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A Year's Reading: LONG Posts Warning

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Joe Bernstein

unread,
Oct 14, 2007, 11:45:33 PM10/14/07
to
For the past six months, I've been keeping a book log, and I'm now ready
to post it. As the subject line indicates, it covers an entire year, and
during the year in question I was often under-employed, so that's a *lot*
of books. As many of you know, I also tend to write long. So...

Tuesday or Thursday, I'll be posting eleven posts, most of which are
around 800 lines long.

People with strong feelings about such posts should take note. They
will all be followups to this post or to each other. They will all
have subject lines that begin "A Year's Reading", like this post (but
with different stuff after the colon). Adjust your killfiles or other
tools accordingly.

Joe Bernstein

--
Joe Bernstein, file clerk, bookkeeper, and writer j...@sfbooks.com
<http://www.panix.com/~josephb/>

philos...@yahoo.com

unread,
Oct 15, 2007, 9:50:30 PM10/15/07
to
On Mon, 15 Oct 2007 03:45:33 +0000 (UTC), Joe Bernstein
<j...@sfbooks.com> wrote:

>For the past six months, I've been keeping a book log, and I'm now ready
>to post it. As the subject line indicates, it covers an entire year, and
>during the year in question I was often under-employed, so that's a *lot*
>of books. As many of you know, I also tend to write long. So...
>
>Tuesday or Thursday, I'll be posting eleven posts, most of which are
>around 800 lines long.
>
>People with strong feelings about such posts should take note. They
>will all be followups to this post or to each other. They will all
>have subject lines that begin "A Year's Reading", like this post (but
>with different stuff after the colon). Adjust your killfiles or other
>tools accordingly.
>
>Joe Bernstein

Heh. I saw the heading and said to myself: 19 lines isn't THAT long
of a post!

Rebecca

Robert A. Woodward

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Oct 16, 2007, 2:16:24 AM10/16/07
to
In article <2668h3hsphreoq39j...@4ax.com>,
philos...@yahoo.com wrote:

It depends on how L O N G the lines are (the posts of a poster in a
different newsgroup always show up as 1 line in my subject window,
but the posts could be over 100 lines).

--
Robert Woodward <robe...@drizzle.com>
<http://www.drizzle.com/~robertaw>

Elaine Thompson

unread,
Oct 16, 2007, 1:35:39 PM10/16/07
to

>> On Mon, 15 Oct 2007 03:45:33 +0000 (UTC), Joe Bernstein
>> <j...@sfbooks.com> wrote:
>>
>> >For the past six months, I've been keeping a book log, and I'm now ready
>> >to post it. As the subject line indicates, it covers an entire year, and
>> >during the year in question I was often under-employed, so that's a *lot*
>> >of books. As many of you know, I also tend to write long. So...
>> >
>> >Tuesday or Thursday, I'll be posting eleven posts, most of which are
>> >around 800 lines long.

Welcome back, Joe. I look forward to seeing what you've been reading
and enjoying.

And since you're back I guess I can figure out something to say about
the Joyce Ballou Gregorian trilogy I reread at your instigation.


--
Elaine Thompson <Ela...@KEThompson.org>

Joe Bernstein

unread,
Oct 16, 2007, 9:47:03 PM10/16/07
to
In article <kft9h314a28a5g87n...@4ax.com>,
Elaine Thompson <Ela...@KEThompson.org> wrote:

> And since you're back I guess I can figure out something to say about
> the Joyce Ballou Gregorian trilogy I reread at your instigation.

Thanks for the kind words, and thanks for re-reading that. I haven't -
indeed, one of the things driving that log is that I'm separated from
most of my books, including that trilogy. But maybe I'll try to, so we
can talk about it. Hmmm... OK, typical: The Seattle Public Library
owns only the first volume. And the suburban ones don't even have that.

But for what it's worth, very early in the log there's a *reference* to
Gregorian that can be used as a hook if necessary. With a couple more
later on.

Posts Thursday evening, well, sometime like 4 or 5 am Friday GMT.

Doug Weller

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Oct 17, 2007, 12:12:06 PM10/17/07
to
Hi Joe
I'm looking forward to reading them. I haven't seen any posts from you for
quite a while.

Doug
--
Doug Weller --
A Director and Moderator of The Hall of Ma'at http://www.hallofmaat.com
Doug's Archaeology Site: http://www.ramtops.co.uk
Amun - co-owner/co-moderator http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Amun/

Joe Bernstein

unread,
Oct 18, 2007, 10:18:30 PM10/18/07
to
Sorry! Thanks to those interested, but ... Two days ago, I wrote:

> Posts Thursday evening, well, sometime like 4 or 5 am Friday GMT.

Unfortunately. Seattle's electrical system is so designed as to
collapse every time the wind blows, and the wind blew tonight. (I'm
exaggerating. Last autumn and winter, such collapses only happened
three or four times. But it's still way worse than in any other city
where I've lived.)

Both of my workplaces and my home are without power. After half an
hour waiting for a bus to take me back downtown to the central
library, I gave up and went to my local branch library, which *does*
have power. However, that library has also banned telnet, which means
I can't get at the posting-ready copies of the posts sitting in my
shell account. *Some* computers at the central library allow telnet,
but it's now way too late to get there before closing time. So the
upshot is that I can only post this apology.

The routine last year was that each time this happened, power was
restored to the downtown and the ritzy neighbourhoods near it - in one
of which I live, though not ritzily - fairly quickly, but it took
weeks in outlying areas. We'll see whether things are the same this
year, or its being a local election year changes matters. But *if*
the pattern holds, I should be able to use telnet at my part-time
workplace either later this evening, or tomorrow evening, and get this
show on the road. (And if the pattern doesn't hold, there's an
alternate location that's far enough from downtown it's got good odds
of having power by tomorrow.) If the posts don't appear within the
next three hours, it'll be tomorrow.

Joe Bernstein
(with apologies if there are word-wrap problems here; it's a long time
since I last posted from Google! Did they get rid of the preview
function just as part of their general drive to make their Usenet
interface less useful, or did they hide it, or what?)

Joe Bernstein

unread,
Oct 18, 2007, 11:40:16 PM10/18/07
to
Introduction

Last September, I relocated to Seattle. Here, I live in a "hotel" as
I have before in other cities, but rather more expensively. One
consequence of my residence is that I lack home net access.
Furthermore, events unrelated to rec.arts.sf.written have greatly
reduced my interest in Usenet. Yet soon after those events concluded,
last April, I found myself writing the first draft of this series of
posts. Apparently I missed Usenet, or at least rasfw, more than I
knew. I thought then that I should let some months pass, and some
flamage die down, before posting anything anywhere; I hope I've waited
enough. In any event, I still lack home net access, and will probably
not be as responsive, if anyone comments on these posts, as I'd wish
to be.

Anyway. These posts report on seven months or so of reading
*retrospectively*, and then five months or so of reading
*concurrently*; parts of this I wrote from memory, other parts even
before finishing the book in question. I had three helps to
reconstruct the first seven months' reading: 1) public library date
due slips, which I started saving in early January; 2) public library
date due e-mails, which I seem to have saved all along but which don't
list books returned already before the trigger date; and 3) my ongoing
book catalogue (of books I own, that is). As you'll see, books read
in September through December 2006 are seriously under-represented;
this is partly for lack of date due slips, but also partly because
during those months I was in school, and not only that, but taking
advantage of university library access to do serious research. I list
here no books that are entirely intentional non-fiction, though there
are several mixed volumes. I honestly don't know how much fiction
I've omitted; in July, when I finally thought of checking the e-mails,
I found only one omission that way. Separately, books read in
September through March tend to get much less comment than later-read
ones; this is the main reason I've dated books read for the first time
by month, though for those months there's generally one month margin
of error (usually, the month given is more likely too early than too
late).

For years now I've found it more or less difficult to read books
through from start to finish. Although, last year, this problem
seemed to be diminishing, it's resurged since I relocated. I
considered describing one of my usual patterns as "read most of" for
these posts, but decided the usual verb "skimmed" remains closer to
the truth: at some point I stop reading straight through, and instead
skip to the end, reading backward in fits and starts until I feel that
I understand as much as I really want to about the ending. This
frequently results in my reading most of the actual pages, but out of
order, disrupting any æsthetic effects that rely on things like
suspense or repetition, and in any event usually omitting things like
descriptions or introspection (which is why "skimmed" is still
accurate, even for books whose every line of *dialogue* I've read).
"Lightly skimmed" means I read less of the beginning, and left rather
larger gaps of unread material in the rest. On the other hand, there
are quite a few books here which I finished properly only *after*
skipping to the end, and finding myself unable to satisfy my curiosity
vis-à-vis the ending any other way; I sometimes, but not always,
mention this in discussing the book in question.

The following posts proceed thus:

Read for the first time: fantasy
Read for the first time: science fiction
Read for the first time: children's books
Read for the first time: other fiction
Series
Re-reading and footnotes

Probably the only one that needs explanation is "series". I haven't
lumped all series there, only ones which the "read for the first time"
vs. "re-read" distinction would otherwise split. As for books read
for the first time, those are in the *first* relevant post; thus
children's fantasies are in "fantasy", not in "children's books", and
"other fiction" really means "other" than the preceding three posts.
I didn't treat alternate history as a criterion; in other words, there
are alternate history books (at least, by loose definitions) in the
fantasy post, the science fiction one, and the other fiction one.
(Similarly for, e.g., horror and graphic novels. I index genres and
forms without their own posts at the start of the other fiction post.)
I usually didn't find dividing "fantasy" from "science fiction"
particularly difficult, but of course I expect at least some
complaints about how I divided them, if not about my having done so at
all; in a few cases I try to pre-empt these.

My treatments of particular books or series follow a pattern, to some
extent: 1) There are always headers, giving basic bibliographic info
(author[s], title[s], date[s]), showing who owned the copy I read, and
indicating how thoroughly I read. There may also be a line or two
about awards for the work(s) and/or author(s). 2, optionally) I
generally put in the first paragraph(s) of text any additional
comments on bibliographic matters, such as on uncertainties of dates,
on pseudonyms, etc.; this is also where I usually put any discussions
of genre. In general, if I say anything to defend or clarify the
headers or their placement in a particular post, it'll be here.
3) My main comments on the book(s) generally come next.
4, optionally) At the end there may be a paragraph of minor complaints
about typos or the like, or a footnote, or any cited URL(s). In other
words, approaching these discussions as if they were in pyramid style
may be unrewarding; flipside, don't read too much into the fact that a
number of entries end with trivial criticisms.

I discuss two different (though related) themes globally, and since
both are first illustrated, in the sequence of posts, by Elizabeth
Bear's <Blood and Iron> in the fantasy post, that's where you'll find
"Safety vs. wonder in the new century" and "Reform vs. revolution in
the new century". More trivially, "Seattle as setting or home town"
is in the footnotes post.

On a whim, I decided in July to list movies (um, movies with plots)
too, post by post, classified as if they were books, but with limited
comments. Some are certainly missing. I save movie tickets, but now
don't find the ticket to the first movie I saw on the big screen here.
I *didn't* save library due date slips that only list DVDs and/or
videos; I lost at least two, and I think they listed more movies than
I now remember. There's also the issue of short films included on
DVDs (or occasionally videos), of which I've omitted at least one
*with* a plot that I actually watched (as well as several without
plots). But at least I think I've remembered correctly which of the
movies I *own* (thus, have catalogued) I've watched this past year.
(Note for precision: I count as a "movie" anything watched on video
or DVD too; I didn't use a TV during the year to pick up broadcasts or
cable transmissions, not for lack of trying, but some of the videos
and DVDs originated as TV, not as movies properly so called. Also, I
didn't watch any documentaries; a few of the movies listed in the
other fiction post are perhaps only dubiously fictional, but I decided
in the end that none needed exclusion.)

The next section of *this* post indicates which authors are
represented in which posts, by way of an index. I then,
hypocritically, include something I mock some of the authors for
including in *their* works, a glossary (sigh). The sections after
that, about bibliographic methods and about factors that shaped which
books I read, should be skipped except by people who find these posts
genuinely interesting, or, I suppose, any hypothetical people who
might want to cite them.

May someone find some use in this.

Joe Bernstein

Author Index

f- fantasy; SF - science fiction; c - children's fiction; o - other
fiction; s - series; r - re-reading. I index from the re-reading post
here only authors on whose book(s) I actually comment. Asterisks
indicate discussions longer than the relevant number of screensful
(each 24 lines, 70 character limit per line, and not counting header
lines); an asterisk usually, but not always, means I read the book(s)
in May or later. Note that I list two authors without actually having
read anything by them. Also note that there are anthologies in the
series post under Flint, but not anywhere else in these posts; I don't
index the authors included individually below.

Louisa May Alcott - fcs, Alma Alexander [Alma Hromic] - f**, Charlotte
Vale Allen - or, anonymous - f********, Catherine Asaro - SF*, Jane
Austen - r*
Kage Baker - f*s**********, Elizabeth Bear - f****SF*, Elizabeth
Bowen - o**, Gillian Bradshaw - o***r, Marie Brennan - f, Lois
McMaster Bujold - f**
John Campbell Jr - SF, Jacqueline Carey - f**, P. C. Cast - f***, Glen
Cook - f, John Crowley - s
Kara Dalkey - f, Avram Davidson - f*, Andrew Dennis under Eric
Flint - s, Charles Dickens - o*******************, Paul
Di Filippo - f, Cory Doctorow - f***SF****, Marcos Donnelly - f,
Keith Donohue - f*, L. Warren Douglas - f, Sara Douglass - f*,
Emily Drake [R. A. V. Salsitz] - f*, Sarah Dunant - o*, Hal
Duncan - f
George Eliot - o***, Kelley Eskridge - SF*r
Cynthia Felice under Connie Willis - r, Eric Flint (with miscellaneous
co-authors) - s*******, David Friedman - f, James Bernard
Frost - o*
Neil Gaiman - f, Stella Gibbons - o*, Sue Grafton - o*
Anne Harris - r, M. John Harrison - f****, Robert Heinlein - SF,
Amanda Hemingway - f***, Zenna Henderson - s, Jim Hines - f, Robert
Holdstock - f, Robert Howard - f**, Sarah Hoyt - f*, Alma Hromic as
Alma Alexander - f**
Elizabeth Inchbald - o, Ian Irvine - f*, Robert Irwin - f

Rachel Kadish - o****, Guy Gavriel Kay - f, David Keck - f, Peg
Kerr - r, Charles Kingsley - f, August Friedrich Ferdinand von
Kotzebue under Elizabeth Inchbald - o
Jay Lake - f*SF*, Tanith Lee - f, Kelly Link - f, Barry Longyear - r
John MacDonald - r, Kelly McCullough - f, Shannon McKelden - f*, Syne
Mitchell - SF*******, Sarah Monette - f*, L. M.
Montgomery - c********, Elizabeth Moon - r, Christopher
Moore - f*s, Moira Moore - f, Terry Moore - o
Audrey Niffenegger - fSF***
Rebecca Ore - SF****
Joshua Palmatier - f, Susan Palwick - f*, Christopher Paolini - f*,
Tom Perrotta - o, Holly Phillips - f**, Michael Pye - o*

Satyajit Ray - f**, Kit Reed - SF**, Kat Richardson - f**, Justina
Robson - SF***, J. K. Rowling - f, Matt Ruff - f*, Kristine Kathryn
Rusch - SF, Jessica Rydill - f
E. Rose Sabin - f, R. A. V. Salsitz as Emily Drake - f, Brandon
Sanderson - f*, Darieck Scott - f**o*, Lucius Shepard - f*, Edmund
Spenser - f, Ellen Steiber - f, Bruce Sterling - SF*, Caroline
Stevermer under Patricia Wrede - s**, Sean Stewart - f*, S. M.
Stirling - SF, Steph Swainston - f*
Sonya Taaffe - f**, Lisa Tuttle - f**

Catherynne Valente - f**********, John Varley - SF, Cynthia Voigt - r
Jo Walton - o***, Sylvia Waugh - f, David Weber under Eric Flint - s,
Scott Westerfeld - SF, Kit Whitfield - f*, Laura Ingalls
Wilder - c, Connie Willis - r*, Patricia Wrede - s**, John
Wright - f**s**


Mary Frances Zambreno - f, Louis Zara - o, Stephan Zielinski - f

Glossary

bildungsroman - I mean by this a novel showing the substantial
maturation of its protagonist; I don't remember whether that's a
reasonably correct meaning. See also Sturm und Drang.

biblio, Contento - Bibliography, particularly as practised by William
Contento. See especially <http://www.locusmag.com/index/>. See also
ISFDB.

codes - Well, I meant not to do this, but I now realise I should.
Codes before titles reflect ownership of the book or movie in question
*as of when I read or watched it*. For books or movies in the "read
for the first time" series of posts, that means first reading or
viewing, not any possible subsequent ones. (Anyway, I didn't return
during this year to many of those books and movies.) So the codes:

No code means the copy of the relevant book or movie that I actually
read or viewed was owned by a library, in fact always the Seattle
Public Library.
* means I owned the copy I read or viewed.
0 means I own a copy of the relevant book or movie, but read or viewed
a different copy (because the copy I own is in storage in
Milwaukee). If there's no other code, then the copy I did read or
view was owned by a library.
+ means the copy of the movie viewed was owned by whoever owns the
copies shown in movie theatres.
$ means the copy of the book read was owned by a bookstore (see Kay in
the fantasy post on this).
o means some other ownership situation.

Meanwhile, footnotes with letters, found in text, such as [a],
refer to stuff at the end of the relevant entry. In contrast,
footnotes with numbers, attached to authors' names, such as
Holly Phillips [2]
refer to two footnotes in the final post (the post for re-reading and,
ahem, footnotes).

EOF, Clute - <The Encyclopedia of Fantasy> edited by John Clute and
John Grant. (Disclaimer: I was a contributor.) Also <The
Encyclopedia of Science Fiction> edited by Peter Nicholls and John
Clute. Amusingly, a Seattle press has published a book by Clute this
year: a dictionary of horror. No idea whether I'll see a copy soon;
it's certainly beyond my budget.

fantastication, fantasticated, etc. - To fantasticate something is to
make it a thing of fantasy: Excalibur is a fantastication of a sword,
and London is fantasticated in many books, such as <The Anubis Gates>
or <Neverwhere>.

IMDB, ISFDB - Internet [Movie | Speculative Fiction] DataBase.
Respectively <http://www.imdb.com/> or <http://www.isfb.org/> (*NOT*
.com!) at this time. Both are collaborative efforts, comparable to
wikis but older than Wikipedia; I have not yet seen a more reliable
filmographic reference than the IMDB, in admittedly cursory looking
around, but I find the Contento indices (see biblio) generally
superior to the ISFDB for the uses in which they overlap.

instantiation, instantiate, etc. - To instantiate something is to be
an example of it: <The Lord of the Rings> instantiates the claim that
fantasy can be great literature. (This is one of my favourite words,
and I'm astonished that as of August I've only used it in discussing
one writer. Huh.) Note that this has a different connotation from
"exemplify", "exemplary", and so on: an instantiation is simply an
example, and not necessarily a Platonic ideal or an exceptionally good
example. (Millard Fillmore instantiates "US President", but would
probably not be seen by most as exemplifying the concept.)

instauration - An event which changes the moral structure of the
universe (see mythopoesy), and usually also the laws by which it
operates. This makes most possible examples spoilers, I suppose, but
<The Silmarillion> contains several instaurations; two common
instaurations are The End of Magic and The Restoration of Magic.

Mary Sue - A term which a thread some while ago established has no
consensus definition. But the canonical example of this extremely
fuzzy set is the <Star Trek> fanfic character named Mary Sue (which
also happens to be the author's name, and isn't it funny that they
have the same hair colour too?), who turns out to be the one woman
Kirk (and/or Spock!) falls in love with for keeps, and who also saves
the universe when she foils the villain. The outer edge of the "Mary
Sue" concept fades into the more general realm of "hero".

mode - As I use it, a classification of literary texts that functions
by definition, as in "Fantasy is fiction in which there's something
impossible". Useful for drawing sharp lines - so I relied on modes to
separate speculative from "other" fiction in these posts - but not
much use for getting insight into writing. As best I can tell, no two
critics use "mode" with the same meaning, so caveat lector.

mythopoesy - Fantasy that presents a universe with a structure, which
structure is moral, and usually endangered by the conflict(s) the
protagonist(s) must deal with. The Tolkien type of thing.

novum - "New thing". A thingummy in a work of speculative fiction
that establishes that it is, in fact, speculative fiction, not
realistic fiction: the ghost in a ghost story, for example.

numen - I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean, but when I use it
here, I mean something between "wonder" and "mystery". The sort of
thing really great fantasies tend to have great heaping amounts of, in
my opinion, what convinces you that there really are more things in
those books' heaven and earth. I contrast it with "techne", by which
I mean something vaguely like "engineering knowhow"; I'm trying to
make a polarity there (though of course really good engineering has
its own numen ...), where a fully "techne" book is trying to convince
you that everything is comprehensible and knowable.

paperback - This usually means "mass market paperback", the cheapest
common form of book in the US; depending on context, less often it
refers to paper covers literally.

plot coupons - Things you collect to redeem for a happy ending. The
Signs in <The Dark Is Rising> are plot coupons. Some plot coupons
defectively produce catastrophic endings instead, or at least try to.

plot shape - Um. I have no clue how to define it, but luckily I've
been handed an example to use. A Wikipedia article about one of
Dickens's novels spoilerishly quotes him saying a friend of his had
enlightened him as to how to end it; that (per said friend) comedies
go "He's losing, he's losing, he wins", while tragedies go "He's
winning, he's winning, he loses". I don't actually agree with that
claim about tragedies and comedies (wouldn't that make <Hamlet> a
comedy?), but those are plot shapes. A plot shape I see often
nowadays (and don't especially like) is "He's winning, he's losing,
he's losing, he wins and then flees, sadder but wiser".

POV - Point of view, as in first person (there's a narrator), third
person (there isn't, or the narrator is "omniscient"), or second
person or plural (weird). I also use this acronym as short for "point
of view character".

secondary - A "secondary world" is a world, generally in fantasy, that
isn't ours, and indeed isn't in the same universe, so needn't obey our
universe's natural laws. By extension, a "secondary land", "village",
or whatever seems to occupy such a world, but doesn't talk enough
about it to rule out other options (such as that the place in question
is in the distant past or future of this world, or whatever).
Strictly speaking, Middle-Earth is not a secondary world (past), nor
is Shannara (future); the Land, arguably, is, while Greenwillow is an
arguably secondary village.

sf, sfnal, spec-fic, spec-ficnal, etc. - Unlike my usual practice, in
these posts (but not necessarily in followups) I use "sf" consistently
to mean "science fiction", and in cases where I mean "speculative
fiction" use "spec-fic"; similarly the adjectivals "sfnal" and
"spec-ficnal".

slipstream - No doubt my understanding is wrong, but for what it's
worth, my understanding is that "slipstream" is a (putative) genre
composed of writings that defy the concept of genre by using the
techniques or tropes (q.v.) of multiple genres. I get the impression
that its advocates want to deal with the question "How do you
distinguish science fiction from fantasy?" by saying "You shouldn't be
able to distinguish them! When you can, it's because of bad writing!"
But no doubt I'm slandering them. I find the whole thing paradoxical,
and find that writers who get cited as slipstream often use plot
shapes (q.v.) which I dislike, so I've paid this movement less
attention than perhaps I should. I have the impression that
"interstitial" has recently been another word for this phenomenon. See
also Todorov's fantastic.

Sturm und Drang - Storm and stress, but it sounds better in German
(that's ShtOOrm oond Drahnk); ever since Goethe, a standard label for
adolescent angst, especially as experienced, in heightened form, in
the typical bildungsroman (q.v.).

telling / showing - "Show, don't tell", the famous advice given to
writers.

Todorov's fantastic - Tzvetan Todorov was a literary critic who is
widely reported as having said in one of his books that "the
fantastic", as a category, ought to be understood as comprising art
that *hesitates* before the decision as to whether to be spec-fic or
not, in other words, that raises the possibility but does not settle
it. He therefore (again, from what I've heard) concludes that the
fantastic is rare. This apparently led to much acrimony from genre
sources who felt insulted by his using a different word ("marvellous",
I think) for what was becoming known, at the time, as "fantasy". (He
may also have had nasty things to say about it, though.) Oh,
actually, his words were French (fantastique, merveilleux), but
whatever.
Near as I can tell, the difference between Todorov's fantastic and
slipstream (which see) is that in the former, there is *uncertainty*
whether the story is fantastic or not, in both the reader or viewer
and the characters; in the latter, at least the characters display
indifference to the question. (Wikipedia on slipstream vehemently
disagrees, though; note my ignorance re slipstream.) Traditionally,
Gothic novels, even if they don't occupy Todorov's fantastic in the
strict form - even if they explain everything in their final pages -
nevertheless spend most of their pages in that space, and use the
uncertainty as a crucial driver of tension and plot. Some movies do
something similar, and rather than spoil these movies by classing them
as "fantasy" or "other", I've listed them in the re-reading post, even
though as it happens all such movies that I've seen in the year in
question, have been ones I was seeing for the first time. Anyway, my
limited understanding of slipstream, in contrast, and my limited
experience of it, is that its tensions and plots should normally *not*
rest on the challenging of any one view of reality.

tradition - As I use it, a classification of literary texts that
functions mainly by inspiration and aspiration. When I talk about
"the Anglo-American fantasy tradition", I mean more or less that body
of texts that Lin Carter promoted in the 1960s and 1970s, and those
later ones which have more or less clearly drawn on that body for
ideas or challenges (and works that have drawn on *those*, and so on,
world without end); works that refer to Tolkien, Howard, or some such,
even if only as a model to rebel against. I use tradition to separate
science fiction from fantasy in these posts (since I know of no way to
separate soft sf from fantasy by modes).

trope - Something conventional an author can put into a book.
Unicorns are fantasy tropes; orphans are tropes of children's fiction.

Wikipedia - As used in these posts, this is always
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/>, generally with the relevant term as
the element after the final slash (using _underscores_ in place of
spaces); I don't list individual URLs for Wikipedia articles as for
other Web sources.

Bibliographic Methods

For each book, I try to note author(s), title(s), date(s) of first
publication of the contents, and in cases where the contents
(disregarding things like introductions, notes, etc.) were not
originally published as a unit, date of first compilation. (Where
that first compilation used a different title, I also try to give
that; otherwise, it's "as such".) For series books I try to note
series title, but usually in the text, not the headers. Also in the
text, I try to note *interior* illustrations, naming the artist(s); I
only decided this should be done systematically after the posts had
closed, so I've probably missed some.

As to authors, I (try to) note, in the text, pseudonyms where the
author has been published under names other than the one stated by the
book (so listing them may help you find other works by the author),
but not otherwise. I alphabetise the books by stated authorship even
if pseudonymous. (Thus I note that "Emily Drake" is a pseudonym for
R. A. V. Salsitz, author of <The Magickers>, but still put the book
under D; but I don't give the name behind "George Eliot".) I treat
initials with my usual schizophrenic approach: all initials
*preceding* the first name that's spelt in full are given, but none
*following* that name. (Thus: L. Warren Douglas, R. A. V. Salsitz,
but Patricia [C.] Wrede.)

As to titles, I haven't been especially careful - in particular, I
didn't actually look at physical copies of all the library books
borrowed in previous months, when producing the first draft. That
said, I haven't *noticed* many cases where a more punctilious
bibliographic approach would be productive, for example, cases where
title page title differs from front cover title (except, sometimes, in
the latter's being shorter, or differently capitalised). However, I
do use an unorthodox approach to subtitles: rather than attempt to
note every example of "A Novel", I've considered subtitles worth
including only if they appear on the book's *spine*. (Again, I may
have missed examples in library books read before May. Also, I treat
Dickens differently.) Also, where I *did* get titles from direct
inspection, I observed odd rules for rendering capitalisation (treat
"ALL CAPS" as "Normal Capitalisation"; between cover, title page, and
sometimes spine, any instance of either of those wins; but if all
agree on "all lowercase" or on "an Exception To Normal capitalisation
Rules", use that). For books with multiple titles in English, the
title on the relevant copy is given first, with other titles known to
me after, and no promise of completeness.

As to series titles, I usually get these from memory or inspection,
sometimes from <Locus>/Contento or author websites; I offer no
warranty.

As to dates of first publication and compilation, I have done little
original research, but have relied mostly on Usual Suspects:
copyright pages and their kin, <Locus>/Contento, author websites, and
in some cases of older fiction, printed bibliographies and
biographies. I've consulted the ISFDB occasionally, but not obtained
anything useful therefrom.

The awards listings after the headers proper, for books and authors,
are fairly inadequate. I thought people had been tracking awards
online long enough by now that things would be pretty complete; I
thought wrong. The only source from which I ended up listing anything
was <The LOCUS Index to Science Fiction Awards> by Mark Kelly, at
<http://www.locusmag.com/SFAwards/>, seen October 14, 2007. Laurie
Mann's AwardWeb, at <http://www.dpsinfo.com/awardweb/>, has a list
of links that includes some *non*-spec-fic awards; I scanned lists
of winners and, where possible, nominees, at each working link to an
award name I recognised, and found no overlaps with my reading.
With the awards Kelly lists, I have been selective, omitting all
non-winners of the <Locus> poll, for example, and all "long lists".
This information was the last thing I added to the posts - the
sequence prior to posting was: format (at home); look up awards
(elsewhere); post. Therefore, the awards info (including this
paragraph) may have format problems; if so, I'm sorry.

For movies I list title and date. Titles come from the packaging of
movies I own, and from my recollection as far as library-owned and
big-screen movies are concerned, sometimes corrected by tickets, due
date slips, Maltin 2001, or the IMDB. Dates come from the movies
themselves; from Maltin 2001; and from the IMDB. So neither datum is
particularly reliable! The same goes for original network, which I've
made some effort to indicate for items originally for TV; I may well
have missed some.

For works not originally in English (embarrassingly, nearly all of
these are movies), I consciously *don't* attempt to provide original
titles, but do indicate original language as best I can. Several
movies listed are bilingual or multilingual; I indicate only the
language most used in dialogue, which isn't necessarily the language
formally recorded as that of the production. Note that "Chinese" is a
written language, so movies here are treated as being in "Mandarin" or
"Cantonese" (related spoken languages all of whose written forms are
variations of "Chinese"), generally on the basis of the IMDB.
"Arabic" is a language whose increasingly divergent spoken forms are
linked primarily by the "Classical Arabic" written language of, in
particular, the Qur'an; I don't know whether these spoken forms have
names, let alone what those names are or which movies are in which, so
have indicated for movies in "Arabic" their settings. (Of course,
it's always possible that a movie set in one place was actually shot
in another.)

Access to Books

This section exists mainly because I'd already explained most of
what's in it, piecemeal, scattered across dozens of books, and it
dawned on me that it was better to put it in one place where it could
be ignored easily. Feel free to stop reading this post here, unless
you actually find yourself wondering what motivated some of the
choices listed in the other posts. (Or unless you're a librarian.)

During most of the year in question, I was pretty broke: so I had
lots of spare time, but not the money for many of the things I
might've wanted to fill it with. I'm accustomed to dealing with this
sort of situation partly by reading books from my personal collection,
including lots of re-reading - but I'd cut expenses on moving here not
only by choosing only thirteen boxes of general-purpose books to
bring, but *then* by *shipping* only three of them. (Alas, the box
with the most-wanted mass market paperbacks in it was/is box #4.)
Fair's fair: there were also five boxes brought for my history-of-
fantasy research, which I've mostly neglected, and books in at least
four other boxes as well as my luggage. But flipside, much of the
space in the three general-purpose boxes was devoted to non-fiction.
The last time my personal library *at hand* was this small was before
1990.

So I was thrown much more onto the mercies of the public library than
is my wont; this resulted both in my re-reading less, but more widely,
than usual, and in my skimming less in what re-reading I have done
(knowing that my access to the book was temporary). Particularly in
the first months, I also relied a lot on books bought used (I
certainly didn't borrow any fiction at all before October, and perhaps
not until mid-October), but they didn't include a lot of amazing
finds, and after that I was low on money *and* low on books left over
from when I'd had money. In any event, both approaches suffered from
something that in *other* respects makes Seattle a better place to
live: There's just *tons* of competition for books here, because
practically everyone actually reads!

So. The library, crowded for space, gets rid of books at a rapid
clip, especially paperbacks - but in a semi-annual sale, utterly
jammed with customers, not in the typical sleepy side room. New books
- which do *not* have the shorter loan periods found in many cities -
frequently have dozens of "holds" on them; while I've repeatedly taken
advantage of being first to request a book, I've otherwise been
reluctant to stand in a long line and get a book at an unpredictable
time, so by and large, I've avoided this method. Well-known or sexy
older books are also often on hold.

Meanwhile. The library buys fewer mass market paperbacks in the first
place than I'm used to; perhaps this is partly because it rarely uses
paperback-sized shelves, so there's no real gain in shelf space from
purchasing them. It keeps them less obstinately than I'm used to as
well. Stranger, it doesn't *catalogue* all the paperbacks it *does*
own; somewhere between circulating book and "ready for sale" in the
library's firmament is paperbacks shelved in their own spot (often the
only paperback-sized shelves in the place), that you can just walk out
with, on the honour system. One result of this systematic downgrading
of the mass market paperback by the Seattle Public Library is that one
significant element of my past dealings with libraries - looking for
unfamiliar authors of paperback originals, and reading their books
(focusing on fantasy, on books by women, on non-series books, and
usually on non-comedies) - really, really hasn't worked here. I've
belatedly come to understand that in Seattle, it's more likely to be
productive to look for small press hardcovers instead. For much the
same reasons, it's even less productive to try to find older spec-fic
at Seattle's libraries than at other cities'. When you notice an
egregious tilt towards the recent in these posts, that's why.

One side effect of all these factors - small press books, mass market
paperbacks, clouds of holds, mostly newish books - is that these posts
contain, per Google, the first mentions on rasfw, sometimes even on
Usenet generally, of many authors, and the first *discussions* of many
more. This is obviously an ego-boost to me, but distressing since it
reduces the chances of interesting conversation.

Seattle's library system practices *less* of one important Bad Thing
than any other library system I've dealt with, but still does enough
of it to cause no end of grief: this is, of course, the splitting-up
of series. When I've complained about this on rasfw in the past, I've
been answered that you're supposed to bring the books together by
requesting inter-library transfer. Well, Seattle has that too -
implemented through the same "hold" system - but when I tried to
assemble Elizabeth Bear's trilogy that way in December, three books
that nobody else *had* holds on, it was over forty days before the
library actually got them to me, and the librarian who helped me with
the final two or three weeks of this effort confirmed that assembling
series via holds is, here, in fact, a *bad* idea. Anyway...

At the branch libraries, the spec-fic section usually is heavily
dominated by books that are second, or later, in series, with the
first of course unavailable at that branch. Helpfully, Seattle's bus
system is amazingly hard to use, seemingly designed by people who
think a route that stays on one street for more than a mile is a crime
against humanity, and in any event overwhelmingly dedicated to moving
people in and out of downtown. Since I live half a mile from
downtown, this means that to catch a bus to many areas, I must either
walk a mile or more, to the other end of downtown, or spend half an
hour or more in downtown traffic. Yuck.

However, this isn't the whole story. I actually list a trilogy in the
fantasy post which I borrowed, at the end of February, for no other
reason than my sheer astonishment at seeing all three books side by
side on the shelf at the *central* library. I have since established
that this is actually not extraordinary there; as I write this in
early July, I'm a few feet from copies of the John Wright diptych and
of the Wrede and Stevermer now-trilogy, each set borrowed on a single
day in the same place, having meantime passed up an opportunity thus
to borrow an actual three-book edition of Tad Williams's masterpiece.
In general, it's possible to assemble at least one series at Seattle's
central library, on any given day, as long as I don't care *which*
series, and the series in question might even interest me. For
example, scanning the shelves for someone else one day in August, I
found series by Rosemary Kirstein and Eric Flint both
complete-to-date. (I have also now seen, in early August, for the
first time, an entire trilogy next to each other in the spec-fic
section of my local *branch* library. The mind reels. But don't
worry; it hasn't been there since.) While this isn't anything like
what I'd wish, I have to admit it's better than anywhere else. I
don't know what leads Seattle's librarians to this incomplete heresy.

To be fair, I'll also mention that the Seattle Public Library is much
*more* enthusiastic about misclassifying fiction than any other
library I've dealt with. For specific examples, see, well, something
like 10% of the books discussed below. I tend to dwell on these
misclassifications partly because I'm not sure whether they're
Seattle-specific, or there's some kind of wave of screwups sweeping
the land. Another reason these posts show a sharp tilt toward newer
books is that the new books section is much the easiest place to
*locate* misclassified speculative fiction. In late August, I
actually borrowed four new books one day whose common thread was that
*all* of them appeared to be fantasy, more or less misclassed as
mainstream. [a] There's another trilogy in the fantasy post which I
borrowed mainly out of sheer astonishment that the classifiers
intended to put volume 3 of a YA fantasy series called "The Sangreal
Trilogy" into mainstream adult fiction. The day after I closed these
posts to new entries, I found <Modern Classics of Fantasy>, the Dozois
anthology, in the same section at my branch library; provoked by this
extreme case, I finally actually brought it up to a librarian. She
told me the spec-fic section is, in Seattle, a new thing, which might
have explained that 1990s book's misplacement but not most of the ones
I discuss in these posts; however, I've since been told (by letter, no
less) that for over twenty years the library has in fact separated
spec-fic from regular adult fiction, by sticker if not always by
shelving. So I still don't know what the deal is. But to be fair,
probably about half of the misclassifications I actually discuss here
are more or less defensible, at least if you grant up front the
premises that neither horror nor Arthurian novels are spec-fic.

YA leads to a final issue. Seattle's central library has a children's
and an adult fiction section, each of which is open to everyone; but
the YA section has a librarian posted at the entrance at all times,
whose function appears to be to keep adults out. It also has signs
posted to the effect that adults aren't welcome. My inference for
quite some time was that the object was to keep sexually predatory
adults away from the teenagers, and I doubt I'm the only person to
reach that conclusion. I obtained the Wrede and Stevermer now-trilogy
(dealt with in the series post) by mentioning it to the posted
librarian, who then escorted me to the relevant shelves (and who later
told me that keeping adults out is *not* in fact her job, and that
those signs are meant to apply only to the computers in the section),
but otherwise have steered clear of this section and the
embarrassment. Some branch libraries' YA sections are similarly
obstructed, while others' are not. The upshot is that what kids'
books I cover in these posts tend to be *much* older than those for
adults, because I generally don't read books for younger kids, but
books for older kids have since about 1970 usually been classified as
YA, and these are harder for me to get from the library. (Since
similar situations apply to editions, this has also affected my
reading of older authors, notably L. M. Montgomery, whose more obscure
books tend to be YA-only at Seattle's libraries.) I feel a certain
amount of guilt at having actually pointed out to the librarian who
helped me with the Wredermer books that "The Sangreal Trilogy" belongs
in the YA section...

Though I've occasionally lurked rasfw, I've tended to get information
about new books more often from library and bookstore shelves, and
here my location is a bit disadvantageous. There's a famous
independent bookstore (the Elliott Bay Book Co.) in town, but it's way
off at the other end of downtown from me; Borders and Barnes & Noble
are both much closer. Meanwhile the *best* bookstore in town, at
least for spec-fic, is the University Bookstore's main branch, miles
away. This has had a pronounced "mainstreaming" effect on my reading,
at least on the non-small press part of it. Between that, and the
trouble involved in getting sexy new titles from the library, I've
observed that the lists of award winners and nominees obsessively
posted at Elliott Bay have almost no overlap with the lists in the
following posts.

Both as a reader's town and as the largest metropolis anywhere near,
Seattle gets *lots* of author appearances. So perhaps I should note
that I've gone to none. This started out mostly as laziness (and,
usually, lack of bus fare) combined with my usual embarrassment that I
couldn't afford to buy the new hardcover being promoted; eventually,
though, it dawned on me that seeing some of the authors named herein,
but not others, could be prejudicial. Writers of books discussed in
these posts whom I'm *aware* of having missed in this way (at the
University Bookstore, the Science Fiction Museum, and Richard Hugo
House which isn't even all that far from where I live) include Bujold,
Eskridge, Carey, Kay, Lake, Moon, Christopher Moore, Richardson, and
Willis, but there are probably several more (this paragraph was first
drafted in July or August, and anyway I wouldn't have noticed in
October announcements of visits by authors I didn't read until May).
Writers of books discussed in these posts whom I remember meeting in
the *past* include Gaiman, Kerr, McKillip, Stewart, and Stirling (at a
single World Fantasy, eleven years ago) and Christopher Moore (at an
author appearance in 2002-2003); I doubt any of them remembers meeting
*me*. I've exchanged e-mails with Bradshaw and Kay, either of whom
might plausibly remember me, and with Ore, who probably does; I've
sent e-mail to Flint, without reply; Wright has sent e-mail to me,
without reply. Google presumably records any public online
conversations I've had with these authors, though the searches would
probably be tedious; the only ones I'm *sure* I've exchanged Usenet
posts with, not having done such searches, are those with whose
extensive posting histories I've intersected, to wit Flint, Friedman,
Ore, Richardson, Stirling, Walton, and Wrede. I've participated very
little in non-Usenet online fora, and AFAIK none of these authors have
intersected with that participation. Although I've neither met nor
conversed with Irwin, he and I both worked, somewhat to cross
purposes, on <The Encyclopedia of Fantasy>. I cite several printed or
online interviews in the appropriate entries.

For access to movies: well, consider that I've been broke (of the
fourteen movies seen on big screens, eight current ones were at a
discount house); consider that this has been the year in which $2
became the universal price for VHS tapes; remember my mentioning in a
post some time back that I watch movies I acquire mostly in order of
acquisition (but there've been more exceptions than usual this year);
and see the entry on Stella Gibbons in the other fiction post. I
trust that - even though my hometown also produced
1) the makers and star of <American Movie>,
2) Halle Berry's ex-husband,
and even
3) Heather Graham (according to the <World Almanac>, but never
mentioned in any newspaper *I* saw)
- no one thinks I've actually met *any* of *them*, nor anyone else
whom I might plausibly imagine as connected with any of the movies
listed. (I talked a few times with someone who was peripherally
involved in some earlier projects the <American Movie> folks did, I
*think*, and in fact bought the computer I wrote these posts on from
his shop; and my elder sister did a degree in film in Milwaukee, so I
can't speak for who she might know.)

[a] The four alleged misclasses borrowed in late August: None of them
actually made it into this year's reading. I ultimately concluded
that most *are* modally fantasy, but three can reasonably be
considered horror, which the SPL puts in regular adult fiction, not in
its spec-fic section, and the remaining one was published to the little
magazine market category, not the fantasy one. In other words, arguably
there are no errors here. The books are in next year's edition of this
log, already begun though not necessarily to be posted here, but I don't
name them there; for one, that would be a major spoiler.

David DeLaney

unread,
Oct 19, 2007, 12:11:17 AM10/19/07
to
On Fri, 19 Oct 2007 02:18:30 -0000, Joe Bernstein <j...@sfbooks.com> wrote:
>Both of my workplaces and my home are without power. After half an
>hour waiting for a bus to take me back downtown to the central
>library, I gave up and went to my local branch library, which *does*
>have power. However, that library has also banned telnet, which means
>I can't get at the posting-ready copies of the posts sitting in my
>shell account.

Try ftp, if you're still there...

>Joe Bernstein
>(with apologies if there are word-wrap problems here; it's a long time
>since I last posted from Google!

None such appeared, you're fine there.

Dave
--
\/David DeLaney posting from d...@vic.com "It's not the pot that grows the flower
It's not the clock that slows the hour The definition's plain for anyone to see
Love is all it takes to make a family" - R&P. VISUALIZE HAPPYNET VRbeable<BLINK>
http://www.vic.com/~dbd/ - net.legends FAQ & Magic / I WUV you in all CAPS! --K.

Joe Bernstein

unread,
Oct 19, 2007, 12:01:29 AM10/19/07
to
READ FOR THE FIRST TIME: FANTASY

See also, in the series post, Baker, Crowley, Christopher Moore, Wrede
and Stevermer, and Wright. See also, in the sf post, collections by
Bear and Eskridge. It may also be worth mentioning in the other
fiction post Dickens. There are also fantasies in the re-reading
post, mostly without comments, by Bujold, Gaiman, Holdstock, Kerr,
Levine, McKillip, Stasheff, and Stevermer.

I've intended these posts to cover a year; that year is, as I write
this paragraph, nearly three-quarters over, and I've "skimmed" a far
higher proportion of fantasies than of anything else. For relevant
issues, see especially Irvine below.

Louisa May Alcott
(January?) <Louisa May Alcott's Fairy Tales and Fantasies>, 1855-1887,
first compiled as such 1992, barely started

In an abortive attempt to read Alcott chronologically (which foundered
for lack of access to her earlier works for adults), I borrowed this
book, because it includes the entire contents of her first published
book, <Flower Fables>, otherwise reasonably hard to locate. I'm
fairly sure I read one story, and I might have started another;
it/they left no lasting impression on me. (<Flower Fables> is
illustrated, as are a few of the other stories, but I found no credits
for the artist[s] in the book.)

Alma Alexander (aka Alma Hromic) [2]
(June) <The Hidden Queen> aka <Changer of Days, Volume One>, 2001
(June) <Changer of Days> aka <Changer of Days, Volume Two>, 2002
Probably the first volume nominee, 2002 Sir Julius Vogel Award for
Novel

These books originally appeared in New Zealand (and/or Australia?) as
by Hromic; the name change appears to have happened by 2004, when
another book appeared, and as of these books' 2005 US printing, the
author had relocated to a city not far north of Seattle. The obvious
explanation is the well-known fact that Americans will not buy books
by people with foreign surnames like "Heinlein" or "Asimov". (It
would be a lot easier to snort contemptuously over this if I could
think of a good blockbuster fantasy-author example; I don't suppose
"Tolkien" counts. Does "Paolini" ?) Alternatively, however, name
change and relocation could *both* be explained by marriage. So I
dunno.

These books claim the author has written four books, but speak of only
three; the local library catalogue doesn't clarify matters. (There
is, of course, a book more recent than the copies I looked at; that
doesn't strike me as relevant.) The third book is that 2004 title,
<The Secrets of Jin-shei>; I've seen no hint it's related to these
two. Indeed, in pleasing contrast to the Australian writers mentioned
below, Hromic/Alexander manages in the two at hand to *finish* a story
properly, and in just (!) 703 pages. The <Locus> biblio claims these
are YA books. Now, in the back of the US editions we find advertised
<Lord of Light>, <Beggars in Spain>, and <The Year of Our War>, so my
mind respectfully boggles at this claim, but maybe the NZ editions
looked different, or maybe nowadays books like Swainston's *are*
considered YA. (God forbid.) Anyway, it's true that Hromic/
Alexander's writing flows considerably more smoothly than Douglass's
or Irvine's, and it's also true that she relies far more heavily on
telling, rather than showing, than Irvine at least would dream of
doing; I can certainly take each as indicative of YA origins.

The books that all this telling makes flow so smoothly are the story
of a princess, for ten years after her elder, but illegitimate,
half-brother takes the crown when she's nine years old. Of course
that involves politics, and that it involves (a little bit of) romance
is also unsurprising; given that this is fantasy, for her maturation
to involve magic, too, is little news, but what does surprise is the
way religion is woven into the mix, if not deeply - I'm not persuaded
Hromic/Alexander really *grasps* polytheism any more than I do myself,
and one can argue that she covertly advocates monotheism - at any rate
rather less superficially than one expects in a mass market book.
(But then, in New Zealand, these weren't mass market.) And the author
(born, her bio says, in "Yugoslavia") certainly *does* understand
exile; in her writing of that, if nothing else, and of the
rootlessness it can confer, she achieves something genuinely beyond
the rest. Against this we can set that love of telling (this could've
fit in one volume, I suspect); a protagonist some will think overly
Mary Sue, though I'd disagree; blond faux-Arabs (shades of Gregorian!)
severely afflicted with the Cur'se of Ap'os'tro'phes (which are
certainly *not* glottal stops); and the usual clutter - map
(ecologically dubious, I think), glossary (crowded with spoilers), and
prophecy. But on balance, I found these fairly good of their kind
(essentially, very un-dark secondary-world fantasy, the sort of thing
that filled scores of trilogies in the late 1970s and early 1980s),
and I may investigate the author's other writing.

anonymous
0 (September) <The Arabian Nights>, Arabic, ?circa 1275 [a]

This volume, published in 1990, was translated by Husain Haddawy from
an edition of a Syrian manuscript he attributes (following its editor,
Muhsin Mahdi) to the 14th century. Per Haddawy, this manuscript
represents a Syrian tradition of generally faithful transmission of a
cohesive <Alf Layla wa-Layla>, that is, <Thousand and One Nights>,
which he thinks was composed in the second half of the 13th century.
His reason for considering the Syrian tradition, and in particular
this manuscript, faithful, is that there's also at least one Egyptian
tradition, whose (later) manuscripts invariably show considerable
expansion but also contain essentially the same material where the two
overlap. Anyway, since the Syrian tradition's manuscripts all break
off early in the same story (for which story, in an Egyptian version,
see below), this tradition is obviously incomplete, but cannot be
reliably completed from the Egyptian tradition's much later and much
expanded versions. This volume contains none of the stories most
famous in the West, except, of course, the frame story, which here is
incomplete, unless you consider a brief paragraph an adequate ending.

As to genre, that's actually a difficult call. There's no way at all
that anything in this <Nights> can be accused of what literary critics
consider "realism", but several of the stories in this volume have
nothing in them that looks to a modern like fantasy. (Some people on
rasfw will declare the whole book non-fantasy because the frame story
is one of these.) Experts in Persian literature have told me that the
nearest thing to intentional fantasy in mediæval Persian was the
world of wine, women and song certain poets wrote about. The <Nights>
very much inhabit such a world: they do participate in then-new
trends in Islam, for example using the obscurantist ideology, "All
happens as God wills, so it's pointless to try to do or understand
anything", then sweeping that faith, to justify outrages against
realism ("Why should the reader complain [b] that my story involves
magic? After all, God can create anything, so why shouldn't He create
magic too?") - but they don't respect official Muslim morality much at
all. (In one of the seemingly non-fantasy stories, Our Hero and
Heroine work hard to get a teetotaling devout Muslim drunk.) All the
same, Arabic literature is by no means the same story as Persian...
And I haven't done anything like the research I'd want to, before
concluding that demons, ghouls, and such would qualify a story as
"fantasy" in the 13th century Near East *anyway*. *ALL* of that said,
bottom line: somewhat less than half the book is to modern eyes
non-fantasy, somewhat less than half is to modern eyes clearly
fantasy, and the balance is a long story whose fantasy elements are
limited to a couple of demons, a story which Dickens among others
could have written considerably better without any fantasy at all.

In most respects, I found reading the <Nights> properly for the first
time (in any translation, as opposed to retelling) surprisingly
unsurprising. The Syrian manuscript has many squibs of poetry, which
rarely rejoice in translation and sometimes slow it way down.
Otherwise, though, what's here is exactly what I'd expected, and I
mainly want to note a few things by way of contrast with Valente's <In
the Night Garden>, much further down. Graydon once posted here to the
effect that in older stories, typically, plot per se doesn't matter
much compared to the brilliance of the individual images the writer
presents. He overstated his case (and the modern writer he was trying
to defend with it told me by e-mail that he was quite wrong about that
writer, anyway) - but the <Nights> present an impressive
corroboration. They're riddled with errors little or big - Shahrazad
tells several stories set centuries later than she supposedly lived; a
character's children are mentioned only twice, on p. 30 as three
daughters but on p. 66 as two daughters and a son; and how, anyway, do
Shahrayar and Shahrazad survive so many consecutive nights of sleep
deprivation? (This version's tagline is "But morning overtook
Shahrazad, and she lapsed into silence.") So reading for character
depth or development, or coherent plotting, is likely to prove futile.
Indeed, given the sudden reversals characteristic of what plots there
*are*, and the spectacular shortage of things like combat, even
reading for *story* strikes me as dubious, by spec-ficnal standards.
What some of these stories have in abundance to set against all this
is arresting tableaux, one after another. The apparently non-fantasy
stories supplement these with other things: doggerel which the
characters laud as great verse; stock descriptions of people dying of
unrequited love, or descriptions of characters' physical beauty, so
repetitive that frankly I'd have found it easier to bear with Haddawy
simply writing "Oh, and this person ALSO has Charisma 18" every time;
descriptions of luxury or references to kings and caliphs; and in the
maugre best of the non-fantasy ones, copious grotesquerie.

I'm trying not to create spoilers (so to speak) by getting too
specific about the individual stories, but perhaps this advice will
suffice: Do try to get past the sheer misogyny of the opening pages.
The first 150 pages are worth reading, if only for the magnificent
flights of fantasy. After that, if you like the next story - the next
50-odd pages - you're probably going to enjoy the rest; but if you
don't (I didn't), I still suggest at least *trying* the one after
that, which is full of (fairly low) comedy, and a violent contrast
with the rest of the book. But if you didn't like that 50-page story,
don't expect to like anything after the comedy, even though one of the
three stories in question ("Jullanar of the Sea") involves lots of
magic.

[a] See after the next book.

[b] Persian literature, until sometime in the 19th century, was one of
the many literatures in which fiction for fiction's sake was despised;
the standard evasion of this was to declare that your story was meant
to teach, and in fact Persian literature still tolerates didacticism
much more than Western literatures. Well, Persian literati were
*far* more tolerant of fiction than Arabic literati, and modern
scholars of Arabic tend to take the same attitude; histories of Arabic
literature tend so to ignore the <Nights> and the entire mass of
similar works that I didn't learn for sure that, for example, <Kalila
and Dimna> and the <Nights> are two separate works, until researching
the latter for footnote [a] below. Arabic fiction writers also
pretended their stories were meant to teach, though it didn't get them
any more respect at home. (Europeans tended to buy it, though, and
translate the texts under titles like <A Mirror for Princes>.) At
least one modern critic thinks these <Nights>, in particular, actually
do teach an ethic. I find this preposterous, but regardless, we do
find the author at the beginning informing us his goal is educational
- his characters are all royal because that makes his stories history,
see! - and occasionally reminding us later that whatever fantastic or
absurd thing he's portraying is OK because, after all, we can't know
everything about God's world, etc., so, see, it's true despite our
disbelief.

<The Arabian Nights II>, Arabic and French, 1712-circa 1770

Haddawy's book was very successful despite its lack of the really
famous stories, but people still wanted those stories, so in 1995
Haddawy published a second book. From an Egyptian version probably
dating to between 1759 and 1781, as represented by the 1835 Bulaq
edition, he translated the story ("Qamar al-Zaman") whose opening
pages the Syrian tradition has preserved, and the story of Sindbad;
from the French version which introduced the <Nights> to the West, the
stories of Ali Baba and of Aladdin. (Antoine Galland, who wrote that
French version, attributed both to Hanna Diab, a Lebanese Maronite
Christian monk and storyteller he had heard; but to judge by his
written notes on Ali Baba, which survive, both were largely his
original work; they are still routinely considered non-Arabic in
origin. By the way, Galland's initial volumes were actually based on
the same Syrian manuscript as Haddawy's first source, by the way; if I
understand correctly, he was the lucky purchaser thanks to whom it got
to the West in the first place.) Galland's Aladdin appeared in 1712,
and his Ali Baba in 1717. [a]

This version of "Qamar al-Zaman" may, per Haddawy, be half a
millennium later than his first volume's stuff, but if so, he
should've let that material age too. It isn't actually as good as the
opening stories in the first volume, but it's like the *other*
stories, only longer and with a major shot of adrenaline: essentially
the same material as the four stories I'm condemning, again with
minimal fantasy (demons as transportation), but with about five times
as much plot as any of the four, and unfortunately also about twice as
much so-called poetry. If you don't like "Qamar al-Zaman", I'd be
surprised if you liked *any* of the bad part of the first volume.

Haddawy's (Bulaq's) Sindbad is plain prose, and consists of seven
voyages, each of which meets with catastrophe and astonishing rescue.
If you're up to that sort of repetition, the story is actually pretty
well constructed, with someone keeping careful track of each voyage's
implications for the next. And of course much of what happens is
iconic fantasy material. Haddawy's (Galland's) Ali Baba and Aladdin
are more prosaic, but worth reading. I'd be interested in reading a
feminist revision of the Ali Baba story, actually, because halfway
through it's taken over by a slave girl whom Galland tries, but fails,
to do justice. As for Aladdin, well, D&D players may find the tale of
dueling Wish spells more interesting than I did - it's the worst of
the famous three here - but if nothing else, it's a wish-fulfillment
story of upward mobility which H. G. Wells, in his non-spec-fic
<Kipps> (basis for the musical <Half a Sixpence>, 1969, listed in the
other fiction post), seems to have had in mind, in his treatment of a
more likely fate.

Each of the four stories has as frontispiece a black-and-white picture
by Dia Azzawi.

[a] On the Web, you can find pretty much every year between 1704 and
1717 given as the original publication date for Aladdin and Ali Baba,
and there's a lot of imprecise handling of Galland's edition in
general. So I'm going to put here some information that I hope is
authoritative. According to <The Thousand and One Nights> by Muhsin
Mahdi (Leiden [et alii]: Brill, 1995), pages 20, 27-28, and 33,
here's the deal: Galland's first six volumes contained the material
in Haddawy's first volume plus his version of Sindbad, and appeared in
1705 except the first two, which came out in 1704. Volumes 7, 1706,
and 8, 1709, contained additional stories from other Arabic
manuscripts; volumes 9 and 10 began Galland's renderings of Hanna
Diab's stories, in 1712, and volumes 11 and 12, published posthumously
in 1717, included more of those stories and others' as well. Aladdin
bridged volumes 9 and 10; Ali Baba was in volume 11. I'll probably
dump some version of this paragraph (perhaps with more precise
contents) into Wikipedia at some point, if nobody beats me to it.
Meanwhile. I also looked at volume 1 of <The Arabian Nights
Encyclopedia> by Ulrich Marzolph and Richard van Leeuwen (Santa
Barbara et alii: ABC-Clio, c 2004), whose entry on Sindbad indicates
(page 387) that a 17th-century Turkish version survives, the earliest
evidence of the story. There's no evidence that this story was
considered part of any version of the <Nights> before Galland. (A
story about a different Sindbad, a king, is known from rather further
back, and I think it was seen as part of the <Nights> earlier too.)
In the same encyclopædia, an essay on "The Manuscript Tradition
of the Arabian Nights" by Heinz Grotzfeld, pages 17-21, discusses the
"ZER" ("Zotenberg Egyptian Recension", Zotenberg being the guy who
figured out that such a thing existed), and notes a 1759 manuscript
that seems to prefigure it; Mahdi, pages 98-100, discusses a story
that *seems* to say ZER should have existed before 1781. Bulaq is
treated by both authors as at least approximately an edition of ZER.
Also, Grotzfeld argues that the manuscript Haddawy translated in
his first volume has to date much later than Mahdi and Haddawy think;
you can find the brief version in his encyclopedia article, with
reference to a longer one, but anyway, the upshot is that if you buy
Grotzfeld's argument, as I tentatively do, the *manuscript* is
probably later than 1450 - and since Grotzfeld agrees with Mahdi and
Haddawy that the manuscript is "close" to the composition it contains,
this suggests, but doesn't require, a post-13th-century date for that
*composition* too.
This footnote omits Robert Irwin's <The Arabian Nights: A Companion>,
1994, because I didn't have access to a copy when I had the chance to
research it.


Kage Baker
Nominee, John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, 1999

(August) <Dark Mondays>, 2001-2006, first compiled as such 2006

Of this book's ten stories, only four had previously been published;
I've read nine, the tenth being included only in the book's limited
edition. Take my further comments as applying only to the trade
edition, since "Dark Mondays and Peculiar Tuesdays" could contradict
some of them.

This is Baker's only book to date with no links to either of the
series covered at some length in the series post, though there is one
story in the Cthulhu mythos (it would be a spoiler to say which story,
though unfortunately the publisher's blurb *does* say). That story is
like several others in using the fantastic only at story's end, though
they don't *feel* to me quite like Todorov's fantastic. All the
stories are set on Earth. The first four strike me as contemporary,
one clearly dating to the 1970s and the rest at any rate post-WWII;
the rest step backward in time - 1937-1940 in or near North Carolina,
1900 in San Francisco, 1796 in a ?North Sea lighthouse, 1505 in
England - until the last, set mainly in 1670, mainly in Panama. Two
of those feature mad scientists, and could be argued to be some sort
of archaised science fiction, but I wouldn't agree; however, in turn,
one of these also echoes 1950s science fiction by mirroring modern
darkness (though partly by reminding us that not all modern darkness
is genuinely new).

Several of these stories have the sheer density of depiction that
Baker's Company novels of these years, set largely in the future, so
notably lack; in particular "Katherine's Story" (here expanded from
the version published in 2001) and "The Maid on the Shore" show her
rendering humanity of a particular place and time more sharply than
ever before. Their emotional range, if you will, is reasonably wide,
but none of these stories *surprises*, coming from Kage Baker; all fit
comfortably between her established poles of black humor, understated
horror, and residual numen and honour.

Elizabeth Bear
Winner, 2005 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer

(July) <Blood and Iron>, 2006

This book, the first "novel of the Promethean Age", was Bear's
graduation from mass market paperbacks, at least in the US, and I
first heard about her thanks to discussions of it on rasfw. How much,
then, need I say? The matter is complicated further by the way
discussing even something as abstruse as POV involves spoilers.
Suffice, then, the scenario: The Fae exist, and the Promethean
Club [c] of human Mages would rather they didn't. As the book begins,
events in the vicinity of Manhattan are beginning to build to a climax
in this conflict. Well, that's the simple scenario. The more complex
scenario is that this book mirrors Bear's <Carnival>. In each, the
core of the conflict (arguably, conflict*s*) we witness is between
safety and security, on the one hand, and the possibilities of
wildness, of wonder, of danger, on the other. In each, the conflict
evolves through knotty and violent politics, and in each, to put it
bluntly, Bear rigs our sympathies to fall primarily with the un-safe.
(She has posted here to the effect that the Prometheans are the good
guys; well, duh, but she doesn't exactly go out of her way to focus on
this!) The endings differ - in one book, the personal happiness of
our principal POVs does better, the public good does worse, than in
the other - but at core, it's the same story: great change is
possible, but at great cost.

<DIGRESSION TITLE="safety vs wonder in the new century">I've noticed
the safety/wonder conflict in a bunch of books lately, and I wonder to
what extent writers are consciously responding to the political
debates in America under the younger Bush. Or is this simply an old
hardy spec-fic perennial in a new bottle, or even just me being more
attentive? Among recent books, I cite ones, in this set of posts, by
Amanda Hemingway (to some extent), Holly Phillips (both books), and
Justina Robson, as well as, beyond these posts, Patricia McKillip's
<Solstice Wood>, 2006 (which to a certain extent represents an
explicit repudiation, or at the very least massive clarification, of
her own stance on the issue in <Winter Rose>, 1996). Contrariwise,
similar conflicts (though usually not so explicit) dominate such older
books as those mentioned herein by Kara Dalkey, L. Warren Douglas, M.
John Harrison, and Sean Stewart. Pretty much everything Neil Gaiman
has written in a career that began long before this Bush presidency
focuses *very* explicitly on safety vs. wonder, as do all the Lisa
Tuttle books I mention below, both pre- and post-2001; Sonya Taaffe is
writing about that conflict today, but in the older, less explicit
manner. And Christopher Moore's <A Dirty Job> seems premised on the
(correct) argument that safety is inherently a crock, as does much of
<Sandman> for that matter. Nevertheless, I see in most of the more
recent books *something* different - and find this mildly surprising,
given that Robson (and apparently, if it matters, Hemingway) come from
Britain, where the conflict must surely look quite other from how it
looks in the US. (Further complication: Phillips is Canadian! So is
this an optical illusion?) I'm just not sure what exactly the
difference is; I hope it's not merely the explicitness, not merely a
willingness to hector readers, sure to become dated within a decade or
two.</DIGRESSION>

<DIGRESSION TITLE="Reform vs. revolution in the new century">A
related, but distinct issue: Is it ever better simply to cast aside
what cannot be repaired, and make things anew? Strangely, of *many*
books this log discusses - at least a dozen - that raise this issue,
not *one* answers that question "Yes". You could stretch
extravagantly to count Gillian Bradshaw's <Bloodwood> (in the other
fiction post) as doing so, but short of that, the impulse to
revolution (or its fantasticated avatar, instauration) is *always*, in
the books I've read this past year, a sign of villainy. (It's also
usually a spoiler; I'm sticking this paragraph here because in <Blood
and Iron> one side avows a similar ambition from early on.) In the
genres that gave us, for example, <The Last Battle> and <V for
Vendetta>, I find such unanimity ... interesting. It's difficult for
me to avoid a political interpretation: Given that people so far
*right* as to be revolutionaries are generally hostile to spec-fic,
revolution in these genres really should be a left-wing preoccupation.
(Though then what about C. S. Lewis?) And in recent years Iraq has
been a big fat object lesson to the Western left wing as to the
inadvisability of radical change. Furthermore, the most vigorous
revolutionary thinking (so to speak) in the world today is in radical
Islam, which is innately hostile to spec-fic (see footnote b, under
anonymous, above), and spec-fic writers apparently actually grasp
this. So OK, I can sort of see why a group normally as herdable as
cats might nevertheless have abandoned all dissent on the question of
revolution; but I'm not *satisfied* with this answer, and I'd be
interested to know what I've missed that shows otherwise, in which
books I should look for that dissent.</DIGRESSION>

In the sf post, I say of <The Time Traveler's Wife> that it's the
least arguably great of the books in the "read for the first time"
posts. I skimmed <Blood and Iron>, out of patience with it; but then
I read it properly, unsatisfied with any grasp of the ending skimming
could get me. At the end of that proper reading I wondered if I
needed to drop that comment. Well, how should I know for certain?
But some hours later, I think not. I'm troubled by a minor character
in <Blood and Iron>, present near its beginning, dead near its end;
she seems to me too near being a pawn in the family dramas around
which the book revolves. While I'm impressed by the unusual thing
Bear does with POV, I'm not so impressed with the rest of her use of
it, which could have thrown even that unusual thing into sharper
relief, but doesn't.

Above all, I'm not convinced that I buy her story. In the first draft
of my comments here, written after the skimming, I asked why it should
disturb me to find knotty and violent politics in a Bear book, even if
it's fantasy. This turns out not to be the rhetorical question - "Of
course it shouldn't disturb me!" - it seemed. It should disturb me in
*this* kind of fantasy because when fantasy talks about changing the
world, it persuades not by realism, but by necessity; a fantasy story
changes its world through recounting the only way that world *could*
change. Here, however, the penultimate pages are devoted precisely to
alternative ways for the ending to happen; others are discussed again
and again earlier on. This is the context in which something like a
minor character's ringing false can loom large. Well, we'll see.
Maybe by the time I post this, I'll have decided that I *do* buy her
story, in which case you won't be reading this. But for now, I doubt
it, and so I remain unconvinced that Bear has yet attained greatness.

I've seen <Whiskey and Water>, 2007, evidently a sequel, but have no
intention of trying to read it in bookstores and no hope either of
buying it or of reading it in a library copy anytime soon. It's a
trade paperback too; Bear still hasn't, anyway in the US, broken into
hard covers from major publishers. I find this perplexing; even her
first book (sf post) was certainly worthy of them.

[c] Note the slightly prior emphasis also by John Wright on Prometheus
as father of human freedom from beings of greater intrinsic mana; the
main relevant series, "The War of the Dreaming", is in the series
post, but his more recent "Chronicles of Chaos" trilogy, in this post,
also mentions Prometheus in this context. If Giordano Bruno was the
1990s' preferred hero of spiritual and intellectual freedom,
Prometheus seems to be this decade's answer. But Bear's use of the
name is, I suspect, at least somewhat ironic, which Wright's certainly
isn't.

(September) <New Amsterdam>, 2005-2007, first compiled as such 2007

Per a bibliography at Bear's home page (URL below), "Wax" appeared in
2005, followed in 2006 first by "Wane" and then by "Lucifugous"; these
are now (in a different order) the first three stories in this
compilation. The rest (over half the book) I presume to be new.
Subterranean Press "proud"ly labels this Bear's "hardcover debut", and
I'm happy for them, but it's a major sin by Bear's other publishers
that gave them this opportunity.

In a weird irony of the alphabet, this book, though last read, is the
first in this series of posts for you to read *about*, of the group I
read because of a gaming situation. See for more info Dalkey below;
the other examples are Pye and Zara in the other fiction post (a
footnote in the series post also relates). In this case, of course, I
also grabbed it because it's by Bear, new, and *not* buried under
fifty holds.

So OK. What is it? It's a collection of six murder mysteries, solved
by Detective Crown Investigator [Lady] Abigail Irene Garrett, Doctor
of Thaumaturgy, and/or Don Sebastien de Ulloa, wampyr. "Lucifugous"
occurs on a dirigible going from Calais to New Amsterdam, capital of
the British colonies in North America, in 1899; the rest, three in New
Amsterdam itself and two more beyond, in 1901-1903. The POV, always
third person, usually follows one person per story, and except for the
final story either Garrett or Sebastien.

And this being Bear, there is, of course, knotty and violent politics
involved, though here at least its complexity is limited by the
lengths of the individual stories. "Wax" and "Lucifugous" introduce
New Amsterdam and Sebastien, respectively; at book's end, both have
changed. In this case, the politics, like the well etched characters,
provided me something other than the mysteries to catch hold of; so
did the fun Bear has with history, blithely ignoring butterfly rules
and the like. This book's hardly equal to <Carnival> or <Blood and
Iron>, but it's worth reading; far as I know, Bear has yet to write a
bad book.

<http://www.elizabethbear.com/bib.html>, seen September 2, 2007

Marie Brennan
(March) <Doppelganger>, 2006
(June) <Warrior and Witch>, 2006

The first book, the story of an assassin and the witch who's trying to
assassinate her, is a good read, though the ending leaves me somewhat
queasy. (I should also warn that there's both a map and a glossary,
though neither needs very much attention in practice.) The sequel, to
Brennan's credit, devotes some attention to the problematic angle of
the first book's ending; but while it too is compulsive reading,
Brennan still doesn't really grapple either with this problem or with
the other larger implications of her plot. Since this plot concerns,
in part, approaches to worshipping the local Goddess in a hitherto
(locally) neglected fifth aspect, one could argue that we have here a
transposition of Bujold's Quadrene/Quintarian conflict into paperback
fantasy, which unfortunately proves no more insightful, at least not
so far, than that might lead one to expect.

Should a third volume appear, I'll probably read it, but I promise no
loyalty. If there's a series title, it may be "Twelve Kingdoms"
(after the secondary, um, continent), but I don't remember and don't
much care.

Lois McMaster Bujold
Nominee, 1987 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer

$ (May) <Beguilement> (perhaps better known under the series title
"The Sharing Knife"), 2006

Titles actually bring up an interesting point. This book is
fundamentally a romance, to a certain extent as if the romances in
<The Curse of Chalion> and/or <The Hallowed Hunt> had been extracted
and exaggerated (the age gap is *way* bigger than in <Curse>, for
example). So <Beguilement> fits *generically*, as a word easily
sourced to the domain of love. However, it doesn't relate in any
obvious way to the plot; the romance that drives the book has as
little of "beguilement" in it as I can imagine. This makes it
somewhat unnerving, after reading the wedding with which this book
ends, to discover that the *next* book's title is <Legacy>; for if
that's a similarly vague tag, then surely the domain to which it
belongs is death's. (And according to this book's cover in mass
market paperback, <Legacy> would be the last book in this series,
too.)

By itself, this is, then, a romance; after some early derring-do the
book mostly thereafter simply deals with the implications of that
romance in both partners' cultures. More exactly, it deals with those
implications in a pattern - man's military culture, then woman's
civilian culture - exactly matching <Shards of Honor>, though in this
book neither culture is nearly so inimical as in the earlier one.
(The pages from <Legacy> at the end of the mass market edition of
<Beguilement> indicate that the second book begins with the man's
civilian culture, again repeating Bujold's earlier duo.)

On the other hand, there are numerous hints that the second book will
offer Radical Change in the setting, driven by these two characters;
so it's very premature to say anything definite, very plausible that
looking at this book "by itself" is not entirely wise.

But I will note that a speech late in the book quotes a memorable
passage from <A Civil Campaign> almost word for word. I am not
accustomed to thinking of Bujold as a writer who repeats herself, and
find this book's number of parallels to her earlier work somewhat
alarming.

Anyone know whether there's any hint of a return to Miles Vorkosigan
in the offing?

$ (July) <Legacy>, 2007, skimmed

Well, oops, they didn't mean it when they said "two-part" in that
blurb a few months ago, did they? Idiots.

Anyway, I can't really object to this becoming a longer - and indeed
to judge by this volume, potentially *long* - series. This volume is
a mirror image of the first: that one began with combat and concluded
with romance; this one begins with marriage and concludes (well,
almost) with combat. (As usual, when I say "skimmed" what I mean is
that I read in the order beginning, ending, middle, and not complete
as to middle. But actually, here, I read so *much* ending that I'm
honestly not sure whether I ended up reading the whole book or not.)
The major changes promised by the first volume don't happen, despite
plenty of further foreshadowing; by book's end, though, it's at least
easier to accept that both of Our Couple can reasonably be expected to
participate in those changes.

Jacqueline Carey
* (May) <Kushiel's Scion>, 2006, skimmed

Carey takes longer to present the teenage years of this protagonist
(Imriel, introduced in the previous book in this series) and a
six-month journey, than she took in her first book to present the
childhood *and* teenage years of her first protagonist, and *two* long
journeys. This is partly because she has her narrator do a lot of
info-dumping (mostly too small scale to actually benefit anyone who
hadn't read the previous books, at that!). He has a considerably less
distinctive voice than his predecessor. (To be fair, that also means
he's less given to rhapsodies of exaggerated admiration than she is.)
This book's fantasy is low-key; the exact settings of the journey are
new, but travel also occupies a smaller proportion of the book, and
shows us a country that already appeared in Carey's second book; so,
in effect, there just isn't as much wonder as in the earlier volumes.
In sum, I didn't have the patience for all 943 (?!) pages, though I
did read quite a lot.

I haven't really got a settled judgement yet, but I'm leaning towards
"worst so far, but not irrecoverably so". I also do have the
impression that Carey is finding it harder to work with a viewpoint
character who is *not* (far as I can see) Divinely Fated to a Destiny,
as her previous viewpoint characters all have been, and so whose
career's structure is less obvious.

$ (June) <Kushiel's Justice>, 2007, skimmed

Negatively, this book has nearly everything its predecessor lacks:
two journeys, rather than one; one of those to a new country, and both
involving new magic; there's still a passel of info-dumping, but the
book nevertheless comes in rather shorter than its predecessor.

Positively, with two books out of a presumed three now available,
several additional contrasts with the previous volumes have become
obvious. Where each of Phèdre's memoirs ends with a party, and
years pass between them, each of these books (so far) marks instead a
phase in their narrator's maturity, and they form a through-told tale,
with a single night between volumes (and a minor cliffhanger ending
the second). Imriel is rather more convincing as a hero of
bildungsroman, with its Sturm und Drang, than the better-centred
Phèdre ever was. On the other hand, the characters themselves, both
those of Phèdre's generation and those of Imriel's, bemoan the way
the age of heroes seems to have passed; Imriel witnesses great events,
but ones very far afield, and ones which involve him only peripherally
or accidentally, while his own doings focus much more on the
individuals close to him. There *is* a subplot which hints that a
third book might make things very different, but it's a rather
hackneyed subplot, and I hope Carey has a better rabbit up her sleeve.

In any event, watching her use a narrator *not* Divinely Fated to
study character rather than plot is interesting, but raises the
spectre of Carey's simply settling for dynastic fantasy forevermore;
let's hope not. I have yet to read any of Carey's last three books
properly, so it takes a certain amount of chutzpah to say this, but my
sense is that Carey is steadily developing the capacity to write
really extraordinary fantasy, as she has already the capacity to write
really popular fantasy; but I have no idea whether she'll fulfill both
capacities, whether the temptations of the latter will end up
outweighing the glory of the former.

P. C. Cast
(June) <Divine by Mistake>, 2006 as such, but "revised" from <Goddess
by Mistake>, 2001
(June) <Goddess of Light>, 2005
(June) <Elphame's Choice>, 2005

I've no idea how many books Cast has written, but those I know of
belong to two series, both of which begin with <[Goddess | Divine] by
Mistake>, and all of which have been published within the romance
market category. The <Goddess> series, originally from Berkeley, has
as its common thread linkages between contemporary women and beings
from Græco-Roman mythology; it also includes <Goddess of the Sea>,
<Goddess of the Spring>, <Goddess of Light>, and according to the
last-named a projected <Goddess of the Rose>. To judge by the fourth
volume, there's at least some continuity on Olympus from book to book,
but I'm not sure how much continuity there is on modern Earth. (The
common *theme* seems to be that no male being can possibly resist
idolising a woman from modern America; presumably we modern American
men are the sole exceptions, drat us. On this exception see also
McKelden, below.)

The Partholon series, originally from Luna (which amusingly considers
Berkeley a "small press"), has the more conventional common thread of
a secondary world; the heroine of <Elphame's Choice> is the
great-granddaughter of the heroine of <Divine by Mistake>, and
<Brighid's Quest> stars one of Elphame's friends. Partholon is a
place where the historical fact that Roman and Celtic cultures
intermingled, epitomised in this series by the goddess Epona, is used
to excuse centaurs with names like, well, Brighid, and clans that seem
taken from tertiary sources (if even that direct) on early modern
Scottish society. That said, while its inspirations don't bear
looking into, <Elphame's Choice> is actually a tolerable novel, in
which Cast gives some attention to the structure of her society, and
seems to concede that loss is part of life; it's by far the least
embarrassingly romance-category soppy of the three I read.

<Divine by Mistake>, the hinge-pin as retitled in the Luna revision,
has two massive flaws; the other books I've seen share one but not the
other. The shared one is that Cast clearly loves to describe luxury.
I suspect this is simply a romance-category convention, but her
heroines' ability to get distracted by fancy stuff knows few limits.
This flaw is least in <Elphame's Choice> (in which the viewpoint
characters are usually more or less camping), and worst in the
original book (in which the first-person narrator/protagonist is
Epona's high priestess, and surrounded by gold, jewels, and an adoring
populace); in <Goddess of Light>, which is set in Las Vegas, the
heroine is an interior designer who sneers at the tawdriness
surrounding her, but still loves fine things.

The flaw specific to <Divine by Mistake> is its narrator's astonishing
vulgarity. Imagine Chick Lit Protagonist as bad as she could possibly
be, and you will have imagined about 10% of what this narrator has to
offer. I'd quote an example, but the problem isn't just *how* vulgar
she can be, but how *relentlessly* she can be so; I'd have to quote
the dozens of examples within, say, three pages, to get the point
across. Eventually the fantasy plot (a conventional Save The World
From Evil one) reduces how much space she has for self-expression, but
she never actually reforms. After requesting <Divine by Choice> from
the library thinking it a revision of <Goddess of the Sea>, I sent it
back unseen, terrified that it would actually be a direct sequel to
<Divine by Mistake> with the same nauseating narrator; I've now seen a
copy, and established that not only is this the case, but a third
volume (projected title, <Divine by Blood>) is threatened. (In the
final pages of <by Choice>, FWIW, the vulgarity seemed close to zero;
but I still have *****NO**** intention of reading it.)

Something else I dislike in these books, though given my praise for
<The Time Traveler's Wife>, in the science fiction post, and my liking
for <Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind>, I'm not sure how
consistently I can attack it: They demonstrate all too well
everything that's wrong with the idea of a Predestined Mate.
Soulmate, other half, second self, call it what you will, this idea is
deeply woven into modern ideas about romance, but by taking it
seriously in settings where magic or prophecy actually work, Cast
shows it up for a cheat, a way to evade the uncertainties that
otherwise govern incipient love. (Would it be rude to note that the
best-known group of adults believing in Fated Love in our world is
stalkers?) Again <Elphame's Choice> comes off best here, given that
it focuses on *two* couples, one of which has no obvious
predestination (and doesn't even get mutual love-at-first-sight).

I originally got interested in Cast for two reasons. One is that
Christopher Moore is quoted on the cover of <Divine by Mistake>
praising it. Well, I bet he'd say something rather different were it
narrated by an equally obnoxious *male* character, but whatever; I'll
just have to mistrust his blurbs in future. The other is that
<Elphame's Choice> has a superficially pretty, but on closer look,
deeply unsettling cover painting; if the artist is named, a library
sticker covers that name on the copies I've seen, but that artist has
clearly imbibed from Kinuko Craft without following her into safe
territory, and bears watching. I suppose the moral here is, then,
obviously, "Don't judge a book by its cover".

Glen Cook
(?March) <A Cruel Wind>, 1979-80, first compiled as such 2006, partly
skimmed

This book consists of <A Shadow of All Night Falling>, 1979, started;
<October's Baby>, 1979, essentially ignored; and <All Darkness Met>,
1980, lightly skimmed. These are the first three, in publication
order, and middle three (far as I know), in series order, of the
"Dread Empire" books.

The Black Company books turn out *not* to be the only Glen Cook
writings I bounce off of. I'm not sure why I can read Jack Vance just
fine (well, more or less) but not Cook, but there it is. Broadly
speaking, these books appear to tell the story of massive political
change in a darkish secondary world, primarily through the eyes of
fairly Vancian major characters who are instrumental in said change.

On the day I finished fact-checking for these posts, and started final
formatting, I found a copy of Cook's <The Dragon Never Sleeps>, 1988,
selling for a dollar at a local thrift shop. This is the book whose
rarity James Nicoll constantly bemoans. I bought it on general
principles, but fully expect I'll find it as impossible to finish as
the other Cook books I've tried, and even if I finish it, it's science
fiction, and I won't need to keep it around for history of fantasy
purposes. So: does anyone want, maybe a month from now, a rather
beat up copy of <The Dragon Never Sleeps> ? If so, let me know.

Joe Bernstein

unread,
Oct 19, 2007, 12:07:03 AM10/19/07
to
READ FOR THE FIRST TIME: FANTASY - continued

Kara Dalkey [1]
0 (April) <Goa>, 1996
(April) <Bijapur>, 1997, and <Bhagavati>, 1998, skimmed

In 2004 I helped a friend, to whom I'd once given a copy of <Goa>,
research a game set in a fantasticated version of Nieuw Nederlandt in
the 1640s; for more on this see Pye and Zara in the other fiction post
and Flint in the series post. Anyway, my friend remarked at one point
that Goa (India) at the same date might have been a more interesting
setting.

Well, Dalkey here proves him right (OK, OK, these are set somewhat
earlier, but still). This trilogy ("Blood of the Goddess") well
depicts a quest conducted by a whole bunch of people at extravagantly
crossed purposes, and sophisticated gamers should find a lot to
inspire them here; but at the time I was wading through the end of my
first tax season as a tax preparer, and just found keeping track of
all the characters and their motivations too much work. I may try
again someday, or may not; I was somewhat upset at how Dalkey ties the
ending back in with an earlier book, my copy of which is in storage in
Milwaukee, and of which most of her readers are probably totally
unaware.

Curiously, my friend's inspiration for thinking of Goa was *not* this
series after all.

Avram Davidson
1986 World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement

* (October?) <The Phoenix and the Mirror>, 1969

Huh. This took me a while to read but was worth it. It recounts the
efforts of the great sorcerer Vergil (who isn't a poet in his spare
time, and doesn't know anyone named Mæcenas) to construct a "virgin
speculum" (roughly, a mirror that has never been looked at before),
which he is doing at the command of someone who wants to use it in
(Roman) imperial politics in a way of which he disapproves. It's a
remarkably inventive and persuasive fantastication of history, of
historically documented magic, and of historical fantasies themselves
(Davidson's source for Vergil-as-sorcerer). I found the ending mildly
unconvincing and am not sure there's any *depth* here, but while it
may not be much of a novel, it's probably a great fantasy.

I do not have access to the sequels here (see the start post re older
titles), though one is in storage in Milwaukee.

Oh, and as to that claim that something can be great fantasy without
being a great novel (the converse being a given): Samuel Delany
argues vehemently in at least one of the essays in <The Jewel-Hinged
Jaw> against any such claim (well, OK, there he refers to science
fiction, but anyway), and I haven't reasoned out an explanation of why
I find his arguments unconvincing. It may be that if I re-read them,
I will in fact find my own present position unconvincing. But at this
point, I find the distinction valuable. I list books here whose
spec-fic content is unimpressive, or anyway not extraordinary, but
which still may be extraordinary in other ways; well, this is a book
whose spec-fic content is extraordinary, though that's attached to a
somewhat unconvincing nexus of plot and characterisation. So I'm
using the distinction here.

Paul Di Filippo
(July) <Harp, Pipe and Symphony>, 2004, skimmed

A preface indicates that the book was conceived when the author was
eighteen (circa 1972), written ten years later, and not much revised
around publication date.

Which makes sense, because this is very much a young man's book: the
tale of Thomas Rhymer, seeker of a middle way between Good and Evil as
understood by his (unconvincingly) mediæval neighbours. Told by
Queen Mab that she offers such a middle way, he finds proof in visits
she arranges, to kingdoms that seem to represent each principle in
pure form. The seemings strike me as rigged, as does the paradoxical
ending; I'd have to read the book more closely to decide whether the
whole thing *is* schematic, or mocks the schematic.

Cory Doctorow
Winner, 2000 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer

(July) <Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town>, 2005
Nominee, 2006 Sunburst Award

I raced through this book nearly as fast as I did through Doctorow's
rather shorter <eastern standard tribe> (for which see the science
fiction post), but I have no idea what I think of it yet. I suppose I
can note that the settings include Toronto (primary), a mountain north
of Kapuskasing and its environs (secondary), and an island which, in
defiance of local watersheds, is at the end of the book somewhere in
the Saint Lawrence; that the characters include, inter alia, the
mountain and the island (which is the mountain's third son); and that
the date is indeterminable but sometime vaguely present-like. (The
only chronological data involve the ages of, and times between the
births of, the mountain's seven sons, and those data are pretty
consistently irreconcilable with each other. I assume Doctorow
intended this, since the sons' names are also consistently
indeterminate.) The book is in third person past throughout, usually
tight on the mountain's eldest son (whose name is most often Alan, but
also, for example, Abel, Alby, or Asa).

Alan (etc.) is by far Doctorow's least confident book protagonist, and
I think he's the least confident Doctorow protagonist I've read at
all, so although much of the book retains the zippy effervescence of
Doctorow's previous novels, it feels different, and the many graver
passages come as little surprise. He has left the mountain and the
North to come to the big city, where he has successfully run a series
of shops selling used goods (sequentially junk/antiques, clothes,
records, or books), but has now retired to become a writer. Although
he has never fully come to understand normal humans (I should probably
note that his mother is a washing machine), he has nevertheless
delighted in using his businesses and the rest of his life to act as a
mentor to younger people, and instead of writing much of anything, he
actually spends much of the book working on a guerrilla scheme to
provide free wireless Internet access to all of Toronto. (Huh. My
understanding is that every municipality in the US is racing to become
FIRST to offer free wireless Internet access everywhere; I wouldn't
have thought that, even back in the Stone Age of 2005, and even in a
different country, it would be a guerrilla thing to do.)

But Alan has a Dark Past, too. Doctorow takes the chronological
hopping he practised in <eastern standard tribe> and here builds of it
something powerful and disturbing as he relates this past in
flashbacks, but early on he explains the core of it, which is six of
the brothers' concerted murder of the demon child Davey (Darren,
etc.). Davey didn't stay dead, and as the book begins, he's about to
threaten Alan's life passing for normal in Toronto.

Late in the book, I saw a plot resolution coming, and thought "Huh.
Doctorow wouldn't have let me see that unless he had something even
*bigger* coming behind it." So I was somewhat unprepared for the
actual ending, in which the plot resolution I thought I saw didn't
happen, most of the bigger things I'd imagined didn't either, and I
was left unsure whether Doctorow had pulled a fast one on me, and
unhappy with the unanswered questions. It'll be a while before I can
be sure, but I *think* my reactions to this book are the sort I
usually consider "irritation" in retrospect. In that case, there's a
decent chance I'll end up praising it highly, after a second reading,
sometime in the future. We'll see.

In any event, this book is probably the closest thing to "slipstream"
I've yet seen from Doctorow, save perhaps "Return to Pleasure Island";
it's probably the closest thing in these posts to seriously
undermining my decision to split sf and fantasy in them.
Mode-technically, it's unequivocally fantasy, in the questions it
asks, the (very few) answers it provides, and even at least one of the
structuring elements of the plot (a mega-spoiler). It also isn't in
any meaningful way science fiction; I mean, free wireless Internet
service? But it uses bits of modern technology - that washing-machine
mother - in the centre of the novum, and sneers visibly at the
Anglo-American fantasy tradition's obsessions with realism and with
*some* level of comprehensibility. The average fantasy in English
says something like this: "Some things Man was not meant to know; but
Man can know enough, and can know much." Doctorow here disagrees
violently, and it isn't obvious to me that he's doing so in dialogue
with the tradition, and so as part of it, rather than by way of
identifying with some such thing as the "slipstream" concept instead.

Marcos Donnelly
* (May) <Prophets for the End of Time>, 1998, lightly skimmed
Nominee, 1999 Crawford Award

A book presented as a comic fantasy, which seems more than a little
dubious from what I was so far able to read. Apparently intended to
recount the careers of the two titular men, whose place in Revelations
is not clear to me as yet. Set on Earth, more or less in the present.
I may try to finish this someday, or not.

Keith Donohue
(September) <The Stolen Child>, 2006
Nominee, 2006 Quill Award for SF/Fantasy Horror, 2007 Crawford Award,
and 2007 Mythopoeic Award for Adult Literature

Considering that this book begins with several short info-dumps from a
narrator explaining the taxonomy and some of the lifeways of
changelings - and identifying himself as one - it simply boggles my
mind to have to report this, but yes: The Seattle Public Library
considers it regular adult fiction. At this rate, how many weeks til
I see the first copy of <The Lord of the Rings> so classified?

Anyway. The book is set mostly in or near Maryland; I'm fairly sure
the "city", as seen by the growing "town" the characters revolve
around, is Baltimore. It starts in 1950 and ends in or soon after
1977. There are two narrators; each has at least two names, but
anyway, here's the core deal: Donohue's take on changelings is that
the stolen child *becomes* a "hobgoblin", stuck at the age of the
theft, and can return to human life (and mortality) by becoming, in
turn, a changeling. In effect, it's a cycle, though a leaky one since
hobgoblins can also die by accident. So: the two narrators (who have
the same fairly plain style) are a changeling, and the hobgoblin whose
life he stole.

Our changeling (original birthdate, 1850) turns out to be a musical
prodigy, which his predecessor in his name was not; this is one of
several things that trouble his stolen life. His story is one of
growing up essentially in the Baby Boom (since Donohue's hobgoblins
don't want to tend babies, they steal older kids, and our hobgoblin
was actually born in 1943). There's surely a good bit of reminiscence
in this strand of the tale - the author looks about the same age, and
lives in Baltimore - but the tiresome business of The Sixties doesn't
take over or even intrude much. (I say this as a non-Baby Boomer with
a really low tolerance for that generation's tendency to gushing
eulogy over its own past.) Anyway, his story is mainly that of an
outsider trying to pass for human. The other story is stronger and
stranger, though not dense enough to have survived on its own: the
slow maturation of someone who physically has no need to do so, his
life with a band of hobgoblins in the forests around the town, and how
he deals with the changes taking place in his worlds. The stories
are, of course, intertwined.

This is a fine novel, and to the extent that fantasy readers don't
find out about it, that's a shame. (Yes, I do see that the awards
people, at least, are doing their best to prevent that disaster.)

L. Warren Douglas
* (March) <The Sacred Pool>, 2001

A reasonably good fantasy set sometime in the general neighbourhood of
AD 800 in Provence, showing the early years of a great sorceress
(series title "A Sorceress's Tale"), and culminating in what is just
about the oddest quest I've read in years, crowded with unexpected
resolutions to conflicts. (Revenge, Christianity vs. paganism, and
Good vs. Evil are just three of these surprisingly resolved
conflicts.) Of the two sequels (<The Veil of Years>, 2001, and <The
Isle Beyond Time>, 2003), I've only found the latter, which is why I
haven't read further.

Sara Douglass
* (February) <The Wayfarer Redemption> (aka <BattleAxe>), 1995
Nominee, 1996 Aurealis Award for Fantasy Novel

This book annoyed the hell out of me. In everything from plot shape
to grammar, it was deficient; but I couldn't stop reading it.
Fortunately, a day intervened between when I finished and when I could
go looking for the next volume, and my sanity returned. (This is the
first of three volumes, at least as sold in the US, known as the "Axis
Trilogy" after the leading man; furthermore, there's *another* three,
without separate title, about the next generation, and I have no idea
whether that's the end of it. The series title for the whole schmear
appears to be "The Wayfarer Redemption", in the US edition also used,
as all too often, to title the first book.)

There's a map, there's a prophecy, there's a Hero and a Heroine, yadda
yadda: Even if you haven't read this before, you've read it before.
No need to look, folks, move right along... I concede that Douglass
has quite a grip of story, at the soap operatic extreme of "story".
But between this and quick skims of some of her other books, I don't
think I'll be paying her much more attention.

Sigh. I'm thinking as I write that this is not entirely fair. I'm
perfectly capable of babbling indefinitely about the fine gradations
of thought behind world-building and quest-writing of the 1960s and
1970s; but there's an element to this sextet's ending, skimmed at a
bookstore, which I'm pretty sure I've seen in none of those books.
(Though it *does* appear, at the end of many fewer pages, in a book
mentioned below with more praise.) See Irvine below for more on my
arguable unfairness. The counter-argument is that none of those
mythopoetic fantasies of the 1960s and 1970s that I so admire occupied
the emotional world of the soap opera; the closest comparison I can
think of, Michael Moorcock at his hackiest, I generally bracket as
swords-and-sorcery, not mythopoesy.

Emily Drake
* (May) <The Magickers>, 2001, skimmed

Picked up for a dollar (twice the price on the tag, at that) on a
whim. Now that I've looked at the copyright page I know that Ms.
Drake is better known as Rhondi Vilott, R. A. V. Salsitz (her real
name), or something like half a dozen other pseudonyms, perhaps best
known as Charles Ingrid, or Elizabeth Forrest. <Locus> and Mr.
Contento now inform me that as of 2004, there already existed at least
three sequels to the book I bought. Imagine my surprise.

I actually liked a couple of Salsitz's much earlier books (a fantasy
duo published under her own name), but I'm afraid that in this case,
unlike one I'll mention below, the Hogwarts ripping off extends beyond
the general setup of "kids learning magic en masse". (Here, a summer
camp, somewhere in the western US, not a school - not yet, that is.)
There's a Sorting Hat of sorts, there's a scar that warns of evil
nearby, etc.; Our Hero in this case is firmly attached to the local
equivalent of Ginny Weasley from the start - which is curious enough
for an eleven-year-old boy who wants to be Perfectly Normal - and the
local equivalent of Cho Chang is not-Ginny's underdrawn friend.
Oddly, the overall structure imposed on all this is *not* especially
similar to the Harry Potter books', and has the potential to be
genuinely interesting; but this book could not, in fact, hold my
interest all the same; the problem is partly that it's just too long,
and partly that Salsitz's structure encourages her to such dramatic
flaws as a hundred or so pages in which the summer camp's leaders are
Hiding The Secret Of Magic from the campers.

Hal Duncan
(September) <Vellum>, 2005, started
Nominee, 2006 World Fantasy Award for Novel, 2006 August Derleth Award,
and 2006 Crawford Award (and it boggles my mind that this book won
none of those - was 2005 *that* much of a banner year for fantasy?)

As I mention in several later places in these posts, for August I set
myself three Goals: to read / re-read as much of Kage Baker's work as
I could find (see above and the series post); to read as much Early
Charles Dickens as I could stomach (see the other fiction post); and
to read Catherynne Valente's first four books of prose (see below).
In later August, imagining (falsely) that some of these goals were
near accomplishment, I let myself rip loose borrowing a *lot* of books
for the freedom of September, including this one and its sequel,
<Ink>, 2007.

Well, "The Book of All Hours" is clearly well worth reading, though
Duncan's approach to the myth of Inanna's Descent did not, as far as I
*read*, have the power other approaches I've found (by Gregorian and
Anne Harris) offer. But it turns out to be foolish to put sexy new
books from the library in the "Read later" pile; they can't be
renewed. I'll try again later. (Unaccountably, the copy of <Ink>,
someone else's desire for which forced me to return it, was on the
shelf a few days later, so actually, I'll try again sooner.
Anyway...)

David Friedman
(February-April) <Harald>, 2006

When the author has posted snippets of this not especially
magic-ridden secondary-world story here and on rasfc, I've tended to
get the impression that I don't understand his style. Well, I didn't
understand it any better in print. The first half's story of "the
education of a king" held my interest enough that I got halfway before
stopping, though I did not find the resolution persuasive; eventually
I read the rest, which appears to represent the education (via war) of
an empire, but I'll be cautious before reading any other fiction by
Friedman. I personally prefer Katya Reimann's approach to educating
an empire, at least in fantasy. (It belatedly occurs to me that
<Harald> could be read as containing a message about educating the
USA, though I'd be astonished if Friedman intended any such thing; at
any rate, I can fairly argue that <Harald> seems far more optimistic
about the prospects for educating empires than the evidence suggests
is warranted in the real world. Come to think, Reimann actually makes
empires *harder* to educate than they are in reality, as she herself
explicitly points out. Hmmm.)

Neil Gaiman
* (April) <The Last Temptation>, 1994-1995

Mediocre Gaiman, treading familiar ground: a timid boy, about
thirteen years old, gets roped into a Show which is Not What It Seems,
and thus learns to face his limitations. See: <Death: The Time of
Your Life>; <Stardust>; <Neverwhere>; most closely, various arcs in
<Sandman>. Well drawn by Michael Zulli; black and white; lettered by
Todd Klein; conceived in conjunction with Alice Cooper, the story
meant as a program for the latter's album of the same name.

(Speaking of that Show: I watched some videos on a TV with no "mute"
function for previews, and I went to a few movies, and I can't begin
to tell you how I *longed* for the preview that dares what no preview
has dared before, and triumphantly informs me that in *this* movie,
"Everything is what it seems" ! Or at *least* refrains from the
utterly tedious, and invariably false, claim that the opposite is
true... Thought exercise: What *would* a movie look like, in which,
really, nothing was what it seemed? How could you tell? Director's
track on the DVD: "Sure, you probably *thought* that was a chest of
drawers in this scene, but actually it was just a carefully carved
block of wood; the character's actual clothing storage was in this
thing that looked like a wall... Oh, and the character herself wasn't
played by Uma Thurman, but rather by Uma Thurman's clone." I am
relieved to report that a month or so after writing the first two
sentences of this paragraph, I went to the movies and saw not a
*single* preview making the vapid claim I'm mocking, which may be why
I went to the trouble of mocking it further.)

M. John Harrison
Winner, 1999 Richard Evans Memorial Prize

(June) <The Course of the Heart>, 1992

The edition I read claims copyright of 2004 but I see no obvious
reason for this claim; in particular, no revision is asserted, and in
the shape of the book, which is set in our Earth's recent history and
which turns vague fairly exactly in 1991, I see no suggestion of one.
(Delayed American editions of British books seem often to have new
copyright dates, though, so maybe I'm being unfair in singling this
one out. Why is this still happening, though? Given that the US has
now subscribed to the Bern Convention for decades, what need is there
for it?)

This edition also claims that the book is "genre-bending", but I don't
see that either.

As of 1992, of John Crowley's <Ægypt>, only the first volume had
appeared (under the same title). When I read this book, I had read of
that set only the first two volumes. So it may be presumptuous to
speak, but I'm still surprised by the way Harrison had evidently, in
writing something fundamentally of the same sort as <Ægypt>,
anticipated the darkening and even the villainy seen in its second
volume. This is a book not of Crowley's great instauration dreamt of
in the 1960s and 1970s as developing naturally, but of doomed efforts
to realise such an instauration, in the 1970s and 1980s, by magic or
imagination; and it is set in London and Manchester with considerable
excursions into the country, rather than Crowley's country with
excursions into the city. Also, the first-person narrator is a man
who, apparently unconsciously, represents himself as having tried, all
of his adult life, to help others, and as having always, for reasons
often well within his control, failed dismally; again this is a
contrast to Crowley, who has severe doubts about help but usually
(<Great Work of Time> excepted) doesn't quite make of it a tragic
flaw. (On the other hand, the narrative seriously neglects the
narrator's own wife and child, who seem to have few complaints about
him, and in order to visit his final disasters upon him seriously
warps a minor character's, well, character, or at least leitmotif. So
we *may* have an unreliable narrator.)

I want to call the book "elegiac" - its prologue's title represents a
kind of heaven, its epilogue's a kind of hell, and the narrator well
knows it. And I want to call it "grimy", which the mage at least
generally is, both literally and spiritually. But neither word is
correct, because both are true, and they're incompatible; perhaps
China Miéville on the cover saying Harrison is "austere,
unflinching" makes the point instead. This regretful realism merges
the book, for me, with several others by Englishmen I've read over the
years, including one by Graham Joyce (also quoted on the cover); it
may be that, twenty years from now, on seeing a copy, I will merely
vaguely think "Oh, that sounds a lot like <Waterland>. Have I read
it?" (Sigh. I suppose I now must explain that yes, I *am* aware that
Graham Swift is not Graham Joyce. It's just that thanks to a long-ago
birthday gift, <Waterland> was the first of these books I read, and
with the possible exception of <The Light Ages> it's also the best.
Um. Assuming Ian MacLeod actually counts as "English", anyway...) But
to judge by those cover quotes, there must be a lot of readers for
whom exactly this tone is the first essential of literary quality, for
whom if you aren't world-weary you aren't worth noticing, and I can
assure those readers that they will find here what they consider true
brilliance.

Getting back to the (unattributed) claim of "genre-bending". Sure,
the narrator may be unreliable. But much of his narrative concerns or
depends on visions other characters have, which they are surprised to
discover he can also see. Maybe I'm just blind to the absinthian
æsthetic, but seems to me there's simply something bizarre about
trying to read this book as anything but fantasy, or at most
anti-fantasy, a record of *shared* delusions; if it's just meant to be
understood as, say, a buncha lies on the narrator's part, then
whatever is the point? Even so, "is it really supernatural?" has a
long history; generically speaking, there's nothing new here, and
nothing meaningfully "slipstream".

The typesetting is strangely imperfect: occasional misspellings mar
the evident precision of the writing, but rather more often, a hyphen
appears needlessly, mid-line. I wonder if a scanner was involved in
the reprint, but a misspelling in the inside front cover's blurb *and*
a needless hyphen in the inside back cover's author bio argue
otherwise. So I'm unimpressed with Night Shade Books' work on this
edition, which misrepresents not only the book, but also the text.

(I later borrowed <Viriconium>, the Bantam version, from the library
fully intending to read it, but before actually doing so checked
whether it represented the entire series, and found not only that it
didn't, but back in Milwaukee is the copy I own of the book that holds
the rest - two short stories Harrison later disowned, "Lamia Mutable"
aka "The Bringer with the Window", and "Events Witnessed from a City",
both available in the Ace version of <Viriconium Nights>. One
Website, URL below, which I found while digging into this matter,
refers to Harrison's "The Causeway", and unnamed other stories, in a
way that suggests they're Viriconium stories too, so I have no idea
whether there are other such that were never collected as explicitly
related - and that site also says <The Centauri Device> has a
character mentioned in Viriconium stuff too? Anyway, so I finally
decided I should wait until I had access to my copy of VN, at least.
For Harrison's probable objections to this decision, see the Night
Shade Books URL below.)

<http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/i/harrison/>, actually a copy of a
1996 essay by Rhys Hughes on Harrison's work in general but seen
through the lens of Viriconium, seen September 13, 2007 (for the
second time)
<http://www.nightshadebooks.com/discus/messages/2625/2856.html?1144506598>,
seen (for the second time) August 27, 2007

Amanda Hemingway
(July) <The Greenstone Grail>, 2004
(July) <The Sword of Straw>, 2005
(July) <The Poisoned Crown>, 2006

The claim on the (US) covers, apparently prompted by the series title,
that these books are Arthurian, is false, and is explicitly disposed
of early in the first volume.

I borrowed "The Sangreal Trilogy" out of astonishment not only at
finding the whole thing at the central library at once, but all of it
shelved as regular adult fiction, not spec-fic. (It's an example of
stumbling on misclassed spec-fic by finding it in the new books
section, where <The Poisoned Crown> was.) I also think, on reading,
it's not really adult fiction but YA, if relatively sophisticated YA -
there's a brief, mild torture scene in book 2, and also a rape in the
backstory, for example (though that's described almost dreamily, as no
rape on our world would be). Oh, um, world. The main setting is
Sussex, and except for an opening chapter, between the years 2002 and
2006. There are also other settings, however, considerably less
constrained as to geography and chronology: Eos (throughout), the
last surviving world in a universe where exceptionally advanced magic
has led to nigh-complete disaster; Wilderslee (mainly in book 2), a
quasi-mediæval kingdom on an unnamed world of magnificent forests;
and Widewater (mainly in book 3), a world where selkies and mermen war
in an ocean broken only by polar ice. Through these worlds, Nathan
Ward moves in dreams, collecting plot coupons, trying to do good
deeds, and growing up some. Back in Sussex, he has a single mother,
an oldest friend whose father's abuse and desertion prompt her to low
self-esteem and failing grades, and various other contacts. Well,
but: his mother can move between worlds, his friend has inherited
magic, and several of those other contacts want either to guard or to
kill him, usually using supernatural abilities.

So to read these books is to read a very familiar story (that friend
clearly has met Eilonwy ap Angharad, though Eilonwy would have next to
no patience with her modern teenaged problems), told in a transparent,
sententious style (with an often omniscient 3rd person POV) and a
quiet, meditative, and often humorous but also often grave tone. In
the third volume, one of those sententiæ (either the narrator's or
Nathan's mother's) may well contradict my claim these are YA:
"Children like stories about blood. Grown-ups know better." One
interesting aspect to these books' un-gory quiet is how Hemingway
deals with how much the characters tell each other; despite their
assorted magical powers and their copious conversational efforts to
puzzle things out, the plot rolls along without their ever seeing far
ahead.

But. That very familiar story is reimagined with gentle irony, and
not a little determination to infuse it with realism. I've already
hinted at some of that, and there's plenty more, though no political
axe has been ground anywhere near the writing of these books, so I
don't really want to give (more) examples that might imply such.
Granted none of the revisionism is carried very *far*, but the ending
is of a piece with the rest, and offers only so much consolation. (I
would cite a particular previous fantasy trilogy which seems directly
ancestral to that ending, except that it'd give too much of the plot
away. One of the titles above hints at it, and the other two refer to
artifacts whose alternative names would clinch the matter. Arguably
this ending is less vulnerable to the charge of pulled punches than
the ending of the trilogy I'm not naming.) These books mention many
works of British children's and YA fantasy, but the Harry Potter
series gets by far the most references, and I feel safe in suspecting
this trilogy wouldn't exist if that series didn't. But Hemingway
copies it not at all, and clearly seeks to offer something quite
different.

There are several minor auctorial goofs; in particular, the first book
irked me with much fuss about the conflicting results produced by C14
dating, which "can't fail", when applied to the titular (*stone*)
artifact. I personally find this kind of (set of) mistake(s)
difficult to forgive in books for children, but I doubt that's why the
trilogy wasn't published as YA in the US.

Nevertheless, the books can cast a spell. I underestimated them at
first - yes, that C14 morass really got to me - and simply skimmed.
My main reason for finishing them properly was, to be honest,
embarrassment at saying so much *without* doing so (most of the above
was written after that skim). And yet I find myself thinking, at the
end, that if these are not great books, that's largely because
Hemingway chose modesty, and used humor and a cozy fixation on food to
dilute her brew. These same things, along with all those references
to kids' books, are much of why I think this a YA series, and if I'm
right, I'm probably too old to judge it properly, and it may be great
after all. I fully expect that I'll end up owning a copy, and
re-reading at long intervals.

Jim Hines
(April or May) <Goblin Quest>, 2004, skimmed

A moderately amusing story of an unusually intelligent goblin who
falls in with an unusually dysfunctional band of adventurers hacking
their way through a dungeon. Fun for a while but I didn't see any
real point in finishing properly. Recommended to players or
ex-players of D&D, but there's a bias of mine involved: this is about
the most palatable argument I've ever seen against D&D's ingrained
essentialism, whereby significant percentages of a world's population
are Born Evil and can therefore be slaughtered out of hand with no
compunction. (In fairness I should note that recent versions of D&D
have moderated this considerably, though players I've known have yet
to catch up.)

I've seen <Goblin Hero>, 2007, in stores, but not looked into it
significantly.

Robert Holdstock
(March) <Celtika>, 2001, started

I couldn't even make myself skim this, which appears to begin just
about the weirdest possible biography of Merlin ("The Merlin Codex"),
set largely in the Baltic region... I don't seem to be up to
Holdstock at the moment; I've returned a copy of <Mythago Wood> only
half re-read. (Actually, though, that was as much because I'd
established that I couldn't get access to the later books of the
Ryhope Wood set, which I thought maybe I should finally try to read
through, now that it's been years since any more books appeared.
Mind, I own most of them; but my copies aren't in Seattle, a city
which has none of its own.)

Robert Howard
(August) <Kull: Exile of Atlantis>, 1929-2006, first compiled as such
2006

This is, of course, neither the 1967 Lancer <King Kull> (with stories
completed by Lin Carter), nor the 1978 Bantam <Kull>, though it
contains nearly all of the latter and most of the former.

My repeatedly expressed wish, that Howard's <Weird Tales> stories be
reprinted as they appeared there, is actually being carried out by
Wildside Press, who are even reprinting them in mass market. Of
course, the Seattle Public Library instead offers access to a
different reprint series, cheaper in its *non*-mass market form, Del
Rey's "Fully Illustrated Robert E. Howard Library". I'm not sure why
I chose, at long last, to read a Howard book by reading this one,
except that I've learnt from experience always to grab bright shiny
objects when they appear on this library's new books shelves; but
anyway, I did.

And to my pleased surprise, the three stories in the book which
appeared in Howard's lifetime *are* given in their <Weird Tales>
versions, or at least so claims the end matter. (This hasn't been the
rule in previous volumes of the Del Rey series.) "The Shadow Kingdom"
was easy enough to read, but would've fit better in half the pages.
"The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune" surprised me by fitting many of the same
elements (and in particular a lot more of Kull's speculation) into
*far* fewer pages, and I liked it a good bit. I see from reprint
histories that mine is a minority preference. "Kings of the Night" is
usually treated, correctly, as a Bran Mak Morn story; Del Rey's
inclusion of it in both relevant volumes could be seen as padding, but
I prefer to see it instead as courtesy to those like me who *don't*
have access to both books. Anyway, it's an OK battle story whose only
actual magical content is Kull's presence allegedly "a hundred
thousand years" later than his own time. I might think better of it
if I weren't actually familiar with the history of Roman incursions
into Scotland, but eh, whatever.

"The King and the Oak", from <Weird Tales> 1939, is the only other bit
of the contents to have appeared independently of the past few
decades' incessant Howard reprints; it's a fair poem on the hoary Tree
vs. Human theme, and although it's closer to Donaldson's Forestals, I
can't help wondering whether Tolkien had read it before conceiving the
Ents.

I chose, after these, to read the bulk of the book in the order of the
1978 edition (whose 1995 Baen reprint I own), though this edition
doesn't draw on that one for its texts. Both editions try to use
story order to hide a problem, but neither could have succeeded: All
of the longer (and one of the shorter) stories *not* published in
Howard's lifetime have legally forbidden marriages driving their
plots. Interestingly, four of the five portray these romances
favourably; I find myself wondering whether Howard, or someone close
to him, had fallen in love across racial lines in the late 1920s. I
doubt he'd have used the idea twice in *published* stories, so I'm not
blaming Howard here, but it does make such a compilation of
*un*published items repetitious. Still, it also provided a bit of
romantic leaven, given Kull's determined uninterest in women, and the
stories were mostly at least a little worthwhile. But I notice that
the full-blown swords & sorcery formula, in which swordsman and
sorcerer whether opposed or partnered are anyway more or less equal,
is mostly absent here. Only in "The Shadow Kingdom", "The Mirrors of
Tuzun Thune", and "The Cat and the Skull" (printed as "Delcardes' Cat"
in the 1967 and 1978 books), do I really find swords and magic mixed;
several shorter stories are dominated by magic, and the remaining
longer ones by mundanity.

So I haven't yet fully met the originator of swords & sorcery, but at
least I've now finally read a Robert E. Howard book.

The edition is copiously illustrated by Justin Sweet, with numerous
in-line pictures and quite a few (black and white) plates. Most of
the plates are fine; the other pictures could've been cut in half with
little loss, but some are quite good.

Sarah Hoyt
(March) <Ill Met by Moonlight>, 2001, <All Night Awake>, 2002, and
<Any Man So Daring>, 2003, skimmed, all but the first lightly
<Ill Met by Moonlight> nominee, 2002 Mythopoeic Award for Adult
Literature

I don't buy the <Locus> biblio's claimed series title, and don't know
of any other.

I have been consistently and volubly appalled at how *extremely*
consistently fantasists have refused to explore the early modern -
which I was arguing already a decade ago on rasfc was an obvious place
to set fantasy - without tying it to the Elizabethan age, and usually
to either John Dee or William Shakespeare if not both. I should
exempt from this blanket condemnation at least Sarah Ash and Mary
Gentle, but otherwise? Feh. And Sarah Hoyt, who makes of Shakespeare
her *protagonist*, is the poster child for this utter timidity. So
what is she doing in this list at all?

Well, I mentioned in the start post that there was a trilogy I
borrowed just from the shock of seeing the whole thing on a single
library shelf, despite the fetishistic way libraries I've known split
up series. This is that trilogy: how could I resist? Well, I
couldn't resist checking them out, but as it turns out, I could all
too easily resist reading them. Aside from my prejudice re
Shakespeare as a character, I found Hoyt's fey unconvincing to the
extent that they pleased me, and unpleasing to the extent that they
convinced me; and her human characters couldn't make up for it.

(Belatedly, I realise that I've opened myself to charges of hypocrisy.
Lisa Goldstein, several of whose books I praise, has used John Dee as
a protagonist - and though <The Alchemist's Door> is set in Prague,
<Strange Devices of Sun and Moon> makes up for that with the hackneyed
theme of Elizabethan fey. But for what it's worth, those are also my
least favourite of *her* books. Complaints vis-à-vis John Crowley's
<Ægypt> would be better founded, if I'd finished it, but ...)

Ian Irvine
* (April) <A Shadow on the Glass>, 1998, skimmed
Nominee, 1999 Aurealis Award for Fantasy Novel

This is the first volume of "The View from the Mirror", a tetralogy;
apparently not, at that, Irvine's last word on the fictional world.
Its cast of thousands includes, in particular, a (justifiably)
arrogant historian/storyteller way out of his depth, and a simple
landowner who is More Than She Seems; inevitably, they faw in wuv.
(To make matters worse, this process is partly mediated by telepathy,
on which see also the science fiction post.) Irvine has neither
Douglass's facility for riveting story nor her panoply of bad writing
habits; there are infelicities in what I read, but they're few. Maybe
I'm just getting *tired* of Prophecies, Maps, Quests, and so on. This
suspicion is much of why my history of fantasy seems to be losing my
interest.

Here, I'm not sure how unfair I'm being. From this book, it looks
like we have Good Guys Disagreeing on a scale more like the
<Silmarillion>'s than like anything in the trilogies I tend to think
of as typifying the ideal of secondary-world fantasy. But in fact,
writers from Tolkien to Lloyd Alexander to Kay adumbrated this sort of
thing, and Tad Williams's trilogy explores it in detail. And I also
own the third volume, some glances at which suggest to me that Irvine
doesn't *mean* to rest his originality on that anyway. <Locus>
apparently called this series "a world-building labor of love"; well,
mebbe so, but what I read didn't carry that home to me the way a
similar number of pages of Tolkien would. And Irvine seems to know
nothing more than Douglass about the variety of ways authors have
found in the past two decades to make world-changing quest series less
gratingly repetitious. (Heck, Barbara Hambly and J. V. Jones have
*both* managed to have two protagonists of opposite sex who do *not*
fall in love with each other, so how hard can that be?) I note that
both writers are Australian: is it that trilogies from the US and UK
don't appear there, so the Australians have had to reinvent the whole
thing? Is there some school in Australia teaching that Originality Is
Evil? What's the deal?

On the other hand, the cover art by Mark Sofilas on the paperbacks I
have is way cool, though here too I have doubts about originality.

Robert Irwin
* (April?) <The Arabian Nightmare>, 1983, skimmed

A book in which the viewpoint character is constantly uncertain about
the shape of the world and in which we are constantly uncertain about
the shape of the viewpoint character. To the extent that there's a
consistent setting, that setting is one or more version(s) of Cairo in
the late Middle Ages; to the extent that there's a consistent
viewpoint character, that character is an Englishman who travels there
fairly clueless and gets caught up in the titular problem, which is of
interest to way too many people, including the local government. The
ending reveals all that has gone before as a hoary spec-fic
cliché, only for this revelation in turn to be subverted. Not
even remotely my cup of tea.

But it includes several excellent lithographs of Near Eastern city
scenes, done in the mid-19th century by David Roberts.

Guy Gavriel Kay
$ (April) <Ysabel>, 2007, started

Kay's return to contemporary fantasy (if you consider a few chapters
of Fionavar in that light) looks really promising. But, well...
Having spent months of poverty here, I've become less able to resist
simply reading books found in bookstores, right then and there. Well,
<Ysabel> establishes that not all books *can* be read in bookstores.
I look forward to being able to read it right, if ever the cloud of
holds should lift, or I should find stable enough work to buy it.
(Update: the cloud of holds lifted in October, and I'll be reading it
soon.)

David Keck
(January) <In the Eye of Heaven>, 2006

I remember liking this, but remember nothing else, which should at
least make it refreshingly easy to re-read it when the sequel is out,
assuming I'm actually able to get both books from the library at once,
anyway. (And assuming the sequel in fact appears. It's needed, but
the cover copy carefully refrains from saying anything about this
being a series book.)

Charles Kingsley
(January) <The Water-Babies>, 1863

Undoubtedly there's some good reason why this is a Classic of Fantasy,
but I can't say I care all that much what that reason is. Yuck. Plot
summary: a poor, abused child of 19th-century London becomes a
water-baby and Learns Morals as well as a few bits of info about sea
life magical and otherwise. The edition I read is illustrated, in
colour but not to my taste, by Jessie Willcox Smith.

(The EoF, which I consulted for Kingsley's first name, informs me <The
Water Babies>, sic, was the first English fantasy *not* based on
folklore. It's easy to reply "OK, better let Jonathan Swift know..."
but the actual wording is "first modern English children's fantasy
novel", which is a good bit more specific, especially since "modern"
and "first" are a perfect combination for weaseling purposes. More to
the point, the EoF credits this book's success as what encouraged
publishers to try Lewis Carroll. So OK, historical importance; but
classic status?)

Jay Lake [2]
Winner, 2004 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer

(July) <Dogs in the Moonlight>, 2002-2004, first compiled as such 2004

Four collections by Lake appeared between 11/2003 and 11/2004. This
particular one is set entirely in rural Texas, a rural Texas whose
residents nearly all come from dark soap operas. Somehow I'm not
astonished to learn that Lake attended the University of Texas, as
opposed to either being entirely ignorant of the area or having grown
up there. The book has four parts, titled "Ghosts", "Angels", "Gods"
and "Aliens". The only unequivocal science fiction story, "The Oxygen
Man", is in "Ghosts"; the "Aliens" are rather like some of late
Tiptree's aliens, and indeed this collection represents early Lake,
like late Tiptree, as focused on fables and fairy tales. One of
these, "Shattered Angel", is strictly speaking realistic; most of the
rest use tropes from the fantasy tradition in bizarre ways, but
towards often ineluctable endings. (This is true even of "Pax
Agricola" and "Gratitude", the "Aliens" stories that show protagonists
using human reason enough to make a strong case for them as science
fiction, as well as "Shattered Angel".) So compare my comments above
on Bear's <Blood and Iron>: yeah, I can perfectly well tell that Lake
is the sort of writer for whom the term "slipstream" was coined, as if
the introduction by Ray Vukcevich weren't enough cue, but between
Lake's sources of material and his structural aspirations, I'm
comfortable saying this particular book fits into the fantasy mode.

Anyway. I don't think Lake actually looks down on his characters, and
he usually likes them, but I'm sure not seeing signs that he loves
most of them; neither happy endings nor humor are abundant here, but
he still feels like a comic writer. He attempts virtuosity in
"Arrange the Bones" and achieves a different sort of virtuosity in
"Twilight of the Odd"; in a few stories he seems to be trying to reach
deeper, and in "The Goat Cutter" I think he succeeds. The book's
worth reading; I'll probably try (lazily) to find the other three
collections from Lake's wunderjahr, if only to see how much they
differ from this one, how protean he really is.

Tanith Lee
(September) <Voyage of the Basset: Islands in the Sky>, 1999, skimmed

Too much complexity to deal with twice; if I do similar posts next
year, read about this book then.

Kelly Link
(September) <stranger things happen>, 1995-2001, first compiled as
such 2001, started
Oh, my. Stories in this collection won the 1999 World Fantasy Award
for Short Story, the 1998 Tiptree Award, and the 2002 Nebula Award
for Novelette, and were nominated for the 1999 World Fantasy Award
for Short Story and the 2001 World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction.
Also, the collection as a whole won the 2002 World Fantasy Award
for Collection.


I'd only read one story by cutoff time, so it took some cheek from me
to classify the book, but I think the most parsimonious explanations
for "Water Off a Black Dog's Back" do involve fantasy. It's really a
horror story, though, and arguably, it's a rare example of Todorov's
fantastic successfully used in 20th century fiction. It was not
involved in the schmear of awards listed above.

Joe Bernstein

unread,
Oct 19, 2007, 12:10:36 AM10/19/07
to
READ FOR THE FIRST TIME: FANTASY - continued

Kelly McCullough
(March) <WebMage>, 2006, lightly skimmed

How a young, untested guy from the family of Earth's Secret Masters
(in this case, the Three Fates and their descendants) Finds His Place
using a combination of magic and software "wizardry". Did not sustain
my interest. Could be argued to be a Mary Sue in drag. There is room
for a sequel.

Shannon McKelden [2]
(August-September) <Venus Envy>, 2006

I first saw this book at Barnes & Noble, which considers it regular
adult fiction. It then turned up under the same classification at the
library; what's more, while it's a Tor book, it comes from their
avowedly non-genre line Forge. Yet the title refers to the
Græco-Roman goddess of love, in a reduced state thanks to an
argument with Zeus, as one of the book's main characters. Whatever is
going on here?

Well, the back cover gives us one clue: McKelden not only writes
romance stories, she's an officer in a local chapter of the Romance
Writers of America. And the opening chapters give another. Venus has
been banished from Olympus, you see, and the terms of her banishment
are that she help one mortal woman after another attain the man of her
dreams, until she's helped enough and she can go home. So this book
has two narrators: Venus, and Rachel Greer, her latest Cinderella,
who like Albrecht (and inconveniently for Venus) has forsworn love.
At first, these two sort of merge together, and the first pages read
like standard Chick Lit: here's Bridget Jones complaining about work
and sublimating her loneliness, and here she is obsessing, in the
latest slang, over trendy shoes. But in fact, while McKelden is far
from deft at characterisation generally, she does work a neat trick
with her narrators. Venus is an over-the-top sendup of Chick Lit
Narrator as vapid fashion fiend, never as vulgar as P. C. Cast's worst
but much funnier; Rachel is a perfectly normal human being except for
her melodramatically wounded heart.

In the end, McKelden decides *not* to make this a standard issue
romance, but to aim a different way. Nevertheless the book is
fundamentally trivial, between its shallow characterisations and other
weaknesses. (The fact that I spent parts of two months reading it is
due solely to my sleeping eight hours in between; it's a speed read.)
And while it complements Cast's schtick by Græco-Romanising a modern
American man's Love At First Sight the way Cast Græco-Romanises
every other kind of male's, it's much more superficially fantasy than
Cast's books, and Tor, B&N, and the library are probably right not to
treat it as spec-fic.

Sarah Monette
Nominee, 2007 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer

(March or April) <Melusine>, 2005
Nominee, 2006 Crawford Award

(April) <The Virtu>, 2006

Early modern-ish fantasy done *right* ! Ooh, ooh!

I have not seen nearly enough shouting about this wonderful story.
Two narrators, one a real jerk of a mage, the other a morally upright
thief, tell of their respective roles in saving their home city and
(secondary world) country from a wicked mage. The narrators are very
well differentiated, even to the madness one endures; lots of other
characters, from unusually varied backgrounds and from several
countries, are well and sympathetically depicted too. The five
different magic systems evoked are not so clearly depicted, but this
works: Monette succeeds in her depiction of professional jealousies
and inter-system contempt without making things so clear that magic is
stripped of all its numina. The ending is both convincing and
satisfying. I even, what's rare for me, believed Monette's fictional
history! I mean, wow!

Of course, I now have to update this assessment. Monette's website
(URL below; consulted for dates for the books) informed me that there
were more (plural) on their way. I've now seen <The Mirador>, 2007.
Since I was thoroughly convinced that the story of the narrators of
these two books didn't *need* any more finishing than it had gotten,
I'm disappointed to report that both in fact reappear as narrators in
the new book; but at least Monette allows a minim of change, in the
form of adding another narrator (the one readers of <The Virtu> will
consider obvious).

I'll probably have to wait a while before reading any further volumes,
to get over my sheer irritation, but I don't want the dishonesty with
which the first volumes were published to discourage people from
reading these books. Just don't trust that any given volume actually
represents the end of the story, whether or not it says it does - and
whether or not it should.

<http://www.sarahmonette.com>, seen (much later than the first time)
October 8, 2007

Christopher Moore
(July) <A Dirty Job>, 2006

Imagine my surprise. One: A Christopher Moore novel of recent date
which I *hadn't* heard ballyhooed from the rooftops. Two: A
Christopher Moore novel actually available for borrowing at a Seattle
public library. I checked the catalogue, *after* borrowing it, and
established that the hold system should've prevented me from doing so,
and that people were waiting in line for *all* the other copies of
Moore books the library system owns. Well, figures.

Anyway, though. Given my adventures with P. C. Cast, no, I don't
trust him as a blurb-writer (and this *has* affected at least one
recent decision about a book), but Moore still writes really well, and
I missed a half day of work to read this. It's the story of Charlie
Asher, who loses his wife as the book starts, and then discovers that
he's become involved with the mysteries of death. Well, "mysteries"
is perhaps the wrong word; Charlie *likes* mysteries, and likes them
to stay mysterious, but he really does need to understand what's going
on in his own life. Because the plot he is dropped into shows every
sign of being the standard Save The World From Evil plot, only with
jokes, most of which I, at least, find funny. I'm not sure what more
I can say that won't be a spoiler.

This book is set in San Francisco, mostly, and features not only the
Emperor and Inspectors Rivera and Caputo, but even Jody Stroud.
(Admittedly, she only has a bit part.) I haven't read all of Moore's
books, nor indeed most of the recent, famous ones. But I *have*
noticed the persistence of Rivera, Pine Cove, and certain other proper
nouns from book to book, and if I had read the rest, I might well have
slung everything Moore's written into the "Series" post. (OK, OK, I'm
having a little trouble figuring out what the link in <Lamb>, which
I've yet to read, might be ...)

Moira Moore
(February) <Resenting the Hero>, 2006
(February) <The Hero Strikes Back>, 2006

My take on Required Obnoxious Elements of Chick Lit is that they
include relentless narrative wisecracks, a generally complaining
attitude towards life, and frequent mention of brand names. These
books are marketed as Chick Lit Fantasy, but are set in a secondary
world with few brand names, and are relatively low in annoying
wisecracks; this made the complaining easier to take. (It's also
relatively well motivated, by which I mean, in part, that the heroine
is *not*, in fact, complaining about the banal tedium of having to
Save The World, à la, say, Rachel Caine's heroine. She belongs to
one of two classes of magical people who *collectively* Save The
World, a world ostensibly first settled from spaceships, which for no
obvious reason is subject to frequent disasters which these folks
magically forestall.) I found the books OK to read, and if Moore
produces any more, I might read those too.

Audrey Niffenegger
(April) <The Three Incestuous Sisters>, 2005

Eh. A mildly fantasticated, mildly interesting, family melodrama,
effectively a graphic novel though Niffenegger disavows the term.
There are real format differences - no bubbles, and all text at the
bottom of the page as in some books for little children; perhaps more
important, no *narrative* use of panels - they're occasionally used
for what amounts to simultaneity. The author (and artist) calls this
a "visual novel". Not at all long - calling it "novel" at all is
somewhat misleading, as is the title. But hey. I found this while
looking (unsuccessfully) for a copy of Marjane Satrapi's <Persepolis>,
and liked it just enough to dig up <The Time Traveler's Wife>; so it
certainly did me a big favour, albeit instrumentally rather than
æsthetically...

Joshua Palmatier
(April or May) <The Skewed Throne>, 2006, skimmed
(April or May) <The Cracked Throne>, 2006, skimmed

Two-thirds of a trilogy whose conclusion is due soon. I just realised
that the parts I read thoroughly all focus on the viewpoint character
*off-balance*, whereas I find her hard to take when she's humming
along full speed. Hmmm.

A thousand years ago a bunch of mages set up a throne (the skewed one
of the first title), and since then our city has been ruled by a
Mistress who can wield the throne's magic to detect wrongdoers; she
then sends assassins after them. Our Heroine starts out as a street
urchin being taken in hand as a scout by one of these assassins, and
changes occupation several times thereafter, which drives her
off-balanced-ness; meanwhile various dramatic events are happening in
city politics, which increasingly impinge on her consciousness.

I like these books, what I read of them anyway, but am not awed by
them; I expect to begin the third book, but don't promise to finish
it. I'm pleased to see these made it into mass market paperback; not
that I begrudge Palmatier the hardcovers, but seems to me the mass
market is the natural home for this series.

Susan Palwick
(July) <The Fate of Mice>, 1986-2007, first compiled as such 2007
"Elephant" nominee, 1987 Sturgeon Award; "GI Jesus" nominee, 1997
World Fantasy Award for Novella

Includes eleven stories, three previously unpublished. Of the rest,
half come from this decade, and two each from the 1990s and 1980s; the
latter include "Ever After", which to judge by the <Locus>/Contento
bibliography is the story (ahem, novelette) that made Palwick's name.
It's fantasy, like about half the stories in the book, but none of
these stories really wears its generic garb all that heavily. Paul Di
Filippo in the introduction says one of them wouldn't be out of place
in <The New Yorker>; well, I *think* I know which he means, but I'm
not sure... And there's some (equally moderate) science fiction too.

I read the entire book within twenty-four hours of finding and
borrowing the central library's copy; while Palwick is a much-praised
literary writer, and a professor of English, she seems to think these
things obligate her to write *well*, not to write *ostentatiously*.
Neato! Anyway, the stories are all sidewise to what tropes they use
(yes, "Ever After" is a Cinderella story, but that doesn't even
remotely mean what you now imagine - nor, I suspect, have you read a
zombie story much like "Beautiful Stuff"), and they all work for me.
Given my usually bad memory for short stories, I'm unsure how many
I'll remember; it's a bad sign that a few hours after I finished the
book, I'd forgotten the title of the story I liked the most, "Jo's
Hair". But that story remains what it is, a powerful indictment both
of Alcott's story (listed in the series post, as it happens) and of
the age to which it belongs, which nevertheless succeeds in
transforming itself into a flare of hope, in just a few pages. And it
will remain worth reading even (ever?) after I've forgotten having
read it.

I found only two typos here; the first had been corrected by pen when
I read it, so I was all set to praise Tachyon for such care until I
found the other, which, hoping to make some other reader think such
happy thoughts, I corrected myself.

Christopher Paolini
(September) <Eragon>, 2002

Well, finally, a more respectable example in our genres of
self-publishing made good than <The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You>...
But I read the Knopf 2003 edition, in which the opening chapters are
apparently revised, though they still include plenty of risible prose.
(My mind boggles that Knopf actually put the ludicrous first line -
"a scent that would change the world" ! - on the back cover.) I
*think* such infelicities become much less frequent later in the book,
but maybe I was just distracted by the plot.

Which is the tale of F'rodo Skywalker ... um. Actually, although it
does unite motifs from many sources, including McCaffrey, Tolkien, and
Lucas, this book has enough merit to survive the "derivative" charge.
Eragon is a hunter who finds (very minor spoiler) a dragon egg; it
hatches and he becomes a Rider, the first new one in a century in an
Empire ruled by the last surviving Rider, who had treacherously
destroyed the order. Surprise surprise, the emperor's servants soon
show up and drive him from his home; the rest of the book follows his
quests, learning, and maturation. It is not an extraordinary fantasy,
but is a good one; and it's certainly an excellent story.

So yes, I'm reassured that I can still enjoy a book with a map, a
glossary, and a prophecy after Douglass and Irvine - to be fair,
Paolini gets more creative with both glossary and prophecy than either
of those authors, though his control of his geography is inferior.
But why then, after those books, did I even try this one? Partly,
because a friend had recommended it years ago - confusion over that
recommendation is much of why I read <Elantris>, later in this post.
Also, I thought it began a trilogy now complete, and wanted to verify
my suspicion that it didn't really belong in the YA section where I
found it. (My local branch library is among those *without* walls
around the YA books.) Well, I was wrong about the trilogy's
completeness. On this book's evidence I was also wrong about its
non-YA-ness. I'd figured it was so classified just because its author
was a teenager; well, but is there any law *against* a teenager
writing a YA book? Anyway, I don't expect to have access any time
soon to a copy of the sequel, <Eldest>, 2005, but when the trilogy
*is* complete I'll probably be happy to re-read this volume on the way
to the others.

Holly Phillips [2]
(October-November?) <The Burning Girl>, 2006

I'm not sure I can say much of anything about this book's plot without
spoilers, though I'm also not sure how much that matters. It begins
with the release from hospital of a young woman with profound amnesia
and weird symptoms that have not entirely gone away. It ends with
paragraphs that are still with me, some to the word, several months
after finishing it.

This is hard reading. There are two viewpoint characters, the other
being a man Our Heroine meets. Phillips is not generous with clues as
we follow our amnesiac around, and you have to read the whole book to
make any sense of it. (I know whereof I speak: this is a case where
"skimming", as described up top, is utterly futile.) The style is
vivid but not transparent and indeed sometimes opaque.

I stopped halfway through for something like a month, as I did with
<Harald>. Then I finished the book. This is one of the books in the
"read for the first time" posts which I suspect of possibly being
great novels. In this case this is because I class it with such books
as <Heart of Darkness>, <Crime and Punishment>, and <Moby-Dick> as
"books I'm glad I've read once, but I have no intention of ever
re-reading". However, as I think about this book, I'm not convinced
that it has those other books' *depth*. It is not a great fantasy in
the sense that its fantastications are vivid, original, and
overwhelmingly persuasive; and I'm not sure it's a great *novel*,
because I'm not sure it uses those fantastications to *do* anything
remarkable.

Sigh. I suppose I'll *have* to re-read it, sooner or later, so I can
sort this out, and maybe even one or more of the others for
comparison. In any event, Phillips is clearly a superb writer, and
I'll be looking at what else she's written.

(August) <In the Palace of Repose>, 2003-2005, first compiled as such
2005
"In the Palace of Repose" nominee, 2005 International Horror Guild
Award for Short Fiction; "The Other Grace" nominee, 2006 World
Fantasy Award; the book winner, 2006 Sunburst Award, and nominee,
2006 World Fantasy Award for Collection and 2006 Crawford Award

Nine stories, only two of which had been published before; as yet, no
collection covers the first years of Phillips's career. The two
previously published stories - the title story and "The New Ecology" -
along with the soon reprinted "Summer Ice" represent a hopefulness
absent, in spades, from <The Burning Girl>. But the other six make up
for it!

Two of these stories belong fully to Todorov's famously rare fantastic
- one could be a ghost story or could be an utterly realistic
neurological one; another ends just before we find out whether the
superstitions being derided by professors ... "Summer Ice" is, if
anything, science fiction, unless the surprising level of public good
sense with which its society has met the end of oil is taken as
absurdist fantasy; in a sense, it's a sunny answer to "The Last of the
Winnebagoes". The remaining six are full fantasy, though "The New
Ecology" proffers a paper-thin science fictional rationale. I
consider three of the stories horror; others might find six, and yet
others none.

Sean Stewart's introduction contains a line Prime Books evidently
thinks the perfect summation of what Phillips does, and I agree: "In
a world that feels too little, there is a girl who sees too much."
Modulo one or more stories each that change the girl's age or sex,
there you have it; but I should add that the girl is generally also
alone - self-exiled, orphaned, homeless, or in one story that starts
like a precursor to <The Burning Girl> but turns quite otherwise,
amnesiac. Two stories are first person, the rest tight third, all but
(at most) one of those using the girl as POV. Most, like much of <The
Burning Girl>, have a recognisably modern setting, but without more
specific details (one story is definitely set in Vancouver, another in
California).

Oh, and any number of the stories deliver their freight with
considerable force. Yes, Phillips *is* a superb writer - less
stylistically abstruse than other writers Prime publishes, described
below, but far richer in things to use her style *for*. This
collection, which I read in less than twenty-four hours, almost
persuaded me to re-read <The Burning Girl> after all.

Satyajit Ray
(May) <The Unicorn Expedition and Other Fantastic Tales of India>, aka
<Stories>, Bengali, 1961/1972-1978/1987, probably first compiled as
such 1987

Yes, the author is the famous film director, not someone else of the
same name.

I can't date most of the stories precisely. The earliest story must
have been published between 1961 (when Ray started writing prose
fiction) and 1972, inclusive; the latest, between 1978 and 1987 (the
date of the US and UK editions with the different titles noted), again
inclusive. Ray translated them himself, and fluently, even including
at least one English-language pun; Wikipedia asserts that he wrote his
screenplays in English, and to judge by this collection, I have no
problem believing that. Ray in an introduction describes <Sandesh>, a
magazine for children of which he was an editor; he doesn't specify
any of these stories as having appeared there, but some did, and none
would be conventionally unsuitable for kids.

Of eleven stories, six *feel* like fantasy to me, as against four that
feel like science fiction, and one that is plainly realism. But this
sort of breakdown is dubious here, for reasons other than the obvious
usual ones. The stories that feel like "science fiction" I call so
because their plots revolve around solving problems by the use of
reason - one goes so far as to set its hero up as if for a fall,
because he has no imagination and so no sense of wonder, only to
vindicate him in the end. Yet in these as much as in the "fantasy"
ones, the feeling is more "more things in heaven and earth" than "Man
the Problem-Solver". These stories' *real* genre, I think, is
"children's fiction", that subcategory ("wonder stories"?) starring
everything from ghosts to UFOs. It's not so much that they transcend
genre categories, or are orthogonal to them, as that they *precede*
that level of categorisation: taxonomy recapitulates ontogeny.

(The Seattle Public Library considers the book regular adult fiction.
One website I consulted, URL below, asserts that Ray's influences
included H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, and Arthur Conan Doyle.)

Anyway, they were fun to read. A couple have what I'd have to call
unhappy endings; one edges towards but does not reach a political
theme. There's a glossary up front - sure sign of a genre book! :-) -
but it's hilariously inadequate; I doubt any serious spec-fic reader
will be thrown by such words as the glosser omitted, but it's strange
to see <Ramayana> glossed, while "namaskar" bows are not. Most of the
stories are set in India, but Professor Shonku (explicitly modelled on
Doyle's Professor Challenger) visits in the final four stories Chile,
Japan, Egypt, and Tibet. (Professor Shonku turns out to be star of a
long series which Wikipedia gives its own page, and that page dates
*these* stories to 1972 through 1978, around the middle of the
series's publication history.) I recommend the book as a whole, as
light reading, to readers open to soft science fiction and/or weirdish
fantasy, told conservatively but set (to most of us) exotically. The
issues with the glossary probably make it a poor choice for kids of
the age the stories were aimed at, unless they're especially
interested in India or themselves fluent in reading that demands an
adaptable vocabulary; younger teens might fare better.

<http://www.satyajitrayworld.com/rayfiction/rayfiction.aspx>, seen
August 27, 2007

Kat Richardson [2]
(August) <Greywalker>, 2006

I am nervous about reviewing this book. My excuse for this feeling is
that Ms. Richardson after all reads, or has read, rasfw, and is
reasonably likely to see what I say; but there's more to it than that.

Her first book is narrated by Harper Blaine, a P.I. in Seattle who
gets enmeshed with the Otherworld. Ms. Blaine conforms in a number of
respects to the stereotypes I refer to in the other fiction post, as
regards Sue Grafton's first novel, but there's an interesting
exception, which it'd be something of a spoiler to reveal. However,
she's also un-stereotypical in a less rewarding way. Most women of
Ms. Blaine's general type whom I've encountered are characterised more
or less fully, usually largely with their Pasts. In the hands of a
master like Paretsky, or like (on evidence so far available)
Whitfield, treated below, these Pasts interact with a credible
personality so as to create just as much tension as the writer
requires. In hands like Grafton's, well, at least the Past provides
scenery. Ms. Blaine, however, seems *not* to have a Past. She's too
much a loner to be a cop, and she's always liked mysteries, so she's a
P.I., even though most of the work is drudgework, and even though her
mother desperately wanted her to be a dancer instead. Also, she was
fat as a child, though she's attractive now. She's as doughty as the
plot requires. She has basic social skills, so she probably knows
some people when the book begins, though we don't meet them. This is
about as much as I now know about her. I was able to fill the void
having fun with Richardson's use of Seattle locations (though her take
on the city differs materially from mine), but I don't know what a
reader who'd never been here will make of this book.

So why, then, has this first of her stories made me nervous? Well,
because whatever Richardson's faults in characterisation, she makes up
for in spades in numen. Somehow the narration of that faceless woman
was able to convey to me, as more books than I care to remember have
not, the sheer terror creatures of the night are supposed to evoke;
was able to render for me a sketch darker, more convoluted, and
stranger than any photograph glistening with techne could possibly be.
And so I am nervous of going near any of the places Richardson has
described, as I'd planned tonight; and I am nervous of writing what I
wrote above, as I prepare to sleep instead.

Of course all books introducing female P.I.s have sequels, and I've
seen <Poltergeist>, 2007, in bookstores. For what it's worth, while
the first book resolves both Blaine's actual cases, and a credible
cluster of fantasy plot elements underlying them, in a way that works
for both mystery and fantasy genres, enough underlying issues are left
hanging to make it perfectly clear that the story isn't - shouldn't be
- over. (More specifically: why *has* Blaine become enmeshed in the
Otherworld?) I have no idea whether I'll read that sequel; this
certainly isn't My Kind of Writing, and we all know that sequels tend
to be worse - but the mere chance that Richardson can again write true
fantasy balances the scales. What would be unpleasant in a much less
rewarding way would be her simply following the pattern so many other
writers (especially in this particular subgenre) have established,
book after book until any original merit has been diluted past
recognition. It wouldn't shock me, though, if there were in fact an
overarching plot projected, with perhaps three or four volumes total
required to bring it to completion.

J. K. Rowling
$ (July) / * (August) <Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows>, 2007

If there's a book in any of these posts on which my comments are less
necessary than on this one, I sure don't know which; I spent money I
couldn't spare to buy it because I'd come across one spoiler already
lurking rasfw and expected more. I will mention one thing which may
not have been obvious to people who hadn't recently been reading Eliot
and Dickens: Rowling has shown, in this series, considerably more
talent for casts of thousands, of the sort that nineteenth century
authors did so often and so often so well but that more recent authors
have tended to neglect, than I think she's usually been given credit
for. I don't read many other books in which *several dozen*
characters get more than about half a dimension; she's got at least
that many one-dimensional characters, and perhaps that many
*two*-dimensional ones, which is genuinely impressive. This is *not*
a backhanded compliment: if you go through these posts looking for
other authors of whom you can say the same, you will, I think, be
quite surprised at how few you find. When I originally read each of
the second through fifth books of this series, I preceded that reading
by reading everything that came before. I haven't been able to do
that with the previous volume nor this one, but I look forward to a
full read-through someday simply so I can appreciate this particular
virtue.

I'll be interested to see what Rowling does next.

Matt Ruff [2]
It may interest various rasfw readers to hear that the <Seattle
Post-Intelligencer>, on August 3, 2007, reported as follows: ' MATT
RUFF: The Seattle literary writer, on the cusp of rising above his
current indie favedom, does a surprising turn into fantasy with his
latest novel, "Bad Monkeys." ' I imagine the rasfw reader who posts
as Matt Ruff, and who is usually understood to be the author by that
name of various spec-fic/slipstreamy novels such as <Sewer, Gas &
Electric>, will be particularly interested.

That said, and although I usually like his posts, I tried to read at
least one of his books once and didn't get far, so I didn't
investigate the lengths of the hold lines, let alone whether I'd agree
with the P-I's curious take on things. Anyway, the same page
announced widespread breathless anticipation for a collaboration
between Kevin Anderson and Brian Herbert [2, who'da thunk], so I
probably shouldn't mock it too much: coals to Newcastle...

Mr. Ruff may perhaps find some comfort in what Paul Constant, in
Seattle's <The Stranger>, said about him on September 12, 2007: inter
alia, "Matt Ruff is one of Seattle's best writers, and it's about
friggin' time we started to recognize that." The context being that
he had been shortlisted for the <Stranger>'s annual (ahem) "Genius
Award" for literature. Constant's description nowhere explicitly
links Ruff's novels to spec fic of any kind, though it doesn't read
like a description of any kind of "mainstream" novelist.

I also can't really resist quoting a headline later in that issue,
which well approximates certain mistakes I made anent P. C. Cast this
year: "You Should Never Judge a Movie by Its Book's Cover - But I'm
an Asshole". Article, and perhaps also headline, by Jeff Kirby.

Jessica Rydill
(March) <Children of the Shaman>, 2001

A story of family dynamics intersecting with magical villainy in
various ways, in a vaguely alternate-historical world where the Little
Ice Age was somewhat bigger and started around AD 500 or so; it's set
at the retreating edge of the tundra somewhere around Belgium,
sometime in the middle of the millennium that recently ended. The
family dynamics - the narrator and her older brother are traveling
with their father, whom they barely know, while their aunt who raised
them gets medical care - are remarkably well done.

This book does end, but as clearly should have a sequel. Apparently
that, titled <The Glass Mountain>, has appeared in Britain but not
here, and now seems unlikely to; too bad. Also, per Wikipedia,
Rydill's now writing a third book in the sequence, though I don't know
whether it's an offshoot or a continuation (conclusion?) of the first
two books' story.

It belatedly crosses my mind that one, um, aspect of the setting of
this book could be read as a comment on Harrison's <The Course of the
Heart>, above, though I seriously doubt any auctorial intent involved.

E. Rose Sabin
(February) <A School for Sorcery>, 2002
(February) <A Perilous Power>, 2004, lightly skimmed

<A School for Sorcery> surprised me in the degree to which it
*doesn't* rip off Hogwarts, beyond the basic setup - for starters, we
have here a secondary world where magic is out in the open. I still
wasn't all that thrilled, and I bailed on the second book upon
discovering it a (distant) prequel, not a sequel.

But I should note that the first book's ending almost redeemed the
rest of the book (in particular the glacial and unpleasant opening)
with its extraordinary refusal of standard kids' books' wish-
fulfillment approaches. "You may have one thing that doesn't much
matter to you, but not any of the things that do ..." Brrr.

I'd consider reading something else by Sabin. But am astonished to
discover (from the <Locus>/Contento biblio) there's a third book in
this setting - <When the Beast Ravens>, 2005; I've never seen it at a
library or bookstore.

Brandon Sanderson
Nominee, 2006 and 2007 John W. Campbell Awards for Best New Writer

(April) <Elantris>, 2005

A one-book secondary world fantasy which I liked a lot. Ten years
ago, Elantris, the capital of a realm standing as bulwark against a
rather ugly religious fundamentalism, changed overnight from a city of
magnificent-looking near-gods wielding awesome magic and living
forever, to one of visibly diseased, cursed and miserable people whose
only magic is their retention of all pains and miseries in their
continuing deathlessness. Until ten years ago, it was a blessing of
sorts to become an Elantrean (a Change which happened, no-one knew how
or why, across an entire people apparently randomly); now it's the
worst thing that could happen to you. Our book begins as the new
capital's prince prepares for a marriage to which he looks forward
personally, but which also will seal an alliance against those
fundamentalists; but he wakes up, just days before, struck with the
Change.

The narrative follows him, his would-be bride, and the advance leader
of the fundamentalists, in alternating chapters, as they each try to
deal with their respective personal and political situations. Each
chapter is headed with a glyph from the Elantrean magic system, and in
the back there's a glossary. It turns out that each chapter to a
greater or lesser extent *focuses* on the area of that glyph's
relevance, and the opening lines often refer to that area of
relevance. The glyphs also assist in some heavy foreshadowing of
central mysteries, which I'm pleased to report are *not* resolved in
the neat, obvious way. Furthermore, for the bulk of the book (not
beginning or ending), the glyphs run in parallel, with one chapter
following each viewpoint character headed by the same glyph; in other
words, Sanderson isn't just being cute here (though he certainly is
being cute, for better and worse), he's also trying to discipline his
plot, show his three protagonists moving through similar stages.

That plot, depicting as it does moral growth and effort, as well as
various determined (if often conflicting) efforts to Save The World,
I'm increasingly convinced I do in fact like. This is certainly a
neat book, an accomplished work of fiction and a very good (if not
better) fantasy; it may also be a lasting book, and I certainly intend
to read other books by Sanderson.

Darieck Scott
(July) <Hex: A Novel of Love Spells>, 2007

A case study in library classification. Title: as given above
(spine, cover, and title page - there is no half-title page).
Author's self-description: "a committed fantasist" (p. vi). Author's
"idol": Samuel R. Delany (p. vi). Quote from Delany: "an adventure
that pushes over the edge of horror and the supernatural, witchcraft,
and strange transformations" (both covers). Should this be put into:
a) Children's fiction; b) mysteries; or c) spec-fic?

Well, of course, if you're the Seattle Public Library, you put it into
d) regular fiction. This may be because it's well known that black
men write nothing else (there's a picture of Scott on the cover), or
it may be for some more obscure reason; I dunno. OK, OK, to be fair,
it may be because of the scary black cover, the aforementioned quote
containing the word "horror", and the fact that authors like Anne Rice
and Stephen King wind up in the regular fiction too. (Elliott Bay
clarifies matters: that bookstore has a horror section, and mis-
shelves this book in it.)

Anyway, on to the book. The POV is consistently third-person, and
although it's often omniscient, the character through whose eyes we
most often see is Langston Fleetwood, who is black, gay, a casual user
of many drugs, and a grad student in Classics, still taking classes.
He's also just five years younger than his sister, who is nevertheless
both 39 and in her 40s. So that's a demonstration of the book's
biggest problem: basically *none* of the chronology works. But it
claims to be set in "the present", and it's certainly set in this
century (except flashbacks, none of which precede 1949). Most of the
central characters are men, black and/or gay, and meet in Miami, where
some of them live, while others (Langston included) are accidentally
visiting in time for the bacchanalia with which Cubans and gays (both
large groups there) celebrate Fidel Castro's death. Amidst this,
Damian Sundiata, the charismatic man who binds together most of the
characters, vanishes; the rest spend the rest of the book looking for
him. Langston, especially, also spends the rest of the book finding
out about magic, partly through a book titled <Hex>, which is not a
recursion. So this is that troublesome sort of book in which the
central character Learns Magic, which inter alia involves breaking
down his resistance to same, the sort of yawnful lecture-heavy thing
Charles de Lint writes too often. Here, however, much of his learning
is imparted by his "sensitive" (and she *is* sensitive on the subject,
hating the word "psychic" for example) aunt, who quotes bastardised
modern physics liberally [d], and considers spells in general to be
"mumbo jumbo".

The combination of her acid presence, the oft-drugged fog of mostly
homosexual desire through which the younger characters steer, and a
convoluted plot, make this read as though it were <Dhalgren>
reimagined by a mystery writer whose head was on, um, straight.
Between its effective style, a mixture of transparency and
well-deployed metaphors, and the plot's sheer complexity, it resisted
my attempt to skim and move on; and since some of the pages I usually
skip while skimming turned out critically to change the meaning of the
ending, I'm glad it did. It's true fantasy, complete with healing;
it's *not* horror, not even close; and it's not nearly as boring as it
oughta be, aunt or none. (Indeed, one of her lectures, at the end of
Part 2, is for paragraph after paragraph riveting.) I wouldn't read
it except in summer, but it fit Seattle's brief, record-breaking heat
wave well, and turned out to have surprising gentleness.

[d] Bastardised modern physics seems to be a popular trope in recent
fantasy, perhaps more so than at any time since the 1940s; see also
writers who would seem Scott's polar opposites, Amanda Hemingway and
John Wright.

Lucius Shepard [2]
Winner, 1985 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer

(July) <softspoken>, 2007

A story that begins with an unhappy wife in an apparently haunted
house, whose inhabitants, besides her and her husband, are his
siblings, who are far from normal. I'm not sure what more I can say
about it that isn't a spoiler, except to note that the (tight 3rd
person, present tense) protagonist's name, Sanie, is significant.
Unfortunately, this means all the *active* flaws in the marriage are,
of course, her husband's fault; but arguably, it has to be that way
anyhow for the book to work as a horror novel, which is what it is.
I'd say I couldn't stop reading, except that occasionally I had to;
nevertheless I tore through this short novel in rather less than three
hours' time. That said, I felt cheated by the ending, and am not sure
I can talk myself out of that; maybe I'm just being willfully obtuse,
but seems to me Shepard *has* cheated, in order to get the outcome he
wanted genre-wise, in order to make a point, or both. The book is set
in September to November, 2007, in a nonexistent county in
northeastern South Carolina, within a long drive of Myrtle Beach; I
don't *think* Shepard is simply exploiting the Southern Gothic
stereotypes here, but since his core story relies heavily on them, I
wouldn't care to argue the point too hard.

Not so trivial complaint: I'm beginning to wonder whether one of the
requirements for starting a small press is ineptitude with the basics
of English. This book is loaded with errors, starting with an "all to
familiar" in the eleventh sentence, and provably not all Shepard's
fault given that on page 113 a line begins with a comma. (Not long
after that, South Carolina's capital city's name is spelt correctly -
for the first time in the book.) It's some reassurance that this is,
like the American edition of Harrison's <The Course of the Heart>,
from Night Shade Books; perhaps Night Shade's remarkable incompetence
is skewing the small-press average I'm seeing. Ah well: at least
keeping track of the errors gave me some relief from the story.

Edmund Spenser
* (December-January) <The Faerie Queene>, 1590-1609, first compiled as
such 1609, started

I can only take so much of Spenser's style, let alone his gender
politics, at a time. I haven't yet made it out of the first canto
(therefore also not out of the 1590 part). Nor have I looked at it in
months.

But anyone who wants to object that the Elizabethans didn't have a
concept of "fantasy", so I can't call *this* a "fantasy", should try
reading it. I assure you that the Greek gods, unicorns, dragons,
giants, and sorcerers - yes, *all* of these in < one canto - do not
appear in most Elizabethan realist or historical writing, let alone in
such concentration. Yowza.

(Oh, and speaking of the "in such concentration" argument, apparently
someone at the Seattle Public Library knows something about Gene
Wolfe, and nothing worth mentioning about ancient Greek literature:
they have a copy of <Latro in the Mist>, the omnibus reprint of the
first two <Soldier> volumes, in regular adult fiction just as he has,
in my view very erroneously, claimed it should be, and despite Tor's
explicitly and correctly labeling the volume fantasy.)

Ellen Steiber
(December?) <A Rumor of Gems>, 2005

A mixture of love story and secondary world quest, with a
fantastication that I never entirely got my head around; but I
remember it despite lacking physical evidence of it, and remember it
as good. There is a really well-drawn fantasticated city, in
particular, and we meet people from a bunch of backgrounds in it. I
would be reluctant to read a sequel - one thing I remember as good
here is the sequel-blocking ending - but if Steiber writes anything
else, I'll be interested.

(<Locus> and Mr. Contento tell me she has already written a bunch of
stories, mostly sold to Terri Windling and/or Ellen Datlow, and a
bunch of <X Files> novelisations. Huh.)

Sean Stewart
0 (November?) <Clouds End>, 1996

This had been the only Stewart book I hadn't finished, and had
remained so for an awfully long time; I finally discovered it not
nearly as odd as I'd thought it would be, but don't remember it as
standing out among his books either, and indeed I'd forgotten having
finished it during the year covered here until it dawned on me to
check e-mail due date reminders.

In case anyone actually wants information about it, um, it concerns a
world where economics more or less matches religion: everyone
*believes in* the same gods, but the fishers of the islands actually
*revere* the ones relevant to their lives, the forest-dwellers of the
Empire ditto, and so forth. It presents the quest of some islanders,
driven by divine signs and a sort of curse (on which compare Marie
Brennan's <Doppelganger> above), to right a Wrong in that Empire, a
quest in which they're eventually joined by some imperials; not
everyone winds up where they started. There is plenty of travel,
divine activity, regular magic, and what-all; it's explicitly
Stewart's homage to Tolkien (cf. the last line), but Stewart, in his
only full-blown secondary world fantasy so far (<Nobody's Son> being
set in a type case of the secondary kingdom), makes his world real not
through languages and decades of rumination, but rather through
building its infrastructure, structure, and suprastructure with equal
degrees of attention, giving us cultures that have cuisines,
economies, governments, *and* real live gods running around. So it
probably deserves more praise than I gave it in the previous
paragraph, but hey, that *still* isn't actually *that* impressive, for
Stewart... To be fair, I seem to remember that in a much earlier
version of his website (the current version, URL below, seems to lack
this), Stewart explained that this was the first written of his
published novels.

It's been three years since <Perfect Circle>, and I was curious what
Stewart had been up to more recently. His website mentions <Cathy's
Book>, a 2006 YA novel I hadn't seen, written with Jordan Weisman, but
he seems to have become increasingly focused on "interactive fiction",
apparently some sort of cross between regular fiction-writing and
online games.

<http://www.seanstewart.org/>, seen September 7, 2007

Steph Swainston
Nominee, 2005 and 2006 John W. Campbell Awards for Best New Writer

(May) <The Year of Our War>, 2004, skimmed
Winner, 2005 Crawford Award

(May) <No Present Like Time>, 2005, lightly skimmed
(July) <Dangerous Offspring> aka <The Modern World>, 2007, very
lightly skimmed

It probably takes gall for me to say much about these, and given that
I'm *sure* they've been discussed a good bit here, I won't. The
setting is (mostly, so far) an empire run by an immortal emperor who
is able to share his immortality with a select few, and who uses a
competitive meritocracy to choose these. The main series plotline
seems to involve the breakdown of this system under discoveries about
its raison d'être (that reason being an external threat which in the
first book comes close to doing it in), its origins, and the emperor's
motivations; we're seeing all this from the first-person POV of one of
the youngest of the immortals, the emperor's flying Messenger, who is
also addicted to a drug which proves central to the above plot. What
can I say? I didn't much like the POV character, and didn't find
remotely enough hints to convince me that sticking with him would
reward me æsthetically.

Why that criterion? Well, see, the first book was released as
literary New Weird, with China Miéville prominently featured on the
US edition. This US edition came out just a month before the second
volume appeared in Britain, making its marketing look more than a bit
disingenuous: since when does the New Weird do series? (Yeah, yeah,
OK, I *do* know about Miéville's New Crebuzon, or whatever it's
called ... but AFAIK that isn't a set of "novel fragments", and this
is.) Similarly, the US edition of the second volume claims that
this'll be a trilogy, but if volume three represents the story's end,
I'll eat my hat, and in fact volume three's US edition makes no such
claim. At this rate, volume eight will probably be marketed as a
story for six-year-olds' bedtimes, and volume nine as a Western. I
suspect whether this in fact remains a trilogy, or becomes a
googleplexology, will be determined by sales, but I suppose it's
possible that Swainston's story is simply running away with her. In
any event, I acknowledge the hypocrisy of slamming Swainston over this
much more harshly than I did Monette (or Bujold), above; the
difference is primarily that Monette's publisher has not, so far, made
a *recurring* practice of dishonesty (ditto Bujold's), and Swainston
probably has little or no control over her US publisher. But, well:
Those who like the sort of thing Swainston offers, feel free to leap
to her defense; I can only tolerate one case of postponed final
volumes at a time, and I think Bujold gets first claim on me for that,
with Monette somewhere behind.

(Gee. Now I realise I'm picking exclusively on women. If the second
of Stephen Donaldson's "Last Chronicles" had come out in time for
these posts - on the night I closed 'em I checked for it at Barnes &
Noble - or if I'd been able to convince myself finally to read <A
Feast for Crows> straight through, I could mitigate that efficiently,
but as things are, I'll have to request nominations for male exemplars
of the problem from the audience.)

Joe Bernstein

unread,
Oct 19, 2007, 12:14:47 AM10/19/07
to
READ FOR THE FIRST TIME: FANTASY

Sonya Taaffe
(May) <Singing Innocence and Experience>, 2001-2005, first compiled as
such 2005
"Matlacihuatl's Gift" winner, 2003 Rhysling Award for Long Poem;
"Retrospective" nomine, 2005 Fountain Award

Fifteen stories, seven poems (judged by their printed layouts; I can't
detect meters in most, and their language could hardly be much more
concentrated than the stories' [e]), and one "cycle" arguably prose
poetry. Three of the poems also appear in Taaffe's collection
<Postcards from the Province of Hyphens>, according to the
<Locus>/Contento bibliography. The stories are just over half of
those known to the Miller/Contento <Magazine Index> through 2005; the
*only* item in that Index from a market I'd previously heard of is the
title story, which was in <Realms of Fantasy>, and which is
uncharacteristic in this book by virtue of some humor and decidedly
more irony than usual, more in fact than is to my taste.

The dust jacket, considered in light of a high school English
opposition, encapsulates the contents: the title recalls a great
forerunner of Romanticism; the author bio mentions Taaffe's projected
doctorate in Classics; the cover painting, Waterhouse's <The Siren>,
links across the alleged opposition. I learnt last fall, studying
colour, that "indigo" and "violet" at the blue end of the spectrum are
*not* funny names for "purple"; rather, purple is a colour not in the
spectrum at all, the true mixture of red and blue. So prose
transmutingly beyond purple is *not* ultraviolet, and I lack a word to
describe Taaffe's prose; but perhaps if I say that it is to Patricia
McKillip's what McKillip's is to the average spec-fic writer's, you'll
get the idea. To recur to that opposition, she expresses a Romantic
sensibility through that precision in language that the earliest
Romantics inherited from their Classical upbringings. (This is also a
coastal New England sensibility; the only elements in her world are
wind and water, and those elements' children, ice and snow, do as much
as Classical precision to cool the heat of Romantic passion in these
stories.) That bio also mentions her abiding interest in mythology;
her take on it is usually as humorless as any teenaged devotee of the
pre-Raphaelites could ask, but insightful enough, at least, to justify
the suggested comparison to Waterhouse. The fifteen stories involve:
Orpheus; Urania; the nameless second woman of Midrash; a merrow; the
nagas, arguably; Joseph (no, not that one); Geshtinanna; the Devil; a
selkie; another woman nameless in the most obvious source; Ammut; one
arguably kin to the Lady Amalthea; a ?succubus; an automaton (this is
my favourite of the stories, predictably enough if you know the story
and my tastes); and, arguably, a periwinkle. (That list began with
serious intent but became a puzzle; clearly I'm infected. But I will
say that while the order is not that of the table of contents, it is,
almost, deducible.)

The introduction, by an editor who, I think, originally bought nothing
in the book, says "Sonya Taaffe is an immensely gifted writer, and may
well become a genuinely *great* writer." I do not disagree.
Nevertheless, I am relieved to have nothing more of hers to read now.
But on the third hand, I would be bitterly disappointed to have
nothing more of hers to read ever.

[e] I've since read Matthew Cheney's 2004 interview with Taaffe (URL
below) in which she describes differences between poetry and prose
partly as generic, rather than formal - for example, that poems can
more readily do without plots. (I'm not sure whether she avoids the
word "lyric" here *because* she's a doctoral student in Classics, or
*despite* that.) This explains much.

<http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2004/11/conversation-with-sonya-taaffe.html>,
seen (for the second time) August 27, 2007.

Lisa Tuttle [1]
Winner, 1974 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer

(June) <The Mysteries>, 2005

I'd read <The Pillow Friend>, 1996, not long before coming here, in
the new hardcover edition, without realising it came from the 1990s.
I'd wondered what had happened to Tuttle between <Windhaven>, way back
in the early 1980s, and the recent spate of fancy hardcovers. I
borrowed the other two fancy hardcovers, if only to spur me to
inquiry.

Well, the <Locus> bibliography has now told me about <Familiar
Spirit>, 1983, <Gabriel>, 1987, and <Lost Futures>, 1992, which I may
well have seen over the years in horror sections but not remembered,
as well as <Panther in Argyll>, 1996, to which that disclaimer doesn't
apply. Meanwhile, though, halfway through the trudge that I found
Elizabeth Bowen's <The Last September> (see the other fiction post), I
got fed up and grabbed the book at the top of a different stack.

Some hours later, it's 3 a.m. and I have closed that book on a perfect
ending.

I suppose I should say something else, something like: this is the
first-person account (in a convincingly male voice; the contrast with
the credibly female voice of <The Pillow Friend> is notable) of a man
who works as a P.I. specialising in missing persons. He tells
stories: primarily of his second encounter with the "Otherworld", and
secondarily of numerous historical missing-persons cases, as well as,
in flashbacks, both those stories told him as he works on the case,
and those he remembers himself, of his first encounter with the
numinous, and of people who've left him in the past. (Yes, people,
plural.)

Oh, and if I hadn't phrased it that way, I wouldn't have been reminded
of the beginning, which is also perfect, but which I belatedly
remember is an explicit warning that we are in the hands of an
unreliable narrator.

Oh, bother; I can summarise and comment at will, but cannot turn my
prose convincingly into an explanation of why this book is so good.
Just go read it. I'm not sure whether this book could be considered a
great novel; and its fantastic elements are wholly traditional and
distinctly underplayed, so it doesn't fit this category I've
re-erected of "great fantasy" that *isn't* also "great novel". But I
am sure that it's head and shoulders above most of the books listed in
this post.

(June) <Silver Bough>, 2006, skimmed

It's probably my fault, but lightning didn't strike twice. Of the
recent glossy hardcovers, only <The Pillow Friend> (not, after all,
originally so recent) is particularly horrific; <Silver Bough> is
unmistakably not. Ordinarily, I'm not much for horror (as a couple of
books still ahead in this post will illustrate), but somehow I wasn't
able to keep reading this account of How Magic Awoke and Made Things
Right on the West Coast of a Celtic Land. Aside from the somewhat
stereotypical topic - but then, is that of <The Mysteries> so much
less so? - perhaps my problem was with the POV. Here there are *four*
POV characters (I think), and so the sustained, and sometimes
horrifying, examination of a single soul offered by both <The
Mysteries> and <The Pillow Friend> (as well as several other novels I
tackled around the same time as the Tuttle pair, such as <The Gentle
Powers> and <Benighted>) is here lacking. Not that there's anything
necessarily *wrong* with that, but it wasn't what I expected, and
perhaps, given those other books, wasn't what I wanted at the time,
either.

Catherynne Valente [2, sorta; see below]
This post deals with Valente's first 3.5 novels. My description of
the first is likely to result in some readers (assuming any have read
this far anyway) skipping on to Sylvia Waugh way down below. However,
the first and fourth books differ considerably, with the second and
third fairly obvious stops along the way. I would encourage anyone
who wants to skip ahead instead to stop and read my treatment of <In
the Night Garden>, and then consider whether to read backward, book by
book.

As to footnote 2: Valente was born in Seattle, but grew up in
northern California and went to college in San Diego. She has since
lived in lots more places. I've read much of her website, and didn't
see much reference to the Northwest.

(July) <The Labyrinth>, 2004

Catherynne Valente's first book came from Prime Books, as does Sonya
Taaffe's second, discussed above. Also, both write spec-ficnal prose
*and* myth-influenced poetry. (I see no chance I'll read Valente's
recent version of <The Descent of Inanna> soon, but I'm certainly
interested, given that prose reinterpretations by Joyce Ballou
Gregorian and Anne Harris both delight me.) Well, I've now read on
the Web lists of influences provided by both. Taaffe's (in the
Matthew Cheney interview cited above) is mostly spec-fic writers, to a
surprising extent Usual Suspects. But Valente's (in an FAQ at her
website, URL below) is mostly Famous Names of the Past, and the only
two genre names I saw were Jeff VanderMeer and ... Sonya Taaffe.

Huh. I said Taaffe's prose is to Patricia McKillip's as McKillip's is
to the spec-ficnal average. Well, Valente's prose in <The Labyrinth>
is to Taaffe's as Taaffe's is to, oh, the Dick and Jane books, maybe.
Prose this extreme is better represented by quotes than by
description, so here's one: "Walked you on the desert Road like the
shadow of a hawk, but you can never, never escape it, it trails you
like squid ink, trails you like a credit report, chases you like
wolves after caribou, clings to you like jellyfish." If you find a
copy, try to get through the first two paragraphs; if you can, it
makes sense to try to read it, but don't attempt more at once than you
can take.

Because eventually, the plot *will* actually pull you in; it just has
a *lot* of very dense language to fight before it gets the chance. As
the book opens, the narrator is walking the eponymous Labyrinth. She
remember nothing before the Labyrinth. She doesn't believe there's a
centre. She describes Walls, and especially the prowling, predatory
Doors she has so far avoided. We spend page after page after page
with this narrator; dialogue begins thirteen pages in, but sustained
interaction between the narrator and another character is still
farther off. (I became absolutely certain there *was* no plot, and my
reading was as futile as the narrator's walking. Well, I was wrong.)
Eventually, the story becomes a melancholy but antic consideration of
futility, of the body and of eternity, of the attraction, the
repulsion, and the domineering gentleness of men ... Above, I called
a Paul Di Filippo book a young man's book for its light picaresque
depiction of a young man trying to prove his System of the World.
Well, this is a young woman's book for its depiction of a nameless
(caveat [f]) woman trapped in corporeal and psychic changes,
repetition, futility, male arrogance, and acceptance, all told in
language too weird to be entirely histrionic.

This book is only problematically readable as fantasy. (Which means I
can't actually complain about the Seattle Public Library's decision
that it *isn't* fantasy.) It's about equally awkward to read it as
allegory. If there's a genre of "spirit quest", that might be a
better slot for it.

Prime Books didn't leave many typos, unlike some other small presses I
bash in these posts, but the few there are, are remarkably disruptive,
given the sheer concentration the text requires, and Valente's
cheerful habit of making up words, so you can't be *sure* a typo
really *is* a typo...

As of this novel's publication, Valente lived in a city near Yokohama.
This had effects I see as superficial on her next novel, but
fundamental for her third; but she might consider her Japanese stay
fundamental to both books.

[e] One of Persephone's names is archaic Greek for "maiden", and so is
in reality not a name. I can think of no other phrasing with even a
chance of not being a spoiler.

<http://www.catherynnemvalente.com/faq/>, seen (for at least the
second time) August 27, 2007.

(August) <Yume no Hon: The Book of Dreams>, 2005

I can't praise the Prime Books edition this time 'round; especially
towards the end, typos are fairly profuse, though, again, not *all*
are certainly typos: "Let the scholars in Kyoto pour over pages until
their eyes dribble onto their cheeks." That sentence also shows a
more important difference between this book and <The Labyrinth>: this
time the syntax is far clearer. However, the imagery is, if anything,
*less* clear, at least to me, and there's an image every few words, so
I still found this book slow going.

It concerns a woman with several selves, of which at most one is *not*
a dream-self but real:
1) The Sphinx at Thebes, before Oedipus.
2) A being of fire, possibly from a mythology I don't know, though she
visits Troy (and in one chapter I think she encounters <The
Labyrinth>, rather than the original Labyrinth at Knossos).
3) One I'm really unsure about, but she at least resembles Tiamat
after Marduk's victory.
4) Isis gathering the parts of Osiris from the Nile.
5) Valente herself, I suspect, with writer's block (only briefly
mentioned, unlike any of the others).
6) Ayako, an old woman, a hermit on a Japanese mountain in (I think)
AD 1181.
Valente tells us up front that the chapter titles come from the old
Japanese calendar, leading to the reasonable expectation that the book
will be a cycle; and for about the first two thirds of the book, with
actual plot at best uncertain, minimal dialogue, and no real
continuity of characters other than the woman, there's little reason
to doubt this.

Again the Seattle Public Library has concluded the book isn't a
fantasy, but regular adult fiction. Mode-technically, this is
dubious: although the book's resolution encourages a reading in which
the book's events are not fantastic, that reading requires the *setup*
to be impossible. (I can't be clearer without spoilers. Anyway, a
different reading is possible in which the book isn't fantasy at all,
though that reading trivialises the novel.) But no more than <The
Labyrinth> does this book engage with the Anglo-American fantasy
tradition.

This book states Valente's current residence as being in Virginia. It
has a number of illustrations by A. R. Menne, most of which make even
less sense to me than Valente's word-images, partly because, as best I
can tell, they typically contradict those images.

(August) <The Grass-Cutting Sword>, 2006

Valente's third novel represents a considerable change from the
previous two. For the first time, much of its prose is straight-
forward; for the first time, it is clearly multi-character from the
beginning; for the first time, there's a plot of genuine complexity.
Formally, the sections told in first person by a male aren't new -
<The Labyrinth> also has a few such sections - but the regular
alternation of those passages, narrated by Susanoo no Mikoto, the
Japanese storm god, with passages narrated by the dragon he eventually
(minor spoiler) slays and by the sisters that dragon has eaten, gives
the book rather more forward motion than its predecessors had, and the
voices - of the god, the dragon, and all eight of the sisters - differ
convincingly. In a nutshell, this is the book in which Valente for
the first time embraces the norms of prose fiction.

That said, she's still Valente. You still couldn't mistake her style
for anyone else's. The book revolves around Japanese myth - what
seems a long digression midway into the creation story proves nothing
of the sort - and makes only trivial bows (references to stereotypes
of dragons and maidens) to the tropes of conventional fantasy. It
also revolves around womanhood: the sensual nature of being female,
and the trials I can no longer pretend Valente sees as anything but
inextricable from that state. In keeping with her profoundly bitter
vision of gender relations, the myth turns more warped than anything
the Greek myths offer [g], and while this is a far easier book to read
than <The Labyrinth> or <Yume no Hon>, it's even less pleasant. Oh,
and there's still more than a hint of cyclicity in the whole thing.

Daringly, this book refuses to enter the Valente residence
sweepstakes, at least in the trade paperback edition from Prime Books
that I read, but it *is*, far more than <Yume no Hon>, clearly a
result of her time in Japan. I should also mention, after the
complaints above, that I caught only two typos, both easily recognised
as mistakes, not new words or grammatical experiments.

This is the book with which I began to accept that I'm very far from
being Valente's ideal reader, largely, but not only, because I'm male.

[g] I actually went and checked a couple of books on Japanese
mythology, one a translation of the <Kojiki>, and should note that
although Valente does change her source story, and does do so in a way
that sharpens her emphasis on the sheer torture of being female, she's
mostly faithful to what's already there, and that includes plenty of
misogyny, and also of what may seem to a non-Japanese reader obviously
her invention.

(August) <In the Night Garden>, 2006, started
Winner, 2007 Tiptree Award; at this writing candidate, 2007 World
Fantasy Award for Novel

Illustrated by Michael Kaluta, which I found, mildly, a net plus.

This is Vol. I of "The Orphan's Tales", which each earlier novel
projected as forthcoming. It was always going to include four books,
each representing a Greek element. <The Grass-Cutting Sword>
announced that these would be split into two volumes, and named the
first volume and its two books as they in fact appeared: <In the
Night Garden>, "The Book of the Steppe" and "The Book of the Sea".
Coming any time now: <In the Cities of Coin and Spice>, containing
(per <The Grass-Cutting Sword>) "The Book of the Storm" and "The Book
of the Scald".

The core setting isn't Greek, but Arabic; the book is fairly
explicitly modeled on <The Arabian Nights> (the third character to
appear in the frame story is named Dinarzad, though here she's the
storyteller's enemy). In turn, *that* means there are plenty of
sub-stories; and when Valente turns to representing her writing as
stories told orally, an amazing thing happens - she becomes thoroughly
comprehensible, sounds almost as prosaic as she does writing for her
website. I don't think this book's style is even as elliptical as
Patricia McKillip's. Readers who find this first and look up the
Prime Books publications later are in for a real shock. (In case
anyone's wondering why I stuck with the previous three books, well,
this is why: I wanted to be prepared for this book, which I
anticipated being much easier, given that it came from Bantam not
Prime. I just didn't expect it to be *this* much easier.)

What's less amazing is that Valente turns out, when not experimenting
stylistically, to be a wizard plotter. Suddenly I feel less stupid
for having, three times now, trudged through the first part of one of
her books only to race through the rest; obviously I wasn't just
*telling* myself the plots had sucked me in, in an attempt to convince
myself the time spent on those books was worth it, but I really *had*
won through all obstacles to Valente's remarkable gift.

All the same, I knew the frame story wouldn't be complete in this
volume, and I didn't expect the second volume to come so soon as it
apparently is. (I have a hold on it as I write this.) So I took time
off between "Steppe" and "Sea" to read the Haddawy <Arabian Nights>
books, discussed above, and ran out of time to finish this one
afterwards; oops [h]. Still, it allows me to describe the book by
contrasts. First of all, Valente, unlike the <Arabian Nights>
storytellers, does things like plots, characters, and so forth, and
does *not* do things like doggerel and CHA 18; yay her. Second, and
not so obvious: Where the <Nights> exult in vague geography and
self-contradictory chronology, Valente here is offering a *tightly
structured* set of plots. Each of these two books has a single
second-tier story told by the frame plot storyteller; everything else
in the book is a sub-story told within that second-tier story.
Further, the many sub-stories of "Steppe" (I counted; there are
twenty) all relate to the same world, and mostly to the same central
and massively complex story. Finally, I know from glances at the
book's final pages that "Sea" shares at least one character with
"Steppe". I will be utterly shocked if the second volume fails to
link not only "Storm" and "Scald", but also the frame story itself,
with these two.

It may also be worth mentioning that at least thus far, though Valente
still dwells on When Bad Things Happen To Women, it's less a central
focus than in her previous books, and there are actually several
sympathetic male characters.

As of this book's publication, Valente lived "in Crete", which I
presume means, on the Greek island so named in English. However, her
website, when I checked it in, I think, early August, gave her current
residence as Ohio. No doubt by the time anyone looks this post up on
Google, she'll have relocated at least once more.

In the sf post, I severely criticise Tor, publishers of Jay Lake's
<Mainspring>, for something Bantam does a *much* more restrained
version of here. A quote from Carol Berg appears in two places in
Bantam's edition of <In the Night Garden>. On an inside page, Berg
announces that this is Valente's "debut novel", but the version of the
quote given on the cover specifically excises those words.
Furthermore, Bantam explicitly reports the book as Valente's *fourth*
novel in the author bio. So while I'm not pleased by this apparent
predecessor stunt to what Tor did with <Mainspring>, I also have to
admit that Bantam went out of its way to mitigate it.

[h] As I write this, having decided after all to close the set of
posts at the one-year mark - I'd been planning to include a lot more I
was hoping to read and/or watch in the next few weeks - <In the Night
Garden> is also both overdue and up to its renewal limit. So I was
out of time in multiple senses. If I do this again, expect both
volumes in the series post next time.

Sylvia Waugh
* (October?) <The Mennyms>, 1993, skimmed
Nominee, 1996 Mythopoeic Award for Children's Fantasy (wow, *that*
must've been a slow year!)

A yucky kids' book about giant dolls with button eyes, etc., made and
given life by a deceased mad inventor, and their struggles to remain
undetected. I found it torturously bland, and wound up selling in
June the copy I'd bought eight months earlier. There are, of course,
sequels.

Kit Whitfield
(June) <Benighted>, 2006

I skimmed this book the same day I read <The Gentle Powers> by Stella
Gibbons (see the other fiction post), and wrote a description here
which I then entirely erased, because I couldn't stop there after all,
and had to read it in full.

This makes little sense. I have, as I say several times in these
posts, little tolerance for darkness, and this is one of the darkest
books I've ever read, perhaps a shade lighter than <Heart of
Darkness>, but considerably darker than <Crime and Punishment>. But
it's worth noting that even though the copyright page claims this is
the first edition of its author's debut novel, there's a "reader's
guide" in the back, whose final words speak of a movie deal already
made; and I can find no way to think of such ballyhoo as an injustice.

Setting: Britain, I think, and recent enough to have cell phones and
hacking. I suspect but do not know that this Britain is Catholic. I
do know that in it, only one child in 250 is born *not* lycanthropic.
So far, we have an echo of David Sosnowski's <Vamped>, 2004 (which I
haven't yet read), but then... POV: One of that .4%, a woman
twenty-eight years old, who works primarily as a defense lawyer in the
courts that handle crimes committed on full moon nights by
lycanthropes; but the agency that employs all the "non"s is so
short-staffed that everyone does lots of things, and the word
"moonlighting" appears not once. Anyway, the choice to focus on the
tiny minority is AIUI different from Sosnowski's. Plot: Two of that
agency's people are murdered, and the narrator spearheads the search
for the killer. Style: Largely transparent; nevertheless I dare not
allow myself to start quoting. Theme: Well, there's two. This is a
bildungsroman, but this woman is older and *much* more scarred than
usual; that provides Whitfield the opportunity to use the plot to
bring *every* aspect of her history to the boil. At another level,
Whitfield uses her careful construction of the "non" disability and
world to study difference from myriad angles; there are echoes not
just of the obvious medical minorities (compare recent issues in the
deaf, dwarf, and Down's syndrome communities), but of the sexual
minorities, the racial ones, and more than a few aspects of the
history of Jews in Europe. I'm sure there are other books that have
used the noir formula to do more than the formula was meant to do, and
I just don't read enough books of that kind to know of them;
regardless, this one's mournful flow has overpowered me. I can't rule
out the possibility that it's a great novel; I certainly can't see its
becoming a movie as unfair, even for a first novel.

John Wright
(July) <Orphans of Chaos>, 2005
Nominee, 2006 Nebula Award for Novel

(July) <Fugitives of Chaos>, 2006
$ (July) <Titans of Chaos>, 2007

Since the protagonists have to work hard to learn the natures both of
themselves and of the world they live in, I can't say much about "The
Chronicles of Chaos" without spoilers. However: The protagonists,
narrator Amelia Armstrong Windrose (a name she chose herself not very
long before the book opens) and four others, begin as
student-prisoners, at a boarding school in southern Wales, at a time
when word processors have replaced typewriters thereabouts and both
Virginia Madsen and "Britney" can be called "starlets". (?) Their
ages are indeterminate, and they get much misinformation about those
ages, but physically they're teenagers. In their universe, Greek
mythology holds true, including some exceedingly recondite bits
thereof (I don't think this is the first fiction I've seen citing
Hyginus - who's a good candidate for "Most Boring Myth-Writer Ever" -
but it isn't the third!). The five of them are (of course) determined
to escape; they also (further of course) turn out to have Special
Powers, each different from the others.

OK, so. There's good news and there's bad news; bad news first, two
problems of very unequal importance. Trivially, Alma Alexander's
f'a'u'x-A'r'a'b's ought to arrange an emergency airlift of their
excess apostrophes to this series; these protagonists' dialogue and
Amelia's narration are severely contraction-deprived, and although
contractions are not mandatory, I am certain that they are often good
ideas. Since contractions have their normal roles in the dialogue of
(some) other characters, I assume Wright had some purpose for writing
so, but I don't see it. Much more seriously... Wright can defensibly
argue that *as* (?pseudo-)adolescents - and two female, three male -
his protagonists are full of raging hormones. But those hormones are
much more on display than I remember from my own adolescence, or for
that matter from what I see on buses - and much more *specifically* on
display too, with fighting impulses far less prominent than sexual
ones. To make matters worse, Amelia, who is not only narrator but
often taken prisoner, finds that she's "the kind of girl who likes it
rough". There's no actual sex - the fast-moving plot hardly leaves
room for it - but this series still kept making me feel like a dirty
old man for reading it.

But the feeling consistently passed. I *said* the plot was
fast-moving, no? When it slows down, it's not for lust, violence, or
any combination thereof; it's either for contests of will, or for
discussions I'll get to shortly. There's too much of techne in how
our heroes handle their powers to leave much numen in sight, and the
characters only intermittently replace that lack with the powerful
numen of adolescence itself, but the techne is neat in its own right,
and so is the story.

The more distinctively rewarding thing about this flawed series is
that Wright *finally* shows he's capable of writing, and about ideas,
without hectoring. Wright roots the protagonists' powers in five
different "paradigms": strict materialism, the One True Art,
"mysticism" or "psionics", Sufficiently Advanced Physics, and
solipsism. They argue plentifully over this (and over leadership -
Wright actually manages to show that one of the many irritating things
in <The Number of the Beast> *can* be used productively). They
gradually learn each others' viewpoints well enough to make these
arguments something other than brick walls talking to each other;
their actions to some extent also reflect these differing outlooks.
They devote some attention to a sixth paradigm, that used by Wright's
Olympian gods. While there are a *few* ideas that none of them
seriously dispute, these are far in the background in comparison - and
I'm not sure any even of those gets the explicit agreement of all
five.

I don't entirely *buy* his handling of the paradigms, but then, this
*is* fantasy, and essentially adventure fantasy at that. If Wright
finds a way to write as seriously as he has in past books, but with
this approach to ideas rather than the more domineering one in those,
he may well write a work for the ages. We'll see.

Mary Frances Zambreno
(September) <Voyage of the Basset: Fire Bird>, 2001, skimmed

As with Lee above, comment awaits the next edition, if any, of this
post.

Stephan Zielinski
(March) <Bad Magic>, 2004, skimmed

Wow. Even though I couldn't make myself read straight through, this
is an amazing book for Zielinski's sheer inventiveness, combining
horror, lashings of humor, and an almost role-playing-style quest.
(This mixture is probably why I didn't read it properly: even horror
plus quest, e.g. <The Stand>, tends to put me off; for humor plus
quest see above; horror plus humor pretty much guarantees I'll choke.)
In a nutshell: All forms of magic, every one you've ever heard of,
are real and functional; it's just that their practitioners take pains
to keep the rest of us from knowing about it, assisted by the human
capacity for self-deception. Mundane governments more or less similar
to this Earth's operate, but don't matter much. The Incumbents, who
appear to be vampires, are headquartered in San Diego; the Opposition
in Seattle. (Huh.) Our Heroes are a clandestine Opposition cell of
eight, in San Francisco; they range from a cleancut naval officer to
someone who appears to have been a member of the SS to someone who is
never clearly described but appears to be among other things a serial
killer. They face an enemy even worse than the Incumbents. So in
essence, this is a book about When Evil People Fight Exceptionally
Evil People. The appendix, a detailed review of the biological, and
especially taxonomic, literature on <Zombi diego> (the San Diego
surf-n-tan zombie), is a lot of fun.

Why haven't I heard anything more about Zielinski?

Next, movies that would, if books, fit in this post; I make much more
extensive comments on these than on the movies listed in the other
posts, on the grounds that after all my claimed expertise *is* in
fantasy, and more importantly, that a lot of these are not well known
to rasfw regulars:

<Good Morning, Eve>, 1934 (a musical short in which Adam and Eve meet
the Emperor Nero, King Arthur, and some 20th-century types - or
maybe not; I'm not sure it belongs in this post but its main
interest anyway is as a surprisingly early colour movie, by
Technicolor no less; it's on the <Dames> DVD);
<Those Beautiful Dames>, 1934 (a cartoon also on that disc, probably
part of what was obviously a Warner marketing onslaught for that
movie, but still a sweet story of toys conspiring to throw a party
for a starving child);
<I Only Have Eyes for You>, 1937 (the other cartoon on the disc,
cynical and sexist; apparently the soundtrack is 1995);
<Münchhausen>, German, 1943 (actually fairly entertaining despite
being a Nazi propaganda vehicle - the propaganda was in its
existence, as a counterpart to <The Thief of Baghdad> and <The
Wizard of Oz>, and at most minimally in its contents; inferior to
Terry Gilliam's version but worth seeing);
<Brigadoon>, 1954 (which I liked a lot, though I can see several
reasons not to);
* <Carousel>, 1956 (not interesting enough, as an afterlife fantasy,
to be must viewing for anyone who doesn't like musicals, nor is it
a stellar musical);
<Cindarella>, 1957 (colour and CBS, lost) / 2004 (a black and white
recording of the lost version, broadcast, after it was found, on
PBS, and the version available on DVD; this raises the question
whether colour differences matter, as I here implicitly claim, more
than the size differences DVDs impose, or the cropping videos
usually add; separately, I'll note that I watched inattentively
after, halfway through, thinking of dead parents and thus of
"Beauty and the Beast", and realising how very much more mature an
idea of love that fairy tale offers than this one ... but anyway,
this is a largely eviscerated version, still fantasy but dwelling
more on mild satire and Julie Andrews's admittedly very good
singing);
+ <Kwaidan>, Japanese, 1964 (a movie every enthusiast for ghost
stories should see at least once, a Japanese adaptation of four of
Lafcadio Hearn's Japanese stories);
* <J. R. R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings">, 1978 (which
significantly increased my appreciation for Peter Jackson's
version);
<Siberiade>, Russian, 1979 (comments below);
<The Legend of Surami Fortress> [i], Georgian, 1984 [i];
* <Wizards of the Lost Kingdom>, 1985 (a quite bad quest story);
<Ashik Kerib>, Georgian, 1988 (an excellent, but experimental movie,
whose sound has to be heard to be believed);
* <Buffy the Vampire Slayer>, 1992;
* <Gabbeh>, Persian, 1996 (it really is fantasy, and y'all should
hurry out and look for it, no joke; fwiw, the video is
letterboxed);
* <The Secret Kingdom>, 1997 (much worse than <Wizards of the Lost
Kingdom>, and with it, conclusive proof that buying a movie just
because it's a fantasy I've never heard of is a bad idea; I'm
pretty sure it was never released theatrically, but I also doubt it
ever appeared on any TV channel);
<il Mare>, Cantonese (dubbed over the original Korean vocal track),
2000 (comments below);
<warm water under a red bridge>, Japanese, 2001 (one of the many
movies in which a city slicker finds zanies galore and True Love in
a remote ocean island village, except the island is Honshu rather
than Great Britain or Ireland; not to my taste as romance or
comedy, and the fantasy is restricted to one essentially symbolic
and mildly squicky element);
* <Boundin'>, 2003 (an icky Pixar short included on the video of <The
Incredibles>);
<Birth>, 2004 (disappointing, but coincidentally seen while I was
reading Donohue's <The Stolen Child>; it's arguable whether it's
really fantasy, but I think it is; and Alexandre Desplat's music
almost makes up for the rest);
<The Phantom of the Opera>, 2004 (this is the one starring Andrew
Lloyd ... um, Emmy Rossum, who makes the most of a much bigger, but
less dramatically interesting, part than she had in <Songcatcher>;
anyway, this version is only barely mode-technically fantasy,
mainly via mass extinctions of candles; and no, I hadn't before
experienced Webber as self-parody, but perhaps worse, I enjoyed it
anyway);
<Aquamarine>, 2006 (so now I have some idea why Alice Hoffman is so
popular);
<Lady in the Water>, 2006 (not the best movie in this list, but by
*far* the most numinous);
very arguably + <Ten Canoes>, Ganalbingu (but there's more narration,
in English, than dialogue), 2006 (comments below);

and no fewer than five movies whose status as fantasy or realism
depends on whether you believe a young person is delusional or not
(the filmmakers seem to split on this score):

+ <Cría Cuervos>, Spanish, 1976 (I can't remember this movie
clearly, which frustrates me a lot, since I do remember that I
found it perplexing and worthwhile);
* <Agnes of God>, 1985;
<The Silence>, Persian, 1998;
+ <Pan's Labyrinth>, Spanish, 2006 (which I found greatly overrated;
also, after seeing <Cría Cuervos>, not much later, I was just
about positive that this movie makes clear homage to that one);
+ <The Science of Sleep>, French, 2006.

Also see the re-reading post, where I list several movies seen for the
first time, whose running time is spent largely in the realm of
Todorov's fantastic, in other words movies for which specification as
"fantasy" or "other fiction" would be a non-trivial spoiler.

See also, in the re-reading post, real re-viewings: <Picnic at
Hanging Rock>, 1975; <Somewhere in Time>, 1980; <Labyrinth>, 1986;
<The Princess Bride>, 1987; <Into the Woods>, 1990; arguably <The Fast
Runner>, 2002.

The "arguably" cases have to do with double motivation, Homer-style:
"I lost that race because I was tired and because the gods were angry
at me", that kind of thing. I think <The Fast Runner> at least once
crosses the line from double motivation to "Magic's the most
parsimonious explanation" (if you've seen it, think rabbits); <Ten
Canoes>, on the other hand, has only double motivation and the
characters' own belief in sorcery to justify calling it fantasy.

My DVD player had a problem with the subtitles for <il Mare> (as it
does for many other movies), but through much effort I eventually
managed to read perhaps 3/4ths of them, which I *think* was enough to
allow me to make the following comments. This is the movie of which
<The Lake House>, 2006, was a remake; its leads were (per the IMDB)
substantially younger than <The Lake House>'s stars, and though I
haven't seen <The Lake House>, I suspect that makes a difference to
plausibility. It's as gorgeously shot as <Why has Bodhi-Dharma Left
for the East?>, 1989, listed in the other fiction post, and this leads
me to think I should make all Korean movies that show on big screens
in America must-sees; but perhaps I should see <The Host>, 2006,
before deciding for sure. (I do remember being underwhelmed by
<Chunhyang>, 2000, which I *did* see on a big screen.) Anyway,
timeslips could conceivably be science fiction, though as forms of
time travel go they're pretty far along the continuum to fantasy, and
I don't know whether <The Lake House> retains the elements that
convinced me <il Mare> belongs in this post not the sf one.
(Separately, it's ironic that the copy I saw was dubbed, albeit into
languages I don't know, because the leading lady's job is as a "voice
actress" - the only example we see of what she voices is a cartoon,
but lots of other characters call her a dubber.)

I read <Anne of Green Gables> (in the kids' books post) the day after
I left Milwaukee, so there's a sense in which it's the first item in
this set of posts. I watched <Siberiade> exactly one year later,
still unsure when to close the year, and made the snap decision
afterward that I'd close it exactly then; it really is the last item.
So I may simply be mis-remembering the movies I saw earlier. But ...
I'd seen <Lady in the Water> only a few days before, and written that
it isn't the best movie in the list, and so for a few days I'd been
trying to figure out which *was*. <Ashik Kerib>? <Gabbeh>? For that
matter, despite their obvious flaws, <Brigadoon> or <Kwaidan> or even
<The Phantom of the Opera> ? Well, one could fairly easily argue that
<Siberiade> is only barely fantasy, and it's noticeable that as late
as 1979 it tepidly preaches Soviet ideology. All the same, if the
question is strictly "Which is the best movie in that list?" (and not
"best fantasy", or "mentioned in this post", or "without stupid
subtexts" or whatever), then I guess it depends on your criteria for
"best". <Ashik Kerib> and <Gabbeh> can probably claim greater
æsthetic value, but <Siberiade>, directed by Konchalovsky (whom the
box correctly compares to Tarkovsky), has plenty of that, and a much
more powerful *story* as well. Don't watch it looking for the next
<Lord of the Rings>, but do watch it if you want to see a great movie.

So I should probably note that it's 3.5 hours long, and that you
probably won't agree with me about its having anything to do with
fantasy until much of that time has passed. The fantastical elements
in the first several parts are unobtrusive, and only the ending gets
overt, in a way that by itself wouldn't qualify the movie as fantasy
at all. (If you look carefully at the list of movies in the other
fiction post, you'll see an embarrassing structure that <Siberiade>
*not* being fantasy was my only realistic chance of eliminating;
believe me, I'm biased, but biased *against* putting it here, not the
other way round.) Beyond that, I'd provide plot summary, except that
the videos' box provides all you really need to know, and I'd assume a
DVD box, if it's on DVD yet, would do the same.

[h] The DVD box containing <The Legend of Surami Fortess> and <Ashik
Kerib> on the same disc portrays the former's title as <The Legend of
Suram Fortress> and its date as 1985. The subtitles and credits,
however, portray those data as <The Legend of Surami Fortress> and
1984 (giving 1985 as the copyright date of the subtitles). They also
contradict the box on the direction of that movie: the box claims
insistently that it was directed by Sergei Paradjanov, and although
<Ashik Kerib> makes it clear that he is indeed a brilliant director,
the credits of <Legend> make it quite clear that he was not that
movie's sole director; the subtitle names his partner or predecessor
or whoever as "Dodo Abashidze", and both credit and subtitle list
Abashidze *ahead* of Paradjanov. Interestingly, a "David Abashidze"
is credited as assistant director on <Ashik Kerib>. There are
noticeable style differences between the two movies, but I'm not sure
I can attribute them entirely to Abashidze, especially if David in
fact = Dodo. (The IMDB says he is.)

Joe Bernstein

unread,
Oct 19, 2007, 12:17:58 AM10/19/07
to
READ FOR THE FIRST TIME: SCIENCE FICTION

See also, in the series post, Baker and Henderson. See also, in the
fantasy post, collections by Lake, Palwick, Phillips, and arguably
Baker and Ray. There's also science fiction in the re-reading post,
mostly without comments, by Bradshaw, Bujold, Eskridge, Gould, Harris,
Longyear, MacDonald (arguably), McCaffrey, Moon, and Willis (with and
without Felice).

Catherine Asaro
* (April) <Primary Inversion>, 1995
Nominee, 1996 Compton Crook Award

(April-May) 0 <Catch the Lightning>, 1996, and <The Last Hawk>, 1997,
skimmed
<Catch the Lightning> nominee, 1998 Sapphire Award; <The Last Hawk>
nomine, 1999 Nebula Award for Novel

Various other books, lightly skimmed at libraries and bookstores

"The Saga of the Skolian Empire" runs to plots that include
a) romances between telepaths, with the tedious gushing that tends to
involve, and b) villains who either are, or are motivated by, the
"Traders", a caste who get sexual pleasure from empaths' and
telepaths' pain, and who have managed to conquer much of the galaxy
for no particularly obvious reason. The "Skolian Empire" is much of
what the Traders *haven't* conquered (Earth and its colonies are much
of the rest), and most of the telepaths we meet are from a family
that's heavily involved with the Skolian government. This summary
makes the series sound like the epitome of silliness, but it's
actually not entirely so.

In fact, I really liked the first book, and went chasing after more.
But I've now dug into enough of the series to persuade myself that the
political efforts that pervade Asaro's books are "sound and fury,
signifying nothing"; that at some level, the hope offered in the first
book for *progress* is delusive, because progress would interfere with
Asaro's dynastic machine for continuing the series. (She ought to
learn from how Anne McCaffrey did Pern; McCaffrey's a considerably
worse writer, by any of several measures, but still managed a more
intellectually respectable method for constructing a twenty-book
series. The contrast with Bujold's Vorkosigan books, to which Asaro's
are sometimes compared, is also notable.) Besides, I've gotten bored
with the romance novel conventions (though I note that <Spherical
Harmonic>, 2001, skimmed, seems to lack these). I may or may not look
further into this series, and will probably skip several volumes if I
do. No idea whether I'll look at Asaro's other books.

These books have contributed a good bit to my growing discomfort with
psionics, which all too freaking often seems to be an sf writer's
convenient way to have something be total: total love, or total
intimidation (see Campbell below), or whatever, an easy cop-out route
to something nobody would believe otherwise.

Elizabeth Bear
Winner, 2005 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer

(January-February) <The Chains That You Refuse>, 2000-2006, first
compiled as such 2006
"Two Dreams on Trains" nominee, 2006 British SF Award for Short
Fiction

(January-February) <Hammered>, 2005, <Scardown>, 2005, and
<Worldwired>, 2005
Collectively winner, 2006 Locus Award for First Novel

(February) <Carnival>, 2006
Nominee and Special Citation, 2007 Philip K. Dick Award

I got interested in Bear because of what I'd heard about <Blood and
Iron>, so of course that was the one book I couldn't find at any
library at the time. Imagine my surprise that *everything* else was
science fiction... OK, well, except a bunch of the stories.

While I'm not absolutely certain I properly read through the "Jenny
Casey Trilogy", I am sure I liked it a lot, though Bear is at the
harsh edge of my range of tolerance for When Bad Things Happen to Good
Characters. ("Gone to Flowers", in <Chains>, is a prequel, best read
after at least the first volume.) <Carnival> is interesting as a book
that has Setup for Open-Ended Series written all over it, but seems
fairly clearly to end in a whole succession of ways that preclude that
outcome; a gutsy move on Bear's part. (She takes pains, on her
website [URL below], to note that the science fiction novels she has
forthcoming are *not* related to this book or to each other.) All I
remembered about <The Chains That You Refuse> is that it's a
collection of short stories that establishes that Bear is smarter than
I am, something I'm not used to finding too often any more; I wound up
looking at a lot of websites about it trying to work out when the
stories originally appeared without access to a copy of the book, and
was surprised to see how many had taken up residence in the vast
recesses of my Unattached Short Story Recollection Archive. (Compare,
if you will, Kit Reed below.)

Oh, sigh, I suppose I should do some level of plot summary of the
novels? The trilogy is essentially a depiction of the early stages of
a Singularity appearing despite the bleakness of its near future
setting, full of science fictional action and largely from the
perspective of a reasonably interesting heroine (Casey), a bitter
retired member of a cyborg military unit. <Carnival> depicts two men
from a moderately patriarchal interstellar civilisation, visiting a
matriarchy on an espionage mission (and the romance subplots thus
generated, by the way, are not remotely the ones you now expect). Its
ending unexpectedly but convincingly resolves a lot of issues that had
looked like part of the background. This book is quite a read. Bear,
in general, looks to me like a must-read author for the near future;
if she continues to get better, she may be a must-read author
indefinitely.

Oh, and trivially, in <Worldwired> we have machine-mediated telepathy
done *sensibly*, which tends to show up Syne Mitchell's approach, or
even (to some extent) Catherine Asaro's.

<http://www.elizabethbear.com/>, last seen September 2, 2007

John Campbell, Jr.
(February and/or March) <A New Dawn>, 1935-1940, first compiled as
such 2003

This collects Campbell's most famous fiction - the subtitle is "The
Complete Don A. Stuart Stories" because Campbell, having established
himself as a writer of cheerful adventures or some such under his own
name, used his wife's (she was born Dona Stuart) to write these much
darker stories. The sources for several famous movies of the 1950s
are here. I don't think I'd read any before. So, drumroll please,
and ... ?

Eh. I hadn't realised Campbell had been obsessed with psionics that
far back. Lemme tell you, between straight psionics and telepathy by
machines, I've just about OD'd enough on psionics to give in to those
annoying claims that the <Foundation> series is fantasy...

OK, so anyway: Some of these worked for me, but on the whole, this
further reinforced my sense that 1930s magazine science fiction
generally does not live today and does not have a bright future. I
haven't re-read Doc Smith in years, but if there's a major exception,
he's it; hometown pride aside, I'm confident Stanley Weinbaum is not,
and Heinlein's 1930s output, for example, doesn't count.

Cory Doctorow
Winner, 1999 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer

(June) <A Place So Foreign and 8 More>, 1998-2003, first compiled as
such 2003
"Craphound" nominee, 1999 Sturgeon Award and 1999 Aurora Award for
Short-Form Work in English; "0wnz0red" nominee, 2004 Nebula for
Novelette; collection winner, 2004 Sunburst Award

Huh. Now I know why there's so much noise about Doctorow. (Though in
fact this book holds less than half of the short fiction that won him
the Campbell award.)

But I'm not sure why I remember him being described as "slipstream".
Of the nine stories in this book, only the title story and especially
"Return to Pleasure Island" strike me as being disputable as science
fiction. What I find more interesting is a different question. I
read these stories, as best I could, in publication order. Only "All
Day Sucker", four pages long and evidently new in this book, appeared
later than Doctorow's first novel. Now, I had the strong sense that
the stories got *better* over the few years in question, but in
preferring "0wnz0red" and "The Super Man and the Bugout" and "To
Market, to Market: The Rebranding of Billy Bailey" over "Return" and
"Home Again, Home Again" and "Craphound", am I reacting to actual
improvement in the writing, or only to their brassier, less depressing
protagonists and surfaces? The later-published stories *feel*
considerably cheerier, but in fact, "Craphound" preaches forgiveness
where "All Day Sucker" and "Rebranding" exult in revenge, and while
"Super Man" is easily better than anything else I'd read from <On
Spec>, a magazine of which I once made the mistake of reading two
entire issues [a], it's about as optimistic as the average number of
<The Baffler>. I suppose, at any rate, the plot reversals of
"0wnz0red" are considerably smoother than the emotional reversals of
"Craphound" or "Home Again"; but I'm not sure I should take Doctorow's
transition from writing about relatively schmucky men to writing about
relatively less schmucky ones as any kind of æsthetic improvement.
George Eliot (in the other fiction post) would certainly urge
otherwise.

Whatever. The truth remains that this is writing way outside my usual
fare, and I can already predict that my memory for these stories, not
too much later, will be far from exact.

[a] To be perfectly fair I should note that this was in 1998, and so
before Holly Phillips was associated with <On Spec> either as
contributor or as editor. Though I note that none of her <On Spec>
stories is collected in her first and so far only collection, so I
can't say whether any of them is actually any better than "Super Man"
either.

(June-July) <Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom>, 2003
Winner, 2004 Locus Award for First Novel; nominee, 2005 Nebula Award
for Novel

This was a hard book for me to finish properly - in fact I took a week
or three off after skimming it, basically because it's the tale of a
semi-schmuck who undergoes both emotional *and* plot reversals right,
left, and centre. But I do respect the way Doctorow uses his story.
Just like <Pacific Edge>, this is the story of the least happy man in
Utopia; but not only does Doctorow avoid Robinson's blandness, he also
uses that man's unhappiness to ask searching questions about the
ostensible Utopia, instead of Robinson's reaffirmation. In the
Future, post-death, post-scarcity, Wired "Bitchun Society", reputation
("Whuffie") affects more than Google ranking of web pages; it's
replaced money. Ahem: a backtrack. Explicitly, the society is
*mostly* post-scarcity; implicitly, things like attention, love, and
any form of permanence remain as scarce as ever. So while I strongly
suspect Doctorow *would* like to see this Future, his story's about
what could lead his protagonist to lose faith in it.

Sigh. I've already mentioned that most of my discussions of books
read after I started this log run long, so maybe it'll look like I'm
disparaging this one by writing short. Well, lessee. It's set mostly
in or near Disney World, save the opening chapter; the title fairly
accurately describes much of the second half (in which, among other
things, Our Hero's implanted net connection is usually down). It's
first person POV, and even has a built-in rationale for the tale's
being told. The date is apparently between 2100 and 2150. The book
is short. Enough. Honestly, if I'm not the last reader of rasfw to
read it (fantasy-only readers aside), I oughta be, short review or no.

(July) <eastern standard tribe>, 2004

*This* book is set in either 2012 or 2022, depending on which page you
believe, and mostly in London, Massachusetts, and Toronto. In other
words, it's only mildly science fictional, except the eponymous social
idea: Our Hero, a "born arguer", has adopted as the core of his life
a "tribe" devoted to the supremacy of Eastern Standard Time ways of
life, companies, etc. (This means, in practice, New York, Boston, and
Toronto - which strikes me as a mildly unwieldy mixture already - but
at least Doctorow doesn't try to add in Michigan, South Carolina,
Puerto Rico, or Perú!) He spends much of the book as an EST
saboteur, a consultant in London feeding garbage to British (GMT)
managers. In some chapters, he speaks in the first person, usually
present tense; in others, third person, past tense. This enables him
to start in medias res, and so make us aware that he's been betrayed
before we meet the betrayers, and aware of their identities before
they act, and ...

Oh, yes, betrayers. Belatedly it dawns on me that betrayal is
something of a standard theme for Doctorow, as is cutthroat workplace
competition (both inter- and intra-group, for groups at every level
from "team" to corporation). Betrayal is central to at least five of
the nine stories in <A Place>, usually at the level of individual vs.
individual. It would be a spoiler to say much about betrayal in <Down
and Out>, but the overt plot of that book from early on is about
workplace competition, both personal and inter-group. Here, betrayal
and workplace competition are inextricably mingled (consider the
narrator's job, after all), operating at pretty much every scale from
the personal to the mega-corporate, and lacking most of the
consolations that mitigate them in <Down and Out>.

Nevertheless I raced through this book, in sharp contrast to how I
read <Down and Out>; the split in the story means things never seem as
hopeless as in that book. Still, I find this one the lesser of the
two. Our Hero delivers a six-page rant halfway through justifying the
cockamamie Time/tribe idea; thanks to his profession, "user
experience" work, Doctorow gets to toss ideas off left, right and
center, and also uses the narrator's business activities to justify
some (brief) rants of Doctorow's own (for example, against the
intellectual property maximalists). One entire plotline can be read
as an ongoing rant against the mental health system. All this would
be easy to forgive if there were something new or deep here. Indeed,
the narrator, in an opening chapter ranting against literary criticism
(his own concern, or the author's?), claims that the book is about
whether it's better to be smart or happy. But smartness and happiness
correlate pretty closely in this book, so that's a crock. Formally,
while the split story is a good idea, it's not as though Doctorow
lacked proven abilities in either third or first person; thematically,
competition and betrayal are old news in his fiction, and a
book-length treatment that explicitly piles on paranoia just doesn't
strike me as revelatory.

Kelley Eskridge [1] [2]
(September) <Dangerous Space>, 1990-2007, first compiled as such 2007
"And Salome Danced" nominee, 1996 Tiptree Award; "Alien Jane" nominee,
1996 Nebula Award for Short Story

This book collects the six stories <Locus> and Mr. Contento know
Eskridge to have published in the 1990s, plus the title novella, which
is apparently new, and which is therefore the only story known to me
that Eskridge has (presumably) written since her novel <Solitaire>,
listed in the re-reading post.

I read three of the stories as fantasy, three as science fiction
(slightly longer, which is why this entry is here and not in the
fantasy post), and one as neither (even though its title is "Alien
Jane"). Two of the earliest are in tight third-person POV; the rest
are first person. And three of those are narrated by a character
named Mars, who is, in each story, closely associated with a woman
named Lucky, and who, in each story, falls dangerously in love with
some combination of artist and art. (The art in question being in one
case acting, in another arguably fighting, and in the third music.) I
take two of those stories as fantasy and one as science fiction, but
I'm deeply unconvinced that Eskridge cares about the distinctions; if
"Strings", one of the third-person stories and also about music, is
science fictional, it's at least as much a fable, something that might
once have appeared in <Galaxy> or have been written by Bradbury or
Vonnegut or late Tiptree. (And Datlow and Windling, not Dozois,
collected it at year's end.)

I tend, when looking at <Solitaire>, to look only at the final part,
and so I tend to forget how hard it is to read it from the beginning,
to remain attentive amid the suffering narrated. Kelley Eskridge
writes clearly enough (though the one early first-person story,
"Somewhere Down the Diamondback Road", shows her acquitting herself
reasonably well with Prime Books -ish prose), but her stories aren't
light reading. She emphasises, especially in the Mars stories, that
it costs work to make art; I remember discussions here that suggest
some would disagree with me, but I think it also costs work to
appreciate her art.

Later, trying to answer my own "Where are they now?" questions, I
looked at her website, and a mock interview there (URL below), linked
to the publication of this book, confirms her uninterest in
subdividing "speculative fiction" (she even offers "slipstream" as a
label for herself). And while I didn't find anything that directly
explains her relative silence of recent years, she does say "In the
last year I've rediscovered my joy in writing". However difficult her
stories are to read, I hope to see more of them in the next years.

<http://www.kelleyeskridge.com/Interviews/AboutWritingDangerousSpace.htm>,
seen September 7, 2007

Robert Heinlein
* (September 2006, or October) <Four Frontiers>, 1947-1950, compiled
as such not later than 2005

An omnibus of <Rocket Ship Galileo>, <Space Cadet>, <Red Planet>, and
<Farmer in the Sky>. I liked reading this once and have since
revisited the last-named book; I'd like to read on in Heinlein's
juveniles, but haven't gotten hold of the rest. (Ones I'd already
read include, lemme see, <Tunnel in the Sky>, which is one of those
books I've mentioned before as irritating me on first reading but
stunning me on much later re-reading; <The Rolling Stones>, which is
not; and I think one other, but can't remember which.) I assume I can
skip plot summary and such here?

Jay Lake [2]
(July) <Rocket Science>, 2005

This is an rasfw favourite. And it deserves to be.

Just in case I wasn't the last rasfw-er to read it: It's set entirely
in southeastern Kansas in, I think, 1945, and its plot distantly
resembles John Varley's <Red Thunder>'s, which is as much as I think I
can say without adding spoilers. But this isn't a triumphal story at
all: "Even though I felt like a circus freak - see the Unlucky Man,
displayed for your edification ladies and gentlemen..." It's told in
the first person POV of Vernon Dunham, whose polio, less crippling
than FDR's, had still kept him out of World War II, and who spends
most of the book focused on practicalities, but also worrying about
those he cares about; he sounds much like the narrator of a classic
Heinlein book, only a lot less confident. I'm sorry to have to report
that he's pretty much the only consistently decent human in the book,
but by book's end he's not the only one *you'll* care about; and
arguably he manages to thread the needles to the one conclusion that
holds any hope of his *not* staying the Unlucky Man. It's a book well
worth reading.

So go read it.

Minor complaint: In case of any reprints, past or future, I devoutly
hope the slew of errors, missed by Fairwood Press in the first
edition, is greatly reduced. They aren't typos exactly: most often,
they're quasi-grammatical, as though if this phrase had an extra word
or two in, and strike me as probably artifacts of revision.

Speaking of errors, I've now seen <Mainspring>, 2007, also by Lake.
Based on the dust jacket blurbs, I'd probably have put that in the
fantasy post if I'd read it by now. But I'm bringing it up not for
its content, but for something Tor did in publishing it: *on the dust
jacket*, Greg Bear is quoted as calling it Lake's "debut novel".
While this preserves some deniability for Tor, it's much worse than
the equivalent statement by Carol Berg about Catherynne Valente's <In
the Night Garden>, mentioned in the fantasy post: Bantam did quote
that, but also made a couple of efforts to offset it, particularly
leaving the offending phrase off the cover; Tor nowhere contradicts
Bear in any copy of <Mainspring> I've seen. Someone oughta contact
the FTC and see whether this sort of lying-by-proxy is going to
continue to get worse. I can just imagine: in 2080, on the cover of
Jim Schmuck's new posthumous "collaboration" with Robert A.
Heinlein®: "Four billion readers have loved Heinlein's debut novel!
Be the next one!" After all, that doesn't mean the *publisher* is
actually saying *this* is Heinlein's debut novel - it could just be
four billion people all of whom are coincidentally wrong, or they
could actually mean <Methuselah's Children> or even <The Devil Makes
the Law> (huh?) - or they *could* even mean *Murgatroyd* Heinlein's
2064 debut, a Western, right?

Syne Mitchell [1] [2]
(April) <Murphy's Gambit>, 2000
Winner, 2001 Compton Crook Award

(April or May) <Technogenesis>, 2002

I had the impression that Mitchell's newest book begins a fantasy
series, so I wanted to read her earlier ones and see if I could grasp
at least one case of "Science Fiction Writer Becomes Fantasist! No
Surprise at All!" More on the initial impression below.

Anyway, Mitchell, as of the second of these books, was a good writer
of paperback science fiction, who might or might not become more. I'm
pretty sure these books are vulnerable to attack on moderate to loose
definitions of "Mary Sue", though not on tight ones. Each of these
books' heroines changes her world, and in the first by more than I
find plausible. In the first book, a woman is drummed out of an
interstellar police training academy and deals with the consequences,
gradually becoming a political figure; in the second, a woman is
drummed out of, well, normal life (in the nearish future), and becomes
a key player in human interaction with collective intelligence. (See
comments above about machine-mediated telepathy.)

Eric Nylund, now Mitchell's husband, is quoted on the cover of
<Murphy's Gambit> as claiming that the book is "adamantine-hard"
science fiction. Um, for a book whose plot *revolves* around FTL
travel, that's certainly an interesting claim. But given that adamant
is a *fantasy* concept, it's at least consistently phrased!

(May) <The Changeling Plague>, 2003
Nominee, 2004 Campbell Award

This book is still paperback science fiction, but Mitchell has
extended her range a bunch. She shows three protagonists, who
sometimes work at cross purposes; her world (again near future) also
becomes denser by intermittent reminders that not everything revolves
around these protagonists. None of the three is remotely Mary Sue (in
fact, two are deeply transgressive and profoundly isolated men). She
retains her central interest in depicting moments of Big Change, but
here pays a lot more attention to the costs of change than in her
previous books. Oh, the plot? Well, "drummed out" remains a sort of
focus: given that the McGuffin here is a runaway plague of a
gene-rewriting virus, characters spend a lot of time in, and attention
on, various forms of quarantine, which is in a sense an ultimate
drumming out, no?

(May) <End in Fire>, 2005

Here Mitchell breaks out of what might be called her apprenticeship
straitjackets; what I'm less sure of is whether she moves further than
the breaking-out. We are back to a single main viewpoint character,
who is crew on a space station, working on the final setup of a solar
power satellite, when a nuclear war breaks out over the last remaining
oilfield. (Other viewpoint characters include her husband,
throughout, and a few people clumsily used early on to inform us
mostly about the war.) Our Heroine makes a bunch of wise decisions,
at least two really dumb ones, and some decisions whose wisdom is
challenged, probably unanswerably, by other characters; in other
respects, such as her love life, she also isn't much of a Mary Sue.
However, she *is* *seen* as a hero, as the book progresses, partly for
radio messages from orbit that prevent various governments from
covering up, I wish I were joking, the fact of nuclear war. So
Mitchell has not entirely shed the desire to give her protagonists
profoundly improbable credit; but she's well beyond the sheer
stupidity of the Mary Sue.

In any event, while SPS could certainly be a Big Change, it is here
far from central; survival, an element in each previous book, is here
front and centre. Five American astronauts are well characterised,
one each from China and Japan somewhat less so. There is much about
what's involved in leadership. The fact that the major characters are
mostly astronauts stranded in space does, obviously, invite comparison
with the "drumming[s] out" described above.

This strikes me as the book in which Mitchell unequivocally earns that
"hard science fiction" label her first book received (given that the
McGuffins of the previous two are still vulnerable to charges of
handwavium).

I was thinking after the previous books that Mitchell seemed to be
aiming sort of towards the direction of Jack McDevitt's writing; this
book only strengthens that opinion. She has not, however, equaled
McDevitt's ability to intermix the Big and the small in soul-stirring
ways. But to be fair, I'm not sure the more manipulative aspects of
his soul-stirring are, in fact, part of her goal. I do think Big
Change really is core to her approach, and God knows the world *does*
need science fiction writers who want to think Big, so more power to
her. I hope she continues to progress as a writer, and does not
simply settle into the techno-thriller plateau whose edge this book
could represent.

(May, but weeks later than the previous ones) <The Last Mortal Man>,
2006

This book is explicitly on the front cover "Book One of the
Deathless".

Nevertheless, my initial impression was wrong. So far, at least, we
actually have that extraordinary and quasi-mythical creature, a
science fiction writer who has *not* crossed over to fantasy.
However, we *are*, here, back to something that seems awfully close to
magic technology; in this case, "nano-biology".

If <End in Fire> was Mitchell's exit from apprenticeship, then she
spent a very short time as a journeyman, because this series bids fair
to be a masterpiece, in the old sense: a work showing that the worker
knows her trade. She re-uses, here, the McGuffins of *each* of her
previous three books - the worldwide computer network and
machine-mediated telepathy of The Future (here, somewhat older than in
<Technogenesis>, and kids are growing up who learn no natural
language...); plague, again striking at the genes; and apocalypse.
But she uses them, first of all, to deliver a relentlessly exciting
book - as I write these words, I'm up an hour later than I should have
been, with nothing done that I needed to do, because I could not stop
reading, even *after* skipping to the end. But at the same time as it
delivers that Quest for Survival à la <End in Fire>, the book also
delivers Big Change. As this book *opens*, immortality is available
to human beings: its advent is not the Big Change that interests
Mitchell here, but what happens *afterwards* certainly is.

A scene from this book appeared at the end of <End in Fire>, but here
that scene doesn't arrive until page 95. Those first near-hundred
pages revolve largely around Alexa DuBois, who comes from a poor,
cancer-ridden family in an increasingly utopian world, and Lucius
Sterling, the owner of the nano-biology patents and controller of
immortality. She meets him planning to assassinate him, but instead
becomes (minor spoiler) his most valued bodyguard. We watch as
Sterling lives for 144 years making enemies with abandon, and we know
the chickens will come home to roost; we just don't know how. (Well,
unless we've been stupid enough to read the back cover, that is...) I
will not further describe the plot of the rest of the book. It is, in
any event, the first in a series; I thought I remembered that trilogy
was threatened, but in fact the cover's carefully unclear on this
issue. My take on things is that Mitchell shouldn't need more than
one more book to take care of what she's already laid out, but given
her Big Change agenda, it would not shock me if the second book
complicated things enough to justify a third, or conceivably more.
(Compare the Bear trilogy, whose second book certainly justified its
third.)

Meanwhile, a couple of notes. She's now master enough to deliver a
line as Heinlein-efficient as (spoken to a US Senator, early in the
book) "You are one senator out of fifty, for a waning superpower, with
a maximum term of eight years." She's also still careless enough to
set that line, unexplained, in the year 2034. Worse, not much later
in the book, a child goes from conception to his first birthday in,
near as I can tell, just over four months. (Mitchell actually
*names*, in a page of acknowledgements, the copy editor who presumably
missed that: one Jan McInroy.) From a writer who clearly at least
*aspires* to hard science fiction, such innumeracy is jarring. I
think what I'm trying to say here is that Mitchell *is* now a master;
her books should be coming out in hard covers, and they should be
competently copy edited. They're worth it.

Unfortunately, her publisher disagrees strongly: according to the
desultory "blog" (URL below) which is the only even vaguely up to date
part of her website (like I should talk!), they dropped her
mid-series, and she's now working, without a publisher, on a book
*not* the sequel to this one.

Mitchell is clearly the most important "find" of the year from my
policy of reading mass market originals preferentially, the way Naomi
Kritzer (who *still* hasn't broken out of the mass market ghetto she
never belonged in) was some years ago. None of the other candidates
(Brennan, Hines, McCullough, or Moira Moore) comes close, though Bear
(whom I first heard about for a trade paperback, but whose first four
books were mass markets) if anything surpasses Mitchell. I have mixed
feelings about the fact that Bear and Mitchell both have written
primarily science fiction: it's a pleasing sign of that genre's being
healthier than I'd thought, but also a reminder of how freaking hard
it is to find enough good fantasy to read in Seattle. OTOH, Bear's
website (one of the many consulted to date her short stories, URL
above) indicates most of her next bunch of books will be fantasies.
Bear is certainly the more accomplished writer, so far, and in
particular her characters are substantially more real. (Character
plausibility is perhaps the most obvious way <The Last Mortal Man>
does *not* improve on Mitchell's previous two books.) But if Mitchell
*can* catch up in conventional writing prowess, she could end up with
the bigger impact on the field, from her fairly narrow focus on
science fiction usually of Big Ideas; I don't read enough science
fiction these days to know whether her takes on these Big Ideas are
original, but they certainly feel that way to me.

<http://blog.synemitchell.com>, seen (for the second time) October 8,
2007

Audrey Niffenegger
(April) <The Time Traveler's Wife>, 2003
Nominee, 2005 Campbell and Clarke Awards

I haven't seen much on rasfw about this book. I suspect this is
largely because it was published in the mainstream - and why not?
after all, it's set mostly in and around late-20th-century Chicago -
and partly because it's fundamentally a fantasy novel in structure:
in patterns that reek of handwavium, the titular time traveller, who
has no control over when and where he goes, nevertheless tends to
return to the same places and/or people over and over, which allows
Niffenegger to approach particular incidents both through multiple
points of view, and through strongly heightened importance, using them
to structure the book as a whole in a way straight out of the fantasy
toolkit. But if you want to get mode-technical, it's actually
unequivocally science fiction (the novum turns out to be genetic, and
is reproduced in mice; some scenes hint that come the 21st century
it's being genetically engineered in people). It's not particularly
impressive *as* either sf or fantasy - Niffenegger does bring up
issues of paradox, but only to breeze past them, for example - but
it's still worth a lot of attention as fiction - not least for
Niffenegger's fluid and fascinating first-person style. (There are
two narrators, the time traveller and the wife; I think he gets the
majority of the total pages, but the book is largely, not entirely,
chronologically structured by her timeline.) Given which virtues this
book has, I can't really argue with the local library's decision
(which I strongly suspect matches many other libraries') to shelve it
in regular adult fiction; I just want to argue with the spec-fic
community's parallel decisions to ignore it.

There is a woman on the other coast whom I met at seventeen, who, when
last I spoke with her, was still single, and in whom I've never
fundamentally given up hope. But my *rational* mind knows by now that
whoever I marry, if anyone, will have no direct experience of most of
my past (and this would even be true of the woman I just mentioned).
She will probably see only a minority of my life, and to judge by my
experience of middle age so far, she will probably miss an even larger
share of the strong emotions and vivid incidents I consider as
defining who I am, except as filtered through my words or those of
such people from my earlier life as she meets. At some basic level,
she will know *about* me (I hope!) but she may not *know* me. I'm not
sure that at that level, anyone will; I have only one friendship left
from high school, whose survival is thanks largely to our *not* being
*too* close most of the time, and I'm not all that close with my
family.

While this experience, this particular form of alienation, isn't
universal - there are still lots of people out there who married young
and stayed together, for example - it's also not unique; indeed, it's
also not all that new, since it's a core element of what in America is
often called "the immigrant experience". Niffenegger here has written
what is perhaps the definitive spec-ficnalisation of it (yes, even
eclipsing Cordwainer Smith's "The Lady Who Sailed the <Soul>"), in her
story of a woman who first meets her husband when she is 6, and he 36,
though *he* first meets *her* when he's 28, and she 20. The book is a
rich depiction of a, um, mentorship, that becomes a romance, that
becomes a marriage, with its effects on the characters' friends and
friendships, their daily lives, and their work - and, in particular,
the *differences* between its effects on her and on him; and it uses
the tools of fantasy mentioned above to turn that depiction
holographic, enriching it much as Geoff Ryman's (much harder to read)
holography enriches <The Child Garden>.

I will not know anytime soon whether this is a great novel, and it
pushes enough of my buttons that I may never be a particularly good
judge of that. On a second reading (after buying a copy) I'm struck
by the fact that the two narrators don't result in two *styles*, have
voices rather less distinct than Monette's two narrators mentioned in
the fantasy post - but is this lack of skill, or a careful
representation of how much one has influenced the other? Flipside, on
a second reading I'm also impressed by just how many unobtrusive ways
Niffenegger finds to weave meditations on the interactions of time
with love into her prose; while I wouldn't pretend to any confidence
as to whether she actually makes of this a Theme on which she has
either a wise conclusion or magisterial Variations, it certainly
suggests that the book *may* have such a virtue. Anyway I've
hesitated a few times in these posts over whether books "could be
considered" great; I have no doubt that this book *could* sanely be
considered great, that it is the most *obviously* superior of the
books in the "read for the first time" posts.

Rebecca Ore
Nominee, 1987 and 1988 John W. Campbell Awards for Best New Writer

(September) <Outlaw School>, 2000

Ore is one of the writers about whom Michael Swanwick's "In the
Tradition ..." first informed me; I wound up reading the
oeuvres-to-date of several, which in Ore's case alone meant reading
mostly science fiction. Later I became acquainted with her in the
news.* hierarchy, where we usually came into conflict. But in 2002 I
wrote a fairly lame "novels of" post in response to someone who was
faulting her as a writer, based on a bad review of this very book, the
review itself apparently written in Seattle; how's that for
coincidences? I'm amused to see that others from that generation of
news.* figure in the acknowledgements of both this and her next novel.
That next novel is what prompted me to read this one - I'd already
read everything previous.

Anyway, what of this book? <Outlaw School> is a medium-length novel,
and I read it in five hours while horrendously sleep-deprived. I
trust that makes it obvious both that I found it a kick-ass story, and
that my judgement concerning it was impaired. But here's what I'll
try to say: It's the story of Jayne, whose surname (near's I can tell
the next day) we never learn, and whom we first meet as a child (or
anyway as someone remembering childhood) and last meet as an old
woman. She grows up in a college town in North Carolina, and settles
in Philadelphia; in between we see shorter scenes from her youth in
South Carolina (a sort of internship during college) and Brooklyn
(during her twenties). I can't pin down the date, but when Jayne's a
teenager, my best guess is that we're in the 2030s or so. POV is
always 3rd person, tight on Jayne.

For about the first half of the book, it's very clear what the story
is: Jayne is an incipient rebel against a remarkably oppressive
America. Information overload, among other problems, was solved by
the simple expedient of making much knowledge private property,
subject to copyright, licensing, and caste restrictions. Large
sections of the population have been eliminated by removal to
ancestral countries and euthanasia; those undesirables who remain
actually sometimes have a freer life - prostitution is now legal, for
example. But crucially, it's become all the rage among upper middle
class girls to become "Judicious" (as they call it), or "Judas" (as
others do): One eye is removed and replaced with video monitoring
equipment, which encourages them to keep their promise to stay on the
straight and narrow, and simplifies the jobs of the morality police as
regards everyone they come into contact with, too. OK, then, given
this fairly improbable future, so: Our Heroine becomes a teenaged
unwed mother, and then, as the title hints, an outlaw teacher,
bootlegging knowledge to the unwashed masses. Will she and her
fellows in the Movement succeed in changing things? Or will fascism
just roll over them relentlessly? Oh, yes, this is a familiar story.

Except that, well, oops, it isn't. I suppose it's something of a
spoiler to say so, but I won't say more, except to note that the
truest statement remains the simplest: this is the story of Jayne.

And well worth reading.

(September) <Time's Child>, 2007

Interestingly, the deep argument I see <Outlaw School> as making,
<Time's Child> contradicts. Whether this means I'm wrong about the
arguments, or about what they mean to Ore, or Ore's views actually
changed in the intervening years, I couldn't guess. But it's worth
noting that in many ways <Time's Child> is a book about Usenet. It's
easier to see the author as defending a vision of Usenet very close to
the one I always had in this sort of writing, than in her posts which
so often annoyed me.

The premise is that in 2308, long after plagues wiped out most of
humanity, which at least slowed global warming down to a survivable
level, Philadelphia has been given a time machine from the (a) future.
Researchers at the Archives there use it to bring people out of the
past, both to learn about the past and for medical purposes (learning
about immune systems, possibly replenishing the gene pool).
Relatively few survive, let alone survive sanely. Our POV characters
are three who do: Benedetta, who had been an artillery man's wife and
who had spent a lot of time hanging out with Leonardo da Vinci; Ivar,
who had drowned as a teenager on his way from Norway to Iceland in
Harald Fairhair's day; and Jonah Kirkpatrick, who'd been an accountant
but devoted his spare time to hacking, security consulting, and being
a troll, "Fluffy", on Usenet. (On some parts of news.*, "Fluffy"'s is
a considerable name; I'd bet Ore actually *does* know the real name
behind it, but she misspells the other Usenet name she gives, which I
take as her hint that the real name *isn't* "Jonah Kirkpatrick".) We
get several flashbacks from Benedetta's life, and in chapter 8 Jonah
talks with researchers into Usenet "performance art". But mostly the
book follows these three people through the next several years of the
24th century.

This is a book about Usenet not just because of Jonah's reminiscences,
but in a much deeper sense: It's a book about free agents,
cooperating or conflicting with limited oversight. The plagues have
created a world of city-states, whose various governments try to
police the citizens much as news-admins used to try to police users,
but they've also encouraged people to become much more independent
than we are nowadays. Ore's views on trolls have aroused a lot of
controversy on news.*, but I find her use of the concept of "trolling"
beyond the nets persuasive here (and she designs her time travel in a
way that well reflects her distinction between trolls and "mission
posters" - locally, that would mean, between Terry Austin and Sound of
Trumpet).

I find this book's ending less convincing than <Outlaw School>'s, in
particular because of changes I've seen in news.* in the past few
years, which leave me with real doubts about Ore's vision, the one I
opened this review by mentioning that I shared. All the same, this,
rather than <Outlaw School>, is the one I'm likely to re-read as
comfort reading, in the future.

Kit Reed
Nominee, 1959 Hugo for New Author of 1958

(February) <The Baby Merchant>, 2006

I forgot until July that I'd read this. At that time, I wasn't
actually sure any more that this *was* science fiction; I *remembered*
it as giving us a US whose laws and institutions vis-à-vis pregnancy
have changed from those now existing, but remembered nothing else
sfnal about it except, well, the titular character. Which would have
made this a case where the Seattle library's habit of putting spec-fic
into the regular shelves was not, after all, at fault. But in
September I went and looked, and actually, a *major* element of the
background, which drives the motivations of several characters and
figures in the foreground plot several times, is a not-yet-existent
extrapolation of several recent trends; the book really is science
fiction. More on this below.

This is essentially the story of a duel, and as such, it has two main
POV characters. Our opponents are 1) a pregnant art student who, at
the book's start, intends to give her child up for adoption so she can
go back to school, and who desperately needs to hide her pregnancy
from her tyrannical family, and 2) a man who makes his living by
occasionally kidnapping babies for rich childless couples unable to
adopt, and who, at the book's start, is blackmailed into going after
character #1's baby, after which, like a gunslinger in the average
Western, he intends to retire, since his cover is blown. The book
studies them, and their incidental characters (the blackmailing
couple; the student's matriarch, and her baby's father), in the
crucibles that result; our duelists' moral trajectories, in many ways
parallel, lead them to opposite destinies. Considering how long I
forgot *about* it, I'm impressed with Reed for how much *of* it I
remember, thinking back. It's a powerful story, and if Reed offers
her characters little mercy, she certainly offers them justice.

0 (February?) <Other Stories and ... The Attack of the Giant Baby>,
1959-1981, first compiled as such 1981

As I wrote the above paragraphs, I vaguely remembered having also read
a book of Reed's short stories, and looking at the list of contents in
<Locus>/Contento, I'm pretty sure this is the book in question.
(Library due date slips don't list it.) I've owned a copy for years
and years but never read it (one of these two books, in whichever
month, is the first Reed book I ever read); I remember only a couple
of the stories at all, even prompted by that list, and those not well.

Well, the Seattle Public Library's catalogue doesn't remember it
either. This opens two possibilities: the book may have been sold;
or it may originally have been one of those uncatalogued books the
introductory post mentioned. In any event, I discovered this because
when I checked in September whether I'd correctly classified <The Baby
Merchant>, I found other misclassed books, and this led me to look
Reed up in the catalogue so I could produce a comprehensive report. I
can now attest that the SPL and I disagree on the spec-ficness of:
<Seven for the Apocalypse>, 1990-1998, compiled 1999 (a collection one
of whose stories got a Tiptree nomination), <Weird Women, Wired
Women>, 1958-1998, compiled 1998 (another collection, intro by Connie
Willis), and possibly <Bronze: A Tale of Terror>, 2005 (but if it
really is horror, perhaps it belongs in mainstream because that's
where the library puts other horror). On the other hand, we do agree
on the spec-ficness of <Dogs of Truth>, 2001-2005, compiled 2005, and
<Thinner Than Thou>, 2004; and we do agree on the *non*-spec-ficness
of <J. Eden>, 1996, <Cry of the Daughter>, 1971 (and imagine my
surprise that Reed was breaking out of the genre that early! but this
looks like one of those generations-of-a-family novels), and (in an
astonishing display of SPL perspicacity - compare Frost in the other
fiction post) <@expectations>, 2000, a novel about online obsession.

Justina Robson
(July) <Silver Screen>, 1999
Nominee, 2000 Clarke and British SF, and 2006 Philip K. Dick, Awards


Another rasfw favourite, read the day after I read Bear's <Blood and
Iron>... Well, but I can probably speak less spoilerishly about this
one. It's set in the early or mid 2060s, in a world which has not
fallen apart and is recognisable in (too) many respects. (The
narrator is familiar with old movie stars; granted, she doesn't refer
to any post-1960, so it's not unreasonable that she doesn't name any
post-1999, but still.) The first chapter is probably set in the
mid-2050s, with Our Heroine and her friends children; in the rest of
the book they're young adults mostly working on AI research. Of
course, real AI has been operational for at least twenty years, so
this isn't the same sort of thing as AI research today, and has
various legal, high financial, and ultimately political implications
(complete with violence), after the plot gets started with Our
Heroine's oldest friend dying.

At another level, the book has an element of bildungsroman. The
narrator tells us in the first chapter what she thinks is wrong with
herself; by the end of the book, perhaps she's come to peace with it.
The opening line, "We were good friends", she immediately contradicts,
but by book's end, perhaps she could truthfully say those words. This
is all greatly underplayed, though, which is a refreshing change. But
there's one false note in it: An AI-related experience partway
through the book is shown (and told) as turning her into more of a
strategic and tactical thinker, more sure of herself. However,
*after* that experience, and *not* before, she's prone to severe
depression. Um: depression takes many forms, but I find this one
hard to swallow.

Still, an intriguing story, whose status in regard to the implied
incipient Singularity is never made clear.

(July) <Mappa Mundi>, 2001
Nominee, 2002 Clarke Award

This book, apparently originally published in October 2001, was as
spectacularly overtaken by events as <Russian Spring>: It is 2010,
and since our long (inter)national nightmare of peace and prosperity
did *not* end, remarkably implausibly Great Strides have been made in
nanotechnology, biochemistry and especially neurochemistry. The
question, then, is who shall control these advances? Who shall write
the software of the human brain?

Well, let me back up a bit. The book comes in four sections; when I
first looked at the table of contents, I feared I was being threatened
with a map and a glossary, but in fact, "Map" is the core story, over
four hundred pages in the edition I read. Before it we find
"Legends", which introduces four POV characters in childhood or youth,
one in adulthood, and one more biographically (a defensible
distinction; all six are in essence origin stories); then "Compass
Rose", which introduces the seventh and last POV character (and
arguably the author's own stance), not long before "Map" begins. At
the end a few pages of "Update" cynically confirm both optimistic and
pessimistic characters' views, most strongly the opinion of a minor
character right near "Map"'s start.

So I dunno. I don't think Singularity is on offer here; transcendence
is, but not with the usual awe. I do find more convincing here than
in <Silver Screen> the following: Robson's plot, her take on the
survival chances of people who get involved in Big Change, and her
characterisation of POV characters. (Her ability to establish that
her villains are not entirely so, move in worlds occupied by still
worse, is particularly appealing.) All in all, I don't understand
rasfw posters who say this is an inferior book. But then, I've always
liked <Russian Spring> best of the Spinrad books I've read.
(Currently five, none pre-1980.)

But one trivial complaint: it would've been nice if, at least in the
American edition, someone had gotten the American characters to speak
American English. Of several surprising slips, the really jarring one
is a metaphor in an interior monologue: "had him sent off the pitch",
chapter 12 of "Map". I'm an American myself, so I'm not sure, but
isn't that from cricket? Would cancelling 9/11 really have resulted
in American women following cricket by 2010?

Kristine Kathryn Rusch [1] [2]
Winner, 1990 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer

(May) <The Retrieval Artist and Other Stories>, 1991-2002, first
compiled as such 2002
"The Retrieval Artist" nominee, 2001 Hugo Award for Novella

(May) <Extremes>, 2003, lightly skimmed
(May) <Consequences>, 2004, skimmed
(May) <Buried Deep>, 2005, skimmed
(May) <Paloma>, 2006, skimmed

I'm not usually much for mysteries, and Rusch, even when not writing
mysteries, tends to be even harsher than Bear. So I'm not surprised I
didn't finish these. Oddly, I find her aliens (prominent in
<Consequences> and <Buried Deep>, less so in the other two) sometimes
*too* alien here: I might be more interested in a book set among
aliens who were a little easier for us humans to understand. (She has
aliens playing bit parts who seem to fit this description, so this is
not just a complaint but also, well, a suggestion.)

But I'm pretty sure that as science fiction mysteries go, these are
very good, though the human side of things tends not to be that sfnal
(there's a massacre in one book straight out of the 19th century, for
example); these are not extraordinarily *innovative* science fiction
mysteries, just good ones. "The Retrieval Artist", 2000, seems to be
the only shorter entry, and doesn't fit into the overall plotline near
as I can see; the first book in the "Retrieval Artist" series proper
is <The Disappeared>, 2002. And if I'd been able to get hold of a
copy of that book, I might have simply forced myself to read straight
through.

No comment on the other stories in the collection.

Bruce Sterling
Nominee, 1978 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer

0* (May) <A Good Old-Fashioned Future>, probably 1993-1998, first
compiled as such 1999
"Deep Eddy" nominee, 1994 Hugo Award for Novelette; "Bicycle Repairman"
winner, 1997 Hugo for Novelette; "Maneki Neko" nominee, 1999 Hugo
Award for Short Story and 1999 Sturgeon Award; "Taklamakan" winner,
1999 Hugo and Locus Awards for Novelette, and nominee, 2000 Nebula
Award for Novelette

"Maneki Neko", the first story, originally appeared in Japanese, and
this appearance isn't dated in the usual places, but I doubt it was
earlier than 1993. At least three of the stories - "Deep Eddy",
"Bicycle Repairman", and "Taklamakan" - constitute, by themselves, a
loose series (minor character in one story becomes protagonist of the
next); I don't know whether that series includes other stories.

I read all of this except "The Littlest Jackal" (which is the longest
story in the book by a few pages, and which I skipped because it comes
fairly late in a *different* series). Initially I picked it simply as
a cheap book at the library book sale, and was somewhat chagrined on
getting home to find that I already had a copy in storage. Anyway,
though, it continues to surprise me to what extent Sterling can hold
my attention despite doing essentially none of the things that usually
please me. Everything from his preferred characters, to his plot
shapes, to his preoccupations contrasts sharply with the sorts of
things that I'm used to thinking I like, and I note that I've never
actually re-read <Islands in the Net>, the other book of his I've
read. But for years I kept thinking of <Islands> as a really superb
novel that I *should* re-read sometime; and I'm still trying to figure
out just how much of his other writing I want to investigate. (In
other words, should I try again with the Mechanist/Shaper stories, or
should I just look at the more recent stuff, such as, well, that
series that includes "The Littlest Jackal" ?)

Presumably the fact that he can appeal to me so very much against type
indicates he's a really good writer. Hmmm.

S. M. Stirling
(June-July) <The Sky People>, 2006, skimmed

This is a book that looks like a singleton, and is clearly unrelated
to the double trilogies [b] that, in turn, seem to be related to the
Draka multiverse. You could read it as alt-history for the first
hundred pages or so, but only by straining; as the divergences grow
this gets harder and harder. So anyway: in a universe where Barsoom
really has canals and Venus jungles, this is an adventure story set on
Venus in 1988, amid the lasting détente created by the space race.
This particular jungly Venus has dinosaurs, sabertooths, and
Neanderthals; its ecology seems to be heavily selected for *sexy*
extinct creatures, in fact, which is problematic to the eventual
resolution of the plot. The adventure doesn't actually get started
until nearly a hundred pages have passed, and, well, that's exactly
where I started skimming. The characters aren't particularly well
developed, nor their romances; there's plenty of life-and-death
activity, though. The very last pages offer retribution where I'm not
at all convinced it's deserved, and seem like cheap shots. Admittedly
I'm judging without proper reading, but I doubt this is one of
Stirling's better books. But it did serve well as a counterweight,
while finishing the George Eliot book.

[b] OK, OK, I now see that one of them is reproducing.

John Varley
Nominee, 1975 and 1976 John W. Campbell Awards for Best New Writer

(March) <Red Lightning>, 2006

I'm not sure whether this belongs here or in the series post, because
while I have no evidence that I also re-read <Red Thunder>, 2003, that
would be my usual behaviour. See, I'd forgotten reading this at all
until I found the due date slip hiding under my bed in September. So
I really haven't anything much to say about it, except that I vaguely
remember finding it worth reading, but not especially so.

Scott Westerfeld
(March or April) <The Risen Empire>, 2003
(April) <The Killing of Worlds>, 2003, skimmed

These books clearly do deserve much of the shouting about them, in
their vivid depiction of interstellar empire and war in a universe
*without* FTL. But after the first book I couldn't convince myself to
read the second straight through, particularly once skimming
established that these were nowhere near the end of the story of
"Succession" (and years later, no further volumes seem to be in
sight).

Movies that would, if books, fit in this post:

* <Galaxy Quest>, 1999 (wow! that was more fun than I've had in
ages!);
* <MIIB: Men in Black II>, 2002;
<Koi... Mil Gaya>, Hindi, 2003 (Bollywood Does First Contact! claims
to be "the first sci-fi film made in Hindi", which I suspect may be
true; more comments below);
* <The Incredibles>, 2004 (derivative but still enjoyable);
<Æonflux>, 2005.

Although <Half a Sixpence>, 1969, is based on an H. G. Wells novel, it
is *not* science fiction; see the other fiction post. But do see
also, in the re-reading post, <Earth Girls Are Easy>, 1989; <The
Rocketeer>, 1991; <Dark City>, 1998; <Josie and the Pussycats>, 2001;
<Spy Kids>, 2001; <Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams>, 2002; <Spy
Kids 3-D: Game Over>, 2003; <Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind>,
2004.

As to <Koi... Mil Gaya>. I had written five paragraphs of comments on
it after watching it, but then found that Mark Leeper had anticipated
enough of my points in a review posted to (among other places)
rec.arts.sf.movies, on August 10, 2003, that it made no sense to keep
them. So I'll confine myself to a detail neither he nor the DVD box
mentions - it's *long* (165 minutes) - and a couple of updates. 1)
This, and probably its sequel, <Krrish>, 2006, should be added to the
list of science fiction musicals compiled in a thread in spring 2006.
2) Oh, yeah, sequel: there's another due in 2008, too. The summaries
given by the IMDB suggest that they *might* be significantly more
sci-fi-ish than <Koi... Mil Gaya> itself; but it's never safe to
underestimate Bollywood's power to reduce all genres to romance
musicals.

Message-ID for Mark Leeper's review: <3F3683DA...@optonline.net>.

Joe Bernstein

unread,
Oct 19, 2007, 12:22:36 AM10/19/07
to
READ FOR THE FIRST TIME: CHILDREN'S BOOKS

This post ignores the now-standard distinction between children's and
YA books, and the millions of other distinctions that have joined that
one in marketing and library practice.

See also, in the fantasy post, Alcott, Drake, Hemingway, Kingsley,
Lee, Ray, Rowling, Sabin, Waugh, Zambreno, and arguably Alexander,
Gaiman, and/or Paolini; in the science fiction post, Heinlein and
arguably Varley; and in the series post, Alcott and arguably Henderson
and/or Wrede and Stevermer. There are also children's books in the
re-reading post, mostly without comments, by Levine, McKillip, and
Voigt; also, books listed there by Kerr and Stevermer have been
reprinted as kids' books, but I disagree.

I had to make an unexpected journey just before coming here, and
happened to pick <Anne of Green Gables> from the shelf of the friend I
was staying with before setting out. Between this chance, and my
interest in staving off depression in my first months in a new region,
I eventually decided that having reached mid-life without any
daughters I should probably stop waiting, and find out what was in
some of those books that had cooties back when I might more
appropriately have read them... So this post is really a list of
"girls' books", and yes, of course, it's incomplete.

Louisa May Alcott
(January) <Under the Lilacs>, 1878

This is a relatively pleasant and low-preaching Alcott story for kids,
showing the friendship between two girls and the runaway boy they
persuade their family and friends to adopt, and for a refreshing
change it's complete in one book, without Alcott's usual "dammit, now
I have to get everyone married" sequel.

* (May) <An Old-Fashioned Girl>, 1869-1870

Much higher-intensity preaching in this two-part book. The first part
presents a sort of disproof to critics of "Pollyanna", or with more
chronological plausibility of "Pippa Passes", showing how one person
(a country cousin) really can make a big difference to several (a
fashionable city family). The second and longer part develops the
characters at length, and *not* exclusively with attention to love and
marriage (in fact, our country cousin also spends time with early
feminists). I liked it.

* (April) <Eight Cousins>, 1875
* (April) <Rose in Bloom>, 1876, lightly skimmed

<Eight Cousins> is pleasant if vignette-y, not persuasively a unified
book: Rose, orphaned, comes to live in the same town (though not the
same house) as her seven male cousins. It's the only Alcott book I
read this year in an illustrated edition, the illustrator being C. B.
Falls. I'm not sure why I bailed so fast on <Rose in Bloom>, which
predictably for Alcott sequels turns to the marriage years, but anyway
I did. Will probably try again within a year or two.

L. M. Montgomery
(September 2006) <Anne of Green Gables>, 1908, series order 1
* (September 2006) <Anne of Avonlea>, 1909, series order 2
* (September 2006) <Anne of the Island>, 1915, series order 3
* (February) <Rainbow Valley>, 1919, series order 7
* (February) <Rilla of Ingleside>, 1921, series order 8
* (October) <Anne's House of Dreams>, 1922, series order 5

<Anne of Green Gables> is deservedly a classic, albeit very episodic
(I was flabbergasted to learn it had *not* been serialised; but
it was, after all, the first novel of a by then very experienced short
story writer). Other men not fathers of girls may need to be told
that it's the story, ages 11 to 16, of an extraordinary orphan girl
(Anne Shirley) and the ordinary people who adopt her. These sequels,
while none as good, don't let down the side. <Avonlea> shows Anne as
a young teacher; in <Island>, she's in college and in love; <Rainbow
Valley> has her kids young, <Rilla> older and involved in both love
and war; <House of Dreams> covers the first year or two of Anne's
marriage, and as the only book in the series entirely about adults,
distinguishes itself considerably, with moments and subplots of real
beauty and power, despite the constraints on an infilling book. The
three later books all have substantially more unified plots than the
earlier ones.

The setting is Prince Edward Island, except in <Anne of the Island>,
set mostly in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. (All other books by
Montgomery mentioned in this post are also set on the island.) The
books fall roughly from the 1880s through the 1910s, but <Rilla of
Ingleside> and <Anne's House of Dreams> contain unequivocally datable
events (respectively, the outbreak of World War I and the Canadian
election of 1896) which cannot be reconciled with each other; the
series as a whole moves several years depending on which you accept.

More seriously, Montgomery has a fairly consistent problem with
writing about older teenagers and adults: she can't do leading men
well at *all*. These men seem to exist almost entirely as objects of
romance or marriage. (The leading man in *this* series is an only
child who fathers six children. I find it remarkable that the names
of all six can be explained entirely by reference to Anne's past, even
though all are born after both her husband's parents are dead.) Some
male *supporting* characters (e.g. Captain Jim in book 5, or of course
Matthew Cuthbert in book 1) are very well drawn, but if forced to
explain differences between Anne's beloved and Emily's (below), I
should have to fall back on their occupations, while Rilla's is all
but a blank.

These books have a rather strong streak reminiscent of the spec-fic
"Fans Are Slan" meme (nowadays more prominent as Fans Are Pre-Adapted
to Fantasy Heroism, cf e.g. P. C. Cast in the fantasy post), in what
Anne describes as "kindred spirits" or "the race that knows Joseph"
(ahem). I'm actually mildly grateful I *didn't* read these as a kid,
if only because I didn't need to be any more convinced than I was
(courtesy of Spider Robinson, mainly) that All Right-Thinking People
Get Along Fine before this myth was shattered for me in my early
adulthood. Montgomery anticipated several, though not all, of my
criticisms, and this is one of them; apparently in a letter not long
after the first book came out she bewailed ever using the phrase
"kindred spirits". She did not repeat this mistake in at least one
later series.

* (October) <Anne of Windy Poplars>, 1936, series order 4
* (October and February) <Anne of Ingleside>, 1939, series order 6

Wow, WHAT a case for publication order not series order! I actually
bailed on <Anne of Ingleside> for months, leaving two perfectly good
books unread after it, because it seemed poised to repeat what I'd
liked least about <Anne of Windy Poplars>, Montgomery's war on elderly
women. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that these are two of
the author's last books, written when she herself *was* an elderly
woman. These are markedly episodic infill books, and the clumsiness
especially of the second can be illustrated this way: there are three
characters in book 4, which depicts Anne teaching again while her
fiancé studies medicine, with whom one expects her to stay in touch.
They do not, of course, figure in the earlier-written books 5 or 7;
so in the first hundred pages of book 6, which basically covers the
second half of the years between books 5 and 7, each comes to visit,
bim bam bom, without those visits having any real impact (either on
the plot, or by showing their characters' changes) other than to fill
an otherwise mildly perplexing gap in the series. Should only be read
by Anne completists (I acknowledge that that group includes, and even
should include, a non-zero percentage of girls of a certain age).

* (October) <Chronicles of Avonlea>, first compiled as such 1912
* (October) <Further Chronicles of Avonlea>, first compiled as such
1920 (but entirely pre-1912 in contents)

I lack access to the only real bibliography of Montgomery known to me,
<Lucy Maud Montgomery: A Preliminary Bibliography> by Ruth Weber
Russell, D. W. Russell, and Rea Wilmhurst (1986). One biography hints
that the stories in <Chronicles> date between 1904 and 1910, but
doesn't clearly say so. In any event, Montgomery's first published
writings appeared in 1890 (though her first published short story was
later), and her first sales were in 1896 (including her first paid
short story), so those are termini post quem.

There has been quite an industry of Anne-related stuff "by other
hands" published in recent decades, and also several posthumous
collections of Montgomery's short stories, which I've tended to assume
were blatant commercialism. (One, a theme collection of stories about
orphans, is titled <Akin to Anne>, for example.) Well, the actual
history of these, the only two collections published during
Montgomery's lifetime, makes it difficult to criticise her heirs too
hard. <Chronicles> resulted from her publisher's desire for a third
Anne book when Montgomery was already sick of the character; he came
up with the idea that she could revise earlier stories to insert
references to Anne. She had already figured out that the stories were
unimpressive, but complied. <Further Chronicles> has an even worse
backstory: she had finally broken with that publisher, so he dug into
the pile of leftovers from the first book, and published them. This
led to a years-long court battle.

Anyway, yawn. Anne appears in only one story, AFAIR, and other
characters familiar from the novels not much more. Most of the
stories depict pat resolutions to longstanding conflicts (often but
not always interrupted romances).

* (October) <The Story Girl>, 1910
(February) <The Golden Road>, 1913

Apparently the first was Montgomery's favourite, of her books. Well,
these are OK; it's even refreshing that they provide what the other
series tend not to, a portrayal of children in a *group* (<Rainbow
Valley> is an exception). And since they don't actually get far into
teenage years, they certainly avoid Montgomery's biggest flaw - in
fact, the most prominent romance is the only example I've seen in a
Montgomery novel of a romance with *two* well-characterised
participants. The narrator, however, a boy of thirteen, is on the
under-characterised side. And I was underwhelmed by the "story girl"
herself, in comparison to Anne Shirley or Emily Starr; she's the kind
of character who clearly means more to the author than to, at least,
this reader. The books also lack the guiding conflicts the Anne and
Emily books benefit from; perhaps it does actually help an author of
children's books to orphan their protagonists, though these days,
divorces seem to be as efficient, conflict-generation-wise. (Here,
the narrator and his brother come to stay with their cousins while
their father goes overseas, their mother being dead. I'm afraid the
titular Sara Stanley, one of those cousins, actually does get called
"the story girl" by the other kids. She is also arguably a little
psychic; see remarks not far below.)

(January) <Emily of New Moon>, 1923
(February) <Emily Climbs>, 1925
(February) <Emily's Quest>, 1927

I actually like <Emily of New Moon> more than <Anne of Green Gables>,
I think, though I'm fairly sure it's a somewhat lesser book; Emily
Starr is just a lot more *like* me, in her sorrow, her introspection,
and her occupation - already in the first book she's determined to
write. (For that matter, also in her lack of Anne's histrionics...)
The other two books suffer from Montgomery's usual failure with
leading men, but in this case she actually sets up a triangle, and the
Other Man is, though deeply flawed, a genuinely interesting character.
Montgomery also avoids, here, promising that all good people always
get along, portraying interpersonal conflicts, and how they ebb and
flow across years, convincingly. (The years in question, much harder
to pin down than in the Anne books, probably run from about 1900 to
about 1920.) And Emily's career as a writer is intrinsically easier
to develop, to show changing across years itself, than Anne's shorter
one in the more cyclic occupation of teacher; Montgomery exploits this
advantage to the full. It's mere chance that I don't own these yet,
my failure to find copies at times when I had money.

Hmmm. So *why*, then, is <Emily of New Moon> the lesser of the two
first books? Well, let's see. <Anne of Green Gables> depicts someone
who has been accustomed to using her imagination to fill profound
physical and emotional lacks in her life, and what sort of person she
becomes when given just enough real physical and emotional support
that she can turn her mind to other things. <Emily>, by contrast,
depicts its protagonist's bereavement, after which she never is left
so low as Anne starts out from; indeed, physically, being orphaned
*enriches* her. Both are stories of the creation of a human soul by
the often conflicting efforts of adults and of the child herself; but
Anne's is the more fascinating, because less nourished. Whatever the
relative merits of *later* books in each series, moreover, the *first*
books' endings reinforce this contrast. Also, <Anne> is often funny;
not only does that make it more pleasant to read, it shows a wider
range than <Emily>. (Though to be fair, <Emily> delves more deeply
into sorrow than does <Anne>; I wonder how much it's informed by
Montgomery's familiarity with the depressive man she married in 1912.)
Finally, while popular success isn't an infallible guide, these books
are old *enough* that it has some merit; and <Anne> is by far the more
popular book.

Emily, like Sara Stanley, is portrayed as having limited psychic
abilities; the contrast between how Montgomery handled this in the
mainstream, as against how Campbell handled psionics in science
fiction a decade later, is spectacular if somewhat predictable.

(February) <Kilmeny of the Orchard>, 1910 but based on an earlier
(1906?) serial

As in <The Story Girl> et seq., this story is in first person, with a
male narrator. But this time, the narrator is also the leading man in
the romance, which lends colourlessness a whole different aspect. A
short and tolerable read, but nothing special. These days this is
understood as a children's book, but I can't imagine why. (In
fairness, I should note that the central library here shelves an
omnibus of this book with <The Story Girl> and <The Golden Road> as
regular adult fiction, hence only 2/3rds wrong... That copy includes
what appear to be the original illustrations for <Kilmeny>, by George
Gibbs, which are fairly good; except for frontispieces also by Gibbs,
the Sara Stanley books in the volume are unillustrated. All my other
Montgomery reading this year was in mass market paperbacks,
unillustrated.)

Not all of the writers on Montgomery seem to be aware that <Kilmeny>
is in a sense Montgomery's first book, and none clearly source the
serial it's based on, though one claims a date of 1906. I don't know
whether any of Montgomery's later novels, or other early stories,
involves a female first-person narrator; I've now read essentially all
of her earlier novels, though, and am struck by the lack among those.
(At least <Rilla of Ingleside> does give considerable attention to its
protagonist's thoughts. And much, though not as sometimes claimed
all, of <Anne of Windy Poplars> is told via Anne's letters to her
fiancé, hence in first person.)

* (July-August) <Magic for Marigold>, 1929, skimmed

This is the only one of these books set in the 1920s, and Montgomery
has a good deal of fun gradually introducing modern slang like "fed
up" and fads like bobbed hair as she goes. It's the story of Marigold
Lesley, heir to the ancestral Lesley estate and all the pride that
goes with it, following her from the ages of six to about thirteen.
(Strictly, OK, the first chapter is set shortly after her birth, and
tells how she got her name not as a Just-So Story, but as an
introduction to her quarrelsome family.) It's episodic but with two
consistent threads: Marigold's imaginary friend Sylvia, and her
halting discovery of real friendship and other human connexions - for
Marigold is unlike Anne or Emily, not only in her actual lack of the
aforementioned pride, but in that she spends most of her childhood
pretty much without a (living) playmate.

(She also lacks deprivation; her father is dead before the book opens,
but she always has enough food and enough love.)

There are hints of fantasy in the opening chapters, but the book is
not a fantasy. I know of no sequel. And again, no, no female
narrator; the book's in omniscient third-person POV. The book's lower
on my "try again" list than <Rose in Bloom>.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
(February) <Little House in the Big Woods>, 1932
(February) <Little House on the Prairie>, 1935
(March) <Farmer Boy>, 1933
(April) <On the Banks of Plum Creek>, 1937, lightly skimmed

The first and especially the third books benefit a lot from Wilder's
consistent "how to" approach - these books would definitely serve
double duty, as both entertainment for the kids and useful teaching
tools, in any survivalist camp. And there's some plot to books 2
and 3. But on the whole, these weren't for me. I read all four in
the edition illustrated by Garth Williams.

Movies that would, if books, fit in this post:

* <the Parent Trap>, 1961;
+ <Nancy Drew>, 2007 (The Seattle <Stranger>'s Josh Feit: "Now this
is a conservative backlash to get behind: brainiac sleuthing
instead of CGI stunts" - oddly, a recent Lindsay Lohan movie seems
to have featured sleuthing as well, but possibly because its
heroine cared about fashion rather than set it, does not seem to
have received similar praise; but then, I wasn't interested in that
movie after reading the DVD box from which I've described it,
either).

Fittingly, given the books listed above, both the above-listed movies
star girls. See also, in the fantasy post, <Those Beautiful Dames>,
1934, <I Only Have Eyes for You>, 1937, arguably <J. R. R. Tolkien's
"The Lord of the Rings">, 1978, <Wizards of the Lost Kingdom>, 1985,
<Boundin'>, 2003, and <Aquamarine>, 2006; in the science fiction post,
arguably <Galaxy Quest>, 1999, and certainly <The Incredibles>, 2004;
and in the re-reading post, <Labyrinth>, 1986, <The Princess Bride>,
1987, <Spy Kids>, 2001; <Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams>,
2002, and <Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over>, 2003.

Joe Bernstein

unread,
Oct 19, 2007, 12:25:23 AM10/19/07
to
READ FOR THE FIRST TIME: OTHER FICTION

See also, in the series post, arguably, Flint. See also, in the
fantasy post, collections by Lake, Palwick, and Ray, and arguably
anonymous and Phillips; and in the sf post, the collection by
Eskridge. There's also other fiction in the re-reading post, some
without comments, by Allen, Austen, Bradshaw, MacDonald, and Voigt.

As noted in the relevant post, in the spring I re-read Jane Austen en
bloc, for the first time. This got me interested in reading
predecessors and (near) successors of hers. Admittedly Austen is
supposed to be unique. But there isn't anything in what I've read
(the Brontës, much of Scott, some of Dickens as successors; a
scattering of predecessors) that even *vaguely* resembles her stories.
And Austen herself refers, *in* her novels, to plenty of works she
evidently considered generically similar. On this reading I was
particularly intrigued by the interactions of manners, the marriage
market, and romance, interactions I thought probably central to such
books, so I wanted to read 'em, see how other writers handled the
topic, and whether I could trace changes through time. I also wanted,
quite simply, to spend some more time immersed in civilised moral
certainties of the sort Austen does so well, figuring this is a good
antidote for depression. Well, too bad for me: most such books as I
learnt of aren't available from the public library here, and the few
that are, were all checked out at once, in several cases with holds on
'em as well, when I looked. Full disclosure: if you count Richardson
as a predecessor, which might make sense if you left out the "moral
certainties" part, then I could in fact have read <Pamela> and the
final 3/4 of <Clarissa>; and see also Inchbald, below. Anyway, I did
manage to find in <Mothers of the Novel> by Dale Spender a useful, if
polemical, guide to the (female) predecessor writers; when I have a
university library card again, I'll go looking. Meanwhile...

This post is, perhaps, an appropriate place to provide indices to
genres that don't get their own posts.

1) Horror discussed in these posts: see, from the fantasy post,
arguably Irwin, Link, Richardson, Shepard, arguably Tuttle,
arguably Whitfield, and Zielinski; and from the science fiction
post, arguably Campbell.
2) Romances discussed in these posts: see, selectively, from the
fantasy post, Cast and McKelden; from the science fiction post,
Asaro; from this post, arguably Inchbald and arguably Kadish; and
from the re-reading post, Austen, arguably Bujold, Voigt, and
Willis and Felice.
3) Mysteries discussed in these posts: see, from the fantasy post,
Bear, McCullough (maybe - I didn't read far enough to want to stand
by this claim), Richardson, and arguably Whitfield; from the
science fiction post, arguably Bear, arguably Doctorow, and Rusch;
and from this post, arguably Bradshaw, Dunant, Grafton, arguably
Perrotta, and Walton.
4) Historical fiction and alternate history discussed in these posts:
see, from the fantasy post, Baker, very arguably Bear, Dalkey, very
arguably Davidson, arguably Douglas, arguably Holdstock, Hoyt, and
very arguably Irwin; from the science fiction post, Lake and very
arguably Stirling; from the children's books post, arguably Wilder;
from this post, Eliot, Pye, Walton, and Zara; from the series post,
Baker, Flint, Henderson, and very arguably Wrede and Stevermer; and
from the re-reading post, Bradshaw, arguably Gaiman, and very
arguably Stevermer.
5) The only books discussed in these posts that could reasonably be
*classed* as "humor" are by Dickens, in this post, but see also
books (comedies) in the fantasy post by Donnelly, Hines,
Christopher Moore, and Zielinski, in the series post by Christopher
Moore again and Wrede and Stevermer, and in the re-reading post by
Stasheff; further afield - several sorts of "comic writing" ? - see
also books in the fantasy *and* science fiction posts by each of
Doctorow and Lake, in the fantasy post by Cast, McKelden, and Moira
Moore, in the science fiction post by Sterling, in this post by
Frost, and in the re-reading post by Austen, Bujold, Longyear, and
MacDonald.
6) For obvious reasons having to do with spoilers, I won't similarly
list tragedies; note please that such a list could overlap the
"comic writing" above.
7) And while "graphic novel" is a form, not a genre, these posts
discuss graphic novels by, in the fantasy post, Gaiman and arguably
Niffenegger, and in this post, Terry Moore.
8) Huh; I suppose "drama" is also a form, so OK, these posts discuss
dramas by, in this post, Dickens and Inchbald, not counting all
them movies; I think there's also a playlet in Bear's collection in
the science fiction post.

(I considered indexing the movies in a similar way, though it would've
strained even my ability to post off-topic to include the indices in a
post, rather than offer them by e-mail. But there are simply too many
movies in these posts, and I don't really understand how movies are
categorised, so ... no.)

Charlotte Vale Allen
(April) <Parting Gifts>, 2001

Oops. Allen's <Promises> has long been a guilty pleasure of mine. I
thought maybe she had learned to write better as she got older. Nope;
reading another book of hers just underscored how unrealistic the book
I'd already read really is, by showing how she just reassembles the
pieces in different combinations for each book: "grieving widow
*here*, whore with a heart of gold *there*, friend who Stands By
protagonist beyond credibility over *that* way...".

Perhaps a critic immune to manipulation and without prurience could
read Allen's books for the sheer intellectual sport of seeing how the
jigsaw puzzle is constructed *this* time, but I found myself feeling
somewhat soiled. I personally define the dividing line between
erotica and pornography as the point at which it becomes impossible to
believe any longer that there are *characters* involved, as opposed to
counters being manipulated. I already knew that there were other
sorts of writing besides the erotic in which this dividing line could
appear. What disturbs me about this book is that evidently even
writing focused on the emotions, and capable of reaching my own, can
straddle, if not cross, that line. In other words: if I find myself
moved by the *emotional* equivalent of pornography, even for a moment
- and the ostentatiously constructed (meaning, "unnatural") ending of
this book moved me for rather longer - then surely that suggests a
problem, a fakeness, in my own emotions, no?

Elizabeth Bowen
0 (May) <The Hotel>, 1927
0 (May-June) <The Last September>, 1929

My treatment of these books contains spoilers. I can't imagine
getting through either of these books primarily out of a desire to see
what happens next, but just in case anyone *would* in fact find their
pleasure lessened by a loss of suspense, you're warned. Stop reading,
or skip ahead to Bradshaw, HERE; you have less than a screenful left
before the main spoilers.

In the relevant volume of <The Penguin Companion to Literature>, Angus
Ross writes that Bowen "in her consciousness as an artist has been
compared with Jane Austen." Separately, I have long owned copies of
<The Hotel> and <The Last September>; they're in Milwaukee, but still,
it's always good to increase the percentage of my library which I've
read. So...

Well, the comparison with Austen seems apt, but what a difference a
century makes! In Austen's world romance and practicality compete as
grounds for marriage, and even old-fashioned parental arrangement
shows up now and again; but pretty much all of Austen's characters
actually end up married, regardless of their reasons. Bowen works the
same ground, but very differently, and her endings differ radically.
In a nutshell, in Bowen's fictional worlds, nobody marries; anyone who
was stupid enough to marry before the book started has reason to
regret it, or is so very stupid as to be incapable of regret; and in
sharp contrast with Austen's most famous middle-aged woman, the main
business of such characters in Bowen's books is to *thwart* marriages,
not further them. Despite the obvious undesirability of marriage in
these books, these women who prevent it are nevertheless her villains.

These two books, Bowen's first novels, both concern idle, frivolous,
people, some of them rich, some not but acting as if they were; each
revolves around an engagement that gets broken. In <The Hotel>, the
characters are *supposed* to be frivolous, given that they're at an
Italian Riviera resort (and they're frivolous *enough* that they never
notice that they're in a Fascist country, save an incidental reference
to trains *not* running on time). In <The Last September>, they're
supposed to be serious, since they're landowners in Ireland on the
verge of the latter country's independence, but they aren't, and they
know it: they complain a lot about not knowing what's going on in the
fight against the rebels. Both books could plausibly be part-
autobiographical, and chronologically it'd be possible for the
protagonist of <The Last September> (set in 1920) to grow up to be the
protagonist of <The Hotel>, though in personalities they differ
substantially.

Bowen has a very clear grasp of the workings of emotions over the
course of conversations and of days; her characters are believable,
though mostly not people it'd be easy to take seriously in real life.
This is the core of her similarity to Austen. She also writes more or
less lyrically of landscape (she's much fonder of Ireland, her native
land, than of Italy), but I find her similes and metaphors very often
incomprehensible. I gather she's considered one of the second-rank
great novelists of the 20th century; um, maybe so, but I don't see it.
Reference books tell me that Bowen's later books frequently featured
spies; I don't know, but perhaps this was her bow to the idea that
novels should have plots. In any event, I'm greatly relieved *not* to
have access to her third novel after *finally* finishing her second.

Gillian Bradshaw
(November?) <The Elixir of Youth>, 2006

I'm *fairly* sure I first read this after coming here. In that case,
it would be yet another library book I remember without physical
evidence. But I must confess I don't remember it very well: after
writing most of this paragraph, I found myself remembering more and
more and thinking I'd have to take those words back - *until* looking
the publication date up on the Web tonight notified me that in fact
the narrator is female, not male! Anyway, although I found this book
affecting at the time (it deals with a father-child reunion Gone
Wrong), I also felt frustrated that Bradshaw remains constrained to
thriller-writing.

Arguably, this should be listed under "science fiction", since it
concerns a nonexistent treatment. Um, well. I certainly see <The
Wrong Reflection> and <Dangerous Notes> as science fiction, but am
less convinced in this case; not all medical thrillers that have
nonexistent treatments in them are sf. (This is also why I have to
hedge my complaints in the re-reading post about the classification in
Seattle's libraries of Moon's <The Speed of Dark>.)

Unlike Bradshaw's other thrillers, this one's set in the US, in fact
in California.

(June) <Bloodwood>, 2007

While this is *again* a thriller from that publisher, Severn House,
whose only visible use is to provide Gillian Bradshaw with a way to
get her books into print (it certainly doesn't, like, make them
available to book buyers) ... Well. The first-person narrator is an
Englishwoman who wanted to be a poet, but concluded she had no talent,
and became a PR specialist instead. As the book opens, she is being
told she has an inoperable brain tumor. Later in the book, casting
about for meaning in her rather sterile life, she tries to write a
poem, and falls back on formal structure to buttress herself.

Bradshaw, in this book, uses formal structure to buttress, I think,
the poverty of her category rather than of her talent; anyway, she
does so to good effect. The page after the dedication reads:

"African Bloodwood
"Pterocarpus angolensis
"Southern Africa

"Listed as 'vulnerable' on the World Conservation
"Union's Red list"

This seems simply an odd epigraph to a book which is, after all,
titled <Bloodwood>, until, fifteen pages later, "Satinwood" is
presented in the same format. At this point, the structure looks a
bit like the one Connie Willis used in <Bellwether>, all those fads
and all those rivers as decorations, more or less; but no. When Our
Heroine is let down by a former co-worker, we have "Walnut Veneer",
and the next chapter, in which she collects allies who will prove more
true, is "Mahogany". Shortly after the halfway point a chapter ends
"I would not have to go empty-handed to the grave." The next chapter
is "Oak"; and when I saw that, I had to stop reading for a time,
thinking it must offer something even more wrenching. Well, actually,
in an arguable misstep, it doesn't; but the device still ends up
integral to the book.

In any event, this is the fifth quasi-medical thriller Bradshaw has
written. (The one I haven't yet mentioned is <The Somers Treatment>.)
It's the *least* medical of those; where three of the others revolved
around an invented treatment, in this one a real disease is simply the
engine driving the narrator. (However, the arguably spec-ficnal
element, in this case, *is* related to the disease - implausibly
meaningful hallucinations, which could be called fantasy, though I'm
satisfied just to call 'em convenient.) But here Bradshaw takes
something that six years ago was just one element, examined under
unusual circumstances, in <Dangerous Notes>, and instead devotes her
full attention to a much more ordinary form of it: How do you invest
meaning in life? How do you do enough of that to come to terms with
mortality? The result is, I think, her best book in six years.

I hope the parallel I've noted between Bradshaw and this narrator is
the only one; I hope she has plenty of time left to return to writing
the historical novels she does so well, and claim the audience for
them she deserves. I suppose that will depend partly on lots of
readers finding ways to beat down Severn House's hatred of sales.
(While Severn House doesn't, as far as I know, do business with anyone
else who sells books in the US, it *does* deal with Amazon.) Good
luck.

(Update: <Dark North>, 2007, set in early 3rd century Britain, from
Severn House, is sitting waiting to be read at post closing time.)

Charles Dickens
Yes, finally, a bridge amazingly many fictional characters cross:
having decided at last that I should try to make the best of my
library situation, I started reading through Dickens. (I considered
two alternatives. One, reading through Eliot, I actually began, and
the result appears below; the other, reading through Barsetshire/
Palliser, was delayed by my finding <The Warden> only at times when I
could remember previous attempts.) This post deals with eight Dickens
books. I should note a couple of things about the cross-references to
Dickens in the other posts before beginning with those books: The
reference in the fantasy post is to <The Pickwick Papers> (book #3),
and (trivially) to <Nicholas Nickleby> (book #5) and <Master
Humphrey's Clock and A Child's History of England> (book #6). The
reference in the series post is partly to the "Our Parish" section of
<Sketches by Boz> (book #1), which, consisting of related stories
originally published every couple of weeks, is effectively a
short-fiction-only series; but note also that some characters from
<The Pickwick Papers> reappear (anæmically) in <Master Humphrey's
Clock>. The reference above to Dickens as a dramatist is to <Plays,
Poems, and Miscellanies> (book #2).

I'll also dispose here of the POV issue. Many of the <Sketches by
Boz> and similar writings use the first person, fairly obviously for
Dickens himself; the scientific meeting reports in <The Mudfog Papers>
present themselves as (sometimes first-person) reportage *not* by
Dickens. <The Old Curiosity Shop> begins as if narrated by Master
Humphrey, in first person, but this soon ends. The rest of it, and
the other novels described here, use first person only in occasional
inset stories; the main POV is third person, usually linked to one
person at a time but pretty nearly omniscient. Which is, of course,
the style for which Dickens is famous, and which I assume everyone
here has encountered, if nowhere else then in <A Christmas Carol>.

(July-August) <Sketches by Boz>, 1833-1840, first compiled as such
between 1880 and 1957

The edition in question belongs to "The Oxford Illustrated Dickens"
(and first appeared in 1957) and includes <Sketches of Young
Gentlemen> (1838), <Sketches of Young Couples> (1840), and <The Mudfog
Papers> (here as "The Mudfog and Other Sketches"; 1837-1838, first
compiled 1880). (For the latter two see the next book; I deal with
the young gentlemen under this book.) <Sketches by Boz> in specific
dates 1833-1837, and reached its present form in the first edition to
combine the "First Series" (February 1836) and "Second Series"
(?January 1837), along with one stray item, this combined edition
first appearing as a serial from November 1837 to June 1839. (It's
here illustrated by George Cruikshank. I think all the Dickens
editions I read used the original illustrations. Cruikshank also
illustrated the Mudfog material, while Hablot K. Browne, better known
as 'Phiz', did the <Young>s.) Dickens revised the <Sketches>, like
his other works, in later years, and I'm fairly sure this edition
represents one of those revisions. At some point, the full title was
<Sketches by Boz Illustrative of Every-Day Life and Every-Day People>.

More specific chronology, though obscured by the arrangement of that
combined edition ("Our Parish", "Scenes", "Characters", and "Tales"),
can be informative, and I'm going to present the sketches thus. (My
source here is Kitton's <The Minor Writings of Charles Dickens>.)

The earliest contents are "Tales". Seven of the twelve appeared in
<The Monthly Magazine> from December 1833 to February 1835 (when
Dickens decided he wanted to be paid for them): "The Boarding-House",
"Mr. Minns and His Cousin", "Horatio Sparkins", "The Steam Excursion",
"Mrs. Joseph Porter", "A Passage in the Life of Mr. Watkins Tottle",
and "The Bloomsbury Christening". These comic stories feature middle
class characters as vapid as any Elizabeth Bowen could dream up, but
rather funnier; however, those characters' emptiness darkens over the
months, with the latest-published story (*not* "Christening") seeming
to end in suicide. At least several of them were apparently drawn
from life.

From January to August 1835, Dickens sold <The Evening Chronicle>
short essays, which became twelve of the twenty-five "Scenes", six of
the seven parts of "Our Parish", and one of the twelve "Characters".
These essays, while still essentially comic, are more Russell Banks
than Dave Barry, and already in the second ("Gin-shops"), Dickens the
Reformer is visible. List: all but the seventh sketch in "Our
Parish"; "The Streets - Morning", "Hackney-coach Stands", "London
Recreations", "The River", "Astley's", "Greenwich Fair", "Private
Theatres", "Early Coaches", "A Parliamentary Sketch", "Public
Dinners", "Gin-shops", "The Pawnbroker's Shop", and "Thoughts about
People".

In September 1835, he picked up with <Bell's Life in London>, and over
the next four months produced three more "Scenes" and nine
"Characters". These begin with sketches ("Seven Dials", "Miss Evans
and the Eagle", and "The Dancing Academy") in which jealousy is
prominent, sketches about misplaced aspirations ("The Misplaced
Attachment of Mr. John Dounce" and "The Mistaken Milliner"), and
stories of louts ("Making a Night of It" and "The Last Cab-Driver, and
the First Omnibus Cad"), all played mainly for comedy. But in the
last few of the <Bell's Life> series - "The Prisoner's Van", "The
Parlour Orator", "A Christmas Dinner", "The New Year", and "The
Streets - Night" - it's as though the fully mature Dickens, the one I
knew from books like <A Christmas Carol>, <A Tale of Two Cities>, <Our
Mutual Friend>, and unfortunately <Little Dorrit>, has emerged from
the crucible, with his genial, sentimental, willingness to look at all
sorts of people, to document unhappiness and urge against it while
remaining, over all, cheerful - his Victorian-ness still some while
before that young woman took the throne.

Eight of the sketches first appeared in the "First Series". Three -
"Omnibuses", "The Great Winglebury Duel", and "Sentiment" - are the
sort of comic thing Dickens had been doing rather earlier, the latter
two perhaps held back because they involved elopements; the others -
"Shops and their Tenants", "A Visit to Newgate", "Brokers' and
Marine-store Shops", "The Black Veil", and "Shabby-genteel People" -
are dark enough to explain their absence from the periodical markets.
Ironically, "A Visit to Newgate" and "The Black Veil" were the ones
reviewers singled out for praise; I can't say I understand why.

"The Tuggses at Ramsgate" and "The First of May" originally appeared
two months later, in the first volume of <The Library of Fiction>.
Neither is remarkable. In the fall of 1836, about the time <The
Pickwick Papers> was becoming a bestseller, four last "Scenes"
appeared in <The Morning Chronicle>. "Meditations in Monmouth-street"
and especially "Scotland Yard" (*not* about the police headquarters)
focus on nostalgia, "Doctors' Commons" on humor, and "Vauxhall Gardens
by Day" uses nostalgia for humor. Finally, around the year's end,
came the "Second Series", which included the last four sketches, one
of each category: "Criminal Courts", "Our Next-Door Neighbours",
"Hospital Patients", and "The Drunkard's Death"; as the titles
suggest, these are again fairly dark.

<Sketches of Young Gentlemen> appeared anonymously, in answer to an
equally anonymous <Sketches of Young Ladies> that some people
mistakenly thought Dickens had done. The idea of answering was his
publisher's, but since it came out after Dickens had finished <The
Pickwick Papers>, before he started <Nicholas Nickleby>, but halfway
through the long run of <Oliver Twist>, it wouldn't surprise me if he
also wanted to do some comedy again. It consists of twelve sketches
plus dedication and conclusion. The sketches are very short character
types - in my own words the schmuck, the nerd, the lout, you get the
idea - of a kind then two millennia old (see Theophrastus's
<Characters> if you don't believe me), though not historically written
mainly for laughs; but Dickens more often used example than analysis,
so they have a little merit from his talent for describing behaviour
comically. Still, they truly *are* "Minor Writings".

(July-August) <Plays, Poems, and Miscellanies>, 1836-1869, first
compiled as such 1894, started

About a fourth of this, Volume XXVIII of the unillustrated "Standard
Library Edition" of Dickens, is the same as the extra materials in the
edition of <Sketches by Boz> noted above. It also includes a fair bit
of Dickens's more clearly non-fiction writing, though not of the
journalism by which he supported himself prior to the next book's
success; the earliest piece in this book, by some months, is his
advocacy pamphlet <Sunday under Three Heads> of 1836, in which he
pseudonymously turned the observational talents he'd been
demonstrating in the sketches to argumentative use.

I borrowed this book for access to Dickens's plays, which premiered in
late 1836 and early 1837. The first, <The Strange Gentleman>, makes
its source ("The Great Winglebury Duel") seem a masterpiece of
fictional prose by comparison; at least it's only two acts, though it
seems longer thanks to the excessive use of soliloquies as infodumps.
<The Village Coquettes> is considerably better, not that that's high
praise; it's a two-act pastoral operetta (a word which seems, based on
this example, to have the same meaning as "musical"), of comic intent,
arguably misogynistic but mostly anti-London, and probably has more of
Dickens's (uninteresting) poetry in one place than any other of his
works. The third play, <Is She His Wife? or, Something Singular!>,
unfortunately resembles the first both by being a farce of mistaken
identities, and by overuse of infodumps (this time mostly in the form
of asides); but fortunately there's one crucial difference: it's only
one act, not two. The world then benefitted by Dickens's
concentration on narrative and expository prose, as writer and editor,
rather than on drama, for the next two decades.

Thanks to library due dates, I also read <Sketches of Young Couples>,
and somewhat less than half of the Mudfog stuff, in this book. <The
Mudfog Papers> is essentially a collection of everything Dickens wrote
for <Bentley's Miscellany> *except* <Oliver Twist>. The items from
1837, which I read in the previous book's rendering, include a couple
of brief essays (one describing a literary "lion", the other, with
acknowledged debt to Shakespeare, likening life to a pantomime) and
two long items: a story of a man elected mayor of Mudfog and the rise
and fall of his vanity thereat; and an account, more or less straight
from <The Clouds>, of the first annual Mudfog scientific gathering, at
which I actually did laugh aloud more than once despite wheezes like,
well, "Professors Snore, Doze and Wheezy". Mudfog 1838, read in
*this* book, consists of a short pub sketch (containing a grisly,
non-fantasy, tale within it), and a report on the next year's
scientific meeting, which I didn't find as amusing. Typically
included with <The Mudfog Papers>, though I think not normally
considered strictly one of them, is the brief "Familial Epistle from a
Parent to a Child Aged Two Years and Two Months" with which Dickens
announced his resignation from editing <Bentley's Miscellany>; it
contains a passage of nostalgic description of a roadside inn which,
by summoning up a scene I, at least, would normally think of as
Dickensian, makes me suspect that the stereotypical Dickensian world
was already gone by this early in his career. (For that matter, of
course, the most obviously "Dickensian" part of <A Christmas Carol> is
the past part, is it not? and rather more than two decades past at
that. Well, <A Christmas Carol> came out in 1845, so ...) It hadn't
occurred to me before to think of Dickens as *fundamentally* a
purveyor of nostalgia, not only as seen by us but also for his
contemporaries, but I'm not at all sure the thought is wrong.

<Sketches of Young Couples> is basically a rerun of <Sketches of Young
Gentlemen> with a different focus. Eleven types of couples, not all
"young", appear, for example "The Loving Couple" and "The
Contradictory Couple". The illustrative anecdotes this time seem less
lifelike, more "typical" (in its old meaning: representative of the
type); Dickens actually once apologises for having to use an anecdote
*instead of* abstract figuration. The book appeared in the gap
between <Nicholas Nickleby> and <Master Humphrey's Clock>, claiming as
its excuses for existence Queen Victoria's impending marriage, and the
year 1840's being a leap year, as doubly threatening to the bachelor
population of England. Readers of <To Say Nothing of the Dog> may be
pleased to learn that pen-wipers are mentioned as trivial gifts, in
one of the sketches; there's also a cute game with the number of
couples, which you have to read attentively to bring out right.
Finally, the mythos of Victoria as homebody worshipping Albert gets,
in the epilogue, an early boost from one of her most prominent
subjects.

These materials (along with <Sketches of Young Gentlemen>) make up, in
all, just over half the volume; I decided not to worry about the other
half, most of it more or less journalistic (though there are a few
pages of poems). At any rate, the great majority dates later than
1849.

0 (July-August) <The Pickwick Papers>, aka <The Posthumous Papers of
the Pickwick Club>, 1836-1837, first compiled as such 1837

Both titles appear to go back to early editions of the book, which
originally appeared in monthly installments independent of any other
periodical; the full title of the second installment, whose cover page
the edition I read includes, is actually <The Posthumous Papers of the
Pickwick Club, Containing a Faithful Record of the Perambulations,
Perils, Travels, Adventures and Sporting Transactions of the
Corresponding Members>. (The combined edition of <Sketches by Boz>
was also published in such independent installments.) The edition I
read, from Penguin, is based on the first one-volume edition of 1837.
(Looking at Dickens editions in general, I note in Penguin numerous
advantages: not just use of early texts, and marks to show where the
installments ended, but also annotation with endnotes, and even maps.
A pity the Seattle Public Library owns so few.) The original idea for
<Pickwick> was that Dickens would write to back up illustrations by
Robert Seymour, rather than the other way round; Seymour killed
himself early in the run, and was replaced by 'Phiz'. I believe, but
haven't verified, that the Penguin edition, like most not mass market
paperbacks, includes the original illustrations.

Need I say much? This is the famous and beloved story of four
Londoners who travel around southern England, in a fairly
anachronistic late 1820s, for the sake of the advancement and
diffusion of knowledge (or possibly for the sake of the consumption of
alcoholic beverages). We have Tupman the lover, Winkle the sportsman,
Snodgrass the poet, and Pickwick the genius, all of whom are, perhaps,
less than perfect in their roles, to comic effect. In their travels,
they hear any number of tales, which take pretty much any tone
*except* the jocular one of the main story. These include Dickens's
first forays into fantasy: a brief ghost story in chapter 21; "The
Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton", chapter 28 [ii] or 29
depending on edition; "The True Legend of Prince Bladud", in chapter
35 or 36, the worst of these; and "The Story of the Bagman's Uncle",
chapter 48 or 49, much the best, a superb combination of romance and
ghost story. There are also lots of romances, duels, and so forth in
the main storyline, and various more singular events such as a
parliamentary election, a lawsuit, etc. Eventually, much to my
surprise, much of this hubbub cohered into an actual plot, which
*un*surprisingly made the book much easier for me to read, and
eventually cheered me considerably. (Presumably the incoherence of
the earlier chapters has something to do with the original intent to
have text only as backup to the pictures?)

One reason I started reading through Dickens is the introduction to a
paperback copy I own of a Balzac novel, which claims that Balzac is
like Dickens and Scott: nobody can read any of these writers' books
for the first time, so the claim goes, after youth. Some years back,
I read something like a dozen of Scott's novels, all but one for the
first time, and liked several a good deal; I can't proceed further
here, or similarly tackle Balzac, without a university library card.
So further disproving that silly introducer meant Dickens. I'm glad
to have found, in the end, a better reason to keep reading. This is
probably not a truly great novel, but being no real aficionado of
comedy, I can't be sure; in any event, it *is* truly great fun.

0 (August) <Oliver Twist>, 1837-1838, first compiled as such 1838

This book led to the only two times in Dickens's career when two
novels were coming out at once. Richard Bentley chose him to edit
<Bentley's Miscellany>, and required him to contribute to every issue;
he became editor before finishing <The Pickwick Papers>, and continued
until he was well along with <Nicholas Nickleby>. A few of these
contributions became <The Mudfog Papers>, but most were <Oliver
Twist>, which lasted until early 1839, although the final five
installments actually *followed* full publication in three volumes.
(Similar circumstances later gave rise to <Hard Times> in <Household
Words>, and <A Tale of Two Cities> and <Great Expectations> in <All
the Year Round>.) That said, the edition I'm reading, from Everyman's
Library and illustrated by Cruikshank, presumably includes the rather
massive revisions Dickens did in later life, as indicated by the
number of chapters (the 1846 edition split two chapters, for a total
of 53, as opposed to the original 51). If any of *you* want to read
through Dickens on a strict chronological plan, you're probably best
off with the Penguin edition, which represents the first book edition,
and notes where each issue's part leaves off, so you can synchronise
it with <Pickwick> and <Nicholas> (whose serialisation dates you can
reliably get from Wikipedia). But see the discussion of <Nicholas>
below as to whether that's a good idea.

Um, as to the three volumes, or the two-year serialisation: this is
actually a good deal shorter than either <Sketches> or <Pickwick>; the
installments are much shorter than in other Dickens novels. However,
three volumes was the lending libraries' preference at the time (three
patrons could read the book at once, you see), so that's how <Oliver
Twist> was published. Oh, and the fullest title given by the edition
I read, at least, is: <Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy's Progress>.

In case I'm not the last rasfw regular to have read this (or, at
least, to have seen one of the visual versions), I suppose I shouldn't
dispense with *non*-bibliographical comments. So I'll note that the
book is set sometime in the mid-1830s (after a law of 1832 but before
Victoria's accession), largely in London but also other places in
southern England; the chronology is vague (this seems to be a
recurring problem for Dickens) but it appears to cover two or three
years. Chronology aside, this book is probably the strongest feat of
construction of fiction Early Dickens accomplished, and since it's
also the shortest actual novel among them, and considerably better
than the "Tales" in <Sketches>, you should just go read, if you wish.
Be prepared for the coincidences and melodrama you've probably heard
listed among the besetting vices of Early Dickens, try to weather the
persecutions of the opening chapters (the grimness there makes most of
Dickens look Pollyannaish), if you're intolerant of sentiment try to
weather that too (Chesterton: "the unhappy passages which are good
and the happy passages which are atrocious"), and prepare for the
near-wizardry with which the final chapters tie the book up.

0 (August) <Nicholas Nickleby>, aka <The Life and Adventures of
Nicholas Nickleby>, 1838-1839, first compiled as such 1839

Dickens's third novel came from the same publishers as his first, and
on the same independent serialisation plan. (Later, <Martin
Chuzzlewit>, <Dombey and Son>, <David Copperfield>, <Bleak House>,
<Little Dorrit>, <Our Mutual Friend>, and <The Mystery of Edwin Drood>
also premiered this way, though not all from the same publishers.)
The edition I read is again from Everyman's Library, this time
illustrated by 'Phiz', and again doesn't say what source text it
follows (but again I suspect a late one). The most complete title
appears to be <The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby,
Containing a Faithful Account of the Fortunes, Misfortunes, Uprisings,
Downfalls, and Complete Career of the Nickleby Family>. (But in fact,
though Dickens is far from clear about chronology, the story covers at
most a few years. As in the previous book, the setting is split
between London and the country, here extending all the way to
Yorkshire and Devonshire.)

I can't really recommend reading this book simultaneously with <Oliver
Twist>, even though that's how they were originally published. Doing
so only makes more obvious an annoying repetition. In each book,
multiple villains operate by a moral code which amounts to "Starving
other people to death is the highest good." While I suppose it's
possible there was really such a heresy being spread in England in the
1830s, so Dickens may here simply be engaging in reportage - and the
villains in question are in each book associated with that book's
propagandistic target, a workhouse in <Oliver> and a Yorkshire school
in <Nicholas> - I strongly suspect the real explanation is that he was
being lazy, or at least - this being Dickens, of whom the word "lazy"
is practically an oxymoron - economical of effort. Flipside, though:
if you do read them at once, you can at least compare how Dickens at
almost the same time wrote scenes of young women - Nancy in <Oliver>,
Kate in <Nicholas> - profoundly uncomfortable in unfamiliar
circumstances, and confronted from very different directions with the
moral implications of prostitution; which is some compensation.

Laziness (or whatever) is also how I'd explain the plague of weirdness
that afflicts most of this book's characters (and on which the
introduction by John Carey dwells). If you compare this approach to
Rowling's for handling of a "cast of thousands", I'd have to say
Rowling winds hands down. (But to be fair, I'm comparing a seventh
novel to a third here.) The book is rendered mildly surreal by the
mutable physical and mental disabilities that afflict way too many of
the characters, but only "The Baron of Grogzwig" in chapter 6 is
actually fantasy, of an anæmic, moralistic kind, driven by the
henpecked husband stereotype. (There's also a prophetic dream.)
Nicholas Nickleby, on the other hand, is thoroughly un-weird, being a
gentlemanly, scholarly, doughty, and above all honourable young man.
As Chesterton pointed out in an older introduction that Everyman
includes as an appendix, Nickleby represents Dickens doing for the
first time a conventional hero (in the mode of, for example, Walter
Scott's insipid heroes, or rather too many fantasy series'); well,
note also that many of his later books lack such heroes. The
resulting book demands all one's tolerance for Early Dickens to get
through, being rife with coincidences, sentiment, et cetera, but given
that tolerance, it's a good enough read. I defy, however, any claim
that it's a great novel.

(August) <Master Humphrey's Clock and A Child's History of England>,
1840-1853, first compiled as such between 1853 and 1958, skimmed
0 (August) <The Old Curiosity Shop>, 1840-1841, first compiled 1841,
started
Not read: <Barnaby Rudge>, 1841, first compiled 1841

For twenty months in 1840 and 1841, Dickens wrote an entire weekly
periodical, titled <Master Humphrey's Clock>; it also came out in a
monthly compilation, and the first volume collecting it appeared in
1840 (the other two in 1841). Two serials formed the *entire*
contents of all but seven or eight issues: <The Old Curiosity Shop> -
the book people clamored over at American docks, as mentioned in
Connie Willis's <Bellwether> - and <Barnaby Rudge>. Dickens in fact
later sought to suppress the remainder. The novels both appeared as
books in 1841, initially as volumes of <Master Humphrey's Clock> and
subsequently (still in 1841) under their own titles. The upshot:
these two novels occupy a middle position between the separately
serialised Dickens novels like <The Pickwick Papers> and the ones
serialised in more conventional periodicals like <Oliver Twist>.
<Master Humphrey's Clock>, that is, the non-novel material, is about a
fourth of a volume in "The Oxford Illustrated Dickens"; I started <The
Old Curiosity Shop> in the same edition. The original <Clock>
(including both novels) was illustrated by George Cattermole and
'Phiz', and this edition uses those illustrations.

<A Child's History of England> ran as a serial in <Household Words>,
then edited by Dickens, for pretty much all of 1851 to 1853, thus
overlapping with the entire (independent) publication run of <Bleak
House>. Since I was reading chronologically and with limited interest
in non-fiction anyway, I didn't read this, but did skim around some,
finding it a well-written and, to my eye, conventional history,
focused on war, politics, and trials, much as Tacitus had been many
centuries earlier, and about as disdainful of monarchs. It starts
with Phoenicians, Druids, and Julius Cæsar; for all practical
purposes it stops with 1688, showing that the impulse which leads high
school history classes to avoid connecting history with the present
day is no innovation. (Oxford's introducer, Derek Hudson, considers
it very *un*conventional, FWIW. The illustrations are by Marcus
Stone.)

<Master Humphrey's Clock> in the narrow sense is rooted in a weird
conceit. Dickens presents Humphrey as an old man crippled
(hunchbacked, I gather) since birth, whose main friends are 1) a deaf
man, 2) a jack of all trades and master of none, and 3) a retired
businessman; although friend #2 supposedly lives with him, he's also
supposedly alone for all but four hours per week (not counting his
barber and housekeeper as company, anyhow). In other words,
grotesquerie and eccentricity still reign supreme here. Anyway, those
weekly gatherings are devoted largely to storytelling, and the three
stories we get are set in the past. Neither the one in Elizabeth I's
time, nor that in Charles II's, is genuinely historical in character,
being rather ordinary melodramas; but the one in James I's day relies
on witch hunts for its plot, and is rather more cheerful. The
Elizabethan story (courtesy of friend #1) is set within a trivially
fantastical frame, being told by statues of Gog and Magog who come
alive at night; shades of <Puck of Pook's Hill>. The witch-hunt
story's cheerfulness derives from its being told by Pickwick, who
along with friends of his dominates the middle part of the "book".

Even though <The Old Curiosity Shop> only overlapped the material
nowadays printed as <Master Humphrey's Clock> for a few weeks, nobody
on the Web or in several books I consulted explains how they
interlaced; I finally had to go consult a Penguin edition. To save
any other reader the same trouble, I'll note here that the first
installment, in what's now treated as "chapter II" of the <Clock>, is
chapter I of the novel; the second, ending "chapter IV" of the
<Clock>, is chapter II of the novel; the third, ending "chapter V" of
the <Clock>, is chapters III and IV of the novel. Thus the continuous
run of the novel, which interrupts "chapter VI" of the <Clock>, begins
with chapter V of the novel, *not* chapter IX as per Hudson, p. vi of
<Master Humphrey's Clock and A Child's History of England>. Well,
but: This seems to mean very unequal issues of the <Clock>, so I'm
not as confident in it as I'd like to be. It would be very nice
indeed if some Dickens expert would *look* at all the first printings
and dump the results onto the Web once and for all, wouldn't it?

Anyhow. After all that foofaraw, I found that <The Old Curiosity
Shop> finally strained *my* tolerance for Early Dickens beyond its
utmost, and took rather more time off than I had since starting.
Ultimately I gave up, at least for the time being.

Sarah Dunant
$ (April or May) <Birth Marks>, 1992?, skimmed

Actually, I read all of this except a middle chunk that got nastier
than I wanted to deal with.

I've been curious about Dunant's historical novels lately, and as is
my wont, have sought her earlier books first, which hasn't been easy.
(August: Oops. The Seattle Public Library actually owns about half
of them, but that ol' cloud o' holds has obscured this fact... And:)
Misled by copyright dates on the books I examined (but see Harrison in
the fantasy post), I *thought* this her first novel; Wikipedia turns
out to support the next most plausible hypothesis, based on the
ordering of "Other Books by" lists, by which this would be her
*second* novel, if you count neither of two collaborative titles
published as by Peter Dunant. Wikipedia also claims a 1991 date for
this book, on which I have no grounds for an opinion; 1992 is merely
the copyright date on the (US-printed) copy I looked at.

Anyway, it's a moderately conventional noir-ish P.I. mystery, set in
modern Britain and France, the first of three with the same
narrator/protagonist, Hannah Wolfe. This character mocks noir
conventions even while, to some extent, hewing to them; and there's a
sustained meditation woven through the book on forms of, and desires
for, motherhood; the book's well superior to Grafton's described
below. But there's no reason to expect the shape of Dunant's future
career.

Joe Bernstein

unread,
Oct 19, 2007, 12:27:54 AM10/19/07
to
READ FOR THE FIRST TIME: OTHER FICTION - continued

George Eliot
(June-July) <Scenes of Clerical Life>, 1857

Three long stories. "The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton",
Eliot's first fiction, includes a sort of manifesto in its Chapter V:
it urges the importance (perhaps even superiority) of fiction with
outwardly unremarkable protagonists. "Mr Gilfil's Love-Story" and
"Janet's Repentance" followed. Each was serialised in <Blackwood's
Edinburgh Magazine>, respectively for two, four, and five months of
1857 (omitting only December); the edition I read represents mostly
the first book edition of the following year. Formally, in their
simple plots and restricted casts of characters, the first two are
novellas, but bulked enough by the omniscient narrator's descriptions
and ruminations that word counts might disagree; the third, I think,
is both formally and by size a short novel. All were based on real
people (and some of them complained), of the author's youthful
neighbourhood, in Warwickshire about twenty miles east of Birmingham.
Eliot poses as a man not only in pen name but also, here, through a
narrative voice which the final story explicitly represents as that of
a man of around her own age, who becomes a trivial character.

In all three stories, despite the title's final word, death features
prominently. "Amos Barton" is a "tragedy" in the common sense, though
not, I think, the literary, and there's little more I can say without
spoilers; it's set mostly in 1837. In the other stories this life
remains very much a vale of tears, but the focus is instead on
redemption; I like these more hopeful stories better. "Mr Gilfil's
Love-Story" concerns a love triangle in 1788; a peroration at its end,
apparently added at the publisher's behest, anticipates my own
self-image, in a way more objective than comfortable, long before my
birth. "Janet's Repentance" involves an unhappy wife, a
self-sacrificing minister, and their relations through church
politics, charity, and friendship, around 1832; it's the most complex
not only in plot, but also morally, and I think it much the richest of
the three.

"Mr Gilfil's Love-Story" is the only one to have been filmed, in 1920,
per the IMDB, which also asserts that all seven of Eliot's later
novels have been, um, rendered visual, but two - <Felix Holt> and
<Romola> - likewise only in the silent era. (The DVD of <Broken
Blossoms> includes clips from <Romola>; the link is Lillian Gish.)
I'm mildly surprised that at a time when <Brokeback Mountain>, <The
Last Mimzy>, and <Away from Her> severally reveal filmmakers grasping
that short fiction is easier than novels to turn into movies, none of
these <Scenes> is being considered - but someone is actually trying to
boil down <Middlemarch> to feature length for the first time! Only
<Silas Marner> has hit the big screen in the past seventy years, and
only under a different title, but TV - mainly the BBC - has been
fairly good to Eliot, <Scenes> aside: productions of <Adam Bede> and
<Daniel Deronda>, two of <Middlemarch>, and three each of <Silas
Marner> and <The Mill on the Floss>. (For more on these, see the list
of movies below.) This is probably a function of the BBC's famous
stodginess. Eliot's plots tend to complexity, she depicts few balls,
and in the book at hand there is only one great house, which is
undergoing renovations, hence far from splendid - so the lack of
Hollywood versions is a limited surprise. As for these stories, well,
I suspect the problem is this: they're far too Christian to find
their natural audience on channels like Lifetime and Oxygen, but Eliot
was far too notoriously an apostate for the Christian channels to pick
them up.

<Middlemarch> is generally acclaimed as one of the greatest novels in
English, but is widely un- or under-appreciated; this has led to a
standard diagnosis of its detractors, which is, essentially,
childishness. (At least, I *think* I've seen this elsewhere than in
Virginia Woolf's famous comment that it's "one of the few English
novels for grown-ups".) Both one's æsthetic and one's personality
must be fully adult to value <Middlemarch> as one ought, so the story
goes. Well, I've never valued <Middlemarch> as one ought - not even,
as with such Thomas Hardy novels as I've read, coupled with a silent
sigh of relief that *that's* over with. (OK, I admit it: in the case
of <Jude the Obscure> the sigh was neither silent nor lacking in
profanity...) Indeed, I also once managed to read <Silas Marner>
without liking Eliot any better (but all I remember of that book is
that it does *so* differ from <The Vicar of Wakefield>, because it has
a different title; no, I didn't like Goldsmith either). So I wondered
whether approaching her in my preferred way, chronologically, would
teach me to appreciate her, or whether I must simply resign myself to
permanent infantilism. Well, we'll see; I'm in no hurry now to read
<Adam Bede>, let alone <The Mill on the Floss> whose ending a
reference book gave away; but in two of these stories I did find much
to like.

James Bernard Frost
(May) <World Leader Pretend>, 2007, skimmed

This book is shelved as science fiction in Seattle's libraries. But
the only things in it that clearly separate its fictional world from
the real world, near as I can tell, are actually auctorial mistakes.
(For example, he gets the date of a D&D book wrong, and no, there
isn't a more convincingly spec-ficnal mistake than that.) <World
Leader Pretend> *is* weird for the fun of it, in that by now tiresome
postmodern way, but it isn't the New Weird! Four main characters are
highlighted on the back cover of the trade paperback I borrowed: one
is a Bangkok street kid, which makes her by far the most ordinary of
the four; another is rich and paralysed; one is in Antarctica; and the
fourth is a former dot-com millionaire. I twice bailed after spending
too much time around this fourth character's insane twin sister, in
particular, on the second attempt, after discovering the Childhood
Sexual Abuse Explanation for her madness. Sigh. (To be strictly
fair, Frost proffers it as a *possible* explanation.) Anyway, then,
the book's "science fiction" status seems to come from its being about
computer games of a sort that already exist, and perhaps from its
having the paralysed character use technologies that paralysed people
(at least, ones as wealthy as he) already use.

So, um, yeah. The book is largely about the four characters and
others interacting in a massively multi-player online game called The
Realm, which is essentially <Civilization> writ large; it tells us
enough about the first three's offline lives to make sense of them,
and rather more about the twins. Frost has as an overt purpose
describing the education of Character #4 in human wisdom; his implied
covert purpose is to explain that human contact over the nets is more
innocent, and capable of more reality and good, than usually
understood. Obviously I'm predisposed to buy this argument, but I
don't see how weirdness makes it more believable.

Stella Gibbons
(June) <Cold Comfort Farm>, 1932, started
(June) <The Gentle Powers> (apparently aka <Westwood>), 1946

As a general rule, to borrow any particular DVD from the Seattle
Public Library you must place a hold. However, at any given time
perhaps .1-5% of the DVDs the library owns are actually shelved, and
one day this portion included the 1995 movie of <Cold Comfort Farm>.
While the movie didn't much delight me (no more the book's opening),
it did make me curious about the author, who seemed to have written
for adults a sort of book usually found only for children.

The Seattle Public Library's only other book by Gibbons is <The Gentle
Powers>. This is set across a year late in World War II (probably
1943-44), mostly in London (though it ends elsewhere). As it opens,
Hilda Wilson is expecting a visit from her best friend, Margaret
Steggles. Hilda is a pretty, vivacious, conventional young woman, and
conventionally enough, her friend is none of these things. The book's
third-person POV follows various characters, generally one at a time,
but fundamentally, this is the bildungsroman of plain, sensitive,
idealistic Margaret, who comes to London from the provinces and falls
in, largely through her own deliberate efforts, with a rather mingy
artistic crowd, consisting of one lofty playwright, his painter
son-in-law, and their various relations, friends, and servants.
Actually, it's primarily through their servants that Margaret comes to
know them, and I'm impressed by the way the book managed to rouse my
interest in whether this made sense, class-wise, or not, given my own
fundamental uninterest in the British class system. At any rate, the
book is a far more palatable, rather plainer written and rather less
despairing, study of a young woman's not getting married than either
of the Elizabeth Bowen novels described above, and I can recommend it
to anyone who finds this description interesting.

Oddly, several of Gibbons's titles sound like fantasy; these include,
besides the present volume, arguably <The Woods in Winter>, less
arguably <The Snow Woman>, and rather definitely <The Shadow of a
Sorcerer>. I don't know whether any of those actually are spec-ficnal
(though she has no entry in the Clute encyclopædiæ), but I can
assert flatly that <The Gentle Powers> is not.

Sue Grafton
0$ (July) <'A' Is for Alibi>, 1982

Eh. I'd been curious about this series for a long time (two other
volumes are stored where my copy of this one is), but it was clearly a
mistake. I figured out at least some of the mystery less than halfway
through, and after I'd read this book, I extrapolated from its body
count, the number of volumes in the series (#19, the last in the used
bookstore in question, is set just six years later than #1), and the
fact that none of those I examined *lacked* a dead body in the back
cover copy - from all this I extrapolated that Kinsey Millhone has to
solve the equivalent of the murder rate of at least one moderate-sized
city, all by her lonesome. Sheesh, and they call space colonies
implausible!

In case anyone cares, this is yer typical PI solving a murder mystery
noir, variant "the PI's a woman so of course she falls for someone
Bad" (and this is not a spoiler; there are several Bad men, and they
don't have a monopoly on crime in the book). What makes it mildly
different is that the case she starts with is eight years cold. The
main entertainment value I found in it was the sheer weirdness of
Millhone's voice, which I could understand as contemporary, but which
recounts detection work of the pre-Internet era - y'know, physically
going to government offices for public records, and like that? So
that provided some cognitive dissonance with which to keep going. But
I doubt I'll read any of the much longer volumes that followed this
one.

Elizabeth Inchbald
(May) <Lovers' Vows>, 1798

A play, in five short acts, loosely adapted from <Das Kind der Liebe>,
German, 1791, by August Friedrich Ferdinand von Kotzebue. A family
melodrama, silly but readable. It's the play that figures prominently
in Austen's <Mansfield Park>, hence included in the Norton Critical
Edition of that novel, and hence, in turn, read by me, somewhat before
I re-read the novel.

Inchbald's <A Simple Story>, 1791, is one of those Austen predecessors
I mentioned lacking access to. (It's really frustrating that
Charlotte Lennox's <The Female Quixote>, 1752, is another, my copy
being in storage; AIUI that book could be as relevant to the history
of fantasy as is its acknowledged predecessor.) Weeks before this
posting I managed to buy a copy, but had way too many library books
piled up to read first, so no discussion here.

Rachel Kadish
(July) <Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story>, 2006

The title refers to the opening line of <Anna Karenina> (not one of
the Tolstoy books I've read). Since I've always felt betrayed by
Dostoevsky's *not* having written the book <The Brothers Karamazov>
supposedly prologued, I could hardly resist. I'm tolerably sure that
"Tolstoy lied" is the author's premise, but it's certainly her first
person protagonist/narrator's - the core of the research she wants to
work on *after* she gets tenure.

I picked this book up to read a little before bed, and put it down at
about 4:30 am. Oops. I like it a lot - I expect, sometime when I
have money, to look for a copy to buy - but I'm not as confident as
I'd wish to be about that liking. The setup: Our Heroine is an
assistant professor of English Literature in Manhattan (seemingly
NYU); early in her tenure year, she falls in love. The tenure plot,
the romance, and her work with a graduate student she's advising play
off each other not (primarily) at the plot level, but thematically,
and there they do so intricately. I'll have to revise this note
whenever I decide whether I believe the book instantiates its
narrator's thesis, that it is possible and worthwhile to write about
happiness.

(Sigh. I suppose I should clarify that the author is not a professor,
at least to judge by her author bio. I know that many many mainstream
novels are written by professors of English, and that way too many of
*those* also *star* professors of English. In this case, however,
Kadish gets at least three major things by using this trope: one, a
strong linkage between the stated theme and the character's life; two,
the whole tenure plot, with all the attendant academic politics; and
three, the nearly in loco parentis role of dissertation adviser with
which to make the heroine think about love, parenthood, and such
things.)

(July-August) <From a Sealed Room>, ?1996-1998, first compiled as such
1998

The cover and spine give the title as <From A Sealed Room>, probably
because in the font used, the A is gorgeous, and integral to the cover
design. The copyright page says some of the book previously appeared
in <Bomb>, but not when; the only online table of contents for that
journal containing Kadish's name is dated 1996.

Anyway. I wanted to see if my disclaimer was right; and indeed,
Kadish's first novel is *not* about any English professors. The first
part is set in Jerusalem in 1990 (the title's "sealed room" resulted
from the Scud attacks during the Gulf War), and seen from the third
person POV of Tami Shachar, wife, mother, and above all daughter, who
seems incapable of happiness, not least thanks to having been raised,
after her father's death, by a scintillating, charming mother with no
capacity for comfort. The rest is set in 1993, largely in Jerusalem,
and has two narrators. Shifra Feldstein, whose parts are in italics,
survived Dachau, and is not sane [a]; even before the Holocaust, her
grip was at least shaky, thanks largely to cold, scheming parents with
no capacity for comfort. The main narrator, Maya, a distant cousin of
Tami's whose surname we never learn, is an American college student
studying abroad, who allows a man seemingly constructed from a
checklist of "Signs of an Abuser" to sweep her off her feet, partly
because his passionate need for her addresses her rejection, after her
father's departure, by a judgementally activist mother with no
capacity for comfort. All three POV characters can be difficult to
read: Tami is bitter, Shifra lyrical and burning, and Maya muffled,
not affectless but disturbingly close.

So: Kadish's main concern here is not with domestic violence, or the
Holocaust, or the discussions of peace in "the Middle East" that were
so prevalent in 1993, or even Tami's <New Yorker>-style middle-aged
miseries. It is with the burden of the past, and especially the past
as instantiated by parents, or mothers. (To be fair, the Holocaust
and the "peace process" both get Kadish's attention to the extent that
they also instantiate the past as burden.) Shifra charges Maya, as
both mothers charge their daughters, with the urgent need to "set the
past at rest". Maya's dangerous boyfriend is more an example of the
past's dangers than a real obstacle in his own right. In the middle
three parts, Maya's voice veers between past and present tenses; when
in the final part she adds the future tense to the mix, I'm unsure
which of her concluding pages are meant to be story, prophecy, or
wishful thinking.

Elizabeth Bowen's first two novels made perfect sense to me as coming
from the same author; Jane Austen's reversals (see the re-reading
post) do too. I still don't know whether <Tolstoy Lied> instantiates
the premise that happy families *aren't* all alike, and therefore are
worth writing about, but <From a Sealed Room> certainly goes some way
towards instantiating the *other* possible meaning of "Tolstoy lied",
a premise that unhappy families *are* all alike. I didn't mention
that an unhappy family in <Tolstoy Lied> is led by a sternly religious
father with no capacity for comfort, either. But to be quite fair I
should note that Maya's madman *does* have that capacity, vestigially;
were he to reach his logical conclusion, he would certainly, after
killing his beloved, stroke her cheek and croon to her. Does
*alikeness* make unhappy families worth writing about, and so justify
<From a Sealed Room> ? I've suggested a way to reconcile Rachel
Kadish's first two novels with each other, but it's inherently
self-contradictory, and I just don't get it; perhaps it's simpler to
note the long gap between the books.

[a] Shifra's narrative is problematic, politically: I don't know
enough about the range of mental illnesses to justify my unhappiness
with her madness, but I'm quite sure that the form it takes will lack
delight for at least some non-Americans.

Terry Moore
* (October) <Child of Rage>, 2000-2001
* (October) <Flower to Flame>, 2002-2003

Two more volumes in my ongoing effort to collect <Strangers in
Paradise>, a comic-book melodrama that's just about as extreme in plot
as it can be *without* being spec-ficnal (to say that organised crime
is heavily involved is at once true, misleading in several ways, and
tamer than the actual weirdness). But it somehow manages to keep
believable characters at the centre of its outlandish situations. By
the time you read this, <Strangers>, which is its author's main claim
to fame in the way common to independent books I like [b], will have
ended. Please, nobody tell me how.

I don't remember either of these volumes as especially revelatory
(though there is one thing that surprised me, which it would be a
spoiler to explain).

[b] Jeff Smith and <Bone>, also now ended; Martin Wagner and
<Hepcats>, abandoned; Mark Oakley and <Thieves and Kings>, continuing,
last I heard.

(September) <Brave New World>, 2001-2002

Oddly, given that I'd already read two of the four issues this volume
contains, this was more revelatory. Unfortunately, this is about
where the Seattle Public Library's collection of <Strangers in
Paradise> stops. Sigh.

Tom Perrotta
* (May) <Little Children>, 2004, lightly skimmed

Musical beds in the suburbs, mixed with the Drama and Excitement of A
Child Molester In Our Midst, Eeeeek. Yawn. Well, $2 for a used
paperback was cheaper than seeing the movie would have been in this
town, and I'd been mildly interested in the movie (OK, OK, mainly
because it has Jennifer Connelly in it), so I guess this wasn't a
complete loss.

Michael Pye
(February) <The Drowning Room>, 1995

This book is far enough into stylistic oddity that it can be read by
readers of literary spec-fic even though there is, in the end (minor
spoiler), nothing truly spec-ficnal about it. It's a rich evocation
of the life of Grietje Reyniers, probably the most interesting single
person of her time and place, to the mid-1640s; since it's the only
novel known to me set (partly) *in* that time and place - Nieuw
Nederlandt under Governor Willem Kieft, of special interest to me as
mentioned in the fantasy post - I ate it up. The author makes it
clear that he's inventing much of Reyniers' story (essentially, the
entire 2/3rds of the book that precedes the New World part has no
known evidence to back it), but I find nothing implausible; we do know
from Nieuw Nederlandt records that Reyniers really was what authors of
the past two decades have been so desperate to find, a colourful and
independent woman in pre-modern times. Pye's meditative tone and
choice of structure (much of the book is flashbacks, told by Reyniers
for reasons that only gradually become clear) prevent this colour from
becoming garish, and humanise the woman behind some of the strangest
stories of earliest New York. Bottom line: I'm biased by the
setting, but I still *think* I can recommend this to literary-minded
spec-fic readers.

(Any authors reading this take note: Reyniers was not the *only*
interesting person in that setting, and Pye doesn't even mention
another of them, Jan Jansen Damen, a Pillar of Society with a violent
streak and lots of conflict at home, inter alia over the genocidal
wars on the Indians he helped plot in the 1640s.)

Darieck Scott
(July) <Traitor to the Race>, 1995

A book by a black gay man with (I think) a white lover, whose main POV
character is a black gay man with a white lover. Said lover also gets
significant amounts of POV time (and there are also substantial
third-person chunks). One index to the differences between the lovers
is that sections told in first person by the black one, Kenneth
Gabriel, are headed "Kenneth Watches", while those told in first
person by the white one are headed "The Adventures of Evan Marcialis".
That said, the book begins and ends with a different POV, one who can
tell us more than they about the book's central concern - the rape and
murder of Kenneth's cousin when he (yes, *he*) happens upon, and thus
interferes with, a gang rape - but who understands, I think, less.
Anyway, Scott seems to use this incident to bring together in one
book's worth of time, a few weeks perhaps, the reflections on race and
sexuality that Kenneth (and to a lesser extent Evan) might otherwise
have taken years to come up with; to make the most of the situation
summed up in hatred by the title.

On the acknowledgements page of his much later <Hex: A Novel of Love
Spells>, discussed in the fantasy post, Scott describes himself as "a
committed fantasist". If this commitment can be seen here, it's only
through identifying Scott further with Kenneth Gabriel. Both Kenneth
and Evan are actors, but Kenneth is the one who initiates most of
their role-playing "Games", which are generally both actorly and
sexual exercises, and the one who spends much of his time (he works a
lot less than Evan) "inhabit"ing what he imagines about those he sees
around town. The increasing prominence of Kenneth's "inhabitation" as
the book goes on does much to mute the political in it and emphasise
the artistic. Well, whether or not "committed fantasist" makes sense,
at least the word "committed" is by itself easier to defend: the two
books, twelve years apart, name the same person in ways that I see as
identifying him as Scott's lover.[1]

Like other books in this post, this one is set in Manhattan, but over
three centuries later, essentially in the then-present.

Jo Walton
Nominee, 2001, and winner, 2002 John W. Campbell Awards for Best New
Writer

(July and September) <Farthing>, 2006
Nominee, 2007 Campbell Award, Nebula Award for Novel, and Sidewise
Award for Long-Form

OK, fair's fair: those lists of award nominees posted at Elliott Bay
*did* make me aware of this one. (And to be even fairer, I'll note
that when I established that my branch library actually had a copy on
hand, I preserved that astonishing state of affairs by using the hold
system.)

I was taken aback to discover that Walton's newest book was not only
an alternate history - and one with that theme so peculiarly
unappealing to me, "The Third Reich survives" [c] - but also a murder
mystery. So on first approach I stopped very early and skimmed a
little towards the end; then put the book aside for a month.

Well, I was better prepared on the second try, but I still wish I
hadn't read this back to back with <Greywalker>. Walton's fifth novel
is not only an alternate history and a murder mystery; it's also a
cautionary tale, with rather more than a hint of "It can happen here"
to it. It is set in various parts of southern England, especially the
eponymous manor house, scene of the murder (of the man who negotiated
peace with Germany in 1941, Minister of Education in the outgoing
Conservative government); it covers the days 5th to 10th May, 1949.
(Walton should probably have looked at a calendar for 1949 before
dating it so precisely, though; the 7th of May was not in fact a
Monday that year.) The two POV characters are (3rd person) the
inspector from Scotland Yard, and (1st person) Lucy Kahn, née
Eversley, the scandalously married daughter of the Viscount whose
house Farthing is.

In her LiveJournal account (URL below), Walton refers to two sequels,
neither of which I've yet seen, and to the final book as having a
"happy ending". She also cites as common the question how any happy
ending could be possible; indeed! By putting the peace in mid-1941,
before the US entered the war and before Hitler broke with Stalin,
Walton succeeds in utterly recasting the shape of mid-century
politics. James Nicoll recently posted here a pointer to an essay
(URL below) about how poor the world was in 1900; well, the people
running major countries in <Farthing> are people who vehemently
disapprove of every change since that date, if they're even prepared
to countenance the *nineteenth* century. I don't see how you can get
there - a happy ending - from here - <Farthing>.

But I also don't see how you can get there - <Farthing> - from here -
our real world. I don't know whether the British political system is
so set up that a single assassination could really turn it upside
down; I do know that assassinations have *consistently* failed to
wreck the American system (see, in particular, events in the 1860s and
the 1960s-70s), and that Canadian governments get turned out of office
like clockwork every two decades or so over corruption. Maybe I'm
just naïve and complacent, but seems to me the people running the US
government for at least the past six years are every bit as ruthless
as the people depicted in <Farthing>, and every bit as interested in
becoming Evil Overlords, and they have signally failed to get anywhere
near so close to their goal. So should I stop looking in this book
for references to my own arrogant land, and instead read it as an
attack on current trends in the politics of Canada - where, I think,
it was written - or the UK - Walton's home country? I actually spent
some time trying to figure out how many countries *have* discarded
deep-seated democratic or republican institutions for dictatorship,
and frankly, the list doesn't strike me as all that long. (Rome; very
arguably Germany; I'm not sure whether it's happened in Dutch history;
you could make the claim for some South American countries, though not
Mexico ... ).

I dunno. I owe Ms. Walton a lot for informing me, back when the
writing she was best known for was either gaming materials or her
excellent posts right here, of the Martin Pippin books by Eleanor
Farjeon. And this is a book eminently worth reading - even though I
purposely wrecked it for myself as a mystery, and even though I don't
like its alt-hist scenario - for its characterisation of a woman who's
smarter than she thinks, and a man who's less upright than he does;
for its depiction of an England gone to seed; even for making me argue
with it. But it has not persuaded me of the thesis many of the
blurbists claim it has; while I'm prepared to buy quite a few "It can
happen here" arguments, I don't buy this one.

[c] Despite my name, all branches of Judaism agree with me that I'm
not a Jew. However, Nazis disagree. And I learned fairly early that
Israel's Law of the Return does not apply to people like me.
Concretely, the events in <Farthing> *wouldn't* have happened to my
parents when they lived in England in the late 1950s and early 1960s,
because my parents never moved in such rarefied political circles as
the otherwise similar, though earlier, couple in the book, but I don't
find that especially reassuring.

<http://papersky.livejournal.com>, seen (much later than the first
time) October 8, 2007; I didn't look up all of the particular
relevant entries, but one is around July 8, 2007, and the others
should be near it
<http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/08/slouching-tow-1.html>, seen,
for the second time, October 12, 2007

Louis Zara
(February) <Blessed Is the Land>, 1954, skimmed

An origin myth for New York Jews, somewhat turgid; I found it
thoroughly conservative, but a Jew reading in the 1950s might not have
(the narrator/protagonist, for example, has lovers not only outside
his faith but outside his race). Also, though it took me a while to
sort this out, it starts rather later than 1640. I found no obvious
historical flaws in what I did read: when I say "origin myth" I'm
referring to the fictional details, but it's well established that New
York's first Jews did come from Brazil, as depicted here.

Movies that would, if books, fit in this post, are of course far more
numerous than books:

<Broken Blossoms>, 1919, started (two different copies became
unplayable in roughly the same part of the movie, and I was told
that one of those had only been checked out four times, so my guess
is that the DVDs were mismade);
<Grand Hotel>, 1932;
<Footlight Parade>, 1933;
<42nd Street>, 1933 (at last);
<Dames>, 1934 (in which Joan Blondell got top billing, way too few
spoken lines, and, I'm afraid, way too many sung ones; now I know
why she spoke, rather than sang, "Forgotten Man"; sometimes
considered part of the <Gold Diggers> series, on which see the
series post, but shares fewer themes and cast members with the two
so-titled movies in these posts than they do with each other);
<Gold Diggers of 1935>, 1935;
* <The Awful Truth>, 1937;
<Shall We Dance>, 1937 (sigh; if any of the Astaire-Rogers movies I'd
seen before made me cringe anywhere near so many times, memory has
mercifully blotted it out);
<Ups and Downs>, 1937 (a rather silly short, but rewarding for the
opportunity to see June Allyson at the age her character in <Good
News> is supposed to be);
<The Ghost Ship>, 1943;
arguably <The Leopard Man>, 1943 (has one possibly-fantastic element,
which it'd be a spoiler to name, but which I see as instead
cinematic convention);
<Stormy Weather>, 1943;
<State Fair>, 1945;
<Good News>, 1947 (easily the best of these musicals);
<New Orleans>, 1947 (except, perhaps, this one);
<Pinky>, 1949 (about which I have many, but conflicting, comments);
+ <Rashomon>, Japanese, 1950;
<The Lavender Hill Mob>, 1951;
<Lullaby of Broadway>, 1951;
<Call Me Madam>, 1953 (ah, *now* I know why Ethel Merman became a
household name!);
<Kiss Me Kate>, 1953;
<Pyaasa>, Hindi, 1957 (despite a poor transfer to DVD, and although
hardly equal to Satyajit Ray's contemporary Bengali movies, this is
a worthwhile social melodrama, and as an added bonus, unlike most
recent Indian musicals I've seen, has lyrics that *actually relate
to the plot* ! imagine that! oh, and if you do read the extremely
spoiler-heavy back of the DVD box, fear not; though it seems to
give away the entire plot, it doesn't);
<Lola>, French, 1961;
arguably <Fruit of Paradise>, Czech, 1969 (though indeed surreal, as
the box describes it, its fundamental story is fairly conventional
and does not strike me as fantasy; but I could be wrong);
<Goodbye, Columbus>, 1969 (which helped me decide against reading any
of Philip Roth's fiction anytime soon!);
<Half a Sixpence>, 1969 (a musical based on an H. G. Wells novel?
sign me up! only, oops, <Kipps> is Cod Leftist Wells, not at all
Visionary Wells; nearly as disappointing qua musical; but see
anonymous in the fantasy post for an arguable spec-fic connection
after all);
<The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie>, 1969 (imagine my surprise when, a
week or so later, I found Muriel Spark listed in the <Encyclopedia
of Fantasy>, though at least her book of this title isn't mentioned
there);
<1776>, 1972;

next an improbable string of British TV productions...

<The Brontës of Haworth>, 1974 (YTV, inadequately produced, and
though written by Christopher Fry, not as affecting as I'd
expected);
<Pennies from Heaven>, 1978 (not the Steve Martin movie, but its
source: the Ben Hoskins BBC miniseries - also, I think, ancestral
to both <Moulin Rouge!> and <Dancer in the Dark>, both of which
are, thank God, far shorter than this, which is much the most
disturbing musical I've yet seen);
<Silas Marner>, 1985 (BBC, with Ben Kingsley; somewhat easier to bear
as movie than as book, or perhaps in middle age than in youth);
* <The Lady's Not for Burning>, 1987 (YTV again, and of course much
better work by Fry than the first in this sub-list);

<Why has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East?>, Korean, 1989 (which I now
regret not having seen on the big screen, for its ravishing
images);
<Days of Being Wild>, Cantonese, 1990 (disproving the maxim that the
first movie in a series is always the best, but that's no surprise
when <In the Mood for Love>'s the second);

and then the unbroken chain of recent years:

* <The Snapper>, 1993 (the IMDB says this was BBC);
<The Browning Version>, 1994;
<Middlemarch>, 1994 (BBC, specifically the miniseries starring Juliet
Aubrey and Douglas Hodge, although, of course, like all movies of
the 1990s with British performers it features both Rufus Sewell and
- well hidden - Judi Dench; oh, and yes, I do now see that
<Middlemarch> is among other things a manual of ways to ensure
happiness or un in marriage ... but am still unable to convince
myself that I should therefore re-read it);
<Cold Comfort Farm>, 1995 (BBC);
<Pride and Prejudice>, 1995 (this is the rightfully much-praised BBC
miniseries starring Jennifer Ehle, now high on my list of most-
lusted-after DVDs);
* <Bound>, 1996;
<Emma>, 1996;
* <Heavy>, 1996;
* <Ulee's Gold>, 1997;
* <White Lies>, 1997 (CBC);
<The Governess>, 1998 (one could argue, though not very well, that
this is really science fiction, no?);
* <Smoke Signals>, 1998;
* <Felicia's Journey>, 1999;
* <Illuminata>, 1999 (which I liked a lot);
* <Not One Less>, Mandarin, 1999;
<The Other>, Arabic (Egypt), 1999;
* <bread & tulips>, Italian, 2000;
<I Have Found It>, Tamil, 2000 (a moderately loose adaptation of
<Sense and Sensibility>, and a musical with rather sappier songs
than those in <Bride and Prejudice>, with which it shares a star,
Aishwarya Rai, as well as a source; so now I'm wondering whether
anyone's done a Bollywood, or other Indian, <Mansfield Park> ! -
though if so, Ms. Rai would have to play Mary Crawford or one of
the sisters, which might be hard for all concerned...);
* <inspiración>, Spanish, 2001;
<Me Without You>, 2001 (wow);
* <All the Real Girls>, 2002;
not very arguably <Bollywood/Hollywood>, 2002 (there are ghosts, and a
"levitation accident", but I'm pretty sure both are to be taken as,
well, maya; oh, and though the dialogue is in fact mostly in
English - I've no idea how much of that dubbed - the songs - mostly
or entirely dubbed - are mostly in Hindi, and not subtitled on the
"fullscreen" version of the DVD);
* <Far from Heaven>, 2002;
<The Hours>, 2002;
* <How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days>, 2002;
* <Insomnia>, 2002;
* <Alex & Emma>, 2003 (about a book considerably worse than *any*
other book mentioned in these posts);
* <Casa de los Babys>, 2003;
* <Mystic River>, 2003;
arguably * <The Saddest Music in the World>, 2003 (refers directly to
<Footlight Parade>; though it feels like fantasy or at least Weird
Science to me, I find no genuine novum);
<chehraa>, Hindi, 2004;
<A Good Woman>, 2004 (an adaptation of Oscar Wilde's <Lady
Windermere's Fan>);
arguably <House of Flying Daggers>, Mandarin, 2004 (I actually
re-watched a scene to catch the commentary track and find out the
intent of radically changing weather in that scene; turns out the
weather they were shooting under changed and they rolled with it,
so *that* doesn't make it fantasy, and if I called it a fantasy
just because of the ærial combat, I'd have to call, say, <Good
News> a fantasy just because it's a musical);
<Melinda and Melinda>, 2004 (oops, stopped avoiding Woody Allen movies
too soon);
<Sideways>, 2004;
<The Syrian Bride>, Arabic (Golan Heights), 2004;
<Brokeback Mountain>, 2005;
<The 40-Year-Old Virgin>, 2005 (further evidence for Seattle's
nickname "Sodom on the Sound" : the *library* here bought the
[interminable] *un*rated version of this!);
<Fun with Dick and Jane>, 2005;
<rumor has it...>, 2005;
<The Upside of Anger>, 2005;
<Walk the Line>, 2005;
<Akeelah and the Bee>, 2006;
+ <Away from Her>, 2006 (how good to live near a Landmark discount
house!);
<Clerks II>, 2006 (sigh);
+ <The Queen>, 2006;
<Step Up>, 2006;
+ <The Valet>, French, 2006;
+ <Waitress>, 2007.

Some movies aren't listed here because so listing them would be a
spoiler; each occupies, for much of its length, the realm of Todorov's
fantastic, and derives much of its strength therefrom. See the
re-reading post for a list of these.

See *also*, in the re-reading post, *actual* re-viewings: <Gold
Diggers of 1933>, 1933; <The Thin Man>, 1934; <Stage Door>, 1937;
<Children of Paradise>, 1945; <Sabrina>, 1954; <West Side Story>,
1961; arguably <Jesus Christ Superstar>, 1973; <Where the Heart Is>,
1990; <Career Opportunities>, 1991; <Rambling Rose>, 1991; <The Scent
of Green Papaya>, 1993; <The Wedding Banquet>, 1993; <Swingers>, 1996;
<Fools Rush In>, 1997; <all I wanna do>, 1998; <Shakespeare in Love>,
1998; <Cruel Intentions>, 1999; <The Road Home>, 1999; <Bring It On>,
2000; <Gladiator>, 2000; <Save the Last Dance>, 2000; <Spring
Forward>, 2000; <Blue Crush>, 2002; <Pride and Prejudice>, 2005;
<Rent>, 2005; <Shopgirl>, 2005; <Take the Lead>, 2006.

Joe Bernstein

unread,
Oct 19, 2007, 12:36:57 AM10/19/07
to
SERIES

I should remind the reader that this post concerns only series in
which I re-read or re-viewed at least one work, *and* read or viewed
for the first time at least one work. So see also, in the fantasy
post, Alexander, arguably Baker, Bear, Brennan, Bujold, Carey,
Cast, Cook, Dalkey, Davidson, Douglas, Douglass, Drake, Duncan,
incidentally Harrison, Hemingway, Hines, Holdstock, Hoyt, Irvine,
arguably Keck, Lee, Monette, arguably Christopher Moore, Moira Moore,
Palmatier, Paolini, Ray, Richardson, Rowling, Rydill, Sabin,
Swainston, Valente, Waugh, Wright, and Zambreno; in the science
fiction post, Asaro, Bear, arguably Mitchell, Rusch, Varley, and
Westerfeld; in the children's fiction post, Alcott, Montgomery, and
Wilder (which means, the whole post); and in the other fiction post,
Dickens, Dunant, Grafton, Terry Moore, and Walton. There are also
series books in the re-reading post, mostly without comments, by
Bujold, Holdstock, Longyear, McCaffrey, McKillip, Stasheff, Stevermer,
and Voigt. In addition, on the basis of series that consist entirely
of short fiction, or include at most one full book, see in the fantasy
post, Bear (again) and Howard (arguably also Spenser); in the science
fiction post, Campbell, Doctorow, arguably Eskridge, and Sterling; and
in the other fiction post, Eliot.

Louisa May Alcott
Re-read: <Little Women>, 1868, and * <Good Wives>, aka <Little Women,
Vol. 2>, 1869 (in most recent editions, these are presented as
"Part One" and "Part Two" of a single book, 0 <Little Women>,
1868-1869, first compiled as such arguably 1870, still as two
volumes, or by 1880, the date of the earliest one-volume edition
known to me)
Read for the first time: * (January) <Little Men>, 1871, and
(January) <Jo's Boys>, 1886

I first read <Little Women> at the one earlier time in my life when I
*did* keep a book log. In it I wrote that it was imperfect (as
contrasted with another book read around then) but that this struck me
as part of its point - Alcott being quite clear that perfection is for
God, not men. (For a somewhat similar case, see Amanda Hemingway in
the fantasy post.) Anyway, I wanted recently to read the rest of the
series; imagine my surprise on finding that of the four volumes, I had
already read two, not one. Oops. The other two seemed OK, but
Alcott's moralism came harsher in them, and the ending of <Jo's Boys>
(admittedly written near the end of her life), besides containing
something of a chilling presage of the idea of eugenics in Alcott's
strong endorsement of one character's decision never to marry, is
about as clear an auctorial abdication of responsibility as I've ever
seen. (Compare it with the ending of <An Old-Fashioned Girl> if you
wish to see how Alcott handled the same general impulse, her
impatience with marriages as expected happy endings, at different
stages of her life.)

Kage Baker
Nominee, 1999 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer

Re-read: * <Black Projects, White Knights>, 1997-2002, first compiled
as such 2002; * <On Company Time>, 1997-1999, first compiled as
such 1999; <Mother Aegypt>, 1999-2004, first compiled as such 2004;
0* <Mendoza in Hollywood>, 2000, aka <At the Edge of the West>;
<The Graveyard game>, 2001; 0 <The Anvil of the World>, 2003
Read for the first time: * (August) <Company Men>, 1999-2005, first
compiled as such 2005; (August) <Gods and Pawns>, 2001-2007, first
compiled as such 2007; o (August) <The Empress of Mars>, 2003;
(August) <The Machine's Child>, 2006; $ (September) "Maelstrom",
2007; $ (September) <The Sons of Heaven>, 2007, started;
(September) "Plotters and Shooters", 2007; $ (September) "The Ruby
Incomparable", 2007; o (September) <Rude Mechanicals>, 2007,
started
Not read: "The Unfortunate Gytt", 2005; "The Bad Machine", 2005;
"Where the Golden Apples Grow", 2006

"Son Observe the Time" nominee, 2000 Hugo Award for Novella; <The Anvil
of the World> nominee, 2005 Mythopoeic Award for Adult Literature;
<The Empress of Mars> nominee, 2004 Hugo and Nebula Awards for
Novella, and winner, 2004 Sturgeon Award

Coast dwellers aren't the only Americans ignorant of geography. When
I came to Seattle last August to scout jobs and housing, I found a
remaindered copy of <Black Projects, White Knights> at Elliott Bay,
and bought it, telling myself that since Baker is a West Coast writer,
it made sense for me to catch up on her writings while living on that
coast. (And yes, that means I first shipped it to Milwaukee, then
back to Seattle.) So I was surprised by how hard it was for me to get
at her books through the libraries, or even the bookstores, here;
silly me! Southern California is almost as far from Seattle as Fargo
is! But eventually, I pulled it off, sort of.

<On Company Time> contains <In the Garden of Iden>, 1997, and <Sky
Coyote>, 1999. <Company Men> contains <The Children of the Company>,
1999-2005, first compiled as such 2005 - which I suspect was all
written at once, except for (and after) the 1999-2001 stories it
contains - and <The Life of the World to Come>, 1999-2004, first
compiled as such 2004 - which was originally written as a novel, from
which the version of "Smart Alec" published in 1999 was an outtake.
The edition of <Gods and Pawns> I read is the trade edition, omitting
"The Bad Machine", which the limited edition contains (and which
previously appeared in <Asimov's>, but strangely, no local library
subscribes to that periodical - more bizarrely, the Science Fiction
Museum here *has* no library). <The Empress of Mars> was published
both in <Asimov's> and as a chapbook, but I read it online, at a URL
given below. <Rude Mechanicals> has been published as both a chapbook
and an audiobook; the latter is available free online, at a URL given
below, and that's how I started, um, experiencing it, as the only
audiobook in this set of posts.

This entry links two different series, because <Mother Aegypt>
contains stories belonging to each. But the only other link known to
me is their author.

The "Company" series, which I consider science fiction, includes the
entire contents of <Black Projects, White Knights>, <On Company Time>,
<Company Men>, <Mendoza in Hollywood>, <The Graveyard game>, <The
Empress of Mars>, <Gods and Pawns> (either edition), <The Machine's
Child>, <Rude Mechanicals>, and <The Sons of Heaven>, as well as
"Mother Aegypt", in the volume of the same title, and several
uncollected stories - "The Unfortunate Gytt", "Where the Golden Apples
Grow", "Maelstrom", and "Plotters and Shooters". (I foresee at least
one more Company volume, collecting these stories, <Rude Mechanicals>,
<The Empress of Mars>, and possibly new stories. Or if Baker writes
several more stories, there could be two more volumes, each anchored
by one of the chapbooks; this would enable one to focus on Mars, or at
least on events off Earth.)

The other series is sometimes called after Troon, a city in the
setting, or Lord Ermenwyr, a character, but I know of no declared
title; it's fantasy, and includes "Desolation Rose" (1999), "The
Caravan from Troon" (2001), <The Anvil of the World>, "The Briscian
Saint" (2003), "Leaving His Cares Behind" (2004), and "The Ruby
Incomparable" (2007), as well as a novel Baker is currently working on
(per her website, URL below). Only the latest story is uncollected;
three of the others are in <Mother Aegypt>, and one became the first
part of <Anvil>.

Note that the majority of the stories in <Mother Aegypt>, as well as
all those in <Dark Mondays> (for which see the fantasy post), are
related to neither series. I haven't been able to determine the
series affiliation (or lack thereof) of three uncollected stories -
"The Ruined Vacation", 2001, "MacCreech's Dementia", 2003, and "The
Faithful", 2003 - but I consider it mildly improbable that any of
these belongs to either series.

THE COMPANY SERIES has a convoluted premise summarised at the front of
most of its books. In the 24th century, the discoverers of time
travel and immortality (and their investors) form the Dr. Zeus
Company. Time travel only allows going to the past and back again,
meaning you can't bring stuff from the past forward; immortality only
works by turning the individual into a cyborg, and only on small
children with heads of a particular shape, so you really can't sell
*it* either. The solution? Create a corps of cyborgs in the
Palæolithic, and set them to recruiting more; make them immortal,
indenture them to the Company, and use them to arrange the
preservation of lost artworks, species, and what have you, which the
Company can then cash in on come the 24th century. Many Company
stories have cyborg narrators; most are at least about the cyborgs.

Well, much of the previous paragraph is untrue or misleading, but that
form of the premise doesn't do much spoiling. Anyway, Baker uses it
for multifarious purposes. <In the Garden of Iden> is predominantly a
tragic romance, <The Graveyard game> almost a thriller; <Sky Coyote>
is satirical, like many of the stories and much of <The Life of the
World to Come>, while <Mendoza in Hollywood> lacks any dominant
affect. Baker uses stories set in the future to mock or attack
nannyism in many forms (including but not limited to political
correctness); she uses stories set in the past to have fun with
history. This makes her sound like a comic writer, but much of the
time, she's within hailing distance of noir; much of her humor is
gallows humor.

The most sustained exception I can think of, in the Company series, is
<The Empress of Mars>, a fairly goofy story of how a plucky woman
survives by *not* being a rugged individualist, set in Baker's future
history but otherwise only tangentially Company-related. It's a lot
more like <The Anvil of the World> than like most Company stories.
It's sequeled by "Where the Golden Apples Grow" and "Maelstrom", as
well as by the grimmest parts of <The Life of the World to Come>,
which book, Baker says in a 2006 interview with Nick Gevers, URL
below, is what prompted her to write <Empress> as backstory in the
first place. "Plotters and Shooters", set in orbit around Mars, has a
little bit of <Empress>'s goofiness amid much of the bleakness with
which Baker usually depicts Future Employment, but is otherwise
unconnected to the <Empress> set (and seems to involve no Company
personnel at all).

The publication in book form of the series, at least so far, seems
neatly to break in two: each half contains four novels plus a book of
shorter fiction. (Though the second half also includes three
chapbooks.) Also, in each half, the second novel (respectively <Sky
Coyote> and <The Children of the Company>) stands apart from the main
plot the other three trace. <In the Garden of Iden> and <Mendoza in
Hollywood> are narrated by the same character, the misanthropic cyborg
botanist Mendoza. The POVs of <The Graveyard game> search, in part,
for her. But the stories range much more widely. Stories that went
uncollected until <The Children of the Company>, in which Mendoza
doesn't figure, form most of the underpinning of <The Graveyard game>;
<The Life of the World to Come> focuses on the protagonist of most of
the future-set stories, and although he's linked to Mendoza, she's
offscreen for most of the book. (I can't say much of anything about
<The Machine's Child> or <The Sons of Heaven> without spoilers for
earlier volumes.) Baker has said in a 2005 interview with Cat
Eldridge (URL below) that she originally meant the Company series to
be Mendoza's story, but found that it provided too good a canvas to
limit it so; <The Sons of Heaven>'s blurbs borrow the phrase "story
arc" from comics to name what that book ends.

The series's unfolding has been *so* oddly non-linear that I suspect
there's a dissertation in it for someone. To take just one example,
"Son Observe the Time", set in San Francisco in 1906, appeared in
<Asimov's> for May 1999, and for the first time explicitly pointed out
the cyborgs' similarity to science-fictionalised fey. The next month,
"The Fourth Branch", set in Ireland in 507, appeared in <Amazing>, and
explicitly dismissed this linkage by showing us real science-
fictionalised fey. A coincidence of publishing history or a subtle
game with readers' thoughts? But in either a "series order" reading
or their actual collected placement in <The Children of the Company>,
"The Fourth Branch" comes first, and the issue vanishes. (Baker has
continued to play both sides of the fence on whether the cyborgs are
fey. In, and after, <The Graveyard game> we hear that the cyborgs
can't produce art of their own; in <The Life of the World to Come>,
they become explanations for legends of the Seven Sleepers sort; but
the "real" fey of "The Fourth Branch" figure in both, and in numerous
other Company stories.)

Those fey bring up another point: This is very much everything-but-
the-kitchen-sink soft science fiction, of the paranoia subtype. We
have not only time travel, cyborgs, and immortality, but what amounts
to machine-mediated telepathy (the cyborgs, when they "broadcast" and
"scan"), *real* psionics ("Crome generators"), a future history
(somewhat marred by its largely unidirectional character), Secret
Masters, and much, much more.

If I did my usual routine of listing settings and dates, this post
would go on forever. I'm sure some readers think this whole log
should've gone onto the Web; at any rate, I've put a page of details
about Company stories at yet *another* URL below. That page focuses,
in particular, on what the series offers for people who like
historical fiction, so I'll also note here what quibbles I have. She
has habits I dislike with calendars (December 31st, "1699 A.D.", ends
a century, chez her). Substantively, she seems to have a weak grasp
of archæology. A prominent bit of her prehistory is the "Great Goat
Cult", which supposedly killed much of the population of Eurasia
sometime around 20,000 BC, and thus delayed the rise of civilisation
by ten millennia; suffice it that this doesn't look like any
Palæolithic *I* can reconcile with what's known. It will also come
as a surprise to most Mesoamerica specialists that human sacrifice was
an Aztec innovation, as per "The Angel in the Darkness". But away
from calendars and Stone Ages Baker's generally better informed.

Given that my planned reading for August was Baker, Dickens and
Valente - and I figured (wrongly, as it happens) that by month's end
two would be long done, but Dickens far from it - I was amused to see
in <In the Garden of Iden> that cyborgs-in-training were expected, in
less than one week (!), to read through Dickens. See also Voigt in
the re-reading post.

THE OTHER SERIES is much less convoluted (so far) and much less
famous. It's set in a secondary world with real gods and demons,
magic, and at least two sentient races: the Yendri, who live on
flowers and such in forests, and are healers who rely both on divine
aid and the germ theory of disease; and the Children of the Sun, who
live by farming and are wizards at things technological. The world in
question also has trade unions (*not* guilds - their most notable
feature is work rules), railroads, and gated communities, but steam
engines are new-fangled.

"Desolation Rose", Baker's first-published non-Company story, is an
appealingly ironic high-fantasy tale. It reads as a prologue to
something more extensive; in the Eldridge interview, Baker says it was
actually excerpted from an unpublishable early novel. At any rate,
<Anvil of the World> isn't whatever "Desolation Rose" might have been
prologue *to*. Indeed, it isn't a single work at all, though it was
sold as a novel; it's essentially three separate novellas, each of
which has its own comprehensive ending. (Besides "The Caravan from
Troon", in that interview Baker calls the other two "The Hotel
Grandview" and "The Kingfisher's Nest".) That said, some characters
*do* figure in all three, and grow over the length of the book; and
the three stories don't just share, but develop, a focus on the
conflict between the two races, which does ultimately link the
stories. The book is also far more lighthearted than most Company
stories, despite a fairly high body count. "The Briscian Saint" is a
mordant fable about religion vs. skepticism, and shares no characters
with the other stories I've seen; "Leaving His Cares Behind" feels
like a valedictory to Lord Ermenwyr, who figures in all the previous
stories *except* "The Briscian Saint". After several years without
new stories in this series, "The Ruby Incomparable" deals with the
education of Ermenwyr's sister (but doesn't name him). Baker's next
novel will apparently be about his father, but in the Gevers interview
she swears off writing any more series in the sense of multi-volume
*stories*.

THE OTHER STORIES IN <Mother Aegypt> are mostly covered by the same
comments as I made on <Dark Mondays> in the fantasy post, but a few -
"What the Tyger Told Her" and "Her Father's Eyes", to a lesser extent
"Nightmare Mountain", "Two Old Men", and "The Summer People" - are
numinous to a degree rare in Baker's writing, and less prominent in
most of <Dark Mondays>, though "The Two Old Women" also has its share
of wonder. (The "Two Old" stories are neither linked nor conceptually
parallel; if "Two Old Men" has a counterpart in <Dark Mondays>, it's
"Oh, False Young Man!" instead.)

<http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0406/empressofmars.shtml>, seen August
11, 2007
<http://subterraneanpress.com/index.php/magazine/spring2007/audio-rude-mechanicals-by-kage-baker/>,
seen September 2, 2007
<http://www.kagebaker.com/>, seen numerous times in August, 2007, the
latest being August 30
<http://www.greenmanreview.com/book/interview_kagebaker.html>, seen
August 27, 2007 (for the second or third time)
<http://www.scifi.com/sfw/interviews/sfw12543.html>, seen August 30,
2007
<http://www.panix.com/~josephb/lit/company.html>

John Crowley
Winner, 2006 World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement

Just a note to explain why <Ægypt> is *not* in this post. I
actually own the first three volumes and expect to own the fourth
soon; but as best I remember, I packed most of Crowley's books in the
ten boxes that didn't get shipped, putting only those I hadn't already
read (<Dæmonomania> and <Lord Byron's Novel>) in the three that did.
Incredibly, this summer when <Endless Things> came out, the Seattle
Public Library owned neither <The Solitudes> (that is, the volume that
was, until this year, mispublished as <Ægypt>) nor <Love & Sleep>.
One copy of each can be obtained from suburban libraries, but I lacked
bus fare at that time, and by the time I had fare, <The Solitudes> had
been buried under a dozen holds. *Now*, the Seattle Public Library
*does* own <The Solitudes>, so once the suburban copy of <Love & Sleep>
becomes available, I should be able at last to read the whole of
<Ægypt>.

Eric Flint
Re-read: <The Rivers of War> (aka <1812>), 2005
Read for the first time: (February) <1824: The Arkansas War>, 2006

Straight alt-history, whose basic premise is that the Cherokee and
various other Southeastern Indian tribes set up a homeland west of the
Mississippi themselves, before the Trail of Tears can be forced on
them. (Its breakpoint is considerably more precise than that.) I
still like the original book, but I found the sequel less interesting.

Perhaps this was because it skipped so far ahead, leaving it neither
fish (a true sequel) nor fowl (a book essentially new in characters or
even setting). In the backstory of <1824>, among other things, the
homeland is founded, and Sam Houston, the principal protagonist of the
first book and a major one here, marries. This is almost as obviously
a missing book as Norman Spinrad noted the story between <Ender's
Game> and <Speaker for the Dead> to be. Still, this doesn't result in
the famous, um, difficulties of Card's series; in fact, the missing
book *here* would be a story of Houston's triumphs political (he
supports the homeland project) and personal, so its omission tends to
*darken* the story, in contrast to the way Spinrad noted that Card's
omission affects that series. I'll probably read the third book
whenever, if ever, it appears, and regardless of its chronological
spot.

Flint has a lot more patience with upper-class style in these books
than he and David Weber have in <1633>. In my latest re-reading of
that book, especially, I noted the consistency with which
representatives of money, birth, and power are shown as SHOCKINGLY
lapsing from their own canons of good taste, in a fairly preposterous
series of "special" occasions, as if being noticed by the authors were
a communicable virus with the side effect of changes in demeanour and
standards. There's a touch of that here, but Flint also takes some
care to show contrasts in the characters' standards: for example,
John Quincy Adams is a minor POV in the second book, and not that
implausible.

Re-read: * <1632>, 2000, * <1633> (co-written with David Weber),
2002, 0 <Ring of Fire>, 2004, and 0 <Grantville Gazette I>, 2004,
and <II>, 2004 (these last three edited by Flint).
Not re-read: 0 <1634: The Galileo Affair>, 2005 (co-written with
Andrew Dennis).
Read for the first time: $ (November?) <Grantville Gazette III>,
2004, $ (December?) <1634: The Ram Rebellion>, 2006 (these two
edited by Flint), $ (December?) <1635: The Cannon Law>, 2006
(co-written with Dennis), and (May) <1634: The Baltic War>, 2007
(co-written with Weber).

I've modified this discussion to take account of <1634: The Bavarian
Crisis> by Flint and Virginia DeMarce, which appeared after these
posts closed but before I could post them; I don't, however, discuss
it in its own right.

The dates for volumes of the <Grantville Gazette> are for electronic
publication; it isn't clear to me whether these differ from the
consistently later printed versions (the ones I've read) in contents.
The fixed point is that somewhere (Baen's site?) there's a date of
2004 for the electronic publication of volume II. So the date for
volume I is based on its being earlier, but still subsequent to <Ring
of Fire>, per the latter's aftermatter; the same date for volume III
is based on some note somewhere online indicating it had been released
by the end of that year, I think.

I assume everyone here is familiar with the premise. The books
continue to be less than I might wish them to be - in particular I
dislike the, um, aggressive vulgarity just noted for <1633> and less
prominent but still present in others. But they also continue to
represent a sustained effort to take alternate history seriously,
using a collaborative approach for reasons and in ways that make a lot
of sense to me. (Sigh. I suppose this point is arguable, since
alternate history is supposed to have *possible* breakpoints, right?
On the other hand, the core *point* of alternate history, the
exploration of the gap between possibility and reality in history, is
certainly more vigorously handled here than in any genuine alternate
history I've read, including the series just discussed. So I'll stick
with "alternate history" as a reasonable label for this series.)

<The Ram Rebellion>, especially, is much more heavily devoted to
"down-timers" than previous books (though less than it claims to be);
it didn't thrill me, but I'm glad it exists, as something of a proof
of concept. The latest novels also offer rather more "down-timer"
initiative than previously; the focal plot of <The Cannon Law> is
driven start to finish by such, in fact. More on this shift of
emphasis (which isn't a total shift; one could arguably say the same
thing about <1633>) below.

The series is still growing fast, but not without limit. One
afterword promised five 1634-based books: <The Galileo Affair>, which
of course came out first; <The Baltic War> and <Escape from the
Tower>, which have been merged; <The Austrian Princess>, now released
titled <The Bavarian Crisis>; and a book focused on Bohemia, about
which I've heard nothing since. So <The Ram Rebellion> represents an
addition, but the merger of the northern books compensates. <The
Bavarian Crisis> is partly a sequel to <The Baltic War> (which ends in
June 1634); it was already drafted before <The Baltic War> was begun,
and its publication delayed on the latter book's account. I've seen
no attempts to enumerate possible 1635- or later-based volumes;
Flint's usual after- or occasional fore-matter is minimal in the
latest books.

<The Baltic War> is a disappointment, nearer the level of the books
written with Andrew Dennis, say, than that of <1633>, the book to
which it's the direct sequel. If there's less of the aggressive
vulgarity, or of <1633>'s embarrassing idolisation of one of its own
characters, there's also considerably less talk of *ideas*, and more
simply of the working-out of what the earlier book had set in motion.
This, in turn, seems partly to be due to the consolidation I
mentioned. <The Baltic War> is *longer* than the previous books, to
be sure - <1632> was 500 pages in hard covers, <1633> 592, while <The
Baltic War> is 718 (not counting maps and lists of characters, the
former more extensive than in previous books, the latter new). But it
isn't *enough* longer to hold the entire contents of two books. And
the talkfests of ideas are not the only loss. Outside some set-piece
treatments - e.g. a big incident in London, another in Copenhagen - we
have a fair amount of telling, not showing, even getting perilously
close to "As you know, Bob" conversations. Three romances reach at
least as far as betrothal; one is slighted (I can't tell whether the
couple are married by book's end; we barely see the woman involved;
neither participant is a POV), another is given perhaps enough space,
but the third, which gets pride of place at the ending, somehow
manages to get all that space and *still* be slighted. (It's
introduced early in the book as already in progress; we only get
Events Before in a mental flashback, over five hundred pages *later* !
Nor do we ever get the woman as a POV. There's a modicum of dramatic
necessity for that omission and perhaps for that of the beginning, but
it still leaves us with a romance that eats a lot of pages without
feeling complete.) And to top it all off, the presentation of events
in the Low Countries, on which Flint has focused in each of his own
stories for <The Grantville Gazette>'s first three printed volumes,
and which (I share his apparent belief) are crucial elements of the
story he's trying to tell, consists here almost entirely of
conversations, those in turn primarily between one general and one
advisor of his: "scanted" isn't even the word. (Matters Dutch do get
much more space in <The Bavarian Crisis>, but that doesn't make their
treatment in <The Baltic War> any better to read.)

A related detail: in <The Baltic War> we get again the unequivocally
false claim from <1633> that (West) Friesland, Drenthe, and Groningen
were in the 1630s still mostly Catholic. If Weber and Flint actually
needed those provinces' revolt, they could more easily have relied on
the fact that they were under the leadership of a different branch of
the House of Orange. [a]

To end on a brighter note, <The Baltic War> does finally put its money
where the series' "Down-timers aren't any dumber than up-timers" mouth
is, in the form of actual military successes against the transplanted
Americans. We can hope that no later than Weber and Flint's 1635
book, triumphalism will become clearly impossible.

I'll continue to collect the series, but I'll buy these newer books
only in mass market paperback except, perhaps, <The Baltic War>, which
I may decide is just too long for that format. The only upside to the
hardbacking of, in particular, the newer volumes of the <Grantville
Gazette> is that some unknown authors are getting hardcover royalties;
I don't remember any of the newer stories as improving on the first
volume, in which several ("The Sewing Circle" by Gorg Huff, "Anna's
Story" by Loren Jones, and to a lesser extent "Curio and Relic" by Tom
Van Natta) are good comfort reading, though certainly not great art.

[a] I'm basically, here, taking <The Dutch Republic: Its Rise,
Greatness, and Fall 1477-1806> by Jonathan Israel (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, [1995]) as gospel; if Weber and Flint actually have disproved
Israel's heavily footnoted information, Mr. Flint is welcome to post
the details. On religion, Israel offers an extended discussion of the
Catholic Church in Dutch (and Frisian)-speaking lands generally, with
counts of Catholics in cities apparently based on statistics kept by
the Church, on pages 377-389; see especially pages 383-384. In a
nutshell, there doesn't seem to have been any place in the three
provinces in question, except perhaps a few nobles' houses, that was
more than about one third Catholic. As to the dynastic alternative,
it isn't much, but the stadholders of Friesland, and usually also
Groningen and Drenthe, were from the 1570s to 1640 descendants not of
William the Silent but of his younger brother Johann (pages 301-306
and 470). When stadholder Ernst Casimir, count of Nassau, died in
1632, Frederik Hendrik, stadholder of the rest of the United Provinces
at the time and of course a character in <1633>, tried to grab the job
from Ernst Casimir's son, Hendrik Casimir I, and when he failed,
generally seems to have had little use for his colleague (pages 489
and 538); this would seem good enough reason for the latter to take a
different course when faced with a Spanish invasion. Unfortunately
for this scenario, the northerners disliked Frederik Hendrik
specifically because they thought he would be too tolerant of
Catholics and others not perfect in their Calvinist doctrine. Another
difficulty for the scenario, perhaps, is that Hendrik Casimir was
Frederik Hendrik's son-in-law (his wife was his second cousin).
See Dalkey in the fantasy post for why I would have read half of
Israel's book in the first place. A pit neither Weber nor Flint
apparently did; I suppose it's too late now to fix the errors, but
it's a shame that the only works in the genre known to me that deal
with the Dutch Golden Age at all, outside a couple of Kage Baker's
stories, get things wrong.

Zenna Henderson
(November) <Ingathering>, 1952-1995, first compiled as such 1995
"Captivity" nominee, 1959 Hugo Award for Novelette

I'd previously read the two books printed in the 1960s, so about
2/3rds of this collected edition of the People stories. Perhaps if I
hadn't read this around the same time, I'd have found it easier to
take what I thought of as cloying in Alcott and Montgomery. I have
nothing insightful to say here. But I suppose youngsters may need to
know that the People stories, here collected for apparently the first
time in full (one had never before been printed), are stories of a
population, to all intents and purposes human except that they're all
psychic, who find out their sun is going nova in time to flee every
which way in spaceships, but who don't have time to prepare all that
well; so some of the ships break up in Earth's atmosphere, in the
later 19th century. The upshot is that a reasonable number of people
get scattered across the western US who don't speak English or Spanish
but do have strange powers. Most of Henderson's stories relate to a
time, starting about a generation later, when those who found each
other quickly can start looking for the rest, hence the title. Our
psychics are all firmly convinced of a faith that bears a tolerable
similarity to mild Christianity, and are mostly earnestly moral; I
first read those two books as a child.

Christopher Moore
Re-read: * <Bloodsucking Fiends>, 1995
Read for the first time: $ (July) <You Suck>, 2007, lightly skimmed

I only read enough of the new book to become mildly hesitant to read
the rest, and anyway, then the Baker-Dickens-Valente month of August
hit. I did read enough of the ending to find myself wishing for a
third book to rectify it, except that that's silly; no doubt Moore
would just leave me even more upset, yes?

Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer
Re-read: 0 <Sorcery and Cecelia, or, The Enchanted Chocolate Pot>,
1988; 0 <The Grand Tour>, 2004
Not re-read (a pity, even if they don't quite belong to this series
anyway): 0 <Mairelon the Magician>, 1991; 0 <Magician's Ward>,
1997 (both by Wrede alone)
Read for the first time: (July) <The Mislaid Magician>, 2006

Ah, expectations. At least one of the last few times I re-read
<Sorcery and Cecelia>, I was expecting the Great Book I'd convinced
myself it was, and I became upset over the comic fluff I found. This
time, I was just re-reading it to prepare for the new book, raced
through it, and had nearly as much fun as ever. Similarly, when I
first read <The Grand Tour>, whatever I was expecting was not, of
course, what I got, and I was thoroughly disappointed. It's much
easier this time simply to luxuriate in more time with these
characters, and it's even possible to notice that the authors work to
set the story up from early in the book, that it isn't just the jumble
of plot I remembered. (On the other hand, it's also easier this time
to notice that each of these two books has a character with
essentially the same function and almost the same name. Hmmm.)

Just in case... <Sorcery and Cecilia> is an epistolary novel that
originated as a "Letter Game" played by the two authors; the letters
are those of two cousins who grew up together, one of whom is having
her first Season in London and the other of whom is not, and date
between April and July 1817, during which time the two cousins are
involved in thwarting a nefarious magical plot. <The Grand Tour>
consists of two interwoven narratives, one an improbably detailed
deposition given by one of the cousins in December 1817, the other a
diary kept by the other cousin from August to December of that year,
both relating their involvement in thwarting another nefarious magical
plot, one of considerably more general importance, as they travel
through France and Italy. On this reading I noticed sly offhand
references to the authors' other books, including those noted above as
"Not re-read".

So what of the third (or fifth) book? Well, nearly true to its first
subtitle ("Ten Years After"), it's set from February to June of 1828,
and entirely in England. If Dumas [b] figures in any way other than
that subtitle, I don't see it; in particular, the pronounced
personality changes aging brings the Musketeers don't figure here,
except as driven by the cousins' motherhood. But their motherhood
does, entirely, eliminate the leisure with which the first two books
open. <The Mislaid Magician> is fully epistolary again (the jacket
claims that both sequels were done via "Letter Game", in fact), but it
includes letters by the cousins' husbands as well as the cousins. The
nefarious magical plotting is again of general importance, and this
time lacks a character with the distinctive name and role. On first
reading it seems a more unified book than <The Grand Tour>, though the
reverse is in fact the case.

I heard about <The Mislaid Magician> lurking rasfw, and I'm using the
above paragraphs mainly to argue against what I'd heard. <The Grand
Tour> was only a letdown thanks to expectations, and <The Mislaid
Magician> therefore isn't some sort of return to form, though it's
certainly a good book.

[b] Actually, I wanted to read the Musketeers books this year too, but
didn't pull it off: spent weeks dithering around trying to locate
recent translations of the middle books, and by the time I'd
established that they didn't exist, I had to return the recent
translation of <The Three Musketeers> that I'd borrowed during its
surprising day or two out of the grasp of the hold system. Strictly
speaking, I think I caught wind of a new version of <Ten Years After>,
but didn't find a copy I could borrow or buy, and did establish with
some confidence that there are no new versions of the first two-thirds
of the final book.

John Wright
Re-read: <The Last Guardian of Everness>, 2004, skimmed
Read for the first time: (July) <Mists of Everness>, 2005, skimmed

I reviewed the first volume of "The War of the Dreaming" in December,
2004 in rasfw. I lacked the patience to re-read it in full in July
partly because I'd just been reading hyperactive Doctorow, but mostly
because I'd fallen ill; I tried to restore that patience by skipping
to the ending (i.e. volume 2), which prompted me to a very extensive
bout of skimming. Finally I concluded that the odds of my finishing
properly soon were poor, and since I'd already renewed the books once
and the new due date was near, it was time to let someone else try.

So while it's presumptuous of me to comment much on the second volume,
I'll say this much. It's been claimed that just as the second half,
more or less, of Wright's science fiction trilogy "The Golden Age" (as
opposed to the book with the same title), was highjacked by
Objectivist ideas, so the second half of "The War of the Dreaming" was
highjacked by Christian ones. I find this ... implausible. I'd have
to re-read <The Golden Transcendence>, something I have very little
interest in doing, to defend the following thesis, but based on an
incomplete reading of <Mists of Everness>, I'm strongly tempted to say
it anyway: Wright may not even be well acquainted with Objectivism,
and what looks like libertarianism in his stories' ends may be just
that, or may instead be a kind of conservatism that is no longer
understood as such in the US political spectrum, and so goes nameless
here. In any event, I can assert with considerable confidence that
<Mists of Everness> does not resemble any Christian preaching I'm
acquainted with.

It does, however, show Wright as still inclined to, as the old joke
goes, sell his birthright for a pot of message - and that's why I
figured I wouldn't be finishing the books properly soon enough. There
are enough differences between what I remember of <The Golden
Transcendence>, what I've read of <Mists of Everness>, and what I find
in "The Chronicles of Chaos", that I'm honestly unsure to what extent
Wright's messages are his beliefs, to what extent they're his attempts
to reason out what his stories and characters demand, or to what
extent they're games he's playing. (I will also note that I've once
received e-mail from him, and my uncertainty is fed partly by what he
said therein, which however was explicitly not for repetition.)

In any event, <Mists of Everness> is a very different thing to read
from <The Last Guardian> of same, a book far more clearly American
than the earlier book feels English. The character who dominates it,
who's the single biggest source of all that message, talks more like
John Galt than like anyone in <The Last Guardian>; the other
characters increasingly master the use of the talismans that they
accepted at the end of the first book; as a result, the book has a
strongly science fictional - "techne" - air. <Mists> has an extended
set piece straight out of thousands of silly late-night conversations,
in which an aircraft carrier and its complement battle the forces of
Hell, and call in a nuclear strike on same. As I mentioned under
Elizabeth Bear in the fantasy post, Prometheus, glimpsed already in
<The Last Guardian>, is here prominent, so it's no surprise that human
reason is too; Wright never actually betrays the logics of his fantasy
structures. He does, however, strip away their numen - one notable
example of message *outside* that dominant character's talk is his
treatment of kelpies, plague spirits, for instance. I compared <The
Last Guardian of Everness> to the great Victorian and Edwardian
fantasies; well, <Mists of Everness> looks a lot more like <Unknown>
on steroids.

Movies that would, if books, fit into this post:

* <American Pie>, 1999 and * <American Pie 2>, 2001 (a series whose
reputation, that the movies' quality declined, is unfortunately
true, this far anyway; I don't plan to investigate the question any
further).

Of course various movies listed elsewhere are also series movies:
from the science fiction post, <MIIB: Men in Black II>, 2002 and
<Koi... Mil Gaya>, 2003; from the other fiction post, <Days of Being
Wild>, 1990, arguably <The Snapper>, 1993, and <Clerks II>, 2006; and
from the re-reading post, <The Thin Man>, 1934, <Cat People>, 1943,
<The Curse of the Cat People>, 1944, <Spy Kids>, 2001, <Spy Kids 2:


The Island of Lost Dreams>, 2002, and <Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over>, 2003

- to name only cases I know about.

I presume various movies with downmarket "sequels" (e.g. <Bring It
On>, 2000) don't really qualify as "series" movies, but there's a
complicating issue. The first two <Gold Diggers> movies share no
characters, setting, etc., so aren't series movies by most standards
that apply to fiction. But James Blish and Pat Murphy, for example,
have written series with still fewer shared elements, and even in
movies there's, e.g., Eric Rohmer. (Probably, someone now wants to
suggest the Three Colours trilogy, but that person didn't watch <Red>
carefully enough.) If I did count <Gold Diggers> as a series, based
on shared title and thematic elements and some shared cast members
etc., the first two would belong here (the criterion being "one+ first
viewing, one+ re-viewing"); but if those arguments make <Gold Diggers>
a series, then I don't see how I can properly exclude <Bring It On>.
Yuck. (Mind, this is *not* to say I've actually *seen* anything of
the <Bring It On II> ilk. I suppose it's possible that I've got
everything wrong here.)

Joe Bernstein

unread,
Oct 19, 2007, 12:45:32 AM10/19/07
to
RE-READ

See also, of course, the entire series post.

I'm skipping plot summary throughout and saying nothing about several;
I've commented on many of these books more or less lengthily on rasfw
in the past. I'm certainly not doing awards look-ups on these either.

Charlotte Vale Allen
* <Promises>, 1980, skimmed

In what little self-defense I can offer, I'll note that this preceded,
rather than followed, reading <Parting Gifts> as described in the
other fiction post.

Jane Austen
0* <Pride and Prejudice>, 1813
<Sense and Sensibility>, 1811
0 <Northanger Abbey>, 1818
0 <Mansfield Park>, 1814
0 <Emma>, 1816
0 <Persuasion>, 1818

I had a lot of comments on these, and unsurprisingly, given that I'd
never read them as a group before, those comments mostly had to do
with comparisons between the books. Not, actually, "among": I did
find something I thought distinctive about <Pride and Prejudice> as
against the rest, but otherwise I was most impressed by ways in which
the books *without* long gestations seemed to represent successive
*pairwise* reversals (<Mansfield Park> is famously an anti-<Pride and
Prejudice>; <Emma> is meaningfully also an anti-<Mansfield Park>; but
I haven't fit <Persuasion> into this scheme). Anyway, eventually
these comments got to be too much even for me to put into a post, so
here they aren't. (I saved 'em, so if anyone's actually interested,
request them by e-mail.)

On this approach to Austen, I learnt she has surviving non-canonical
works ("juvenilia") besides the well-known <Lady Susan>, <Sanditon>
and <The Watsons>, but I continue to avoid reading even those, wanting
to save *something* for when I'm older and probably even pickier. I
also now know that (nearly) no manuscripts of the Big Six novels
survive; I presume, then, that <Elinor and Marianne>, <First
Impressions>, and <Susan> (earlier versions of S&S, P&P, and NA,
respectively) are also lost, which I think a pity.

The pages of comments I removed included one question I'll re-insert:
There seem to be hundreds of books out there these days that tell
Stories Our Dear Jane Surely Would Have Gotten To Had She Lived
Longer, such as the stories of the Darcys' children's romances, of the
remaining Bennet sisters' romances, of the Darcys' dogcatcher's
romances, and even of the mysteries solved by Charlotte Lucas's
gardener (or by Our Dear Jane Herself, All Hail). I've heard of, but
not been able to find, a novel by one Judith Terry which presents a
servant's perspective on MP; this is the only non-P&P-centred example
known to me. What I'm curious about is whether anyone has actually
had the guts to write a novel centred on Mary Crawford from MP -
perhaps even in first person?

(I can't find a place to fit it into the above paragraph, but regret
to report that I've even found one of these books claiming to sequel
<Pride and Prejudice> which is simultaneously a *cento* of Austen's
other books. Someone, I think, has missed the point: among those few
who concede centos *any* possibility of merit, the idea is that they
should be *new* creations out of old texts, not just warmings-over.
Snarl.)

See also the lists of movies in this post and in the other fiction
post.

Gillian Bradshaw
* <Cleopatra's Heir>, 2002, lightly skimmed
<Dangerous Notes>, 2001
* <Island of Ghosts>, 1998

<Dangerous Notes> is another library book noted here without physical
evidence I borrowed it. I've mentioned before, on rasfw, my
difficulties devoting time to things like eating, instead of
compulsively reading and re-reading <Dangerous Notes>, when I have
access to it; this difficulty was somewhat less this time, but I still
made myself return it after just a few days.

Unfortunately, the Seattle libraries own few of Bradshaw's historical
novels, and only two were in the three boxes mentioned in the start post.

Lois McMaster Bujold
* <A Civil Campaign>, 1999, skimmed
* <The Curse of Chalion>, 2001

Kelley Eskridge [1] [2]
* <Solitaire>, 2002, skimmed

One of several of these novels that I keep thinking oughta be a movie;
now I hear that Eskridge is actually working on a screenplay. Here's
hoping... (I'll anticipate by noting that as of post closing date I
hadn't yet seen <Stardust>, though I'd *meant* to see it that very
day. Reviews suggest I should be careful what I wish for.)

From the same newspaper article I also learn that <Solitaire> is a
"thriller". Now, I admit that there is a certain amount of violence
in <Solitaire>, and more so if you count state violence in the form of
prisons. But still, there are no chases or fugitives, and I have
trouble seeing what violence there is as "fights", so such a use of
the word "thriller" leaves me a little uncertain whether there is any
book for adults left which would *not* be considered a "thriller",
these days. Well, OK, maybe Jane Austen's... Still, "thriller" may
have become an empty term, embracing as it apparently does everything
from Agatha Christie to, oh, I dunno, Lucy Taylor; will people two
centuries from now use "thriller" to mean what we mean by "novel" or
"fiction" ?

(But hey. For more on the reliability in matters literary of the
newspaper in question, see Ruff in the fantasy post.)

Neil Gaiman
* <Stardust>, 1997-1998 and re-read in those four serial parts,
illustrated by Charles Vess

Steven Gould [1]
* <Wildside>, 1996

Anne Harris
<Inventing Memory>, 2004, skimmed

Has done more to convince me that I really do want to finish my
history of fantasy than most of the other things I've tried. I'm
still looking for a copy to own, and neither of Harris's other books
is available at local libraries.

I eventually decided I should do my own "Where are they now?" research
rather than just throwing questions out to hypothetical readers.
Harris doesn't seem to have a website, but I found an interview with
Therese Walsh and Kathleen Bolton from August of last year, in which
she mentions that she's completed a novel titled <Libyrinth> and was
looking for a publisher.

<http://writerunboxed.com/2006/08/11/author-interview-anne-harris/>,
seen September 7, 2007

Robert Holdstock
0 <Mythago Wood>, 1984, started

Peg Kerr
* <Emerald House Rising>, 1997

Of the five authors I went Googling on in September to answer my own
"where are they now?" questions, Kerr is the one with whom I failed.
I found links to her own website - which however seems to consist of
an empty folder. I found a fan website, breathlessly announcing a
signing in 2005, but anyway listing numerous short fictions published
in the early 1990s, of which I hadn't previously known. And I found
her Livejournal account. After reading dozens of posts I knew a fair
amount about her life, but essentially nothing about whether she's
still writing. However, those posts did make it clear that she's
really pressed for time, so my best guess is, she's writing
Livejournal and not much else.

<http://pegkerr.com/>, seen September 10, 2007
<http://www.tc.umn.edu/~d-lena/PegKerrBibliog.html>, seen September
10, 2007
<http://pegkerr.livejournal.com/>, seen September 8, 2007

Gail Carson Levine
* <The Two Princesses of Bamarre>, 2001, skimmed

Barry Longyear
0 <Circus World>, 1978-1979, first compiled as such 1980
<City of Baraboo>, 1979-1980, first compiled as such 1981

For some reason I've never had the chance to read this whole series at
one go, my usual preferred approach. Well, not this time either;
couldn't find <Elephant Song> (the other one I own, but didn't bring
with me, oops) for love or money. But these two, while hardly great
art, I still found engaging.

John MacDonald
* <Please Write for Details>, 1959, skimmed
* <The Girl, the Gold Watch, and Everything>, 1962

Unfortunately, Charlotte Vale Allen has reminded me how to see puzzle
pieces, and by looking at these two too close together, I've seen
more. (To be fair, though, MacDonald's own Travis McGee series is
what first taught me to see formulas, to which puzzle pieces are
merely an extension of concept.) Not that there isn't some genuinely
strong writing here, but scenes like the party and the lecture towards
the end of <The Girl ...> just felt like they'd been inserted from
some other book, in order to fill out the space or spice up the total
or something.

Anne McCaffrey
0 <Dragonflight>, 1967-1968, and 0 <Dragonquest>, 1968

Patricia McKillip
* <The Changeling Sea>, 1988
* <Winter Rose>, 1996, skimmed

Elizabeth Moon
<The Speed of Dark>, 2002

Belatedly, I have realised that this is not a book with a happy
ending.

(I'd like to leave it there, but also wish to note that this book is
classified - sez me, misclassified, though it's arguable - as regular
adult fiction by the Seattle Public Library.)

Christopher Stasheff
* <The Warlock in Spite of Himself>, 1969

Caroline Stevermer
* <A College of Magics>, 1994

Cynthia Voigt
* <Glass Mountain>, 1991

Twice, actually, and on the second go-round I noticed that I was
starting something the narrator does late in the book - read through
Dickens in order. Huh.

I mentioned above that Jessica Rydill's sequel to <Children of the
Shaman> is titled <The Glass Mountain>; imagine my surprise at
discovering, thanks to a whimsical check for Rachel Kadish in the
<Locus> Index (she isn't there), that Cynthia Kadohata also has a book
by that title. So does Leonard Wolf. In Wolf's case the reference is
to the original fairy tale; in Voigt's it's to a book by Donald
Barthelme; I don't know about Rydill or Kadohata.

* <Dicey's Song>, 1982

See the children's fiction post anent orphanhood as a useful (to
authors) status for kids' books protagonists. I've also looked at the
final pages of * <Homecoming> some, but not enough to claim to have
skimmed it.

Connie Willis
* <Remake>, 1994

I think by now I can be sure that this is my favourite of Willis's
books, at least to date. It dawned on me on this reading how *very*
schematic it is; though on the surface it's orthodox science fiction,
it also draws heavily on the tools of fantasy (specifically, of fairy
tales), for example in the way characters' names reflect their roles.
(Not that Willis plays this entirely straight; she has one character
explicitly embrace her role-nickname in preference to her real name,
*and* change its spelling.) Now that I think about this, it's too
long since I read <Lincoln's Dreams> to be sure, but I'm unable to
think of *any* book of Willis's, except <Doomsday Book>, that truly
attempts or achieves novelistic density of a traditional kind.
Certainly <To Say Nothing of the Dog> and <Passage> don't even try;
nor do her novellas that I've read.

(This post used to contain a bunch of casting-related comments on the
movie that's now been made out of <Stardust>, which I hadn't yet seen
at post closing date, focused on suggestions for Yvaine. Those
comments would, obviously, have been radically different if <Remake>
had been predictive: near as I can figure, it's set in 2005, or not
long after.)

Connie Willis and Cynthia Felice
0 <Promised Land>, 1997, skimmed

So perhaps here's why I so like <Promised Land>: Of the three
Willis-Felice collaborations, it's the least harsh, and also the
easiest to read - I suspect that in this case that means also "best
written". <Light Raid> may well be a better book - less trammeled by
conventions, more ambitious in several ways - but in reading <Light
Raid> I feel like I'm always getting mere glimpses of a world, like
density is *there* but out of reach; in <Promised Land> there's a
sense that the world portrayed is sort of a small toy one, but the
lives it contains look real, and I see most of what there is to see.

Anyway. It's been six years since <Passage>. Sure, there've been
some novellas, but, to judge by the <Locus> biblios, nothing like her
previously usual rates of publication; does anyone know what's going
on with Connie Willis? Her website refers to her working on a time
travel novel set in London during the Blitz - which would be at least
her third visit to that setting after "Fire Watch" and "Jack" - but
otherwise seems mainly to confirm the slowdown.

<http://www.sftv.org/cw/>, seen September 7, 2007

Movies seen for the first time, so they don't belong here, but which
it would be spoilerish to list as either fantasy or "other" - in other
words, movies that occupy, for more than a few minutes, Todorov's
fantastic (in the past century, much more popular in movies than in
books):

<Cat People>, 1943;
<The Curse of the Cat People>, 1944 (wow!)
+ <Volver>, Spanish, 2006 (the IMDB says there were two 2006 movies by
this title; I mean the Almodóvar one)

Movies that would, if books, fit in this post:

<Gold Diggers of 1933>, 1933 (borrowed by mistake, watched through
partly from laziness and partly because I *assumed* the 1935 movie
would be some sort of sequel);


<The Thin Man>, 1934;

<Stage Door>, 1937 (which I'd forgotten I'd seen, but which had, near
as I can now remember, the same strong though mixed impact on me as
the first time);
0+ <Children of Paradise>, French, 1945 (on the big screen at last,
allelu!);
* <Sabrina>, 1954;
* <West Side Story>, 1961;
* <Jesus Christ Superstar>, 1973;
<Picnic at Hanging Rock>, 1975 (nearly as dazzling on the small screen
as on the large);
* <Somewhere in Time>, 1980;
* <Labyrinth>, 1986;
* <The Princess Bride>, 1987;
+ <Earth Girls Are Easy>, 1989 (so I've now seen it twice on the big
screen, but never on the small, which may say something strange
about me);
* <Into the Woods>, 1990 (PBS);
* <Where the Heart Is>, 1990;
* <Career Opportunities>, 1991;
* <Rambling Rose>, 1991;
* <The Rocketeer>, 1991;
* <The Scent of Green Papaya>, Vietnamese, 1993;
* <The Wedding Banquet>, 1993;
* <Swingers>, 1996;
* <Fools Rush In>, 1997;
* <all I wanna do>, 1998;
* <Dark City>, 1998;
* <Shakespeare in Love>, 1998 (the Seattle <Stranger> reviewer, Annie
Wagner, recently blamed this movie for <Becoming Jane>, 2007, and I
sneered; but then I saw a preview for that movie nearly
back-to-back with a preview for <Molière>, 2007, and realised she
was right, alas; Tom Stoppard does now have much to answer for);
* <Cruel Intentions>, 1999;
* <The Road Home>, Mandarin, 1999;
* <Bring It On>, 2000;
* <Gladiator>, 2000;
* <Save the Last Dance>, 2000;
* <Spring Forward>, 2000;
* <Josie and the Pussycats>, 2001;
* <Spy Kids>, 2001;
* <The Fast Runner>, Inuktitut, 2002;
* <Blue Crush>, 2002;
* <Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams>, 2002;
* <Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over>, 2003;
<Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind>, 2004;
<Pride and Prejudice>, 2005 (this is the version in which Keira
Knightley makes a delightfully lovely Elizabeth Bennet, which would
be grand except that, oops, Elizabeth Bennet isn't *supposed* to be
lovely... it's also too much a Cliff's Notes of the book rather
than something that could be understood on its own, though at least
it's a lot more faithful than that overpraised, saccharine Olivier
version; I'd seen it in a theatre at the time, and borrowed it by
mistake, but admittedly didn't watch it through *only* by mistake);
* <Rent>, 2005;
<Shopgirl>, 2005, started (oops; I'd seen this one too recently to
deal with its hard parts again, but see, for another unexpectedly
painful Steve Martin-associated project, <Pennies from Heaven>,
1978, in the other fiction post);


<Take the Lead>, 2006.

FOOTNOTES

[1] I've also bought since coming here, but haven't (re-)read, a copy
of <The Fall of the Kings> by Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman. I
glanced at that book while compiling these posts' first draft, and
something dawned on me. In lots of married couples, both members
write or wrote speculative fiction. I've attached this footnote to
Kara Dalkey (John Barnes's ex-wife), Lisa Tuttle (Christopher Priest's
ex-wife), John Wright (L. Jagi Lamplighter's husband [3]), Syne
Mitchell (Eric Nylund's wife), Kristine Kathryn Rusch (married to Dean
Wesley Smith, last I heard), and Steven Gould (ditto Laura Mixon);
other examples are too numerous to name, indeed too numerous for me to
imagine I've even caught all the ones in these posts. Well, I also
know of at least two long-term lesbian couples in which both members
write or wrote spec-fic - Kushner and Sherman, and Kelley Eskridge
(thus footnoted) and Nicola Griffith; I've heard rumours of a third
(not, AFAIK, entirely out, and anyway not otherwise appearing in these
posts). But I don't know of any gay male couples, both of whom write
spec-fic. Anyone? (As far as I know, Darieck Scott and his lover
don't qualify, because said lover is not known to me as a spec-fic
writer at all - nor to my admittedly not current copies of Contento
indices - or indeed as a writer at all. This is one reason why I'm
not naming him here.)
I also know of no examples of "polyamorous" groupings of spec-fic
writers, whether or not the people in question are modeling their
lives on anything in Heinlein. But that's cheating; the odds of
everyone having a shared occupation drop dramatically, the more people
you include.

[2] Those footnoted are just the authors I *know* to be local to
Seattle. (OK, as regards Jay Lake, Holly Phillips, Kristine Kathryn
Rusch and Lucius Shepard, admittedly, "local" seems to extend all the
way to the Columbia River, but anyway. Oh, and the Columbia River
*does* reach Canada...) The Seattle Public Library seems to make much
more of a fuss about local/regional authors than the library of any
city I've lived in before; it doesn't buy *that* many paperbacks, so
it says something that so many of the ones I've borrowed from it come
from these authors. [4]
But it isn't just the library. The current coverage of some
readings Nicola Griffith is doing has finally explained something to
me: Kelley Eskridge lives near here. See, in the Midwest,
<Solitaire> is not an easy book to find on the shelves of used
bookstores; but in Seattle, it's all over the place. And this means
it has to have sold well here. Which suggests that bookstores and/or
book buyers *also* pay extra attention to local authors. I suppose
it'd be unreasonable for Chicago to make quite this much of local (let
alone regional) authors - I mean, I can't imagine that New York, say,
would - and Milwaukee and Madison don't have all that many to puff
about if they wanted to. Still, I have to give Seattle credit for
this, as for other signs that this really is a city that *reads*.
(Newspapers generally do pay lots of attention to local writers, not
just in Seattle, but for a particularly embarrassing example for the
Seattle writer in question, see Matt Ruff in the fantasy post.)
<DIGRESSION TITLE="Seattle as setting or hometown">Kat
Richardson's <Greywalker> is set here. Syne Mitchell's <The
Changeling Plague> is partly set on a nearby island and has a few
scenes here as well; her <Technogenesis> starts here but doesn't stay
here for long. Shannon McKelden's <Venus Envy> is set in an imaginary
town across Puget Sound from here, and has several scenes in the city.
And Eskridge's <Solitaire> is half set in places that don't exist, and
half in a city (anglophone, North American) that's never named. Three
streets are named in that second half - Perdue Street, Ypsilanti
Street, and Marginal Way. Marginal Way, as described, is very
reminiscent of Seattle's Marginal Way, but Seattle doesn't have the
other two, so I dunno. Since Ypsilanti Street is supposed to be home
to a Mongolian stir fry house, I doubt any of the suburbs near
Marginal Way would fit.
For completeness, I'll also mention that Rachel Kadish's <Tolstoy
Lied> has a narrator who claims to be from Seattle (which a minor
character, a New Yorker through and through, asserts means she's from
"a farm"); but near as I can tell, this narrator could be from any
trendy US city, and in fact more easily from ones like, say, Chicago,
that have more substantial Jewish populations, and it wouldn't make
any difference to the book. Another "from Seattle" that really
doesn't matter is in Justina Robson's <Mappa Mundi>. I don't remember
any other city I've lived in, even Chicago, being so popular as a name
for "Inconsequential Hometown", but this may be selective memory. Odd
that in the real world, Seattle is much more an importer than an
exporter of population ... (However, Catherynne Valente does offer a
real-life example of Seattle as a *truly* inconsequential
hometown.)</DIGRESSION>
It intrigues me that Mitchell, Eskridge, and Rusch all fit under
both footnotes. There are billboards all over town noting in small
print that this region has an unusually high incidence of multiple
sclerosis, and asking in big print, "Is it the water?" Well, OK: we
also have an unusually high incidence of spec-fic-writing couples,
much higher than I'm aware of for anywhere in the Midwest except
Minneapolis, for example. Is it the water?

[3] Yeah, I know, you said "Huh?" or "yeah, right" when you read her
description in the <Orphans of Chaos> author bio as "fellow author",
and you're saying it again now when I accept her as a spec-fic author.
Well, tough. The criterion Darieck Scott's lover did not pass, L.
Jagi Lamplighter does: she's in my 2004 [sic] <Locus>/Contento Index
with four stories, one of which was reprinted in the <Best of> the
magazine it appeared in. (She's also in my 2005 Contento/Miller
Magazine Index, but only with two of the same stories; the others
originally appeared in books.) Furthermore the stories in question
date to 1993, 1998 (two), and 2005; while she's hardly prolific in
ways that come to the attention of <Locus>, she's actually senior to
Wright by this criterion, his first publication in each index being a
1994 story. She's also co-edited an anthology, but since this
included both her 2005 story and two by her husband, it's a mixed
blessing to her spec-fic-*author* credibility.

[4] OK, yeah, the library pays a lot of attention to local authors,
and it also shelves series together more than you'd expect. In early
July I learnt that Terry Brooks is local. Nevertheless, no, Shannara
books fare no better than other long series on library shelves I've
examined here.

Andrew Plotkin

unread,
Oct 19, 2007, 1:02:30 AM10/19/07
to
Here, Joe Bernstein <j...@sfbooks.com> wrote:

> Sarah Monette
> Nominee, 2007 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer
>
> (March or April) <Melusine>, 2005
> Nominee, 2006 Crawford Award
>
> (April) <The Virtu>, 2006
>

> [...] The ending is both convincing and


> satisfying. I even, what's rare for me, believed Monette's fictional
> history! I mean, wow!
>
> Of course, I now have to update this assessment. Monette's website
> (URL below; consulted for dates for the books) informed me that there
> were more (plural) on their way.

For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure that _Melusine_ and _The Virtu_
comprise what was originally conceived as the first volume of a
series. So you may be perceiving a single book with a good ending,
which would imply that the sequel would *also* have a good ending,
despite the interference of current publishing realities.

So, don't start _The Mirador_ until the fourth volume comes out.

--Z

--
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
If the Bush administration hasn't shipped you to Syria for interrogation,
it's for one reason: they don't feel like it. Not because you're patriotic.

Rich Horton

unread,
Oct 19, 2007, 7:48:29 AM10/19/07
to
On Fri, 19 Oct 2007 04:01:29 +0000 (UTC), Joe Bernstein
<j...@sfbooks.com> wrote:

>Alternatively, however, name
>change and relocation could *both* be explained by marriage. So I
>dunno.

Alma used to post around here somewhere ... maybe in
rec.arts.sf.composition, maybe some other online haunt. I am pretty
sure the name change was requested by her publishers for essentially
commercial reasons.

(Her relocation may be related to her marriage, though -- I'm not
sure. Her married name is Alma Hromic Deckert.)

She is originally from Yugoslavia, and grew up in many places,
especially Africa. I am not sure if her first books first appeared
Down Under because she was then living in New Zealand or simply
because it was an Australian publisher who first bought her books.

Andrew Plotkin

unread,
Oct 19, 2007, 12:33:00 PM10/19/07
to
Here, Joe Bernstein <j...@sfbooks.com> wrote:

> Peg Kerr
> * <Emerald House Rising>, 1997
>
> Of the five authors I went Googling on in September to answer my own
> "where are they now?" questions, Kerr is the one with whom I failed.
> I found links to her own website - which however seems to consist of
> an empty folder. I found a fan website, breathlessly announcing a
> signing in 2005, but anyway listing numerous short fictions published
> in the early 1990s, of which I hadn't previously known. And I found
> her Livejournal account. After reading dozens of posts I knew a fair
> amount about her life, but essentially nothing about whether she's
> still writing. However, those posts did make it clear that she's
> really pressed for time, so my best guess is, she's writing
> Livejournal and not much else.
>

> <http://pegkerr.livejournal.com/>, seen September 8, 2007

Her post today (http://pegkerr.livejournal.com/909119.html) touches
the matter of writing at the end.

I don't want to play interpreter, or even summarizer, for her journal
posts. But she was talking more about writing a couple of years ago,
and the posts are public:
<http://pegkerr.livejournal.com/tag/ice+palace+book> will turn a lot
of them up.

Konrad Gaertner

unread,
Oct 19, 2007, 5:36:26 PM10/19/07
to
Joe Bernstein wrote:
>
> Jacqueline Carey
> * (May) <Kushiel's Scion>, 2006, skimmed
>
> I haven't really got a settled judgement yet, but I'm leaning towards
> "worst so far, but not irrecoverably so".

Of her Kushiel books, or of everything she's written?

> On the day I finished fact-checking for these posts, and started final
> formatting, I found a copy of Cook's <The Dragon Never Sleeps>, 1988,
> selling for a dollar at a local thrift shop. This is the book whose
> rarity James Nicoll constantly bemoans. I bought it on general
> principles, but fully expect I'll find it as impossible to finish as
> the other Cook books I've tried, and even if I finish it, it's science
> fiction, and I won't need to keep it around for history of fantasy
> purposes. So: does anyone want, maybe a month from now, a rather
> beat up copy of <The Dragon Never Sleeps> ? If so, let me know.

I'm interested, but not necessarily enough to pay the shipping costs.
And I'm sure there are others here far more interested.

--
Konrad Gaertner - - - - - - - - - - - - - email: kgae...@tx.rr.com
http://kgbooklog.livejournal.com/
"If I let myself get hung up on only doing things that had any actual
chance of success, I'd never do *anything*!" Elan, Order of the Stick

Elaine Thompson

unread,
Oct 19, 2007, 7:14:29 PM10/19/07
to
On Fri, 19 Oct 2007 04:01:29 +0000 (UTC), Joe Bernstein
<j...@sfbooks.com> wrote:

>Alma Alexander (aka Alma Hromic) [2]
>(June) <The Hidden Queen> aka <Changer of Days, Volume One>, 2001
>(June) <Changer of Days> aka <Changer of Days, Volume Two>, 2002
>Probably the first volume nominee, 2002 Sir Julius Vogel Award for
> Novel
>
>These books originally appeared in New Zealand (and/or Australia?) as
>by Hromic; the name change appears to have happened by 2004, when
>another book appeared, and as of these books' 2005 US printing, the
>author had relocated to a city not far north of Seattle.

> Alternatively, however, name


>change and relocation could *both* be explained by marriage. So I
>dunno.
>

Well, she did marry an American, so I lean towards that. Plus
publishers' phobias about apparently impronounceable names.


>These books claim the author has written four books, but speak of only
>three; the local library catalogue doesn't clarify matters.

I poked into the question when I ran across Changer of Days and liked
it. The other was probably _Letters From the Fire_ novelization based
on correspondence with a fellow named Deckert about the events
involving NATO & Yugoslavia. They married - her web page says so..


>(There
>is, of course, a book more recent than the copies I looked at; that
>doesn't strike me as relevant.) The third book is that 2004 title,
><The Secrets of Jin-shei>; I've seen no hint it's related to these
>two.

It's not. It's set in alternate China (medieval, more or less, with
magic), as is the UK only(I believe) _Embers of Heaven_ which deals
with alternate China developing into revolutionary China with an
alternate Mao, and a descendent of one of the characters of Jin Shei.
Parts of Embers were harrowing in a good way. And the return after
generations to a drastically changed land was well done.


>Indeed, in pleasing contrast to the Australian writers mentioned
>below, Hromic/Alexander manages in the two at hand to *finish* a story
>properly, and in just (!) 703 pages.

Yes, it doesn't go on and on and *on*.

I liked the villains, too. So many villains are two dimensional and
these weren't.


>(But then, in New Zealand, these weren't mass market.) And the author
>(born, her bio says, in "Yugoslavia") certainly *does* understand
>exile; in her writing of that, if nothing else, and of the
>rootlessness it can confer, she achieves something genuinely beyond
>the rest. Against this we can set that love of telling (this could've
>fit in one volume, I suspect); a protagonist some will think overly
>Mary Sue, though I'd disagree; blond faux-Arabs (shades of Gregorian!)
>severely afflicted with the Cur'se of Ap'os'tro'phes (which are
>certainly *not* glottal stops); and the usual clutter - map
>(ecologically dubious, I think), glossary (crowded with spoilers), and
>prophecy. But on balance, I found these fairly good of their kind
>(essentially, very un-dark secondary-world fantasy, the sort of thing
>that filled scores of trilogies in the late 1970s and early 1980s),
>and I may investigate the author's other writing.
>

I think between that duology and Jin Shei her skills improved.

Jin Shei also struck me as very much a female's book. OTOH, I saw
Steve Stirling comment favorably on it, somewhere on Usenet. So what
do I know?

>repetitive that frankly I'd have found it easier to bear with Haddawy
>simply writing "Oh, and this person ALSO has Charisma 18" every time;
>descriptions of luxury or references to kings and caliphs; and in the
>maugre best of the non-fantasy ones, copious grotesquerie.

You do not make me regret reading only abridged Arabian Nights tales.


much snipped including responses thought better of about _Blood &
Iron_ Let's just say it didn't work for me.


>
>Anyone know whether there's any hint of a return to Miles Vorkosigan
>in the offing?

She's committed to write a Vorkosiverse in memory of Jim Baen.


>
>$ (July) <Legacy>, 2007, skimmed
>
>Well, oops, they didn't mean it when they said "two-part" in that
>blurb a few months ago, did they? Idiots.
>
>Anyway, I can't really object to this becoming a longer - and indeed
>to judge by this volume, potentially *long* - series.

At least two more coming.

>almost) with combat. (As usual, when I say "skimmed" what I mean is
>that I read in the order beginning, ending, middle, and not complete
>as to middle. But actually, here, I read so *much* ending that I'm
>honestly not sure whether I ended up reading the whole book or not.)
>The major changes promised by the first volume don't happen, despite
>plenty of further foreshadowing; by book's end, though, it's at least
>easier to accept that both of Our Couple can reasonably be expected to
>participate in those changes.

As someone else pointed out when discussing these books, the changes
that must be made aren't the sort that two people can just impose and
have the book wrap up happily ever after. They're major cultural
shifts that will take a long time. Our protaganists seem to be more
catalysts for the necessary shifts than Major Actors, if you catch the
distinction I'm trying to make.

--
Elaine Thompson <Ela...@KEThompson.org>

Konrad Gaertner

unread,
Oct 19, 2007, 7:27:53 PM10/19/07
to
Joe Bernstein wrote:
>
> FOOTNOTES

I'm reading these posts out of order (saving the longest ones for
later), and it'd be really nice if I had some idea where these
footnotes came from.

> [1] I've also bought since coming here, but haven't (re-)read, a copy
> of <The Fall of the Kings> by Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman. I
> glanced at that book while compiling these posts' first draft, and
> something dawned on me. In lots of married couples, both members
> write or wrote speculative fiction. I've attached this footnote to
> Kara Dalkey (John Barnes's ex-wife), Lisa Tuttle (Christopher Priest's
> ex-wife), John Wright (L. Jagi Lamplighter's husband [3]), Syne
> Mitchell (Eric Nylund's wife), Kristine Kathryn Rusch (married to Dean
> Wesley Smith, last I heard), and Steven Gould (ditto Laura Mixon);
> other examples are too numerous to name, indeed too numerous for me to
> imagine I've even caught all the ones in these posts.

That's never stopped us before :)

David and Leigh Eddings
Joan and Vernor Vinge
Isaac and Janet Asimov
Scott Westerfeld and Justine Larbalestier
Debra Doyle and James D. Macdonald
Mercedes Lackey and Larry Dixon
Roger Zelazny and Jane Lindskold (never officially married)
Phil and Kaja Foglio (though Kaja hasn't published any prose yet)

> [2] Those footnoted are just the authors I *know* to be local to
> Seattle. (OK, as regards Jay Lake, Holly Phillips, Kristine Kathryn
> Rusch and Lucius Shepard, admittedly, "local" seems to extend all the
> way to the Columbia River, but anyway. Oh, and the Columbia River
> *does* reach Canada...)

You also have Robin Hobb (Megan Lindholm) in Tacoma.

> But it isn't just the library. The current coverage of some
> readings Nicola Griffith is doing has finally explained something to
> me: Kelley Eskridge lives near here. See, in the Midwest,
> <Solitaire> is not an easy book to find on the shelves of used
> bookstores; but in Seattle, it's all over the place. And this means
> it has to have sold well here. Which suggests that bookstores and/or
> book buyers *also* pay extra attention to local authors.

Also keep in mind that local authors are frequent guests at local cons
and do frequent book signings at local bookstores. Both are ways for
local readers to hear about them and be encouraged to read their books.

> I suppose
> it'd be unreasonable for Chicago to make quite this much of local (let
> alone regional) authors - I mean, I can't imagine that New York, say,
> would - and Milwaukee and Madison don't have all that many to puff
> about if they wanted to.

I think cities like NYC, Chicago, and Los Angeles are too impersonal
in culture to encourage authors to hang out with fans, and most
other cities don't have many local authors to begin with, which is
why this is only noticable in Seattle and Minneapolis-St. Paul.

> <DIGRESSION TITLE="Seattle as setting or hometown">Kat
> Richardson's <Greywalker> is set here. Syne Mitchell's <The
> Changeling Plague> is partly set on a nearby island and has a few
> scenes here as well; her <Technogenesis> starts here but doesn't stay
> here for long. Shannon McKelden's <Venus Envy> is set in an imaginary
> town across Puget Sound from here, and has several scenes in the city.
> And Eskridge's <Solitaire> is half set in places that don't exist, and
> half in a city (anglophone, North American) that's never named.

> </DIGRESSION>

Right now I'm in the middle of C.E. Murphy's _Coyote Dreams_, which is
part of an urban fantasy set in Seattle. Lindholm's _Wizard of
the Pigeons_ is also set there.

Konrad Gaertner

unread,
Oct 19, 2007, 8:10:50 PM10/19/07
to
Joe Bernstein wrote:
>
> Eh. I hadn't realised Campbell had been obsessed with psionics that
> far back. Lemme tell you, between straight psionics and telepathy by
> machines, I've just about OD'd enough on psionics to give in to those
> annoying claims that the <Foundation> series is fantasy...

Victory!! Mwahahahahahhahaha!

Actually, I seem to have lost my zeal for having this argument after
reading webcomics like Girl Genius, Gunnerkrigg Court, Storm Corps,
and Alpha Shade.

David DeLaney

unread,
Oct 19, 2007, 8:43:04 PM10/19/07
to
Joe Bernstein <j...@sfbooks.com> wrote:
>Stephan Zielinski
>(March) <Bad Magic>, 2004, skimmed
>
>Why haven't I heard anything more about Zielinski?

Because, despite pushing from friends, he hasn't managed to get off his butt
and sit himself down and write another book, yet. (Plus which Bad Magic didn't
really get talked up much by its publisher on its hardback release.) His
website is http://stephan-zielinski.com/ , and he's recently been doing much
photography of San Francisco and zombies.

Elaine Thompson

unread,
Oct 19, 2007, 8:32:30 PM10/19/07
to
On Fri, 19 Oct 2007 04:07:03 +0000 (UTC), Joe Bernstein
<j...@sfbooks.com> wrote:

>Hal Duncan
>(September) <Vellum>, 2005, started
>Nominee, 2006 World Fantasy Award for Novel, 2006 August Derleth Award,
> and 2006 Crawford Award (and it boggles my mind that this book won
> none of those - was 2005 *that* much of a banner year for fantasy?)
>
>As I mention in several later places in these posts, for August I set
>myself three Goals: to read / re-read as much of Kage Baker's work as
>I could find (see above and the series post); to read as much Early
>Charles Dickens as I could stomach (see the other fiction post); and
>to read Catherynne Valente's first four books of prose (see below).
>In later August, imagining (falsely) that some of these goals were
>near accomplishment, I let myself rip loose borrowing a *lot* of books
>for the freedom of September, including this one and its sequel,
><Ink>, 2007.
>
>Well, "The Book of All Hours" is clearly well worth reading, though
>Duncan's approach to the myth of Inanna's Descent did not, as far as I
>*read*, have the power other approaches I've found (by Gregorian and
>Anne Harris) offer.


I guess I'll have to pick up the Duncan.

Now - Gregorian's trilogy is Inanna's Descent? Sybbie is Inanna? huh.

Oh, I reread it. Sort of. I jumped around a lot. I think I read it
all in the end. I remember way back when wondering why it wasn't
resonating for me, didn't seem to have the depth of some other books I
was reading around the same time and whether it was because the author
was using less familiar myths. Well, that may have contributed, but I
also noticed this tme a sense that she was rushing through things,
barely sketching them in, instead of letting them acquire depth and
resonance. The Kermyrag - the burning immortal bird in the first book
- struck me this time as basically wasted. I still love the image,
though. The Players and their tarot/cards also.

I do appreciate the scope of the work - very few authors write about
whole world changing events and place them in a large enough world.
With the third installment, Gregorian did open up her world to be much
more planet-sized. And I no longer think she wrote herself into a
hole at the end of the 2nd book. She clearly knew what she was doing
the whole time, and worked it out carefully. She wasn't going to use
the tropes in the usual way. Way back when the first two books came
out I couldn't see that, or appreciate it.

Mostly though because of the 'rushed' writing, a lot doesn't stick so
I can't be more specific.


>
>Guy Gavriel Kay
>$ (April) <Ysabel>, 2007, started
>
>Kay's return to contemporary fantasy (if you consider a few chapters
>of Fionavar in that light) looks really promising. But, well...
>Having spent months of poverty here, I've become less able to resist
>simply reading books found in bookstores, right then and there. Well,
><Ysabel> establishes that not all books *can* be read in bookstores.
>I look forward to being able to read it right, if ever the cloud of
>holds should lift, or I should find stable enough work to buy it.
>(Update: the cloud of holds lifted in October, and I'll be reading it
>soon.)


I'll be interested in your take. I read it and enjoyed it, as I have
enjoyed all GGK's books. As with McKillip, the books tend to linger
in a good way and make it difficult to get a different novel started
reading.


--
Elaine Thompson <Ela...@KEThompson.org>

Konrad Gaertner

unread,
Oct 19, 2007, 10:12:45 PM10/19/07
to
Joe Bernstein wrote:
>
> Christopher Moore
> (July) <A Dirty Job>, 2006
>
> Imagine my surprise. One: A Christopher Moore novel of recent date
> which I *hadn't* heard ballyhooed from the rooftops. Two: A
> Christopher Moore novel actually available for borrowing at a Seattle
> public library. I checked the catalogue, *after* borrowing it, and
> established that the hold system should've prevented me from doing so,
> and that people were waiting in line for *all* the other copies of
> Moore books the library system owns. Well, figures.

Several ways that could happen:
People who reserve "this copy" rather than "first available copy".
Multiple catalog records for different copies (usually due to having
different ISBNs, and most commonly seen with large print editions).
Multiple records, each with holds, were merged into one.
"Inactive" holds, which stay at the head of the list once they reach
there, but are otherwise ignored (and maybe forgotten by the patron).
Hold was placed when the book was on the shelf, and the librarians
haven't had a chance to pull it yet.

> Kat Richardson [2]
> (August) <Greywalker>, 2006
>

> Of course all books introducing female P.I.s have sequels, and I've
> seen <Poltergeist>, 2007, in bookstores. For what it's worth, while
> the first book resolves both Blaine's actual cases, and a credible
> cluster of fantasy plot elements underlying them, in a way that works
> for both mystery and fantasy genres, enough underlying issues are left
> hanging to make it perfectly clear that the story isn't - shouldn't be
> - over. (More specifically: why *has* Blaine become enmeshed in the
> Otherworld?) I have no idea whether I'll read that sequel; this
> certainly isn't My Kind of Writing, and we all know that sequels tend
> to be worse - but the mere chance that Richardson can again write true
> fantasy balances the scales. What would be unpleasant in a much less
> rewarding way would be her simply following the pattern so many other
> writers (especially in this particular subgenre) have established,
> book after book until any original merit has been diluted past
> recognition. It wouldn't shock me, though, if there were in fact an
> overarching plot projected, with perhaps three or four volumes total
> required to bring it to completion.

I've read the second book, and while there isn't any real sign of
an overarching plot (so probably not a short series), that may be
because the heroine is still trying to figure out just what exactly
she's gotten into.

Joe Bernstein

unread,
Oct 19, 2007, 10:34:28 PM10/19/07
to
In article <tleih3hbfacn0k517...@4ax.com>,
Elaine Thompson <Ela...@KEThompson.org> wrote:

> On Fri, 19 Oct 2007 04:07:03 +0000 (UTC), Joe Bernstein
> <j...@sfbooks.com> wrote:

> >Hal Duncan
> >(September) <Vellum>, 2005, started

> >Well, "The Book of All Hours" is clearly well worth reading, though


> >Duncan's approach to the myth of Inanna's Descent did not, as far as I
> >*read*,

Page 34 of the Ballantine trade paperback, the section "Broken Minutes
and Bent Hours" in the first chapter of volume one. In other words,
not very far at all. Duncan builds each "volume" of <Vellum> around
a myth - Inanna's Descent for the first half, <Prometheus Bound> for
the second, with one of Vergil's Eclogues (the song of Silenus) in
between. So page 34 is just 1/6 of the way through his take on that
myth. I must admit, though, it didn't work for me much better in the
end. Duncan writes in a way that I understand as just extravagantly
mythic - the way he builds incantations out of puns, for example, is
utterly characteristic of lots of myth-and-related-writing, and he
works magic with it. I just don't entirely get the emotional power
he seems to want his use of these overarching myths to evoke. His own
story seems stronger than these echoes.

> >have the power other approaches I've found (by Gregorian and
> >Anne Harris) offer.

> I guess I'll have to pick up the Duncan.
>
> Now - Gregorian's trilogy is Inanna's Descent? Sybbie is Inanna? huh.

Toward the end of the ?first book, - *if* I remember correctly - Sybil
descends to an underworld run by the Goddess. I remember it as echoing
Inanna's Descent, but don't pretend to confidence in the memory.
The passage in Harris's <Inventing Memory> is explicitly modelled on
the Sumerian myth.

> Oh, I reread it. Sort of. I jumped around a lot. I think I read it
> all in the end. I remember way back when wondering why it wasn't
> resonating for me, didn't seem to have the depth of some other books I
> was reading around the same time and whether it was because the author
> was using less familiar myths.

Part of the reason I rave about it is precisely that I'm familiar with
some but not all of the myths and legends she draws on. When she dips
into Greek or Mesopotamian sources, I can follow her, when she uses
Iranian ones, much less so, and when she uses Armenian or further
sources, I'm usually lost. So there's a combination of familiar stuff
used in reliably interesting ways with unfamiliar stuff to keep me
on my toes. And partly I just like the image this creates of Gregorian
and of her approach to myth and legend: She mentions in an author bio
or some such that she's trying to echo her father's stories, her father
having been born in Armenia. Usually mixy-matchy mythology strikes me
as blatantly Wrong, but Gregorian persuades me that the world as seen
from a small place with lots of neighbours really would work that way.

> Well, that may have contributed, but I
> also noticed this tme a sense that she was rushing through things,
> barely sketching them in, instead of letting them acquire depth and
> resonance. The Kermyrag - the burning immortal bird in the first book
> - struck me this time as basically wasted. I still love the image,
> though. The Players and their tarot/cards also.

I remember feeling that <The Broken Citadel> was just a bit *off*, if
you will. Even were the sequels more of the same rather than what they
are, I would *never* urge it on kids as One of the Great Fantasies,
type Kid Travels to Fantasy World. I vaguely remember that this is
largely a matter of finding Sybil (sp?) just plain *cold* for a child
protagonist, but I can easily extrapolate that to a lack of warmth
in the book as a whole, specifically, a lack of spectacularly cool
Fantasy Stuff.

In a sense, for me, the depth and resonance come from the way our
world and its myths stand behind Tredana's world and *its* myths,
for me. (I remember of the name Kermyrag that it should be Iranian,
and my memory is also claiming that it's got a real source, but since
I've yet to read any Persian story about a Kermyrag or a flaming bird,
I suspect my memory is lying to me.)



> I do appreciate the scope of the work - very few authors write about
> whole world changing events and place them in a large enough world.
> With the third installment, Gregorian did open up her world to be much
> more planet-sized. And I no longer think she wrote herself into a
> hole at the end of the 2nd book. She clearly knew what she was doing
> the whole time, and worked it out carefully. She wasn't going to use
> the tropes in the usual way. Way back when the first two books came
> out I couldn't see that, or appreciate it.
>
> Mostly though because of the 'rushed' writing, a lot doesn't stick so
> I can't be more specific.

Well, I certainly can't be specific in reply, but yeah, this is what's
so miraculous about this trilogy, cool use of unfamiliar stories aside.
I praise Nick O'Donohoe for taking a toy fantasyland and doing something
similar, but Gregorian did it full-tilt. Somehow starting in the 1970s
she could already see the fundamental conflict between conventional
mythopoeic endings and the world we actually live in, and she chose
to do a mythopoeic fantasy sticking up for the other side. Yeah, I
know, lots of authors do this - George R. R. Martin uses Sansa primarily
to convey the sense that the 13th century was *not* the pinnacle of
human civilisation - but Gregorian does it wholeheartedly. I think
much of what's cold in Sibyl is exactly this, in a way. She, unlike
the average Child Tourist, *really doesn't buy into the perfection
of the Middle Ages*. Ever.

I'll go out on a limb and say that the lack of depth and resonance is
intentional on Gregorian's part, her way of keeping what she's
attacking from winning the way Satan is said to have won <Paradise
Lost>; but as I said, I haven't re-read in quite some time (I vaguely
remember skimming <The Great Wheel> a year or three back), so this
is just a wild guess, really.



> >Guy Gavriel Kay
> >$ (April) <Ysabel>, 2007, started

> I'll be interested in your take. I read it and enjoyed it, as I have
> enjoyed all GGK's books. As with McKillip, the books tend to linger
> in a good way and make it difficult to get a different novel started
> reading.

Thanks for the warning; I'm having to schedule my reading *carefully*.
(I'm currently FINALLY nearing the end of <Vellum>, which is about the
slowest-reading book I've gotten this far in for ages, and panicking
at the implications for other due dates.)

Joe Bernstein

Joe Bernstein

unread,
Oct 19, 2007, 10:41:11 PM10/19/07
to
In article <4719235A...@tx.rr.com>, Konrad Gaertner
<kgae...@tx.rr.com> wrote:

> Joe Bernstein wrote:

> > Jacqueline Carey
> > * (May) <Kushiel's Scion>, 2006, skimmed
> >
> > I haven't really got a settled judgement yet, but I'm leaning towards
> > "worst so far, but not irrecoverably so".

> Of her Kushiel books, or of everything she's written?

Well, I haven't read her book on angels (and have no wish to), but of
her book-length fictions, my guess would be that <Kushiel's Scion> is
the worst, yes. It has to be a guess because I've read *way* too
little of <Godslayer> to be more certain.

On the other hand, if we talk of "novels", hmmm. There's a sense in
which each of the Phedre books is clearly a novel. I'm not sure the
same is true of the Imriel books; the first does have a solid ending,
but the second follows it by a day, and the second doesn't strike me
as having a very solid ending at all. If I look at <Kushiel's Scion>
simply as the first part of a very long novel, well, I'd need to re-
assess, let's just say. And maybe read through at least one of Carey's
last three books cover to cover, eh?



> > On the day I finished fact-checking for these posts, and started final
> > formatting, I found a copy of Cook's <The Dragon Never Sleeps>, 1988,
> > selling for a dollar at a local thrift shop. This is the book whose
> > rarity James Nicoll constantly bemoans. I bought it on general
> > principles, but fully expect I'll find it as impossible to finish as
> > the other Cook books I've tried, and even if I finish it, it's science
> > fiction, and I won't need to keep it around for history of fantasy
> > purposes. So: does anyone want, maybe a month from now, a rather
> > beat up copy of <The Dragon Never Sleeps> ? If so, let me know.

> I'm interested, but not necessarily enough to pay the shipping costs.
> And I'm sure there are others here far more interested.

Well, good to know someone wants it. I'm inclined to favour anyone
local to me, because then I get to meet someone, as well as cheaper
shipping, but I mainly want the book to have a good home given that
I'm unlikely to decide to finish it. So I'm prepared to pay sane
shipping costs. (This doesn't include overseas.)

Joe Bernstein

Anthony Nance

unread,
Oct 19, 2007, 10:51:00 PM10/19/07
to


Kuttner and Moore
Brackett and Hamilton
Hambly and Effinger
Priest and Kennedy
Duane and Morwood
Poul and Karen Anderson

Maybe Garrett and Heydron? (Did she publish anything that wasn't
co-authored by Garrett?)

Tony

Joe Bernstein

unread,
Oct 19, 2007, 10:57:36 PM10/19/07
to
In article <47193D79...@tx.rr.com>, Konrad Gaertner
<kgae...@tx.rr.com> wrote:

> Joe Bernstein wrote:

> > FOOTNOTES

> I'm reading these posts out of order (saving the longest ones for
> later), and it'd be really nice if I had some idea where these
> footnotes came from.

Well, you quote, just below, where footnote 1 comes from. Footnotes
specific to a particular author or book go in the relevant place.
These are global footnotes, related to lots of authors.



> > [1] I've also bought since coming here, but haven't (re-)read, a copy
> > of <The Fall of the Kings> by Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman. I
> > glanced at that book while compiling these posts' first draft, and
> > something dawned on me. In lots of married couples, both members
> > write or wrote speculative fiction. I've attached this footnote to
> > Kara Dalkey (John Barnes's ex-wife), Lisa Tuttle (Christopher Priest's
> > ex-wife), John Wright (L. Jagi Lamplighter's husband [3]), Syne
> > Mitchell (Eric Nylund's wife), Kristine Kathryn Rusch (married to Dean
> > Wesley Smith, last I heard), and Steven Gould (ditto Laura Mixon);
> > other examples are too numerous to name, indeed too numerous for me to
> > imagine I've even caught all the ones in these posts.
>
> That's never stopped us before :)

See, this is where footnote 1 comes from: each author so named. And
Kelley Eskridge (Nicola Griffith's not-by-US-law-wife).



> David and Leigh Eddings
> Joan and Vernor Vinge
> Isaac and Janet Asimov
> Scott Westerfeld and Justine Larbalestier

OK, so I missed Westerfeld. I didn't read anybody else on this list
in the year in question.

> Debra Doyle and James D. Macdonald
> Mercedes Lackey and Larry Dixon
> Roger Zelazny and Jane Lindskold (never officially married)
> Phil and Kaja Foglio (though Kaja hasn't published any prose yet)

And I also missed Avram Davidson, didn't I?

As long as you've changed the subject line, I might as well reiterate
my question. There are lots of heterosexual marriages between spec-fic
authors, and at least two, probably more, lesbian unions; but I still
don't know of any gay male couples who both write spec-fic. Does
anyone else?



> > [2] Those footnoted are just the authors I *know* to be local to
> > Seattle. (OK, as regards Jay Lake, Holly Phillips, Kristine Kathryn
> > Rusch and Lucius Shepard, admittedly, "local" seems to extend all the
> > way to the Columbia River, but anyway. Oh, and the Columbia River
> > *does* reach Canada...)
>
> You also have Robin Hobb (Megan Lindholm) in Tacoma.

Oh, sure, and Terry Brooks, and a bunch of others I didn't read in
the relevant year. (Come to think, I think I forgot to attach this
footnote to Matt Ruff's name after I decided to put in the joke about
him. Oops.)

There's a writer already in the next edition whom I suspect of being
local but am not sure (he's from "Washington"). I happened to show
the book to a librarian, who instantly picked up on that without any
prompting from me.

> > But it isn't just the library. The current coverage of some
> > readings Nicola Griffith is doing has finally explained something to
> > me: Kelley Eskridge lives near here. See, in the Midwest,
> > <Solitaire> is not an easy book to find on the shelves of used
> > bookstores; but in Seattle, it's all over the place. And this means
> > it has to have sold well here. Which suggests that bookstores and/or
> > book buyers *also* pay extra attention to local authors.

> Also keep in mind that local authors are frequent guests at local cons
> and do frequent book signings at local bookstores. Both are ways for
> local readers to hear about them and be encouraged to read their books.

Sure, but that doesn't mean I've seen anything remotely so, if you will,
*regional* about book-buying patterns elsewhere as here. It's not like
Robert Bloch's books grow on trees in Milwaukee, for example, or Phyllis
Eisenstein's in Chicago. I did, IIRC, learn of Naomi Kritzer while living
in Madison (where she grew up, but not where she's lived as an adult),
but I don't remember seeing lots of used copies of her books in the
stores there.

Maybe Midwestern cities are weird in this regard, and everywhere else,
local authors are minor cult figures; but I don't *think* so, in the US,
anyway. Can't speak for more cultured nations.

Joe Bernstein

Mike Schilling

unread,
Oct 19, 2007, 11:01:42 PM10/19/07
to

Avram Davison and Grania Davis (not sure if she wrote any SF while they were
married)
Silverberg and Haber
Van Vogt and Hull
Pohl and Merrill
Knight and Wilhelm

Did T E Dikty ever write any SF, or just edit and anthologize it?


philos...@yahoo.com

unread,
Oct 19, 2007, 11:59:50 PM10/19/07
to
On Fri, 19 Oct 2007 04:14:47 +0000 (UTC), Joe Bernstein
<j...@sfbooks.com> wrote:

>
>Next, movies that would, if books, fit in this post; I make much more
>extensive comments on these than on the movies listed in the other
>posts, on the grounds that after all my claimed expertise *is* in
>fantasy, and more importantly, that a lot of these are not well known
>to rasfw regulars:
>

>* <Carousel>, 1956 (not interesting enough, as an afterlife fantasy,


> to be must viewing for anyone who doesn't like musicals, nor is it
> a stellar musical);

And it has a rather icky subplot of: "Yes, sometimes beating people
really is an expression of love." I remember watching that show,
since I'd heard a lot about it, and boggling that the studio hadn't
apparently had a problem with producing a show that was pretty much
pro spousal/child abuse. The past really was a different country!


><The Phantom of the Opera>, 2004 (this is the one starring Andrew
> Lloyd ... um, Emmy Rossum, who makes the most of a much bigger, but
> less dramatically interesting, part than she had in <Songcatcher>;
> anyway, this version is only barely mode-technically fantasy,
> mainly via mass extinctions of candles; and no, I hadn't before
> experienced Webber as self-parody, but perhaps worse, I enjoyed it
> anyway);

And this one had me thinking: You know, if I tell the love of my life
that I have just been kidnapped and taken to a strange underground
lair by a mysterious masked man, I want his response to be just about
anything but "you must have been dreaming" and a pat on the head.

Cherryh also pointed out that it's not really historically accurate,
which I can accept, but that she'd like to see a version where the
young opera singer is devoted enough to her art to not abandon it for
a man. Which is also probably a modern viewpoint.

Rebecca

Gene Ward Smith

unread,
Oct 20, 2007, 12:43:51 AM10/20/07
to
Joe Bernstein <j...@sfbooks.com> wrote in news:ffbqr0$45v$1
@reader1.panix.com:

> There are lots of heterosexual marriages between spec-fic
> authors, and at least two, probably more, lesbian unions; but I still
> don't know of any gay male couples who both write spec-fic. Does
> anyone else?
>

Tanya Huff and Fiona Patton; who's the other couple?

David Librik

unread,
Oct 20, 2007, 12:55:13 AM10/20/07
to
>> Joe Bernstein wrote:
>>> Lisa Tuttle (Christopher Priest's
>>> ex-wife),

...and then he turned around and married Leigh Kennedy, so he's 2 for 2
with Turkey City female SF writers. It's like the guy flies from England
to Austin whenever he needs a girlfriend.

William George Ferguson

unread,
Oct 20, 2007, 1:13:48 AM10/20/07
to
On 20 Oct 2007 02:51:00 GMT, na...@math.ohio-state.edu (Anthony Nance)
wrote:

Tanya Huff and Fiona Patton (to quote linebacker Larry on Buffy, "I'm so
out my grandmother is setting me up with guys")

I'm honestly not sure what the relationship is between Eluki bes Shahar
(penname Rosemary Edghill) and India Edghill except that they share a house
in NY and a website on sffnet.

--
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
(Bene Gesserit)

Robert Hutchinson

unread,
Oct 20, 2007, 10:29:47 AM10/20/07
to
Konrad Gaertner wrote:

> Phil and Kaja Foglio (though Kaja hasn't published any prose yet)

By herself, you mean? She's definitely published some with Phil.

--
Robert Hutchinson

James Nicoll

unread,
Oct 20, 2007, 11:26:17 AM10/20/07
to
In article <Xns99CEDD1772905...@207.115.17.102>,

Shirley Meier and Karen Wehrstein? Or do I misremember?
--
http://www.livejournal.com/users/james_nicoll
http://www.cafepress.com/jdnicoll (For all your "The problem with
defending the English language [...]" T-shirt, cup and tote-bag needs)

Michael S. Schiffer

unread,
Oct 20, 2007, 1:20:03 PM10/20/07
to
Joe Bernstein <j...@sfbooks.com> wrote in
news:ff9boa$3u7$1...@reader1.panix.com:
>...

> Elizabeth Inchbald
> (May) <Lovers' Vows>, 1798

> A play, in five short acts, loosely adapted from <Das Kind der
> Liebe>, German, 1791, by August Friedrich Ferdinand von
> Kotzebue. A family melodrama, silly but readable. It's the
> play that figures prominently in Austen's <Mansfield Park>,
> hence included in the Norton Critical Edition of that novel, and
> hence, in turn, read by me, somewhat before I re-read the novel.

I read this in the middle of my last reread of _Mansfield Park_.
(During earlier readings, I have to admit, I wasn't actually sure
that _Lovers' Vows_ was a real play, but this time around I had
Google and the University of Pennslyvania[1] to satisfy my
curiosity.) It made a lot of that section of the book much
clearer, though it does still take some work to recognize just how
scandalous it was in context. It helped when I looked up a 1933
article examining the play's original reception, which included a
lengthy quote from a review in the wonderfully-named newspaper,
the _Porcupine and Anti-Gallican Monitor_, which gives a
contemporary POV:

[1]
<http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/inchbald/vows/vows.html>

***
We have ever beheld, with regret, the avidity with which
imported nonsense is attended to, while the truly admirable
productions of native genius are thrown by to moulder on the shelf
of forgetfulness. _Lovers' Vows_, the natural son of Kotzebue, is
not among the least objectionable dramas of German notoriety. It is
the universal aim of German authors of the present day, to exhibit
the brightest examples of virtue among the lower classes of
society; while the higher orders, by their folly and profligacy,
are held up to contempt and detestation. This is fully exemplified
in Lovers Vows. The Cottager and his Wife are benevolent and
charitable; Frederick, the hero of the piece, a common soldier, the
offspring of cupidity, presents an amiable pattern of filial love;
while Count Cassel, a travelled nobleman, is a caricature of every
odious and contemptible vice. Necessity will not be admitted as an
excuse for such conduct in a dramatic author; for, like the botter,
he has power over the materials out of which he selects and forms
his characters, and it would be equally easy, and more commendable,
for him to excite, in the minds of his auditors, respect,
admiration, and love of our laws, our magistrates, and our
religion, than to expose them to obloquy and contempt. The fall of
Agatha, in this play, [she's seduced, abandoned, and left pregnant
by the Baron --Mike] is effected too easily; and her restoration to
happiness, [the Baron, now conveniently widowed and apprised of her
poverty by his son, the aformentioned Frederick, is guilted into
marrying her] notwithstanding her repentance, forms too much of an
apology for error. Such things may be admitted in real life; but,
on the stage, a seduced female should never be suffered to appear
but as an object of terror.
***

Undergoing a couple decades of stigma and poverty before-- joy!--
marrying the guy who abandoned her (and who was browbeaten into
proposing by their son) apparently not being adequately terrifying.
Whatever you may have heard elsewhere, I can assure you that the
_Porcupine and Anti-Gallican Monitor_ was *not* soft on unwed
mothers.

>...

><I Have Found It>, Tamil, 2000 (a moderately loose adaptation of
> <Sense and Sensibility>, and a musical with rather sappier
> songs
> than those in <Bride and Prejudice>, with which it shares a
> star, Aishwarya Rai, as well as a source;

I actually liked the songs better in "I Have Found it" (aka
"Kandukondain Kandukondain", if anyone's looking for it). I also
loved the sendup of Bollywood itself running through the movie-- in
particular, the aspiring director's struggle to make the wholly
original movie he has envisioned, concerning a train with a bomb on
board that will go off if it slows below a certain speed...

so now I'm
> wondering whether anyone's done a Bollywood, or other Indian,
> <Mansfield Park> ! - though if so, Ms. Rai would have to play
> Mary Crawford or one of the sisters, which might be hard for
> all concerned...);

>...

Speaking of which, I did see the 1999 (American) "Mansfield Park"
movie. Replacing Fanny with a spunky modern heroine who's writing
Jane Austen's juvenilia on the side not being quite enough to bring
things into line with modern sensibilities, everything else gets
turned up to eleven on the theory that viewers won't get it
otherwise (we'll all recall Jane Austen's scene of Mr. Crawford and
Julia being viewed _in flagrante_ by Fanny, and then Edmund).

Mike

--
Michael S. Schiffer, LHN, FCS
msch...@condor.depaul.edu

Kurt Busiek

unread,
Oct 20, 2007, 1:24:33 PM10/20/07
to
On 2007-10-19 22:13:48 -0700, William George Ferguson
<wmgf...@newsguy.com> said:

Robin McKinley and Peter Dickinson.

Stephen King and Tabitha King (and from the same household, Joe Hill
and Owen King)

kdb

Michael S. Schiffer

unread,
Oct 20, 2007, 2:47:00 PM10/20/07
to
Joe Bernstein <j...@sfbooks.com> wrote in
news:ff9b5m$6lm$1...@reader1.panix.com:
>...
> As to <Koi... Mil Gaya>. I had written five paragraphs of
> comments on it after watching it, but then found that Mark
> Leeper had anticipated enough of my points in a review posted to
> (among other places) rec.arts.sf.movies, on August 10, 2003,
> that it made no sense to keep them. So I'll confine myself to a
> detail neither he nor the DVD box mentions - it's *long* (165
> minutes)

Though that's pretty much standard for Bollywood.

- and a couple of updates. 1) This, and probably its
> sequel, <Krrish>, 2006, should be added to the list of science
> fiction musicals compiled in a thread in spring 2006.

"Krrish" is arguably a superhero movie, rather than science fiction
as such.

2) Oh,
> yeah, sequel: there's another due in 2008, too. The summaries
> given by the IMDB suggest that they *might* be significantly
> more sci-fi-ish than <Koi... Mil Gaya> itself; but it's never
> safe to underestimate Bollywood's power to reduce all genres to
> romance musicals.

Roughly remembered from _Kandukondain Kandukondain_:

"We're not going to have any dance numbers. They know the bomb
could go off at any time. How could they stop to sing and dance?"

"And where's the mother character?"

"There's no mother character. This is an action movie!"

"That sort of thing may fly with foreign audiences, but Indian
audiences expect a *complete* movie. We're going to have to make
some changes."

Konrad Gaertner

unread,
Oct 20, 2007, 3:59:47 PM10/20/07
to
William George Ferguson wrote:
>
> I'm honestly not sure what the relationship is between Eluki bes Shahar
> (penname Rosemary Edghill) and India Edghill except that they share a house
> in NY and a website on sffnet.

I've been assuming India is Rosemary's daughter, but this site claims
they are sisters:

http://westofmars.blogspot.com/2006/11/susans-book-talk-rosemary-edghill-and.html

Konrad Gaertner

unread,
Oct 20, 2007, 4:01:57 PM10/20/07
to
Robert Hutchinson wrote:
>
> Konrad Gaertner wrote:
>
> > Phil and Kaja Foglio (though Kaja hasn't published any prose yet)
>
> By herself, you mean? She's definitely published some with Phil.

I mentioned "prose" to exclude comics work, and "yet" because
_GURPS: Girl Genuis_ isn't finished.

Gene Ward Smith

unread,
Oct 20, 2007, 5:23:14 PM10/20/07
to
"Michael S. Schiffer" <msch...@condor.depaul.edu> wrote in
news:Xns99CF7D78C583...@130.133.1.4:

> (we'll all recall Jane Austen's scene of Mr. Crawford and
> Julia being viewed _in flagrante_ by Fanny, and then Edmund).
>

I hope Edmund came up with a suitably moral comment.

Gene Ward Smith

unread,
Oct 20, 2007, 5:24:22 PM10/20/07
to
Kurt Busiek <ku...@busiek.comics> wrote in
news:2007102010243316807-kurt@busiekcomics:

>>> Maybe Garrett and Heydron? (Did she publish anything that wasn't
>>> co-authored by Garrett?)
>>
>> Tanya Huff and Fiona Patton (to quote linebacker Larry on Buffy, "I'm
>> so out my grandmother is setting me up with guys")
>>
>> I'm honestly not sure what the relationship is between Eluki bes
>> Shahar (penname Rosemary Edghill) and India Edghill except that they
>> share a house in NY and a website on sffnet.
>
> Robin McKinley and Peter Dickinson.
>
> Stephen King and Tabitha King (and from the same household, Joe Hill
> and Owen King)
>

Stephen King is a lesbian? I did not know that.

Robert Hutchinson

unread,
Oct 20, 2007, 6:27:34 PM10/20/07
to
Konrad Gaertner wrote:
> Robert Hutchinson wrote:
>> Konrad Gaertner wrote:
>>
>>> Phil and Kaja Foglio (though Kaja hasn't published any prose yet)
>> By herself, you mean? She's definitely published some with Phil.
>
> I mentioned "prose" to exclude comics work, and "yet" because
> _GURPS: Girl Genuis_ isn't finished.

I wasn't sure if you were excluding comics with "prose", but I think
issue 0 of Girl Genius ("The Secret Blueprints") still qualifies, as (I
think) there was a lot of background material written down in non-comic
form in there.

--
Robert Hutchinson

Kurt Busiek

unread,
Oct 20, 2007, 7:00:59 PM10/20/07
to

About as much as Randall Garrett.

kdb


Andrew Wheeler

unread,
Oct 20, 2007, 7:57:34 PM10/20/07
to
Konrad Gaertner wrote:
>
> William George Ferguson wrote:
> >
> > I'm honestly not sure what the relationship is between Eluki bes Shahar
> > (penname Rosemary Edghill) and India Edghill except that they share a house
> > in NY and a website on sffnet.
>
> I've been assuming India is Rosemary's daughter, but this site claims
> they are sisters:
>
> http://westofmars.blogspot.com/2006/11/susans-book-talk-rosemary-edghill-and.html

I think they are actually "sisters," but I've heard confusing reports.
They're of roughly the same age and neither one is the other's mother.

--
Andrew Wheeler: Professional Editor, Amateur Wise-Acre
--
Also available in blog form!
http://antickmusings.blogspot.com

Mad Hamish

unread,
Oct 20, 2007, 10:35:16 PM10/20/07
to

you always thought he was a cowboy?
--
"Hope is replaced by fear and dreams by survival, most of us get by."
Stuart Adamson 1958-2001

Mad Hamish
Hamish Laws
newsunsp...@iinet.unspamme.net.au

William George Ferguson

unread,
Oct 21, 2007, 1:22:08 AM10/21/07
to
On Sat, 20 Oct 2007 19:57:34 -0400, Andrew Wheeler <acwh...@optonline.net>
wrote:

>Konrad Gaertner wrote:
>>
>> William George Ferguson wrote:
>> >
>> > I'm honestly not sure what the relationship is between Eluki bes Shahar
>> > (penname Rosemary Edghill) and India Edghill except that they share a house
>> > in NY and a website on sffnet.
>>
>> I've been assuming India is Rosemary's daughter, but this site claims
>> they are sisters:
>>
>> http://westofmars.blogspot.com/2006/11/susans-book-talk-rosemary-edghill-and.html
>
>I think they are actually "sisters," but I've heard confusing reports.
>They're of roughly the same age and neither one is the other's mother.

And, of course, 'Edghill' was chosen as a penname by bes Shahar when her
agent told her she needed an appropriate name to sell historical romances.
She took the name from the Battle of Edghill (also spelled Edgehill or Edge
Hill), the first battle of the English Civil War.

tkma...@yahoo.co.uk

unread,
Oct 21, 2007, 6:17:02 AM10/21/07
to
Michael S. Schiffer wrote:
> Joe Bernstein <j...@sfbooks.com> wrote in
> news:ff9b5m$6lm$1...@reader1.panix.com:
>> ...
>> As to <Koi... Mil Gaya>. I had written five paragraphs of
>> comments on it after watching it, but then found that Mark
>> Leeper had anticipated enough of my points in a review posted to
>> (among other places) rec.arts.sf.movies, on August 10, 2003,
>> that it made no sense to keep them. So I'll confine myself to a
>> detail neither he nor the DVD box mentions - it's *long* (165
>> minutes)
>
> Though that's pretty much standard for Bollywood.
Yes. There have been occasional Hollywood length movie experiments in
Hindi - all flops. Audience expects to spend 3 hours in theater. There
have been occasional 4 hours movies too - but that's very rare.

Incidentally, "Koi Mil Gaya" was said to be a children's hit. I still
find 8 & 10 year olds glued to TV when this is shown. Plus adolescent
girls - lots of Hritik Roshan fans (he was the man alien lived with).
Adults tend to flip channels when this movie is shown.

> - and a couple of updates. 1) This, and probably its
>> sequel, <Krrish>, 2006, should be added to the list of science
>> fiction musicals compiled in a thread in spring 2006.
>
> "Krrish" is arguably a superhero movie, rather than science fiction
> as such.

May be he was thinking of its "future viewer" machine - though that is a
minor subplot. I have a feeling it is liked in India because of good
music & superhero part - in that order, rather than sf theme.

> 2) Oh,
>> yeah, sequel: there's another due in 2008, too. The summaries
>> given by the IMDB suggest that they *might* be significantly
>> more sci-fi-ish than <Koi... Mil Gaya> itself; but it's never
>> safe to underestimate Bollywood's power to reduce all genres to
>> romance musicals.

Look at India Box office ticket sales - including of Hollywood movies in
Hindi. A non-musical that sells is a very rare exception. And if the
sequel stars Hritik, hero of two previous ones, there will be be many
songs - don't have any doubts on that.

> Roughly remembered from _Kandukondain Kandukondain_:
>
> "We're not going to have any dance numbers. They know the bomb
> could go off at any time. How could they stop to sing and dance?"
>
> "And where's the mother character?"
>
> "There's no mother character. This is an action movie!"
>
> "That sort of thing may fly with foreign audiences, but Indian
> audiences expect a *complete* movie. We're going to have to make
> some changes."
>
> Mike
>

Possibly genre related: There is a few years old movie based on
Gulliver's Travels - "Jajantaram Mamantaram". Big man washed ashore an
island of tiny ones. Has some ghosts, but generally a sane movie for
first viewing. Far less music than typical Bollywood.

Joe Bernstein

unread,
Oct 21, 2007, 1:34:49 PM10/21/07
to
In article <fff8vs$99c$1...@aioe.org>, <tkma...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

> Michael S. Schiffer wrote:

> > Joe Bernstein <j...@sfbooks.com> wrote in
> > news:ff9b5m$6lm$1...@reader1.panix.com:

> >> As to <Koi... Mil Gaya>.

> >> - it's *long* (165
> >> minutes)

> > Though that's pretty much standard for Bollywood.

> Yes. There have been occasional Hollywood length movie experiments in
> Hindi - all flops. Audience expects to spend 3 hours in theater. There
> have been occasional 4 hours movies too - but that's very rare.

Oh, I suppose. Perhaps it's just that I *noticed* the length more than
I have with other Bollywood movies I've seen (not many). Also,
crossover movies (<Bollywood/Hollywood> or <Bride and Prejudice> for
example) seem to run shorter, so I don't automatically think "South
Asian equals long" (Satyajit Ray aside).



> Incidentally, "Koi Mil Gaya" was said to be a children's hit. I still
> find 8 & 10 year olds glued to TV when this is shown. Plus adolescent
> girls - lots of Hritik Roshan fans (he was the man alien lived with).
> Adults tend to flip channels when this movie is shown.

That's certainly understandable. I emphasised the length for two
reasons. One, since I was pointing non-Bollywood viewers at it on
the grounds that it's a sci-fi movie, I couldn't take for granted
that they'd expect long. Two, *the box doesn't state the length*,
so I just sort of automatically figured I should. It's nice to be
able to plan one's evening.

But then: It's also a really *draggy* movie. Much more so than
<Asoka> (which remains my admittedly ignorant image of What a Bollywood
Movie Should Be) or even (despite their respective flaws) <I Have Found
It> or <Chehraa>. One thing that was in the five paragraphs I snipped
was emphasis that if you stop watching during the first half, you'll
miss most of what makes it sci-fi. Because lots and lots of people
lack my tolerance for sappy romance, and are quite likely to stop
watching during the first half.



> > - and a couple of updates. 1) This, and probably its
> >> sequel, <Krrish>, 2006, should be added to the list of science
> >> fiction musicals compiled in a thread in spring 2006.

> > "Krrish" is arguably a superhero movie, rather than science fiction
> > as such.

> May be he was thinking of its "future viewer" machine - though that is a
> minor subplot. I have a feeling it is liked in India because of good
> music & superhero part - in that order, rather than sf theme.

Well, um, I was thinking of the summary in the IMDB; it's not like I've
ever seen this movie, or even a copy of the DVD. That's why I wrote
"probably". Anyway, it's a musical, and unless I'm badly mistaken the
superhero gets his powers from a sci-fi rather than a confessedly fantasy
source; so if <Rocky Horror> is a science fiction musical (which is how
that 2006 subthread got started), then so presumably is <Krrish>.



> > 2) Oh,
> >> yeah, sequel: there's another due in 2008, too. The summaries
> >> given by the IMDB suggest that they *might* be significantly
> >> more sci-fi-ish than <Koi... Mil Gaya> itself; but it's never
> >> safe to underestimate Bollywood's power to reduce all genres to
> >> romance musicals.

> Look at India Box office ticket sales - including of Hollywood movies in
> Hindi. A non-musical that sells is a very rare exception. And if the
> sequel stars Hritik, hero of two previous ones, there will be be many
> songs - don't have any doubts on that.

Oh, don't imagine I'm musical-averse: something like a fourth of the
movies listed in the posts are musicals, and for an American that's
really an unusual concentration. I'm not even actually romance-averse.
But given that both <Chehraa> and <Asoka> manage to turn fundamentally
other plots into romances - in <Chehraa>'s case to its detriment
as a movie, in <Asoka>'s only to its detriment as history (and it's not
like that's a Bollywood exclusive - look at <The New World>, say) - I
figured it was a safe assumption that <Krrish>, like its predecessor,
would play down the spec-fic in favour of romance.



> > Roughly remembered from _Kandukondain Kandukondain_:
> >
> > "We're not going to have any dance numbers. They know the bomb
> > could go off at any time. How could they stop to sing and dance?"
> >
> > "And where's the mother character?"
> >
> > "There's no mother character. This is an action movie!"
> >
> > "That sort of thing may fly with foreign audiences, but Indian
> > audiences expect a *complete* movie. We're going to have to make
> > some changes."

Yeah, that sounds right to me. Amusing that the happy ending is built
around the director getting to follow his artistic vision and *not*
do conventional Bollywood. Perhaps that was a jape on the scriptwriter's
part? "Dang it, here I'm in Tamilnad rather than Mumbai because I want
to do *real movies*, and I'm stuck doing this dreck instead?" Well,
hey, his problem: I do like Satyajit Ray, but I also like (some)
Bollywood musicals.



> Possibly genre related: There is a few years old movie based on
> Gulliver's Travels - "Jajantaram Mamantaram". Big man washed ashore an
> island of tiny ones. Has some ghosts, but generally a sane movie for
> first viewing. Far less music than typical Bollywood.

Thanks for the tip.

Joe Bernstein

unread,
Oct 21, 2007, 1:51:52 PM10/21/07
to
In article <Xns99CEDD1772905...@207.115.17.102>,

Gene Ward Smith <ge...@chewbacca.org> wrote:

Well, I certainly concluded Huff was lesbian from her books, so I'll
buy that one; Eskridge and Griffith (quite out) and Kushner and Sherman
(actually married by law) were the two I had in mind. Which means
we're up to three.

The other pairs suggested seem to belong with the one I didn't name
as speculative. In particular, I'm almost certain I've seen the
Edghills named as sisters in a book by one of them. Speaking of
speculative, one of my last-minute research tasks for these posts
was finding out what the deal was with Ellen Steiber living in Terri
Windling's house - they've also co-written a kids' book, already in
next year's edition of these posts - but I found nothing online
supporting prurient speculation, and Steiber seems to be heterosexually
attached now, anyway. So my point is that there are probably rather
more examples of closely attached women spec-fic writers than there
are of romantically attached women spec-fic writers. See also
<Possession>.

But the gay male question seems not to be answered? Huh. I'd have
assumed that at least *once* Samuel Delany would've taken up with
another sf writer long enough to count, but I guess not.

philos...@yahoo.com

unread,
Oct 21, 2007, 2:38:32 PM10/21/07
to

It appears (and is even sort of SF-y) that CJ Cherryh and Jane Fancher
have signed a Domestic Partnership agreement. As she put it: Our
relationship may be that of two businesslike writers sharing a
residence, but our ownership of our domicile is a potential legal
nightmare if one of us should step in front of a truck.

Plus she likes the (hopefully improved!) access that they should have
in case of medical difficulties.

So we are now moving into a future where heterosexual couples, who
have the right to get married, don't always, where homosexual couples
are starting to get some rights "similar to marriage", but still not
the right to marry, and where people in non-romantic long-term
relationships can get some of the same rights as married couples. I
wonder if heterosexual, non-married, non-romantic couples can apply
for a domestic partnership anywhere yet?

The times, they are a' changing.

Rebecca

Michael S. Schiffer

unread,
Oct 21, 2007, 2:54:03 PM10/21/07
to
Joe Bernstein <j...@sfbooks.com> wrote in
news:ffg2jo$931$1...@reader1.panix.com:

> In article <fff8vs$99c$1...@aioe.org>, <tkma...@yahoo.co.uk>
> wrote:
>
>> Michael S. Schiffer wrote:
>
>> > Joe Bernstein <j...@sfbooks.com> wrote in
>> > news:ff9b5m$6lm$1...@reader1.panix.com:

>...


>> > - and a couple of updates. 1) This, and probably its
>> >> sequel, <Krrish>, 2006, should be added to the list of
>> >> science fiction musicals compiled in a thread in spring
>> >> 2006.

>> > "Krrish" is arguably a superhero movie, rather than science
>> > fiction as such.

>> May be he was thinking of its "future viewer" machine - though
>> that is a minor subplot. I have a feeling it is liked in India
>> because of good music & superhero part - in that order, rather
>> than sf theme.

> Well, um, I was thinking of the summary in the IMDB; it's not
> like I've ever seen this movie, or even a copy of the DVD.
> That's why I wrote "probably". Anyway, it's a musical, and
> unless I'm badly mistaken the superhero gets his powers from a
> sci-fi rather than a confessedly fantasy source; so if <Rocky
> Horror> is a science fiction musical (which is how that 2006
> subthread got started), then so presumably is <Krrish>.

Very minor spoiler (it's clear to anyone who's seen "Koi... Mil
Gaya" from early in "Krrish"): the title character of "Krrish" is
the son of the couple in the first movie.

It's SF in much the same way that Superman is SF (and Wonder Woman
and the original Captain Marvel are fantasy). That is, the
trappings and explanations (such as they are) are tech and aliens,
not magic and gods. (As per usual, particularly for superheroes,
the tech and powers in "Krrish" are "magic" as far as their
scientific plausibility are concerned, but it's been a long time
since I belonged to the "implausible science fiction equals
fantasy" camp.) I don't have any real problem with overlapping
genres-- I just meant it as a clarification as far as what a viewer
might expect.

>...

> Oh, don't imagine I'm musical-averse: something like a fourth
> of the movies listed in the posts are musicals, and for an
> American that's really an unusual concentration. I'm not even
> actually romance-averse. But given that both <Chehraa> and
> <Asoka> manage to turn fundamentally other plots into romances -
> in <Chehraa>'s case to its detriment as a movie, in <Asoka>'s
> only to its detriment as history (and it's not like that's a
> Bollywood exclusive - look at <The New World>, say) - I figured
> it was a safe assumption that <Krrish>, like its predecessor,
> would play down the spec-fic in favour of romance.

I'd say you're pretty much on target there. Though there is an
SF/action climax.



>> > Roughly remembered from _Kandukondain Kandukondain_:
>> >
>> > "We're not going to have any dance numbers. They know the
>> > bomb could go off at any time. How could they stop to sing
>> > and dance?"
>> >
>> > "And where's the mother character?"
>> >
>> > "There's no mother character. This is an action movie!"
>> >
>> > "That sort of thing may fly with foreign audiences, but
>> > Indian audiences expect a *complete* movie. We're going to
>> > have to make some changes."

> Yeah, that sounds right to me. Amusing that the happy ending is
> built around the director getting to follow his artistic vision
> and *not* do conventional Bollywood. Perhaps that was a jape on
> the scriptwriter's part? "Dang it, here I'm in Tamilnad rather
> than Mumbai because I want to do *real movies*, and I'm stuck
> doing this dreck instead?"

>...

Given that the character's "artistic vision" was to do a knockoff
of "Speed"-- knockoffs of popular Hollywood movies being another
standby of conventional Bollywood-- I doubt that the writer was
playing the situation all that seriously. I read it as a good-
natured sendup, rather than any sort of attempt at biting satire.
(Though of course at this cultural distance, I'm probably not the
best judge.)

James Nicoll

unread,
Oct 21, 2007, 2:54:11 PM10/21/07
to
In article <7r5nh35nh7sgk2itu...@4ax.com>,

<philos...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>>
>It appears (and is even sort of SF-y) that CJ Cherryh and Jane Fancher
>have signed a Domestic Partnership agreement. As she put it: Our
>relationship may be that of two businesslike writers sharing a
>residence, but our ownership of our domicile is a potential legal
>nightmare if one of us should step in front of a truck.
>
Alberta has something that they call an "adult interdependent
relationship".

http://www.justice.gov.ab.ca/home/default.aspx?id=3550#elev

"This act amends several Alberta laws for people in unmarried
relationships involving economic and emotional interdependency. These
laws set out the financial and property benefits and responsibilities
attached to these relationships.

The act covers a range of personal relationships that fall
outside of marriage, including committed platonic relationships where
two people agree to share emotional and economic responsibilities."

Gene Ward Smith

unread,
Oct 21, 2007, 4:34:31 PM10/21/07
to
philos...@yahoo.com wrote in news:7r5nh35nh7sgk2itu3oji36romuq1dnh3s@
4ax.com:

> I
> wonder if heterosexual, non-married, non-romantic couples can apply
> for a domestic partnership anywhere yet?
>

It's a contract, it should cover all cases equally.

Kat R

unread,
Oct 21, 2007, 5:50:05 PM10/21/07
to

The Washington State version specifically denies domestic partnership to
unmarried heterosexual couples under the age of 65. The protections
granted to domestic partners are a little stronger--because they are
legal contract guarantees--than those granted to married heterosexuals,
bizarre as that is. If you declare yourself a same-sex couple or you
are a couple of any gender mix over 65, but unmarried, the law
applies--but you must register.

The intention was to "level" registered domestic partners with married
heterosexuals, but it ends up leaving single heterosexuals sharing
domestic arrangements unprotected legal outsiders. Washington doesn't
recognize common law marriage, but legal marriage grants the State of
Washington the right to inspect the state of your marriage and
childrearing and to interfere in it at will. This right is not granted
to the state in the matter of declared domestic partnerships. They've
actually made it better to remain unmarried.

--
Kat Richardson
Greywalker (2006), Poltergeist (2007)
Website: http://www.katrichardson.com/
Bloggery: http://katrich.wordpress.com/

Gene Ward Smith

unread,
Oct 21, 2007, 6:18:18 PM10/21/07
to
Kat R <null....@lycos.com> wrote in news:3
_Cdndd78eoMVIban...@comcast.com:

> They've
> actually made it better to remain unmarried.
>

So you are saying the people defending marriage have managed to wreck it?

David Johnston

unread,
Oct 21, 2007, 6:47:26 PM10/21/07
to
On Sun, 21 Oct 2007 14:50:05 -0700, Kat R <null....@lycos.com>
wrote:

>Gene Ward Smith wrote:
>> philos...@yahoo.com wrote in news:7r5nh35nh7sgk2itu3oji36romuq1dnh3s@
>> 4ax.com:
>>
>>> I
>>> wonder if heterosexual, non-married, non-romantic couples can apply
>>> for a domestic partnership anywhere yet?
>>>
>>
>> It's a contract, it should cover all cases equally.
>
>The Washington State version specifically denies domestic partnership to
>unmarried heterosexual couples under the age of 65. The protections
>granted to domestic partners are a little stronger--because they are
>legal contract guarantees--than those granted to married heterosexuals,
>bizarre as that is. If you declare yourself a same-sex couple or you
>are a couple of any gender mix over 65, but unmarried, the law
>applies--but you must register.
>
>The intention was to "level" registered domestic partners with married
>heterosexuals, but it ends up leaving single heterosexuals sharing
>domestic arrangements unprotected legal outsiders. Washington doesn't
>recognize common law marriage, but legal marriage grants the State of
>Washington the right to inspect the state of your marriage and
>childrearing and to interfere in it at will.

How does the state interfere in marriages? And are we expected to
believe that single parents are immune to state interference?

Nobody in particular

unread,
Oct 21, 2007, 6:56:01 PM10/21/07
to
"Gene Ward Smith" <ge...@chewbacca.org> wrote in message
<news:Xns99D09B995F52E...@207.115.17.102>...

They had to destroy marriage in order to save it.


David DeLaney

unread,
Oct 21, 2007, 10:04:23 PM10/21/07
to
On Sun, 21 Oct 2007 14:50:05 -0700, Kat R <null....@lycos.com> wrote:
>The intention was to "level" registered domestic partners with married
>heterosexuals, but it ends up leaving single heterosexuals sharing
>domestic arrangements unprotected legal outsiders.

...that's odd - my schadenfreude meter just started beeping.

>Washington doesn't
>recognize common law marriage, but legal marriage grants the State of
>Washington the right to inspect the state of your marriage and
>childrearing and to interfere in it at will. This right is not granted
>to the state in the matter of declared domestic partnerships. They've
>actually made it better to remain unmarried.

_Eventually_ I believe we'll get some national unity on this stuff, but it's
gonna take a while before all the state legislatures get their various
posturings out of their systems and/or the US Supreme Court says "ENOUGH
already". Alas.

Dave
--
\/David DeLaney posting from d...@vic.com "It's not the pot that grows the flower
It's not the clock that slows the hour The definition's plain for anyone to see
Love is all it takes to make a family" - R&P. VISUALIZE HAPPYNET VRbeable<BLINK>
http://www.vic.com/~dbd/ - net.legends FAQ & Magic / I WUV you in all CAPS! --K.

Kat R

unread,
Oct 22, 2007, 3:12:15 AM10/22/07
to

At the moment, the State of Washington usually does not, but, the state
requires a license which gives it the right of examining your marriage,
limiting whom you may marry and under what circumstances. That they
don't doesn't mean the right is not there to be invoked. You do not
have a right to marriage in a statutory marriage state--you are extended
the privilege of marriage which can be take from you. At one time
certain races were barred from marrying outside their own, the blood
test requirement can--and occasionally does--stop people from being
married. Under certain circumstance, the state may also declare your
marriage to be null and void--without your consent. These things cannot
be done to a domestic partnership.

> And are we expected to
> believe that single parents are immune to state interference?

I didn't claim they were. But since the topic is partners....

David Goldfarb

unread,
Oct 22, 2007, 7:27:26 AM10/22/07
to
In article <ps5hh311u4lg7h900...@4ax.com>,
Rich Horton <rrho...@prodigy.net> wrote:
>On Fri, 19 Oct 2007 04:01:29 +0000 (UTC), Joe Bernstein
><j...@sfbooks.com> wrote:
>
>>Alternatively, however, name
>>change and relocation could *both* be explained by marriage. So I
>>dunno.
>
>Alma used to post around here somewhere ... maybe in
>rec.arts.sf.composition, maybe some other online haunt.

She still is quite active on rasf.composition, under the name
"Alma Hromic Deckert". I've seen her post recently a few times
to Making Light as "Alma Alexander".

--
David Goldfarb | Nunc, Pince, tibi nocendus sum.
gold...@ocf.berkeley.edu |
gold...@csua.berkeley.edu | -- Aniinsani

Jasper Janssen

unread,
Oct 22, 2007, 10:31:14 AM10/22/07
to
On Sun, 21 Oct 2007 13:38:32 -0500, philos...@yahoo.com wrote:

>So we are now moving into a future where heterosexual couples, who
>have the right to get married, don't always, where homosexual couples
>are starting to get some rights "similar to marriage", but still not
>the right to marry, and where people in non-romantic long-term
>relationships can get some of the same rights as married couples. I
>wonder if heterosexual, non-married, non-romantic couples can apply
>for a domestic partnership anywhere yet?

Here in .nl, registered partnerships were always available to both
romantically and non-romantically attached people -- that is in fact the
primary difference between RP and marriage. The legal result of that is
that it differs in two regards:

1. Automatic parental rights of children had by one of the partners
assigned to both heterosexual partners (yes in heterosexual marriage, no
in RP or homosexual marriage[1]) and

2. You're not allowed to get married if you're closely related, but you
can get an RP. Siblings living together because they've never flown the
nest, is one of the canonical examples.

As of 2001, you don't have to live together for marriage or RP, it looks
like. And I can't actually find any reference to condition 2. anywhere
either, although I'd be surprised if parent/child or brother/sister was
legal for marriage. Apparently uncle/niece or cousin/cousin *is* legal,
though, since I find lots of references to it being on the rise in 2d and
3d generation Turkish and Moroccan immigrant families.


Jasper

[1] Note that you can get the parental rights assigned to both of you
without too much trouble -- it just involves formally acknowledging the
child is (like) your own, either before or after birth. If the natural
father turns up things get trickier.

William December Starr

unread,
Oct 22, 2007, 1:28:02 PM10/22/07
to
In article <ffi1eu$2cj8$1...@agate.berkeley.edu>,
gold...@OCF.Berkeley.EDU (David Goldfarb) said:

> She still is quite active on rasf.composition, under the name
> "Alma Hromic Deckert". I've seen her post recently a few times to
> Making Light as "Alma Alexander".

I couldn't resist: since it looks so scrambled to begin with (to my
American eyes, that is) I fed "Alma Hromic Deckert" into the anagram
generator at <http://www.wordsmith.org/anagram/advanced.html>.
Favorite results:

Alarmed Metro Chick (gotta be somebody's blogging pseudonym)

Armored Metal Chick (edited by Esther M. Friesner)

Admiral Ketch Comer (of the Imperial Navy, died on the Death Star)

Radar Heckle Commit (something you'd hear in the background radio
chatter during an F-16 dogfight simulator game)

Hectic Karma Remold (great name for a rock band)
Karma Circle Method (runner-up to the above)
Melted Karmic Roach (mmm, maybe)
Karma Melodic Retch (not even in the running)

Macho Emerald Trick (I dunno, but it sounds cool, don't it?)
Maced Armhole Trick (runner-up to the above)

--
William December Starr <wds...@panix.com>

John F. Eldredge

unread,
Oct 22, 2007, 8:43:28 PM10/22/07
to
On Sat, 20 Oct 2007 15:26:17 +0000, James Nicoll wrote:

> In article <Xns99CEDD1772905...@207.115.17.102>,
> Gene Ward Smith <ge...@chewbacca.org> wrote:
>>Joe Bernstein <j...@sfbooks.com> wrote in news:ffbqr0$45v$1
>>@reader1.panix.com:
>>
>>> There are lots of heterosexual marriages between spec-fic
>>> authors, and at least two, probably more, lesbian unions; but I still
>>> don't know of any gay male couples who both write spec-fic. Does
>>> anyone else?
>>>
>>
>>Tanya Huff and Fiona Patton; who's the other couple?
>>
>

> Shirley Meier and Karen Wehrstein? Or do I misremember?

Melissa Scott and Lisa Barnett were another lesbian spec-fic couple,
although without a Midwestern connection, unless you count Scott's having
been born in Arkansas. Also, Barnett died of cancer in 2006, and I am
not sure if you are asking for current couples.

--
John F. Eldredge -- jo...@jfeldredge.com
"Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better
than not to think at all." -- Hypatia of Alexandria

David Johnston

unread,
Oct 23, 2007, 1:23:18 PM10/23/07
to
On Mon, 22 Oct 2007 00:12:15 -0700, Kat R <null....@lycos.com>
wrote:

What are those circumstances?

These things cannot
>be done to a domestic partnership.
>
>> And are we expected to
>> believe that single parents are immune to state interference?
>
>I didn't claim they were. But since the topic is partners....

How does having a partner make a single parent immune to state
interference?

Jasper Janssen

unread,
Oct 27, 2007, 8:11:13 PM10/27/07
to
On Sat, 20 Oct 2007 22:22:08 -0700, William George Ferguson
<wmgf...@newsguy.com> wrote:
>On Sat, 20 Oct 2007 19:57:34 -0400, Andrew Wheeler <acwh...@optonline.net>
>wrote:
>>Konrad Gaertner wrote:
>>> William George Ferguson wrote:
>>> >
>>> > I'm honestly not sure what the relationship is between Eluki bes Shahar
>>> > (penname Rosemary Edghill) and India Edghill except that they share a house
>>> > in NY and a website on sffnet.
>>>
>>> I've been assuming India is Rosemary's daughter, but this site claims
>>> they are sisters:
>>>
>>> http://westofmars.blogspot.com/2006/11/susans-book-talk-rosemary-edghill-and.html
>>
>>I think they are actually "sisters," but I've heard confusing reports.
>>They're of roughly the same age and neither one is the other's mother.
>
>And, of course, 'Edghill' was chosen as a penname by bes Shahar when her
>agent told her she needed an appropriate name to sell historical romances.
>She took the name from the Battle of Edghill (also spelled Edgehill or Edge
>Hill), the first battle of the English Civil War.

So she chose the penname before meeting this India Edghill? Small world, I
guess.

Jasper

Andrew Wheeler

unread,
Oct 28, 2007, 7:34:06 PM10/28/07
to

"India Edghill" is also a pseudonym. I don't know if her real name is
public, though.

I believe the matching pseudonyms are part of the act of being
sisters...but, as I said, I'm not 100% sure their sisterhood *is* an act.

Jasper Janssen

unread,
Oct 30, 2007, 12:19:32 PM10/30/07
to
On Sun, 28 Oct 2007 18:34:06 -0500, Andrew Wheeler
<acwh...@optonline.net> wrote:

>"India Edghill" is also a pseudonym. I don't know if her real name is
>public, though.
>
>I believe the matching pseudonyms are part of the act of being
>sisters...but, as I said, I'm not 100% sure their sisterhood *is* an act.

Oh well. As long as they write good books.

Jasper

Joe Bernstein

unread,
Oct 30, 2007, 7:27:24 PM10/30/07
to
In article <7rcih31e10jfddhn6...@4ax.com>,
Elaine Thompson <Ela...@KEThompson.org> wrote:

> On Fri, 19 Oct 2007 04:01:29 +0000 (UTC), Joe Bernstein
> <j...@sfbooks.com> wrote:

> >Alma Alexander (aka Alma Hromic) [2]
> >(June) <The Hidden Queen> aka <Changer of Days, Volume One>, 2001
> >(June) <Changer of Days> aka <Changer of Days, Volume Two>, 2002

(Info about Alexander/Hromic/Deckert/X snipped. My thanks to various
people who've posted informational replies in this thread. I'm not
very likely to put those posts on my website, but if I do, I'll try
to incorporate at least some of the info.)

> >Indeed, in pleasing contrast to the Australian writers mentioned
> >below, Hromic/Alexander manages in the two at hand to *finish* a story
> >properly, and in just (!) 703 pages.
>
> Yes, it doesn't go on and on and *on*.
>
> I liked the villains, too. So many villains are two dimensional and
> these weren't.

No, though at least one is very clearly villainous.

But in a way that's an accomplishment in itself. Not all cultural
shifts are value-neutral; to show a decidedly non-value-neutral
cultural shift without dehumanising the chief advocate for the worst
possible course is - well, unusual. Much more common either to
pretend all shifts *are* value-neutral, or to dehumanise.

> Jin Shei also struck me as very much a female's book. OTOH, I saw
> Steve Stirling comment favorably on it, somewhere on Usenet. So what
> do I know?

Well, all I know is that it's popular in Seattle. Lessee ... Huh, OK,
it's actually available at a library near me right now, and I'll be
going there tomorrow; helpfully, the library also hides it in the regular
fiction (see recurring theme in the original posts)...

> >repetitive that frankly I'd have found it easier to bear with Haddawy
> >simply writing "Oh, and this person ALSO has Charisma 18" every time;
> >descriptions of luxury or references to kings and caliphs; and in the
> >maugre best of the non-fantasy ones, copious grotesquerie.

> You do not make me regret reading only abridged Arabian Nights tales.

That was an extremely frustrating book to write about, because about
a third of it is "Read this! Really, READ THIS!" and the rest is dreck.
So, well, go find it someplace and read the first third or so. The rest
can go hang.

> much snipped including responses thought better of about _Blood &
> Iron_ Let's just say it didn't work for me.

I was surprised the other day by two things: 1) that <Whiskey & Water>
was already available (not on hold) at a library; 2) that on not checking
it out, given my overloaded schedule, I felt very little regret. (Next
to read: Hal Duncan's <Ink> - I took time off for several books between
<Vellum> and its sequel - and that should be quite enough knotty and
violent to keep me for a while...)

[Bujold]
> >$ (July) <Legacy>, 2007, skimmed
> >
> >Well, oops, they didn't mean it when they said "two-part" in that
> >blurb a few months ago, did they? Idiots.
> >
> >Anyway, I can't really object to this becoming a longer - and indeed
> >to judge by this volume, potentially *long* - series.

> At least two more coming.
>
> >The major changes promised by the first volume don't happen, despite
> >plenty of further foreshadowing; by book's end, though, it's at least
> >easier to accept that both of Our Couple can reasonably be expected to
> >participate in those changes.
>
> As someone else pointed out when discussing these books, the changes
> that must be made aren't the sort that two people can just impose and
> have the book wrap up happily ever after. They're major cultural
> shifts that will take a long time. Our protaganists seem to be more
> catalysts for the necessary shifts than Major Actors, if you catch the
> distinction I'm trying to make.

I have but have never read a book which I picked up because it's a
historical novel about people I'd never heard of, and then didn't
read partly because I choked on the style, and partly because the
main characters turned out to be *parents* of someone famous, namely
Erasmus.

The couple in "The Sharing Knife" strike me as catalytic something
like that. Not that their kids would become famous, but that what
they do will have to ramify outward for that long. (I mean, Erasmus
himself is mostly famous for who he influenced, right?) Thing is,
Bujold is really good at delivering conventional payoffs, so I have
to wonder, how is she going to do both?

Anyway, thanks for being the only person to engage with my reviews
of the books. (I'm posting that partly in the hope, albeit a feeble
one, that once I've done so I'll find three other people who've
also made comments on the reviews since I last looked; no surer way
to be proven wrong than to post to Usenet, right?)

Katie Schwarz

unread,
Nov 1, 2007, 2:14:52 AM11/1/07
to
In article <vfmei35m7p0a4u3et...@4ax.com>,

><acwh...@optonline.net> wrote:
>
>>"India Edghill" is also a pseudonym. I don't know if her real name is
>>public, though.
>>
>>I believe the matching pseudonyms are part of the act of being
>>sisters...but, as I said, I'm not 100% sure their sisterhood *is* an act.
>
>Oh well. As long as they write good books.

*grumble* "Rosemary Edghill" isn't writing the books that *I* want her
to write, namely, a lot more in the Bast series. Bast is maybe the
only fictional character that makes me think wow, I want to be like
her! (Though I like to think I have better taste in men.) I want the
rest of the Twelve Treasures series, too, but I realize it didn't
sell. Do her books under other names have the same kind of voice and
style? If so, I'll have to look for them.

Never heard of "India Edghill" until now.

Joe Bernstein

unread,
Nov 8, 2007, 12:12:20 AM11/8/07
to
This post contains spoilers for the Webber version of <Phantom of the
Opera> and to a lesser extent for the original book.

In article <6ouih31s4vm8h2j9b...@4ax.com>,
<philos...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:

> On Fri, 19 Oct 2007 04:14:47 +0000 (UTC), Joe Bernstein
> <j...@sfbooks.com> wrote:

> >* <Carousel>, 1956 (not interesting enough, as an afterlife fantasy,
> > to be must viewing for anyone who doesn't like musicals, nor is it
> > a stellar musical);
>
> And it has a rather icky subplot of: "Yes, sometimes beating people
> really is an expression of love." I remember watching that show,
> since I'd heard a lot about it, and boggling that the studio hadn't
> apparently had a problem with producing a show that was pretty much
> pro spousal/child abuse. The past really was a different country!

Yeah. Here I share your objection; I thought damning it with, um,
no praise was enough, but I was probably wrong. I have the vague
guess, between that subplot and the lead character, that the producers
were trying to come up with a musical men might want to see, something
that seems to have been a preoccupation in the 1950s (<Guys and Dolls>,
<West Side Story> - both of which are both better and, um, more PC
than <Carousel>!).

> ><The Phantom of the Opera>, 2004 (this is the one starring Andrew
> > Lloyd ... um, Emmy Rossum, who makes the most of a much bigger, but
> > less dramatically interesting, part than she had in <Songcatcher>;
> > anyway, this version is only barely mode-technically fantasy,
> > mainly via mass extinctions of candles; and no, I hadn't before
> > experienced Webber as self-parody, but perhaps worse, I enjoyed it
> > anyway);

> And this one had me thinking: You know, if I tell the love of my life
> that I have just been kidnapped and taken to a strange underground
> lair by a mysterious masked man, I want his response to be just about
> anything but "you must have been dreaming" and a pat on the head.

This gave *me* a "past is a different country" vibe. I mean, it's not
like I see anyone walking around today who's as much the stereotype
of the helpless Victorian female as Rossum's character in that movie,
but still, the idea that she could get that kind of dismissal and not
have it affect her take on the guy's character just boggled me.

> Cherryh also pointed out that it's not really historically accurate,
> which I can accept, but that she'd like to see a version where the
> young opera singer is devoted enough to her art to not abandon it for
> a man. Which is also probably a modern viewpoint.

I actually wanted to go check Leroux's novel before replying to this,
and can report that the novel makes it unequivocally clear that she
retires; but I don't remember the movie doing so. Maybe it was in
the beginning, so I missed it (I watched the movie once, and then
tried to watch only songs again, and only those that didn't involve
Gerard Butler's annoyingly hoarse voice).

It's logical to *assume* that she retires - 1) her main venue has
just burned, and 2) she marries - but I don't remember evidence.

That said, there have been billions of screen versions of the story
by now, per the EOF, so yes, Cherryh's wish is a reasonable one.
The real question: Can she get out from under *both* men's thumbs?

philos...@yahoo.com

unread,
Nov 8, 2007, 8:13:30 PM11/8/07
to
On Thu, 8 Nov 2007 05:12:20 +0000 (UTC), Joe Bernstein
<j...@sfbooks.com> wrote:

In the Weber version, her gravestone clearly says that she is the
"Countess of whatever", and a Countess would never be seen on the
stage. It just wasn't done at the time. On the other hand, the Count
would never have married her (that wasn't done, either), but would
most likely have set her up as his mistress while she continued to
sing.

Rebecca

Joe Bernstein

unread,
Dec 2, 2008, 8:43:13 PM12/2/08
to
As some people may remember, I posted a ginormous book log last year in
October. Well, I had already by then started another year's log, it
closed some months ago, and although I've been delayed by jobs and other
things (for example, completely deleting one post by mistake in October),
I'm pretty sure I'll have it ready to post within a week or so.

So this is your warning. If you hate long posts, killfile this thread.
If you want to argue with my every opinion (or, flattering myself, if
you actually want to *read* my opinions), selectfile this thread. If
there's anyone still out there using crippled software that can only
kill/select on the subject line, note that "Another Year:" will begin
all the relevant subject lines, but there'll be a bunch of different
things after the colon.

As last year, I'm shooting to have individual posts limited to about 800
lines, and as last year, that'll cause some posts to be split up.

Joe Bernstein

PS The post deleted by mistake was not the fantasy post, nor was it the
science fiction one. Thank God.

--
Joe Bernstein, tax preparer, bookkeeper and writer j...@sfbooks.com
<http://www.panix.com/~josephb/>

Joe Bernstein

unread,
Dec 16, 2008, 1:28:04 AM12/16/08
to
Introduction

This is the second annual installment of a greatly overgrown book log.
I keep it partly because, with no home net access, this is a way I
can at least remind myself of rasfw; partly because, without time and
library access sufficient for research, this is a way I can remind
myself of, and keep myself in practice for, the history of fantasy I
theoretically still intend to write; and partly because of tedious
problems involving version control for my catalogues of books and
other media. I expect that at least one of these purposes will obtain
for another year, but that none are likely to obtain thereafter. I've
already started, therefore, the 2008-2009 log, anticipating that it'll
be the last of these. Meanwhile, here's this one.

Last year, this post's predecessor (posted 19th October 2007 with
message-ID <ff98uv$1an$1...@reader1.panix.com>) included right up front
an explanation of my efforts towards making it complete, despite the
fact that I only started the thing seven months or more after the date
I used as its own start date. This year, of course, I was in a
position to make the log truly complete. However, I decided not to.
I confess this was not primarily because I wanted to spare y'all extra
reading; but I had reasons for two exclusions all the same. Both are
guessable from the two years' logs; one is in fact essentially
deducible from this year's fantasy post, if you read really carefully;
but I don't intend to talk further about them myself, which would
defeat the purpose.

In general, these posts are formatted much like last year's posts;
when I became aware of a formatting issue, I used last year's posts as
a guide to resolving it, though I suppose I could have missed a
difference here or there. There's a fair amount of repetition from
last year in what follows in *this* post, too, except in the "access
to books" section that concludes it.

There's a glossary further down, but I should again define here what I
mean when I say, in the following posts, that I "skimmed" a book: at
some point I stopped reading straight through, and instead skipped to
the end, reading backward in fits and starts until I felt that I
understood as much as I really wanted to about the ending. This
frequently results in my reading most of the actual pages, but out of
order, disrupting any æsthetic effects that rely on things like
suspense or repetition, and in any event usually omitting things like
descriptions or introspection (which is why "skimmed" is still
accurate, even for books whose every line of *dialogue* I've read).
"Lightly skimmed" means I read less of the beginning, and left rather
larger gaps of unread material in the rest. And "minimally skimmed"
means I read the ending, and perhaps a bit of the beginning, and very
little else.

The following posts proceed thus:

Read for the first time: fantasy
Read for the first time: science fiction
Read for the first time: Gothics, fantastique
Read for the first time: children's books
Read for the first time: other fiction
Series
Re-reading and footnotes

The "series" post includes only series which the "read for the first
time" vs. "re-read" distinction would otherwise split, though it also
indicates (indirectly, by author) which books in other posts belong
to series.

Books read for the first time are in the *first* relevant post; thus
children's fantasies are in "fantasy", not in "children's books", and
"other fiction" really means "other" than the preceding four posts.

I didn't treat alternate history as a criterion; in other words, there
are alternate history books (at least, by loose definitions) in most
of the posts. This year I also treated what you might call "alternate
geography" the same way. The actual Ruritania books (did *you* know
there were three?) are in the series post, but several other
Ruritania-like books by Hope and by others are in the other fiction
post, while books not far distant in approach are in the fantasy one.
(The science fiction post, this time, has some alternate history,
but no alternate geography.) Horror, mystery, and graphic novels are
other divided categories; I again index some genres and forms without
their own posts, including each just mentioned, at the start of the
other fiction post.

As before, I found dividing "fantasy" from "science fiction" usually
straightforward. However, this year there were more movies, and some
books as well, for which dividing spec-fic (fantasy *or* science
fiction) from "other fiction" would have been a spoiler. These are,
roughly speaking, what I mean by "Gothics". In addition, a much
smaller number actually offer no reasonable grounds for deciding
whether they're spec-ficnal or not; these, what Tzvetan Todorov
originally meant by "fantastique", are in the same post as the
Gothics. (Unfortunately, the post in question is unreliable; see its
introduction.)

My treatments of particular books or series follow a pattern, to some
extent: 1) Always: Headers, giving basic bibliographic info
(author[s], title[s], date[s]), a code showing who owned the copy I
read, and sometimes words indicating incomplete reading. Following
the header proper there may be a line or two about awards for the
work(s) and/or author(s). 2) Sometimes: I generally put in the first
paragraph(s) of text any additional comments on bibliographic matters,
such as on uncertainties of dates, on pseudonyms, etc.; this is also
where I usually put any discussions of genre. In general, if I say
anything to defend or clarify the headers or their placement in a
particular post, it'll be here. 3) Always: My main comments on the
book(s) come next. 4) Sometimes: At the end there may be a paragraph
of minor complaints about typos or the like, or a footnote, or any
cited URL(s). In other words, approaching these discussions as if
they were in pyramid style may be unrewarding; flipside, don't read
too much into the fact that a number of entries end with trivial
criticisms.

I discuss two different (though related) themes globally: for
"Woman's fiction" see Snyder in the fantasy post, but for "The fates
of bad men" see Burney in the other fiction post (sv <Camilla>).
Also, see McGarry in the fantasy post for comments relevant to one of
the themes I discussed in last year's fantasy post, "Reform vs
revolution in the new century". More trivially, "Seattle as setting
or home town" is again in the footnotes post.

I still list movies with plots; see the other fiction post for some
problematica of that criterion (as against the criterion for listing
written works, which is that they be fictional).

The following sections of this post are, again: author index;
glossary; bibliographic methods; and "access to books".

Nobody followed up to last year's introductory post, and I don't
actually know whether anyone read it. If anyone has *this* time read
this far: welcome, and thank you. May you find something worthwhile
herein.

Joe Bernstein

Author Index

f- fantasy; SF - science fiction; g - Gothics (etc.); c - children's
fiction; o - other fiction; s - series; r - re-reading. I index from
the re-reading post here only authors on whose book(s) I actually
comment; in three cases, such comments point mainly to other posts,
and I provide those links below. Asterisks indicate discussions
longer than the relevant number of screensful (each 24 lines, 70
character limit per line, and not counting header lines).

One of the most significant format differences between this year's and
last year's posts is that this year, I include shorter works from a
number of sources, including two anthologies that I don't treat as
whole books. However, I continue to treat anthologies *in the
1632verse* as whole books, listing them under "Flint and
collaborators" in the series post; I acknowledge the inconsistency but
don't apologise for it. The index below includes all authors listed
in the posts on their own, including those from the two anthologies,
but includes, from the Flint-edited 1632verse anthologies, only
authors mentioned by name in the comments. The two non-1632verse
anthologies are: <Five Italian Renaissance Comedies> edited by Bruce
Penman (Penguin, 1978), fully discussed in the fantasy and other
fiction posts, and <The World Turned Upside Down> edited by David
Drake, Eric Flint, and Jim Baen (Baen, 2005), incompletely discussed
in the science fiction and re-reading posts.

Daniel Abraham - f*, Harriet Stratemeyer Adams as Franklin Dixon - c*,
and as Carolyn Keene - c**, Alma Alexander [Alma Hromic] - f****,
A. Manette Ansay - o*, Alex Apostolides under Mark Clifton - SF**,
Philip Ardagh - o, Pietro Aretino - o*, Ludovico Ariosto - o,
Mildred Augustine as Carolyn Keene - c**
Natalie Babbitt - f*g, Hilary Bailey - f**, Kage Baker - SF, Wayne
Barlowe - f*, Elizabeth Bear - SF*, Mildred Benson as Carolyn
Keene - c**, Carol Berg - f*, Thomas Berger - f*, Alex
Bledsoe - f*, Gillian Bradshaw - or, Kevin
Brockmeier - f*o*********, Anne Brontë - r (and see also Haig - f
and Burney - o), Joe David Brown - o*, Steven Brust - f*****SF*,
Tobias Buckell - SF, Lois McMaster Bujold - SF*, Emma Bull - r,
Fanny Burney as Frances Burney - o[16*], Frances
Burney - o****************
Chelsea Cain - f*, Sylvia Cassedy - fg*, Georgiana Spencer Cavendish
as Devonshire - o**, Arthur Clarke - r (but actually see
Raphael - SF), Mark Clifton - SF**, Molly Cochran - f***, Jonathan
Cresswell-Jones under Eric Flint - s
Frances Burney d'Arblay as Frances Burney - o[16*], Sebastian de
Grazia - o**, Virginia DeMarce under Eric Flint - s*****, Georgiana
Duchess of Devonshire [aka Georgiana Spencer Cavendish] - o**, Paul
di Filippo - o, Franklin Dixon [Edward Stratemeyer, Leslie
McFarlane, and Harriet Stratemeyer Adams] - c*, Cory
Doctorow - SF**, Patricia Doll as Carolyn Keene - c**, David
Drake - SF*, and under Eric Flint - SF*, L. Timmel Duchamp - SF*,
Alexandre Dumas père - o*, Sarah Dunant - o*, Hal Duncan - f****,
Lois Duncan - g*
Edward Eager - r (but actually see Hope - s), Teresa Edgerton as
Madeline Howard - f*, Rosemary Edghill - f, M. J. Engh - f
John Meade Falkner - g*, Sheila Finch - SF*, Eliot Fintushel - f*,
Eric Flint - SF**s**********, Kaja Foglio under Phil Foglio - f,
Phil Foglio -f
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell - o*, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - f, Paula
Goodlett under Eric Flint - s, Maxim Gorky - o, Margaret Gray - f,
William Elliott Griffis - f**, Nicola Griffith - SF***o*,
Giambattista Guarini - f*
Margaret Peterson Haddix - f*, Matt Haig - f**g*, Karen
Harrington - g**, Nathaniel Hawthorne - o, Robert Heinlein - SF*,
Tom Holt - r, Anthony Hope - f*o**********s***, Madeline Howard
[Teresa Edgerton] - f*, Morgan Howell - f**, Alma Hromic as Alma
Alexander - f****, Gorg Huff under Eric Flint - s
gli Intronati di Siena - o*, Alex Irvine [Alexander Irvine] - SF,
Alexander Irvine - f, and as Alex Irvine - SF*
Raymond Jones - SF
Carolyn Keene [Edward Stratemeyer, Mildred Augustine Wirt Benson, Edna
Stratemeyer, Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, and Patricia Doll] - c**,
Megan Kelso - o, Carol Kendall - f**, Evan Kilgore - g***, Laurie
King as Leigh Richards - SF*, Dorothy Koomson - o***, Marilyn
Kosmatka under Eric Flint (in an entry *after* the long "and
collaborators" entry) - s**, Ellen Kushner - c*, Henry
Kuttner - SF*
Jay Lake - f*, Glenda Larke - f****, Tanith Lee - f*, Fritz
Leiber - SF, Aleen Leslie - r**, John Ajvide Lindqvist - f*, Joan
Lindsay - f*, Kelly Link - f**, Anita Loos - o***, Maud Hart
Lovelace -c
Niccolò Machiavelli - o*, Rose MacMurray - o*, Michelle Magorian - c,
Auguste Maquet under Alexandre Dumas - o*, Zachary Mason - f*,
Bruce McAllister - SF**, Wil McCarthy - SF***, J.M. McDermott - f*,
Jack McDevitt - SF*, Sandra McDonald - SF*, Leslie McFarlane as
Franklin Dixon - c*, Terry McGarry - f***, Eloise McGraw - f, Robin
McKinley - SF*, Lois Metzger - c, Stephenie Meyer - f***, Olive
Beaupré Miller - f*, Alan Moore - f*, Christopher Moore - s**, John
Moore - f**, Moira Moore - s, Terry Moore - o, Warren Murphy under
Molly Cochran - f[***]
Arthur Nersesian - SF*, Glenda Noramly as Glenda Larke - f, Naomi
Novik - f**
Kerryn Offord under Eric Flint - s
Joshua Palmatier - s*, Susan Palwick - SF, Marisha Pessl - o***, Lynn
Plourde - f, Eleanor Porter - c*, Beatrix Potter - r

Rick Raphael - SF*, Jane Rawlings - f**, Leigh Richards [Laurie
King] - SF*, Frank Riley under Mark Clifton - SF**, Patrick
Rothfuss - f**, Karen Russell - o**
Germain François Poullain de Saint-Foix - o*, Robert Sheckley - SF,
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley - SF*, Will Shetterly - f*, Sherwood
Smith - f**, Maria Snyder - f*, David Sosnowski - SF*, Georgiana
Spencer as Devonshire - o**, Ryk Spoor under Eric Flint - SF,
Johanna Spyri - c**, Ellen Steiber under Terri Windling - f*, Edna
Stratemeyer as Carolyn Keene - c**, Edward Stratemeyer as Franklin
Dixon - c*, and as Carolyn Keene - c**
Roderick Townley - f*

Jack Vance - s*, A. E. van Vogt - SF
David Weber under Eric Flint - s, Rebecca Wells - o***, K. D.
Wentworth under Eric Flint - s, Leslie What - f, Terri
Windling - f*, Mildred Wirt as Carolyn Keene - c**, Philip
Wylie - SF*


Mary Frances Zambreno - f*

Glossary

bildungsroman - I mean by this a novel showing the substantial
maturation of its protagonist; I don't remember whether that's a
reasonably correct meaning. Traditionally, a bildungsroman's
protagonist is a teenager, but this seems to have gone out of fashion;
for relevant comments see in particular Fintushel in the fantasy post
(and, by implication, McCarthy in the science fiction post, sv <Flies
from the Amber>).

biblio, Contento, <Locus> - Bibliography, particularly as practised by
William Contento. See especially <http://www.locusmag.com/index/>,
which has been a joint project between Contento and <Locus> magazine
for quite a few years now. See also ISFDB.

chick lit - As I use it, this doesn't include all fiction written for
women, or even all non-romance-category fiction for women, but is in
its own right a genre whose distinguishing traits seem to include more
or less brassily comic outlook (in particular, with lots of putdowns
or mockery - "snarkiness"), querulous narrators (uniformly female,
single, and not quite as young as they'd like to be), and heavy use of
brand names in establishing setting and character.

Clute - see EoF, below

codes - Codes before titles reflect ownership of the book or movie in
question *as of when I read or watched it*. For books or movies in
the "read for the first time" series of posts, that means first
reading or viewing, not any possible subsequent ones. So the codes:

No code means the copy of the relevant book or movie that I actually
read or viewed was owned by a library, and unless otherwise
indicated, the Seattle Public Library.
* means I owned the copy I read or viewed.
0 means I own a copy of the relevant book or movie, but read or viewed
a different copy (because the copy I own is in storage in
Milwaukee). If there's no other code, then the copy I did read or
view was owned by a library.
+ means the copy of the movie viewed was owned by whoever owns the
copies shown in movie theatres.
$ means the copy of the book read was owned by a bookstore, *or*, the
copy of the movie viewed was owned by a video store. (Note the
differing implications for whether I paid for the reading/viewing.)
o means some other ownership situation, explained in the comments
x means specifically an e-text downloaded to a work computer and read
there; I don't count a book as "owned" until I get it home, so
these aren't quite copies I own, but there were too many of them to
explain every time. See also the access to books section below.

Contento - See biblio, above

EOF, EOSF, Clute - <The Encyclopedia of Fantasy> edited by John Clute
and John Grant. (Disclaimer: I was a contributor.) Also <The
Encyclopedia of Science Fiction> edited by Peter Nicholls and John
Clute.

epistolary fiction - Strictly, fiction made of letters (epistles); but
by convention, a story is still epistolary if it includes other
documents too. It stops being epistolary when there's any text that
*isn't* sourced to a document, that has no obvious reason for
existence in the fictional world. Thus, for example, <The Mislaid
Magician> by Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer is epistolary even
though there are few letters in it; instead it quotes a diary and a
deposition. (Quoting a memoir would be, I think, cheating; the point
of the distinction seems to me to be that documents are of their time,
whereas narratives look backward on events. In fact, the deposition
in <The Mislaid Magician> stretches this very point.)

footnotes - Footnotes with letters, found in text, such as [a], refer
to stuff at the end of the relevant entry. In contrast, footnotes
with numbers, attached to authors' names or to titles, such as
Rebecca Wells [2]
refer to two footnotes in the final post (the post for re-reading and,
ahem, footnotes).

house name - see sharecrop, below

IMDB, ISFDB - Internet [Movie | Speculative Fiction] DataBase.
Respectively <http://www.imdb.com/> or <http://www.isfb.org/> (*NOT*
.com!) at this time. Both are collaborative efforts, comparable to
wikis but older than Wikipedia; I have not yet seen a more reliable
filmographic reference than the IMDB, in admittedly cursory looking
around (for further comments on this, see the movie list in the
fantasy post, under 1953), but I tend not to use the ISFDB, although
it has a wider remit than Contento's bibliographies, and did not
consult it at all for this set of posts.

instantiation, instantiate, etc. - To instantiate something is to be
an example of it: <The Lord of the Rings> instantiates the claim that
fantasy can be great literature. Note that this has a different
connotation from "exemplify", "exemplary", and so on: an
instantiation is simply an example, and not necessarily a Platonic
ideal or an exceptionally good example. (Millard Fillmore
instantiates "US President", but would probably not be seen by most as
exemplifying the concept.)

Learn Better - Somewhere in <Expanded Universe>, Robert Heinlein talks
about there being only three fundamental plots: boy meets girl; the
Little Tailor (protagonist triumphs against improbable odds); and the
man who learns better. I'm pretty sure he meant the third to refer
mainly to stories of regret, but this year's log includes quite a few
children's books, or books that are to adults what lots of children's
books are to children, whose protagonists Learn Better on their way to
successes.

<Locus> - See biblio, above

Mary Sue - The canonical example of this extremely fuzzy set is the
<Star Trek> fanfic character named Mary Sue (which also happens to be
the author's name, and isn't it funny that they have the same hair
colour too?), who turns out to be the one woman Kirk (and/or Spock!)
falls in love with for keeps, and who also saves the universe when she
foils the villain. The outer edge of the "Mary Sue" concept fades
into the more general realm of "hero".

McGuffin - The thing a story's plot is ostensibly about. Often proves
to be a distraction from what's *really* driving the story, but
there's a lot of fuss and bother over it anyway.

mode - As I use it, a classification of literary texts that functions
by definition, as in "Fantasy is fiction in which there's something
impossible". Useful for drawing sharp lines - so I relied on modes to
separate speculative from "other" fiction in these posts - but not
much use for getting insight into writing. As best I can tell, no two
critics use "mode" with the same meaning, so caveat lector.

mythopoeic, mythopoesy - Fantasy that presents a universe with a
structure, which structure is moral, and usually endangered by the
conflict(s) the protagonist(s) must deal with. The Tolkien type of
thing.

<New Yorker> story - I mean by this a story with finely drawn
characters but no plot, beyond the protagonist's realisation of some
minor epiphany, and usually set in fairly faceless American locales.
As indicated in the fantasy post, not all stories published in <The
New Yorker> are, in this sense, <New Yorker> stories.

novum - "New thing". A thingummy in a work of speculative fiction
that establishes that it is, in fact, speculative fiction, not
realistic fiction: the ghost in a ghost story, for example.

numen - I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean, but when I use it
here, I mean something between "wonder" and "mystery". The sort of
thing really great fantasies tend to have great heaping amounts of, in
my opinion, what convinces you that there really are more things in
those books' heaven and earth. I contrast it with "techne", by which
I mean something vaguely like "engineering knowhow"; I'm trying to
make a polarity there (though of course really good engineering has
its own numen ...), where a fully "techne" book is trying to convince
you that everything is comprehensible and knowable.

paperback - This usually means "mass market paperback", the cheapest
common form of book in the US; depending on context, less often it
refers to paper covers literally.

picaresque fiction - Carefree stories of the open road. Originally
referred to a Spanish genre (Cervantes wrote some picaresques)
starring "pícaros", who are generally somewhat roguish; the true
picaresque is nearer to Jack Vance's <Eyes of the Overworld> in
character than to more morally conventional stories.

POV - Point of view, as in first person (there's a narrator), third
person (there isn't, or the narrator is "omniscient"), or second
person or plural (weird). I also use this acronym as short for "point
of view character".

prosopography - 'writing about persons'. A prosopography is
essentially a compilation of what's known about a population; for
example, there are prosopographies of various provinces of the Roman
Empire.

roman à clef - As I understand it, a novel which files the serial
numbers off real life, a book in which most of the characters can be
found, under other names, in the phone book.

screen time - I use this not only for movies; in writing, a character
"gets screen time" when that character is POV, or is the focus of
whoever is POV.

sf, sfnal, spec-fic, spec-ficnal, etc. - Unlike my usual practice, in
these posts (but not necessarily in followups) I use "sf" consistently
to mean "science fiction", and in cases where I mean "speculative
fiction" use "spec-fic"; similarly the adjectivals "sfnal" and
"spec-ficnal".

sharecrop series, house name - A series of fictions written by
multiple people, who may or may not be obscured by a common pseudonym
('house name'), who generally have to follow certain rules in their
plotting, style, etc., and who get paid up front but retain no
copyright in their writing.

slipstream - No doubt my understanding is wrong, but for what it's
worth, my understanding is that "slipstream" is a (putative) genre
composed of writings that defy the concept of genre by using the
techniques or tropes (q.v.) of multiple genres. I get the impression
that its advocates want to deal with the question "How do you
distinguish science fiction from fantasy?" by saying "You shouldn't be
able to distinguish them! When you can, it's because of bad writing!"
But no doubt I'm slandering them. I find the whole thing paradoxical,
and find that writers who get cited as slipstream often plot in ways I
dislike, so I've paid this movement less attention than perhaps I
should. I have the impression that "interstitial" has recently been
another word for this phenomenon. See also Todorov's fantastic.
I tend to read few works that I then understand as slipstream; but
such few as there are in these posts are *not* included in the Gothics
post. I do, however, list them there.

techne - See "numen" above

telling / showing - "Show, don't tell", the famous advice given to
writers.

Todorov's fantastic - Tzvetan Todorov was a literary critic who is
widely reported as having said in one of his books that "the
fantastic", as a category, ought to be understood as comprising art
that *hesitates* before the decision as to whether to be spec-fic or
not, in other words, that raises the possibility but does not settle
it. He therefore (again, from what I've heard) concludes that the
fantastic is rare. This apparently led to much acrimony from genre
sources who felt insulted by his using a different word ("marvellous",
I think) for what was becoming known, at the time, as "fantasy". (He
may also have had nasty things to say about it, though.) Oh,
actually, his words were French (fantastique, merveilleux), but
whatever.
Near as I can tell, the difference between Todorov's fantastic and
slipstream (which see) is that in the former, there is *uncertainty*
whether the story is fantastic or not, in both the reader or viewer
and the characters; in the latter, at least the characters display
indifference to the question. (Wikipedia on slipstream vehemently
disagrees, though; note my ignorance re slipstream.) Traditionally,
Gothic novels, even if they don't occupy Todorov's fantastic in the
strict form - even if they explain everything in their final pages -
nevertheless spend most of their pages in that space, and use the
uncertainty as a crucial driver of tension and plot. Anyway, my
limited understanding of slipstream, in contrast, and my limited
experience of it, is that its tensions and plots should normally *not*
rest on the challenging of any one view of reality. Hence I was
comfortable putting Gothics and fantastique into the same new post,
but not putting slipstream there as well.

tradition - As I use it, a classification of literary texts that
functions mainly by inspiration and aspiration. When I talk about
"the Anglo-American fantasy tradition", I mean more or less that body
of texts that Lin Carter promoted in the 1960s and 1970s, and those
later ones which have more or less clearly drawn on that body for
ideas or challenges (and works that have drawn on *those*, and so on,
world without end); works that refer to Tolkien, Howard, or some such,
even if only as a model to rebel against. I use tradition to separate
science fiction from fantasy in these posts (since I know of no way to
separate soft sf from fantasy by modes).

trope - Something conventional an author can put into a book.
Unicorns are fantasy tropes; orphans are tropes of children's fiction.

Wikipedia - As used in these posts, this is always
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/>, generally with the relevant term as
the element after the final slash (using _underscores_ in place of
spaces); I don't list individual URLs for Wikipedia articles as for
other Web sources. I tried non-English-language Wikipedia articles
for two purposes, but ended up getting no useful information on either
French capitalisation rules or Italian poetic metres from them,
whereas English-language Wikipedia came through; go figure.

Bibliographic Methods

For each book or story, I try to note author(s), title(s), date(s) of
first publication of the contents, and in cases where the contents
(disregarding things like introductions, notes, etc.) were not
originally published as a unit, date of first compilation. (Where
that first compilation used a different title, I also try to give
that; otherwise, it's "as such".) For series books I try to note
series title, but usually in the text, not the headers. Also in the
text, I try to note *interior* illustrations, naming the artist(s); I
only mention cover art or artists on occasion.

As to authors, I (try to) note, in the text, cases where the author
has been published under names other than the one stated by the book
(so listing them may help you find other works by the author). I
alphabetise the books by stated authorship even if pseudonymous.
(Thus I note that "Madeline Howard" is a pseudonym for Teresa
Edgerton, but still put the book under H.) Last year I didn't note
other pseudonyms (say, "Mark Twain"), but this year special
considerations repeatedly intervened, and I can't come up with a
significant example I actually left untouched. I still treat initials
with my usual schizophrenic approach: all initials *preceding* the
first name that's spelt in full are given, but none *following* that
name. (Thus: L. Timmel Duchamp, but Raymond [F.] Jones.)

As to titles, since I was doing the log this year from getgo, I was
able to be strict about using titles as rendered *on the book's (or
DVD's or video's) spine*, a procedure I adopt to limit how many
subtitles I have to bother with. (Otherwise the other fiction post
would read: <A: A Novel>, <B: A Novel>, <C: A Novel>, and so forth
ad nauseam.) However, I was less consistent about the many titles of
works that didn't occupy a whole book, DVD, or video, or whose spinal
titles were otherwise unavailable to me (as for movies seen on the big
screen). I continued to observe odd rules for rendering
capitalisation: treat "ALL CAPS" as "Normal Capitalisation"; between
cover, title page, and sometimes spine, any instance of either of
those wins; but if all agree on "all lowercase" or on "an Exception To
Normal capitalisation Rules", use that. For books with multiple
titles in English, the title on the relevant copy is given first, with
other titles known to me after, and no promise of completeness.

As to series titles, I usually get these from memory or inspection,
sometimes from <Locus>/Contento or author websites; I offer no
warranty.

As to dates of first publication and compilation, I have done little
original research, but have relied mostly on Usual Suspects: copyright
pages and their kin, <Locus>/Contento, author websites, and in some
cases of older fiction, printed bibliographies and biographies. I'm
pretty sure I never used the ISFDB this year.

The awards listings after the headers proper, for books and authors,
are only a little less inadequate than last year. I again relied
mainly on <The LOCUS Index to Science Fiction Awards> by Mark Kelly,
at <http://www.locusmag.com/SFAwards/>, seen November 6, 2008. This
year, I used Laurie Mann's AwardWeb, at
<http://www.dpsinfo.com/awardweb/>, primarily to investigate
children's book awards, and succeeded in finding reasonable lists for
the Newbery, but not for the Caldecott; I ended up excising a
reference in my comments to an award nomination that I couldn't back
up November 6, but now suspect may have involved a non-genre award.
(The story in question is Kevin Brockmeier's "The Green Children".) I
also consulted what lists of Edgar winners and nominees I could find,
with zero results. With the awards Kelly lists, I have again been
selective; this time I ignored not only all "long lists", but all
<Locus> poll results, even winners.

For movies I list title and date. Titles come from the packaging of
movies I own, and from my recollection as far as library-owned and
big-screen movies are concerned, sometimes corrected by tickets, due
date slips, Maltin 2001, or the IMDB. Dates come from the movies
themselves; from Maltin 2001; and from the IMDB. So neither datum is
particularly reliable! The same goes for original network, which I've
tried to indicate for items originally for TV, though I think I tried
rather harder than last year.

For radio dramas, I use essentially the same standards as for TV
shows, including network.

For plays seen live I use a complex but, I hope, self-explanatory
header structure.

For works not originally in English, I consciously *don't* attempt to
provide original titles, but do indicate original language as best I
can. For bilingual or multilingual movies, I indicate only the
language most used in dialogue, which isn't necessarily the language
formally recorded as that of the production. Note that "Chinese" is a
written language, so movies here are treated as being in "Mandarin" or
"Cantonese" (related spoken languages all of whose written forms are
variations of "Chinese"), based on the DVD packaging or the IMDB.
"Arabic" is a language whose increasingly divergent spoken forms are
linked primarily by the "Classical Arabic" written language of, in
particular, the Qur'an; I don't know whether these spoken forms have
names, let alone what those names are or which movies are in which, so
have indicated, for the one movie in "Arabic", its setting (which is,
I believe, also where it was shot).

Access to Books

Differences between these posts' year and the previous one, external
to me: The Seattle Public Library got a bigger book-buying budget.
The local Borders noticeably deteriorated; I don't know to what extent
this reflects the national chain's hard times. It's somewhat easier
to get to far places by bus, since a tunnel allowing buses to escape
downtown traffic has re-opened.

As for my personal situation? The biggest difference between last
year and this year is, I suppose, that I'd been here longer. Most of
my complaints in this section last year still obtain; but I'm used to
some of the hassles.

More importantly, *because* I was better established, I made a *lot*
more money in the year in question. I got depressed this summer for
the first time since I moved here, leaving me, as I write this
paragraph weeks before posting date, quite broke; concretely, I list,
and specially code, e-books that I couldn't bring home because I
couldn't afford a used CD drive to replace the broken one on my
computer, and they were too big for diskettes. But still, for *most*
of the year, I was better off. I may have spent less than half of my
gross income on housing, which certainly wasn't the case for the year
covered by the previous posts.

This had a pronounced effect on my reading and movie viewing,
reflected in the fact that this year's posts list rented movies, and
in the numerous series which I could buy volumes from, and so reduce
the hassles offered by the library. Series which I set out to read by
a combination of library and bought books include:
in the fantasy post, ones by Cochran, Larke, arguably Lindsay, and
McGarry;
in the sf post, ones by Drake (although I didn't actually get to
the book I bought) and arguably Finch;
in the other fiction post, one by Wells.
(Other series listed with mixed ownership represent, instead, my
buying a book and *then* looking for related volumes at the library.)
In addition, thanks to my looser budgets, I could buy background books
for reading Cain, and I could start reading the following authors'
novels and/or collected stories chronologically (though I didn't
finish any of these projects): Brust, Irvine, and McCarthy. I was by
no means rich - nearly all the bought books just mentioned were used
mass markets, or at least comparably priced - but often had enough
money to simplify at least *some* reading plans.

Another effect of more money is more formats. I thought it silly to
include printed scripts as books, and filmed scripts as movies, but
not scripts performed live or audio only. So there are now sections
between the books and movies, for radio dramas (fantasy post only),
and for plays performed live (fantasy and other fiction posts). I
only actually paid admission to two of the four plays listed (<Ghost
Sonata> and <Boxes>), but the willingness to go out at all, implied by
the other two (seeing <Twelfe Night> as part of a promotional "Live
Theatre Week", and <The Tempest> in a park), is still largely an
effect of increased familiarity with Seattle, and indeed, of better
budgets.

The second big difference from last year is that I grew obsessive
about movies.

One specific focus of this obsession, fed partly by the surprising
enthusiasm last year's log's lists of movies generated, was spec-
ficnal movies. Big-screen movies are much more concentrated in the
spec-fic posts than last year, and the list, especially, of science
fiction movies in general is enormously longer. I also watched more
horror movies in these posts' year than I usually see in a decade,
simply because I was privileging anything that might be spec-fic,
when borrowing movies from libraries; it turns out I can tolerate
horror much better on the small screen than I can in theatres.

The bigger problem, obsession with movies in general, led to: twice
borrowing huge numbers of them from the library, which I then kept
rather longer than I should have; buying (with much of my increased
income) hundreds of videos and well over a hundred DVDs (nearly all
used; only a few are listed here, for various reasons); and buying
(money again) tickets to the Seattle International Film Festival for
the first time. The obsession ended up collapsing halfway through the
film festival, in May; I did use up my remaining festival tickets, but
saw no more movies on the big screen within these posts' year, or
indeed until November, and watched few DVDs and videos as well.
However, it took me a long time to *recognise* that I'd lost interest,
and in the meantime I built up overdue fines on nearly a hundred
borrowed movies, fines which, colliding with depression-reduced
income, kept me from borrowing catalogued books in the final two
months of the posts' year; I'm unlikely to have restored borrowing
privileges at the Seattle Public Library, in fact, until March 2009,
at best.

Therefore, the fact that these posts nevertheless list many library
books as read in July through September owes mainly to the Seattle
Public Library's many uncatalogued paperbacks. I read the following
works in such paperback copies:

fantasy post: Berg, <Revelation> and <Restoration>; Brust, <The
Phoenix Guards>; Cochran, <The Broken Sword>; Guarini, "The
Faithful Shepherd"; Howell, all three; Larke, <Gilfeather>; John
Moore, <The Unhandsome Prince>; Rothfuss, <The Name of the Wind>;
Smith, <Inda>; Snyder, <Poison Study>;
sf post: Bear, <undertow>; Buckell, <Crystal Rain>; Clifton et alii,
<The Forever Machine>; Heinlein, <Starship Troopers>; Leiber, <The
Wanderer>; McDonald, <The Outback Stars>; Richards, <Califia's
Daughters>;
Gothics post: Falkner, <The Lost Stradivarius>;
other fiction post: Aretino, "The Stablemaster"; Ariosto, "Lena";
Intronati, "The Deceived"; Machiavelli, "The Mandragola"; Wells,
<Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood>;
series post: Flint et alii, <Grantville Gazette III> and <1634: The
Ram Rebellion>; Moira Moore, <Heroes Adrift>.

As this suggests, the sources for these paperbacks appear to be two:
first, brand new books that the library actually buys *for* the
uncatalogued collection; and second, older books given to the library,
which has a stated policy against cataloguing donated paperbacks in
general. (Of the above, the Italian comedies volume and the Wells book
aren't even mass markets.)

It was very kind of y'all not to point out to me, when I last year
bemoaned my inability to read Scott or Balzac with the library
resources available to me, the availability of e-books. As it
happens, it was also very smart of y'all; for example, the particular
point where my long ago sustained reading of Scott had stopped was
*one* book away from his only novel not yet available online (<The
Pirate>). That said, you may notice that most of the e-books listed
in these posts are concentrated in the posting year's final months,
and think that I simply remembered free books online when I no longer
had (much) free access to physical books. The reality is less
obvious. The hardcover copy of <1634: The Baltic War> that I
borrowed in spring to review it, prior to reading <1634: The Austrian
Princess>, included one of Baen's CDs in it, full of e-books. As
noted above, I lack a working home CD-ROM drive, so I copied the disc
to a work computer, and then set about bringing the files home on
diskette. Lots of the files were large enough that I could only fit
one onto a diskette, but small enough that I had lots of space left
over; so, to fill the empty space, I went shopping at Project
Gutenberg for books I hadn't been able to get from libraries, or for
authors who were only incompletely available through libraries. (At
this time I still actually *had* borrowing privileges; this is early
July.) Only later did I consciously shift my reading focus to books
available online. The e-books, listed by *source*, for the use of
anyone wishing to track down the ones I discuss:

Project Gutenberg (<http://www.gutenberg.org/>):
fantasy post: Griffis, <Dutch Fairy Tales>;
other fiction post: Burney, <Cecilia>; Gaskell, both; Hawthorne,
<Fanshawe>; Hope, the seven books not listed under Google Books
below;
series post: Hope, <The Prisoner of Zenda> and <Rupert of
Hentzau>;
re-reading post: Brontë, <The Tenant of Wildfell Hall>
Google Books (<http://books.google.com/>):
fantasy post: Hope, <Chronicles>;
other fiction post: Hope, <Mr. Witt's Widow>, <A Change of Air>,
<Sport Royal>;
series post: Hope, <The Heart of Princess Osra>
Baen <1634: The Baltic War> CD (some but not all of these are also
available from the Baen Free Library, via <http://www.baen.com/>):
sf post: Flint and Drake, all; Flint and Spoor, <Boundary>;
Raphael, "Code Three"; Sheckley, "Hunting Problem"; van Vogt,
"Black Destroyer";
series post: various 1632verse books, sv "Flint and
collaborators", not listed in the headers and only minimally
consulted;
re-reading post: Clarke, "Rescue Party"; Heinlein, "The Menace
from Earth"
A Celebration of Women Writers
(<http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/>):
other fiction post: Burney, <Camilla>

(The above list omits items actually read online, whose sources, and
usually URLs, are indicated in the relevant entry in each case.)

The movie obsession, with its various effects on my reading, had
itself, I think, a cause, in my inability to find *anything* I could
usefully research here, given the constraints I was under: I was
learning the history of movies, for lack of anything else to learn.
Only in August did it dawn on me that I actually *could* describe
these posts' year as "the year without research"; after about ten
minutes of resignation to this sad situation, which I knew would
change when I re-enrolled at the University of Washington in the fall,
I set about trying to do research *anyway*. But of course, in late
August the university's libraries shut down for interim, and I had to
switch focus. This is why I took on, very late in the posts' year and
much constrained by that fact, a full reading project of Burney
(itself a scaling-down of a much larger projected task, stretching
from <Amadis de Gaul> through <Don Quixote> to <The Female Quixote>
and many subsequent books), a considerable start with Hope, and a
small start with Hawthorne. Anyway, you can expect that next year's
posts will list at once fewer movies with plots, *and* fewer books of
fiction, between heavier work loads and my determination not to do
without a university library card again.

I believe Seattle saw far fewer spec-fic authors visit in these posts'
year than in the prior one. Certainly I less often noticed authors
showing up whom I'd recently read. I did, unlike the previous year,
actually *go* to an author appearance: I've finally met John Crowley.
(But thanks to ongoing massive holds on the one suburban copy of
<Love & Sleep>, I still haven't read "Ægypt" in full, and he isn't
listed in these posts.) His appearance was in a series at Richard
Hugo House called "Fantastic Fiction Salon" that also included a
number of other authors I respect, and represented a significant
percentage of total spec-fic author appearances in town; there wasn't
much this year at the Science Fiction Museum, while the University
Book Store's impressive schedule was probably slacker than before, but
still the single largest set of spec-fic appearances. Anyway, I kept
lots of newspaper listings, so can confidently assert that writers of
books that *are* discussed in these posts whom I missed include
Alexander (a joint appearance with Louise Marley and Kay Kenyon that I
*really* wanted to attend, but work precluded), Cain, Doctorow
(multiple visits), Griffith, Haddix, Howell, King (aka, but not in
this case as, Richards), Meyer, Nersesian, and Novik. This is ten
authors against last year's list of nine, but last year's list was
built from memory, not documents; a memory-built list this year would
have included only Alexander, Doctorow, Griffith, Meyer, and Novik,
and bear out my point.

The other lists I included in the equivalent paragraph last year are
also rather shorter. The only writer of books discussed in these posts
whom I remember meeting in the *past* is Christopher Moore (at an
author appearance in 2002-2003), though my unreliable memory is
claiming that I've also at least seen Edghill and Kushner; even
assuming those confabulations to be true, surely none of them
remembers meeting *me*. I've exchanged e-mails with Bradshaw, who may
remember me; I've sent e-mail to Flint, without reply. As for public
interaction, though I may have forgotten exchanges with some of these
authors, I only confidently remember talking on Usenet with Flint and
Spoor; in general, this year's list of authors, even disregarding the
dead ones, is noticeably less net-prominent.

I prepared tax returns for several burlesque performers in this post's
year, which was not unpleasant, but I did not, as far as I know, meet
anyone involved with any of the movies, or even the plays, listed
herein. (I did communicate by phone and e-mail with someone more or
less secretarial at one of the companies, getting a program so I could
name some of the performers. I think I also said "Thank you" to one
of that play's performers as I left.) Two of the movies I attended at
the film festival (<Camille> and <Apollo 54>) had filmmakers in
attendance, so I saw them and heard them speak, but I asked no
questions and didn't meet them; the other four (<Sita Sings the
Blues>, <Mermaid>, <Head-On> and <Romeo and Juliet>) did not have the
filmmakers present. (<Romeo and Juliet> was presented by the director
of the Seattle Shakespeare Company, but as it happens, though I saw
two Shakespeare plays, neither involved that company.) I can't
imagine guessing whether I've interacted electronically with any of
the movie or play performers, let alone crew, but I think it's
unlikely.

Joe Bernstein

unread,
Dec 16, 2008, 1:30:28 AM12/16/08
to
READ FOR THE FIRST TIME: FANTASY

This post's predecessor was posted 19th October 2007, with message-IDs
<ff9a6p$2qr$1...@reader1.panix.com> (A-C),
<ff9ah7$2jb$1...@reader1.panix.com> (D-L),
<ff9ans$d9a$1...@reader1.panix.com> (M-S), and
<ff9avn$srq$1...@reader1.panix.com> (T-Z and movies). This year's post
is split into *five* parts instead, but has grown a great deal less,
proportionally, than the science fiction and other fiction posts. I
haven't tried to crunch numbers to figure out how much of this
reflects a different allocation of books read, and how much just a
different allocation of things said about them. (Other fiction's
case, for example, was helped mightily by the fact that Kevin
Brockmeier and Frances Burney, my two most important finds of the
year, fit primarily there.)

See also, in the sf post, Duchamp, Irvine, and McAllister, and
arguably McKinley and Sosnowski. See also the Gothics post in
general. See also, in the kids' books post, Kushner. See also, in
the other fiction post, Brockmeier, very arguably de Grazia, very
arguably Dumas, Hope (sv <Sport Royal>, and very arguably others),
very arguably Kelso, and Russell. See also, in the series post, very
arguably Hope, Christopher Moore, Moira Moore, Palmatier, and Vance.
There are also fantasies in the re-reading post, mostly without
comments, by Bujold, Bull, Eager, Holt, Kerr, McKillip, Potter, and
Stevermer.

Daniel Abraham
(December) <A Shadow in Summer>, 2006
Nominee, 2007 Crawford Award

(December) <A Betrayal in Winter>, 2007

These are the first two books of "The Long Price Quartet". They come
with rapturous blurbs from many authors I respect, and in some measure
earn those. But expectations can play real games on these books'
readers; I'm more concerned here to deal with that than to go into
detail, especially since almost anything concrete I could say is at
least minimally a spoiler.

Both books have as POVs (among others) two men, often friends and
always linked. Both are essentially crime novels, involving political
plots in a world where magic is very powerful, very rare, and tightly
controlled by politics, and where all the political players come from
hellish upbringings. (This is one of what must by now be hundreds of
fictions that seem inspired by Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from
Omelas".) When I tell you that the third book is <An Autumn War>,
2008, you'll probably be sure that we have here, if not formula,
something similar. And yet... The volumes' settings are separated by
thirteen years, and by something like the distance between Vladivostok
and Saigon, at least climatically. And I would be more surprised than
not if the third volume didn't shift its attention to those two men's
children; already in the second, the other two POVs are much younger.

Because power in this world has such high prices, which magic does
nothing to ameliorate, the people Abraham chooses as POVs can be
difficult to tolerate, and while reading the first book I repeatedly
came close to uttering the Eight Deadly Words. I found the second
much easier to read, whether because I'd become acclimated or because
it lacked the older, more troubled POVs of the first, but still had
skimmed both before finishing either. But I'm glad I did. I knew
nothing of Abraham before reading these, but the <Locus>/Contento
biblio tells me he's been published for over a decade, and has
collaborated with several Major Names. Now he's created a serious
study of the costs of magic and of bondage, which also pays
considerable specific attention to gender issues: the first book's
plot revolves around an abortion, the second around women's stifling
more generally (if it doesn't make at least the long list for the
Tiptree award, something is seriously wrong). His world's history is
sketchy but plausible, except for the truly vitiating impression he
gives that his protagonists are the first to try to change things.
Should the remaining books maintain the standard these books set, the
Quartet will be a major work, and inspire hope that whatever Abraham
does next will truly deserve raptures.

Alma Alexander
(December) <The Secrets of Jin-shei>, 2004

One of the stereotypes of girls of a certain age concerns the vows of
friendship they make, and the bitter weeping when they (invariably)
break those vows. Apparently, in at least some periods, traditional
Chinese society gave some degree of social and customary support to
those vows, and they were rather less consistently broken.

Now let's imagine Elizabeth I of England, in a land with a similar
custom, whose geniuses aren't a bunch of men younger than their queen,
but instead a bunch of girls contemporary with her, who become her
socially-sanctioned friends. This is, in essence, the plot of <The
Secrets of Jin-shei>.

This is fantasy, but not overwhelmingly so. Syai, the land in
question, is imaginary - essentially a traditional China with some
changes, of which blond Gypsies are the flashiest, but a massive
softening of traditional Chinese patriarchy is far more important, so
our not-Elizabeth doesn't have to contend with an overwhelming set of
odds. And instead of Philip of Spain we have an alchemist, mage, and
sage as an opponent - imagine, if you will, a far more successful and
far more wicked John Dee. Two of our girls (um, when adult) become
his students in magic, and there are also occasional prophetic dreams
and the like, but basically, this is fantasy à la 1990s Guy Gavriel
Kay (whom Alexander acknowledges as an inspiration): we're not all
that far from reality.

So OK. The story concerns nine women. At the book's opening, the
youngest are nine years old; in the penultimate chapter, the oldest
would, I think, have been twenty-six. Alexander spends considerable
effort in the first half of the book showing the mixture of motives
behind the individual friendships that link these nine, then in the
second half of the book seems to sweep this away and treat the whole
bunch as a "circle". This is one example out of many of the tension
here between idealising the friendships of young women, and rejecting
such idealisation. Another, which cuts deeper, is the circle's
concentration of genius. In last year's post I noted that some might
see the protagonist of Alexander's previous fantasy duo as a Mary Sue;
well, it's easy to argue that gathering all these exceptional people
as friends is something similar. But exceptional people *do* gather
as friends in the real world; such gatherings seem to crush genius at
least as often as they exalt it; and Alexander's most obvious
departure from Kay would seem to be that she presents a much more
pessimistic picture than he ever has of the ultimate legacy of the
kind of glittering circle he so long specialised in depicting. My
comparison to Elizabethan England has barbs. (She also lacks Kay's
talent for *showing* genius; in context this reinforces, instead of
detracting from, her point.)

In last year's post, I also faulted Alexander's previous fantasies for
telling rather than showing, and for some tiresome tropes of imaginary
world fantasy, including the "clutter" of map, glossary, and prophecy.
Here there's still a glossary (and it's again spoilerish), but no
other clutter, and what tiresome tropes are internal to the text come,
I think, from romantic women's fiction, not from fantasy, and so are
anyway less tiresome to *me*. On the other hand, in working with so
many characters Alexander demonstrates what I (in a pet peeve)
understand as weak control over perspective - she'll shift from one
third-person POV to another more than once within a paragraph at
times. And she certainly hasn't gotten over the habit of telling;
readers with strong aversions to that should just grit their teeth
through the book's first part, because it does tail off considerably
thereafter.

But still, this book feels like a masterwork. Like the Kay books it
emulates, it's propulsive reading, and like them, it's plain enough
that you can read fast enough to avoid dying of suspense, but still
has enough style to lift it above the paperback bestsellers. And if
I've spent too much space saying too little about it, rest assured I
could say a whole lot more. I'm not sure there's a dissertation in
this book for someone, but it's certainly the first time I've ever
*had* to use that deconstructive word "tension" in describing a
literary work. There is wealth in this book, and it is justly its
author's best known. (Its lack of awards nominations implies to me
that 2004 was a spectacularly good year in spec-fic. Please don't
disillusion me!)

It's a pity, therefore, that its US publishers didn't see fit to copy
edit it properly. Last year I faulted any number of small press
titles over this sort of thing; well, here's a big publisher earning
such opprobrium. Much of this concerns a single character. Out of
the blue she gets about four years older, not far past the halfway
point; she was conceived in winter, but born nine months later in
*spring* (well, hmm, since Syai uses only eight months, this may
actually work *calendrically*, but biologically?); her name is
Tammary, but once becomes Tammy. Separately, Alexander's mildly odd
choice to use names mostly based on Pinyin-transcribed Chinese
occasionally veers into Wade-Giles-transcribed Chinese (Hsu, Szewan -
this latter a prominent character), which makes mock of the
pronunciation guide she took the trouble to include at the back; and
there are a fair number of grammatical slips, understandable for an
author writing outside her native language, but the sort of thing any
competent editor could fix. I'm not clear on whether I should be
criticising HarperSanFrancisco, or HarperCollins, or HarperWhosis, but
whichever Harper it is, shame on it.

Nevertheless, since writing this entry, I've bought a hardcover copy.

Natalie Babbitt
(December) <Tuck Everlasting>, 1975

Borrowing and reading this was my consolation for resisting the
impulse to re-watch the 2002 movie version starring Alexis Bledel,
which I'd liked only with great restraint when it came out anyway. I
have to admit considerable surprise as to the book's date: Babbitt
was apparently publishing children's fantasies for the entire length
of my childhood, so how on Earth did I never hear about her or any of
her books at the time?

But I might not have liked this curiously quiet book then anyhow;
Clute in the EoF remarks correctly that Babbitt's work "appeals
strongly to adults". It's August 1881 (except in a 1950 epilogue),
and Winnie Foster, aged ten, feels stifled by her far too correct
family; then she meets the considerably rougher Tucks. But they have
a secret - a spring of immortality - and while she travels a gamut of
emotions - from excited complicity, to terror, and onward - towards
them, she helps them keep that secret. Her story is an excellent way
to spend an hour or two; it's going to take me a while to decide
whether I think more of it.

(February) <The Search for Delicious>, 1969

Babbitt's first novel is a farce combining a mermaid's sorrow, a
preposterous series of arguments and fights over a dictionary
definition (of "delicious"), a plot to seize a kingdom, and whether
one should believe old stories. Our Hero is a boy aged twelve, who
does rather more thinking than doing. I read it in about an hour, and
mildly enjoyed it.

Hilary Bailey [1]
(March) <Frankenstein's Bride>, 1995

The Sourcebooks edition in which I read this may be the first US
edition; it contains at the back a separately paginated copy of Mary
Shelley's <Frankenstein>, which I read first, and discuss in the sf
post. So why have I put this sequel in the fantasy post? Well, first
of all, it's not a sequel, as consecutive reading of the two books
makes disconcertingly apparent. Bailey announces this clearly early
on - as we meet Victor and Elizabeth Frankenstein, happy young
parents, in 1825 - over two decades later than the death of the
original newly-married Elizabeth Frankenstein! There's ultimately no
way to reconstruct some part of the original as underlying this
"sequel" - no one page served as a breakpoint - but other than the
date, no single difference can be relied upon; Bailey competently
manipulates expectations throughout the book. She wrote, in fact, at
least four books, published in the 1990s, which work with old tales,
others being: <Cassandra: Princess of Troy>, 1993; <Mrs. Rochester>
(as in, Jane Eyre Rochester), 1997; and <Miles and Flora>, 1997
(sequeling <The Turn of the Screw>).

Several arguments could defend my calling this book fantasy though the
original is sf, but though one at least is fairly strong, only the
core issue matters here: I believe goalposts move. I don't think
ancient storytellers telling of Gilgamesh, or the Flood, intended
their tales as fantasy; I do think Robert Silverberg writing two
decades ago of Gilgamesh was a fantasist. Where Shelley, an
enthusiast for science surrounded by other enthusiasts, could
hand-wavingly say "What if a galvanic jolt could awaken life?", we now
know perfectly well that doesn't happen. (Well, OK, except when it
does - isn't the pacemaker based on a similar idea?) Bailey, in fact,
makes the point clearer, though it'd be a spoiler to explain. So:
Shelley could write of the enlivening shock in 1818, and it could be
sf, but it wasn't sf in 1995 when Bailey wrote of it.

Anyway, Bailey clearly intended in her version to use any number of
opposites; a generic one probably wouldn't bother her. Where
Shelley's book both assumes, and uses, the Romantic fear of ugliness,
Bailey's instead studies the Victorian fear of beauty, or at least, of
sexuality. (Hence the date change.) The sole narrator is Jonathan
Goodall, a philologist who meets Frankenstein and finds him even more
appealing than Shelley's Robert Walton had. At the time, a beautiful
woman, a wondrous dancer who sings equally well but is otherwise mute,
Maria Clementi, is dazzling London; Frankenstein and Goodall undertake
to try to teach her to speak. After the first session, Goodall, going
home, sees an ogreish, gigantic man, working at the docks. And events
unfold from there, more or less as a mystery observed, rather than
solved, by the half-sober intellectual narrator. The book is
involving and interesting enough, with romance and history as well; I
can certainly recommend it, and not, despite the Sourcebooks
presentation, only to horror readers. Just don't buy the claim that
it's a sequel.

Wayne Barlowe [1]
(July) <God's Demon>, 2007

The story of a revolt in Hell. Um. We all know that revolt in Heaven
is The War in Heaven, is by definition a big deal. But revolt in
Hell? Depending on your opinion of the beings there, it may seem
likely to happen all the time. Still, there's revolt and then there's
revolt. Spider Robinson once conjectured that his generation of
parents had become too hard for their teenage offspring to shock -
"What can they try? Celibacy?" Well, one is in Hell because one
broke rules, correct? So what's the biggest rule of Hell one can
break? Obviously, the rule that one must be evil. And this is
exactly the rule that Sargatanas, ruler of Adamantinarx, sets out to
shatter. He increasingly doesn't buy the slogans under which Lucifer
raised rebellion in the first place, and he *certainly* doesn't see
that buying them ever required one to be evil, or to torment human
souls.

Barlowe's story narrates Sargatanas's revolt from four tight 3rd
person POVs. We have Eligor, one of the rebel's lieutenants, and
Hani, a damned soul in Adamantinarx; and then in Dis, capital of Hell,
we have Adramalik, Chancellor General of Beelzebub's cavalry Knights,
and Lilith, who presumably needs no introduction, but is here Consort,
originally to Lucifer, but in his millennia-long absence, to Beelzebub
as Regent. Of these, only Adramalik takes pride in evil; this is
probably the least shocking rendition of Hell on offer, indeed often
banal, and the blurbist who says the characters behave "appallingly"
is making stuff up. Now, it's no spoiler to say that Sargatanas's
story ends with the book - his first appearance in the book is in this
phrase ending the second paragraph: "the last days of his lord,
Sargatanas". But none of these POVs' stories ends with the book, and
I'm not sure any of them is even, if you will, resolved. Barlowe's
acknowledgements strongly suggest that he still isn't thinking of
himself as a writer, but nevertheless a sequel would not shock me.

Flipside, however, this book is in itself a sequel. I don't remember
ever having seen <Barlowe's Inferno>, 1998, which apparently
introduced Sargatanas, or <Brushfire: Illuminations from the
Inferno>, 2001. Both were published by Morpheus and of course were
mostly art (and Barlowe's art isn't really to my taste), but
apparently both also included text.

So I may have done something I normally sedulously avoid, here: I may
have read a middle book without reading its predecessors. Well, it
was worthwhile. Barlowe needn't be so timid about his writing; he's
written a good book. I found this story's ending perfectly adequate,
and I'm always nervous when sequels to such endings appear, but if he
does write a primarily-prose sequel, I'll probably read it.

Carol Berg
(February) <Transformation>, 2000
Nominee, 2001 Compton Crook Award

(February) <Revelation>, 2001
(February) <Restoration>, 2002, skimmed

Our narrator, in these books, is Seyonne, who when we meet him has
been a slave for some sixteen years. In <Transformation> he becomes
mentor to the crown prince Aleksander. Seyonne comes from the
Ezzarian people, now lost to him, whose names, except for his, are
mostly Welsh, but whose culture, single-mindedly focused on fighting
the demons that possess humans at times, has no earthly analogue known
to me; Aleksander's Derzhi people have Russian names but actually run
an empire that to my mind is more or less the old Persian empire,
somewhere between Arsacid and Sasanid in its degree of centralisation,
but more like the Achæmenid in its entire extent. The Derzhi
conquered Ezzaria sixteen years ago.

<Transformation> is mainly a story of Seyonne and Aleksander, and how
each works the other's redemption. If it's justly overshadowed as a
spec-fic portrayal of slavery by Steven Barnes's later series
(unfortunately not finished, but begun with <Lion's Blood>, 2002, and
<Zulu Heart>, 2003), it can bear the comparison. Berg includes in it
just enough hooks that her sequels needn't be retcons, but it stands
alone. <Revelation> considerably widens the scope, and Aleksander is
no longer really a major character; it does *not* stand alone, but
pretty much requires <Restoration> as its sequel. By the end of the
series, both the Ezzarians and the Derzhi have faced many changes.

I got interested in Berg because she kept praising books I respected.
If our opinions of, say, Anne McCaffrey are lowered by her promiscuous
blurbing of garbage, then it's only fair to look in the other
direction as well. I find Berg's use of relatively obscure sources
refreshing, and she does politics, characters, and the other
ingredients of standard commercial fantasy unusually well, but these
books aren't extraordinary. I'll have to read more of her books to
find the link between her own writing and the daring writing she
praises. Seems like a good thing to me.

Thomas Berger
* (February and September) <Being Invisible>, 1987

This book chronicles six days in the life of Frederick V. Wagner, with
some flashbacks in the first chapter and a dinner, some days later, in
the last. The six days are essentially the ones in which he comes to
terms with his wife's having left him. This involves a rather
improbable amount of sex, as well as a lot of discoveries about
others' sexual behaviour, the latter made possible because the six
days in question are *also* the first six in which he uses in public
his newfound ability to become invisible.

Berger is, to my surprise, in my aging guide to American writers;
apparently he'd been a comic novelist for quite some time. (He's best
known for <Little Big Man>, 1964.) Well, I don't get much out of the
comedy here. Fred Wagner is not only a schmuck - a "writer" with
nothing published and even less progress on his book than I've made, a
writer in real life of ad copy for catalogues of novelty items, and of
course, headed for divorce - but also a rather unpleasant man who
seems to get along only with attractive women, and a linguistic snob.
He actually has enough ethics not to abuse invisibility horribly (as
soon as he figures out that his bank robbery will get the teller in
question prosecuted, he goes to all kinds of trouble to put the money
back), but he does make plenty of pettier uses of it, and what these,
as well as the (not very explicit and definitely not titillating) sex
stuff, amount to is a running series of slapstick situations. I don't
like slapstick much on screen, and apparently I don't like it in
writing either, especially when that writing is leisurely and is
focused on a guy whose linguistic standards are far pickier even than
mine.

But in any event, Berger plays the invisibility perfectly fairly, and
the narrative voice sometimes amuses if only by its own blasé dryness.
So if you *do* like slapstick written this way, by all means, look
this book up.

Alex Bledsoe
(June) <The Sword-Edged Blonde>, 2007

This book gave me two cases of expectations shock, one externally
generated, the other internally. The one that isn't Bledsoe's fault:
although one of the quotes on the back calls it "comedy" and another
says it's "often hilarious", it turns out not to be written primarily
for laughs. (To be fair, the blurbs don't actually *say* it's written
so either, if you read 'em with care.) The one that *is* the author's
doing: it starts out reading like exactly as you'd *expect* a fantasy
version of a hard-boiled detective story to read (whether or not you'd
encountered such a thing before - I don't remember any personally).
But it doesn't *stay* that way, and you shouldn't expect it to.
Bledsoe might be able to make a series out of his protagonist (and at
least one website I looked at claims he plans to), but it would
outrage credibility if he made later books about this protagonist
resemble this one, whose hidden depths transform it beyond
recognition.

This is something of a delayed bildungsroman, like Kit Whitfield's
<Benighted> about which I raved last year. It's not in that league,
but it's pretty powerful nonetheless, as a story of middle-aged
regrets and healing, among other things. The narrator's voice isn't
as distinctive as you expect hard-boiled detectives' to be, but is
adequately cynical and entertaining. I guessed most of the ending
well before getting there (and yes, without skimming ahead), so I
can't really recommend it to mystery fans. But I read it wanting
light fantasy and was surprised by the rewards its not being quite so
light gave me; if your tastes resemble mine, then I strongly recommend
you pick this up rather than some lighter fantasy next time you're in
that mood, and see if you have the same reaction.

The hardcover I read comes from Night Shade Books, and aside from the
mildly misleading blurbs, is about the least badly packaged Night
Shade title I've yet read. And it appears to be less than $20 at the
moment. So although Tor did have the sense to buy reprint rights,
anyone wanting a hardcover copy should probably just buy one, rather
than wait until next summer and settle for the paperback.

Kevin Brockmeier
(October) <The Brief History of the Dead>, 2003-2006, first compiled
as such 2006
"The Brief History of the Dead" Nominee, 2004 Nebula Award for Short
Story

This discussion will probably make more sense if you first read what I
say about Brockmeier's previous books for adults in the other fiction
post. (This is his fifth book, and second novel for adults.)

This book's first chapter appeared (as "The Brief History of the
Dead") in <The New Yorker> for September 8, 2003, AFAIK Brockmeier's
first story in that magazine [a] and another sign of his rise as a
mainstream writer. Oddly, though, the story (and the book) are
unequivocally spec-fic.

Still, if I wish to avoid spoilers, I'm posed a problem. The book's
basic setup is itself spoilerish for that chapter, that story. I will
therefore retreat, as (with astonishing good sense) the cover copy
writers retreated. There are two storylines here. One is set in a
city of the dead; the other is set in Antarctica. The first chapter
uses what amounts to an omniscient 3rd person POV to introduce the
city; after that, the seven even-numbered chapters follow Laura Byrd
in tight 3rd on a journey through Antarctica, while the seven
remaining odd-numbered chapters follow seven different people around
the city, also in tight 3rd. Laura's story is science fiction, set, I
would guess, within a century from now, while the city's is, by most
standards, fantasy.

Oh, and the city's story is built on a remarkable extrapolation from
an African concept of the afterlife. It is, perhaps, Brockmeier's
first really brilliant spec-ficnal inspiration; or perhaps it's just
the first that he allows free enough rein to see in all its glory.
Although science fiction readers will find the slowly revealed future
fairly plausible, much about the city will drive them nuts - and by
that token, Brockmeier still isn't doing the "realistically presented
impossibilities" thing of the conventional Anglo-American fantasy
tradition. (Heck, I want to call this "magical realism", but even
that makes no sense - the city is *not* realistic in any way!)
Furthermore, his focus is still very much on using spec-ficnal
concepts to illuminate life as it is; perhaps the standout chapter,
after the first, is one in which a character in the city tries to
enumerate the central idea, which he can only do by thinking
thoroughly about his past life. So this is by no means a genre book,
but I would certainly recommend it to any fantasy readers who can do
without maps and glossaries.

[a] Was "The Brief History of the Dead" also the first story from
<The New Yorker> nominated for a major spec-fic award?

Steven Brust
(November) <The Book of Jhereg>, 1983-1986, first compiled as <Taltos
the Assassin> 1991
(November and March-April) <The Book of Taltos>, 1988-1990, first
compiled as such 2002

(And somewhere in there, April I think, I lightly skimmed most of the
rest of the series. I still meant, and mean, to read them properly,
but a stupid mistake prevented this, and the opportunity didn't recur
in this post's year.)

<The Book of Jhereg> includes 0 <Jhereg>, 1983, <Yendi>, 1984, and
<Teckla>, 1986. <The Book of Taltos> includes <Taltos>, 1988, and
<Phoenix>, 1990.

I have the impression that most of the readers of this group have
already read this series ("Vlad Taltos", itself a subseries of
"Dragaera"), or are terminally uninterested in it (and many of the
latter subset's members probably haven't even bothered with this
post). A sizable percentage seem able to discuss this series in
staggering detail at the drop of a hat. Even in the event that anyone
reading this post *isn't* familiar with the series, dozens of rasfw
readers are better qualified than I to introduce it. So I'll pass.
Obviously, I liked the books, or I wouldn't have kept reading. They
didn't convince me my life would've been a far better thing had I read
them when they came out, but who knows what's still in store?

(April) <The Phoenix Guards>, 1991

Same (lack of) comments on the Paarfi subseries as on the Vlad Taltos
books, except that I seem to be one of the minority who actually
prefer Paarfi as narrator. I find it much easier to imagine buying
copies of these than of any particular Vlad Taltos book.

(November) <To Reign in Hell>, 1984

In the country of the naïve, the one lying man is king?

Sorry it doesn't scan better, but I had to take my consolations where
I could find them, while reading this book's first half. This may be
the biggest case of expectations shock I've dealt with: after inching
through it a chapter at a time reluctantly for days, and putting it
aside for days more, I picked it up again and read the second half in
an hour. What was *that* ?

I'd not previously read any long treatments of the War in Heaven [b],
so I can't tell how much of Brust's massively surprising (and highly
un-Christian) version is original, but I suspect much is. I might
talk about his imagined Heaven, his characterisations of the angels,
etc., but I'm too troubled by the way he depicts primordial innocence
as perfectly poised for destruction by one inevitable troublemaker
(here a minor angel named Abdiel) - a kind of "Pollyanna" in reverse -
even to figure out whether *that* makes any sense, let alone whether
the rest does. So I'll settle for this: The book isn't *all*
dialogue, but probably well over 50%; the POVs are numerous.
Obviously, at least half of it can be read quickly; the other half
probably can too, by someone else. It was probably worth it for me,
but I still think I prefer the regular kind of Pollyanna. [c] I do,
however, certainly recommend the book to anyone who's enthusiastic
about angels (and not oversensitive to heresy); here you get an almost
trilogistic (if ironic) explanation of the traditional orders of
angels, and many of the better-depicted characters bear names ranging
across the celestial and infernal maps.

[b] Of course, now I actually *want* to read <Paradise Lost>. Huh.

[c] Some months later, I set out to verify this claim. See Porter in
the kids' books post.

(November) <Brokedown Palace>, 1986

This was Brust's fourth novel, and the fifth I read; it's the first of
those that I more than enjoyed. I'm writing this minutes after
finishing it, but already feel sure of re-reading this book, as I'm
not sure about others.

The only book of Brust's I could have re-read in this season - that is
to say, the only one I'd read before, long ago - I could not in fact
re-read, because no local library owns it, and my copy is far away;
this is 0 <The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars>, 1987. [d] <Brokedown
Palace> is formally similar to what I do remember of <Sun>: in both
books, sections, different in content and POV, alternate in a rigid
order. In this book's case, the order starts with brief tales (mostly
folktales) of Fenario, the setting; next, chapters from the main
third-person POV, Prince Miklós of Fenario; third, brief accounts of
the book's main McGuffin; and finally, chapters from other POVs close
to Miklós (also third-person). (There are 8.5 iterations, and two
exceptions to the order: both chapter 17 and the following epilogue
belong to Miklós; and chapter 16, in a tour de force, sums the whole
structure up.) So the most obvious difference from <Sun> (and most of
Brust's books) is that here there's no first person account (though
the tales have a first-person teller). The characters in this book
are far less violent than in the Dragaeran books, and far less naïve
than in <To Reign in Hell>; given that neither Dragaerans nor angels
are human, it shouldn't surprise me that these characters feel more
human than the characters in Brust's other novels I've recently read -
but given that the book is drenched in fairy-tale matter, it *does*
surprise me, they nevertheless *do* feel more human, and I have to
admit this must be much of why I liked the book so much.

Anyway. Fenario is fairly obviously in the same world as the Dragaera
of Brust's main series, and there are two mysterious characters whom I
suspect of being better explained in Dragaeran books; I wouldn't be
shocked if there were also events in common. But things look very
different here. Dragaera knows Fenario (and probably other areas) as
"the East"; Fenario knows Dragaera as "Faerie". Fenario also has a
map (unlike Dragaera, AFAIK), and a pronunciation guide, both of which
make it perfectly clear (as if character names weren't enough) that
it's really Hungary. Should we, then, understand Dragaera as Austria
or some such? At this, the mind reels, and frankly, I find it easier
to believe that the world in question has one region from our Earth
and another not. Regardless, this book was written at a time when it
probably wasn't yet obvious that the Soviet domination of Hungary
would soon end. Much of it reads like a somewhat more earnest than
light-hearted adventure fantasy, but the plot here revolves around the
decaying titular palace and the changes its decay suggests, and near
the end, I think a single paragraph squarely links that palace with
the (ahem) Curtain of Communism:

All we ask for is a miracle or two. Is that so much? All we
need is to see ourselves as we are, so we can become what we
wish, for Fenario is the place where that may be. But to do that
we need to look, and to do that we need to stop.

At which I should stop. It's silly of me anyway to distinguish
Brust's other books from the Dragaeran ones. I'm pretty sure I could
pick *any* novel of his, at random, and several dozen rasfw readers
exist who could complete a full dissertation on it within a week. But
this is the one I *wanted* to talk about at length regardless.

[d] This whole thing started because I stumbled onto the collected
"Book"s mentioned above; my conscious reason for not reading Brust,
for *years*, has been that it would be too much of a headache to round
up the whole series, and I couldn't think of another excuse in time to
keep myself from borrowing them. (Though <Sun> remains my least
favourite of the "Fairy Tale" series it appeared in, and that was
probably the real reason all along.) Anyway, while chasing <Brokedown
Palace> and the Paarfi books I allowed myself to broaden the project's
scope, as usual for my reading projects, which is why I read <To Reign
in Hell> and, as listed in the sf post, <Cowboy Feng's>. I'm
intrigued by the way Brust's novels, for a decade, consistently
alternated between Dragaeran and non-Dragaeran, but I'm more intrigued
by the fact that such a well-regarded novelist has written, at shorter
lengths, mostly for shared-world anthologies. At any rate, since the
stories haven't been collected, and half the Liavek books I own are
also far away, that's why I've neglected his short fiction. (Does
anyone here actually know of a library *anywhere* that owns a Liavek
book?)
Oh, and duh, I'd also previously read 0 <Freedom and Necessity>,
1997, which Brust co-wrote with Emma Bull. Which I'd taken as further
evidence that Brust and I aren't on the same wavelength, but I should
be fair and admit that Bull and I usually aren't either.

Chelsea Cain [2]
arguably (July) <Confessions of a Teen Sleuth>, 2005

Nancy Drew Does the American Century!

I actually had this book in the other fiction post until quite
recently. There's nothing nearer spec-fic in the *plot* than Tom
Swift (admittedly, that's pretty darn near), after all. But I claim
that Alan Moore's <League of Extraordinary Gentlemen> is fantasy on
grounds that pretty much dictate the same claim for this book; and
Cain stretches her universe to its limits in her final chapter.

As noted in the rasfw discussion that made me aware of this book (and
that, thus, indirectly prompted me to spend $6 buying five of its
sources, for which see the kids' books post), this book is subtitled
"A Parody" where most novels are subtitled "A Novel". Well, in a
sense it *is* a parody. Cain's Nancy Drew (here, her own narrator) is
just as snobbish about clothing and bitchy towards those she dislikes
(especially romantic rivals) as one could cynically imagine by peering
beneath the originals' dialogue, and there certainly is plenty of
humour along the way, inspired by the disconnect between River Heights
and, well, America. (The last line, discussing octogenarian sex,
isn't a spoiler and is an example: "They didn't call him Hardy for
nothing." Nancy also wonders, in 1942, what companies are offering
Japanese-Americans "internships".)

But Cain has other things going on here too. "American Century":
This is Cain's first novel, but her fourth book; the previous three
*all* apparently derived from her growing up in the heart of the
counterculture. So in a sense she had been working the field of
generational difference for some time. In this book, she takes her
heroine and the supporting cast through the changes of this century
with a pretty keen eye, and for a "parody", this book has a lot to
offer anyone hoping to understand people who are currently becoming
centenarians. The disconnect between River Heights and America, after
all, isn't solely funny; this book, unlike its originals, includes
divorce, murder, and the Cold War as seen from Africa.

Meanwhile, "Nancy Drew": Cain also builds something out of a problem
not restricted to teen sleuths: when "the best years of our lives"
really are. As we watch not only Nancy and the Hardy boys, but Cherry
Ames, Encyclopedia Brown, and the rest doing precisely what they never
do in the books themselves - aging - Cain studies the trajectories
personalities take over lifetimes, what changes and what doesn't, and
what can be kept, what not, in an exercise that goes way beyond the
nostalgia or contempt characters (or living people) who peaked in high
school usually inspire.

Sylvia Cassedy
(February) <Behind the Attic Wall>, 1983

As tradition demands, this book features an orphan, with the
conventional name Margaret, who goes to live with cold, distant
relatives and finds magic; eventually she humanises the relatives and
herself becomes strong enough to do without the magic again. This
book is also traditional in being slower reading than so many modern
kids' books; and it's even set in a building that had housed a girls'
school.

However, Our Heroine's name is in fact Maggie. And she's almost the
only heroine in children's literature whose behaviour actually
justifies (IMNSHO) her cold relatives' hostility: she lies, steals,
and hides relentlessly. But in fairness, it's hard to blame her.
After all, this is her tenth (or eleventh) home in twelve years of
life, and most of the others were boarding schools. Moreover, one of
the few virtues the relatives turn out to have, other than extending
their obsession with health to Maggie, is that they left her in
schools so long, rather than taking her in sooner and blighting her
more with their inflexibility and stupidity. Separately, the magic
here is exiguous, small, and ghostly. Finally, three characters not
heretofore mentioned speak mainly in inspired nonsense, which is, in
fact, what I enjoyed most about this curiously untraditional
traditional book. (See the Gothics post for a later book of
Cassedy's, not as well known, but, IMNSHO, inordinately better.)

Joe Bernstein

unread,
Dec 16, 2008, 1:35:19 AM12/16/08
to
READ FOR THE FIRST TIME: FANTASY

Molly Cochran and [?] Warren Murphy [1, probably]
* (July) <The Forever King>, 1992
(August) <The Broken Sword>, 1997

There is a concluding volume, inventively titled <The Third Magic>,
2003; I've never seen a copy. It appeared under Cochran's name alone.
Furthermore, at the authors' respective websites (URLs below), Murphy
says nothing about the first two books (not even offering copies for
sale - and the site is mostly about selling stuff!), while Cochran
talks quite a lot about them and routinely refers to them as her
writing. Both volumes are copyright "M. C. Murphy". So these books
may be an actual case of that semi-legendary phenomenon, a
"collaboration" in which the more famous author's name on the cover is
his only contribution. In any event, Cochran's site mentions a
divorce, which may or may not be from Murphy; I don't *know* that they
were ever married (though I've found references to other marriages for
each, and numerous websites say they were), but the author bios in
these two books refer to their having a child together and living in
the state Cochran mentions as her pre-divorce home.

Anyway, all of that said, these books pose me a quandary. The easy
way to approach them is this: The story of King Arthur has millennial
popularity, for all sorts of reasons; obviously it's an excellent
choice if you wish to write a bestseller. But any author of Extruded
Fantasy Product can tell you the one thing that makes it less than
perfect for the purpose. It *doesn't have a Dark Lord* !
Fortunately, if there's anything EFP authors know how to do, it's Dark
Lords, so ... problem solved, and besteller status here we come!

Thing is, though, I can find no reason to believe Cochran (or Murphy,
come to that) has any history of writing or even reading EFP. (Murphy
of course has a *long* history of writing *other* Extruded Product,
just not the fantasy kind.) I can assure you these books (actually
set in the early 1990s, one in the year of publication, the other
three years later) don't carry any of the EFP warning signs. Instead
they carry all kinds of other warning signs, because what these really
are, is books of the Bestseller *genre*. Thus they have profuse POVs;
lots of cliffhangers; a bewildering mishmash of fantasy (from many
different cosmologies) and reality that any self-respecting EFP author
would sneer at; and a pretty good plot. (Tor actually published each
under its Forge, non-spec-fic, imprint.)

There's also a central idea that isn't wholly without merit. Just
what does it *mean* for Arthur to be a "once and future king" ? What
use, exactly, would a King Arthur be today? Here he's too busy
dealing with Dark Lords to give the question much thought, or action,
and Cochran (?) is (?) a little too in love with her own idea to take
it seriously. In reading these books, I found myself endlessly losing
traction - Cochran has no compunctions about screwing up history (did
*you* know Rome was sacked five times in the 5th century AD?), or
about complicating her universe with yet another bit of fantasy, so
there's really no safe ground except maybe in her characters.

But it's a more literate example of this sort of thing than <The Da
Vinci Code>, and certainly both more literate and more persuasive than
Harrington's book covered in the Gothics post. The characters can be
sympathetic (except when you're noticing they're mostly supermen), and
there's lots of "whee!" in the plot. And while the first book can
arguably stand alone (as Cochran's site claims she intended), the
second really does demand a sequel. I'll probably read it, sooner or
later.

Regardless, brr! It's beginning to dawn on me that a real difference
between genre fantasy and fantasy in the mainstream is that genre
fantasy at least knows that our world obeys consistent laws. Fantasy
in the mainstream - at least the downmarket kind - seems all too often
to be utterly innocent of such a concept, and cheerfully sweeps pretty
much any mix of counterfactuals together to make a book. Sure looks
to me like a sign of the rising tide of ignorance and stupidity.
Brrr.

<http://mollycochran.tripod.com/>, seen (for the second time) October
4, 2008; note that then, unlike the first time in summer, the site
was so designed that you would see a brief glimpse of the actual
content, followed by at least one annoying ad, which stuck around
indefinitely; you couldn't even get the brief glimpse of the
content if the ad was blocked; this was true under both IE6 and
IE7. I assume this is simply another step in Tripod's yearslong
effort to destroy its own usefulness as a hosting service, but
don't have any basis for guessing how long it'll take for Cochran
to move the site somewhere else. Maybe other browsers don't even
have this problem, I dunno. Anyway, what I say above is,
obviously, based on my first, undated, visit.
<http://www.warrenmurphy.com>, seen (ditto) October 4, 2008, and
without any obvious new glitches.

Hal Duncan
(October) <Vellum>, 2005, finished
Nominee, 2006 World Fantasy Award, 2006 August Derleth Award, and 2006
Crawford Award

(November) <Ink>, 2007

These two books comprise a series titled "The Book of All Hours" - the
title also of a legendary artifact in that series's conceptual scheme,
an artifact sometimes made of ink on vellum. The series itself is
made largely of massive reimaginations of myths. Each book contains
two "volume"s; in each book, the second of these begins with an
"eclogue", while the first of the four volumes begins with a
"prologue" and the last ends with an "epilogue". Each volume also
contains seven chapters, and between each pair of chapters, a section
titled "Errata" (the "Errata" sometimes, but not always, follow a
single story parallel to the chapters' main story). The main plot of
"The Lost Deus of Sumer", the first volume, is built around the
Sumerian myth of Inanna's descent into the underworld, and some of
that volume's "Errata" trace Dumuzi's resulting doom - but here, in a
major departure, our Inanna-figure goes to the underworld in the first
place because she's *looking* for our Dumuzi-figure. "Evenfall
Leaves", the second volume, uses Vergil in its eclogue, while the main
section is based on <Prometheus Bound> by Æschylus. Volume three,
"Hinter's Knights", depends on <The Bacchæ> by Euripides, reimagined
through commedia dell'arte; the epilogue ending volume four, "Eastern
Mourning", again draws on Vergil (and somewhat baffles me).

Well, that's the simple explanation; but to describe this work as a
whole is much, much harder. Let's see. By the end, Duncan has
explicitly singled out seven characters, but they get very different
amounts of attention, and this also varies by volume. Each is at
least once a POV, and several are even narrators. But there are also
plenty of other POVs (though I don't think any of those narrate), and
that's not counting the plural POV you're going to have to figure out
for yourself (which does narrate). Oh, and did I mention that each of
those seven characters is instantiated by at least several
individuals, and occasionally one version of character X kills another
version of himself? (Romantic relationships are a tad more stable,
though; the most fully depicted are gay male ones.) Or that all seven
may be aspects of a single soul?

So OK, POV and characters in general are pretty hopeless. Setting is
also problematic, for reasons related to the McGuffin. See, there's a
language called the Cant; its speakers are the unkin. Essentially,
speaking the Cant allows you to reshape reality. The Book of All
Hours, written *in* the Cant (in ink upon vellum), comprehensively
describes all possible worlds - or at least, that's one understanding
of it. (We actually encounter the Book early in <Vellum>, and on that
occasion, it's not obvious that it matches that understanding.) So,
setting? Much of <Ink> appears to be set in Glasgow or analogues;
there are also substantial sections set in Sodom, in Appalachia, and
in the Mojave. Or analogues thereto. Oh, and then there's the Somme,
and ... The date is often 2017 or 2037; we also spend a lot of time
between 1914 and 1940 or so, and some in other 20th century dates, or
in various parts of the pre-Christian era.

Plot is a major spoiler - the dust jacket of <Vellum> tells us that
the book's about War in Heaven, that is, among the unkin, and there's
some truth to that, but also a lot of, well, misdirection. The war is
the backdrop of <Vellum>, and sometimes but not always its focus; more
I'll not say. Theme? I haven't entirely figured it out. I think
Duncan wanted to write a book enthusiastic about revolution, chaos,
and revenge on the ruling classes, but couldn't convince himself of
the entire rightness of these causes; or I might be quite wrong.

So I end up with style. Because I really don't think any of the rest
is the point here, at least not for a reader who doesn't share
Duncan's more or less punk outlook on life. (Probably the least
successful passage in the series, for me, is in "Hinter's Knights", an
outline of The Horrors Of The Twentieth Century that strikes me as
punk in both its passion and its, well, disproportion.) Duncan wrote
this story with myth, knows myth backwards and forwards, and exploits
it to the fullest. So ætiology, allusion, parody, and above all
punning run throughout the volumes, erupting where least expected.
Duncan routinely tells a story by switching among several realities,
in each of which a different aspect of that story is being enacted; he
links across these switches, usually, with catchphrases straight from
cuneiform scribal practice. He draws his main characters clearly
enough that it often takes little more than a phrase to recognise one
under a new name, in a new reality; and for all the intellectuality
much of this discussion focuses on, he summons physical reality (or
unreality) vividly, earthily, and almost incessantly. He invents
words with abandon (my favourite, though probably not his, is
"hissper"), and in the first and last volumes also invents authors:
one of our heroes learns of the Book partly from "Liebkraft", while
"Joe Campbell" writes "Six-Guns at Salt City", one of several passages
in "Eastern Mourning" where Duncan parodically reduces his own
conception to boilerplate prose in various genres.

More seriously, the massive complexity of his creation means that
these books read very slowly - each took me something like two weeks
while working full time, whereas ordinary books might take one to
three days - and offer as much as you choose to put into them. A
reviewer in <Locus> mentioned <Finnegans Wake>; it was in an
infelicitous context, but I think the reference is warranted. One
thing that I doubt I'll ever know, for just one example, is how the
three fonts and, in particular, the different placements of the
section headings - flush left, flush right, centered, indented left or
right, ... - relate to what's going on. (I also still don't know just
how much of <Vellum> is set in the reality where people normally have
wings and horns.) So I think there are two ways to read this series.
One is to study it with care; I have very little doubt it would repay
the effort, if not, perhaps, the entire lifetime's study Joyce
supposedly wanted spent on his magnum opus. The other is to do what I
did, and treat it as bus and lunch reading despite the manifold,
manifest ways it's ill-suited to such settings. (I may try a more
dedicated reading later: I'm halfway to owning the series in first
editions, something I almost never care about.) As long as you're
prepared to devote a month or so of bus rides and breaks to it, you
can finish the story this way; you will, during that month, frequently
be confused, but you will have been lifted several times a day, by a
wash of dazzling prose, into the company of an extraordinary mind
doing its best to amuse, excoriate, or amaze you.

I don't think these books could ever win a voted award like the Hugo,
but I'm baffled that <Vellum> lost the juried awards for which it
contended. The series may be great, and is certainly at worst one
step short of greatness. Every serious reader of serious fantasy
should at least try to read it.

Rosemary Edghill
(January) <The Warslayer>, 2002

You've read this before, or at least seen the movie. Someone from our
world (in this case, an Olympic-class gymnast become phy-ed teacher
become "Vixen the Slayer" on TV) finds herself in another, hailed as
that world's last desperate hope against Evil. Gradually she attains
true heroism, and accomplishes her fated task, though not in the fated
way; she then has to decide which world to live in thereafter. This
version isn't especially inspired, and certainly not as fun as <Galaxy
Quest> (an explicitly acknowledged source), but is fast reading and
has no obvious flaws. Anyone who likes both chick lit and quest
fantasy might find this an appealing (though only mildly snarky)
mixture of the two.

There are several references to Donaldson's Thomas Covenant books
here, including the basic setup: the secondary world's inhabitants
have for a thousand years been utterly peaceful, which is why they
need an imported hero in the first place. (There's more to the
parallel, spoilerish for Donaldson and Edghill both.) I wouldn't
really have expected such an influence either in J. Random Baen Title
or in Edghill in general, but there you go.

Contains an introduction, and an episode guide for the imaginary TV
show, by Greg Cox.

M. J. Engh
* (August) <The House in the Snow>, 1987

What you'd least expect from this author: a straightforward boys'
adventure story. Benjamin runs away from the innkeeper who's abused
him for two years, since his grandfather died, and stumbles across
another runaway, Mackie, from the House in the woods, which the
villagers see as an abode for demons. The runaways lack much of a
plan, but it turns out this is the ideal day to take the House away
from the invisible robbers who run it, abusing the nine boys they've
kidnapped to slave for them. The invisibility is the only novum, and
is handled strictly as techne.

My copy is illustrated, with invisibility-appropriate vague,
expressive charcoals, by Leslie Bowman.

Eliot Fintushel
(February-March) <Breakfast with the Ones You Love>, 2007

A fantasy of the coming of the *Meshiach*, as seen by a
sixteen-year-old non-Jewish girl who's in love with one of "the Chosen
of the Chosen of the Chosen". Or, well, maybe he's just a drug
dealer. I had to stop and consider whether even telling you the
narrator's age would be a spoiler; much of the rest of what I might
say certainly is. But we do know from early on that Lea Trillim (Our
Heroine) has Powers - can slay at a glance, more or less - and there's
that "Fantasy" label on the spine of the trade paperback I read, so
... Anyway. The blurbs make much of the book's fast-moving plot and
its rich supply of curveballs, and unfortunately also of the
Yiddish-influenced narration (several authors, not all of them Jewish,
annoyingly drop into Yiddishisms in their blurbs). But to be honest,
while I did enjoy the generously and surprisingly tightly imagined
structure Fintushel gives to the beginning of the end, the main thing
I noticed in this book was the bildungsroman of its narrator. The
back cover makes much of her "bad attitude", but this is one
expectation you'll do well not to have as you start this book: pride
goeth before a fall, and Lea's pride in her toughness is a case in
point. Read not for her attitude but for her, an interesting
character in an interesting story.

(It dawns on me, in retrospect, that this is almost the only normal
bildungsroman in this post, as opposed to the numerous "delayed
bildungsroman"s, starring characters ranging from their late 20s to
their late 30s who must not only grow up but also come to terms with
the many experiences of their not-grown-up adulthood, that is, with
their pasts. Presumably this category caters to the numerous moderns
who by word and/or deed demonstrate their own reluctance to be
considered grown up. See McCarthy in the sf post, sv <Flies from the
Amber>, for a related topic.)

Phil and Kaja Foglio
o (June?) <Agatha Heterodyne and the Beetleburg Clank>, 2001, first
compiled as such 2002

While an argument could be made that this is science fiction, since I
agree with Ms. Foglio that it's fantasy, I'm not going to worry about
that. I read the opening pages at a bookstore, then read the rest
online, at the site for the series of which this is the first volume,
<Girl Genius>. And I should note that this volume was inked by Brian
Snoddy.

Well. Rowling last year, Brust this year; I've already commented on
books that rasfw obsesses over. But near as I can tell, the only
reason I get away with looking at rasfw but *not* obsessing over <Girl
Genius> is that I was grandfathered in. I suspect newcomers find
large unshaven men at their doors, shoving laptops at their faces and
demanding "Read this OR ELSE!" (Mind, I've met the Foglios
repeatedly, and an old friend works for them: I'm not accusing *them*
of anything. I'm assuming an rasfw-organised effort.) Clearly, it
would be idiotic of me to say much of anything about this, except
that, well, it's my turn for the thugs to visit, grandfathering or no:
I actually read a whole book's worth, and found myself fairly
uninterested in continuing. (Or indeed, in logging it; I was on the
verge of posting these posts when a technical difficulty intervened,
providing time for me to remember that the many posts about "Girl
Genius" I'd skipped past had something to do with a forgotten task.)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
* (June) "The Bride of Corinth", German, 1798

This ballad is based on the first (incompletely) surviving prose story
in the <Book of Marvels> by Phlegon of Tralles. It was translated by
Breon Mitchell as Appendix 2 of William Hansen's 1996 translation of
and commentary on Phlegon; Hansen claims there that the translation
was newly done for that book. The rest of Phlegon's book (which I
read to decide whether to put it into storage) is pretty boring, but
the first story was also a source for Washington Irving's "The
Adventure of the German Student".

In this poetic form Goethe's version seems a bit bumptious - I have no
idea whether to blame Goethe or Mitchell - but it scans well.
Phlegon's original is a tale of a ghostly lover; Goethe, ignorant of a
surviving summary by Proclus, added a backstory and replaced the
ending, making it essentially a new, unsubtly anti-Christian, story
(and, by a few years, a forerunner to European vampire stories). I'm
probably making it sound bad, but Goethe also takes the tragedy
Phlegon left latent and heightens it; in twice as many pages, or
probably about the same number of actual words, it's a far stronger
tale, and I found it worth reading.

Margaret Gray
* (August) <The Ugly Princess and the Wise Fool>, 2002

This is a very silly book about a land where - unlike every other land
its inhabitants have ever heard of - the third princess is born
utterly plain. Meanwhile, the king, who dislikes stuck-up wise men,
abolishes wisdom, so the youngest of the wise men cuts off his wisps
of beard and goes to work as a fool instead. Add in fairy godmothers,
balls, and old men out berrying, and, well, I had a lot of fun.

I think this is ironic given how I complain about didacticism in
Haddix's novel below. Evidently the saying about sugar-coating with
humour actually holds true: there certainly *is* preaching here, and
not even all that different from one of Haddix's main messages, but it
goes down very well indeed.

This book is aimed rather lower in age than most of the kids' books I
talk about in these posts. My copy is illustrated (with annoying
inattention to the text) by Randy Cecil.

William Elliott Griffis
* (September) <Dutch Fairy Tales for Young Folks>, 1918

Oh, be careful what you wish for...

I was frustrated by the blandness of Miller (below) and wanted a
volume devoted more exclusively to Dutch *fairy tales*, so when,
looking for Griffith's <The Angel of the Revolution> at Project
Gutenberg, I came across this book, I was thrilled. But blandness is
by no means the worst thing that can happen to a Dutch story for
children! Griffis's approach has so many fatal flaws I'm not sure I
can list them all.

First of all, like any sound mythographer born in the 19th century, he
Knows What Fairy Tales Are For!!! Nearly every one - in Griffis's
theory - is an ætiology, a Just So story. In Griffis's book,
"Cinderella" would be founding ancestress of a dynasty that has a
glass slipper on its coat of arms, and "Little Red Riding Hood" would
explain the origins of human hostility towards wolves. I wish I were
making this up, but I'm not. One of the stranger stories in the book,
with an actual hint of numen, turns into an origin myth for
linen-weaving. "The Cat and the Cradle" (hey, did *you* know that was
a real, and Dutch, story?) turns out to star the grandmother of a
famous saint. And on, and on, and on it goes.

Second, Griffis is under the purely bizarre impression that fairy
tales and legends belong to history. (OK, I admit this is vaguely
consistent with his Just So-ish obsession.) So he works into
something like half the stories some sort of prologue referring to
glacial times, cavemen, and the like, the coming of farming, the
coming of Christianity, and so forth, even if this has little to do
with the story. (Far too often, the historical scene actually does
have a lot to do with the story.) Little did he know that by putting
Solid Truths into his fairy tale book, he would make it one day far
more outmoded than any pure Tissue of Lies would have been...

Third, he is under the even more bizarre impression that fairy tales
should cohere and make sense. He tries to keep his fairy folk (who
tend to be nauseatingly helpful, and get credit for many of the
origins of major discoveries [e]) straight, explaining in detail the
differences between kobouters and elves, for example. He even, in one
story, has the gall to have the fairy folk themselves refer to a
couple of his previous stories, as though this were not a collection
of fairy tales but an actual bona fide history itself. His concern
for consistency would put many a modern fantasist to shame.

Well, but there's *one* good thing. His book is also obnoxiously
didactic. Since there's a couple of centuries' history showing that
didactic books are wildly popular, obviously many people should
appreciate this feature. I commend this book to the under-imaginative
among them. Others, I encourage to stay away.

(On the other hand, the Gutenberg HTML version comes with
illustrations, which are rather like Maxfield Parrish's 1890s
illustrations only darker, and are fairly good. They aren't credited
in the text, but the first one appears to be signed Rachael Robinson
Elmer. If you're curious, download the HTML version and throw away
the text.)

[e] Well, OK, this is *usually* irksome, but turns hilarious when he
credits a single dream given to one person for both wooden clogs, and
pile drivers. No, I am not making this up, either. Fairy folk have
to be kept consistent, but evidently multi-centenarians are just fine.

Giambattista Guarini
(August-September) "The Faithful Shepherd", Italian, 1590

This is the longest, latest, and last, though listed first *in these
posts*, of <Five Italian Renaissance Comedies> included in one volume
edited by Bruce Penman. In this case, Penman reprinted a 1647
translation by Sir Richard Fanshawe, very lightly emended; the
translation is in rhymed iambic pentameter (in other words, without
the rhymes, it'd be blank verse such as Shakespeare used). The
Italian original is also poetic (and has repeatedly been set to
music).

It isn't much of a compliment to call this the best of the five
comedies in the book, and people who dislike Shakespeare wouldn't
agree: aside from Fanshawe's metre and archaic diction, the structure
(five acts with varying numbers of scenes), the soliloquies, the sheer
wordiness all recall the English playwright. Guarini's setting is
ancient Arcadia (and he actually manages not to perpetrate any really
blatant anachronisms, in particular not to have his characters call on
Christ for example). He consistently refers to young women as
"nymphs", but the fantasy of the play doesn't lie in that; rather, the
whole intricate plot revolves around Delphic oracles, and there are
plenty of descriptions of offstage signs of divine favour or anger.
There's also an actual Satyr running around.

I find the plot not entirely plausible; though I haven't read enough
of Shakespeare's comedies to make fair comparisons, still, I have read
four other Italian ones from the same century ... Some of the
characters give hints of actual characterisation behind the relentless
rhetoric of Twoo Twoo Luv. There are flashes of humour, too, though
that brings in the unpleasant question of gender politics (here, men
are either lovers or misogynists, women either virgins or sluts; I'm
not sure Guarini actually scorns any of these, but he doesn't give any
women lines that directly counter the misogynists). But basically,
the best thing about this play is the poetry, and since the notes
suggest that Fanshawe was a pretty faithful translator, I infer that
Guarini deserves at least some of the credit there too. (And it
appears the original was popular for two centuries, and remains
something of a classic of Italian literature, which is also a strong
hint that Guarini did a good job!)

Margaret Peterson Haddix
* (July) <Just Ella>, 1999

I found this book irritating, and unlike many books I found irritating
when I was the age this book is aimed at, it is unlikely to emerge in
my memory, years from now, as a literary triumph.

The first irritating thing about it is having to classify it as a
fantasy at all. Like several other versions of "Cinderella" (on which
see far below), it's set in a kingdom that a) does not exist, b) is in
an imaginary geography, and c) has a preposterous sociopolitical
order. So like <Swordspoint>, in particular, it's fantasy. But it's
fantasy in no other sense. This is a determinedly revisionist
Cinderella; it's arguably a spoiler, since the backstory doesn't come
until mid-book, to give details, but there's no fairy godmother here.

There's also no very good book here. Haddix's story shows Ella first
catching Prince Charming, then rejecting and escaping him, all largely
through her own efforts. Aside from giving us a heroine with this
can-do attitude, Haddix is out to preach - to show that infatuation
over looks isn't the same thing as Real Love, and to show that various
loathsome forms of sexism from the Victorian era (see <Idols of
Perversity>, about mid-book) are Bad - and preach she does. The copy
I foolishly spent two quarters to buy (and soon after, got rid of)
claims that this was chosen an "ALA Best Book for Young Adults"; that
doesn't reflect well on the good sense of librarians, and I hope it's
untrue.

Matt Haig
(July) <The Labrador Pact>, aka <The Last Family in England>, 2004

Prince [f] is a Labrador retriever living in an English city other
than London with the Hunter family - Adam Hunter, a teacher; Kate
Hunter, a former teacher; Hal Hunter, seventeen and soon to go to
university; and Charlotte Hunter, thirteen and acting out. Into a
nearby house moves an apparently far less wholesome group, consisting
of Simon, Adam's financially successful contemporary; Emily, his much
younger third wife; and Falstaff [f], their mutt. Prince tells the
resulting story (which involves behaviour I understand as soap
operatic on the humans' part) to a young Labrador as he waits at the
vet's to be killed. He is trying to explain why he broke the Labrador
Pact.

Prince is a naïve and ill-informed narrator, but he leaves no real
room for doubt that within this fictional world, where dogs are all
intelligent and talk constantly (this is the first thing he tells us),
there really is some kind of mass understanding among British
Labradors that, unlike other dogs who have abandoned the central goal
of taking care of humans, they have a duty. Indeed, their greeting to
each other is "Duty over all". And that duty is exemplified by the
Pact, which enjoins, among other things: Each Labrador controls his
or her Family, and if anything bad happens to that Family, the
Labrador is to blame. Never reveal canine intelligence. Never give
in to base urges such as sniffing for pleasure. And never descend
into violence. Should a Labrador follow the Pact and shield his or
her Family from harm, there is an Eternal Reward. Apparently Prince's
original lessons in the Pact came from his mother, but he gets further
instructions from Henry [f], the Labrador kept by an ex-cop Adam
knows; one lesson presented early in the book is on advanced
tail-wagging.

So let's be clear here. By a freak of the alphabet, we have two books
in a row making frontal assaults on mid-Victorian ideals of womanhood,
but two books of vastly unequal merits. Where Haddix felt obligated
to make everything explicit (she even has Ella's wedding preparations
take the blame for the introduction of the corset), Haig instead
displaces the whole complex onto a different species, and never once
refers to his original. It took me until about two-thirds of the way
through the book (in fact, until the rule against violence) for me to
grasp that advanced tail-wagging is a substitute for embroidering
doilies, and that Haig is here portraying what it would be like for a
young, uneducated, and naïve person to be handed the huge
responsibilities - the double bind - implicit in the Victorian ideals.

I'm unlikely to read this book again, but it did set me to wondering
whether any of the Victorian novelists themselves dealt with similar
issues; and if so, how. (Well, OK, here's one arguable case: <The
Tenant of Wildfell Hall>. Hmm, a reason to go re-read my favourite
Brontë novel... Hmmm. ... So, OK, weeks later I did, but it's an
imperfect example: [spoiler] is naïve, but not uneducated and not
long deluded by impossible ideals; her only failure has to do with her
inability to change another, something she'd been warned she couldn't
do. Still, I can't think of a better example, and would be interested
to know of one, even if it's by Hardy.)

[f] - So yeah, I'm stupid. But I haven't ever read, let alone seen,
any of Shakespeare's history plays. So how was I to know Haig was
borrowing from <Henry IV Part One> here? Regardless, this is neither
the main plot nor, in my view, the main point. Haig's book in the
Gothics post is much more thoroughly Shakespearean.

Anthony Hope
x (September) <The Chronicles of Count Antonio>, 1895

This book consists of ten stories linked in a single plot; Hope
originally meant them for serial publication, but AFAIK they actually
first appeared in book form [g]. There is unequivocal fantasy only in
the fourth story ("Count Antonio and the wizard's drug", surprise);
there are a couple of asserted miracles in subsequent stories. But
the book belongs in the fantasy post regardless, because the very air
it breathes is fantastical.

The narrator is a monk named Ambrose, writing about a century after
his story's time. He earnestly insists on ignoring stories obviously
false (including several seemingly fantastic ones); this makes the
many improbabilities he accepts, only a few of which are spec-ficnal,
interesting comments on his worldview. His book stars a superlative
warrior with an even more superlative sense of honour, who rebels
against his Duke when the latter betrothes Antonio's beloved to
someone else. This is the matter of the first story; the next eight
feature the outlaw's exploits, and the last is "The manner of Count
Antonio's return". Antonio's deeds are a more warlike version of
Robin Hood's - in one story he disposes of a local equivalent to
Prince John outright - set among imaginary duchies and principalities
of late-mediæval northern Italy.

I've read nothing that goes beyond this book in the cult of mediæval
knightly honour. People who love <The Prisoner of Zenda> as, if you
will, a well-made, sweet, muffin, will find in this book marzipan,
sweetness to a degree that some will consider excess. The mildly
archaising style will probably stop more readers, right from the
start; here's the first sentence: "Countless are the stories told of
the sayings that Count Antonio spoke and of the deeds that he did when
he dwelt an outlaw in the hills." (This style did in fact stop the
editor of <The Strand Magazine>, the originally intended venue. [g])
So although I found the book fun indeed, I can't recommend it to
everyone. But I do think it's an interesting comment on Hope's own
view of his plots. In 1894 [g], when many of his readers must have
admitted an ending they'd wished for to <The Prisoner of Zenda>, he
wrote a sequel, <Rupert of Hentzau>, and a transposition of a vaguely
similar situation to the distant past, <The Chronicles of Count
Antonio>, with two very different endings clearly, but very
differently, adressed to such wishes.

[g] - See the other fiction post for my sources for facts and contexts
about Hope's books.

Madeline Howard
(February) <The Hidden Stars>, 2004
(February) <A Dark Sacrifice>, 2007

The second book is copyright Teresa Edgerton, and the two books share
enough to leave little doubt that "Madeline Howard" is simply a
pseudonym. "Howard" is an ironic choice of surname for such
Tolkienesque books, the first two parts of a trilogy, titled "The Rune
of Unmaking", which shares not only the form but the central plot of
<The Lord of the Rings>: a small, shifting group of questers pursue a
small but crucial goal through a world racked by war. Here, however,
the small goal is a person (Fated By Prophecy, of course), and we get
a fair amount from her POV, besides the POVs of the Dark Lady and that
Lady's son. (All of this is third person.) Edgerton seems to be
working toward several other variations on the norm; I'd call them
surprises, except that I'd be more surprised by their *not* happening
- what looks probable isn't *that* original, and she's foreshadowing
it way in advance. We'll see.

Years ago, I read Edgerton's vaguely early modern books (0 <Goblin
Moon> and 0 <The Gnome's Engine>, both 1991) and mildly liked them;
I've tried and failed several times to get into her previous high
fantasy series (0 <Child of Saturn> and 0 <The Moon in Hiding>, 1989;
0 <The Work of the Sun>, 1990; 0 <The Castle of the Silver Wheel>,
1993; 0 <The Grail and the Ring>, 1994; 0 <The Moon and the Thorn>,
1995). [h] Like that series, this one has Celtic roots (the main
characters' names use Irish phonology), but this time, at least, those
are superficial; these books' main source is the trilogistic
tradition. They acquit themselves decently therein, with a moderately
colourful and convincing world, well-drawn characters, and no
obtrusive flaws, and I'll probably read the third.

The first book has nothing but the story; the second adds a glossary.
Books so focused on their characters' travels could *really* do with a
map, but none is offered.

[h] This list omits only her first book published in a trade edition,
<The Queen's Necklace>, 2001, apparently a sequel both written and set
much later than the books I've read.

Morgan Howell
(May) <King's Property>, 2007
(June) <Clan Daughter> and <Royal Destiny>, 2007

These three books, published in three months, constitute a trilogy.
Each volume has a full, legitimate ending, but it's a closely knit
trilogy that could reasonably be treated as a single book, and by most
standards of bibliographic correctness, the title of that trilogy
should be the real title. So should I tell you A) that <King's
Property>, <Clan Daughter>, and <Royal Destiny> are the volumes of
"Queen of the Orcs", or rather B) that "King's Property", "Clan
Daughter", and "Royal Destiny" are the parts (and subtitles) of <Queen
of the Orcs> ?

Regardless. I no longer remember exactly what led me to pick up
<King's Property>, but I suspect my inquisitive approach to
revisionist-seeming D&D books may have been the key, and that was
certainly what I expected when, about twenty pages in, one of the
first things the orcs do with the human protagonist (who's been sold
by her family to serve them) is force her to bathe, much against her
wishes. But as information about the orcs keeps building up in that
book, it becomes obvious that Howell has nothing so small as D&D in
mind. Nor is Tolkien directly attacked here: We're in a world where
"orcs" are the elder people, humans latecomers, and while Howell puts
most of our sympathies with the former, there are just enough
counterexamples to keep the books seeming unbiased.

This dance gets a bit harder when it comes to gender, but Howell still
pulls it off. See - minor spoiler here for the first book, but
considering that the title is itself a massive spoiler for the first
*two*, I can't care too much - in Howell's world, orcs are intensely
matriarchal. So all Howell really has to do is to scatter in a *few*
decent human men and a few bad orcs. Which brings us to a diagnosis
at long last: like Naomi Kritzer, like Michelle Welch, like for that
matter James Tiptree, Jr. herself, Morgan Howell has apparently found
it necessary, to publish intensely feminist spec-fic stories, to
settle for paperback originals; and what this series really is, is
neither D&D revisionism nor an assault on Tolkien, but rather a good
adventure married to ferocious contrasts of matriarchy with
patriarchy. And while these books hardly share the subtlety Kritzer
and Welch have, nor the sheer power of Tiptree, they marry *enough*
subtlety to *enough* power to form an astonishment, a speed-published
and fast-reading paperback trilogy that's also an impressive work of
fantasy.

A couple of warnings: 1) There's a lot of nastiness in these books -
in at least the first and third volumes we get to see through
villains' eyes pretty often, and in the first, rape is hardly unknown.
2) The books also require some mental dexterity, since Howell has an
orcish language that gets *way* more use than languages I can remember
in most other fantasies. (This is, in fact, what originally suggested
Tolkien to me: eventually I became uncertain whether language or
story came first, and I still couldn't say. So this language is the
main thing that worries me about wishing Howell a long and successful
career: I think this story is as much as this setting can bear, and
further books would be unfortunate, but if the language really did
come first, will the author feel able to abandon it? This isn't a
rich enough world to sustain a <Silmarillion>. But I look forward to
anything *else*...) I was able to pick up most of the orcish words
from context, with relatively little use of the glossaries in each
volume, but I tend to be quick with languages, so am not sure I can
reassure everyone on that basis.

Given those warnings, some people shouldn't read these, but otherwise,
I recommend them to any who share my tastes.

Finally. I recommend doing as I did, and reading the copyright pages
*last*. I almost always read copyright pages very nearly *first*, and
can't account for my not having done so in this case, but I would be
interested to hear from any woman who, given this warning, follows my
example, and then wishes to discuss with me whether a famous
Tiptree-related idea has developed a new wrinkle.

Alexander Irvine
Nominee, 2002 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer

(November) <Pictures from an Exhibition>, 2000-2006, first compiled as
such 2006, started

The only story in this I've read so far is "Green River Chantey",
which makes out of Faulknerian backstory and a ghost in the foreground
a strangely calm mix. Its setting makes it perfectly clear that it's
a by-product of Irvine's work on <A Scattering of Jades>.

* (November) <A Scattering of Jades>, 2002, started
Winner, 2003 Crawford Award, and 2003 International Horror Guild Award
for First Novel

I wasn't up to this book, possibly because of its villain (see also
Buckell in the sf post). I hope to get back to reading Irvine more
fully next year.

Carol Kendall
(February) <The Gammage Cup>, 1959
(February) <The Whisper of Glocken>, 1965

The Minnipins live in the Land between the Mountains, isolated by
those landforms from the rest of the world. Minnipins strongly
resemble hobbits (though I found no basis for thinking they *look* any
different from Homo sap.), but these children's books exaggerate their
provincialism and stolid silliness, children's book style.

<The Gammage Cup>'s tight plot breaks into three acts. In act I, five
Minnipins, distinguished largely by their preferences for colours
other than green, become exiles at a stressful time. In act II, they
build a life in the wilds. And in act III, they respond to an
invasion. I found act I tediously smothered by its Cold War
liberalism: Conformism and Isolationism are Bad, Invaders are Evil,
Individuality and Kindness are Good. Once the wilderness-and-invasion
stuff gets going, though, the book's good enough reading. And I liked
the maxims of the most important POV character, befuddled but
practical exile Muggles (whose name is just right): "No use throwing
the door wide open when trouble was standing just outside."

<The Whisper of Glocken> moves fast all the way through, and although
it too has fairly obvious satirical points to make, they're not so
simplistic: five years after the events of the first book, a
different five Minnipins travel outside their valley, and meet two
other peoples, each of which has good as well as bad points (unlike
the earlier, 100% evil, invaders); they're travelling to deal with a
flood, which makes room for plenty of talk about the nature of
heroism. I didn't find any of the POVs as endearing as Muggles, but
the book's still worth reading.

The editions I read are competently illustrated, by Erik Blegvad and
Imero Gobbato respectively.

0 (February-March) <The Firelings>, 1981
Winner, 1983 Mythopoeic Award for Fantasy

Imagine a children's fantasy that's really nine-tenths a work of
anthropological science fiction for adults, and you'll have imagined
<The Firelings>.

Firelings are persons of inexact small size who live on the slopes of
a volcano, far above the ocean. They're descended from the five who
stayed behind when everyone else fled, on the occasion of an earlier
eruption (the lack of a founder effect is, I suppose, an example of
this not really being sf). The volcano is their god, and they believe
it sometimes to require child sacrifice. They'd thought they had
outgrown that custom, but ten years ago they returned to it. Now the
volcano is rumbling again.

This is, in fact, a children's book, whose ending is rich in
unexpected redemptions; but it isn't a children's book, either, as
indeed the subject matter (announced on the first page) ought to make
plain. We spend a lot of time in the (3rd person) POVs of the
children threatened - and they're not unaware; by Fireling custom
you're a child until you're married, and I daresay there's a marriage
soon after the book ends. The narration is filled with Fireling
words; Kendall didn't make up a language, but used her own words for
many things which may or may not differ from their ordinary English
counterparts, and I found the result wearisome enough that I was
halfway before I could read more than a chapter at a time. There's a
foreground plot, searching for the Way of the Goat that the rest of
the Firelings had taken, ages ago, to escape the volcano (and the
search is part of why I see science fiction in this book), but much of
Kendall's focus is on the background Fireling village, and how its
people deal with threat and guilt. So yes, there are prophecies, and
the most understated magic sword in all of fantasy, and so forth, and
yes, it came from a children's publisher. But the paperback I left in
Milwaukee was published as for adults, and I honestly wonder whether
the publisher put "Fantasy" on the spine, or "Science Fiction" - as
many did, back then, before the fantasy market category fully took
hold, and as, in this case, may have been truly apt.

Joe Bernstein

unread,
Dec 16, 2008, 1:39:06 AM12/16/08
to
READ FOR THE FIRST TIME: FANTASY

Jay Lake
Winner, 2004 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer

o (February) "The Soul Bottles", 2004
(February) <Trial of Flowers>, 2006

"The Soul Bottles" originally appeared in <Leviathan 4> ed. Forrest
Aguirre, but I read it online (URL below).

"The Soul Bottles" is the first presentation known to me (and to a
reviewer online) of Lake's City Imperishable, which the publisher
(Night Shade Books) presents as consciously heir to Miéville,
VanderMeer (quoted on the cover), et alii. (However, not having read
those writers, I found only one explicit reference: to fuligin as a
colour, i.e., to Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. I found another
almost clear, and also not to recent New Weird cities, but then forgot
it.) The City offers much to connoisseurs of decadence, certainly,
and this story introduces such things, but turns into something of a
morality tale, reminding me of sins of my own.

<Trial of Flowers> turns the same approach into something much richer,
a magnificent fantasy creation around a pair of plots: an outer one,
which the back cover goes some way towards revealing and which the
book's first half deals with, and an inner one, underlying the first
half of the book and central to the second half. There are scenes of
hideous, grisly squick in the first half, but though they slowed me
down, you shouldn't let them stop you from reading on: Lake may seem
blasé about these, but he isn't; he has a purpose with them, again a
moral one, as the two plots offer the three POVs roads to redemption
amid an increasingly cosmic drama.

<Madness of Flowers>, forthcoming 2008, is a sequel. The ending of
<Trial> makes room *for* a sequel, but no need for it.

<http://www.forteanbureau.com/archives/april_2006/the_soul_bot.html>,
seen February 2, 2008

Glenda Larke
* (August) <The Aware>, 2003
Nominee, 2004 Aurealis Award for Fantasy Novel

(August) <Gilfeather>, 2004

$ (August) <The Tainted>, 2004, minimally skimmed
Nominee, 2005 Aurealis Award for Fantasy Novel

A week after this post's year ended, I finally bought <The Tainted> -
new, at a time when even finding money for bus fare had me hungry all
the time - and read it in full. So I considered putting off
discussion of this trilogy to next year, but decided that made no
sense. By then, it may have gone out of print in the US. And anyway,
Elaine Thompson should not be stuck - for *another* year - with the
whole job of explaining to rasfw just how much, compared to most of
what's out there, the "Isles of Glory" books are dazzlingly superior.

So. The first thing to say is that Larke comes from Australia (though
she now lives in Malaysia). Given my strictures against Australians
Sara Douglass and Iain Irvine in last year's post, I'm surprised, to
put it mildly. I now infer that when they were passing out
originality to Australian fantasy writers, Larke got all of it. [i]

Because that's much of what's so excellent here. Larke's setting,
plot, characters, and themes *all* include much that's astonishingly
original. Combine all this originality with commercial necessities -
that setting is also cool and complex, that plot is also exciting and
moving, those characters are also sympathetic and conflicted (and six
of them more so, because they narrate), those themes, though startling
in their conclusions, work with premises familiar to fantasy readers -
and what you get is clearly commercial fantasy, suitable reading for
fun and on the bus, that at the same time is æsthetically and
intellectually rewarding. Larke's first book, <Havenstar>, 1998, came
out under her married name, as by Glenda Noramly; she has published,
since "Isles of Glory", another complete trilogy, and written a third,
to appear in the next two years. (Interestingly, each seems to have
the same Australian publishing schedule as this trilogy had in the US:
first book one year, the other two the next. For all this see her
website, URL below.) It infuriates me that "Isles" has made so little
impact in the US, and thus I'm unlikely to have much chance to read
Larke's other books.

Well, enough enthusiasm: here's what I can offer by way of more
objective description. There is a wispy frame story, set from 1793 to
1794 of a local calendar, epistolary - in the first two volumes,
presented via an ethnographer's letters, in the third, via the diary
of a woman he was in love with at about the end of <The Aware>, who
has come to the Isles out of fascination with the stories he brought
back. Those stories, most of the text, are the narratives of the
other four narrators, and their reminiscences concern that calendar's
year 1742, more or less. (This plot takes roughly one year to play
out.) In <The Aware>, we have one narrator (the only woman of these
four). In <Gilfeather>, she recedes, and a new narrator dominates the
book. And in <The Tainted>, although both the old narrators are still
around, two *more* new ones get most of the pages. Each of Larke's
narrators begins as someone, somewhere between 20 and 30, who has a
clear path towards a worthwhile future, and who is about to see, or
has just seen, that path destroyed; each does things *later* that
create deep and bitter regret; each plays a central rôle in the events
of the central year 1742. Moreover, the four of them are surrounded
by other characters, again more or less young ones more or less
setting out in life, whose paths we can compare to theirs - and who
also accumulate their share of regrets, or in one poisonous case,
merely *should* do so. So Larke telescopes into this exciting story
of one year, the moving stories of entire lifetimes, and provides
perfect endings to both.

I'll say less about the setting - islands, isolated from the rest of
the world, with incipient modern technology, a harsh social system
built on rigid separations of peoples, and several forms of magic (one
of which is Eeeevul) - and still less about the plot, because even
bringing up the major issues of the second and third books constitutes
massively spoiling the first. Thematically, plot, setting, and
characters combine to provide one explicit message (on which see the
digression "Woman's fiction" under Snyder below); but there are plenty
of implicit ones too. This is easily the most impressive mythopoeic
trilogy since Tad Williams to launch a sustained, and largely
persuasive, attack on the logic and tropes of the trilogistic
mythopoeic tradition; it also has a lot to say about relations among
peoples, and between people.

Unfortunately there *is* one problem area: the style. Or rather,
what the style isn't. Only in one of the narrators of <The Tainted>
do you really get much sense that someone is looking back across fifty
years (even allowing for the improbably good memory he has to have, to
narrate at all!). Elsewhere, the regret works, but the distance
doesn't; and the fifty years themselves are left all but blank. It's
as if you were talking with a Korean War veteran, and the person
reminisced in rich detail about the entire war, but never mentioned
marrying his sweetheart upon returning, nor trips back to Korea later,
nor his post-military career or family; not even to the extent of
saying, in relation to some person mentioned, "and this is what
happened to *her* later". It doesn't convince.

This isn't remotely enough to justify refusing to read these books, if
you're someone to whom fantasy trilogies about world-changing events
are at *all* acceptable. It's just a mild disappointment, an edge of
cognitive dissonance in reading. If Larke had found a way to use
something at least remotely like J.M. McDermott's style in the book I
describe below, to tell this story with these characters - then this
trilogy would, I confidently assert, have been one of the truly great
works of fantasy. As it is, it's still exceptional.

[i] Sigh. I claim Cecilia Dart-Thornton is original, don't I? and
she's Australian, right? Oh, and now I'm reminded of Garth Nix too.
So yeah, I'm exaggerating. Sue me.

<http://www.glendalarke.com>, seen (for the second time) October 4,
2008

Tanith Lee
(September 2007) <Voyage of the Basset: Islands in the Sky>, 1999, finished

In early September 2007, I was trying to find the relevant volume of
the Datlow/Windling <Year's Best Fantasy and Horror> so I could see
which editor picked Kelley Eskridge's "Strings". (See, I claim it's
science fiction; if Datlow picked it, there's no issue for me, since
her bailiwick is horror, but if Windling, then fantasy editor, picked
it, that's a disagreement. I didn't find the book.) ANYWAY, I did an
author search on Windling, and was amazed to discover she'd co-written
a book with Ellen Steiber, whose <A Rumor of Gems> I'd liked in 2006.

So... Turns out that between 1999 and 2001, five quasi-sequels to
James Christensen's <Voyage of the Basset>, 1996, appeared. (I
thought I owned a copy of the original book but had left it in
Milwaukee; my book catalogue claims I'm imagining things, which is at
least appropriate to the book's motto. The several copies owned by
the library here are in much demand.) Volume 2 is the book by
Windling and Steiber (for which see below); this is volume 1, perhaps
because Lee is by a good margin the most prominent author involved,
and it's also rather longer than the rest.

Anyway, this isn't a standard series, and not just because the six
volumes have seven authors. Christensen's <Voyage> takes place,
real-world-wise, in 1850; this one, in 1867. Some of the first book's
main characters do reappear, but hardly with direct continuity, and
only as supporting cast here. It resembles very little the other Lee
books I've read (but I've read none of her other books for kids); it
is, in itself, a perfectly acceptable kids' book, though I found it
easier to put down than most. Our (3rd-person POV) Heroes: Hope
Glover, eleven, is the much-suffering maid of all work at a house
where Apollo Rivers, thirteen or so, is the son of the family, much
berated by his father. She likes to play-act; he likes to daydream;
neither fits in well with the household; they don't get along at all.
H.M.S. <Basset> gets involved, and you can probably predict the
ending; en route we see a war between centaurs and pegasi, which Hope
(who gets much more screentime) and Apollo help to end, and several
other fantasy tropes (from Greek myth and the <Arabian Nights>), well
used.

John Ajvide Lindqvist
(June) <Let Me In>, Swedish, 2004, lightly skimmed

The first movie version of this book, <Let the Right One In>, Swedish,
2008, was one of the more praised movies at this year's Seattle
International Film Festival, by which time it already had separately
sold US distribution rights and English-language remake rights. (The
Swedish version has already shown up in a Seattle art house; the
remake will doubtless get more screens.) Anyway, the day after I
missed the second and final SIFF showing, this book (translated by
Ebba Segerberg, published 2007) was on display at the library, so I
borrowed it.

Well, I'm afraid I'm rarely in the mood for horror stories, and this
is indeed horror, in spades; it's a vampire novel, but not one of
those nice cute ones lately growing on trees. (For a particularly
flagrant example see Meyer below.) Its living characters (seen in
many tight 3rd person POVs) seem mostly to be casually or tormentedly
violent; its most prominent subplot could be titled "the making of a
psychopath: the pre-teen years". Of the various authors named in the
blurbs, I find Stephen King, with his many disturbing characters, the
aptest comparison. (To clarify, I've read King's first few books
only. Several of this book's subplots read like <Carrie> squared or
cubed.) Lindqvist's vampires are quite traditional (the title refers
to their needing an invitation to enter a house), but their world
(suburban Stockholm in fall 1981) is gritty and grungy. So even if it
weren't a vampire novel, it wouldn't usually interest me. That said,
what I did read looked like respectable work, but efficiency of
telling is another trait Lindqvist shares with King, so I'd have to
have read a great deal more to perceive any elements of higher quality
that might be there.

Joan Lindsay
* (October) <Picnic at Hanging Rock>, 1967
(October) <The Secret of Hanging Rock>, 1987

In last year's post, I listed <Picnic at Hanging Rock>, 1975, the
movie, as fantasy, without a qualm. Whatever one makes of its main
events (which relate to the disappearance on the titular outcropping
of three schoolgirls and a teacher, on a picnic in 1900), I figured
the simultaneous stopping of several watches was enough justification
for this decision; and anyway I buy Simon Spiegel's argument that in
movies, what you see is important to how you classify, and the movie
*looks* like fantasy, albeit nothing like genre fantasy. The book is
more problematic. Here there are only two watches, which puts their
stopping together barely within the realm of coincidence; and prose is
a different medium, to which I apply different rules of
classification. But I list <Picnic>, the book, here anyway, if only
because it simplifies matters vis-à-vis the second book. <Secret> is
the first publication of the final chapter of <Picnic> (the book) as
Lindsay submitted it for publication; that chapter is twelve pages
long as printed there, and several of those pages consist of material
incorporated into the published version of a much earlier chapter.
Nevertheless it significantly changes the impact of the book - several
explanations, including possible *and* fantastic ones, are ruled out
by it, though no explanation conclusively wins.

Either way, the book's the length of a 1960s popular fiction rather
than one from this decade, so less of it is new to someone who's seen
the movie than you might expect. Lindsay focuses more than the
filmmakers on Michael Fitzhubert and Irma Leopold, and less on Sara
Waybourne and Mrs Appleyard. (One thing one expects from prose is
clearer names, but actually, we never learn Mrs Appleyard's first, or
Miranda's last, name - indeed Lindsay goes well out of her way *not*
to give the latter.)

I found it worth reading, but am not convinced I'll read it again.

Kelly Link [1]
(September 2007) <stranger things happen>, 1995-2001, first compiled
as such 2001, finished
and get ready for a long list of awards ...

Nominee, 2002 World Fantasy Award for Collection
"The Specialist's Hat" Winner, 1999 World Fantasy Award for Short
Story
"Travels with the Snow Queen" Winner, 1998 Tiptree Award
"Shoe and Marriage" Nominee, 2001 World Fantasy Award for Short
Fiction
"Louise's Ghost" Winner, 2002 Nebula Award for Novelette

This collects eleven stories, nine of them reprints; per her website
(URL below), it includes most [j] of Link's published fiction up to
2001, in particular reprinting all of <4 Stories>, 1995-1998, first
compiled as such 2000. I'm unconvinced that "Shoe and Marriage" is
spec-fic at all, though it references "Cinderella" and some other
folklore. I think several of the other stories occupy Todorov's
fantastic, and several (an overlapping several) are certainly horror.
But although I thought I'd seen Link cited as an example of
slipstream, in fact all of her inspirations seem to come from the
realm of fantasy. Besides "Cinderella" we also have reworkings of
"The Snow Queen" and "The Twelve Dancing Princesses", and a story
evoking the terrors of Greek myth; there's an afterlife story, a ghost
story, and several built around conceptions I've never seen before.
Link's style is usually transparent, and usually objective in a way
reminiscent of, but not the same as, clinical objectivity. Irony
figures strongly in these stories, but they're rarely cynical. Only a
few are in first person; "Travels with the Snow Queen" actually uses
second person fairly effectively.

And none of that really bears on what I want to say; I'm not sure I
have the words to say it. This book reminds me of first reading
Connie Willis, in <Impossible Things>. Link's stories, though they
don't connect so directly to my own psyche, have comparable
originality and power to Willis's, and deserve much, if not all, of
the praise lavished on them by the cover blurbs.

[j] Exceptions: Two stories from 2000, "Sea, Ship, Mountain, Sky"
written with her husband, Gavin Grant, and "Swans", and one from 1988,
"Dreaming January". All remain uncollected.

<http://kellylink.net/biblio.htm>, seen September 23, 2007

(September 2007) <Magic for Beginners>, 2002-2005, first compiled as
such 2005
and get ready for a *really* long list of awards ...

Nominee, 2006 World Fantasy Award and 2006 International Horror Guild
Award, both for Collection, and 2006 Stoker Award for Fiction
Collection
"The Hortlak" Nominee, 2004 World Fantasy Award for Novella
"The Faery Handbag" Winner, 2005 Hugo Award and 2006 Nebula Award,
both for Novelette, and Nominee, 2005 World Fantasy Award and 2005
British Fantasy Award, both for Short Fiction
"Magic for Beginners" Winner, 2006 Nebula Award for Novella and 2006
British SF Award for Short Fiction, and Nominee, 2006 Hugo Award
and 2006 World Fantasy Award, both for Novella, and 2006 Sturgeon
Award
"Some Zombie Contingency Plans" Nominee, 2006 Stoker Award for Long
Fiction

Oh, so *that's* why I hear Link being called a "slipstream" writer!
She isn't prolific, and in 2002 and 2003, only three of her stories
appeared; all could reasonably be called slipstream. There are six
other stories in this book (three, including the title story, new in
it), and the degree to which any is really fantasy is heavily
debatable, though I think that's the simplest reading of five of them,
including that exceedingly good title story, which I'd read before,
though I'm not sure where. (I don't see "Some Zombie Contingency
Plans" as fantasy, though the small painting could be a novum. Those
who like the slipstream concept would probably call it slipstream, I
suppose, but the characters' unconcern over the small painting ensures
it isn't Todorov's fantastic. At any rate, despite the title, I don't
read it as horror; but I probably willfully misunderstand the ending.)
To those who insist that genre is determined exclusively by frame
story, I'm not sure there's any fantasy at all in the book; often,
occasional comments from a first-person storyteller exiguously frame
the rest, and "Magic for Beginners", for example, is presented as a
story shown on TV. I read only "Stone Animals" and "Catskin" as
horror, though others might differ, and though Link in general offers
neither happy endings nor pastoral joys.

In any event, "Magic for Beginners", "The Faery Handbag", and "Stone
Animals" are good enough to make the book worth reading; most of the
rest is too far away from what I normally read for to reach me.
(Above I compared her to Willis, so note here the remarkable
consistency with which Link's people, even those who've managed to
marry, fail to communicate. Turns out I enjoy this even less in irony
than I do in Willis's comedy or tragedy.)

Zachary Mason
o (August) "No Man's Wife", 2008

Since my neighbourhood's locally famous for its nightlife, the utility
poles tend to be blanketed in posters - but for some weeks in August,
a pole near a bus stop I often visited was a strangely persistent
exception. And one of the few posters on that pole then was an
ordinary 8 1/2 x 11 piece of paper with "No Man's Wife" printed on it.
I use that title because it was in the upper left of the page; in the
upper right, "The Lost Books of the Odyssey". The only other text on
the page is a story, the story "No Man's Wife" appears to title.

In a nutshell: Odysseus is in the Underworld, and sees Penelope
there. He rushes to her, feeds her some blood, and, posing as one of
his own mariners, asks how she came to die. She replies that she had
sought an oracle at Delphi, and been told that after many years, "no
man" would come back to her. (Cf. Cyclops story.) So when the
suitors became pressing, she began to weave a shroud; and finally
poisoned the wine, killing them and herself. The writing is
unexceptional, and certainly not Homeric (I kept watching for similes,
and eventually found one of just two words; there's a reference to
asphodel, but another to a "broadsword"). But I was struck by the
whole schtick - "lost books" of the *<Odyssey>* ? Published as
posters? At just one location? And the core story intrigued me, a
reinterpretation of Penelope as radical as Rawlings's described below,
but equally radically different from hers.

Well, I keep having to re-learn that surprising posters in Seattle are
*always* just unusually creative ads, and this was probably another
such experience. Turns out "No Man's Wife" (indeed the correct title)
is a single chapter in a whole book by Mason, <The Lost Books of the
Odyssey>, 2008, which has received much acclaim from serious critics;
apparently each chapter is a separate re-imagining of the <Odyssey>.
(Oh, and those critics may be serious, but they still call such a
thing a "novel".) The book can be downloaded for free (URL below),
but I haven't brought it home nor found time to read it where I
downloaded it; expect me to deal with it in next year's log.

<http://the-lost-books.com/>, seen August 29, 2008

J.M. McDermott
(July) <Last Dragon>, 2008

This strange and haunting book is presented as the reminiscences of
Zhan Immur, Empress of Alameda, written "letter" by letter during her
lucid spells (she eventually admits she's dying) to her long-lost
lover Esumi. Except the narrator's name and the parenthesis, the
previous sentence comes from the first letter, a tour de force of
auctorial manifesto shaped into the form of a dying reminiscence.
That letter introduces the first of sixteen chapters. In most
chapters, most of the letters (ranging from a line to a few pages in
length) relate to two stages in Zhan's story, and the plot sort of
advances as the chapters continue because the chapters' particular
stages usually edge forward. But much of the ending is actually laid
out in the first letter, and the suspense by the end is to find out
which of the events mentioned there is actually to be narrated, and
which not.

That said, what *is* narrated is on the painful side; the story begins
as Zhan, seventeen, and her not much older uncle head south tracking
her grandfather, who has killed everyone else in the family. Zhan
herself tells us she was a "violent fool", and that her uncle
"deserved to die". Cluelessness is much of what goes on here, though
gradually decreasing. The characters spend most of their time
travelling, which is no doubt much of why the stages of the story blur
into each other in Zhan's memories.

I was reminded, as I read, of Catherynne Valente (in her quieter
moments), and of Tom de Haan's <A Mirror for Princes>. On a different
note, this book appeared as the second 2008 publication of "Wizards of
the Coast Discoveries" [k], and a major character is identified as a
"paladin". But I think these hints of influence are deceptive.
There's much regret in these pages, but it's bitter regret, not
world-weary like de Haan; McDermott is a man from Texas, not a woman
from everywhere (like Valente), and he casts his hostility much wider
than simply against males; and I detected D&D rules nowhere in the
book.

I hope his next book is quite different in tone, but I look forward to
reading it regardless.

[k] There's a list of 2008 releases on the back inside cover of the
trade paperback I read. Those so far known to the Seattle Public
Library are mostly horror, and so not classified as spec-fic by SPL; I
have no clue why WotC is publishing horror. Aside from one title by
the Tems (who seem to be omnipresent where horror is concerned), near
as I can tell, they really are "discoveries".

Terry McGarry
* (April-May) <Illumination>, 2001
(May) <The Binder's Road>, 2003
* (May) <Triad>, 2005, skimmed

I'm going to have to talk about this series in three levels, which is
fitting: one of the guiding conceits at the elementary level is that
in McGarry's fantasy world, Eiden Myr, almost everything important
comes in threes. (For example, a big number isn't a hundred or a
thousand there, but 81, a "nonned", or 1458, "twice nine nonneds".
However, though we're given an example or two of marriage in three,
it's much less common than pairwise marriage; this is easily the most
important *non*-triune phenomenon in the books.) Eiden Myr is a small
continent, near as I can figure - you can cover much of it in a year
or two of walking, but it's big enough that weather is seriously
different at different ends of it. (Ellisa Mitchell's map is
unusually unhelpful; in particular, it seems to misplace North.) Only
the first and last few pages of the trilogy are set outside Eiden Myr.

The whole trilogy is in third person, usually tight on a single POV,
but by being third person allows McGarry's often vividly earthy
depictions of her world to remain constant; this is a rich trilogy for
its images of life if nothing else. Each book has one or two
prologues, whose POV characters all die à la Martin; each book has
quite a few other POV characters, but there the similarities end. In
<Illumination>, there's one main POV, Liath, a mage who's lost her
ability to work magic and so is questing to regain it; her chapters
are separated by much shorter passages from other POVs. In the other
two books, the multiple POVs are more conventional, though still not
*wholly* conventional (most notably, each book has three linked POVs,
and though the linkages are different in each book, they oddly mirror
each other). Anyway. Liath takes a severe blow to her heart pages
into her story, and encounters blow after blow thereafter; her book is
suffused with the miasmas of daunt, and of doubt, and of despair that
surround her, so although much of her quest should be enjoyably
picaresque, it doesn't feel that way. <The Binder's Road> is much
lighter. McGarry has the frivolous conceit of not using Liath's name
in it, though several of the POVs knew her; they, however, are
overshadowed by newer and less scarred POVs, who have less fun than
Liath, but agonise over it much less. I can't speak in a similar way
yet of <Triad>.

So OK, we have here a trilogy whose middle book is actually more fun
than the first, which is peculiar; is there anything else here that's
worth noting, or is this just another trilogy? Well, see, that leads
us to the other two levels. Intellectually, McGarry is clearly intent
on big ideas. Eiden Myr is, as <Illumination> opens, something of a
paradise. About halfway through, Liath asks in all seriousness why
mages can't prevent death from old age, when they can do so much else;
and it doesn't seem an unreasonable question. But the quest she's on
when she asks this question is to put an end to a revolution. So
<Illumination> asks, in other words, a question many books I read last
year [l] considered to have a self-evident answer: Can revolution
ever be justified? Nor is that the final question. This trilogy
resembles the first Thomas Covenant trilogy both in that its
characters come up with successive attempts at answers along the way,
and in that a dominant wrong answer in the middle book is warfare; but
is ambitiously different in that the question whose answer's being
sought, so clear in, say, the first third of <Illumination>, keeps
changing.

And all this would be impressive, except that my take on things is
that McGarry cheats her way to her answers. (Your elementary
spoiler-free hint to this, obviously, is that in paradise, revolution
is *never* justified, right? While that turns out not to be the final
answer, it's an example of the kind of rigged deck McGarry just can't
stop using.) In <Illumination>, she uses something that's become a
fantasy trope to dodge the revolution issue *after* Liath agonises
over it endlessly. In <The Binder's Road>, she shows us people
unpersuaded by the arguments in <Illumination>, but it's hard to take
them seriously, and anyway she's moved on. In <Triad>, as her bigger
debate comes to fruition, I'm pretty sure she cheats again, setting up
her fantasy world in such a way that the answer is hardly in doubt.
So my third level of comment has to do with results, and I say that
McGarry's reach exceeds her grasp.

These books can be recommended for their rich depiction of their
world, and for the plausible and appealing characters who inhabit that
world. I admit they'll also make you think, and I can certainly
recommend them to that extent too. Whether I can applaud the author's
own thinking is much less clear to me.

[l] See this post's predecessor, under Elizabeth Bear's <Blood and
Iron>. Or, if you don't want to bother, simply note that none of
those books reaches the same conclusion as the sentence most of us
learn the word "self-evident" from.

Eloise McGraw [2]
* (August) <The Moorchild>, 1996
Nominee, 1997 Newbery Award

As best I can tell without reading them, McGraw's other kids' books
aren't fantasies; I'm not sure why this one is, though the back cover
of my copy has a statement from her about her interest in changelings.

Anyway, yeah, Saaski, the titular moorchild, is a changeling. She's
the daughter of a woman of the Folk, but her father was human, she
can't do much of the Folk's magic, and the Folk finally cast her out
by swapping her for a fully-human baby. Growing up, she has trouble
with village life. This is the matter of Part I. The rather longer
Part II concerns the year she's eleven, when all her troubles come to
a head.

When I was eight or nine I was enormously proud of a "creative
writing" assignment I wrote titled "Different Is Dead". When I was
fourteen, and cleaned my room for the first time, I was enormously
proud of *not* keeping the embarrassing thing. Well, McGraw can be
pretty didactic, and it's plain that her own take on what Different Is
is her concern here. But she characterises well, doing an especially
good job with Saaski - whose emotional capacities, like the rest of
her, are halfway between Folk obligations and pranks, and human love
and hate - and in all, I found this an affecting and worthwhile story.

Stephenie Meyer
(June) <twilight>, 2005 [2, as is the below]
$ (June-July) <new moon>, 2006, started

Well, folks, we're clearly at a moment of crisis here. Either the
vampire novel is on the verge of vanishing from popular culture, or
it's going to be an effectively permanent, and actually fairly staid,
feature of same. Because now that it's been reduced to a
wish-fulfillment story for young girls - and wildly popular in that
incarnation - it has nowhere else left to go.

I haven't read Anne Rice, but I can't think of any other literary
vampires who resemble Meyer's. The jape I heard once about Rice -
"Oh, woe is me! I'm immortal, beautiful, rich, and talented - ah,
what agony!" - pretty much sums up these folks. They are constrained
by only one thing: desire. Some of this constraining desire is their
own: the bloodlust that comes upon them whenever they encounter blood
means they can hardly help killing those they drink from; in turn,
that means that in order to fit in to the human world, they have to go
out of their way to *avoid* blood except when necessary. Some of it
is others': they aren't actually harmed by sunlight, rather their
beauty is *enhanced*, so much so that it's problematic for them to be
seen in public. (Regardless, desire really is their only constraint.
Forget garlic and holy water.)

Meanwhile, for Meyer's human characters, desire and constraint are
also the central themes. Fundamentally, this series is a (radical)
rewrite of Tanith Lee's <The Silver Metal Lover>. Bella Swan, aged
seventeen and beautiful, has always lived with her mother. But Mom
has remarried, and the new husband is a travelling man, so Bella frees
them to travel by going to live with Dad. This means Forks,
Washington - a real place reasonably near here, which is building a
tourist industry out of this, and which is apparently one of the
rainiest places in the country. Bella promptly falls in desperately
desirous love with a blatantly obvious vampire. (It takes her half
the first book to figure out his secret, but I can't imagine anyone
else taking more than a chapter or two. I should also note that
Bella, as narrator, is the only person unaware of her apparently
considerable beauty. This latter blindness is presumably so Meyer's
main audience can comfortably identify with the narrator - who is not,
in this case, actually a heroine, except to the extent that "heroine"
is a synonym of "protagonist".) Bella would be perfectly happy to
re-enact Lee's plot - but she lives in a web of familial and social
obligations, largely unlike Lee's heroine (and for that matter even
more unlike the heroine of <Metallic Love>), she chooses not to ignore
these, and her beloved (who is, of course, an *ethical* vampire - on
sunny days he and his clan go hunting non-human blood in the local
state and national parks) informs her of the impossibility of her
surviving sex with him, and therefore refuses her. Her desire is
constrained.

<twlight> has copious sequel-driving hooks, in the form of Special
Powers for Bella, her beloved, and others, and of the conflicts the
star-crossed romance engenders, and for days after finishing the first
book I wanted to read the sequels [m], because no matter how
fundamentally silly her story is, Meyer is a pretty good storyteller.
Paul Constant, in Seattle's <Stranger> for August 7, 2008, noted
correctly that the books have neither plot nor style, and incorrectly
that the core romance is unmotivated (it arises at least partly out of
all that beauty, plus Bella's life being saved several times by her
beloved ... hey, I *said* she wasn't a "heroine"!). He misses the
fact that Meyer *is* a good enough storyteller to get away with having
neither plot nor style - nor indeed particularly interesting
*characters* - but does identify her books' core asset: "What Meyer
does, maybe better than anyone else in popular fiction right now, is
capture that sensation of new teenage love, when one's genitals have
just come alive and the desire to copulate is so powerful and
all-consuming that the teenage brain, still reeling from the recent
passage from childhood, has to interpret it as powerful, undying love
- the kind of love that nobody on earth has ever or will ever
experience again." (Huh. Comments also relevant to a famous work
best instantiated, in this respect, in a movie listed in the
re-reading post, under 1968. Anyway, Constant's whole essay -
ostensibly about a release party for <breaking dawn>, but mainly a
review of the first three books - is worth reading; see URL below.)

Eh well. Not only Lee but Robin McKinley, in <Sunshine>, have done
this story better. But kids have certainly gone for worse stuff.

[m] The ones I didn't start are <eclipse>, 2007, and <breaking dawn>,
2008 (at whose final pages I've looked), in case you've been living
under a rock or something. There was going to be another book, I'm
not sure whether a pendant or a continuation, but not in Bella's POV;
however, as you'll know if you've been reading the newspapers lately,
it's been postponed or possibly cancelled. The ending of <breaking
dawn> certainly didn't strike me as obviously conclusive of the story.

<http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=638178&bk>, seen
August 17, 2008

Joe Bernstein

unread,
Dec 16, 2008, 1:42:14 AM12/16/08
to
READ FOR THE FIRST TIME: FANTASY

Olive Beaupré Miller, presented as editor
* (February) <Tales Told in Holland>, ?compiled as such 1926

This old children's book doesn't offer any credits for its text, and I
doubt it's by multiple hands at all; Miller may not have been so much
editor as author, or at least reteller. (The insipid illustrations by
Maud & Miska Petersham *do* get title-page credit, though about as
different from the Dutch Masters paintings they constantly claim to
emulate as any pictures could be. And I suppose they deserve the
credit, for demonstrating so very well that lousy art in kids' books
is no new thing.)

Anyway. The book contains twenty-two nursery rhymes and twenty-one
prose passages. Five of the latter are more or less clearly
non-fictional; the other sixteen split evenly between fantasy (fairy
tales) and not (legends and tall tales, mostly). The non-fantasy ones
have rather more pages, thanks largely to a very long presentation of
Tyl Ulenspiegel as a Sea-Beggar of the Dutch revolution - but, well,
that's the problem; I'm not sure how many of the non-fantasy ones are
real history, rather than historical fictions, even granting that the
Tyl one isn't. So I finally decided to classify by the stories I
liked better, which are the fairy tales, and put this book in the
fantasy post.

So ANYway. The best evidence for multiple authorship is some clotted
prose especially in the Tyl story; otherwise, most of the book's
fairly blandly told. The stories of Tyl, the wise men of Kampen, Abel
Stok, and Hans Hannekemaier all provide mildly earthy, stereotypically
Dutch, humour; there's derring-do courtesy of Dumas in "The Story of
the Black Tulip", and two tales of royal contrition, in "The
Charlemagne Saga of Sittard" and the final story. Among the fairy
tales, several again are mildly comic (a couple of romances and "The
Basilisk of Utrecht"); others would be somber if this book had
somberness in its remit ("The Lady of Stavoren", "The Mermaid of Edam"
which provides an interesting contrast with Britain's "Green Child",
"Echo Well"). "The Giants and the Dwarfs" is in between, mildly
preachy and tedious. Only "The Cat's Cup of Vlaardingen" has genuine
numen, and a frisson of horror.

"The Lady of Stavoren" is certainly, and "The Mermaid of Edam"
probably, also in Griffis's slightly earlier book described above, in
quite different versions; there are no other stories in common.

Alan Moore
(October) <The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol. 1>, 1999-2000,
first compiled as such 2000
Winner, 2001 Stoker Award, and Nominee, 2001 International Horror
Guild Award, both for Illustrated Narrative

$ (October) <The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume II>,
2002-2003, first compiled (perhaps not exactly as such) 2003
Nominee, 2004 Stoker Award and 2004 International Horror Guild Award,
both for Illustrated Narrative

Both drawn by Kevin O'Neill, coloured by Ben Dimagmaliw, and lettered
by Bill Oakley.

It's 1898, and in a world where most of the Victorian fiction you've
heard of, and much of that you haven't heard of, is fact, the British
Empire is threatened. So the intelligence services recruit Wilhelmina
Murray (several years divorced from Jonathan Harker) to recruit, in
turn, several others: Allan Quatermain, Captain Nemo, Henry Jekyll or
Edward Hyde, and Hawley Griffin. These books recount the work of
these five, first in tracking down some stolen Cavorite, then
assisting in the defeat of the invading Martians with their tripods,
all within a few months.

Given the science fictional nature of each book's McGuffin, my claim
that these are fantasy is debatable, but the premise, I think,
requires as much. (Note please that at least two of the five main
characters come from fantasy books.) In any event, I'm not pushing
the claim. What I find more interesting is the (genuinely science
fictional) way Moore uses each McGuffin to confront Victorian
characters with horrors of twentieth-century war: the Cavorite
enables ærial bombardment, while the tripods' heat rays recall
Napalm. Otherwise, the story is good, and fast-moving, but not
especially deep. So if it weren't that the complexity of the milieu
provides endless room for fannish speculation, I'd be somewhat
confused by the evident enthusiasm these books have inspired.

Wikipedia says some large but (probably) finite number of other
similarly-premised books are at least contemplated; I have no idea how
many already exist as of posting date. (Direct sequels to these two
are implausible, for spoilerish reasons.) Vol. 1 contains "Allan and
the Sundered Veil", a moderately horrific prequel about Quatermain,
exuberantly written by Moore in a 19th-century style one shade short
of purple, copiously and fittingly illustrated by O'Neill. Volume II
contains the much longer "New Travellers' Almanac", a sort of guide to
the fictional universe (via intelligence reports in various first
persons), which I didn't read.

John Moore
(February) <The Unhandsome Prince>, 2005

Moore has apparently written at least five paperback originals sending
up fairy-tale conventions. This is the third, found on an
uncatalogued-paperbacks shelf one day, borrowed the next, and read
within twenty-four hours; I was, at the time, juggling David Drake
affectless, Jack Vance amoral, and "Madeline Howard" fraught, and
apparently I wanted something opposite all those. Which this sure is.

The sorceress Amanda turns young Prince Hal of Melinower into a frog
for trying to steal her philosopher's stone; he winds up in a swamp.
Caroline, the most beautiful (and poorest) girl in the nearby town,
mounts a truly dedicated search and indeed eventually turns him back.
This is how she finds out that his looks are, well, titular; and she's
most disappointed. Amanda has in the meantime died; the town council
alleges breach of contract against her estate (Caroline was supposed
to get a *handsome* prince), and somehow Hal, Caroline, and Amanda's
daughter, threatened heir, and quondam apprentice Emily all wind up
riding back to the capital together.

And if that doesn't get across to you that this book's real
inspiration is screwball comedy, I sure don't know what would. That
said, Moore is actually juggling an insane number of angles here, not
just comic romance. He works in genuine mediæval factoids benign
(fostering) and malign (expulsion of Jews as a financial measure); he
does satire - Rapunzel is a hair care fiend (Melinower has never heard
of "wetlands", but has conditioners) and Rumpelstiltskin protests
anti-Semitism; he turns out to be a surprisingly tight plotter; and
I'm fairly sure this is aimed at the YA market even though it's not
sold so. (There's a threatened rape, but otherwise the book's
kid-safe; I suspect it was published as an adult book simply to evade
reviews in places like <School Library Journal>.) Unsurprisingly,
given this scattering of purposes, Moore doesn't produce much of a
consistent world, and this annoyed me early on; but if it annoys you
too, keep going: the inconsistencies eventually thin out, and the
book turns out to be a fair amount of fun. I'll probably end up
reading Moore's other books.

* (April) <Heroics for Beginners>, 2004

This is the second of the five books I mentioned (the first, <Slay &
Rescue>, Baen 1993, seems to be out of print). It concerns the plot
of an "Evil Overlord" to conquer the world with a "Diabolical Device",
and the contention between two men who wish, by heroically preventing
this, to win the hand of a local princess. From early in the book it
becomes obvious why Moore's books haven't been appearing as YA; this
one, first of the newer (Ace) bunch and so presumably setting their
category, has much of the sort of jokey lewdness actual young adults
are prone to, which is of course unacceptable in writing aimed at
them, and a major subplot involves lots of (imprecise) allusions to
lesbian S & M. That said, there are plenty of other jokes (the
<Handbook of Practical Heroics> prominently featured on the cover is
less prominent inside, but gives you an idea), and some of them
actually got me to laugh. Moore's world in this book hangs together a
bit better than in <The Unhandsome Prince>, and this book's just as
quick reading.

Still, if I'd read this first, I wouldn't have wanted to read anything
else by Moore. So I guess we'll see.

Naomi Novik
Winner, 2007 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer

* (May) <Temeraire: In the Service of the King>, 2006, first compiled
as such 2006
Winner, 2007 Compton Crook Award, and Nominee, 2007 Crawford Award and
2007 Hugo Award for Novel
(Um. I think those awards were actually for the first book, not for
this compilation...)

* (May) <Empire of Ivory>, 2007
(August) <Victory of Eagles>, 2008

<Temeraire: In the Service of the King> collects, more or less
simultaneously with the publication of the last, <His Majesty's
Dragon> (aka <Temeraire>), <Throne of Jade>, and <Black Powder War>,
all first published in 2006.

Wow.

Nothing else in this post is as good as these books as *story* - as,
if you will, an intersection of character and plot, paying little heed
to other stuff. The series has feet of clay, but everything Novik
puts atop those feet is impressive.

Here's the deal. We have real live dragons, and in civilised parts of
the world, they are generally tame, and indeed used for military
purposes. (China turns out to be different.) Some of them breathe
fire or have other special powers, others don't, but anyway, what they
amount to is air power in war, before the Wright brothers. Novik pays
no heed to the butterfly effect, so despite this rather massive and
ongoing change to history, we are in the Napoleonic wars, with real
people like Napoleon and Lord Nelson running around and appearing
sometimes in the books, and with human societies more or less as the
actual early 19th century ones were - only with dragons. (This is why
I say the series has feet of clay. Should Novik ever be tempted to
reach back into its past, à la George R. R. Martin's novellas about
Dunk, she'll quickly run into major problems.)

In the incipient Victorianism I've been finding preceded the actual
Queen (see the other fiction post), aviators are seen as disreputable.
But dragon eggs are still excellent things to find, and rising naval
Captain Will Laurence is thrilled with the booty he took from a French
ship - until the egg hatches and Temeraire imprints on *him*. But
Temeraire turns out to be of a Chinese breed, and a high-ranking one
at that, of extraordinary intelligence for dragons. (In keeping with
real scientific efforts to prove inferiority of various kinds in the
19th century, there's a trendy theory in these books that dragons in
fact *have* no intelligence.) He's the first dragon of such qualities
to live in Europe. So he is, in essence, the breakpoint Novik has
heretofore ignored; and the books move fairly rapidly from the private
social disaster to Captain Laurence, to world-shaking events.
Laurence and Temeraire are themselves, however, rarely privileged, and
even more rarely safe, amid these events.

Captain Laurence is honourable to the nth degree, and there's a sense
in which I can sum up these books by reference to books I read later:
Take the relentless plots and passionate concern for honour of some of
Anthony Hope's books, throw them into the world-changing plots and
troubled, deeply sympathetic characters of the Glenda Larke trilogy I
described above, and then put the whole thing into quasi-real history,
and there you have it: that's the Temeraire series. I don't think
these books have quite the depth Larke's have, though they certainly
aren't as shallow as Hope's. But while Novik may not have quite as
much to say as Larke about human life in general, she's *really*
determined to say a lot about history; <Throne of Jade> gives us a
trip to China, <Black Powder War> a return via Central Asia and
Germany, and <Empire of Ivory> a trip to sub-Saharan Africa, in
particular the ports that support the slave trade. And Temeraire's
own education involves him in all the intellectual currents of the
day.

So these are books you can read in about a day each, and won't want to
read much slower than that, the first time anyway, but unlike most
such fast-reading adventures, they're worth thinking about for much
longer. Wow.

Lynn Plourde
$ (February) <Wild Child>, 1999

A picture book for toddlers or so, in which we see Mother Nature
getting the titular child (Autumn) to bed, with a song (leaves
crunching), a snack (harvest), pajamas (leaves again), and a kiss
(snow). Oh, oops, there I've gone and given away the plot, shame on
me! but not the *whole* plot; there is another page. Anyway, I'm
pretty sure I'd have liked it, at that age, because Greg Crouch's
illustrations are gorgeous; but I didn't like it enough as an adult to
spend $1 to buy it.

Jane Rawlings
(May-June) <The Penelopeia>, 2003

This was on a shelf of librarian recommendations; I was intrigued by
the claims (made both by Rawlings and her publisher) that it was
modelled on Richmond Lattimore's <Odyssey> translation (my favourite),
so I borrowed it.

Well, um. I would not put it on that shelf myself. And it resembles
Lattimore only in certain matters of word choice (in particular, while
Lattimore's lines had minimal metre, this book's ostensible "free
verse" has none). But it isn't awful either. I suspect readers'
opinions of it will vary more or less proportionately to their
opinions of the word "sisterhood". Because what Rawlings does in this
book is re-imagine Penelope, and while she pays more than lip service
to Homeric Greece, much of her material comes from the more
touchy-feely aspects of modern feminism. So while I more or less had
to make myself finish, I'm sure there are readers who'll love it.
(Also, as feminist revisions of ancient Greece go, it's a sight less
extravagantly wish fulfillment than some I've seen - but I still
washed my mind out by looking at Gillian Bradshaw's Byzantine books
shortly after reading this one.)

The setup: Penelope was pregnant when Odysseus left, with twin girls
as it turned out. She hid them away with Laertes and Antikleia,
warned by Athene that they'd otherwise be in danger (imagine the
suitors from the original with teenaged girls around); Athene also
bade her take them to Pytho when they came of age. So almost
immediately upon Odysseus's return, Penelope and these daughters set
off on this voyage.

They face various perils, meet various famous women from Homer (here
all more or less feminist, though Penthesilea misbehaves), and end up
with different fates; Rawlings alludes in the final lines to the
<Telegony>, ancient Greece's own sequel to the <Odyssey>, but doesn't
bind herself to what we know of its plot. There's too much
sisterhood-talk throughout for my taste, and the addition of a wife
for Phemios who turns out (oh so politically correctly) to be an
Ethiopian queen really strains things. Also, it's just plain foolish
to read this expecting poetry; fortunately, the lines are long enough
that there's little eyestrain involved in just reading it as prose.
But, well, as I say elsewhere in this log, though usually more
enthusiastically: I recommend the book to anyone still interested
after reading my description.

It's only fantasy to the extent that the bulk of the <Odyssey> is,
mainly thanks to various potions. Deities stay offstage (like the
long-ago prophecy from Athene); Pytho and Phaeacia are demythologised.
The Seattle Public Library doesn't shelve it as fantasy, and I can't
really say I blame them; its intended audience certainly isn't the
fantasy audience.

It's illustrated by Heather Hurst, with pictures of (reasonably
credible) black-figure pottery.

See also, of course, Mason above.

Patrick Rothfuss
(August-September) <The Name of the Wind>, 2007
Winner, 2007 Quill Award for SF/Fantasy/Horror

Like Abraham's books way above, this one came with rapturous blurbs.
It goes some distance towards earning them; but the intended plot of
this trilogy ("The Kingkiller Chronicle", of which <The Name of the
Wind> is "Day One") is still too little advanced to guarantee that the
remaining volumes will, in that respect, bear out this one's promise.

Well, plot or plots. The book begins in a presumed present. Some
guys are telling stories in an inn, and a friend of theirs walks in,
having been attacked by a demon. Subsequent events result in the
innkeeper coming to some people's notice, and a noted historian
(exposé-writer) shows up identifying him as the great and notorious
Kvothe, and asking him to tell his story. Kvothe eventually agrees,
under various conditions, including that the story will be allotted
three full days. The remaining pages - over six hundred, in the
paperback I read - are, thus, literally, "Day One". Kvothe's story
relates his childhood among travelling entertainers, his
apprenticeship while still with them to a wizard, and how his father's
research into stories of evil beings resulted in a massive derailing
of his life. He nevertheless, halfway through the book, makes it to
the University, and begins his studies, finding what I'm guessing will
prove to be his true love and his greatest enemy early on, while also
establishing himself as an exceptional, but profoundly unconventional,
student of magic. And he continues to research those evil beings.
This is essentially as much as happens in this book, though copious
incidents quite obviously lay groundwork for what remains to come.
(So yes, this book also begins a normal bildungsroman, I admit.)

I find Kvothe and those he speaks of thoroughly credible as people;
indeed, the extent to which Kvothe relates his own flaws (most
notably, hasty impatience), without entirely admitting they *are*
flaws, is totally convincing. His style (and Rothfuss's, in the
"present" passages) is mostly transparent, but with occasional
flourishes, especially as each begins his story (Kvothe's start is
quoted on the cover), and sometimes a notable rise in the complexity
of the transparent sentences; again, convincing, and effective. The
setting is *again* convincing, mediævalish kingdoms with enough dirt
and poverty to obscure their Glorious Nobles and Wise Wizards, whose
wizardry itself is just cool enough without being world-shaking.

Rothfuss makes it clear that he's running a tight ship already in this
book, linking beginning and ending so as to emphasise that this is not
an unplanned book, and we have some hints of the end of Kvothe's story
from remarks in the present-day one, but there are still many ways
this could go. For one thing, I'm deeply unconvinced the present-day
plot is going to peter out at the end of the third day's storytelling.
Indeed, I'm fairly sure that whether it does or not is going to
relate substantially to whatever thematic concerns Rothfuss intends to
emphasise. It is only ingrained pessimism that leads me to reserve my
whole-hearted applause until I know more; but that pessimism *is*
ingrained, and despite the fact that *all* the signs are promising, I
will in fact reserve that applause. But I will also look for a
hardcover copy of this book to buy.

Will Shetterly [1]
(October) <Voyage of the Basset: Thor's Hammer>, 2000

Volume 4 of a sharecrop series, following a book by Sherwood Smith,
and preceding one by Mary Frances Zambreno. The fact that Shetterly
follows Smith, instead of preceding her, is thus the only interruption
in the progression in this series from more famous authors to less.
(Smith may be the more famous today, but she certainly wasn't in 2000,
except possibly as an author of kids' books - which admittedly would
be relevant.)

I'd read one of Shetterly's books before, but don't remember it well,
so can't compare this one. This book varies several aspects of the
series formula. There are three children coming from Earth to the
<Basset>; they're all boys; and they're all Americans, the departure
point being San Francisco, 1876. Joshua Green is black, alone in the
world, and has just lost his job. Toby McGee is Irish, supporting his
family, and unhappy that he can't risk a strike at the factory where
he's already lost three fingers. And Lin Yutang (how tired I am of
unoriginal allusion to an excellent mid-20th-century author whenever
any author needs a Chinese name!) is, obviously, Chinese, and unhappy
with his parents' demands on him. So these are our three third-person
POVs, who get chapters alternating in strict sequence. The <Basset>
was to pick up the person who fell in the water at a particular time
and place; all three boys do. Their task is to find Thor's hammer,
which has gone missing.

After three kids' books by women with their predictable paired
protagonists in a row, I must admit I found a book whose characters
met by coming to blows refreshing. Shetterly also goes rather lighter
on the moral lessons than Windling and Steiber or Smith. His use of
Norse myth isn't especially original, but this is still a better book
than those two.

Sherwood Smith
(October) <Voyage of the Basset: Journey to Otherwhere>, 2000

Volume 3 of a sharecrop series, following a book by Terri Windling and
Ellen Steiber, and preceding one by Will Shetterly.

Again involves a pair of kids who leave 19th-century England to voyage
on the <Basset>, but the formula is wearing thin. Smith is vague
about their ages, or the place and date; at any rate it's later than
1860, since William Morris has become known for design. Bradford
Ellis is the son of a Progressive headmaster, and fully infected with
his father's materialism and enthusiasm; Lucinda Beale has become a
seamstress at the school after her father (whose reactionary opinions
*she* shares - she's our Morris fan) died in a train accident, and her
poverty causes other tear-jerking problems for her. Their adventure
is schematic: the ship's navigational device is broken (by Brad's
tinkering), and they must both Learn Better to fix it. Smith scatters
mythological references around promiscuously. As I wrote this
description, I already had another of Smith's books from the library;
this one led me to put off reading it for months.

(May) <Inda>, 2006
(May) <The Fox>, 2007, skimmed

These are the first two books in an apparently ongoing dynastic
fantasy series that can be seen as Ice and Fire Lite.

That's not entirely fair. Smith's author bio for <The Fox> reveals
that this world is to her as Darkover was to Marion Zimmer Bradley;
evidently legions of would-be Brontës out there these days find the
idea of abandoning their adolescent worlds for realism absurd. The
books contain occasional lines referring to their story as belonging
to a distant past, and it's perfectly obvious from the structure of
the secondary world that the world pre-exists this particular story.

Nevertheless, Ice and Fire Lite this particular story is. Consider,
first, POVs. Smith doesn't do Martin's disciplined control of
third-person POVs; instead, she does exactly what I've long claimed to
hate, flitting restlessly from one POV to another all the time. I'm
perplexed that I nevertheless read most of each book. All the same,
her POVs consist of an improbable number of young men and women, at
first mostly nobles of a particular kingdom, then also sailors
encountered by the titular character, along with a smaller number of
older characters, largely but not exclusively powerful people within
the kingdom; and as in Martin's work, the youngsters become prominent
soon enough, while experiencing plenty of hair-raising danger, and
gradually awakening to sex (though mostly not to the more lurid
elements of Martin's tale; indeed, it's mildly refreshing to see the
consistency with which Smith treats sadists, three so far, as only
minor villains, not worth much screen time) and romantic love (only
about 50% of which is requited, in sharp contrast to lots of books).

Also as in Martin's work, the fantasy elements come in slowly. The
focal kingdom turns out to be unusually weak in magic, so for the
first half of the first book (before Inda, aka the Fox, is exiled to
sea), it looks like the world in general is. This gradually changes,
but we're well along in book 2 before any kind of overarching plot
involving magic becomes apparent. (And I regret to say there's no
such clarion line as the closing line of <A Game of Thrones>.)
Superficially, this series presents itself as sort of a biography of
Inda, a putative military genius, from the age of ten; it isn't
obvious to me that the magic-related plot will actually overcome that,
or the alternative of endless dynastic complexities.

I'll probably look at the next book, <King's Shield>, 2008.

Maria Snyder
(August) <Poison Study>, 2005
Winner, 2006 Compton Crook Award

This extremely popular book is, in a way, extruded fantasy product
done perfectly; or in another way, better than one would expect.
Whatever. It's the story of narrator Yelena, whose origins turn out
to be a spoiler, but whom we meet anticipating execution for killing
the sadist who'd been tormenting her. She is instead appointed poison
taster to the ruler of the realm she lives in. This realm is a
totalitarian setup - the ruler had, fifteen years before, overthrown a
corrupt and decadent king and aristocracy, and has put in its place a
rigid code of conduct (hence executions for killing in self-defense,
and indeed for accidental killing too) and enforced residency and
occupation rules for everyone. So it's totalitarianism Diocletian-
style, not Soviet-style (except that history seems to be getting heavy
rewrites). The ruler's right-hand man trains her, and given that this
is a Luna book, nobody will be surprised that she falls in love with
him. The book is more or less a thrill a minute - lots of factions
have reasons to attack Yelena - and is told in a very plain style.
(I'd be interested to know whether anyone's assessed this book with
one of those methods that determine the grade level of a text; I
strongly suspect it's sub-adult.) It's not chick lit because Yelena
doesn't whine much and because there's no product placement (unless a
mystery ingredient central to the plot qualifies), but it pretty
obviously wouldn't exist in a world without chick lit; where chick lit
commiserates with modern women, books like this encourage them. It's
certainly not even good writing, let alone great, but I'm not sure
there's anything actually *wrong* with it; for those it pleases, it
probably needn't be a guilty pleasure, unlike far too many popular
books. Flipside, I no longer have any interest in the sequels.

<DIGRESSION TITLE="Woman's Fiction">I recentishly bought, and have
been reading in fits and starts, <Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels
by and about Women in America, 1820-1870> by Nina Baym (1978). It
chronicles a genre Baym thinks arose in US fiction around 1820,
dominated the bestseller lists around 1840-1860, and then died out
around 1870. Baym thus defines her category:

Works of the genre that I am calling woman's fiction meet three
conditions. They are written by women, are addressed to women,
and tell one particular story about women. They chronicle the
"trials and triumph" (as the subtitle of one example reads) of a
heroine who, beset with hardships, finds within herself the
qualities of intelligence, will, resourcefulness, and courage
sufficient to overcome them.

She goes on to note that in these books, marriage *before* such
self-redemptive growing up invariably leads to further troubles, so
the heroine, unlike the heroine of earlier "novels of sensibility"
(e.g. the one by Devonshire in the other fiction post), must learn
more than how to feel love. (Mothers of woman's fiction heroines
often themselves resembled faded heroines of novels of sensibility,
utterly unequal to raising their daughters, in a remarkably clear
statement of generic relationships!) Marriage *after* fully growing
up - often after, also, the man in question has Learnt Better - is
meant to create a "domestic" sphere such as did not, in fact, exist as
the book opened, one elevated by being headed by two genuine adults.
(This is the small share of reality Baym concedes to the stereotype of
the novels in question as making "a cult of domesticity": domesticity
is indeed their goal, but not their main narrative focus. She shows
from dozens of examples that there's no sentimentality at all about
the parental home, which is frequently even worse than in
"Cinderella".)
I think it's clear that a bunch of non-chick-lit spec-fic novels
starring women follow an essentially similar pattern. I have no doubt
that's where Snyder's series is headed, but the pattern also appears
in the much more impressive trilogy by Larke discussed above, as well
as the kids' books by Gray and Haddix; see in the sf post Griffith
(both books, and at the extreme of literary quality vis-à-vis most of
these), to a lesser extent Richards, and even, I suppose, McDonald.
The *contrast* with the plot in Meyer's series - whose intelligent,
well-loved and previously sensible narrator openly and literally
confesses that as she now sees it, her *sole* purpose in existence is,
just like any 18th-century ravishee, *to FEEL love* - is also notable,
and suggests I was wrong to think that series harmless.
Obviously, the "overplot" Baym refers to is pretty easy to
masculinise, and is if anything more common in stories about heroes
(whose marriages are frequently rewards for maturity-developing
questing) than in those about heroines. (See also, in fact, Sosnowski
in the sf post - he has two protagonists, and he, like one of them, is
male, but this is his plot all the way. In the Howell trilogy above,
Baym's definition is tested even more sharply.) So it'd be silly to
claim these forgotten stories of the mid-19th century had any direct
*influence* on more recent stories. But I'm wondering to what extent
the current crop - to which I can add Naomi Kritzer's "Two Rivers"
trilogy and arguably Mindy Klasky's Glasswright series - represent
anything new, and to what extent this has been going on ever since
feminist sf became notable in the 1970s. It's easy enough, in
particular, to imagine that the quite recent emergence of "fantasy
romance" and similar explicit market categories had called forth as an
(inevitable?) reaction an emergence, also, of "fantasy woman's
fiction". But it's also easy to imagine that fiction of the shape
"Consciousness raising is essential to a healthy love life" was a dime
a dozen in 1970s sf and fantasy. I don't remember potentially-
"woman's fiction" examples from the 1970s-1990s clearly enough to
decide the issue myself.</DIGRESSION>

Roderick Townley
$ (July) <The Great Good Thing>, 2001

I saw <The Great Good Thing> lying on a half-empty shelf, piled with
some others, in the YA section of a Half Price Books store, and got
curious about it. I wondered how much it was; well, it was a mass
market, so that should've been easy - oops, though, it wasn't: not a
mass market but a school edition, and therefore, not easy. So I took
it to the counter and the guy said $2. Meantime, I'd started reading.

And couldn't stop.

And couldn't stop.

And couldn't stop.

So this is probably the only time I've read an entire book at a
bookstore in one evening and *then*, that same evening, gone ahead and
bought the nicest copy the store owned.

I've since learnt of two sequels. It was already obvious from the
four copies at the store that it had been popular. Plot summaries and
reviews abound on the Web. (Given all this, *why on Earth* hadn't I
heard about this book on rasfw?) So I'm not going to tell you very
much. The blurb on the back of the first copy I picked up said the
first line would snare me, and since it in fact did, I'll settle for
that:

Sylvie had an amazing life, but she didn't get to live it very
often.

Oh, well, I'll tell you one other thing. There is an underlying
sadness behind the book's inevitable happy ending, because this book
is also a moving study in how heritages can be lost. So even if the
central concept weren't a brilliant fantastication (admittedly, one
easy to pick holes in), I'd recommend this book to adults, who can at
least try to limit the losses.

(August) <into the Labyrinth>, 2002, and <the constellation of
Sylvie>, 2005

These are serviceable sequels, and at least as fast reading as the
first book!, but I don't think magic struck twice. Now, I was coming
down sick when I read them (both, in ninety minutes), so God knows I
didn't give them my best attention. But Townley's central
fantastication closes an important door to him, and unfortunately he
reacts to this closure by concentrating on elaborating the
fantastication itself - which was too rickety to sustain this. So the
third book's climax actually winds up hinging on a silly meta-mystery
of the same fantastication. If you love the first book as much as I
did, and have patience with inferior sequels, you may enjoy these just
because they *are* its sequels, but I'm not sure adults with other
views should touch them.

Leslie What
(September 2007-October) <Olympic Games>, 1996-2004, first compiled as
such 2004

This was apparently expanded from a story whose title says it all:
"The Goddess Is Alive and, Well, Living in New York City". I have a
guess as to which chapter (if only one) that story is, but only a
guess; the plot is so intricate and well-constructed that, frankly, I
only believe the book came from a short story because it says so.

We have at least eight POV characters, always in 3rd person. Sometime
in the past decade or so, these characters converge somewhere near a
nonexistent river upstate from New York City. One is the Oracle;
another was once a naiad; two are relatively ordinary men. And then
there's Hera and Zeus, monsters of selfishness built on the male and
female stereotypes their myths have long helped exemplify. Much of
the book is comic, as witness the amount of screen time these last two
POVs get, and there's a whole cascade of sappy moralistic endings.
But there's also a fair amount of genuine pain here: I stopped
reading for a month on discovering this, so thought I should warn you.
All the same, if only for the portraits of several of the POVs and (I
must admit) of those awful deities, I finally found the book worth
reading.

And since in last year's posts I made so much of small presses'
failures in copy editing, I should note that I only caught this
Tachyon book in one error.

Terri Windling and Ellen Steiber
(September 2007) <Voyage of the Basset: The Raven Queen>, 1999

Volume 2 of a sharecrop series (with unusually prestigious authors),
following a book by Tanith Lee and preceding one by Sherwood Smith.

As with volume 1, I don't detect here much of what I've seen as
distinctive about either author (though in this case I've read only
one book each, so am likelier to misjudge). It is, in St. Ives,
Cornwall, 1874, and Our Heroes are Devin and Gwenevere Thornworth.
They are twelve years old, children of Pre-Raphaelite-ish
painters [n], and although twins, opposite in more than sex:
Gwenevere takes after the rest of the family in artistic talent and
temperament, while Devin sees himself as the family's self-appointed
practical caretaker, with no creative gifts at all. Their mother
paints the women the girls from <Voyage of the Basset> proper have
become. Those women choose Gwenevere to travel via H.M.S. <Basset> to
take the painting to Titania, who will get it to the women's father;
Devin winds up coming along, to both twins' discomfiture. (They're
3rd person POVs in alternate chapters, Devin's written by Windling,
Gwenevere's by Steiber.) Needless to say, they wind up Learning
Better thanks to getting mixed up with Unseelie fey. I found it
easier to read, and much more page-turning, than Lee's volume.

[n] They're invented. Apart from the woman being a painter, they're
not much like D. G. Rossetti and Lizzy Siddal; physically, at least,
Mrs. Thornworth takes more after Alexa Wilding or Jane Morris, and
while Mr. Thornworth is clearly inattentive, he doesn't seem insane or
philandering. And their home life, while not as conventional as the
Millais family's and prone to crises from their own irresponsibility,
seems as underlyingly placid.

Mary Frances Zambreno
(October) <Voyage of the Basset: Fire Bird>, 2001, finished

The shortest and AFAIK final volume of a sharecrop series, following
one by Will Shetterly.

Zambreno rolls back some but not all of Shetterly's changes to the
series formula. She again has two main POVs of opposite sex, again
with alternating chapters at that, and again they start from England,
indeed, as with Windling and Steiber, from Cornwall. But they're
thirteen years old, which Zambreno uses not to provide romance but
rather to make them think seriously about their futures; the girl's
father also travels on the <Basset>; and Zambreno fudges the
real-world location as well, I think, as the date. (Depending on
whether you go by external references or ages of continuing
characters, we're either circa 1850 or no earlier than 1860. My guess
is that Zambreno intended this uncertainty.) Emily Alexander's father
is a noted lighthouse engineer who was blinded by an accident; her
late mother was gentry in Aldestow, Cornwall (modelled on Padstow), so
they retreat there. Shortly after she knocks Cyril Trelawny down in
an argument, her father's hired to repair the Pharos (erstwhile of
Alexandria), and Trelawny winds up coming along. The fantasy elements
cohere fairly tightly, as in Shetterly's book, but are here fewer.
And where Smith, in particular, seemed determined to discredit
science, and the series as a whole is premised on a fairly
anti-scientific perspective, Zambreno here has the guts to show the
numen of engineering.

Joe Bernstein

unread,
Dec 16, 2008, 1:51:11 AM12/16/08
to
VIEWED FOR THE FIRST TIME: FANTASY

Dramatic performances that would, if books, fit in this post:

<Boxes>
Script by Andrea Allen, 2008; directed by Scott Koh (music by Chris
Dewar and Koh); performed at the Seattle Repertory Theatre on May
22, 2008 by students from the Drama Intensive program ("a
collaboration between Seattle Repertory Theatre and The Center
School"), in other words, high school students, mostly girls

I don't remember going to many of the plays put on at my schools, but
the impression I got then (and in college) was that they were mostly
real plays written by real playwrights; that the Hollywood stereotype,
by which all school productions are deadly dull works written by the
drama teacher, had absolutely no basis in fact.

Oops. Andrea Allen is the Seattle Repertory Theatre's "Education
Director", and apparently, every year, she writes the script for the
Drama Intensive program's big show. This year, she was beset by
infant twins and writer's block after one act; Koh then suggested
making it a musical. So yep, that means I went to a high school
musical!

So oops again. The <Seattle Post-Intelligencer> for May 16, 2008,
featured this show on the front page of the local section, so I
figured it wasn't simply some high school's spring show. Which means
I misread the article. So I should probably restrain myself. No,
this wasn't a professional show, nor at the level of quality I've seen
in college productions; but why should it have been? So I'll confine
myself to praise, and to what's relevant to spec-fic. As with the
college-level <Tempest> discussed below, these largely overlap. First
a, well, meta-overlap: Aidan Fay and Randi Rosing-Schow were very
funny and reasonably convincing in several scenes together covering
the invitation, event itself, and aftermath of two nerds' first date.
(Fay's character is heavily into Tolkien, at that.)

More substantively. The script is a rather didactic affair, with
exposition, plain info-dumps, and moralising, and this extends to its
structure: Allen re-enacts versions of the myths of the rape of
Persephone and of Pandora's box, *and* presents, with explicit
linkages, more or less similar stories set among high school students
today. (Rosing-Schow played the modern Pandora analogue.) So, first
of all, these myths reinterpreted by a woman, for girls to act,
produced an interesting re-allocation of blame: In the modern
version, Rosing-Schow's character isn't at fault at all for her
diary's dissemination (the box-opening); even in the mythic one,
Pandora has way more excuse than in the original myth. On the other
hand, in both versions, it's perfectly clear that Persephone was more
than a little willing, until she found out Hades was playing for
keeps; indeed, Demeter and her analogue are shown as smothering their
daughters, unable to let them grow up (hence the plural in the title:
Persephone is *in* a box, or worse, moves from one box to another).
I'll leave it to more competent feminist critics than I to suggest
implications of the switching, but it's only fair to note that Allen
explicitly said her theme was "mothers and daughters". (I'm not sure
how this relates to either of the Pandora stories.)

Allen did one really smart thing, which I would guess is independent
of the vaguely similar smart thing mentioned re <The Tempest> below.
She has a "Greek chorus". Like real Greek choruses, it participates
in the action; unlike those, it consists of four personalities more
vivid than most of the characters, often at odds, and collectively
confident in their control of the whole show. From comments after the
show it sounds like the actresses themselves provided much of their
material, so my compliments also to Alicia Crowley, Anna Johnson,
Chloe Moser, and Milly Pierce. Moser's character does most of the
background info-dumping (including, I kid you not, detailed accounts
of the workings of "deus ex machina" when the script finally collapses
into same), and Johnson's, besides asserting herself as not only
chorus leader but also prime mover of the show, does most of the
foreground exposition. Pierce played the dimwit who needs all this
information. Finally and crucially, Crowley played a cynic who, when
not busy suggesting bad ideas to Persephone and Pandora, relentlessly
interrupts and mocks her choral colleagues; while the resulting
balance between exposition and drama wasn't ideal, it was immeasurably
better than it would've been without this character, and the interplay
she provoked with her peers. Should anyone reading this ever find it
necessary to write an exposition-heavy script for a high school show,
I commend the device to your attention.

<Ghost Sonata>
Script by August Strindberg, Swedish, 1908, here in an uncredited
translation uncreditedly adapted by the director and an unnamed
friend; directed by Andy Justus; performed at Seattle's All
Pilgrims Church on April 19, 2008 by Open Circle Theater with a
mostly local cast

My impression is that this is Expressionist theatre, and possibly a
seminal example. One logical conclusion is that confidently
classifying it as "fantasy" is, at least, somewhat imperceptive; and
so it may be. But near as I can tell, there are characters in the
play I saw who can obtain knowledge by seeing things other characters
can't see, and can do so because they are Sunday's children; this is
enough spec-ficness for me.

Anyway, so yeah, I'm far from the ideal audience for this show.
There's plenty of overwrought dialogue, which only Aaron Allshouse, as
the (main) villain, really inhabited well, uninhibitedly playing up
(hamming up?) to it in a way reminiscent of Darth Vader. (Emma
Hassett, in two non-speaking rôles, also impressed me). It was
awkward watching a play in a venue without a stage, as a short man
behind taller patrons, but the staging accomplished a fair amount with
limited props. And since nobody will read this until months later, I
should really be talking about the play or the company instead, right?
Well, Open Circle actually specialise in spec-fic, apparently thanks
to some combination of their own interests and donor generosity [o];
their main claim to fame is an ongoing series of dramatisations of
Lovecraft. This apparently led them to hype the spec-ficness of
<Ghost Sonata>; what I actually saw included none of the visual
correlates of the advertised ghouls, mummies, vampires, or
"creatures", just people (though to be fair, Allshouse managed to come
off as a refugee from an Addams cartoon [p]). The program refers to
Strindberg as "less concerned with building up suspense to a final
resolution and more about sustaining a mood and having different
themes play off each other." This is to a certain extent fair: the
three scenes are related, but separate, each with its own not really
surprising climax. But the program doesn't mention Strindberg's
considerable preachiness - largely cynicism about human nature, but
also a caricature of the servant problem! Over all, you probably
shouldn't go see this if your main interest is Fantasy!!! On Stage!!!,
but if you can take, say, Ellison's didactic cynicism, and you can
deal with, say, Eddison's language, you might find <Ghost Sonata>
interesting.

(I heard about this production, and got some of the info above, from
"Creative staging" by Rosemary Jones, an article in the April 2, 2008
edition of the <Capitol Hill Times>, page 9.)

[o] Paul Allen, the less famous founder of Microsoft, is also the
founder of the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame here, and
listed first in the "thank you"s in this show's program.

[p] One of my regrets as to how I spent the summer just ended is that
I missed Allshouse playing Mr. Toad in an adaptation of <The Wind in
the Willows>. I figured he'd be perfect for the part, and a couple of
reviewers said he was.

<The Tempest>
Script by William Shakespeare, probably 1611, here significantly cut;
directed by Kerry Skalsky (music by Gretta Harley); performed at
Seattle's Volunteer Park on April 27, 2008 by the Cornish College
of the Arts Theatre Department with a cast of women students

I arrived late, and missed much of the first act. Oh, and: I'm
undecided as to whether seeing the same play in different productions
counts as "for the first time" or not, but as it happens, although
<The Tempest> is one of the Shakespeare plays I read in childhood (the
others I remember are <A Comedy of Errors> and <Romeo and Juliet>),
I'm pretty sure I'd never seen it acted before, on stage or screen.
Come to think of it, I *still* haven't seen it acted on stage or
screen; but now I *have* seen it acted.

<The Tempest> is one of Shakespeare's most fantastical plays, but it's
also one of his most male-dominated: Miranda is the only woman
onstage. (For a century or two - later than Shakespeare! - it was
traditional to have women play Ariel too.) Doing such a man-heavy
play with an all-woman cast is mildly eccentric, but it had one
interesting benefit for the fantasy. This cast performed outdoors, in
and around a grove (on a showery afternoon), with minimal props and
sets, and indeed no seats; three women conducted us from place to
place as scenes changed, using lengths of rope to separate audience
from performers. So obviously, there were also no special effects -
except that in an inspired casting choice which I've been unable to
source to other stagings [q], Skalsky produced a special effect all
the same. Here, Ariel wasn't *one* player, male or female, but
*three*: three women all sopranos and of similar height, but of three
different builds and races; all in street clothes, unlike the other
actresses, but all in similar street clothes. While this made the
play's occasional references to Ariel in the singular more difficult,
plenty of other references to "spirits of the air" and the like made
far more sense. And the three actresses - Anees Guillen, Dale Ross,
and Joetta Wright - were nearly perfect in their divisions and
combinations of Ariel's lines, movements, and musical effects, often
summoning eeriness from their collaboration, the impression that I
really was watching fey, not humans. Considering that these women
were also the ushers mentioned above, indeed often singing even while
waving us on, they couldn't operate at the same pitch all the time.
But in their first appearance, and several times thereafter, I sensed
true numen in their work.

[q] I've since seen - this is one of the reasons these posts were so
delayed - the 1991 Peter Greenaway movie, <Prospero's Books>, in which
four male actors play Ariel. They're pretty important in the movie as
a whole, and Greenaway does use *some* of the implications of a
multiple portrayal - for example, Greenaway's Ariels all look similar,
despite ranging in apparent age from around 6 to around 20. So it
wouldn't shock me if Skalsky had gotten some of the idea from this
movie. But Skalsky explored the possibilities of the multiple
character much more thoroughly than Greenaway, whose Ariel, for
example, has relatively few speaking lines (and only one singing
voice). <Prospero's Books> is rich in numen, and Greenaway's Ariels
contribute to it, but the way in which they do so is very different
from the eldritch qualities Skalsky's Ariels brought to the <Tempest>
I saw.


Radio dramas that would, if books, fit in this post:

<Daniel Webster and the Sea Serpent>, 1937 (CBS; on the DVD of the
1941 <The Devil and Daniel Webster>; I'd had no idea Benét actually
wrote three stories about Webster, but to judge by this
dramatisation, there's a reason for the other two's obscurity);
<The Devil and Daniel Webster>, 1938 (CBS; guess where).


Movies that would, if books, fit in this post, even more than last
year, get much more comment than in the other posts:

To start with, <The Magic of Méliès>, which came out in 1994 on video
and has just appeared on DVD from Kino; it compiles fifteen short
movies dating between 1904 and 1908. This is not the new 5-disc set,
<Georges Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema (1896-1913)>, from Flicker
Alley, but its release on DVD was presumably timed to compete with
same. Dave Kehr, reviewing the Flicker Alley set in <The New York
Times> for March 18, 2008, is clearly sour about it, but has to admit
that thanks to Méliès, fantasy filmmaking is no new thing, but part of
cinema's ancestry and the source of one of the first movie moguls.
(Méliès didn't just invent a bunch of special effects; he also
apparently started the first cinema *and* the first studio.) That
said, as far as the Kino disc is concerned, Kehr's criticisms are, if
anything, too mild. Six of those movies have no more plot than "Here
are some magic tricks" (these are the ones listed below without
summaries); most of them plump out their special effects or actual
stage magic with slapstick (often), fancy clothes and/or sets (often),
and/or cheesecake (less often), rather than with interesting plot or
characters. I found only one (<Long Distance Wireless Photography>,
1908, in the sf post) actually funny, though <The Cook in Trouble> and
<The Mysterious Retort> also worked for me, and none of the movies
were actually unwatchably bad.

You may think me a glutton for punishment, but I was curious whether
the movies that had worked so poorly for me on the TV screen would
work better on bigger ones, and astonishingly, I got the chance to
find out. So I took that chance - and also astonishingly, they did.
Seattle's Sprocket Society's Spencer Sundell (say that three times
quickly!) put together for May 15, 2008, at the Northwest Film Forum,
a program of longer Méliès movies - no "here are some magic tricks",
thank you! - accompanied by much more recent music. I encourage
interested readers of this post to try to get this program exported
(contact info at URL below; as of May 16, anyway, the actual printed
program was also available there as a PDF). Of the seven movies, I
concluded that three (one of which Kino also has) are sf, and one not
spec-fic at all, so only three are listed below. Unfortunately, I had
a lot of trouble following two of these fantasy movies - they had
basic plots I hadn't encountered in the Kino disc, I was really tired
that day, and I admit I discovered the hard way that I actually can
drowse in a movie theatre (a problem hitherto confined to concerts).
Hélas! Because although only one of the unfamiliar movies really
pleased me, all were more interesting than most of the Kino movies.

Anyway, I also learned from the program Sundell provided that these
movies have been recovered decade by decade, and are often still
incomplete. So my decision to provide running times for the Kino
movies, because Kino hadn't, had the unexpected side benefit of
helping identify the completeness of the Sprocket Society prints.
(For the Kino disc, I relied on the time indicated by the disc's
clock, rounded to the nearest minute. For the Sprocket Society I used
my cell phone, which doesn't display seconds, as a timer, so could be
off by up to one minute either way, but probably normally am not.) I
should note that all titles are translated, and rendered as presented
by Kino or by Sundell's program; Kino also provides French titles,
Sundell those plus alternate English titles, so if you're acquainted
with Méliès, and not sure if one of those below is one you've seen,
you'll have to look further.

+ <The Kingdom of the Fairies>, 1903 (11 min. as shown; ORT 20 min.; a
quest fantasy - evil fairy slighted at royal wedding kidnaps bride,
prince pursues - with many sets which must've been dazzling back
then, but didn't keep me fully awake; sorry!);
$ <The Cook in Trouble>, 1904 (a chef scorns a beggar, who then turns
to a wizard and curses him; this results in a lot of balletic
slapstick, if you can imagine such a thing, and is a pleasure to
watch; 4 min.);
$ <The Mermaid>, 1904 (4 min.);
$ <Tchin-Chao, the Chinese Conjurer>, 1904 (3 min.);
$ <The Untamable Whiskers>, 1904 (3 min.);
$ <The Wonderful Living Fan>, 1904 (3 min.);
$ <The Black Imp>, 1905 (the titular being causes a man trying to go
to bed to go mad instead; 4 min.);
$ <The Enchanted Sedan Chair>, 1905 (3 min.);
$ <The Living Playing Cards>, 1905 (3 min.);
+ <The Palace of the Arabian Nights>, 1905 (this time the prince is
questing for the princess's bride-price; again I had trouble
following it, but this time some of the sets and effects actually
did impress me; 14 min. as shown);
$ <The Hilarious Posters>, 1906 (the titular live posters turn the
tables on the normal people who try to contain them; 3 min.);
+ <The Merry Frolics of Satan>, 1906 (this is the one I was fully
awake for, but I understood it as another bad-magician-slighted
story while the program claims it's actually about sold souls;
anyway, it's basically <The Cook in Trouble> or <The Black Imp> on
a larger scale, and rather less balletic, with an ending Hollywood
would never tolerate today; 12 min. as shown);
$ <The Mysterious Retort>, 1906 (unusually cool effects in another
tables-turned story; 3 min.);
$ <The Eclipse>, 1907 (and tables turned one more time; a medley of
cheesy astronomically themed effects, as observed by an
astronomical club; 9 min.);

<http://www.sprocketsociety.org/>, not actually seen, cited on the
basis of Sundell's program and his statements May 15, 2008

<Cinderella>, 1914 (comments below);
<Peter Pan>, 1924 (seen with difficulty, but I did like it);
<Faust>, (edited over the original German intertitles), 1926 (wow!);
<March of the Wooden Soldiers>, aka <Babes in Toyland>, 1934 (in which
we learn that in street fighting, a guerrilla force is no match for
an organised marching regiment; this may explain much about US
military history over the past forty-odd years, come to think);
<She>, 1935 (included on a disc whose title attraction, which I
ignored, is the same movie as colourised by Ray Harryhausen; <King
Kong>, 1933, this movie's financial and to some extent
inspirational progenitor, certainly deserves its much greater fame,
but if this movie isn't as ancestral to a whole lot of later swords
& sorcery - especially, to D&D - as every page of <Weird Tales>
ever written, I'll eat my hat);
<The Early Bird and the Worm>, 1936 (a colour cartoon on the DVD of
<After the Thin Man>, notable mainly as a sterling example of the
cartoons' implacable hostility toward predatory animals);
<The Devil and Daniel Webster>, aka <All That Money Can Buy>, 1941;
arguably <The Bishop's Wife>, 1947 (one case where my knowledge of
Christian theology *isn't* enough for me to figure out whether the
movie's clearly fantasy);
<Little Tinker>, 1947 (a Tex Avery cartoon on the DVD of <"The
Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer">, about the distresses of
xenophilia);
<Afrita Hanem: The Genie Lady>, Arabic (Egypt), 1949 (too many things
at once - underdog physical comedy, romance, musical - but anyway
fantasy, not entirely, or even primarily, for the titular reason;
if you can get used to a musical much of whose music is
sorta-traditionally Arabic, at least the dancing may appeal to, um,
half the viewers);
* probably <Cinderella>, 1950 (comments below);
<The Magic Voyage of Sinbad>, (dubbed over the original Russian vocal
track), ?1953/1962 (<Sadko>, allegedly recut by Francis Ford
Coppola for Roger Corman; the movie must have been cheesy already,
but probably twice as bad in the reworking, which, oddly, left a
lot of stupidly leftist economic preaching intact; also,
filmographies I've seen claim that <Sadko> was first released in
every single year from 1950 through 1954, and I could probably
extend that to 1807 through 2408 if I looked harder, which is a
sterling example of why I usually treat the IMDB as if it were a
reliable source - there's no such thing as a *genuinely* reliable
source when it comes to movies, indeed there's probably a natural
law forbidding such to exist);
<Flea Circus>, 1953 (a mildly amusing Tex Avery cartoon on the <Les
Girls> DVD);
arguably <The Court Jester>, 1956 (OK, I *suppose* I have to put it
here, even though the alleged witch's only actual skills appear to
be hypnosis and pharmacology);
<The Day the Earth Froze>, (dubbed over the original Finnish vocal
track), ?1959/1963 (based on the <Kalevala> and originally titled
<Sampo>; rather more enjoyable than the other movie on the disc,
<The Magic Voyage of Sinbad>, and non-trivially numinous; both
actually had the same director, Aleksandr Ptushko, though the
credits of these versions work hard to obscure this, and both are
in this form severely cut);
arguably <Gypsies Are Found Near Heaven>, Russian, 1976 (comments
below);
<The Slipper and the Rose>, 1976 (comments below);
<The Changeling>, 1980 [2] (NB: the title actually refers to the most
*realistic* element of this movie);
not very arguably <Supergirl>, 1984/2002 (a "director's cut", because,
you know, you can never have too much of a bad thing; even though
I'd generally consider Superman et alii sf, this movie's dominated
by black magic and so clearly fantasy; but if this is the worst of
the Salkind movies, then the other three may actually be worth
seeing);
arguably <Castle in the Sky>, aka <Laputa>, Japanese, 1986 (like much
anime, uses both fantasy and sf material heavily);
<Dead Again>, 1991 (of which I'd say "wow" had the ending lived up to
the rest);
<The Kingdom: series one>, Danish, 1994 (DKTV; comments below);
arguably <La Celestina>, Spanish, 1996 (was it the love spell or
not?);
<Visible Secret>, Cantonese, 2001 (the DVD may also contain a "comic
version" - it claims to, but when I tried to play it, it looked
identical to the version I watched, so I dunno; I'd never call the
version I did watch either comic, or all that good);
<Guy Maddin's Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary>, 2002 (CBC;
comments below);
<Joshua>, 2002 (the obscure one with Tony Goldwyn in the titular
rôle; further comments below);
<Ju-on>, Japanese, 2002 (comments below);
<The Stone Raft>, Spanish, 2002;
<Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl>, 2003;
arguably <Finding Neverland>, 2004 (only fantasy by the slenderest
thread, in late scenes, if at all; but belongs here anyway as Geoff
Ryman's <Was> would belong in this post, had I read it for the
first time this year; unlike <Was>, this takes truly massive
liberties with its historically known characters' actual lives);
<Beowulf & Grendel>, 2005 (comments below);
<Homecoming>, 2005 (combines an awesome horror concept - war dead as
zombies - with a no-holds-barred political attack - they're not
voting for the president who sent them to battle - but at core, a
fairy tale about promises and wishes);
<The Promise>, Mandarin, 2005 (yawn; I hadn't known one of those
flying-combat movies now so common could be built around
sentimental hokum; but very pretty, anyhow);
<Stay>, 2005;
+ <The Telepathic Restaurant>, 2005 (a clumsy, slight, short romance
with an almost fairy tale plot, shown before <Donnie Darko> at the
showing I attended);
* <The Initiation of Sarah>, 2006 (A[merican]BC Family; the version
with Mika Boorem in the titular rôle; pseudo-Wiccan witches vs.
pseudo-Satanic ones, actually based on a conventional fantasy
distinction also used by e.g. Patricia Wrede; nevertheless a bad
script with some bad acting, watchable mainly thanks to other,
half-decent, acting, and occasional cinematographic grace notes);
<The Lake House>, 2006 (comments below);
<The Mourning Girls>, Tagalog, 2006 (a quite bad comedy - <Why Do
Fools Fall in Love?> done for sentimentality and laughs - but still
fantasy: many people see the dead man's ghost, who can produce
physical effects);
<Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man's Chest>, 2006;
<The Return>, 2006;
$ arguably <Stranger than Fiction>, 2006 (*many* thanks to Kurt
Busiek, Rebecca Rice, and Lawrence Watt-Evans for recommending it
to me);
+ <Beowulf>, 2007 (comments below);
+ <Camille>, 2007 (comments below);
+ <Enchanted>, 2007 (WOW! further comments below, after a spoiler
space);
+ <The Golden Compass>, 2007 (having been warned of its evisceration
of the books' main message, I was unprepared for how faithful it
was to the rest - so I concluded it was actually pretty good,
though I'm not sure someone who hadn't read the book could agree);
+ <The Spiderwick Chronicles>, 2007 (which answers something I've
wondered about: I hadn't read the books this movie is based on, so
I now know that it *is* humanly possible to make sense of an
unfamiliar plot in at least one fantasy blockbuster);
+ <Stardust>, 2007 (good-looking dross, but it did teach me to value
more both the book, and Peter Jackson's <Lord of the Rings>; I now
regret deleting the paragraphs I cut from last year's conclusory
post objecting, in particular, to the choice of Claire Danes as
Yvaine);
+ arguably <The Water Horse>, 2007 (arguable because if it hadn't pled
so hard to be considered fantasy, I'd have lauded it as good
science fiction!);
+ arguably <Sita Sings the Blues>, 2008 (comments below).

Also see the Gothics post, where I list movies seen for the first
time, whose running time is spent largely in the realm of Todorov's
fantastic, in other words movies for which specification as "fantasy"
or "other fiction" would be a non-trivial spoiler. In last year's
post, I listed five movies seen for the first time whose status as
"fantasy" or not depended on whether one trusted a young POV
character's perceptions or considered that character delusive. This
year, such movies fit more easily into the Gothics post.

See also, in the series post, the <dead like me> discs. See also, in
the re-reading post: <Skeleton Frolic>, 1937; <Bell, Book and
Candle>, 1958; <Truly Madly Deeply>, 1991; <The Phantom of the Opera>,
2004; <Mirrormask>, 2005.

Now follow volumes of longer comments on movies:

<Cinderella>, 1914, when I saw it in November, was the earliest movie
of any length I'd ever seen (though it didn't long retain that
status). Doubtless it survived mainly thanks to its starring Mary
Pickford [r], but for anyone who's actually read this far in this
post, there are reasons to see it that hold independently of one's
opinions of Pickford. First, this version actually heightens the
fantasy, rather than shrinking it. Second, it mitigates the criticism
I made of this fairy tale last year, by *not* having Cinderella and
the Prince fall in love at first sight: they meet before the ball,
and *at* the ball spend most of their time talking, rather than
dancing. Third, *this* Prince, despite his name, is sincere rather
than charming. (He's played by Owen Moore, then Pickford's husband,
which is surprisingly non-obvious from the movie itself.) Oh, and
furthermore, it's only 52 minutes long.
But it also pointed up for me elements of absurdity in the Perrault
story. Let's see: Cinderella attended a ball incognito. Then we can
strike from the list of possible women who'd fit that [non-]glass
slipper *all* those invited guests who actually showed up, right? So
that whole sordid business of chopping off the stepsisters' heels and
toes flies out the window. (Of course, this movie, like most visual
versions, omits that anyway.) Also, she showed up with a grand dress
and coach. Surely this means a search strategy focused on the
aristocracy, or maybe also successful merchants, would be a better
plan than checking out every woman in the entire kingdom. (Granted,
it wouldn't actually *work*, but still: the larger scale search
suggests sinister ulterior motives, doesn't it?)
That said, I'm glad I saw it. A movie from before the Great
War [s]: it came honestly by its pre-Raphaelite good fairies (yes,
plural) and some Rackham-esque scenes - though I suspect the
intertitles were actually recreated in the 2004 production of the DVD,
so their Art Nouveau style may *not* date from 1914.
It's on the DVD of <Through the Back Door>, 1921, as a special
feature. Check it out!

[r] Though a biographer says Pickford actually *wanted* her movies
destroyed upon her death! Which makes it all the more bizarre that
they're now released by the foundation her will established...

[s] OK, OK. It was released in December 1914; I don't know whether it
was shot before September or not. And although it's a US movie, so
the 1914 dates arguably don't matter, Pickford was Canadian, and I
think Moore was too.

In November, my DVD player, less than two years old, developed new
bugs. The (typically damaged) library DVDs I was trying to watch at
the time never played through properly; I didn't know whether this was
due to my player's decline, or to their own defects. (I'm now pretty
sure both elements were involved.)
<Gypsies Are Found Near Heaven> (whose title has been translated
several other ways, including <Queen of the Gypsies>) is a movie set
and partly made in Moldova back when it was the Moldavian SSR, with
largely Moldovan personnel, in the Russian language and based on
Russian stories, and mostly about Romany characters. It's set right
around 1900, based primarily on an intensely Romantic Maxim Gorky tale
of 1892 (for which see the other fiction post), and although the
filmmakers prided themselves on getting the Romany culture right, they
also prided themselves on Romanticism. So. Gypsies are colourful
people who spend lots of time outside, right? Therefore this is a
spectacularly gorgeous film, one of the most beautiful I've seen;
about the only thing I saw that November in which most of the
freeze-frames I had to sit through were actually worth looking at. So
I regretted the problems (in this case) mainly because of the
splintered music: Since Gypsies are famously musical, the movie is
(sort of) a musical, and the score is about as gorgeous as the
cinematography. (One song is strikingly sung, and dazzlingly danced,
by Alena Buzyleva, aka Alyona Buzylyova, now seemingly one of the
most-acclaimed Russian Romany singers, apparently then age nine. Yes,
I know what you're now thinking; well, wrong: she's *nothing* like
Shirley Temple.) Oh, and then there's Gypsy independence, of course:
and the story is of two (gorgeous) paragons of Gypsy life - the man a
great horse thief, the woman an utterly enchanting, well, witch (the
only reason this movie is in this post and I can justify spending all
this space on it). They, of course, fall in love, but each values
independence more; in a sense, it's a Romantic, or anyway
individualistic, reinterpretation of <Romeo and Juliet>. To judge by
IMDB users' comments, today's Romany see this movie, woven as it is of
mingled authenticity and stereotypes, with feelings ranging between
love and contempt, but I enjoyed it immensely. The anæmic DVD cover
copy gives no hint of this movie's sheer beauty, which is my *reason*
for spending all this space on it; anyone who can tolerate subtitles,
Romanticism, and singing in movies should certainly try to see it.

<The Kingdom: series one> is a miniseries, four and a half hours,
conceived and partly directed by Lars von Trier, before he became a
professional America-hater. Here he instead attacks medicine, if not
all science. From quite early this hospital drama is obviously a
ghost story, though there are several other plotlines; at the end,
there are cliffhangers in most of those, and none is truly resolved.
In 1997 a new miniseries appeared, now also available on DVD for
multiple regions; comments at the IMDB indicate that it too ends
mainly with cliffhangers. In 2000 and 2002 the actor and actress who
played the most important characters, each born in 1930, died, and I
know of no evidence that the story will ever be completed. The DVD
box claims that Stephen King based <Kingdom Hospital> on <The
Kingdom>.
In looks <The Kingdom: series one> anticipates the Dogme doctrine
von Trier would soon announce - for example, its many interiors
usually aren't well lit - though obviously its stories are hardly
Dogme-mundane. No character is wholly admirable, but some are
sympathetic; we're a long way from <Dogville> here. I found it worth
watching, but could have lived without it. However, an astonishing
percentage of those who felt moved to leave comments at the IMDB
declared it the best thing they'd ever seen - and no, that's not a
figure of speech on my part, it's what one after another after another
actually wrote. So it's always possible, I suppose, that you would
too.

Oh, good; these comments are in chronological order by when I watched
the movie discussed, and now <The Kingdom> doesn't have to end this
post. <The Lake House> is, as noted in last year's post, a remake of
<il Mare>, a Korean movie of, um, 2000. I was surprised by its
fidelity to its original; some months after I saw the original, I'm
sure I missed a bunch of changes, but the single biggest change,
turning the woman into a doctor, actually substantially smooths the
plot, though it also leaves a gaping hole right in the middle of said
plot. (And OK, the next-biggest change, aging both the main
characters quite a bit, works in the opposite direction: now, having
got rid of young people whose difficulties with parents and work,
singleness, and readiness to treat a timeslip as a romantic
opportunity, all make some sense, the script has to jump through a
bunch of hoops to establish both leads as lonely loners.) I'm not
sure whether other aspects of the plot that made more sense to me this
time 'round did so because I'd already seen the original, or because
they actually did make more sense, but anyway this too had a drawback:
with everything else so much clearer, the paradox underlying the
ending was even harder to ignore. (In fact, the Korean version at
least tries to deal with the paradox; this version just sweeps it
aside.)
I went into it thinking I'd end up writing that the movie I'd be
trying to see again would be <il Mare>, not this one. Well, to some
extent that's still true. The American version's use of Chicago
tourist havens as settings made me a bit homesick, but couldn't
compare with the breathtaking beauty of much of the Korean one. And
although I'm not one of her detractors, I've also never been all that
keen on Sandra Bullock, whereas Jun Ji-Hyun (aka Jeon Ji-Hyeon), her
predecessor in the rôle, was rather lovely, and in a rather more
histrionic performance more appealing. But I'll probably have to
compare the movies rather more closely before I can figure out what I
really think; and I'm already confident <The Lake House> didn't
deserve all the scorn that was heaped on it.

The <Joshua> I saw (I gather there are several movies with this title)
is a direct-to-video movie for the Christian market, which I wish I
still thought a massive comedown for F. Murray Abraham; I remain
mildly baffled by Giancarlo Giannini's participation. The cover copy
makes it obvious that this isn't remotely a typical "Christian
fantasy"; I nevertheless put it in this post because I'm pretty sure
it's no more possible from any kind of orthodoxly Christian
perspective than from my atheist one. Regardless, it leaves me
wanting to perpetrate two major spoilers, and I'll settle for one: it
is not, in fact, anti-Catholic, although anyone who missed the final
seven minutes would think otherwise. That said, the Christianity it
offers is certainly Protestant at core. I found it, very mildly,
worth watching, but am quite certain I won't watch it again;
especially if you're devout, YMMV.

As noted in the introductory post, I watched an unusual number of
horror movies this year. One day in December, I found exceptionally
many horror DVDs available from the Central Library all at once, and
borrowed several that seemed likely to involve spec-fic. When I
finally watched them in late January, the first three surprised me
more than a little by not being particularly scary, which is one
reason I gave <The Wicker Man>, <The Descent>, and <The Return> no
comments in these lists. But the reason I'm commenting on <Ju-on>
isn't that it's scary (though it is), but that it's stupid.
The premise behind <Ju-on> is that a single murder in rage creates
an undead creature that itself kills in rage, thus generating a
positive feedback loop. The movie takes a leisurely course, showing
this loop in action against various people, most of whom (but not all)
have visited a particular house, the home of the woman whose murder
(by her husband) set up the loop in the first place. However, it's
clear enough that the house isn't actually essential, and the last
victim introduced is in fact recruited by the undead to visit the
house; the final scenes (spoiler alert, as if you care) show the city
apparently depopulated. I actually am fairly sure the premise
promises the extermination of humanity within a decade, if not weeks.
All as a result of one enraged murder. (No cure is even suggested,
much less shown: this is a sort of Buddhist ecological horror, but
with the Buddhism reversed - karma here isn't an incentive to do
right, but a guarantee of agony.) The makers of J-horror clearly live
on a much safer planet than the one I occupy; on the planet where I
live, there are enraged murders every day, but the human race still
exists. So hey: does anyone reading this live on that idyllic world,
J-horror Planet? Or is it a figment of the imagination, the real
exercise in fantasy here?
Oh, well. Not that I watched those four looking for horror, but I
admit, if horror *is* what you're looking for, <Ju-on> beats the pants
off a bunch of other movies anyhow.

The two <Beowulf> movies differ substantially, but both massively
reinterpret the epic.
<Beowulf & Grendel> stars Gerard Butler, thankfully not singing,
and Ingvar Sigurdsson in the titular rôles; though it has special
effects, it isn't dominated by them. It treats the first half of the
epic as a traditional Nordic blood feud, in effect; obviously, this
considerably diminishes Grendel's monstrosity, and that's one of
several reasons this treatment is likely to enrage the apparently
sizable number of people who passionately hate everything politically
correct. (Another is Sarah Polley's rôle as a witch, used to produce
a bigger female part than Wealhþeow's, but not only for that purpose.)
I recommend it to anyone who can deal with PC without
hyperventilating, though; I found it elegiac and intriguing.
<Beowulf> stars Ray Winstone in the titular rôle (and several other
rôles too), and John Malkovich as Grendel (one of numerous CGI effects
that I found less than wholly convincing; in *this* movie, Grendel's
monstrosity is heightened, not diminished). It covers the whole epic;
it's not especially PC, but actually modifies the epic's plot even
more radically than the earlier movie. (I do mean "radically", here,
in its original meaning, not its political one - though some will take
the ironic treatment of heroism deep here, and present in <Beowulf &
Grendel>, as political in its own right.) I found it less
intelligent, though certainly flashier, and not without originality;
and of course it's much richer in stars, especially women, who get
more screen time than Sarah Polley in the other movie, and vastly more
than any woman in the written epic.

First, imagine <Dracula> done as ballet, to music from Mahler's first
two symphonies, and in two basic movements - first focusing on Lucy
Westenra, then on Mina Murray.
Next, imagine this filmed for broadcast TV.
And then imagine that Guy Maddin is chosen as director.
This is one of several "silent" movies Maddin has done, and the
first I've seen. (Another spec-ficnal one, <Brand upon the Brain>,
was shot in Seattle shortly before I moved here, and premiered here in
2007, but I've so far missed it.) This one is largely conservative;
aside from use of intertitles and casting to create a pronounced
(ironic?) anti-immigrant message, its tools are mostly traditional
silent-movie ones, such as monochrome tints (see on this the other
fiction post), heightened movements (which of course the ballet
encourages too), and well-chosen music. On the other hand, there are
actually several non-monochrome elements (red for blood and for
Dracula's cape, green for money), and the soundtrack isn't *only*
music, though it includes no dialogue.
The movie is dominated by arresting images, usually well-filmed
ballet moments. Lucy, Mina, and van Helsing are superbly cast, and I
suspect Dracula is too, though I have a hard time with this movie's
idea of Dracula. That said, this is neither a typical Maddin film,
from what I've heard, nor a typical filmed ballet (maybe half the
running time actually depicts dance), nor typical horror. Watch it
with an open mind, and it's well worth seeing; watch it with too many
expectations, and you're in for trouble.

Huh. I considered treating two Cinderella movies together like the
Beowulf ones, but decided it'd be too awkward to integrate the
treatments, especially since I wanted to make it very clear how much I
liked the Mary Pickford one. But it's also awkward to separate them,
because I can only see Gemma Craven's <The Slipper and the Rose> of
1976 in the context both of Mary Pickford's <Cinderella> of 1914 and
of Julie Andrews's <Cinderella> of 1957, which I discussed (less) in
last year's post.
Several of the variations from the norm in the 1914 movie reappear
here, you see: again the couple have a previous encounter (though
it's played down this time), again they talk (well, OK, talk, sing,
and kiss) as well as dance. And this time our prince (Richard
Chamberlain, making the most of an excellent rôle) isn't even *named*
Charming, and is most sincere. Flipside, the very failures of logic I
noted above anent 1914 (months before seeing <Slipper>) are fixed in
1976: the search strategy *does* focus on the aristocracy, and in
particular on the uninvited.
1957 isn't forgotten either. Again the fantasy is limited, if not
so much as in the CBS version - and the special effects are 1970s-bad.
Again mild satire is prominent, and it takes much the same form,
showing the kingdom as fecklessly ruled - so not only Chamberlain as
the prince, but Michael Hordern as the king and Kenneth More as Lord
High Chamberlain get major rôles. (This is a British movie, and I
can't help thinking there's also a clear satire on Prince Charles's
long-unwed status - satire now bitterer, in light of his later marital
history.) The biggest real innovation offered by this movie in plot
builds on that satire of the kingdom, extending the 1957 approach to
its logical conclusion. But it then turns into a pulled punch that
just paints Cinderella as a milquetoast. I'd picked the movie
*mainly* because it stars Gemma Craven as Cinderella - she was so good
as the morally dubious wife in the 1978 <Pennies from Heaven> - but
she's almost wasted here, given fewer songs than you'd expect, and a
painfully pliable rôle.
That said, <The Slipper and the Rose> can still be eminently worth
watching if you want a Cinderella movie. It's full of breathtaking
outdoor shots (apparently taken in Austria); Craven may be wasted but
she's still winsomely lovely, and Chamberlain's character may be named
Edward but he's still charming; the songs, while not classics, are
good, there are a few production numbers, and some of the satire
actually manages to be mildly amusing. For someone who hates
musicals, 1914 is the way to go; someone keen on fantasy should pick
that version (or, I suppose, Disney's 1950); 1957, for all I fell
asleep watching it, surely has the best music; but if what you want is
eye candy, 1976, much wider and longer than the others, with much the
prettiest stars, and built on a big budget, has much to offer.
(Oh, and yes, Disney's. I'm not entirely sure this is the first
time I saw it, but if I'd seen it before, I remembered astonishingly
little of it, so I really do think I hadn't. I was taken aback by the
near-absence of the Prince, and separately by how very much of the
stereotypical Disney princess deal satirised in <Enchanted> comes
specifically from this movie, but otherwise, yawn. Talk about an
underwhelming fairy godmother!)

If I start talking about what <Camille> is, you'll get quite the wrong
impression, unless I say first a couple of the things it *isn't*. So:
It isn't a horror movie, and it isn't a romantic comedy.
However, it *is*: a ghost and/or zombie movie; very comic, capable
of inducing tears of sorrow, *and* a pæan to the power of love; a road
movie, a crime movie, and a movie with horses in it. And I've
probably missed a few categories. (But I hasten to reassure those who
share only some of my tastes: it definitely isn't a musical.
However, the soundtrack does contain a bunch of new country songs.)
At this point, those unfortunate enough to have seen the Heather
Graham vehicle <Committed> are probably wondering just why anyone
wanted to do this ever again. Well, but they didn't, see. In
context, this movie's many genres *all make sense*, and its plot not
only hangs together logically but also has emotional credibility.
Camille and Silas (Sienna Miller and James Franco) marry, out of her
stubborn idealised devotion to him and his interest in appeasing her
uncle (who's his parole officer). Then she dies in an accident en
route to Niagara Falls. After this, they continue their honeymoon,
experiencing a lot of (often funny) incidents and, well, growing into
their marriage. Finally, there's a triumphantly over-the-top ending
(at the Falls, of course!).
It's not the best movie in the above list, even considering only
movies from this decade. It isn't particularly numinous. As fantasy
(or for that matter crime) goes, it's pretty quiet, and it doesn't
even have Standard Fantasy Blockbuster Music. But it is a very good
movie indeed, and I'm harping on it because as I write this I don't
know whether it'll get a theatrical release in the US at all, but if
it does, it's likely to be at least as late as when I post this. [t]
So keep your eyes peeled! And if you have a local art house, but it
tends to sneer at spec-ficnal premises, consider doing some lobbying.
It does have US distribution; given that theatrical release
isn't guaranteed, that implies DVD release is. I, for one, intend to
buy it when that happens. I just hope I get another chance to see it
on the big screen first.

[t] Shortly before posting date, I found out <Camille> had opened at a
bunch of theatres in Austin, Texas. I have no idea why this release
strategy; the movie's set, as implied above, in New York. But I think
it's worth a road trip for at least some Texans who might read this,
and I still hope it comes here again.

I suppose this is as good a place as any to play the game I fumbled
last year, identifying the best movie from the above list. Well, I'm
gonna fumble again; I don't pretend to be able to choose from among
<Faust>, <Gypsies Are Found Near Heaven>, and <Enchanted>. (Which
last is why I don't think <Camille> is the best movie from this decade
on the above list. Well, OK, <Stranger Than Fiction> and <Guy
Maddin's Dracula> are probably better too.) I also, last year, picked
a "most numinous" movie. This year, frankly, I'm not sure I can. I
seem to have seen a lot more movies *with* genuine numen this year
than last, and don't see how to choose among them: <Faust>, <She>,
<The Day the Earth Froze>, <The Kingdom>, <Guy Maddin's Dracula>, and
<Camille>. <Faust> and <Guy Maddin's Dracula> are the safest choices,
I suppose, but since when does numen have anything to do with safe
choices? At any rate, <Camille> and <The Day the Earth Froze> are
probably ruled out because numen doesn't pervade them, only fills some
of the running time; I don't clearly remember, but suspect this is
also true of <She>. But while the numen offered in <The Kingdom> is
ugly and disturbing, I sure don't remember anywhere we were promised
that numen couldn't be that way, and there, it *is* pervasive.

Apparently, Nina Paley recovered from a bad breakup (a divorce?),
listening to old blues tunes sung by Annette Hanshawe, and reading the
<Ramayana> in translation. She then made (wrote, directed, animated,
edited, "everything not otherwise specified" ...) a film linking all
three experiences. That film is <Sita Sings the Blues>.
She uses several different animation styles to keep layers of the
movie distinct - the breakup story, <Ramayana> as told by three
bickering modern Indians who know it a little better than modern
Americans tend to know the Gospels, <Ramayana> as actually portrayed,
and the Hanshawe songs presented as sung by Sita at appropriate
moments. These styles have a certain non-fluidity in common: Paley
is good at vivid or detailed images and at visual jokes, not so good
at movement. (I heard people saying this was computer animation; I
don't know whether this is true, but it's sure plausible.)
At any rate, the songs fit in with Sita's troubled story (told
canonically, near's I can tell) quite well; the parallels with Paley's
own life are somewhat less exact, but still work. This isn't a great
animation milestone, but I found it worth seeing, and I rather suspect
women in general will like it more than men. As I write this, it's
unclear whether this movie will be distributed (theatrically or on
DVD) in the US, let alone elsewhere; hence, as with <Camille>, the
extended comments. (As of posting date, its official site - reached
from the IMDB - listed lots of upcoming festival dates, but gave no
hint of any distribution deal.)
As for why it's "arguably" fantasy: Well, it's a myth, but a myth
told by a non-believer; or is it simply a myth used to explicate
modern life?

SPOILERS FOR <ENCHANTED> and <THE NECESSARY BEGGAR> BY SUSAN PALWICK
FOLLOW. NOTHING BUT THOSE SPOILERS REMAINS IN THIS POST. STOP HERE
IF YOU WANT TO AVOID THE SPOILERS, AND YOU MISS NOTHING.

Some years ago, I said something to the effect that I'd like to see a
book in which a refugee from a fantasy universe came to our world and
actually decided to stay. Now, the choice of "refugee" wasn't
accidental. I wanted someone whose absence from Fantasyland wasn't
chosen, someone for whom the dice would be loaded *against* staying,
so finding a job or a lover, as in the penultimate scenes of the
Fionavar trilogy, wouldn't be enough: so the decision would be a
clear statement "Modernity beats magic" or some such. Well, it'd be
stretching a point to call Giselle in <Enchanted> a political refugee,
given she'd actually been deported in the first place. But still,
imagine my shock that the Mouse, of all studios, actually came so
close to what I'd asked for! It's not just that Giselle falls in love
with a man of Earth, though she does; she also quite obviously falls
for much, though by no means all, of the rest of what she finds here.
True, in the process she consciously discards those tropes that so
annoy me, of fated love at first sight, so sure, I'm biased. But
still, it's an explicit repudiation of fairy-tale norms, so as "I'll
take reality", it counts.
The only other work I've found that compares for closeness to my
spec is Susan Palwick's <The Necessary Beggar>, and there, our exiles
(also deportees) actually never do come to prefer our Earth; they just
learn to live with it.

Lawrence Watt-Evans

unread,
Dec 16, 2008, 1:56:17 AM12/16/08
to
On Tue, 16 Dec 2008 06:35:19 +0000 (UTC), Joe Bernstein
<j...@sfbooks.com> wrote:

>There is a concluding volume, inventively titled <The Third Magic>,
>2003; I've never seen a copy. It appeared under Cochran's name alone.
>Furthermore, at the authors' respective websites (URLs below), Murphy
>says nothing about the first two books (not even offering copies for
>sale - and the site is mostly about selling stuff!), while Cochran
>talks quite a lot about them and routinely refers to them as her
>writing. Both volumes are copyright "M. C. Murphy". So these books
>may be an actual case of that semi-legendary phenomenon, a
>"collaboration" in which the more famous author's name on the cover is
>his only contribution. In any event, Cochran's site mentions a
>divorce, which may or may not be from Murphy; I don't *know* that they
>were ever married (though I've found references to other marriages for
>each, and numerous websites say they were), but the author bios in
>these two books refer to their having a child together and living in
>the state Cochran mentions as her pre-divorce home.

They were married when I bought a story from them in 1989. I hadn't
heard about the divorce; that's too bad.

Cochran had ghosted stuff for Murphy many times, by the way, so
putting his name on her writing isn't anything new.


--
My webpage is at http://www.watt-evans.com
I'm serializing a novel at http://www.watt-evans.com/realmsoflight0.html
The final issue of the Hugo-nominated webzine Helix is now at http://www.helixsf.com

Joe Bernstein

unread,
Dec 16, 2008, 1:56:09 AM12/16/08
to
READ FOR THE FIRST TIME: SCIENCE FICTION

This post's predecessor was posted 19th October 2007, with message-ID

<ff9b5m$6lm$1...@reader1.panix.com>. (Note that last year the post was
not split in two.)

See also, in the fantasy post, very arguably Bailey, very arguably
Brockmeier, arguably the Foglios, arguably Kendall, and arguably Alan
Moore. Although the Gothics post got started precisely because of
*movies* which balanced between science fiction and non-spec-fic,
among its *books*, only Babbitt and, I suppose (holding my nose),
Harrington have any claim to be treated as sf. See also, in the other
fiction post, Brockmeier (primarily sv <The View from the Seventh
Layer>). See also, in the series post, the Flint & collaborators mess
(sv <Time Spike>, *after* the main entry). There's also science
fiction in the re-reading post, mostly without comments, by Bradshaw,
Bujold, Clarke, Eskridge, and Heinlein.

Kage Baker
Nominee, 1999 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer

$ (September 2007) <The Sons of Heaven>, 2007, finished; (September
2007) <Rude Mechanicals>, 2007, finished

All I'm going to say about <The Sons of Heaven> is that it's nearly a
worthy ending of the story begun by <In the Garden of Iden> ten years
earlier. As I noted in last year's series post, saying anything more
would constitute a spoiler for the earlier books.

<Rude Mechanicals> is a moderately amusing romp, basically isolating
the slapstick elements of "Welcome to Olympus, Mr. Hearst!" (with the
same cyborgs, Joseph and Lewis, again involved) amid Max Reinhardt's
production of <A Midsummer Night's Dream> in the Hollywood Bowl in
1934. The book is illustrated by J. K. Potter, much more tamely than
his norm, though still recognisably his work. I did end up reading it
in book form, but repeat below the URL at which an audiobook version
has been available.

<http://subterraneanpress.com/index.php/magazine/spring2007/audio-rude-mechanicals-by-kage-baker/>,
seen September 2, 2007

Elizabeth Bear
(July) <undertow>, 2007
Nominee, 2008 Philip K. Dick Award

Knotty and violent politics. Again.

This is a highly unfair approach to this novel. Bear offers here a
*lot* of ideas, though admittedly some of them enable an ending too
close to <Xenocide>'s for comfort. She convincingly portrays at least
half a dozen (3rd person) viewpoint characters, at least one of whom
is genuinely evil (though that's not especially her focus), none of
whom is clearly good, and at least one of whom is credibly alien. She
gives us planetary revolution, a multiply ambiguous ending, and a
ringing of changes on games you can play with recent physics vis-à-vis
FTL. (It would be too much of a spoiler to identify the award-
winning, famous science fiction story, not hers, that seems to have
been her starting point, but certainly isn't where she stopped.) What
more can I ask?

Well, put it this way. I started this book thinking: "Hey, I just
read three crime novels by Nicola Griffith! I'm *ready* for Elizabeth
Bear!" And found I wasn't, and trudged at a snail's pace through most
of the rest. People who demand less comfort in their reading than I
do - who don't want as much to admire, or at least respect, at least
some of the characters, who don't need stories to work out well (this
isn't *really* <Xenocide> !), who don't mind lots of violence - are
Bear's natural audience. They will find in <undertow> an impressive
science fiction novel, possibly better than her previous trilogy or
<Carnival>. But me? I found in it knotty and violent politics,
starting pretty much from page one, where we meet perhaps the most
important POV, a hit man. So well before any of the cool science
fictional stuff started coming clear, I was getting knots in my
stomach. I was right to be cautious in approaching a book by Bear,
and I'll have to keep that in mind in the future.

Steven Brust
* (April) <Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grille>, 1990

I avoided this book for years, thinking it a comedy. I was wrong.

It does have, like Brust's Vlad Taltos books, a narrator, whose voice
indeed resembles Vlad's in, among other things, weary, mordant irony.
(He is, however, to my taste more quotable; but I'll spare y'all.)
And yes, it's about a bar, and a bar band. But that's about the
extent of the comedy. This book comes near the end of a phase in
which Brust had experimented with structure in his books - <Brokedown
Palace>, <The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars>, <Taltos>, and (minimally)
<Phoenix>, at the least. Here, that experimentation seems confined to
"Intermezzo" passages between most (not all) pairs of chapters, which
tell "pivotal" bits of backstory. These are actually, in a sense, a
red herring, and Brust's doing something rather more daring,
structurally, but it would be a spoiler to explain. Anyway, the
book's about an edifice (the titular bar) which keeps arriving places
only to see those places get into nuclear wars, from which it somehow
teleports away. The plot, unsurprisingly, involves the bar's staff
and band trying to figure out why this is happening, even as they
mourn. As usual with Brust books, I'll leave further comment to his
legions of devotees.

Oh, but I *will* note that despite hints to the contrary along the
way, the book really is properly science fiction, though certainly not
hard sf.

Tobias Buckell
Nominee, 2002 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer

(April) <Crystal Rain>, 2006, started

I know, I know: "Nihil humani me alienum puto", and all that, right?
But it's one thing for lots and lots of people to have worshipped
murder in our historical past, and another thing entirely to imagine
future villains who for some reason would want to *revive* the worst
aspects of Mesoamerican religion. I, for one, couldn't deal with it,
and at the point where the main POV gets captured by the bad guys -
guaranteeing that I'd see a lot more of them - I bailed.

Coherently: This is set on a world which isn't aware of being a world
(except for one guy, Our Hero, who comes from space, but is amnesiac
about it). The good guys are basically Caribbeans (black, not Carib).
The bad guys are basically Aztecs, and we learn early on that they've
been made that way by the efforts of at least one alien; the
underlying action of the book is that said alien wants to conquer the
good guys, and in particular, to get hold of Our Hero. <Ragamuffin>,
2007, and <Sly Mongoose>, 2008, are sequels, but I have no idea
whether the neo-Aztecs are involved.

Lois McMaster Bujold
Nominee, 1987 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer

$ (February) "Winterfair Gifts", ?2002
Nominee, 2005 Hugo Award for Novella

My uncertainty about the date of this story runs thus: I'm reasonably
confident it was first printed for sale in English in 2004. However,
posts to this group in 2002 suggest it was being read at conventions,
which at least approximates what I consider "publication"; and a 2003
post to this group reported its having appeared in Croatian the
previous year.

This story surprised me in three ways.

First, it isn't nearly as much of a romance as its publishing history
would suggest, although it does delineate something that could have
been the beginnings of falling in love.

Second, it nearly matches the plot I suggested on this group in 2005
for a future Vorkosiverse book; since that suggestion concerned Things
I Wanted to See of Barrayar, I hope it isn't immodest of me to say
that this shows Bujold being a smart writer, and foreseeing wishes
like mine. To unpack a bit: I wanted to see Barrayar outside the Vor
orbit, and I suggested linking this to the existing series through a
non-Vor woman protagonist who might turn out to be Ivan Vorpatril's
eventual wife. Here, the protagonist is Armsman Roic, feeling keenly
inferior to his ex-Imperial Security boss and colleagues and not quite
fresh from the provinces, and the main topic his relations with a
different (but also persistently single) major character. I still
want to read the book I suggested, but it's not as though the book one
really wants is ever quite written, and this is certainly more of a
substitute than I could've imagined.

Third, unfortunately, is that despite these two desirable surprises, I
cared less about the story than I'd have expected. It felt a tad
schematic, perhaps partly because the villains were all offstage and
there was little moral complexity to the plot. I'm not saying it
wasn't worth reading, which would be silly, ungrateful and false; but
compared to the other Vorkosiverse novellas, "The Mountains of
Mourning", "Labyrinth", and "The Borders of Infinity" - well, it
doesn't. Compare, that is. I trust it won't be Bujold's last word on
that universe.

I should also mention that this story, if not the rest of the omnibus
it appears in (<Miles in Love>) from Baen, appears not to have been
copy edited at all; or if it was, it was for the purpose of inserting
typos and other errors, rather than removing them. Last year I
harshly criticised the failings in this regard of small presses, which
at least have the excuse of penury; this year it seems to be the turn
of large ones, which don't.

Mark Clifton & Frank Riley [and Alex Apostolides]
(September) <The Forever Machine>, 1953-1954, first compiled as such
?1992
<They'd Rather Be Right> Winner, 1955 Hugo Award for Novel

My usual sources - the copyright page, the EoSF, and the
<Locus>/Contento indices - tell three very different stories about
this book. As it happens, these stories are all compatible as long as
you count only what they *say*, and never what they omit saying; for
example, the copyright page doesn't *deny* that anything dated 1953 is
in the book, or that Alex Apostolides wrote any of it, it just doesn't
say so explicitly. My best guess, however, is that the volume
includes the stories originally published in <Astounding> as: "Crazy
Joey", by Clifton and Apostolides, August 1953; "Hide! Hide! Witch!",
by Clifton and Apostolides, December 1953; and "The Forever Machine",
by Clifton and Riley, August to November 1954. Detail notes:
1) "The Forever Machine" was first published in book form in 1957 as
0 <They'd Rather Be Right>. I'm not clear on whether any book
titled <The Forever Machine>, and containing *only* that story, has
ever appeared.
2) The tables of contents in Contento's magazine index strongly imply
that "Hide! Hide! Witch!" is, in this volume, considerably
expanded: while in <Astounding> the first two stories occupied 24
and 35 pages respectively, in the book they take 27 and 55 pages.

ANYWAY. So OK, it's Carroll & Graf once again performing a service to
sf by republishing something, and once again fumbling in the details.
But what of the book itself? Well, until the recent slew of Robert
Sawyer wins, "The Forever Machine" was *the* poster child par
excellence for people who wanted to mock the Hugo award. (It won the
1955 award, second ever, for Best Novel.) I mean, compare the other
1950s victors: <The Demolished Man>, <Double Star>, <The Big Time>,
<A Case of Conscience> ... So what's the deal? Why was this book so
popular, and then so disdained?

Well, because it's the ne plus ultra of <Astounding> science fiction,
that's why. Imagine <The Stars My Destination>, given a rather less
exciting plot and a *LOT* more didactic verbiage, and you have much of
<The Forever Machine>; the piece you're still missing is that the
didacticism is focused largely (though *not* overwhelmingly) on
psionics. (Especially in "The Forever Machine" proper, there's also a
lot of time taken to instruct us, portentously, on the workings of
politics, publicity, business, science, and Skid Row, as well as on
the right way to think, which turns out to be that there *is* no one
right way to think, except when you're being paid by the word to
preach one... There's actually a couple of moderately comic pages in
which the authors portray an sf writer - in other words, themselves -
as among those not really ready for the revelations of this book's
novum, though perhaps a smidgen closer than others.) Snark, snark.
OK, look, yeah, it's a fast read; it does have a tolerably amusing
plot, if not a patch on Bester's. (Though <Stars> was beaten, for the
1957 Hugo, by "No award"!) But it also *reeks* of the paranoid
kookery, complete with grandiosely tedious lectures, that has long
battened on sf's fringes.

That said, I'll try to be a bit more objective. "Crazy Joey" is set
in the 1980s near "Steiffel University" (ha ha) and is essentially the
story of how a telepathic eight year old learns to control his powers
enough to fit in. "Hide! Hide! Witch!" introduces the larger
setting - one in which the US has completely succumbed to "opinion
control" in an "if this goes on" of McCarthyism - and shows Joe, now
twenty, strong-armed by a professor (at "Hoxworth University"), who
knows his secret, into driving the construction of an AI; the title
refers to the backlash when the I-ness of the AI gets through to the
public. "The Forever Machine" gives us Joe, a couple of professors,
and the machine on the lam (hence Skid Row), and is set mostly in San
Francisco, where Our Heroes eventually find allies both low and high;
it ends in a climax that I grudgingly admit is surely ancestral to
Bester's <Stars> climax. I can't honestly recommend any of these
stories, except for their historical / subcultural interest, though
"Hide! Hide! Witch!" *might* (perhaps) have been better before
expansion.

Cory Doctorow
(December) <Overclocked>, 2004-2007, first compiled as such 2007
"I, Robot" Nominee, 2006 Hugo Award for Novelette and 2006 British SF
Award for Short Fiction

This book's copyright page does the mainstream thing and provides
inadequate bibliographic info, so I'm going to fill the gap, courtesy
of the <Locus>/Contento biblios and the websites involved - because,
you see, five of this book's six stories were first published online.
So: "Printcrime", <Nature> (the print exception), January 12, 2006;
"When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth", <Universe>, August 2006 (and
earlier, serially, on Doctorow's podcast); "Anda's Game", <Salon>,
November 15, 2004; "I, Robot", <the Infinite Matrix>, February 15,
2005; "I, Row-Boat", <Flurb> #1, Fall 2006 (not in the biblio, found
at URL below); and "After the Siege", <the Infinite Matrix>, January 8,
2007 (too new for the biblio, found at URL below).

Three of these stories concern the intellectual property wars - and
that phrasing is considered: each features IP-centred violence, and
in two, full-blown war, no joke. "Printcrime" is too short to be more
than a jape on the subject. I've never read Asimov's robot books nor
<1984>, so I was ill-prepared to read "I, Robot", but anyway I didn't
much enjoy it: its protagonist is, in this book, as close as Doctorow
comes to the kind of schmuck-protagonist he used to specialise in, and
none of the other characters appealed more to me. The awards tally
suggests mine is a minority view. Anyway, "After the Siege" is, for
me, the best of this triplet, the one in which Doctorow fully
submerges his political points into the story of a girl from ages
thirteen to sixteen in a besieged city, which can be imagined as a
future Caracas of an IP war. I think in the hands of the writers I
think of as best, it would be harrowing, and I didn't find it so; but
it is page-turning, well-plotted and effective, and those writers
wouldn't have sought that effectiveness, wouldn't have sought a way to
make a real issue that does change lives into a story.

Of the other three, "I, Row-Boat" is as far as its namesake from the
kind of thing I generally read for, the spiritual biography of an
underworked AI. (It contains a minor IP dig and some references to
Usenet.) "Anda's Game" is, for me, the standout of this collection,
probably my favourite Doctorow story at any length yet, interweaving
intense consideration of online gaming (missing no angle known to me)
with more of Doctorow's political passion and another girl
protagonist's maturation. Those who object to explicit politics in
fiction will not share my high opinion, but I'm still baffled that
this one didn't get a bunch of awards nominations. (Hmmm. 2004.
Same year as <The Secrets of Jin-Shei>, which *also* got no
nominations. What the heck was going *on* that year?) Between this
post's ending date and posting date, I had the opportunity to buy more
than one of Doctorow's books cheap at a library book sale, but
<Overclocked> turns out to be the only one I actually want to own, and
that's for "After the Siege" and "Anda's Game".

I left "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth" for last for reasons unrelated
to quality; frankly, the apocalypse that triggers the story, including
an earthquake no less, still doesn't make any sense to me. But like
Rebecca Ore's <Time's Child>, which I discussed in last year's post,
this story uses Doctorow's understanding of online politics, and
specifically Usenet politics, as central to its treatment of real
life. And I find it therefore even more bitter to read. "Usenet
newsgroup votes had been running for more than twenty years without a
substantial hitch." In August 2006, this story came out with that
sentence in it. One year after Usenet newsgroup votes - not in all
hierarchies, but in the Big 8, where rasfw is and where newsgroup
voting began - had ended. Doctorow is not, in fact, so optimistic as
to proffer Usenet's governance as a stable structure for real life;
but I won't pretend to be able to judge the rest of his story
objectively.

<http://www.flurb.net/1/index1.html>, seen December 1, 2007 and
September 15, 2008
<http://www.infinitematrix.net/stories/after-the-siege.html>, seen
December 1, 2007 and September 15, 2008; as of the first date, this
story led the still-latest issue, on the top of the home page
(i.e., <http://www.infinitematrix.net/>) with an appeal for
donations lower down; as of the second date, the site appears to
have been revived, but in a way that's seriously damaging the link
structure, so there's no way to navigate from the home page to this
story.

David Drake
(February) <The Complete Hammer's Slammers: Volume One>, 1974-2005,
first compiled as such 2005, started

<The Complete Hammer's Slammers> is an accurate title to the extent
that one considers <Cross the Stars> and <The Voyage> independent of
the main series; as best I can tell, everything but those two novels
is included in the three volumes. The first volume contains all the
short fiction to date. As best I can tell, no set of earlier volumes
contains all the reprinted stories in this one without duplication,
but the first third of the book reproduces <Hammer's Slammers>,
1974-1979, first compiled as such 1979. I read barely beyond that
volume's contents, chronologically.

The original stories published in 1974-1975 - "Under the Hammer", "The
Butcher's Bill", and "But Loyal to His Own" - present an utterly
unsentimental view of war, and the titular mercenaries, whose lives
revolve around it, as invariably destructive. Drake in these stories
doesn't deny the martial virtues' existence but also doesn't find in
those virtues enough to balance war's costs; or at least so I see the
stories. It's noteworthy that although all three involve the same
military unit, they have no characters in common.

But in the stories of 1978-1979 - "Caught in the Crossfire", "Cultural
Conflict", and "Hangman" - the earlier characters reappear and are
brought together, which inevitably begins to soften them in the
reader's eyes. Some of them start to change, in ways that make
dispassionately rejecting their actions tougher; and Drake begins
showing them doing things other than harm. As of "Code Name
Feirefitz", 1984, I'm fairly sure Drake *still* isn't being
sentimental - but the sheer contrast between the rawness of the early
stories and the more conventional series nature of the later ones
makes the latter *feel* sentimental.

L. Timmel Duchamp
(February) <Love's Body, Dancing in Time>, 1997-2004, first compiled
as such 2004
Nominee, 2005 Tiptree Award
"The Apprenticeship of Isabetta di Pietro Cavazzi" Nominee, 1998
Tiptree Award
"The Héloïse Archive" Nominee, 2005 Sidewise Award

This is a collection of five "love stories", organised chronologically
- not by publication date, nor by date of setting, but rather by
phases of love affairs. Thus "Dance at the Edge" shows falling in
love, and seduction; "The Gift" moves on to estrangement; "The
Apprenticeship of Isabetta di Pietro Cavazzi" starts from
estrangement; "Lord Enoch's Revels" concerns, I suppose, forgetfulness
(it's very short); and "The Héloïse Archive" starts after all of
these.

Leaving aside the shortest story, the rest are pretty consistent.
Duchamp vehemently insists on the importance of our "embodiment", and
the worth of physical love. She objects to systems of thought that
deny these: in three of the stories, these systems are Christian
churches, but in "Dance at the Edge", which first appeared in a
<Bending the Landscape> anthology that might be expected to welcome
anti-Christian polemic, Duchamp instead makes abstruse arguments
*against* some major implications of political correctness. She
adeptly inhabits unfamiliar points of view - giving us in "Dance at
the Edge" a world whose theology is PC-derived, in "The Gift" a
moderately clueless narrator observing a world which marries
Christianity to a theory of art (and talking to its convincingly
presented artists), in "The Apprenticeship" a peasant girl learning a
vaguely Wiccan witchcraft, and in "The Héloïse Archive" a mediæval nun
becoming a Gnostic. This unaccustomed depth in Duchamp's POVs can
make some stories difficult to read, but also solidifies them
powerfully.

I read two of the stories as fantasy, and three as science fiction,
but I'm far from sure about classifying three of them; at least one
story could be credibly read as non-speculative. If the "slipstream"
enthusiasts aren't all over Duchamp, I sure don't know why not.

Sheila Finch
* (March) <Triad>, 1986
(March-April) <The Guild of Xenolinguists>, 1988-2007, first compiled
as such 2007
"Reading the Bones" Winner, 1999 Nebula Award for Novella

<Triad> was Finch's first published book, though she's the same age as
many of the New Wave types of the 1960s. It's a planetary romance
with unconvincingly intelligent AIs and convincingly alien aliens.
Except for ansibles, it's hard sf (the way relativity deforms spacers'
lives is a major theme), but it reads like the semi-mystical books of
the 1970s, and has a major (non-trivially surprising) subplot about
gender relations. I had to buy it over the Internet, and don't regret
doing so.

One of the three third-person POVs of <Triad> was a "lingster", and
soon after, Finch began publishing short stories about lingsters, or
"Xenolinguists". These have a common background, which isn't actually
much like <Triad>'s. Here, FTL is possible, and the AIs and gender
issues of <Triad> are gone. And here, there is a Guild of
Xenolinguists, after which the collection of these stories is
rightfully titled.

Because, you see, although there are some links between stories, what
really unifies this book is a formula. Finch's Guild is a nearly
monastic order, determinedly neutral in all things, and strongly
opposes members' romances, marriage or parenthood (because these
increase the risks to neutrality created by family ties). So in story
after story, a lingster finds it necessary to break a Guild rule.
Most often, the lingster is in mid-life, already disillusioned with
playing the rôle straight (with amazing persistence the Guild teaches
its pupils to expect more Adventure and Scientific Glory than they can
sanely hope for), and so primed to rebel. Two or three stories
instead star youths, brought up in the Guild house (so intrinsically
violations of Guild policy), finding their own rules-breaking way to
function as lingsters. I found the book mildly difficult to stick to
once I twigged to this formula; although I read it in publication
order, as usual, I can't say I found any great insights by doing so.
But it's worth reading all the same. Finch gets from her basic
scenario a surprisingly wide range of stories: some of her
protagonists find redemption or new purpose, while other stories are
horror stories, still others simply represent ironic way-posts in
ongoing careers - and there are at least two true tragedies here.

I seriously considered buying the book version of "Reading the Bones"
over the Net, too, but a month or two later, don't expect to.

Eric Flint and David Drake
all * (all August): <An Oblique Approach> and <In the Heart of
Darkness>, 1998; <Destiny's Shield>, 1999; <Fortune's Stroke>,
2000; <The Tide of Victory>, 2001; <The Dance of Time>, 2002-2006,


first compiled as such 2006

Eric Flint
* (August) "Islands", 2002

<The Dance of Time> incorporates an expanded version of "Islands".

In mid-August I spent a day home sick from work and massively upset my
sleep schedule, so when I stayed home sick again two days later, I
*had to stay awake*, even though, the way my brain was working, I
might as well have been asleep. This level of brain function proved
ideal for starting this series.

The setup here is that a fanatic minority in the very far future tried
to ensure its ideals' victory by intervening in the past, so its
opponents have to counter this. The counter-intervention winds up in
the hands of the 6th century Roman general, Belisarius. As a result,
we get the rapid technological advance scenario of <The Connecticut
Yankee in King Arthur's Court>, or for that matter Flint's slightly
later <1632>, on a *much* larger scale. And all of this is pressed
into the service of war, because the original intervention has been
busy too, and so we have, of all improbable things, a ravenous
conquering empire based in the Ganges valley! Fortunately, that
conquering empire is ideologically committed to shooting itself in its
own foot (I am *not* making this up - the Big Reveal of its ideology
in volume 2 is, probably unintentionally, hilarious), as well as to
being as evil as possible. So what we have here is essentially World
War II, only with the respective sides purged of all remaining moral
ambiguity (there's no Stalin among the good guys here, and Hitler
doesn't get any credit for breaking down the German class system),
also purged of essentially all balance (the bad guys almost never
win), and fought at a rather lower tech level.

So, in turn, what we *really* have here is wish-fulfillment mil-sf.
(It's even complete with those delightful, absurd, memes, "Everyone of
good will always gets along", and "Everyone who matters has Charisma
18" !) It's not at all what I'd have expected Flint to want to write,
but it curiously helps explain <1632> et seq. - this series was a dry
run for that (somewhat) less egregious one. I'm even more croggled by
Drake's involvement - in one of the books, Drake even explicitly says
he originated the series. But most of the time, the style, at least,
is clearly Flint's, so I'm giving him most of the blame.

I've snipped a long paragraph about anachronisms, misspellings, and
the like in the series; if anyone actually cares to read it, let me
know.

Eric Flint and Ryk Spoor
* (July) <Boundary>, 2006

Need I say much about this? I'm guessing the average reader of rasfw
is quite familiar with what is, for all I know, the first
collaboration between two of the group's regulars. So OK. It's set
sometime around 2030, and starts with some characters at a
palæontological site in Montana, some of whom also have ties to
competing missions to Mars. Anyone who's read Jack McDevitt will be
able to figure out where this is headed, but the book is nothing like
McDevitt's elegiac romantic tales; instead it's pervaded by the almost
carefree optimism of the authors' favourite older sf. (An early hint
comes from the introduction of character after character, *all* of
whom are exceptionally good-looking.) The plot essentially breaks
down the characters' great doings into smaller tasks or conflicts,
each settled within a few chapters, except for a couple of
inordinately protracted romances and some central mysteries; while the
narration makes it perfectly clear the authors *know* these are great
doings, in the foreground we get mostly specific problems and how
they're solved. I had foolishly thought "OK, reading Nicola Griffith
is *great* preparation for dealing with Elizabeth Bear!"; this
cheerful, traditional sf proved to be much more what I wanted instead,
and I read it within twenty-four hours.

Nicola Griffith [1] [2]
0 (June) <Ammonite>, 1992
Winner, 1994 Tiptree Award, and Nominee, 1994 Clarke Award and 1994
British SF Award for Novel

The planet Jeep harbours a virus that kills about 60% of the people it
infects - all of the men, and some of the women. So five years after
the corrupt extraterrestrial agencies had tried to settle Jeep, it
remains quarantined. Now comes Marghe Taishan (our main 3rd person
POV), an anthropologist who's agreed to replace her (male, ergo
literal) predecessor there, and to test a vaccine against the virus.

Thing is, Jeep has native humans. Evidently there was a colony ship
centuries before, none know how long. The stranded *new* colonists
and the natives have avoided each other pretty consistently for five
years; Marghe, by the nature of her work, is going to change that.

Oh, and meanwhile, there's a dying tribe up north, teetering on the
edge of following a madwoman whose preachings make the Aztecs (real or
Buckell's) look saintly.

This is a thoroughly traditional planetary romance, complete with
dodgy science - that virus has more effects than just killing people,
and what's a virus deadly to humans doing on an alien world anyway? -
and mysticism - this is more a 1970s than a 1990s story, in many ways,
except for a harshness exemplified by, but not limited to, that
madwoman. Well it's a traditional planetary romance *except*, of
course, that it's also a lesbian feminist utopia, a functioning,
vibrant world where women with powers superior to Earthly women's live
without men, having parthenogenetic babies via psychic talents. Um,
that is, it's a lesbian feminist utopia except that, *in turn*, it's
in fact no more a utopia than Charnas's <Motherlines>, and superior
powers don't mean superior wisdom or harmony. (Something Griffith
hammers on in a tenth-anniversary afterword in the edition I read.)

<Locus> and Contento tell me that this book is actually fairly late in
Griffith's career (thus far) as a writer of spec-fic: aside from one
story in 2000, that career ran from 1988 to 1995. Nevertheless, it
feels like an audacious announcement, a "Here I stand", implicitly (or
in that afterword explicitly) repudiating sexism from either
direction. If you actually like planetary romances, as I do, it's
well worth reading; if you've ever wished to read <Darkover Landfall>
done right, this is your book.

As far as I can tell, though Griffith leaves several large hooks for a
sequel, there have been no other stories in this setting. I can't see
how any sequel could build to the crescendo this book does, so it's
simultaneously annoying, and deserving of respect, that she hasn't
written one.

0 (June) <Slow River>, 1995
Winner, 1997 Nebula Award for Novel

I can't be the only person who heard about this book, when it came
out, mainly as "the sewer book". This is, however, a fairly silly way
to look at it.

There are three narrative strands here, woven like so: ABA C; in
other words, the B narrative is always at the middle of the otherwise
A odd-numbered chapters, while the C narrative gets its own (much
shorter) even-numbered chapters. Each narrative follows Lore van de
Oest, who narrates A; B is in third person past, and C in third person
present. When A starts, she's 21 and starting a new life; when B
starts, she's 18 and has just escaped from kidnappers with nothing but
her life; when C starts, she's 7, and the underlying plot is about to
be set in motion. (So yes, that's right, present tense is for
memories here.) In C, she's the cherished youngest child of one of
the world's richest power couples, whose wealth rests on control of
patents for bioremediation of sewage; late in C, she's old enough to
start working in management on the company's projects. In B, she
becomes a criminal in London (I'm fairly sure it's London, in the
mid-21st century). In A, she becomes a member of the same city's
working class - in fact, a sewer worker.

What this division gets Griffith is two things: an economy of
information that apparently works for her, with things being revealed
all in good time (though the later stretches of B and C in fact struck
me as overdue, and difficult contrasts with the flowering of A); and
stretches of parallels and contrasts, structuring Lore's story as a
set of awakenings to danger and change. <Ammonite> is so constructed
as to make a peroration delivered by Marghe late in the book world-
changing; in <Slow River> and her later non-spec-fic novels, Griffith
has rejected that kind of artificiality, instead focusing on the same
ideas as instantiated in her individual characters. Lore, in
particular, is a less-conscious version of Marghe. She's also an
interesting contrast to Jackal Segura, in <Solitaire>, the one novel
to date from Griffith's partner Kelley Eskridge: I'm far fonder of
<Solitaire> than of this book, but Lore feels like she really is what
Jackal claims to be, a competent leader in way over her head - almost
as if Jackal were a watery copy of the original Lore. The praise for
this book has focused mainly on its central character, and there's
good reason for that.

And yes, I suppose, you'll also learn a little bit about sewers from
it. But sheesh.

Robert Heinlein
Winner, 1975 SFWA Grand Master Award

0 (May) <Starship Troopers>, 1959
Winner, 1960 Hugo Award for Novel

During the day I read the majority of this book, Half Price Books was
having a sale. I was scanning the section at my local branch devoted
to ancient and mediæval literatures - probably the only section I
already own a higher percentage of than of spec-fic, and certainly the
only section I've *read* a higher percentage of than of spec-fic -
when I noticed a woman also scanning these shelves, whose modus
operandi was to pull a book out, open it to someplace in the middle,
look for a few seconds, and then close the book and put it back, only
to scan a few more inches of the shelf and repeat the process. I was
struck by this, and curious - and I'll admit I was also intrigued by
the woman - so I asked her what this was about. Her reply? "I'm
looking for something that moves me." Double defeat: knowing nothing
of her, I could hardly share my knowledge usefully, and reminded that
I knew nothing of her, I also couldn't maintain the confidence to chat
her up. But I thought about that: something that moves you? As
determined by glancing at two pages in the middle of a book? Yeah, so
OK, I should've recommended Sappho, or some such (Sei Shonagon? whom I
haven't read); but still.

So. <Starship Troopers>. Between general spec-fic knowledge, and all
too many threads here, I'd already heard a lot about this book, and
frankly, it hardly ever surprised me. ("Father" did, but that's about
it.) What did surprise me was my indifference to most of what it
said. I'd read other Heinlein juveniles, and knew they could get
pretty didactic; I'd read other Heinlein political books, and knew
they didn't necessarily represent Heinlein's own views. (For that
matter, this book is a Navy man's glorification of infantry. Sheesh.)
I spent enough of my own life with Ayn Rand to consider the book's
puffery about mathematically proving moral propositions piffle,
unworthy of disdain let alone anger. I also spent enough of my own
life with Ayn Rand to agree with a percentage of the didacticism,
whether or not Heinlein meant it.

So in other words, I'm moderate about the whole damn thing. Probably
Heinlein himself would've thought less of me than of those who
consider this book one of the most evil ever written, but whatever.
Something that moves me? Not this, that's for sure.

(Oh, and the woman wound up behind me in line, and I got a glimpse of
the book she'd chosen, but didn't recognise it. Maybe she ended up
going to a different section.)

Alex Irvine
(November) <Unintended Consequences>, 2000-2003, first compiled as
such 2003
"Vandoise and the Bone Monster" Nominee, 2004 International Horror
Guild Award for Medium Fiction

Last year's log listed no library books except ones owned by the
Seattle Public Library. This year is *almost* the same - except for
two books, of which this was first. SPL owns all Irvine's other books
(OK, OK, not the chapbooks - <Down in the Fog-Shrouded City> and
<Rossetti Song> [2] - subsumed by this book, and I don't know about
the Asimov sharecrop either) - but not this one. Two suburban
libraries do, but they're across the county line, so I went through
inter-library loan - and wound up instead with a copy from Portland,
or anyway Multnomah County, Oregon. While dwelling on details, then,
I should also note that yes, this is the same guy who as Alexander C.
Irvine is best known for <A Scattering of Jades> (listed, barely, in
the fantasy post).

The fundamental affect of these stories is regret. The POV (usually
not first-person) character may have a good life and be regretting an
imminent change, or may have bitter regrets over the past, or may
regret what he's (usually he) doing even as he's doing it. In the
end, I didn't come away from this book convinced that Irvine was a
brilliant fabricator of spec-ficnal ideas, but I don't know to what
extent this was because he isn't, or to what extent it was because of
the regret-muffled tones of his stories. At any rate, the majority of
what spec-ficnal ideas there are, are more or less science fictional;
out of thirteen stories, there's one I read as regular adult fiction,
two or three ghost stories, one that's just the fantasy side, for me,
of things like "Chance" and "The Heat Death of the Universe", and one
(<Down>) that's simultaneously real fantasy and sorta-mystery, à la
<Scattering>. Of the science fiction, "Chichén Itzá" can be read as a
sort of prequel to "The Sea Wind Offers Little Relief".

And although this review amounts to a damning with faint praise,
that's because I simply don't know how to explain why - when due dates
so demanded - I was able to read this book within two work days; why I
was willing to keep reading despite Irvine's obvious distance from
what I most often like to read for. The best explanation I can come
up with is that even though few of Irvine's characters are people I'd
like in real life, he persuades me well enough that he understands
them, that I can empathise, and want to find out what happens to them.
People who can deal with downbeat fiction, and who like good
fictional prose, are encouraged to do the inter-library loan thing
too; maybe if enough of us do, someone will figure out how to get this
book reprinted in a trade edition. Speaking of editions, I ought to
say I didn't catch Subterranean Press in any typos in this one.

Raymond Jones
* (May) "The Colonists", 1954

As mentioned up above, Half Price Books had a sale in late May; I
bought a bunch of old sf magazines then, including <If> for June 1954.
This was the issue's first story, and it caught my eye because it
seemed to involve characters interacting constantly.

Actually, it almost does. It turns excessively didactic towards the
end, enough so that one feels it was really written in the first place
just to argue the author's point. (That point being vaguely
reminiscent of something I could call "sociological", à la early
<Galaxy>, if it were a thousand times more sophisticated. The story's
McGuffin is the difficulty of finding people psychologically equipped
to colonise other worlds.) The final paragraphs are as sexist as one
could ask. But there's a love story near this story's *narrative*
core (as opposed to the apparently *intended* core, the preaching or
argument at the end). And while that love story isn't believable, at
least it's one that one might wish to believe.

Should anyone without access to that issue of <If> want to read this
story, it was apparently reprinted in <The Second World of If>, ed.
James Quinn and Eve Wulff, 1958.

Henry Kuttner [1]
$0 (April) "Mimsy Were the Borogoves", 1943

Long ago I learned that I prefer to see movies *before* reading the
books or stories they're based on. Having seen Kaufman's <The
Unbearable Lightness of Being> before reading Kundera's, I could
interpret their differences as reflecting a subtle inversion of
philosophical perspectives; I gather those who'd read the book first
usually had a quite different reaction. And in general, I get much
more attached to books than to movies, and much likelier to feel
betrayed by changes. So, for example, I can't remember ever wanting
to see the movie version of <Possession>, with its male lead's
personality (not just nationality) apparently changed beyond
recognition.

The weird thing, then, about reading this story for the first time
only *after* seeing <The Last Mimzy>, is that I found nearly all of
the changes well *within* recognition. Clearly, structuring decisions
from the filmmakers had fundamentally changed a variety of plot
elements, especially obvious early in the story. Flipside, the
movie's glaring semi-fantastication of the outside "expert advisor"
rôle, while easy to dismiss as catering to our culture's present
inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality, strikes me as
being at once true to, well, the decision to choose a present-day
setting, and of only superficial significance to the movie's actual
plot. The really major change is that "Mimsy" was written for
teenagers and adults, while <Mimzy> was made for kids; this in turn
fed my surprise at the only point where I did gasp at the movie's
betrayal of Kuttner's story: the ending.

Fritz Leiber
(March) <The Wanderer>, 1964
Winner, 1965 Hugo Award for Novel

Clute in the EoSF refers to this book as a precursor of the more
famous "mosaic" novels of circa 1970, for example those by John
Brunner. I don't think I've read any of those, and I found this one
difficult to get into; it's considerably herky-jerkier than anything
in "A Song of Ice and Fire", for example.

The basic idea is that the titular planet appears in the sky and has
catastrophic physical effects on Moon and Earth. We follow these
through a primary plotline (involving a man on a lunar base and his
fiancée and best friend back in California), a secondary plotline (two
sf fans of very different ages coping with the tides' and tsunamis'
effects on Florida), and a bunch of others, all told in 3rd person
POV, usually tight on one character (but not always the same character
at every appearance of that plotline).

It's refreshing to find a book of this vintage that's matter-of-fact,
rather than histrionic or smirking, in foreseeing changed mores
(particularly sexual ones), and Leiber's eventual explanatory
info-dump lays out chillingly a type of future milked at great length
by, for example, Kage Baker (above) since. I can't really fault
Leiber's characterisations, and I eventually found it easier to keep
reading; but on balance, I still don't find this an especially good
book.

Joe Bernstein

unread,
Dec 16, 2008, 2:01:20 AM12/16/08
to
READ FOR THE FIRST TIME: SCIENCE FICTION

Bruce McAllister
(January) <The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories>, 1963-2006,


first compiled as such 2007

"Dream Baby" Nominee, 1988 Hugo and Nebula Awards for Novelette
"Kin" Nominee, 2007 Hugo Award for Short Story

This book collects something like half of its author's short fictions,
including the stories behind each of his novels to date. I read it,
as usual, in chronological order by date of publication; I think in
this case the stories group fairly sharply through this approach, and
I'm going to use it to talk about them too. But first a general note:
McAllister is about as soft a science fiction writer as they come.
Very often, his novum is implausible; very often, it consists of
psionics.

"The Faces Outside", 1963, is an excellent example. It's a story of
interstellar conflict, but resolved through a soft-sf staple.
McAllister wrote it at sixteen; I haven't read <Humanity Prime>, 1971,
which was based on it, but I presume it represents a rather more
mature treatment of the material.

The next group of stories in this collection dates between 1969 and
1971 (I'd say 1965 to 1973 are this group's limits among all the
stories known to <Locus> and Contento). This book includes "Benji's
Pencil", "The Man Inside", and "The World of the Wars", and they're
all relatively simple, fairly Romantic, so plausibly student work;
"The World of the Wars" is probably the most complex, and not actually
spec-fic.

The book omits McAllister's handful of stories from the next decade
("The Boy" and "Their Immortal Hearts", both mentioned by Clute in the
EoSF, among these).

The late 1980s stories here, perhaps McAllister's most famous, fall
into two closely related pairs - "The Ark" and the title story concern
a future in which nearly all non-human vertebrates have gone extinct
in the wild, more or less simultaneously (a clear example of
McAllister's inability to resist punching up his story at the expense
of plausibility); "Dream Baby" and "Little Boy Blue" concern psychic
powers in the context of the Vietnam War, and both come from an
unpublished novel, though "Dream Baby" also gave rise to McAllister's
second published novel, <Dream Baby>, 1989. They're all set in or
near the present, and the title story hints that all are set in the
same universe, which I see as a rather grim place, where Romantic
gestures are still possible but not with innocence, and not usually
with hope.

I don't know to what extent those four stories resemble McAllister's
other stories of that time; his fiction appeared more or less
continually, though slowly, from 1985 through 1996. Four stories from
the early 1990s appear in this book: "Angels", "Moving On",
"Southpaw", and "The Assassin". These are strongly individual, and
strongly written, stories. "The Assassin" is far-future, the first
such in this collection since "The Faces Outside"; "Southpaw" is
nearly straight alt-history. "Moving On" is perhaps the least grim of
these, and my favourite in this book, but none is comfort reading.

Finally, McAllister's been publishing spec-fic again since 2004, and
five of these stories appear in this book: "Hero, the Movie",
"Spell", "Stu", "The Boy in Zaquitos", and "Kin". "Hero, the Movie"
actually derives from a movie treatment written in the early 1990s;
"Kin" is another example of far-future sf, while "Spell" is low-key
fantasy; but these stories still have much in common. Each focuses on
a young man in the course of growing up; with "Kin" an arguable
exception, each in some way contrasts that youth with age. In these
respects they're almost predictable, examples of what old men tend to
write. But of course they vary as well. "Hero, the Movie" imagines
the future life of the hero of one of the 1950s science fiction movies
I first watched this year, transposed into 2005 (this is the "age"
that story contrasts with 1950s "youth"). "Spell", "Stu" and "The Boy
in Zaquitos" draw heavily on McAllister's own past, the latter two
also focusing on the US government institutions of the Cold War, but
where "Spell" concentrates on childhood terrors and "Boy" on adult
ones, "Stu" is a gentle account of invention and military stupidity.
In these stories McAllister's skills remain as strong as in those of
his middle age, but there's less grim urgency, and all are lighter to
read, though not more comforting.

Wil McCarthy
* (September 2007) <Aggressor Six>, 1994

As I write this, it's six months since I read the book - common for
books in last year's log but unique for this year's. [a] It concerns a
future in which the human race, spread across roughly a dozen planets,
has already lost several of these to a war in which the other side is
overwhelmingly superior. Our Heroes are six members of the human
military who are ordered to attempt to understand the enemy better by
imitating its military units, in other words, to become, for
intelligence purposes, an "aggressor Six", and we follow them for the
length of this assignment; it is, in essence, the plot. And although
I remember that McCarthy does characters well in this book, it isn't
the characters I remember, but the plot, which simultaneously
culminates in a surprising but convincing and elegant climax - and
remains solidly grounded, with no hint of the game-ish aura elegant
climaxes usually carry. An impressive first sf novel, and given
McCarthy's subsequent fame, I'm mildly surprised it hasn't been
reprinted.

[a] Oops, not any more. I ended up writing about the first <Girl
Genius> book about six months after I read it too.

* (December) <Flies from the Amber>, 1995

The reason a six-month delay in writing was unique [a] for this year's
log is that this book's entry had a *ten*-month delay, unfortunately -
I never found a way to write it until I'd re-read the whole book. And
that, in turn, is because I was too stupid to see what McCarthy was
doing on first reading.

The setting is a star system consisting of a white dwarf, a brown
dwarf with two planets, and two black holes. One of the black holes
and the white dwarf form a binary within this system. That pair, the
brown dwarf, and the other black hole, all revolve around a
rubble-strewn area called the Centromo. The inner of the brown
dwarf's planets is inhabited, a dark, quake-ridden place whose actual
ecology is unrevealed and strikes me as unlikely to be plausible, and
spacefaring miners from it, in the Centromo, stumble on a remarkable
material which they call "centrokrist". The local authorities send
news of the discovery to Earth, and decades later, a sub-light ship
arrives bearing scientists to study it. We follow several of the
scientists, one of the authorities, one of the ship's crew, and a few
less-prominent POVs through some dramatic events and a lot of
intercultural and interpersonal small-scale conflict. (This latter is
exacerbated by the fact that people now live to 200 or more years,
which has apparently led to a substantial drop in reproduction; people
younger than about a century are routinely derided and discriminated
against by their elders. None of our main POVs is directly affected
by this, but we still hear a fair amount about the issue.) Although
Things Happen, still, on first reading, I felt like I'd basically
watched some scenes unfold in order, but without meaning. I knew it
was a book worth reading, but - beyond some well-drawn but not
altogether comforting characters - had no clue why.

Well, so, stupid me. I left out one important part of the setup, you
see. The first two pages of this mass market paperback original
aren't about the discovery of centrokrist, or anything else human at
all; they involve some aliens, chasing some other aliens. These
aliens are in fact the titular characters, if you will, and they
reappear later in the book. McCarthy takes pains to show them as
symmetrical with the human characters, right down to explicit phrasing
(the word "amber" is nowhere innocent in this book). Nor is this his
only symmetry. We see two romances begin; we see two marriages end.
We see two human societies balanced in their weird customs and
incomprehension of each other [b]; they are in turn balanced against
the ship's crew, lost to all planets by the spacer's tragedy; and all
the humans in turn, as I said, against the aliens. (The social
structure, seen in this light, *almost*, but not quite, reproduces the
structure of the star system, come to that!)

In other words, McCarthy in his second novel *again* set up an elegant
structure, but this time not only avoided the artificiality usually
attendant on elegance, he even managed to make the book he built
around that structure look as messy and meaning-opaque as life really
lived. It's an impressive, if exotic, achievement, and obviously a
harbinger of McCarthy's books I *haven't* yet read, the more famous
ones this newsgroup talks about all the time.

[b] It's also worth noting that McCarthy's future Earth, in this book,
is a sane, if unpleasant, precursor to Kage Baker's future Earth in
her Company novels, or successor to Leiber's in <The Wanderer>.

(January) <Murder in the Solid State>, 1996

Our setting: Sometime within a century from now (and probably less:
Usenet still exists, for example), in a US whose politics has been
transformed by an unpopular law and order political party, and by that
party's favourite tool, which can detect trace amounts of substances
in the air (for example, gunpowder, or marijuana). Our hero: a
nanotechnologist who finds himself arrested for murdering that (sort
of nanotechnological) tool's inventor. Obviously, the rest of the
book includes a mystery, but it isn't limited to that; there's also
Big Change - here, unlike McCarthy's previously published novels, not
primarily driven by war. This is the first set of comments I've
written about McCarthy's books, nearly four months after I first read
<Aggressor Six>; obviously I find it hard to know what to say about
them, and with this book a mystery it's harder. But I did find the
book easy to read fast (and it's a major mistake to plan to put it
down for the night halfway through!), and I did find it a worthwhile
story of invention, suspense and social contrasts.

Jack McDevitt
$ (December) <cauldron>, 2007, lightly skimmed

I distinctly remember that the hardcover edition of <Omega> I read
claimed that it would be the last novel about Priscilla Hutchins.

Not much later, I read <Seeker> and got mad at McDevitt. Neither he
nor I is a professional historian or archæologist, but we both clearly
rely on such people. But nearly every such pro he puts in his
stories, he treats badly - contemptuous, harsh, or both. With
<Seeker>, which totally reverses my understanding of the real world,
contrasting dishonest pros with the antiquties trader hero, I'd
finally had enough. So I stopped looking at his books for a while.

Well, so. One night I was in Borders, considering the Seattle Public
Library's inexplicable non-ownership of <Illumination>. Nothing by
Terry McGarry on the shelf - but what's this? So, yeah, I did look at
this one, and to my surprise found that it was the *second* post-
<Seeker> Hutchins book. And yes, I also read the opening chapters and
the epilogue, which made it clear that this was going to be much like
the other McDevitt books I've read, before realising that I really
wasn't in the mood for McDevitt right now *anyway*. In a season when
I had far too little resistance to far too many things, a small
victory, but a victory nonetheless.

But for anyone who doesn't share my current grudges, I should note
that the impression I got from this one (and a quick glance at the one
before) is that he's turning the Hutchins series into one
unequivocally focused on a future, not an individual. Characters from
the previous novels are reappearing and developing - I have the
impression one is a major POV in this book. There's also some
continuity in outside events, but not much: near as I can tell,
"outside events" in McDevitt's books always, and still, amount to
"Technological development is booming, politicians are venial and
short-sighted, and the human species is losing interest in space".
Which in a six-book series means, well, a *lot* of cumulative loss of
interest, no?

Sandra McDonald
(July) <The Outback Stars>, 2007
(July) <The Stars Down Under>, 2008, started

The setting: a spacegoing future. Humanity acquired alien technology
enabling us to make use of a limited FTL arrangement (wormholes or
some such), the Alcheringa. We have expanded to at least seven
planets strung out along the Alcheringa's length; Team Space is the
essentially military organisation that runs the starships linking
these planets. Nothing about the road from now to this future is
altogether definite, but the titles aren't the only strong hints that
Australia has a disproportionate influence on that future, possibly by
virtue of surviving calamities other continents did not. (All the
spaceships are named after ecological disasters on Earth.) The
primary POV is Lieutenant Jodenny Scott, just recovered from wounds
heroically received in the destruction of the <Yangtze>, who uses this
reputation to push her way aboard the <Aral Sea>. There she finds
herself commanding Sergeant Terry Myell, the other POV, and other crew
members around whom rumours swirl; several officers in the
quartermasterly units to which she belongs have recently died or
unexpectedly deserted.

The first book basically deploys a romance plot around genuinely
dangerous skullduggery set in the back ranks of a starship, evidently
drawing on McDonald's own history in the US Navy; there's a subplot of
bigger adventure, but no more. I didn't find it extraordinary, but
did find it good; probably, offered a chance to buy a copy used, I
would. The second book, however, abandons first the ship and then the
military per se, in favour of that subplot of adventure from the first
book, and begins by warning us that Myell is going to die. I'm not
sure that warning actually comes true, but I ran out of time to read
at the library just when it looked like it *had* come true, and
somehow never developed the motivation to start reading again, at a
time when I couldn't just borrow the book and read it at home. I'll
probably finish it sooner or later.

Robin McKinley [1]
(June) <Dragonhaven>, 2007

Yeah, yeah, I know you're thinking I'm off my rocker, but look: Even
if this book wasn't *actually* inspired by the Heinlein juveniles,
there's nothing else I can think of that it so resembles as ... a
Heinlein juvenile.

So yes, there are dragons in this book with six limbs and
fire-breathing capacity. (And to make matters worse, they're sort of
marsupial.) But they're an endangered species, essentially confined
to three reservations: one in Australia (their native land); one in
Kenya (where Our Hero's mother died some years before our story
starts); and one, Smokehill, somewhere in the hinterland of Cheyenne,
but not in Wyoming - which is where Our Hero and Narrator, Jake
Mendoza, fourteen years, nine months old, has grown up, son of the
director of the national park / institute in question. He aspires to
go off and get Ph.D.s (plural) and succeed his father. But since his
mother's death, the two of them have more or less shut down
communications, and gone off each doing his own dysfunctional thing.
Nevertheless Jake finally gets his long-delayed First Solo Hike in the
Wilderness (the nearly 10,000 square miles the reservation occupies).
And there he finds a whole bunch of absolute shocks that threaten to
destroy Smokehill. Of these shocks, the crucial one is that he finds
a newborn dragon, motherless, who imprints on him. (I *did* mention
that they're sort of marsupial, right?)

The dragons turn out to have various *additional* capabilities that
will have any number of hard sf people insisting the book is fantasy
(though, God knows, a bunch of Heinlein's books feature similar
issues). If you squint really, really hard you can even sort of stuff
the plot into a fantasy template, I suppose - but this is true of most
writing, so it doesn't impress me. Ultimately, this is a story about
First Contact, it is a story about applying human reason to solving
problems and then dealing with the consequences, and it is, as I said,
very like a Heinlein juvenile. Longer - Jake is more garrulous, with
a story more complex and certainly longer-lasting (it runs about nine
years all told), than Heinlein's heroes. But still, I can confidently
assert that this is Robin McKinley's first book of science fiction.

(Jake's narrative begins with an excessive three pages or so of his
complaints that he doesn't know how to tell the story. I read certain
lines in those pages as McKinley's direct reply to people like me who
think she should write a sequel to her previous book, <Sunshine>.)

Arthur Nersesian
(January) <The Swing Voter of Staten Island>, 2007

In late October, 1980, a man knowing himself as Uli finds himself in
what appears to be Brooklyn, with no memory except of a set of
instructions: directions to a location in Manhattan, and an
imperative to kill a man there. He quickly learns that he is, in
fact, in the Rescue City of New York, established in 1970 after a
major attack on the real New York, and located in the Nevada desert on
the site of an old urban warfare training ground. The people
surrounding him embody stereotypes of New York at its worst - rude,
uncaring, violent, occasionally backhandedly kind. The man he is to
kill turns out to be a Rescue City political figure. And that's about
as much as I'm going to tell you.

The book covers ten days, and it isn't a coincidence that the
penultimate of those days is Election Day 1980; politics, both the
city's and the country's, pervade the book, though often only dimly
discernible, as through the fog of war. The underlying story is at
once a paranoid fever dream of the 1970s, and a non-trivial satire on
the present decade. This is an old-fashionedly man's story, with an
action-ready protagonist whose 3rd-person POV involves little
reflection or description, let alone figures of speech, and who gets
more than his share of attractive women. It's also blackly absurd.
It's in this post because of psychic stuff of various kinds, but is
really more alt-history or just plain satire than science fiction. I
only picked it to read because it was classified as mainstream fiction
and I suspected that to be wrong; it's far enough from what I like
that, for recommendation, I can only say that if my description
appeals to you, you might find it worthwhile.

Susan Palwick
(November) <Shelter>, 2007, started

This is the first of Palwick's books to demand intellectual, as well
as emotional, effort to read. I wasn't up to it at the time. I fully
expect to read it sometime in the next year or two.

Rick Raphael
* (August) "Code Three", 1963
Nominee, 1964 Hugo Award for Short Fiction

One disadvantage of the way I organise this log is that I end up, late
in the year, having to write in a way that recasts stuff I'd written
months earlier. Below I talk about "yesterday's tomorrows" and the
claim that "the past is another country"; both phrases kept occurring
to me as I read this story.

We're in a near future that vaguely reminds me of "The Last of the
Winnebagoes": North America is crisscrossed by vast divided highways,
where the top speeds get up to 200 mph. But since this is two decades
*before* "Last", here, drivers retain their own control of their
vehicles as a matter of course. Inevitably, accidents and other
problems result, and Our Heroes are the three-person crew of a sort of
super-patrol car, a cross between a tank and a hovercraft, who police
these roads; the story follows one run from Philadelphia to Los
Angeles. It's a fairly eventful run, involving among other things an
emergency delivery (it's a boy) and a chase after violent bank
robbers, but Raphael's main focus is on how the whole setup works,
from personnel issues to technology. And I kept being struck by how
very *quaint* the whole thing seemed, how outdated not only the
technology, but the "if this goes on" itself and any number of its
social underpinnings, were. Since I don't tend to think of 1963 as so
long ago - it's only a few years before I was born, after all! - and
since I certainly didn't find 1960s stories quaint when I was growing
up, this came as something of a shock to me, reinforced by the similar
sense I got from *re*-reading Arthur Clarke's "Rescue Party" (a story
I'd never found quaint before!) in the same anthology.

Leigh Richards
(August) <Califia's Daughters>, 2004

"Leigh Richards" is a pseudonym for Laurie King, better known as a
writer of mysteries.

Her website (URL below) speaks of <Califia's Daughters> as the middle
book of an apparently not fully written trilogy, and I have to admit,
this shows. You can make a defensible case that the book has a
unified theme/plot with clearly defined beginning, middle, and end:
this is to argue that the main (3rd person) POV is the subject of its
delayed bildungsroman. But so many of the book's pages shoot off in
other directions - and other POVs are introduced so freely - that I'm
not at all convinced by this claim; and concretely, the morning after
I finished the book, I kept thinking I hadn't, kept thinking there
surely must be more to read. (A rushed ending, though itself
plausibly a sign that the bildungsroman is here the whole point,
contributes to this feeling.)

Anyway. We are in a future (two or three generations into this
century) where a wave of plagues has vastly reduced the population.
Some of these plagues are strongly more dangerous to men than to
women, and Dian, Our Heroine, has grown up in a village where only one
adult in six is male. So this village, which seems to be in the
Salinas River valley behind Monterey, California, has responded (as
have other societies known to it) by guarding its surviving men,
discouraging all dangerous activities for them, and by default turning
those activities over to women; Dian, in fact, is in charge of the
village's defense. She is also itching to escape the village, at
least for a time, and an excuse comes along: emissaries from a
village far to the north, which wants to uproot and settle nearby. So
after a *long* section showing her at home, setting up a bunch of
conflicts that never get resolved, Dian goes to check out the
village's way of life, make sure they're acceptable neighbours, a
journey where she gets much more escape than she bargained for, and
grows up a bunch.

I found it worth reading, and may end up buying a copy. I would be
interested in the apparently unwritten first book, and very interested
in the apparently unwritten third book.

(But what is it *anyway* that keeps making non-Oregonians set their
post-apocalyptic books there? The Big Villain here seems to be
headquartered, as is S. M. Stirling's Big Villain in <Dies the Fire>
et seq., in Portland. I wonder if the Rose City's city, ahem, fathers
have considered offering a prize to the writer of the first
post-apocalyptic book where their town hosts the *good* guys.)

<http://www.laurierking.com/>, seen (for the second time) September
15, 2008

Robert Sheckley
*0 (August) "Hunting Problem", 1955

A mordantly funny story about how an alien makes Eagle Scout.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley [1]
0 (March) <Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus>, 1818/1831

I read this as, if you will, a special feature included in the 2007
Sourcebooks reprint of Hilary Bailey's <Frankenstein's Bride>, for
which see the fantasy post. That book doesn't say which edition it
reprints, but it's the third, much revised by Shelley; hence the
double date.

The book's well known, so I'll try to be brief. It's built on three
levels: letters by Robert Walton begin and end it, introducing and
concluding Victor Frankenstein's narrative, which itself contains (as
the book's central part) the monster's narrative. (The narrators lack
clearly independent voices, and all use way too much Romantic
rhetoric.) The monster is undeniably criminal, perpetrating at least
three murders in his pursuit of revenge against Frankenstein, but I
can't help thinking Shelley meant him to have our sympathy;
Frankenstein is a malignly absent-minded professor, a genius who can't
make a practical *or moral* decision right to save his life. The
other characters are fairly one-dimensional.

<Frankenstein> is unequivocally science fiction, though the science is
mostly handwavium: Shelley *may* be saying, as so often claimed, that
there are places science should not go, but she certainly *is*
speculating logically on the development of an intelligent creature.
And thinking of this as the first science fiction novel helps approach
the book's flaws. The one-note characters become the start of a sorry
tradition that's still with us. Logical lapses (the monster's story
emphasises his lack of familiarity with humans other than his beloved
cottagers, but then quite late he mentions their having servants!)
become the slips to be expected from the first writer to attempt such
speculation, a writer with no predecessors to learn from. First or
not, this is an amazing work to have come from the pen of a nineteen-
year-old writer, and it deserves its status as a classic of our field
and a minor classic of literature in general.

David Sosnowski
(January) <Rapture>, ?1994-1996, first compiled as such 1996

The book refers to two short stories by Sosnowski, "Fix" (1986) and
"Useless Things" (1994), as related to it (the latter, incorporated in
it); I don't know if others are, so the earlier of the two dates above
is tentative. (I also have been utterly unable to find where either
story was first published. Sosnowski's short fiction is unknown to
every bibliographic tool known to me.)

It's not obvious, to put it mildly, that a book about people acquiring
wings is science fiction. At the one point where Sosnowski considers
explanations for the outbreak of a new disease, "Angelism", none make
much sense. Most of the stated symptoms, not just the wings, strike
me as flatly impossible. I can reasonably argue that much of the book
straightforwardly extrapolates social implications of such an outbreak
(in particular, what it'd be like to *be* an "Angel"), but then I have
to consider that the *main* plot is that hackneyed mainstream standby,
How Two Damaged People Find Love. But so what? Since when does a
hackneyed mainstream plot disqualify a work from being science
fiction? This book is drenched in the speculative, much of its
material is extrapolative, and while several symptoms seem symbolic
(the wings themselves, a sort of chrysalis preceding their emergence,
and a magnetic-field effect that renders Angels' relationships with
electronics problematic), they're mostly played straight, not *as*
symbols. So I say it's soft science fiction.

Anyway. Yes, How Two Damaged People Find Love. We're on the edge of
postmodern Weird Is Cool land here, but Sosnowski allows his sympathy
to predominate over his humour, so I found that bearable. Zander
Wiles was thrown onto the streets on his eighteenth birthday, and
survived through petty crime. Cassie O'Connor was raped at eighteen,
and survived by isolating herself. Each becomes an Angel, and for
different, inadequate, reasons an Angel celebrity; each knows the fame
unmerited. They meet as the book opens, after which we get each one's
backstory, and for the final third or so of the text, what happens
next. Our setting is a late-twentieth-century Michigan, and I have
the vague impression that flashbacks and all, the book covers not much
more than a decade (Oprah Winfrey is famous throughout). POV is
third-person, mainly Zander's and Cassie's but prone to jumping
around. That's a pet peeve of mine, but didn't annoy me too much
here; I think that's because I basically liked Sosnowski's voice. I
mildly recommend the book.

A. E. van Vogt
* (September) "Black Destroyer", 1939

A moderately exciting man-vs.-alien story in which, for <Astounding>,
the alien gets a surprisingly fair shake.

Philip Wylie
(January) <Triumph>, 1963

We hear, nowadays, two conflicting memes: that the Sixties didn't
really get going until 1965 or so, and that the Fifties weren't at all
the years of conformity the preachers of the Sixties called them. To
judge by this book, the former claim is preposterous, and the latter
safe.

Sometime around 1980, nuclear holocaust breaks out, planned by the
Soviets as a way to conquer what's left of the world. This already
hints at a major difference between this book and most post-holocaust
stories I've read: this *is* basically the tale of survival in a
Connecticut mountain shelter built by a billionaire, but Wylie weaves
through it information about what's happening in the wider world.
This makes the book feel uneven, but also relieves it of the ending-
shock books like <Malevil> have, as a pastoral haven abruptly
reconnects with the rest of humanity. Another difference is Wylie's
fascination with current politics. He studies the Sexual Revolution
which had already begun, predicting much more loosening of mores but
little of modern feminism; and he uses the holocaust he projects, far
more savage than the 1950s books imagined, to advocate fairly strongly
a Cold War liberalism. Perhaps in the 1990s the latter would have
felt antiquated, but today it's easier for Americans to believe in
monstrous evil on the world stage, even if its shape is very
different. Similarly, the Connecticut survivors' well-stocked
library, and broadcast and reception gear, substitute for the Internet
we would now expect (as in a Doctorow story discussed above); their
infoverse, little shrunk by the apocalypse, doesn't feel all that
weird.

So: "The past is a foreign country," the saying goes. This
particular past isn't; it's on the frontier of the country I live in.

Movies appropriate to this post are *way* more numerous than in last
year's log, as discussed in the introductory post. So two notes:
1) I treat some movies as "sci-fi" (therefore belonging here) that, as
books, I might classify as fantasy (though I still *probably*
wouldn't).
2) I distinguish "science fiction" or "sf" below from "sci-fi" with
intent. That said, the movies:

+ <A Trip to the Moon>, 1902 (John Brosnan and/or Peter Nicholls, in
the EoSF, calling this *the* first sf feature, list[s] a 21 min.
ORT - the Sprocket Society program mentioned in the fantasy post
says 20; I saw only 10 min.; at any rate, it's a good bit more
plausible than the next movie, though still silly enough to have
umbrellas prove secret weapons, and the return trip achieved by
simply falling off a cliff; I liked it);
$ very arguably <The Impossible Voyage>, 1904 (chronicles a
geographical exploration voyage which includes a spaceflight
swallowed by the Sun, literally through the Sun's *mouth*, among
other nonsense, and with a plot full of coincidences and
"miracles"; but on balance, no sillier for its time than all too
many later sci-fi movies for theirs, so here I put it; this is
actually the 20 min. pièce de résistance of the Georges Méliès disc
described in the fantasy post, and is hand-tinted, supposedly in
the original manner; it also has narration which the box claims is
"original", but the disc itself says was adapted from a catalogue
that Gaston Méliès, US agent for his brother Georges, wrote for US
theatres - and so originally in English, though on this DVD spoken
with a very strong French accent) + (further notes after seeing it
- or anyway 14 B&W min. of it - on the big screen: it's a lot more
fun there, especially with a narrator who puts real gusto into the
task; and that narrator, Spencer Sundell, mentioned in the fantasy
post, told me afterward that it was his understanding he'd actually
worked from a translation of *Georges's* narration; so the mystery
continues ...);
$ <Long Distance Wireless Photography>, 1908 (Méliès predicts
television! who'da thunk?; has humour that doesn't depend on
slapstick, and I liked it a lot; 6 min.);
+ <Conquest of the Pole>, 1913 (one of Méliès's last movies, and
listed here because of the things the explorers find at the North
Pole, including, you may be interested to know, a *magnetic* POLE,
as in the ten-foot variety; entertaining enough; ORT 20 min., of
which I saw 8; the only Méliès movie I've seen with intertitles);

<Sur un air de charleston>, French, 1927 (comments below);
<The Thing from Another World>, 1951;
<When Worlds Collide>, 1951 (*oh*, I miss believing in yesterday's
tomorrows!);
<Them>, 1954 (imagine my surprise: a 1950s horror movie, but also
genuine science fiction);

Three featuring Robbie the Robot, as created by three different
characters (so not a series):

<Forbidden Planet>, 1956 (true: I'd never seen it before; and true:
it *is* one of the best sf movies yet made);
<The Invisible Boy>, 1957 (on the <Forbidden Planet> DVD; first time
tragedy, second time farce, yes? not entirely, and anyway still
worthwhile);
<The Thin Man: Robot Client>, 1958 (which makes the third time what?
well, at least this episode of a regrettable NBC show, also a
<Forbidden Planet> special feature, was short);

<The Blob>, 1958 (whose final line's meaning has changed, and will
change more);
<Le Testament du docteur Cordelier>, French, 1959 (sixth in the set of
Renoir movies in which <Sur un air de charleston> is third; its
spec-fic angle is predictable from early on, and it's otherwise a
slowish, clumsy movie about a debased criminal);
<Kalimán en el Siniestro Mundo de Humanón>, Spanish, 1974 (Kalimán,
superhero, against a mad scientist);
<Born in Flames>, 1983 (speaking of yesterday's tomorrows! - more
comments below);
+ <Back to the Future>, 1985 (wow! and no, I'm not kidding, I'd
really never seen any of this series before);
$ <Back to the Future Part II>, 1989 (so, dude, where *is* my flying
car?);
$ <Back to the Future Part III>, 1990;
<Spectres of the Spectrum>, 1999 (a low-budget paranoid sci-fi
thriller, much of whose footage comes from 1950s TV, much of that
in turn science-oriented, and whose plot revolves around a not
entirely alternate history of human use of electromagnetism);
<Smallville: The Complete First Season>, 2001-2002, started (WB);
$ <firefly: The Complete Series: Disc One>, 2002 (Fox);
$ <firefly: The Complete Series: Disc Two>, 2002 (Fox);
$ <firefly: The Complete Series: Disc Three>, 2002-2003 (Fox);
$ <firefly: The Complete Series: Disc Four>, 2002-2003 (Fox; and of
the series I've seen collected this way, this was the first I
wanted to own *after* seeing it - wow!);
<Robot Stories>, 2002 (includes four, well, robot stories, ranging
from "The Robot Fixer", entirely, wrenchingly, mundane, to "Clay",
a profound work of science fiction film; the other two, both more
simply science fictional, are very nearly as good; if in fifty
years *this* isn't on a list of the best science fiction movies
ever made, that'll either be a sign of astoundingly bad judgement
or of an extraordinary renaissance in the category);
<Voices of a Distant Star>, Japanese, 2002 (an often gorgeous short
anime, largely silly, but built around the old sf theme of the
spacer's tragedy);
arguably <The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra>, 2003 (a no-budget homage to
the grade Z sci-fi horror movies of the 1950s, trying very hard to
be so bad it's good, and succeeding in at least part of that
objective; more comments below);
<District B13>, French, 2004 (and yes, obviously, fantasy is a better
label for most of the movie's plausibility; but the underlying plot
comes straight from paranoid science fiction, and the surface is
all tech and therefore sci-fi);
<The Place Promised in Our Early Days>, Japanese, 2004 (comments
below);
<Primer>, 2004 (huh);
<Doom>, 2005 (not as bad as I thought it would be, but I still can't
account for my decision to borrow it from the library);
$ <Serenity>, 2005 (a movie spun off from a TV series that doesn't
equal its source; but good);
o <When My Baby (When My Baby)>, 2005 (comments below);
arguably <The Descent>, 2006;
* <The Host>, Korean, 2006;
<My Super Ex-Girlfriend>, 2006;
<UltraViolet>, 2006 (same comments as on <District B13>, except it's
even dumber and somewhat more fun);
+ <Apollo 54>, Italian, 2007 (comments below);
arguably + <Cloverfield>, 2007 (while the monsters are never
explained, the movie uses none of the tropes and none of the
structuring devices of fantasy; more comments below);
probably o <The Gathering>, 2007 (comments below);
+ <I Am Legend>, 2007 (which I liked a lot better before I read Tasha
Robinson's discussion of it, the other, um, three I think movie
versions, and the original novella, courtesy of the <Onion>'s AV
Club website);
not very arguably <the last mimzy>, 2007 [2];
+ <Sunshine>, 2007 (holy smokes, Batman! it's an actual *science
fiction* movie with a big budget! didn't they make those illegal
decades ago? - yeah, ok, <I Am Legend> is another, but I saw it
later).

Also see the Gothics post, where I list multiple movies seen for the


first time, whose running time is spent largely in the realm of
Todorov's fantastic, in other words movies for which specification as

"science fiction" or "other fiction" would be a non-trivial spoiler.

See also, in the re-reading post, <V for Vendetta>, 2006; and in the
series post, the Superman shows.

<When My Baby (When My Baby)> and <The Gathering> are two videos,
roughly three minutes each, included in <hug: Recent Work by Patricia
Piccinini>, a science fiction art show I reviewed here November 21,
2007 to a resounding lack of response. Piccinini is an Australian
artist; her main subject is genetically engineered species, and her
media also include sculpture, drawings, and photographs. <The
Gathering> features small marsupial critters swarming around a
sleeping little girl; I suppose it's possible the critters in question
actually live today, in which case it isn't really spec-ficnal at all;
the climax is mildly squickish. <When My Baby (When My Baby)> studies
a rather more squickish organism which I'm fairly sure isn't actually
possible.

<Born in Flames> is actually in the EoSF (with a complimentary review
by Peter Nicholls), rather to my surprise, though Maltin 2001 doesn't
see fit to mention it. It's a shortish indie feature film, written,
directed, and edited by Lizzie Borden, in which obviously contemporary
footage is used to present New York City ten years after a peaceful
socialist revolution, which installed a government that likes to make
the patently false claim that it's the only democratic socialism in
the world. Said government has to deal with an unsurprising ongoing
economic malaise (no doubt responsible for the fact that not much has
changed in over a decade!), and tries to placate unemployed young men
by blaming employed women for the problem, and engineering widespread
layoffs and firings of women. Radical women then turn increasingly
toward rebellion. The movie's look, music (sorta then-college radio),
and (especially) its politics all feel to me like they come out of a
time capsule - though I unhappily acknowledge that too much of the
Left has not changed its politics, either goals or tactics, one iota
since the phase captured by this movie: hey, folks, let's change the
world tomorrow by holding a demonstration!
Towards the end, an explosion planned by the good guys at the World
Trade Center is likely to be seriously problematic for some viewers.
(I'm among probably very few non-blind American adults who actually
*haven't* seen much of the footage of the towers falling, so I'm ill
equipped to judge, but my impression is that the explosion shown in
the movie isn't at all similar; the issue is more symbolic.
Ironically, I watched this movie and <The Birth of a Nation>, which
valorises the sterling morals and noble deeds of al Qaeda in Iraq -
oops, sorry, I meant the Ku Klux Klan - on the same day.) I'm not
sorry I saw <Born in Flames>, but I'm also not sure I'd actually
recommend it to anyone except sf enthusiasts who, like me, have at
least the periphery of the New Left in their personal histories, and
so can experience this as nostalgia, and not (mainly) as curiously
retro propaganda with a really retro-offensive scene in it.
Oops - almost forgot to mention that a moderately prominent
character is played by a "Pat Murphy". No reason to think she's *our*
Pat Murphy, then living in San Francisco, but it's fun to wonder, no?

<Sur un air de charleston> is the third of seven movies directed by
Jean Renoir and included in a three-disc set titled <Jean Renoir> from
Lionsgate. It's twenty minutes long, and, from today's perspective,
it's a weird mix. The opening titles inform us that in 2028, some
years after the last war, an explorer sets out (in a spherical
aircraft) from civilised Central Africa to explore the wilds of Europa
Deserta. The explorer (Johnny Huggins, a black man in extravagant
blackface) lands somewhere in what we would call France, atop the
tower-ish dwelling of a savage played by Catherine Hessling (Renoir's
wife 1920-1930, which years contain most of her career in movies, and
star of the other three silent movies in the set, for which see the
other fiction post). She quickly captures him, and does as a victory
dance what he recognises as a Charleston, a mysterious dance which he
at different times identifies as either White Aboriginal, or
traditional among his own ancestors. Anyway, she does a *lot* of this
dance, showing her exceptional lack of clothing, and eventually
teaches him the same. He's charmed by her primitive dancing,
technology (telephony, for example), and, well, the obvious; she's
pleased by how fast he learns the dance; you can guess how it ends.
So already by 1927 cheesy sci-fi existed in the movies, and already
it was capable of being combined with satire and also with
exploitation. But all three at once? And from a director who in less
than a decade would make one of the most widely acclaimed movies in
history? Go figure.
A further oddity: this originally had a specially composed score
(per a plausible IMDB comment), but Lionsgate chose it, alone of the
silent movies in the set, to leave truly silent on the DVD.

' "I always feel like I'm losing something," she said. '
<The Place Promised in Our Early Days> is an anime exercise in
elegy and nostalgia, using the heightened emotions and awareness of
beauty of one's early teens, and the way so many of us can look back
on that time with affectionate regret, to justify often magnificent
imagery, a deeply sentimental story, and a plot revolving around first
love and strained friendship. Like <Voices of a Distant Star>, its
writer/director's previous feature, it's built around enforced
separation of two people who aren't at all sure they're in love
anyway, but this time the rest of the story works.
That isn't to say this is anything but the softest of science
fiction, mind. We're in an alternate world where Japan became divided
in 1974, and much of the movie is set at the northern tip of Honshu,
looking toward the border and the unfamiliar island of Hokkaido.
(Another aspect of alterity: in this world, the US actually declares
wars properly.) The plot revolves around some sort of effort to reach
parallel universes, an effort far less advanced in southern Japan or
the US than in Hokkaido. Between that and lots of aircraft, I'm
calling this an sf movie, or at least sci-fi. But it's also a movie
where dreams, ancestry and, yes, promises Matter; I wouldn't seriously
argue with anyone who wanted to claim it for fantasy.
Regardless. I'm probably a poor judge, with my pronounced
weaknesses for beauty and for regret, but I think this is a movie well
worth seeing.

I've seen <Cloverfield> described as "<The Blair Witch Project> meets
<Godzilla>", and I suppose there's some truth to that, but I saw in it
something more like '9/11 meets Katrina'. I remember Godzilla movies
and such from childhood, though I've seen none since. And I found
<Cloverfield> dragging often; I certainly don't want to set it up as a
model. But like the Japanese after World War II, we now can imagine
violent destruction striking our cities; unlike them, we also now can
imagine destruction slow enough to allow for evacuation, and
street-level chaos. The tradition of ærial views giving good shots of
gigantic monsters belittles the actual terror that results just from
being in a city threatened with destruction, a place whose immense
machineries have turned (more than usually) untrustworthy. I'm sure
movies in the <Godzilla> tradition will be made in future, but I think
<Cloverfield>, despite its flaws, is more appropriate fare at least
for Americans, at least at this time.
Coincidentally, I planned a day spent seeing <Cloverfield>, <I Am
Legend>, and (for the second time) <Enchanted>, and only realised
halfway through that all three are set in New York. (And of course
two offer evacuations of Manhattan, reinforcing my point.)

Probably it's a matter of different tastes in humor, and it can't have
helped that I saw one movie on DVD, alone, the other in a theatre
(admittedly half-empty, but still). But I thought <Apollo 54> fully
succeeded in being "so bad it's good", and I'm much less sure about
<The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra>. <Cadavra> isn't that hard to find, so
I'll be brief: It's something of an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink
sci-fi horror movie, with aliens and rival scientists in search of an
exotic rock (the McGuffin). The skeleton, of course, is also
searching. As mentioned above, it tries way too hard, with blatantly
cornball dialogue - "It's time for me to do some science, dear!" "Oh,
yes, it's very important for you to do science! Even if I never
understand it..." "Oh, don't you worry your pretty head about that."
- intentionally bad acting and intentionally lame special effects. I
found it intermittently amusing, but not enough so.
<Apollo 54> is an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink sci-fi space
movie which I saw at the Seattle International Film Festival, and
which has no US distributor as I write this, so I'll be less brief.
It's a sepia-toned (so not strictly B&W) movie in which a profoundly
dysfunctional pair of guys (one captain, the other crew) set off in a
pulley-driven craft to follow a cable that reaches into the sky. This
allows the filmmakers to make all kinds of references to earlier
sci-fi (and sf) movies; they were at the screening I attended, and,
asked about influences afterward, mentioned <Dark Star> and (for one
scene) <The Matrix>; but when the captain first discovers the cable,
it's straight out of the opening scenes of <2001>, and there's plenty
more where that came from. Most of the special effects are apparently
computer-generated (the movie as a whole is clearly low-budget), but I
didn't notice; at any rate, they're far from cutting edge, but they
have a certain integrity, and for me, they worked. Actually, similar
praises (integrity, working) apply, I think, to the characters and the
plot. The movie's even more scientifically egregious than most
sci-fi, but I found that easy to swallow as part of the comic
situation, along with the foolishly arrogant captain and the twit of a
crewman. This one I recommend fairly strongly to anyone who can take
<Hitchhiker's> level silliness in sci-fi movies.
As of posting date, <Apollo 54> wasn't listed in the IMDB, and a
friend reported that it was also unknown to Netflix. I suspect that
for the foreseeable future your best chance of seeing this one is at
film festivals; should you be so fortunate as to know someone involved
with a film festival who has enlightened views on silly sci-fi movies,
do yourself and your neighbours a favour and tell them about this
movie. (There's a reviewer out there who liked it as much as I did,
but gave away the plot, so no URL below; anyway, that reviewer says
the proper procedure is to e-mail the filmmakers and tell them to
submit their film to the festival in question. The official site,
easily found by doing a search on "Apollo 54" at Google, lists some
festival dates in Italy in the near future as of posting date, but not
a lot.)

Joe Bernstein

unread,
Dec 16, 2008, 2:04:45 AM12/16/08
to
READ FOR THE FIRST TIME: GOTHIC AND FANTASTIQUE

In October 2007 - late in the calendar year but early in these posts'
year - I saw several movies for which the question, is it science
fiction or not?, was a significant element of the tension: movies
which it would be a spoiler to put either into the science fiction
post or into the other fiction post. I also read some books at that
time which straddled the fantasy / other fiction line in a similar
way; one, in fact, is a genuine example of Todorov's fantastic, never
clearly settling the question whether it's spec-fic or not. In last
year's posts, I put five movies, for which similar conditions
obtained, into the re-reading post, but this time, with the problem
clearly growing, it became clear that these movies and books needed
their own post. So I started one. This is not that post.

In October 2008 - late in the calendar year but early in other posts'
year - I opened the post I'd started in October 2007, to remove its
specific contents and reproduce the boilerplate, for next year's log.
Now, I normally very carefully always use "Save As" rather than "Save"
when editing any file. Partly because I rely on this habit, I rarely
back up personal files. Unfortunately, my mouse has recently broken
down, as mentioned in the introductory post I've been too broke lately
to replace it, and so I've allowed my good "Save As" habit to lapse
sometimes. And the particular occasion referred to in October 2008
turned out to be just the wrong time, as any fool could see, to allow
such a lapse. So, as I said, this is not the post I started in
October 2007. This is the replacement post I started in October 2008,
the reconstruction. (And yes, I did call a data recovery service
first.)

I remember the books more or less well; I remember more or less well
my comments on the only three movies that I'd really commented on.
(At least the paging down involved in doing the deletions had put some
of this into my short-term memory; things would be rather worse
otherwise.) It was easy to reconstruct which books were in here,
since I'd already done the introductory post's author index. It was
harder to reconstruct the movies, but thanks to all the stuff I keep
around, as boringly detailed in last year's introductory post, I was
able to list most of the *features*. Shorter films included as
special features, if there were any, are irretrievably lost, as are
any movies seen on the big screen, or rented, and then forgotten;
concretely, the movies list seems to be about two lines (hence,
probably, two movies) shorter than it was. As for comments, while
I've looked at some of the books to verify what I say (in other cases
relying only on online reviews), I certainly haven't re-read most of
them, I can hardly re-view each movie commented on, and I'm sure I've
gotten some stuff wrong. (So perhaps this post will, as no post did
last year, elicit multiple followups actually arguing with my comments
on books. One can only hope!)

Titles come partly from checkout slips, with various methods of
verification, and partly from book, video, or DVD spines as is the
standard in the rest of these posts. Dates come from various sources.
So nothing in here, probably, should be taken as reliable. But for
what it's worth, here is the best reconstruction I can offer of books
I read, movies I watched, and the comments I found worth making on
these, in the year these posts cover, for which a classification as
science fiction or fantasy, or as "other fiction", would either be a
spoiler, or unwarranted by the actual work in question.

See also, in the fantasy post, Lindsay (for reasons not so much
explained as adumbrated there) and Link, and in the other fiction
post, Hope (sv <Sport Royal>) and Russell. See also, I suppose, in
the fantasy and sf posts, Irvine, in the fantasy post, Link again, in
the sf post, Duchamp, and in the other fiction post, Brockmeier and
Russell again - to the extent, which I consider pretty minimal, that
"slipstream" can be equated with this post's purpose.

Natalie Babbitt
* (August?) <Knee-Knock Rise>, 1970
Nominee, 1971 Newbery Award

This is like the Babbitt books listed in the fantasy post in taking
only an hour or so to read; it's aimed even younger than those are,
and illustrated, by the author. It's unlike those books in that this
time, the central issue is in fact whether something fantastical (the
Megrim central to the local myths of the village Our Hero is visiting)
is real or not. And this turns it into a story an adult need not be
embarrassed to *think* about. I recommend it.

Sylvia Cassedy
(February) <Lucie Babbidge's House>, 1989

Lucie Babbidge is eleven years old. She has a teacher with many
faults, one of which is that she picks on Lucie, thus strongly
encouraging the rest of the students to do likewise. Lucie deals with
her persecution by hiding, and by thinking. (In <Behind the Attic
Wall>, Cassedy's earlier and more famous book, certain characters
dealt in inspired nonsense. Here Lucie herself, as well as some of
her *non*-classmate associates, do so. This makes for a book with
rather more jokes. But don't expect those jokes to be spoken aloud in
class.) We spend much of the book watching Lucie in class, or
otherwise among her classmates, but there are happier threads too:
her house and family, her correspondence with a pen pal, and her
memory of a delightful vacation with her family. Except that
actually, *all* of those labels for the other threads are highly
misleading, as is "class" for her school situation. And as the
threads proceed and interweave, the initial mystery - just what *is*
Lucie's situation? - is joined by others prompted by the interweaving,
until the reader is, like Lucie herself, moving through mists of
uncertainty.

This was published as a children's book. Now, enough of the mysteries
remain unresolved at book's end that I'm quite sure, had I read this
book when I was the age it's aimed at, I'd have been disgusted. But I
wasn't, in fact, a child when it first appeared, and I'm not a child
now. And what I think now is simply that this is a superb book, in
which mysteries are created and (some of them) resolved without ever a
word of explicit acknowledgement of their existence, and in which
change in its troubled heroine's life seems impossible and invisible -
until it bursts with shattering force into the final chapter. It
offers the best kind of teaching - convincing characters, the central
one of whom changes convincingly - with no tinge of didacticism. It
is Cassedy's last, posthumously published, novel, and converts
ingredients similar to those of <Behind the Attic Wall> into something
far richer and better.

I was dissatisfied with my original discussion of <Lucie Babbidge's
House>, and dissatisfied again with the similar treatment I wrote for
this reconstruction. I re-read the book trying to do better. One of
my dissatisfactions was that, lacking words to say what was so good
about this book, I had simply resorted to shouting. Well, I've found
some words on the third try. And I acknowledge that some people -
people who can't tolerate eleven-year-old heroines, or unresolved
mysteries - should avoid it, but otherwise - I'll shout anyway:
EVERYONE ELSE SHOULD READ THIS BOOK!

Lois Duncan
* (August?) <Down a Dark Hall>, 1974
* (ca. August) <Summer of Fear>, 1976, and * <Daughters of Eve>, 1979,
minimally skimmed

Ah, Lois Duncan! <Five Were Missing>, <Killing Mr. Griffin>,
<Stranger with My Face>, for that matter <I Know What You Did Last
Summer> - my generation's version of R. L. Stine! Duncan has
apparently had three careers to date. First she wrote romances, when
women authors were expected not to scare kids. The 1960s freed her to
write what she wanted to, tales of fear. (The books listed above came
out in 1966, 1978, 1981, and 1973 respectively.) These tales, near as
I can tell, never much cared about any dividing line between realism
and spec-fic, and Duncan's third career helps clarify this: after
someone was sick enough to kill her own daughter in a way that
copycatted one of her books, she stopped writing Gothics, and
eventually started writing "even-handed" accounts of psychic phenomena
- making room in the market for Stine.

Anyway. In <Down the Dark Hall>, Kit Gordy, age 14, is being bundled
off to boarding school while her remarried mother goes on honeymoon.
She had applied with her best friend, but her friend wasn't accepted,
and Kit *was*; she's miserable at the prospect of a year in exile from
everything she's ever known. This makes her reaction on arrival at
the actual school - see Diana Wynne Jones's <The Tough Guide to
Fantasyland>, sv "Reek of Wrongness" - easy for her mother and
stepfather to discount. So she winds up one of a student body
consisting of *four* girls, with a staff-student ratio in excess of
one. And then the Bad Things start to happen.

Duncan doesn't seem to do comfort much. In this book, we actually end
up not learning whether one of the four students survives; in books
where fates are more completely told, they are by no means uniformly
reassuring. At any rate, I found this one readable enough, possibly
thanks in part to the villains' cultural aspirations, but have
repeatedly bounced on looking at the other two, which are thoroughly
bound up in small-town life.

John Meade Falkner
(as best I remember, winter) <The Lost Stradivarius>, 1895

This turned out to be the hardest entry to reconstruct, and the only
one I *had* to go back to the original book for. (I re-read <Lucie
Babbidge's House> mainly because I wanted to.) It is the source of
about two weeks of this set of posts' unusually long delay.

<The Lost Stradivarius> consists of two very unequal parts. In the
Gutenberg text I used for review, "Miss Sophia Maltravers' Story", in
fifteen chapters and five sixths of the screensful, and "Mr. Gaskell's
Note", unbroken, in the remaining space. The book begins with a
letter (dated 1867, so already historical) from Miss Maltravers to her
nephew, in which she explains that her purpose is to elucidate her
brother's last days to his son, to fulfill a dying request and to
mitigate the harm gossip may do. So she's used notes taken at the
time, what she admits is strangely sharp recollection, and, for
corrections and supplement, her brother's friend, Gaskell. The story
that follows focuses on the years 1842 to 1845, and depicts, often at
a distance and not in great detail (this is a short book), the gradual
but swift decline of a young man who had it all - looks, talent,
wealth, and a loving new wife - but threw it away for a disturbingly
wild piece of music and the titular instrument to play it on. There's
a strong element of xenophobia in her classically Gothic portrayal of
Italy as mysterious, decadent and dangerous. Gaskell then with rather
better information adds further hints as to What Went Wrong, and the
book ends.

In other words, hints are all we get. Was the violin actually
demonic? Was there a secret ritual? Why are there so many
coincidences in the story? (They're patently *intended* to be seen
with unease; Falkner isn't just demonstrating incompetence by using
them.) For that matter, what is Miss Maltravers's relationship with
Mr. Gaskell? In keeping with this love of uncertainty, Falkner
wanted, I think, to make this a true example of Todorov's fantastic,
but I also think he failed.

At any rate, there's one more suspension to mention, the one you can
get from the introduction and especially the endnotes to the
second (!) Oxford World Classics edition, by Edward Wilson - the
edition I originally read a year or so ago. Wilson plainly has a deep
love-hate relationship with Falkner, which he expresses by doggedly
determined unearthing of all the many anachronisms the book commits.
Eventually, this piling on becomes twistedly amusing, and something of
a relief from the Gothic atmosphere of the book itself.

Matt Haig
(October) <The Dead Fathers Club>, 2006

Philip Noble is eleven years old and lives in a British city other
than London, sometime between the beginning of the war in Iraq and
Tony Blair's resignation. Philip's problem is that he's living out
the plot of <Hamlet>, with himself in the titular rôle. He's also
narrator. So here we have two real successes of Haig's right up
front: First, he conveys, as I've never picked up from reading
Shakespeare's script, just how *hard* it would be to be Hamlet, the
pain involved. And second, although I can't pretend to a clear enough
memory or recent enough experience to judge reliably, Haig does nail
every single thing I *do* remember, or imagine I remember, about
writing at that age, and every single thing I would expect of an
eleven year old boy's writing.

But this isn't all. Consider the beginning of <Hamlet>, when Hamlet
sees his father's ghost. In drama, this either happens or it doesn't,
but in prose, it's easy to have things both ways. Haig exploits this
difference to the fullest, and reinforces it by making the case for
Philip's madness much stronger than the case for Hamlet's. So we look
through Philip's convincing prose into not only his wretched life, but
also his very doubtful psyche; we ultimately have no solid place to
stand.

I strongly recommend this book to anyone who can deal with that sort
of book, or who's fond enough of Shakespearean pastiche to bear with
it anyway. I see that in this reconstructed post it gets the least
discussion of the books for adults; but it's probably the best of
them. Oh, and it *is* a book for adults. The US edition has a blurb
quote from a British paper claiming otherwise, but any library foolish
enough to shelve it as YA is just begging for the trouble it'll get.

Karen Harrington
(June) <Janeology>, 2008

I ranted about this book on rasfw when I was reading it; it's easily
the worst modern novel I've read in years. The problems start with
things like spelling and grammar, and go on to the unoriginal and
clumsy dialogue. Then there's the plot, characters, and themes. Tom
Nelson is a tenured professor whose wife, Jane (cf. the title),
sometime in the early part of this decade (chronology is yet another
weak point here), killed one of her toddler children, and tried to
kill the other. Jane is now committed, for life, but an ambitious
prosecutor is going after Tom for not seeing it coming and keeping the
kids away from her. Tom, however, has collapsed into a drunken
stupor. His mother sics a defense lawyer on him. This lawyer decides
his best bet is, I am not making this up, to use a psychic to
establish that Jane had a hereditary propensity to horrendously
abusive kookiness and that Tom could not have known this, and
therefore, by some heretofore unknown logic, that Tom is innocent of
the charge. So the bulk of the book consists of short chapters (it's
only a long book subjectively, while reading), chasing up and then
back down Jane's family tree. Several chapters have narrators - Jane
herself, in the first one, and a couple of her more distant ancestors
- but all are supposedly channeled through the psychic, who works by
handling Jane's surprisingly convenient memorabilia, using a talent
Wikipedia knows as "psychometry", but Harrington calls
"retrocognition". These chapters offer the one virtue I do find in
the book: Harrington clearly has a talent for imagining really awful
families; the ones we see vary implausibly, and get increasingly lurid
the further back in time we go, but still make an impressive gallery.

So OK, the plot has its points, though it makes no sense. Aside from
the dialogue, the big problem with the characters is really with Tom,
and underlies my objection to the theme. See, the main reason Tom's a
tenured professor is so that he can stand, in the book, for Dogmatic
Reason and Intellectual Pride. Harrington is out to preach, and
although her faith revolves around God and the therapeutic culture -
the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the sons unto seven
generations, unless they shall learn the truth and it shall make them
free - its core premise is that one should have believe anything one
is told. So, for example, there are professed psychics in the world;
therefore one should have faith in psychic powers. Tom is supposed to
demonstrate this by the way the psychic wins him over despite his
rational intellectual skepticism. He is, however, a pushover; while
Harrington is aware of the existence of intelligent people, she
clearly can't think her way into one's head. So even if I didn't
despise Harrington's message, I would find her argument for it
unconvincing.

Even if you share Harrington's credulous faith, there are better books
out there preaching it. This book comes from a newish small press,
Kunati, and to judge that press by this example, my worst enemies
should buy all Kunati's books, but everyone else should stay far far
away.

Evan Kilgore
(October) <Who Is Shayla Hacker>, 2007

No, that title isn't wrong; I don't know where the question mark went,
but it's not anywhere in this book's title.

This is an awkward book. Early on it seems to be primarily a thrill-
a-minute action novel, in which deaths, disappearances (from
airplanes, even), destroyed buildings, and the like happen again and
again. Practically every chapter ends on a cliffhanger, and as the
suspense ramps up and up, it's hard to imagine how the author can
possibly keep topping himself.

And he doesn't. Gradually, past the book's midpoint if I remember
right, he starts tamping the suspense down again, and trying to
convince us that the book has *really*, all along, been mainly about
his characters. (And to be honest, their situations are where the
book begins, before any of the action stuff gets started). We have
five third-person POVs. Gregory Klein and Debbie Wendell are loners
who more or less stumble into the plot - obsessive searching for
Shayla Hacker, by lots of people apparently recruited in a way vaguely
reminiscent of <The Ring> - by chance. Terry Young and Joseph Molloy
are facing big changes - one about to marry, the other to retire -
when they more or less inherit their parts in the Shayla Hacker quest.
I can't say even that much about Jackie Savage without spoilers.
Anyway, all five experience big changes over the course of the book.
Some of these changes convinced me, others did not; but my predominant
reaction was astonishment that Kilgore could write them at all.
Because, you see, Kilgore is described on this book's jacket as a
"recent graduate" from college, and he mentions having written much of
the novel at age 20. But the result is about as far from the
stereotypical young author's "write what you know" memoir-novel (see,
for example, Devonshire in the other fiction post) as one can imagine.

So I recommend it to enthusiasts for either action stories, or
character-driven fiction, with the warning to both to be prepared for
a less than perfect example.

I'm less sold on it as a mystery, even though it was published
explicitly with the "mystery" tag by Bleak House Press, which
specialises in that genre. Sure, there are plenty of crimes here -
including a fair number of violent deaths, of both searchers for Ms.
Hacker and others - and some do get solved, but others don't, and
anyway solving them isn't the main focus. On the other hand, "who is
Shayla Hacker?" *is* the main focus, and to the extent that that's a
mystery and solved, well, mystery readers *might* find what they want.
As to spec-ficnality: I can't without spoilers say whether this is
fantasy or not, but it certainly is horror, or at least horror's close
kin, Gothic.

But, um, there's one other possible route to spec-ficnality for this
book. Bleak House Press is headquartered on a street I used to love
in Madison, Wisconsin. This makes inexplicable to me the way the
locale of the book's ending - a mountainous area of low population
density - is set in "Indiana". Neither my own memories - I've never
lived in Indiana, but I have lots of relatives there, and have visited
several parts of the state - nor my atlas will allow this portrait to
stand. So maybe Kilgore's really doing alternate geography, and his
book's spec-ficnal that way? Or did he just somehow mix up Indiana
with South Dakota? This leads me to another, more substantive issue
with Kilgore's geography. Most of the places the characters visit are
small towns, and without exception, these small towns are dying.
Kilgore explicitly asserts a distinction between metropolitan and
small-town America that he even, in one place, links to the more
famous coast-flyover one. (Which makes his coastal ignorance of
Midwestern geography hypocritical.) Well, I don't claim wide
familiarity with small towns, and don't claim to be able to prove
Kilgore's requiem for them premature; but the ones I have visited have
usually not seemed dying to me. And I note that Kilgore has lived
mainly in cities himself. The smallest - and poorest - of these is
Tacoma, Washington, his hometown though not his birthplace, per his
website (URL below). Tacoma is indeed the least thriving of the Puget
Sound and Lake Washington cities; but it's metropolitan, and it isn't
dying. As a lifelong metropolitan myself - I assume Madison isn't
what Kilgore means by a small town - I still found myself, while
reading, unable to buy this book's portrait of small town America.

<http://www.evankilgore.com/>, seen (for the second time) November 4,
2008

Movies that would, if books, fit in this post:

<The Cat and the Canary>, 1927 (the silent version starring Laura
LaPlante);
<I Walked with a Zombie>, 1943;
<The Seventh Victim>, 1943;
<Isle of the Dead>, 1945;
$ <The Year My Voice Broke>, 1987;
<The Moonstone>, 1996 (BBC; the version starring Greg Wise and Keeley
Hawes);
<Ponette>, French, 1996;
<Don Juan>, French, 1998 (the version directed by, and immodestly
starring, Jacques Weber);
<Love and Let Love!>, Cantonese, 1998 (comments below);
<Brotherhood of the Wolf>, French, 2001 (and if I am ever Evil
Overlord of a "Brotherhood of the Wolf", I will order my followers
to actually *act like* their eponyms, and TEAM UP against the good
guys, for Heaven's sake!);
+ <Donnie Darko: The Director's Cut>, 2001/2004;
<Save the Green Planet!>, Korean, 2003;
<The Forgotten>, 2004;
<Dark Water>, 2005 (I've seen this movie scorned, but partly because
the ending managed to surprise me *twice*, I disagree; Ariel Gade
should've had much better billing; and I fear the movie's proposed
solution to a social problem is unlikely to scale well) [2];
<The Wicker Man>, 2006 (the version starring Nicolas Cage) [2];
<Bridge to Terabithia>, 2006;
+ <August Rush>, 2007 (comments below);
+ <Mermaid>, Russian, 2007 (comments below).

You may object that several of these don't actually leave the
question, "is it spec-fic or not?", open for any meaningful amount of
time. Fair enough; I thought so too. Therefore I had some of these
movies in the other fiction post, and others listed here but labeled
"arguably", that is, "arguably Gothic". But as that summary implies,
I found that *all* of the movies I'd labeled "arguably" were movies
that in fact turned out *not* to be spec-fic. The whole point of this
post is to avoid spoilers; "arguably" violated that point, so I had to
remove it.

Lies of Hollywood:
There is only one true love for each of us.
When we meet that person, it's always love at first sight.
When it comes to family, we're all psychic.
Art is 99% inspiration, 1% perspiration.
Talent is fungible: a great guitarist is probably also a great
composer.
Prayer reliably gets the results prayed for.
(And I've forgotten some that were in this post's previous
version.)

Errors of Hollywood:
Soloists at classical music concerts wear white.
Minimalism is the good kind of classical music. [a]
(Here, I'd forgotten a bunch before writing even the first
version.)

Open questions of Hollywood:
Can children attain fame without being exploited?
Are happy endings really possible?

Now, if I really believed all those Hollywood lies, I know where I'd
be: I'd be in Maine, paying desperate court to a woman who, in fact,
has never offered me any encouragement. So I do so know better.
Nevertheless, as yet more evidence that I'm less of an intellectual
than I think I am, I loved nearly every minute of <August Rush>, a
movie that accepts every one of those lies and errors, and "yes"
answers to those open questions, as Gospel truth.
At least my existing plans - to see <Sweeney Todd> on the same trip
to a discount theatre, because both movies, as I understood it,
"involved" music - provided a prompt cure. <Sweeney Todd> is one New
Musical which I'm quite sure I won't buy on DVD, but by the time it
was over, I was almost back to my normal self from seeing <August
Rush>; and in fact, I've yet to feel much temptation to buy *that*
movie on DVD either.
Don't think about this with any liquid near your hand, mouth, or
keyboard, but there's actually a much stronger similarity between
<August Rush> and <Sweeney Todd>. It's way too much of a spoiler to
clarify, but if you've seen both, consider their plots, and see if you
don't agree. If you don't get it, say so, and I'll clarify either in
e-mail or behind spoiler spaces.

[a] To be quite fair, the allegedly brilliant musical work with
which the movie ends is not minimalist. However, the rest of the
movie's music either is minimalist, or is so presented as to seem so
(which in some cases takes some doing).

It's more than a little wrong of me to put <Mermaid> into this post;
its title in Russian, <Rusalka>, only makes this clearer. The movie
tells the life of Alisa, the heroine, at two phases: when she's six
or so (played by Nastya Dontsova), and decides to pretend sudden
muteness; and when, at seventeen or so (played, with increasingly
loopy good cheer, by Masha Shalayeva), she emerges from the
institution this decision landed her in, to modern Russia. At the
very beginning of the second phase, hence quite early in the movie, we
get explicit on-screen confirmation that Alisa has Special Powers. So
what excuse can I have for putting this movie into this post?
Well, after Alisa's *second* use of those powers (which she
understands as causing a hurricane), she panics, and determines never
to use them again. So we remain constantly in a suspense very like
that of a genuine Gothic: will she maintain her vow? How will she
survive whatever happens next if she does? Because, you see, Alisa
and her family, as hurricane refugees, end up in Moscow, and there,
Alisa becomes the anti-Amélie. Amélie moved, as a serious pixie,
through a Paris that didn't understand her but was essentially benign;
Alisa moves, as a grinning pixie, through a Moscow that doesn't
understand her but is essentially malign. She becomes the only
consoling element of a steadily darker satirical picture, in which
hardly anyone acts from anything but the basest motives, and which
culminates in an ending you'd better not claim I didn't warn you
about. Amid all this grimy realism, it's easy to forget that we've
already been assured we're in a spec-ficnal universe.
So I have mixed feelings about this much-praised movie.
Shalayeva's performance is well worth seeing, and writer-director Anna
Melikyan also makes, as befits the title, constant, excellent use of
water imagery. It's certainly incomparably the most impressive, as
art, of the three movies I'm commenting on here. But all that cynical
darkness disturbs me. Already by the time I saw it, <Mermaid> had
been picked up for US distribution by IFC Films, as something called
"video on demand". I can't figure out whether that means there will,
or won't, be either theatrical or DVD release here. I also can't
figure out whether such release would be a Good Thing, or not.
(As of posting date, IFC was no longer advertising it on its
website, and I have no clue what this movie's future in the US may
be.)

<Love and Let Love!> is a textbook example of the power of scripts, on
the one hand, and stars, on the other, to make or break a movie. It's
a remake of <Truly Madly Deeply>. But writer-director Dennis Chan
apparently didn't think sensitive character depiction could stand on
its own. (Well, I admit to no great love for the original, so maybe
he was right.) So he bulked his movie up with absurd quantities of
meet cutes, pornography of luxury (this movie's much higher on the
class scale), and physical comedy. In the process, he managed to turn
the central character into a puddle of nonsense. She's supposed to be
a strong businesswoman, but she frequently acts like a lovestruck
schoolgirl.
Thus enters the opposing force. Theresa Lee as the protagonist
probably really does less impressive work as an actress than Juliet
Stevenson in the original; but she has vastly less to work with, and
the extraordinary thing is that she manages to make it work at *all*.
Only her skill - in particular, with her exceptionally expressive face
- can paper over the cracks in her character as written. She gets
some help from Julian Cheung in Alan Rickman's rôle, and the result is
a movie far more watchable than it has any right to be.
It exists on an all-regions DVD, but it isn't known to the IMDB (I
find no movie that the three named participants have in common there,
so this statement isn't vitiated by my not knowing Chinese). However,
it's on a bunch of imitative sites specialising in Hong Kong movies.
The subtitles are pretty minimal, and Roman-script credits still more
so; I got the stars' names, and the chance to blame Chan, from those
sites.

Joe Bernstein

unread,
Dec 16, 2008, 2:07:23 AM12/16/08
to
READ FOR THE FIRST TIME: CHILDREN'S BOOKS

This post's predecessor was posted 19th October 2007, with message-ID

<ff9bec$k6s$1...@reader1.panix.com>. Like that one, this post makes no
distinction among children's books, YA books, tween books, books for
ages 8.51 to 8.56, or any of the other categories marketers have
dreamt up in recent decades: if a book is meant for people younger
than adults, and fits in none of the spec-fic boxes of the previous
posts, it properly belongs here.

Last year's post was dominated by books I read in the autumn, shortly
after coming to Seattle, when I was mostly unemployed. This year, it
wasn't until the end of June - again, a long spell of underemployment
- that I'd finally read a complete *non*-spec-fic kids' book, and thus
established that there was any point at all to keeping this a separate
post. The two years also differ because last year I made a conscious
decision to read girls' books, and this year, I didn't; but this
year's list still proves to be heavy with girls' books. Next year I
should probably make a conscious decision to read boys' books - plenty
of classics remain that I never read.

See also, in the fantasy post, Babbitt, Cassedy, Engh, Gray, Griffis,
Haddix, Kendall, Lee, McGraw, Meyer, Miller, Plourde, Shetterly,
Smith, Townley, Windling and Steiber, and Zambreno, and arguably John
Moore; in the science fiction post, McKinley, and arguably Heinlein;
and in the Gothics post, Babbitt again, Cassedy again, and Lois
Duncan. There are also children's books in the re-reading post,
mostly without comments, by Eager, McKillip, and Potter; several of
the other books in that post have been republished as YA titles though
not originally so published or, as far as I know, intended.

Franklin Dixon
* (July) <The Tower Treasure>, 1927/1959

This entry and the one for Carolyn Keene, below, both concern books
written under house names for the Stratemeyer Syndicate. The
Syndicate's procedure, at the time these books were originally
written, was that one person (a Syndicate employee) would write an
outline; another person (a contractor) would write the actual text;
then an employee would edit the text for criteria of length,
conformity, etc. For four of the five books at issue, authorship is
further complicated by revisions done decades later to "update" and
render then-pc the texts. *This* book was outlined by Edward
Stratemeyer, written by Leslie McFarlane, edited by Stratemeyer, and
later revised by Harriet Stratemeyer Adams. Stratemeyer and McFarlane
both wrote much fiction under their own names, other house names, and
pseudonyms; I know of no fiction published under Adams's own name, but
she wrote many books for Syndicate house names herself, well after
this book's time. My copy is illustrated, with no credit.

I read this, the first Hardy Boys book, only after reading one of the
original-version Nancy Drew books, which I hadn't much enjoyed (see
below), and I knew the connoisseurial view is that the originals are
much better than the revised versions. So I was rather surprised to
find this fairly fun, if rather implausible. (I was also astonished
to find several minor signs of what in the 1920s would have to be
considered liberalism in the book. Perhaps this owed to McFarlane, a
Canadian? I understood neither Stratemeyer nor his daughter to be
remotely liberal.) I don't actually expect to go read more Hardy Boys
books, but I'm not ruling it out either.

Carolyn Keene
* (July) <The Secret of Red Gate Farm>, 1931
* (July) <The Secret of the Old Clock>, 1930/1959
* (July) <The Hidden Staircase>, 1930/1959
* (July) <The Bungalow Mystery>, 1930/1960

See the Dixon entry above for the procedure under which these books
were written. For <The Secret of Red Gate Farm> (the sixth Nancy Drew
book), the relevant people are outliner Edna Stratemeyer (Edward's
younger daughter), writer Mildred Augustine Wirt Benson, and editor
Harriet Stratemeyer Adams. (I give all three of Benson's surnames
because she published fiction *and* journalism under *each*, as well
as fiction under several house names and pseudonyms.) For <The Secret
of the Old Clock> and <The Hidden Staircase> (the first two books),
it's outliner Edward Stratemeyer, writer Benson, editor Edward
Stratemeyer, and reviser Adams. For <The Bungalow Mystery> (the third
book), the same except that some sources attribute some of the
revision to Patricia Doll. I know of no fiction actually written by
Edna Stratemeyer or Doll, under their own names or otherwise, but
haven't looked very hard either. My copies of the revised books are
illustrated by an unnamed person; there are no illustrations in my
unrevised <Red Gate Farm>, though it was printed shortly before 1959.
My sources for the above, as well as the facts in the Dixon entry
above, are primarily Melanie Rehak's <Girl Sleuth>, 2005 (partly a
joint biography of Edward Stratemeyer, Benson, and Adams, with some
attention to Edna Stratemeyer Squier, partly a publishing history of
the Stratemeyer Syndicate, partly Nancy Drew-specific), and
secondarily a lot of websites, generally either Wikipedia articles
with the obvious titles (e.g., "Nancy Drew", "Hardy Boys", and various
personal names) or websites linked to by those articles as of the date
I consulted them, 19th July, 2008. (For a bibliography of Benson's
books I had to go two deep, to a <Salon> article linked to by the
University of Iowa site which Wikipedia references.)

Rehak tells a detailed story about Mildred Wirt's complaints that the
outline for <Red Gate Farm> was inadequate, so she'd had to add
filler. Flipside, one of the websites I consulted claims that court
records, from the lawsuit that finally brought Benson's involvement in
these books to light, indicate that, according to the *Syndicate*'s
files, it had had to be extensively revised by Adams. Beats me;
regardless, it's the worst of these. It moves slowly (that,
presumably, is the filler); it involves several girls without
personalities, and a couple of (non-criminal) adults with unpleasant
ones; and when I shortly later read the other Stratemeyer books listed
in this post, I also observed that it lacks the *social* network they
offer. Neither Nancy Drew nor the Hardy Boys, in these early volumes,
existed in a vacuum. But the first Nancy Drew title conceived after
Edward Stratemeyer's death gives the impression of being set in a bell
jar.

So flipside, I found the revised-edition volumes more fun. They're
shorter - 20% by chapter count, 10% by word count, but the words
average shorter too, I think. This means they have to move faster,
which makes the lack of personality some characters have less irksome.
I also found Nancy herself easier to take in these, for some reason
to do with her cheerful overstepping of traditional gender rules; I
fear this is actually because she's *more* conventionally feminine in
the revised books, but would like to believe it's because the
overstepping seems bolder. (Perhaps these are linked, converse,
points? Anyway, I'd have to re-read to sort it out, and that has no
appeal at all.) The social network mentioned above is there, and
pleasant; Ned Nickerson isn't there, which is also pleasant. The main
tiresome thing about reading three in one day turned out to be the
repetitive way Nancy's earnest charm keeps convincing evildoers to
turn over a new leaf; but even that isn't *too* prevalent. (It's
another thing missing from <Red Gate Farm>, book #6.)

Well, at any rate, now I know why all genre mysteries involve murders.
It's because all lesser crimes are solved by teenagers. Duh.

Ellen Kushner
arguably * (July) <Statue of Liberty Adventure>, 1986

This was Kushner's second published book of fiction, after 0 <The
Enchanted Kingdom>, 1986, two earlier in the "Choose Your Own
Adventure ®" series to which both belong. (And not counting
<Basilisk>, 1980, which she edited but contributed no actual fiction
to.)

Kushner's are the only books in this series I've read since the early
1980s, but I have the *impression* that this one is, for the most
part, not unusual. It's probably more didactic than most, with pages
devoted to the history of the Statue of Liberty and subplots built
around immigrants who passed through Ellis Island; Kushner's
motivation for that may be indicated by the dedication to her paternal
grandparents, who immigrated in the 1920s. It's also unusual because
it can reasonably be treated as non-spec-fic (as I've done by putting
it into this post at all). There is in fact a timeslip - whether you
fall into it is determined by the first choice you make - but there's
nothing spec-ficnal about the events on the other side of the
timeslip, nor about the events following the other choice. And the
timeslip's consequences get only about a third of the total pages in
the book.

I remember thinking of <The Enchanted Kingdom> that it had nothing
distinctive to Kushner in it, and the fact that I can remember nothing
of the book except that thought suggests to me I was right. Nor is
this book a diamond in the rough, save some neat touches of
characterisation. I read it in July because I wanted a real "Choose
Your Own Adventure" story to compare against Kevin Brockmeier's
mentioned in the other fiction post, so see also there.

Maud Hart Lovelace
(November) <Betsy-Tacy>, 1940, started

It's something of a relief to find that there are limits to my ability
to read girls' books.

Michelle Magorian
$ (May or June) <Back Home>, 1984, sort of skimmed

What I actually did with this was open it to somewhere past the middle
and skim from there. None of what I read inspired me with the wish to
read the beginning, or buy the book.

It's the story of a girl who'd been evacuated to relatives in North
America during World War II, and is now "back home" with parents who
have become strangers to her - but in the part I read, she's *really*
in the boarding school that her aristocratic father and his mighty
family insist upon, and that she hates. The story and even the ending
involve more pain than I'm used to in kids' books.

Lois Metzger
* (July) <missing girls>, 1999

How Carrie Schmidt, aged twelve, in 1968 emerges from the shell she'd
retreated into when her mother died, four years earlier. This
involves the formation (without the vows referred to in the fantasy
post, sv Alexander, or the bitter weeping) of a best friendship,
Carrie's awakening to her Jewish family's history (which involves
World War II, arguably the Holocaust, and the Kindertransport), and
like that. Lucid dreaming (as in Nancy Kress's Beggars books) figures
prominently. Carrie's muffled emotions dampen the story, and Metzger
includes many inconclusive threads, making the book feel like a "slice
of life" despite the fairly substantial changes in Carrie over the
course of the book. I read it fast and don't regret reading it, but
didn't choose to keep the book.

That said: I emerged from my own shell after my father's death
(similarly, when I was eight), um, some months more than four years
later, and Metzger depicts what that emergence feels like perfectly.

Eleanor Porter
* (July) <Pollyanna>, 1913
(July) <Pollyanna Grows Up>, 1915

Given what I'd written some months before about Steven Brust's <To
Reign in Hell>, how could I resist? (Ironically, the sale where I
bought <Pollyanna> had been *advertised* as a place to find vampire
novels and erotica. Go figure. I did find a Tanith Lee book there.)

Pollyanna Whittier is yet another in the long line of orphan girls who
come to live with cranky people they eventually humanise. She's
famously insipid, annoying, and various other hostile adjectives, but
I found her, for one book, an acceptable protagonist. The thing that
most draws the hostility is her "game", the "Glad Game", which amounts
to treating "Look on the bright side of things" as a challenge to the
imagination, and which Porter does trowel on pretty thickly. But
reputation had not prepared me for her being decently characterised,
nor for her having real problems to deal with. Anyway, the first book
watches her for somewhat less than a year, from eleven to probably
twelve, in Beldingsville, Vermont. The second is in two parts, one
set a year and a half later in Boston, the other picking up seven
years later in Beldingsville. The Boston half redeems itself some
with Porter showing her "Game" up against slum poverty, but the
Beldingsville half is embarrassingly full of marriages.

Even so, my November belief is confirmed: I do prefer the regular
kind of Pollyanna to Brust's reversed kind.

My copy of <Pollyanna> was published as a "Glad Book®", and lists
dozens of sequels. The copy of <Pollyanna Grows Up> I borrowed
snippily notes that only one of those sequels (that is, itself) was
actually written by Porter, and claims that only Porter's two volumes
have any merit. Well, the Oz books written by people other than L.
Frank Baum stand as obvious counter-examples to such claims, but to be
honest, I don't like Pollyanna nearly *enough* to want to investigate
her series further.

Johanna Spyri
* (June) <Heidi>, German, 1880-1881

Wow. I'm glad <Betsy-Tacy> didn't discourage me from buying this one
at a charity sale in May.

I bought a 1981 edition, in a "new translation" by M. Rosenbaum,
illustrated by Pelagie Doane (reasonably well, though in her colour
frontispiece she gets hair colours wrong), and published by the
religious publisher Collins, which saw fit to advertise on the back
inside flap two sequels, <Heidi Grows Up> and <Heidi's Children>. I
had bought my copy of <Pollyanna> not much earlier, and was put out to
find that while I could get that book's sequel from the public
library, these sequels to <Heidi> were nowhere in sight. As the weeks
went on, first the titles and then the number faded, and all I
remembered was "<Heidi>'s missing sequel".

Rather later, I was hunting around Project Gutenberg (because the
<North & South> miniseries had interested me in Elizabeth Gaskell),
eventually remembered Spyri, and lo! things turned out to be more
complicated. Johanna Spyri didn't write <Heidi Grows Up> or <Heidi's
Children> - a translator of <Heidi>, one Charles Tritten, did. But
she *did* write *two* books about Heidi. And they actually contrast
pretty sharply. <Heidis Lehr- und Wanderjahre>, 1880, is extremely
sweet and Christian (that's a warning to some), a story about a little
girl who's been shunted around quite a bit, and how she finds a nearly
perfect home with her hermit grandfather, halfway up a mountain in (I
think) northern Graubunden, in eastern Switzerland. Her aunt then
takes her from there for a great opportunity in Frankfurt - where
Heidi pines to go back home. So there are two conflicts here - the
grandfather's misanthropy, and Heidi's homesickness. These main
conflicts are supplemented by some difficult characters (I was tempted
to believe one the original source for the English word "rotten"!).
But in the much shorter sequel, <Heidi kann brauchen, was es gelernt
hat> ("es" ?), 1881, though one difficult character persists, there
isn't much other conflict; this makes the sweetness and Christianity
somewhat harder to take, and much of the book reads essentially as an
ad for tourism to the Swiss Alps.

ANYWAY, since we're seeing one pattern after another familiar from
other kids' classics here, one more will hardly be a surprise. In
translation, these two books are consistently merged into one, like
the two volumes of <Little Women> ! For what it's worth, the division
is between chapters fourteen and fifteen (in this translation, between
"The Bells Ring Out" and "Preparations for a Journey"). And this is
why I couldn't find "<Heidi>'s missing sequel": it was right under my
nose.

(Meanwhile, I'm curious about Tritten's sequels, but I hope to resist
the curiosity. The laws of children's books make it perfectly clear
who the father of <Heidi's Children> must be, and in *Spyri*'s books
he's obviously unworthy of her. Indeed, I've since seen the books -
<Heidi Grows Up> from 1938 and <Heidi's Children> from 1939 - and the
second *begins* with an accusation against him. Humph. Tritten makes
claims in a preface to the first that could be read as saying Spyri
had authorised it, but could just as well be read as not saying so, as
if he simultaneously wished to forestall a lawsuit, and to avoid
giving additional grounds for one.)

Movie that would, if a book, fit in this post:

<Flicka>, 2006.

See also, in the fantasy post, <March of the Wooden Soldiers>, 1934,
<The Early Bird and the Worm>, 1936, <Little Tinker>, 1947, <Flea
Circus>, 1953, <Castle in the Sky>, 1986, <The Spiderwick Chronicles>,
2007, and <The Water Horse>, 2007, and despite its PG-13 rating <The
Golden Compass>, 2007; in the science fiction post, <The Invisible
Boy>, 1957, probably <The Thin Man: Robot Client>, 1958, and <the
last mimzy>, 2007; in the Gothics post, <Bridge to Terabithia>, 2006;
in the series post, the Superman shows; and in the re-reading post,
<Skeleton Frolic>, 1937.

Joe Bernstein

unread,
Dec 16, 2008, 2:10:01 AM12/16/08
to
READ FOR THE FIRST TIME: OTHER FICTION

This post's predecessor was posted 19th October 2007, with message-IDs
<ff9bjj$ank$1...@reader1.panix.com> (A through D, and the indices that
follow shortly in this post) and <ff9boa$3u7$1...@reader1.panix.com> (E
through Z, and movies). Obviously, this year's version is split into
*four* parts because it's much, much longer.

See also, in the fantasy post, arguably Cain, not too arguably Link,
and Miller. See also, in the sf post, very arguably Duchamp, Irvine,
and McAllister. See also, in the series post, arguably Flint and
collaborators, and arguably Hope. (I take for granted that straight
alternate history is neither fantasy nor science fiction; I'm not sure
whether I consider it speculative fiction. Flint & co's stuff is way
more speculative than straight alternate history, and one book is
really science fiction, but in general the tone is strictly
realistic. As for Hope, if alternate history can be non-spec-fic,
surely alternate geography can too?) There's also other fiction in
the re-reading post, some without comments, by Austen, Boylan,
Bradshaw, Brontë, Leslie, Scott, and Voigt.

Indices to genres that don't get their own posts follow.

1) Horror discussed in these posts: see, from the fantasy post,
Bailey, probably Irvine, Lindqvist, very arguably Lindsay, Link,
very arguably Meyer, and arguably Alan Moore; from the sf post,
arguably Irvine, and Shelley; from the Gothics post, Lois Duncan,
Falkner, arguably Haig, and arguably Kilgore; and from the series
post, arguably Christopher Moore.

2) Romances discussed in these posts: see, selectively, from the
fantasy post, Guarini, Meyer, John Moore, and arguably Snyder; from
the science fiction post, Bujold, arguably Duchamp, McDonald, and
very arguably Sosnowski; from this post, Burney, Devonshire, Hope,
Intronati, and Saint-Foix (well, but really, *don't* see Saint-Foix
if you can help it); from the series post, Hope; and from the
re-reading post, Austen, arguably Bujold, and Voigt.

3) Mysteries discussed in these posts: see, selectively, from the
fantasy post, Bledsoe, probably Irvine, and arguably each of
Abraham, Brust, Cain, and Alan Moore; from the science fiction
post, arguably each of Irvine, McCarthy, and Nersesian; from the
Gothics post, arguably Kilgore; from the kids' books post, Dixon
and Keene; from this post, arguably Ardagh, Pessl, and, extending
to "crime fiction", Brown, Dunant, and Griffith; and from the
series post, arguably Moira Moore.

4) Historical fiction and alternate history discussed in these posts:
see, from the fantasy post, arguably Alexander, Babbitt, Bailey,
Cain, Hal Duncan, arguably Goethe, Griffis, very arguably Guarini,
Hope, Irvine, Lindsay, Miller, very arguably Alan Moore, Novik, and
Rawlings (but probably not the five "Voyage of the Basset" books,
set *mostly* outside history, by Lee, Windling and Steiber, Smith,
Shetterly, and Zambreno); from the science fiction post, Baker,
Duchamp, Flint and Drake, and Nersesian; from the Gothics post,
Falkner; from the children's books post, Kushner, Magorian, and
Metzger; from this post, Bradshaw, Brockmeier (though only
incidentally, in two short stories), Brown, Burney, arguably de
Grazia, Dumas, Hawthorne, arguably Hope, MacMurray, arguably Pessl,
and Wells; from the series post, Flint and collaborators, and Hope;
and from the re-reading post, Boylan, Bradshaw, Leslie, and Scott.
(As regards Hope, it's true that nothing listed in this post is
actually set meaningfully before its publication date, but several
of the books use alternate geography to accomplish ends very
similar to ones common in both historical fiction *and* alternate
history. Each of the fantasy and series posts does list a book
clearly historical, if still alternate-geographic, in character.)

5) Comedies discussed in these posts: see, from the fantasy post,
Babbitt, Cain, Gray, and John Moore; in the sf post, Baker and
Sheckley; in this post, Ardagh, Aretino, Ariosto, di Filippo,
Intronati, Loos, and Machiavelli; in the series post, Christopher
Moore; and in the re-reading post, Holt; further afield - several
sorts of "comic writing" ? - see also, in the fantasy post, Berger,
Bledsoe, the Foglios, Miller, and What; in the science fiction
post, Nersesian; in this post, Burney and Hope; in the series post,
Moira Moore; and in the re-reading post, Austen, Bujold, Stevermer,
and Voigt.

6) For obvious reasons having to do with spoilers, I won't similarly
list tragedies; note please that such a list could overlap the
"comic writing" above.

7) And while "graphic novel" is a form, not a genre, these posts
discuss graphic novels (or short stories) by, in the fantasy post,
the Foglios and Alan Moore, and in this post, Kelso, Terry Moore,
and (in the appendix) Satrapi.

8) "Script" is another form. I list actual plays attended in their
own sections in the fantasy post (by Allen, Shakespeare, and
Strindberg) and this one (by Shakespeare), after books and before
movies, but scripts read in books include, in the fantasy post,
Guarini, and in this post, Aretino, Ariosto, Intronati,
Machiavelli, and Saint-Foix. (There may be others, included in
collections - I'm pretty sure there was one in a collection by
Elizabeth Bear, in last year's log, that I've only now remembered.
This year, it wouldn't surprise me if there were a short script
somewhere in Brockmeier's collections.)

A. Manette Ansay
* (October and August) <Read This and Tell Me What It Says>, ?1991-
1995, first compiled as such 1995

As with the Doctorow collection in the sf post, and several other
collections below, this one's forematter has less bibliographic
information on the stories than I like. However, it has more such
info than is actually usual in non-genre collections, and I was less
able to supplement it than I'm used to. I can attest that "Silk" was
first published in 1991 and "Sybil" in 1993, and I've seen the issue
of <EPOCH> in which "Neighbor" first appeared: it was volume 44,
issue 2, not issue 3 as the forematter says, and it came out in 1995.

This collection is much less generically diverse than others I read
this year: "Smoke" (the one previously unpublished story, I think)
would by itself go into the Gothics post, being (minimally) a ghost
story; the rest aren't spec-fic in any way. As I read, it felt narrow
in other ways too: I was convinced Ansay's main engine for her
stories was her characters' cluelessness. This may not be fair. It's
true that in story after story she does use a young protagonist or
narrator, never well informed; I count seven such stories out of the
book's fifteen. Her adults' fecklessness, though, seems driven more
often by shock than by ignorance, because Ansay writes few <New
Yorker> stories. In this book, several marriages end (always by the
man walking out), a protagonist dies (I think), and few people emerge
unchanged. Most of the changes are disturbing - we see here a
teenager becoming homeless, another trying to become pregnant, both
deeply unready, and several stories depict steps in a girl's sexual
awakening that in most states would be subject to prosecution; all of
the old women in the book seem to be one step from death. But some of
the changes are, of all strange things, tentatively life-affirming,
and if you want to single those out I wouldn't blame you, so I'll
point you to the title story and the closer, "July".

I bought this book because it was on a discount rack, and I'd heard of
Ansay. More precisely, I'd heard of Ansay for *years*. She lived in
Wisconsin for quite some time, growing up, though she wasn't born
there and hasn't lived there much as an adult; when her novels started
selling in the mid-1990s, the local paper started puffing her up as a
native daughter, a prosist laureate if you will. Well, um. Frankly,
I'm not a bit delighted to advertise this book: it represents my home
region, southeastern Wisconsin (though hardly ever my actual home
*town*, Milwaukee) as home to tons of ignorance and misery, and not
much else. I would guess that the novels that drove the paper's
praise are less troubling, simply because I can't imagine novels built
primarily on feckless ignorance or shock selling as well as Ansay's
did; but I'm in no hurry to read them now.

Philip Ardagh
$ (September) <The Not-So-Very-Nice Goings-On at Victoria Lodge>, 2004

A short story built on a gimmick. Ardagh took a bunch of pictures
from 1891 and 1892 issues of <The Girl's Own Paper> - mostly pretty
conventional, occasionally mildly Romantic - and wove a lurid,
ludicrous tale of a prominent family's persecution out of them. I
found it pretty funny, though some of the reinterpretations of the
images are overly strained. I didn't, after reading, promptly spend
the $1 asked for a remaindered copy, but I may in future.

Pietro Aretino
(August) "The Stablemaster", Italian, 1533

This is the worst of <Five Italian Renaissance Comedies>, a 1978
Penguin volume edited by Bruce Penman, who also translated two of the
plays (but not this one; this is a translation, new in the same
volume, by George Bull). It may be better known by its Italian title,
<Il Marescalco>.

Each of the three plays by "name" authors in the book (the others are
by Ariosto and Machiavelli) is way below its author's reputation.
Since Aretino's is the least of those reputations, well, you do the
math. The titular character is an angry, vulgar man who has just
learned that the duke he serves has decided that he must marry, and
chosen a wife for him. There are strong hints that he self-identifies
as gay, and that his apprentice is his blackmailed lover (no sex, no
professional progress); his apprentice is overjoyed over the marriage,
but the ostensible groom is horrified. Most of the play consists of
him discussing marriage with others, a few of whom defend the
institution - but his part, and usually his interlocutor's too,
consists mostly of attacks on wives. Eventually, the play culminates
in a big practical joke.

Those really in need of a misogyny fix may find it side-splitting.
Various scholars and Aretino enthusiasts will want to read it too.
Everyone else should pass.

(Strangely, I later found that this was one of the three plays from
Penman's volume which Laura Giannetti and Guido Ruggiero had chosen to
*re*-translate in <Five Comedies from the Italian Renaissance>, 2003.
Well, to each their own. In their introduction they apparently
confuse this with a play revealing tender homosexual love, which
bewilders me. Hmmm. OK, thinking about it, if one particular
character was in on the practical joke, and it was understood as
something *other* than a joke, then maybe ... but I'm having trouble
envisioning the implied conclusions in 16th century Italy.

(I suppose I ought to note which plays *not* from Penman's volume
Giannetti and Ruggiero translate; they are <The Comedy of Calandra>,
1513, by Bernardo Dovizida Bibbieno, and the anonymous <The Venetian
Comedy>, c 1535.)

Ludovico Ariosto
(August) "Lena", Italian, 1528

Another of the five Italian Renaissance comedies. Unlike Aretino's,
it's *blatantly* Renaissance, a studied imitation of Terence and
Plautus, who were themselves imitating Menander. (So people who
dislike sitcoms because they're unoriginal should give Menander a bit
more slack than the others, because we don't know him to have been
unoriginal; we who dislike them because they're dull should tolerate
him even less, because *he* didn't have a successful predecessor to
justify his commercial calculations.) In fact, unlike Machiavelli's
play (below, and also a boring copy), Ariosto's actually *quotes*
Terence and Plautus, and gives them explicit credit, improbably enough
placing these lines in servants' mouths.

Well, I'm being a mite unfair here. We have three households. Old
man and son; old man and daughter; old couple. The wife of the latter
is the unhappy mistress of the daughter's father. (Her husband and
she get free rent in return.) Son and daughter are in love. Much of
the action of the play revolves around the son's desperate attempts to
find time alone with the daughter, and of course the play ends with
their projected marriage, but in between, much of the focus is on the
couple - his debts and especially her various attempts to get even
with her lover - and the wife (Lena) is in fact reasonably well
characterised. I would say, surprisingly so, for a time that could
produce an Aretino, but then Boccaccio wrote <The Life of Fiammetta>
around this time, so it's not as big a surprise, perhaps.

Doesn't make the play much more fun to read, though. The
translation's by Guy Williams, new for the book I read it in.

Gillian Bradshaw
(September 2007) <Dark North>, 2007

Bradshaw takes an incident from the <Historia Augusta>'s life of
Septimius Severus, in which an "Ethiopian" gives the emperor an omen
of death during the futile campaigns in Scotland, and turns it into
the story of the first (documented, at least) black man in Britain.
Wajjaj, born somewhere in West Africa but exiled by raiders and by the
vengeance he took on them, has become, at the book's beginning,
Memnon, an ordinary man in a Moorish light cavalry unit, though an
able scout. When his unit comes to Britain in preparation for the
war, his talent gets him the assignment to find their posting and
otherwise prepare; an incident in his travels north starts him on a
dangerous career of imperial notice.

<Island of Ghosts>, 1998, is also set near Hadrian's wall (though much
less north of it); I see occasional reminders of that book's main
characters, but over thirty years separate the stories' settings, and
there are no explicit links. There's more warfare in this book than
in the older one, and more scary imperial politics. Also, where
<Island> is narrated by its aristocratic protagonist, we see Memnon in
tight 3rd person. <Island of Ghosts> is my favourite of Bradshaw's
historical novels, and it's probably unfair to compare this one so
closely to it; I like <Dark North> better, in particular, than
<Alchemy of Fire>, 2004, and it's well worth reading, but not one of
Bradshaw's (many) strongest stories.

Kevin Brockmeier
(October) <Things That Fall from the Sky>, 1997-2002, first compiled
as such 2002

This book, Brockmeier's first, contains eleven stories. Published in
the mainstream, its copyright acknowledgements don't offer the sort of
bibliographic aid spec-fic readers are used to finding in most genre
collections and anthologies, so I'll offer what I can of that aid
here. Five of the stories have no copyright acknowledgements, nor is
there any hint on the Web that they appeared before the book did. Of
the other six, "A Day in the Life of Half of Rumpelstiltskin" appeared
in <Writing on the Edge> 8:2, in 1997, as winner of a prize; the
magazine is actually mostly a trade magazine for writing instructors.
Two years later, "These Hands" appeared in Volume LIII, Number 3 of
<The Georgia Review>. Either late the same year, or early in 2000,
"Apples" appeared in <The Chicago Tribune>, again thanks to an award.
In 2000, "Things That Fall from the Sky" was in #58 of <Crazyhorse>.
In 2001, <McSweeney's> issue 7 included "The Ceiling". And in 2002,
apparently before the book appeared, Brockmeier returned to <The
Georgia Review> with "Space", in Volume LVI, Number 2.

On the Web (URL below), Terri Windling links Brockmeier with Kelly
Link (on whom see the fantasy post) as "interstitial" writers. This
is, I think, in Brockmeier's case, perfectly reasonable.
Mode-technically, I read five of the stories as spec-ficnal, and six
as not, which is why the book is in this post. But all of
Brockmeier's stories breathe the sense of wonder, and none of them
uses genre trappings (indeed, one at least will infuriate if read as
science fiction, a reading it almost encourages). One of the stories
I call not spec-fic offers a scene that enraptured me, in which we
read of a first kiss in the words of a study session on prepositions;
another uses a passage reminiscent of a "Harper's Index" to turn the
story at once tragic and aleatory. One of the stories I call spec-fic
presents itself as a literary study on a nonexistent genre, and is
spec-ficnal thrice over, alt history for the nonexistent culture and
genre, at least meta-fantastic for the genre's contents, and at least
in communion with science fiction through an ending that recalls one
of the most famous of all genre stories. Another story's absolutely
dazzling ending also evokes a science fiction warhorse, but that story
I count as non-spec-fic. Brockmeier is not, as these examples
suggest, all about words - but he isn't primarily about vivid
concreteness either, there's an element of squick to many of his most
sensuous passages, and I finally decided I couldn't quote him without
in some way misrepresenting him. If I had to sum him up in one
sentence, that sentence would be something like this: Kevin
Brockmeier explores human life and emotions, usually other than
romantic love, through lenses of strangeness, of wonder. Because he
uses very little irony, he reads much more like a spec-fic writer than
like a postmodernist, as he does so.

On the Web, you can find Brockmeier listing his fifteen favourite
books; and if you look a bit harder, there's a list of fifty too.
(URLs below.) The fifteen are mostly what you'd expect a magical
realist who works in the mainstream to recommend, though they include
books by J. G. Ballard and Philip Pullman; but the fifty include quite
a few works originally published in the spec-fic market categories (if
mostly their more intellectual parts), by Peter Beagle, Octavia
Butler, John Crowley, Samuel Delany, Kelly Link, Walter Tevis, and
John Wyndham. Brockmeier is in a sense an anti-Vonnegut: having made
his initial splash in the mainstream (he teaches at Iowa! he gets NEA
grants!), he has unashamedly used his relative fame as freedom to
move, not towards the established spec-fic genres, but anyway towards
the freedom many writers can only get within them, and (further)
towards spec-ficnal content.

<http://www.interstitialarts.org/what/featuredBrockmeierLink1.html>,
seen (among other dates) November 24, 2007
<http://www.webdelsol.com/Literary_Dialogues/interview-wds-brockmeier.htm>,
last seen November 24, 2007
<http://earthgoat.blogspot.com/2006/04/kevin-brockmeier-interview.html>,
seen October 13, 2007

(October) <The Truth About Celia>, 2003

Christopher Brooks is, ostensibly, a writer of science fiction and
fantasy, though he's clearly way off at the intellectual end of the
spectrum: he's published two solo novels titled <Metaphysical
Puzzleland> and <The Empty Space>, a trilogy ("The Gate of Horn and
Ivory": <The Mark of Abel>, <The Cult of Beautiful Pain>, and <The
Minutes>), to which a sequel has long been promised, and, believe it
or not, *two* collections (<The Golden Age of Jumping> and <Songs for
Coming Out the Other Side>). Rather improbably given what these
titles imply about his style, he lives on his royalties, and so, when
living with him, do his wife (though at least sometimes she also works
part time) and daughter. His new book, <the truth about Celia>, circa
2007, is his first in ten years, and is not the promised sequel to the
trilogy; instead, it's a collection of eight stories, with an author's
note and an author bio. I read only four of those stories as
spec-ficnal, and they fill fewer than half the pages of the book, so I
would not have classified <the truth about Celia> as fantasy for
purposes of these posts.

But that doesn't matter, because <the truth about Celia> isn't the
book I read; <The Truth About Celia>, Kevin Brockmeier's third book
and first novel for adults, is. <The Truth About Celia> contains the
following: a page for the publisher's logo; a half-title page; a
title page, with copyright page on the back; acknowledgements
including credit for a story from <The Book of the New Sun>; and <the
truth about Celia>. I cannot read <The Truth About Celia> as fantasy;
it is a believable record of how a man deals with an unbearable shock
by writing.

Because, you see, that's what the author's note explains. Celia
Elizabeth Brooks, aged seven, disappeared on March 15, 1997; Brooks
has written stories in an effort to restore her, by remembering her
and by imagining her. The first story vividly depicts from both his
and his daughter's points of view the morning she disappeared. Four
of the others record what happens later in the Brooks family and in
their town. (Brooks's author's note reverses the usual disclaimer:
"their resemblance to real events, places, and people, living or dead,
is as exact as I could make it".) One of those, and the remaining
three, imagine what became of Celia, and these four are the
spec-ficnal stories.

There's a lot of praise for "The Green Children", but I'm a little
perplexed by this; the story tells the old tale well, and with a
twist, but if only because of John Crowley's shadow (and that's
Crowley's *short* fiction on Brockmeier's list above), I don't see it
as extraordinary. Of the spec-ficnal stories in this book, I suppose
"The Telephone", a sort of supernatural story, strikes me as best. In
fact, though, I don't see Brockmeier as so far an especially
interesting *spec-fic writer*: to use an opposition suggested by
David Tate, he generally offers neither extrapolation nor evocation,
except for evocation of our own world. But he is an excellent writer
who is, for readers of spec-fic, extremely congenial, because he
thinks like one of us; and his evocation *of* our own world, and of
ourselves, is often disturbing and frequently superb.

(July) <The View from the Seventh Layer>, probably 2005-2008, first
compiled as such 2008

Again with the bibliographic details. (There's only one previously
unpublished story in this collection.) The only 2005 story in here (I
claim) is the uncharacteristically straightforward "Home Videos", from
<The Georgia Review>, Volume LIX, Number 1. From 2006 we have two
stories from <The Oxford American>, the title story from issue 53, and
"A Fable with Slips of White Paper Spilling from the Pockets" from
issue 55. "Father John Melby and the Ghost of Amy Elizabeth" appeared
in an issue of the same magazine that I haven't been able to see, but
I suspect it's issue 56, and I suspect that issue appeared in 2007.
Definitely from 2007 we have: "A Fable Ending in the Sound of a
Thousand Parakeets", as "Parakeets", in <Granta> 97; "The Lives of the
Philosophers", in <StoryQuarterly Annual 2007: 18 Lies and 3 Truths>;
"The Year of Silence", in <Ecotone> Vol. 2 Issue 2; "A Fable with a
Photograph of a Glass Mobile on the Wall", in <The Darfur Anthology>
(published by Elgin Community College); "The Lady with the Pet
Tribble", from <Five Chapters>, a webzine (URL below); "A Fable
Containing a Reflection the Size of a Match Head in Its Pupil", from
<The Georgia Review>, Volume LXI, Number 4; and "Andrea Is Changing
Her Name", from <Zoetrope>, Vol. 11, No. 3. Finally, "The Human Soul
as a Rube Goldberg Device: A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Story"
appeared in the 2008 annual issue of <Words and Images> (published by
students at the University of Southern Maine).

So I dunno. Brockmeier still mostly flies under the radar of the
<Short Story Index>, and I can't guess whether he wasn't getting
stories published in 2003, 2004, or for the most part the next two
years, or whether he just hasn't wanted those years' stories collected
yet. (But <The Truth About Celia> and <The Brief History of the Dead>
are both, as novels go, remarkably like short story collections, and
the latter certainly does account for one separately-published 2003
story.) I should also note that putting this book into this post
involved me in a bit of inconsistency. Five of the stories are
clearly not spec-fic, versus two fantasies, one science fiction (guess
which), and one that I'd have put into the Gothics post. However,
this omits the much shorter "fable"s entirely. All four of them could
be called fantasy, based on their setups; or you could call one or two
or three fantasy, and one or two or three non-spec-fic, based on their
actual plots. If I called them all fantasy, I'd have six fantasies
versus five "other", and I'd have misclassified the book as judged by
my usual approach; but this would be Wrong.

This was, of the four books by Brockmeier I've now read, the most
difficult for me to appreciate. The title story is essentially
plotless, and several of the fables (as well as "The Year of Silence",
which is essentially a longer fable) skimp on plot. At the other
extreme there's "The Human Soul", which errs as a "Choose Your Own
Adventure" story precisely by over-plotting (as some reviewers online
have noted, a story of this kind isn't supposed to have only one
ending; but the problem of over-determination doesn't end there [a]).
On the other hand, "Home Videos" and "Father John Melby" are Just Good
Stories (one "other", one fantasy), and "The Air Is Full of Little
Holes", the previously unpublished story, is a surprising,
surprisingly good demonstration that Brockmeier can break out of his
own rut. (It's also the other story, besides "The Green Children",
that I consider obviously historical in character.)

Finally, there's that rut itself. I'm leaving intact my comments on
his style above, but it occurs to me now that the word "lenses" is the
best-chosen of that set of words. Brockmeier is masterful at evoking
emotions or states of mind that we rarely contemplate and certainly
don't often see addressed in fiction, and he can achieve truly
glittering prose in this; I may, for example, complain about the
over-determined ending of "The Human Soul", but the many paths *to*
that ending contain a wealth of insights and gorgeous images. This
book has sparked something of a backlash among the reviewers I read on
the Web, and they have a point; but Brockmeier remains often
brilliant, and in any event a superb writer for the mind's eye.

[a] - One one piece of paper, I mapped a real "Choose Your Own
Adventure" story, Ellen Kushner's <Statue of Liberty Adventure>
discussed in the kids' books post, and "The Human Soul". The real one
has two fundamentally separate paths following the first choice, and
these paths lead, one to nine, the other to eleven, different endings,
depending on subsequent choices. While there's an element of chance
to these endings, there's also a moral element - doing the Right Thing
often (though not always!) leads to a better outcome for the
reader/player. On the paths *to* the endings, there are short
decision trees and long ones - you can reach an ending in as few as
three choices or as many as nine. One choice turns out to be
meaningless, and there are other pages you can reach from more than
one place. The paths vary widely in their contents, giving the
impression that your choices shape not only your own (character's)
life, but also the world you're reading about.
"The Human Soul" differs in most respects. Its decision tree is
purely binary; each page (two pages in this edition) ends with two
choices, leading to different pages, so there's one page in the first
level, two in the second, and so on to sixteen in the fourth - where
the pattern breaks, because each of those sixteen pages leads to the
same ending page. Obviously, your choices don't affect the outcome
per se; there's at least one choice that affects, perhaps, the
happiness of that outcome, and there the Right Thing turns out to be
to humble yourself. All trees are the same length; no choices are
meaningless, and only the ending can be reached from more than one
place. And, crucially, you see enough of the world beyond your
choices that you can be quite sure that it is trucking on more or less
indifferent to you - that the same people will drive the same places,
make the same phone calls, and so forth regardless of what you choose
in the story. Many of these differences can undoubtedly be defended
as making the story more realistic. This defense gets some power from
what the ending actually is - but not, actually, as much power as
might appear; that particular ending is not as deterministic as
Brockmeier seems to think it is, is not, as far as I know, something
that happens like clockwork, indifferent to one's own actions.

<http://www.fivechapters.com/>, seen (for the second time) September
15, 2008

Joe David Brown
(December-January) <Addie Pray>, probably better known as (and in its
current edition titled) <Paper Moon>, 1971

<Paper Moon>, the movie, is a moderately faithful adaptation of the
first half or so of this book, but though the changes are few, they
turn it into something rather different all the same. There is, in
the book, no such scene as the one where Tatum O'Neal's character
comes to an understanding with Miss Trixie Delight; the movie's entire
ending is new (from the state line on); and most importantly, where in
the movie Addie is nearly a black box, routinely stone-faced, in the
book, she's not only the titular protagonist, but the narrator
(writing her memoirs, it seems), and, really, the heroine. (This
change may be partly because Miss O'Neal was, when the movie was made,
rather younger than the character as Brown wrote her.)

The settings are another change: Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, and
Louisiana. The book's earliest scenes occur in 1928, but it mostly
covers a year, more or less, ending in August 1935, when Addie is
twelve or thirteen. As in the movie, Addie, left orphaned by her
"fast" mother, is taken up by con man Moses Pray, probably her father;
she finds his activities fascinating, and becomes his partner.
However, the half book omitted shows them moving into increasingly
refined cons, up the social scale, culminating in a complicated set of
inheritance swindles involving millionaires. That final bit of
"business" also involves Addie in learning to love others. The upshot
is that this isn't the masterpiece of Depression realism the movie is,
but rather an often cheery and ultimately heartwarming tale. Strange
but true: a major Hollywood movie that's far less Hollywood than the
book it's based on.

Andrew Plotkin

unread,
Dec 16, 2008, 2:10:20 AM12/16/08
to
Here, Joe Bernstein <j...@sfbooks.com> wrote:

> Carol Berg


>
> I got interested in Berg because she kept praising books I respected.
> If our opinions of, say, Anne McCaffrey are lowered by her promiscuous
> blurbing of garbage, then it's only fair to look in the other
> direction as well. I find Berg's use of relatively obscure sources
> refreshing, and she does politics, characters, and the other
> ingredients of standard commercial fantasy unusually well, but these
> books aren't extraordinary. I'll have to read more of her books to
> find the link between her own writing and the daring writing she
> praises. Seems like a good thing to me.

I liked that trilogy, and I think she's slowly improving over time.
Irregularly, though. (She spent a lot of time on a quadrilogy of which
I didn't see why the last three books were needed.)

But her most recent two-logy, _Flesh and Spirit_ and _Breath and
Bone_, were very solid work.

--Z

--
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*

Joe Bernstein

unread,
Dec 16, 2008, 2:25:49 AM12/16/08
to
READ FOR THE FIRST TIME: OTHER FICTION

Frances Burney d'Arblay

An introductory note.

1) None of what I say about Burney and her novels is really on-topic,
and points of contact with on-topic matters are few, though non-zero.
If you just want to skip the whole thing, do a find on "de Grazia".

2) I discuss all four [b] of Burney's surviving novels in this post
even though, due to severe and unnecessary logistical difficulties, I
finished the fourth several days past this post's ending date.

3) All four novels were published anonymously or at least
pseudo-anonymously. <Evelina> was truly anonymous; it was some months
before Burney's own father, with whom she still lived at the time,
discovered the identity of this bestseller's author. <Cecilia>,
<Camilla>, and <The Wanderer> appeared as by "the author of
<Evelina>". Burney married in 1793, so when <Camilla> and <The
Wanderer> came out, she was, socially, Madame d'Arblay (sometimes
misspelt Madame D'Arblay); <Camilla> has a dedication signed "F.
d'Arblay", while <The Wanderer>'s is signed "F. B. d'Arblay".
References to her as an author, until around 1900, were pretty
consistently either to Frances Burney or to Mme. d'Arblay. But she
was known within her family as Fanny, and as her journals were
published, starting soon after her 1840 death, they began to
overshadow her novels (let alone her plays, most of which were never
acted before about 1990). By 1900, her novels were utterly out of
critical fashion, and the journal name, "Fanny Burney", was the name
by which she was known to scholars at all; as shown in the following
entries, which use the names offered by the copies I read, "Fanny
Burney" is still the name under which her books often appear.
Feminists are quite right to object.
Ironically, although Burney had no reason to expect that her own
name would become a case in point, true names are a ***MAJOR*** issue
in *three* of the four books.
(Trivially, if you're looking for Burney in a library, be prepared
to look under all of B, D, and A; librarians are totally whimsical in
shelving her, and at some libraries, her books are actually split up,
shelved under multiple names.)

4) Burney may well be the most important English novelist of the
period I've seen called "the desert between Smollett and Austen";
she's certainly the novelist Austen herself most publicly praised.
(The title <Pride and Prejudice> is a phrase emphasised in <Cecilia>'s
ending; two of the three books Austen names when defending novels in
<Northanger Abbey> are <Cecilia> and <Camilla>.) The link to Austen
unfortunately has thus dominated critical approaches to her; largely
on the strength of <Evelina>, her first published book, Burney is
treated as a "comic novelist", or a "Georgian satirist", and her later
novels understood as a successive falling off from what is alleged to
be her sole claim to our attention. Partly because I'm not persuaded
that even <Evelina> is *that* comic, I think this is preposterous
bosh, and I don't build the following around it. (Note that thinking
of Burney as "Fanny" makes it easy to think of her as a cozy comedian,
which no sane reader of all of her novels would do; compare the "Jane"
so beloved of Austenites. I never hear Dickens referred to as
"Charlie".)
I see Burney's novels largely in a series of oppositions to each
other - a sort of quadrilateral in which <Cecilia> is usually opposite
<Camilla>, and <Evelina> <The Wanderer>. Last year, I cut a lot of
writing about Austen in a somewhat similar vein out of the posted log,
and offered it by e-mail to anyone interested; nobody was. This year,
while I haven't explored Burney scholarship, I can say with some
confidence that the casual reader looking for information in reference
books, online, or in introductions to the books is *not* going to find
most of the following in those places. So while my ideas may be as
unsound as they are original, at any rate, I think it worth putting
them forward.
I also think Burney is much of the answer to a decided
chronological oddity in the usual histories of English literature.
Goethe's <Sorrows of Young Werther> appeared in 1774. I suspect most
people, if asked to name a Romantic novel in English, would pick Emily
Brontë's <Wuthering Heights> - which appeared in 1847. What's wrong
with this picture? In the sf post I note that <Frankenstein>, 1818,
is thoroughly Romantic, and of course many of the other Gothics would
qualify, but are there no Romantic novels of the *first* rank in
English until a full lifetime after Goethe, and half a lifetime after
the great English Romantic poets? Well, Burney doesn't fill this
hole, not quite; her most Romantic novel isn't really of the first
rank, and her best isn't fully Romantic. But returning her to the
history of the English novel does at least make the whole picture
somewhat more plausible. And note that *both* of Shelley's own
parents have been proven to be directly influenced, in their own novel
writing, by <Cecilia>: none of this long discussion is really
on-topic here, but Burney is still almost literally part of science
fiction's ancestry.

[b] Apparently, a book appeared in 1800 in Ireland claiming to be by
"the author of <Evelina>", and is included as Burney's, with a
statement that the attribution is doubtful, in some collections on
microfiche (or microform, or microwhatever). The title was
<Harcourt>. Unfortunately, since Burney knew a General Harcourt and
her diary talks about him - enough so that someone has seen fit to
publish a book consisting solely of those passages - it's impossible
to learn anything significant about this book and its alleged
relationship to Burney from the Web; nor do several biographies
mention it in any way. (I don't have access to Joseph A. Grau's 1981
<Fanny Burney: An Annotated Bibliography>, which might have pointed
me at something.) It's possible that Burney, whose life at the time
was rather complicated, never even knew this book existed. I hope to
read it by next year.

Fanny Burney
* (September) <Evelina>, 1778

As I just said, <Evelina, or, The History of a Young Lady's Entrance
into the World>, Burney's second novel, is usually understood as a
comedy, a satire. Above I claim this is nonsense, but that's too
strong. Burney certainly was a witty woman, though shy; she models
Evelina on herself, and although this is an epistolary novel, all the
narration is in Evelina's hands, so we do get a fair number of sharp
jokes here.

But there's more going on than that. Burney is interested in
varieties of character, and like Dickens (whom, in general, she
resembles much more than she does Austen), she has a weakness for the
grotesque. Much of what's called comedy in <Evelina> consists of
these grotesques revealing themselves; one of the most prominent,
Evelina's grandmother, is appallingly and uninterestingly rude, while
that character's most consistent opponent, the father of Evelina's
best friend, is given to practical jokes that nowadays, taken
together, would land him in prison for upwards of a decade.
Admittedly one of the "comic" characters, an inveterately sarcastic
woman who shows up in the third volume, really is funny, but I'm not
convinced the rest is primarily meant to make one laugh.

There's also something else going on in <Evelina>: the exploding of
Awful Warnings. Evelina is beautiful, witty, lucky, diffident,
principled, and naïve, and these qualities keep landing her in trouble
- but though these troubles keep raising the tension, they never
actually bear out their accustomed weight. Concretely, things Evelina
comes close to but does not actually experience include: rape and
seduction; elopement and abduction; incest; suicide; prostitution; and
I'm sure I've forgotten a few. In a sense, the book as a whole is a
declaration in the face of contemporary (and succeeding decades')
English literature: "Look, see, it is *so* possible for a girl - even
one afflicted with beauty - to reach adulthood without disaster! Not
every woman dies at age nineteen of a broken heart or violated hymen!"
I think it would take a reader incapable of empathy to read Evelina's
brushes with fate as nothing but comedy, which makes me wonder about
all those critics, but they do eventually start to lose their impact;
by the book's end I was imagining the Awful Warnings as huge,
terrifying ghosts in the sky - kind of like the balloons in parades,
or those weird gigantic creatures in <Mirrormask> - scary but
incapable of actual harm.

Above I called <Evelina> Burney's second novel, and this relates to
the Awful Warnings thing. See, Burney wasn't just faulting other
writers; she had, herself, *already written* <The History of Caroline
Evelyn>, a conventional novel of seduction and abandonment. She burnt
it in 1767, on her fifteenth (!) birthday; she summarises its plot in
Letter II of Volume I of <Evelina>, because, you see, Caroline Evelyn
was Evelina's mother, and <Evelina> is, no joke, a sequel to a lost
book. So a few characters from <Caroline Evelyn> erupt into <Evelina>
with their quasi-Gothic qualities intact; this makes them look very
odd indeed in Evelina's witty, fundamentally Classical tale. This may
be a flaw; some other things are certainly flaws. A significant chunk
of the plot is driven by a coincidence; a crucial late development
would've been much easier to swallow with even a hint of
foreshadowing; and it's pretty remarkable that the perfect man for
Evelina should be the second man she meets in London. Burney never
stopped playing with mixtures of genres, but she did learn to plot
better.

Cathy Decker has a wonderful page on "British Women's Novels: A
Reading List, 1775 - 1818" (URL below; its links are now sadly
outdated, but the page itself worth a great deal). She also, in
discussing <Evelina>, focuses on the heroine: "a passive aggressive
young woman who is trapped in a society that gives her no-win,
double-bind rules about life. Evelina is a real woman; at time[s] she
is a sweet girl, a snob, a catty teenager, a craven coward, an
innocent victim in a frightening world of rapists and prostitutes, a
clever commentator on a crazy society ... "

The Oxford edition I read includes two frontispieces from the 4th
edition of 1779; I've been unable to learn the artist's name. The
notes (by editor Edward Bloom and his wife Lillian Bloom) are adequate
though usually uninspired; Edward Bloom's introduction is a type case
of how a critic can go wrong by focusing on "Fanny" (which really is
how he refers to her), and, by presenting the book as a cheerful comic
romp, left me radically unprepared to read it.

<http://locutus.ucr.edu/~cathy/womw.html>, seen September 20, 2008

Frances Burney
* (September) <Cecilia>, 1782

Wow.

Critics of the <Evelina> persuasion complain about <Cecilia> because
the narrator isn't the light, witty character Austen used, but a
gloomily omniscient being with moralistic tendencies. In other words,
a Dickens narrator. Considering that Austen herself didn't object to
Burney's narrator, I sure don't know why the critics make this
complaint - are they claiming that a young man like Dickens can pose
as omniscient, but not a young woman like Burney? Or are they just
pissed off because Burney's narrators aren't as witty as Burney
herself, or as Evelina?

That said, the critics are right when they say <Cecilia> is the best
of Burney's three *extremely long* non-epistolary novels; it is in
fact her best novel, period. Though <Cecilia> appeared a day before
her thirtieth birthday, she was still living at home, and still
fundamentally writing for writing's sake, when she wrote it; in
contrast, both <Camilla> and <The Wanderer> were inspired largely by
her need for money, and I'm afraid this shows.

The full title is <Cecilia, or, Memoirs of an Heiress>. Where Evelina
Anville entered the world at sixteen, unacknowledged by her father
and, by Society standards, poor, naïve, shy, and witty - Cecilia
Beverley enters the world at twenty, heir to both her father and her
uncle and fabulously rich (though she doesn't control that money,
because not yet of age), principled, self-assured, serious, and
decisive, though *occasionally* briefly naïve. However, where Evelina
moved through a Classical world whose dangers all turned out illusory,
Cecilia is, instead, a fully Classical heroine *in a fully Romantic
world*. In her book we have: a man bent on his own doom, a starving
poet, a crumbling edifice, a scheming villain, multiple duels, no
fewer than *three* inadequate guardians (one of whom sins profoundly
by commission, and another by omission), and plenty of love at first
sight. We also have love leading to sickness unto death, and to
despair unto madness. Oh, and since Cecilia is rich, we *also* have
any number of ways, both noble and base, to separate a woman from her
money.

The most obvious difference between Burney and Dickens is that
Burney's fiction is always Society fiction. Even when her heroines
become acquainted with lower classes - as Cecilia does, and as the
heroine of <The Wanderer> does on a *much* wider scale - they never
fully enter into sympathy with the people they meet; there is no
Lizzie Hexam in Burney's writing, though <Cecilia> does give us,
across a wide gap *within* the gentry, the charming Henrietta
Belfield. (That said, what I experience as <Cecilia>'s biggest flaw,
other than some 'comic' longueurs built around the recurring theme
that Society interferes with all serious purposes, is the way, near
the book's ending, Cecilia does grave harm to a lot of people in the
lower classes and, despite her genuine commitment to charity, never
even notices. This is a spoiler; anyone who's read the book and
doesn't get this, e-mail me.) So perhaps I can best describe
<Cecilia> by comparing it to what Ayn Rand said about Dostoievski:
Rand said his writing resembled a tour of Hell, given by a powerful
guide, and I remember that as suggesting that the guide (the author)
is your source of safety. <Cecilia> is a tour of the Hell that
underlies Austen's cozier settings, and the heroine herself, though
often beset, is in her steadfast morality your powerful guide, your
source of safety.

Cathy Decker again: "This is one of the greatest novels ever
written". Decker admits, on the page I've mentioned, hostility to
most modern writing, so she's unfairly handicapping most of the
competition. But <Cecilia> certainly *is* a great novel, and in
itself a towering refutation of the "desert" I mentioned above.

Fanny Burney
* (September) <Camilla>, 1796

OK, so I'm saying Burney's novels run by opposites, and <Camilla> is
the opposite of <Cecilia>. Here's what I mean by that:

First of all, Camilla Tyrold is the first of Burney's heroines who
*isn't* staggeringly beautiful, who doesn't outshine everyone she
meets. She isn't actually ugly (though one of her sisters is, and
Burney tries hard to write of this character sympathetically,
succeeding enough that I actually ended up caring about Eugenia Tyrold
more than about Camilla ...) - but she's herself outshone by her
cousin, and by some of the women she meets.

She also isn't rich, though a combination of a complicated family
history and a prankish brother leads to a lot of people (particularly
fortune-hunting men) *thinking* she is. She isn't as strongly
principled as Evelina or Cecilia; unlike them, she several times acts
in ways she knows, or anyway can fairly easily figure out, are wrong.
She's somewhat younger than Cecilia, and between inexperience and
character, much more like Evelina than either is like Cecilia. (Full
title: <Camilla, or, A Picture of Youth>.)

She isn't isolated, the way Evelina and, moreso, Cecilia are. She has
two parents and an uncle, all living and all loving; she also has
several cousins, two sisters, and a brother. Most of the people she
spends time with are people with links to her family or neighbourhood.
In this respect - and in the fact that London is a relatively minor
setting in this book - <Camilla> is the most Austen-like of Burney's
books; it's certainly the easiest to imagine re-reading for comfort,
the coziest of the set.

But this would be a mistake to buy too whole-heartedly, because the
*fundamental* way <Camilla> is opposite <Cecilia> is that in her
Classical setting - a clergyman father, a wholesome country lifestyle,
an extremely annoying prig of a beloved - Camilla is a fully Romantic
heroine. She privileges impulse, emotion, and beauty above all else.
When she's happy she lights up the sky; when she's sad she darkens the
world. As the plot proceeds, and as her own mistakes, ramified by the
machinations of the bad men and women around her, push her into ever
more precarious situations, all resemblance to Austen comes to an end;
no Austen heroine ever comes *near* the levels of despair Camilla
Tyrold attains. (Marianne Dashwood gets within a hundred miles or
so.)

Burney apparently complained that <Cecilia> had been rushed to press
still needing cuts. I haven't heard of similar complaints re the
later novels, but each has, like <Cecilia>, an overdone motif. In
<Cecilia> it's clueless Society folks getting in the way of all
serious purposes, essentially setting, if you will, overdrawn. In
<Camilla>'s case the overdone motif is unfortunately the ostensible
engine of the *plot*: the endless misunderstandings between Camilla
and her (obnoxious) beloved. If you're prepared to deal with
*hundreds* of pages that include that sort of thing, though, most
everything else in <Camilla> is *well* worth reading.

I read it in the version offered by "A Celebration of Women Writers",
URL below.

<http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/burney/camilla/camilla.html>,
seen September 12, 2008

<DIGRESSION TITLE="The fates of bad men">In both <Cecilia> and
<Camilla>, a character important to the heroine extorts money from her
by threatening to kill himself if she refuses. Indeed, in <Camilla> a
worse (though similarly motivated) extortion is practised on a woman
other than the heroine (not *all* of Camilla Tyrold's setting is
Classical!). In both novels, and to a lesser extent <Evelina>, bad
men on a lesser scale abound. A bad man is not merely a flawed man -
I don't embrace in the type, say, Mr. Collins from <Pride and
Prejudice>, or even Sir Walter Elliot from <Persuasion> - but one
whose behaviour shows that he either lacks principles altogether, or
is expert in ignoring their dictates; who wantonly harms those,
especially women and people lower in the social scale, with whom he
deals. A bad man seems somewhat solipsistic: other people's
existence only matters to him insofar as he can perceive their
affecting his interests. (And he's often pretty stupid as to what he
perceives.) In Burney's first three (surviving) novels, bad men of
this sort are the most obtrusive, and sometimes even the dominant,
element of the setting. (Each novel also has bad women - Burney is no
man-hater - but these do less harm, because less free to do it.)
Burney doesn't deal very much in fates: though <Cecilia> has a bit
of wrap-up on the final pages, and <Camilla> and <The Wanderer> a bit
more, basically the action takes place in each book over a matter of
months or at most (<Cecilia>) a couple of years, and everything
afterward is pretty vague. As a general rule, though, Burney's bad
men seem unlikely to fare well, and bad men grown old seem to be
unhappy; of the three extortionists I mentioned, two die more or less
onstage.
(It would be a spoiler to say much about bad men in <The Wanderer>,
but they're definitely less prominent; the worst of them doesn't even
appear until the book is well under way, and his fate, though told, is
kept offstage. In her final novel, Burney is a *lot* more concerned
with bad women.)
Austen, being lighter in general, is lighter here too; her bad men
are generally less bad, less doomed, or both. They tend to appear
mainly as competitors with the heroes for her heroines' hands; only in
<Mansfield Park> - Austen's most Burney-like novel - do we get a
gallery of bad men comparable to those in Burney's first three novels.
Notably, though, while each of those has a fairly mild fate foretold,
those fates vary pretty widely. In Austen, we seem not to meet bad
men grown old (but consider, offstage, the Admiral who helped raise
the Crawfords); and of her younger bad men who fail to reform, we hear
little more.
With the Brontës the fates of bad men really come into prominence.
I don't remember Charlotte Brontë's later novels well, but have the
impression that none of them really embraces a span of years in any
man's life, or much features bad men. (Bad men don't figure in the
Gaskell stories listed below, for that matter.) In contrast, the
novels for which each Brontë sister is best known *do* each cover a
span of years in a man's life, and each centrally features at least
one bad man. Again, my memory for <Wuthering Heights> is poor, but
I'm fairly sure its bad man's misanthropic, miserable fate is
everything a moralist could wish (if Emily Brontë's own skill in
rendering him an object of some sympathy is decidedly not!). In <Jane
Eyre> Charlotte Brontë gives us a man bad in his youth who *has*
reformed, and although he actually attempts onstage, during the book's
main action, a stereotypically Bad 18th century sort of action, all in
all, he represents a rather more hopeful fate than previous novelists
seem to have imagined. Finally, in <The Tenant of Wildfell Hall>,
Anne Brontë focuses on bad men, and shows over nearly a decade of
foreground and flashback action, and a couple more decades of
retrospect, their fates: of the main four, two die, one onstage and
bitter; two reform, at least to some extent, and live.
The "bad man", as I've defined him, can only exist in a social
setting with at least some form of aristocracy. Isolated as a member
of royalty, or merged with the commons, he can only be understood (and
so turned into a bad boy, that far more sympathetic figure of romance)
or not (and so turned into a sociopath, that villain common to many
genres). As a "gentleman", or a member of the village's first family,
or what have you, he is instead looked up to, he remains acceptable to
a numerous society for reasons unrelated to his behaviour, his very
misdeeds rely crucially on his own understanding of his social rôle;
the question whether he'd be capable, shorn of position, of becoming
human is left unresolved.
So it's unsurprising that modern fiction tends not to do bad men.
I find them from shortly before Burney, in Devonshire's novel below,
and from shortly after, in Mary Shelley: Victor Frankenstein may not
precisely be a bad man, but he's pretty close, and in a book where he
wasn't a narrator, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Later
in the nineteenth century, Anthony Hope uses bad men a fair amount as
villains, in his adventures set outside England (Rupert of Hentzau is
the bad man at his best), but doesn't try to present them in his
Society novels as women writers had a century earlier; thus the sheer
element of shock Burney achieves, in having someone near and dear to
her heroine turn into a monster, is lost. It would be a spoiler to
talk about these bad men's fates, but suffice that none of the three
writers gets original. Novelists like Elizabeth Bowen and Stella
Gibbons, though still writing about people notionally gentry, no
longer use the bad man at all.
And I may have an explanation for this, albeit it relies on books
read well after this post's year ended. It should have come to me in
October, when I read <Elsie Dinsmore>, 1876; but at least I wasn't
blind enough to miss the much clearer statement of the issue in
<Little Lord Fauntleroy>, 1886, when I re-read that book in November.
Nina Baym, mentioned in the fantasy post as author of a book on an
American genre she calls "woman's fiction", at the end of her
thus-titled book treats Louisa May Alcott's <Little Women>, 1868-1869,
as that genre's culmination and downfall, because while it was far
better literature than any previous example of the genre, it also
transformed it from material for adult readers into the stuff of a
children's book. Well. Elsie Dinsmore's father may not be a bad man,
though many of his actions are bad, but *his* father, and some of his
siblings, certainly *are* bad men. (And women.) And Frances Hodgson
Burnett is at inexhaustible pains to assure us of Lord Fauntleroy's
grandfather's badness. Indeed, though she details hardly anything of
his bad *actions*, except as regards his sons, she defines his
character in precisely the sort of terms I've used above. So perhaps
the decline and fall of bad men in modern fiction isn't just because
of the decline of the aristocracy; perhaps it's also because, just as
"trials and triumph" came to seem old-fashioned when it became
material for girls, so bad men, rendered more or less easy to
humanise, came to be seen as nothing but fodder for children's
bestsellers, and so not fit difficulties for an adult book.
(Well, OK; I grant that bad men, or something like them, seem
pretty prominent in several down-market genres around the turn of the
century too - as I understand it, they're traditional villains in
Westerns. This would, I take it, have a similar effect to their
starring in children's books.)
Anyway, as for recent fiction? Several of Nicola Griffith's
villains would like to be bad men, and conceive of themselves as
aristocrats, but sorry, they aren't aristocrats, and are mere
sociopaths. You would think fantasy and science fiction, able to
reverse the levelling of the twentieth century, would do better, and
to some extent they do - though writers as willing as Burney or Anne
Brontë to shock remain thin on the ground. (For example, Sherwood
Smith is obviously clear on the concept, but she sets up her plot so
as to prevent herself from using it much. George R. R. Martin does
more so: it's no accident that Jaime Lannister becomes a POV only as
he's beginning to lose his bad-ness, nor, I think, that his narrators
rarely have low enough social status to experience bad men at their
worst. Arya's and Sansa's stories do show us some bad men in action.)
Catherynne Valente in <The Grass-Cutting Sword> makes a bad man her
narrator, which is a neat trick; but he is also a god, a status to
which the bad men in Kage Baker's <The Anvil of the World> approach.
Molly Cochran's <The Broken Sword> foregrounds a bad man as villain,
but also confers apotheosis on him. In contrast, Sandra McDonald has
a generous supply of them relying on military rank to make them
aristocrats - but she's too realistic to let them get away with it
indefinitely.
So, strangely enough, it's male writers who in my recent reading
have come closest to Burney's approach to this concept. Hal Duncan in
his Book of All Hours sympathises with his worst narrator a bit too
much to make him work as a bad man, but he's built on the entire
history of the type. Roderick Townley's bad men in <The Great Good
Thing> are, as befits a kid's book, lightly sketched. Patrick
Rothfuss has at least one in <The Name of the Wind>, but I'm not sure
he isn't headed for worse; in the meantime, he isn't allowed full
shock value, being Our Hero's enemy from day one. Finally, and most
significantly, Jay Lake in <Trial of Flowers> takes the concept
*seriously*, using his intricate social structure to present at least
one, perhaps three examples *as POVs*, and using the sheer shock which
their *not* quite unthinking conformity to social rôles provides, as a
driving force in his effort to show their redemption.</DIGRESSION>

Frances Burney
o (September) <The Wanderer>, 1814, started

I started this book with the online "preview" offered by Google Books
of the (now out of print) Oxford World's Classics edition of 2001,
which I misunderstood as including the entire actual text of the
novel. (It doesn't.) I continued with the 1988 Pandora Press edition
owned by the University of Washington's Odegaard Library. Finally,
and only after this post's year had ended, I found and read the full
e-text offered by "Blackmask Online" (URL below). I have since done
what I could to publicise the latter, so others (and there are others
- a graduate student in Alaska was desperately advertising on
Craigslist for a copy while I was looking) seeking Burney's most
obscure novel can find it.

The setup of <The Wanderer> is clearly an antithesis to <Camilla>'s:
Our Heroine arrives in England destitute, alone, and determinedly
nameless, unable to avail herself of any "protection" of family or
friends. Protection is a crucial element of what Burney deals with in
this book: the "Incognita" faces all sorts of the kinds of hazard
Evelina narrowly avoids, and faces them precisely because she lacks
that "protection" that always seems so very odd when mentioned by
Austen. I mean, is there anyone out there who found the stagecoach
ride towards the end of <Northanger Abbey> even remotely as scary as
the characters did? Well, this book - actually written *after*
<Northanger Abbey> - explains why it scared them.

But to the modern reader the most interesting aspect of the
"Incognita"'s situation is that she has to find the means to survive:
unlike most heroines of old novels, she can't take her food for
granted. At different points in the book, she's a guest in various
gentry houses, a harp teacher, a performer, a shop assistant, a
seamstress, a farm girl ... Burney herself grew up in the aspiring
middle class, by which I mean her own father, for example, had some of
the difficulties her heroine here has as a harp teacher; she has no
illusions about whether it's better to belong to the gentry or the
working classes, and (to judge by Dickens not much later) she probably
snobbishly exaggerates the awfulness of working classes' lives. All
the same, it's worth remembering that her focus here is on a *woman*
making her way, and she's a woman herself: the novel fully lives up
to its subtitle: <The Wanderer, or, Female Difficulties>.

Unfortunately, it lives up to that subtitle in other ways. Cast
adrift as she is, the "Incognita" is particularly dependent on female
patronage, and Burney has a field day here showing that women, where
they have power, can be just as bad as men can. But she no longer has
her *own* power, to make her grotesques as convincing as she had in
<Cecilia> and <Camilla>, and her "harpies" of old women, or especially
her harsh portrayal of the book's explicit feminist, whose new-fangled
ideas also include reverence for suicide, elicited more than a little
wincing from me. This is Burney's most feminist book, but that's
because it so pitilessly exposes the conditions under which women
lived, not because it advocates any remedy, or portrays women
particularly favourably.

If that's a flaw, it is, I suppose, an ideological one; unfortunately,
<The Wanderer> also has purely æsthetic flaws. Where <Evelina> relies
harmfully on one coincidence, <Cecilia> escapes the problem entirely,
and <Camilla> has only a few, usually explicable by reference to the
smallness of its characters' world - <The Wanderer> has bunches, some
of which, especially in the dénouement, surpass all plausibility.
Also, the "Incognita" tends to be boringly weepy; and the sheer
persistence with which one attempt after another on her part to
support herself, *fails*, becomes this book's wearisomely overdone
motif. It's as though Burney were answering her much younger self,
the declaration she made with <Evelina>: "Maybe all women aren't
doomed to die, but women without male protection are! NO woman can
*really* support herself!" (This is particularly ironic since Burney
wrote this novel, like <Camilla>, precisely to support not only
herself but also her husband and son. But to be fair, she does show
women supporting themselves as long as they're in their accustomed
rôles in society, from a village midwife to women of the nobility;
it's just that the Incognita, without male protection, can't usefully
*enter* any such rôle.) So Burney is taking a conservative position
here; but in her weepy heroine, her use of suicide, namelessness and
other secrets, her profuse coincidences, her many night scenes: Where
<Cecilia> and <Camilla> used Romanticism as a contrast with
Classicism, this is Burney's one outright, *fully* Romantic book.
This does not prove to be a Good Thing.

*All* of that said, look, my standards of comparison here are a great
novel and a major one. I'm not confidently prepared to call <The
Wanderer> *worse* than any novel not by Burney in this post; it's
certainly better, in meaningful ways, than most of them. I would not
recommend that anyone, even anyone interested in it for its portrayals
of working women, make it their first Burney novel, because the effort
of adaptation it takes, to read nearly a thousand pages of Burney's
narrative voice, will be too upsetting without better reward than this
novel brings. But if you're already adapted, you're at no risk from
at least trying <The Wanderer>; I certainly commend it to anyone who
likes any two of the three others. And if you, like me, become a
Burneyphile, you won't want to miss it.

<http://www.munseys.com/diskone/wandererburn.htm>, seen September 20,
2008

Sebastian de Grazia
(November) <A Country with No Name>, 1997

De Grazia was a professor of political philosophy. He's best known
today for his Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Machiavelli,
<Machiavelli in Hell>, also written after his retirement; he wrote
several other books much earlier (before he got tenure?). This one
may have been his last; it's certainly an old man's work. I place it
in this post as a compromise; explaining that statement involves most
of what I want to say about the book.

It comprises twelve essays in the history mostly of east-central North
America, whose unifying claim is that for quite some time, the state
governing that region had no true name. Around this thesis - likely
to please lovers of <Tigana>, but I found it just this side of
mystical - de Grazia arranges a lot of other iconoclastic and
generally anti-federal arguments: the writing of the Constitution was
treason (as was the Revolution before it); Marshall was wrong, Calhoun
right, Thoreau incoherent, and Lincoln dictatorial; you get the idea.
Many of these arguments will be familiar to anyone who's paid much
attention to (ahem) American history, others not. At any rate,
they're leavened with stories: most of the essays focus on one
individual (Washington, not Madison, for the drafting of the
Constitution), and roughly the first half of the essay is
biographical, the second half political philosophy, but not rigidly
separated.

But they aren't precisely essays anyway; in principle, they're
tutorial sessions, because, you see, de Grazia cast the whole thing in
a fictional framework. Oliver Huggins, at age nineteen surprisingly
well acquainted with literature and old music, has been in college in
Ethiopia for a year or two (his father, a lawyer, had been working
there), but is now about to begin study in this country; his father
has hired him a tutor. Claire St. John is a grad student from
England, who's begun work on her dissertation, and has agreed to six
one-hour sessions per week for two weeks. She's imperious, with some
vivacity; he's feckless at first, but gradually becomes bolder,
largely in thrall to the infatuation de Grazia has him develop for
her. The romantic plot mildly charms me, but I've no idea whether a
woman reader would agree; it doesn't, however, convince me.
Unconvincing too is the whole pose that the essays are really
transcripts of tutorials; several passages can only work in writing
(for example, a long list of the spellings of a minor figure's
surname).

At any rate, late in the book St. John fairly clearly confirms vague
hints throughout that there's More To Her Than Meets The Eye. I think
this is *meant* to evoke convention - casting her sort of as the Muse
Clio - but if I were playing very strictly, I'd have to put this book
in the fantasy post. That, however, would be preposterous, given that
the only even vaguely fantastic element is in one character's
backstory, and anyway it barely even works as *fiction*. So I put it
here instead.

Whatever. I found the book a worthwhile whole despite my doubts about
its parts; I'd recommend it to those interested in its topic.

anonymous, attributed to Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire
(January) <The Sylph>, 1779

I haven't seen the new movie about the (very probable) author, <The
Duchess>. Even if you have, please bear with the following paragraph,
which is actually one of the more on-topic ones in this post.

Georgiana Spencer was a dazzling blonde beauty who 'caught' a young
duke (William Cavendish), was stronger in sensibility than in sense,
and was addicted to gambling; her ducal marriage was an unhappy one,
partly from her husband's neglect of her. In other words, she was,
quite obviously, a model for Georgina Talgarth, in the books by
Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer, <Sorcery and Cecelia> and <The
Mislaid Magician>. (Note, however, some differences. Georgina is
roughly forty years younger than Georgiana, who was born in 1757, and
who was the eldest sibling. Georgiana's marriage to the Duke of
Devonshire was arranged, more or less, and preceded her début. And
the *convention* of British high nobility in the 1770s was for spouses
to ignore each other; this may have been rather less the case
forty-odd years later.) Unfortunately, despite the title, there's
really no more of spec-fic here than the Spencer-Talgarth link.

This is an epistolary novel, in sixty numbered letters - but some of
these are enclosed in other letters, while there are also unnumbered
letters within numbered ones. In fact, this is not a very *good*
epistolary novel, in the sense that some of the letters strain all
credulity; letter 26, which originally opened the second (of two)
volumes, is the worst of these, consisting mostly of the heroine (A)
quoting a friend of hers (B), who is in turn quoting someone she met
(C), who is narrating a story most of which he didn't witness, but
must have pieced together from several others' accounts (D, E, and
probably F and G). There's nothing else nearly that bad, but still,
Wrede and Stevermer do it rather better. To be fair, both Wrede and
Stevermer were rather older than 22 when they started <Sorcery>, and I
suspect both of being closer to the 'sense' side of the spectrum. By
the by, <The Sylph> was the Duchess's *second* epistolary novel, her
first having appeared when she was sixteen! (I see by the chronology
that this cannot explain Burney's destruction of <The History of
Caroline Evelyn>. Darn.)

Anyway. Julia Grenville (yep, another W+S link), the dominant
letter-writer here and rather like the author in her beauty and her
sensibility, is courted by the enamoured rake Sir William Stanley, who
can find no other way to seduce her. Their marriage proves unhappy
(see above), and various other things happen. The ending, which
involves several weddings, is partly predictable. The title derives
from letters Lady Julia starts to receive, full of moral advice, from
one who says he can follow all her doings because as a Rosicrucian he
can obtain information from the sylphs of the air; he therefore signs
his own letters as "Sylph" though he never claims to be anything but
human. No reader born after 1850 is likely to buy this for any length
of time, for reasons abundantly clear before letter 16 (which
introduces the Sylph), so this book is here, not in the Gothics post.

The editor of the Northwestern edition I read, Jonathan Gross, notes
that the book is a rare example of a member of the high nobility
writing *about* the high nobility, and therefore valuable; he also
notes that it's got some good qualities, and in this he's correct. I
don't think I wasted the time I spent reading it; if nothing else, it
provides a hint what Samuel Richardson's novels are like in far fewer
pages than any of those novels involve. But I also don't want to
recommend it with any strength; for the average reader of this group,
it's more likely to seem worthwhile as illumination for Austen, or
Wrede and Stevermer, than in its own right.

Gross's notes are quite inadequate, though he does track down lots of
literary allusions. The back cover claims the author was an ancestor
of Princess Diana; if this is true, then unhappy upwardly mobile
marriages must run in the family!

Paul di Filippo
* (April) "Matchmaker, Matchmaker, Make Me a Text", 2008

One of his "Plumage from Pegasus" columns, a joking story in the May
2008 F&SF. Apparently, in real life in 2006, a romance publisher did
a cross-promotion with a speed dating service. Di Filippo's starting
point is four years later, when the publisher offers free counseling
to any resulting marriages needing it... I read it as comic (and, to
my taste, mildly funny), but not necessarily spec-ficnal (beyond the
near-future setting).

Alexandre Dumas (père) [with Auguste Maquet, uncredited]
arguably (June-July) <The Count of Monte Cristo>, French, 1844-1846,
first compiled as <Le Comte de Monte-Cristo> 1845-1846

I read this in the translation by Robin Buss, published by Penguin in
1996 (though in a later edition). Note re the header that this book
was originally a magazine serial in eighteen installments, first
collected in a series of eighteen *volumes* that began to appear in
1845 but didn't finish until the next year.

Sometime between twenty-five and thirty years ago - roughly speaking,
during my personal Golden Age of Science Fiction - I was given an
abridgement of one of the 19th-century translations of this book
floating around in the public domain; which is to say, an abridgement
of an abridgement. So one reason this book only "arguably" belongs in
this list is that I'm not sure whether having read such a version
allows me to claim, on having *now* read all twelve hundred-odd pages
of a full translation, to have read it for the first time. But
another reason has to do with one of the chapter titles, "Toxicology".
<Romeo and Juliet> hinges on a potion that allows one to stop
breathing, and one's heart to stop beating, for over a day, followed
by full revival. I don't believe it makes sense on that account to
consider <Romeo and Juliet> fantasy. Well, when, historically, does
that change? We certainly shouldn't accept the reality of
cryogenics-by-potion today. Is the 1840s too late?

Anyway, there are more interesting ties to spec-fic in this book (with
which, in itself, I found myself as unsurprised as I was last year
with the <Arabian Nights>, and about which, in itself, I have nothing
insightful to say). Batman is of course not really spec-fic, but if
the titular Count isn't a direct ancestor to Batman, I'm a monkey's
uncle. He is also, however, I think, a direct ancestor to the
Competent Man of so much science fiction. The Count can do just about
anything; he neither boasts of his abilities nor takes any trouble to
hide them; he cares not the least for the astonishment of those around
him, and he cultivates an aura of eccentricity. Sounds plenty
familiar to me.

Buss's translation reads fine, and there are pleasingly few typos.
The notes seem inadequate; a few offer things like explanations of
currency, but most supply cultural references, for example saying
which line of which play by Shakespeare or Molière is being cited.
They rarely *elucidate* those references, and that's why I say they
seem inadequate: the impression they give is that Dumas did nothing,
most of the time, but name-drop. If in fact Dumas had other purposes
in using particular references, Buss leaves those purposes
unfulfilled. But perhaps the book really is, in that respect, that
shallow. Either way, it was certainly worth reading; its moral
structure is, if not deep, still *not* shallow, and for those of us
fond of, say, Guy Gavriel Kay, this sort of story, in all its length,
is something of a ne plus ultra of that kind of Romanticism.

Sarah Dunant
(December) <Snowstorms in a Hot Climate>, 1988

This was Sarah Dunant's first solo novel, according to the book and
the Wikipedia article about her; the latter (but not the former) also
notes two collaborative mysteries earlier. Last year I read (most of)
<Birth Marks>, which at the time I thought her first novel, and noted
that part of it was darker than I wanted to deal with, but that it was
distinguished, moderately, from the mystery crowd by the way Dunant
had woven many different forms and images of motherhood through the
story. This book is considerably more literary in character, I think;
or perhaps I'm just deceived by its surface, for its narrator is a
professional historian and the book is pervaded by things of the
intellect. Flipside, it has nothing comparable to the <Birth Marks>
symphony of maternity. At any rate, in place of the rogues' gallery
and solved mystery <Birth Marks> offers, this one is a close study of
four people (two pairs of friends, as close as this book comes to a
theme), none of whose versions of reality is confirmed, and though it
has no scary passages like the one I skipped in the other book, it
left me sorry to have read it as that one didn't.

For whatever it's worth: The book is set in New York, Santa Cruz and
points nearby, Paris, Inverlochy ... And either in 1985 (if you
believe the opening line) or 1982 (from several internal points of
evidence). Our narrator is on her way from London to New York as it
opens, to see her best (indeed, perhaps her only) friend, who is in
trouble. It's only a mild spoiler, already perpetrated by the back
cover, to note that the trouble involves the titular "snow", which is
cocaine; addiction is here mostly offstage, but casual death is not.
Follow Our Heroine on her rescue mission if you wish, but don't say I
didn't warn you.

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
* (June and August) <North and South>, 1854-1855, first compiled as
such 1855

The tale of how Margaret Hale, over a four year period, loses her
parents, gains a fortune, and finally gains a fiancé. So much is
ordinary, but Margaret Hale, in particular, is different: she's a
snobbish parson's daughter from the rural south of England who winds
up in a little disguised Manchester, and she's intelligent and wise
enough to change. Hence "North and South".

This is a quiet, unhappy novel. "Quiet": Nearly every one of the
memorable set pieces from the BBC miniseries turns out to have been
invented; here there is no Crystal Palace, no factory floor, no actual
wedding at the beginning, you get the idea. There are rarely more
than a handful of people in a scene. "Unhappy": Everyone behaves
more or less properly, but bad things happen to them a lot anyway.
While True Love wins out in the end, it's really only at the very end,
there's room for doubt about the love, and there's especially room for
doubt it'll be enough - Gaskell certainly includes examples of
marriages for love gone awry. If I'd tried to read this book in my
twenties, I'd have found its quiet in the face of sorrow maddening,
and if I'd finished at all, it wouldn't have been with any kind of
appreciation.

So I am grateful to have lived long enough to read this book.

* (July) <Cousin Phillis>, 1864

<Cousin Phillis> is a novella, narrated by Paul Manning, remembering
the first days of his career, and specifically the third cousin,
Phillis Holman, he came to know then. It's not much of a spoiler to
say that this is a tale of disappointed love; it may be more of a
spoiler to mention that this is the kind of story Jo Walton referred
to as helping prompt her to write <Tooth and Claw>. Withal, it's
beautifully written, has lots of pleasant pastoral scenes and a vivid
young woman amid them, and is arguably crypto-feminist to boot; it's
well worth reading.

Maxim Gorky
(November) "Makar Chudra", Russian, 1892

I wanted to see what lay behind <Gypsies Are Found Near Heaven>, a
movie I rave about towards the end of the fantasy post. Several Gorky
stories were incorporated (per the opening credits and several other
sources), but this is the only one whose title I've found. So on a
library visit I sat down and read it (in an undated translation by B.
Isaacs); it's not long. It is, in fact, clearly the main source for
the movie's central plot and at least one subplot. Here, the only
fantasy element in the movie - the heroine's sorcerous powers - is
absent; it's replaced by misogyny, as Makar Chudra (a minor character
in the movie) narrates the story of doomed love with firm confidence
that all the blame belongs to the woman, by way of illustrating his
firm belief that no man should marry. (Strictly, the story's narrator
is someone else, an unnamed Romany man, not the author; but most of
the text is Chudra's narrative.) Oh, well; at least some elements of
the plot made more sense in prose. The story, Gorky's first, didn't
convince me to go read more of his writing, though I gather his
greatest works were Realism, not this sort of Romantic thing, and
though I naïvely hope that as he became Marxist, he outgrew misogyny.

Nicola Griffith [1] [2]
(June) <the blue place>, 1998
(June) <Stay>, 2002
(June-July) <Always>, 2007 [2]

These are the three novels to date narrated by Aud Torvingen, a woman
in her thirties whose delayed bildungsroman they form.

You've probably heard about them as "mysteries", in which case that
description might be somewhat confusing. Well, um. In the first and
third, the mystery with which the book starts is solved by about
halfway through, but Bad Things keep happening for various reasons,
and admittedly, in the first book, *a* mystery makes it all the way to
the ending. "Crime fiction" is probably a better description: many
of the Bad Things are crimes, as are many of the things Aud does to
deal with them.

But she's rather more interesting and strange than any of that. She
begins as a profoundly under-socialised person, remarkable for having
even less grasp of other people than I tend to. She has a long
history of martial arts work, some years in the police force under her
belt, and in general, she's deeply aware of the body, and more
specifically, of the body in violence. (In one book, she's stunned
by the effects of drugs she involuntarily consumed on her senses;
she's much more used to trusting her body than I can remember ever
being used to trusting my mind, say. She often thinks, especially
upon meeting people, about how in the situation at hand she could kill
someone, and how quickly.) She grew up cultured and educated, she's
independently wealthy, she's lesbian and feminist but not militant,
and she's one of the weirder minds I've tried to inhabit in ages. I
find myself wondering how Griffith does it, and unsurprised that the
answer is "not quickly".

These books cover just over a year in Aud's life, although the year in
question begins in 1998 and ends, I think, in 2007 (I don't *think*
<Always> is decisive about its own date, but the first two books are
set in their years of publication). [c] During that year, she changes
a *lot*, and it's about damn time. The third could very plausibly
represent the end of the story. If it doesn't, though, it wouldn't
surprise me at all if, in the fourth, what went to make Aud the way
she was - why her bildungsroman got delayed in the first place - came
into the foreground.

These books were well worth reading, and I expect to buy all three
when I can.

[c] I didn't find out until after reading these that this sort of
loose chronology is standard in, for example, the Nancy Drew books
(see the kids' books post, sv Keene). I hasten to reassure you that
this series, unlike that one, has an overarching plot that moves
forward - and lacks a formulaic plot repeated in each book.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
* (September) <Fanshawe>, 1828

This is a quiet story, and I start with that because I'm not convinced
a story can be both quiet and silly, so my persistent wish to call
this book silly must not be indulged. However, I can certainly
understand its author's disavowal of it. <Fanshawe> is a story with a
fair maiden and her three suitors - one a villain of darkest dye, one
a conventionally doughty hero, and one, well, he's the least ordinary
of them, which is probably why he's the titular character, but if you
imagine what a Byronic hero who wouldn't be disapproved by an educated
New England conservative might be like, you'll have him. Anyway, I'm
not familiar with many of the book's sources, but I have no doubt at
all most of it *had* sources. Some flashes of characterisation and
one or two twists of plot are original; those and the descriptions, of
the 1740s New England setting (plausibly identified with Maine's
Salmon Falls River area), are what make the book worth reading. It's
short enough and simple enough to be just on the novel side of the
novel/novella dividing line, whether measured by length (I think) or
by complexity.

Joe Bernstein

unread,
Dec 16, 2008, 2:29:00 AM12/16/08
to
READ FOR THE FIRST TIME: OTHER FICTION

Anthony Hope
* (September) <A Man of Mark>, 1890

OK, so why is it that a book putting an imaginary country into Europe
is "Ruritanian" and borderline fantasy, but a book doing the same
thing in South America isn't? Anyway, Ruritania's inventor was
playing with alternate geography years before Ruritania itself
existed.

The most notable difference between <A Man of Mark> and <The Prisoner
of Zenda> is in the characters, or more precisely, their motivations.
Only one person in this book has ever heard of the concept of honour;
everyone else has a shame culture, not a guilt one. Hope's
descriptions of "Aureataland", ostensibly founded by American
adventurer Marcus Whittingham, with its capital city of Whittingham on
the banks of the river Marcus, are eerily prescient of what one hears
about tinpot dictators today, which would seem terribly insightful if
it weren't also fairly obvious that they're founded on British
stereotypes - so I ended up wondering how accurate today's news is,
instead of impressed with Hope. (There are points of contact with the
histories of Panamá and Nicaragua, but the differences outweigh the
similarities; this book isn't remotely a roman à clef.) Anyway, the
narrator manages a private bank that has arranged to act as central
bank of Aureataland, and thus has to worry about the public debt; this
ropes him into a comic-opera plot involving a femme fatale, a military
coup, and so forth. He is young and of limited clue, but is
emphatically not the one honourable man in the book. So it's a fast
and amusing read, but has none of the consolation value of <Prisoner>,
which is no doubt why it was less successful. (In fact, Hope
published it through a vanity press, which is perhaps why his next
several books represent a massive change of direction.)

This book also provides an example of something that's a recurring
issue with Hope: His women often fail to convince me. Sometimes - as
in <The Prisoner of Zenda> - the problem is simply that they're
underdrawn; sometimes the problem is bigger than that. Oddly, though,
sometimes his female characters *do* strike me as plausible, but
never, in the books I've read thus far, enough so that I want to push
any forward as examples.

Bibliographic note: Thousands of wrong dates for Anthony Hope's books
are floating around the Web. This one in particular is often dated
1895 (after the first US edition, I suspect) or various 20th century
dates (reprintings, omnibuses, and so forth). However, several lines
of evidence justify the 1890 date.

I did find that Malcolm Elwin's <Old Gods Falling>, 1939, whose Hope
section is mostly available at Google Books, agrees with Wikipedia; in
contrast, fantasticfiction.co.uk lists as novels several short
stories, and gets several dates provably late, but is the most
comprehensive list of Hope's fiction online, and substantially less
wrong than several others.

And yes, of course, I should have checked reference books instead, but
don't let's be silly. Hope was too popular to qualify for the serious
reference books, is too long dead to qualify for the non-serious ones,
and is known for nothing spec-ficnal enough for the spec-fic ones.
(Even the EoF gets Ruritania wrong!) My first clue as to how awful
this would be was when I was trying to date the limited sample I'd
gotten from Project Gutenberg: the two works I *could* find listing
his books disagreed about six dates (of fourteen). One of the books
agrees, consistently, with Elwin and Wikipedia; the other is, among
other things, misled by the US 1895 date for <A Man of Mark>. [d]

Possibly the most egregious lie these books tell is to call the source
I ultimately relied on for all dates, Sir Charles Mallet's <Anthony
Hope and His Books>, 1935, a bibliography. It certainly is not; it's
a biography built around Hope's diary and other sources, including
Mallet's own long friendship with his subject. At any rate, it pretty
consistently seems to agree with Elwin and Wikipedia.

[d] - The bad book is <World Authors 1900-1950> edited by Martin
Seymour-Smith and Andrew C. Kimmens, New York/Dublin: The H. W.
Wilson Company, 1996. The unsigned article pages 1157-1158 manages to
date <A Man of Mark> to both 1899 and 1895!
The good one is <Twentieth Century Romance and Historical Writers>
edited by Lesley Henderson, Chicago and London: St James Press, c
1990 (2nd edition; 1st ed. 1982). The article there by Louis James
makes a bunch of errors (including calling <A Man of Mark> a
collection), but the booklist preceding it gets everything I can check
correct, except for five volumes: <A Cut and a Kiss> is pretty
clearly a pirated US volume (look for yourself at Google Books, and
compare it to <Comedies of Courtship> which you can find at Project
Gutenberg); <Helena's Path> is a US outtake from a collection already
listed (incorrectly) as a novel, <Tales of Two People> (again, see
Google Books); <Love's Logic> is presented as a US collection, so I'm
guessing more piracy; and <Frivolous Cupid> is certainly a pirate
volume (see below on *its* relationship to <Comedies of Courtship>).
Anyone wishing to dig further needs to know that Hope's real name
was Hawkins (as in, Anthony Hope Hawkins); obtuse mainstream
literature reference books are absurdly persistent in putting him
under his real name, not the name he used for all his fiction,
presumably on the principle that the only people who would actually
look him up are his descendants? I have not seen this nonsense
applied to Mark Twain, George Eliot, or George Sand, and have no idea
what Hope did to deserve being singled out like this. (But compare
Burney's fate at the hands of librarians, above.)
Oh, and anyone who gets all upset about all this US piracy, or my
blithe assumption that that's what was going on, please see also
<Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Descriptive Bibliography> by C. E. Frazer
Clark, Jr., [Pittsburgh]: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1978, which
goes into great detail about pirated editions of Hawthorne, most of
which were perpetrated in the *UK*.

* (September) <Father Stafford>, 1891

Hope's second novel is almost as brisk as his thrillers, but very
different in subject. It concerns the intricate romantic geometries
of some society people in England - the men range from MPs to loafers,
assuming that's a range - and how these impinge on a deeply religious
Anglican parson who's taken a vow of celibacy. Although Hope engages
now and then in judgement, he's too amused by his 'bad' characters to
be harsh, and the book is pleasant.

x (September) <Mr. Witt's Widow>, 1892

This is basically similar to <Father Stafford> except that 1) the
parson's rôle as outsider is taken by a parvenue young woman (the
titular widow) with few scruples - so, among other things, there's a
*lot* less spiritual agony here; 2) this is Hope's first book to make
a big deal out of honour; and 3) it's also his first to fulfill what
my high school English teacher insisted was the proper culmination of
comedy (she was, I think, quoting Northrop Frye): to end not just
with a wedding, but with the establishment of a better social order
than the one reigning at the beginning - in effect, with a circle of
friends replacing a family. (See, for the archetypical case, the
final pages of <Pride and Prejudice>. This shows that such an ending
was no innovation of Hope's, of course, but it also precedes Austen;
of Burney's books above, <Cecilia> ends with a little bit of that sort
of thing, and <Camilla> and <The Wanderer> with more. Nor do I assume
they're the first.)

This book is involving, fun, and (like most of Hope's books) readable
in an hour and a half.

x (September) <A Change of Air>, 1893

Around the year 1900, Hope was apparently given to distinguishing his
"serious" novels from things like <The Prisoner of Zenda>. In these
posts' year, I lacked access to his certainly serious <The God in the
Car> of 1894 (since it's his second most famous book, it is, of
course, nearly the only one of which no e-book exists, and the only
local library copy is in storage!). But my guess is that where his
first two novels mingled (a little bit of) seriousness with
light-hearted fun (whether of adventure or of romance), <Mr. Witt's
Widow> is his first thoroughly light-hearted one, and <A Change of
Air> is his first clearly serious one. This is not to say it lacks
humour. But this story of what results when a rising poet, of
Nihilistic tendencies and left-wing politics, takes a country house to
relax for a year, and there falls in love with the local squire's
earnestly Conservative daughter, is deeply ironic, the irony pervading
both the tragedy and the comedy in the plot.

It was after reading this book that I concluded that, of the four
possibilities implied in
1) Characters deserving or undeserving
2) Endings happy or unhappy
Hope would do three of them with abandon, but would never give
deserving characters a happy ending. This is not a spoiler for this
book, which goes a long way towards casting doubt on the existence of
deserving characters. As it happens, I was wrong, and one of the
books listed below in fact does give deserving characters a happy
ending, or at least seems to. (Of course, identifying it *would* be a
spoiler.) But that certainly isn't Hope's normal ending, even in his
light-hearted books.

x (September) <Sport Royal and Other Stories>, first compiled as such 1893

This is a fun book with a surprising claim on our attention, because
it turns out Anthony Hope, of all people, occasionally wrote outright
fantasy!

The book falls into three sections. "Sport Royal" is a novella
(everything else here is a short story), and a clear dry run for
Ruritania; it has the panache and devil-may-care attitudes of <The
Prisoner of Zenda> but not the concern for honour, in its story of
romantic fuss, bother, and dueling in and near the imaginary German
kingdom of Glottenberg. (Hope explicitly acknowledged the link in a
later Ruritanian book, making a prince of Glottenberg a minor
character.) The next six stories are all comic; "A Tragedy in
Outline" amused me, and "A Little Joke", predictable though its ending
is, actually made me laugh aloud, while "How They Stopped the 'Run' "
is at least diverting. But the book ends with three bona fide fantasy
stories - "Middleton's Model", an elegant 1890s-Decadent tale of a
sold soul; "My Astral Body", a comedy about psychic powers gone
astray; and its sequel, "The Nebraska Loadstone", also comic -
followed by an eerie (though still witty) Gothic, "A Successful
Rehearsal".

I recommend most of the stories (though I could've done without "A
Malapropos Parent" and "A Guardian of Morality"), and particularly the
spec-ficnal ones.

* (September) <Dolly Dialogues>, 1893-1894, first compiled, apparently
as <The Dolly Dialogues>, 1894

These stories, as they appeared in the <Westminster Gazette>, were
important in making Hope prominent before Zenda. They really are
dominated by dialogue, though there's a narrator (who is, of course,
involved in most of the dialogues). He is more than half in love with
each of two married women, who loathe each other, and not just from
jealousy over him. Dolly, in particular - that would be Dorothea,
Lady Mickleham, to us unwashed types - is his equal in archly cynical
talk of love. I found the book readable enough, but it's very much of
its time, and I suspect it's an acquired taste nowadays. There is a
storyline, which progresses, but there isn't really an ending, and
only by courtesy is there an overall plot. Obviously, this is one of
Hope's "frivolous" books.

* (September) <Half a Hero> aka <Half-a-Hero>, 1893

Another probably-serious book, this relates the rise and fall of Jimmy
Medland, a Labour politician in New Lindsey (an imaginary British
colony, to all appearances without any annoying natives, somewhere
near Australia). Here the clash of principles and classes that
animates <A Change of Air> is treated without that book's irony (or
what might be considered its optimism), while the political "game"
played by silly means in Ruritania, here follows the conventional
means of electoral and parliamentary politics. Hope had the year
before run as a Liberal candidate for the British parliament, and
lost; leaving his own party out, he deals pretty fairly with the
Conservatives and Labour men of New Lindsey. Medland himself - named
by the title, I'm pretty sure - comes across as nine-tenths of a
well-drawn, complex and fascinating character, with just a little
something lacking toward his making this a really good book.

Do not read this book to cheer yourself up. Just don't. But when you
don't need cheering up particularly, it's worth the couple of hours
it'll take to read it.

* (September) <The Indiscretion of the Duchess>, 1894

I'm beginning to suspect that the real way to tell Hope's serious
books from the others is that the others are usually in the first
person. Our narrator here is Gilbert Aycon, who also tries hard to
convince us he's our hero; I have to admit I found his story more than
a little self-serving: although Hope does nothing open to suggest the
guy's an unreliable narrator, still, his main rival for not just one,
but two, beautiful women - one of them, the rival's own wife - suffers
no genuine wrongs by his actions, among other examples. The book's
set mostly where Normandy and Brittany meet, around Mont St. Michel,
Avranches, and Pontorson - yep, surprise, Hope, who even in <A Change
of Air> made up an English county, here actually uses a bona fide
existent setting. There is a magnificent jewel, there are jewel
thieves, and there is a duel, among other things. The book is as
diverting as most of the author's.

* (September) <Frivolous Cupid>, first compiled as such 1895
* (September) <Comedies of Courtship>, first compiled as such 1896

<Frivolous Cupid> consists of eight stories bearing out the title.
The first, in third person, is as serious and gently, ironically, sad
as anyone could want; the next two, in first person, are as silly.
Then there are two whose narrators, otherwise indistinguishable from
most of Hope's narrators, have the same name and relatives (so these
two are technically a series); both of these are mildly bitter tales
of love thwarted, and one, "A Repentant Sinner", also stars an author
of commercial fiction! The last three grow increasingly fantastic,
though none is actually spec-ficnal; "Marriage by Compulsion" is
mildly amusing, and "All's Well That Ends Well" (whose title hides an
<Arabian Nights> setting) made me laugh aloud.

<Comedies of Courtship> opens with a note claiming Hope's authority
for the publication, and consists of six stories, four of which are
stories 4 through 7 from <Frivolous Cupid>. (Here "A Repentant
Sinner" is "A Three-Volume Novel", and "Marriage by Compulsion" is
"The Decree of Duke Deodonato".) So evidently <Comedies> is the
legitimate book, and <Frivolous> a piracy. It's a pity, then, that at
Gutenberg, the e-text of the latter is so much better than the e-text
of <Comedies>. All of this said, <Comedies> is twice as long, because
its two remaining stories are both *long* novellas. "The Wheel of
Love" is an ideal type of a comedy of romantic geometries, and while
its denouement actually led me to laugh aloud, I suspect that was more
a matter of my having read a bunch of Hope's books in a row than of
objectively assessed amusement. <The Lady of the Pool> is a less
frantic, less cynical version of the same thing (and depends
considerably less on coincidence, more on character); a ghost story
figures in the plot, but despite that and the romantic title, it's not
a Gothic, let alone spec-fic.

gli Intronati di Siena
(August) "The Deceived", Italian, probably 1532

Nobody really knows who wrote this play; a whole literary society took
the credit for it, and apparently nobody ever spilled the beans. (In
an Italian edition, I found what may be a membership list as of a few
years earlier, in the form of a list of cast members for another play;
it's pretty long. See pp. VII-XI or so of the introduction by Nerida
Newbigin to <Gl'Ingannati con Il Sacrificio> [and a whole lot more
title], 1984.) It was quite successful at the time - go figure, a
play written by committee, and a hit! - and wound up making its way
all the way to England, where you may have heard of a cover version of
it, called <Twelfth Night>.

Yeah, that's right. A play written by committee was a source for
Shakespeare. It's also a tolerable play to read, compared to its less
bearable contemporaries by Machiavelli described below, and by Aretino
and Ariosto described above. (Though you still have to hack through
quite enough comic baggage, in the form of rude male and lewd female
servants, for example.) It's probably most interesting, though, read
in the context of <Twelfth Night>. Shakespeare changed the plot a
good bit: his siblings have been separated a much shorter time, but
are both new to town, whereas this play's have been separated rather
longer, but one has a long local background. (Which she recites
tiresomely in a three-page "As you know, Bob" scene, I regret to say.)
Again, there's no Malvolio here, with the queasiness his part
induces; instead there's merely the Other Woman's *father* - who's
dead set on marrying the sister. (This is partly *why* she's taken to
going around in male drag.) Etc.

This is, of course, one of the five Italian Renaissance comedies, in
this case translated for that 1978 volume by its editor, Bruce Penman.
It's another of the three *also* translated by Giannetti and
Ruggiero, my source for the date (Penman only noted the first printed
edition, in 1538).

Megan Kelso
$ (May) "the squirrel mother", 2003

This is the titular and lead story of a 2006 Fantagraphics collection,
which I picked up to see what it's like. It's a sad story depicting
similar events (a mother abandoning her children) in two streams -
humans in bigger panels on the bottom of each page, squirrels in
smaller panels on top - and the plot is complete in neither stream,
which is a neat effect.

Near as I can tell, nowadays, most educated Americans over thirty
consider realistic fiction or even memoirs the highest and best use of
comics formats; those are certainly the only kinds of graphic novel I
ever see reviewed any more in the mainstream press. (A memoir's a
"novel" ?) So while I wasn't inspired to read further, let alone to
buy the book, that shouldn't stop most people, right? As sad little
stories go, it's pretty good, and it has the great advantage over <New
Yorker> stories that it's much faster reading. There are more than a
dozen other stories in the book.

Dorothy Koomson
$ (August-September) <My Best Friend's Girl>, 2006

As best I can tell, this has nothing whatsoever to do with the current
movie of the same title.

This is Koomson's third novel, though in the US it's being sold as a
"Discovery". I picked it up while at Borders looking for something
else, attracted by the vapid but amusing chick-lit cover (big shoes
next to little shoes, primitively drawn in candy colours) and the
title, and intrigued by the fact they'd ordered enough copies to fill
a shelf, despite emptying shelves elsewhere. The only spec-fic
connection is that the narrator's favourite writer is J. G. Ballard.
(Turns out Koomson shares this taste, and is also enthusiastic about
Douglas Adams, <Dr. Who>, and <Buffy>. See her website, URL below.)

Well, anyway. The British cover is better - a photo of a black woman
and a small blonde girl, holding hands, as seen from behind - but the
book is no more primarily about interracial contact than it's an
example of chick lit. What Koomson seems to have done is something
I've long suspected M. K. Wren of having done in her Phoenix trilogy:
come up with the most improbable plot she reasonably could, and then
set herself the challenge of making it completely credible. I'm not
100% sold on her success in this, but she comes close enough that I'm
writing this to praise her, however opposite my success so far may be.

So OK, here's the setup. Kamryn ("Ryn") Matika (black, but doesn't
make much of it) ditched her fiancé (white, I think, ditto) and her
best friend (white, ditto) somewhat over two years ago when said
friend (Adele Brannon) confessed that said fiancé was the father of
her then three-year-old daughter - and just to be clear, the
engagement was of more than four years' standing at the time. That's
backstory; the actual story begins when, on her birthday, Ryn gets a
card from Adele. Adele is dying of leukemia, and wants Ryn to adopt
the child.

And no, we aren't done with the soap operatics yet: there's still
child abuse, jealous conflicts between men, and a couple more things
to come. But the *main* deal here is Ryn, the narrator, changing her
life: becoming a mother (something she'd never wanted), finding out
the effect this has on her career, and falling in love again. (This
last is where some of my disbelief arises. The major characters'
damaged selves don't strike me as correlating well with their damaging
childhoods; in particular, Ryn, who suffered much less abuse than the
others, is much more walled. But I do *completely* buy the succession
of miscommunications and bad timings that much of the romance consists
of. I find myself wondering whether, next time I read someone like
Elizabeth Bowen or for that matter Connie Willis, I'll be more patient
with their handling of miscommunication, having seen this example.)
The single biggest element of the book is the "becoming a mother" one,
and though I admit to lacking a lot of experience to go by, I find it
entirely believable, and well worth reading the book for.

Koomson complains about the "chick lit" label on her website,
basically because she sees "chick" as insulting. I had never
understood "chick lit" to extend to anything as serious (and not
obsessed with romance and shopping) as this book, but apparently she's
been hit with the label, and then there's that US cover... She
prefers, herself, the terms "commercial fiction" or "women's fiction",
but offers "heart lit" as a substitute catchphrase. This is an
example of what I can only see as a basically sunny worldview (who on
Earth would call something they didn't like "heart lit" ?). But
anyway, yeah, it's women's fiction. Basically what you do in this
book is follow deep emotional goings-on in Ryn's life, and what she
can suss out of similar things in the lives around her; there are
tears honestly jerked here, and happinesses honestly earned. Koomson
is, I think, one of a group I've always found small, and worth
cherishing: people who can see into darkness, but themselves remain
of the light. So despite my doubts about some of the characters, this
book works for me; if anything similar is likely to work for you, I
recommend giving <My Best Friend's Girl> a try. I'm at least toying
with the idea of going back and paying for a new copy; I'd probably
buy a used copy without hesitation.

<http://www.dorothykoomson.co.uk/>, seen September 7, 2008; note in
particular the "Dorothy Says" section, where she calls herself a
"sci-fi geek" in one essay, but protests against the term "chick
lit" in another. In an ordinary copy of IE 6 running under Windows
XP, parts of the site were rendered unreadable by poor design
and/or browser misbehaviour, but I was able to read them using
"view source" and some patience.

Anita Loos
* (July) <Gentlemen Prefer Blondes & But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes>,
1925-1927

This is an omnibus of, obviously, <Gentlemen Prefer Blondes>, 1925, a
magazine serial compiled into a book the same year, and <... But
Gentlemen Marry Brunettes>, 1927, a shorter magazine serial compiled
into a book equally promptly, or nearly so. Bibliography on Loos is
far from adequate, at least as best I can determine (I can't guarantee
the dates just given, though they strike me as probable), and I have
no idea when the first omnibus edition appeared, nor what title it
bore.

Some bestsellers turn into cultural phenomena, winning improbable
praise from esteemed arbiters while also flying off the racks like
mad. (Examples: I don't remember esteemed arbiters praising <The
Bridges of Madison County>, but this may be a merciful forgetfulness;
I have the impression <Jonathan Livingston Seagull> got such praise,
though I wasn't old enough at the time to remember.) Apparently
<Gentlemen Prefer Blondes>, long before the second movie version
became a breakout rôle for Marilyn Monroe, was such a bestseller. (On
the back of my paperback, Vintage quotes Edith Wharton, of all people,
calling it "the great American novel" !) It's presented as the diary
of one Lorelei [e], from March 16th to July 10th of 1925 (but the
calendar isn't that of our world's 1925), until our narrator gets
married. In a recollection here used to introduce the book, Loos
wrote in 1963 of her "idiot heroine", and much of the book's comedy
comes from laughing at Lorelei, but much also comes from the
situations she recounts as she and her friends, classic "gold-
diggers" [f], make their ways around New York, London, Paris, Munich,
Vienna, and New York again.

The sequel is stranger. The first two chapters continue Lorelei's
story, but then she switches to telling the life history of her best
friend, Dorothy Shaw. (Lorelei's a stereotypical "best friend" full
of deprecations and insults - the whole conceit is that Dorothy is a
Bad Example for other women - so we now have *three* layers of comedy:
Dorothy's own jokes and improbable life; Lorelei's sarcasm and
goofing; and our mocking take on Lorelei.) The narrative consists of
Dorothy's childhood and adolescence (in California) followed by a
nonstop series of events (in CA, New York, and Paris, mostly); it
seems irreconcilable with the first book. The easy explanation is
that the series of events isn't nonstop, and the first book fits into
the omitted spaces; on the other hand, Loos let the 'idiot' mask slip
a few times in the second book, so I suspect she just didn't care
overmuch about consistency. Wikipedia claims that Dorothy is partly a
self-portrait (and though Dorothy's biography is *much* more baroque
than her creator's, or her narrator's, there are points of contact
between Shaw and Loos). [f] Anyway, the sequel's only about half the
first book's length, and also funny.

I'm pretty sure I've seen the famous (second) movie, but I don't
remember much; plot summaries suggest it conflates (and somewhat
cleans up) the two storylines, presumably to get both protagonists
married in one movie. It certainly doesn't give any meaningful hint
as to what the books are like, but that can't really be helped; no
movie, after all, would have the appallingly funny style Loos
concocted for her narrator, which makes by far the strongest
impression in reading the books.

[e] Lorelei's maiden surname is usually understood to be "Lee", but I
can't find textev in either book.

[f] Irony of ironies: The husband to whom Loos, thanks to emotional
blackmail, dedicated both volumes turned out to be a gold-digger
himself. Once Loos had written this best-seller, he basically stopped
working. He also insisted on shared credit for all the work she did
supporting them - at least until he had the minimal decency to get
himself committed. Sheesh.
Another irony: Loos's main claim to fame, despite these books, was
as a screenwriter, but she wasn't involved in the writing of the
famous movie. (She did write the first movie version.)

Niccolò Machiavelli
0 (August) "The Mandragola", Italian, 1518

The translator of the version I read is Bruce Penman, editor of the
book in which it first appeared in 1978. This is the third play in
which the later volume, translated by Giannetti and Ruggiero, overlaps
Penman's, and as in the case of the Intronati above, I'm buying G+R's
date (of first performance; a printed edition appeared in 1519), not
Penman's vague dating of around 1520. I'm not sure who translated the
version I own that's in storage.

The plot is appropriate to Machiavelli. There's a couple with a
significant age difference (this would be the threatened ending to
<The Deceived>, carried out), and a young rake who's fallen in love
with the wife. He plots a way to become her lover, and, well, take it
from there.

Alas, the execution is *not* all that Machiavellian. Maybe in
performance this would be fun, but on the page, it's just warmed over
Terence and Plautus, and I was unimpressed. At least Machiavelli
resists the temptation to show off his learning the way Ariosto does.
When I was digging around looking for info on the Intronati, I kept
finding people calling this play a major classic, so mileage evidently
varies, but this is clearly the unusual situation in which, on rasfw,
I'm *not* sticking up for some famous non-genre work's merit.

This is the first of the five Italian Renaissance comedies, by date
and by placement in the book, and the shortest of them, but it's the
last in these posts. Thank God.

Rose MacMurray
(September 2007) <Afternoons with Emily>, 2007

This book's only spec-fic connection is that Don Maass was the agent.
Essentially, it's the bildungsroman of Miranda Chase (born 1843), who
also narrates, focusing on the years 1856-1869, and set mainly in
Amherst, Massachusetts (with intervals in Boston, Barbados, New York
City, and Springfield, Massachusetts, but only Barbados gets anywhere
near as much depiction as Amherst). Between date, setting and title,
you might already have guessed the book's selling point, but if not:
yes, "Emily" is the poet, Emily Dickinson. In 1857, new in town,
Miranda indignantly tells an Amherst minister pushing her too hard
that she's repeatedly worshipped gods other than the Christian. This
gets around, so Dickinson (the only un-"convert"ed of her own family)
invites her to visit, an invitation that eventually obtains every
Monday afternoon.

MacMurray's Emily Dickinson is far less strange than Emily Dickinson
could be imagined; I'm honestly not sure whether she's diminished by
MacMurray's treatment. She's a histrionic, over-imaginative, recluse,
given to EMPHASIS in a way easy for me to summon from memories of
certain older women; she's also deeply self-centred, and passionate
about her poetry, which Miranda, at least, comes to see as her main
saving grace. I can believe in her. I'm less sure how much I can
believe in Miranda herself, both because she comes through a certain
amount of abuse and lots of neglect with remarkably little damage, and
because she and those around her feel rather twentieth century to me.
(MacMurray justifies some of this by making her father a classicist
and freethinker.) And let's be clear here: Miranda is the book's
focus; MacMurray's strongest accomplishment in writing it was to be
able to depict the famous poet without thereby putting the book off
balance, the way cameos by King Arthur, for example, tend to distort
fantasies.

It was published ten years after the author's death, and (per her
daughter's afterword) her only work of fiction; so it's not only a
"debut novel" but a *first* novel (such as often stays in the trunk),
and by that standard remarkably good, though I still found it slow
going, and had the doubts mentioned above.

Terry Moore
(November) <Heart in Hand>, 2002

Yes, another <Strangers in Paradise> volume; either I was wrong, in
last year's post, about where Seattle Public Library's purchasing of
SIP ended, or they're still buying volumes. Anyway, this filled
another hole between the books I'd already read, though not a happy
one.

Marisha Pessl
(November-December) <Special Topics In Calamity Physics: A Novel>, 2006

I've snipped a paragraph about the title above; I'll simply note that
the sheer confusion given my bibliographic soul by the many versions
of the title this book offers - was an appropriate warning.

A quote early in this book illustrates most of what I can fairly say
about it:

"Always live your life with your biography in mind," Dad was
fond of saying. "Naturally, it won't be published unless you
have a Magnificent Reason, but at the very least you will be
living grandly." It was painfully obvious Dad was hoping his
posthumous biography would be reminiscent not of <Kissinger:
The Man> (Jones, 1982) or even <Dr. Rhythm: Living with Bing>
(Grant, 1981) but something along the lines of the New Testament
or the Qur'an.

As I read, I gathered evidence on many fronts, and I'd like to share
some of it with you, but in most cases, doing so would break my rule
against major spoilers. For example, I could describe a character
(not named in the quoted paragraph) by a conventional lit-crit term
familiar to anyone reading this post. But the four or five lines of
evidence justifying my saying so *each* rest on two facts, A and B, C
and D, and so forth, and not *one* of those pairs is complete, as best
I can tell, less than two-thirds of the way through the book. Such
care taken at once to establish a fact, and to keep it hidden from the
reader, can only be respected. And as I cast about for what I *could*
say, this sort of thing just kept happening. (If I gave the exact
dates of the main action - which I could, they're calendrically
certain - it'd be a spoiler. Trust me on this.) Since the book
jacket and library classification (at least here in Seattle) concur
that this is a mystery, and since the prologue gets explicit, I
suppose I can at least indicate that there's death in it... But
otherwise I must fall back on the opening chapters.

Which are actually enough to start with. This book is narrated by
Blue van Meer, trying to come to terms with events a year or so
earlier in her life. She had, since 1993, been travelling with her
father, Gareth van Meer, who worked as a visiting professor at one
school after another; she exaggerates the amount of travel involved,
but they did relocate three times per year, so she's entitled. She
understood this life as isolating the two of them with each other,
other human beings floating only intermittently into and out of view.
She did not fully understand the sickness of this isolation; an early
clue to one of the things I didn't say in the previous paragraph comes
when she considers the definition of "sociopath" and concludes that
her father isn't one, because he does love her. Anyway, for her
senior year of high school, Prof. van Meer gives his daughter a whole
(well, academic) year in one place; and the bulk of the book records
that academic year, with the corresponding opening-out of her life
that it enables.

Ms. van Meer has been superbly educated by a superbly educated tyrant
of a man, and scatters this education across the page with abandon.
She has also inherited both his vainglory and his comprehensive
contempt for other human beings, and her narration teems with both
qualities. I initially glommed onto the book because its pretentious
title was reflected by pretension all over the dust jacket, by a
pretentious table of contents (each chapter named after a famous
literary work, and a "Final Exam" to end with), and finally by Blue's
pretentious prose; as a pretentious writer myself, how could I resist?
For anyone else who can tolerate Blue's show-offy quasi-
intellectualism, she provides much cause for laughter, both at and
with her.

But from early in the book I was insecure about her as a narrator
because of her repeated references to Homer as dating to the
"Hellenistic Period". We know up front that she's a student at
Harvard; is she taking the Harvard side, the Gregory Nagy (at his,
well, *almost* most extreme) side, in the controversy over Homer? Is
she just, like most people Blue's presumed age, unclear on the meaning
of "Hellenistic"? Or is Pessl? The back inside jacket flap
reinforces this last question: a photo of Pessl making her look like
a teenager (OK, a gorgeous one), and a minimal author bio that
nevertheless mentions her growing up in Asheville, North Carolina,
which a little work with an atlas will show is the only plausible
model for the book's (nonexistent) setting of Stockton, NC. Is this
that classic debut novel, an autobiography writ large?

As it happens, Pessl is past thirty (the author photo supposedly a
slip-up of some sort); despite Blue's many boasts of her knowledge of
science, and despite the title, Pessl actually makes very little of
science in the book (it's *not* spec-fic in any way, unless as
minimally alt history); and Blue's references themselves are as often
to trashy true crime paperbacks, celebrity biographies, and reference
books (though not kids' ones) as to classics. Oh, and not only does
she misdate Homer, not all her other references are real. (I was
sorely tempted to compile a list and check each one out; some of the
least plausible, I *want* to be real.) No, this isn't autobiography
(though again, some of the strongest evidence is spoilerish). But it
*is* a dazzling if not entirely convincing portrait of two people, and
through them of a bunch of others. And, yes, a mystery: there are
crimes, and there are (fewer) solutions.

I recommend it to any still interested after reading the above.

Karen Russell
(June) <St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves>, 2005-2006, first
compiled as such 2006
Nominee, 2007 Tiptree Award

As for some collections listed above, I'll start with bibliographic
info. There are ten stories in this book, and two of them appear to
be new there. Two more appeared in 2005; these are "Haunting Olivia",
from the June 13, 2005 issue of <The New Yorker> (volume 81, issue 17)
which was apparently dedicated to fiction debuts, and "<from>
Children's Reminiscences of the Westward Migration", from
<Conjunctions> 45, fall 2005. (And I'm quite sure the italicisation
in that title belongs on the final six words, not the first word, but
the first word is the one that's actually italicised in the book. I
hope, in any event, that the title's a conceit. Russell has landed on
at least one list of promising young novelists, and I'd consider -
dubiously - reading a novel by her if it were rooted in some of the
*other* stories in this book, but definitely not this one.) The
remaining six were first published in the following places: the title
story in <Granta> 93, spring 2006; "Ava Wrestles the Alligator" in
<Zoetrope> volume 10, number 2, summer 2006; "Z.Z.'s Sleep-Away Camp
for Disordered Dreamers" as a WebConjunctions extra (URL below),
August 1, 2006; "The City of Shells", as "The World's Greatest
Sensational Mystery", in <The Oxford American> issue 53, Spring 2006;
"Out to Sea" in <Five Fingers Review> issue 21, 2006; and "Accident
Brief, Occurrence # 00/422" in <The New Yorker> (volume 82, issue 18)
for June 19, 2006.

Dunno about you, but the titles intrigued me. In fact, I originally
found out about this book because its title is used to justify
Russell's blurbing Brockmeier's <The View from the Seventh Layer> -
and how could I resist that title? Well, oops. Russell has something
of a formula. All but (I think) two of these stories are set in
southern Florida, several on islands (possibly the same island),
though Russell is herself from Miami. ("Ava Wrestles the Alligator"
and "Out to Sea" form the barest minimum kind of series, in that the
POV of the latter is named in the former as its POV's grandfather.)
All involve kids, mostly between ages 10 and 15, and, except for "Out
to Sea", as POVs or narrators. And all involve weirdness, which in
three stories I read as outright fantasy (a minotaur, pre-Cambrian
giant conch shells, and werewolves - this last, the title story, is
the only one to use the strategies of conventional fantasy at all), in
three more as Todorov's fantastique or something like it (a putative
ghost, "postmonition" through dreams, and possession), and in three as
just use of southern Florida's tourist spots and other oddities as
settings (tourists at the beach, a "Palace of Artificial Snows", and
houseboats). "Accident Brief" is arguably fantasy because its
setting, a wintry land conquered by pirates two centuries ago, doesn't
exist; but it doesn't read as spec-fic in any meaningful way, and so
provides the minimal edge by which I classify this book as other
fiction, not Gothic or fantasy. But I really so classified it because
I think Russell's use of otherness here is radically different in
purposes and methods from genre uses, and I just couldn't see the
point of putting this book into a genre-linked post.

Above I remarked that Brockmeier's weirdness without irony allowed him
to look like a spec-fic writer without necessarily being one. Russell
isn't usually ironic either, but the boredom, confusion, curiosity,
peer pressure, and minor epiphanies of the "tween" years, which she
nails to a T, make her seem that way, and I didn't enjoy her stories
remotely as much as Brockmeier's. I remember lots and lots of times
when I was those ages that felt exactly as Russell reminds me here,
but I didn't enjoy them then, and don't enjoy reading about them now,
even with weird ocean-coast backdrops. In some of these stories
disaster looms, or even strikes, but somehow Russell makes them all
feel like <New Yorker> stories *anyway*, only with werewolves or
islands in place of suburban bungalows, and kids in place of suburban
husbands or housewives.

<http://www.conjunctions.com/webconj.htm>, seen June 25, 2008

Germain François Poullain de Saint-Foix

(January) "The Sylph", ?1771

This is a short play in ten scenes (some only a paragraph long), based
on a 1730 story by Crébillon (fils), and I don't know whether its 1771
English publication was its first appearance, or a version in French
preceded. I profoundly hope there was no previous English-language
*performance*, anyway, because the play I read is abysmal; it is by
quite a wide margin the worst writing mentioned in this year's posts
(and quite possibly worse than the novel within the movie <Alex &
Emma>, which won similar honours last year). If you get past the
massive "As you know, Bob" info-dumps comprising Scene One, you find
very little reward for your patience. Julia, having just inherited a
fortune, has shut herself away from the world with "Kabbalistic"
books. A Marquis who wishes to marry her has, with the help of
Julia's anti-mysticism maid, gotten a job in drag as her servant, and
has also begun appearing to her at night posing as an infatuated
Sylph. Julia returns this sylph's love, and demands to be made a
sylphid (I infer, a female sylph). Don't worry; this is a Hollywood
story, except even dumber than Hollywood gets [g], and you know the
ostensibly happy ending. Don't bother reading it even if you decide
to read the novel of the same title, described above, by Georgiana,
Duchess of Devonshire, in whose 2007 Northwestern edition this
wretched script appears.

[g] - OK, so that would be the only reason to read this thing: if you
sincerely believe nothing can get dumber than Hollywood, this play
will disabuse you of that notion. But I hope you can find a less
painful method instead.

Rebecca Wells [2]
* (August-September) <Little Altars Everywhere>, first compiled as
such 1992
(August-September) <Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood>, 1996,
skimmed [2]
$ (September) <Ya-Yas in Bloom>, 2005, very lightly skimmed

I finished <Divine Secrets> properly shortly after this post's year
(finding as I did so that, by post year end, I had already read nearly
all the actual pages); I have no intention of reading <Ya-Yas in
Bloom> in full anytime soon.

Oh God, I think, it's such a good life, but it *hurts* !

I know of no fiction by Wells outside this series, but with this
series, she became something of a high priestess to the fascination
with dysfunction and healing of the 1990s. I'm not especially crazy
about that whole movement, but it's been long enough since it was
culturally triumphant that I was able to read these books with little
difficulty from the thought of it.

<Little Altars Everywhere> is sort of a collection, sort of a novel.
It consists of ten chapters set from 1961 to 1967, and seven more set
in 1990-1991. I don't know how many of the chapters appeared
separately first - at least four - let alone which; I'd be fascinated
to know the order of writing [h], because the two parts of the book
diverge pretty sharply. Half the 1960s chapters are narrated by
Siddalee Walker, aged eight to twelve, and three more by her siblings
(the remaining two, by her parents); the cumulative effect is to
portray a moderately happy childhood for these kids, marred though it
is by some darker tinges. The 1990s chapters (a fairly
inconsequential one of which was the first to be written) have seven
different narrators, and turn those darker tinges into exactly the two
forms of darkness most focused on by the 1990s dysfunction-healing
movement.

<Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood> starts from one (but not the
other) of those forms of darkness; Siddalee (who has just, aged forty,
gotten over her parents' marriage enough to become engaged) has told a
reporter about the darkness in question, the reporter has blazoned it
in the <New York Times>, and Siddalee's mother, Viviane Abbott Walker,
has disowned her. Somehow this turns into a situation where Siddalee
is holed up in a cabin about seventy miles from where I sit, studying
her mother's scrapbook to try to come to terms with her mother, her
past, and her own understanding of what love is. Wells plays here a
narrative game that I found disconcerting: again and again, she shows
Siddalee wondering what some scrap of memorabilia means, only to turn
to a flashback that explains it all; the effect is to keep tension to
a manageable level, make the book easier to read, but the ploy also
makes Siddalee's own thinking harder, not easier, to follow. On the
other hand, the flashbacks, which focus mostly on Viviane's teenaged
friends (and compare Alexander in the fantasy post: another example
of vows not broken), the "Ya-Yas", are what made the book a
bestseller, showing Viviane salvaging what she can of a life out of
the wreckage of truly harmful parents and the loss of her beloved,
largely through the help of her three best friends.

Besides the flashback dodge, Wells also cheats in another way: she
never really shows us the 1970s and 1980s, the years in which Siddalee
and her siblings come of age, and in which the changes in the older
generation's lives, hinted at in 1960s chapters and confirmed in 1990s
ones, presumably come to fruition. Near as I can tell, this remains
true in the third book; I've only really skimmed its final section
(set in the 1990s), but at first glance the rest seems to steer clear
of the preceding two decades, and focus instead on more Ya-Ya
flashbacks.

Basically, to the extent that you want to read books that instantiate
the quote I gave up above, I recommend the first two books to you.
Whether or not both books' painful portrayal of family, or the second
book's exuberant portrayal of female friendship, interests you, their
portrayal of life in Louisiana from the 1930s to the 1960s is rich,
hurtful, and good.

[h] Wells seems to exert a magnetic effect on bibliography - a
same-pole magnetic effect, that is. Otherwise extremely staid sources
forget all about the concept of titles and dates when they come into
contact with her, and either go all lyrically critical, raving about
her local colour, or get into the high-priestess thing. I may not
live long enough for someone to reveal when and where her first story
- the oldest bit of <Little Altars Everywhere> - actually appeared,
let alone the rest.

Joe Bernstein

unread,
Dec 16, 2008, 2:31:16 AM12/16/08
to
VIEWED FOR THE FIRST TIME: OTHER FICTION

Dramatic performance that would, if a book, fit in this post:

<Twelfe Night, or What You Will>
Script by William Shakespeare, circa 1601, here apparently unaltered
and perhaps uncut; directed by David Esbjornsen; performed at the
Seattle Repertory Theatre on 17th October 2007 by a cast mostly US but
not mostly local

I thought I'd have a lot to say about this, having enjoyed it a lot.
But I wanted to check something out before writing it. And by the
time I'd found that what I wanted to say in that respect was *wrong*,
somehow the other comments had evaporated. To what extent does my
writing this log fix in memory unimportant things, then? To what
extent does it rescue from oblivion important ones?

Movies that would, if books, fit in this post:

Early in the year, I found that I was commenting on way too many of
the following movies, so I deleted most of those comments and made a
policy. I've tried to comment in only four ways:
1) describing a reasonably poorly known movie, which means here some
combination of "I hadn't heard of it before" and (where relevant,
chronologically) "It's not in Maltin [2001]" (some movies meeting
this criterion don't get comments anyway);
2) mentioning any spec-fic connection (or lack thereof) that I
noticed;
3) asking a question; or
4) pushing a strong opinion.
The first criterion turns out to cover most of the silent movies I
watched, and several cropped up remarkably often for later films, so
there's still a lot of comments anyway. I also use parentheses, as
last year, to indicate dubbing, or translation of intertitles; to
indicate TV network of origin; to differentiate movies whose titles I
know not to be unique; and to indicate which DVD (or video) a given
short was associated with.

That said, then, the movies:

+ not very arguably <Paris to Monte Carlo>, 1905 (in the Sprocket
Society Méliès program described in the fantasy post; 6 min. as
shown there; a mildly amusing Dire Warning comedy about reckless
drivers of them newfangled automothingies; features an impossible
re-inflation of a man run over, but I consider that comedy not
fantasy, as discussed below re <Mister Peepers>);
$ <The Scheming Gamblers Paradise>, 1905 (on the DVD <The Magic of
Méliès> described in the fantasy post, but here, instead of magic
tricks, blatant scene and cast changes drive the "plot"; 3 min.);
$ <Good Glue Sticks>, 1907 (ditto, except this time the McGuffin is
SuperGlue; 5 min.);

Seven short "Civil War Films" directed by D. W. Griffith in 1910-1911,
included as special features in Kino's DVD edition of <The Birth of a
Nation>, which I watched as prefaces to <Birth> and <Intolerance>; all
are melodramas:

<In the Border States>, 1910;
<The House with Closed Shutters>, 1910;
<The Fugitive>, 1910;
<His Trust> and <His Trust Fulfilled>, both 1910 (meant by Griffith to
be a single film; introduces his approach to race relations by
portraying a "servant", played in blackface by Wilfred Lucas, who
has a house and "savings" that real house slaves lacked, and who
selflessly and secretly uses these for the orphaned daughter of his
erstwhile masters);
<Swords and Hearts>, 1911 (where we learn that poor whites also adored
the slave-owning class);
<The Battle>, 1911;

<Cabiria>, (edited over the original Italian intertitles, written by
no less than Gabriele D'Annunzio), 1914 (a historical epic set amid
the Second Punic War, whose length, something like two hours,
astonishes me given its date, and whose temple of Moloch clearly
underlies at least some fantasy art);
<The Birth of a Nation>, 1915 (I expected appalling racism, and I
expected lots of some combination of entertainment or æsthetic
value; well, I got very nearly as much of the former as I'd heard,
and maybe a tenth as much of the latter; *not* recommended! - oh,
and when they tell you how Woodrow Wilson praised it, employ a
grain of salt: the intertitles actually quote at length a history
book *by* Wilson, and anyway, he was the most racist 20th century
US president, by a mile);
<Intolerance>, 1916 (perhaps the first time I truly experienced a
spoiler: there's a detailed description halfway through Kage
Baker's <Mendoza in Hollywood>, and at least without a big screen,
the movie does *not* improve enough on the description to justify
how much longer it takes to watch than to read);
<A Reckless Romeo>, 1917 (a short comedy/slapstick film starring Fatty
Arbuckle; #2 on a DVD titled, somewhat misleadingly, <The Cook and
Other Treasures>; like the other two, could be considered fantasy
except that the devices used are standard in comedy);
<The Cook>, 1918 (#1 on the obvious DVD; same description as <A
Reckless Romeo> except this time Buster Keaton's involved;
definitely the best of the three on the disc);
<M'liss>, 1918 (73 min., as I timed it, since the DVD box didn't state
the length, because on that box it's just a "special feature" - but
it's a much more enjoyable Mary Pickford vehicle than the main
feature, <Heart o' the Hills>; though over 25, Pickford plays a
teenager in *both*);
<Heart o' the Hills>, 1919 (longer and slower moving than <M'liss>,
and substitutes dramatics for that movie's comic elements);
<Male and Female>, 1919 (an adaptation of J. M. Barrie's <The
Admirable Crichton>, directed by Cecil B. DeMille, already leaning
towards extravaganza);
<Haunted Spooks>, 1920 (a Harold Lloyd short film, first I'd seen of
his; mixes slapstick and screwball romance with jokey horror, but
never makes the ghosts plausible enough to qualify as Gothic, let
alone fantasy; much funnier than it has any right to be; on the DVD
of <The Cat and the Canary>);
<The Mark of Zorro>, 1920 (are characters like Zorro and the Scarlet
Pimpernel the source of superheroes' secret identities?);
<Number, Please?>, 1920 (a markedly inferior Harold Lloyd short film,
three ostensibly comic set pieces involving an amusement park,
telephony, and a stolen purse in his doomed attempt to romance a
girl; #3 on <The Cook and Other Treasures>);
<Through the Back Door>, 1921 (here, Pickford at *29* actually plays a
*ten*-year-old, with limited but nonzero success; longer and more
sentimental than <M'liss> but I still liked it);
<La Fille de l'eau>, French (edited over the non-original English
intertitles: apparently, only a copy with those survived, and the
present French intertitles, subtitled in English in the copy I
watched, were actually back-translated *from* the English!), 1924
(a mildly inane perils-of-heroine melodrama produced and directed
by Jean Renoir, who does show remarkable directorial talent in a
phantasmagoric, effects-filled nightmare scene; the first of seven
movies collected in a three-disc set of his movies from Lionsgate;
further comments below);
<Nana>, French, 1926 (Renoir set #2);
<Hindle Wakes>, 1927 (comments below);
<The Garden of Eden>, 1928 (comments below);
arguably <La Petite Marchande d'allumettes>, French, 1928 (an
adaptation of Andersen's "Little Match Girl"; Renoir set #4 - movie
3's in the sf post; in the Lionsgate edition this one sure sounds
like it's got its 1928 score, which may make it the earliest sound
recording I'd then heard; further comments below);
<The Toy Shop>, 1928 (also sounds like it retains its original score;
further comments below);
<Diary of a Lost Girl>, (edited over the original German intertitles),
1929 (comments below);
<Windy Riley Goes Hollywood>, 1931 (a short film on the DVD of <Diary
of a Lost Girl>: Louise Brooks Speaks! and though certainly not
thanks to this movie, I do wish she'd had major rôles in the
talkies);
<Mystery of the Wax Museum>, 1933 (on the DVD of <House of Wax>;
comments below);
<Twentieth Century>, 1934;
<Zou Zou>, French, 1934;
<Alice Adams>, 1935;
<Reckless>, 1935;
<How to Be a Detective>, 1936, started (a short film on the DVD of
<After the Thin Man>);
<Mr. Deeds Goes to Town>, 1936;
<Reefer Madness>, 1936 (on the obvious DVD listed far below);
<The Rules of the Game>, French, 1936;
<La Marseillaise>, French, 1938 (Renoir set #5);
<Home Movies>, 1939 (a short film on the DVD of <My Favorite Wife>);
<Made For Each Other>, 1939;
<Dance, Girl, Dance>, 1940 (wow);
<Just a Cute Kid>, 1940 (a supposedly comic short film on the DVD of
<Dance, Girl, Dance>; manages to feature prominently a mad
scientist - who even spends most of his time cackling - and *still*
not be, or even seem, spec-fic);
<Malibu Beach Party>, 1940 (a tedious "Merrie Melodie" on the DVD of
<Dance, Girl, Dance>);
<Adam Had Four Sons>, 1941;
<Melodies Old and New>, 1941 (an Our Gang short film on the DVD of
<Ziegfeld Girl>);
<You'll Never Get Rich>, 1941;
<Ziegfeld Girl>, 1941;
<The More the Merrier>, 1943 (wow);
<Cover Girl>, 1944;
arguably <The Body Snatcher>, 1945;
<Bedlam>, 1946 (alt-history, probably unintentionally, for its
treatment of British politics in the 1760s-1770s);
<"The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer">, 1947;
<Mourning Becomes Electra>, 1947 (<Oresteia> demythologised and with a
different ending);
<Easter Parade>, 1948;
+ <The Red Shoes>, 1948 (also de-fantasised, except the brilliant,
phantasmagoric eponymous ballet-within-the-movie);
<Father of the Bride>, 1950 (of course, the version with Spencer Tracy
and Elizabeth Taylor in the titular rôles);
+ <How Do You Know It's Love?>, 1950 (a short "Coronet Instructional
Film" chosen, perfectly aptly, to precede the showing of <Kissing
Jessica Stein> I saw);
<Kim>, 1950;
* <Father's Little Dividend>, 1951;
arguably <Mister Peepers>, 1952-1953, started (NBC; this set contains
only what amounts to one season out of three; I don't think some
malevolently animated machines make this spec-fic, because such
machines have been comedy staples for decades);
<We're Not Married!>, 1952;
<House of Wax>, 1953 (comments below);
<Lili>, 1953 (also has a fantasticated ballet scene near the end);
<Titanic>, 1953 (the one starring Clifton Webb and Barbara Stanwyck);
<New Year Sacrifice>, Mandarin, 1956 (an incredibly depressing movie
chronicling the life of a poor woman in pre-Communist China,
demonstrating Murphy's Law rendered much more literally than usual;
rather blatantly exemplifies Communist ideology, but alas does not
thereby become less plausible; I'm allowing myself this comment
because the Seattle International Film Festival this year showed a
Chinese movie called <Blind Mountain> which appears to be a remake
of the single most appalling episode of this movie, and I wanted to
warn y'all in case that one got wider distribution);
<The Teahouse of the August Moon>, 1956;
<Written on the Wind>, 1956;
<Les Girls>, 1957;
<Eyes Without a Face>, French, 1959;
<It Happened to Jane>, 1959 (comment below);
<Where the Boys Are>, 1960;
<All in a Night's Work>, 1961;
<Viridiana>, Spanish, 1961;
<Le Caporal épinglé>, French, 1962 (Renoir set #7 - movie 6 is in the
sf post);
<Gypsy>, 1962;
arguably <The Color of Pomegranates>, Armenian (the DVD box claims
Russian, but multiple lines of evidence contradict that), 1969
(arguably plotless, surreal and conceivably fantasy though I'd say
not, and for either reason may not belong in this list; the DVD
also offers a probably plotless short, also by Paradjanov, <Hagop
Hovnatanian>, ?Russian, 1965);
<The Madwoman of Chaillot>, 1969 (an opening title calls it "a
fantasy", but it isn't, by our terms);
<Sweet Charity>, 1969;
<Fiddler on the Roof>, 1971;
<Paper Moon>, 1973;
<Love for Lydia>, 1977 (LWT);
<An Unmarried Woman>, 1977;
<Romeo & Juliet>, 1978 (BBC; the version with Patrick Ryecart and
Rebecca Saire differing in their inadequacies for the titular
rôles);
<Pride & Prejudice>, 1979 (BBC; the version, oddly mixed of elements
of re-creation and adaptation, starring Elizabeth Garvie);
<Fame>, 1980 (could've been much better twice as long, so the obvious
question is, had the spinoff TV show any merit?);
<Ordinary People>, 1980;
<Night of the Shooting Stars>, Italian, 1982 (the DVD box seems to
hint at fantasy, but no);
<Starstruck>, 1982 (the Australian musical, not the movie currently
available cheap at many video stores);
<flashdance>, 1983;
<Jane Eyre>, 1983 (BBC; the rather faithful version in which Sían
Pattenden and Zelah Clarke play the titular character; oh, all
right, yes, it also stars Timothy Dalton);
arguably <Rendez-vous>, French, 1985 (it'd be a spoiler to explain);
<Lucia di Lammermoor>, Italian, 1986 (A[ustralian]BC; the ill lit
Australian Opera version in which Joan Sutherland, aged fifty-nine,
plays the titular "girl": obviously, I've yet to become an opera
fan);
<Betsy's Wedding>, 1990 (to quote a friend of mine: "I want my life
back!");
* <flirting>, 1990;
<Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing & Charm School>, 1990 (this is the
short one, included on the DVD of the overlapping 2005 feature film
of the same title);
<Clarissa>, 1991 (BBC);
<The Darling Buds of May>, 1991-1993 (YTV; the Peter Jackson
prominently credited as director of photography is *not* the New
Zealand director of much else);
<A League of Their Own>, 1992;
<Love on a Branch Line>, 1993 (BBC; the DVD box says "surreal", but
no, it's just wish fulfillment);
<Passion>, 1995 (PBS);
<Total Eclipse>, 1995;
<Leila>, Persian, ?1996;
<Ivanhoe>, 1997 (BBC; I'd distinguish this from other versions of the
novel it *loosely* adapts by saying it's the one that goes on
forever, but since Maltin indicates even a version one-third as
long drags, I'll have to settle for noting that Steven Waddington
has the titular rôle; still, and although it *isn't* fantasy,
scenes in it dramatised for me, as nothing I've seen before, scenes
from several works by Kay and Martin);
<Mother and Son>, Russian, 1997;
<Mouse>, 1997 (a short film included on the DVD of <Robot Stories>);
<Welcome Back, Mr. McDonald>, Japanese, 1997 (an often amusing farce
set back- and on-stage at a live radio drama);
<Christmas in August>, Korean, 1998 (for which I have no words);
* <Drop Dead Gorgeous>, 1999;
arguably <Genesis>, Bambara, 1999 (the parts this dramatises mostly
contain nothing I'd consider impossible, but despite a gloss of
realism, I can't call this, like <Mourning Becomes Electra>,
"demythologised"; it is, in fact, fundamentally a mythic
presentation of stories revolving around Jacob and Dinah - so I put
it here because I don't consider myth fantasy or indeed spec-fic,
not because I consider it truly realism);
<My Life So Far>, 1999;
* <White Valentine>, Korean, 1999;
<All About You>, 2001 (should be much better known, sez me; a romance,
almost a musical, and the title song is gorgeous; recommended to
anyone whose tastes in movies resemble mine);
<Almost Strangers>, 2001 (BBC);
not very arguably <Amélie>, French, 2001 (and if there's a more
extreme example of whimsy not being fantasy, I sure don't want to
see it ... argh);
<Baran>, Persian, 2001;
<The Girl from Paris>, French, 2001 (wow);
<Lagaan>, Hindi, 2001;
<Memoirs of a Geisha>, 2001;
<She and Her Cat: Their standing points>, Japanese, 2001 (a five
minute anime, included along with three minute and shorter versions
as special features on the DVD of <Voices of a Distant Star>);
<the truth about Jane>, 2001 (Lifetime);
<A Bizarre Love Triangle>, Korean, 2002 (which though not primarily sf
has an sf frame, a wedding on the Moon in 2030; and whose region 1
DVD box gives an *exceptionally* inaccurate plot summary);
<Tipping the Velvet>, 2002 (BBC);
not very arguably <Twin Sisters>, German (though the DVD box claims
Dutch, and it is a Dutch-made movie, a majority of the dialogue is
in fact in German, the titular characters' native tongue), 2002 (I
couldn't substantiate claims that this was a TV movie, let alone
name the network; the fraternal twins in question seem, as kids, to
have the sort of long-range sensitivity so often attributed to
identical twins - but they get over it);
<Edge of America>, 2003 (Showtime);
<Fear and Trembling>, Japanese, 2003;
<Head in the Clouds>, 2003;
<House of Sand and Fog>, 2003;
<Indian Babu>, Hindi, 2003, started (see <Garam Masala> below: this
one may be only half as dreadful, but is obviously in the same
spirit, so ... once bitten, twice shy);
<Kuch naa Kaho>, Hindi, 2003 (so I now retract my claim that it's bad
for Bollywood movies to mix genres: nearly three hours of
screwball rom-com *un*adulterated is worse, even with Aishwarya Rai
involved! but at least now I've seen her do flirtation, disdain,
mirth and above all *archness* enough to be certain that if
Bollywood tackles the Thin Man stories anytime soon, she should
play Nora Charles; in any event, I'd willingly watch this again,
with trepidation, but I want some way to avoid *ever* seeing
another scene from whatever Bollywood genre <Indian Babu> and
<Garam Masala> belong to);
<The Lost Prince>, 2003 (BBC; evidently not only fantasy finds princes
and princesses useful as metaphors!);
<Not on the Lips>, French, 2003;
arguably <Touch of Pink>, 2003 (the "spirit of Cary Grant" is a major
character - but as an "imaginary friend", and this movie lacks
<Harvey>'s door; Grant's superbly played by Kyle MacLachlan, so
this also isn't evidence that <Remake> is coming true);
<Being Julia>, 2004;
<Desperate housewives. The complete first season>, 2004-2005
(A[merican]BC);
<Electric Shadows>, Mandarin, 2004 (wow! at once a moving and
beautiful melodrama, and a love letter both to movies unknown to
the West - possibly for good reason - and to the power of cinema
itself; I can't believe the two best movies in this list from this
century - the other I mean is <All About You> - are movies I'd
never heard of before seeing them, but so it is; and I should note
that the North American DVD box's summary of the plot is mostly
incorrect);
+ <Head-On>, German, 2004 (wow; I suppose I should distinguish this
from the movie that the film festival's distributor confused with
it by noting it's the one about German Turks...);
<In Good Company>, 2004;
<North & South>, 2004 (BBC);
$ <The Prince & Me>, 2004 (oops);
<Producing Adults>, Finnish, 2004;
arguably <Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical>, 2004 (Showtime; near as
I can tell, there are two lines of defense between the fantasy/
horror scenes and this being a fantasy movie, but it didn't feel
that way);
<Sequins>, French, 2004;
arguably <3-Iron>, Korean, 2004 (it'd be a spoiler to explain);
<Woman is the Future of Man>, Korean, 2004;
<Breakfast on Pluto>, 2005;
<Brick>, 2005 (wow);
<Christmas In The Clouds>, 2005;
<Flightplan>, 2005;
<Garam Masala>, Hindi, 2005, skimmed (how I learned, first, that
Bollywood has such a thing as raunchy comedy for thirteen-year-old
boys, and second, that I actually dislike sniggeringly censored
raunchy comedy even more than openly raunchy comedy: YUCK! - but
I'll also note that this appears to be a remake of a 1960s show
recently revived on Broadway, there known as <Boeing Boeing>, so
perhaps Seattle shares some blame for this awful movie's
existence);
<Imagine Me & You>, 2005;
<In Her Shoes>, 2005;
<Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing & Charm School>, 2005 (this is the
long one);
<Me and You and Everyone We Know>, 2005 (whimsy that *doesn't* edge on
fantasy);
<Oprah Winfrey Is the New Neighbor>, 2005 (a special feature with the
first season set of <Desperate housewives>);
<The Squid and the Whale>, 2005;
<Under the Greenwood Tree>, 2005 (ITV1, I gather, but sold in the US
by the BBC);
<Dreamgirls>, 2006 (comments below);
<Friends & Crocodiles>, 2006 (BBC);
<Gracie>, 2006;
<Little Miss Sunshine>, 2006;
<Material Girls>, 2006;
<The Page Turner>, French, 2006;
<sherrybaby>, 2006;
<something new>, 2006;
<stick it>, 2006;
<10 items or less>, 2006;
<Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story>, 2006;
+ <Across the Universe>, 2007 (comments below);
+ <Atonement>, 2007;
+ <The Band's Visit>, 2007;
+ <Juno>, 2007;
+ <Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day>, 2007;
<The Nanny Diaries>, 2007;
+ <The Savages>, 2007;
+ <Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street>, 2007 (I mention
this in the gothics post, but the title of this Tim Burton musical
is its only actual hint of spec-fic);
+ <The Other Boleyn Girl>, 2008 (the very silly version whose titular
rôle is played either by Scarlett Johansson or by Natalie Portman;
certainly fictional);
+ <27 Dresses>, 2008.

See also, in the series post, the original Thin Man movies. See also,
in the re-reading post: <The Broadway Melody>, 1929; <Broadway Melody
of 1940>, 1940; <My Favorite Wife>, 1940; <The Band Wagon>, 1953;
<Smiles of a Summer Night>, 1955; <The Music Man>, 1962; <Romeo and
Juliet>, 1968; <The Breakfast Club>, 1985; <all I wanna do>, 1998;
<Kissing Jessica Stein>, 2001; <me without you>, 2001; <Bride and
Prejudice>, 2004; <The New World>, 2005.

Per rules stated above, I meant to comment on neither <Diary of a Lost
Girl>, which is in Maltin, nor <Hindle Wakes>, of which I had somehow
heard. But imagine my surprise: When I'd already decided to break
the spirit of my rule anent <The Garden of Eden> and <The Toy Shop>
and comment at length, I discovered that the theme they share is also
present in those nearly contemporary movies!
I borrowed a DVD of <The Garden of Eden> from my local branch
library in November, I think, but when time came to play it, found it
had been destroyed, because the bits supposed to hold the DVD in place
had broken off, and their remnants had scratched the middle part of
the disc at least a hundred times as the disc moved around. Another
library claimed to have it, but that copy was then lost. But the
librarian there got me the copy of the local bookmobile, and I'm glad
she did. This was perhaps the most nearly purely fun DVD I'd seen in
months.
The disc contains three movies, one incomplete. <Hollywood the
Unusual>, 1927, is a 10-minute tour of the well-known bizarre
architecture of early 20th century LA, full of not entirely lame
jokes, but at the same time clearly an early example of Hollywood's
relentless (and relentlessly publicised) self-obsession. (The final
shots feature, brand new, Grauman's Chinese Theatre, and focus on the
prints already present of Hollywood's original power couple, Douglas
Fairbanks and Mary Pickford.) Regardless, the architecture itself is
well worth seeing.
<The Toy Shop> is a bewitching, wordless, 9-minute small-f fantasy
in which the proprietor of said shop takes in a beggar girl, at least
for a snowy night. But it's Hollywood, and you know by the end she'll
be staying. For a more realistic (non-Hollywood) treatment of waif in
snow, with a similar structure, see the Renoir <La Petite Marchande>
of the same year. <The Toy Shop> includes a dream sequence that's
just about big-F Fantasy, involving dancing puppets (um, actors
impersonating puppets, and no, none of this is animated) acting out a
playlet of sorts. (<La Petite Marchande> also has a dream sequence,
and just maybe I should've listed that movie in the Gothics post.)
But perhaps <The Toy Shop>'s most notable feature is that it's in
colour! [i] Apparently Technicolor was already in business by 1928,
using a two-colour process that leads to peculiar but genuine colour
for the movie.
Perhaps it's clear now that the theme here is "lost girls". <The
Garden of Eden>'s first fifteen minutes actually played on that
wrecked copy from my local library, and made the movie look dark dark
dark: Toni LeBrun (and I'm positive I'd heard *that* name before
too!), played by the modernly lovely Corrine Griffith, runs away from
home to become a famous opera singer, only to find that the "Palais de
Paris" she's come to is actually a corrupt cabaret/whorehouse. But
from there things change fast, and roughly two-thirds of the movie is
actually the earliest screwball comedy I'd ever seen (unless <Haunted
Spooks> just barely counts, by virtue of a marriage for implausible
comedic reasons). Unlike Hollywood's screwball comedy heroines of the
1930s, and for that matter unlike the contemporary non-Hollywood lost
heroines of <Hindle Wakes> and <Diary of a Lost Girl>, LeBrun here
exemplifies several stereotypes of femininity [j]; but unlike
Christine Daaé of <Phantom of the Opera>, her beloved is a composer,
and she may just wind up conquering the respectable stage after all.
I don't know how feminist women would take those stereotypes, but as I
said, I found the entire disc (except the first fifteen minutes or so
of the main feature) just plain fun.
Oddly, "attempted marriage under false pretences" is another theme
I saw as repetitive in <Garden>, but this time only because in the
preceding two days I'd seen <Clarissa>, <Jane Eyre>, and much of
<Garam Masala>, all featuring variations on the idea. But, in keeping
with <Garden>'s slant on women (of its six credited characters, guess
the sex of the unredeemed villain...), it's the only one where the
attempt isn't unequivocally the man's fault.
But as to lost girls: what's the deal? I thought anxiety over
"flappers" and such was prominent throughout the 1920s; is it just
that I've seen hardly any movies from the decade's first two-thirds,
or was there something specific to 1927-1929, perhaps a new scare over
white slavery, perhaps the rising reputation of Weimar Germany, that
made this theme so trendy?
Well... A week or probably two after writing the above, I found
another lost girl heroine in <La Fille de l'eau>, several years
earlier than those mentioned above, which probably answers that
question. (But I should also note that Mary Pickford's characters in
the earlier movies listed, though also arguably "lost", are
consistently impossible to see as such.)
Skip past the footnotes and one other long comment, and there's
more on the general topic of Hollywood and gender.

[i] OK, OK. Actually, what I've been finding by watching so many
silent movies is that *many* movies before sound weren't black and
white; they were in various tones, like the sepia tones stereotypical
of old photographs, and lotsa movies used multiple tones, for example
one (usually a yellowish tan) for indoors, another (usually blue) for
night, a third, or B&W, for day. Sometimes this actually contributes
a lot, but at least as often, it just looks cheesy. All the same,
there's a difference between monochrome and "in colour", even if the
chrome in the monochrome varies. <The Garden of Eden> actually *is*
B&W (unlike <Hollywood the Unusual>, which is mostly in that
yellowish-tan tone), but once had a 5-minute colour sequence near the
beginning, apparently a dream sequence in which LeBrun imagined her
future success, using the two-colour process; this was inserted by
hand in each copy, and is now lost. Which is why I said one of the
three movies on the disc is incomplete.

[j] In all fairness, though, Catherine Hessling's Karen in the
non-Hollywood <La Petite Marchande> shows some stereotypical
femininity too.

My comment on <Dreamgirls> is that I now know why it was so popular.
I kept thinking "OK, another 'wow' comment", but then reconsidering -
the movie *does* have flaws. So why was I so transfixed? Well, some
time ago, I remarked that the new movie musicals of the past few years
- disregarding, inter alia, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Disney - were
rather consistently twisted, or perverse: <Dancer in the Dark>;
<Chicago>; <8 Women>; <Moulin Rouge!>; even <Hip Hopera: Carmen> ...
such that <Rent>, despite its épater les bourgeois topics, was
actually the least morally ambiguous one I'd seen. Well, that was
true of what I'd seen when I wrote that - and the Webber I've seen
since, <The Phantom of the Opera>, doesn't exactly rebut it, centred
as it is on a now unacceptable moral code of a past century. But
<Dreamgirls> is very nearly a bona fide Hollywood musical of the kind
they don't make any more, concerned for right and wrong, willing to
let evil lose, and neatly tied up at the end. Yeah, its characters
have moral ambiguities, but those ambiguities don't dominate them; and
the movie ultimately affirms life as a worthwhile struggle. Combine
this with its use of a musical style lots of people now praise, and,
well, duh. I hope someone in Hollywood learns the right lesson from
this!
(And indeed apparently someone has! Concerned for right and wrong?
Check. Willing to let evil lose? Arguably check. Neatly tied up at
the end? Well, sorta. Ambiguities not dominant? Um... Life as a
worthwhile struggle? Check. Musical style lots of people now praise?
Duh. I mean, of course, <Across the Universe>, whose treatment of
its edgy topics is edgier than the equivalent in <Dreamgirls>, but
which I can't imagine would've been greenlighted without the earlier
movie's success - and yes, I am aware that it was nearly derailed at
the last minute, and still don't know whose version I actually saw.
Separately, <Enchanted>, in the fantasy post, was the first Disney
musical I'd seen since childhood, and I admit total unsurprise that
*it's* un-twisted.)

<Mystery of the Wax Museum> and <House of Wax> are an excellent
illustration of the claim that a work of art reveals a lot about the
society it was made in; though only two decades separate them, they're
miles apart. Maltin claims <Mystery> was the first horror movie set
in a modern city; <House> is set fifty years before its release, and
includes as a joke an argument about whether automobiles will ever be
fast enough to be dangerous, so displacement vitiates its horror. On
the other hand, <Mystery> is adulterated with vaguely screwball
comedy; <House>, despite a silly ending, is played mostly straight.
But the big differences have to do with the movies' respective
views of women. The <Mystery> of the earlier movie is unraveled by
Fay Wray's newspaper reporter character, a brassy independent woman
fighting to keep her job on her terms; although Phyllis Kirk's
character in the later one has the biggest single part in sorting
things out, she gets a lot more help, and is herself thoroughly
dependent, much of her motivation coming from the fact that a victim
of the murderer was her friend and support. Where the earlier movie
prominently features a male playboy (and you can tell it precedes the
Hays code), the later one includes a scene where the lead's boyfriend
tries to cheer her up - by taking her to a burlesque (!?), a classic
cheesy way to provide cheesecake in a censored movie. It's not that
<Mystery> is a lost feminist classic - see its ending, for example.
But it's vastly less condescending towards women than its more famous
remake. And really, it isn't hard to see in this a larger picture:
where the screwball comedies of the 1930s, as well as more famous
films like <Gone with the Wind> and <The Wizard of Oz>, featured
strong, independent women, such women in the 1950s as often tended to
be the villainesses of noirs and such. (Ironically, on the same day I
wrote that last sentence, I saw a limited counter-example, <It
Happened to Jane>, 1959.)

Some November stories about the borders of fiction:

I wasn't interested in researching how fictional <Why Do Fools Fall in
Love?>, 1998, actually is; at any rate, instead of the usual
disclaimer it explicitly says it's based on real life people and
incidents, and since its material comes from a court case, I could
believe this. (Contrast <The Queen>, 2006, which was the most
problematic item in last year's lists once I learnt that <Not One
Less>, 1999, was based on a novel. Some of <The Queen>'s characters
have published probably-relevant memoirs, but I don't think any of the
major ones have, and so no plausible source exists for plenty of
scenes. <The Queen>'s disclaimer pointedly referred to the movie as
fictional.)

Little did I know, when I wrote the previous paragraph in early
November, that within days I'd face the same issue; but at least
<Close-Up>, Persian, 1990, offers surprisingly many points of contact
with actual on-topic matters. The movie re-enacts (mostly with people
playing themselves) the arrest and trial of a man who impersonated a
famous movie director. Substantively, I can't help thinking <Being
John Malkovich>, 1999, must have got at least a smidgen of its
inspiration from this movie. Trivially, the director impersonated
(who actually appears in the final scenes) is Mohsen Makhmalbaf,
director inter alia of <Gabbeh> (Persian, 1996) and <The Silence>
(Persian, 1998), one definitely fantasy and the other arguably so.
And coincidentally, the flashback scene in which the imposture begins
echoes a story I heard Stephen Donaldson tell at the one World Fantasy
I've attended, about how a man used to impersonate him until his
publisher started putting photos of him on his book covers. Whatever.
The movie itself is less fun but more interesting than <Why Do Fools
Fall in Love?>; the DVD as produced by Facets, if not the movie
proper, suffers from poor volume control on the sound (I wound up
turning the sound down something like four or five times over the
course of the movie).

I did assume that being a musical, <Gypsy> had to be at least somewhat
fictional, though it's certainly a biopic. (Come to think of it, I
should've worried last year about <Walk the Line>, 2005, which is
*not* in the same sense a musical. Oops.)

And as long as I'm so lavishing attention on non-fiction, I'll add
that *also* in November, I finally read Marjane Satrapi's
<Persepolis>, French, 2000-2001, first compiled as such in English
2003 (translated by Mattias Ripa and Blake Ferris, lettered by Eve
Deluze and Céline Merrien), and <Persepolis 2>, French, 2002-2003,
first compiled as such in English 2004 (translated by Anjali Singh,
lettered by Céline Merrien). Here I see no obvious spec-ficnal hooks,
except the lamely obvious remark that Satrapi recounts three separate
cases of her own culture shock, which actually exceeds what happens to
a lot of spec-ficnal protagonists.

I made a mistake last year, by stating different criteria for listing
movies vs. listing books: Books are required to be primarily
fictional; movies only have to have plots. The movie criterion is
based on my impression that most documentaries (except perhaps the
subspecies made or inspired by Michael Moore) generally try *not* to
portray events as having shape, which is what a plot is, so yes, this
criterion is meant to exclude documentaries (also newscasts, etc.).
But stupid me! this does not exclude all films I'd consider
non-fiction! So since I chose not to make basic changes this year,
but did see several movies (*besides* those listed above) for which
this criterion difference is decisive, I finally had to make another
list. So OK, here are essentially non-fictional movies with plots,
seen after November:

<Cheaper by the Dozen>, 1950 (AFAIK the much later movie of the same
title, which I haven't seen, *is* fiction, but this one is closely
based on a memoir written by two of the characters, at least as
best I remember that memoir from several readings in childhood -
oh, and yes, in this case, I'll spare you any attempt to
distinguish movies with the same title by naming the actors who
played the titular dozen!);
<Dersu Uzala>, Russian, 1975 (also based on a memoir);
<Walkout>, 2004 (HBO; the disclaimer at the end refers to certain
scenes being fictionalised, but that's it - the credit sequence
actually opens with several iterations of picture of actor, picture
of person portrayed, quote from person portrayed about the
historical significance of the events portrayed).

Joe Bernstein

unread,
Dec 16, 2008, 2:34:32 AM12/16/08
to
SERIES

This post's predecessor was posted 19th October 2007, with message-ID

<ff9c99$qni$1...@reader1.panix.com>.

As usual, I read lots of series books not listed below (the criterion
for inclusion in this post is that the series must include some
fiction I read for the first time *and* some fiction I re-read, all
within the year covered). So see also, in the fantasy post, Abraham,
arguably Alexander, very arguably Bailey, Barlowe, Berg, probably
Bledsoe, Brust, very arguably Cain, Cochran (arguably and Murphy), Hal
Duncan, the Foglios, Howard, Howell, Kendall, Lake, Larke, Lee, very
arguably Lindsay, McGarry, Meyer, Alan Moore, Novik, Rothfuss,
Shetterly, Smith, Snyder, Townley, Windling and Steiber, and Zambreno;
in the science fiction post, Baker, Buckell, Bujold, Drake, arguably
Finch, Flint and Drake, McCarthy, McDevitt, McDonald, and arguably
Richards; in the children's fiction post, Dixon, Keene, arguably
Kushner, Lovelace, Porter, and Spyri; and in the other fiction post,
arguably Burney (sv <Evelina>), Griffith, Loos, Terry Moore, and Wells
(and in its appendix Satrapi). There are also series books in the
re-reading post, by Bujold, Eager, Potter, and Stevermer. In
addition, on the basis of series that consist entirely of short
fiction, or include at most one full book, see in the fantasy post,
arguably Griffis, and Miller; in the science fiction post, Clifton et
alii, Finch (if she doesn't belong in the previous list), arguably
Irvine, less arguably McAllister, and arguably Sosnowski; and in the
other fiction post, Hope (several examples) and Russell. Finally, see
in the other fiction post Brockmeier (sv <The View from the Seventh
Layer>), for a story, not a series *book*, which belongs to a series
that neither consists entirely of short fiction nor includes at most
one full book... argh.

Eric Flint and collaborators
Re-read: <1634: The Baltic War> by Flint and David Weber, 2007,
skimmed; <Grantville Gazette III> edited by Flint, 2004 (fiction
only; I've also re-read selected fiction from earlier volumes);
<1634: The Ram Rebellion> by Flint and a bunch of others,
especially Virginia DeMarce, 2006
Read for the first time: $ (October) / (June) <1634: The Bavarian
Crisis> by Flint and DeMarce, 2007; $ (June-August) <Grantville
Gazette IV> edited by Flint, 2005?, started; $ (July-August) /
(September) <Ring of Fire II>, edited by Flint, 2008; o (August)
<1635: The Dreeson Incident>, by Flint and DeMarce, 2008, started

To clarify, I (very lightly) skimmed a bookstore copy of <Bavarian> in
October, then properly read a library copy in June. I read most of
<Ring of Fire II> in a bookstore in July and August, then read the
closing novella in a library in September. I read a substantial chunk
of <Dreeson> online (URL below) as "sample chapters", in August. I
read all of <Grantville Gazette IV> except some of the non-fiction.

Proposed: That the 1632verse, whose opening to multiple authorship
was supposed to give it something of the complexity of real history
and thus prevent its staling, is instead becoming, largely under
pressures created by that very multiple authorship and other elements
of its publishing structure, a hermetically sealed (and staling!)
world of stories accessible only to devotees, and increasingly, only
to its own authors.

Exhibit A: <1634: The Bavarian Crisis> (and <1635: The Dreeson
Incident>). <Bavarian> is effectively a sequel to <The Baltic War>,
which I slammed in last year's log; it is actually a clearly better
book. It breaks out of some of the established patterns of the
series, and nudges others. Examples of breaking out include a *much*
stronger focus on women (possibly attributable to DeMarce; no previous
whole book had a woman as co-author), severe downgrading of
conventional romance (we see no weddings in this book), and a central
focus on a "down-timer" charting her own course, not even undergoing
very much bildungsroman. Examples of nudging include a young couple
for whom we hear a prediction of an unhappy marriage, and a minor POV
character who engages (not explicitly) in torture: the 1632verse
continues to display a restricted range of human nature, but in this
book, there's at least some recognition that something *exists* beyond
that range. (On an overcorrection of the restriction, see also
below.)
There are problems, too, of course. The primary plot is uneasily
joined to a secondary one which another minor POV actually *calls* "a
comedy of errors" (but even there, we get the consolation of a
strong-minded "down-timer" woman driving *that* plot too). And
there's a limited amount, in this book, of the big setpiece emotional
catharses that drive <1632> and at least decorate the endings of most
of the previous novels.
But, see, that's just a symptom of the real problem Exhibit A is
about. We know that Flint considers history a complicated thing full
of eddies and backwashes, in which it's hard to point to real
"beginnings" and "endings". Well, I agree with him there. But
"history" and "story" are different words, and it's frustrating the
extent to which he and DeMarce have put those beliefs into effect in
this *novel*. They never want us to forget that this book is part of
a series, and so there's actually a *tertiary* plotline with no value
in plot or character development, and certainly no thematic value,
except to bring in familiar characters; and that's *besides* the
increasingly tiresome business of giving Mike Stearns short chapters
to make like a Greek chorus. Furthermore, I'm pretty sure the reason
they avoid big cathartic scenes is that such scenes would remind us
that we were reading a story, would emphasise "beginning" and "ending"
and not the onward flow of history. (Belatedly an alternative
hypothesis suggests itself: maybe they think they *have* big
cathartic scenes? Oops. That suggests an entirely different, though
still hermetic, problem.)
But the single most pernicious apparent effect of those beliefs'
instantiation here is that <1634: The Bavarian Crisis> is the *first*
1632verse novel that (in my opinion) makes no sense without one's
having previously read the 1632verse short stories. It's just
*riddled* with references to them; just for two examples, it relies
for background on Flint's "The Wallenstein Gambit" in <Ring of Fire>,
and for foreground material on Flint's Low Countries stories in
various volumes of the <Grantville Gazette>.
I'm always skeptical of authors who claim you can start a series
with any volume, and I try as hard as I can to start only at
beginnings myself. But while <Bavarian> is the sixth 1632verse *novel*
to appear, it's at least the tenth 1632verse *volume* to appear - and
well over twentieth if you count volumes of the <Grantville Gazette>
that have only appeared electronically. Doubling or tripling the
amount of reading your readers have to do to continue reading your
series is not a step to take lightly.
Those who read <1632> but for whatever reason have avoided later
volumes should *not* try to pick the series up again with this, nor
with its sequel <1635: The Dreeson Incident>. Just don't. Leave
these books, and probably their successors, to the devotees, or become
a devotee yourself and read the intervening books first.

Exhibit B: <Grantville Gazette IV> and <Ring of Fire II>.
<Grantville Gazette IV> is the last volume of the <Gazette> to see
full print publication, according to its own forematter. Well, it's
about time.
There's something of a pattern for short fiction in the 1632verse:
Take someone who's dissatisfied with life; add a problem arising
somewhere in the "up-time" / "down-time" interface; realise an
epiphany that allows the dissatisfied person to become fulfilled and
happy, and solves the problem. (This frequently involves a successful
romance, but not always; it's more important that the story explain
the problem and solution clearly, like non-fiction.) Well, this is
certainly a comforting kind of story to read, when done tolerably
well, and depending on the writer's range (some are capable *only* of
sentimental comfort) it can also be fun. In the first <Grantville
Gazette> volume, the stories that follow this pattern - "Anna's
Story", "The Sewing Circle", and "Curio and Relic" - are precisely
those I like best. But note also that they don't follow it
particularly closely; and that of them, "Curio and Relic", the
closest, is the one I like least. In the second volume, "An Invisible
War" is probably the single most drearily problem-and-solution focused
of the bunch, but "God's Gifts" also follows the pattern; still, of
the four I've read, this is certainly the most diverse volume. It's
in the third volume that the pattern becomes the norm: "Pastor
Kastenmayer's Revenge", "The Sound of Music", "Other People's Money",
"Hobson's Choice", "Hell Fighters" - only two stories in the book
diverge much. (Or perhaps I should blame the single-mindedness on the
original <Ring of Fire>, in which I'm not sure a single story other
than "Here Comes Santa Claus" completely avoids the pattern; I'm not
clear on which book's stories were first chosen, nor on what the
sequence of publication was.)
Well, in <Grantville Gazette IV> there are no holdouts at all. Not
one - not even Flint's usual comic story of the Low Countries.
Between this and a problem I'll discuss below with regard to <Ring of
Fire II> (where the pattern also crops up, but much less), only three
stories in the book are at all better than time-passing, the stories
by Flint, Gorg Huff and Paula Goodlett, and Kerryn Offord. So the
book is just plain monotonous to read, except for the sort of devotee
who likes the problem-and-solution part - the unfolding of the
1632verse's technology and sociology - *best*. I can't imagine a
reason for a non-devotee to stick with it.

Exhibit C: <Ring of Fire II>, <1635: The Dreeson Incident>, and
<Grantville Gazette IV>. Apparently it was one thing for "name"
authors to contribute to a one-off anthology, quite another for them
to produce stories in a product line; where the original <Ring of
Fire> had stories from David Weber, Mercedes Lackey, S. L. Viehl, and
K. D. Wentworth, the new one involves only Wentworth. So <Ring of
Fire> is now meant to represent architectural stories, stories that
"connect more directly with the series as a whole", where <Grantville
Gazette> is just slices of life. <Ring of Fire II> actually is
dominated by stories that relate to plot development, so to speak; one
even fills in a gap I mentioned in panning <The Baltic War> last year
("Eddie and the King's Daughter" by Wentworth). But it still has a
few stories that do the pattern thing (one of which, "Malungu Seed" by
Jonathan Cresswell-Jones, is easily the book's most interesting story,
and maybe its best), and it also has a couple of stories that advance
1632verse subplots without the full pattern, but devote a lot of
attention to "down-time" phenomena (games, actually) in the
problem-and-solution semi-fictional manner. But Exhibit C is about
another problem.
Authors in the 1632verse are supposed to hew to a prosopography
("grid") of "up-timers" so as not to trip over each other. (See the
endmatter to <Gazette III>. The grid is apparently a creation of
DeMarce's, which may explain why this problem is becoming more
prominent as she is, in 1632verse writing.) What the latest volumes
have in common is a dense reliance *on* that prosopography. Again and
again, I stumbled over references to events and relationships among
Grantville's residents that may or may not have been described already
in published 1632verse material, but that certainly hadn't stuck in my
head. Given that <Ring of Fire II> actually covers a gap in the
earlier-published <Baltic War>, I can't rule out the possibility that
some of these stories actually take as their starting point stories
*not yet published*. (Some almost certainly do start from material in
the unprinted volumes of the <Grantville Gazette>.) Substantial parts
of the plot in <Dreeson> and in the long closing stories of <Ring of
Fire II> are driven by events - and always events involving
"up-timers" - that I'm fairly sure I've never read; this leaves me
more than a little confused and uninterested.
(It doesn't help that the up-timers in question tend to have much
more chaotic lives than those featured in earlier volumes. Unhappy
marriages *abound* in the hinted-at stories, occasionally foregrounded
as in DeMarce's "Second Thoughts" in <Ring of Fire II>, the worst
offender; so do small-time violence, births out of wedlock, domestic
abuse, and all kinds of things that I *had* thought the 1632verse was
trying to show were *not* characteristic of Appalachia. Now, I'm on
record as thinking human nature is too narrow in the 1632verse, and in
many stories it still is; but that makes the cognitive, well,
*rupture* all the harsher when I move from that atmosphere, within a
single book, to an atmosphere straight out of, well, Faulkner or some
such that I've never read.
(One more sub-issue: The fact that all this gossip usually
involves people of relatively low social standing among "up-timers"
creates a striking contrast with most (not all!) writing about
comparable "down-timers", which is anyway rather scarcer. "Club 250"
in Grantville has become strangely prominent lately; I can't think of
any similarly prominent tavern frequented primarily by "down-timer"
riffraff. So undoubtedly I'm a snob, but I don't understand why the
only losers worth writing about should be losers from West Virginia.)
So, OK, back to the main point: Stories are now being printed that
assume prior events either undescribed, or underdescribed, in
previously printed stories. In a nutshell, 1632verse authors are now
taking the prosopography for granted. What's worse, I strongly
suspect they're taking their *readers'* familiarity with it for
granted too. So even someone like me, who's gone to some trouble to
read all the *books*, is left by the wayside.
This is the clincher. It's somewhat embarrassing to me already to
keep reading these books. If, in order to continue doing so, I have
to dedicate a significant amount of my time and money to reading
online material as well - and then, on top of that, to reading
material neither fiction nor prose, but simply *data* - why on Earth
shouldn't I bail out?
Looks like hermetic sealing to me.
I honestly don't know whether I'll finish <The Dreeson Incident>
when it's published, or take the trouble to read whatever other
volumes come next. It's the notionally comfortable thing to do, but
it's increasingly frustrating in actual practice.

<http://www.webscription.net/chapters/A1416555897/A1416555897.htm>,


seen (for the second time) September 15, 2008

$ (August) <Time Spike> by Flint and Marilyn Kosmatka

Flint has talked before now about spinning the "Assiti shard" concept
(his approach to moving smallish regions around in time, as against,
say, S. M. Stirling's) off into other scenarios than the 1632verse's;
at one time a story was planned involving George Washington and
Frederick the Great plunged into ancient Rome, as I recall.

This is not that story. And although it's an "Assiti shard" story, it
represents a substantial revision (and retcon) of the idea. <1632>
has a prologue discussing the universe Grantville left, which
explicitly says that the "Grantville incident" was never
scientifically explained, and ascribes it to a purely accidental side
effect of Assiti art. In contrast, in <Time Spike> we have two plots
running side by side - one set in the 'before' universe, one in the
'after', so to speak - and the 'before' one (which helps make this
book, unlike the main series, clearly science fiction to me) centres
on scientists who are hard at work explaining the Grantville incident,
and who find compelling evidence that the new incident the 'after'
plot focuses on was no mere side effect. In fact, I felt some
sympathetic discomfort when reading about this, because Flint and
Kosmatka make it pretty hard to avoid equating themselves, morally
speaking, to the Assiti.

ANYWAY. It's a pity I have to put this book in the series post, and
then explain in what ways it is and is not consistent with the rest of
the series, because in its own right, it's a sight better than
anything published for some time in the main series. This book has
much less of Flint's distinctive, manipulative stylistic tricks than
is usual for him, but isn't written at the sub-professional level of
much of the 1632verse writing that *isn't* by him; I infer that
Kosmatka has some promise as a writer. The plot follows moderately
predictable 1632-ish lines - politics, romance, and battle - but is
relatively taut, and has some twists; for example, there's a wedding
at the end, but it's a sham one.

And in plot and characters both, there's none of the 1632verse's
coziness. The central story involves an early Cretaceous setting in
which arrive a maximum security prison, Hernando de Soto and his
expedition, and a Cherokee band on the Trail of Tears, among others.
So there's existential crisis at two levels: Can humans survive here,
before the evolution of most of our known foods, and with no assurance
that there's enough of a population? And given that population is
critical, how many of the genuinely evil people in the prison and the
expedition can be allowed to live *or* to die? (We spend a lot of
time watching these people, often with the upper hand; I don't
remember anything as gory, or disturbing, in the 1632verse.) Even
without the 21st-century subplot, it'd be hard to call this book
anything but science fiction.

The ending makes a disclosure that vitiates much of the crisis tension
and sets up the possibility of a sequel; I can easily imagine this
book becoming the source of another cozy series. But in its own
right, it isn't cozy at all, and is well worth reading.

Anthony Hope
Re-read: * <The Prisoner of Zenda>, 1894
Read for the first time: * (September) <Rupert of Hentzau>, at least
1897-1898, first compiled as such 1898; x (September) <The Heart of
Princess Osra>, 1896

<Rupert of Hentzau> was serialised in <Pall Mall Magazine> before book
publication, but if you can find the exact dates, you're better at
this than I. (See for more on this the end of this entry.) It was
serialised in <McClure's Magazine> beginning with the December 1897
issue, which is the earliest I've been able to source it, but
certainly not the earliest appearance (which would've been in <Pall
Mall>).

It's difficult for me to imagine someone reading this post who neither
has, nor intends to, read the other posts in this set. And I'm quite
sure such reading takes well over an hour. Well, as it happens, the
time it takes to download a copy of <The Prisoner of Zenda> from
Project Gutenberg *and read it* is rather less than two hours. So I'm
not going to waste any time describing it; in the unlikely event that
anyone reading this hasn't read the book, well, you know what to do.
(Sheesh, if you need persuading, consider that <Prisoner> is a direct
and explicit source for both Heinlein's <Double Star> and Stevermer's
<A College of Magics>.)

But surely there are millions who, like me six months ago, *have* read
the famous book, but not its sequel, nor its distant prequel. So what
are *those* like?

Well, first of all, note that <Rupert of Hentzau> gives us some pretty
substantial retcons. For example, where <Prisoner> should have taken
place not too long before publication date, <Rupert> moves not only
the events, but also the *narration* of <Prisoner>, rather more than a
decade earlier. <Rupert> is narrated not by Rudolf Rassendyll, but
instead by his friend Fritz von Tarlenheim, so lacks some of the
insouciance of its predecessor. It is not, despite its title,
centrally about the villain Rupert of Hentzau; rather, his
machinations are what bring Rudolf back to Ruritania, and drive the
subsequent adventure. Into this Hope weaves some fairly pointed
reflections on the "right" ending many of us must have wanted for
<Prisoner>, much as Edward Eager provides a "right" ending for Sir
Walter Scott's <Ivanhoe> in <Knight's Castle>. Well, <Knight's
Castle> is a book for children, and let's just say Hope wasn't writing
for children. I find that, on balance, I'm glad to have read <Rupert>
- the story feels whole now in a way it never did before - but I'm not
sure I'd have been so glad as a teenager, say, when the openness left
in <Prisoner>'s ending was a spur to the imagination.

<The Heart of Princess Osra> is rather stranger. It consists of nine
stories of unequal lengths, which depict nine men with whom, in one
way or another, the Princess Osra of Ruritania, several generations
before Rudolf Rassendyll and co., gets mixed up; in each case, the
mixing-up is, broadly speaking, romantic in character. Several of
these are the sort of "bad men" I talk about under Burney (sv
<Camilla>) in the other fiction post; others turn out to be diamonds
in the rough; only towards the end do we start meeting clearly good
men. Several of the Princess's suitors wind up dying, either in her
defense or as a result of their own wicked deeds; a couple of others
come close. So this certainly isn't the cozy little romance its title
and plot summary suggest. But it's still rather more old-fashioned
than many people today will want to read, in its depiction of a girl
growing (?) from an indifferent minx into a loving wife. It should
not necessarily be read by everyone enthusiastic for <Prisoner>, nor
even by everyone who also enjoys <Rupert>.

Interestingly, it seems fairly clear that <The Heart of Princess Osra>
was both *written* and *published* before <Rupert of Hentzau> - even
though the final chapter of <Prisoner> pretty strongly prefigures the
sequel. For the writing, it's certain; in <Anthony Hope and His
Books> by Sir Charles Mallet, page 81, Hope's diary is quoted as
saying he'd finished the first draft of <Heart> in September 1894,
while on pages 86-87, he's writing the first draft of <Rupert> in
November and December of that year. For publication it's more
problematic. Various sources claim that the serialisation of <Rupert>
began in 1895, while <Heart> was certainly published in 1896 (summer,
to judge by Mallet p. 95). However, Mallet p. 90 implies that
<Rupert>'s serial rights had not yet been sold by the end of 1895, and
on p. 95 there's an October 1896 diary entry indicating the serial in
<Pall Mall> had yet to begin. Without access to actual copies of the
magazine, I don't think I can settle the question, but it looks like
<Rupert> was the later published of the two.

But for whatever it's worth, I found it worthwhile to read <Prisoner>
and <Rupert> back to back, and took no harm from separating them a
ways from <Heart>.

Christopher Moore
Re-read: * <Bloodsucking Fiends>, 1995
Read for the first time (well, except minimal skimming the preceding
July): (November) <You Suck: A Love Story>, 2007, finished

I have to say that reading these books together is probably not a good
idea. I, at least, was distracted, for the first quarter or so of
<You Suck>, by Moore's squibs of info-dump, and rather more distracted
by the fact that these weren't always consistent with the book I'd
just read, whose plot they were trying to summarise. (In at least one
case, Moore later corrects himself; don't expect a deceased turtle to
have the same name throughout <You Suck>.)

For rather longer, I was distracted by the book's not being what I
wanted from a sequel; but I eventually realised that it's what a
sequel, in this case, has to be. <Bloodsucking Fiends> is also
subtitled "A Love Story" (just not on the spine of my copy), and fits
the expectations this raises rather more. In it, Jody Stroud, a
brand-new vampire, and Tommy Flood, a wannabe writer, fall in love.
Well, in <You Suck> we see what happens *after* the infatuation stage.
As a separate issue, towards the end of BF Jody makes a promise, and
at its end you know perfectly well that promise won't be kept. That
promise's breaking has a heavy impact in YS, and Moore takes pains to
make it clear that the impact is karmic, deserved. Nearly all the
characters from BF reappear (there's at most 24 hours between books)
and most of them take some punishment they had earned.

Moore introduces several new characters to compensate for the relative
darkness thus generated, and unfortunately, I can't point to a single
one who feels to me like a clearly successful creation. There's a
whore with a heart of, oh, some alloy of brass and americium; there's
a gay Goth teenager; and mainly, there's his best friend, the perky
sixteen-year-old Gothette Abby Normal (née Allison Green, and
occasionally hit with other names too). Quite a few pages of the book
come from Abby's journal. Now, most of the sixteen year old girls
I've ever known have been rather smarter than average (I was in that
kind of school from eighth grade on, and haven't known many teenagers
since), so maybe I'm wrong about this, but seems to me that journal's
author is a stereotype.

The scene involving Jody from <A Dirty Job>, 2006, which I mentioned
in last year's fantasy post, here reappears from her perspective, and
I have to admit it makes more sense now.

All said and done, Moore's still a very funny writer, I did laugh a
lot, and I can't justifiably complain about this book; even the
new-character misfires aren't fatal. If there's anyone else out there
who cherishes <Bloodsucking Fiends> as a sweet romance, I'll warn you
off - I haven't re-read BF *after* the sequel yet, but I suspect it'll
be harder to ignore the elements that drive YS's darker plot. But
otherwise, I can recommend the book.

Oh, and although I'm not sure I want a third book (as I considered in
last year's series post), there's certainly room for one, and if it
appears, you shouldn't bet against my reading it.

Moira Moore
Re-read: <The Hero Strikes Back>, 2006, started
Read for the first time: (June) <Heroes Adrift>, 2008, skimmed

See last year's fantasy post for a not very informative, flippant
treatment of the first two books in this now three-book series. I
found Moore's narrator, and her writing, significantly less tolerable
this time around. I'd also forgotten that there are strong hints of
an overarching plot. (Well, either that, or Moore just can't resist
the temptation to make her main characters Special.) Looking at these
two back to back, I'm unclear on whether some really large story is
supposed to be brewing (and if so, how many volumes will it take
before it gets going?), or Moore is just firing at random, book by
book; facing the shallowness the narrator is made to convey as her
major trait, and the carelessness with grammar and spelling that - in
this case - I don't think I can blame on Moore's publishers, I found
myself unable to believe that I'd care.

Joshua Palmatier
Finished properly: <The Skewed Throne> and <The Cracked Throne>, 2006
<The Skewed Throne> Nominee, 2007 Compton Crook Award

Read for the first time: (March) <The Vacant Throne>, 2007

I wrote inadequately about the first two books of "The Throne of
Amenkor" last year. Of the five quotes on the back of the third, at
least three (including both those attributed by name, to Kate Elliott
aka Alis Rasmussen and to Alma Alexander aka Alma Hromic Deckert...)
praise the first, which is an improbable but powerful story, weaving
ordinary fantasy tropes with an un-ordinary city setting and,
especially, with the story of the moral awakening of a teenaged girl,
"gutterscum" (her word), who narrates. It could stand alone
reasonably well, but has no need to; and at its end, the years-earlier
events that drove its plot remain unexplained. However, the second
book takes up not those events, nor (to anything like the same extent)
our narrator's development, but primarily the city setting. Palmatier
is moderately good at this, but not really good enough; there are no
maps, and in other ways Palmatier fails to make his setting dense
enough that he can keep his political, economic, and military angles
from feeling schematic. (One of his virtues unfortunately contributes
to this problem: because he takes pains to characterise nearly all
named characters, the book winds up feeling like one of those dynastic
fantasies that confuse the fates of individuals with those of nations,
although I'm practically certain Palmatier intends no such thing.) He
also introduces a couple of new plot drivers, though at least one of
these was strongly adumbrated in the first book.

<Vacant> is the longest book yet, and moves forward many of the issues
raised in the first two books, but it doesn't persuade me this series
is really a trilogy. By book's end the major conflicts of <Cracked>
are at least temporarily resolved, but the original events that fed
<Skewed> remain mysterious. Maybe Palmatier is going to leave things
that way, which would, in a way, be admirable, if frustrating; or
maybe he'll just see if the market will bear more books. <Vacant>
does end in a way that ought conclusively to finish the narrator's
bildungsroman, and if Palmatier does continue the series, a different
narrator (or different POV approach altogether) seems called for.

Finally, maybe I was wrong about why I only skimmed the first two
books last year. I didn't find any particular parts of those books
hard to read this time; maybe I just can't deal with the levels of
suspense Palmatier offers, or something like that. (This is strongly
suggested by the fact that I *did* wind up skimming the third book,
only sheer persistence eventually getting me to finish it properly in
the same month.) In that case, people who read *for* suspense might
want to look into these.

Jack Vance
(January-February) <Tales of the Dying Earth>, 1950-1984, first
compiled 1999 as <The Compleat Dying Earth>, started
<The Dying Earth> Nominee, 2001 Retro Hugo Award for Novel
"The Seventeen Virgins" Nominee, 1975 British Fantasy Award for Short
Story
"The Bagful of Dreams" Nominee, 1978 World Fantasy Award for Short
Fiction

This volume reproduces four earlier volumes: I'd read 0 <The Dying
Earth>, 1950, and 0 <The Eyes of the Overworld>, 1965-1966, first
compiled as such 1966, during the Golden Age of Science Fiction, while
I hadn't previously read 0 <Cugel's Saga>, 1974-1983, first compiled
as such 1983, or <Rhialto the Marvelous>, 1973-1984, first compiled as
such 1984. (I don't own <Rhialto the Marvelous>, but do own
0 <Rhialto the Marvellous>, 1973-1985, first compiled as such 1985, a
Baen reprint with "Basileus", a story by C. J. Cherryh and Janet
Morris set in their "Heroes in Hell" universe, added. To make matters
still more amusing, <Rhialto the Marvellous> is also a title of
<Rhialto the Marvelous>, for example in its British edition.) The
original title of the omnibus, as issued by the Science Fiction Book
Club, is inaccurate, as the book omits 0 <A Quest for Simbilis>, 1974,
by Michael Shea, which I haven't yet read. However, the Tor reprint
title is well chosen, since none of the four books included is a
novel; rather, each is a collection of tales, set on the Dying Earth.

Um. I'm afraid that, for readers like me (assuming there are more
such), omnibuses like this one are Bad Ideas. See, I can deal with an
amoral protagonist in small doses. Even as a teenager, I'd managed to
get through <The Eyes of the Overworld>, all of whose stories star
Cugel, who's as amoral as they get. But it turns out I'm *still* not
up to following that book directly with <Cugel's Saga>, and when I'd
read two, or at most three, stories I'd never before read, I'd
established that Rhialto, the fourth book's protagonist, is nearly as
bad as Cugel. So I bailed. Don't misunderstand: These books are as
Vancian as one could want. The elegant prose and harsh wit never
flag. I just can't deal with the stories told in that prose, with
that wit.

Movies that would, if books, fit into this post:

<The Thin Man>, 1934, <After the Thin Man>, 1936, and * <Another Thin
Man>, 1939;

<Superman and the Mole Men>, 1951 (included as a special feature on
disc 5 of ...) and <The Adventures of Superman: Season 1>, 1951,
started (syndicated; except for Superman himself, his origin story
in episode 1, and the "mole men" of the pilot/movie, the episodes I
watched - rather fewer than half - held nothing spec-ficnal, and in
particular no supervillains);

$ <Dead Like Me: Season One: 1>, $ <2>, $ <3>, and $ <4>, all 2003,
all (Showtime), all arguably [2].

Of course various movies listed elsewhere are also series movies:
from the fantasy post, <Supergirl>, 1984, <Pirates of the Caribbean:
The Curse of the Black Pearl>, 2003, <Pirates of the Caribbean 2:
Dead Man's Chest>, 2006, and presumably <The Golden Compass>, 2007;
from the science fiction post, <Kalimán en el Siniestro Mundo de
Humanón>, 1974, the three <Back to the Future> movies, 1985, 1989, and
1990, and <Serenity>, 2005; from the Gothics post, <The Year My Voice
Broke>, 1987; and from the other fiction post, <His Trust> and <His
Trust Fulfilled>, 1910, <Father of the Bride>, 1950 and <Father's
Little Dividend>, 1951, <flirting>, 1990, arguably the two <Marilyn
Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing & Charm School> movies, 1990 and 2005, and
<The Prince & Me>, 2004 (and in that post's appendix <Cheaper by the
Dozen>, 1950) - to name only cases I know about, and also not counting
movies sequeled by TV series, or for that matter TV miniseries and
series themselves. See also the extended discussion in last year's
series post as to why I don't consider the <Gold Diggers> movies
series movies, anent this year's rejection of the <Broadway Melody>
movies as series movies. Also, since the three Robbie the Robot
appearances listed in the sf post provide three different explanations
for the robot's existence and have no other characters in common, I
don't consider them a series either. (However, one, sadly, does claim
to have characters in common with the Thin Man movies listed above,
and is at the same time part of a TV series itself, one I'm glad to
have seen no more of.)

Joe Bernstein

unread,
Dec 16, 2008, 2:36:38 AM12/16/08
to
RE-READ

This post's predecessor was posted 19th October 2007, with message-ID

<ff9cpc$hf0$1...@reader1.panix.com>. It contained a short list of movies
seen for the first time which it'd be a spoiler to list in the fantasy
or other fiction posts; this year, similar movies (and books) are in
their own post, headlined "Gothics".

For other re-reading during the year, see also, of course, the entire
series post, and see also Link in the fantasy post and Dumas in the
other fiction post. For re-reading in the minimal sense of finishing
books I'd previously started, see also Hal Duncan, Lee, Link and
Zambreno in the fantasy post, Baker in the science fiction post, and
again, several writers in the series post.

I'm mostly skipping comments of any kind; I've commented on many of
these books more or less lengthily on rasfw in the past. However,
this year, unlike last, I do give full comments (even plot summary) on
one book.

Looks like my re-reading fell back into familiar patterns this year -
mostly a form of skimming (but usually skipping beginnings, unlike
what I mean by "skimming" in the rest of these posts), and mostly my
favourites, though now a very restricted subset of these because the
rest are too danged far away.

Jane Austen
0* <Pride and Prejudice>, 1813, skimmed

Clare Boylan [and Charlotte Brontë]
* <Emma Brown>, 1860-2003, first compiled as such 2003, lightly
skimmed

Gillian Bradshaw
<Dangerous Notes>, 2001

I've since finally acquired a copy, regrettably thanks to the Seattle
Public Library's foolish decision to part with one. Oddly, I have
not, in fact, read it compulsively since buying it; apparently it's
possible after all to become habituated to this novel. (But in the
first four months, I did skim or re-read it twice or so.)

Actually, libraries selling off their copies of this book reminds me
of something: the same decisions libraries made about their copies of
Tom Holt's <Goatsong> and <The Walled Orchard> ten years back. Each
strikes me as a crime of roughly similar proportions against a
period's literary heritage. But I'm probably slightly exaggerating
this book's importance. Holt's two-book novel may be great, and is
certainly, at the very least, the next thing *to* great, while I'm not
yet persuaded <Dangerous Notes> is any better than extraordinary; I
just love it personally.

0 <The Beacon at Alexandria>, 1986, skimmed
0 <Imperial Purple>, aka <The Colour of Power>, 1988, skimmed

Last year I claimed the Seattle Public Library owned few of Bradshaw's
historical novels. I was wrong; they were just always checked out
when I looked, but a simple check of the catalogue would've told me
otherwise. Sorry.

Anne Brontë
*0 <The Tenant of Wildfell Hall>, 1848

For relevant comments, see Haig in the fantasy post, and Burney in the
other fiction post.

(And yes, I was sorely tempted to write full comments on this book,
but won't without being asked. It is, of the Brontë sisters'
respective most famous novels, the only one without *any* hint of
spec-fic, as well, of course, as the least known. As it happens, none
of Charlotte Brontë's other novels have even such meager
inexplicability as <Jane Eyre> offers; nor, of course, is there any
novum in Anne Brontë's <Agnes Grey>, a book all too well described by
the adult narrator of Lisa Tuttle's <The Pillow Friend>. It is a
mystery to me that my favourite and least favourite Brontë novels
should be the only two books by their author. Anyway, though, only
<Wuthering Heights> and <Jane Eyre>, of the Brontë novels, border on
our genres.)

Lois McMaster Bujold
Nominee, 1987 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer

* <The Curse of Chalion>, 2000, skimmed
Winner, 2002 Mythopoeic Award for Adult Literature, and Nominee, 2002
Hugo and 2002 World Fantasy Award, both for Novel

* <A Civil Campaign>, 1999, skimmed
Nominee, 2000 Hugo Award and 2001 Nebula Award, both for Novel

Emma Bull [1]
0 <War for the Oaks>, 1987
Nominee, 1988 Crawford Award, 1988 Compton Crook Award, and 1988
Mythopoeic Award for Fantasy

On this reading, for the first time, I noticed how carefully
foreshadowed all the plot twists of the book's second half are. Also
for the first time, I registered the fact that this book contains that
bête noire of mine, the "magic lessons" motif so especially and
annoyingly common in urban fantasy (I mean you, Charles de Lint!), but
here done so unobtrusively I'd never minded. (It's more obtrusive,
and sure enough I mind it more, in Peg Kerr's <Emerald House Rising>
listed below.)

Arthur Clarke
*0 "Rescue Party", 1946

For relevant comments, see Raphael in the sf post.

Edward Eager
* <Knight's Castle>, 1956

For relevant comments, see Hope in the series post.

Kelley Eskridge [1] [2]
* <Solitaire>, 2002, skimmed
Nominee, 2003 Nebula Award for Novel

Robert Heinlein
Winner, 1975 SWA Grand Master Award

*0 "The Menace from Earth", 1957

Tom Holt
*0 <Expecting Someone Taller>, 1987, started
Nominee, 1991 Crawford Award

Ooh! Now I own a hardcover copy!

Darnit! I may be beginning to get over my love for this book.

Peg Kerr
* <Emerald House Rising>, 1997

Aleen Leslie
* <the scent of the roses>, 1963

This is a memoir of an amnesiac year.

Well, um. It's one of my favourite books, but most descriptions I can
think of are wrong; that's just the most striking one. It is, of
course, a novel, so not a memoir; and the narrator's amnesia concerns
events *before* the book begins, so the contradiction is also bogus.
But anyway. Jane Carlyle is ten years old as of February 14, 1908,
when the book begins, and her memory revives, with her arrival at the
Weber household. The book, save a couple of pages of coda, and her
amnesia both end on January 2, 1909, when she has just turned eleven.
Nearly half the book concerns the long week from Christmas Eve to
January 2. Except for a short visit to New York, the setting is
Pittsburgh and its environs. (As the above suggests, the book is in
fact organised by holiday: chapters are titled "Saint Valentine's
Day", "Easter", and so forth. But the narrative ranges beyond those
days.)

A much older Jane narrates. And although the reason she was with the
Webers was a murder, she didn't remember it at the time, and she
remembers this family - full of people, as against Jane's
only-childness, rich in irony, food and affection - with deep love and
endless nostalgia, which she communicates in full to the reader. Yet
even in such a paradisiacal place there must be troubles: beyond the
sometimes comical, sometimes less so troubles the Webers themselves
have, Jane herself has the deep trouble that she can't get enough
attention, or indeed enough of the truth, from glamorous Sophie Weber,
who first brought her there and whom she loves desperately; within a
few months she's come to suspect Sophie in the murder itself.
Eventually Jane recovers her memory, the murder is explained - I'm
afraid this is weaker than the rest of the book - and Jane leaves the
Webers again. But the last line is nostalgia itself: "I have always
felt a long way from home."

Opinions of nostalgia vary, of course. But I'm fond of it, and I love
this book, which incites nostalgia so fiercely without ever pretending
that what's lost is perfect. My first copy, I found on a shelf at the
Marquette University library where they put unwanted items to be taken
away for free; it was mildewed, so I stored it in the basement, from
which it was stolen two years later by a workman. The estate sale I
went to this spring, advertised as a place to find erotica and vampire
books, where I bought <Pollyanna> as mentioned in the kids' books
post, also (and equally ironically!) had a copy of this book, and I
was overjoyed, after seven years, to see it again. Obviously, it's a
pretty obscure book. Which is why I'm telling y'all about it so
fully.

(Sigh. This is where I would now see several followups telling me I
could've bought it for a dollar online, if I didn't mention the fact
myself. However, not all books available for a dollar online are in
fact common; some are just unwanted. Hint: *why*, exactly, have I
just spent several paragraphs telling y'all about a non-spec-fic book?
Anyway, I hadn't *seen* another copy for seven years, and don't
generally even think of buying fiction online.)

Patricia McKillip
* <The Changeling Sea>, 1988, skimmed
Nominee, 1990 Mythopoeic Award for Fantasy

Beatrix Potter
* <The Tale of Peter Rabbit>, 1901

Included in the packaging of my annual post-Easter chocolate rabbit.
Had not improved with age.

Walter Scott
* <The Heart of Mid-Lothian>, 1818, lightly skimmed

Caroline Stevermer
* <A College of Magics>, 1994, skimmed

Cynthia Voigt
* <Glass Mountain>, 1991, skimmed

Movies that would, if books, fit in this post, combine to suggest that
I'm going prematurely senile, so I trust y'all will forgive the
garrulous comments:

<The Broadway Melody>, 1929 (I'd remembered seeing it, but forgotten
both how little of a musical, and how painful a story, it is; it
certainly earned its Best Picture Oscar, the second);
<Skeleton Frolic>, 1937 (a gorgeous Ub Iwerks cartoon on the DVD of
<The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra>, which I sort of think I remember
seeing in childhood);
o <Broadway Melody of 1940>, 1940 (I borrowed a library DVD simply to
see if it made for noticeably better viewing than my VHS copy,
which is *not* in storage in Milwaukee; it actually does; and I
concur with Connie Willis that the "Begin the Beguine" numbers near
the end are, in fact, the best dances I've seen on screen);
<My Favorite Wife>, 1940 (which I'd forgotten having seen);
<The Band Wagon>, 1953 (ditto);
<Smiles of a Summer Night>, Swedish, 1955 (and I was utterly
astonished to find I'd seen *this* before; ah, the privileges of
middle age!);
probably <Bell, Book and Candle>, 1958 (I recognised many of the
scenes, and remembered the plot, but I'm almost positive I hadn't
seen the whole thing before - so apparently yet another forgotten
viewing...);
o <The Music Man>, 1962 (as with <Broadway Melody of 1940>, a library
DVD borrowed for comparison to my non-stored VHS copy; in this case
no real improvement, but I'm still pleased as punch that my
favourite musical was the first item to enter in this year's log);
+ <Romeo and Juliet>, 1968 (wow! I'd never before seen it on the big
screen - only in the apparently now standard high school
presentation - and it's reassuring, in view of the next entry, to
know that at least one movie that impressed me as a teenager
merited my praise; I suppose I should also differentiate it in the
standard way: Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey played the titular
rôles);
* <The Breakfast Club>, 1985 (what may be even more embarrassing than
the fact that I still mostly like this rather bad movie, is that
amid all this other evidence of my forgetfulness, I remembered an
astonishing number of *individual lines* from this movie, over two
decades since I last saw it! ah, such is the power of youthful bad
taste...);
probably <Truly Madly Deeply>, 1991 (BBC, much to my surprise; and by
movie's end I *still* wasn't positive I'd seen the whole stupid
thing before...);
* <all I wanna do>, aka <Strike!>, 1998 (and now I've replaced the
copy rendered black and white by its transport here, I can perhaps
face watching some of the other videos from that box...);
+ <Kissing Jessica Stein>, 2001;


<me without you>, 2001;

<Bride and Prejudice>, 2004 (second viewing; tried to watch it without
thinking of the Austen novel, but that works almost as badly as
watching it with constant comparisons; must one do both at once?
anyway, I still like most of the songs);
<The Phantom of the Opera>, 2004 (the one with the titular rôle played
- unfortunately more accurately, sung - by Gerard Butler; and pace
Ms. Rice, the first reason we know this Christine Daaé retired from
the stage is not that she married a Viscount, but rather that
"he'll always be there singing songs in my head");
$ <Mirrormask>, 2005 (it loses a lot on the small screen, but at least
I was reminded that there's been a major fantasy movie in recent
years that DOESN'T have The Same Damn Tedious Fantasy Movie Music
Template);
<The New World>, 2005, started (until I realised I'd rather watch a
copy I owned);
<V for Vendetta>, 2006 (third viewing, first on the small screen, on
which it does lose something, but I *was* better able to follow the
*speeches* than before; but I'm commenting mainly to mention a
local band I know only as a name: Natalie Portman's Shaved Head).

FOOTNOTES

[1] These are speculative fiction authors I know to be, or have been,
married (or in long-term same-sex commitments) to other speculative
fiction authors, same as last year. The spouses (etc.): Hilary
Bailey - Michael Moorcock; Will Shetterly and Emma Bull - each other;
Nicola Griffith and Kelley Eskridge - each other; Henry Kuttner - C.
L. Moore; Robin McKinley - Peter Dickinson; Mary Wollstonecraft
Shelley - Percy Bysshe Shelley (yes, really, he wrote spec-fic, and
not just that vampire story that was really Polidori's work; the EoF
gives him over half a column); Kelly Link - Gavin Grant (who's
apparently been prolific in magazine short stories); and the ringer,
Wayne Barlowe (not usually himself thought of as a spec-fic *author*,
but that is indeed the rôle under which he's listed in the fantasy
post) - Shawna McCarthy (also far better known within spec-fic as
editor or agent, but Contento tells me she and Charles Platt
*co*-wrote *one* story, "Starhaven" for the January 1982 <F&SF>, so
there!).

[2] These are authors I *know* to be local to Seattle (or anyway the
region bounded by the Columbia River, an ocean, and I suppose some
land up north), same as last year. This year, unlike last, the
Columbia River border actually excluded an author or two from eastern
Washington, IIRC; I couldn't produce a name now, though. (It was a
project of mine for several months to read Patricia Briggs in
chronological order - I'd found all but one of her novels-to-2006 at a
used bookstore while I was flush with cash in the spring, and didn't
get around to finding out how rare and pricey <Masques> is until early
fall. Anyhow Briggs is an interesting test case, since she's lived a
lot on the Columbia, and apparently currently lives there, but has
also lived a lot across it, in Montana, which is not only far from
Seattle, but unlike Spokane or even Boise, at most debatably in
Seattle's hinterland.)
Anyway, I'm also making the same digression:
<DIGRESSION TITLE="Seattle as setting or hometown">Irvine's
<Rossetti Song> is set here, and feels more Seattle-esque to me than a
number of other such stories I've read, even though I know of no
evidence Irvine's actually lived here.
Possibly because I read so much less by local authors this year, it
took most of the year to produce another example of Seattle showing up
in writing. But the longer of the two plotlines of Griffith's
<Always> is set here. I find myself concurring with a fair bit of
what Griffith has to say about the city.
This year's movies were *much* richer in Seattle settings than this
year's books. The main character in <Dark Water>, 2005, is supposed
to come from Seattle, and we know that this is true because in
flashbacks to her childhood, it's always raining. (Though usually
harder than it usually rains here.) <The Wicker Man>, 2006, claims to
be set mainly on a Puget Sound island, and <The Changeling>, 1980,
claims to be set mainly in Seattle (and actually features a few scenes
that look like Seattle to me). Oh, and also, <the last mimzy>, 2007,
not only claims to be set here and nearby, but apparently was actually
shot so (if Vancouver counts as "nearby", anyway); I was surprised at
how many of its named locations are real, though AFAIK no "Seattle
Research Facility" for the black helicopter agencies exists, nor can I
find a "Seattle Elementary School".
<dead like me>, 2003, is a difficult case. Early clues point to an
ostensibly Seattle setting - the local university is "the U-dub"; an
early shot shows a building clearly resembling (but not actually) the
Space Needle; it's set in a city whose hinterland includes Spokane and
Boise, and that has ferries to islands. Wikipedia confidently asserts
a Seattle setting. It's shot entirely in B.C., but is set in "the
Northwest", which surely doesn't include Canada's southwesternmost
province. That said, Seattle doesn't have "Metro Police"; I don't
think it has a neighbourhood named "Spring Hill"; and mainly, it
doesn't *look* like the places you see in <dead like me>. (For that
matter, Seattle doesn't have anything like the amount of good weather
<dead like me> has, which seems truly bizarre for any coastal location
north of California.) The "U-dub" and Space Needle clues both occur
only in the pilot, and given such later items as the "Metro Police"
and a similarly vague newspaper title, I infer an early decision to
de-localise the show.</DIGRESSION>

netcat

unread,
Dec 16, 2008, 5:29:55 AM12/16/08
to
In article <gi7hpk$c6q$2...@reader1.panix.com>, j...@sfbooks.com says...

> Nobody followed up to last year's introductory post, and I don't
> actually know whether anyone read it. If anyone has *this* time read
> this far: welcome, and thank you. May you find something worthwhile
> herein.

I had been looking forward to your this year's post for some time now. I
always read the whole thing. I take notes. The time you took putting all
this together is much appreciated.

rgds,
netcat

Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)

unread,
Dec 16, 2008, 8:12:23 AM12/16/08
to
Joe Bernstein wrote:

> Eric Flint and Ryk Spoor
> * (July) <Boundary>, 2006
>
> Need I say much about this? I'm guessing the average reader of rasfw
> is quite familiar with what is, for all I know, the first
> collaboration between two of the group's regulars.

You'd actually be surprised by the number of people on Usenet who have
said to me even this year, "You've had books published??". So while I'd
HOPE that any reader of r.a.sf.w who would possibly be interested would
already have read "Boundary" (and my other books), I am not sure it's
quite a slam-dunk.

> So OK. It's set
> sometime around 2030, and starts with some characters at a

> palćontological site in Montana, some of whom also have ties to


> competing missions to Mars. Anyone who's read Jack McDevitt will be
> able to figure out where this is headed, but the book is nothing like
> McDevitt's elegiac romantic tales; instead it's pervaded by the almost
> carefree optimism of the authors' favourite older sf. (An early hint
> comes from the introduction of character after character, *all* of
> whom are exceptionally good-looking.)

Actually, Joe Buckley isn't exceptionally good-looking. (the fictional
Joe, that is; I have no idea what the real Joe Buckley looks like. I
really must meet him someday). He's not ugly, of course. I prefer
looking at good looking people, and when I'm writing I have to look at
them a lot. :)

> The plot essentially breaks
> down the characters' great doings into smaller tasks or conflicts,
> each settled within a few chapters, except for a couple of
> inordinately protracted romances and some central mysteries; while the
> narration makes it perfectly clear the authors *know* these are great
> doings, in the foreground we get mostly specific problems and how
> they're solved. I had foolishly thought "OK, reading Nicola Griffith
> is *great* preparation for dealing with Elizabeth Bear!"; this
> cheerful, traditional sf proved to be much more what I wanted instead,
> and I read it within twenty-four hours.

Excellent. Then we achieved precisely what we wanted to. I was trying
for something like a cross between "Rendezvous with Rama" and a good RAH
juvenile.

Hopefully Eric will get to finish his part of _Threshold_ (the sequel)
soon.

--
Sea Wasp
/^\
;;;
Live Journal: http://seawasp.livejournal.com

David DeLaney

unread,
Dec 16, 2008, 5:55:59 AM12/16/08
to
Joe Bernstein <j...@sfbooks.com> wrote:
>Nobody followed up to last year's introductory post, and I don't
>actually know whether anyone read it. If anyone has *this* time read
>this far: welcome, and thank you. May you find something worthwhile
>herein.

We're here _because_ we read, and also because some of us like to comment on
what we read, right? So thank _you_!

Dave
--
\/David DeLaney posting from d...@vic.com "It's not the pot that grows the flower
It's not the clock that slows the hour The definition's plain for anyone to see
Love is all it takes to make a family" - R&P. VISUALIZE HAPPYNET VRbeable<BLINK>
http://www.vic.com/~dbd/ - net.legends FAQ & Magic / I WUV you in all CAPS! --K.

Andrew Plotkin

unread,
Dec 16, 2008, 11:40:19 AM12/16/08
to
Here, Joe Bernstein <j...@sfbooks.com> wrote:

> Jay Lake


> <Trial of Flowers> turns the same approach into something much richer,
> a magnificent fantasy creation around a pair of plots: an outer one,
> which the back cover goes some way towards revealing and which the
> book's first half deals with, and an inner one, underlying the first
> half of the book and central to the second half. There are scenes of
> hideous, grisly squick in the first half, but though they slowed me
> down, you shouldn't let them stop you from reading on

Too late (he said, gloomily). They already did.

> Alan Moore
> (October) <The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol. 1>, 1999-2000,
> first compiled as such 2000
> Winner, 2001 Stoker Award, and Nominee, 2001 International Horror
> Guild Award, both for Illustrated Narrative
>
> $ (October) <The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume II>,
> 2002-2003, first compiled (perhaps not exactly as such) 2003
> Nominee, 2004 Stoker Award and 2004 International Horror Guild Award,
> both for Illustrated Narrative
>

> So if it weren't that the complexity of the milieu
> provides endless room for fannish speculation, I'd be somewhat
> confused by the evident enthusiasm these books have inspired.

It's the spot-the-reference game, which I personally enjoy the hell
out of.

> Wikipedia says some large but (probably) finite number of other
> similarly-premised books are at least contemplated; I have no idea how
> many already exist as of posting date.

One that I know of; it takes on James Bond and the spy thriller era.
Less successful.

> Volume II contains the much longer "New Travellers' Almanac", a sort
> of guide to the fictional universe (via intelligence reports in
> various first persons), which I didn't read.

Several pages of concentrated spot-the-reference, unencumbered by story.

> Sherwood Smith


> (May) <Inda>, 2006
> (May) <The Fox>, 2007, skimmed
>
> These are the first two books in an apparently ongoing dynastic
> fantasy series that can be seen as Ice and Fire Lite.
>
> That's not entirely fair. Smith's author bio for <The Fox> reveals
> that this world is to her as Darkover was to Marion Zimmer Bradley;

> evidently legions of would-be Brontės out there these days find the


> idea of abandoning their adolescent worlds for realism absurd. The
> books contain occasional lines referring to their story as belonging
> to a distant past, and it's perfectly obvious from the structure of
> the secondary world that the world pre-exists this particular story.

She's self-published some of her original wrote-this-when-I-was-16
material. It's surprisingly not unreadable. But very, very I-was-16.

> Smith doesn't do Martin's disciplined control of
> third-person POVs; instead, she does exactly what I've long claimed to
> hate, flitting restlessly from one POV to another all the time.

Yeah, that bugged me too. But they're very engaging POVs and I was
solidly hooked all the way through those two books.

> $ <Mirrormask>, 2005 (it loses a lot on the small screen, but at least
> I was reminded that there's been a major fantasy movie in recent
> years that DOESN'T have The Same Damn Tedious Fantasy Movie Music
> Template);

Speaking of _Stardust_, which you did a few posts earlier, I was
watching it with a friend who burst out at one point with "It's the
Lord of the Rings music, except in 7/4 time!" (That being the motif
of the character Septimus.)

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