Review: Hidden Folk, by Eleanor Arnason

Review: Hidden Folk, by Eleanor Arnason

by Rich Horton

Eleanor Arnason is one of my favorite writers. She's been publishing excellent short fiction for over 50 years, including early highlights such as "The Warlord of Saturn's Moons", brilliant middle period work like "The Lovers", "Dapple", and "Stellar Harvest", and wonderful late stories like "Mr. Catt". She has published six novels as well, including two in her Hwarhath series, A Woman of the Iron People and Ring of Swords.

Arnason is of Icelandic descent, and a number of recent stories draw on her ancestry. Hidden Folk, a 2014 collection from Many Worlds Press, collects five of these, along with an absorbing introduction telling a bit about Iceland and its history, and also about Arnason's own ancestry. There is also an afterword giving "Notes on the Stories". Hidden Folk is available now (as of August 2025) for only $14 here. 

The five stories are all good reading, set at multiple times in the last millennium or so. They are characterized by a forthright presentation, with humorous undertones, taking the weird events and strange creatures completely at face value. They are variously clever, sweet, scary, violent, and simply odd. I'll quite briefly describe the stories:

"Kormak the Lucky" is an outstanding novella about an Irishman taken into slavery by Norwegian raiders. He ends up in Iceland, eventually in the household of the "Marsh Men", until the crazy grandfather of the family, scheming against his son, forces him to flee to an underground land of "light elves". This doesn't save him from slavery, but eventually he agrees to help a beautiful elf-woman escape --  first to the dark elves, then to the Irish fey. Arnason blends Scandinavian and Irish traditions with her own imagination -- the technological nature of some of the elves is particularly well thought out. The elves are unsympathetically and realistically presented, and the people much the same. The telling is deadpan, with Arnason's wit simmering underneath. Just an absorbing and original story. 

"Glam's Story" is essentially a reimagination of an episode from the sagas about a violent outlaw and great fighter called Grettir Asmundarson. Here he is engaged to battle the ghost of Glam, a slave owned by Thorhall Grimson. Grimson had murdered him, perhaps because he (Grimson) was a worthless husband and his wife seemed to like Glam a bit. The story is narrated by the wife in a very matter of fact tone, and in the end it's a much about her unhappy marriage and how that works out as it is about the somewhat epic battle of hero and ghost.

"The Black School" is about Saemundur Siguffson, a young man from Iceland, and his two companions, who go to Paris to attend the university there, in the 11th Century. Alas, they speak no French, and instead of the university they find themselves at the title school, and underground (literally) institution run by a sinisiter figure whom they learn is the devil. The school does offer instruction, which takes at least three years ... and at the graduation ceremony, the slowest graduate to leave is taken by the devil. The others seem likely to become black magicians. But Saemundur holds on to his faith and his principles, and works out a way to escape.

The first three stories, based on sagas and folktales, are set early in the second millennium, but the last two are set in the 20th Century. "The Puffin Hunter" concerns Harold, a divorced man living in rural Iceland, who hunts puffins and gathers their eggs. One day a puffin speaks to him, asking him not to wring its neck, but Harold wrings it anyway. And then is haunted by the puffin's ghost. It turns out the ghost puffin was an elf woman, who had changed into a puffin and now was stuck. The elves have found Gudrun, a human folklorist, who is helping them recover their lost one, and who works with Harold to that end. The story proceeds nicely on more or less the expected path. Their are comic bits such as the effects of a ghost puffin haunting you -- lots of guano -- and I also like the deadpan descriptions of elves in Iceland in more or less the present day.

"My Husband Stein" is a bit of a romance, about a Finnish journalist who takes a house in the remote East Fjords of Iceland, and finds herself the object of unwanted advances from a troll. Arnason's wrily humorous, poker-faced telling makes the story go -- but it's not just whimsy, there's an ecological subplot, and strong believable characters.

All in all, this is a first-rate collection. Arnason's stories are a treasure, wherever you find them, and not nearly as many of them have been collected in book form as should be. Snap this book up!

Resurrected Review: Humpty Dumpty: An Oval, by Damon Knight

[I'm getting ready to head to Seattle for the 2025 Worldcon, so I've resurrected a review I did in 2004 of a really fine novel by one of SF's true greats.]

Resurrected Review: Humpty Dumpty: An Oval, by Damon Knight

by Rich Horton

Humpty Dumpty: An Oval, was Damon Knight's last novel, published in 1996. It is a very strange book, reminding me somewhat of Gene Wolfe, and of Patrick O'Leary's The Impossible Bird, and of other afterlife fantasies like William Golding's Pincher Martin, or even Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman. Which is a hint that I regarded the book as an afterlife fantasy, though that interpretation is not entirely clear.

The book opens with the narrator, Wellington Stout, in an Italian hospital, recovering from a shot to the head. He had come to Italy for his beloved stepdaughter's wedding, but had agreed to ferry a mysterious package for his less than beloved older brother -- and in trying to deliver the package he seems to have been shot.

Stout is a salesman for a firm dealing in ladies' underwear. (A running joke -- or rather a detail of characterization -- is his obsession with women's breasts and with their bras.) He is 64 years old, an American long resident in England. We learn a bit about his past life -- a couple of marriages, one failed, one seemingly happy but ending with his wife's untimely death. Lots of affairs are implied. His relationship with his stepdaughter (actually his first wife's daughter by her second husband, whom Wellington raised after her mother fell apart) is loving but perhaps on the edge of impropriety. He seems a nice guy but far from perfect. 

However, after his injury, he appears to lose his grip on reality. Or perhaps reality has lost its grip on the world. There seem to be competing groups of aliens, and of powerful secret humans, vying for control of the world. Stout finds himself willy-nilly on a journey westward, from Italy back to England to his childhood homes in Pennsylvania and Oregon. At first it seems that an explanation for all the strange goings on may be forthcoming -- what is the message Stout was carrying? Are the aliens from the planet Mongo real? what do the strange voices Stout keeps hearing, muttering almost intelligible phrases, mean? etc. etc. But as Stout's travels continue, things get weirder and weirder. 

I thoroughly enjoyed the novel, but I remain puzzled by it -- which is not necessarily a bad thing! We do get a pretty comprehensive portrayal of Wellington Stout, and of his life, in an odd fashion. (In a way it recalls a little known but quite remarkable timeslip novel, The Man Who Got Away, by Sumner Locke Elliott.) The weird events are continually interesting. But what it all means? I don't really know. It's easy enough to say that it could be an afterlife fantasy -- Stout hallucinating as he dies from the bullet in his head -- but even if that's true that's not much of a stab at what the novel really means ... Still, it keeps me thinking. A reread is in order -- and it's a reminder that Damon Knight was a magnificent writer at every length short of novel until late in his life -- and then in his last two novels he figure out that length, so Why Do Birds? and Humpty Dumpty: An Oval are true capstones to a great career.

Review: On Strike Against God, by Joanna Russ

Review: On Strike Against God, by Joanna Russ

by Rich Horton

I don't usually publish reviews of books by the same author back to back, but after finishing The Female Man I proceeded straight to On Strike Against God. My review of The Female Man is here. 

Joanna Russ wrote what she called her "coming out" novel, On Strike Against God, beginning in 1973. A first draft was complete by 1974, making it her first novel after The Female Man, though the final manuscript wasn't complete until 1977, by which time she had finished two other novels, We Who Are About To ..., and The Two of Them. On Strike Against God was placed with a Lesbian press, Out and Out Books, and publication was delayed until 1980 largely due to financial issues at the publisher. It was thus her last novel to see print.

It's a short novel, a bit over 40,000 words. Russ's novels are fairly short -- each of Picnic on Paradise, We Who Are About Too ..., and On Strike Against God are in the 40,000 to 45,000 word range; while her other three novels are roughly twice as long, between about 75,000 and 80,000 words. This is in no way an issue -- they are all the right length. On Strike Against God is also Russ's only non-SF novel, though she wrote a number of mainstream short stories.

This novel is told by Esther, a teacher at a college in upstate New York. Esther is in her late 30s, and divorced. She is beginning to realize that she doesn't like men much (she liked her husband OK, but didn't like sex), and she is falling in love with a younger woman at the school named Jean. At first she struggles -- society has told her for so long that heterosexual relationships are the only proper ones that she's not sure what to do about Jean. But she's also coming to her feminist consciousness, and is fiercely resisting the sexism that affects every other aspect of her life.

So ... she makes a tentative move on Jean, and Jean responds, and ... well, I won't tell the rest of the plotty stuff, but the relationships has ups and downs, but mostly, I'd say, ups. The sex scenes are simply beautiful -- not in any sense pornographic, but sweet, character-based, revelatory, emotionally honest. There are also reminiscences of earlier female friendships, scenes of men, good-intentioned or hostile, simply failing to comprehend her (or any women), and "coming out" scenes to friends -- a gay male friend, an older couple in the neighborhood, other women -- that painfully illustrate how hard it was to buck society's rules back then even with the most supposedly liberal people.

The book is profoundly feminist, with some passages quite similar to passages in The Female Man. And this is all powerful -- but much more powerful is the love story at the heart of the novel. It is real, it is emotionally convincing, and it's just -- good. This is a novel that a lot of SF readers have missed, I think. At any rate, I certainly had! It has had several editions: the Out and Out Books printing, a 1985 edition from The Crossing Press, and a 1987 edition from The Women's Press (a UK imprint.) I read it in the 2023 Library of America volume Joanna Russ: Novels and Stories. And the Feminist Press put out another edition in 2024. So, after a quarter century or so in which it was hard to find, On Strike Against God is again quite readily available, and I strongly recommend it.

Review: The Female Man, by Joanna Russ

Review: The Female Man, by Joanna Russ

by Rich Horton

Joanna Russ finished The Female Man in 1971, and spent the next few years trying to sell it. According to Nicole Rudick, the editor of the Library of America edition in which I reread it (Joanna Russ: Novels and Stories), one reason was that Russ wished to place it with a "mainstream" publisher, instead of a science fiction imprint. Those publishers rejected it, says Rudick in her "Notes on the Texts", either because of Russ's established identity as a "science fiction writer", or because they had already bought their token feminist novel for that year. (I would add that Russ's identification with science fiction aside, The Female Man is pretty obviously science fiction in itself, no need to have the author's backlist confirm that.) Eventually she placed it with Frederik Pohl's line at Bantam, labeled "A Frederik Pohl Selection". This was, then, a definite concession for Russ -- it appeared from a science fiction imprint, and as a mass market paperback to boot. That said, the "Frederik Pohl Selection" label was an attempt at positioning the book as a sort of prestige imprint for SF, and indeed the month before The Female Man appeared in February 1975 the Frederik Pohl Selection was Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren. (Having said that, the only "Frederik Pohl Selections" that seem to have lasted are The Female Man, Dhalgren, and another Delany novel, Triton.)

1975 was 50 years ago, and for that reason there have been some discussions of the major SF novels of that year, and in the process I have reread the top three such books: in terms of sales (I assume), notoriety (I am sure), and latter day reputation (I sense). These are The Forever War, which won both the Nebula and the Hugo; Dhalgren; and The Female Man. (The latter two did not appear on the Hugo shortlist, but were both on the (rather long) Nebula shortlist.) Back in 1976 I am pretty sure my Hugo vote went to The Forever War, though I did read both Dhalgren (the whole thing, honest!) and The Female Man. But here in 2025 I am pretty strongly of the opinion that the best SF novel of 1975 was The Female Man. All three novels are to a great extent, er, "products of their time" -- particularly in their treatment of sex and sexuality. But The Female Man remains much fresher today, certainly including that aspect.

I hinted at commercial success above. Frederik Pohl took a significant risk in publishing both Dhalgren and The Female Man -- but his risk definitely paid off. Dhalgren was a major seller, something of a sensation back then, and it still sells well now. The Female Man didn't make quite the commercial splash Dhalgren did, but it sold nicely, and it too has continued to sell consistently since then -- over 500,000 copies, according to Ludick. And on the face of it, The Female Man isn't a particularly "commercial" book. (Neither to be sure is Dhalgren.)

Part of the appeal -- and part of the difficulty -- of The Female Man lies in its structure. It's told from the points of view of three women ... or four ... or even five? Janet Evason was born on Whileaway, a world inhabited entirely by women, the men having died of a plague hundreds of years before. Jeannine Dadier lives on Earth, in 1969, in an alternate history in which a certain Herr Schickelgruber died in 1936. And Joanna ... who is Joanna? We see her first in Jeannine's timeline. She tells us she has turned into a man. We are invited to imagine that she is indeed the author, and she does seem to be from our timeline. Later we will meet Jael, who lives in another timeline in which men and women live separately and are engaged in a decades-long war -- in which Jael serves as a gleeful assassin. (And behind these women is a mysterious other -- the spirit of the author? The spirit of the book?)

Janet Evason has come to Jeannine's timeline, as the very advanced society of Whileaway has developed a means of interdimensional travel. Janet is acting as some sort of ambassador (though with what goals seems unclear.) Jeannine is in a long term unsatisfying relationship with a man named Cal. The plot -- and there is a plot though in no sense a conventional one -- follows Janet's time on Earth, during which she ends up collecting Jeannine and Joanna, and then the three of them go to Jael's timeline. That sounds a bit flat, but the novel isn't flat at all. 

Whileawayan society is described through Joanna's life story: in some ways almost utopian, though with dark streaks: duelling is common, and there is a distinct authoritarian aspect to its organization, though it's a rather communal and apparently benevolent authoritarianism. Their technology is high, and they live lightly on the land (partly due to a fairly low population.) By law, every woman has one child of her body (the goal seems to be a static population but in reality such a rule would lead to a continually declining population, as some people die before they can bear children.) There is advanced genetic science, allowing for their parthenogenetic reproduction and also for enhancements such as elimination of most diseases, and increased intelligence.

Janet's mission to Earth gives us a view of Jeannine's society, which is broadly very similar to ours in 1970 or so. Jeannine herself is a critical character -- evidently intelligent, but unable to use her intelligence due to sexism; unable to have a satisfying relationship due to sexism; unable even to quite understand that she isn't happy. Another woman allows us another perspective -- Laur is shown attracted to Janet, and able to break free of heteronormative constraints. 

The eventual transition to Jael's world is the most satirical, and the harshest, part of the book. It's also queasily funny, and Jael is a fascinating if horrible character. The men of Manland have made themselves a dystopia, complete with men deemed unworthy of manhood who are changed into women -- the fully changed can become "wives", the half-changed take on other traditionally so-called feminine roles. All this is horrific but it lands too, as a cruel exaggeration of male-dominated society that hits home as a funhouse mirror of our world. 

Throughout the novel there are powerful lines, expressing the frustration the author, her characters, and many women feel at the positions they are forced into by men, at the justifications offered by men, at the lack of listening, the lack of imagination, the lack of perception by men. These hit home, they hit hard, and it's hard for me as a man to respond in any way -- inappropriate even. I could argue -- and I would -- that in the 50 years since The Female Man was published there has been significant progress; but then perhaps that's not an argument I have the right to make. Finally I should say that angry as the book is -- justifiably angry -- it is also very funny. (One of the abiding virtues of Russ's writing is her wit.)

The last chapter is the best -- it's unexpected, it's powerful, it's moving. It reiterates many of the arguments set forth earlier (implicitly or explicitly.) It provides a conclusion -- not a wrapping up but an impressionistic hint -- for each of the book's four -- no, five! -- J's. It makes its point, it says goodbye, and it introduces itself -- the book -- to the world. It was four years late, perhaps, to first publication -- but 50 years later, the book still speaks strongly.