BERJAYA

Private Rites – Julia Armfield

Posted on 29/12/2024 by Roseanna

My overwhelming impression of this book is rain. Constant, undramatic, pervasive, it haunts the margins of the story so effectively that it has overwhelmed my memory of it, forming a damp sheen over the foregrounded aspects of the story. It’s one of the (many) things Armfield does well – the way that she takes the climate catastrophe of her novel and never quite lets the reader look it straight in the eye, never quite lets us dig into any details of the what, the when, the how, the could this even really…? It is found in the passing asides, the lingering descriptive passages, full of the opulent grime of her prose style that dwells on the grubby detritus of the world and makes a symphony of it. It is found in how it underpins the mood of the story – melancholy, as have all her works I’ve read been – and exacerbates it. It is the key part of how she uses horror, to take something so familiar in a rain-washed Britain, take our habitual overemphasis of it and turn it into reality, with all the attendant calamity that would require.

To take a step back (or actually perhaps forward), what is Private Rites about? It is a loose reimagining of King Lear, told predominantly from the perspectives of three sisters, the daughters of a famous architect of structures designed to escape or survive in a slowly drowning landscape, in a near future Britain. It follows their discovery of his death, and how they each deal with the aftermath and, more critically, each other, as they navigate the intersections of long-held grudges and impressions of one another and the reality of where they all are now, alongside the practical matters of resolving the bureaucracies of death and the problems of their own lives. There is a lot in it all about misunderstanding, about people being too caught up in their own heads, their own lives to see the truth of those around them, as well as being caught up on the past to see the present. It examines love, duty, traumas that bond and drive apart and the mundane realities of living life while dramatic events occur, whether in the foreground or the background.

Unsurprisingly to anyone who has read Armfield’s work before, it is also very much about melancholy lesbians being melancholy and all up in their own thoughts about things – a microgenre in which she excels. Certainly as regards being all up in their thoughts, she has the trick of perfect interiority – her characters constantly drift into musings that border on the nonsensical, having thoughts that are not ones I have or have had, but feel completely true to the peculiarity of the barrage of personal, inconsequential notions that one would never share – the babble that is the true interior.

They also make sometimes terrible or inexplicable choices in their own lives and how they act to each other, undermining themselves, working against their goals, but because she gives us such an authentic insight into the how of their minds, we can see the emotional impulses that drive them to act, moment by moment, and so be swept along in the irrationality rather than being estranged by it. It plays out in the micro as well as the macro – we see Isla, the eldest sister, sitting in her office, needing the toilet but not bringing herself to go, for no good reason in particular, and this smaller echo helps reinforce the same unthinking self-sabotage when it comes up writ large, in the way she avoids dealing with the realities of her divorce from her wife, or the feelings she has about the legacy left by her father. Seeing her in all her little, everyday foibles helps ground and make sense of her larger arc, and the whole is left the richer for the time spent on those fleeting irrelevances.

However it is not just the sisters whose perspectives we get. There are occasional chapters that stray outside them into other characters, but more critically, regular sections labelled only as “The City”, which tend to be choppy moments from across a sea of different lives – the city as the sum of its people, and the landscape they see and inhabit. We get brief little vignettes of how living in the future of the story affects all the people outside of this family unit, mundane moments of daily life captured in glass. They are often the most beautiful, and where Armfield makes use of that “opulent grime” to make the most of the smallness of scene, and craft it into something lastingly impactful. For instance:

Wide waters, sloe-black and dense with detritus: glass beans and tin cans and the bodies of cormorants, sugar packets and plastic spoons and shopping trolleys and the heads and tails of creatures blown off course and drowned for want of salt.

This passage serves only to create the atmosphere, and to build up that backgrounded sense of the constantly encroaching water that is a fact of daily life for the characters of the story and of the city – it isn’t a grand moment of tragedy, a dramatic scene, but the drudge of the sort of life that involves plastic spoons and shopping trolleys, however beautifully rendered.

This – her ability to craft beautiful scenes – alongside intricate character work, and the emotional vicegrip of the psychodrama between three sisters that is both stunningly mundane and intensely compelling, forms the foreground of the story. I don’t want to dismiss it or undermine it, because it is all as beautifully done as anything she’s written. On their strength alone, a good novel would exist. But it is that backgrounded genre, that keeps pulling my mind back, and I think her approach to the climate, the changes that have happened and are happening, that really makes this a novel worth reading.

What do I mean by background? Well, the reality of climate change in the novel is never really explained, and while it is mentioned by characters, it is far more for its emotional impact on them, its existence as root cause to their persistent collective melancholy, its inspiration of cultish behaviour in the wider populace that crops up in intrusions of unexpected and sometimes incomprehensible-to-the-characters acts by unnamed passers by. No one ever, in conversations or inside their head, seeks to explain it. It is a reality of the world to be weathered (ha) rather than an antagonist to be confronted, and we see it for its effects, not its causes. It’s an artefact of those beautiful descriptive passages and moments of emotional impact, and so exists under and around the narrative, intruding in echoes.

Which made me think, as I was reading, about genre, and how this framing of clifi works for me in a way that much does not. This turned into something of a sprawling discussion on bsky between, predominantly, myself, Niall Harrison and Dan Hartland, which you can read here if you’re interested¹. I don’t know that I have a truly settled answer for myself about what genre the book is, but it definitely uses pieces of litfic, of horror and of SF, and it is the interactions between them – and what pieces aren’t used – that I find most interesting.

Specifically – climate change, as a theme in fiction, and clifi as a subgenre are things I tend to associate with SF. Until two days ago, I think I would have called clifi a subset of SF without much thoughts. But here… the way Armfield uses climate feels wholly un-SFnal to me. I think the crux of it comes down to that lack of explanation. For me, in how I’ve experienced their place in genre so far science fictional objects yearn to be explained; horror objects yearn to be inexplicable, and take their force from that unknowability. Climate change in Private Rites is wholly the latter – it is an act of God, something to be grappled with emotionally rather than intellectually. It is a violence enacted by the world by slow degrees on the characters. And as the book progresses, its enaction starts to veer into the improbable, the way that everyday objects seems transmuted or overgrown overnight with avatars of the water that is engulfing them – sea urchins and kelp, in places they have no right to be, at speeds that make no sense. It’s not an overt rejection of plausibility, but a testing of it, an invitation to begin to doubt.

That this works for me, as someone who would claim to dislike both clifi and horror is… interesting. But that too is a hallmark of my reaction to Armfield thus far. Her previous work gave us unknowable horrors of the deep sea – something I already find unsettling in the extreme – and yet I loved it. And I think, as well as her obvious skill as a writer, the key to this enjoyment is in how she blends in the litfic or realist aspects into her work – the interiority mentioned above, the constant focus on the emotional and the physical as an evocative environment. The horror and the SF are pushed to the margins to make space for the interpersonal, but at least as far as the horror goes, being in the shadows only serves to increase its impact. The tension of the slow build up is far more unsettling than an immediate, SFnal head-on take.

If you forced me, I think I would eventually settling on calling this litfic, because that forms the emotional core of the story. But I think talking about what genre it is, ultimately misses the point – instead, it is what genres Armfield uses and how, whose grammar she uses to tackle what subjects, that make this story what it is.

All three of those genres come into play in that ever present rain – the SFnal in the climate change it represents in our horribly plausible near future, the horror in its lurking in the shadows of the story, and the literary in how the rain is used, how it is described, and how its description echoes out into the story, filling every corner, rendering all in shades of shimmering grey.

The replies begin to fan out rather, so it’s a little difficult to track. The link is to the start of my own thread of live reactions to reading the book, but the majority of discussion kicks of from the post that begins “Is it speculative?” ↩︎

Posted in All, Awesome, Horror, Literary, Science Fiction | Tagged Armfield, Horror, Literary, SF | Leave a comment

Three Eight One – Aliya Whiteley

Posted on 22/12/2024 by Roseanna

Three Eight One by Aliya Whiteley is the story of Fairly, a young girl setting out on a quest away from home for the first time, on something called the Horned Road¹. The story comes with annotations by a reader from a much later age – long into our own future – examining it from a perspective of both knowledge and ignorance, and using it as a way to think about her own life, and her values. As the story we progresses – and the annotations with it – we learn more about the future world the annotator² lives in, as well as its relationship with the past, the Age of Riches we come to realise is our own time.

The quest narrative is, in many ways, quite a weird one – it sort of takes place in the 21st century, but a lot of it is entirely nonsensical for the modern world³, not in the way of something like urban fantasy, but more as a fairytale with no real connections to reality at all. Even as a story alone, it might be interesting on its own terms for the strangeness of the narrative choices. It is not, however, left alone, and it is in the relationship between the quest narrative and the annotation that the subtle, thoughtful, and incredibly compelling magic of the story truly happens.

Firstly, there is a huge amount of worldbuilding going on in those footnotes. We learn a lot about the distant, post-singularity (question mark⁴) future through snippets, asides and subtle implications, as the annotator talks about her relationship with the past through her rather more personal relationship with the text.

Particularly, though, what interests me isn’t the content of this technofuture, but how the annotator conceptualises it with respect to the past⁵. Specifically, she says:

It’s difficult to come to terms with what humanity once was. The future is clear and calm, a long straight road ahead, and challenges that once plagued us are now overcome. There is only the past left to fear, and I’ve found it easy to picture the old ways as a monster, coming up fast behind me. How can I learn to accept this terrible legacy? Not only that, how can I escape it? When we sacrificed difference and discord, we gave up on part of ourselves. It takes bravery to admit that maybe we miss it.⁶

Coming in at the start of the story, this sets a huge amount of tone for how to read the rest of it – quest and annotation alike. It says “there is a gulf between the world you know and the world the annotator lives in” and asks “is that gulf surmountable?”. It’s one of the fundamental questions of the book, one that it tackles both on a factual level – are we truly able to recover the answers to our questions across time in a manner where the answers can be trusted – and an emotional one – can we empathise with those who live in a context so alien to our own? I am, unsurprisingly⁷, extremely interested in all of that. And it makes the worldbuilding better because it feels purposeful. It’s not lore dumps and information for the sake of itself. Every single thing we learn about the future the annotator lives in is finely crafted to help us understand either her as a person, whole and entire, and why she is connecting to and interacting with this specific text, or to highlight something in the space between the two stories. The annotations are not, for the most part, enormous, they have to be used as a precision tool, and are. Off-hand remarks, personal remembrances, hopes for future, all of it feeds into moving the story forwards – not the story of the quest, nor the story of the annotations themselves, but the true story, which exists in the space they create between themselves.

But even what we learn about the future purely qua the future is well done on its own terms. That assertion – When we sacrificed difference and discord, we gave up on part of ourselves – feels a critical one because it spells out something I think is often missing from utopian SFF (unless it is the sort of utopian SFF that seeks to undermine that utopia, and prove it false and flawed all along): the idea that this sort of safe, stable future will come with very high costs to reach it⁸. Whenever the future the annotator lives in is discussed, even when about topics where she disagrees with a decision, or regrets something, it remains utopian in her characterisation of it. But it is a utopia whose construction came with a high price – as surely any such must.

Secondly, the annotator character is a hugely sympathetic one⁹. When we first meet her in the footnotes, she is seventeen, and at a loss as to what to do with herself. At this particular time in her life, she finds meaning in a story about a young girl going out on a quest – hardly an uncommon impulse, across any time. Through the course of about two thirds of the book, we witness her slowly unfolding existential crisis, asking of herself the same questions that have plagued most of us as teenagers. She wants to know what she’s for.

The story – with its focus on the extent of the differences between cultures across time – works precisely because the annotator finds so much commonality and meaning with Fairly, and because we find so much commonality with her. That gulf of context is entirely true and yet made more obvious and more poignant by the things that belie it¹⁰.

Are there threads that run common throughout all people, at all times? Impossible to know, really. But that potentiality lies across the very clear differences that Whiteley is highlighting throughout, and is never really resolved – because how can it be? It’s a question to sit with.

Which is a good way to characterise the book as a whole, come to think of it. I am not always great at books with ambiguous or open endings¹¹. But this one works for me, and I think it’s because, for all it has the ambiguity in the ending, it’s one that has been building clearly throughout the whole story, and one that is an open ended question outside of the context of the book itself – these truly are big, unanswerable questions that we have to just live with if they intersect with our interests. Of course she can’t answer them neatly just like that! To do so would undermine their importance. But the act of sitting with them in this guided manner is an enjoyable and substantial one, and well worth the time of doing it, without leaving a lingering futility or despair¹², both of which would feel like easy outcomes of the problems laid out.

And then there is a (secret) third thing¹³, and it sits in how Whiteley handles her prose.

Within Fairly’s story, there is a device, which we meet for this first time early on, just as she embarks upon her quest and is called to leave her village. As she begins, she must press a button on what is called in the story a “chain device”. As she does so, the text flips from third to first person¹⁴, switching the perspective to be within Fairly herself, in which it continues up until the next time she meets one of the devices. Each time they crop up at a significant moment within the story, and each time they change the way the story is told, flipping a textual switch to underline the emotional one that has occurred. They feel like a knife through the story, cutting through the fourth wall and giving a knowing look to the reader – saying “I see you”.

It is by far the most obvious, but forms a part of a toolkit that is on display throughout the story, making sure the reader is aware constantly that this is a story to be thinking about a step back. It’s a story with meta, and it benefits so so much from a thoughtful examination, mirroring the examination being done within text by the annotator¹⁵. And you’re forced to do it by those prose choices, by those deliberate nudges into your consciousness. This is not an immersive story. This is not a story to forget or ignore the prose. There is nothing streamlined about it. It is deliberate, and it will never let you forget that it is a text, with all that means.

And it’s wonderful. It’s the most perfect thing about it.

And so I loved it¹⁶. It has no clear message, no easy answers. It does not hold your hand. And yet there’s so much richness in it, so much weight, and leaves you with so much to think about afterwards. There’s a quote towards the end that runs:

The question is not: How do I move forward? It is: What do I lose if I don’t look back?

It’s one worth thinking about, and without an answer, one I’ve come to before, and one I will no doubt come to again. That is the power of Three Eight One – it loops into the big thoughts, and gives you more to add to the pondering of them, without being so crass as to tell you any of the answers.

Or is it? For all that the majority of the text belongs to Fairly’s story, I don’t think it forms the majority of the meaning, by any stretch. ↩︎
We learn her name by the end of the story, and I hardly think a name is a spoiler, but I referred to her as “the annotator” in my head throughout, so that’s what I’ll call her here. ↩︎
And this is absolutely brought to attention in the footnotes – but the interest comes from how. There are points at which the annotator seems almost to be unaware of the concept of fantasy as a genre, and I wondered to what extent some parts of both the quest and the annotation are intended to be commentary on the state of the genre now. ↩︎
Is it post-singularity? It’s definitely post-something significant. But Whiteley isn’t super interested in spelling it out in great detail, which I appreciate. ↩︎
Not just because I love formatting bullshit (although I do), but also because the way she talks about the relationship between past and present resonated quite strongly with me from my own experiences of reading ancient texts. ↩︎
Page 8, though a similar concept comes up again right towards the end of the book, encircling the narrative in a way that makes me think it was critical to the framework of the story, however little it is overtly called attention to. ↩︎
I spent so much of this book thinking, in particular, about Catullus, probably the ancient author with whom I have the most emotional relationship. Much of what the annotator thinks through was familiar to my own interactions with his work as an undergrad, although where she is thinking about life, direction, destiny and the big questions, for me it was more about humour and personal relationships. I have always found Catullus the funniest of the classical poets (suck it Horace), and that humour feels like a bridge into the past, in much the same way the annotator finds in Fairly’s story. But it is just as much one to be questioned as are the annotator’s responses. ↩︎
This is particularly on my mind right now, as I know I’ll need to reread A Psalm for the Wildbuilt by Becky Chambers for book club, a story which I think does this very poorly. This is examined in more detail (in a way I found useful and interesting) by Sim Kern here: vm.tiktok.com/ZGdh4gdCM/ ↩︎
Of course, we are left to consider how much we can sympathise with her across the gulf of time, reflecting her questions back on ourselves. ↩︎
And also because, at various strategic points, Whiteley gently draws our attention back to it. I cannot quite articulate how, but she has a great way of being both obvious and subtle at the same time, so none of it ever goes clunk, but nor could you possibly ignore the significance – a very necessary skill when trying to fit so much meaning into the small text of the footnotes without having them overwhelm the body text. ↩︎
I really struggled with The Rift by Nina Allan, for this reason. ↩︎
Or at least it feels that way to me. I spent a number of years immersing myself in things written by people dead more than 2000 years (in some cases more like 3000-3500), and yeah, an amount of that involved some angsting over the level to which I felt both connected and distant from these people whose words I was analysing, while knowing I could never truly understand them because I could never understand the world they wrote in. I still get flashes of that, usually in heavily referential conversations, or daft memes. How will future historians interpret this? Will it be entirely incomprehensible? Loaded with meaning it never had? Ritual significance. Possibly for fertility. ↩︎
You can pry the stupid memes from my cold, dead hands. ↩︎
I know a bunch of people get very fussy about which person a story is told in, let alone flitting between multiple, but I love that shit. It was great in The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez, and it’s great here. ↩︎
Particularly fun because I was taking notes as I read, as I often do with books I think I might go on to review. I suspect I’d have felt that knowing glance either way, but it definitely came through as I engaged in precisely the same act as I was reading about. ↩︎
Inconvenient though that is – I am already thinking about awards nomination next year, and indeed already had a bit of a draft shortlist ready for nomination. The problem with scrambling to read the things all the cool reviewers liked at the end of the year, is the bastards know what they’re talking about. ↩︎

Posted in All, Awesome, Science Fiction | Tagged Awesome, SF, Three Eight One, Whiteley | 1 Comment

The Breath of the Sun – Isaac R. Fellman

Posted on 30/11/2024 by Roseanna

One of the questions on the little slips of paper through which our book club runs asks:

Was the author better at describing the concrete or the abstract? Did the use of description affect your reading of the book?

Obviously, like all book club questions, the answer to this is supposed to be an essay, or at least a number of discursive paragraphs. Good discussion isn’t borne out of binary responses. But if we assume that the answer to this could be binary, as the question supposes, then Isaac Fellman has nonetheless ignored it, and chooses the secret, third thing. Where his prose excels, where it creates moments of beauty that linger and compel me to highlight them in my ebook (and to wish fervently I had bought this as a physical book, so I could highlight or tab them for real, and feel as though my notation had any sort of impact on the face of this incredible text), is instead where he takes the concrete, and through descriptions which could be fanciful if handled any less well, renders them abstract. Like so:

It was one of those moments in our lives that are hieratic, where what we see combines with what we feel and they become the same, such that the easy swing of that rotten door, dangling on its light hinges into the stone room with the brown desk, was the thing that I felt when I peered into the room: fear and a burning welcome.

As to the second part of the question? His use of description affected my experience of the book in the same way the world’s use of oxygen affects my experience of breathing. It’s a fundamentally ridiculous question, founded on presumptions that make no sense in the face of an Isaac Fellman novel – you cannot take the intricacy, the artfulness of the prose away from the story as if nice words are a little sprinkling of seasoning over the top of it, rather than the whole of the thing. The entirety of the experience of reading this book is to submerge yourself in his evocative, awe-inspiring (in the literal sense that they engender feelings of awe as experienced by the narrator) world, that he creates, word by intricately chosen word. The use of description is the whole damn book.

In general, I find the way we talk about prose in SFF… difficult, at best. There is often that sense that, indeed, prose is a nice little bonus you might get if you’re lucky, but it’s not in any way critical to the telling of a good story. Hark back to all the discussions not so long ago, and Max Gladstone, for instance, on “streamlined” prose. I can’t help but think the position that prose “gets in the way” – this is not a straw man, I have literally experienced people saying this – boggling. My good person, how else are you piping this story into your brain? It’s like Platonic mind/body dualism all over again but without the excuse of living in the 5th century BCE and basing a lot of your models of the world on people who thought the world was a pot lid floating on the steam of the universe¹, or worse, Socrates². But, to be more serious and less flippant for a second, truly – how does one conceive of a text as a thing apart from the prose that creates it? I cannot. And never more so than when faced with an author like Fellman, for whom the act of description constitutes the majority of the force of his work, at least in the micro.

In the macro, those constant, delicious descriptions form together by some strange alchemy into a larger text with the power to deeply affect. Just as he packs in the metaphor, Fellman also manages to cram each story with layer upon layer of thematic reflections, without answers but with plenty of space around them for the reader to fill with their own wondering.

And so, I should possibly say what this story is actually about.

The Breath of the Sun is a story narrated by Lamat Paed, a woman of many jobs, but who has climbed the mountain that is the body of god to the Holoh, the people of her birth, twice in notable circumstances. The first, many years before the time of this story, ended in tragedy and excommunication for the living and dead of her party, but not for herself. The second is the stuff of the narrative. Disaine, a disgraced scholar-priest, has read Lamat’s account of the first ascent, and wants to make the climb herself, following in the footsteps of the prophet of her religion. Through Lamat’s own account – addressed to a future lover, Otile – and interspersed with excerpts from Disaine’s diary and occasional interruptions in footnotes from Otile herself, the events of that second ascent and what comes after slowly unfold. With some emphasis placed on “slowly”.

This is a story that contains events, to be sure, but it is not narrative driven. If anything, the events serve far more as substrate upon which to grow exciting metaphors, breath-taking views of landscapes both real and imaginary, the sketched outline of a world full of complexities just out of reach and fascinating interpersonal relationships. And then, to come back to the point, those thematic reflections.

This is a story about obsession, or even compulsion – the need to climb, the need to find meaning, or god, or be the person in the world you think you are owed with being. It’s also a story about personal growth, about despair and loss, about language, and about religious belief, in the face of circumstances and experiences almost beyond measure of description, and about climbing, as well as the delicate interlinks between all of these. Fellman, from time to time, drops intensely quotable little lines about them all:

It was obvious now why the Holoh use the image of a jewel to discuss the fallen, for what else, famously, do city lights look like? Look at any set phrase long enough, and it’ll shiver into focus; you’ll see its original maker, in his tiny workshop, portentously pairing a jewel with a city, patching his threadbare darkness with velvet.

Nice women, I always forget. You can’t forget that niceness is rare, and a great virtue. It means a quickening to others and a desire to please. A cloven feeling like a mirror, making you both happy simultaneously, one move, one gesture, no gap. I am not nice, ever.

“To be an insect on God’s body, and to do as They desire, and to decorate Them with your pattern, and to run cloth over Their flesh, with your flesh, lest They turn you into a red jewel, and to climb when you must, and to descend when you must, and not to step on Their face to go higher,” I said. “That’s the whole poem.”

But they never stray so far as didacticism. They always remain rooted in Lamat (or Otile, or rarely Disaine)’s viewpoint – they are a window into their soul, not a dictat to the reader. But as they build up, over the course of the story, they begin to show us patterns of how all these things have impacted on Lamat’s life, or on Disaine’s, and give us just enough to maybe start the have some conclusions about them all, like the role religion plays within Lamat’s life, that sometimes even seems to go against how she talks about it, how fundamental it is to her as a person. But it’s never spelled out in one of these little soundbite gems – that would be too clumsy. It’s more of a feeling than anything made clear.

It’s a book that lives on feeling. In the tone of each of the three narrative voices, how they each put themselves into the words and the shape of the story. But also on the feeling imbued into the world. Because, to loop back to another book club question, if asked:

What will be you most vivid memories of this book a year from now?

I would answer two things – the image of the mountain, and the deep-seated feelings of awe and reverence, the which are so intrinsically linked in the story that they feel like a single concept.

I’m no mountain climber. I’m a coward without the grace or daring (or cardio fitness) to feel any impulse to scale things larger than small hills and staircases. But somehow, Fellman has nonetheless managed to gift me the wonder of climbing, of the experience of it, the desire for it, the compulsion to go back to it despite the hardship and the heartbreak. There are scenes, up in the desolate expanse of the mountain beyond the cloudline, that are so brittle and bright that you can feel the cold sunburn of them. His descriptive prose is achingly gorgeous, and never more so than up there, where he uses all of that craft to combine Lamat’s religious and compulsive fervours into one in the unreachable summit of the mountain-that-is-god’s-body. I am possessed of no more religious wonder than I am a desire for climbing and yet, that feeling came through the text just as strongly.

This comes through, I think, in how Fellman mixes the mundane into the miraculous, at every single point. There is no glory of the sun on the clouds that doesn’t also have shitting into a bottle in a climbing suit. There is no dessicated corpse without the twinkle of the falling snow. All of those intermingled themes come together in this, to put… if not god, then something of the sublime into the ordinary. Lamat’s narrative is incapable of speaking of the world without finding something profound in every single mote of it, and where, in some books, this constancy might become a sort of emotional exhaustion, here it does not. Instead, the wonder and awe form the bedrock from which everything else is built, they become necessary to understand everything else, rather than something visible at every moment and thus capable of wearing out our capacity to enjoy it.

I have now read all of Fellman’s published work, going backwards from the most recent to this, his first, and I find it fascinating the differences between them. Of the three, I think this is the one that has affected me most deeply, and feels in some way most free of the constraints imposed by the norms of the modern SFF narrative. Where I can see some fellowship with other stories in The Two Doctors Górski, I struggle to see something similar here – it is, if not unique, then certainly unusual. And it is playful, dancing about within structure and format (something that becomes more developed in Dead Collections), while also deadly serious about the things that matter most to its protagonists, like faith. Religion, especially religion in a world that also contains magic, is something I find done well rarely in the books I read, and here, it not only does that, but in a world that contains science in something approaching the modern sense too. All three play harmoniously – the only negative effects they have are the ones personal to the characters, or practical, rather than at a philosophical level. I enjoy stories that entertain that, and also with characters for whom belief, in some form, informs the world we see when we look out through their eyes. Not only is it here, but it is done so exquisitely, I worry it has set the bar for other stories I’ll encounter in the future, such a perfect mingling of the different strands of Lamat’s life. I’m sure it’s not without its debts, because no story can exist in a vacuum, but it manages to feel a step apart nonetheless.

If you like thoughtful, meandering prose, lingering over vivid descriptions of places and views, of experiences moment by moment, all underscored by faith and emotion, this is a story you must read. Its narrative impetus is… minimal, and it has few scenes full of anything you might call action – much of what is most dramatic in it happens in reflection and recollection. But in that meandering, there are moments of absolute beauty, and so if you care for that sort of thing in the slightest, if you can enjoy stories that contain space for ambiguity, or at least for multiple possibilities, I think this would be for you. It is one of the most intense, exquisite things I have read this year.

I cannot honestly remember which of the presocratic philosophers this was, and I say it mostly without judgment. I loved all those weirdos and their theories. But they have very muddleable names like Anaximander and Anaximenes, and undergrad was a long time ago. If I have the details wrong well… so did they? ↩︎
This tells you a number of things about a) how I think about the world and b) my opinions on Socrates. Mfer must have been an incredibly annoying person to experience first hand; he was bad enough in text two and a half millennia later. ↩︎

Posted in All, Awesome, Fantasy | Tagged Awesome, Fantasy, Fellman | 2 Comments

Pansies – Alexis Hall

Posted on 27/10/2024 by Roseanna

Jenny Hamilton, who it turns out is a distressingly good recommender of books, suggested that if I wanted to dip into Alexis Hall’s back catalogue after enjoying Mortal Follies and Confounding Oaths, I should try Pansies.

I am not, in general, a romance reader if it’s just romance and nothing else. There are a couple of reasons for this – I don’t particularly enjoy sex scenes and have a tendency to skim through them, my cringe threshold is so low you can step over it, I do not have romance in my own soul – but since I’ve enjoyed a few romantasy books in recent past, I thought it was worth giving a go.

Short answer: it absolutely was.

Caveat first though. It was still a romance. I am still not that interested in reading sex scenes, especially after the first one or two. In general, I am happy with them for their place within the dynamics of the relationship of the people involved, and like them as a way to further that, but I’m not interested in them… aesthetically, I suppose? After a page or two, it becomes “yes yes, very sexy, anyway can we get back to angsting please”. So that didn’t really work for me. There’s also a trope in the book I didn’t realise I didn’t like until I had to listen to it in audio, because apparently audio makes everything more intense for me. Good to know.

Those two aside though, it was an incredibly interesting book, and I want to talk about that specifically one two intertwined axes.

The first is about home, and place, about going away and coming back, and how people feel about it (or are supposed to feel about it). In the story, Alfie grew up in South Shields, but now lives in London as a big city investment banker, while Fen left South Shields to pursue a career in theatre, but has been forced to come home after the death of his mother, and is now working in the flower shop she ran. Both of them are people who Left and then Came Back, but they both have entirely different feelings about it. For Alfie, the story is a process of realising that the north is home, and will always be home, and maybe what he has in London isn’t actually what he wants at all. And yet, home, the north, also contains his family, and that’s bound up in a tangled knot of feelings about sexuality, about his own masculinity – who he is supposed to be to the people at home, but isn’t. Fen meanwhile had left and felt good about it, found a career and friends and loves and a home in London, been happy to have escaped the place that, growing up, bullied him for being unapologetically who he was. But now he has had to come back and, quite clearly at the start of the story, is absolutely miserable about it all, but feels compelled to remain by the legacy of his mother.

As someone who Left, and indeed left the north/midlands and ended up in London, I think a lot about place and home and belonging in stories. There are so many that involve going away and coming back again, and in a large proportion of them, going back home – and home is always the place you started in – is ultimately the right decision. The story demands that the protagonist reject the flimsy allure of the place away, in favour of the more grounded, more fundamental, more real characteristics of their starting place. For many stories, home was right all along, but the story teaches you to see that, and the process of going away is merely a lesson, a way of growing as a person until you become the one that fits that original place.

I… do not like that narrative. Not to get all personal, but going away was, for me, the right decision. I have memories from growing up, where my mother would ask me what my ideal future home was for my adult self, and I remember that the dream (long before I knew the value of property, or the depressing job prospects of a degree in classics) was a Georgian townhouse in London. And my mother would always say that, well, I might think that, but if I lived in London I’d realise that actually it wasn’t what I wanted at all. It’s too big, too much, too bustling, too loud, too anonymous, too… well, all the things people say about London. I do not, alas, have a Georgian townhouse, or even a part of one, but I do still live in London and… well, she was dead wrong. Some people are born to leave and never come back.

Pansies gets that. While Alfie is the viewpoint character, and is very clearly realising throughout the story that home will always be the place he came from, that we see from conversations with Fen a different approach to it all is incredibly important. There is no sense in the story of a rightness to Alfie’s preferences, except for it’s rightness for him. Fen’s going away, and being happy there, is no less right. And this is so rare.

What it most reminded me of, in a strange way, is A Memory Called Empire, which I read and reviewed here and then again here. The second post is the more relevant because it touches on those feelings of wanting the thing away from home. For all that, in the end, the decision in A Memory Called Empire to not be seduced by Away, to come back home again, is absolutely the right one, in so many ways, it is a book that makes you truly understand the position of someone wanting to leave and not regretting it. The character of Yskandr is powerful because he represents a very plausible position – home is not enough. It is so rare, so precious, to get that kind of understanding in books, because I find SFF is, for the “genre of ideas” strangely parochial about small beginnings and homes. Why is it, in stories full of wide worlds and adventures, of a universe bigger than a single planet full of places to go away to and explore, that so many of them end with returning to that small beginning? There’s nothing wrong with it, but I find it so strange that we don’t have more stories of leaving with gladness in our hearts and never, ever going back. Surely that too is a relatable position?

And so we have these two texts, both of which ultimately do end with returnings, but which also both contain the alternative viewpoint, and hold it as comprehensible, as something whose emotional underpinnings we can see and relate to.

Both of them left me feeling a little raw and emotional too. But Pansies in particular does so because it speaks to some very specific British angles that I occupy if not precisely, then sufficiently similarly as to make me pause and reflect. It is very specifically dealing with being from the north, with leaving, with becoming in some way less northern, and thus less “authentic” as a person by the acculturation to the south, and no longer being fully comprehensible to those you left behind. That it does so without falling into the typical factionality of that divide is again, a rare thing. Hall makes the usual jokes. The “yes we have running water up here actually”, the “will you combust if you go further north than Watford”, the “all that posh crap, what we have up here is real food” stuff. The off hand things that people do say all the time, that are a real part of the divide and the tension. But there’s something deeper underneath it being tackled, an awareness that both places have their allures and their failings, and that the impact of both sets of those things can be intensely personal, affecting each person fundamentally differently.

Which brings us around to the second fascinating and well executed axis – gender, sexuality and class and how that all gets bound up in the north south divide. Alfie, the viewpoint character, is a gay man who only learned that about himself in his late twenties, living in London. He feels somewhat new to gayness and relationships with men, and throughout the story finds himself at odds with his conceptions of masculinity – he often sees his relationship with Fen through very heteronormative lines, even as he’s attracted to Fen as a man, for the ways in which is “manly”. When he struggles, it’s often because what he wants is at odds with the person he feels like society – and specifically the cultural context in which he was raised – expects him to be. He’s not entirely wrong either. We meet his parents, we hear the struggle of their expectations, the views on what a family is, what love is, what men and women can and cannot do. Even as he rejects those views on a surface level, we see them come back over and again in how he approaches his relationship with Fen. His idea of himself is crafted upon a specific model of a working class northern man, and this idealised view simply cannot continue alongside his life as a gay man working in investment banking in London, living in a swish penthouse, having strong opinions about wines and wanting to fuck men, and be in the company of people for whom that last bit is normal and discussable.

We meet his London friends at several points in the book, and in every one of those meetings, there’s a tension where they accept the gayness of him, that he wants to fuck men is normal and entirely ok to discuss, but they struggle with many of the other things he cares about. They don’t see the appeal of the place that calls to him as home. They find his conflicts with himself baffling, because they don’t have the same set of cultural ideals.

Meanwhile Fen has rejected a lot of what Alfie is struggling with. He identifies as queer, has seemingly abandoned a lot of the baggage of heteronormativity, and is chafing under the confines of being back in the place that never accepted all that about him. But! In his attraction to Alfie, he too is conflicted because he both wants the Alfie that is, and wants to help Alfie let go of the things that are clearly hurting him in his expectations for his own behaviour. Fen is both charmed and exasperated when Alfie takes him on a date to the restaurant he used to take girls to in his youth. Fen, we realise, has his own baggage about northernness, about class, about gender and sexuality and how we present to the world. It’s just different baggage.

All of this stuff is incredibly difficult. I read back what I’ve written, and in it I see a ghost of the typical “northern working class bad”, the idea that you go up past the home counties and unless it’s more affluent people in urban centres, it’s all 1960s attitudes again. But it’s not. Hall… gets it. In a way that’s really hard to explain without having that same context of, in some way, being both.

I am a thirty-something queer woman, born in Leigh, a small town in the north-west and grew up there and later in Hinckley, another small town in the Midlands. When I was 19, I went away to Cambridge for university. I briefly returned in 2013 after studying for a Masters, but as soon as I got an actual job, I was gone. I have no intention of going back in any long term way, to either place. In truth, neither of those places has been home for me for a very long time. I don’t have the same horrible memories, the same reasons to hate them as Fen does for South Shields in Pansies, but his reaction to leaving of finding his people, his place and the things that made him really him, that felt so real to me. In the darkest, quietest places of my mind, I still think of Cambridge as the home of my heart. Home is a thing I have always moved towards, not away from, and so when I find fiction that acknowledges the validity of that, alongside or in opposition to the rightness of the homecoming, the return, it sings to me in a way that lingers. Hall does all of that, and makes his places both authentic, both real to at least my experiences of north and south, and their own particularities. The north is not a barren wasteland, stranded out of time in the repressive sexual politics of the past. Nor is prejudice the sole province of the working class, nor are they limited to parochial views, embittered shoulder chips and a refusal to accept change. But it would be inauthentic to pretend that there are not differences in some communities in how gender, sexuality and the performance of both are accepted. To pretend that, at least for some people, the ideals of gender, of sexuality, and how they should be performed are harmfully crafted in a way whose only escape is by physically going away.

The worlds Hall writes reflect the complexities of the worlds I, at least, have lived in. For both of the characters in the book, the north has both oppression in the form of disappointed family members and teenagers graffiti-ing slurs onto shop fronts, but it also has acceptance, friendships, people who’ve grown and changed, people who were never as harsh as the worst voices inside your mind told you they might be. It is not a cultural monolith, and nor is the London they went to and left in turn.

More than anything, that is what I crave. Pictures of worlds that are real, or feel real, because they mimic or contain the complexity that exists in reality. Pictures of people, and the stories of people, that do likewise. And so I enjoyed Pansies, sex and cringe and all, because it contained all that. Because it was a story that spoke to things I don’t often talk about but constantly feel. To being someone who has existed in those separate contexts, and has made choices about the one that feels like home to me. It is ultimately a story about finding out what home means, to each person, at each time, and making the right choices individually to create it, with the right person, at the right time, in the right place, together.

I finished listening to it, and found myself feeling a little emotional about the places that are, and have been, home for me. It’s a story that speaks to specificities, but whose specificities echo wider, accessible narratives because the deepest core of the story is one that exists everywhere – there are always people who leave, and people who come back again. It is good to have stories that speak to both of them.

Posted in Else, Romance | Tagged else, Hall, Pansies, Romance | Leave a comment

Three Collections of Reviews

Posted on 16/10/2024 by Roseanna

Reviewing the collected reviews of another reviewer is surely an act of supreme arrogance. Who, I wonder, the fuck am I to say “this is good, actually” or, worse, “this is bad, actually”? The same could, of course, be said for fiction, but I’ve managed to rationalise myself into that one, so I can ignore it¹.

So this is, coward that I am, not a review. It’s more a discussion of three books of criticism I’ve consumed within a relatively short time of each other, and the things they all did differently, and what they made me think about. One of the things that came through most clearly, which I didn’t entirely anticipate, is how much reading a collection of reviews in aggregate ends up making me think of my own reviewing, and how I can be better at it. I suppose that’s the arrogance too, just in a slightly different direction. But while reading a review of a specific work, at the time the review first comes to my notice, I can take it more purely as being centred on its subject (though I may find myself going “oh that was a good one” or similar), but once you start compiling a lot of them together, it becomes about The Review As Craft, in a way that one alone doesn’t need to be. And then, the natural next step is to reflect on it and what it can teach you, if you think it’s good.

In the order I read them:

A Traveller in Time: The Critical Practice of Maureen Kincaid Speller edited by Nina Allan, [Luna Press Publishing, 2023]. Launched at last year’s Fantasycon (where our household gained a copy, though by Ed’s actions rather than mine) and nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Related Work, this is a wide-ranging, thematically organised selection of Speller’s reviews, published posthumously.

All These Worlds: Reviews and Essays by Niall Harrison, [Briardene Books, 2023], also nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Related Work this year, collects some of Harrison’s reviews between 2005 and 2014 chronologically, along with three essays on genre more broadly at the end.

Track Changes: Selected Reviews by Abigail Nussbaum, [Briardene Books, 2024], launched at Worldcon with an interesting discussion of Nussbaum’s views on a variety of SFF topics, a selection of her reviews across a number of years, collected into thematically linked sections.

Even from these brief blurbs, you can see there’s a difference in approach, and one that’s only more clear when reading them. A Traveller in Time (hereafter ATiT because I’m lazy) meanders pleasantly through its various topics, lingering sometimes on a particular author across time as Speller covered a variety of their works as they were released, and came back to particularly strands of their craft, their themes or something else that seemed to niggle. The one that sticks most in my memory is the extended section of reviews of the works of Alan Garner, whom she clearly kept coming back to again and again, and there was something fascinating in that, in seeing the evolution of the author and the response, condensed into a short section of pages.

Abigail Nussbaum, though also approaching her reviews thematically, chooses to be more structured about it, titling her sections – Space, Systems, Places, Bodies, Tales – and collecting within them chronologically the reviews that tie in to each theme. It gives a very clear sense of her priorities – seeing takes on media tackling the same issues helps to crystallise down the crux of her perspective in a way that made each subsequent section feel more deeply contextualised.

Niall Harrison’s collection, meanwhile, is strictly chronological, with a selected number of reviews from each year presented, and so instead the process of reading is the process of walking through highlights of SFF publication across the space of ten years. As the first year covered was the year before I took my GCSEs, and the last one the year after I finished my year in Oxford, a lot of it was before the time where I was properly engaging with SFF in a conscious, adult way, and so it was doubly interesting to see the antecedents of themes, issues and ideas I’m more familiar with, as they built up towards what I already knew.

In some ways, I think I enjoyed it more for that lack of familiarity with most of the subject matter. With Track Changes, by far the collection of the three with the greatest overlap with my own reading, I found myself too often examining each review in the context either of “awww yeah this is a great point, I agree with this” or “hmmm… interesting… would it be a deeply weird decision to reread this book and post a response to this *checks notes* five years after the original review?”². Which is fine, and a very enjoyable reading experience, especially when those opinions are quite so articulately put forth, but it’s a different, more immersed form of reading, inextricable from the source text, to the response to reviews of things I’ve only vaguely heard about.

What this did mean is that Track Changes is the one I flew through the fastest. I am a horribly slow reader of non-fiction, in the usual course of things – ATiT took me about three months of intermittent attention, all told, and it’s a slimmer volume than the other two by far – but it is easy to be propelled along by investment in… well, not arguments, but definitely discussions, even if ones that only really exist between my head and the page. Track Changes exists far more embeddedly in discourses, opinions, texts and takes that I too am engaged with, and it felt… if not a conversation I was in, one of people I knew in just the next room. It helps, too, that while not fully informal, Nussbaum’s tone is far more the one I associate with reviews From The Internet than the other two, and so it felt… well it felt like home, I suppose. I’ve been reading her reviews as I stumble across them online for a while, now, so it was all familiar and excellent and exactly what I was here for.

By contrast, ATiT was also less strict formality, but far less Internet – I was much less familiar with Speller’s writing before reading it, an omission I came to regret, and while I didn’t feel distanced by it, it felt more the informality of a pub conversation with someone who knows what they’re on about. The kind where you’re sipping your drink and nodding emphatically every few minutes. It felt intensely… personable, I suppose the word is? And full of emotion. Hers were by far the set of reviews where I knew straight away on reading it whether she liked the book or not, and it meant there was a sense of personality running through the collection, of a person with likes and dislikes which may have formed and changed over time but nonetheless were there, present and visible on the page, and made the reviews feel… well, felt as well as thought.

And then, on the total other end of the spectrum, where the other two I might consider discursive and opinionated, All These Worlds (hereafter ATW because again, I am lazy) heads far more into the analytical. I often didn’t quite know until nearly the end of each one, if at all, whether Harrison liked the book in question. Instead, they were reviews that seemed determined to understand what made each text tick, the why and the how and the what and the where, and the how it related to everything else that year, that Hugos, that Clarkes and so on.

It is at this point, I cite the Strange Horizons podcast Critical Friends, with Dan Hartland and Aisha Subramanian, and particularly the episode joined by Abigail Nussbaum, as well as a comment either on the post about it on bluesky, or around the same time (I forget) by Dan Hartland. Both things I encountered before reading Track Changes, and before reading most of All These Worlds. Somewhere, in the mix of all that, it was pointed out that Abigail reviews with a sharp focus on politics, and Niall with an eye to how each text fits within the wider genre (a nicer phrasing of which escapes me that was used at the time, but that was the gist). And so, as I was reading, inevitably, both of those conceptualisations of a review lens sat in my head, and kept on proving true.

Particularly, I kept spotting the word “megatext” in ATW. There aren’t actually that many of them (yes I did do a search on my ereader to count them), but given how often I hadn’t encountered the word for the preceding 34 years of my existence, even five or so become notable. And yes, ATW does feel like a collection fascinated by the megatext, what constitutes it, how it changes, and what, maybe, it ought to be, and, in each case, how the text in question can be fitted into it. There’s a spectrum here, from ATiT whose interest is in emotional response, individual quality and perhaps the macro in the sense of a particular author, through Track Changes and its awareness of the discourses various, into ATW and its musings about genre qua genre. Which I found fascinating. Who doesn’t love spending much too long thinking abstractly about what this whole thing means (no, I’m genuinely not being sarcastic… oh, some people don’t love that? Well, sucks to be them, I suppose). More than anything I read in any of these three, it was this that lingered with me, and that caused the most putting down of book and thoughtful staring into space. It’s the only one of the three I felt the need to highlight sections of to come back later, because it was thinking about genre in a way that transcended the constraints of the specific book or books being discussed, and so in a way that can exist and linger outside of those constraints subsequently.

The other thing that was interesting, particularly about ATW and Track Changes, though in some ways about all three, is how in conversation with one another they felt.

The review scene, and even the internet review scene, that I grew up on is clearly different from the one that was five or ten years previous to it. I started reviewing in 2012 (after my final year undergrad exams were done, but all my friends were still revising, so I needed to keep myself entertained but quiet), and while that may have been within the peak period of blogs, I was never really social about it until much later, so I missed out on what I come to hear about through other people’s work, the heyday of reviews being well… a conversation. For me, reviewing has almost always been an exercise in yelling into the void. Even when posting on social media, I’ll far more often get a chat message from a friend to argue a point than an actual, visible, online response. It’s a closed loop, and that’s fine, because it’s always been that for me. But then I hear about a time when it wasn’t, and see the echoes of it here, in people talking about the work of others working around them, and I feel like I missed out. There is something richer, in all three works, for the obvious way they exist in a context full of opinions – whether from the time they were written or the authors’ inclination, these are reviews conscious of the reviews of others, and all the more interesting for it. I’m sure there’s a long German word for nostalgia for a thing you never personally experienced, and this is that. I didn’t expect reading review collections to feel bittersweet.

The other connection between ATW and Track Changes is the parentheticals in some of the reviews, a voice from the future giving insight into predictions made or trends observed. In Track Changes, Nussbaum reviews The Last Jedi, and the weary voice of 2024 talking about where the sequel trilogy went is… well, you can imagine. I enjoyed those snippets, the little asides of the author stepping out of the text to tell you something extra.

Obviously, given the context of its publishing, this wasn’t something possible to do with ATiT. But in some way, it didn’t need it – there’s so much feeling of conversation to each piece of writing that it doesn’t need that little stage whisper to draw you in, because you’re already there. Especially for the pieces covering an author or similar throughout a body of work over time, you get that layered feeling of changing opinions more gradually too, each subsequent return adding something that brings you to a similar place.

More than anything, what I enjoyed in reading each of these, and reading all three close together, was the ability to get a sense of style and themes and focusses, and compare them between each other, to see what looks different in another hand. It’s easy, reading reviews one by one and spread apart, not to think of them as a broader work, the reviewer’s own megatext (sorry). But it’s impossible not to think of them that way when they’re all together and you burn through the whole collection in a couple of days.

I think about style in reviewing a lot. One of the things that is still rumbling around my brain from the worldcon panel about reviewing, and from before, is about reviews as art, reviews as pieces of entertainment writing that can be worthwhile things in and of themselves, if you want to make them that way. And about how you can make them that way. And here sit three very different examples of how to do it. My own answer, in the moment on the panel when called to give an example was “you can make it funny”, which I stand by as one strand, one potential piece of the puzzle. And indeed, all three had moments that made me if not laugh then smirk, and ATiT most of all. But there were other things too. Moments of just pleasing prose, or an interesting line of argument, or a delightfully circuitous aside – things that made them texts worth reading for themselves, not only for their relationship with the works they discussed, or the information they could impart.

And this is the thing I keep coming back to – reviews ought to be good to read. They shouldn’t just be a means of communicating “x book – good or bad?” or “y book – should you read it y/n?”. Those are things they can do, but they should also be just… texts I want to spend time reading. They should be their own joy. And you realise, especially when reading reviews of books you’ve never heard of, books you’ll never read, and yet still not being able to put the collection down, that that’s exactly what’s happening here. Reviews that are more than just plot summary, pros, cons, conclusion. Maybe they’re a lens you never thought to look through on a text, or an enjoyable metaphor, or just some really nice prose and a snarky aside. Maybe all of the above and something else besides. I had a good time reading all three of these collections, and, arrogance though it may be, it kept bringing me back to the thought: how do I do this? How do I make the reviews I write something worth reading?

From A Traveller in Time, I see how to put a human voice into writing, to speak with warmth, knowledge and humour about works, and to interact with stories over and again through time, building on one’s own foundations to get to complex, nuanced, and fascinating places.

From All These Worlds, I see deep analysis, and the kind of broad view that understands the conversation that exists between texts, across time, as well as thinking about what the genre could be, not just what it is. Turning dissection into creation.

From Track Changes, I see the understanding of the political, the other kind of web that binds all these works together, the threads of human things and human concerns amid the abstract. Remembering that the world outside still exists within the world we escape to, and that our understanding of them is the richer for the reminder.

Which isn’t to say I plan to copy any of these approaches. But there’s benefit and enjoyment in reading them, seeing them, and above all continuing to think about them, alone and in conversation. I may have missed out on the blogging heyday, but I hope I can write things that connect into the shape of the genre conversation as it exists now, in the way that all three of these link into their own, at the various times of each review as it was published. And even if I can’t or don’t, I hope collections like this continue to exist, and I keep reading them, simply for the joy of the review as a piece of art, and a piece of a wider discussion. All three gave that in great quantities and different ways, and I would read another volume of each again, if ever there were more of them.

Maybe, coming back to that arrogance, I am saying they’re good, actually. Maybe I can be ok with being a little bit arrogant, just for now.

I jest. I think there is actually a clear difference. When I talk about a piece of fiction, I am ultimately just providing my response – predominantly emotional because that’s what I tend to write – to a piece of art, and I firmly believe that all responses to art are valid, even when they’re daft. I am allowed to respond emotionally to art because that’s the point. But criticism, like all non-fiction, isn’t primarily art (though I would argue one can respond to the artistry involved in the crafting of the review as a text in its own right), and so we stray out of emotional responses to that which is designed to prompt them into assessing someone’s… I don’t know, intellectual rigour, the validity of their arguments, how much sense they make… that sort of thing. And that’s something I can be concerned I don’t have a leg to stand on for. Who the fuck am I, here? ↩︎
Yes, yes it would. Doesn’t mean I’m not tempted though. Especially the one about A Desolation Called Peace. ↩︎

Posted in All, Else, Non-Fiction | Tagged Allan, else, Harrison, Kincaid Speller, Non-Fiction, Nussbaum, Review Collection | 8 Comments

Short Fiction – September

Posted on 28/09/2024 by Roseanna

The more short stories I read, the fewer I find that I love (there are plenty I like, but finding ones that feel special?). I was much more easily impressed five years ago, unfortunately. I suppose when you only read five short stories a year, it doesn’t matter if one or two of them do stuff that a lot of stories do… when you read 50 or 500 though (not that I get anywhere near 500 myself), it begins to become so samey you stop seeing them at all. This is absolutely a subtweet of some of the Hugo short fiction shortlists, as well as perhaps both my past and present selves, for very different reasons.

In any case, what that seems to find me craving at the moment is innovation of form, where short stories really do have the opportunity that longer fiction might lack for that kind of creativity (I think back to 2020’s Hugo nominated “Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island” by Nibidita Sen, which has lingered with me far more than a lot of what I read alongside it or since), or things that focus on the emotional gutpunch more than anything else. I’m struggling a lot with short stories that make me go “yes… and?”, at the moment. Any recommendations for weirder shit would be greatly appreciated.

In any case, I read a bunch of eclectic things this month (yes I am apparently incapable of sitting down and just reading a single volume of an SFF magazine all in one go, so sue me), so here they are.

From Interzone 300:

Hate: A Geneology by Fábio Fernandez

Didn’t really click for me. It’s a bit “wisdom of the ancients” for my taste, and I struggled with the direct, vocative style of the narrative feeling a little overdone. There was a sense of the used car salesman, or just of the patronising, in how often I was being reminded that the story was speaking to me, yes, me specifically, that I didn’t like. Trust me to remember, I beg, especially over so short a space as this. It is not particularly fixed by the sellotape of self-awareness, either:

I trust that by now, Reader, you are aware that I know who you are.
Since my first day here, when I started to feel your presence hovering over me, as if I was inside a movie and you were watching me on a screen, I got used to talking to you as if this all was some sort of lacklustre postmodern novel.

The rest of it, alas, was not interesting enough for me to overcome how much the direct address kept annoying me.

Joanie from Rupture to Rapture by Carlos Norcia

I rather liked this one, almost despite myself at times. A lot of the theme was centred around things I’m not usually all that interested in, but the prose, the author’s grasp of a nice descriptive phrase, really rescued it for me and made me want to keep reading.

Fables by Rachael Cupp

It was like beiong trapped within a vicious net of stars.

That was a rather nice phrase to encounter early on in the story. It made me hopeful. The tone struck by the majority of the story – unsurprisingly for the title – is bang on what you’d expect from instructive stories possibly aimed at children. It is incredibly, instantly nostalgic. But being peppered with little moments of pretty, deft phrases like the one above makes it clear this is for adults (or adults too). It becomes clear that this direct address to the reader is quite specific, and it only makes it better.

It’s a story full of explanations that are all idiosyncratically accurate but also useless, and again, utterly charming for it. A voice shines through, and thus, slowly, a character.

It manages sweet without shifting all the way into schmaltzy, which is difficult and I appreciate immensely.

A trip back in time somewhat on a recommendation:

On Venus Have We Got a Rabbi! by William Tenn (Tablet Magazine, December 27 2016)

This was sold to me as SFF that does religion in an actually interesting way, and while it absolutely delivers that, what sticks with me just as firmly is how clearly it does voice. There is a person telling this story, someone with a whole life and background that works its way into every part of how he tells things. By contrast with Hate: A Geneology, his constant intrusions of paranarrative are delightful, and welcome every single time for the warmth they bring, even as they slow the story down. Very much enjoyed, highly recommended.

We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read by Caroline M. Yoachim (Lightspeed Issue 168, May 2024)

Looping back to my craving for interesting form, we have this one. The two text structure, side by side, and the way the story refers outwards to it, forced me to pause and try to read it as I was instructed, despite this not being at all what my eyes or brain were configured for. The mixed success was not nearly so rewarding as the act of attempting it, and the way the story dragged me into playing along – speaking directly out to the reader works a lot better when you actively coerce their participation in the bit, it turns out.

That being said, I found its repetition not always meaningful, and it felt a little like it lost its way towards the end, before circling back to a punchy finish. I’m glad I read it though, and I think there’s a good chance it might make its way into my Hugo nomination shortlist.

Five Views of the Planet Tartarus by Rachel K. Jones (Lightspeed Issue 164, January 2024)

I did not particularly enjoy Jones’ Hugo nominated short story “The Sound of Children Screaming”, and I’m not immensely fond of this one for similar reasons – there’s a certain type of Hugo-bait story that’s focussed very much on Making A Point and everything else it might be doing falls by the wayside in service of The Point. And I never like them. Sometimes it’s that the Point is one so rooted in US perspective and concerns that it feels remote and ungraspable to me, someone not in the US. Sometimes, like here, it feels unmoored from reality, even as it makes its Point, and so becomes all moral and no substance. The message, such that it is, feels trivial and facile. I roll my eyes. I do not feel like any purpose has been served by making The Point, or any point, in this way, because without the art to intersect with it (and I don’t think, as an object of art, Five Views of the Planet Tartarus holds up to much scrutiny – too blunt for craft, not emotive enough for impact), what is this but just having an opinion about something? I prefer my stories to have a bit more about them, in whatever form that may take.

Stone / Heart / Flesh / Wound by P. H. Low (Heartlines Issue #5, Summer 2024)

It’s basically an AI/computer story through the lens of religion. Which is definitely interesting. The idea of flawed humanity being the filter/lens through which we perceive the divine. I quite liked it.

The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video by Thomas Ha (Clarkesworld Issue 212 – May 2024)

My day job as a freelance re-writer meant I often studied material like this. But typically I would be cleaning up inarticulate copy, trying to make output from some desk producer into something people could understand. My agency mandated simplified phrases and strict grammar rules we had to know by heart[…] The Winter Hills did not have any of those phrases or rules. There were long turns that were not necessarily about efficiency or meaning, but about rhythm. It was a voice I wanted to transpose for myself to feel the words. I was getting lost in the book, but at a pace and flow that felt more like a dissolving comfort than the listlessness of despair.

This section from the middle of the story very neatly articulates how I feel reading complex, weird, unnecessary books. Ha is very good, throughout the story, at capturing little moments of emotion or relatable feeling just so, as this does. When the protagonist takes a second to look at the world and see it in a specific way, when there’s a pause, in those moments, the prose and tone shine.

However the above quoted section, and the story as a whole, feels too pointedly and clunkily about current trends in fiction – whether increasing use of AI or subtler movements towards the easy and the popular in place of the challenging or the good – for it to completely land for me.

When it moves on, when it shifts into thinking about grief, about memory and about objects, it becomes a bit more poignant, a bit more gentle in its messaging, and it works all the better for it. The passages specifically about the protagonist’s mother, her habits and her collecting, land the clearest and the hardest, rounding it out at the end to something very worthwhile, but not 100% balancing out the slightly clumsy over-emphasis of the messaging in the centre.

Poetry

The Soldier and Death by Rachel Ayers (Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #48)

Most of my experience with poetry falls into two rather distinct camps – written by Ancient Greeks or Romans before 100AD, or published in the last few years and predominantly focussed on themes of nature. Almost none of it is speculative. So I struggle to find a framework to talk about contemporary speculative poetry, at least until I’ve done a bit of work to bring myself up to speed. They can’t all be Harry Josephine Giles (more’s the pity). What little I have read is mostly from Strange Horizons, which is great, but means there’s a distinctive flavour to it all – I am starting to become familiar enough to sense a set of preferences in there, even if I can’t quite put my finger on exactly what they are, and that they don’t entirely align with what I look for in my poetry. I’m a big fan of rhythm, of fluidity, and putting some distance between moral arguments and the words on the page. Not absence, but a bit of subtlety. Poetry, for me, is a perfect site for subtlety, obfuscation and ambiguity, and I tend to find it a shame when those aren’t put to use. I also prefer emotionality and immersion in description to action or cute concepts, on the whole.

By all of those metrics, I shouldn’t really like The Soldier and Death, and yet I somewhat do. I cannot quite justify it, except that there are little peaking hints of subtlety around the corners of something that feels less so. It is what it is.

Along the River’s Edge by Daniel A. Rabuzzi (Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #48)

This meanwhile is far more in the metier of things I know I like. This is far more a poem invested in the (extremely efficient) creation of an atmosphere, a sense of space and movement in the natural world, which is much more where I feel at home. Short lines, snappy repetition, artfully inventive descriptions that cut out all but the most essential pieces and thus leave some of the work up to the reader. The brisk pared-down-ness of its language renders it simultaneously direct and ambiguous, and I rather love it.

In Slumber We Rehearse Our Days by Angela Acosta (Heartlines Issue #5, Summer 2024)

The rustle of sheets jogs my memory—
she knows the choreography,
yet forgets to turn off the light nightly.
Asleep, we relax into thoughts of togetherness.

I like the prosaicness of this excerpt, and the poem as a whole. It’s happy to inhabit sensation of the moment in a situation much less grandiose than one might expect.

There’s also something very charming about the slightly clunky feel of the SFFnal language the poem employs – it feels deliberate more than it does awkward. I personally struggle with reconciling “photons gliding / across galaxies warped by gravity” and xenobotany with poetry because I encounter the two wholly separately, for the most part, but that feels more of a me problem than anything else. It works here because it is in service to the prosaic, evocative description, at least for me.

Favourites of the month:

Prose – On Venus Have We Got a Rabbi!
But if we’re talking things from this year, then We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read.#

Poetry – Along the River’s Edge, easily.

Posted in All, Poetry, Short Stories | Tagged Clarkesworld, Fantasy, Heartlines, Interzone, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Lightspeed, Lightspeed Magazine, Poetry, SF, Short Fiction, Short Fiction Monthly, Strange Horizons, Tablet | Leave a comment

In the Shadow of the Fall – Tobi Ogundiran

Posted on 25/09/2024 by Roseanna

I read this on holiday, and had no particular intention to review it… until I saw someone else had reviewed it*, and drew particular attention to how it works with the constraints of the novella format. Because my chief response to having read it was that it failed to do precisely that. So now I want to talk about it, and particularly about simplicity.

But first – In the Shadow of the Fall is the start of a planned duology, following Ashâke, a girl raised in a temple in training for priesthood, but who has never heard the gods call to her to ascend into that role as her contemporaries have, and so remains years later still stuck, frustrated and hurt, as an acolyte. We follow her attempt to reach out to the gods directly, her rebellion against her temple, and her running away from it out into the world and subsequent shenanigans. It’s playing with themes of chosen ones and destinies and whatnot, while being a pacey, adventurous coming of age type story. I should stress, I enjoyed it fine, but felt it had a number of key weaknesses that meant I was never able to progress from like to love.

And they all boil down to that simplicity – Ogundiran has responded to the constraints of novella format by paring things down. Some people do that by reducing the scope of the story – focussing on a short period of time, a smaller set of stakes, a particular moment or singular event. Ogundiran has elected instead to cover a bigger section of events such as might constitute a novel elsewhere, including multiple POVs, but instead reduce down how it’s told, cutting out the metaphorical packing material around the fragile core of the story. It’s an approach that could work, I’m sure, but for me, here, it does not, because it takes away the grounding that the character arc desperately needs to make it believable.

Spoiler incoming, be warned.

Still with me? Ok, so Ashâke has been raised her whole life in the temple. Yes, she’s frustrated with it, with what she perceives as the gods’ rejection of her, or ignoring her, but it has been her whole life. Critically, she has met at least one person with a magical gift that indicates the favour of a specific god – she has a conversation with him about it and everything, where she figures this out about him herself. She isn’t told this, it is something that she has concluded from evidence, and only then had confirmed for her. And yet, when she runs away, when she meets some new people who tell her a story about how actually all the gods are dead and all the people she has known her whole life have lied about the calling they felt, and so she’s ultimately been conned, she believes it immediately. Why? I can construct reasoning for it. I can logic it out. But the text does not do the work for me to make that kind of instantaneous about-face emotionally plausible. She just accepts it. Straight away. She’s upset, of course, and we do get time spent on that impact of it, but we get very little doubt, emotional turmoil, or sense of the process or background to her being able to make that kind of worldview inversion. It’s only been a few pages since she chatted to that someone with a magical gift from the gods! We need something of substance to get us to buy into why she is rejecting that knowledge – something she was able to deduce from evidence in the world – in favour of new information from people she doesn’t know. The text needs to do the work to sell it to us. And it doesn’t. Because it does not have the time to do so – to keep the story pacey, to fit in all the events that are going to occur before the final page, we simply need to accept this and move on to other things. This is how Ogundiran pares things down to the constraint of the novella.

To be clear, this isn’t an objection to the protagonist being irrational. I think, in the circumstances the character is in, her being emotionally affected, irrational and impulsive all would, theoretically, make a lot of sense and be far more believable than someone crisply logical in the same position. My issue instead is with her not being given sufficient processing time on page to make that irrationality feel right. Decisions don’t have to be logical, but I have to feel like I get why this character, in this time and in this place, made them, and how she got there. And that’s what feels like is missing.

Which is such a shame, because I get the sense that this is a story that, if given the time to breathe, could have done exactly that. I tend not to like impulsive, rebellious, impassioned young heroines running away from quiet lives, but this one… I felt like this one I could buy into. And so when that initial promise of emotional grounding gets lost in the need to rush from event to event, it feels all the more disappointing for that glimmer of unexpected promise.

To focus less on what the story doesn’t do for a moment, I will say that it is a plot-forward narrative – it is direct, pacey and events-driven, with a lot going on, so if what you want is those things, if you want to be carried along by a story? That, it will absolutely provide. While the prose is not of the sort that makes you linger over delicious phrases, when you pause to consider, it is clearly how carefully and tightly crafted it is – indeed, it has to be, to cover the amount of ground Ogundiran gets through in so few pages. When world-building is paused over, he has a knack for clear, vivid imagery – I particularly remember a scene where oral storytelling literally immerses the listener in the events being described – as well as immediately distinctive character voices. We do not get a lot of visual cues for every person we meet, but if they speak, we know them and know them well. There are also some promising and satisfying hints of the breadth and complexity of the wider world beyond the confines of the story – cities and polities that are not described, but mentioned in passing in ways that suggest they may come back in future and in well-realised depth. Nothing is spelled out comprehensively; it’s not that sort of story. And I am, in general, very much in favour of that approach, especially as regards both magic systems and religions**. The kind of exhaustive completionism that gives a book the air of the RPG about it for me often kills the very magic the author seeks to evoke – intricate, perfect logic that feels crafted in a single, comprehensive stroke are, for me, the greatest enemies of mysticism and grandeur. Both the magic and the divine, to me, are products of humanity (or whatever equivalent peoples a given story), and like cities must grow organically, full of inefficiencies, oddities and contradictions, in order to feel like they come from a true place. In this metaphor, Brandon Sanderson might be Milton Keynes? Which feels a little unfair to the man, but only a little. In any case, Ogundiran, whether through deliberate choice or the need to keep the story simple and directed, has eschewed that need for comprehensive overexplanation, and the magic and mystic in his story is all the better for it, and for the fact that he draws on real-world deities. For me, at least, it is easier to believe in when no one in the story feels that it needs explanation.

So if you don’t care that the characters never wallow in their emotional processing, and aren’t invested in a magic system you can turn into a physics engine, I do see how there would be a great deal here to recommend it. But as someone who does care about the former, it never quite lands for me. It makes me want to read it as a full length novel instead, to see quite what it could do given that little bit more time.

The older I get and the more I read, the more I realise how deeply my enjoyment of books, of stories, links up to the emotional coherence and tangibility of their characters. Not likeability, because I can absolutely get on very well with a story full of asshats. But I have to feel like I have a handle on what makes them tick, and why they do as they do, whatever that do might be. The more I also realise… that’s apparently not what everyone else is always after. People have different preferences, go figure.

Which is why reading that Strange Horizons review was so interesting – I see in what Mittra has written not one of those boggling “we read entirely different books” takes, but exactly the same story as the one I read. Every feature she mentions, I go “yes, exactly that”, it is only our reaction to it that differs. She even highlights the feature I dislike about it: “But if I had to nitpick, I would note that the latter half of the text is rather rushed”. We are clearly focussing on different things, or affected by different things, however. And it is such a rare, precious thing to get this kind of insight into a book I didn’t love, from someone who saw it so clearly, and yet so differently to me. It is, on the best days, what a good book club is for. What reviews can be for – a window into a different framework on a piece of literature, that allows me to shift my own perspective for a little while, to see things differently. It doesn’t change my own opinion of it, but that little interlude of comprehension is its own small kind of marvel.

And so I am glad that I read both book and review, for the sake of that momentary perspective change, if nothing else.

*Archita Mittra in Strange Horizons, review here. It’s a very good review (we just clearly took to the book very differently), but I am amused how immediately upon reading it, I felt the need to spell out my own opinion in response. In conversation? Something.
**I spent too long studying the ancient world to fully detach these two things in my head, for good or for ill.

Posted in All, Fantasy | Tagged Fantasy, In the Shadow of the Fall, Novella, Ogundiran, Reviews in Conversation | Leave a comment

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

Posted on 21/09/2024 by Roseanna

When you say of a book “oh it’s doing a lot of things”, that’s normally at least a subtle burn, a mild sass. The implication is one of too many balls juggled, and thus at least a couple dropped. But here, please take me strictly and entirely literally when I say – oh, it’s doing a lot of things.

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley is, all at once, a romance, an SF, a mystery, a thriller and a spy novel. Yes, really, all of those, simultaneously, while also grappling with a main character who is mixed race within the system of British institutional racism and busy being a chaotic 30-something who isn’t a millennial because this is the future, but totally feels like a millennial. Somehow, none of these balls are dropped. In the space of a totally normal length novel, Bradley has done justice to all of her separate, disjointed threads, and while doing so, delivered some absolutely exquisite foreshadowing, and complex character work the likes of which I rarely see in genre fiction. If “morally grey” as a term hadn’t been thoroughly eroded into meaningless oblivion, I would say she had captured the spirit of it within several of her characters perfectly, but in its absence instead find – compromised but compelling motivation, a value system that is visibly struggling with itself throughout the novel, a set of choices made both incorrect and yet entirely sympathetic and explicable. It’s truly delicious.

But what is it actually about?

We follow an unnamed protagonist (an interesting choice, whose meaning I’m still pondering over*), the daughter of a Cambodian mother and a white father, who works for one of the more secretive branches of the British civil service as a translator. After applying for a mysterious but well paid internal job role, she finds herself acting as a “bridge” – a liaison for a person pulled out of their time (close before their known death, so they won’t be missed) and into her own through a mostly unexplained door into the past that the Ministry have got their hands on. Her job is to live with him, educate him and help facilitate his assimilation into the modern world – parallels are drawn frequently between the subjects (referred to officially by their year of origin) and modern-day refugees, and to the protagonist’s own mother, whom she frequently recalls rejecting exactly that label.

Labels, language, assimilation, education, viewpoints and cultural mores – all form a scaffolding around the core of the story. The way that the subjects are talked about, the way that refugees are talked about, feels inextricable from the context of modern Britain – this is very British racism and very British responses to racism, very British sensitivity training and adherence to the form of politeness and moral rectitude, even as those the system purports to be helping chafe under its rigidity and inability to accommodate the vast variability of people. We see this from several angles – there is the protagonist, who passes as white as often as she can, who strives to be part of the machinery of power; there is her sister, a writer, whom the protagonist describes with disdain, uncomfortable with how she is willing and capable of spelling out her feelings, her memories and her opinions about her place within her world and the legacy of their mother’s immigration and experiences all online for anyone to read; there is Simellia, the protagonist’s black co-worker, who tries to forge bonds of solidarity, of shared experience under the same dubiously-intentioned system but whose attempts are rebuffed or misunderstood, and whose more liberation-focussed politics alarm the protagonist. Three triangulated viewpoints on the same problems; three ways of coping with the system. What is particularly interesting is how the perspective of our unnamed narrator influences this – we feel her disdain palpably when she talks about how her sister reacts, but that disdain more than anything gives us insight into her. Bradley does a magnificent job of not… an unreliable narrator, per se, but a biased one, letting us see her as she is through how she sees others. Her emotions are often unclear to her, but through her actions and reactions, through the undercurrent of discomfort that so often comes with her thoughts, we see a picture of someone trying to navigate difficult, complex waters in a way that prioritises her own survival.

The narrative does not feel as though it judges her, exactly. But nor does it support. We are simply presented with a person in a place, whose choices, whether good are bad, are made comprehensible through their context. For all that I did not always agree with or like those choices, I could always see where they came from, and was deeply invested in following where it all led – she felt, always, like a real person responding to very real pressures.

I am, of course, not the person to talk to for experiences of racism in Britain being, as I am, white, but for what little its worth, the way that it was portrayed felt very real to me, especially because we are given viewpoints into such differing responses to the same situation. I also just… really liked Simellia. She is such a contrast to the protagonist in so many ways, and we need her to highlight exactly what sort of person that protagonist isn’t, by giving us someone with those exact traits – forthrightness, bluntness, idealism. And yet, at the same time, she is just as conflicting and contradictory – her growing anti-establishment feeling in such obvious opposition to her job within the government.

In many ways, that use of characters, and the writing of them into such vividly real people, is Bradley’s great strength in the novel. The protagonist, in all her great depth and complexity, is the real tour de force, but there are others around her who get enough work, enough time, to make them entirely gripping as well. Whether it’s the gentle Arthur pulled from 1916, the newly-ragingly lesbian fashionista and film-addict Margaret from the 17th century, many of the people we meeting throughout the story manage impressive feats of contradiction, pulled into something that nonetheless makes them feel fully realised. The only exception to this is perhaps the other 17th century visitor, a consistently unpleasant man whose historical patriachalism only intensifies with exposure to the modern world. But we see little of him, and he is more than made up for by the most prominent and interesting of the historical subjects – Commander Graham Gore.

Gore, pulled from Franklin’s disastrous polar expedition of the mid-19th century, is just as much a study in contrasts as the others. He is pulled from the height of empire, a military man who had participated in the violent expansion of British interests – he is thoroughly contextualised over and again throughout the story, and his participation in British colonialism is never hidden or downplayed. He is, however, to the protagonist’s view, personally charming, intelligent, thoughtful, respectful, and willing to learn… up to a point.

There could be a whole essay to write about how Bradley approaches historical ethics and mores and the extent to which people are immutably defined by the morality of the time they come from. The way that they each respond to being pulled through time, what they do and do not cling to from their own time, the lessons they each take (or don’t) from their introduction to modern history… none of them are condemned as irredeemable, even when their moral starting position may be abhorrent to a modern view, but neither are they all easily and perfectly rescued by the moral rectitude of the present day. They push back, in different ways, to different things. Sometimes, they push back and the reader (or at least this reader) is forced to think “well… they may have a point”. Sometimes it seems just an inability to accept change. Bradley never abandons the historicity of a character, never has them step outside what feels plausible to who they are, but still makes them into something we can connect to, on some level. The whole complexity of humanity and all that.

But Gore is the epitome of it, if only because we spend so much time with him, the subject of our protagonist’s work. And… yes, the object of her growing affections, as it soon becomes clear – and as we see through her eyes, we see why she would fall for someone like him. It is sometimes a straight romance, and sometimes played for little laughs, the mutual bafflement of two people from such different worlds, but it is such a sweet and compelling thing at times, full of Gore’s charm and the protagonist’s awkwardness, and I found it very easy to get sucked into it, even as someone who is not a habitual reader of romances.

And then… it’s sitting right alongside all of the institutional racism, all of the potentially dubious ethics, the growing sense that something isn’t right with this project, with the ministry. You have to doubt the romance, because the context against which it appears is so shadowed and concerning. You have to wonder, is this ok? Is this right? Because you wonder if the protagonist is ok, if she is in the right. Are either of them capable of this, in this way? Should this be being allowed to happen? You have to sit with your feelings of wanting the romance to go ahead because it is so aesthetically pleasing, because Gore is so charming, so alluring, and yet the logical understanding that there are problems all the way down with the whole thing. There are no easy solutions, no clear answers, and Bradley is happy to trust the reader to come to their own conclusions about… well… everything. It is never a didactic story, and that is another of its great strengths – instead of giving heavy implications about the correct or incorrect path, it simply presents a horrible, messy, complex situation, with various actors within it doing their best, and invites you to watch along, and to understand. It is a book full of understanding, of situating and contextualising people and decisions, and does so by consistently presenting ones that defy clear solutions – they are things to take away and chew on afterwards, things to wonder at later.

For myself, I often found the protagonist… if not wrong, then deviating from the paths I feel I would take in her place. But I can never quite bring myself to dislike her for them, because why she is who she is is made so plain on the page. She makes mistakes – mistakes she acknowledges and understands, if sometimes only in the messy aftermath – and we know that we are watching someone who is Going Through It, as well as the ones we spot and think she doesn’t. The narrative is told by her, in the past tense, so we have the benefit of her own hindsight, and the occasional foreshadowing editorialising on the decisions she thinks were total clangers. It’s not an intrusive narrative voice, for the most part, but it drops in sufficiently often that you can never forget that this is being told by a future self – this is someone who knows how the story will end, and is never… all that optimistic about it. The sense is given very early on that shit will, at some undetermined point, absolutely go down, and so much of the story is spent wondering which shit and how badly, and when, did we miss the turning? Are we there yet? Oh! Oh…

This is the crux of what I think this is, as a story – one about mistakes, about human fallibility and the possibility of growth, moving on from what you’ve ruined, and from being the kind of person who ruins it, and making something (and someone) better in the aftermath. Only… maybe with time travel, which complicates that a whole bunch.

Personally, I think those many different genre aspects all play together really well. The romance, the SF, the spy-thriller, the mystery, the lit-fic adjacency, every one of them for me feels like it has a part to play in the story that results – it’s not a mess, but a narrative deliberately choosing to ignore genre boundaries, and instead tell a story that could not exist without transgressing them. It feels, constantly, artful. Everything feels so carefully placed, so artful, that I feel no lack for what is not explored. But, I am conscious, it will not necessarily be for everyone – by choosing to embrace such a broad variety of tools from such a wide selection of genres, the story cannot be constrained by the normal rules that define each of them. SF, spy thrillers, romances, and so on, they all have their narrative conventions, the expectations readers bring with them about the sort of story something will be, but when you start bundling so many different things together, you being to be pulled in so many different directions that they cannot all be satisfied. The Ministry of Time consistently chooses to flout the conventions of the genres that collaborate to make it, because it must, lest it feel tied down into the only decisions it could ever possibly make in the circumstances. Bradley chooses to forge her own path, at every point. This is always risky – I am just as guilty as any other reader of struggling when an e.g. SF story does not give me what I’ve come to expect from them. If you want in depth exposition about the technology of time travel, this is not the place for it. It is simply not something the author, or the story, is interested in providing, because it’s irrelevant to where things go, to the themes, to the focus. It would be a distraction. But it does make it feel less of an SF book for the lack of it. Again, for me, that worked – it feels fresh and complex and desperately thoughtful, a story unfettered by trope and convention. But if such genre-bending isn’t your thing, this has it in absolute spades, so may be one to avoid.

It’s the sort of book I want to see more of, though. This year (and last) for me have been great ones for the genre I will call “weird shit” – things that defy boxes and expectations, that are willing to take risks to create something unusual, whether in structure, in prose, in worldbuilding or, as here, in the genre sandpit(s) they choose to play in. Such stories rarely comfort, rarely make things easy, but often reward the difficulty with lasting impact. This, like so many of the weird stories I’ve read in the last few years, is one I anticipate mulling over for some time, and one I would be deeply unsurprised to find myself coming back to in future, and having entirely different takes the second time around. There’s simply so much in there, so many threads to pull, viewpoints to explore, lenses to look through. I want to talk about it. I want to make other people read it, so we can disagree about it, so we can talk about our wildly different respective frameworks for thinking about it, so we can realise just how wildly variant our reading experiences of it will be. Because they absolutely will. It’s just that sort of book.

I hope a bunch of SFF people read it, because I think it’s trying to do something properly thoughtful. My fear is that it will suffer from what often happens when people from “outside” of SFF use its tools in a different way to the norm – accusations of not understanding the genre, of trying it on like fast fashion and discarding it, and dismissal, which so often happens to books that cross the line from litfic into SFF. And for sure, not all of them do so successfully. But sometimes that act of immigration brings with it a new perspective on what might be growing stale, or a different way of handling something seen many times before. I think this is one of those books.

*Although we never learn her name, we are aware of it constantly in her frequent comments – people mispronouncing it, people not using it, people getting it right. It is an absence that weighs heavy on the narrative.

Posted in All, Awesome, Else, Literary, Romance, Science Fiction | Tagged Awesome, Bradley, else, Genre bending, Literary, SF, The Ministry of Time | 5 Comments

These Burning Stars – Bethany Jacobs

Posted on 05/09/2024 by Roseanna

It says something about where we are in SF, that an author can just say “jump gates”, never explain them, and expect the reader to follow along just fine. It also says something about what the author is – and isn’t – interested in exploring.

Theoretically, practically, These Burning Stars is a science fiction novel. It’s set in a multi-planetary polity, with space ships and station, mining colonies on moons and hackers and encrypted data, body mods and physical regeneration technology. And, indeed, jump gates. The jump gates are actually pretty important. But for all that, for all that tech and implied space-future-ness… it doesn’t actually feel all that much like an SF novel, I think in large part because absolutely none of those trappings of science fiction are important to the story – they are simply the set-dressing. What this actually is is a story about conflict and oppression within a brutal and corrupt theocracy, alongside some good old fashioned revenge, interpersonal drama and complex, compelling character relationships and growth.

Of course, SF books can absolutely be about all those things, as this one is. I’m not saying otherwise. But it is unusual to find one quite so uninterested in digging into the building blocks of its world as Jacobs is in These Burning Stars. The technology isn’t interrogated at any point, is barely explained, in a way I would only expect to see in the lightest and schlockiest of space operas. And this is very much neither of those things. Also… I am so here for it.

For my many sins, I don’t actually give much of a shit about space travel, or future technologies, simply for themselves. If you start telling me how your interstellar travel works scientifically, I’m gonna glaze over until we get to the next paragraph. I am weak of spirit and moral fibre, I’m sorry. So what kind of fool am I to read SF then? Well… the kind who really likes it when I understand how the tech fits into the world culturally, socially, politically, and so on. I am not interested in the nuts and bolts of objects, but I am interested in people, and things that have an effect on people, and so the SF that draws me in is the kind that tells me not what its tech is, but how it affects the world around it. Ninefox Gambit is possibly the apotheosis of the type – Yoon Ha Lee goes as far as to make the tech deliberately ungraspable and it is beautiful to me right in my soul, because it renders all of it down only to its effects on the world around it, without being distracted by the irrelevant, nitpicky little details of the what and how. While it does not soar to such calendrically heretical heights (god, maybe I need to do a reread, that was the good shit), Jacobs is far more in that mould in her worldbuilding than the kind I was first introduced to. The time that might, elsewhere, have been devoted to explaining casters (hackers/programmers of some kind) or exactly what type of ship a warkite is (smallish, I think), instead gets funnelled primarily into two areas.

The first, and the most major, is the characters. This is predominantly a character-driven story, orbiting around three/four major players and their relationships with each other and each other’s actions leading back into the past. Mainly, it’s interested in two of them – Chono and Esek, both clerics in the religious wing of the tripartite government(ish) of this interplanterary world, working together to hunt down someone from their shared past who may pose a threat to them individually, as well as to the Kindom they represent. They are… quite different, as characters, but their relationship with each other is central to the story, and something we see playing out across a number of years (chronological narrative? naaaah). Chono I found deeply sympathetic, often painful, intensely emotive and, at times, rather relatable. She has a lot of past to grapple with, and does so, with the swinging inconsistencies of a real human rather than the clear direction of someone with a narrative arc to be getting on with.

Esek, though. Esek is a monster, but she is a fascinating monster, and besides everything else her being as she is is probably the most effective bits of world-building in the book*. It tells us so much about how the society around her works, how her privilege works – and how so much of that society doesn’t work. Which is the crux of why I think this book works so well for me – it is built, right from the very start, on showing us exceptions and shattered rules. Whenever we are told that something in the Kindom is a certain way, we’re immediately shown an exception to it. We meet Esek Nightfoot, a cleric, part of the religious arm. But she’s training cloaksaan, the military wing, and only ever does so, in spite of the rules. We meet Chono, trained by Esek… but then becoming a cleric herself, in spite of all her espionage and violence. Time and again we see a constructed system and the person who breaks it, across all realms of the world – people breaking social mores, religious conventions, performing their culture or gender in unexpected ways. And Esek is at the heart of that, someone who is literally a part of the establishment in both ways that matter – a significant figure in the clerical institution and an important part of one of the most influential families in the worlds – and someone who keeps on breaking the law, flouting her orders and defying the instructions of her family. And we see her getting away with it, which speaks volumes about the sort of society in which someone like her could survive and thrive.

We also just have to spend time sitting within the perspective of someone just… really rather awful. She’s not morally grey. She’s not redeemable. Even in the eyes of those who follow her, she’s more often compared to a dangerous animal than anything else. But nonetheless, we see the story through her perspective. One might expect her to be humanised through that, her position given sympathy. A terrible childhood, or perhaps a redeeming focus on… some worthy cause. Nope. She’s just quite awful. And we sit with that. We can see some of the explanation for it, in some of the past-ier flashback chapters, how the family she comes from and the world she lives in shape the person she became. But the narrative never feels like it’s excusing her or apologising for her. It simply offers understanding, and we can come along for the ride.

It’s such a good decision. More stories should do it. Relatability be damned (sorry Chono). Give readers complex shitheads to watch sometimes. Make them fascinating.

And then, and then, give us the perspective of someone with much more human, sympathetic emotions, and have that person idolise and follow the monster. Let them grapple with their overwhelming loyalty to the monster. Let them do terrible things, things they keep on regretting through the story, for the monster’s sake. Let us all wallow in the MESS. It’s delicious.

The second area that dedication goes into is the religion/government/polity/I don’t even really know what to call it that governs the Kindom. We learn about the wealthy, corrupt (natch) families who exert power over it. And we learn about the three-part system that rules it as a theocracy in the name of the mostly-unexplained Godfire, and the often-referenced-and-sometimes-explained gods. The ruling of the Kindom is done by three Hands – clerics (the actual religioning), cloaks (a combined espionage and military wing) and secretaries (basically all of the admin and law). This sounds so terribly simple and neat that I’d expect to see it in an extremely traditional, subpar fantasy novel. And yet… it works. All the rule-breaking referenced above, alongside a healthy dose of inter-hand feuding and general mess makes something that could have been a little tragic instead feel remarkably real, and terribly brutal. There is a constant thread through the book of the cruelty of this world, of this system of government, a horror baked in from the earliest and a disregard for life as a constant throughout. We are given no illusions to cling to about righteousness in the system here.

And then there’s the religion itself. I find religion in SFF often tricky – whether it’s the sort of fantasy where the gods literally rock up and the functional, mundane side of the religion is barely acknowledged, or the sort that thinks an enlightened future will have dispensed with it entirely, there are a range of options that simply do not acknowledge how critical a force within much of human existence it has been and can be. So I love it when I get a story that gets it, as Jacobs does here. Devotion is highly variable across individuals, religion is as much a worldly tool as a connection to any kind of divinity, and it is extremely variable across geography and culture. The different people we meet interact with their gods, well… differently. Some favour the one with a geographical connection they share. Some just have favourites. Some don’t. There’s a group of people important to the plot called the Jeveni whose approach to religion sees them oppressed by the wider Kindom – they don’t worship the Godfire, and practice their own traditions in secret, maintaining them in the face of societal hate for hundreds of years. No blandly unifying pseudo-spirituality here, thank you very much.

Like so much in the story, religion is made impactful because we primarily see it through its effect on characters – whether on our protagonists or the people moving through the world around them, or society at large – and it is here that it becomes clear how effectively constructed a book this is. It is constantly drawing ideas back to the complexity that makes people, at every scale, plausible, and so no matter where it takes place, in what distant space future, it feels constantly real. It is a story willing to take an unflinching look at the worst humanity can do to itself, sometimes even through the eyes of those who perpetrate it, while also giving space to the better, and for the people who strive for something good, or something more.

If I have one bone to pick, it is entirely a personal niggle. The plot leaps around between a number of time periods, and each chapter header gives you a date for when it occurs. In numbers. Which I then promptly forgot, every single time, and had to skim back to the previous chapter to work out where they existed in relation to one another, essentially retagging them in my head as “the present”, or “the past” or “the even more past”. I have this problem with all media that gives me dates like this (unless they’re historical ones I am already passing familiar with) – I simply do not retain them. I don’t feel I can actually hold this against Jacobs, somehow.

And if that’s the only complaint I can muster…

Truly, this was a fascinating read. It took a long time for me to feel like I had any sense of where things might be going, but never did I resent that. Jacobs keeps you invested in the ride regardless, and for me, that investment came first and foremost from how well-drawn her characters were, and how that portrayal of graspable humanity spilled over into everything that touches on human existence surrounding them. It is not, for the majority of its length, a fast paced book (although the final section does ramp up somewhat, without feeling too hurried), but it’s one that made me want to keep on picking it up, keep on wondering what exactly was coming just around the corner of the next chapter. Although it’s the first book in a series (a trilogy? probably a trilogy), it felt like a complete story in its own right, with a genuine ending that gives deserving pay-off to all the build up of the story. I have no idea what could possibly come in book two… but given that I had no idea what was coming chapter to chapter? I’m alright with that. And I am absolutely here for the ride.

*This is a direct quote from my notebook that I wrote relatively early in reading. If you’ve finished the book… well. I like how coming back to this knowing the ending feels.

Posted in All, Awesome, Science Fiction | Tagged Awesome, Jacobs, SF, Space Opera, These Burning Stars | 5 Comments

Short Fiction – August

Posted on 28/08/2024 by Roseanna

So, fun fact, I do actually read short fiction. Do I ever blog about them? No. Because I suck, apparently. Literally there’s no reason behind it, I’ve just never got into the habit (ha! foreshadowing) like I have with novels and novellas.

But that is going to change! I am determined. So I’m going to try to post at least monthly a round up of short fiction I’ve read, what I’ve enjoyed, what I’ve not enjoyed and anything I’m looking forward to.

Old Habits Die Hard by Lawrence Harding (stumbled upon on Bluesky)

Did I buy this just for the name? Not just, but it did help. The author billed this as containing “loving references to Cadfael, The Legend of St Eustace, The Dream of the Rood, blinged-up relics, Definitely not starring Jason Statham” and I… am a sucker for a number of those things, so it worked.

We follow a monk exiled from his monastery to a remote hillside, called back ~~for one last job~~ to help investigate unusual goings on since the new abbot has taken the reigns. He and his fellow brothers must sneak back in and discover why their saint is suddenly pouring out miracles like never before, and whether the previous abbot’s death was as innocent as it appeared.

It is absolutely action-Cadfael. Statius, the protagonist, like Cadfael, is a monk with a bit of real-world experience. He can beat up a man if the situation calls for it. He’d just rather not. We get the same war between the pragmatism of experience and what faith and a life of faith dictates, though obviously in less depth, and watch as he comes to terms with having to use those old skills again. It’s a good trope, and one done well here.

It’s a little snippet of action, with enough work in the crevices to make the character and his position in the narrative make emotional sense, and his story to feel meaningful. The action doesn’t overwhelm everything, and it solves the problem of the format by skipping out on the “mystery” part, instead giving you a fairly direct line of problem > solution – it’s not about solving the puzzle, just about the journey to get you to the end.

I definitely enjoyed, and will very happily read more in this world, as will hopefully exist in future.

Lips Like Sugar – Cynthia Gómez (Ignyte Award Shortlist)

So it probably tells you everything you need to know about my approach to vampires when I say that I grew up on three primary versions of them in the media – Anne Rice novels, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the kind of text-based, free form roleplay web forums that proliferated in the early-2000s, when I was a teenager. I’m not sure it says good things about me, but it is what it is*.

In any case, the person that those pieces of vampire media have made me is so extremely into lips like sugar. Like, I cannot even begin to explain. It is exquisitely on vibe for “horny sexy cool vampires”, without being the trashfire a lot of sexy vampire media ends up being. And I think the key part of that is we’re getting the interiority of the vampire herself, and seeing that sexiness and horniness tempered by the reality of her existence. Not in a big melodrama oh woe is me for I am cursed for all eternity sort of way, though – Gómez is more interested in the more mundane realities of that unlife. There’s a delicate balance being maintained here, between the earthy reality and the magical, surreal quality overlaid onto it by the vampiric lust, beautifully embodied by Gómez’ prose. Most stories would pick one or the other, but I found myself delighted by this middle path, tempering the extremities of either option without reducing their effectiveness to the story – Viviana can be both, can embody both, and feels a more realised character for it.

And that’s mostly what this story felt like to me: a deep, vivid embodiment of a character in a particular moment, a particular existence. That’s not a criticism; it’s exactly the sort of story I adore, especially in short form. There is some plot, of course there is, but after setting it down, that plot somewhat fell away in my memory, leaving instead the impressions and emotions that are conveyed so well. It’s a story to feel, not to think, and I felt intensely.

The Goddess of Loneliness and Misfortune by Anna Bendiy (khōréō volume 4, issue 1)

I liked this one, but it has left less of an impact on me than some. There are a lot of good ingredients to it – the way it tells a story in the margins of bigger stories that we don’t need to see in totality to understand the place they hold around this one, picking up the traditional three quests style narrative and reworking it into something newer, the way the viewpoint character’s sadness and exhaustion carry through the story so constantly – but it’s not quite got the magic for me to make it sing.

I think the issue somewhat lies in that reworking of the three quest narrative – it’s less interesting than all the work the story is doing around it.

There’s also a feeling of disjointedness? The opposition of the mien of the grumpy little goddess with the existential dread in the background was clearly very deliberate, but did not work for me. Something about it jarred instead of highlighting or contrasting. Possibly there wasn’t enough extremity in both directions? A case of close but not close enough, perhaps.

In any case, this was one to enjoy while reading, to appreciate, but I think won’t be lingering with me long term.

Excursions into Poetry

In 2025, we’re getting a shiny new category to try out in the Hugos – Best Poem – which I’m quite excited about. I read a fair bit of poetry, but I have to admit what I read very rarely intersects with SFF (the main example I can think of being Fran Wilde’s poetry collection Clock, Star, Rose Spine back in 2021, which tells you how (in)frequent the overlap is). This isn’t a particularly deliberate choice on my part, it’s just that the places I tend to find poetry to read don’t seem to also be places that highlight speculative works. So I’m going to try to get myself acquainted with the SFF poetry space, as much as I can in the time between now and then, so I can be a good voting citizen in 2025 (and because I do enjoy poetry, and I do enjoy SFF, so maybe I should explore the overlap in that venn diagram, no?).

So I started with somewhere I did at least know had poetry (and I have dabbled in reading, though never in any sort of systematic way): Strange Horizons. Skimming back through what they have from this year so far, two poems stood out to me.

The first is Your Visiting Dragon by Devan Barlow. The overwhelming impression I have of it is one of sweetness (in an entirely non-derogatory way). It’s the sort of poem I can imagine seeing in a collection fondly remembered from childhood, with a lovely illustration on the facing page of a dragon snuggled up in a pile of blankets. It has that sense of softness to it.

The other is What Giants Read by Mary Soon Lee. I like the delicate cleverness of the list format, the way that “atlases, because” stands out amidst the rest of it. It’s the sort of thing that doesn’t, on the face of it, seem to be doing a lot and yet somehow catches your brain all the same, and makes you stop and wonder if there’s something that bit more going on.

As I think becomes clear with those two paragraphs, what I also need to do in the time between now and 2025 is spend more time on learning how to talk about poetry, how to write about poetry, something I haven’t had to do with any real earnestness since 2013 or so, and even then none of the poetry was in English anyhow. I feel much more comfortable with Latin elegiac couplets than English free verse, at least in providing my opinion (I’m not sure quite how well my Latin is up to the task of reading them these days, though I’d be willing to give it a stab). I have no real or formal background in English poetry, and my consumption of it is so hotchpotch, there’s a whole world of context and genre convention I simply do not yet have access to, and will need to learn on the fly to be able to feel confident in interacting with it critically. But I’d quite like to try.

That’s all for this month – WorldCon, dental drama, cat illness and just being busy as all heck have interfered with my reading, but I’m hoping I can get into good habits with my short fiction going forward. If you have any recommendations for good 2024 SFF poems, I would be extremely keen to hear them and get reading, and if you have suggestions for good SFF poetry criticism, I shall praise you like the gods of old (maybe without the sacrifices, but you can have a holy hecatomb of chocolate if you really want). So please do share either or both.

*Between Anne Rice in my early teens and then a degree in the ancient world, I got my processing done very early on liking texts whose context was less than ideal. In hindsight, extremely useful.

Posted in All, Fantasy, Poetry, Science Fiction, Short Stories | Tagged Barlow, Bendiy, Gómez, Harding, Ignyte Awards, khōréō, Short Fiction, Short Fiction Monthly, Soon Lee, Strange Horizons | Leave a comment

A Reader of Else

Private Rites – Julia Armfield

Three Eight One – Aliya Whiteley

The Breath of the Sun – Isaac R. Fellman

Pansies – Alexis Hall

Three Collections of Reviews

Short Fiction – September

In the Shadow of the Fall – Tobi Ogundiran

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

These Burning Stars – Bethany Jacobs

Short Fiction – August

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