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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

And now, for a quick look at my recent anthology reading.

Sword and Sorceress III, Marion Zimmer Bradley (ed.)

I’d originally bought this because I wanted to collect all of Charles Saunders’ short stories about Dossouye, the Abomeyan woman warrior, most of which were first published in the early Sword and Sorceress anthologies edited by the late Marion Zimmer Bradley. But that’s hardly the only reason to read (or re-read) the anthology. It’s great fun to go back and revist the early stories of other favourite fantasy writers, like Jennifer Roberson, Diana Paxson, Elizabeth Moon and Mercedes Lackey.

The Sword and Sorceress anthologies played a significant role in the development of a new kind of woman-centred fantasy , and a new generation of writers, mostly women, who knew how to write it. Sometimes it’s a very good thing to travel back and look at where some of the great female characters of heroic fantasy, and the people who created them, had their beginnings.


Sword and Sorceress XXIII, Elisabeth Waters (ed.)

From the retrospective to the modern day – this is the second volume of the Sword and Sorceress anthologies to be edited by Elisabeth Waters and released by Norilana Books (by publisher Vera Nazarian). Featuring stories by well-established writers who have been part of the Sword and Sorceress phenomenon from the beginning, like Patricia B. Cirone, Mercedes Lackey and Deborah J. Ross, as well as relative newcomers such as Pauline Alama, Leah Cypress, and others.


Tesseracts Q, Jane Brierley & Elisabeth Vonarburg (eds.)

One of the biggest disadvantages to being monolingual– and worse, being a monolingual speaker of English – is that it’s hard to really read globally. Many works in English are translated into many other languages (can you spell cultural imperialism? I thought you could.), but only a small percentage of the interesting writing, in any genre, in languages other than English gets translated into English.

And so, much thanks to Jane Brierley and Elisabeth Vonarburg, who have selected some of the interesting work that Quebecois(e) writers have been producing, and publishing it in translation for the benighted monolingual English to read. There are some very interesting stories in this anthology, and in addition, it offers the chance for the reader to immerse herself in a different tradition – science fiction with a different set of working assumptions about treatment and style. Many of the stories here are more “literary” than much English-language science fiction, and ask different questions. And that makes the experience of reading works in translation doubly engaging.


Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing, Delia Sherman & Theodora Goss (eds.)

What, you may be asking yourself, is interstitial writing? For the long answer, you can read this Wikipedia article or this essay by Delia Sherman, one of the founders of The Interstitial Arts Foundation and co-editor of this anthology.

For a short answer, it is writing that exists in between. In between what, you may ask. In between something that you think you have all neatly boxed up and categorised, and something else (or several somethings else) that you think is different from the first something. It’s work that colours outside the lines. And it’s interesting to explore – which is exactly what this anthology is all about. Many of the writers whose work appears in this anthology are known primarily as science fiction or fantasy writers, including Catherynne Valente, K. Tempest Bradford, Christopher Barzak, Holly Phillips, Vandana Singh, Rachel Pollock and Leslie What – and in fact, many of the stories are ones that would not seem particularly out of place in an anthology of fantasy, or science fiction, or horror, or the other genres that fall under the umbrella of speculative fiction. And yet – there is something extra about each of these that harkens to something else even as it seems to be, when looked at in a certain light, something you think you can clearly identify.

So what, you may ask. Read the anthology and find out, I may answer.

The Collected Short Fiction of C.J. Cherryh

C.J. Cherryh is known primarily as a long form writer – in a long career of writing mainly well-regarded novels, she has only published enough short fiction to fill one, admittedly thick, volume – and fully a third of those are related short stories from a themed short story collection originally published in 1981 as Sunfall, set in the cities of an unimaginably old Earth, where only those who cannot bear to leave their planetary home remain. The remaining stories bear publication dates ranging from 1979 to 2004 – occasional pieces scattered throughout the working life of a major writer of SFF, all different, and all interesting. It’s a good collection to own.

Cast in Secret by Michelle Sagara (who also writes as Michelle West)

Cast in Secret is the third volume in Sagara West’s Chronicles of Elantra, featuring police officer and healer Kaylin Neva as she forges alliances with yet another of the many different peoples who inhabit the capital city – the telepathic Tha’alani – and learns more about her own mysterious abilities.

I’ve become quite a fan of the series – it has a strong but conflicted female hero, a complicated political background, well-developed non-human cultures, in short, lots of the things that turn me on in my SFF reading. And so far, the ominously predictable love triangle has not yet manifested (very surprising for a Harlequin imprint book, but more power to Sagara if she's found a way to avoid the obligatory annoyingly obvious romance plotline that detracted from some of the other Luna fantasy novels I've read), so I'm quite happy to keep reading.

Fortunately, the series is a hit with its publishers and Kaylin’s adventures are assured to continue for some time to come.

The Hurog Duology, by Patricia Briggs:
Dragon Bones
Dragon Blood

These books were my first introduction to Briggs, and I enjoyed them very much. While the overall plot arc of the two books isn’t particularly original and the setting is your pretty standard generic feudal Europe, the writing is good, the characters are interesting, there are some interesting variations on the theme of the young hero on a quest to claim his throne and, well, there are dragons and some kick-ass women, especially in the second book.

The main character is Ward, oldest son of the lord of Hurog. At the beginning of the first book, we see a family that has been corroded from within – a violent father, a mother who has retreated into something near to melancholic madness, a mute daughter, a runaway younger son, missing for two years and presumed dead, and Ward, so badly abused by his father that his injuries have almost destroyed his gifts as a mage, and have led him to play the simpleton for seven years to avoid more of his father’s brutality. We also sense in the details of life in Hurog that there is something wrong in the land itself, that the corruption in the family of the lords of Hurog may be tied to something greater and wider-reaching.

Then Ward’s father dies in a hunting accident. Having played the fool for so long, Ward’s right to hold the lordship of Hurog is in doubt, and his uncle is given control until he comes of age. Enter several interesting plot threads having to do with politics in the larger kingdom of which Hurog is a part, and a mysterious cousin who comes to Ward’s aid, but who is clearly not what he claims to be, and suddenly we’re off on a quite absorbing adventure.

The first novel ends with Ward succeeding in claiming his lordship (this is hardly a spoiler, is it?), but with a great many unanswered questions about the state of the kingdom itself, which lead us into a new quest in the second volume, as Ward, having proven himself, must come to the assistance of former allies and a prince who has been dispossessed of his kingdom much as Ward had been dispossessed of his lordship.

For the easily triggered, I should note that here is realistic sexual and physical violence in these books that goes beyond the typical sword-hacking. I think it’s important to the story, and not gratuitous, but it’s not pleasant reading the relevant sections.

Elizabeth Bear:
Ink and Steel
Heaven and Earth

Elves in the Elizabethan era. With Christopher Marlowe and Ben Johnson and Will Shakespeare and Francis Walsingham and the Queen of the Elves and a most strangely imprisoned angel and Lucifer himself.

In the second duology of her Promethean Age series, Bear continues to explore themes of how the creation of narratives influences reality, and issues of servitude and freedom, sacrifice and the desire for redemption.

A more focused story (the title of the duology is The Stratford Man, and Shakespeare is the central figure, although it is Marlowe’s actions – beginning with the historical circumstances of his death, often speculated to have been at the hands of an assassin – that drive much of the plot) it is stronger and more thematically coherent than her previous Promethean Age novels, Blood and Iron and Whiskey and Water. The Stratford Man duology also focuses more specifically on religion as a source and instrument of oppression/bondage.

While Bear has received criticism for her handling of racial tropes in Blood and Iron and Whiskey and Water, I’ve always appreciated her treatment of queer characters and situations. And in the character of Chris Marlowe, Bear continues her solid and, in my opinion, very welcome tradition of sympathetic representation of queer characters.

I could barely put the books down to sleep and eat and work until I finished them.

The Grass-Cutting Sword, Catherynne M. Valente

In this book, Valente turns her exquisite literary style and her extensive knowledge of the roots and meanings of myth to a tale based on Japanese legends. The storm god Susanoo-no-Mikoto, cast out of heaven by his sun goddess sister, sets out to find his mother, the goddess Izanami, dead before his birth and now become the Root country, the land below the surface of the world, the place of death and decay. En route, he learns of the sad tale of eight daughters, all stolen away by an eight-headed, eight-tailed serpent, and decides to kill the monster and rescue the women. Valente tells the story from multiple perspectives, that of the god, the monster, and each of the eight sisters who have been consumed into the body of the monster.

Running through the various threads of the story is a grim examination of the experience of women in the family, whether they be goddesses or mortals. Particularly disturbing is the revelation that the eighth sister, having witnessed her older siblings' relationships with men, chooses to give herself to the monster rather than marry.

Very interesting reworking of Japanese mythology, but then, would you expect any less from Valente?

Elizabeth Bear’s first two novels of the Promethean Age, Blood and Iron and Whiskey and Water, are, in my mind, absolutely brilliant. These books are to what is often called urban fantasy as Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing is to a Harlequin romance. Not that there's anything wrong with the standard urban fantasy book (I read several series in this subgenre most avidly) or with Harlequin romances (not my cup of tea, but clearly they offer satisfaction to a great many people). But Bear's books, although unarguably fantasy, and clearly set in a modern urban setting (at least those portions that take place on Earth, and not in Faerie), are something quite special indeed.

As with many of Bear’s novels, there’s almost too much going on to even being to state a simple premise, over-arching plot or singular theme, but one can begin by saying that the universe of The Promethean Age is one where Earth and Faerie, Heaven and Hell, are real… places. Dimensions, overlapping and intertwined worlds, or something like that. The Earth is much as we know it, except that in the places that no one ordinarily looks to closely at, there are Magi, many of them members of the Prometheus Club, an organization which has for centuries waged a war with the realm of Faerie for the control of Earth. But neither the human Magi nor the otherworldly folk of Faerie can be said to be monolithic blocs, and there are power struggles between factions of the Magi and factions and courts of Faerie. And of course, various parties have various allegiances with Heaven and Hell – and not necessarily the ones one might expect.

Some reviewers have suggested that Bear has researched her material a bit too deeply. Certainly the more one is familiar with folk ballads, history (particularly the Elizabethan period), world mythology, other literary interpretations of the realm of Faerie and of the relationship between God and Lucifer, Heaven and Hell, Arthurian myths, and sundry other related fields of interest, the more one are likely to find in these books that delights with a fresh perspective on familiar characters and ideas. But the use of all of these stories, of differing degrees of presumed truth and cultural influence, is absolutely key to what Bear is doing with these books, because one of the underlying themes in the Promethean series is all about the consequences of the act of creation and the role of the imagination in creating and shaping reality.

As for me, I thought these two books were among the best things I read in 2008. I'm currently reading the next duology in the Promethean novels, Ink and Steel and Hell and Earth, and if anything, these are even better than the first.

Edit: Since I wrote this brief comment on my reaction to Blood and Iron and Whiskey and Water, the racial tropes Bear uses in exploring another of her themes in these books - issues of bondage,servitude and obligation - have been critiqued by several readers of colour as problematic. Bear herself has not handled the critiques or the discussions that spread out from her responses particularly well. (For context on this debate, which has come to be known as RaceFail 09, please see this post by rydra_wong for a very long list of pertinent links, including links to some timelines and summaries.)

I agree that the tropes are problematical. My reading of the text is that Bear was attempting, among many other things, to deconstruct these racialised tropes as part of her exploration of binding and servitude. Speaking as a person with white privilege, I think that she was successful in this to some degree, certainly enough that I was encouraged by the book alone to think about these issues. But I am not a person of colour, it is not bodies that look like mine that are being used in the text to do this deconstruction, so the text had no power to anger or injure me. It was easy for me to read a text written by a white author that made use of these tropes, and wait for her to show me what she intended in making use of them.

Moreover, the author was working primarily with myths that were drawn from my home culture, one in which concepts of binding spells and geasa and other, similar tropes are common and not racialised, and in my privilege I did not think about how the use of explicitly racialised characters and tropes would affect people of colour.

I am not detracting my statement that these books were among the best that I read in 2008, but I am acknowledging that there are serious issues of cultural appropriation and how to write racialised characters and situations to be considered in approaching this text, and that it should not have been easy for me not to see these issues up front. I need to be a more careful reader where race is concerned.

Temple: Incarnation, by Steven Savile

In Temple: Incarnations, Steven Savile makes something both heroic and horrifying out of the iconic image of the lone figure, lost but not yet completely despairing, wandering in the wasteland, searching for some kind of grail - truth, meaning, redemption, renewal.

Temple is a man almost wholly without a past, with clouded memories suggesting a weight of guilt, driven to find the answers to the essential mystery of his existence. The world around him is plague-ridden, civilisation all but vanished, with no place for heroes.

This is not a tale to be read for reassurance – it’s dark, and terrible, and there’s only the tiniest sliver of hope that anything could ever change. But if you happen to enjoy the occasional foray into the darkest of dark fantasy, there’s a frightening beauty here as well.

The Orphan’s Tales: In the Cities of Coin and Spice, Catherynne M. Valente

Valente continues her tour de force of storytelling in this, the second volume of Orphan’s tales. Similar in structure to the first volume, with its nested tales and interwoven strands, the focus of the tales shifts in the second volume, as the threads of the characters' lives become more tightly woven and the quests change slowly from searches for what is past, for origins and beginnings, from “how it happened” stories, to questions of identity, of who the characters are, and what do they need to fulfil their futures.

The division between story-teller and audience is blurred in this volume as well, for the tales that remain to be told are written on the eyelids of the orphan girl in the garden, and so, the more completely she embodies her text, the more deeply the young prince, formerly a passive listener, is drawn into the storytelling as he now must read to them both the tales that are still written on the body, but in places that the teller can not see by herself.

Valente's subtle imaginings speak on so many levels- if the eyes are the windows to the soul, then can the secrets within only be read by another?

As with the first volume, this book is mesmerising to read and almost impossible to describe. What Valente does in this book is nothing short of magic.

Midnight Never Come, Marie Brennan.

It’s 1554 and Mary Tudor wears the English crown. Her sister Elizabeth lies in the Tower, expecting at any moment to hear the news that her death warrant has been signed. To preserve her life and gain her throne, Elizabeth makes an alliance with another would-be queen, Invidiana, who seeks rulership over all the faerie of England. They swear to help each other to their respective thrones – but where Elizabeth is the true queen of England, Invidiana is at heart a usurper. Though affairs may appear to go well in Elizabeth's court, Invidiana's Onyx court becomes a place of fear and corruption, and the pact between the two queens, which now keeps an unfit queen on her throne just as surely as it originally brought a fit queen to hers, will be challenged by a young courtier from Elizabeth’s world, and a secret agent with mixed loyalties from Invidiana’s court.

As I’ve mentioned before, there’s something that’s just so thematically right about bringing Faerie to Elizabeth’s court, and Marie Brennan has written a new and interesting variation on a theme that’s as old as Spenser and Shakespeare.

Battle Magic, Martin H Greenberg and Larry Segriff (eds.)

I bought this anthology because it contains Michelle West’s short story “Warlord” set in the same universe as her Sacred Hunt duology and Broken Crown series, and being the story of how a key character in that series ends up in the crucial place in which he is found, I wanted to read it becasue, well, I can be obsessive like that.

There are other cool stories about magic as a method of combat or a weapon in warfare here, too, from Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s unique take on the Sleeping Beauty fairytale, “The Strangeness of the Day,” to John DeChancie’s truly funny “BattleMagic(TM) for Morons,” to Elizabeth Ann Scarborough’s retelling of the cursing of the men of Ulster, “the Fatal Wager,” to Charles De Lint’s intriguing variation on the theme of the infernal musical contest, “Ten for the Devil” – with lots of other interesting tales in between.

Kynship, Daniel Justice Heath.

Once, the whole of the Eld Green was the home of the Folk – the tree-born Kyn, the earth-dwelling Gvaerg, the Tetawi, descended from ancient animal spirits, the clever builders of the Ubbetek, the reclusive, spider-like Wyrnack, the Beast-folk and the Ferals. Then there was an opening of the walls between the worlds, and the Eld Green experienced the coming of the Humans, who have pushed the Folk out of the great plains and forests that were once their home, driving them into a small stretch of forest and mountain; yet even so, the Humans are not satisfied. They want all the land, all the resources, all the power.

It’s easy to see parallels between the setting and backstory of this novel – the first in a trilogy – and the European conquest of the Americas, and it is hardly surprising to see them, as Health is a member of the Cherokee Nation and scholar of Indigenous literary traditions, with an interest in telling stories rooted in the Aboriginal experience. As one reviewer comments, "...Justice helps decolonize the genre and brings us a story that is vital to Indigenous survival and resistance." (Qwo-Li Driskill, Walking with Ghosts: Poems)

One of the things that has struck me most about Kynship is that the story is told from the point-of-view of non-humans, who are confronted with humans as alien oppressors. While I’m sure there are other fantasy and science fiction works that give us this perspective – requiring us to identify with the oppressed Other, rather than observing the oppressed Other through the mediation of a human ally – it’s certainly not a common perspective. In Kynship, the humans are the invading aliens, and the story is experienced through the eyes and minds of non-human protagonists. Most other conquest stories I can think of are about non-humans oppressing other non-humans, non-humans oppressing humans, or, more common in recent years, humans siding with oppressed non-humans against other humans.

Of course, Heath is too good a writer to make the racial divisions in his world quite so cleanly defined. There are members of the Folk who have left the old ways and want to assimilate into Human culture; there are Folk who want to give way, keep retreating until they find some place the Humans won’t follow; there are Humans who live and work among the Folk, intermarrying with those of the Folk who are more humanoid than not; and so on. But the simple fact that, as humans reading this book, our point of view is made explicitly non-human, and in opposition to humans, adds layers of meaning to the work.

And non-human they may be in appearance, but the protagonists of Kynship, Tarsa, the she-Kyn warrior and apprentice wyrwielder, or sorcerer/shaman, and Tobhi, the Tetawi scout and guide, are engaging and sympathetic characters, and the society they live in is a complex one, on the verge of decisions that could mean survival or extinction.

I was impressed, and plan to read the remaining volumes as promptly as I can. One can hope that the Kyn fare better against those who would steal all their land than the Indigenous peoples of Earth have done.

The Duke in His Castle, Vera Nazarian

Long ago, a King punished the rebellious peers of his realm by casting a spell affecting every ruling Duke or Duchess and their heirs, confining them to their castle grounds. No matter what they do, none can step beyond the walls of power that keeps each of them prisoner in their seat of power.

Yet of course, there is a rumour that the King in his mercy has left one way out. Each Duke, it is said, has a secret power, and any Duke who learns the secrets of all the others will earn the freedom to step beyond the walls. The Duke in His Castle is the story of a Duchess who will risk anything to find her freedom, and a Duke who discovers that there are some things more important than his.

A compelling fable about the nature of life and death, power and responsibility, confinement and freedom.

Last night we watched the new adaptation of C.S. Lewis' Prince Caspian. We were disappointed. There was so much that didn't seem right at all that I had to get the original novel from the shelf and re-read it right away, muttering to myself all along "Why did they move this around?", "Why did they cut this out?" and most importantly, "Why did they put in this freaking raid on the castle sequence that isn't in the original and doesn't make sense in the freaking movie?" It was just all wrong.

On the other hand, the book, Prince Caspian, by C. S. Lewis, was as charming as I remember it from previous multiple readings. The plot makes sense and the story unfolds without needless repetitions. (Aslan is not a Tame Lion, and I hardly think he'd bother telling Lucy in the same way twice that things that things don't happen in the same way twice - a rather amusing bit of irony that can happen all to easily when you hack up parts of a perfectly good plot and mix them in some kind of stew with your own longing for bigger and longer swords.) And the Bacchae fit right in, as Lewis knew full well, understanding that Christianity like many other religions is both Apollonian and Dionysian in nature.

About the only thing the movie did better than the book was having Susan in the middle of the melee doing double duty with short-sword and bow and giving Legolas a run for his princely money and perfectly coiffed hair, rather than just shooting lady-like arrows from afar while the boys grunt and sweat and bleed. (I always thought Lewis gave Susan a raw deal, but there are something that must be understood in the context of the time and culture, even if one must disagree with them.)

Of Darkness, Light and Fire is an an omnibus volume containing two of Huff’s early novels, both of which I've read before, and both of which I was delighted to read again.

Gate of Darkness Circle of Light

As i think I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been a devoted fan of Tanya Huff’s work since her very first published novel. I read this novel shortly after it was published, and loved it then, and I still love it now that I’ve read it again.

These days, when people talk about urban fantasy, what they mostly seem to mean is novels with urban settings about kick-ass protagonists, primarily women, who hunt down magical or supernatural nasties, usually with the help of a friendly vampire or werewolf or whatnot (unless we're talking YA urban fantasy, where the protagonist is having an angst-ridden adolescent romance with the vampire, werewolf or whatnot). There’s certainly nothing wrong with that – after all, Huff was one of the pioneers of that particular subgenre, with the Victory Nelson series. But the urban fantasy that I remember fondly and don't see quite as often as I'd like to is the kind that started a bit earlier, with books like Diana Paxton’s Brisingamen and Emma Bull’s War of the Oaks – and Tanya Huff’s Gate of Darkness, Circle of Light.

Books where the formula isn’t set yet, and the group of people who come together to fight the darkness may well be special, even supernatural (after all, the assembled warriors of light here include a street musician who, all unbeknownst to himself, is two-thirds of the way to becoming a true Bard, three women - a bag lady, a frazzled social services caseworker, and her mentally challenged client who works in a doughnut shop - who are, at times, avatars of the triple goddess, and an Adept of light, who might be called in other frames of reference an angel) but what gives them the edge to win is the basic human virtues of love in the face of despair, courage in the face of fear. Because it’s their humanity that saves the world, the rest just makes it a little easier to get there. This is a beautiful story about daring to do what is right, even when you have no idea how you're going to make it happen, and fear that tyhe sacrifice may be all you have to give.

The Fire’s Stone

Another early Huff novel, The Fire’s Stone is a wonderful coming-of-age magequest romance and political intrigue story – and yes, putting all of those elements together in one story just makes it stronger.

Huff has always had the gift of creating characters that are multi-dimensional and interesting. The Fire’s Stone brings together Chandra, a 16 year old princess who has the gift to become a powerful wizard; Darvish, the dissolute third son of a king to whom Chandra has been betrothed, and Aaron, master thief with a death wish. Their quest is to save Darvish’s homeland from total destruction after the theft of a magical artefact threatens to unleash the power of the sacred volcano in the heart of the capital city. Along the way, the three manage to heal each other of old and very deep wounds, and forge a most unexpected and unusual relationship.

Another great early story from a master of the fantasy genre.

Moving Targets and Other Tales of Valdemar, Mercedes Lackey (ed.)

Yes, it's another Valdemarian anthology, full for the most part of interesting stories about times and places and characters in Lackey's most successful creation, the world of Velgarth.

Some of the stories are rather slight (including, alas, Lackey's own contribution, which seemed to be a mediocre ghost story and which, I gather from the observations of others, is a misguided homage to a piece of pop culture I have somehow been fortunate enough to have completely missed, called Scoobie-Doo). Others (like Janni Lee Simner's "What fire Is") are moving and powerful.

A mixed bag, but there's enough in it to please at least this devoted fan of Lackey's Valdermarian tales.