Novel Gazing Redux

Review copy provided by Tor.

I don’t always, or even usually, note who translates a work in translation, but Ken Liu did such a beautiful job with the balance of fluid English prose and not flattening out cultural differences. He also translated the first volume of this trilogy with similar skill, and I was pleased with the translator of the middle volume, Joel Martinsen, as well. I hope that both Ken Liu and Martinsen get further translation jobs, because I would love to have more Chinese SF out there to compare and contrast.

Because of how the publishing industry works, this makes me encourage people to buy and read and talk about this book and the two before it in the series, even though I…didn’t really enjoy it. I respect some of the things it’s doing. It’s a major achievement. But enjoy? No. I can’t say that I did.

Here’s why: this is basically a horror universe, which is not my jam. The universe is not indifferent, it is actively hostile. And not just outside forces in the universe. “Space was like a distorting mirror that magnified the dark side of humanity to the maximum,” is a line in the book that is not really contradicted by anything else in the book. It is, in fact, exemplified by a lot of things in this book. There is more than one discussion of cannibalism in fairly flat affect, so if you’re not down with that, this is not the book for you.

Further, while it has central female characters (unlike the book before it), the degree of sexism and gender essentialism is pretty staggering. Somehow Liu managed to get to 2016 without realizing that “she was a woman, not a warrior,” needs to be preceded with “Dammit, Jim” or omitted completely. (Seriously, can you imagine writing, “he was a man, not a warrior”? No? Then cut it out. “She was a woman, not a” should be finished with “man” or “genderqueer/nonbinary person” if absolutely necessary. Otherwise, in this century and most of the last one we acknowledge that womaning doesn’t interfere with professions, thank you and good night.) Further, there is a whole long riff on feminized men in the middle, culminating in a time jump forward to: “This was another age capable of producing men.”

There is one autistic character who doesn’t ever appear on stage, he is just there to be the source of genius solutions and “tortured by his illness.” Do I even need to? NO JUST DO NOT DO THIS.

So. This is a book that is Stapledonian in scope, the entire age of the solar system available. It is sweeping, it is full of ideas about space travel and the continuation of the human race. It is doing some interesting things. And I want there to be more Chinese SF translated into English, so I really want to encourage people to buy and read and talk about this book. But for weird and substantially external reasons, so I’m pretty conflicted about that.

Please consider using our link to buy Death’s End from Amazon.

Review copy provided by Tor Books.

At my house we often complain that urban fantasy is not actually urban, but more sort of vaguely suburban fantasy. Vassa in the Night does not have that problem. In the least. It’s set in a magical all-night convenient store.

Well, not very convenient. Baba Yaga is involved.

Vassa is one of three sisters of highly assorted parentage, grumpy and snarky and not at all sure what she wants out of life other than that this is not it. She has an even grumpier, snarkier magical wooden doll that she keeps secret from even her sisters. And magic is an integral part of her world–no one thinks twice at having to sing an incantation to a convenient store that dances on chicken legs to get it to stop and let a customer in.

Add in a mix of swans, the Night itself, non-human attorneys, and independently functional hands like the worst nightmare of Thing from The Addams Family, and you’ve got a book that is really, really not like your average retold folktale. It’s bloody and strange and headlong, willing to look at the night without flinching but ultimately hopeful. This is the right way to stand out of the teen urban fantasy pack.

Please consider using our link to buy Vassa in the Night from Amazon.

Review copy provided by Tor Books.

I don’t think a single one of Cherie Priest’s books is My Sort Of Thing, and yet I’ve read almost all of them. Cherie knows paragraph-level pacing like nobody’s business, the sort of thing that makes it easy to read just a little more and just a little more until another hour has gone past and you haven’t started making supper yet.

This one is a haunted house story. In some ways it’s a very classic haunted house story, and in others it’s very modern. Everyone uses their cell phones sensibly, and most of the characters are engaged in a very modern business: salvaging wood, fixtures, and other parts from old houses before they get torn down, to sell them for elevated antique prices. Dahlia Dutton is a recent divorcee, still working through her issues with losing both husband and house in the divorce. She’s working with her cousins and another employee on a job that could make or break the family business. And that job turns out–of course–to be haunted.

Cherie Priest clearly knows a lot about old houses and their bits, and there’s an affection for them that shines on almost every page. She doesn’t shy away from admitting the places where they can be unpleasant, even downright nasty, but the feeling that they’re worth attention comes out and makes the house feel more special than the genre-standard haunted house.

Please consider using our link to buy The Family Plot from Amazon.

Adrienne Maree Brown and Walidah Imarisha, eds., Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements. I was a little confused at first about why these stories tended to be heavy on exposition. Then I realized that when you’re trying to do things that are not very well aligned with what has gone before–when you’re trying to break new ground, examine new territory–sometimes that ends up heavily weighted towards having to tell people what you’re doing. Go figure.

Ben Hatke, Mighty Jack. Discussed elsewhere.

Christopher Hibbert, Garibaldi: Hero of Italian Unification. Nineteenth century Italy is deeply, truly weird. I mean, totally bizarre. This is an older book–from the 1960s–so you’ll still find people referred to with racial terminology that, while not deliberately offensive, is not what we would use in my lifetime. Also, there is not a great deal on Garibaldi’s early life. With those caveats, it’s a fascinating book about a strange, strange place/time.

Luis Martin, Daughters of the Conquistadores: Women of the Viceroyalty of Peru. This author had very firm ideas about what convents are Supposed To Be Doing and how nuns are Supposed To Act. If you can get past him telling colonial Peruvian nuns, rather frantically, that they were Doin It Rong, this is a fascinating study about women of many walks of life. The other caveat is that the author was focused on Spanish-descended women and plaintively called for someone else to write a study of the roles of native and African-descended women. Amen, brother. I am with you on that. But Peruvian women had some really interesting cultural quirks that you would not guess from first principles, and this was very much worth my time.

Nisi Shawl, Everfair. Discussed elsewhere.

Gerald Vizenor, Chair of Tears. This is the third of Vizenor’s short novels I’ve read, and it occupies a conceptual place between the other two as well as a temporal one. The satire explores both university culture and Native families, it draws on the trickster stories so clearly dear to Vizenor’s heart, and it divides the book into stylistically and tonally different sections. It’s interesting to watch Vizenor change and stay the same with time, and I will probably read more of his stuff.

Drew Weing, The Creepy Case Files of Margo Maloo. Discussed elsewhere.

Review copy provided by First Second Books.

If you have watched Gravity Falls, you may have wondered where Thompson came from. The earnest butt of his teenage friends’ jokes, the one who is always stuck with the dare, fond, ambling, amiable Thompson. I don’t think that Drew Weing meant for the protagonist of his kids’ comic to be an origin story for that Thompson. But here we are: Charles Thompson, preteen, moving to a new city where he would have preferred his old small town. This Thompson is precise, cranky, nosey, nervous. This Thompson is physically quite similar, but he has not learned to go with the flow. He would not know the flow if he saw it. Young Charles Thompson is the anti-flow.

And then he meets Margo Maloo.

Charles–Thompson, as Margo Maloo immediately decides to call him–has a troll problem. Not with the internet, with his closet. His new friend and neighbor Kevin gives him her business card, says that Margo is the person to call. Sharp and impatient, Margo swings through his window to take care of things. Her methods, though, are not as Thompson expects, and he ends up pursuing her through her next few cases–different kinds of monsters, different parts of the city–trying to figure out what is going on and what Margo Maloo knows about it.

There is room for nearly infinite variation in this if it’s going to be a series, which it feels like it is: different monsters, different kids in addition to Charles Thompson and Margo Maloo. Different interactions with the outside world. In a kids’ comic, you have to make the choice how scary your scary things are going to be. The trolls, ogres, goblins, ghosts, and vampires in this volume, at least, threaten but do not carry through on their threats, and while they are unfamiliar shapes and colors, they seem to be at least as threatened by humans as threatening to them. Some kids are going to be scared by anything with monsters in it. But ruling out that category, it’s hard to imagine anyone else finding this book genuinely frightening. If anything, it pulls too many punches/fangs. It’s aiming for a pretty heavy message of “we shouldn’t be xenophobic, we should talk out our differences with people who look different from us, and everybody should get along.” I like that message! But I kind of feel like that message gets undermined when the person you are shaking hands and agreeing to be pals with is *literally considering eating you* rather than shaking your hand. So…Weing walks a really fine line here. Because if the monsters are basically not at all scary–which is the side I came down on, I had a very hard time reading them as scary–then people who are treating them as scary are being xenophobes, bigots, pretty much inexplicably so. And if the monsters actually might eat you…”Oh, be nice, it’ll probably be fine, let’s leave everyone else in ignorance of the danger” seems like it’s maybe not the best complete response, even if “kill it with fire” is also going too far.

So…odd little book, fun to read, fast read if you’re not new to this reading thing. Balanced a little strangely, but entertaining enough.

Please consider using our link to buy The Creepy Case Files of Margo Maloo from Amazon.

Blake Charlton’s Spellbreaker came out last month, but the life of a doctor-and-writer is a busy one, so we just caught up with each other now! Here’s a Q&A with Blake.

1) Most classic fantasy is centered on an external conflict. Many of the best authors add an internal conflict. For triple backflip, you’ve added autoimmune to the other two layers of conflict in Spellbreaker. Is there any farther down the rabbit hole you can go? Can you talk about some of the difficulties of dramatizing conflict that isn’t just character vs. themself but character vs. their own body?

It’s intensely gratifying when a reader picks up on a personally important theme as you just did. So thank you kindly for this question.

Although the charters of Spellbreaker wouldn’t recognize the term ‘autoimmunity,’ they would recognize the disease that the protagonist, Leandra, contends with as one of the parts of her heritage at war with each other. They would also recognize the themes of self-hatred and self-attack as important to their lives and the story unfolding around them. Casual perusal of the internet suggests one of the more popular scenes in the book is Francesca’s emphatic, hopefully humorous declamation on why there is no hatred worse than self-hatred–which you can read here <http://darkfaerietales.com/review-spellbreaker-blake-charlton.html>.

My interest in these themes comes from my own struggle with my disability. I was often frustrated by my limitations, would often disparage the part of me that made me different. When I was younger, this lead to flares of hating and attacking myself or hating and attacking ‘normal’ people and the insensitive society they created. Escaping these flares was central to my struggle to become an adult. Anecdotally, I have noticed other friends and patients with disability get caught within or escape such flares. So you see, the conflict between a person and their own body or brain and the resultant secondary conflict with a society built by convenience around the fiction of ‘normalcy’ has been dramatized throughout my life.

For those interested in such things, the different characters in this series explore different aspects of this theme. In the first two books, Nicodemus was struggling with his doubt and self-hatred. The danger he faces is that of becoming the bitter and angry disabled person, who lashed out at the world. His nemesis in those books, James Berr, represents a shadowy reflection of who Nicodemus has the potential to become. Francesca, on the other hand, is a character who in the second and third books contends with regret. She has had to make difficult decisions–many of them the right ones, some of them wrong. She is haunted by her past, though she is not completely aware of her past. In the third book, her relationship with her daughter, Leandra, is fraught with regret; mother and daughter find themselves in cyclic flares of blaming themselves and then blaming each other. Trying to find a way out of that cycle, if there is one, is the central issue of their development in the book. Finally, Leandra has the most immediate and visceral relationship with the theme since she has a chronic disease that induces periodic, unpredictable, and agonizing flares. She has grown up with the sense that her own body has betrayed her, expecting that she will die young. There is a strong anti-heroic streak in Leandra, and the capriciousness and injustice of the world weighs heavily on her, makes her ruthless. Her overarching passion is to effect justice in a chaotic and prejudiced world. It gets her into trouble. Big trouble.
2) Many doctors get accused of having a God complex. You have several. Were there any divine complexes that got left out in the editing stages? Any fun combos of gods you’d have loved to include?

Wow. This question is amazing. I should get my answers out of the way of your questions. Yes, several god complexes. No, no developed complex was left on the cutting room floor. But I did toy with the idea of showing the creation of a new divinity complex. Perhaps, I thought, it would be fun to show the southern war gods–who show up as reinforcements toward the end of the book–on ‘shore leave’ as it were in Chandralu. Deities from different cultures intermingling.  I had some vague idea of dramatizing a kinda paper-rock-scissors love-triangle between deities of incompatible elements and ideologies: Something like an angel of light falls for, but would erase, a goddess of shadow who’s obsessed with, but useless to, a demon of prisms, glass, and illusion, who would of course perforce be enamored with the angel of light. But that was going to be too involved, and the book was already too long. So I put it in my back pocket, where it will likely stay.
3) Lupus, teratomas, and instant cancer curses: there’s a lot of medicine in this book compared to most fantasy. How much does your own practice inspire your work? How hard is it to keep the lines in the right places?

Medicine is the lens though which I see the world. As a physician in training, I don’t think I can escape it. When riding the muni around San Francisco, I can’t help but try to diagnose fellow passengers. When listening to the news, my mind jumps automatically to the implications on global or national health. And when I think about adventure, fantasy, magic that same lens stays with me. It may seem like a stretch to some. It certainly isn’t similar to the typical fantasy lens, which focuses on chainmail and horses and catapults and Feudal politics. I don’t know anything about chainmail. But maybe that’s okay. I think much of the innate human conception of health and sickness is connected to the spiritual and the magical. I would guess that many, if not most, of human prayers and rituals center around health and healing. So if magic were real and tied to manifestations of divinity, then maybe it isn’t so far a stretch to say that the world that created would be as much or more obsessed with medicine as with chainmail. I have wonderful beta-readers and editors who are good at slapping my hand when my medical speculations or technical language gets too far afield.

4) The islands involved in this book mean that sailing, kayaking, and other water transport take a major role in thisbook. What’s your favorite form of water transport, and do you get to take part in it, or is this all theory for you? What’s your personal favorite? (I have an ongoing love affair with Lake Superior and a recent fling with the Kemijoki in northern Finland, so I probably get more emotionally involved with water than most.)

Maybe it’s a little silly but each of the books in the Spellwright series are associated with an element, a phase of life, and a direction. Spellwright is a book rooted in the earth. It’s about digging down into one’s past, discovering all the things about one’s family and what lies underneath. The ghostly chthonic people are the best example of this. My hope was to convey a sense of mystery and exploration, something like discovering a magical cave. Its physical inspiration was all the pseudo-gothic buildings and libraries of Yale University, where I was a student when I first conceived of the idea for the series.

Spellbound is a book that’s oriented upwards, into the sky and air. The theme is romance and fluidity. This was, hopefully, manifested in all the airships and the mercurial evolution of Francesca’s understanding of herself and her feelings toward Nicodemus. It was a book that was supposed to capture a feeling of weightlessness, flight, possibility. Its physical inspiration were the windy mountains of savannahs of my native California with a splash of the majestic ridges and jewel-like cities of Morocco’s Atlas Mountains–where I was fortunate enough to travel as a young man.

Spellbreaker’s element is water; its direction neither up or down, but all the innumerable points of the compass that the horizon represents to the sailor. The physical inspiration for Ixos is the leaward side of Kaui and my current home of San Francisco Bay. During my intern year, the America’s Cup came to San Francisco and during some of the rare days off, I would go down to watch the catamarans sailing out on the bay; the way the sail caught the wind, jumped up on to their hydrofoils, seems so magical to me I couldn’t help writing it in to Spellbreaker. I’m sure I made many, many nautical mistakes when writing the books, and I’d like to beg for forgiveness from any sailors who read the books.

To answer your question, I would have to say I’m partial to the traditional American ‘holiday on a lake’ activities of swimming, fishing, waterskiing. My grandparents had a humble cabin on Lake Nacimiento in the Central Coast region of California, and I group up splashing around in its green waters and then reading 1990s classic fantasy in the cabin at night. I am, however, very jealous of your access to Lake Superior, and after googling “Kemijoki” I might have to add “float down a Finish river” to my wanderlust bucket list.
5) It says that Spellbreaker is the final installment in this trilogy. Can we expect more in this world that’s separate from this trilogy, or will your future work be something completely different?

The next book will be something wholly different, something placed in this world but still a fantasy, heavily influenced by my medical training. The elevator pitch so far is “Neil Gaiman’s American Gods goes to Medical School.” But it’s a work in progress so we’ll see. There may well be a return to the world of Spellwright. I tried to plan a few seeds at the end of Spellbreaker; I’ll have to wait to see if they grow into anything.

Thanks for joining us, Blake!

Review copy provided by First Second Books.

This is the first in a new Hatke series. For those who have enjoyed Zita the Spacegirl and stand-alone works like Little Robot and (my personal favorite) Julia’s House for Lost Creatures, a new Hatke book is reason to sit up and take notice–a new series perhaps doubly so.

Jack has a single mom struggling to make it all work and a sister–Maddy–who is substantially non-verbal. He wants to help more than he’s allowed to, and it’s all very frustrating. Until a bad trade at the flea market leaves him and Maddy with packets of fascinating alien seeds. Their new garden draws the attention of their sword-fighting neighbor, Lilly, who has ideas of her own about what to do with the creatures who come out of the ground.

Mighty Jack ends on a cliffhanger, and a lot of how I feel about the series will depend on how it’s resolved. So far everybody is doing their best, and everybody has sensible motivations that don’t always work well together. But it’s Jack’s story. How will Hatke keep that balance going? The cliffhanger has me in genuine suspense–how will he resolve it and how soon? It’s pretty rare that I’m not sure. But this time I really don’t know. I’m eager for the next volume, to find out.

Please consider using our link to buy Mighty Jack from Amazon.