–Gary K. Wolfe
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LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: FAREN MILLER
A Face Like Glass, Frances Hardinge (Macmillan 978-0-230-74879-8, £12.99, 490pp, hc) May 2012. Cover by Sam Hadley.
The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There, Catherynne M. Valente (Feiwell and Friends 978-0-312-64962-3, $16.99, 258pp, tp) November 2012. Cover by Ana Juan.
Midnight and Moonshine, Lisa L. Hannett & Angela Slatter (Ticonderoga 978-1-921857-30-0, A$13.99, 319pp, tp) November 2012. Cover by Kathleen Jennings. [Order from Ticonderoga Publications, PO Box 29, Greenwood WA, Australia;
Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille, James Van Pelt (Fairwood 978-1-933846-34-7, $17.99, 306pp, tp) November 2012. Cover by Elena Vizerskaya. [Order from Fairwood Press, 21528 104th Street Court East, Bonney Lake WA 98391;
Elsewhens, Melanie Rawn (Tor 978-0-7653-2877-9, $25.99, 384pp, hc) February 2013.
SHORT TAKE
Trinity Rising, Elspeth Cooper (Tor 978-0-7653-3166-3, $25.99, 490pp, hc) February 2013.
Whenever a Year’s Best issue looms, the reviewer plays frantic catch-up as gems seem to keep springing out of thin air. So I begin with four more standouts from 2012.
Both Frances Hardinge’s A Face Like Glass and Catherynne M. Valente’s The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There are young adult novels. It’s a genre that positively encourages wild leaps of imagination and glorious absurdities; as standard fantasy, neither book could exist. But although each takes a girl-child to a wacky underworld, they manage to enchant in different ways.
In Hardinge’s long, richly imagined tale, young heroine Neverfell is a mostly amnesiac anomaly in Caverna. Everyone else in this vast, dark city – from artisans who spin mind-bending magics out of things like cheese and wine to courtiers engaged in endless scheming – ‘‘speaks’’ a language of Faces, trained from the moment a child begins to understand. ‘‘Most Cavernians spent their lives making do with the Faces they had learned in infancy’’ (just a crude ABC for the lowliest in this society of castes and cliques), ‘‘but the affluent elite sometimes hired Facesmiths, specialist Face-designers, to teach them new expressions.’’ For this upper crust, ‘‘a new, beautiful or interesting Face could cause more of a stir than a string of black pearls or a daring hat.’’ While Neverfell gradually learns about one strange food-alchemy, after Cheesemaster Grandible informally adopts her, she’s shockingly unable to adapt in other ways. And so he hides her, masked and illegal in his lair.
Though she doesn’t really learn what’s ‘‘wrong’’ with her until after she escapes those redolent/stinking tunnels, we can guess much sooner from a glimpse of her earliest memories and needs: ‘‘a desperation for light and air. Not greenish trap-lantern light or the dull red drowsing of embers, but a chilly, searing immensity staring down at her from above…. Air that jostled and roared.’’
Hardinge has a remarkable ability to give a sense of history and – for the locals, anyway – ordinary life to the craziest situations. But Neverfell, the outsider who’s been abandoned here, still sees things from the other side, each new adventure vividly surreal. When she begins to talk about it all, while something draws her up the social ladder to ever-higher circles, people listen. By the time she meets the almighty Grand Steward, who has long ruled Caverna despite his strange affliction of divided souls, Neverfell can’t help but notice her words’ effect:
She was the window on to the world. Through her and with her he saw cobbled fords through underground streams, ossuary doorways decorated with a thousand human bones, ladies pausing to have stone dust brushed out of their coats. She knew that she was making the golds bright, the shadows black, the reds vivid, and she could feel his gaze like a draught.
(A cold draught, since he could doom her by raising an eyebrow.)
Outside of YA, prose this fine might almost seem too good: never a word too many, each simile exact. But regardless of the wry political savvy lurking in the background, A Face Like Glass is not intended for aging cynics. Hardinge’s fantasy finds ways to make us all young again, open to every wonder.
•
Catherynne M. Valente’s The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There (sequel to The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, Valente’s first turn from adult fantasy to works for younger readers) openly proclaims its nature as a zanier kind of YA. There’s a massive Dramatis Personae with such characters as The Duke of Teatime and his wife The Vicereine of Coffee, an info-spouting creature called A-Through-L, assorted trolls, goblins, and plant-men, and the heroine’s Watchful Dress (‘‘a Useful Tool’’). Every chapter heading features a quirky illustration plus an offbeat résumé of what’s to come. Publisher Feiwel and Friends (an imprint of Macmillan) says the target audience is children ages 10 to 14, whose fancies have been tickled ever since writers discovered Wonderland and Oz. And yet, in these continuing adventures of ‘‘a girl named September,’’ Valente still finds room for fine lyrical writing and psychological insights – providing nuance and subtle truths as well as fun.
The odd plague that has struck Fairyland, sending September to investigate in the realm below, targets ‘‘shadows,’’ vital essences with many dimensions: ‘‘[S]ometimes people keep parts of themselves hidden and secret, sometimes wicked and unkind parts, but often brave or wild or colorful parts, cunning or powerful or even marvelous, beautiful parts, just locked away at the bottom of their hearts… left in the dark to grow strange mushrooms….’’ Deprived of these, the citizens of Fairyland might as well be dead.
Even when its most offbeat inhabitants are targeted, a sense of danger mingles with peculiar beauty. Here’s part of a vegetable being’s encounter with the mostly invisible enemy who could spell his doom:
The onion-man saw what had come for him. He danced anyway. Up went his arms, out went his graceful long bony legs, bending at the knee, pointing at the toe. He made a ballet dancer’s leap, and then spread his skeleton’s arms wide, nodding his onion-skull from side to side. The truck stopped. The dark door of the cab opened, and the red cap floated out, its twin feathers like knives stuck into the scarlet felt. The onion-man kept dancing, his steps growing more frantic, his leaps higher and more desperate.
After his unexpected rescue, the pockets of September’s Useful coat open: ‘‘Three little lavender and yellow onions rolled to the dancer.’’ Absurd and charming, a family reunites.
•
The things we call collections range all the way from gatherings of stories so miscellaneous they may seem to have no more in common than their author’s name to the linked tales also known as ‘‘mosaic novels’’ (though the degree of connection varies). At its best, a collection can show both a distinctive personality and an appealing openness to possibility – narrative as unconventional as an avant-garde novel, but much less liable to tie the reader’s brain in painful knots.
Midnight and Moonshine by Lisa L. Hannett and Angela Slatter sprang from a single co-written story about witches and flappers in an alternate-’20s Charleston VA, ‘‘Prohibition Blues’’. It appeared in Damnation and Dames, a 2012 anthology, but left the authors haunted by characters and concepts much too big for one tale. They ended up writing another dozen stories (which all debut here), that move from Old Norse times, where humans encounter wrangling immortals, right up to a present day, where the bounds between gods and men have become oddly fluid.
The interactions of a raven-goddess who survived Ragnarok with members of the hordes of Fae and mortals, as their varied lifespans intersect with hers, could have inspired a series of epic tomes. Fortunately, Hannett and Slatter preferred to keep things relatively short and free from the confines of any one genre. Aside from the connections between characters and generations, these are tales of many kinds, each playing off its header: bits of old sagas, doggerel, songs, as well as fiction
al diaries and excerpts from the works of obscure scholars. When these elements come together in ‘‘Prohibition Blues’’, some Nordic names persist among Southerners whose roots go back to France or Africa – each with their own gods, manners of wizardry, and connections to shapeshifting Fae. Cultures meld in a rich gumbo where Loki and Legba are one and the same. And there’s more to come.
Another kind of combination gives this book its unique tone: however grand the fantasy, passionate the romance, or regally exotic these Fae, their stories inevitably take on some of the gritty frankness, spilled blood, and shit of ordinary human life. After enough of these random encounters, even the most arrogant deity can’t help but change.
•
How could the multiple subjects, settings and genres in James Van Pelt’s fourth collection, Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille, be anything more than a mixed bag? A suburban dad whose son dreams of dragons, a 30-something virgin in an oddly haunted house, a moon dweller overseeing ‘‘full reality skin shell rentals’’ for tourists curious about old Earth, a questing knight, a sophisticated E.T. whose academic curiosity about us primitive earthlings changes with closer contact….
It’s Van Pelt’s refusal to accept the usual distinctions between normality and strangeness that both gives the book its odd sense of unity – one guiding spirit – and the stories a combined power more than the sum of their parts. He conjures magics linking body, mind, and heart – life as we know it – from such simple stuff as a school desk, the images a horny teenager once stuck to his bedroom wall, and World War One memorabilia in a Denver bar. And his excursions into myth, history, or the far future seem just as lived-in, when nonchalant little details take us there.
The title story opens in the midst of action: a pilot from the famed Lafayette Escadrille squadron flies, half-frozen by the ‘‘November air’’ at 14,000 feet. And the air ace won’t dissolve into a wish-fulfillment fancy even when his adventures prove to be the dreams of a quiet drinker, gazing up at the ‘‘completely restored Nieuport’’ hung in an overdecorated bar. ‘‘Night Sweats’’ masterfully weaves its many strands – a grown woman’s fear of sex; a WWII-era schoolboy’s collage, with Tokyo Rose supreme among the vamps; the wild mood swings of the ’40s, home to both Casablanca and the bombing of Hiroshima; the little messes caused by a restless poltergeist – into a moving tale of change. The few pages of ‘‘Just Before Recess’’ make the crazy concept of a schoolboy with ‘‘a sun in his desk’’ seem real enough that readers will both laugh and wince when his teacher decides to pry.
Van Pelt himself still teaches high school and college English, as well as writing. Aside from that one hapless victim, some of the other instructors here seem more like wizards. Uncanny power crops up totally without warning in the most recent story, ‘‘Mrs. Hatcher’s Evaluation’’ (Asimov’s 2012), when an evaluator assigned to check out a frumpy woman’s history lectures gets swept up, along with all her students, in an experience that feels more like time travel.
Even when a teacher gets dragged back to work by creatures that had been his students, in the brief zombie satire ‘‘Classroom of the Living Dead’’, there’s a kind of odd magic when – at a loss for other options – he starts diagraming sentences on a blackboard and becomes lost in ‘‘the arcane language of grammar.’’ Though their faces stay blank and all he hears are a few groans for ‘‘braaaiiins,’’ no one tries to eat him. He moves beyond despair to conclude: ‘‘Tomorrow I think I’ll teach literature. Some Dickinson, some Poe. Tomorrow I’ll teach the dead and for a moment pretend that the world will go on.’’ Whether the horror’s pulpish or tragically real, we can learn from his example.
•
None of the books discussed so far, including the Valente, moves at the pace of a multi-volume epic. Melanie Rawn’s ‘‘Glass Thorn’’ project does need that expansiveness. While Book One Touchstone was my lead review last March, and I enjoyed the mixture of high fantasy with a cast of foul-mouthed, screwed-up yet magical players, this year’s sequel Elsewhens truly fulfills its promise of greater things to come.
It has elements in common with the other fantasies here. The main setting Albeyn (a variant on Albion) is used to humans living and working among such creatures as trolls, pixies, Fae, and giants – or their current incarnations – and producing mixed breeds along the way. Albeyn’s main religion is pagan, and the rulers are royals, while the era seems Baroque or Rococo, advanced well beyond Olden Days. The players of the group Touchstone, all of them young and none 100% human, speak in a mixture of oaths and slang that could almost be modern, sprinkled with words unique to their various uncanny arts, plus a few expressions that linger from the past: most notably ‘‘beholden,’’ a word that can just mean ‘‘thanks,’’ but gains significance and emotional power as the tale develops.
At times, Elsewhens resembles psychodrama more than fantasy adventure, delving deep into the minds and hearts of some remarkable characters. The title refers to Touchstone member Cayden’s abrupt yet intimate visions of potential futures: some where his complicated friendship with the group’s most volatile member, the part-elf Mieka, ends in hatred for a drugged has-been who’s brought about his own early ruin; others where the pair exhibit the resilient byplay of old survivors. Though the darker scene appears first (and could be all too likely), the elsewhens use a different text face. However real they seem when they intrude on Cayden, these are visions, spawned by a kind of magic that he can’t control.
A few of them have nothing to do with the group in times to come. This proves crucial to a plot that develops only slowly, behind most of the main action – initially a fierce contest for top place on the yearly touring circuit, later a trip to the Continent as part of a delegation charged with bringing back the Prince’s new wife. These foreigners don’t just ban all forms of magic; they won’t acknowledge that it exists. Though Touchstone plans to make their own case for it in performances (without pressing too much, since blatant displays might lead to disaster), their travels lead to troubling revelations about the natures of these foreign lands, Albeyn, and ultimately themselves.
Clearly there’s more to come, but Elsewhens already offers a wealth of mysteries and surprises, myths and minds and cultures, during its long, delightfully unpredictable course.
SHORT TAKE
Another massive new sequel, second in Elspeth Cooper’s The Wild Hunt series, Trinity Rising juggles far more plot lines and characters than the Rawn. After opening with the exotic little magics of a sorcerer whose dark master wants results now, it turns to the travails of a young woman in a nomad camp – told in such unflinching detail, it’s clear the author’s female. Later scenes alternate between this hard life (only a little improved when she begins to learn a kind of witchcraft) and the doings of more experienced, widely traveled characters. A note about setting: Book One’s title, Songs of the Earth, seems misleading, since the planet isn’t ours. While its cultures can resemble Mongol, Middle Eastern, and something more Celtic societies, this world has moons and magics that you’d never find in Camelot or Middle-earth.
There’s a lot to absorb here. Though the galley blurb makes Trinity Rising sound like the further struggles and adventures of Gair, a young magic-user bent on revenge after his people threw him out, Gair doesn’t even show up for a substantial portion of this big book – more than 100 pages! If you don’t mind a slew of viewpoint characters, whose plot lines don’t even start to come together till very late in the day, you can settle down and enjoy Cooper’s eloquent prose, unique versions of the occult, and fine emotional range. But if you want a strong, cohesive narrative arc, you’d best look elsewhere.
–Faren Miller
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LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: ADRIENNE MARTINI
Six-Gun Snow White, Catherynne M. Valente (Subterranean Press 978–1-59606-552-9, $40.00, 168pp, hc) February 2013. [Order from Subterranean Press, PO Box 190106, Burton MI 48519;
By Light Alone, Adam Roberts (Gollancz 978-0575-08366-2, $14.95, 422pp, tp) January 2013.
Seven Wonders, Adam Christopher (Angry Robot 978-0-85766-196-8, $12.99, 416pp, tp) August 2012.
The Friday Society, Adrienne Kress (Dial 978-0-0803-737616-7, $17.99, 448pp, hc) December 2012.
I’ve grown leery (and weary) of stories that take classic tales like Snow White and reboot them. Most of them only rearrange the furniture without also renovating the house. Like, say, let’s put Cinderella on Mars! She’ll sweep red dust! It’ll be all space-y and stuff! Changing the set dressing isn’t enough and misses the point of what makes those iconic tales resonate.
Catherynne M. Valente’s Six-Gun Snow White moves Snow into the wild, wild west and her take on this trope has all that you’d expect: prospectors, duels, horses, and dust. But Valente rips the beating heart out of the old versions of the story, dissects it to see how it works, jams it back into this new tale, and gives it a jolt of juice to bring it back to life. Six-Gun Snow White is a vital marvel.
Like any reboot, Snow White gets a new origin story here, too – although ‘‘new’’ is a misnomer because I’m not certain she ever had one before. Mr H, a wealthy Nevada silver baron, barters for Gun That Sings, a Native American girl he is obsessed with. Gun That Sings dies during childbirth. Her daughter, who Mr H’s new wife names Snow White, grows up without both a mother and a life she can comfortably inhabit. After tortures inflicted on her by her wicked stepmother, Snow sets out to make her own way. It isn’t easy.
But what it is is equal parts painful and cathartic. Valente’s story is about mothers and daughters, yes, but also about the act of storytelling itself. Six-Gun Snow White is subtly meta without ever winking about its own high-falutingness. ‘‘You’re in a story,’’ one of the characters tells Snow, ‘‘and the body writing it is an asshole,’’ a sentence which perfectly fits both Snow’s situation at that point in the tale and Valente’s approach to the tale itself.
Locus, February 2013 Page 19