Author: katenepveu

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Kirstein, Rosemary: (02) The Outskirter’s Secret

Rosemary Kirstein’s The Outskirter’s Secret (reprinted as the second half of The Steerswoman’s Road) is even better than The Steerswoman and made me extremely happy. In it, the steerswoman Rowan and her friend and traveling companion Bel journey to the Outskirts, where Rowan hopes to find the source of the mysterious jewels that brought her in conflict with the wizards.

Exploring Outskirter society and the Outskirts is one of the best things about this book, as they are fascinatingly different from those of the first book. Early on, Rowan and Bel meet an Outskirter tribe that is very stereotypically barbarian, living only by stealing and treating the non-warriors with contempt. And just as this stereotype fully registers, Bel expresses her disgust with their primitive and dishonorable ways. Rowan, and through her the reader, is often reminded of her assumptions about Outskirter culture as the book unfolds and the reasons for Outskirter customs and organization are explored.

One of the fun things about reading these books is that the reader gets to be a steerswoman or steersman too, putting clues together with their external knowledge to assemble a bigger picture than is available to the characters. The Outskirts and their inhabitants eventually resolve into such a picture, and I think an author’s really done an excellent job when three little words (big spoilers, see sidebar for ROT13) — “ebhgvar ovbsbez pyrnenapr” — can crystallize an entire understanding of a world.

The plot and the characters here are also better, more layered, more twisty, and (I think) more exciting; I particularly admire the handling of the title character. The prose continues to be transparent, which was why I picked it up Friday night: my weird prose sensitivity (see prior entries) had recently continued with an inability to sink into the retrospective omniscient of David Anthony Durham’s Acacia, plus I had a headache and was tired. Which last admittedly was not helped by my staying up later than I’d planned to finish this . . . but the lift in my mood from reading a really good book made up for it. All in all, my only complaint about this book is that now I’m torn between finding out what happens next and saving the other two published books for when I really need them.

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Sedia, Ekaterina: Secret History of Moscow, The

Ekaterina Sedia’s The Secret History of Moscow is almost certainly a good book. Unfortunately I can’t be more definite because I am allergic to its prose and therefore didn’t actually like it.

It’s Moscow in the 1990s, and all over the city, people are turning into birds and flying away. Galina’s sister is one of the missing, and as Galina searches for her, she meets Yakov, a police officer, and Fyodor, an alcoholic street artist. The book cycles between their points of view as they find themselves in an underground Moscow populated by desparate humans and exiled myths.

This should be right up my alley, since I like urban fantasy and works with a strong sense of place. (Also, the author was sensible at and after a vexing con panel last year.) But the first time I tried to read it, I didn’t even finish chapter two: I and the prose seemed to be such a bad match that I could hardly grasp what was going on.

I put it aside for Ragamuffin and then tried it again this Friday. Unfortunately, I should perhaps have considered that a day in which I spent the entire morning dog-walk thinking, “I’m ready for winter to be over, already,” was perhaps not the optimal time to read a book set in Moscow. At any rate, this time I did manage to extract meaning from the prose, but my allergy to it remained.

For instance, as Galina, Yakov, and Fyodor explore the underground Moscow, they meet a number of characters and hear their stories. Because I couldn’t sink into the prose, I experienced these stories not as a rich exploration of myth à la The Orphan’s Tales, but as vexing interruptions of the quest for Galina’s missing sister. In addition, I didn’t like two of the three point-of-view characters and can’t tell if I was supposed to; and I found the story’s final resolution deeply troubling.

I can see that this book has virtues: its exploration of Russia’s past and present, its concern for those forgotten and displaced, perhaps even its undercutting of its own quest format. And the prose is much-praised by people who aren’t me. But for whatever reason—the weather, the cold that I wasn’t quite over—this is just not a book for me.

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Buckell, Tobias S.: (02) Ragamuffin

Tobias S. Buckell’s Ragamuffin was not on my original list of Hugo-nominee possibilities, being pretty much absent from the year-end lists, but Chad reminded me of it, and when I bounced hard off the next thing on my list (more on that later), I gave it a try. I enjoyed it a good deal, and am glad to see that it’s just been nominated for a Nebula.

This is set after Buckell’s first novel, Crystal Rain, which I haven’t read, but which was steampunk set on New Anegada, a cut-off colony established by Caribbean settlers. Ragamuffin is space opera largely set out among the worlds that New Anegada had been cut off from. About four hundred years ago, humanity hit space to find it controlled by the Benevolent Satrapy (which would be a great band name), an alien government that strictly limits technological progress of the species under its dominion—up to and including collapsing wormholes to troublesome planets. As the book opens, a character named Nashara is trying to leave a planet where humans are kept on a reservation or as pets; her departure is a matter of some urgency, as she’s killed a high-ranking alien in exchange for a ticket off the planet and a continuation of her mission against the Satrapy.

The first half of the book follows Nashara as she works her way toward the Ragamuffins of the title, the ships left behind when New Anegada was cut off. According to Wikipedia, Raggamuffin (double-g) is both a kind of reggae and an appropriated self-designation by Jamaicans, making it appropriate to the Caribbean roots of the characters and to humanity’s status in this universe. This Caribbean influence is one of the things I like best about the book: first, it’s something different, which as I’ve said before goes a lot way with me these days; and second, it adds another layer of resonance to the classic SF stories of the struggle for self-determination in the face of a larger and more powerful force and of the search for a home.

In addition to this extra resonance, I like the way that the book complicates these stories along the way. Characters display a realistic range of responses to being part of a species not at the top of the food chain; various things turn out to be more ambiguous or complicated than they first appear; and costs are not ignored. For some reason I had the impression this was a light and fluffy book, rather than the gritty and moderately dark one it turns out to be.

Also, of course, I like all the fast-paced action and adventure. The scene on the cover makes me want to win the lottery so I can go to the Wachowski brothers and say to them, “here’s a truckload of money. You can have it if you go apologize to Jada Pinkett Smith for what you did to her character in the Matrix trilogy, promise not to add a Great White Male Savior, and then film this.” The book moves quite briskly, only stumbling briefly when it switches gears halfway through to New Anegada and the characters from Crystal Rain. Despite this jarring moment, though, I do think that separate parts was preferable to interleaving the sections: at the close of part one, it’s clear how those characters will be meeting up with the New Anegada characters, which might not have been the case if the sections were interleaved. Also, part two is short in comparison, which would have increased the awkwardness of switching back and forth. (Part three is where the characters meet up.)

My only other quibble with the book is the prose, which I found a bit terse or choppy, enough so that I never fell all the way through the page. On the other hand, I’m not usually sensitive to prose, and it might just have been the cold I was coming down with. At any rate, it didn’t keep me from really enjoying the book, which can be summed up as a thoughtful look at social issues, particularly race, in the form of good solid SF fun.

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O’Brian, Patrick: (16) The Wine-Dark Sea (audio)

To my relief, Patrick O’Brian returns to form in The Wine-Dark Sea, which picks up almost immediately after the disappointing The Truelove. Lots of stuff happens, as part of a coherent story; that stuff arising from human action flows from much more natural characterizations; and a long-pending plan is finally carried out. My only quibble is that the last sequence doesn’t fit as smoothly with the plot of the main book, but it does round off a longer arc, so I can see why it’s there.

I find I have fewer and fewer non-spoiler comments to make about these as the series progresses, just because I’m not sure where to draw the line. But this was a good installment in the series, and I think will hold up even after the relief of non-shark-jumping fades.

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

The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden and The Orphan’s Tales: In the Cities of Coin and Spice, by Catherynne M. Valente, are a complete sequence of astonishingly immersive and transformative fairy tales, nested within and wound into each other to create a complete mythology and an overall narrative. I read them now because the second volume is eligible for a Hugo nomination, and unless I read an improbable number of mind-blowing books between now and the end of the month, it’s going on my ballot.

In the gardens of a Sultan lives a girl who has been shunned since infanthood because her eyes are surrounded by a dark birthmark. One day, one of the Sultan’s sons seeks her out and asks her about the mark. She tells him,

“On an evening when I was a very small child an old woman came to the great silver gate, and twisting her hands among the rose-roots told me this: I was not born with this mark. A spirit came into my cradle on the seventh day of the seventh month of my life, and while my mother slept in her snow-white bed, the spirit touched my face, and left there many tales and spells, like the tattoos of sailors. The verses and songs were so great in number and so closely written that they appeared as one long, unbroken streak of indigo on my eyelids. But they are the words of the river and the marsh, the lake and the delta. They comprise a great magic, and when the tales are all read out, and heard end to shining end, to the last syllable, the spirit will return and judge me. After she vanished into the blue-faced night, I spent each day hidden in a thicket of jasmine and oleander, trying to read what I could in my bronze mirror. But it is difficult, I must read them backwards, and I can only read one eye at a time.” She stopped, and the last was no louder than a spider weaving its opaline threads.

“And there is no one to listen.”

Fascinated, the boy asks her to tell him one of the tales . . . and we’re off. A restless prince kills a goose and is caught by a witch, who promises to make him understand what he has done by telling him of her life, which includes the story her grandmother told her, and the story her grandmother was told, and . . .

The series is structured as four books, collected into two volumes for publication purposes. Sometime during the first book, I surfaced and found myself thinking in terms of falling down rabbit holes or dazzling kaleidoscopes—and then immediately rejected them, because to my surprise, I was having no trouble remembering who was speaking, what their relationship was to the broader tale, and what cross-connections were being created. Other people have experienced the text differently, of course, from making no effort to keep track of the interrelationships to purposefully cataloguing them all, or at least wanting to [*].

[*] A substantial effort toward this end has been made over at the Feminist SF Wiki, all of which is deeply spoilery.

My favorite reading experience of the four books was the first, precisely because of the interrelationships: I reveled in the feeling that a web was being created in my mind, with every new tale lighting up a new point or illuminating a connection between existing points. The other three books felt more linear, for though they also link back to past tales, the density of these links is less because so much of the groundwork was laid in the first book. On the other hand, if one finds the first book strenuous, I’d recommend at least trying the other book in the volume to see if it is easier going.

What of the content of these books? Well, they’re fairy tales, of something like the kind found in the Datlow-Windling anthologies of fairy tales for adults; but by virtue of their number, they are far more diverse and complex. The work shuffles a whole deck of fairy-tale roles and deals them out over and over again: witch, princess, woman in a tower, mother, monster, wizard, brother, king . . . each time taking a look at the possible person and reality behind the role. Other themes that I particularly noticed were bodies, their variants, transformations, and mutability; ways of relating to power; and the birth and death of cities, of which I was especially struck by the one at the start of the third book. (The first volume received a Tiptree Award, which was well-deserved, as the tales are particularly interested in and relevant to ideas of gender.)

The cumulative effect of these many tales is the creation of a complete underlying mythology and a wide portrait of a world. More, it’s one drawn from many different cultures, without the wholesale importation of any. Occasionally the resulting juxapositions were slightly jarring, but I prefer the diversity of sources and of characters to the alternatives. Lately I’ve been craving, above almost all else, something different in my fantasy reading; and this is very far from being Extruded Fantasy Product and fit the bill admirably.

These weren’t perfect reads. Once or twice I felt the themes were more obvious than necessary, and I’m not satisfied with the final revelation. But they were richly imaginative reads, with more narrative momentum than I expected given the format and plenty of lingering wonders and marvels. Strongly recommended.

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Tan, Shaun: Arrival, The

Shaun Tan’s The Arrival is a wordless graphic novel about immigration. It’s surreal, beautiful, heartwarming, and one of the best things I read in 2007. (I liked it so well that I’ve been having trouble booklogging it.)

Tan displayed a number of prints from The Arrival in the World Fantasy Con art show, and when I saw them, I immediately went into the dealer’s room looking for a copy of the book. Alas, too many people had the same idea before me, so I had to wait for Amazon to send me a copy. You can see a number of images from the book at Tan’s website by clicking on the cover for The Arrival, and if you like those at all, you need this book.

The book opens with a sad, domestic scene of a husband and wife packing, which includes “The suitcase” (direct link). It seems ordinary enough, until they and their daughter walk along an empty street with a strange shadow above them . . . and then the wider context is revealed in the double-page spread “The old country” (direct link), showing the huge spiky tails that loom over the city streets.

The husband travels across an ocean to a city vastly strange in large ways, as seen in, for instance, “The City” (direct link), which I regret not buying a print of even if I’m not sure where I would have hung it. And strange in small ways, such as the animals that pop out of jars; this leads to one of my favorite sequences, when something like a spiky-tailed raccoon badly startles the protagonist. He explains his reaction by sketching the huge spiky tails of the old country; ohhh, realizes one of his companions, we knew something like that too . . . and we fall into his memory of “The story of The Giants” (direct link).

Not only does this sequence show Tan’s ability to depict emotion, but it demonstrates how the book is built around many immigrants’ tales. More, it’s an example of the fundamental kindness that pervades the work. The protagonist’s companions in this episode are people he met on the street when puzzling over the food-delivery system; they help him figure it out and then invite him home for dinner. I kept waiting, rather anxiously, for something bad to happen—for someone to take advantage of the new immigrant or to display prejudice—and it just never happened.

The Arrival is a deeply sympathetic portrayal of the humanity of immigrants and the universality of their experiences. According to Tan’s comments in the book and on his webpage, it draws from a number of different sources, such as the experiences of his father, a Chinese immigrant to Australia; his own experiences as a traveller to foreign countries; and historical documents like pictures of New York in the early 1900s. This is a rich brew that keeps the book grounded despite all the surreal images, but—to digress slightly—I wonder if it might be less than optimally effective over the widest range of readers. That is, the book has a somewhat historical feel, because of the sepia-toned art, the evocation of Ellis Island (in, e.g., “Inspection” (direct link)), and the fact many people would identify the protagonist as white [*]. And there’s a substantial portion of the American population [**] that sees historical immigration (of white people) as good, but current immigration (of scary brown people) as bad. As a result, it seems possible that people could read this book as a historical tale confirming this attitude, without recognizing the universal nature of its depiction.

[*] I did, but since then I’ve spent some time looking at portraits of mixed-race people and so am freshly aware of other possibilities.

[**] I know that Australia has a bad history when it comes to race and immigration, but don’t know much about its current state.

To be very clear, this is not a criticism of the book, which includes a number of characters of obviously non-European ancestries and which, fairly read, does not in any way support prejudice. More, this is not a suggestion that it’s an explicitly political work, because it’s not. It doesn’t need to be: the beauty of its art and story says more, and more effectively, than any overt statement. Rather, I love this book so much that I want everyone to appreciate it as well and fully as possible, and so was sensitive to aspects that might diminish that. End digression.

The final thing of note is the book’s ending, which shows the adoption of new culture without the abandonment of the old, and has a lovely paying-it-forward moment. Overall, this is a rich and satisfying book, and unless you are completely unable to parse sequential art, I strongly recommend it. I will be nominating it for a Hugo in the Best Related Book category (as it has no words, it’s not eligible in any of the fiction categories) and hope it gets due recognition in the Hugos and other awards.

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Kirstein, Rosemary: (01) The Steerswoman

I finally got around to reading Rosemary Kirstein’s The Steerswoman (recently reprinted as the first half of The Steerswoman’s Road) because the collective wisdom of LJ agreed, quite rightly, that it was the cure I needed for readerly blahs.

Steerswomen are a professional organization who gather knowledge about the world, mapping, charting, and analyzing as they travel. They must answer any question put to them—as long as the asker has not refused to answer a steerswoman’s question and thereby come under a lifelong ban. Wizards are the only group to scorn steerswomen en masse, and as a result the steerswomen know little of magic. And when a steerswoman named Rowan begins investigating some peculiar, possibly-magical jewels, she discovers that the wizards are willing to kill to keep their secrets . . .

For some of the potential readers of this book, all I have to say is “protagonist whose vocation is the scientific method.” (Watching her gradually work out the idea of orbit is one of my favorite parts of the book. Lest I give the impression that it’s all dry and intellectual, I also really like the swarming dragons.) For others, I could add the words “strong female” to the beginning; or “and whose principal relationship is a straightforward friendship with another woman” to the end. And then there’s the spoiler, but one that’s reasonably well known about the series and also the kind of thing that (I hope) tells you whether this is a book for you (ROT-13, see sidebar): gur jvmneqf ner npghnyyl hfvat grpuabybtl.

This book has fascinating worldbuilding, excellent control of its tight-third point of view, good pacing, and interesting and engaging characters. I have only a couple of small quibbles: I would have liked more lead-up to one aspect of the ending, and the introduction of a new point of view after about a hundred pages is startling (and I’m not sure if it was necessary). It broke the readerly blahs perfectly, and though I’m putting the series aside to read some potential Hugo nominees, I look forward to getting back to the other three published books. (A total of seven are projected.)

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O’Brian, Patrick: (15) The Truelove (audio)

After a long hiatus, I resumed listening to the Aubrey-Maturin series with The Truelove. This was originally published as Clarissa Oakes, and with good reason: she is a Botany Bay convict smuggled aboard the Surprise by a midshipman, and the turmoil she causes in the ship is the subject of the vast majority of the book.

It’s always lovely to hear Patrick Tull’s deep growly comfortable voice, but I was disappointed to feel that he didn’t do justice to one big important speech. I was also disappointed in the book itself, not because much of it was tense in the unhappy-ship way, but because it felt like it was built around an artifice. I think this is the first time I’ve had this reaction to one of O’Brian’s books, and I hope it doesn’t signal a decline in the series, here on the fifteenth of twenty complete books.

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