Category: fiction

Where the past comes to my aid…

personby Gillian Polack
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I’ve had my COVID update jab today. This means I’ll be clear in a few weeks and can maybe be a bit social. Unfortunately, I’m also one of those people who are COVID-vulnerable and who has a charming long and painful reaction to the vaccine.

Instead of a real post this week (and maybe next week and the week after, it depends on how long it takes to get through this) I thought you might like something from my past. Three things, in fact. If you scratch below the surface you’ll see a suggestion about how I approach the terrible things happening this month. The posts aren’t about that, however. The posts are about what I was thinking 15-16 years ago. The novels I was writing then were “The Time of the Ghosts” and “Poison and Light.” Both of them are still in print (“The Time of the Ghosts in its umpteenth edition, and “Poison and Light in its first) and the cover of “Poison and Light” contains artwork by Lewis Morley, who entirely understood my thoughts and dreams about the world of the novel. For a change, instead of saying “This book may be out one day, if I’m lucky” I can send you to the exact stories I wrote about, way back then. There aren’t many advantages to getting significantly older, but this is one of them…

(2007-11-26 21:45)

I need to tell you a story.

Once upon a time I was still active in the Jewish Community. At work on Friday afternoon I answered the phone and at the other end was a frantic community leader. “Gillian, you have to come to synagogue tomorrow, it’s very important.” He couldn’t tell me why. All he knew was that he had received a phone call from a well-known Melbourne rabbi (who had never met me) saying that Gillian Polack had to be at synagogue on Saturday morning. The rabbi knew I didn’t usually go to Shul, too, and he had said very firmly to “make sure she’s there”.

I couldn’t arrange a lift, so I hopped on my two busses very early and walked the half mile or so at the other end and found the Progressive Service and looked around for any reason I might have been summoned.

In front of me was a visiting cantor (but visiting from overseas – no links with me or mine), the backs of heads of the usual congregants, and about thirty aging pates. The usual congregants kept sneaking back to me to find out why I was there “Is there something happening this afternoon that wasn’t advertised?”

I whispered a question about the thirty heads to one of them and he whispered back “visitors from Melbourne, doing a tour – nothing to do with the cantor.” Somewhere in that crowd of heads probably lay my answer.

The service ended. Everyone stood up. The visiting group turned round to survey the back of the hall. I heard a woman’s voice cry, “There she is,” and one elderly lady ploughed out of the mob and towards me. The others all followed, like sheep. Some of them knew me, most of them were simply following their natural leader.

Valda is a friend. Except that it’s now “Valda was a friend”. I don’t believe it yet. Mum told me about her funeral just fifteen minutes ago.

She was nearly ninety and we just got on well. We snarked together at conferences and we stirred her kid brother (a close friend of my father’s and another friend of mine – the two of us have stood to the side at parties and brought down the tone of the proceedings since I was a teen) and we did a lot of very good volunteer work together. She died in her sleep, her life a resounding success.

I will miss Valda for a very very long time. And I will always remember how many people went into operation to make sure we got to chat when she was in Canberra. She could have rung me or she could have told my mother, but Valda simply told everyone she wanted to see me and – because it was Valda and we all loved her – everyone made sure it happened.

I will also never ever forget that horde of touring retirees descending on me. I was a whistle-stop for the Canberra part of their bus trip. And I bet Valda knew this when she called out “There she is.”

For the record, the questions were mostly about my Melbourne family. Also for the record, I asked in response “You’ve been away for a week and you miss them?” Valda hasn’t even been away a week and already there’s a hole in my life.

Foxes

personby Gillian Polack
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I’ve started writing this week’s post too many times, and each time it’s had a different topic. This is partly because life is a bit complex right now. It’s also because I am ranging intellectually from my normal research (the craft of writers in fairy tale retellings) to all kinds of other subjects because this is the Month of the Science Fiction Convention. Normally I also have an historical fiction convention but this year I had to make difficult choices. I haven’t missed the history, because I enjoy talking about it so much that people keep asking me.

What I’m thinking about right now (in this current hour, to be precise) are Medieval versions of the various stories about Renard/Renaut the Fox. I’ve decided to give one of my characters a name in his honour. The character will be a werewolf, and his name will be Reinhard Fuchs. This is how I continue gently with my fiction even when I have no time or energy to write.

Most of the things I’m checking up right now won’t enter into the Fox panel at the World Fantasy conference this week, at all. It’s a panel of writers, not a series of papers by Medievalists, after all, but me, I need to know the relationship between the different Medieval texts and how they fit with Jewish fox fables and Aesop and… I’m tracing a cultural trail for the fox stories in Europe. I have until my medical appointment. My medical appointment is late, which is why I have this luxury time to do fun things.

I’m sorry/not sorry that this post is so short. Tracing manuscript transmission and cultural connections is one of my favourite things and it’s giving me a happy hour in the middle of the afternoon. When I’ve reported into the doctor and he’s sorted me out, then I have to return to real research. I would dream of Renard, but… he’s not a great character to dream of. In fact, he’s a very good character to avoid.

Nicola Griffith’s Menewood

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Cover of Menewood, a novel by Nicola Griffith, showing Hild.I have been waiting to read Nicola Griffith’s Menewood since I finished Hild not long after it first came out in 2013. I grabbed Menewood as soon as my bookstore got it in this month and I read all 700+ pages (including notes) over about five days despite a long things-to-do list.

It was worth the wait. Not only that, reading it makes it clear that writing a book that is so deep and complex takes time. I’m not at all sure it could have been written any faster. It’s a sequel, and for that reason it works best if you read Hild first, but it isn’t like so many book series where each one is constructed in the same pattern.

The two books are historical fiction based on the very real St. Hilda of Whitby.  Griffith has written a woman — and in fact, a number of women — with agency while still writing a book that is very much embedded in its times.

This is a book set in 7th century England which shows all the ways that women of that time mattered.

Two things in particular struck me while reading: the writing and some undercurrents about power.

First the writing. I should say that I read every sentence, every word — no rushing over paragraphs of description to get to the action as I am wont to do, especially when reading historical fiction or big fat fantasy. This book repays that kind of attention, because there is something important in all those words, something that advances the story.

Griffith wrote an essay recently on writing immersive historical fiction that makes clear how she approached this book. In that essay, she says:

As a writer, I bring the reader into my fictional world through the characters’ physical, embodied experience. What a character feels, what they notice of their world—and how they feel about it—tells the reader a vast amount, and it creates empathy.

She does exactly that. Pleasure, daily chores, injury, hard labor, death — all are vivid in this book.

But that physicality is woven in with the politics, the wars, and the work of making sure everyone was clothed and fed and housed in a time long before the industrial tools that made some of that labor easy.

And all of that is woven into what is known of the history, so that even though this is a fictional story, it does not swear at the things we know of the past. Continue reading “Nicola Griffith’s Menewood“…

Is Literary Fiction Dead?

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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According to a recent essay in The Nation by Dan Sinykan, an English professor, literary fiction might soon be dead.

I’m probably one of many who will be glad to dance on its grave. While it is certainly true that not all fiction is great literature, the implication that only “literary” fiction is the truly good stuff made me furious long before I started writing science fiction.

Sinykan defines literary fiction as “fiction that privileges art over entertainment.” I find that definition ridiculous, given how much art I have found in science fiction and other work relegated to “genre” and how little I have found in some supposedly literary works.

I mean, are you really going to say that Ursula K. Le Guin didn’t create art? Or, for that matter, Joanna Russ or Octavia Butler?

And while F. Scott Fitzgerald had a lovely way with words, his subject matter was less than enticing. I remain unimpressed by The Great Gatsby, though I suppose the struggle between grifters and the more established rich is still a ripe subject for exploration.

When I was at Clarion West, Chip Delany told us that literary fiction was just another genre. It was a revelation. Of course, Chip’s work certainly reaches the standard of art.

I began to read science fiction at about the time literary fiction became a term – which Sinykan says happened in 1980 – because so much of what was supposed to be good fiction back then was boring the hell out of me. Continue reading “Is Literary Fiction Dead?”…

Turning problems into plot

personby Gillian Polack
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This week my post is for writers. This post is just as handy for readers (since, by reading this, you are a reader and yes, this is a day for bad jokes) but if you want to think of it from the reading perspective you need to look backwards to translate. We see the results of all these writing decisions as readers. This post is about those decisions themselves. It’s like taking a picture of a mountain and imagine you’re standing on that mountain looking down, rather than standing below the mountain taking its picture. Right now, I am sitting in a room at the foot of a mountain and typing. I can’t see the mountain, but I know it’s there. How I see it is the critical question. What view am I describing for my readers?

The view of characters changes depending on where we stand. But that’s not the only discrepancy. What do we know about the private lives of the characters we  invent? How do we explain them when we write? Are there any discrepancies between those private lives and their public selves? And how do we see and interpret all of this, as a writer? I’m not talking about personality. Your character might be a raging genius in public and terrifyingly incompetent around the home. That’s fine. But not today’s subject. What I want to think about today is the difference in culture between someone’s culture in the home (idioculture, private and personal and only really shared properly with people who belong in that small group – think of the Brontë children and their private invented worlds and secret shared language) and how they share or don’t share or are not permitted to share with the rest of a community.

This is as much about privilege as privacy. Where one’s private life matches public expectations of that private life, for good or ill, people know how to interpret it. That’s privilege, because, even if that active interpretation is unkind, we know we’re going to have to deal with it so we can develop tools to deal with it. Knowledge about such things is power over one’s life. Your character can benefit from being treated well because they live like someone important and are seen as someone important. This enables them to fight the racism and prejudice they see, if they see it. Your character might become a suffragette or fight for access to modern washing machines if they know that the vote or the machine will improve their life.

Most people face invisible prejudice, and this is harder.  Think of a character who uses a wheelchair. They might be left out of group activities because of the assumption that people in wheelchairs cannot enjoy them. Or think of a character who faces bigots and is being attacked (quietly, privately) by others. There are no simple ways of explaining what’s wrong because, from the outside, they look helpless or angry and the attackers are playing the long, slow, quiet game. Everyone seeing this from outside tangles things and turns bad to shockingly worse because they assume the victim is the problem. Then there are cultural differences: where your Australian Muslim character has far more in common with everyone else than the Christian characters think, but said Christian characters invent differences anyhow.

This kind of everyday (and it is everyday – some of it is literally my everyday, some of it is the everyday of friends) is really handy for plotting and planning a novel. It can explain why the reader knows and understands something, but other characters don’t. It can give a reason for betrayal, for social activism, for rebellion.

Know the discrepancies between your character’s home life and how they are seen in public and your story blossoms.

News and thoughts about the news

personby Gillian Polack
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Why do I have trouble announcing cool things? Why is it so very difficult to tell you all that I’m on two short lists?

The first list is for an Australian award for my book Story Matrices (edited by Francesca Barbini), and the second is an international one for the Sidewise Award (alt history) for my Medieval story in the amazing Other Covenants short story collection. The short story is “Why the Bridgemasters of York Don’t Pay Taxes,” edited by Andrea D. Lobel and Mark Shainblum (who I finally met, just the other day). Both lists are wonderful to be on. I’m unlikely to win either.

While both are most excellent, the Sidewise in particular is a wonderful moment. Even I can’t deny that.

There is a special, special honour in being listed along with these amazing writers. It’s taken me days to admit this. Partly this is because I’ve not had much comment either short listing. Six people have told me how pleased they are about the William Atheling one, and one of those six is my mother. Another is the editor. This means I feel a bit invisible. Partly this is because there are far better writers than me and it’s easier to talk about them than to talk about my own work. Also, partly this is because Australia is a bit odd. Some people get big shouts for all their accomplishments… I am not one of those people. One day I will discover why, but until that day comes, I will assume my writing is just not that good. There is a lot of encouragement for me to think that and very little for me to think otherwise. Except from German academics, but that’s another story.

However… there are things that no-one’s asked me about my short story and this is the moment to spill the beans. In order for me to spill the beans you need to know about my short story and about one of my novels. Bridgemasters was only released in December last year. The novel is The Green Children Help Out, which came out in 2021. The reason I thought my Bridgemasters story would go unnoticed was because the Green Children went pretty much unseen. There was, however, a much bigger reason for it going unseen than my self-doubt. COVID lockdowns and quiet hit me harder than some, because I was unable to go to any events face to face (I’m COVID-vulnerable), and in Australia it’s almost impossible to reach readers unless they see and talk to you, I’ve found. The story and the novel are linked. In fact, I wrote the Bridgemasters story (and a couple of others) as a testing ground for the world I was building for the Bridgemasters story. They’re quite different, but they’re set in the same alternate Earth. I wanted to know what sort of cultural underpinnings my English Jewish characters would have in this alternate Earth. I test these things in a number of ways, and I build the world gently and carefully, then I let it rip with a story or two. The other stories are in the volume of my collected short stories (Mountains of the Mind), which was also short listed for an award. I am obviously not good at learning.

I thought my Green Children novel was good, but I didn’t think my Bridgemasters story was anything more than a small fun piece, translating late Medieval Christian thought into a world inhabited by Jews that a very particular group of Christians are forced to protect. This just shows that some writers are not good judges of their own work. It also shows that being mainly confined to a tiny physical world for three years was not the end of the known universe. I’m working on a gentle and slow emergence. We’ll see if that changes anything.

I should just have said, “Look! Announcements!” If I win either (unlikely) I promise to do that. In the meantime, I hope a few more readers see my work and make up their own minds about it. Quite obviously I’m not the right person to advise on whether to read my work!

Flowers and garbage and invisible illness

personby Gillian Polack
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Very few people wonder how those of us whose bodies are less capable of doing this or that get anything done. I am a very good illustration. I had glandular fever (mononucleosis to my US friends, I believe) in my mid-twenties and developed many of the vile long-term symptoms that people currently associate with Long COVID. In other words, I’ve had similar symptoms to Long COVID for nearly 40 years. This is not the only problem I’ve faced in my life, nor, indeed is it the biggest. It’s certainly the one that has invited the least inquiry. And the least understanding. Today I want to talk about how I’ve achieved anything at all in a life where I cannot guarantee even an hour without fatigue and pain. The physical side of it is one story and I don’t want to talk about that today. Today is, you see, an exhausted day, when I should be in bed wondering when I will improve a bit. It’s not a day I have to be in bed, however – those days when any exertion at all just makes things worse have become rarer as time passes.

I lost my time sense last night. That is, to me, a signal I need to live my alternate life. This post is brought to you from this alternate life. It’s a half day later than usual because I had to wait until I was able to do it.

This is how I handle days like this. If others have needs I fit in with them, but the next day is worse if I fit in. I suspect Friday will be a bed day because Monday night and Tuesday nights are brain fog days (with occasional windows of opportunity, one of which is right now), Wednesday is full of meetings and Thursday is full of unexpected medical stuff. I didn’t expect Wednesday and Thursday to be the way they are, which is how I can predict Friday. One thing I’m doing to prepare is (with the help of a friend) a big shop. One of the things I will be getting is reheatable food for Thursday to Monday. On Saturday I knew that yesterday and today would be a bit of a struggle, so on Sunday I prepared food for both days. This planning is constant. And I don’t always have the energy to do it.

There’s a lot of body-awareness and a lot of planning to get through the everyday and when one of these fall through things are like a deck of cards and I have to stop and start all over again. Currently I have enough income so that if the cards all fall down, all I need to do is drag myself to the computer and order enough home delivered food to get me through. Or open a tin from my cupboard. I lived on dolmades for 3 days recently, then I advanced to chicken and chips, because that was the easiest option and I wasn’t up to more. Then I was through that phase and was able to cook again.

Knowing I’m exceptionally busy on other peoples’ schedules this week means I can plan in advance. When anyone tries to spring something on me, they can set me up for a whole week of not being able to deal and I will hide it, generally, but there are people I really do not like because they never check if I’m able before springing things on me. If I had energy on the worst days, I could explain to someone who says “I have to see you” that it has to wait because I’m unwell. In fact, I do explain “I can’t do it now because…” but I can’t get into detailed explanations. Exertion can hurt and sometimes the little things like explaining (especially if there’s emotion attached) can hurt more than the large. This is why, oddly, the chronic fatigue is more of a problem in my life than more serious problems are.

The other thing that happens when my time sense gets derailed is that I drift off into byways. The path this post has taken is one of these byways. I meant to launch straight into “This is how I get novels and non-fiction written and research done and achieve as much as some people who have never had any sort of debilitating illness.” I think the tide of emotion carries my life forward at these moments. This post is an excellent example, in fact, of how this happens.

I use emotion to get work done at times like this. I sat down at my computer to write this post, having no idea what I’d write about at that point. I saw my research document open on the desk and just took a look before opening a new file. I edited three paragraphs. It wasn’t a lot, but over a week (even a really bad week) this adds up. Then I stopped and thought, “Why did I do this? Why didn’t I go straight to the blogpost?” My answer was, “It’s one of those weeks” and then “But I should tell people”. Because the sense that something is important gives me enough fuel to write. I will sit down quietly for a half hour as soon as this is posted, and then I’ll go shopping with a friend and make sure I have food for the coming life-sapped time.

I’m the sort of person who would rather work methodically, so when I’m less beleaguered, all my work is done entirely sensibly. On days like today, I allow the wind to carry me along, and take advantage of the moments I have. Little things, done when I can. That’s how I deal with the fatigue and the near-constant pain. I factor in the physical work I need to do to keep going and, month by month, I deal. I write whole novels this way, and do my research and when I can’t do anything except sit or lie down, I think things through. Slowly. My brain stutters at times like this. It’s bad for quick thoughts and insights – it’s wonderful for deep and slow unpinning of complex problems.

A few years ago, when I realised my strange lifestyle, I found a way of describing it. That description was more useful to friends who asked “Are you OK?” than to people like the one who emailed me a the start of Yom Kippur last year, and who wanted to meet urgently. It was a week far worse than this and I wouldn’t be up to a face to face meeting for weeks. I lost my Yom Kippur over that email and lost some days after it. The person who emailed would not have understood this from my metaphor. I needed more capacity to explain than I had… some situations are simply impossible, still.

My metaphor is not a new one. I say that life throws me garbage and, bit by bit, without pushing myself into more illness, I turn that garbage into fertiliser and it grows me the nicest garden. All my published novels are flowers, and Story Matrices, the book that has just been short-listed for the William Atheling Jr Award, is a rather nice rosebush. That book was written in a shockingly bad year, but the editor, Francesca Barbini, knew this and worked with me according to my actual capacity. She didn’t try to make me into something I’m not. She helped me create the best thing I was able to create in a year from hell.

Every paragraph I edit and every thought I have transforms this strange life into a strangely interesting life. Chronic illness isn’t the end of things… it does however, change things. And most people won’t ask or won’t know or won’t care. That’s part of the garbage being thrown. That garbage can be isolating and it can be depressing, but it’s excellent fertiliser.

Now all I need to do is find a publisher for the novel I wrote when I wrote Story Matrices. It’s the fictional approach to this isolation and strangeness and is a very different COVID lockdown novel to most. My way of dealing with the difficult is rather like a portal fantasy, you see, where you open doors briefly and visit worlds you can’t remain in because remaining is dangerous. My COVID novel is a quietly adventurous version of the portal novel that is my life. Glenda Larke (a friend with a marvellous new novel) was my beta reader and she told me that it was the best love story that she’d ever read. It needs a home, but writing it was the accomplishment. Just as the publication of Story Matrices was an accomplishment. Just as editing three paragraphs of my research and writing this blog post are accomplishments.

Chronic ill health isn’t the end of things. It does, however, require a series of reinventions of self, and the ability to say “If this is all I can do today then that’s fine.”

Why am I telling you all this? Because Long COVID is not going to go away. Some people will recover and some won’t. It’s quite likely you know someone who needs to know that this kind of chronic illness is not that end of world and that, over time, some extraordinary things are possible. They probably also need to know that the vast majority of folks around them will not see or even want to see what the new life entails.

Adjusting never stops. Seeing your own needs is essential. And once you know what your signals are (in my case, that loss of time and that drifting brain and the need to dump my once-wondrous rationality) and how to handle them (when to push, when to let things slide, how not to live on chips) life can become a lot better. Your garden will be all the better for the fertiliser. It won’t feel that way, however, because no matter what you do with the garbage being thrown at you, it’s still garbage. I’m still learning to celebrate the flowers and not be personally affronted at the garbage that is thrown in my direction.

The Rules of Writing

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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All genres of writing have their rules. For example, you can’t put a spaceship in literary fiction (though Michael Chabon could probably get away with it).

In science fiction, one of the rules is that you can’t write about writers.

Some people take this rule very literally. I once wrote a story about a freelance writer in a gig economy who needed to go from Washington, D.C., to Virginia at a time when passports were required between states. Hers had expired, so she had to cross illegally.

(Once again I realize that a story that I never spent much time submitting was ahead of its time and now is so obvious that it doesn’t seem prescient. I mean, we’re now living in a time where states are purporting to prevent their residents from traveling to other states for health care, not to mention one with an economy built on gig work.)

But back to the subject of fiction rules. One of the criticisms I got from my writers group was that it was about a writer and that wasn’t acceptable.

But that’s not what the rule means, really. There’s no reason your character can’t be a writer. The purpose of the rule is to keep science fiction writers from producing the navel gazing stories that revolve around writing.

There are any number of exceedingly boring literary stories and even novels that revolve around editorial assistants who are working on a novel and having an affair with their much older editor boss.

Others focus on creative writing professors in minor colleges and their inability to write and their affairs with their students.

This is the kind of fiction you get when a writer takes that major writing instruction “write what you know” literally. And this is the kind of fiction that the rule against writing about writers is trying to avoid.

I am thinking about this because I just read a couple of positive reviews in The New York Times of books that I can’t imagine being of interest to anyone at all. Perhaps there is a small subset of writers who want to read books about aging writers who can’t produce anything and younger writers who are trying to get some dirt on them to feed their own writing. Continue reading “The Rules of Writing”…

Some Thoughts on Clarion West and Writing

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Clarion West 2023 Write-a-thon

Once again I am participating in the Clarion West Write-a-thon, which means I’m working on getting my own writing done in support of the current workshop participants.

If you want to donate to Clarion West in support of me, you can do it here on my fundraising page.

I do this every year in part as a way of donating to Clarion West — I always support myself and usually contribute in the name of a couple of other people — but I am not good at banging the drum for fundraising.

At the same time, I am well aware that in this capitalist society people have to do something to bring in money, and that includes nonprofits and artists. So I participate and mention it and hope some people get inspired to send them a few bucks.

There are many things I hope to get better at before I shuffle off this mortal coil, but fundraising isn’t on the list.

Writing better is, though, and the only way I know to get better at writing is to do more of it in a thoughtful way. So I am working on the sequel to my 2021 novel For the Good of the Realm and hope that the Write-a-thon process will help me do that.

Supporting Clarion West brings me to the issue of writing workshops, classes, and the like. Some people find these things incredibly useful; some do not. For me, Clarion West was exactly what I needed when I did it. It made me take my writing seriously in a way that I had never done before.

I’m very glad I did it, so I continue to support it because I know it will be useful to some other people as well. And I like the way Clarion West has evolved and continues to grow.  Continue reading “Some Thoughts on Clarion West and Writing”…

A Potpourri of Book Reviews

personby Deborah J. Ross
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Here are a few books I’ve read recently.  Some I’ve enjoyed more than others. I’ll start with a rave:

 

Daughter of Redwinter, by Ed McDonald (Tor) What a great read! From the first page, this book grabbed me and carried me along. Superb action, wonderful characters, ever-escalating stakes, and mystery. The story opens with Raine, our heroine, creeping out the back way from a monastery under military siege, looking for an escape route, only to encounter a mysterious wounded woman who is desperate to get back in. On the woman’s heels are a group of warrior-magicians, bent on stopping her even if it means tearing down the walls. The military besiegers are willing to aid the magicians, but what they’re after is inside — people with “grave-sight” that allows them to see, and sometimes speak with, the dead. Raine is one of those with the talent that means execution, should it be discovered. All her life she has hidden, lied, and run away to save her skin, and she’s made some spectacularly bad choices along the way.

The book was full of drama and poignant emotion, hard-bitten action and sweet romance. The balance between slowly unfolding mystery, lightning reversals and betrayals, and coming of age of a most remarkable heroine was exceptionally well handled. Most of all, from the very first paragraphs, I found myself relaxing into the hands of a master storyteller, confident that wherever the tale took me, it would be a wild and infinitely satisfying ride. I was never disappointed.

 

Rosebud, by Paul Cornell (Tordotcom) “The crew of the Rosebud are, currently, and by force of law, a balloon, a goth with a swagger stick, some sort of science aristocrat possibly, a ball of hands, and a swarm of insects.” Although they’re not human, at least not in their current form, they’re most definitely people. And they’re fanatically devoted to The Company, which for 300 years has placed them out in the back acres of space. When they come upon a mysterious black sphere, they arrive at a plan, after much squabbling: to capture the object for the Company, thereby earning lots of praise.

But the object is not what anyone might expect; it has the ability manipulate probability and time-lines, thereby controlling the crew of the Rosebud by selecting the futures with the most benign outcomes. As the crew attempts to understand what’s happening to them, their own pasts are revealed, as well as the less-than-benign nature of the Company.

I loved how the crew figures out that their memories are unreliable and what the object doing. In the end, however, I found the “universe-changing” revelations opaque. I wanted to like and understand the story, but ended up just not getting it, which is never a good feeling to leave a reader with.

 

Dark Earth, by Rebecca Stott (Random House). I requested this book from Netgalley based on the description. I loved the idea of an underworld of rebel women living secretly amid the ruins. Alas, the opening was so sedate and the characters so bland and unrelatable, I gave up in the middle of the second chapter. There simply wasn’t enough to keep me reading. By contrast, the next book I picked up grabbed me right away, so I saw no reason to take another look.


The Hundred Loves of Juliet, by Evelyn Skye (Del Rey) What a great premise — Romeo and Juliet, reincarnated many times over the centuries, always drawn together and always linked in tragedy. In an added twist, Romeo is immortal and remembers all his previous loves. He knows, for example, that whoever Juliet is in any given lifetime, she will die within two years. Juliet, on the other hand, has no idea of their history together. Now in the 21st Century, writer “Juliette” and sea captain “Romeo” find themselves thrown together by fate and consuming attraction. Can they break the cycle?

Well, maybe, if he would just sit down with her and have a candid conversation. Clearly, he’s failed to do that before, only to watch his beloved-of-this-century die, usually horribly. You would think he’d learn from his disasters. Of all the failings of a typical romance novel, the stupidity of keeping secrets ranks top of my list. Even if “Juliet” thinks he’s delusional and doesn’t believe him, at least he would have given her a rationale for him walking away from her. Which he tries to do, but because she has no idea why, it doesn’t work.

I had other quibbles, including the passages supposedly diaries and so forth from past centuries but laden with contemporary sensibilities, that the heroine tries way too hard to be likeable, that the hero is an example of “female-gaze” and not a real person. Although the prose is for the most part pretty good, it slips into tone deafness all too often.

I suspect that this is a romance with fantastic elements, rather than a reincarnation/time-travel fantasy with a love story, and that science fiction/fantasy readers like myself will have a much harder time with it than romance readers. Regardless, I gave up around the 24% mark. I simply didn’t care what happened next as long as the characters were being so dishonest with each other and themselves.

 

Blood of the Pack (Dark Ink Tattoo Book One), by Cassie Alexander (Caskara Press). My introduction to the works of Cassie Alexander was the “Nightshifted” series (in which a nurse discovers a new career path in a secret hospital ward for supernatural patients). I loved how she handled nonhuman characters, great dramatic tension, and smooth prose. So I picked up this first book in a new series without knowing much about it beyond the lots-of-queer sex content warnings. I found many of the elements I’d previously enjoyed, including characterization and great action sequences. The sex scenes were better done than usual for “high heat” stories. There was a nice balance in tension between a satisfying landing level for the first novel in a series on the one hand, and enough of a cliff-hanger so the reader will be left hungry for the next. My personal quibble, and other readers may feel quite differently, was that the sex scenes took up a disproportionate amount of space for what they contributed to the plot. I think this has to do with what different readers look for. If it’s a (in this case) action-mystery with sex scenes that enhance that plot, or if it’s very juicy sex scenes that make sense in terms of character and motivation. As I said, the scenes are very well done, great examples of how to write literate, well-paced intimate encounters. I especially liked the depiction of consent, the mutuality of pleasure, and the care of the partners for one another.

And of course, if that sex comes with vampire and werewolves, oh my, so much the better.

 

And I’ll end with more raves…

 

Drunk on All Your Strange New Words, by Eddie Robson (Tordotcom).  I loved this fresh and wonderful take on human-alien cultural clashes! This alien race, the Logi, are approximately humanoid in appearance and possess valuable technology. They’re fascinated by human culture, especially the arts and printed books. The catch is that they communicate telepathically through specially trained “Thought Language” translators. One such is our heroine, Lydia, from a poor British background. She loves her work, the only thing she’s ever been really good at, not to mention her generous salary and her sensitive, thoughtful boss, the Logi cultural attaché. All this makes it worth feeling drunk from translating between Thought Language and English. It all goes to hell when her boss is murdered and she’s the prime suspect. Both her freedom and her ability to solve the mystery depend on her remaining at the Embassy, and the Logi is charge has never liked her.

Drunk on All Your Strange New Words combines alien contact science fiction, a sympathetic heroine, weird maybe-supernatural stuff, and a highly complex mystery filled with surprises and reversals. I found Lydia, with all her insecurities, bravura, and gullibility, deeply sympathetic. I fell for the same deceptions and cheered her on as the pieces of the puzzle fell into place. This is a smart science fictional mystery and a wonderful take on how even truly weird aliens and humans can find understanding and common ground. Best of all, a deeply flawed character prevails at the end.

 

Three Miles Down, by Harry Turtledove (Tor).  At the height of the Cold War and on the brink of the 1974 Watergate scandal, the US discovers a sunken Soviet submarine…and something they didn’t expect. Something they want to keep even more secret. Under the guise of harvesting undersea manganese nodules, they recruit a team of experts, including marine biology grad student and aspiring science fiction author, Jerry Stieglitz. After being sworn to secrecy, Jerry learns the secret-inside-the-secret: the Soviet sub is sitting on top of an alien spaceship. They want Jerry not only to bolster their disguise when Soviet warships come to check them out but to use his writerly imagination in interacting with the ship and its inhabitants, both dead and in suspended animation. His insight (derived from the scene at the doors of Moria, “speak friend and enter”) opens the door to the ship, for example. Of course, all does not go swimmingly. These are the days of anticommunist paranoia, an increasingly embattled POTUS, and paranoid intelligence agencies. The stakes for Jerry are not just being kicked off a lucrative and historic mission, but survival itself.

Turtledove is a terrific writer, combining sfnal First Contact elements, humor, the unfolding domestic political drama, and human interactions, whether it’s Jerry’s friendships with the others on his alien-spaceship team or his difficulties with his fiancée when he goes missing for months. All this is highly enjoyable, fast reading, but what I found most delightful were the many homage-to-science-fiction touches, like a love letter to fans. There’s even a guest appearance by a well-known hard science fiction author (I won’t divulge who!) that had me laughing out loud at how brilliant the portrayal was. (I’d met the guest-appearance author and yet, that’s exactly what they’d say!)

 

 The Assassins of Thasalon, by Lois McMaster Bujold (Subterranean). I first fell in love with…isn’t that the best way to begin a book review? In the case of Lois McMaster Bujold, the love affair goes back to Ethan of Athos (1986) and Falling Free (1988) Once Miles Vorkosigian burst upon the scene, I was thoroughly hooked. The Curst of Chalion, the first novel set in the World of Five Gods, saved me one convention (I think it was a WorldCon) when I ended up with a concussion from getting slammed in the head by a heavy glass door. I stayed an extra night, reading and re-reading, marveling at the layers of richness. But I digress: Chalion was followed by the equally awesome Paladin of Souls, then The Hallowed Hunt, and—about 100 years earlier in chronology—the Penric and Desdemona novellas. I gobbled them all up, although Chalion retains a special, perhaps concussion-inspired, place in my heart.

Penric is this world’s version of a healer/cleric, both aspects being supernaturally inspired by his god, the Bastard, and the many-generations-old temple demon, Desdemona, who shares his mind and, occasionally, his body. Through her, he can tap into magical powers as well as the experience and memories of her former hosts. “Demon” has a different connotation here than the one typically used. While she is definitely a non-material being, she was born of chaos and has been shaped into a person by her relationships with her human hosts. She’s also sly and sarcastic, although she would never admit to being loving.

Which brings us to the latest adventure, novel-length instead of the previous novellas. The set-up is framed as a mystery: who is trying to assassinate Penric’s brother-in-law, the exiled, brilliant general? In the process of tracking down the attempted murder and preventing further attacks, Pen and Desdemona uncover a plot that goes right to the heart of what makes a person, and what part does the right use of power (or the atrocities of its misuse) play? In too many fantasy stories, characters lack family ties, or they have them, the families are off-stage and forgotten. Not so in this series. Penric lives in a matrix of people he loved and who love him, sometimes as vividly present when he is hundreds of miles away as when they’re in the same scene.

Bujold is such a skillful writer, her work is a joy to read. I’m hooked on the first page, wanting to read faster to find out what happens next and yet wanting to read slowly to savor all the nuances. She plays fair with giving the reader all the necessary information, but she doesn’t berate, lecture, or inflict long explanations. Beneath the mystery-plot, there are layers and layers of story-gold. Although I rejoiced at the novel length, the end still came too soon.

Like the previous Penric and Desdemona stories, this one can be read as a stand-alone, although the references to previous happenings and off-stage characters would be enhanced by having read the adventures that involve them. On the other hand, as an entry drug, it’s a grand excuse to sample this world and its people, and then run off and delve into what has come before.

Highly recommended.