Valor’s Trial, Tanya Huff

Tanya Huff does MilSF like nobody else does. Torin Kerr is truly one of the great characters in the subgenre, and this latest book in the series (and possibly the last, depending on who you interpret the ending) is yet more evidence that Huff knows the things that can go wrong with this kind of a series and this kind of a character in this kind of subgenre, and she does not make the kinds of mistakes that have been made by others working in the same vein. ::cough::David Weber::cough::

One of the inherent problems in writing space opera/MilSF is that you have a hero, and to make the story interesting, you need to have that hero do uncommon, in fact, heroic things. And the more novels you write in the series, the more heroic deeds your character has attached to her name But in a real military organisation, the more of a legend you become, the less you fit into the ranks, because military organisations work by suppressing individual action and identity in favour of the group identity, the mass action.

And by the time we get to this book, Torin Kerr has a lot of heroic and noteworthy deeds attached to her name. She’s not just a Gunnery Sergeant, doing what any Gunnery Sergeant would do – she is an individual with a legend building around her, and that makes her a disruption in the ranks, not an asset.

And Huff knows and understands this. A large chunk of the novel shows us just what happens in a military environment under stress when a personality cult goes wrong, and throughout the novel we see both Kerr and those around her questioning how the cult of personality growing around her will affect her ability to fulfill her function effectively, and affect the ability of others to fulfill theirs.

This novel ties up a lot of loose ends from previous books in the series, and leads Kerr to the only possible solution to the problem her fame and unusual success have caused for her and for the Marine Corps. It’s also a rousing SF version of the prisoner of war breakout story that kept me reading anxiously and eagerly right to the end.

If this is the last Torin Kerr novel – it’s a great way for her to go. If there are more, they will be very different, and that’s going to be interesting if it happens.

Brava, Gunnery Sergeant Kerr, and brava, Ms. Huff, for treating the character with respect and sending her off in style.

Patricia Briggs:
Moon Called
Blood Bound

Moon Called and Blood Bound are the first two novels in Patricia Briggs’ urban fantasy series featuring Mercedes (Mercy) Thompson, a not-quite-human auto mechanic raised by werewolves. She herself is a shapeshifter, but of a kind known in indigenous North American traditions, not European ones – a skinwalker. Her animal shape is that of a coyote, she doesn’t have the great strength of the werewolf but she is not bound by the moon, is faster than ordinary humans, is resistant to certain kinds of magic and can see and talk to ghosts.

In Mercy Thompson’s world, the supernatural beings – fae, werewolves, vampires and others – are in the process of revealing themselves to ordinary humankind, because it is becoming harder and harder to keep their existence a secret. At the beginning of the series, only the lesser fae have done this, but other kinds of non-humans are dealing with the question of how to respond to the increasing problems they are having in remaining undetected, and what changes may be necessary to old habits and traditions in either keeping hidden for now, or in revealing themselves without sparking fear and potential retaliation from humans.

There’s a lot of neat things to commend the series, but there’s also one huge thing that is potentially poison – Mercy gets very close to both werewolves and vampires, in a way that I find just a little too reminiscent of the early Anita Blake books, although with much less actual sex. However, there is a fair amount of focus on dominance issues, the Alpha wolf of the local community declaring Mercy to be his mate at least in name, and how that affects her relationship with his pack, the politics of the local vampire community (Briggs uses the nomenclature “seethe” for a group of vampires related by loyalty to one master), the relationships between pack and were, her friendship with one of the more powerful local vampires, all of the things that made Hamilton’s books interesting at first and then made them intolerable once she’d gone too far with it all.

So far, Briggs is avoiding the pitfalls, and I’m enjoying the series quite a lot, but I’m reading with caution.

Into the Dark Lands, Michelle Sagara West

Into the Dark Lands is the first book of Sagara West’s Sundered series, and is also her first published book. It is unquestionably a strong debut, and one that shows just how much of Sagara West’s themes and style were present from the beginning of her professional writing career.

The universe of the Sundered is one created and sustained within a vast Manichaean struggle between two powers, one of the Bright and one of the Dark. In the first confrontation of these powers, lesser beings – the Sundered – were created out the substance of each power, beings which fought against each other without either side gaining an advantage. Eventually, the two powers joined in direct conflict, merging somehow yet remaining distinct, and falling dormant within each other's embrace. The result of this was the formation of the physical world, in which both Bright and Dark were equally present.

The Sundered who survived the cosmic battle – also called Servants of the Bright or the Dark – went down into physical reality and continued their battle, both directly and through their offspring, mortal yet having some of the powers of their parents among the Sundered.

When the series begins, the battle has been raging in human lands for generations. The First Servant of the Bright, despairing of ever finding an end to the killing, has dared to enter a dangerous prophetic trance in the hopes of seeing some way to end the war without yielding to the Dark. She emerges with a faint chance, which she cannot share with any of her companions or children, one that demands great sacrifices with only the smallest hope of success. Yet as the First Servant of the Bright, she makes the choice to risk all.

The first novel begins the story of Erin, granddaughter of the Lady of Elliath, also known as the First Servant of the Bright – a young girl with enormous potential as a healer who is destined to be the instrument of that fragile hope on which the forces of the Bright will risk so much.

I found it quite enjoyable, although I have some reservations about the overall nature of the way out of eternal struggle foreseen by the First Servant of the Bright. It is shaping up to be a “Beauty and the Beast” kind of tale, with a violent and feared man “saved” by the love of a good woman. The overall gendering of Good and Evil – excuse me, Bright and Dark – in the novel is somewhat problematic, but it’s a well-told story and I’m willing to take a ride with Sagara West to see what she does next with this set-up.

Green Grass, Running Water, by Thomas King

Imagine magical realism with all the satire and bite and planned absurdity of Monty Python’s Flying Circus at its very best. Add in the best of aboriginal storytelling tradition, from some highly unusual and unlikely narrators, and a skillful examination – no, make that evisceration – of the images that white settler culture has created of, about and around aboriginal peoples in North America. And a wealth of literary, mythological, religious and historical allusions and references. Oh, and don’t forget to braid all of this together with a perfectly realistic novel about four people from the same reserve in western Canada who are each, in their own way, on the brink of major changes in their lives, and how their individual pasts, their First Nations heritage and the assumptions and actions of the white people and institutions around them have brought them to this point.

Or, as another reviewer put it:

Imagine four Indian storytellers in the best oral tradition, only with frequent interruptions (“Who, me?” says that Coyote). If I tell you that their names are the Lone Ranger, Ishmael, Robinson Crusoe, and Hawkeye, you will begin to get the joke. Their stories are mashups of Native American and Western culture: Changing Woman, meet Noah. They rewrite the classics, rewrite Hollywood Westerns, rewrite Creation itself in the attempt to get it right this time. And while the novel works as a story complete in itself, the literary references, punning names, and recurring motifs are an English major’s Easter egg hunt.

Short chapters, some of them no more than a barrage of dialogue, keep the plot moving quickly. The novel does jump about: between history, myth, Hollywood, Melville, the Bible, and an actual plot, King is keeping a lot of balls in the air. Enjoy the juggling act and the wickedly dry sense of humor. You’ve never read a book about cultural (and patriarchal) oppression that’s this funny. Williamsburg Regional Library review

Then you’ll have some idea of what you’ll find in King’s Green Grass, Running Water (the very title makes reference to the terms in many treaties and agreements made between settlers and aboriginal peoples – “as long as grass grows and water runs” – that were in fact broken as quickly as ink dries).

It’s a book with the rare gift of making people of privilege see their unexamined racism, laugh at themselves – and thank the author for the pleasure of the lesson.

I’ve raved about Thomas King’s writing before, and I have every intention of doing it again, because I heartily anticipate reading everything he’s written. He’s just that good.

Spider Robinson: The Deathkiller trilogy, aka The Lifehouse trilogy
Mindkiller
Time Pressure
Lifehouse

To begin with, I have to say that I have a complicated relationship with the works of Spider Robinson. He’s a writer who has a tendency to frequently use, and sometimes overuse, some very specific and highly recognisable themes, motifs, habits, re-cycled character types. Some of these I don’t mind until it gets really bad – such as his love of puns and his tendency toward chucks of heinleinesque first-person narrator exposition, and his willingness to openly use Canada as a setting for some of his books. Some of his other writing tics I tire of more quickly. Also, I find his works to range widely in quality, from the very good, to the downright awful; generally, the more self-indulgent hes being, the weaker the book seems to be.

And in the end, there is definitely such a thing as too much Spider at any given time.

Just so you know where I’m coming from.

I’d read the first two books in this trilogy a long time ago, but since it had indeed been a long time ago, I decided to re-read them before proceeding to the third book. So, here are my thoughts on the trilogy and its individual volumes.

Overall, it’s an interesting experiment – to write three novels about a scientific development that will completely and totally change not just human society but human nature itself forever, without ever actually showing us more than the tiniest glimpse of what human life and society will be like, or how it got to be that way – we never see inhabitants of this brave new world living in the future, and we see very little of the people who make the discoveries on which it depends, and who bring this new world into being. In a sense, Robinson is showing us his vision by negative example – here are the things it is not – and be inference – here are its effects on people who are not part of it.

Since Robinson’s future vision in this trilogy is in many ways analogous to the visions of religious mystics concerning life after death, or outside of time and space as we know it, this approach makes a certain kind of sense. How can he realistically describe things that no human can experience outside of the mystical state that has been called, among other things, satori, or the beatific vision? Instead of trying to do so, Robinson shows us this future through sideways glances, through the hopes of those who live before the change, and the second-hand tales of travellers from the transcendent future.

Great ideas, but like Robinson’s oeuvre in general, the quality of the individual volumes is highly uneven.

Mindkiller, the first volume in the series, is in my opinion the best. The structure is interesting – two interesting protagonists, in two timelines separated by six years, propelled by circumstances, embark on dangerous quests that have strong emotional appeal to draw in the reader. At first, you wonder what is the connection. Then, as you engage with the protagonists, you forget to ask that question any more, and finally, the clues start falling and you see how it all fits together. A good science fiction novel by any standard.

Time Pressure is difficult for me to look at objectively, because Robinson sets this volume right in the middle of a time, place and culture that I know only too well. In fact, odds are that I know some of the people who were inspirational models for some of the characters, because it’s a very small and somewhat insular setting and both Robinson and I were part of it at the same time. (Aside: and yes, I met Robinson on several occasions totally unrelated to SF while we were both a part of this setting. See, one of the women in the commune I lived in was dating one of the dancers in Jeanne Robinson’s troupe, and in a small community, that’s enough of a connection to make meeting each other inevitable. I remember him well, because he was already a well-known SF author. I doubt very much that he remembers me at all.)

So for me, the setting predominates my responses to this book, as I deal with both extreme familiarity and the disconcerting effects of seeing the hippie culture of the North Mountain of the Annapolis Valley, nova Scotia, which was my culture for almost a decade, through the eyes of someone who also lived through it, but from a different perspective – again, inevitable, as Robinson is an ex-pat American and I’m a native Nova Scotian. We couldn’t ever have seen the that place in that decade in the same way. But I will make one factual correction to his narrative for anyone who’s read the book: the North Mountain hippies were not, as Robinson suggests, largely ex-pat Americans. A few of the many communes that flourished during the 70s had a lot of Americans, especially the Rajneeshi commune. Many had a couple of Americans among them. There were some very prominent members of the wider hippie community throughout Nova Scotia who were American. But most of the folks who were year-round, settled members of the community were Canadian, and most of those were from the Maritimes. The commune I was a part of had no Americans among its core group. The summer hippies were a different story, but after around 73 or 74, they hardly counted anyway.

What I can say about the book aside from my highly personal engagement with it is that I think it’s a fairly decent SF story about time travel from the perspective of the ones travelled among, and not the ones travelling. I do think that Robinson has used the “male musician who has become spiritually stagnant over guilt because he thinks the accidental deaths of his partner and their children were all his fault” protagonist a little too often, and that’s one of the things that bugs me about the book. And, reminiscent of the two seemingly unrelated plot lines in Mindkiller, it takes a while before you see how it relates to the previous book in the series.

The last book, Lifehouse, is, alas, an example of what happens when Robinson gets way too self-indulgent. First of all, the book is completely unnecessary. We know at the end of Time Pressure that something along the general lines of the Lifehouse set-up is going to happen, and that incidents like the one that forms the novel’s plot are going to happen and will have to be dealt with.

Second, the book is far too narrowly focused with respect to its connection to the overall, barely seen future. While the storylines of two previous novels, like this one, are tightly focused on the protagonists – even though this volume has a lot more key protagonists – their contribution to our understanding of the off-stage developments that lead to this massive change in human existence is to illuminate crucial and far-reaching aspects of that obscured narrative. Lifehouse gives us nothing more about the future beyond a few administrative details.

And third, it’s too cliched, overly complicated, way too full of in-jokes, too much of the plot hinges on coincidences, some of them of the most unlikely order. Making almost half of the key characters science fiction fans is kind of a death knell. It sort of boils down to “look how naive and gullible and yet how clever and resourceful SF fans are because they think about impossibly weird stuff every day” (there’s some of this in Time Pressure, but not nearly as much).

In my opinion, of course, it’s an example of Robinson at his worst.

And with that, I think I’ve had enough of Spider Robinson for some time to come.

Precursor, C. J. Cherryh


Yes, I am continuing to read Cherryh’s Atevi series, and continuing to enjoy it immensely. This really is the kind of novel/series that I love – full of social and political complexity, well-developed civilisations (particularly alien ones), and great characterisation.

Something that I am very interested in here is the way in which Bren Cameron, the viewpoint character of all the novels to date, is dealing with becoming a person without a home culture – he has sufficiently assimilated to atevi culture that he doesn’t feel at home in his birth culture, but at the same times, the divide of alien biology and psychology prevents him from becoming atevi, no matter how deeply he has come to identify with the atevi.

Also, the step-up in political complexity, now that both the atevi and the humans living on the planet have fully engaged the returning human shipdwellers, with their own unique social structure, aims, and factions, is just making me squee with delight.

And so, it’s time to go buy the next volume.

My Death, Lisa Tuttle.

Lately I seem to have been reading, by happenstance I presume, books that in one way or another make me think about what I can only describe as the secret history of women, and the ways in which women as whole, real individuals are erased in our culture and its products. Sometimes it’s been an obvious theme, the writer’s intent being to examine either the reality of women’s lives, or some aspect of how women are disappeared and what they may have been doing that no one wanted to, or was able to, record. Sometimes – as in some of the classic SFF (written by men) that I’ve been re-reading of late - it has been about the total absence of women, or the absence of independence and agency in the women who are represented. Sometimes, it’s just been about a sense that there are untold women’s stories behind a narrative that’s focused more on the stories of men – something that would be less problematic if only there were as many narratives where men’s stories were left in the background in order to tell the stories of women.

Lisa Tuttle’s My Death is very much a story about ways in which women’s stories are erased – and reclaimed. It is also at some levels a vast metaphor for the act of creation when artist and subject merge in order to create a new vision.

In this novella, an unnamed narrator, an author still working through her grief at the death of her husband, is led by a series of apparent coincidences to embark upon writing a biography of an earlier novelist (supposedly a contemporary of Virginia Woolf et.al.) who influenced her when she was younger and which whom she has always felt a strange sense of connection. This novelist – Helen Ralston – had served as model and muse for her older lover and former teacher Willy Logan, whose paintings and novels became well-known, while Ralston’s slipped into obscurity. Ralston, thus, is simultaneously the women whose work is overshadowed by the man she is associated with, and the woman whose individuality is erased by her assigned function as inspiration.

The narrator’s quest to discover what happened to the real woman behind the muse leads her to the discovery of a painting by Ralston, titled “My Death,” which is a visual paradox, simultaneously picturing an island that she and her lover visit; and a woman’s body with the focus on her exposed vulva – yet another form of disappearing of the real woman, this time through the classic tropes of woman as the earth/the land/the soil and woman as sex.

There is much more to this novel, including a profound shift in perspective near the end that cannot be logically reconciled yet illuminates the core truths that Tuttle has to offer about the distinction between Woman as muse and women who themselves create art, between women who are observed, submerged, erased, and women who are seen, known, remembered for who they are as individuals and what they do for themselves.

It is only after this shift takes place that the speculative elements of this work emerge, but once they do, it becomes apparent that this novella – one of the Conversation Pieces series published by Aqueduct Press – lies securely within the scope of literary speculative fiction.

This not a book that can be understood wholly from a rational perspective, for like the painting that give the book its name, the story itself is more than one thing at once, and at the same time symbolic of other things entirely. But it works, and powerfully so, as a an exploration of women and their relations, historically and potentially, to art.

The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet, Vandana Singh

This is a collection of short stories by the most remarkable Vandana Singh, whose work I am growing more and more in love with the more of it I read.

In these stories, Singh writes about apparently quite ordinary people – specifically, people who are often women and often Indian – who find themselves in strikingly unordinary situations and circumstances, or who suddenly feel distanced, alienated as it were, from what once seemed normal and familiar. Her gift for delineating character with subtlety, precision and sometimes gentle humour is in peak form here, enabling us to understand and identify with the rich humanity of her characters, and thus experience a universe much larger and richer than we normally encounter – learning greatly thereby.

As Singh notes in the essay that concludes the collection:

Speculative fiction is our chance to… find ourselves part of a larger whole; to step out of the claustrophobia of the exclusively human and discover joy, terror, wonder, and meaning, in the greater universe.

Singh sees another function for speculative fiction (beyond the simple fun of it all, which she also celebrates), one that is also at the heart of many of the stories in this collection:

Science fiction and fantasy posit other paths, alternative futures, different social arrangements as well as technologies, other ways that we could be. Before we do, we must dream.

I’d be hard pressed to pick a few favourites from this collection to talk about – they are all very, very good.

There’s an interesting review of The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet here.

Archangel, Sharon Shinn

This was my first introduction to Sharon Shinn’s writing, and I was quite enraptured. The book itself is one of those “looks like fantasy but it’s really science fiction once you realise what’s going on” stories, which can be very interesting reading when you know that you are seeing in action highly developed technology that is, to the people in the story, indistinguishable from magic – or in the case of Shinn’s Samaria novels, of which this is the first, divine providence.

As the novel begins, Gabriel, leader of the angels’ hosts of the Eyrie – one of three angelic hosts whose responsibility it is to care for the people and the land of Samaria – is preparing to assume the position of Archangel, the most senior position among angels and the one who must – with his pre-ordained, human spouse, the Angelica – preside over the annual ceremony of worship that prevents the god Jovah from destroying all of Samaria. The only problem is that when Gabriel goes to the oracle of Bethel to find out who he is to marry, he discovers that the village she was born in was destroyed years ago, and no one knows where she is. And he has six months to find her, marry her, and make sure that she is trained and ready to sing the Gloria with him.

Archangel is on the one hand the story of Gabriel’s search for Rachel, his destined bride (but destined by whom?) and his attempts to build a relationship with her once he finds her. It is also a novel about abuse of power and the struggle for social justice in a corrupt regime – for in the process of learning who Rachel is and what is in her past, he learns that even the highest and mightiest of angels can fail in duty and compassion. falling from the heights to the depths.

Alternatively, it is the story of how a woman who refuses to follow custom blindly, who demands justice for all, can change the heart of a ruler and the course of a world.

It's also an interesting look at society under a theocracy (that may not actually be a theocracy at all, and in the absence of a god at the top, what is a theocracy but a dictatorship, no matter how well-meaning), and at the reality of politics and oppression in the nice little feudal fantasy lands that some SFF writers are so fond of setting novels in.

I’m looking forward to reading the remaining books in this series.

Inda, Sherwood Smith

Inda is the first volume in one of several series set in Smith’s fantasy world of Sartorias-deles. Like several other fantasy authors who have spent a great deal of time developing a complex history and cultural geography for their alternate universe (Lackey’s Velgarth and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover come most quickly to my mind), Smith has written several books and series set in different times and places in this world, which is probably both effect and cause of the truly admirable breadth and depth of her worldbuilding.

In many ways, one would think that Inda would be just the right sort of fantasy for me. Complex world building, multiple well-developed cultures, lots of political intrigue, some interesting gender politics – it certainly has many of the things that hook me in. And I was expecting to find this volume – the first of Smith’s fantasy novels I’ve read – to be a pleasurable introduction to a new series of books I would eagerly consume.

Unfortunately, Inda did not engage me. For quite some time, I wasn’t sure why I was finding myself vaguely dissatisfied, yet continuing to read it – looking for something that I felt should be there, but wasn’t. And then I realised that Smith was telling a very fine story, by all objective measures – but it wasn’t the story I wanted to hear about these people.

Smith is writing the story of a young boy from a noble family (the eponymous Inda) who, in a time of threatened war, discovers his gift as a military leader in a brutal school for warriors, all the while surrounded by political intrigue that, fed by personal jealousies, leads to treachery and betrayal and sends Inda into exile, where he learns to survive as a member of a band of mercenary marines.

However, behind the story of Inda and his friends and enemies, I kept catching glimpses of another story, one about the secrets being kept by the women of Inda’s culture and class, who seem to be doing something that the men don’t know about, developing their own language of codes and allusions based on their studies of history, teaching traditions and a secret method of fighting to each other. At first, I wasn’t sure if I was just reading some vast conspiracy of women into these small glimpses of women’s culture that Smith was giving me. Then about halfway through the novel, there’s one scene that explains what is going on among the women – and after that, nothing more of any substance about it.

And I realised that this was that story I want to read, not Inda’s. He’s a nice young lad, with lots of dangerous adventures and shattering reversals of fortune and coming-of-age stuff to deal with, but I didn’t want to read about him. I wanted the story of this secret quest among the women.

I did finish the novel, and it is a very well written example of its genre, and I have no doubt that anyone who is looking for the kind of story it is will enjoy it immensely. I might even have enjoyed it more myself if not for the tantalising hints that something more interesting (to me, at least) was happening mostly off stage, just over there where the girls are talking quietly in the library while Inda and the other boys are on centre stage doing military drills. (although the girls drill too, and often beat the boys – like I said, the book has interesting gender politics).

I will have to explore some review of Smith’s other books set in this world, to see if she is telling the story I want to read somewhere else, but there’s not enough of that story in Inda to tempt me to read the remaining volumes in this series.

Power, Politics and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said, edited by Gauri Viswanathan

This is a fascinating collection of 19 interviews with Edward W Said, conducted between 1976 and 2000 and published in a variety of scholarly and other venues. Through these interviews, it is possible to follow the development of Said’s scholarship and his political activism, as they illuminate the range, penetration and passions in Said’s intellectual and public life.

Editor Gavri Viswanathan puts it best in her introduction:

The interviews Said gave over the past three decades boldly announce that neither his own books and essays nor those written about him have the last word. The first thing to note is not only th number of interviews Said has given, both to print and broadcast media, but also the number of locations in which they took place, spanning Asia and the Middle East as well as Europe and the United States. They confirm his presence on the world stage as one of the most forceful public intellectuals of our time, a man who evokes interest in the general public for his passionate humanism, his cultivation and erudition, his provocative views and his unswerving commitment to the cause of Palestinian self-determination... Together, [these interviews] reveal a ceaselessly roving mind returning to earlier ideas in his books and novels and engaging with them anew. One measure of the fluidity and range of Said’s thought is his ability to revisit arguments made in his books and essays, not merely to defend and elaborate on them but, more important, both to mark their limits and probe their extended possibilities, especially in contexts other than those which first gave rise to them.

Said’s topics range from discourses on the development of his own work, particularly on Orientalism and post-colonial theory, to ruminations on his childhood and how it affects his sense of self in the world, to his political activism and evolving relationship with the PLO, to reflections on other authors and areas from Austen, Conrad, Naipaul and Rushdie to Derrida and Foucault.

There’s a wealth of thought in these interviews, well worth savouring.

The Snow Queen, Mercedes Lackey

The fourth volume of Lackey’s delightful Five Hundred Kingdoms stories, all of which draw on fairy tale traditions from around the world and feature competent and powerful female protagonists – often “Fairy Godmothers” – whose job it is to mitigate the harmful effects of “The Tradition” – the magical force that acts on the people of the Five Hundred Kingdoms, pushing them into fairy tale roles which can be potentially disastrous, even deadly (just think about all the grue and gore in traditional fairy tales, and this will make sense).

Aleksia, the protagonist of this instalment of the series, is a Fairy Godmother who lives in a northern kingdom. Much of her public persona is drawn from the fairytale of the Snow Queen, the heartless fairy who steals young men and holds them until they are saved by the courageous young women who love them. The reality, of course, is that the young men she steals away with are arrogant assholes who take their lovers for granted, and it's is all about making them realise just how much of an asshole they've been. Of course, she does all the usual Fairy Godmother work as well, nudging the lives of people all over the kingdom away from fairytale patterns that end badly.

Then Aleksia starts hearing rumours about a nearby kingdom where there is no Fairy Godmother, about an impostor who has taken on the role of the Snow Queen – only this Snow Queen is killing whole villages, and the young men she lures away are not returned to their brave lovers, a littler wiser and more aware of just how strong a force love can be. This Snow Queen’s victims are never seen again. And it’s up to Aleksia to stop her.

The folklore traditions at the heart of this novel are taken from the culture and mythology of the people of Finland, and particularly the indigenous peoples. Some of the characters Aleksia encounters are drawn from the Kalevala, an epic compilation of folk poetry from across Finland (and parts of the Baltic states, particularly Estonia), and the culture of the people she meets in her search for the impostor is clearly based on elements of Sami culture.

I enjoyed this, not just as another of Lackey’s reliably pleasant fantasy offerings, but also as an exploration of a European tradition that is not found all that often in SFF. It also reminded me of a series of novels that I’d read many years ago in my youth, but long since forgotten – the four Kalevala-inspired novels of Emil Petaja: Saga of Lost Earths, Star Mill, The Stolen Sun and Tramontane. I imagine they're long out of print, but now I have a hankering to re-read them. And of course, to re-read the Kalevala itself.

Not too long ago I bought a book bundle offer at an online auction to help Vera Nazarian, and received a generous stack of classic (and not so classic) science fiction from the 50’s, 60’s and early 70’s. Some I’d read before, some I hadn’t, and some, to be perfectly honest, I’m not sure if I read when I was a kid or not. Here's my thoughts on some of them.


Worlds of the Imperium, Keith Laumer.

A fast-paced parallel universe caper, in which the protagonist is kidnapped from an Earth that appears to be our own by agents from a universe where science has found a way to navigate the various world-lines in order to assassinate a dangerous warlord from yet another world-line. It’s a fairly straight forward spy caper, and a very quick read. Like so many genre novels of the era, the only woman character is a “love interest” for the hero – she’s portrayed as intelligent, brave and beautiful, but does little of substance beyond serving as a compensatory “reward” for the hero, torn from his own world to save another.


Phase IV, Barry N Malzberg.

An alien influence provokes accelerated evolution among a colony of ants somewhere in Arizona. Soon the ants are on the move, destroying homes in a “planned community” being built in the region. The area is evacuated, scientists arrive to investigate.

Much of the novel is a science fictional reworking of Carl Stephenson's famous short story "Leiningen versus the Ants" – only the ants have developed a form of intelligence and the ability to adapt rapidly to threats, and they have a purpose, not just a blind instinct to follow. And that changes the ending completely.


Citizen of the Galaxy, Robert A. Heinlein

This has always been one of my favourite Heinlein juveniles. It’s a classic reversal of fortune story, complete with an ironic justice payoff – the victim of interstellar slave traders turns out to be one person most suited to track interstellar slavery to its very roots and eradicate it.

There is some wonderful worldbuilding in the section that’s set among the Free Traders, to say nothing of a consciousness of power relations between the sexes that to some extent belies the accusations of sexism that are frequently levelled against Heinlein. In Free Trader society, the conscious separation of a person’s roles within the Family and the Ship produces a culture in which each person’s abilities are acknowledged and used – meaning that men and women work together at the jobs they do best – but at the same time, everyone follows strict gender roles as members of the Ship’s Family – roles that are obviously constructed as a response to the social needs of a people divided into small clans that must practice exogamy to avoid the risks of inbreeding.

My main quibble with the book is that it ends far too quickly – just as the protagonist Thorby has just begun the task that all of his history has prepared him for.


Rocket Ship Galileo, Robert A. Heinlein

The first Heinlein juvenile, this reads more like a “boy’s own” adventure than just happens to involve rockets than a science fiction novel. The plot is simple – a group of boy scientists find a mentor, decide to build a rocket that will take them to the moon, and in the process, foil the evil intentions of Nazi space pirates (this are not nearly as cool as it sounds).

What bothers me is the basic set-up of the story. From a teenager’s perspective, it’s a great adventure story, but read from the viewpoint an adult, it sure looks like criminally negligent exploitation of three naive young men by a single-minded scientist who can't persuade anyone to give him the backing to carry out his experiments in a safe and ethical manner. Instead, he uses the unpaid labour of the boys and never discloses the full scope of the risks – particularly the indications that someone who is not averse to violence is trying to keep him from getting to the moon. Also, what is up with the parents of these boys? Two boys simply tell their parents about the scheme, and they say “if that’s really what you want, dear.” The third set of parents initially say no, but when creepy exploitative scientist talks to them about using their kids as unpaid labour and risking their lives in space, we discover that all the parents are really worried about is their kid not going to a good school in the fall – and when creepy scientist promises to tutor the boy, this makes it OK. This rather spoiled my appreciation of what is a slender and formulaic tale to begin with.

However, one nice touch is the inclusion of a Jewish boy as one of the junior scientists, and he turns out to be the one most suited to be the co-pilot (creepy scientist is of course Captain and pilot), which gives him at times some opportunities to be heroic.


Glory Road, Robert A. Heinlein

I liked this when I first read it, and I still like it. Sure, it’s basically a very thin adventure fantasy/RPG/arcade game plot, namely, the Quest for the McGuffin. Hero and party overcome obstacles of increasing difficulty on the path to the McGuffin, overcome the Big Boss who guards the McGuffin, take the McGuffin back to its proper place, then hero marries princess.

And it features three of Heinlein’s favourite characters: the super competent, super beautiful woman; the curmudgeonly old geezer who’s been there and back and knows it all; and the straight-as-an-arrow young man who is about to learn what the world is really all about.

But as one of Heinlein’s rare forays into fantasy, it’s interesting, and it does answer the one question that not too many writers of standard adventure fantasy ever get around to answering – what happens after the plough-boy cum hero settles down with the princess? And at least the princess in this case isn’t just the bait, er, reward for the successful hero, she’s part and parcel of the mission, from planning to execution and she decides whether she’s also part of the hero’s reward.

In that sense, it’s a lot better than a fair number of others of its ilk.


Earth Unaware, Mack Reynolds

If ever a cover was not just totally disconnected from the actual contents, setting and plot of a book, but wrong in every respect, it would have to be the cover of Belmont Books’ May 1968 edition of Mack Reynolds’ Earth Unaware (originally titled Of Godlike Power).

The cover features a muscled, nearly nude barbarian warrior with flowing blond locks and a fluffy loincloth. Clinging to his arm is a red-haired woman with ample breasts, hips and thighs, wearing something dark and vaguely furry that covers her torso and nothing else. They seem to be standing in a cloud of low-lying yellow fog against a dark, featureless background. At their feet is something vaguely mechanical, somewhat suggestive of an abandoned futuristic oversized grenade launcher. It’s all done in an impressionistic, soft focus, pseudo-Franzetta style.

The book itself is a modern speculative fantasy set in a North America not too far advance from the date of writing, in which increasing capacity for the mass production of consumer goods has led to the (once expected and highly anticipated) leisure society, where material abundance and technological advances have resulted in increasingly shorter work-weeks and a massive demand for popular entertainment. The protagonist is Ed Wonder, the host of a radio show that features interviews with people who claim to be reincarnations of Alexander the Great, or to have been taught a new philosophy of life by aliens from Jupiter.

Then Ed and his friends, socialite Helen Fontaine and newspaper columnist Buzz De Kemp find the real deal among all the stories of somewhat questionable veracity – a travelling preacher who advocates an end to consumerism and profligate wasting of natural resources, calling for a return to a simpler way of life, who has the power to change the world with the over-heated Biblical style curses he utters in the heat of anger or passion for his view of how people should live.

The first major manifestation of this comes when Ed and Helen visit one of the preacher’s tent-revival-like meetings. Helen interrupts his sermon on the wastefulness of modern society, provoking his anger – which results in a curse on the vanity of women. Ed and Helen leave the meeting, but before the evening is out, Helen finds herself driven to wash off her makeup and comb out her high-society hairstyle. The next morning, Ed (and the world) discovers that women everywhere are avoiding cosmetics and anything else that might enhance their appearance, choosing functional clothing and wearing their hair au naturel. And only Ed and Helen can even being to figure out why.

So, no, no barbarians, blond or babe-like, but an interesting satire-cum-thought experiment. I’d read some of Reynolds’ other books when I was younger, and I found this as enjoyable in its own way as my memories of his other books.

Distances, Vananda Singh

There’s an image that’s not all that uncommon in science fiction, that of the being who physically and mentally connects with, inhabits or is inhabited by, perceives and encompasses, some aspect of space-time that other beings cannot access or comprehend. Often this ability gives these special being abilities to make otherwise impossible connections, bridge gaps between representation and understanding, navigate sapcewarps, see theoretical relationships, patterns, causalities,totalities, because of this multi-faceted kind of synesthesia.

Anasuya, the protagonist of Distances, has such a gift. When she is submerged certain fluids, she can perceive and explore complex mathematical formulae when expressed in chemical solutions, aided by tiny symbiont organisms in her body, transforming the chemical notations into transcendent vistas that she can somehow travel inside of – and then record her perceptions in holographic form via nanites for others to analyse.

This gift is one of many abilities shared by her people, who live a semi-aquatic existence on the shores and in the coastal waters of one region of her world. Unlike most of her people, she has left the sea and travelled to a stone city in the desert where people not her own have built, among others, a temple to mathematics. It is here that the technology that permits her unique way of seeing mathematically-described spaces and relationships to be recorded and used by others was developed.

It is also to this stone city that a team of mathematicians from the planet Tirana have travelled in search of help in solving an immeasurably complex mathematical problem that describes a previously unknown geometric space. Anasuya is asked to help them, but in the process, she discovers a secret that will change life on both their planets.

Distances, physical, emotional, and conceptual, how they are perceived, how they wound, and how they can sometimes be bridged, play a large part in the themes and imagery of the book. Both Anasuya and the Tirani delegation have travelled far to meet in this city that is alien to them both. Woven into the story are various accounts of myths and events that are centred on creating and covering distances. And Anasuya’s work leads directly to a change in the understanding of distances itself, and in the distances she has kept between herself, her creativity, her past and the people around her.

It’s a profoundly poetic work, and one that continues to resonate at levels that I don’t know how to express in words.

De Secretis Mulierum, L. Timmel Duchamp

Duchamp’s new work is both an uncomfortably accurate picture of sexism and male privilege in the academy, and a challenging speculation on what impact a discovery that some of the most heralded intellects of the European tradition had been passing women might have on our perceptions of gender and history.

Set in an unspecified future, the novella’s protagonist, doctoral student Jane Pendler, is doing historical research, using a new scientific discovery that enables researchers to view selected moments in the past by focusing on specific individuals through the use of bone scrapings. The first historical luminary to be subjected to this new technological tool is Leonardo Da Vinci – and in eavesdropping on the great artist and inventor’s public and private lives, the technique reveals Leonardo to have been biologically female. The predominantly male elite within the field of historical research – including Pendler’s mentor, dissertation advisor and lover Teddy – have managed to accept and adapt to this news, largely because of an assumption that this explains why Leonardo was so often seen as gay.

But then the time-scanning technology is focused on its second target – the brilliant theologian and philosopher Thomas Aquinas – only to reveal that yet another of the great icons of Western Civilisation – and one as inescapably masculine in both quality of thought and in advocacy of an extreme misogyny – is also a biological female.

What follows on this discovery is at the same time a critique of the power relations and reluctance to embrace new paradigms so often found in the academy, and a fascinating thought experiment – how would our understanding of history and the role of women in history change if we were to be presented with evidence that women have always been – no matter how disguised their biological sex or their own, unknowable, perception of their gender – full participants in the intellectual, scientific, and cultural spheres of life.

I don't like having to move. It's tedious and annoying, whether it's in real life or on the Internet. And I don't like having too many spaces on the Interent to deal with - LJ and Facebook were more than enough for me to handle.

But now I have a reason to join the migration to Dreamwidth.

It's here.

When any business or service I patronise chooses to accept money from an advertiser who is spweing such abhorrent bullshit as this, claiming that queer folk are somehow silencing them by demanding their human and civil rights, and using imagery taken from the struggle against the persecution of queer people to do it, then I can't in good conscience patronise them any longer.

I will be moving my two journals, this one and morgan_dhu, to Dreamwidth as soon as I can manage to figure out the whole getting an invite and doing the migration of posts thing. I haven't yet decided if I will delete both my journals here, or just maintain them as pointer pages to the new accounts. I'm certainly not going to continue posting, or crosspost, here once I'm moved. And my inclination is to take down all my old posts, because I don't want to encourage people who might come to LJ to read them.

So I will be here for a while still, until I get everything sorted out, but the days of this journal are numbered.



ETA In light of LJ management's quick response, I have decided to maintain both journals here. I have opened Dreamwidth accounts, and I will be posting from there, but all entries will be crossposted and comments here will be enabled.

So for anyone who is on LJ, nothing will really change. Anyone who also has a DW account is invited to subscribe to my DW journal, which has the same namee.

Unquenchable Fire, by Rachel Pollack

Jennifer Mazdan lives in Poughkeepsie, in the house that she and her husband bought before their marriage fell apart. She has a decent job, working for the Mid-Hudson Energy Board as a server. She enjoys her job, tending to the guardian totems who watch over all the various parts of the county energy supply grid, washing them with sanctified cleaning fluid and performing the proper rituals as she re-aligns them so that they always face toward the sun. She once wanted to be a Picture Teller – one of the Living Masters who has the ability to tell the great sacred stories in such a way that they come alive with meaning – but instead, she dropped out of college, got married, and moved with her husband to a respectable suburban hive development.

But on the 87th anniversary of the Revolution, during the annual celebration of the Day of Truth, the most important Recital Day of the year, as the great Teller Allan Lightstorm recites The Place Inside, one of the most difficult Pictures, first told by the Founder LI KU Unquenchable Fire, Jennifer Mazdan’s life is changed forever.

For one thing, she misses the recital. Just as she’s about to get into her car and head to the Recital Mount, she falls into a sudden sleep. And while Allan Lightstorm tells the Picture, Jennifer has a dream that is unlike any dream that anyone has ever reported to the National Oneiric Registration Agency. And although she doesn’t realise it until some time later, Jennifer Mazdan conceives a child, who will bring a new vision of divinity to the world.

Rachel Pollack said of her book Unquenchable Fire, in a 1994 interview, that:

I've been interested in tribal religion and shamanism and prehistoric religion for a long time. But I'd see books about aboriginal people set in the Australian outback written by somebody who lived in L.A., who not only had never been to Australia but had no contact of any kind with aboriginal people.

So for Unquenchable Fire, I thought, what would happen if that stuff was on the streets of Poughkeepsie, and nothing else changed? America was totally into shamanism and story-telling, but was still America. So I had tremendous fun transplanting bizarre rituals from all over the world onto mainstreet. And I would say, how would these people act that if they were total literalists, if they believed everything was real? So none of it is intellectualized.

This is a picture of a society in which the power of ritual, of story, of symbolic meaning, has taken the place of science and materialism. In addition to the story of Jennifer and the people in her life, the book is full of retellings and reshapings of the divine stories and rituals of many different peoples, sometimes recast into modern times, sometimes told in the timeless landscape of myth and dream. This too is part of the incredible wealth of this book.

But it is also much more than these thingst. It is itself a Picture, a teaching tale, and its inner meaning is that Truth must keep changing, growing, always being renewed and reinterpreted for a new generation.

Jennifer lives in a world that many of us would call a world of magic, of wonder, where strange and astonishing things can happen and great truths are constantly being revealed. But most of the people who live in Jennifer’s world have come to take all this for granted. They follow the external rituals without making the internal emotional and spiritual commitment. A generation in Jennifer’s past, the Revolution shook the world and made everything new and fresh and full of meaning, but in the decades since then, form has driven out substance, and the raging fires of the soul have been codified and bureaucratised. Jennifer is the channel through which will come a new revolution that will shake world and its truths again.

What’s also quite remarkable about this story is that it tells the story of the coming of a messiah from the perspective of the woman who is the gateway between the divine and the world – and who isn’t exactly pleased to find herself and her body taken over by Divine Agency. In this sense, it’s the story of every person who has ever been called upon to transcend the ordinary and commit blood, sweat, tears, even life, for the exceptional. It’s the story of Jesus in Gethsemane, of the artist driven to speak what lies within no matter what, of the martyr, the sacrifice, the Dying King, of anyone who asks “why does it have to be me?” – and does it anyway, because there is no other way to act. This is the unquenchable fire, the ecstasy, the “being out of place” that saints and mystics model for us. It can be hidden, for a while, but it cannot be destroyed.

Blue Light, by Walter Mosley

I’m not really sure what to say about this book. Mosley’s prose is beautifully evocative, his characters are well-realised, and there is something about the way this novel is written that pulls the reader along, eagerly, anxiously, almost breathlessly, to the final pages… and yet I’m left feeling unfulfilled. And more than a little confused.

Blue Light is set in the 1960s, a time of breaking down of all kinds of barriers. People were questioning the accepted standards of social behaviour – rethinking sexual mores, challenging received “wisdom” in all manner of intellectual disciplines, questioning social conventions, exploring consciousness with meditation, drugs, spiritual and philosophical concepts from outside of the mainstream European tradition. It was the decade of the civil rights movement, the second wave of feminism, the beginning of gay liberation, the counter-culture, ecological consciousness, protest movements and revolutionary cadres, cults and communes, going back to the land and listening to the fairies at the bottom of the garden.

The novel, which has been variously classed as science fiction, fantasy and horror, could just as well be an account of the rise and fall of one of that chaotic decade’s more bizarre and violent religious cults-gone-wrong, if one dismisses the narrator’s recounting of unearthly sensations and experiences as the product of drugs or madness. And the matter of the reliability of the narrator is one of the key issues in my attempt to understand this book – because it seems to me that Mosley has written something that he wants people to think about, to try to understand.

The conceit of the book is that an ancient people or some other kind of consciousness from not of Earth has sent something, or perhaps simply released something without real intention – consciousness, a message, a mission, an infection, a collection of memories – into the vastness of space, where it has travelled for perhaps millions of years, and has perhaps encountered many planets, before some portion of it arrives on Earth, in 1965, in California. Perceived and later described by those who experience it as beams or shards or pieces or packets of “blue light,” this alien energy has diverse and unique affects on whatever life it touches – plant, animal, and human. Many of the creatures touched don’t survive the transformations, but among those that do are 16 humans, a pregnant coyote, a dog and a giant redwood tree. While we never are really certain what the blue light is or what it does, or was intended to do [1], the general effect on the human “Blues”[2] is to transform them from ordinary human beings into personifications or avatars of whatever kind of human experience they were most caught up in at the time of their transformation. A woman engaged in sex becomes an avatar of lust. A dying man becomes the personification of death, the enemy of all life. A murderer becomes an exemplar of mindless violence and destruction. A young woman with a curious mind becomes a seeker and eventual repository of human knowledge. And so on.[3]

The narrator is a mixed race former grad student named Lester Foote, who has taken the name of Chance. Not a Blue himself, he is rescued by the Blue “teacher” Ordé from a state of psychological collapse and suicidal despair brought about by his marginalised racial status and lack of a community of identity: “I spoke the white man's language. I dreamed his dreams. But when I woke up, no one recognized me.” Later, through a ritual involving sharing of blood with Ordé, a white ex-hippie turned leader of the Close Congregation, a cult-like community to which several of the Blues have been drawn, Chance becomes “half-blue,” and gains some powers of unusual perception. Still neither wholly of one people or another, Chance appoints himself the historian of the Blue Light.

The novel is organised into three sections. The first part introduces the situation and many of the key characters. One of its focuses is on Ordé, his mystical teachings based on his understanding of what has happened to him, the community of Blues and humans that gathers around him, his attempts to reproduce the blue light in human form – with lethal consequences – and the police who have begun to be suspicious of what they perceive as another hippie sex and drug cult. The other is on Grey Redstar, the name adopted by the energy/entity that animates the body of Horace LaFontaine as he lies dying in the path of the blue light. This section culminates in a confrontation between Redstar and the Close Congregation in which many of the Blues are killed, one of the police investigators is severely injured and some of the surviving Blues flee for safety in the company of Chance.

The second part focuses on the investigation of Greystar’s attack – as later told to Chance by the characters involved. In the course of the investigation, several more “half-blues” are formed as investigators and Blue witnesses/suspects/persons of interest interact.

The final part of the novel brings together the Blues who fled with Chance, the “half-blue” investigators, and a previously unseen Blue, Juan Thrombone [4], who has created a new Eden somewhere in the depths of a national redwood forest where he tends the seedlings of the blue redwood tree, yet another casualty of Grey Redstar. Thrombone hopes to preserve and foster the blues in this secret, safe space, but instead it becomes the site of the final confrontation between Grey Redstar and the surviving Blues.

The outcome is… inconclusive, and we are left at the end of the book not knowing if the influence of the blue light will continue in the Earth or not, and indeed, whether we really would have wanted it to survive. We never really learn where the transformation might have led humanity; there are enough acts of selfishness, carelessness and violence from all of the Blues, not just those who personify Violence and Death, to suggest that becoming blue may bring new powers and abilities and a new perspective, but not necessarily a better or more principled one, wise enough to use its gifts well.

Whatever might have been, the clear suggestion at the end is that the chance has come and gone. It’s the 1980s, Chance himself has been in a mental institution for a very long time, and he has no idea if any of the Blues are still alive. The book begins and ends with Chance’s madness, which is the result of Chance’s perpetual state of being neither one thing nor the other, neither black nor white, neither human nor blue.

The blue light – which could simply be a symbol for the phenomenon of the 60s and its various and often contradictory transformations – may be the topic of the novel but Chance is its protagonist. Is Mosley trying to say that our chance to unravel the weight of the past and try something new has also passed, leaving us with a lot of strange memories, but essentially unchanged? Or is there some other message in the fact that Chance has survived at all, and in the possibility that there may be some Blues who escaped the final confrontation between – not Good and Evil, but Life and Death?

Damned if I know.



[1] I’m reminded of H.P.Lovecraft’s short story, “The Colour out of Space” in which something, characterised as a colour, quite indescribable and incomprehensible, affects life in a relatively small geographic area for reasons that are never understood by the characters and never revealed to the reader.

[2] There's a lot of emphasis on how the blue light seems, to some, to be like music, or the how the inexplicable sense that draws the Blues to each other is a sound, a form of music. Are the Blues (regardless of race, as we see white, black, Asian and Hispanic Blues) somehow a personification of the blues, the musical art form that was developed by Blacks to express their own experiences?

[3] I’m not by any means an expert on the topic of the spirits of African and Caribbean tradition known as loas or orishas, but it seemed to me that at least some of the Blues can be linked to some of the more well-known loas, such as Papa Legba, Erzulie and Baron Samedi, and the way in which they seem to be possessed and altered may in some respects resemble the phenomenon of being possessed or “ridden” by a loa. I’ve looked at various reviews to see if anyone else has commented on these apparent similarities, and so far I haven’t found anyone else who sees this, so maybe I’m completely out to lunch.

[4] Juan Thrombone is a trickster/magician character; his human body is that of a Hispanic or Latino man, and while some reviewers have tried to identify him with characters from Tolkien’s created Anglo-Saxon mythology such as Gandalf or Tom Bombadil, I can’t help but associate him with Carlos Casaneda’s Yanqui sorcerer, Don Juan Matus.

How to Rent a Negro by damali ayo

Satire has a long and noble history, as an effective means of making injustice, hypocrisy, and all manner of society’s ills perfectly clear. When done well, it teaches and enlightens, makes the reader more able to see the faults in herself and her society to which she may have previously been blind.

Starting with a conceit that Jonathan Swift would have appreciated for its combination of audacious offensiveness and paradigmatic perfection, damali ayo deftly skewers many of the things that white people do to demonstrate their complete lack of cluefulness about even the most basic guidelines of civil communication when they/we deal with people of colour, not to mention many of the things that white people think, day and do to prove to themselves that they/we are not racist, while simultaneously justifying their/our racist actions, words and beliefs.

The genesis for the book is in the website rent-a-negro.com, which was created by ayo as a work of performance art satirising race relations in the US (I can assure you, however, that much of the material is directly applicable to race relations in Canada, and where it isn’t, white Canadians have their/our own analogues, such as trying to get black people to agree that Canadians can’t be racist because of the Underground Railway).

In choosing to satirically re-frame the such problematic interactions as “rentals,” ayo underscores the ways in which white people objectify people of colour – one hires people but rents things. The book presents a very long list of how black people are used, marginalised, exoticised and denied agency, identity and individuality, all cast in the conceit of “renting” black people to perform specific acts with monetary values assigned to services thus rendered: these “rental” services cover the spectrum of insult and injury from being used as a token to demonstrate the diversity of a company, organisation, or social group, to being expected to answer for “what (all) blacks think about X,” to physical assaults ranging hair touching to police violence.

In fact, what this carefully crafted litany of everyday insults endured by blacks (and other people of colour) makes painfully clear is how profoundly ingrained and institutionalised racism continues to affect respect for the essential humanity of people of colour in North America today. I suspect that even the most committed white ally will wince at least a few times while reading this book, as they/we see some reflection of their/our own lapses in its pages.

Webs of Discord, by Jason Sizemore

Webs of Discord, a chapbook published by Apex Publications, is a satisfying collection of short stories by author and Apex publisher Jason Sizemore, in the fantasy and horror genres. In one way or another, the stories focus on love – love gone wrong, love denied, love distorted, even a little bit of love triumphant – in ways that are interesting and unusual. Most of these short stories are solid offerings in the vein of horror, and deliver webs of discord indeed; particularly chilling is the story “Breaking Up is Hard to Do.” This deliberately unsettling mix is leavened with a delightful fantasy piece, “Milton, the Christmas Fairy,” the collection’s one unqualified happy ending.

A Mortal Glamour, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

In A Mortal Glamour, Yarbro turns her not inconsiderable talents at researching and writing historical fantasy to a story of sexual tensions and repressed longings – for love, for freedom – and their consequences in the tightly controlled environment of a Catholic convent during a time of social and religious unrest.

It is the 14th century, the time of the Avignon popes, when Catholicism was split between two competing political factions within the Church. Plague is abroad in Europe. Groups of wandering, often violent adherents of assorted heresies have created an internal threat, while the Eastern borders of Europe are once again facing invasion, driven by the migratory pressures that have periodically pushed new populations westward out of Central Asia.

Trouble is brewing in a remote French convent, la Tres Saunte Annunciation. A young nun, Seur Angelique, child of a wealthy family, in love with an unsuitable young man, rages against the unyielding father who has given her an ultimatum – marry an older man she fears and despises for dynastic reasons, or face permanent incarceration in this community of religious women, many of whom are not themselves in possession of a true vocation. Into this unstable set of circumstances comes a new Mother Superior, who may not be exactly what she seems.

Yarbro has written a fascinating account of the consequences of mixing religious hysteria with sexual repression, and if, in this work of fantasy, she gives a supernatural flavour to the proximate cause of the events she recounts, the underlying causes are clearly delineated.

Fascinating reading.

The Black Flame
Rifkind’s Challenge

Some months ago, I re-read Daughter of the Bright Moon, the first of two books written in the late 1970s by Lynn Abbey, about Rifkind, a priestess/healer/warrior of the nomadic Asheera, and enjoyed it just as much as I had 30-odd years ago.

So naturally I had to re-read the second book, The Black Flame, and of course I had to follow that with Rifkind’s Challenge, the recently published third volume of the tale of Goddess-touched healer and warrior, which takes up the story some 15 years after the end of the second volume.

The Black Flame is a rousing sword and sorcery adventure and a doomed romance, one that takes the hero Rifkind through some profound emotional changes. At the end of the novel, she returns to her homeland, gives up her warrior ways, and accepts a role among her people as a healer.

Rifkind’s Challenge finds her once more prepared to leave her people, summoned by dreams of old companions from the adventures of her younger days. Abbey has matured as a writer, and her central character has matured as well, making this third adventure even better than the first two.

And the ending seems to contain a set-up for yet another adventure for Rifkind, so I’ll be keeping my eyes open to see if Abbey does have more plans for this character.

The Serpent’s Shadow, Mercedes Lackey

The first volume of her Elemental Masters series, The Serpent’s Shadow represents another venture into historical fantasy by Mercedes Lackey – set in Edwardian England this time, instead of the Elizabethan England of the series she’s co-writing with Roberta Geillis – and one that is successful on a number of levels.

First, Lackey’s protagonist, Maya Witherspoon, is one of her most complex and interesting characters to date. Maya is the daughter of an English physician who settled in in India and an Indian woman of the Brahmin caste, who gave up her position as priestess (and mage) to marry her lover. Maya has inherited her mother’s magical gifts, but has had no training – her mother has always told her that her path lies with the magical traditions of her father’s people, not her mother’s. Maya has also inherited her father’s gifts as a healer, and following her graduation from medical school in India, she worked with her father as his associate. When double tragedy befalls her with the death of both parents in suspicious circumstances, Maya has reason to believe that she herself is the next victim of the unknown mage who has brought about her parents’ deaths and decides to move to her father’s homeland.

The early part of the book touches on Maya’s struggles, as a woman and a person of mixed race, to establish herself in England as a practising physician at the same time as it lays the foundation for a more-or-less standard plot about evil mage determined to destroy good mage for reason not entirely reasonable. And that’s part of what makes this a more interesting book than Lackey’s usual offerings.

In addition to addressing Maya’s fight against blatant racism in imperial England and her personal quest to find balance in her own life between her two heritages, the book also has a strong feminist and anti-domestic violence stance, and a refreshingly positive perspective on sex work. Once certified as a physician, Maya sets up a practice in one of the less affluent areas of London. Her business plan is to offer both general and reproductive medical services to the elite of London’s courtesans and entertainers – including contraception and abortion – in order to subsidise her practice among poor women and men – where she also advocates family planning and champions abused women. Oh, and she’s also a suffragette.

It’s hardly surprising that I was sold on this book, and its heroine, before the mage vs. mage plot had even got rolling. There are some potentially problematic issues in that plot, but Lackey treads carefully when she pits Maya, newly-trained by English mages, against the Indian mage responsible for her parents’ deaths who has followed her to London with murderous intent. Maya receives assistance from figures out of her mother’s traditions, as well as support from English mages, in her magical battles, and it is made all too clear that the goddess in whose name her opponent has acted repudiates her servant’s excesses.

Lackey has always made an effort to be socially conscious in her writing, particularly in her use of powerful female characters, and positive queer characters. She’s often used her novels to further awareness of child abuse, and there tends to be a feminist slant to her work. I think she’s taken another step forward in this book, and I hope to see more of this kind of complexity in her characters.

Learning to Drive, Katha Pollitt

For some time now I've been reading and enjoying Pollitt's collections of (mostly) short articles and essays on political issues in America - she's an insightful analyst with solid feminist and progressive chops, and she's also very witty.

In Learning to Drive, Pollitt turns her analytical skills, her feminist and progressive sensibilities and her razor wit to a series of longer narratives on issues and events in her own life that are both highly (and sometimes poignantly, often hilariously) personal and at the same time, if not universal, certainly profoundly familiar - to at the very least this 50-something feminist and activist who hasn't always had the easiest time of incorporating political insight into the workings of her own life.

Learning to Drive is a collection of insights and experiences about just that - learning to drive our own lives, live the independence we have argued is ours in theory.

And it made me laugh, not so much at Pollitt's predicaments but at the memories of my own.

The Iron Hunt, Marjorie Liu

I'm picky about my urban fantasy. First of all, I tend to prefer what I think of as first wave (such as Diana Paxson's Brisingamen, Emma Bull's The War of the Oaks, R. A. MacAvoy's Tea with the Black Dragon) and second wave urban fantasy (Lackey's Diana Tregarde, SERRAted Edge and Bedlam's Bard series, Tanya Huff's Victory Nelson and Keeper series) to the overwhelming flood of BTVS-influenced urban fantasy that I think of as third wave urban fantasy.

The Iron Hunt is squarely within the parameters of third wave urban fantasy, but it is not exactly a typical third wave urban fantasy, and its protagonist, Maxine Kiss, is not exactly a typical third wave urban fantasy heroine.

Yes, there’s the trope of the Chosen One who gains her powers only when the previous Chosen One dies – made more emotionally fraught here by making the role of Chosen One - in this case, the Hunter – hereditary, passed from mother to daughter down through the millenia.

And there is a somewhat overcomplicated and yet at the same time familiar back story about an ancient war between evil powers – in this case, demons – and the forces of good who manage to lock away the evil, at least for a while, and then create guardians to defend humanity against demons whose influence can still extend beyond their confines, in the shape of humans possessed and turned into zombies.

And of course, the seals are weakening and something resembling Armageddon or Ragnarok hovers on the horizon and unexpected allies begin to gather around Maxine, who may be the last Hunter and who is naturally special, different in some way from Hunters who have gone before.

But despite the elements of the formula, there are also some striking new twists and interesting questions that remain unanswered at the end of this, the first volume of a series. It’s enough that I’ll be looking for the next volume.