Six fancasts enter, one fancast leaves…
Category: reviews (Page 9 of 12)
I’m probably going to do these one at a time and between everything else, because most of them are long collections of essays, and there are only so many essays I can read in one sitting without going around the bend. Which, contrary to appearances, is not the actual goal of my Hugo reading.
So, the book I’ve been reading over the past few days has been Ursula Le Guin’s essay collection, Words Are My Matter: Writings about Life and Books 2000-2016. It contains speeches, essays, introductions, blog posts and book reviews, and one or two funny little poems.
I enjoyed it quite a bit. I didn’t read absolutely every piece in the book – as I said, I don’t love essays that much – but I would start a piece, and if it grabbed me, I would read it. If it didn’t, I’d page through quickly, and if something caught my eye, I’d stop and go back and read it. I’d say that I read around 2/3 of this collection in total.
I’ve actually read very little of Ursula Le Guin’s actual fiction, and that not for years – I think I read the Earthsea Trilogy before it was a quartet, when I was in late primary school or early high school. This collection makes me want to go back and give her another go – I liked her somewhat acerbic wit, her feminism, and her ability to write both in a very personal register and a very professional, polished, critical one. I think my favourite section was the Talks, Essays and Occasional Pieces, which I read in full – book introductions and book reviews are less interesting when one doesn’t know the books in question, though Le Guin certainly convinced me that I need to read Vonda McIntyre’s Dreamsnake, and George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin, and perhaps also Alan Garner’s Boneland and Tove Jansson’s The True Deceiver. And I need to re-read Among Others, of course.
Getting back to the essays, I enjoyed their thoughtfulness, and was particularly delighted by her piece on Inventing Languages, and how to make these consistent. I liked her various articles articles on genre and publishing (and was particularly pleased that she did not throw Romance under the bus, though I get the impression that she hasn’t read much, if any of it), and adored her horror parody, On Serious Literature, in which the author is stalked by the dessicated zombie corpse of genre fiction. I loved and was depressed by her essay on the ways women’s writing gets disregarded and disappeared, Disappearing Grandmothers, and will definitely be retaining her term ‘prick-lit’ for the equivalent of ‘chick-lit’.
A good, solid read, with moments of absolute delight. I have no idea what the competition on this ballot will be like, but I’m definitely glad I had the opportunity to read this one.
I saved Penric and the Shaman, by Lois McMaster Bujold, for last, because I have read it before and thus already knew I liked it, and I wanted to save something safe for last! And really, I have liked it more on every read. Penric is such an utterly endearing character – unassuming, sharply intelligent, and so very kind, and I love his relationship with Desdemona, the demon who rides inside his head and shares his thoughts. It takes a certain type of personality to just accept the presence of a powerful demon, and to view Desdemona as a council of older sisters who are his constant (and frequently commentating) companions. I love the combination of affection and exasperation he has for Desdemona in her many persons.
In this story, Penric is helping track down someone who might be a murderer, or might be a trainee shaman who had things go terribly wrong. He is in the company of Osric, who is this world’s equivalent of a detective inspector or something of that nature, who has called on Penric’s patroness for some support, as he knows that he does not have the capacity to deal with the supernatural on his own.
I think what I love most about Bujold’s work is that it is always very good-hearted. There is a generosity to her stories that gives characters permission to learn from their mistakes. Yes, there are consequences for actions, but justice in Bujold’s universe is restorative, rather than vengeful. This is very soothing, especially after all the Lovecraft pastiche! I like that Bujold can write a story in which everyone really is doing their best, without necessarily being right – good intentions are important, but not sufficient.
Despite my desire to give the other stories a fair chance, Penric’s Shaman was by far my favourite. It is so easy to read, it has humour, and kindness, and a clever plot, and characters I want to spend more time with. My one possible quibble – which is something I really can’t judge – is that I don’t know how well this story would stand on its own, without having read the first in the series. I think it would work, but one can’t in-read a book, so I just can’t tell.
And I love this story too much to care.
At this stage, my ballot will be Bujold first, Ashanti Wilson and McGuire next, though not necessarily in that order. These three stories were all enjoyable, did not bore me at any point, and I would read them again. Johnson comes 4th, because while I enjoyed the beginning and ending and loved the main character, it did get tedious in the middle (possibly because it was trying to follow the Lovecraftian original). Miéville comes fifth, because it might have been a good story but I found it opaque and unpleasant, and Lavalle is in last place, because it was unpleasant and wasn’t even opaque enough to give me distance from the unpleasantness! Also, I think it really did require a knowledge of Lovecraft to enjoy it. I don’t know what would have made me enjoy the Miéville, but at least it stood alone.
I think I’ll tackle some of the non-fiction next, as I have a story to write, so I need to starve myself of new fiction for a few days. I might even give myself a few days off from the ballot entirely – after all, I’ve done five categories already, and may not even be doing the film/TV episode ones, so I’m doing quite well for time.
A Taste of Honey, by Kai Ashante Wilson is a love story centering around Aqib, a Royal Cousin in the Kingdom of Olorum and Lucrio, a soldier and part of the Daluçan embassy. They meet and fall in love and this is a bit of a problem, because the men of Olorum are absolutely not supposed to have relationships with other men.
I liked this book a lot. It is, however, almost impossible to usefully talk about without spoilers, especially since I know that many people have very strong (and justified) feelings about reading yet another tragic gay romance, so I am going to tell you whether it has a happy ending or not in pale yellow so that you have to highlight it with your mouse to read it.
Aqib and Daluça end up together. This is less of a spoiler than it might seem, because while the story starts off by seeming to close that door, the entire structure of the story points to some sort of future for the pair, even as it seems more and more impossible. And when it is achieved, it is done in a way that was absolutely unexpected to me, and which worked on a lot of levels and without undoing what was already done, even when it seemed to.
Without touching the ending further, I will say that the story has an unusual structure, and leaps forward and backward in time quite a bit. We start with the lovers’ first meeting, then with their parting, and then we travel through Aqib’s life, but keep going back to the time the lovers spent together, so you sort of know that it can’t be a done deal even though it clearly is. The jumping backwards and forwards made it difficult for me to get into the story early on, but it quickly became quite absorbing.
What is interesting about this story is the character of Aqib (we don’t see Lucrio except through his eyes), and the worldbuilding. Aqib is very young at the start of the story. He is beautiful, rather sweet, and painfully naive. There is a sort of innocence about him which doesn’t really leave him even as he gets older. He is also very privileged, and astonishingly oblivious to it – I hesitate to say adorably so, but it really almost is. His society is very stratified, and he is in one of the top tiers, and at one point, Lucrio asks how the nobility can be recognized as such, and he answers, in utter sincerity, that they have a sort of glow or aura about them that everyone recognizes. The narrative shows Lucrio deciding not to touch that one, but also noting that nutritional levels, clothing and hairstyles may also have something to do with it…
One thing that I especially loved about this story is the world building. The Daluçans are basically the Roman Empire. They speak Latin (or something that looks very like it), and are warlike and logical and civilized, but clearly take a more benign view of homosexuality than the actual Romans did (having said that, I found that having read Holy Shit last year, I was able to translate a little bit more of the naughty Latin that I might have expected to).
The Olorum people are an African civilization, with an extremely structured and tiered society. The nobility are supposedly descended from the Gods – and this seems to be literally the case, only the Gods are really mortals with a longer lifespan and greater psychic and intellectual powers. Mathematics and physics and learning of all kinds are ‘women’s business’, and the business of men is war, which is a problem for the rather beautiful and feminine Aqib. Interestingly, while the women appear to be less powerful initially, there are a few disquieting instances of the power they actually hold, quietly and behind the scenes, and it’s pretty clear that they have much more understanding of how their world works than the men do.
I’m still toying with where I want to put this on the ballot. I mean, I know that if the ending had been different, it would definitely be going beneath McGuire and Ashanti Wilson, but since it does, it’s now vying with McGuire for first place. In terms of re-readability, I’d definitely read it again, but I’m not sure I’d read it again more than once. Which would put it behind McGuire. And, for that matter, Bujold, which I’ve re-read twice already. But is that the best way to rank it? I don’t know.
The Dream Quest of Vellitt Boe, by KM Johnson, was much more my thing! It starts with a women’s college that feels much like the one in Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy Night, only it is set in a dreamland. A student has eloped with a man from the waking world, which risks shutting them down, and so Vellitt, former adventurer and now a Professor of Mathematics goes in pursuit.
This quickly becomes a quest story – well, of course it does. It’s right there in the title. Still, not a lot of quest stories feature fifty-five year old heroines, so I approve. Vellitt’s youth has been a good preparation for this quest, and her she meets former friends and lovers along the way as she retraces her steps.
The world building here is fun. This is a rather chauvinistic world of dreams, and all the Dreamers who visit are male (it is believed that women cannot dream great dreams, something which Vellitt finds rather doubtful). Dreamers are very charismatic and tend to be quite self-absorbed, which makes perfect sense. But the world they dream goes on without them, there are capricious gods with destructive intentions who might be involved in the student’s elopement, and whatever the dreamers might think, the people who live in this place have lives that go well beyond what the dreamers observe.
I liked the dream landscapes. The sky is different, and has only 96 stars, distances between places vary depending on whim, and the Gods are not so much worshipped as placated. The quest goes quite smoothly from dreamlike to nightmarish, and it becomes clear that if Vellitt fails, it is not merely her beloved college that will be at risk. Vellitt’s head is a pleasing place to inhabit – she is perceptive, a little acerbic, and quite self-aware. The ending of the story is extremely satisfying.
My only complaint (and this might be an artefact of the fact that I’m pretty tired and crampy at present) is that the story seemed to have too much middle. I loved the beginning and the end, but the middle did drag a little bit. But it was a highly enjoyable, clever story, and deserves a high place on my ballot.
This Census Taker, by China Mieville just didn’t work for me. I’m not sure whether that’s my fault or Miéville’s, but I found it very frustrating to read. It has quite a strong style (and I admit, I prefer my prose transparent), and is quite poetic, and the narrator has the infuriating habit of changing from ‘I’ to ‘the boy’ or even ‘you’. I am sure that this is intentional, but it dragged me out of the story every time.
Which was not, on the whole, a terrible thing, because I wasn’t enjoying the story very much.
It’s hard to say what the story is about. There is a boy, who was raised in a fairly isolated place above the down by his parents. There is his father who is gentle and kind except when he beats animals to death. He also quite probably murders the boy’s mother, though this is ambiguous, and he almost certainly murders others, but this is also not clear. These deaths are disappearances, or we have the not-necessarily-reliable narration of the boy, or we only see them obliquely. There are other children who believe the boy about this; there are villagers who believe him enough not to trade with the father, but not enough not to leave the boy in the father’s care. There are magical keys, but it is hard to say what they unlock. The children who believe the boy disappear, too, and one has to wonder if the father killed them.
The tone is weirdly serene for a book with this much implied and sometimes outright violence. And really, if there are murders in a book, I would much prefer to be sure that they happened. Is this so much to ask? The pacing is also bizarre. The book itself appeared to have 275 pages. At around 190 pages, I thought I possibly understood enough of the premise to describe it in my notes. Then – hooray! Suddenly there is action and movement and things falling into place and – oops, sorry, the book is actually only 200 pages long, the rest is previews of other work, we’re all done here.
Aaargh.
I honestly don’t know what to make of this story. It’s disturbing and strange and full of cruelty to animals, and I think only barely falls into the realm of SFF. I think I like it more than the De Valle, but once again, I feel like I’m missing something. A key, perhaps, which is somewhat ironic…
The second novella I read was The Ballad of Black Tom, by Victor Lavalle. This story is dedicated ‘For H.P. Lovecraft, with all my conflicted feelings’. I haven’t read any Lovecraft, so the only things I know about him are 1. Horror; 2. Cthulu; 3. Racism. All of which, needless to say, I know only at second hand.
It turns out that this was not sufficient preparation for this story. For someone who is not expecting Lovecraft, or familiar with his tropes, the story seems to be a very noirish sort of tale, set in 1920s New York, centering around Charles Thomas Tester, who is black, a terrible musician, a reasonably astute con-man, and an occasional purveyor of magical artefacts. He is rather collected by an older, white occultist, called Robert Suydam, who is trying to summon some sort of sleeping king by using magic learned from the various immigrant populations of New York. Then his father is murdered by police in ‘self defense’, when they mistake his guitar for a gun, and he goes all in to the occult / revenge plot.
Honestly, this wasn’t my thing, and I felt as though it didn’t quite make sense. Which I mentioned to my husband, who quickly recognised the names Suydam and Malone and realised that the whole thing was kind of a pastiche / response to Lovecraft’s famously racist tale The Horror at Red Hook. And so I went away and read a couple of synopses and essays about Red Hook, and bingo! The story suddenly works a lot better. But I’m not sure that the mark of a good story is that it requires further reading to make sense? I am reluctant to say this, because I like playing with pastiche, too. And the story sort of worked without knowing any of that, but I feel as though knowing the original story would have brought this to life a lot more – just reading synopses made me realise that there were particular scenes being referred back to in clever ways.
I do think the racism – the constant, draining, everyday weight of it – was brought out very well in this story. And I like the fact that even the decent detective, the one who is not being gratuitously awful on every occasion, still participates in making the murder of Tommy’s father ‘legal’. And that the greatest fear at the end of the book, the one that is so great that it can’t even be permitted to be a memory, is that a Black man could have defeated so many white cops, armed only with a razor. I also note that the really nasty, racist private detective, the one who murders Tommy’s father, goes by the name of Mr Howard…
In conclusion, I’d say that The Ballad of Black Tom is well written, and not a bad story, if decidedly not my cup of tea, and probably very clever. I’ve seen reviews calling it a brilliant retort to Lovecraft, and it probably is. But since I don’t really know what it is retorting to, I can’t see it landing high on my ballot.
OK, I think that will do me for now. I desperately need to read something which I don’t have to think critically about! I shall return to these reviews in a few days.
Oh, and speaking of reviews, I have another one up at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. I finally managed to draw a RITA nominee that I actually liked! And in the Romantic Suspense category, of all places…
After all those short stories and comics, I wanted something a bit longer. But I’m not quite ready to commit to the novels yet, so it’s novella time!
First cab off the rank was Every Heart a Doorway, by Seanan McGuire. I’ve actually read this already, but it was a pleasure to re-read it. The basic premise of this story is that sometimes, the children who go to Narnia, or Oz, or Fairyland, or Wonderland, or the Land of the Dead, don’t want to come home. But they do anyway, and then what can they do? Well, fortunately for them, Eleanor West, who spent most of her childhood visiting a Nonsense world, has set up a school for these children, which is good, because whether they are High Nonsense / Virtuous, or High Logic / Wicked they tend to be a little bit odd.
Nancy has recently returned from the Land of the Dead, where she spent several years learning stillness before she was sent home to our world, in order to be sure that she wanted to stay. She is certain that the door will open again for her. Sadly, her parents think that she was kidnapped for six months and just want their bright, vibrant daughter back. They also want her to be normal and go on dates, which is a problem for Nancy, because she is asexual.
At the Home for Wayward Children, Nancy meets other children who are like her, but not like her. There is the hyperactive Sami, who spent time in a High Nonsense, candy-themed world; Allison, who ran on rainbows; the beautiful Kane, whose fairyland kicked him out when they realised that the little girl they had kidnapped was ‘actually a little boy who just happened to look like a little girl’ (I do like this way of describing a transgender character); the twins, Jack and Jill, who came from a rather dark world ruled by vampires, where Jack was apprenticed to the local mad scientist, and Jill was the chosen adopted daughter of the local vampire lord; and Christopher, my personal favourite, who went to a world of ‘happy, dancing skeletons’, and can still make skeletons dance with his bone flute.
Alas, someone is murdering the children at the school, and Nancy’s status as the new girl with an affinity for Death (and a tendency to be drawn to the other children from the darker worlds) makes her a suspect.
This story is great fun. It’s quite dark and scary in places, but there is a lovely sense of humour to it, and I do like the way Seanan writes characters whose sexualities are not the standard cis/het variety. I liked all of the characters, and of course the premise is awesome. The mystery was a bit light on – it was clear to me fairly early on who the murderer was – but in fact that didn’t matter, because the suspense came from a) the characters working it out b) wondering just what they would do when they did, since the personal moralities of these characters was pretty variable, and c) wondering whether any of the children would find their way ‘home’ to their other worlds. Which was, I think, something that mattered to the children even more than the murders did.
The bizarre bit is that I could have sworn that the answer to c) was different the first time I read this novella.
But I’ve just checked my hard copy of this book, and unless Seanan McGuire has channelled some sort of alternate universe magic – which is certainly possible – it was the same. Very odd. Anyway, I like this a lot, and it’s going to be high on my ballot!
Day 1:
The Hugo voter pack arrived in my inbox today, and because I take my democratic duty very seriously, I’m planning to read as much of it as I can. I’m comforting myself with the thought that it can’t possibly be as puppy-infested as last year, but I’m also wondering if I am truly morally obliged to read what is almost certain to be a rapetastic and nasty-minded Chuck Tingle parody by an author who chooses to go by the name ‘Stix Hiscock’.
I’ve already looked through and voted on the professional and fan-art, some of which was really lovely. I especially liked Elizabeth Leggett and Likhain in the fanart category, and was quite taken with Galen Dara, Chris McGrath and Victo Ngai in the professional artist category. Though, now I think about it, I think I actually preferred Leggett and Likhain to any of those three.
The latter was an interesting category to judge – I found that I tend to judge cover art on a) whether it’s pretty to look at (I’m really not a very visual person, and know nothing about art, so that’s the best I can do), and b) whether it suggests a book I would like to read. So the first three on my ballot all fell into the ‘very pretty’ category, and the last three, which did not appeal strongly to me, I really judged by how likely I would be to read those books. Which meant that John Picacio came last, not because he is a poor artist – none of them were, as far as I am able to judge – but because his covers said ‘1950s pulp SF with hardly any female characters’ to me. Julie Dillon, who is, I suspect, objectively not necessarily a better artist had books that screamed ‘fun, but not very well-thought-out fantasy or light SF with plenty of female characters, and I’d probably feel embarrassed to read this book, but I’d still love it’, and Sana Takeda – who I felt didn’t quite belong in this category, as she was the only one doing graphic novels rather than covers – came fifth on the grounds that her work said ‘graphic novels, probably quite good ones, but I don’t really like graphic novels’.
Which brings me to the graphic novels. Let me start by saying that I really do not enjoy reading graphic novels – I tend to find it hard to pay attention to the graphics, and I feel like I’m not getting enough plot-per-page to carry them around as reading material. (Yes, I’m a philistine, but I like my stories neat. So I’m not a great judge for this category, but that’s not going to stop me voting in it!
I started with Black Panther Volume 1: A Nation Under Our Feet, by Ta-Nehisi Coates and illustrated by Brian Stelfreeze. I am the wrong audience for all graphic novels, because of the aforementioned non-visual-appreciatingness, but also because I have terrible trouble telling the characters apart. I just can’t hold their faces in my head very well, and so I find the plot hard to follow. This was even more the case here, because the plot appeared to be complicated and political, and something that I would probably have rather enjoyed if it had been the start of a novel, but as it was, I couldn’t figure out which faction was which and who was allied to whom and why. Also, I found the narrative style a little irritating – very rhetorical and portentuous, which only works for me if I am quite invested in a story.
Rather a pity, because I’ve read and enjoyed a number of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ essays, and I was hoping to enjoy this more.
My second graphic novel was Ms Marvel Volume 5: Super Famous, by Willow Wilson and illustrated by Takeshi Miyazawa. I came to this one with high hopes, having heard a bit about Kamala around the place, and I was not disappointed. It’s heaps of fun, super cute, and the ending is adorable. Nice plot about an evil development company using drones and evil magic potions to take over the town, but it’s really all about the characters (who I can actually tell apart! Hooray!). Kamala has a whole network of family and friends who are clearly people with their own stories, and her story is as much (if not more) about her relationships with them and her difficulty juggling all her responsibilities as it is about her superpowers. And there are some great one-liners. I love the whole concept of a superhero with physics homework and boy problems, and I’m always up for witty dialogue, so this one is a win for me.
I may even have to overcome my aversion to graphic novels to read more of it. Maybe.
Day 2: My lunchbreak reading today was Monstress, Volume 1: Awakening, by Marjorie Liu, illustrated by Sana Takeda. I do not recommend this as lunchbreak reading, as it is quite bloody. I have a feeling that I’ve read some of Liu’s short stories, but I’m struggling to remember them. This is another very political fantasy, and it’s humans versus arcana. Arcana have wings or tails or superpowers and seem on the surface of things to be more potentially powerful than humans, but this doesn’t seem to be the case. And also, it seems that killing them, or consuming parts of them, allows humans to be healed of wounds, and even become semi-immortal. You really don’t have to get very far with this premise to end up in some fairly unpleasant places, and this book certainly does that. Beyond this, there are multiple factions within both the Arcana and the humans, which again I found hard to follow, because I had trouble distinguishing between characters. (I just do better if I have names to tag characters to rather than faces – graphic novels rely much less heavily on names because they assume you can tell everybody apart. Ha.)
I’m a bit torn on where to rank this one. The artwork was really, really lovely, my favourite of all the books so far, but this didn’t help me recognise characters, alas. Which made it very confusing – when you have lots of factions and have trouble telling which is which, that’s a problem. And it was way too dark for my taste – highlights include torture, lots of maiming and killing, people being eaten, and babies being threatened with horrible fates. This is another story which I would have enjoyed more in novel format, I think, except that it is so VERY much not my cup of tea. But at least in novel format, I would have had fewer visuals in my head.
So yes. My instinct is to rank it higher than Black Panther, because of the artwork, even though Black Panther was just confusing, as opposed to confusing and distressing. But I haven’t decided yet.
My tram reading was Paper Girls, Volume 1, by Brian Vaughan, illustrated by Cliff Chiang, coloured by Matthew Wilson and lettered by Jared Fletcher. I liked this quite a bit. It had a sort of 1980s feel to it, which was appealing, and centres around four teenage girls who are delivering newspapers when there is… an alien invasion. Or maybe a time traveller invasion. With multiple factions. Hooray, more politics! I found the characters mostly easy to tell apart (though two of the girls kept looking very alike to me), but I still spent a lot of this story feeling confused. I’m beginning to think that perhaps I am rather stupid. Then again, time-travel plots tend to require you to get to the end of the book before everything makes sense, and this is clearly just the start of the story.
This is definitely at second place on my ballot so far, after Ms Marvel, but ahead of the other two. Part of me would like to read more, because I did like the characters, and I always like a good time travel plot, but I’m not sure I’m willing to make the investment of time required. I didn’t love it, and the artwork did not excite me. And the weird near death experience stuff didn’t quite work for me. I think there is also possibly some religious subtext going on (apple computers = apples + fruit of knowledge; heaven and hell in dreams; a bearded guy who looks like a cliché cartoon of God in an apple T shirt, who is in charge of judging people), but I’m not too sure where it is going, and feel a little wary…
Day 3
Another graphic novel read in my lunch break! Can I have four categories done and dusted by tonight? Of course I can!
So, next up was Saga, Volume 6, by Brian K Vaughan, illustrated by Fiona Staples and lettered by Fonografiks. I wondered how I’d go with making sense of this one, since it’s volume 6, but I actually quite liked it. The characters were strong, and I could mostly tell them apart, and there didn’t seem to be too many factions going on (though again, factions and politics – is that a big trend at the moment, or have graphic novels always been about warfare and politics and tribalism?). This particular story centred around a couple who are of different and enemy (but apparently cross-fertile) species, who are trying to find their daughter again. She seems to be locked in some sort of prison camp / re-education kindergarten, and if anyone finds out who she is they will try to kill her. The why of this is presumably in previous volumes. There was a bunch of stuff I didn’t quite follow which clearly related to the overarching story, but the central narrative of this story was quite nice, and I enjoyed reading it. Possibly the more so because it fit in so nicely with my enjoyment of the Vaughn short story… I apparently like narratives where supposed enemies are friends and working together.
Again, I don’t feel any particularly strong need to read more of the story (and for goodness sake, if you are reading it, don’t read it at work. There were several pages I had to turn quickly without reading because those were images I just could not have on my work computer), but I did like it. It has just overtaken Paper Girls and is sitting in second place, after Ms Marvel.
Fingers crossed, I’ll be able to read The Vision, Volume 1: Little Worse than a Man, by Tom King, illustrated by Gabriel Hernandez Walta, between work and my hair appointment today, and I will post the review then…
OK. I started The Vision. I got nearly halfway, and was finding it OK (and for once, having no difficulty telling characters apart), but then there was a scene with someone doing something terrible to a cat who looked quite a bit like Mystery, and that was it for me. I’m afraid I’m not going to read any further into that one, because I don’t need more pictures like that in my head (the cartoonist draws cats really well, and that doesn’t help), and I really wasn’t enjoying it enough to risk it. I don’t know how I can possibly judge this one, so it just won’t go on my ballot.
My delving into Graphic stories for this year is officially over.
Since I had choir last night, and PDFs of graphic novels are not too portable, I decided to take a break from them and have a crack at the Short Stories category. Which is SO MUCH BETTER than last year you CANNOT IMAGINE.
NK Jemisin – The City Born Great. This is a story about the birth of New York, not in the sense of its founding, but of its birth and coming to awareness as a sentient, living being. The protagonist is, for want of a better word, the city’s protector and its midwife, which is a bit tricky, since they (I’m not actually sure if gender was ever specified) are decidedly underprivileged – homeless, hungry, and black. I loved the bits about singing to the city, and graffitiing by circles in a black so dark that it looked like a hole so that the city could breathe through these new ventilations. NK Jemisin clearly loves New York the way I love Paris. There is a nice poetry and sense of history to this story, and I love the concept. I like this story very much.
John C Wright – An Unimaginable Light. I went into this one a little prejudiced, because I know that Wright is associated with the Catholic end of the Rabid Puppies. I tried very hard to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Alas, this happened on page 2.
The kneeling girl did not look like a robot. She looked like a love goddess. Her face was piquant and elfin, her eyes danced and glittered. Her lips were full, her smile ready. She was pulchritudinous, buxom, callipygous, leggy. Her torso was slender, and her abdominal muscles as well defined as those of a belly dancer, so that her navel was like a period between two cursive brackets. Her hair was lustrous, and tied in a loose knot at the back of her swanlike neck. Hairy eye, and skin colour were optional. She was, of course, naked.
Oh, of course she was. And Mr Wright needs to put down his thesaurus now. And also wash the hand that wasn’t holding the thesaurus because I think we all know where it has been. Ick.
This story seems to be a philosophical argument about who is truly human disguised as a short story about a man interrogating a robot, with rather pretentious styling. It is also a fable about how moral relativism is stupid. And how PC culture is oppressive and whiny and microaggressions are just about people bullying people who have *real* morals. It is not as clever as it thinks it is. However, it is heavy-handed, pompous and sexist, and it also gets sadistic and rapey in the middle, which is just lovely. Also, Wright never misses an opportunity to remind us of the robot’s shapely form or flirtatious gaze. Bleargh.
Then we have a plot twist! And theology! And our constantly objectified heroine – who turns out to be called Maria, because that’s just how subtle John C Wright is – isn’t a robot at all! The interrogator was the robot all along, but he didn’t know this! Oh, my shock, it is so shocking! Of course, the way he discovers this is that Maria gets executed in a particularly gruesome and painful way because apparently this is the best way to convey that Love is the most important value and that without religion people will obviously make terrible, sadistic choices.
(Also because Wright’s Catholicism is big on suffering, but it’s better if women suffer, especially if we get to describe their shapely limbs in detail while they do so.)
Also, this plot twist kind of makes a lot of the rest of the plot illogical. Because the whole bit about the interrogator being turned on by hurting Maria is revolting enough when he is human, but makes absolutely no sense if he is a robot, especially as he is apparently following Asimov’s three laws of robotics.
I think this one is a clear No Award for me. It’s pretty terrible.
Alyssa Wong – A Fist of Permutations in Lightning and Wildflowers. This one is very good. The protagonist keeps trying to change time so that she can save her sister, again and again. So many permutations of one event, but not enough. It reminds me a lot of Kate Atkinson’s novel, Life after Life, actually. It’s sad and sweet and rather beautiful. It’s going to be tough to choose between this and the Jemisin. I think the Jemisin is more original, though. And I do have a thing for sentient objects.
Carrie Vaughn – That Game We Played During the War. This story is set in the aftermath of a war between the telepathic Gaantish and the non-telepathic, but very practical, Enithi. A Enithi former nurse who looked after Gaantish prisoners of war (who had to be kept sedated to frustrate their telepathy) comes to visit a former prisoner, and former captor, and friend, who is now in hospital, recovering from wounds received in one of the last battles of the war.
Oh, I love this. Not least because I want to read the romance novel that I am convinced is hidden behind and around this story.
I love that they have developed a way to play chess – which is of course tricky with telepathy involved. Calla, the Enithi nurse, thinks about all the moves Valk could make, but does not think about her moves, and in fact often moves at random, because it’s the only way to hide her strategy from Valk, and also, the randomness drives him up the wall. I admit to finding this especially appealing because I am a horrible chess player who gets overwhelmed by possibilities and thus also moves at random, only I do that most of the time. I also love the implications for how soldiers and prisoners and captors think about each other in this war, and the ways in which fears don’t match up with reality. But most of all I love the friendship in this book, which transcends war and enmity. This is such a kind, affectionate sort of story, the perfect antidote to John bloody Wright. It reminds me of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Shards of Honoor, in all the best ways. I want to read more of Vaughan’s work. This is going to the top of my ballot.
Brooke Bolander – Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies. A sadistic killer decides to make a harpy his victim. It doesn’t end well for him. This story is pretty clearly inspired by reading one too many stories about the ‘distraught father and husband’ who murdered his family, or the ‘promising young man’ whose bright future is being put at terrible risk by the fact that he raped someone (thank goodness for judges who won’t let him suffer too badly for twenty minutes of action!). It is full of rage, as is appropriate. It’s a good story, but there are a lot of good stories this year, and I prefer friendship and wonder to rage, so it’s probably going to be low on my ballot. But can I just say how delightful and refreshing it is to be forced to put a good story low on my ballot because there are so many good stories and they can’t all be at the top?
Amal El-Mohtar – Seasons of Glass and Iron. Another one that I love! This is a subversive, feminist fairy tale, so I am all over it like a RASH. The girl with the iron shoes (and I love how she reflects that the boys get seven league boots and slippers that make them invisible, while the girls get shoes made of molten iron or slippers that make you dance yourself to death) meets the girl on the glass mountain (who really does not want any of the suitors who fall in love with her, then shout horrific abuse at her when they fail to win her). I love how each heroine can see the injustices in the other’s story so easily, but cannot see the injustices in her own. And the ending is obvious and inevitable and utterly appropriate. This is totally the story I wish I’d written.
At this stage, I’m having trouble deciding on whether to put Vaughan ahead of El-Mohtar (mostly because I love Vaughan too much, and feel like I love it for the wrong reasons) (but I still love it more because that’s who I am), but Jemisin is definitely third, Wong is fourth, and Bolander is in fifth place. Woe is me, I shall have to read the Vaughan and the El-Mohtar stories again, just to be sure of who should go first…
Cate Speaks is now archived on PANDORA, the National Library of Australia's Web Archive
