservoir had drowned, is accessible again for the first time in years. The monks have four months in which to work, before the dam is repaired and the water brought back. There are a lot of ghosts to interview.

The other issue is rather more obvious. Camped outside the gates to the monastery are two large royal war mammoths. Their rider, and her sister, are very unhappy with the monks for some reason. Having experience of such beasts elsewhere, Chih is well aware of the damage that they could cause. Negotiations are in the hands of the temporary senior monk, Chih’s childhood friend, Ru.

That’s how the story is introduced. If you are used to these books, you will know that it is not what the story is all about. Inevitably there are deeper currents driving events. Chief amongst these is the death of Cleric Thien, one of the oldest of the residents of the Singing Hills, and the man who was tutor to both Chen and Ru when they were novices.

The problems with the mammoths and their riders even affect the neixin aviary. And we meet more of these amazing birds. There is a male neixin called Cleverness Himself, who seems determined to live up to his name. We get to meet Almost Brilliant’s chick, who is currently named Chiep, but will presumably adopt a more serious name when she is an adult (who knows, neixin culture is a mystery to us). Anyway, she’s adorable. And finally there is Myriad Virtues. She was the neixin companion of Cleric Thien, and she’s dying of grief.

In that magical way she has, Vo draws all of these threads together to provide a satisfactory solution to the problem of the mammoths, telling us much about Cleric Thien, about the childhood of Chih and Ru, and about neixin, along the way. It is all very clever and beautifully told, and I expect this book to be on the Hugo ballot next year.

book cover
Title: Mammoths at the Gates
By: Nghi Vo
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Tolkien, Race and Cultural History

054, Book Review, Dimitra Fimi

One of the things that we have learned over the years about social media is that it has an almost total lack of nuance. Arguments rage, but they can never resolve because you can only ever be for or against a very simplistic position. Some of those arguments concern Tolkien. Was he a racist? Was he ‘just a man of his time’? Was he a great man whom none should dare question? These questions do not have simple answers. And this is where we can turn to academics for some in depth analysis.

Dimitra Fimi is an acknowledged expert on Tolkien. She’s also one of the senior academics at the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic. I should note that she’s also a friend and was one of the editors of the recently published volume on Celtic Fantasy that I had an essay in. She’s very well placed to look into these issues. Tolkien, Race and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits, is the result of her investigations.

The main point that needs to be made here is that the Legendarium, that is the complete world created by Tolkien in which he set his books, was not created overnight. Rather, its creation was a continuous process starting when Tolkien was a teenager and moving on through the publication of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. During that time, Tolkien grew up, studied a lot, married and had a family, and lived through two World Wars. It should not be surprising that his attitudes and objectives did not remain constant throughout his life.

When Tolkien first embarked on created a “mythology for England” he was very young and living through a particular time in history when such a thing might have seemed necessary. Britain had witnessed the rise of Celticism, led by characters such as the notorious inventor of Welsh tradition, Iolo Morganwg. England had nothing of this. If you went too far back, everyone was Welsh anyway. The Romans had gone, the Normans were only ever conquerors (and French at that!). So England focused instead on its Germanic invaders. Fimi notes:

It was mainly during the nineteenth century that Anglo-Saxonism became a national myth; it is not accidental that this happened during a period when the British Empire was slowly declining.

Something very similar can be seen in the present day, when Anglo-Saxonism was first deployed as an excuse for Brexit, and then as a crutch when the real effects of that political disaster hit.

Tolkien, however, did not have to live through Brexit and its aftermath. Instead he lived through two deadly wars in which Germany was the main enemy. This didn’t seem to shake his love for Nordic culture, but that didn’t mean he was overly fond of the Germans. Famously he described Hitler as “a ruddy little ignoramus” who is:

“Ruining, perverting, misapplying and making forever accursed that noble Northen spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light.”

We’ll come back to the racism question later, but first I should note that Fimi presents another motivating force for the creation of the Legendarium. Tolkien, as we know, was a huge fan of languages. He loved inventing them. Sindarin was based on Welsh, and Quenya on Finnish (which Tolkien fell in love with after reading the Kalevala (another piece of national myth-making). It appears that being a language nerd was something that Tolkien was a bit embarrassed about, and the process of creating Middle Earth gave him a very plausible excuse for his hobby. The point here is that Tolkien wasn’t just engaged in myth-making. There were other reasons for the ways in which his work developed.

There was also a third force acting on Tolkien and his writing: the need for a book. The Hobbit was hugely successful has his publishers were desperate for a sequel. Quite rightly, they rejected his attempt to fob them off with the mess that was The Silmarillion. (It is less of a mess now, having been extensively edited, but I still couldn’t finish it.) So Tolkien embarked on creating The Lord of the Rings, and in the process he had to stop fiddling about with hobbyist ideas about mythology and language, and instead create a functioning novel for adults. That caused him to change a lot.

Back with the racism question, as is always the case, it is complicated. Where I disagree with Fimi is when she says that racism is a modern concept that can’t be applied to Tolkien’s time (pg 157). This is rather like saying that people couldn’t have had same-sex relations before homosexuality was invented as a concept (1869, thank you for asking). Racism is something that people do, not an airy concept. What we can say, however, is that Tolkien grew up in a society that was institutionally and culturally racist. In addition, as Fimi points out, the theory known as “race science” was very much accepted as factual by the (white) academic community for much of Tolkien’s life. It isn’t surprising that he developed racist views of the world, because pretty much everyone did. Heck, I have enough trouble dealing with ideas that got drummed into me as a kid, and I’m a couple of generations younger.

So what matters is what Tolkien did with his views. In some ways he clearly grew up. His teenage enthusiasm for ethno-nationalism was severely broken by his experience of how Nazi Germany used such ideas. However, his portrayal of non-white peoples in The Lord of the Rings leaves much to be desired. Saruman is clearly a eugenicist, but equally the fact that he is suggests that eugenics works.

Which brings us to the orcs. Here there’s an issue that I felt lacking in the book: class. Fimi is Greek, so like every other foreign visitor to the UK she’s probably struggling with the complexity of the British class system. But it is relevant. The hobbits are clearly rural English, divided into gentleman farmers such as the Bagginses, and “sons of the soil” like Sam Gamgee. The dwarves are noble artisans such as a village blacksmith might have been, whereas the orcs are working class labourers that you might find in a coal mine or steelworks. The humans have all of the usual range of social classes. And the elves, well they are clearly upper class, above even human royalty. They live apart from the rest of society, and yet they are supposedly in charge of everything. At least, when they can be bothered to exert themselves. Elrond, being famously half-Elven, is notoriously snooty about human-elf relationships, just as you might expect.

Tolkien doubtless regarded himself as upper middle class, at least when he became an Oxford don. Quite how he felt class impacted his subcreation of Middle Earth I can’t say (though I’m hoping that someone will look into it with the same depth and rigour that Fimi brings to her book). What I can say is that, consciously or not, it will have influenced him.

Niggles aside, this is an excellent book, full of sharp observations about Tolkien and the times through which he lived. If you have a deep interest in the Legendarium, I highly recommend it.

book cover
Title: Tolkien, Race and Cultural History
By: Dimitra Fimi
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Follow Me: Religion in Fantasy & Science Fiction

054, Book Review, Francesca T. Barbini

It is somewhat dubious for me to review a book that I have an essay in, but I am very fond of the Academia Lunare series from Luna Press Publishing, so I want to encourage you to buy the books.

Follow Me: Religion in Fantasy and Science Fiction, is the latest volume in the series. The theme should be obvious from the title. The ways in which contributors have engaged with the theme differ widely.

There are several essays on Tolkien, which is hardly surprising. Religion was very important to him, and he created an entire mythology for Middle Earth. That may not be obvious if you’ve only watched the movies, but it is all there in the background. What’s more, there are Tolkien fans who have adopted that mythology as their religion, as Elyse Welles explains in her essay, “Neo-Pagans and the Ainur Pantheon”.

One of the most fascinating essays in the book is Steph P Bianchini’s discussion of the Zelazny novel, Creatures of Light and Darkness. I know I read that book a very long time ago. Given what Bianchini says about it, I suspect that I didn’t understand it very well. Now I want to go back to it, because it seems that it was a very interesting work that would reward in-depth reading with the knowledge of Ancient Egyptian religion that I now have.

The other essay that really leapt out at me is the one by Giovanni Carmine Costabile about the video game, Final Fantasy X. I know nothing about that series of games, nor did I know anything about the French philosopher, René Girard, until I read Costabile’s essay. Now I’m intrigued about how much thought video game writers can put into their work.

The one thing that is missing from the book is an examination of Earthseed, the religion that Octavia Butler created for her Parable books. That was the first thing that occurred to me to write when I saw the call for papers, but I then thought that I should leave that to a person of colour to write. Eugen Bacon, whom I thought might write it, has an essay in the book, but she has chosen a different topic. As no one else stepped forward, we have gone without. Hopefully someone will write that essay for another venue at some point, because it needs writing.

My own contribution to the book is about queer gods. To whet your appetites, here’s the abstract:

In modern Western society, we tend to assume that religion is the enemy of the LGBTQ+ community. Some religious people certainly give us plenty of ground for thinking that. Outside the Abrahamic religions, however, attitudes towards queer people could be very different. Some gods were decidedly queer. Also the history of the Abrahamic religions is nowhere near as heteronormative and cisnormative as some modern church leaders would like to make out.

This paper will look at queer gods from history and their provenances. It will look at how the gender of god/s is understood. It will also argue that for much of human history, religious cults were one of the main safe spaces for queer people.

book cover
Title: Follow Me: Religion in Fantasy & Science Fiction
By: Francesca T Barbini (ed.)
Publisher: Luna Press Publishing
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
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Glorious Angels

054, Book Review, Justina Robson

This book came out in the UK in 2015. It being science fiction by a woman (and having a fair amount of sex in it), it did not get the promotion it deserved. Now, at last, there is a US edition, thanks to Book View Cafe, and there is a promise of the long-awaited sequel. So I am re-printing my review in the hope that the book will get more attention this time around.

Reading Justina Robson can be a bit like reading Gene Wolfe: you get to the end and you realize that the author is much smarter than you are, and that you need to go back and re-read the book to find all of the things you have missed. I don’t really have time for that, and anyway there’s plenty enough to enjoy in a single reading, so here I go with my imperfect understanding of Glorious Angels.

Let’s start with the setting, because that’s easy. There is a planet, there is an empire of some sort, and it appears to be aging and decrepit. Certainly there is an awful lot of technology that is indistinguishable from magic. There may also be magic, who can tell?

The action is centered on the city state of Glimshard, ruled over by the Empress Yaphantine Shamuit Torada. Here is a description of the city:

Over its high top they were able to see most of the capital’s sprawling hillsides climbing steadily towards the clustered citadels of the Terrace. From the Terrace’s heart a thick trunk of what appeared to be many fine crystal stems drew a straight line upward in shining facets of rose and turquoise. Ever-undulating internal lights seemed faint in this hot afternoon of glare and dust, the outer veils of this stem flickering and unreliable in auroras of changing hue. The Gleaming, its heavy flowerhead, was mostly lost in hazy cloud but occasional spires and towers of the Arrays far above them caught the light and glinted down.

Yes, it is probably in part a nod to the city of Sky in NK Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. But it is much more than that. Don’t forget that description of the city, because it will mean something later in the book.

The Empire is comprised of eight city states. Each city is ruled over by an Empress. The eight are telepathically linked. That does not mean that they all get on. The other Empresses look down upon Torada, mainly because she is just a teenager, but also because she prefers to rule by being loved than by being feared.

Loving Torada is not hard. She has pheromones that can win over all but the most steely-minded citizen. Provided, of course, that she can get close enough to exert her influence.

The central character of the book is Tralane Huntingore, Professor of Engineering at the Glimshard Academy of Sciences. Tralane has no real idea why the various machines she works with operate. Disciplines such as physics are but hazy memories. But she is a genius at getting things to work. She is also a single mother with two teenage daughters who have just arrived at that annoying age where any man you might hope to date is likely to be more interested in your daughters than he is in you. Not that this bothers Tralane too much. She’s much happier in oily overalls taking strange machines apart than in a ballgown. And anyway, she’s a powerful noblewoman; if she wants a man, she can have one.

Yes, this is a world in which women rule. Don’t ask why, they just do. I mean, why shouldn’t they? There has been no global catastrophe to do away with patriarchy. There never was patriarchy. At least not in living memory. Equally this is not some radical lesbian feminist utopia. Torada, who rules by love, is happy for her citizens to find it where they may. The city’s language has more words for genders than Justina can easily translate into English. Sex is central to the rose-like city, and men are a key part of that equation.

Nevertheless, a city cannot run on sex alone. Mastery over ancient technology is key to prosperity. Archaeologists from Glimshard have discovered a significant deposit in the far south. Few people in the city, not even Tralane, have much idea what it is, but everyone knows that it must be hugely valuable because so much money and manpower is being poured into securing it. The trouble is that the Fragment, as it is known, is too big to move, and is located in the forest lands of the Karoo.

The Karoo are ignorant primitives with no grasp of technology.

The Karoo are bioplastic and telepathic. They are far closer to nature than mere humans could ever hope to be.

The Karoo, once you get to know them, are fucking terrifying.

The people of Glimshard do not know that. Which is why, when a lone Karoo male arrives in the city and volunteers to serve as a mercenary in the city’s army, most of the women of the city can’t wait to get a glimpse of him. General Borze and his aide, Parillus, having provided us earlier with our view of the city, take in the newcomer.

Head and shoulders taller than any Empire man with a muscular physique that was spare and clear-cut, he looked like a stone sculpture of some legendary fighter. That was where the extent of his resemblance to men of the Empire ended however. He was blue-grey and white, and colours marbled darkly on his back and on the backs of his arms, light on his front and undersides. He was also as thickly maned as Parillus’s horse, with silvery-white hair that surged not only off his head in great hanks but from his neck and along the length of his spine too, disappearing under his belt in finger-length tufts. To either side of this, tiger stripes of intense sunburnt orange spread out around his ribs and waist, feathered the edges of his neck and emerged either side of his head in triangular ears, their thickly furred points tipped with lynxlike purple feather hair that flicked whenever the ears turned — something they did independently of each other in a way Borze found disturbing.

Phwoah!

Trust me here: I have only skimmed the surface of this book. Most of what I have given you above is set-up in the first few chapters. Actually I have left out the first chapter entirely as I want you to enjoy reading it as it was intended. There is so much more: about Glimshard and Torada; about Tralane’s daughters; about the Karoo; and about the Fragment. Never forget, also, that Justina has a philosophy degree. That fact will crop up and surprise you when you least expect it.

It is possible, of course, that this book is not for the faint-hearted. Certainly it is not for the dudebros, who will be utterly squicked out by all that sex and matriarchy and stuff. It may also squick out younger women who think the idea of a mother of teenage girls having sex is just, ewwww, gross! Suck it up, kids, you’ll be in our position eventually. Finally, of course, there is thought required. You can read and enjoy Glorious Angels on a skim through, but you will get so much more out of it from thinking hard about what you are reading.

book cover
Title: Glorious Angels
By: Justina Robson
Publisher: Gollancz/Book View Cafe
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Where the Drowned Girls Go

054, Book Review, Seanan McGuire

Keeping a series going is a skill. Not all writers have it. Juliet McKenna has certainly got the knack as she keeps churning out Green Man books for me. Seanan McGuire, however, is a queen of series writing. Where the Drowned Girls Go is the seventh novella in the Wayward Children series, but that’s nothing; the October Daye series is already up to 15 full novels. I don’t know how she does it.

The other thing about a series is that you have choices to make about how stand-alone each book is, and how much character development you put it. Personally (and with a great deal of publisher bias) I think that McKenna has got that about right. Where the Drowned Girls Go is much more tied in to previous books in the series.

The book’s main protagonist is Cora, the mermaid girl, but it also features Sumi from Beneath the Sugar Sky, and Regan from Across the Green Grass Fields. What’s more there is a developing plot. If Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children is in some ways modelled on Professor Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters (and McGuire is a massive X-Men fan), then there must be a Magneto to oppose it. That comes in the form of the Whitethorn Institute, a strict and brutal place that promises to teach wayward children to forget their lives in magical realms and become ordinary, boring members of the mundane world.

Cora, thanks to her adventures on The Moors in Come Tumbling Down, has been haunted by beings called The Drowned Gods. Although The Moors are not the world in which Cora became a mermaid, they are very watery. The Drowned Gods, who are blessed with far too many teeth and tentacles, have seen a fellow water-spirit in Cora and are determined to have her. Being unable to shake them off, Cora takes a desperate step and asks Miss West for a transfer to Whitethorn. Maybe there she can learn to forget.

The point of this is to allow McGuire to explore Whitethorn from the inside, but rather more importantly it explores the sort of place that children might get sent if they are deemed too different by their parents. I was struck by this passage:

“… because we’re still legally children, our parents get to decide what’s true for us. They get to say they want their ‘real’ kids back, the ones they wanted, and not the ones they ended up with.”

This reminds me very much of the sort of thing that is said about trans kids. Parents who believe in made-up psychiatric conditions such as “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” believe that their ‘real’ kids have somehow been brainwashed into being trans, and that this can be reversed if sufficient cruelty is applied to the problem.

Of course the same is true of many other aspects of childhood. Parents have expectations for their children, and those expectations are not always fulfilled. The above quote could easily be about a kid who has decided she wants to study astronomy, or to play tennis, when her parents have their hearts set on her becoming a lawyer. Whitethorn is a place that stamps out individuality and enforces social norms. Magneto was fighting for mutant rights, just as Xavier was, but in a very different way. Whitethorn is far more evil. An X-Men equivalent to Whitethorn would try to cure the pupils of being mutants.

All this is well and good, but this is also Hugo reading. I enjoyed the book, as I enjoy all of the Wayward Children series. However, the Novella category is fiercely competitive these days so my vote might go elsewhere. Truly, we are living in a golden age of novellas.

book cover
Title: Where the Drowned Girls Go
By: Seanan McGuire
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura
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