An inside-out ghost story that continuously re-contorts itself so you're never sure if you've reached a concrete explanation for anything, or if it's An inside-out ghost story that continuously re-contorts itself so you're never sure if you've reached a concrete explanation for anything, or if it's all about to be dashed in the next paragraph, to the point where it pushes the stylization of fable nearly into postmodern game. There's a scene in Robert Coover's western where the protagonist looks back at the town he's just escaped from a valley rim and sees the buildings and people being reshuffled into a completely new arrangement (and thus new story). This almost feels like that, except we're never allowed a perspective outside the system and the protagonist is himself one of the shifting game pieces. And without that outside perspective we just keep trying to isolate the truth that binds everything together, and the story actually does all it can to provide this. This sounds confusing but it's more complexly multifaceted, there's a tip-of-the-tongue sensation of order and, amidst the occasional frustration, plenty of emergent insight....more
You can complain all you want about the thinness of many of the characters, the degree of telling-not-showing, the somewhat vague nature of linguisticYou can complain all you want about the thinness of many of the characters, the degree of telling-not-showing, the somewhat vague nature of linguistic magic, the fact that the first half of this covers so much time and is to such a degree mere setup that much of it feels like an endless synopsis in place of the text itself. But eventually this is less about the cryptic power of words and more about direct action and the untidy process of decolonization, and for a #1 New York Times bestseller it really doesn't mince words about it. The subtitle, stricken from the cover, but appearing on the title page is, afterall "Or the Necessity of Violence." Kuang can be a little on-the-nose (I get the gag that the political footnotes reverse the typical role of academic notes in supporting the central narrative, these instead undermine it, but do we really need one to point out that astrology isn't real?), even anachronistic (one character is fairly directly citing Fanon, who then turns up in chapter epigraph) -- but this is a fantasy propelling a succinct breakdown of the structures of power. She scourges the defensiveness of those liberal reformers who have always benefitted from the system they claim to want to improve (maybe sincerely, but only within particular limits). She recognizes the capacity of powerful societies to absorb and compartmentalize dissent, to allow dissent and be strengthened by the appearance of the possibility of progress if secretly only within their rules, a very contemporary consideration. And given its popularity, apparently a whole lot of contemporary readers have read and enjoyed a book that explains, via a sympathetic character, the ruthless utility of terrorism. This could be applied to many of the bleakest apparent calculations of a group like Hamas, such as the willingness to allow one's own people die if it tarnishes support for the enemy. I couldn't say how far this extends outside the fenced arenas of fantasy and history (or worse the genre conventions of "dark academia" whatever YA-adjacent nonsense that is) but to force so many people to confront and understand such a position is something....more
Hyperkinetically bonkers. Time paradoxes, ancient Egyptian sorcery, a plot to own the world, cavorting sentient flames, rampant hair growth, period muHyperkinetically bonkers. Time paradoxes, ancient Egyptian sorcery, a plot to own the world, cavorting sentient flames, rampant hair growth, period murderers, London underbellies, migrating souls, double-identities, doppelgangers, surgical excesses, and ... laudanum-soaked 19th-century romantic poetry. Yes, this is a book about literature and don't you forget it. Even if the breathless chase sequences and non-stop action might make it easy to. Perhaps the rollercoaster plotting, the endless implausible chance configurations this necessitates, the sheer scope of story crammed in, the inevitable plot holes, perhaps it's all just much too much. But then it'll pause on a dime to be sidetracked by some historical note on Coleridge or Byron and there's an odd charm to it nonetheless. And for all the it's never long before the gears of plot churn up a set piece so rivetingly odd and original that I can't help but be impressed.
And where's this particular understanding of magic and its elemental and lunar idiosyncrasies coming from? It's not one I've run into before, but then I'm not much of a fantasy reader. Great heroine, too, despite the period trappings; I wish she got more page time. What a marvelously ridiculous ride. Many thanks to someone so erudite as Mark Fisher for giving this a section in The Weird and the Eerie, which I read meer days before spotting this in an overstocked book barn in my old home town while on holiday....more
The cardinal sin of genre fiction, surely, must be to be simultaneously frivolous AND boring. This is fairly frivolous high fantasy nonsense (I don't The cardinal sin of genre fiction, surely, must be to be simultaneously frivolous AND boring. This is fairly frivolous high fantasy nonsense (I don't know where Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ got its blurb, but describing Elric as a "Goth Superman" is hilarious...and not totally off the mark), BUT it's never boring. Moorcock is as brisk and imaginative as ever, and even hints at minor non-frivolities like the fate of fading empire and the layered nature of reality. He wrote so many novels (this was one of at least 20 between 1970 and 75) that surely none could have commanded too much individual attention, but he's never just filling pages like some of his contemporaries. The prose is crisp and bright throughout, and the images memorable. Curious, also, how this may intertwine with the bits of Moorcock's Eternal Champion meta-narrative strung throughout concurrent work like The Knight of Swords and The Final Programme....more
Luis Buñuel observed that one “can find all of Shakespeare and de Sade in the lives of insects" and so it is here: the struggles and internal politicsLuis Buñuel observed that one “can find all of Shakespeare and de Sade in the lives of insects" and so it is here: the struggles and internal politics over the life cycle of a bee hive provide plenty of gripping material. But I cribbed that quote from the opening of Jim Trainor's brilliant 2016 experimental feature The Pink Egg, and ultimately I prefer the extreme otherness of his avant-garde theater melodrama to Paull's translation of apine life into a kind of high fantasy complete with an elaborate hero's journey. As someone who adored Watership Down as a child, I can appreciate her myth-making, and even more so her willingness to portray animal perspectives so directly without overly anthropomorphizing, but there's something a little reductive in the breathless thrill-ride by which this unfolds that loses the alienness of insect awareness. That said, the aspects of insect awareness that she does attempt to portray here are fascinating, even as I'm quite unable to comment on their accuracy. I honestly suspect that her research was quite diligent and the specifics here, however outlandish-seeming, are drawn from a faithful attempt to render comprehensible aspects of bee interaction and communication very far from our access (okay, I'm glossing the interspecies interactions, which, predation aside, can't have come from anything much). But still, it's mostly just the format she chooses that muddles the impact (by attempting to overheighten it)....more
I don't always have a lot of patience with contemporary sci-fi and fantasy, but Vandermeer here tempers forays into pulp with a better-than-working-faI don't always have a lot of patience with contemporary sci-fi and fantasy, but Vandermeer here tempers forays into pulp with a better-than-working-familiarity with the more postmodern and surreal threads running through 20th-century fantastic fiction, as well as that formative dread of the turn of the century weird. Which I suppose encapsulates all of what the New Weird sub-movement he's a part of promises in general, though I don't often find it so elegant in execution as in the three or four especially standout stories here, which push into genuinely strange, memorable, and original territory.
It's bits like the mostly unexplained conceptual tendrils, for instance, permeating "Three Days in a Border Town", which could be set in an ordinary post-apocalyptic world were it not for its yearning towards a de-localized, ghostly, there-but-not-there city promising something better than dusty present life. Or the reconfiguring of Pale Fire, reinvented autobiography, and rewritten bits of other stories, in "Errata". Possibly best of all, the otherworldly office politics of "The Situation", which remains unpredictable throughout by never totally resolving its terms, even as many scenes familiarly recapitulate drab contemporary day job existence. Not so incidentally, that story also offers prototype and sub-variant of Vandermeer's stellar most recent novel, Borne. Or the multiverse-spanning political nightmare in "The Goat Variations".
Other stories do fall more neatly into their categories, and suffer for it -- there's a steampunk piece, a myth retelling, a few bits of surrealism creeping into normal life basically in line with the original weird templates of the past. These will fade down in my memory before long, I'm sure. But then you have a story of a bear plaguing a small town with the techniques of a serial killer, that soon expands from horror yarn into a bleak commentary on how society treats its outsiders. Something familiar here is turned unfamiliar, then smarter and more knowing -- even as it basks in the pulpiest pulp it can offer. Which I can get behind. Sometimes I like to be entertained, it's just that so much ostensibly purely entertaining storytelling, and especially unfortunately horror writing, for me, feels limited and uncreative or else tips over into mawkishness, and I can't really enjoy it. This, more often than not, avoids these pitfalls....more
As much as I can tell from a few encounters its practitioners, the New Weird subset of forward-thinking genre fiction over the last 20 years or so seeAs much as I can tell from a few encounters its practitioners, the New Weird subset of forward-thinking genre fiction over the last 20 years or so seems situated between the polls of Lovecraft, surrealism, and the science fiction new wave, whose social themes and experimentation weren't always as readily picked up by the fantasy writing of the time. Throw in for good measure a bit of the alien causality of Roadside Picnic, and in Cisco's case postmodernism, and you may have a decent idea of whether this is the sort of thing you might read. Which is to say, a fantasy story with the unearthly immediacy of a dream and a deep concern for its own process of unfolding.
The plot concerns Low, whose studies as a narrator are interrupted, but not overlooked, by his sudden conscription into the military, where control of the dominant narrative may be of vital utility. The interests of the book lie in this self-interrogation, along with various interruptions and disturbances of narrative expectation, in attempting to capture the nightmarish arbitrariness of war, and in the utter strangeness of landscapes and cities over which the action unfolds, where much is suggested and little explained. At times I feel Cisco tips a little too far into necromantic particulars of that inescapable sub-theme of war, death (which is not constrained to this story but a major preoccupation of the only other Cisco I've read as well), but everything remains genuinely bizarre and original enough for it to stay clear of adolescent morbidity. There's really not much out there like it....more
Is this Joanna Russ' earliest work? Certainly the first stories of a women adventurer in classical times are among her most conventional adventure yarIs this Joanna Russ' earliest work? Certainly the first stories of a women adventurer in classical times are among her most conventional adventure yarns, but they still have a nuance of character and gender identity that look ahead the the futuristic novel included here (and reviewed by me elsewhere in a stand-alone edition -- Picnic on Paradise) and at last to the closing meta-story set in the 20s and looking further ahead to her magnum opus, The Female Man. Quick but deft and well-conceived. A good companion, perhaps, to her friend Delaney's later forays into early civilization and fantasy in his Neveryon stories....more
Come for the insane cover design, stay for the unusually imaginative turns of the adventure yarn, even if it doesn't strive to be anything more than tCome for the insane cover design, stay for the unusually imaginative turns of the adventure yarn, even if it doesn't strive to be anything more than that. At least for a wile, but this was starting to feel pretty rote, at least within its own rules, by the end. Perhaps a middle-of-trilogy dip? Although Moorcock's conception of pure Chaos as driving eventually towards the monotony of total formlessness seems like an echo of an Ovid quotation I just ran across in another book....more
Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard & My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, in their richly-imagined record of the Yoruba spirit world running alongside moAmos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard & My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, in their richly-imagined record of the Yoruba spirit world running alongside modern life, seemed totally unprecedented and fresh when they appeared in the 50s. But Tutuola had an advantage -- he wrote in English and quickly noticed and brought to international attention.
But he has a clear forerunner -- D.O. Fagunwa, who was channeling Yoruba myth into gorgeous novels as early as 1938, with this, his debut and the first novel ever written in the Yoruba language. Because it was composed in Yoruba and went translated until 1968, after his death, his renown seems to have lagged behind Tutuola's, but he his style is much more refined. Part of the excitement of Tutuola is that his stories seem to be recorded at the moment of crystallization out of oral tradition -- he writes with a breathless conversationally and meandering style. Fagunwa, had already leapt beyond this point, balanced between classically elegant storytelling structures and an almost modernist layering structure punctuating the action.
On the other hand, he also had the advantage of translation by Nobel Laureate Nigerian Poet Wole Soyinka, whose vocabulary and elegance of wording are formidable by any standard. Had Tutuola written in Yoruba and been translated by Soyinka, would the style also have appeared more refined? It's hard to judge exactly. But just note that, however wonderful, Tuotula was not the first to take on this world, and D.O. Fagunwa is at least equally, if not more, worthy of you attention....more
Having pushed the sci-fi genre into new terrain over the first two decades of his career, Delany turned to an even more seemingly blighted genre to prHaving pushed the sci-fi genre into new terrain over the first two decades of his career, Delany turned to an even more seemingly blighted genre to present his most thoughtful and theory-heavy sequence of works: the barbarian novel. If you actually dive into any of the Neveryon works, you won't be fooled for long. Delany's main conceit is to take the moment of coalescence of civilization out of hazy pre-history as the perfect test chamber in which to study the foundations for all of our societal conventions -- economics, culture, politics, everything that's still with us today. He has much to say about all of this, all the while toying with the audience over the fact that he's induced them to read ostensible pulp, or else has enticed them to read critical theory by way of pulp.
Incidentally, this is also a markedly feminist work, not just for having strong female characters (which is just a basic necessity of writing a good book, not necessarily a feminist one!), but for its actual interrogation of gender roles and social constructs. As well as for choosing its theoretical epigraphs for each section almost entirely from female thinkers and philosophers, which given the usual male-domination of the discourse definitely did not happen by accident....more
There's a recurring thread in various Delany stories wherein being provincial (geographically, or socio-economically) may limit one's scope of experieThere's a recurring thread in various Delany stories wherein being provincial (geographically, or socio-economically) may limit one's scope of experience, but should never be confused with intelligence. The experience will come. And so this idea may play into the very form he selected for Neveryon: the genre-provincialism of the barbarian adventure story does not, here, suggest anything simple or intellectually un-developed. In fact, Neveryon is Delany's brink-of-civilization testing ground for ideas about the subtle relationships of power, the societal effects of economics and the advent of currency, how ideas gain a life of their own, and the arbitrary societal basis for gender roles and identities. Given the prominence of isolated "primitive" societies in anthropology class, in Delany's hands, barbarian stories seem like a natural setting for extending these ideas. Sometimes more a theoretical essay than story, but either side is handled excellently, and the whole is very readable. Still, I have to wonder how something so potentially audienceless could possibly have been received. That it made it into several mass market paperback editions before Wesleyan University reissued it in the 90s may suggest that the ready market of the fantasy novel, like that of the sci-fi it bleeds into, may not actually be a bad way to get ideas out after all....more
Oh good lord, am I really reading fantasy novels now? As part of a recent infatuation with fantastic 60s/70s book cover design, I stumbled on a whole Oh good lord, am I really reading fantasy novels now? As part of a recent infatuation with fantastic 60s/70s book cover design, I stumbled on a whole pile of 70s Bob Haberfield covers for Michael Moorcock fantasies, and I couldn't resist grabbing at least one (this one). I'm still not convinced that the experimental social critique and psychological disintegration of the 1969 The Black Corridor doesn't constitute Moorcock's sole essential novel, but part of my program of acquiring these covers is that I actually have to read them (though most only take a day or two), so, yeah, now this tale of swords and sorcery. With, granted, an amazing cover:
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Beyond the normal mythic trappings, this is a book about frame of reference. Our hero finds himself last of a species superseded by history, or perhaps superseded by a narrowing of perspective, his people becoming complacent and eventually unable to look beyond their immediate world and into the other planes that touch their own. Until disaster, in the form of those narrowest of perspectives, humans, sweeps in and strikes them down (obvious commentary). The natural progression would be for the hero to regain a broader perspective and put it to good use, but the execution here is rather supra-normal, rapidly jumping frames each time they're established and mirroring its themes across time and space. Loss of the protagonist's "old race" to those new upstarts, Humans? Oh that's been happening endlessly throughout time. Even the gods dictating the rules of this world and many others grow complacent and are overthrown, even their perspectives turn out to be killingly narrow in the scope of the universe.
This kind of thought on the place of any one moment in the face of all existence is the best Moorcock has to offer here; the worst are those various essentially throwaway genre moments of swordfights and monsters. Fortunately, a surprising amount of this action unfolds in obliquely poetic moments that remain obscure and unusually memorable -- a giant glimpsed in fog, sweeping its huge net through the sea, for instance, or a cave of flickering phantasms, or the purring garden that greets its visitors with gentle caresses of fronds and flowers, unless it devours them....more
A necessary mark on the conceptual-fabulist line from Borges to Calvino. Each dips out of the ordinary and into the carefully-rendered bizarre, often A necessary mark on the conceptual-fabulist line from Borges to Calvino. Each dips out of the ordinary and into the carefully-rendered bizarre, often in service of a deeper truth. Life plays out as a plunge from a 150-story skyscraper, a prince attempts to travel to the borders of his kingdom only to find that it extends beyond any reach, a major construction into the fantastic is forced to cap itself at the mundane. In perhaps my favorite of many favorites, Buzzati renders a world choked by the unforeseen effects of plastic -- very prescient in 1971. And the last two stories, fittingly, focus on the loss that goes with repressing the fantastic beneath bourgeois reservations.
It seems like everyone knows about Buzzati, yet I was completely unable to find an affordable copy of this definitive(?) story collection for almost a decade until stumbling on a pristine cheap used copy in a bookshop over the weekend....more
I don't know that I actually liked this better than A Wizard of Earthsea at the time of reading, but looking back it has the far more memorable premisI don't know that I actually liked this better than A Wizard of Earthsea at the time of reading, but looking back it has the far more memorable premise, starting out with a new character bound to live as a kind captive priestess in a darkened labyrinth....more
I probably read this too long ago to really stand by my reaction or give it a rating, but I just remember its being interminably dull and aimless. AndI probably read this too long ago to really stand by my reaction or give it a rating, but I just remember its being interminably dull and aimless. And yet I continued through two more of the series....more
Loved this as a bedtime story at age something-or-other, then read the trilogy as a fourth grader, then went back to this and ... even at that age theLoved this as a bedtime story at age something-or-other, then read the trilogy as a fourth grader, then went back to this and ... even at that age the writing seemed kind of terrible and an obvious step down. But maybe my opinions would flip-flop again were I to revisit this now, almost 20 years later. I'm unlikely to find out soon....more
China Mieville's New Crobuzon is industrial revolution London at its most corrupt and pathological, all its social issues splayed into a menagerie of China Mieville's New Crobuzon is industrial revolution London at its most corrupt and pathological, all its social issues splayed into a menagerie of the grotesque and fantastic by Mieville's very formidable imagination. He's also notably distinct from typical fantastic writers for being too cynical for obvious morality and clean resolutions, and for populating his story largely with artists and academics, far from central adventure story casting. Even so, he lets the (albeit gripping) story slide towards extended action sequences later in the book, becoming the Clive Cussler to the first half's Dickens. And let's not even get started on the Deus ex Machinas, whether literal or more deus ex arachnida. Ultimately this is something to read for straight entertainment, then, but uniquely inventive, entertaining entertainment at that....more
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